They describe themselves as “cow protectors” or “gau rakshaks” in Hindi. On social media, they often post about carrying out charitable work such as operating ambulances for sick or injured cows, feeding stray animals and distributing food to people.

But in the dark of the night, their work takes on a more violent edge. Multiple photos and videos show members of “cow protection” groups chasing, shooting at and beating up truck drivers they claim are “smuggling” cows for slaughter. 

Cows are considered sacred in Hinduism, the dominant religion in India. Many states in the country prohibit the slaughter of cows and have strict laws on the transportation, sale and purchase of cattle. These laws have become more stringent since the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came into power in 2014.

The vigilantes attacking truck drivers tend to be closely aligned with hardline Hindu nationalist organisations, and a majority of their victims are Muslims. And while they claim to be doing this for the sake of the cows, in some of the videos, the animals can also be seen injured from vehicles overturning during aggressive chases. 

Elaine Pearson, Asia director at Human Rights Watch, told Bellingcat that cow protection has become part of the political agenda of leaders of the BJP and, in some cases, they have backed the alleged actions of the suspects “while the police have failed to take action against them”.

Alt News and Bellingcat found videos on social media showing violent assaults by members of five self-described animal welfare groups, mainly operating in the states of Uttar Pradesh and Haryana, where incidents involving cow-related violence have frequently been reported. 

(Editor’s note: We are not sharing links to these videos to avoid amplifying content depicting violent attacks seemingly targeting minority groups. However, if you are a journalist or researcher interested in obtaining this dataset, please email inquiries@bellingcat.com.)

Some of the leaders of these vigilante groups, when we reached out to them, claimed that they were working closely with the local police. One even received an award for “cow and social service” from a cabinet minister, alongside police officers. Senior police officers from the districts that these groups operate in did not answer questions about alleged police support for the cow vigilantes when we could reach them. 

While these groups most likely only represent a small fraction of the “cow vigilantes” in India, who have been reported on by the media and human rights groups in the country for years, our investigation sheds more light on how they informally work together to carry out mob violence against truck drivers.

Akhil Bharatiya Gau Seva Samiti (ABGS)

In a video uploaded in February this year, several men in cars are seen chasing a truck down a highway at night. A man from one of the cars pulls out a shotgun and fires at the truck. Police sirens can be heard in the background but law enforcement does not appear to interfere. 

Akhil Bharatiya Gau Seva Samiti (ABGS), which uploaded the car chase video, is a trust – a non-profit organisation (NPO) formed to promote charitable activities. It was established in 2022, according to the Indian government’s non-profit database. ABGS is based in Vrindavan, Mathura district in the state of Uttar Pradesh. 

While its day job may seem to be “animal welfare”, videos of its members terrorising truck drivers at night are routine and oftentimes, promoted by the trust itself. 

ABGS’s president Bharat Gautam shared a post in November 2024 that shows a smashed-up car, with a sign for “Akhil Bhrataiya Gau Seva Samiti” on top of it, after what he described in Hindi as a “heavy encounter with cow smugglers”. 

Alt News spoke to Gautam, who said that cows are “not an animal”, but a mother figure in Hinduism.

Gautam claimed that his team works closely with Vrindavan police to save cows from being slaughtered for meat. “We either pass on the information we receive [about trucks transporting cattle] to the police and they accompany us in our pursuit or we patrol areas we know are frequented by cow smugglers,” he said, adding that the police register cases against the drivers based on complaints filed by his team once the vehicle is caught. Multiple calls by Alt News to the Vrindavan police station’s general line, as well as to the direct lines of senior police officials from the district, to request for comment on ABGS’s claims went unanswered. 

“We help the administration but they can’t do everything so it’s also our duty to protect our religion, our mother,” said Gautam.

However, videos shared by his team reveal that the cows they claim to rescue are also frequently injured during their car chases. For example, a video from February last year shows a pick-up truck that had overturned apparently as a result of being pursued, causing the cattle inside to fall onto the road. The video shows three men sitting on the ground, looking gravely injured, and several people hitting them while posing for photos. Meanwhile, the cows can be seen sprawled on the side of the road, also apparently injured.

Gautam’s team operates in Uttar Pradesh, which is one of at least 20 out of 28 states in India that either partially or completely bans the slaughter of cows and the sale of beef. When Alt News asked Gautam about his team’s use of violence, he shifted the blame onto the truck drivers. “Cow smugglers collide with our cars … shoot at us,” he said.

ABGS’s headquarters are located in Vrindavan city’s Venkatesh Temple. When Alt News contacted the temple, they claimed to have no connection with the group. “We only rent out a space,” a temple staff member said. 

Gautam told Alt News that the temple does offer some support to his team, including manpower and financial assistance. But he maintained that most of their work was self-funded and denied receiving any government aid or donations, despite the trust having appealed for donations on social media.

His “cow protection” activities have also won him recognition from the Uttar Pradesh government. In January last year, he received an award for “cow and social service” from a cabinet minister in the state. For this, he was congratulated in the presence of the district magistrate of Mathura city, who is responsible for maintaining law and order in the district, and Mathura police. 

Multiple calls made to senior police officers in Mathura district went either unanswered or the officers did not comment when asked about the Mathura police’s relationship with Gautam and whether they supported cow vigilantism.

Team Sonu Hindu Palwal

While ABGS’s vigilante activities have been particularly visible on social media, our investigations found it is part of a network of local groups based in Uttar Pradesh and Haryana. In a video uploaded on June 27, Gautam says that cow vigilantes have been working under the guidance of one “Sonu Hindu Palwal” the past five years. 

In March, videos shared by ABGS and several related cow vigilante groups show cars chasing a truck, and two men being brutally beaten and kicked.

Bellingcat geolocated the incident to a location outside a police station in Beri in the state of Haryana based on the trees, lamp posts and a temple seen in one of these videos, posted by a member of “Team Sonu Hindu Palwal”.

This location matches reports of an attack that took place in Beri on March 9, where eight men  were arrested after a police officer on the scene filed a complaint. The officer’s complaint stated that the mob shouted “we will not leave you Muslims alive today” while beating up the two men from the truck. 

A man who goes only by one name, Sonu – his official name listed on court documents – was among the eight arrested. He operates a team named after himself called “Team Sonu Hindu Palwal”. Palwal is the district in Haryana state where his team primarily operates.

Sonu told Bellingcat that he is the Palwal district president of Gau Raksha Dal (GRD) – literally “cow protection” unit – an NPO established in 2012. The GRD is one of the largest cow protection networks in India, and its leader told Human Rights Watch in 2017 that the network’s volunteers have a presence in nearly every state.

When asked about the incident in Beri, Sonu said that while they were chasing the truck drivers, the truck collided with another car, and the passengers of that car beat up the truck drivers. “We were blamed”, he said – even though videos of the assault were shared by members of his own team.  

Bellingcat also showed Sonu several videos posted by cow vigilante groups including Team Bharat Gautam that either tagged Team Sonu Hindu or mentioned them in their captions. These videos showed men surrounded by members of the cow vigilante groups, who were hitting them or otherwise treating them roughly. Sonu was personally seen posing for a group photo in one of these videos, even though he wasn’t shown assaulting anyone. When shown these videos, Sonu denied that his team beat people up.

The cow vigilante leader did not directly respond to our questions about what he thought about violence committed by members of his team, but said: “Do whatever you want. Our job is to save cows and we will continue to do so.”

The day after his arrest in Beri, videos of Sonu’s supporters celebrating his release began circulating on Instagram. He and others from his team were paraded in a car with garlands around their necks and a procession followed them while dancing to “Hindutva pop”, a genre of music associated with the Hindu far-Right which carries lyrics with anti-Muslim rhetoric.

The men beaten up by Sonu and his team in March were arrested after a counter-complaint under animal cruelty and cow protection laws was filed against them.

When Alt News called the police station’s number, the police personnel who answered did not seem to know whether the two men seen being attacked in the video were still in jail. One of them said that the case has been transferred to the crime unit but was unable to provide any details of the investigating officers. 

However, bail orders for the two men who were beaten up, which Bellingcat found on the district court website of Palwal, indicated that they each spent at least two months in custody before being released on bail.

Alt News spoke to Sonu who said that his team is tipped off by “informants” whenever cows are being transported, receiving details such as the vehicle’s route and licence plate number. 

According to Sonu, the rescued cows are taken to shelters, while the people transporting them are handed over to the police. He said that the police sometimes show up after a vehicle is intercepted, but at other times the police are with the gau rakshaks during these incidents. 

Alt News’s questions to the Additional Superintendent of Police, Palwal about Sonu’s claim that the police accompanies his team in their pursuits of truck drivers went unanswered.

Bellingcat also found links between Team Sonu and a Mumbai-registered charitable trust, through a photo Sonu posted showing a large truck which he described as an “ambulance for sick or injured cows in Palwal”. There is a Google Pay number shown on the vehicle for receiving donations.

The signage on the ambulance says the service is “courtesy of” an organisation called “Shri Mahesh Chand Dalmia Charitable Trust”, which appears to be a misspelling of “Shri Mahesh Chandra Dalmia Charitable Trust”, a registered trust based in Mumbai. 

Sonu told Alt News that Shri Mahesh Chandra Dalmia Charitable Trust supported his team’s ambulance after local priests in Vrindavan introduced the organisation to his work. 

According to the government’s NPO database, the trust works in the sectors of “Education & Literacy, Any Other, Health & Family Welfare”. The trustee, or person who manages the trust, is listed as Satyadeo Banka. 

Banka is regularly tagged on Facebook in videos of Team Sonu’s attacks on truck drivers. His posts on the platform also frequently promote ideas in line with Hindutva, a nationalist ideology that advocates for establishing India as a Hindu nation-state. 

We attempted to contact Banka on social media but did not receive any response. Alt News contacted the trust’s president, Rahul Dalmia, on the phone and emailed him about his organisation’s relationship with Team Sonu Hindu Palwal, asking whether he was aware of the group’s violent activities and Banka being tagged in their “cow protection” videos. Dalmia declined to be quoted when asked about the trust’s work over the phone, and did not respond, as of the time of publication, to further questions over email about whether the trust supported cow vigilantes in any way

Live For Nation

In 2021, Sonu congratulated someone he referred to as “LFN’s Parveen” for joining the Haryana government’s cow protection force, in a post on Facebook. LFN is the abbreviation of “Live For Nation”, a registered NPO in Haryana’s Faridabad which aims to “save cows”. This group was also involved in a car chase last year that resulted in the death of a 20-year-old man.

On Aug. 23, 2024, Aryan Mishra, 20, was out with his friends on a drive when five cow vigilantes – all LFN members – allegedly “mistook” them to be cattle smugglers and began chasing their car before firing at them. Mishra was killed in the incident. 

One of the accused who was arrested, Anil Kaushik, reportedly told Mishra’s father that he thought the boy was Muslim and regretted killing a Brahmin, the highest ranking caste in the Hindu caste system. Kaushik identified himself as a member of Haryana government’s special cow protection task force, which Parveen is also a part of. 

His full name is Parveen Vashisth and his Facebook bio says that he is a member of the Haryana government’s “special cow protection task force”. Vashisth also names the task force while sharing videos on Instagram of cow vigilantes from Team Sonu Hindu chasing trucks. 

Alt News reached out to the “Haryana Gau Seva Aayog”, the government body responsible for overseeing the task force. Its chairman, Sharwan Garg, said that anyone can engage in cow protection work independently, provided they stay “within the limits of the law and coordinate with the authorities”.

However, Vashisth’s videos on Instagram showing Team Sonu Hindu chasing after trucks, shooting at them and assaulting drivers appear to show that these “limits” are often breached.

Gau Seva Mission

Another organisation that claims to work for cow welfare and operates in the same network uploaded a video on Jan. 9, 2025, showing vigilantes capturing a man they claimed was a “cow smuggler”. In multiple videos, the man looks gravely injured and bloody. His vehicle is also badly damaged. 

The organisation, “Gau Seva Mission”, is based in Vrindavan, like ABGS. Its leader, Govind Singh, is frequently tagged in videos of attacks on alleged “cow smugglers” along with Bharat Gautam, Sonu and Parveen Vashisth. 

Singh told Alt News that he is a veterinary doctor by profession and bears most of Gau Seva Mission’s expenses through his private work. 

Gau Seva Mission appears to be known to the Uttar Pradesh government. In November last year, Singh uploaded photos and videos of the chairperson of the Uttar Pradesh government’s cow service commission visiting his office. 

Singh told Alt News he used to be a member of the GRD – the NPO that Sonu is a member of – but left the organisation to start his own group, although he did not say when this was. One of Singh’s Facebook posts from three years ago gives the helpline number of GRD’s Vrindavan branch – the same number is now the helpline number of Gau Seva Mission. Its office also used to be at the same address as the office of the Vrindavan branch of GRD at least until March 2022, according to older images of the location on Singh’s Facebook account. 

Gau Vansh Sewa Dham

Another organisation that claims to be involved in animal welfare but whose leader has been involved in cow-related violence is “Gau Vansh Sewa Dham”, in Haryana’s Faridabad. It is run by Shiva Dahiya, who told Alt News that the group runs a hospital for cows.

Videos of injured cows being treated are all over the Facebook page of the organisation, and Gau Vansh Sewa Dham makes regular appeals for donations to support their rescue and relief efforts. Dahiya said that the money for his organisation’s work is raised from the community. 

Posts on Instagram that tag Dahiya show him seemingly participating in or being present at the scene of vigilante attacks targeting those transporting cattle. For example, one post from February shows him holding tire puncture spikes to stop a truck. In another, he is seen pulling an injured man, who was slumped over, up by his hair so his face was visible as a group of vigilantes – also including Sonu – posed for a picture with several captured men. 

However, when Alt News asked if the car chases ever got violent, Dahiya said, “We don’t want to do any wrong by our hands”. And when asked if he had ever done anything wrong, he replied, “By the grace of God, never.”

Dahiya denied there was any violence committed by “cow protectors”.

“We never beat anyone,” he told Alt News.

(Shalaka Shinde contributed research to this piece.)

(Story featured image from Canva.)

The post Violence in the name of cows: The ‘animal welfare’ groups that beat up truck drivers in India appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Pooja Chaudhuri.

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The New York State Legislature this week passed a bill banning anonymous complaints to the state child abuse hotline. If Gov. Kathy Hochul signs the legislation, New Yorkers will now have to provide their name and contact information if they want to make an allegation that someone might be neglecting a child.

This dramatic change in the law comes a year and a half after a ProPublica investigation showed how the hotline had been weaponized by jealous exes, spiteful landlords and others who endlessly called in baseless allegations. Even if a caller didn’t leave their name or any details, and even if the same allegation had repeatedly been investigated and found to be unsubstantiated, it automatically triggered an invasive search of the accused’s home and often a strip search of the children.

We detailed the case of one Brooklyn mother whose apartment was searched dozens of times — by police officers and child protective services caseworkers who never had a warrant and often showed up at her door after midnight — all because an angry former acquaintance kept anonymously calling the hotline about her. She was never found to have mistreated her children in any way.

According to federal statistics, 96% of anonymous calls to child abuse hotlines are deemed baseless after an investigation. Among all allegations of child abuse or neglect, including non-anonymous calls, 83% are ultimately deemed unfounded.

