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Why Are US Taxpayers Subsidizing Right-Wing Israeli Settlers?

by GabrielMercier Posted on March 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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A few weeks before Benjamin Netanyahu’s delivered his controversial address to Congress, the Jerusalem Post reported that the Israeli Prime Minister was considering a campaign trip to Hebron, a right-wing settler community in the Israel-occupied West Bank. The proposed March 10 trip to Hebron, which would have been the first by an Israeli PM in more than a decade, raised eyebrows among Israel’s political class and inflamed tensions with Palestinian groups. Last week, Netanyahu called it off, citing security threats.

Here in the United States, meanwhile, few politicians have questioned why American taxpayers continue to subsidize the Hebron settlers, accused by international observers of human rights violations that include thefts, battery, and murder. In 2003, the most recent year for which figures are available, an estimated 45 percent of the settler community’s funding came from the Brooklyn-based Hebron Fund, whose status as a tax-exempt nonprofit allows Americans to write off donations to the group.

“The Hebron Fund has supported, either directly or indirectly, a wide array of acts that are definitely not charitable,” says John Tye, the legal director for the global activist group Avaaz, which last week petitioned the IRS to revoke the Hebron Fund’s nonprofit status. “They are basically using a small group of Jewish settlers in the West Bank to push Palestinians out of their homes. These settlers are arming themselves, they are engaged in military and paramilitary acts, some of them have connections to terrorism, and they are committing a wide range of crimes against Palestinians.”

The Hebron Fund declined to make anyone available for comment for this story, or to respond to my written questions.

Hebron, a community of some 200,000 Palestinians located about 30 miles south of Jerusalem, is home to several ancient Jewish holy sites. The modern Jewish occupation began in 1967, after the Six Day War. The Hebron Fund was founded in 1979 to support the settlers, who now number around 850.

After years of conflicts between Palestinians and settlers, the historic center of Hebron has come to be known as “The Ghost Town.” It is largely abandoned, with the doors of Arab shops welded shut by Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) during the second intifada. Palestinians are forbidden from entering much of the area. In other parts of downtown Hebron, Jewish settlers live in buildings above Palestinian shops. The shopkeepers have stretched nets and metal grates over the streets to catch the garbage that settlers routinely throw from their windows:

Grates erected to catch garbage thrown by settlers living above ISM Palestine

The behavior of Jewish settlers in Hebron has been repeatedly denounced by human rights groups. In 2001, Human Rights Watch called Hebron “the site of serious and sustained human rights abuses,” including “a consistent failure by IDF to protect Palestinians from attacks by Israeli settlers.” In 2011, the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem wrote that settlers “have been involved in gunfire, attempts to run people over, poisoning of a water well, breaking into homes, spilling of hot liquid on the face of a Palestinian, and the killing of a young Palestinian girl.”

In 2013, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights expressed “deep concern” at the abusive treatment and harassment directed at a Palestinian activist in Hebron by settler groups and the IDF. Breaking the Silence, another Israeli human rights group comprised of IDF veterans, offers guided tours of Hebron—but only rarely, the group writes on its website, due to “the Hebron settlers’ violence towards our tours and the limited ability of the Hebron police to protect our tours from this violence.”

Just in the past two months, according to B’Tselem, vandals in the Hebron area have destroyed Palestinian olive groves in four locations.

At least one former member of a terrorist organization has joined the Hebron settlement. Baruch Marzel, a one-time spokesman for the extremist Kach Party, which is listed by the United States and Israel as a terrorist group, lives in Hebron’s Tel Rumeida outpost. In 2011, he helped organize a manhunt for a Palestinian man, Hani Jaber, who’d just been released from jail after serving 18 years for killing a Jewish settler. Posters appeared on Hebron walls with Jaber’s face and the words, “Rise up and kill him.”

Racist graffiti in Hebron: “Gas the Arabs.” JDL is the Jewish Defense League. Jill Granberg

At times, the Hebron Fund has specifically sought to raise money for controversial settler activities. In 2007, according to Salon, it held a fundraiser on a cruise ship in New York’s Hudson River to support a settler who’d taken property from a Palestinian family. A year and a half later, the Israeli government ruled that the house had been illegally seized from the family and ordered the settlers out. Once evicted, the settlers set fire to Palestinian houses, olive trees, and cars—25 people were wounded, including a man shot at close range.

The United States tax code does not provide detailed information about what can disqualify groups from nonprofit status, though precedent suggests that it includes illegal and discriminatory behavior. In 1974, for example, the Supreme Court ruled that the IRS was justified in revoking the nonprofit status of Bob Jones University over its refusal to admit black students.

The Hebron Fund has not released detailed financial information, making it impossible to determine whether it directly bankrolls prohibited activities. Yet Tye of Avaaz argues that the settlements’ finances are sufficiently fluid and dependent upon the Hebron Fund to make it inherently complicit in any abuses. “I can’t tell you precisely where every dollar has gone,” he says. “But when there is a doubt, the legal burden is on the Hebron Fund to produce documents that show how its money is spent.”

This isn’t the first time a group has asked the IRS to revoke the Hebron Fund’s nonprofit status. In 2009, a similar complaint was submitted by the Washington-based American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. The IRS never responded.

Though Tye believes there’s already sufficient public evidence to revoke the fund’s nonprofit status, he at least wants the IRS to conduct a thorough investigation. A spokesman for the IRS declined to comment on the case, citing a federal law that bars the agency from discussing specific taxpayers.

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Why Are US Taxpayers Subsidizing Right-Wing Israeli Settlers?

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On the Selma Anniversary, These North Carolina Activists Will March Backwards

by MinnieBCHogplu Posted on March 7, 2015

Mother Jones

Activists, politicians, and luminaries from across the nation will flock to Selma, Alabama, this weekend to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the nonviolent voting-rights march that was undermined by police-sanctioned attacks, presaging the passage, six months later, of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But this year’s events, which include a reenactment of the fateful march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, are shaping up to have a more activist edge than past commemorations.

Some black leaders, such as North Carolina NAACP president Rev. Doctor William Barber II, will use the day to highlight the assault on black voting rights in the wake of a 2013 Supreme Court decision that rolled back a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. Rather than make it across the bridge, Barber and his delegation plan to turn around and march back toward Selma.

“For the last fifty years we’ve been walking across that bridge to celebrate how the civil rights leaders pushed us forward. This year, we have to turn around,” he told me. This change in routine, he says, is a response to the politicians who “will come down to Selma and give all these platitudes and talk about how they love the people of the past, but won’t ensure a Voting Rights Act that meets the test of history today.” And that “is a step backward.”

Prior to the Supreme Court ruling, the VRA required nine historically racist states, including North Carolina, along with several counties, to get permission from the Department of Justice before modifying their voting laws. It paid off. In 2012, for instance, North Carolina ranked 11th out of 50 states in voter turnout, with 65 percent of registered voters casting a ballot.

But the gains, ironically enough, helped influence the court’s decision in the case of Shelby County v. Holder. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. held that it was unconstitutional to single out just a few states for these voting requirements, especially after all this time—”nearly 50 years later,” he wrote, “things have changed dramatically.”

They can change back, too. In her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg likened the majority’s reasoning to throwing away an umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.

Prescient words: Freed from DOJ oversight, several of those states quickly reversed course, enacting a deluge of new, restrictive voting laws. Within two months of the ruling, North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory signed a package of legislation that was, for anyone who favors access to the ballot box, a nightmare: Same day registration? Gone. Pre-registration for for 16- and 17-year-olds? Also gone. A shorter early registration period? Check. Extended voting hours when voting demand exceeds the availability of voting machines? Nixed. The ability to vote in a precinct outside of where one resides? Nope. Then there’s the most contested provision: the requirement for voters to present a state-approved ID starting in 2016. Without a valid driver’s license, state ID card, US military ID, veteran card, or passport, North Carolina voters are out of luck.

“Voting should not difficult. It should not be something that we have to jump over hurdles to do,” says Donita Judge, a senior attorney at the Advancement Project, a civil rights nonprofit. She and her colleagues promptly sued the state over the new voting restrictions. A number of other groups, including the League of Women Voters, has joined the lawsuit, which is set for a trial in July.

A similar lawsuit filed by the DOJ not long after prompted sneers from Gov. McCrory: “I believe if showing a voter ID is good enough and fair enough for our own president in Illinois, then it’s good enough for the people in North Carolina.” The package, he said, is “common sense reform” aimed at curbing voter fraud and maintaining democratic integrity. Never mind that, between 2000 and 2010, there were 47,000 reported UFO sightings, but only 13 credible cases of someone trying to impersonate a voter. “It’s a red herring. It’s been proven time and time again that there is very minimal voting fraud,” Judge says. “What we do have is politicians manipulating elections—it’s more election fraud then voting fraud.”

Indeed, the sorts of restrictions North Carolina has put in place have been shown time and again to have a disproportionate impact on minority voters. The Advancement Project notes that black turnout leaped from 42 percent in 2000 to 69 percent in 2012 after same-day registration and early voting were implemented. (Granted, there wasn’t an electable black guy running in 2000.) But in 2013, Democracy North Carolina released a report showing that 34 percent of the state’s registered black voters lacked a state-issued ID—overall, 318,000 registered voters lack one, according to data from the state board of elections.

“When people can’t vote, they lack the ability to choose who represents them and therefore who has their best interest at heart, but they also lack the ability to weigh in on important issues, like the criminal justice system,” Judge says. “If you can’t vote, you’re not going to end up on juries, so you don’t have a voice.”

Hence the backward march. “Fifty years ago, they didn’t settle in the face of death, in the face of the Klan, in the face of accepted police brutality. And if they didn’t accept then, we can’t accept now,” Rev. Barber explains. “If they died for us to have these rights, there is no way in the world we can be afraid of the Koch Brothers, of the Tea Party, of regressive politicians.”