In New York, more than 4,000 children every year had experienced child protective services investigations as a result of anonymous calls — until now.

The legislation passing is “a win-win for everybody,” said Democratic state Sen. Jabari Brisport, the bill’s sponsor. Not only will it protect victims of domestic violence who may have an abusive current or former partner who has used the anonymous reporting system to harass them or to influence a custody dispute, it will also help caseworkers themselves, Brisport said. “They are stretched so thin already,” he said. “By reducing the number of these false complaints, we can let them do their jobs better.”

“But the fact that false reports make such an effective method of harassment is a symptom of deeper issues in how CPS operates,” Brisport added, referring to how the home searches and investigations that result from these calls often turn families’ lives upside-down. Black parents especially are affected, he said, and they can feel helplessly unable to comfort their children through a terrifying and opaque process that can lead to their separation from their mom and dad.

A committee of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights last year published a report that cited ProPublica’s journalism on these issues and called on New York to abolish anonymous reporting. ProPublica’s articles were also circulated among lawmakers and legislative staff in Albany both last year and this spring.

California and Texas, too, have passed legislation to curtail anonymous reporting. Several other states are considering similar bills.

New York’s new law will maintain the confidentiality of callers to the child abuse hotline, just not their anonymity. That means that if someone thinks that a family member, neighbor or colleague is harming a child, and they call it in, they can still be assured that the state will not reveal their identity to the alleged abuser or publicly in any way. The caller will just have to provide their name and contact information so that caseworkers can follow up, in part to make sure that they don’t have an ulterior motive for making a malicious accusation and so that caseworkers can gather more details from the caller to conduct a more informed investigation.

If they refuse to identify themselves, hotline staff will decline to pass along the tip to child protective services. But an amendment was added to the bill stating that if a caller doesn’t want to leave their name, they can still speak to a supervisor, who will then explain to them that if they provide their name it will remain confidential; that intentionally making a false report is illegal; and that issues involving children in need can also be addressed through housing, food and other services. Contact information for such services will be provided.

The new law will not affect mandated reporters of child abuse, such as teachers and police officers, who already were not anonymous.

Chris Gottlieb, director of the NYU School of Law Family Defense Clinic, helped to shepherd the legislation to its passage. She said that when she used to bring up this issue in Albany — and talk about how child protective services agents searching families’ homes without a warrant can be deeply traumatizing for both parents and children — she was often met with blank stares. But then ProPublica’s reporting “helped to change the conversation,” she said, and more importantly, parents themselves, many of them Black and Latino and led by the community organizer Joyce McMillan, started holding regular rallies on the steps of the Legislature and testifying at hearings.

In fact, parents have filed a first-of-its-kind class-action lawsuit challenging warrantless child protective services searches of their homes as unconstitutional. New York City is contesting the suit, but the city’s Administration for Children’s Services has said that it is committed to addressing child safety concerns while also respecting families’ rights.

In past statements to ProPublica, ACS has said that it is required by state law to investigate fully and to seek to conduct a home assessment whenever it receives a report of child maltreatment from the state, no matter the original source of that report. But a spokesperson said that the agency supports anonymous reporting reform with the perspective that protections for children who are in danger should also be preserved.

One of the plaintiffs in the class-action suit, Shavona Warmington, praised New York state lawmakers for abolishing anonymous reporting once and for all.

The Queens mother of six alleges that someone called in complaints about her every several months for a decade, knowing that the mere fact of a call would cause caseworkers to pound on her door; threaten that they would call the police if she didn’t let them in; search her refrigerator, cabinets, closets and bed while her kids watched; and then strip search and interrogate them. She said that the content of the reports to the hotline always sounded familiar, clearly from the same person, but that this never mattered.

In the suit, she contended that the person who made the complaints was likely the man who abused her. He could call every day and they would still send somebody out.

Her children have been traumatized by the sound of a knock on the door, she said.

“I have no contact with him otherwise, just through ACS,” Warmington said, referring to her abuser.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Eli Hager.

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Common Dreams (5/14/25)

This week on CounterSpin: On a Sunday night, not when officials do things they’re most proud of, House Republicans passed a plan to give more money to rich people by taking it from the non-rich. Call it what you will, that’s what’s ultimately happening with the plan to cut more than $700 billion from Medicaid in order to “offset,” as elite media have it, the expense of relieving millionaires from contributing to public coffers. Even the feint they’re using—we’re not cutting aid, just forcing recipients to work, like they should—is obvious, age-old and long-disproven, if evidence is what you care about. Thing is, of the millions of people at the sharp end of the plan, most are children, who have no voice corporate media feel obliged to listen to. We’ll nevertheless talk about them with independent journalist Bryce Covert.

Washington Post (5/11/25)

Also on the show: You may have seen an editorial in the Washington Post indicating that, despite what you have heard for years, from trans people and from doctors and medical associations that work with trans people, maybe it’s OK for you to still entertain the notion that, weirdly, on this occasion, it’s not science but talkshow hosts who have it right, and trans kids are just actually mentally ill. We’ll talk about that with journalist and trans rights activist Erin Reed, of Erin in the Morning.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Onto the Democrats. Factor out but a minor percentage of both their legislators and supporters and you have a party of pragmatists. This writer’s definition of a pragmatist is the guy standing in front of the firing squad asking for a blindfold. The leaders of this party believe all that matters is to get out and vote… nothing more… oh sorry, except to send donations. Let’s go back to 2006 when, during the height of the Bush-Cheney ( or is it Cheney-Bush?). The Cabal’s phony war and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Democrats took over the House of Representatives. Rep. John Conyors, he of the Judiciary Committee, had promised a year or so earlier “Once we take over the House and I am chair of the Judiciary Committee, we are going to have major hearings on the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.” Then, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi gave the order that “The hearings are OFF the table.” Bye Bye all chances of holding the Cabal responsible for, in my 70+ years of existence, the equally horrific foreign policy act by my nation as the Vietnam War!

So, in my little hamlet of Port Orange, Florida, population at the time of around 60,000, we organized weekly street corner demonstrations against the Iraq invasion and occupation. We stayed at it from before the 2004 presidential election right up until Obama became the candidate in 2008. Once he was the front runner of his party, the 25-30 folks we had on that corner each Tuesday at rush hour now became three or four of us stalwarts. The BS Democratic Party mouthpiece MoveOn.org refused to get behind  regular street demonstrations. No, now it was time to spend all energy in getting Barack elected. Meanwhile, many of us on what is called The True Left wanted Medicare for All. Mr. Obama said he liked the idea of a Public Option, which in essence was just that in a more pragmatic (here we go again) manner. Then, when Obama was out receiving campaign donations of $21+ million vs. $7+ million  for John McCain from the Health Care and Insurance Industries, he changed course. No public option on the table for his Bully Pulpit. Just the Affordable Care Act, another (here we go again) pragmatic program, which helped stop some of the bleeding but not the cause of the wound.

Bill Clinton gave us the Welfare Reform Act which made those folks in dire need feel like interlopers inside the empire. He and his wife really screwed up any idea for Medicare for All, didn’t they as well? You see, those who walk the line between doing good and doing what the empire wants always fall on their faces… or rather their supporters do. Thus, Obama as President during the middle of the terrible Sub Prime Crisis left it up to his chief of staff Rahm Emanuel to run his “best and the brightest” meetings while Barack went home to dinner with his family. Emanuel twisted arms and came up with more TARP money gifts to the Wall Street predators, instead of what Ralph Nader and many conservatives and progressives demanded: Putting the toxic Wall Street companies into Receivership. Uncle Sam could have paid pennies on the dollar for those shitty assets, and then sold them to highest bidders down the road.

When it came to the phony Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Obama and his party leadership did squat about the lies and misinformation the Cabal issued to justify those invasions and occupations. We are still suffering as a nation from that mess. Now we have Trump 2.0 or shall I say Trump-Musk 1 and what will the pragmatists on the other side of the aisle finally do? Will they push out all those empire serving hypocrites from their party and rally Americans for real, viable change? Kamala Harris actually took in more money from the big donors and still lost the election. Her party’s leaders and their lemmings said it was because she was a woman and of mixed race (wasn’t Obama mixed race?). No, she lost because Kamala kept dancing to the same Neocon tune that Sleepy Joe sang to. Working stiffs nationwide could not see any difference between her and Trump 2.0. Harris, Biden, the Clintons, Obama et al. forgot what FDR accomplished to save the Capitalism that they all love, by sticking it to the Super Rich with his New Deal. Because of their failings we can today see how Trump and his party are pushing us back in time to that glorious Gilded Age and 21st Century Feudal America.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Philip A. Faruggio.

The Vienna, Austria-based group, Four Paws, says the animals are killed cruelly and that the meat poses health risks from rabies and other diseases.

Calling its campaign “Journey of Love,” the group is organizing educational activities in Ho Chi Minh City, Danang and Hanoi to raise people’s awareness about the negative aspects of the dog and cat meat business.

“We believe now is the time to take immediate action against dog and cat meat trading activities, especially given the increasing incidence of diseases and epidemics,” Phan Thanh Dung, an officer from Four Paws’ Companion Animal Campaign, was quoted as saying by the Vietnam Law Newspaper.

Every year, about 6 million dogs and cats are caught, transported and slaughtered for their meat in Vietnam, according to Four Paws. Most of them are stolen from communities or strays taken from the streets.

Vendors in wet markets openly sell dead dogs and cats alongside live ones crammed into cages and waiting to be killed for human consumption, according to an August 2022 report by We Animal Media, an animal photojournalism agency that documents stories of animals used for human purposes.

While the sale and consumption of dog meat is legal in Vietnam, the government banned the consumption of cats in 1998 but then canceled the directive in 2020, the report said. 

Those who eat dog and cat meat run the risk of infection from potentially deadly bacterial diseases and parasites such as E. coli and salmonella, which are commonly found in contaminated meats, the report said. 

Animal rights groups and Vietnamese activists have been working to end the practices of selling and consuming dog and cat meat, given the poor conditions in which the animals are kept and the killing process conducted in view of other animals.

In late 2023, Four Paws and the People’s Committee of Hoi An, whose ancient town in central Vietnam is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, closed one of the municipality’s last remaining dog meat restaurants. 

A survey conducted by Four Paws in Vietnam in early 2021 indicated that 91% of people believed the government should ban the dog and cat meat trade. 

Also, 95% of respondents said they believed that eating dog and cat meat was not part of Vietnamese culture, and therefore supported ending the trade.

Translated by Anna Vu for RFA Vietnamese. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Vietnamese.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

It is one of the enduring myths of the U.S. child support system: that payments made by fathers actually make it to their families. And yet, every year, hundreds of millions of dollars in child support is instead intercepted by federal and state governments — as reimbursement for the mother having received welfare at some point.

But that may be changing. Since a 2021 ProPublica investigation found that child support payments totaling $1.7 billion annually were taken from families and redirected into state coffers, at least six states have rewritten their laws and policies to allow the money to flow directly to kids.

New Mexico, where we focused our reporting, made such a change shortly after our story was published. From Wyoming to Illinois, Michigan to Vermont to California, more child support is now going to children. And several other states are considering similar reforms during their upcoming legislative sessions.

This July, Illinois will start “passing through” all child support paid by fathers to their families, instead of pocketing it as repayment for welfare. “The intent of this change is for more families to receive more support,” said Jamie Munks, spokesperson for the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services. A state’s child support system should not be funded by withholding child support from the lowest-income families being served, she said.

“Not passing through money to a family who is already experiencing financial difficulties will likely exacerbate those difficulties and may make them more reliant on government assistance,” Munks added.

Nicole Darracq, assistant director at the California Department of Child Support Services, said that under a new state law her agency has roughly doubled the amount of child support that it is passing through to families currently receiving welfare. There was roughly a $44 million net increase in payments to families from 2019 to 2022, she said.

Darracq added that starting this week, another piece of new state legislation will allow child support that fathers pay to mothers who’ve previously received welfare to go to those moms and their kids, instead of being intercepted. This change will send an additional $160 million to families each year, she said.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures’ most recent analysis of state laws, at least 26 states and Washington, D.C., pass through some or all child support payments made by fathers to their families that have received welfare, also known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. In the other states, the government takes the cash.

The practice of confiscating child support from poor families persists in part because some conservative policymakers believe that welfare provided to single mothers should be considered a loan from taxpayers, to later be repaid by the patriarch of the family.

“Legislators suggest to me that if a family gets both [welfare] and child support, they’re ‘double-dipping,’” Jim Fleming, past president of both the National Council of Child Support Directors and the National Child Support Enforcement Association, told ProPublica in 2021. “That argument is still out there,” he said, although it is “becoming more and more of a minority view.”

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This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Eli Hager.

Food & Water Watch Attorney Dani Replogle said: “EPA’s preference for weak slaughterhouse regulations privileges the health of a polluting industry over that of frontline communities and our nation’s waters. To adopt anything less than the most stringent clean water protections in the agency’s final rule would be a missed opportunity and a big mistake.”

“For decades, slaughterhouses and meat processing plants have benefited from lax water pollution standards, and we are pleased that the EPA is finally taking action to strengthen these standards for some of the largest plants,” said Sarah Kula, Attorney for the Environmental Integrity Project. “But EPA’s proposal falls far short of what the Clean Water Act requires and exempts thousands of polluting plants that put downstream communities and our waterways in harm’s way. EPA must require that these plants install modern water pollution controls and clean up their act.”

Nearly 10 billion animals are killed each year in slaughterhouses across the United States—that is, over 18,825 animals every minute. Slaughterhouse byproducts such as fat, bone, and feathers frequently are sent to rendering facilities for conversion into tallow, animal meal, and other products. Both slaughterhouses and rendering facilities require a near-constant flow of water, and every year, these facilities discharge hundreds of millions of pounds of water pollution into rivers and streams. According to EPA, slaughterhouses and rendering facilities, which together comprise the Meat and Poultry Products (“MPP”) industrial point source category, are the largest industrial source of phosphorus pollution and the second largest industrial source of nitrogen pollution.

“EPA knows that pollution from slaughterhouses and rendering facilities disproportionately harms under-resourced communities, low-income communities, and communities of color,” said Earthjustice attorney Alexis Andiman. “Yet EPA’s proposal expressly ignores environmental justice and, instead, champions weak standards that, it claims, are necessary to thwart disruptions to the nation’s meat supply—despite clear evidence that stronger regulations will have virtually no impact on meat producers or consumers. The Agency’s priorities are backwards. We need the EPA to protect people and the environment, not corporations.”

Pollution from MPP facilities has devastating consequences for human health and the environment, and it disproportionately harms people living in vulnerable and under-resourced communities. Nonetheless, EPA has failed to revise its regulations governing water pollution from the MPP industry for at least 20 years. Some MPP facilities are still subject to outdated and under-protective standards promulgated in the mid-1970s. EPA’s existing regulations fail to impose any restrictions on discharges of phosphorus, and the Agency has never published national standards applicable to the vast majority of MPP facilities, which discharge wastewater indirectly through publicly owned treatment works (“POTWs”), even though EPA has known for decades that—without adequate pretreatment—pollutants in MPP wastewater pass through many POTWs into our nation’s rivers and streams.