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On the Selma Anniversary, These North Carolina Activists Will March Backwards

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50 Years Ago Today, “Bloody Sunday” Catalyzed The Civil Rights Movement. Are We Backsliding?

by HQGLatosha Posted on March 7, 2015

Mother Jones

This weekend marks the 50th anniversary of the “Bloody Sunday” assault in Alabama, where on March 7, 1965, police violently assaulted hundreds of demonstrators attempting to march from Selma to Montgomery to protest the fatal police shooting of 26-year-old Jimmie Lee Jackson.

Hurling clubs and tear-gas cannisters, state and local police viciously attacked more than 500 people that day. Images and footage capturing the violence shocked the nation and left an indelible mark on the civil rights movement. The march forced a new level of public awareness of the struggles shouldered by civil rights activists and African Americans, and is credited for helping pave the way for the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

AP

AP

James “Spider” Martin, who died in 2003, was a young photographer at the Birmingham News assigned to cover the march. NPR recently broadcast an interview he did in 1987 about the day’s brutal events.

“He walks over to me and, blow! Hits me right here in the back of the head,” Martin said upon recalling a moment when a police officer approached him. “I still got a dent in my head and I still have nerve damage there. I go down on my knees and I’m like seeing stars and there’s tear gas everywhere. And then he grabs me by the shirt and he looks straight in my eyes and he just dropped me and said, ‘Scuse me. Thought you was a nigger.'”

President Obama and many other dignitaries are scheduled to visit Selma this weekend to commemorate the anniversary. On Friday, Obama called the work of civil rights activists an “unfinished project.” The president’s comment came in the wake of numerous high profile deaths of black men at the hands of police, and just days after a federal investigation cleared former Ferguson officer Darren Wilson, who fatally shot unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown last August, of possible civil rights violations. At the same time, the Justice Department released a federal report detailing years of rampant racial discrimination, including disproportionate arrests of African Americans, carried out by the Ferguson Police Department.

Brown’s death and the failure of a grand jury to indict Wilson sparked a firestorm of debate over policing policies, with violent protests demanding police reform and that Wilson be prosecuted breaking out across the country. Many say the aggressive display of force by police officials towards non-violent demonstrators in Ferguson mirrored the events in Selma nearly fifty years prior.

AP/Charlie Riedel

Also at the forefront of this weekend’s “Bloody Sunday” anniversary is the Supreme Court’s recent gutting of the pivotal Voting Rights Act, which required states with a history of discrimination to seek federal authority before attempting to alter local voting laws. In 2013, the court voted 5-4 to strike down a crucial tenet of the landmark legislation. The decision ultimately allowed states, including North Carolina and Texas, to enact strict voter ID laws without automatic Justice Department review. Many say such laws make it increasingly difficult for minorities to cast ballots.

“It is perversely ironic to commemorate the past without demonstrating the courage of that past in the present,” NAACP president Cornell Brooks told The Atlantic‘s Russell Berman last week. “In other words we can’t really give gold medals to those who marched from Selma to Montgomery without giving a committee vote to the legislation that protects the right to vote today.”

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50 Years Ago Today, “Bloody Sunday” Catalyzed The Civil Rights Movement. Are We Backsliding?

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In Anti-Obamacare Case, Ruth Bader Ginsburg Questions the Foundation of the Lawsuit

by ImogeneEnright Posted on March 4, 2015

Mother Jones

During the Supreme Court oral arguments Wednesday morning in King v. Burwell, the case that threatens to destroy Obamacare, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg wasted no time in grilling the attorney seeking to eviscerate the Affordable Care Act about a significant technical matter that could blow up his case. As soon as Michael Carvin, the Jones Day partner representing the four plaintiffs named in the anti-Obamacare suit, started his opening statement, Ginsburg interrupted him with a slew of questions about whether his plaintiffs had a recognizable injury that would allow the case to proceed. A plaintiff, she declared, “has to have a concrete stake in the question…you would have to prove the standing if this gets beyond the opening door.”

With these queries, Ginsburg was picking up on a critical issue highlighted last month when Mother Jones broke the news that the four plaintiffs may have dubious claims of standing in this case. According to legal filings in the case, two of the plaintiffs were likely not adversely affected by Obamacare because they could claim an exemption from the law’s requirement to purchase health insurance due to their low income levels and high health care costs. The other two plaintiffs, Doug Hurst and Brenda Levy, would have benefited substantially from the Affordable Care Act had they obtained insurance through an Obamacare health exchange. (Levy said she was paying $1,500 a month for non-Obamacare insurance, which she could have bought on the federal health care exchange for $148 a month. Hurst, according to bankruptcy filings, had been paying more than $600 a month for his insurance in 2010. The ACA would have provided him insurance for $62 a month.)

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In Anti-Obamacare Case, Ruth Bader Ginsburg Questions the Foundation of the Lawsuit

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Ruth Bader Ginsburg: America Is Ready to Accept a Pro-Gay-Marriage SCOTUS Ruling

by ManuelMaurer Posted on February 12, 2015

Mother Jones

In a new interview with Bloomberg on Wednesday, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said she believes Americans are set to accept a constitutional decision legalizing gay marriage in the country, saying it would “not take a large adjustment” for people to eventually come around on the issue.

“I think it’s doubtful that it wouldn’t be accepted,” Ginsburg said. “The change in people’s attitudes on that issue has been enormous.”

The justice’s comments are yet another indication the Supreme Court will rule in favor of gay marriage this June, when justices will hear a monumental case deciding if the Constitution provides the right for same-sex marriages.

“In recent years, people have said, ‘This is the way I am,'” Ginsburg added. “And others looked around, and we discovered it’s our next-door neighbor–we’re very fond of them or it’s our child’s best friend, or even our child. I think that as more and more people came out and said that ‘this is who I am,’ the rest of us recognized that they are one of us.”

Earlier this week, President Obama said he thinks the court will make a historic “shift” in this summer’s ruling and that it’s time to recognize “same-sex couples should have the same rights as anybody else.”

In the court’s decision not to block gay marriage in Alabama on Monday, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his dissent that the ruling offered another “signal” that gay rights advocates will be similarly successful this summer. Despite the decision, however, several Alabama counties still refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Even with such defiant opposition, Ginsburg maintained a positive outlook.

“One way or another it will be decided before we leave town in June.”

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Ruth Bader Ginsburg: America Is Ready to Accept a Pro-Gay-Marriage SCOTUS Ruling

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High School Police Ask Judge to Let Them Pepper-Spray and Arrest Unruly Students

by JennaManifold Posted on February 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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When B.J. ambled into his fourth-period class at PD Jackson-Olin High School in Birmingham, Alabama, he could hardly have predicted that he would soon be handcuffed and crying, with pepper spray searing his eyes and nasal passages. Nor would he have guessed that by the day’s end he would be sequestered in a holding cell, vomiting from the chemicals.

Here’s how it happened, as described in court documents: One day in September 2010, “Mr. Cook,” a substitute teacher in the Birmingham City Schools, told B.J. (his initials), then a wiry 10th-grader, that he couldn’t be in the classroom until he tucked in his shirt. The teen obliged—dress violations were known to escalate at the school—but as he slipped back into the room a few minutes later, the sub heard someone among the rows mutter, “Fuck you, Mr. Cook.” Unsure who’d dissed him, he zeroed in on B.J. and summoned “Assistant Principal Gaston.”

Out in the hallway, Gaston subjected B.J. to a forced physical search. B.J. objected, and wriggled to loosen himself from the administrator’s grip. He tripped and landed facedown on the floor—whereupon Gaston took advantage of B.J.’s vulnerable position to check his back pockets. B.J.’s defiance led Gaston to call in backup. The kid soon found himself upright and pinned to a row of lockers by Gaston and a fellow administrator, “Assistant Principal Gates.”

That’s when School Resource Officer (SRO) Marion Benson arrived on the scene. Her face was the last thing B.J. saw before she blasted him with a cloud of pepper spray. He sunk to the ground in tears. If you try getting up, I am going to spray you again, she told him, her knee digging into B.J.’s back. She handcuffed him and led him to the main office.

“Woo! That’s the first macing of the year!” Mr. Gates remarked as the shackled teen sat in the office. Twenty minutes later, still wearing his chemical-infused clothes, B.J. was taken to the hospital, where staff said it was too late to do anything about the pepper spray, and then to a nearby detention center. He was held in a cell there until 7 p.m., when his grandmother came to pick him up.

This Was One of eight stories presented to US District Judge Abdul Kallon these past few weeks in a lawsuit whose outcome, which is expected in a decision Monday, may determine whether the city cops who work within the Birmingham school district as SROs can keep using pepper spray to break up fights and thwart what they consider disorderly conduct.

The suit, filed in 2010 by the Southern Poverty Law Center, alleges that eight students, including B.J., suffered physically and emotionally from unnecessary use of pepper spray. It names six SROs, as well as Birmingham Police Chief A.C. Roper. In 2012, a judge granted the case class action status, which means the outcome will henceforth apply to all of the district’s students.

“We want it to be declared unconstitutional because it allows officers to spray people, specifically students, without considering a wide variety of factors—such as whether they are in a school environment, the fact that they are in a closed environment, and the fact that these things that they are accusing kids of doing and acting on are actually just student misconduct issues,” says Ebony Howard, the SPLC staff attorney representing the students.

Since 2006, Howard says, there have been at least 110 pepper-spray incidents in the district. At the very least, her team wants the judge to insist upon written guidelines that state explicitly the circumstances in which it would be appropriate to reach for the Freeze +P chemical agent the officers use. “We want training for these officers on adolescent development, de-escalation techniques, conflict management, and conflict resolution,” she told me. “Basically, we want them to be trained on how to actually be SROs, and to work in an environment where they have the tools to help calm down a conflict that do not involve spraying chemicals in kids’ faces.”