The EPA’s proposal set out three options to strengthen existing standards. The comments made clear that the EPA’s preferred option, which offers the weakest protections for people and the environment, is inconsistent with federal law—not least because it is motivated by a desire to avoid disruptions to the country’s meat supply, even though claims of past disruptions have been resoundingly debunked. Instead, the commenting organizations pressed the EPA to select and strengthen the most protective of the regulatory options presented, which would prevent over 320 million pounds of pollution, reduce nitrogen and phosphorus pollution by 85%, and help to protect over 22 million people.

“We call on the EPA to rise above Big Ag’s push to weaken this plan to reduce harms from the millions of gallons of pollution slaughterhouses and animal rendering plants are spewing into our waterways,” said Hannah Connor, deputy director of environmental health at the Center for Biological Diversity. “This proposal would put very reasonable updates in place that will give critically imperiled fish and mussels the protections they need to survive.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

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The Biden administration this fall is quietly moving to overhaul welfare, aiming to end multiple abuses of the nation’s cash assistance program for the poor that a 2021 ProPublica investigation found states have been engaging in for years.

Through a package of proposed reforms to the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, or TANF, the administration plans to shore up the U.S. social safety net. The regulations are intended to ensure that more federal and state welfare dollars make it to low-income families, rather than being spent on other things or not spent at all.

The proposal, drawn up by the federal Administration for Children and Families, is open for public comment until Dec. 1. Once comments are reviewed, officials plan to issue final regulations that could take effect in the months after that, heading into the 2024 election.

The first change would prohibit states from counting charitable giving by private organizations, such as churches and food banks, as “state” spending on welfare, a practice that has allowed legislatures to budget less for programs for low-income families while still claiming to meet federal minimums. ProPublica documented how Utah avoided more than $75 million in spending on public assistance over the past decade by taking credit for aid to the hungry and homeless provided by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. (Many of the vulnerable Utahns we interviewed felt that in order to access desperately needed aid, they had to participate in Mormon religious rites they didn’t believe in.)

By banning this practice, the Biden administration’s plan would force Utah to stop taking credit for what the church does and instead spend more state money assisting people in poverty.

The new rules would also restrict states from spending TANF funds on child protective services investigations, foster care or any other programs that don’t meet the fundamental purposes of welfare: strengthening poor families and keeping them together. ProPublica found that in Arizona and elsewhere, money meant to help parents struggling to raise their children is instead used to investigate them for alleged child maltreatment — which often stems from the very financial circumstances that they needed help with in the first place.

Under the Biden plan, Arizona would likely have to find other ways of funding its aggressive child protective services investigations of poor parents and use welfare dollars to help families stay together rather than removing their kids into foster care.

The reforms would also redefine the term “needy” to refer only to families with incomes at or below 200% of the federal poverty line. Currently, some states spend TANF money on programs like college scholarships — or volleyball stadiums — that benefit more affluent people.

Ashley Burnside, a senior policy analyst and expert on TANF at the Center for Law and Social Policy, an advocacy organization for low-income Americans, said that political support for such improvements to welfare has grown in recent years, especially amid the pandemic, when so many more families started to need help. Media coverage by both ProPublica and Mississippi Today helped make this happen, she said.

As ProPublica has reported, many of welfare’s failures originated with a 1996 law signed by then-President Bill Clinton. That legislation, which Biden supported at the time as a senator, gave states broad flexibility over how to spend their annual grant of federal dollars intended for the poor. In the decades since, legislatures, especially in the South and Southwest, have found ever more creative outlets for the funding, including diverting it to anti-abortion clinics or not spending it at all.

The Biden administration’s proposal would mandate that states provide concrete evidence, including social science research or real-world examples, showing that they are using their TANF spending in ways that truly help families in need.

One of the best ways to do that, according to the administration: direct cash assistance. “We remind states that there is a large body of research that shows that cash assistance is a critically important tool for reducing family and child poverty,” said the announcement of the proposed regulations. “Studies have found that when families receive TANF and are more financially secure, they are less likely to be involved in the child welfare system.”

The announcement also said that states will have time to create new TANF plans; the implementation period will be flexible. But, ultimately, if they fail to comply, they will be assessed a significant penalty for misuse of funds.

“This will not completely solve the problem of the leakage of TANF funds,” said Burnside. “But it will create guardrails so that more money actually gets to poor families.”

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Eli Hager.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

It was 5:30 a.m. Flashlights beamed in through the windows of the ground-floor apartment in East Flatbush, Brooklyn. Police officers and child welfare caseworkers were ordering a woman to open her front door.

When she did, the first thing she saw was that the police had their guns drawn. Her hands flew up into the “don’t shoot” position; she was well aware of the recent stories of cops “shooting first and asking later.” She prayed that her 7-year-old son was still asleep in his room.

“I was beyond scared. I literally started shaking,” said L.B., the mom, who is Black and asked to be referred to by her initials for her child’s safety and privacy.

Enabled by the police officers’ show of force, the caseworkers from the Administration for Children’s Services, New York City’s child welfare agency, entered L.B.’s apartment without a warrant that day in January 2021. Before she knew it, they were scrutinizing the contents of her refrigerator and cabinets, examining her bed and bathroom, and rifling through her personal belongings. They also had her lift up her son’s shirt so they could inspect his torso.

They found nothing. The boy was safe and unharmed, living in a clean, well-organized home with his mom and his adult sister, according to case records.

The allegations against L.B., made by an anonymous caller at 4:45 a.m. that day, were false. These included that she was a stripper (she worked at a home for people with disabilities); that she used drugs (none were found, and a drug test was negative for all substances); and that an abusive man lived with her and that she owned “machine guns” (after an exhaustive search and interrogation, both claims were deemed baseless).

In fact, L.B. has never been found to have committed any type of child maltreatment, ACS and court records show.

Yet the anonymous caller, whom L.B. believes to be a former acquaintance with a grudge, has continued to dial in to New York’s state child welfare hotline. Each time, this person or possibly people make outlandish, often already-disproven claims about her, seeming to know that doing so will automatically trigger a government intrusion into her domestic life.

And ACS obliges: Over the past three years, the agency either has inspected her home or examined and questioned her son at school more than two dozen times. Caseworkers have sought a warrant for only three of these searches, most recently in August. All of those requests have been rejected by judges, according to court records.

Still, it keeps happening, and it’s nearly always the same routine, records show. The caseworkers demand entry into her apartment, ringing her doorbell and, embarrassingly, sometimes those of her neighbors as well, at all hours of the day and night. They observe her child’s unclothed stomach and thighs, and sometimes take pictures. And they interrogate him without her consent, covering topics like whether she has sex around him.

At one point he said to her, crying, “Mom, you told me they wouldn’t come back,” L.B. said.

“I’m still trying to make it up to him,” she added, “even though I didn’t do anything wrong.”

L.B. this week filed a federal lawsuit against the commissioner of ACS and the city of New York, arguing that her Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures has been repeatedly violated by the agency’s warrantless incursions into her family’s private sphere. She is not primarily alleging that caseworkers committed specific unlawful acts, although several ACS staff members are also named in the suit. Rather, her contention is that three years of the same type and scope of investigation — no matter the source or credibility or repetitiveness of the accusations against her — is indiscriminately and thus unconstitutionally invasive.

Legal aid lawyers in New York had said that more lawsuits like this one might be coming after a ProPublica and NBC News investigation last year found that ACS caseworkers search more than 50,000 typically low-income households every year, obtaining a warrant less than one half of 1% of the time. (L.B. is represented by Brooklyn Defender Services as well as a private law firm, and her complaint cites our reporting.) The agency finds a safety situation requiring removal of a child from a home in only 4% of these cases.

ProPublica’s investigation tracked the case of Ronisha Ferguson, a Bronx mother who sued the city of New York after ACS removed her children from her because she refused to let caseworkers search her apartment without a warrant. (Court records indicate that the city this August agreed to settle that case with Ferguson.)

In response to a detailed list of questions, an ACS spokesperson did not address any aspect of how the agency has handled L.B.’s case. She said that ACS is required under New York law to investigate all reports of child maltreatment that are forwarded from the state hotline, including ones that are anonymous, and that every investigation must include “evaluating the home environment.” The agency has “no discretion” if the hotline operator deems the call worth passing along, she said.

L.B.’s attorneys counter that caseworkers, once they have observed a child to be safe, actually do have discretion under state law not to conduct the same full search that they have completed before. Continuing to follow these procedures over and over causes concrete harm, they say.

L.B.’s child now suffers from severe anxiety, a doctor’s note confirms, which she said is the direct result of ACS’ constant intrusions. (He has even asked her to have the doorbell dismantled.) Her employment has been affected, including when she had to take multiple months of unpaid leave to make sure that she was available for her son. Her landlord has complained to her that the situation is troubling other tenants, causing her to consider moving to a different neighborhood even though she has lived in her apartment for a decade.

Yet for a long time, it was a struggle for her to fight back. When caseworkers arrived at her door, she’d allow them to enter in part because they had the power to remove her son from her custody. They also never told her, she said, that without her consent, they would need a warrant.

They often told her that letting them in was the only way to get them to stop coming, she said.

Finally, in 2022, a co-worker convinced her that she had the right to say no. Anxiously, she started doing just that.

That February, ACS, for the first time, applied for a warrant, stating in court papers that L.B. now knew her rights but that her home still needed to be entered “immediately at any hour.” But a judge, after learning about the case’s history and realizing that L.B.’s child had been observed in his home multiple times and interviewed multiple times with no evidence that any of the allegations against his mom were true, and that all of this was causing him trauma, denied the agency’s request. (The order additionally instructed ACS to refer the matter to the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office for investigation of an apparent pattern of false hotline calls.)

The judge told ACS that its procedures “have to be adjusted when following them is more likely to do harm,” adding that “showing up in the middle of the night is traumatic; taking off kids’ clothes is traumatic.”

Yet caseworkers kept trying to get inside L.B.’s home whenever they received anonymous reports, including a patently false claim that she lived in a bar with multiple small daughters. She kept saying no.

They applied for a warrant again. A second judge denied them, calling the whole matter a “horrible intrusion” as well as a “waste of state resources.”

So ACS took a different tack: showing up at her son’s school and calling him to the office to interrogate him there, without her knowledge let alone consent. Caseworkers did this repeatedly for many months, making him miss class, and without telling him that he was free to leave at any time.

He used to love school — his gifted and talented program, culinary arts, using the computers, playing ball outside, seeing his friends. But now he often tells L.B. that his chest hurts so he has to stay home.

He has been especially sensitive about having to lift up his shirt for strangers, she said. And about the other kids who have started to tease him about it all. He comes home crying.

Advocates for families facing ACS investigations like L.B.’s point to two pieces of legislation that the New York State Assembly could pass next year. One would create a “family Miranda warning” that caseworkers would have to read to parents at their door, informing them of their right to deny entry into their home and to have a lawyer present.

That bill nearly became law this past spring but failed in part due to opposition from ACS, as ProPublica reported.

The second is an “anti-harassment in reporting” bill that would seek to reduce false and malicious calls to the state child welfare hotline by no longer allowing these tips to be anonymous. Under the current law, anyone can report any parent without so much as leaving a name or phone number.

The new legislation would require that callers at least provide basic details about themselves so caseworkers can follow up, gather more information, make sure the accusation has some basis and consider how intrusive of an investigation is needed. Hotline and ACS staff would still be legally required to keep the caller’s identity confidential.

The ACS spokesperson said the agency is “very concerned about false and malicious reporting and the impact it has on families.” She also said ACS “supports eliminating most anonymous reporting,” with rare exceptions including when it is a child calling the hotline.

L.B., whose son is now three years older than when these searches started, agrees.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Eli Hager.

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Starting this September, child protective services agents across Texas will be required to read parents their constitutional rights, the same way that police do for criminal suspects. Under a new law enacted by the state Legislature, caseworkers there will be informing parents under investigation that they have the right to remain silent, to have a lawyer present and to decline searches of their home or of their children without a court order.

The legislation will in many cases benefit Black, Hispanic and low-income families who often have their lives and homes upended by CPS officers. It was signed by Gov. Greg Abbott, a conservative Republican who previously has been criticized for pushing policies detrimental to those groups.

Meanwhile in New York state, an almost identical bill was blocked by state Senate majority leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, a liberal Democrat. She prevented the measure, which had dozens of co-sponsors and a groundswell of grassroots support, from even getting a vote — showing how child welfare issues often defy typical partisan binaries.

Stewart-Cousins’ office declined ProPublica’s requests for comment about her reasoning.

The legislation was not advanced by leadership on the Assembly side either, though it did pass unanimously out of committee there.

Earlier this year, Stewart-Cousins and other top lawmakers in Albany received proposed changes to the bill from New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services, which is under the control of Mayor Eric Adams. The agency suggested removing the word “rights” from the bill text and watering down the list of rights that its caseworkers would have had to read to families.

The legislative efforts in both states came in the wake of a ProPublica investigation finding that child welfare workers — overwhelmingly without warrants — inspect the homes of roughly 3.5 million children nationally every year. Despite the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, these government officers ransack families’ refrigerators and medicine cabinets and inspect kids’ bodies without informed consent.

They do so even if the allegation of potential child neglect that they are investigating, such as a kid missing too many days of school, has nothing to do with the condition of the home. They also sometimes use manipulative tactics, including threatening child removal or calling the police, to get inside residences, according to dozens of interviews with caseworkers, families and attorneys.

Nationwide, the searches ultimately reveal child abuse less than 5% of the time, federal data show.

The new Texas law has gotten little attention but will have a major impact on vulnerable families around the state, said Andrew Brown, associate vice president of policy at the right-leaning Texas Public Policy Foundation.

“In child welfare it’s not this clean Democratic or Republican issue,” he said, adding that the idea of reading parents their rights gained more bipartisan support as a result of not being a topic on the campaign trail.

The New York bill will be reintroduced again next year, said its lead sponsor in the state Senate, Jabari Brisport.

But the result may hinge on whether the idea finally garners support from the state’s top Democrats, including Stewart-Cousins.

“I think she should be voted out, because she doesn’t understand the basic bottom line of being a lawmaker,” said Joyce McMillan, a community organizer and leading family advocate in New York City. “Protect the constitutional rights of everyone — at minimum.”

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Eli Hager.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

On Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act. The decision, by a 7-2 vote, meant that the law will continue to require giving preference to placing adoptable Native American children with Native families.

Kathryn Fort, director of the Indian Law Clinic at the Michigan State University College of Law, represented tribes who appealed after a federal judge in Texas declared ICWA unconstitutional in 2018. She’d spent months anticipating that the Supreme Court would make major changes to the law or even dismantle it.

“I was stunned,” said Fort the day after the decision.

Some legal observers noted that because the justices did not resolve the racial bias claim in the case, which is officially known as Haaland v. Brackeen, the door is open for a future challenge on those grounds. Fort said that’s nothing new.

“This was their best shot at a case,” she said, referring to ICWA opponents. “The messaging has really come through that people who are removing Native children from their family and culture, you're not doing good things for Native people.”

Although the Supreme Court let the law stand, Fort has nonetheless spent a lot of time thinking about how ICWA could be made to work better. A ProPublica investigation published the morning of the decision suggests that the law is unevenly applied across the states. The story profiled the case of Cheyenne Hinojosa, a Native American mother in South Dakota who lost her parental rights for one of her children due to the child welfare agency’s failure to follow ICWA. A ProPublica analysis found that in South Dakota, more than 700 Native American children — or about one of every 40 living in the state — experienced the termination of their parents’ rights from 2017 to 2021. It’s one of the highest rates in the country.