The modern police presence in schools emerged from the same crack-era hysteria that brought us mandatory minimums, three-strikes laws, and an explosion of the US prison population. During the early-to-mid-1990s, with juvenile arrests for violent crime on the rise and legislators shrilling about the so-called juvenile superpredators, more and more schools contracted with police departments to put uniformed officers on campus.

Looking back in 2013, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) reported that about 25 percent of existing SRO programs were originally created because of media-incited fears, and another 25 percent because of school rowdiness and vandalism. Only about 4 percent of districts and law enforcement agencies cited the level of violence in local schools as the motivation for initiating a program. (The rest of the programs were created for “other” reasons, such as a school taking advantage of grant money or taking part in a drug awareness program.)

The number of school resource officers deployed nationwide continued to surge into the early oughts. According to the CRS, there were about 12,000 SROs in 1997—by 2003, the number of officers had grown to nearly 20,000. When the Birmingham district began putting local police in its schools in 1996, it made what the authors of a Justice Department assessment would later describe as a “frequent and destructive mistake.” Like many other districts, it enlisted the cops without first working out their roles and responsibilities in a school setting. “When programs fail to do this, problems are often rampant at the beginning of the program—and often persist for months and even years,” the 2005 assessment warned.

A few years after that report appeared, the district’s then-interim superintendent Barbara Allen began to take notice of what had become an increasingly troublesome partnership. In the absence of school-appropriate guidelines, police were stepping in to deal with minor rulebreaking—sagging pants, disrespectful comments, brief physical skirmishes. What previously might have resulted in a detention or a visit to the principal’s office was replaced with excruciating pain and temporary blindness, often followed by a trip to the courthouse.

Indeed, in 2007-08, a whopping 513 students from the district landed in Jefferson County Family Court. This represented 82 percent of the referrals from schools to court in the county, even though only 25 percent of Jefferson County’s public school students attend Birmingham City Schools. Brian Huff, then a presiding judge, complained to the Birmingham News that fewer than 1 in 10 of those kids ever should have been arrested.

Allen knew she had a real problem on her hands when she learned that multiple school officials were heading to court at least once a week. “Other school systems aren’t arresting kids for small things; they handle it from within,” she told the Birmingham News in the spring of 2009. “We call the police.” The district’s high schools had a total of 12 SROs, plus two sergeants and a lieutenant, patrolling their hallways and grounds. (The same Birmingham News article quoted Mayor Larry Langford saying he would “pull officers off the streets and put them in the schools,” after the mayor had encountered graffiti and disrespectful students during a high school visit.)

After meeting with Judge Huff that summer to discuss the problem, Allen took action. That December, she persuaded the Birmingham PD to sign a “collaborative agreement,” which fleshed out, somewhat, the role of police in the schools. Notably, it acknowledged that pepper spray and cuffs were being used for minor offenses, and that teachers and administrators should be the ones addressing noncriminal violations in the future.

But the agreement had fatal flaws: For one, it didn’t detail how officers should act when their intervention was deemed necessary, so officers continued to behave in schools as they would on the streets. The document also had an “exceptional circumstances” clause, which gave police employees the right to exercise their discretion. The defense in the SPLC lawsuit is now pointing to this provision to argue that the officers have the green light to arrest and deal with students as they see fit.

IF POLICE OFFICERS happened upon a couple of 16-year-olds fighting off campus, they would be allowed to use pepper spray, so why would it be any different on a school campus? That’s a question posed by Michael Choy, the police department’s defense attorney, during the second week of the trial.

The court, Choy said, must remember that these students “are not children” but, rather, “big adults.” One of the former students in the case, he emphasized, would be testifying by video from a New York prison. The implicit message: These kids were the bad apples.

Choy’s comment was “very disturbing,” says Dennis Parker, head of the American Civil Liberties Union’s racial justice program. It reminds him of how police in Ferguson, Missouri, tried to portray Michael Brown as a hoodlum after one of their own shot the unarmed teenager. The tactic distracts from the question at hand, which is “whether or not the police or the SRO were acting in an appropriate way.”

The criminalization of minor student misconduct, and the effect it has on high school kids, is a topic Thomas Pedroni, an associate professor at Wayne State University’s College of Education, is studying in partnership with the ACLU. “Police set up a different environment in a school,” he explains. “It becomes less focused on nurturing and caring and growing, and more focused on control…It’s sort of tough in the environment of police presence to go, ‘Oh, no, we’re really a community of trust.'”

In many ways, Pedroni adds, the school-to-prison pipeline could be renamed the prison-to-prison pipeline, given how so many schools have adopted the sterile, suspicion-first qualities of juvenile detention centers.

This notion of a dehumanized high school experience played a central role in Howard’s legal strategy, especially as she aimed to convey the ripple of effects of a zero-tolerance school culture.

“When you use a tactic like chemical sprays in schools, what you do is you teach a kid who has been sprayed, a kid who may have been accidentally sprayed, a kid who saw another kid get sprayed, as well as a kid who just knows about the use of the chemical—all of those kids learn to distrust law enforcement officers,” Howard says. “They learn that they will not be treated fairly.”