Fort said that ProPublica’s findings were “unsurprising” and that there are a number of things that can be done at both the state and federal levels to try to fortify ICWA’s protections and help achieve its authors’ intent “to prevent the breakup of Indian families.”

Fort said the federal government has never properly tracked whether states are complying with ICWA. The Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System is the only national dataset that describes outcomes of the child welfare system, but it doesn’t collect information about whether children are covered by ICWA.

AFCARS also doesn’t track whether components of the law are being correctly applied, or if children in state custody are being placed in Native American households. Without this data, Fort said, it’s impossible to “understand where the holes are that need patching in the country.”

In 2016, the Obama administration finalized a new rule that would have changed the collection method for AFCARS data, which for the first time would have included a category for tribal citizenship, Fort said. Along with this and dozens of new data points, the changes would have made it possible to track trends in the outcome of ICWA-eligible cases. The Trump administration withdrew those updated guidelines, and ever since then Fort’s clients have been involved in a lawsuit that argues the decision was unjustified.

According to Fort, the lawsuit is pending in a federal court of appeals while the Biden administration mulls how to proceed.

“Obviously, given that we spent over 10 years getting the 2016 rule, it’s a little frustrating that we’d have to essentially have to go through that process again,” she said.

One issue that affects not just ICWA cases but the entire child welfare system is the impact of the 1997 Adoption and Safe Families Act. The law created strict timelines to reduce the amount of time children spend in foster care, allowing them to be adopted more quickly. Once 15 months have passed since a child has been removed from a parent, child welfare agencies in most cases must file for termination of parental rights.

A termination is the legal end to a parent’s relationship with their children.

ASFA has had a huge influence on the system. According to a recent study, the risk of a child in the U.S. having the legal relationship with their parents severed during childhood roughly doubled from 2000 to 2016.

Over the years, Fort said, ASFA has frequently collided in court with ICWA; the two laws have almost opposite intentions. ICWA asks states to go above and beyond to keep Native American parents and children together, while ASFA incentivizes speedy decisions to permanently separate them.

Last year, a ProPublica investigation found that in some states, parents can permanently lose their children in as little as six months. The story documented a rising movement among advocates and policymakers — including a former U.S. Department of Health and Human Services official for the Trump administration — to overhaul or repeal ASFA.

Central to that movement is an interest in lengthening the 15-month timeline, which opponents say was a politically negotiated window rather than a science- or policy-backed timeline.

“It was a mistake,” said Fort, who added that not only does she believe that ASFA is bad for Native American children, but “I don’t think it’s good for any children.”

In the lead-up to the Supreme Court decision, advocates pushed legislatures across the country to put the tenets of ICWA into state law, preserving at least some protections on the local level if the federal law were struck down. Several states introduced ICWA-like bills, and four passed. Today, 13 states have such laws on the books.

In the last session, South Dakota’s state legislature failed to pass several ICWA-related measures, in part because lawmakers said they should wait until after the Supreme Court’s decision.

“I think it’s helpful to have a decision like this just reinforcing to states that this is not going away,” said Fort.

She said she hopes the work to pass state laws will continue, and also that states will make ICWA training for child welfare workers a priority.

While ICWA gives tribes many legal powers, their ability to act is tied to resources. Some tribes have healthy economies and well-staffed ICWA units; smaller, poorer tribes may not. For instance, Hinojosa is a member of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe in central South Dakota, which employs a single ICWA coordinator and does not currently have an attorney.

Lack of funding renders parts of ICWA moot: Tribes may have to be selective when deciding which child welfare cases to intervene in or take jurisdiction over. Even if a tribe has only a small population living on its reservation, it may have thousands of members all over the country who could potentially ask for tribal involvement in child welfare matters.

Fort said there are also “frustrating funding barriers” that may provide an incentive for a Native American family to oppose having its case moved to tribal court. Keeping the case in state court can unlock federal foster care reimbursements for a child’s relative that the tribal child welfare system can’t match.

According to Fort, the federal government has underfunded ICWA since the start. In 1977, Congress estimated that fully funding ICWA programming on reservations would cost between $26 million and $62 million per year, or about $200 million to $500 million in 2021 dollars, Fort said. In 2020, the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs ICWA program sent a total of $14.4 million to tribes nationwide.

“There’s a lot of room for advocacy in Congress to increase the funding to tribal social service systems,” said Fort. “It’s not been a priority for the federal government in years past.”

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Jessica Lussenhop.

We speak with Cherokee journalist Rebecca Nagle about a major victory at the Supreme Court in a case that could have gutted Native American sovereignty. In a surprise 7-2 ruling Thursday, the court upheld the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act, which protects Native children from being removed from their tribal communities for fostering or adoption in non-Native homes. The court rejected an argument from Republican-led states and white families who argued the system is based on race. Nagle has covered the case closely for The Nation and her podcast, This Land, and says the far right is attacking the Indian Child Welfare Act as part of a broader conservative agenda to destabilize federal Indian law. She calls the decision “really encouraging,” noting it is “good not just for Native nations and families, but for the rule of law.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

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The New York State Legislature could by the end of this week pass groundbreaking legislation requiring child protective services agents to read people their constitutional rights, just like the police have to do.

But New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services, despite publicly claiming to support the “family Miranda warning,” has in recent weeks quietly proposed gutting the measure, according to eight lawmakers, staffers and lobbyists involved in the negotiations.

The agency even lobbied for the removal of the word “rights” from the bill text.

And the state Senate’s Democratic majority leader, Andrea Stewart-Cousins, has repeatedly blocked the popular proposal (it has dozens of co-sponsors), throwing into question whether it will get a full vote before the legislative session ends on Friday.

Last fall, a ProPublica investigation found that ACS caseworkers — without a warrant — conduct full home searches of more than 50,000 households every year across New York City, disproportionately affecting Black or Hispanic and low-income families. Despite the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, these government officers rifle through families’ refrigerators and medicine cabinets and inspect children’s unclothed bodies without informed consent.

They conduct these warrantless searches even if the allegation of potential child neglect they are investigating has nothing to do with the condition of the home, such as a kid missing too many days of school. They also sometimes use manipulative tactics, including threatening child removal or calling the police, to get inside residences, according to dozens of interviews with caseworkers, families and attorneys.

The agency ultimately finds a safety situation requiring removal of a child from the home less than 4% of the time.

Lawmakers in Albany repeatedly cited ProPublica’s reporting this spring as they reintroduced legislation, which had failed in the past, creating a Miranda-style warning to be read aloud by child protective services agents like cops do on “Law & Order.” Caseworkers would have to notify parents of their right to deny entry to their home, to have a lawyer present, to be told what they’re being accused of, and to say no to releases of their family’s personal information and to drug or alcohol tests without a court order, while also specifying that anything they say can and will be used against them.

The bill had been gaining momentum in the Assembly, passing unanimously out of that chamber’s children and families committee as its chair, Andrew Hevesi, flanked by grassroots activists, asked, “When in life do you want Americans not to know their rights?”

He continued, “The only time you need them not to know their rights is when their rights are about to be violated.”

The proposed law would not create any new rights, but rather inform families with less education or ones without a lawyer of the rights they already have. It also would not affect the ability of caseworkers to enter a home without a warrant if a child is in danger or if there are other exigent circumstances.

But then ACS sent Senate leadership staff revisions to the legislation that would have removed mention of several of the rights, neutering the proposal to such an extent that advocates could no longer support it, many said in interviews.

Maddy Zimmerman, spokesperson for Democratic state Sen. Jabari Brisport, the bill’s lead sponsor in the Senate and chair of its children and families committee, said that accepting ACS’ version would have been the same as passing nothing at all. She and a half-dozen others who saw the agency’s suggestions said the edits included not only removing the word “rights” but also cutting the sections about informing parents that what they say can be used against them, that they don’t have to agree to body searches of their children without an order from a judge, and more.

Brisport said in interviews with ProPublica that he tried to put the bill, without the ACS changes, on his committee’s agenda — three times. But on each attempt, he said, Stewart-Cousins, the Senate’s majority leader and president pro tempore, removed it from consideration without telling him why.

Stewart-Cousins could still revive the measure and give it a chance of passing this week, provided that the Assembly continues to move it as well.

It is not clear whether ACS has effectively lobbied her or if she has a philosophical objection to the proposal.

Stewart-Cousins’ staff did not respond to calls and emailed questions about her position on the matter.

In recent years, she has highlighted her achievements on affordable housing, pre-K, the sealing of criminal records, bail reform and not criminalizing poverty — all issues that affect many of the same constituents who would be protected by the family Miranda warning.

But advocates say that progressive politicians, not just in New York but across the country, have so far failed to understand how fighting against child welfare agents’ abuses of power is part of the same agenda.

Protesters, including many parents of color who plan to drive up from New York City, said they will be at the state Capitol this week demanding that the bill get a vote.

In a series of emails, an ACS spokesperson did not deny that ACS wanted to remove the word “rights” from the bill.

She did say that it would be “a major and important change to the law” to notify parents of their right to “not let us in” and that they can call an attorney.

The spokesperson added that the agency “has been supportive of legislation that would require child protective specialists to provide oral and written information to parents, about their rights, at the initial point of contact,” but that the measure should account for “the need for child welfare agencies to assess the safety of children who have been reported as possibly abused or neglected.

“ACS has been participating, in good faith, in discussions about pending legislation,” she said of the administration’s lobbying in Albany. “To be clear: ACS does not get a vote on the bill.”

It had appeared to family law professors and activists in New York that ACS was becoming more progressive under its new commissioner, Jess Dannhauser, who was appointed by Mayor Eric Adams last year. At public appearances and conferences, Dannhauser has expressed respect for low-income families of color and their rights.

“I’ve been struck by how Dannhauser is willing to say that these are rights — that the Constitution applies here,” said Anna Arons, a professor at the St. John’s University School of Law and an expert on search and seizure protections in the child welfare context. But, she said, there’s a “disconnect” between “what he’s willing to say and what position he’s willing to stake ACS to. It’s incredibly frustrating.”

The ACS spokesperson did not respond to a question about this characterization of the commissioner.

If ACS agents were to regularly read these rights and it caused some parents to refuse to let them in, then the agency could still go to court and get a warrant like police do, experts said. Or if a child is in danger, agents can already enter under existing law.

Brisport pointed out that the Texas Legislature recently passed a bill creating a similar family Miranda warning — and Texas is not a state known for its protections of poor nonwhite families.

No matter what happens, he said, the New York measure has gotten further than it ever has before.

Hevesi, the Assembly member, said in an interview that he also saw ACS’ proposed changes. The bottom line, he said, is that denying families knowledge of their rights while threatening family separation, in the name of investigating alleged child neglect, is “essentially fighting a childhood trauma with a childhood trauma.”

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Eli Hager.

In what sustainable agriculture, public health, and animal rights champions celebrated as a major victory, the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday upheld a California law prohibiting the in-state sale of pork, eggs, and veal derived from creatures "confined in a cruel manner."

The law, known as Proposition 12, was challenged by the National Pork Producers Council and the American Farm Bureau Federation. The organizations claimed that "because of California's huge market share... pork producers elsewhere would be required to abide by" its rules, and they argued unsuccessfully that this would violate the U.S. Constitution's "restraints on the authority of states to regulate industry beyond their borders," The Washington Post reported.

Writing the majority opinion for the 5-4 decision in National Pork Producers v. Ross, Justice Neil Gorsuch rejected what he described as the plaintiffs' request for the court to "fashion two new and more aggressive constitutional restrictions on the ability of states to regulate goods sold within their borders."

"While the Constitution addresses many weighty issues, the type of pork chops California merchants may sell is not on that list," Gorsuch wrote on behalf of himself and Justices Clarence Thomas, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Amy Coney Barrett.

"A major victory for animal welfare and a more regenerative, healthful, and humane future of our food."

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, and Ketanji Brown Jackson "would have kept the case involving California's humane pork production laws alive but sent it back to a lower court for more work," the Post noted.

Food & Water Watch legal director Tarah Heinzen called the ruling "a rightful victory for sustainable, humane farming against giant corporations that prioritize cost-cutting and profit margins over the environment, food safety, and animal welfare."

"It is also a critical victory for the rights of states that seek to do better on those issues than some of their neighbors, or the country at large," she added.

George Kimbrell, legal director at the Center for Food Safety, which filed a brief in support of California last year, also welcomed Thursday's decision as "a major victory for animal welfare and a more regenerative, healthful, and humane future of our food."

"The Supreme Court rejected industrial agriculture's far-reaching efforts to curtail states' rights to enact laws governing farming to prevent animal cruelty and to protect the public health. Instead, the court properly recognized the value and benefits of such laws," said Kimbrell. "Intensive confinement of pigs poses profound danger to food safety and the public health such as foodborne illness and disease and pathogen transmission, and important laws like Prop 12 mitigate those risks."

As the advocacy group Animal Outlook explained in a statement:

Proposition 12 sets minimum space requirements for egg-laying hens, mother pigs, and baby cows raised for veal in California, such that these animals cannot be confined in the industry-standard cages, which are barely bigger than their bodies. Prop 12 also requires that any eggs, pork, or veal sold in the state comply with these space requirements, regardless of where those products were produced.

After Prop 12 was approved by nearly two-thirds of California voters in 2018, the meat industry proceeded to challenge the law in four separate lawsuits.

"Every court to consider each of the cases, at both the trial and appellate level, has ruled against the industry," Animal Outlook pointed out. "Today's Supreme Court ruling is the industry's latest in that string of losses."

"No matter how cruel or painful a practice is, the animal agriculture industry has fought against laws to prohibit it—in this case, all the way to the Supreme Court," said Cheryl Leahy, the group's executive director. "When a powerful industry will stop at nothing to make complicity in cruelty mandatory, it's a clear sign that the cruelty is part and parcel of that industry, and the only way to refuse to be a part of it is to not eat animals altogether."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Kenny Stancil.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Thomas Rowley, Kateryna Semchuk.

What the authorities did over the weekend was absolutely profound. They guaranteed the deposits, all of them, at Silicon Valley Bank. What that really means … is that they have guaranteed the entire deposit base of the U.S. financial system. The entire deposit base. Why? Because you can’t guarantee all the deposits in Silicon Valley Bank and then the next day say to the depositors, say, at First Republic, sorry, yours aren’t guaranteed. Of course they are.

… So this is a breathtaking step which effectively nationalizes or federalizes the deposit base of the U.S. financial system.

The deposit base of the financial system has not actually been nationalized, but Congress is considering modifications to the FDIC insurance limit. Meanwhile, one state that does not face those problems is North Dakota, where its state-owned bank acts as a “mini-Fed” for the state. But first, a closer look at the issues.

Bail In, Bail Out, or “Socialism for the Rich”?

On Friday, March 10, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) was put into receivership by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). The FDIC announced that deposits over the $250,000 insurance limit would get an advance dividend within the next week, and would receive a receivership certificate for the rest of the funds. Most of the depositors were venture-backed startups that needed to keep large deposits in the bank to meet payroll and pay suppliers, and over 95% of the deposits were uninsured and at risk of being lost. It was basically a “bail in” of the uninsured deposits, which would be recoverable only if funds were available after the bank’s assets had been sold.

But that arrangement lasted only two days. On March 12, Signature Bank was put into receivership; and the FDIC, Treasury and Federal Reserve jointly announced that all of the deposits at the two banks, not just those under the insurance limit, would be available for withdrawal on demand.

At a Senate Finance Committee hearing on March 16, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said that the guarantee would not apply to all deposits at all banks. Rather, the determination would be made on a case-by-case basis.

In a Bloomberg News interview on March 16, former FDIC Chair Sheila Bair criticized that decision. She observed that the two banks getting special treatment were not “systemically important,” and that the cost of the expanded guarantee was to be covered by a special assessment against all insured banks, including the small community banks that provide essential credit to local businesses. She argued that if guarantees were going to be given over the $250,000 limit, they should apply to deposits everywhere.

Meanwhile, on March 12, the Federal Reserve announced that it had set up a special purpose vehicle of the sort arranged for COVID relief in March 2020, called the Bank Term Funding Program (BTFP). Like the COVID special purpose vehicles, it would be backstopped with $25 billion from the Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF), a fund set up in 1934 to stabilize the exchange value of the dollar. The BTFP was to be available to any bank needing it, and many banks obviously did. Over $300 billion in short-term loans were withdrawn from the Fed’s various facilities just in the week after SVB’s collapse.

This money is not, however, the sort of “free lunch” provided to troubled banks in the last financial crisis. The money is to be advanced as a loan for up to a year, at a hefty interest rate as of March 22 of 4.88%. According to a Federal Reserve press release, advances will be made to “eligible depository institutions pledging U.S. Treasuries, agency debt and mortgage-backed securities, and other qualifying assets as collateral. These assets will be valued at par. The BTFP will be an additional source of liquidity against high-quality securities, eliminating an institution’s need to quickly sell those securities in times of stress.”

“Valued at par” means that banks can hold their long-term federal securities to maturity while acquiring ready cash against them to meet withdrawals, without having to “mark to market” and sell at a loss.

The Systemic Flaw

So what caused this crisis, and what can be done to remedy it?

In the midst of the 2008 economic crisis, former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan conceded that there was a flaw in his perception of the financial operating system. For 40 years, he had believed that banks could “self regulate” responsibly, a presumption that had proven to be flawed.

In the case of SVB, however, the bank was not engaged in the sort of risky lending seen in the subprime crisis, and increased “stress testing” wouldn’t have saved it. It had put its deposits largely in federal securities, purported to be the safest assets available – so safe that they carry a “zero risk weighting” requiring no extra capital buffer. What went wrong was that they were long-term bonds at low interest. When rates shot up, the market value of the bonds dropped, since buyers prefer newer bonds paying higher interest. Bonds that could be sold were sold at a loss, and some marked “hold to maturity” could not be sold at all. As a result, SVB lacked the liquidity to meet the sudden unexpected demand for withdrawals.

The flaw to which SVB and many other “troubled” banks have fallen victim is the age-old systemic problem of “borrowing short to lend long.” For centuries, banks have borrowed the money of depositors who expect to have it available on demand, and have invested it in long-term assets that cannot be immediately liquidated. The system works well so long as the depositors don’t panic and rush to pull their money out all at once. But when they do, if the problem is systemic, not just single banks but the whole banking system can collapse.

We used to see this flaw dramatized every December, when TV networks ran the 1946 Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life. When the Bailey Brothers Building and Loan suffered a bank run, George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) had to explain to the panicked depositors that their money had been lent to their neighbors. He was on the verge of suicide, when a guardian angel showed him how critical he and his bank had been to the community; and the neighbors pitched in and rescued the bank.

Even closer to the situation today was the crisis of the savings and loan associations (S&Ls) of the 1980s, after the Federal Reserve raised interest rates dramatically to kill inflation. Most of the assets of the S&Ls were long-term fixed-rate mortgages. As rates rose, they had to pay more to attract deposits; but the amount they earned on their fixed-rate mortgages didn’t change. Losses mounted, but the S&L insurance fund, the FSLIC, lacked sufficient money to reimburse all the depositors at failed S&Ls; so the regulators turned a blind eye and allowed them to keep operating as “zombies.” The matter was finally resolved with legislation in 1989 that placed S&L insurance under the FDIC and established the Resolution Trust Corporation to resolve the remaining troubled S&Ls. The ultimate cost to the taxpayers was estimated to be as high as $124 billion.

As with George Bailey’s savings and loan, the flaw was not “fractional reserve” lending. The S&Ls pooled the money of their customers and lent only what they had. The systemic flaw was and still is that to make long-term loans, banks must borrow “other people’s money,” which is expected to be available on demand. Today the banks’ liquidity options include not just their own depositors but other banks’ depositors in the fed funds market, and pension funds and other institutional creditors lending in the repo market. But they all expect their money to be available on demand; and if the bank has lent it out in long-term loans, the bank can be caught short shuffling reserves around trying to meet that demand.

The Failed Banks Were Not Nationalized, But Maybe They Should Have Been

One option that was debated in the 2008-09 crisis was actual nationalization.  As Prof. Michael Hudson wrote in February 2009:

Real nationalization occurs when governments act in the public interest to take over private property. … Nationalizing the banks along these lines would mean that the government would supply the nation’s credit needs. The Treasury would become the source of new money, replacing commercial bank credit. Presumably this credit would be lent out for economically and socially productive purposes, not merely to inflate asset prices while loading down households and business with debt as has occurred under today’s commercial bank lending policies.

Gar Alperovitz, professor emeritus at the University of Maryland, also weighed in on the issue. In a 2012 New York Times article titled “Wall Street Is Too Big to Regulate,” he noted that the five biggest banks—JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs—had amassed assets amounting to more than half the nation’s GDP. He wrote:

With high-paid lobbyists contesting every proposed regulation, it is increasingly clear that big banks can never be effectively controlled as private businesses. If an enterprise (or five of them) is so large and so concentrated that competition and regulation are impossible, the most market-friendly step is to nationalize its functions …

Nationalization isn’t as difficult as it sounds. We tend to forget that we … essentially nationalized the American International Group, one of the largest insurance companies in the world, and the government still owns roughly 60 percent of its stock.

Another example was Continental Illinois, the largest bank bankruptcy and the seventh-largest bank in the country when it failed in 1984. The FDIC wiped out existing shareholders, infused capital, took over bad assets, replaced senior management, and owned the bank for about a decade, running it as a commercial enterprise, selling it in 1994.

What constituted a radical departure from capitalist principles in the last financial crisis was not “nationalization” but an unprecedented wave of bank bailouts, sometimes called “welfare for the rich.” The taxpayers bore the losses while the culpable management not only escaped civil and criminal penalties but made off with record bonuses. Banks backed by an army of lobbyists succeeded in getting laws changed so that what was formerly criminal behavior became legal. Instead of nationalization, we got TARP, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, in which toxic assets were purchased from financial institutions by the Treasury.  Faced with the inequity of that solution, many economists recommended nationalization instead. Willem Buiter, chief economist of Citigroup and formerly a member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, wrote in the Financial Times in September 2009:

Is the reality of the modern, transactions-oriented model of financial capitalism indeed that large private firms make enormous private profits when the going is good and get bailed out and taken into temporary public ownership when the going gets bad, with the taxpayer taking the risk and the losses?

If so, then why not keep these activities in permanent public ownership? There is a long-standing argument that there is no real case for private ownership of deposit-taking banking institutions, because these cannot exist safely without a deposit guarantee and/or lender of last resort facilities that are ultimately underwritten by the taxpayer. 

. . . Once the state underwrites the deposits or makes alternative funding available as lender of last resort, deposit-based banking is a license to print money. [Emphasis added.]

Those are all good arguments, but Congress is not likely to nationalize the whole banking system any time soon.

What About Nationalizing the Liquidity Pool?

Without going to those lengths, what could be made a public utility is the banks’ liquidity pool. Banks could borrow directly from the deep pocket of the central bank, the “lender of last resort” (or from the Treasury if it were re-engineered so that it could issue money as credit without taxing or going into debt). Banks would still need to make “prudent” loans – loans to borrowers who had demonstrated an ability to pay the money back – since if they suffered substantial defaults, they would not be able to balance their books and could be put into bankruptcy. They would still charge interest to cover their costs, and they would still compete for borrowers by keeping their interest rates low, maintaining the principles of “market capitalism” operating now. Customer deposits could be sequestered separately from loans, e.g. at government-backed postal banks. In fact, sequestering customer funds is what brokerages (such as Schwab and Fidelity) do now. Rather than the bank gambling with your money, you gamble with it yourself. But that, of course, can be risky too!

In any case sequestering deposits is not likely to happen either. What is being sought is what Roger Altman predicted – FDIC insurance coverage of the entire deposit base. In a March 17 letter first reported by Bloomberg News, the Midsize Bank Coalition of America called on regulators “immediately … to reinstate full deposit insurance coverage for depositors,” for two years. That was done in 2008, the letter noted, “and was one of the most effective tools used in the great financial crisis and it needs to be brought back immediately. Importantly, as happened previously, this increase in insurance should be paid for directly by the banks themselves by simply increasing the deposit insurance assessment on banks who choose to participate in this increased insurance coverage.”

The concern for midsize banks is that depositors have been fleeing to giant “too big to fail” banks, perceiving them to be safer. But as Cornell Prof. Robert Hockett observes, midsize banks lend to the midsize businesses that are the backbone of the productive economy. He has drafted legislation to provide for universal deposit insurance, discussed in Forbes. However, it’s an uphill battle. Even Sheila Bair, who is clearly sympathetic to the plight of local banks, has reservations on full coverage. As reported on MSN.com:

FDIC Chairwoman Sheila Bair said Tuesday that Congress should consider temporarily providing guarantees for deposits in transaction accounts used by employers to pay their workers — a move that some Democrats are considering.

But Bair said it would be an “overreaction” to insure all bank deposits.

“Unlimited insurance would be very expensive to do. It would be assessed on the banking system, backstopped by taxpayers, and would primarily help very, very wealthy people,” Bair said on Washington Post Live.

Small community banks — defined as banks with $10 billion or less in assets — have spoken out against paying more to cover the failure of larger banks such as SVB.

The Public Bank Option

Meanwhile, one midsize bank that has escaped this furor is the Bank of North Dakota. With assets in 2021 of $10.3 billion and a return on investment of 15%, the BND is owned by the state, which self-insures it. There is no fear of bank runs, because the state’s revenues compose the vast majority of its deposits, and they must be deposited in the BND by law.

The state’s local banks are also protected by the BND, which is forbidden to compete with them. Instead, it partners with them, helping with liquidity and capitalization. The BND has been called a “mini-Fed” for the state and its banks. That helps explain why North Dakota has more local banks per capita than any other state, at a time when other states have been losing banks to big bank mergers, causing the number of U.S. banks to shrink radically.

UK Prof. Richard Werner recently published a briefing memo supporting the case for a public bank. It was prepared for the state of Tennessee, which is considering a sovereign state bank on the North Dakota model, but the arguments apply to all states. Benefits discussed include dividends, higher state-level tax revenues, greater job creation, greater local autonomy and resilience to shocks, more options for funding public sector borrowing and state pension funds, and protection of financial transaction freedom and privacy.

Small and local is good, but even small regional banks need to pool their resources for maximum efficiency and security. A state-owned bank on the model of the Bank of North Dakota can provide low interest loans, liquidity, and financial sovereignty, keeping financial resources in the state directed to public purposes, all while turning a profit for the state.

This article was first posted on ScheerPost.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ellen Brown.

What the authorities did over the weekend was absolutely profound. They guaranteed the deposits, all of them, at Silicon Valley Bank. What that really means … is that they have guaranteed the entire deposit base of the U.S. financial system. The entire deposit base. Why? Because you can’t guarantee all the deposits in Silicon Valley Bank and then the next day say to the depositors, say, at First Republic, sorry, yours aren’t guaranteed. Of course they are.

… So this is a breathtaking step which effectively nationalizes or federalizes the deposit base of the U.S. financial system.

The deposit base of the financial system has not actually been nationalized, but Congress is considering modifications to the FDIC insurance limit. Meanwhile, one state that does not face those problems is North Dakota, where its state-owned bank acts as a “mini-Fed” for the state. But first, a closer look at the issues.

Bail In, Bail Out, or “Socialism for the Rich”?

On Friday, March 10, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) was put into receivership by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). The FDIC announced that deposits over the $250,000 insurance limit would get an advance dividend within the next week, and would receive a receivership certificate for the rest of the funds. Most of the depositors were venture-backed startups that needed to keep large deposits in the bank to meet payroll and pay suppliers, and over 95% of the deposits were uninsured and at risk of being lost. It was basically a “bail in” of the uninsured deposits, which would be recoverable only if funds were available after the bank’s assets had been sold.

But that arrangement lasted only two days. On March 12, Signature Bank was put into receivership; and the FDIC, Treasury and Federal Reserve jointly announced that all of the deposits at the two banks, not just those under the insurance limit, would be available for withdrawal on demand.

At a Senate Finance Committee hearing on March 16, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said that the guarantee would not apply to all deposits at all banks. Rather, the determination would be made on a case-by-case basis.

In a Bloomberg News interview on March 16, former FDIC Chair Sheila Bair criticized that decision. She observed that the two banks getting special treatment were not “systemically important,” and that the cost of the expanded guarantee was to be covered by a special assessment against all insured banks, including the small community banks that provide essential credit to local businesses. She argued that if guarantees were going to be given over the $250,000 limit, they should apply to deposits everywhere.

Meanwhile, on March 12, the Federal Reserve announced that it had set up a special purpose vehicle of the sort arranged for COVID relief in March 2020, called the Bank Term Funding Program (BTFP). Like the COVID special purpose vehicles, it would be backstopped with $25 billion from the Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF), a fund set up in 1934 to stabilize the exchange value of the dollar. The BTFP was to be available to any bank needing it, and many banks obviously did. Over $300 billion in short-term loans were withdrawn from the Fed’s various facilities just in the week after SVB’s collapse.

This money is not, however, the sort of “free lunch” provided to troubled banks in the last financial crisis. The money is to be advanced as a loan for up to a year, at a hefty interest rate as of March 22 of 4.88%. According to a Federal Reserve press release, advances will be made to “eligible depository institutions pledging U.S. Treasuries, agency debt and mortgage-backed securities, and other qualifying assets as collateral. These assets will be valued at par. The BTFP will be an additional source of liquidity against high-quality securities, eliminating an institution’s need to quickly sell those securities in times of stress.”

“Valued at par” means that banks can hold their long-term federal securities to maturity while acquiring ready cash against them to meet withdrawals, without having to “mark to market” and sell at a loss.

The Systemic Flaw

So what caused this crisis, and what can be done to remedy it?

In the midst of the 2008 economic crisis, former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan conceded that there was a flaw in his perception of the financial operating system. For 40 years, he had believed that banks could “self regulate” responsibly, a presumption that had proven to be flawed.