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High School Police Ask Judge to Let Them Pepper-Spray and Arrest Unruly Students

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BP’s missing oil is found — where else? — on the bottom of the Gulf

by JcH67hvoedzlwyb Posted on February 4, 2015

BP’s missing oil is found — where else? — on the bottom of the Gulf

By on 4 Feb 2015commentsShare

After the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, some of the estimated 200 million gallons of oil that spilled were never recovered. They were missing. Now researchers have found some of them: A good 10 million gallons are sitting at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.

A new study, published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, hypothesizes that about 5 percent of oil from the spill made it to the seafloor. A separate study in October put that number at about 10 percent. “Our number is a little bit more conservative than theirs,” said Jeff Chanton, lead author of the new study, but “if the two approaches agree within a factor of two, that’s pretty good for estimating all of the oil on the seafloor.” Basically, a lot of oil is down there.

And that oil can cause a lot of problems. Because there’s less oxygen deeper in the Gulf, it will take more time to decompose. And the oil can lead to tumors and lesions in sea animals, the researchers found.

“Fish will likely ingest contaminants because worms ingest the sediment, and fish eat the worms. It’s a conduit for contamination into the food web,” Chanton said. “This is going to affect the Gulf for years to come.”

The findings come as BP continues trying to weasel its way out of paying fines and reparations for the spill. Reuters reports that the company is pushing back against a multi-billion-dollar government fine under the Clean Water Act:

In arguments that wrapped up on Monday, BP tried to whittle away at $13.7 billion in potential fines if faces under the Clean Water Act for the worst offshore disaster in U.S. history.

BP has said its fine should be modest as it took extensive steps to mitigate the disaster and that the defendant named in the case, BP’s exploration and production unit, known as BPXP, cannot afford a big penalty.

And the Associated Press reports that the company is still seeking to challenge the way in which businesses affected by the spill are compensated — by attacking the man in charge of distributing the funds.

BP says the claims administrator, Patrick Juneau, failed to disclose that he worked on previous oil spill litigation for the state of Louisiana when he was hired to oversee settlement payouts.

Attorneys for Juneau told the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that he hid nothing improper and his record of work for the state was public well before BP and others agreed to his hiring in 2012.

All sides hailed the settlement when it was approved in 2012. But BP later argued that Juneau was misinterpreting the settlement and paying claims to businesses that didn’t deserve them.

U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier and the 5th Circuit ruled that, under the settlement BP agreed to, businesses do not have to prove they were directly harmed by the spill to collect money — only that they made less money in the three to eight months after the spill.

In case you weren’t feeling sorry enough for BP already, today also brings news that the company’s profits and share price are both down because of low oil prices. Cue the tiny violins.

Source:
“Missing oil” from 2010 BP spill found on gulf seafloor

, CBS News.

Ruling on BP fine over 2010 U.S. oil spill months away: lawyers

, Reuters.

BP Urges Judges to Remove Head of Oil Spill Settlement Fund

, The Associated Press.

BP profits hit by lower oil price

, BBC News.

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Continued – 

BP’s missing oil is found — where else? — on the bottom of the Gulf

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Why the Media Focuses So Much on the Koch Brothers—Explained in 5 Tweets

by CandidaEasterbr Posted on January 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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Any time news breaks about the billionaire Koch brothers and their shadowy network of donors and advocacy groups, conservatives grumble that the media singles out the Kochs, that we reporters are unfair toward and obsessed with them while giving a pass to wealthy liberals like George Soros and Tom Steyer and the progressive donor club the Democracy Alliance. Koch Industries, the international conglomerate run by Charles and David Koch, keeps a ticker tracking the number of Koch mentions in the New York Times. The response to Monday’s revelation—the Kochs and a few hundred of their donor allies plan to spend an eye-popping $889 million on 2016 elections and policy fights—was no different.

But there’s a very good reason the media covers the Kochs so closely: Increasingly, the data shows, they’re the biggest outside money players in town. By a long shot.

Robert Maguire, a cracker-jack researcher at the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks the flow of cash (disclosed and dark money) in American elections, lays out, in just five tweets, why exactly the media report on the Kochs so much—and why it makes perfect sense to do so.

In the 2012 campaign, Maguire shows, the Kochs and their network already ranked as one of the biggest outside entities:

The bulk of that cash was dark money—meaning the true source of the contributions was hidden. And the Koch network’s dark money spending made up a notable chunk of all reported dark money spending in the 2012 elections:

Yes, the progressive movement has its own donor club, the Democracy Alliance, whose members are secret and whose giving is anonymous. But the DA, as it’s called, pales in comparison to Kochworld:

Since the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, Koch-linked dark-money spending has outpaced liberal dark-money spending:

And as you can see, the Kochs’ $889 million goal for 2016 more than doubles its 2012 budget. The figure exceeds the Republican Party’s campaign committee spending in 2012 and isn’t far off from what the Obama and Romney campaigns each spent in the last presidential race.