In the case of SVB, however, the bank was not engaged in the sort of risky lending seen in the subprime crisis, and increased “stress testing” wouldn’t have saved it. It had put its deposits largely in federal securities, purported to be the safest assets available – so safe that they carry a “zero risk weighting” requiring no extra capital buffer. What went wrong was that they were long-term bonds at low interest. When rates shot up, the market value of the bonds dropped, since buyers prefer newer bonds paying higher interest. Bonds that could be sold were sold at a loss, and some marked “hold to maturity” could not be sold at all. As a result, SVB lacked the liquidity to meet the sudden unexpected demand for withdrawals.

The flaw to which SVB and many other “troubled” banks have fallen victim is the age-old systemic problem of “borrowing short to lend long.” For centuries, banks have borrowed the money of depositors who expect to have it available on demand, and have invested it in long-term assets that cannot be immediately liquidated. The system works well so long as the depositors don’t panic and rush to pull their money out all at once. But when they do, if the problem is systemic, not just single banks but the whole banking system can collapse.

We used to see this flaw dramatized every December, when TV networks ran the 1946 Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life. When the Bailey Brothers Building and Loan suffered a bank run, George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) had to explain to the panicked depositors that their money had been lent to their neighbors. He was on the verge of suicide, when a guardian angel showed him how critical he and his bank had been to the community; and the neighbors pitched in and rescued the bank.

Even closer to the situation today was the crisis of the savings and loan associations (S&Ls) of the 1980s, after the Federal Reserve raised interest rates dramatically to kill inflation. Most of the assets of the S&Ls were long-term fixed-rate mortgages. As rates rose, they had to pay more to attract deposits; but the amount they earned on their fixed-rate mortgages didn’t change. Losses mounted, but the S&L insurance fund, the FSLIC, lacked sufficient money to reimburse all the depositors at failed S&Ls; so the regulators turned a blind eye and allowed them to keep operating as “zombies.” The matter was finally resolved with legislation in 1989 that placed S&L insurance under the FDIC and established the Resolution Trust Corporation to resolve the remaining troubled S&Ls. The ultimate cost to the taxpayers was estimated to be as high as $124 billion.

As with George Bailey’s savings and loan, the flaw was not “fractional reserve” lending. The S&Ls pooled the money of their customers and lent only what they had. The systemic flaw was and still is that to make long-term loans, banks must borrow “other people’s money,” which is expected to be available on demand. Today the banks’ liquidity options include not just their own depositors but other banks’ depositors in the fed funds market, and pension funds and other institutional creditors lending in the repo market. But they all expect their money to be available on demand; and if the bank has lent it out in long-term loans, the bank can be caught short shuffling reserves around trying to meet that demand.

The Failed Banks Were Not Nationalized, But Maybe They Should Have Been

One option that was debated in the 2008-09 crisis was actual nationalization.  As Prof. Michael Hudson wrote in February 2009:

Real nationalization occurs when governments act in the public interest to take over private property. … Nationalizing the banks along these lines would mean that the government would supply the nation’s credit needs. The Treasury would become the source of new money, replacing commercial bank credit. Presumably this credit would be lent out for economically and socially productive purposes, not merely to inflate asset prices while loading down households and business with debt as has occurred under today’s commercial bank lending policies.

Gar Alperovitz, professor emeritus at the University of Maryland, also weighed in on the issue. In a 2012 New York Times article titled “Wall Street Is Too Big to Regulate,” he noted that the five biggest banks—JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs—had amassed assets amounting to more than half the nation’s GDP. He wrote:

With high-paid lobbyists contesting every proposed regulation, it is increasingly clear that big banks can never be effectively controlled as private businesses. If an enterprise (or five of them) is so large and so concentrated that competition and regulation are impossible, the most market-friendly step is to nationalize its functions …

Nationalization isn’t as difficult as it sounds. We tend to forget that we … essentially nationalized the American International Group, one of the largest insurance companies in the world, and the government still owns roughly 60 percent of its stock.

Another example was Continental Illinois, the largest bank bankruptcy and the seventh-largest bank in the country when it failed in 1984. The FDIC wiped out existing shareholders, infused capital, took over bad assets, replaced senior management, and owned the bank for about a decade, running it as a commercial enterprise, selling it in 1994.

What constituted a radical departure from capitalist principles in the last financial crisis was not “nationalization” but an unprecedented wave of bank bailouts, sometimes called “welfare for the rich.” The taxpayers bore the losses while the culpable management not only escaped civil and criminal penalties but made off with record bonuses. Banks backed by an army of lobbyists succeeded in getting laws changed so that what was formerly criminal behavior became legal. Instead of nationalization, we got TARP, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, in which toxic assets were purchased from financial institutions by the Treasury.  Faced with the inequity of that solution, many economists recommended nationalization instead. Willem Buiter, chief economist of Citigroup and formerly a member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, wrote in the Financial Times in September 2009:

Is the reality of the modern, transactions-oriented model of financial capitalism indeed that large private firms make enormous private profits when the going is good and get bailed out and taken into temporary public ownership when the going gets bad, with the taxpayer taking the risk and the losses?

If so, then why not keep these activities in permanent public ownership? There is a long-standing argument that there is no real case for private ownership of deposit-taking banking institutions, because these cannot exist safely without a deposit guarantee and/or lender of last resort facilities that are ultimately underwritten by the taxpayer.

… Once the state underwrites the deposits or makes alternative funding available as lender of last resort, deposit-based banking is a license to print money.

Those are all good arguments, but Congress is not likely to nationalize the whole banking system any time soon.

What About Nationalizing the Liquidity Pool?

Without going to those lengths, what could be made a public utility is the banks’ liquidity pool. Banks could borrow directly from the deep pocket of the central bank, the “lender of last resort” (or from the Treasury if it were re-engineered so that it could issue money as credit without taxing or going into debt). Banks would still need to make “prudent” loans – loans to borrowers who had demonstrated an ability to pay the money back – since if they suffered substantial defaults, they would not be able to balance their books and could be put into bankruptcy. They would still charge interest to cover their costs, and they would still compete for borrowers by keeping their interest rates low, maintaining the principles of “market capitalism” operating now. Customer deposits could be sequestered separately from loans, e.g. at government-backed postal banks. In fact, sequestering customer funds is what brokerages (such as Schwab and Fidelity) do now. Rather than the bank gambling with your money, you gamble with it yourself. But that, of course, can be risky too!

In any case sequestering deposits is not likely to happen either. What is being sought is what Roger Altman predicted – FDIC insurance coverage of the entire deposit base. In a March 17 letter first reported by Bloomberg News, the Midsize Bank Coalition of America called on regulators “immediately … to reinstate full deposit insurance coverage for depositors,” for two years. That was done in 2008, the letter noted, “and was one of the most effective tools used in the great financial crisis and it needs to be brought back immediately. Importantly, as happened previously, this increase in insurance should be paid for directly by the banks themselves by simply increasing the deposit insurance assessment on banks who choose to participate in this increased insurance coverage.”

The concern for midsize banks is that depositors have been fleeing to giant “too big to fail” banks, perceiving them to be safer. But as Cornell Prof. Robert Hockett observes, midsize banks lend to the midsize businesses that are the backbone of the productive economy. He has drafted legislation to provide for universal deposit insurance, discussed in Forbes. However, it’s an uphill battle. Even Sheila Bair, who is clearly sympathetic to the plight of local banks, has reservations on full coverage. As reported on MSN.com:

FDIC Chairwoman Sheila Bair said Tuesday that Congress should consider temporarily providing guarantees for deposits in transaction accounts used by employers to pay their workers — a move that some Democrats are considering.

But Bair said it would be an “overreaction” to insure all bank deposits.

“Unlimited insurance would be very expensive to do. It would be assessed on the banking system, backstopped by taxpayers, and would primarily help very, very wealthy people,” Bair said on Washington Post Live.

Small community banks — defined as banks with $10 billion or less in assets — have spoken out against paying more to cover the failure of larger banks such as SVB.

The Public Bank Option

Meanwhile, one midsize bank that has escaped this furor is the Bank of North Dakota. With assets in 2021 of $10.3 billion and a return on investment of 15%, the BND is owned by the state, which self-insures it. There is no fear of bank runs, because the state’s revenues compose the vast majority of its deposits, and they must be deposited in the BND by law.

The state’s local banks are also protected by the BND, which is forbidden to compete with them. Instead, it partners with them, helping with liquidity and capitalization. The BND has been called a “mini-Fed” for the state and its banks. That helps explain why North Dakota has more local banks per capita than any other state, at a time when other states have been losing banks to big bank mergers, causing the number of U.S. banks to shrink radically.

UK Prof. Richard Werner recently published a briefing memo supporting the case for a public bank. It was prepared for the state of Tennessee, which is considering a sovereign state bank on the North Dakota model, but the arguments apply to all states. Benefits discussed include dividends, higher state-level tax revenues, greater job creation, greater local autonomy and resilience to shocks, more options for funding public sector borrowing and state pension funds, and protection of financial transaction freedom and privacy.

Small and local is good, but even small regional banks need to pool their resources for maximum efficiency and security. A state-owned bank on the model of the Bank of North Dakota can provide low interest loans, liquidity, and financial sovereignty, keeping financial resources in the state directed to public purposes, all while turning a profit for the state.

This article was first posted on ScheerPost.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ellen Brown.

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Arizona’s newly elected Democratic governor, Katie Hobbs, has given up on another of her Cabinet nominees in the face of misleading attacks from Republicans in the state Legislature. Matthew Stewart was forced out last Wednesday after serving just a month and a half as Hobbs’ director of the Department of Child Safety, the state child protective services agency.

When Hobbs selected Stewart in December, she called him one of “the best minds Arizona has to offer” and a leader on racial justice issues who would “transform” a child welfare system that ProPublica and NBC News had found investigated the families of 1 in 3 Black children in metro Phoenix during a recent five-year period.

Now, Hobbs has forced Stewart to leave his post before he could defend his record in a public hearing.

In an interview with ProPublica, the first since his ouster, Stewart said the Republicans’ attacks on him are inaccurate and reputation-damaging. More than a dozen current and former DCS employees, all of whom were contacted independently by the news organization and not at Stewart’s recommendation, confirmed that the allegations about him that have since been circulating in the news media are unfounded.

“If you believe change is needed, and you make a decision to bring in a person who will create change, then you stand behind that person,” Stewart said of the governor abandoning him. “I’m an example of someone willing to take a risk going into a bureaucratic, deeply ingrained system trying to bring new thinking, new energy.”

“I wanted to have the opportunity to go through [the confirmation process] and defend myself,” Stewart said, adding that dismissing him was a “way for the governor to stay safe.”

It all started with a vaguely worded news release issued Wednesday by state Sen. Jake Hoffman, a Republican who has been banned from social media platforms for spreading misinformation and running an online troll farm. He has also denied Hobbs’ legitimacy as governor.

Hoffman chairs the Arizona Senate Committee on Director Nominations, a panel for vetting Cabinet appointments that was formed after Hobbs’ November victory over Republican Kari Lake and that never existed before 2023.

In his statement, Hoffman said that “Katie Hobbs openly touted skin color as her seemingly only priority in the search for the next potential DCS director.”

Stewart is Black and the son of the longtime senior pastor of Phoenix’s most prominent Black church. He previously worked at DCS for over a decade as a case manager and training supervisor before quitting over the racial disproportionality he saw in the agency’s enforcement.

Hoffman also said, without providing supporting detail, that Stewart had committed insubordination and taken an unauthorized absence during his prior stint working at the agency.

DCS disciplinary records, obtained by ProPublica from the department, show Stewart received this reprimand (his only complaint during his more than a decade on the job) because he asked to work from home in the spring of 2020, at the onset of the pandemic. His daughter is severely asthmatic, and a doctor had warned him against going in to the office.

Stewart said he informed Hobbs about this when he interviewed with her team, and they said it wasn’t a problem.

Hoffman, the Republican lawmaker, also cast aspersions on Stewart’s recent decisions to dismiss four top DCS officials — adding that some of those who’d been let go are “openly gay.”

According to an internal email obtained by ProPublica from DCS employees independent of Stewart, he did inform the staff on Jan. 20 that he was dismissing the department’s deputy director of field operations, its chief of the office of child welfare investigations and two top program administrators in Maricopa County, where Phoenix is located.

But Stewart had already told ProPublica in multiple interviews over the last year that those individuals were part of an institutional culture that had led to the agency’s high rate of investigations and separations of low-income families as well as its problem with turnover among overworked caseworkers — and that for DCS to change direction, they would have to go.

Trying to reform any agency, he has consistently said, requires replacing people in leadership positions.

Stewart said in an interview Sunday that his decisions to part ways with the four officials were run by the governor’s office and went through normal HR channels at the Arizona Department of Administration, and that he didn’t know each of the individuals’ sexual orientation.

Five current and former DCS employees who identify as LGBTQ also said in interviews or emails with ProPublica that Stewart has consistently supported them and worked closely with them, and that the implication of any discrimination by him is, in their view, without merit.

The governor’s office agrees that none of the issues brought up by the Republican committee had anything to do with Hobbs dismissing Stewart.

“Completely baseless,” said Ben Henderson, the governor’s director of operations, of the implication that there was anti-LGBTQ bias in Stewart’s personnel decisions.

Henderson told ProPublica that the real reason for forcing Stewart out was that while he had the “vision” to change the direction of DCS, he didn’t have the day-to-day administrative acumen to run an agency with a billion-dollar budget and thousands of employees.

The governor’s team declined to specify what exactly Stewart wasn’t capable of as an administrator or how a month and a half was enough time to know that he wasn’t up to the task.

Stewart said it is “news to me” that there was any issue with his performance, and that the governor’s office had never contacted him about this. He said that on Wednesday morning, they scheduled a meeting and told him it was clear to them that his confirmation wouldn’t make it past Republican opposition, and that they would therefore be withdrawing his nomination.

Nothing substantive about his record or managerial abilities was mentioned then or at any point in the past month and a half, Stewart reiterated, saying that he’d only received positive if sparse feedback from Hobbs’ office on his hiring and other executive decisions.

The version of events from the governor’s office “sounds like controlling the narrative,” Stewart said.

In an email Tuesday, C. Murphy Hebert, the governor’s spokesperson, said that Hobbs has “so much respect for Mr. Stewart” that she doesn’t want to challenge his experience of what happened last week. And the issue of his likely not getting through the committee process “was definitely part of the larger conversation.”

“The bottom line, Cabinet members serve at the pleasure of the Governor, and this is a decision that was made in everyone’s best interest,” Hebert said.

The governor’s staff said they’re having internal conversations about repairing the reputations of both Stewart and Dr. Theresa Cullen, who too was recently pulled from consideration as head of the state’s health department after similar attacks from Hoffman and his committee.

In Cullen’s case, several supporters of Stewart pointed out, the governor did at least issue a statement defending her.

After Stewart’s dismissal Wednesday, he was sent back to the DCS office to pack up his belongings and go home. Later that day, Hoffman, the Republican legislator, released his statement taking credit for the governor’s decision to remove Stewart and citing it as evidence of the need for his new Cabinet nominee vetting committee.

Claire Louge, executive director of the child maltreatment prevention organization Prevent Child Abuse Arizona, said she met with Stewart the morning before he was forced to leave. She said she asked him what he was looking for in the high-level positions he had dismissed people from.

Part of his answer was that he really wanted DCS leadership to have optimism and “show up differently” in the lives of struggling families, Louge said.

“What did they expect?” she said of the governor’s office. “Matthew Stewart is a known visionary, a known advocate, who did not have extensive administrative experience. They knew that.”

DCS staffers — some of whom took jobs at the agency since Stewart was hired because they wanted to work with him — say they are upset by the way he was treated, as are many people in Arizona’s Black community.

Dustin Sallaz, a case manager and later supervisor at DCS from 2017 to 2022 who is openly gay and has worked extensively with Stewart, said Stewart was always an “amazing” and “communicative” DCS colleague who took time to get to know the families he worked with — and that he was right to fire the people he fired.

Samantha Aiello was a case manager and program specialist at DCS from 2016 to 2022, when she left the department to work with Stewart’s nonprofit organization, Our Sister Our Brother, which advocates for vulnerable families caught up in the child welfare system. She also identifies as LGBTQ, noting that Stewart knew this and sent her an Edible Arrangement for her wedding.

“Matt is the most compassionate person I’ve ever had the chance to work for,” she said.

The current and former DCS employees interviewed by ProPublica agreed that the officials whom Stewart fired, all key figures in charge of the department’s day-to-day operations, were widely known for contributing to long-standing problems at the agency, including staff retention.

ProPublica has requested that DCS provide documentation of the officials’ complaints about Stewart but has not received the records.

The four officials could not immediately be reached for comment.

In an interview, Kim Quintero, director of communications for the Arizona Senate Republicans, said the allegations about Stewart came from a whistleblower whose identity Hoffman and his team are protecting. “We have attorneys that review these things before they even go out, so we did everything legally accurate,” she said, referring to documentation she said the committee reviewed.

Regarding the allegation that discrimination had something to do with Stewart’s decisions about which DCS officials to dismiss, Quintero said that “obviously, an investigation hasn’t been done.”

Meanwhile, Hoffman, the committee chair, is leading a group of conservatives who plan to sue Hobbs for issuing an executive order guaranteeing equal employment opportunities for LGBTQ people working at state agencies. He also wrote a bill that would have banned books from schools that depict “acts” of “homosexuality.”

Stewart said that many of the changes he made in the short time he was director “were ones that needed to happen for years, maybe decades,” adding that his goal was to reshape “what the community experiences when DCS knocks on their door.”

He also said that during his initial interviews with Hobbs’ team, he was asked what it would mean to the public if he were picked as DCS director. “I said it would mean she wants change,” Stewart said of the governor.

“That was my charge,” he said. “I believe that is why I was hired.”

Lynn Dombek contributed research.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Eli Hager.

Northland kuia Titewhai Harawira has died in Avondale, aged 90.

Titewhai Harawira was a familiar face at Waitangi Day celebrations where she frequently accompanied prime ministers on to the local marae.

The proud matriarch of a close-knit family, she was heavily involved in Māori activism with strong convictions backed by a steely will.

• LISTEN TO RNZ MORNING REPORT: ‘She didn’t bow to pressure from anyone’ — Dame Nadia Glavish remembers Titewhai Harawira
• ‘A powerful personality in the social and political landscape in the North’ – Shane Jones

“We’ve got radio today, we’ve got television today, we’ve got fishing rights today, we’ve got land rights today, we’ve got a Māori Party today. Why?

“Because a few of us have had the courage to get up there and push the boundaries for the last 50 years and I don’t apologise for that to anybody then or now,” she said in an interview with RNZ in 2009.

Her son, former MP Hone Harawira, said she would lay at her home in Avondale for a night before going to Hoani Waititi Marae in Henderson to lie in state. She would return to the north for burial.

Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson paid tribute to Titewhai Harawira’s decades of “feisty, staunch activism” and passionate commitment to progressing te ao Māori aspirations.

A massive mihi
“Massive mihi to her lifelong dedication to advancing te ao Māori interests,” she said.

Titewhai Te Hoia Hinewhare was born in 1932 in the Northland farming area of Whakapara and was raised by her maternal grandparents. After training as a nurse, she married John Harawira in 1952, settling in Avondale in Auckland. They had nine children and adopted another three.

The couple were active in local schools and were founding members of the pioneering Hoani Waititi urban marae in West Auckland. Titewhai Harawira was also active in the Māori Women’s Welfare League, especially its campaign to improve Māori housing.

John Harawira died in 1977 and she brought up their extended family on her own.

She became a member of the protest group Ngā Tamatoa in the early 1970s and campaigned hard, often against bitter criticism, for the Māori language.

“We were determined to rescue our language because we felt and we believed, and we believe today, that a people without its language is a people that die,” she told RNZ in 2009.

Titewhai Harawira was one of the leaders of the 1975 land hīkoi that marched from the Far North to Parliament.

Alienation of Māori land
Growing up during the Second World War, she had seen for herself the alienation of Māori land, and the seeds for her dedication to land rights were sown.

“I saw the farms that belonged to my aunties and my cousins, and people in and around our districts, saw those farms being taken over by Māori Affairs and given out to other people, so that when our people came back from the Second World War those farms were padlocked, and they were locked off those farms.”

In later years, she was best known outside her own circles for her annual protests at Waitangi.

In 1998, she blocked then Labour Party leader Helen Clark from speaking on the marae, bringing the usually stoic Clark to tears. Harawira said she was demanding equal rights for Māori women who did not have speaking rights.

In 2000, some of elders attempted to prevent her and her companions from entering Te Tii marae because of the disruptions they caused, but the protest group eventually won the day.

Dame Nadia Glavish of Ngāti Whatua knew and worked closely with Titewhai Harawira.

“She was often called protester, but in the minds of us who walked with her it was more a protector of civil rights in this country.

Done ‘with such dignity’
“She did it with such dignity even though she didn’t bow to any pressure from anyone, government or otherwise. She was staunch and true to her cause. She was very proud to be Māori.”

Former New Zealand First MP Shane Jones said she was a fierce, determined campaigner who had a few controversial stoushes, and was also a critic of her own people.

“A very powerful woman within Māoridom. Unlike other campaigners though, Titewhai was equally fierce in her criticism of Māori leadership in the community.

“She was no spectator. She constantly said to her own people if you want to boost your quality of life and get out of helplessness and hopelessness, don’t be a spectator, or you’ll get what you’ve got which is pretty near zero.

“E te ruahine, E te kai whakatumatuma. Ko rite te wā mou, hoki ai ki te kainga tūturu, e moe, e moe, e Titewhai. Te kai whakatumatuma o Ngāpuhi. Haere atu rā.”

Passion and sincerity
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins said he did not know her well, but wanted to acknowledge her passing.

“I do want to extend my condolences and my aroha to her whānau. Look, there will be a lot of Kiwis who didn’t agree with Titewhai Harawira but no one could doubt her passion, or her sincerity, and her commitment to Māori — particularly urban Māori.

“In recent years, I know that she’s played a significant role in transforming how we commemorate Waitangi Day and she should be acknowledged for that as well.

“I didn’t know her well and I won’t claim to have, but I did have a few interactions with her … I just extend to them my condolences and my very best wishes.”

When the Māori Party was formed in 2004, Titewhai Harawira wanted to stand as a candidate for it in the general election of the following year, but it was her son Hone who entered Parliament as a Māori Party MP.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Arizona Gov.-elect Katie Hobbs is taking the state’s child protective services agency in a radically different direction in the wake of a ProPublica-NBC News investigation into the racial disparities that have plagued the child welfare system here.

This week, Hobbs, a Democrat, announced that she has selected Matthew Stewart, a Black community advocate, as the new head of Arizona’s Department of Child Safety. Stewart previously worked at DCS as a case manager and training supervisor for a decade before quitting in 2020, later saying he was ashamed by the racial disproportionality he was seeing in his work.

Stewart, who is the son of the longtime senior pastor of Phoenix’s most prominent Black church, will be the first Black leader of the department, replacing its current director, Mike Faust. Faust had been appointed by outgoing Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican.

Arizona’s child welfare system has long disproportionately investigated Black families. According to the ProPublica-NBC News investigation, which highlighted Stewart’s role, 1 in 3 Black children in metro Phoenix faced a DCS investigation in just a recent five-year period. Faust said the department had made progress over that time, but the news organizations found that while the overall number of investigations has gone down, the racial disparity between white and Black families has only increased.

After leaving DCS, Stewart formed the community organization Our Sister Our Brother, which has fought the department for more equitable treatment of Black and also low-income parents.

This fall, he told ProPublica and NBC News that generational poverty and the resulting trauma within families, which in some cases can lead to parenting problems and in turn DCS investigations, have been “centuries in the making.” Are parents supposed to believe, he asked, that after the department takes custody of their children, “these things will be solved?”

“I simply don’t think DCS is the agency to do this,” he said.

Stewart will now run that very agency.

Stewart was not immediately available for an interview. But he said in a statement that he will strengthen the state’s partnerships with community organizations and hopes that under his team’s leadership, the department will “become a place for encouraging and facilitating community healing” in part by providing more resources to families in need.

In a separate statement, the governor-elect said that Stewart knows how to keep children safe based on his experience working at DCS, but also how to get families help and keep them united. “He is a leader who will ensure that we can continue to transform our public systems so they are responsive to the communities that we serve,” Hobbs said.

Child welfare experts in the state and families affected by the system praised Stewart’s selection, though some wondered how much change he could bring about even in DCS’ top position.

“Matthew Stewart has been singularly focused on keeping families safely together,” said Claire Louge, executive director of Prevent Child Abuse Arizona, an organization that provides services and training to prevent child maltreatment. But, she pointed out, like all DCS directors he “will face the challenge of leading an agency that is perpetually criticized — either for removing children from their families too much or too little.”

Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, an advocacy group, noted that “Arizona’s incredibly tough to fix.” He pointed to a previous Democratic governor of the state, Janet Napolitano, whose reform-minded pick to lead DCS’ forerunner agency couldn’t fix the system’s racial disproportionality two decades ago. “We’ll see how much times have changed,” Wexler said.

Tyra Smith, a Phoenix-area parent who has personal experience with the child welfare system and has worked directly with Stewart as a parent advocate, said she is hopeful about Stewart’s leadership but worries that when given a new role, people can change.

“I just don’t want to be forgotten about,” she said.

Stewart’s first order of business likely will be selecting new senior staff; he has been critical of several of DCS’ current top officials.

He also has expressed excitement about installing a new Cultural Brokers program that will ensure that a trusted community member of the same race is present when DCS caseworkers show up at a family’s door.

But Stewart will be partially hamstrung by the fact that the Legislature, still in Republican hands, is unlikely to adjust its anti-poverty agenda to get more economic assistance and support services to struggling families in order to prevent child maltreatment cases before they happen. Currently, Arizona spends a majority of its welfare budget not on direct assistance to low-income parents but on DCS investigations of them, as ProPublica reported in 2021.

Stewart also will have to focus on more than the racial disparity issue: DCS has been plagued by other scandals in recent years, as well as child fatalities. In one example, the outgoing director, Faust, was grilled by legislators about reports of violence and drug use in the state’s foster system, leading to one teenager at a group home being shot and killed.

But for the dozens of Black families across metro Phoenix who spoke with ProPublica and NBC News this year, there is finally a sense that someone who looks like them, who has actually interacted with them and who will listen to them is now in a position of power in a state where only two of 90 state legislators are Black. Many said in interviews that they know Stewart understands the constant, communitywide dread they feel, given that in Maricopa County, 63% of Black children will go through a DCS investigation by the time they turn 18.

After Hobbs defeated Kari Lake in the governor’s race, Stewart told ProPublica and NBC News that “I believe this will work to our benefit.” He noted that Hobbs’ background as a social worker might provide her with “a values frame and openness to change that will help guide her administration and choice of advisers.”

Stewart said he “can’t predict the future,” but “I am optimistic, and I believe it is never too soon for hope.”

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Eli Hager.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Every year, child protective services agencies across the nation investigate the family lives of roughly 3.5 million children, or about 1 out of every 20 American kids.

In these cases, government officials frequently accuse parents of wrongdoing. They enter homes to conduct searches and interrogations, and what they find can be used against the parent by a state attorney in court. And the accused will face punishment — including, often, having their children removed from them indefinitely.

Child welfare cases, that is, operate a lot like criminal ones.

Yet the mostly low-income families who are ensnared in this vast system have few of the rights that protect Americans when it is police who are investigating them, according to dozens of interviews with constitutional lawyers, defense attorneys, family court judges, CPS caseworkers and parents.

“You get more due process protections when facing a couple months in jail than you do when you’re facing losing your kids forever,” said Josh Gupta-Kagan, founder and director of the Family Defense Clinic at Columbia Law School and an expert on civil liberties as they apply to child protective cases.

The right to remain silent, the right to a public jury trial, the right to face your accuser and so on are not recognized and enforced by the courts in the child welfare system, according to our interviews and a review of case law. Neither is the related ideal of “innocent until proven guilty” or the standard that guilt must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

A look at several of the amendments in the Bill of Rights reveals this disparity.

The Fourth Amendment, for example, says that citizens must be protected from unreasonable searches and seizures by the government, and that a warrant to conduct a search should be based on “probable cause” that specific evidence will be found. Yet as ProPublica and NBC News reported this fall, child protective services agencies conduct millions of warrantless home searches every year, rifling through refrigerators and closets and inspecting children’s bodies without going to court first to say what they are looking for. (In New York City, child welfare workers obtain a warrant fewer than 94 times a year, on average, while conducting at least 56,000 searches annually.)

The Fifth Amendment, meanwhile, allows criminal defendants to remain silent to avoid self-incrimination, commonly called pleading the Fifth. But in a child welfare case, which is a civil proceeding, courts are legally permitted to assume the worst of a parent who has decided not to talk.

Then there’s the Sixth Amendment, which says that defendants have the right to a public trial by jury as well as the right to an attorney, among other protections. But if an accused parent in this system even gets a trial, it likely will not be public: Child welfare cases are heard in closed courtrooms in at least 30 states, according to a ProPublica survey of statutes.

Fewer than a dozen states offer the option of a jury trial in these cases.

As for a lawyer, while some states provide one for some types of child welfare hearings, the Supreme Court has found that even people facing permanent termination of their parental rights have no constitutional right to legal counsel — because they are ostensibly not at risk of losing their own physical liberty by going to jail.

Yet evidence gathered by CPS workers without a warrant can be passed to police and prosecutors for use in criminal prosecutions of parents, who may be locked up as a result, according to attorneys, caseworkers and police as well as cases we found in which this has happened.

Parents interviewed by ProPublica also felt that having a son or daughter taken from them forever is a far more severe punishment than spending time in prison, and therefore viewed these cases as equally deserving of due process.

Finally, double jeopardy, or prosecuting a person twice for the same offense, is also allowed in child welfare cases, even though it is otherwise prohibited by the Constitution. Some parents even have their rights to a newborn baby terminated because their rights to a previous child had been terminated, even if there hasn’t been any new allegation.

To be sure, constitutional rights are far from perfectly protected in the criminal justice system. Talk to public defenders and they will tell you that police routinely get away with unconstitutional home searches by using coercive tactics to avoid having to get a warrant, or by saying that something they found in a drawer was actually in “plain sight” and therefore could be collected without a warrant. The right to a trial in criminal court, too, is undermined by prosecutors dangling extreme prison sentences over defendants to get them to plead guilty before there’s a full hearing of the evidence; this plea bargaining process accounts for about 95% of felony convictions.