So there you have it. The Kochs and their allies—again, just a few hundred people hoping to raise and spend nearly $900 million in 2016—are in a different league than their liberal counterparts. Make no mistake: The Democracy Alliance and its state-level counterpart, the Committee on States, are absolutely deserving of tough reporting and serious scrutiny. But at this point, Kochworld is essentially its own political party, on par with the Democratic and Republican parties, and it should be covered just as rigorously.

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Why the Media Focuses So Much on the Koch Brothers—Explained in 5 Tweets

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The Pentagon Is Holding an Essay Contest to Honor Saudi Arabia’s Brutal King. Here’s Our Entry.

by JaimieEnderby Posted on January 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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Shortly after Abdullah Bin Abdul-Aziz, the 90-year-old king of Saudi Arabia, died last Friday, the Pentagon and Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, paid their respects by inviting college students to participate in a “research and essay competition” in the late monarch’s honor. No prize has been announced, but the Pentagon issued a press release about the contest listing the deceased monarch’s considerable accomplishments: “the modernization of his country’s military,” his “lifetime” support of Saudi Arabia’s alliance with the United States, his support of “scholarly research,” and what Dempsey called the king’s “remarkable character and courage.” Although, as a woman, I wouldn’t be recognized as a full human being by the king, here is my essay contest submission:

On women’s rights:

Amnesty International, December 11, 2014: Saudi Arabia: Two women arrested for driving.

Human Rights Watch, April 20, 2008: Male guardianship laws forbid women from obtaining passports, marrying, studying, or traveling without the permission of a male guardian.

Human Rights Watch, December 2, 2014:

The informal prohibition on female driving in Saudi Arabia became official state policy in 1990. During the 1990-91 Gulf War, female American soldiers were permitted to drive on military bases in Saudi Arabia, and Saudi women organized a protest demanding the right to drive in Saudi Arabia as well. Dozens of Saudi women drove the streets of Riyadh in a convoy to protest the ban, which then was just based on custom. In response, officials arrested them, suspended them from their jobs, and the Grand Mufti, the country’s most senior religious authority, immediately declared a fatwa, or religious edict, against women driving, stating that driving would expose women to “temptation” and lead to “social chaos.” Then-Minister of Interior Prince Nayef legally banned women’s driving by decree on the basis of the fatwa.

On migrant worker’s rights:

Human Rights Watch, December 1, 2013: Hundreds of thousands of workers were arrested and deported, some reporting prison abuses during their detentions. No standard contract for domestic workers was ever drafted. Human Rights Watch interviewed migrant workers about the arrests:

One of the Ethiopians, a 30-year-old supervisor at a private company, said he heard shouts and screams from the street, and left his home near Manfouha to see what was happening. When he arrived near Bank Rajahi on the road to the Yamama neighborhood, west of Manfouha, he saw a large group of Ethiopians crying and shouting around the dead bodies of three Ethiopians, one of whom he said had been shot, and two others who had been beaten to death. He said six others appeared to be badly injured.

He said he saw Saudis whom he called shabab (“young men” in Arabic), and uniformed security forces attack the Ethiopians who had gathered. The shabab were using swords and machetes, while some of the uniformed officers were beating the migrants with metal police truncheons, and other officers were firing bullets into the air to disperse the crowd. He said that he narrowly escaped serious injury when a Saudi man swung a sword at his head. It missed, but hit his arm, requiring stitches to close the wound.

On peaceful protest:

Human Rights Watch, December 18, 2013: Authorities arrested and charged many peaceful protestors for “sowing discord” and challenging the government.

Amnesty International, December 4, 2014:

On 6 November, the authorities sentenced Mikhlif al-Shammari , a prominent human rights activist and an advocate of the rights of Saudi Arabia’s Shi’a Muslim community, to two years in prison and 200 lashes on charges related to his peaceful activism. In a separate case, on 17 June 2013 Mikhlif al-Shammari had already been sentenced by the Specialized Criminal Court (SCC) to five years in prison, followed by a 10-year travel ban, on charges related to his peaceful activism. The court also banned him from writing in the press and on social media networks, and from appearing on television or radio.

Human Rights Watch, January 10, 2015:

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia should overturn the lashing and prison term for a blogger imprisoned for his views and immediately grant him a pardon. Saudi authorities lashed Raif Badawi 50 times on January 9, 2015, in front of a crowded mosque in Jeddah, part of a judicial sentence of 1,000 lashes and 10 years in prison for setting up a liberal website and allegedly insulting religious authorities.

On torture:

The Washington Post, November 19, 2004:

A federal prosecutor in Alexandria made a comment last year suggesting that a Falls Church man held in a Saudi Arabian prison had been tortured, according to a sworn affidavit from a defense lawyer that was recently filed in federal court in Washington.

The alleged remark by Assistant U.S. Attorney Gordon D. Kromberg occurred during a conversation with the lawyer, Salim Ali, in the federal courthouse in Alexandria, according to Ali’s affidavit.

The document was filed Oct. 12 in connection with a petition by the parents of the detained man, Ahmed Abu Ali, who are seeking his release from Saudi custody.The lawyer stated in the affidavit that he asked Kromberg about bringing Abu Ali back to the United States to face charges so as “to avoid the torture that goes on in Saudi Arabia.”

Kromberg “smirked and stated that ‘He’s no good for us here, he has no fingernails left,’ ” Salim Ali wrote in his affidavit, adding: “I did not know how to respond to the appalling statement he made, and we subsequently ceased our discussion about Ahmed Abu Ali.”

In conclusion, from Human Rights Watch:

For Abdullah bin Abdul-Aziz’s half-brother and successor, Salman bin Abdulaziz to improve on Abdullah’s legacy, he needs to reverse course and permit Saudi citizens to peacefully express themselves, reform the justice system, and speed up reforms on women’s rights and treatment of migrant workers.

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The Pentagon Is Holding an Essay Contest to Honor Saudi Arabia’s Brutal King. Here’s Our Entry.

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The Group Behind America’s Biggest Anti-Abortion March Now Says Birth Control Causes Abortions

by CarmineGraebner Posted on January 13, 2015

Mother Jones

Each year on January 22—the anniversary of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade—the March for Life draws thousands of protesters to Washington, DC, for what organizers bill as “world’s largest anti-abortion event.” But this year, there’s an added wrinkle: Organizers of the march have spent the past six months arguing that birth control pills are a form of abortion.

March for Life Education and Defense Fund, the nonprofit that organizes the annual protest, identified oral birth control as a form of abortion in a lawsuit filed in July. With the suit, which is ongoing, March for Life is fighting for an exemption from the Affordable Care Act mandate that all private employers provide contraception coverage.

March for Life argues that covering drugs or medical devices that cause abortions would violate its founding principles. And it places hormonal birth control, which includes things like oral contraception and vaginal rings, squarely within that category. In its lawsuit, the group refers to these as “abortifacients,” a characterization with which most physicians strongly disagree.

Polls consistently find that a majority of Americans who oppose abortion have no moral objections to birth control. Most of those planning to attend the march probably have no idea that March for Life views birth control as immoral: March for Life doesn’t advertise its opinions on birth control in its promotional material for the protest, and the group’s website simply bills the march as a mass demonstration against “legalized abortion on demand.”

The group’s lawsuit seems to have been inspired by the Supreme Court’s June 2014 decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. In that case, Hobby Lobby’s owners sued to avoid covering intrauterine devices and emergency contraception pills. A 5-4 conservative majority on the high court ruled in favor of the craft chain’s owners, saying that certain privately owned businesses don’t have to cover emergency contraceptives if the owners object on religious grounds.

The next month, the Supreme Court went even further: It allowed organizations with objections to paying for any kind of contraception—not just the types of emergency contraception that the court dealt with in Hobby Lobby—to bring lawsuits against the contraception mandate. March for Life Education and Defense Fund filed its lawsuit five days after that expanded ruling.

Writing for the majority in Hobby Lobby, Justice Samuel Alito agreed with the argument, made by Hobby Lobby’s owners, that some types of emergency contraception may cause abortions. March for Life makes a similar contention about hormonal birth control. Doctors and medical researchers, however, almost uniformly disagree with these assertions.

Birth control primarily works by preventing ovulation, making it impossible for a woman to conceive. But the pill also causes thinning of the uterine lining. This makes it more difficult for a fertilized egg to implant in the womb. Mainstream medical organizations argue that pregnancy begins when a fertilized egg is implanted in the womb. But in the view of some abortion foes, including March for Life, preventing implantation is tantamount to an abortion. March for Life’s attorneys go so far as to call the lawsuit a legal challenge to the “abortion-pill mandate.” (In fact, the abortion pill, a drug that can be used to terminate a pregnancy in its early stages, is not included under Obamacare’s contraception mandate.)

Jeanne Monahan-Mancini, the president of March for Life Education and Defense Fund, declined to comment on the ongoing lawsuit or its implications for the message of the group’s annual march. “The March for Life Education and Defense Fund believes that life begins at conception/fertilization,” she wrote in an email. “The organization is opposed to any drug or device that has a mechanism of action that can be life-destructive.”

Joerg Dreweke, a policy researcher with the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion-rights think tank, says the March for Life lawsuit is part of a pattern of anti-abortion groups conflating contraception with abortion in a quiet effort to roll back both.

“Birth control is very much in the movement’s cross-hairs, and antiabortion advocates are working to stigmatize contraception by blurring the lines between contraception and abortion,” he wrote in a recent analysis. “Yet, the movement is doing this in a strategic and deceptive way…Antiabortion groups ignore and often contradict their positions when it might hurt them politically.”

As evidence of this, Dreweke pointed to the fact that the March for Life, in promoting its upcoming events, wasn’t also touting the radical claims in its lawsuit: “If you take their lawsuit at face value, it turns the March for Life into the March to Ban Birth Control.”

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The Group Behind America’s Biggest Anti-Abortion March Now Says Birth Control Causes Abortions

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