The right to an attorney in the criminal system is also hardly absolute, with underfunded public defender offices struggling to keep up with caseloads and lawyers facing rampant conflicts of interest.

Still, the rights themselves have been firmly upheld by the Supreme Court and other federal courts — and are therefore part of how police are trained — which is not true in child welfare.

One clear reason for this mismatch in rights is that there was no formal child welfare system when the Constitution was written, so some amendments in the Bill of Rights were worded to apply only to criminal matters.

More broadly, child welfare proceedings occupy a nebulous space between criminal and civil justice.

In the very few instances when the Supreme Court or federal circuit courts have addressed whether such rights should apply in child protection investigations, the rulings have largely said that if law enforcement is involved (like a police officer with a badge and gun being in the room while a CPS worker is interviewing a child), the rights exist. Otherwise, maybe not.

This reflects, in part, the history of child welfare courts, which were set up to be “problem-solving” rather than adversarial — to serve kids rather than to litigate guilt. This was a progressive vision of a system where social services workers, families and judges would work together to improve the child’s situation, rather than a prosecutor-versus-defendant setup.

So when the 1960s brought a due process revolution in criminal justice — the Supreme Court institutionalizing the right to an attorney in Gideon v. Wainwright and the practice of being read your rights in Miranda v. Arizona — child welfare practitioners were not thinking in the same terms.

“We are a pathetic field, still in our infancy,” said Marty Guggenheim, a longtime New York University family law professor who in 1990 founded what was for years the only parental defense clinic in the nation. (There are now about a dozen, according to a ProPublica review of law school offerings and interviews with heads of clinics.)

The problem is perpetuated by law schools, where criminal and corporate defense are deemed essential but family defense is not, ProPublica’s reporting has found. In a review of the curricula of every Ivy League law program and a dozen major state schools around the U.S., almost none appear to provide a class that’s strictly about defending parents accused of child maltreatment. Many offer family law coursework, but it is focused on typically middle-class issues like divorce, custody and wills and trusts.

Zoe Russell, a Harvard Law School graduate who is going into the family defense field, said that the classes she was offered centered on families with money, and that to develop her understanding of her area of interest, she had to read the footnotes of academic papers and attend conferences of her own volition.

And then there’s the stigma, the idea that this kind of law — with children in potential danger — is morally dubious. (Russell notes that many lawyers who are skittish about her field will still defend clients accused of murder, or of serious white-collar crimes, types of work that she says she doesn’t judge but shouldn’t be seen as more valuable or important than her own.)

“I describe my upcoming job differently depending on who I’m talking to and their reaction,” she said. “This is an area that is trivialized, demeaned.”

When ProPublica and NBC News in October found that child welfare agents in New York were routinely conducting warrantless home searches, the city’s Administration for Children’s Services disagreed with some of the rhetorical framing of that reporting.

Perhaps most importantly, agency officials said that when caseworkers enter a home, it is not to conduct a “search” but rather an “evaluation” of the residence. Based on what the workers see, they can then connect families with services to provide food if the fridge is empty or window guards to keep kids safe.

But child welfare experts including Tarek Ismail, a law professor and civil rights attorney at the City University of New York School of Law, noted that what the Administration for Children’s Services does is “suspicion-based” and thus deserving of due process.

In other words, Ismail said, these are not building inspectors going to every apartment in a building and “evaluating” whether each one has a proper window guard so they can generally protect kids. Instead, these are investigators who have received a specific allegation of wrongdoing and are being sent to a specific apartment to look for evidence of it.

And these agents, along with the prosecutors who follow up on what they find, have the power to punish.

Some of this boils down to a question of language, said Guggenheim, who began his career five decades ago in a parallel field: juvenile justice.

Juvenile detention officials, Guggenheim said, often used terminology suggesting that in their line of work there were “no convictions, no prisons, no punishment at all.” Instead, he said, “there were juvenile delinquents, adjudications, placements, training schools.”

And as he worked on legal challenges to the solitary confinement of children in youth prisons, officials called such isolation cells “time-out rooms.”

But the Supreme Court, in a landmark case called In re Gault, ruled in 1967 that “it doesn’t matter what the system calls these things, what matters is the reality of what they are doing,” Guggenheim said.

This push to describe the harms of juvenile incarceration in clearer language, and to enumerate the rights that should therefore be provided to the kids facing it, helped bring about real reforms in that system.

Meanwhile, the child welfare field still leans on benevolent language and concepts such as “child welfare” instead of “family policing” (a phrase that activists have begun using recently); “caseworkers” instead of investigators or agents; and “court-appointed special advocates” filling the shoes of lawyers.

In turn, the rights that most U.S. citizens consider fundamental are hardly rights at all when it is a child protective services “caseworker” knocking on the door.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Eli Hager.

Late Monday afternoon, Congressional leaders announced their long-awaited omnibus spending package which will fund the government through September 2023. The good news: the bill does not include needless corporate tax giveaways. The bad news: it also leaves out any expansion of the Child Tax Credit.

Ultimately, the conservative position on the credit triumphed. The credit was not worth the cost if it cost, well anything.

This fall, as lobbyists descended on the Hill to pressure Congress into passing a set of corporate tax breaks before the year's end, some progressive activists and lawmakers settled on a strategy to make any potential tax package at least mildly palatable: Tax breaks for businesses must be paired with an extension of the Child Tax Credit enhancements that were enacted in 2021.

Those enhancements increased the credit from $2,000 to $3,000 and to $3,600 for children under age 6, but more significantly, they removed limits on the refundable part of the credit, which helps families who most need it. Under permanent law (the credit that was in effect for years before and after 2021), the tax code actually states that certain families make too little money to receive the full credit. That is, a credit which is supposed to help children is denied to them if they are too poor. Last year, all children could receive the full credit if their family income was less than $150,000 (or less than $112,500 for most single parents). The 2021 credit enhancement also made the credit available to families in monthly installments to help match their normal household expenses rather than as a year-end lump sum.

The results of the credit enhancements were dramatic and immediate. Child poverty was cut nearly in half. The 2021 credit pulled more people above the poverty line than SNAP and unemployment insurance combined. The enhanced credit was especially important for Black and Hispanic families. As a result of Congress's failure to extend the credit enhancements, ITEP estimates that 45 percent of Black children and 42 percent of Hispanic children will not receive the full credit next year because the arbitrary limits on the refundable portion of the credit are in effect again.

Given the enormous success of the 2021 credit, many progressive groups were at least open to an unsavory package of tax breaks for big businesses if lawmakers would in turn help children and families by enhancing the Child Tax Credit. The tax package pushed by corporate lobbyists included a deduction for "research" that was promoted by companies making frozen foods and casino games, an interest deduction that would encourage private equity funds to load up companies with debt, and a bonus depreciation break that would accomplish little aside from allowing big companies to save billions on their tax bills.

Sen. Sherrod Brown framed the position of many progressives succinctly this September when he said, "No more tax breaks for big corporations and the wealthy unless the Child Tax Credit is with it. I'll lay down in front of a bulldozer on that one."

Conservative lawmakers dutifully expressed their own position on the issue. Cutting child poverty was not worth it if it could even be theorized that rich people might end up slightly less rich. The White House, for its part, signaled that it could be flexible on the details of a CTC expansion that could be part of such a deal.

But ultimately, the conservative position on the credit triumphed. The credit was not worth the cost if it cost, well anything. That included Republicans giving up their own package of corporate tax breaks. Perhaps they believe they can get a better deal next Congress with the House Republican majority. Let's hope that Sen. Brown carries his promise into the new year.

In the end, there should be few tears shed that the corporate lobbyists lost on this one. But there is a certain amount of ire that rises up inside one's heart knowing the only thing that could kill Congress' appetite for corporate tax breaks is a simple request that they boost the economic security of children and families as well.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Joe Hughes.

Janine Jackson interviewed Crushing Colonialism’s Jen Deerinwater about efforts to overturn the Indian Child Welfare Act for the December 9, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Truthout (11/12/22)

Janine Jackson: On November 9, the Supreme Court heard the case Haaland v. Brackeen. You might not have seen much about it; media coverage has been spotty. I will drop us into the center of it with the lead of our guest’s recent piece for Truthout.org:

Anywhere colonizers have invaded, Indigenous children have been separated from their communities. Whether through boarding or residential schools, child protective services, or outright murder, the theft of Indigenous children destroys tribal nations—which is what’s at stake in the US Supreme Court case Haaland v. Brackeen.

Nominal plaintiffs in the case, Chad and Jennifer Brackeen, fostered a Native child whom they subsequently adopted, but were upset that they might not be able to as easily adopt his half-sister.

But, as with many Supreme Court cases, their story is not the story, which extends far beyond them. It requires critical, thoughtful, human rights–centered storytelling to untangle an intentionally snarled story, to explain what—and who, really—are truly at stake.

Jen Deerinwater writes, as I note, for Truthout. She’s also founding executive director of Crushing Colonialism. Welcome to CounterSpin, Jen Deerinwater.

Jen Deerinwater: Hi. Thank you for having me on.

JJ: Let me ask you to begin with why ICWA, the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978, why was it demanded and passed? What does it do?

Jen Deerinwater: “They say that this is about protecting Native children, but that’s not what it is. It’s about overturning our sovereignty.”

JD: So this nonpartisan act was passed because it was found, prior to ICWA, that 25% to 35% of all Native children were being removed from their homes by state welfare and private adoption agencies. And of those, 85% of those children were being placed with non-Native families, overwhelmingly white Christian families, even when there were good homes with relatives and tribal members available.

So the point of ICWA, this nonpartisan act, is to help keep Native children with our tribal communities. As you read in the intro, a crucial part of colonization, of the genocide of Indigenous people, is taking our children. If you take away our future generations, then we cease to exist as Indigenous people and as sovereign nations, which is really a lot of what this case is about.

Even with ICWA in place—which is called the gold standard of child welfare policy, just so listeners know that—we’re still finding that Native children are still being removed at a rate of two to three times that of white children, and they’re rarely placed with relatives, and Native and tribal families, and community members.

Native families are the most likely to have children removed from their home as a first resort, and are the least likely to be offered any sort of family support interventions to help keep their children.

So that’s the importance of ICWA and where it’s coming from, and why it’s so important.

But now the way that it works, it’s also different than how one might think. So this doesn’t apply to all Native American children. It applies to Native children who are either enrolled in a federally recognized tribe, or are eligible for enrollment in a federally recognized tribe. So that’s really important, and that is something that non-Native press has often gotten wrong about this.

They have not used that distinction, which is very important, because what’s so much at the heart of this, beyond just the genocide issue, is tribal sovereignty, and the potential overturning of tribes as sovereign nations, and really trying to turn us into nothing more than a race of people. And if you say that we are just a race of people, then something like ICWA becomes illegal under race-based discrimination laws in the country.

But really, what the other side wants is the overturning of tribal sovereignty. You know, they say that this is about protecting Native children, but that’s not what it is. It’s about overturning our sovereignty, so that non-Native interests like casinos and oil and gas can take our resources. And they’re just willing to use our children as the fodder in order to do that.

JJ: As you say, the repercussions are huge, and I don’t know that folks just sort of skimming the issue would understand that this isn’t Chad and Jennifer, this is Gibson Dunn, right, the law firm.

JD: Correct.

JJ: Gibson Dunn and their clientele have a much bigger picture in mind than Chad and Jennifer, which is what you’re telling us. But if we could start at the epicenter, which you’ve started to say, what could be unleashed by the dismantling of ICWA, first of all, on Native people and Native rights. Just talk a little more about that.

Howard Law Library

JD: Yeah, so I see this as an ushering in of the Termination Era, which I wrote a bit about in my piece for Truthout.

So just as a bit of a brief background, in the 1950s, the federal government, Congress—Congress is the only one who has any legal authority over federally recognized tribes, which is also part of what’s at stake, the argument within this case.

But the Termination Era of the 1950s, the US government came in and basically terminated its sovereign nation-to-nation relationship with many tribes.

The numbers that I have found vary a bit, but over 13,000 tribal members lost their recognition status. Several tribes in Oregon and California lost their status, which was also based on taking the lands in Oregon and California, and selling them off to non-Native interests.

There were also changes to criminal jurisdiction. Native people were relocated heavily to urban centers. There was a relocation program that came during this era, that the federal government came in and said, “You know what? You can get good education, jobs. We’ll get you housing, all these things if you move to cities.”

And, as they have always done to us, they broke their promises. Our people got to cities and were put in the worst neighborhoods, kept in destitution, no good jobs, no good healthcare.

But suddenly, you’re away from your Native community. You’re away from your tribe, and you’re not—it’s very interesting the way it works in this country. You know, my tribal citizenship for the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma doesn’t end when I leave my reservation, any more than my US citizenship ends if I leave the so-called US.

But a lot of my trust and treaty rights, they diminish, you know? I live in Washington, DC. I have a trust and treaty right for the Indian Health Services. However, there are no IHS services anywhere near where I live.

So by relocating us, even though we’re still citizens and members of sovereign nations, we still have these trust and treaty rights, it was a way of breaking up our communities, and taking away our ability to exercise these rights.

Now with this case, Haaland v. Brackeen, I really see that as ushering in another Termination Era. Quinault Nation vice president and president of the National Congress of American Indians Fawn Sharp told me in an interview that she really saw us as already being in a Termination Era, and that this case could just move it along even further.

SCOTUSblog (11/9/22)

So I sat in the Court. It was an over three-hour hearing and it was, I’m not going to lie, it was quite difficult to sit through. There was a lot of really insulting things being thrown around in there.

But one of the questions that kept coming up is tribal citizenship: Is it being a citizen of a sovereign nation, or is it simply being a race of people?

JJ: That seems to be at the core of it, yeah.

JD: Right. And what’s so infuriating, which I don’t believe I’ve ever seen this talked about in any non-Native press ever, but: You don’t have to know anything about Indian law in order to graduate from law school, to pass the bar, to serve as a judge, to serve on the Supreme Court.

And Indian law is part of constitutional law, it’s part of federal law. We have people graduating, becoming lawyers, becoming judges, that know absolutely nothing about this. And this is very scary for Native tribes, as so much of our very ability to exist goes through the Court.

So it was just really scary. The only person on the Supreme Court who has any experience with Indian case law is Justice Gorsuch. The rest of them have no experience, and it was very clear that they knew very little about us.

Even the justices that I know will rule on the side of tribes, still some of what they said, it was just so clear they don’t even understand who and what tribes are, and how it’s different than being a race.

JJ: Yeah. Maybe explain that a little bit. Maybe tell folks, it’s not the same thing.

JD: Yeah. So one, I want to say that race is a social construct. Race is something made up. Ethnicity is real. Culture is real. So I want to say that, first of all, I believe that race is just a construct in general for everyone.

But for Native people, you know, I’ll use my tribe as an example. I want to point out, Cherokee Nation is the largest federally recognized tribe in the country. We have more resources than a lot of other tribes, so not all tribal nations are in the same circumstances. I want to make that very clear.

But my tribe, for example, just passed a $3.5 billion fiscal year budget for 2023. Our principal chief—if you want to have some comparison to the US system, which our US federal government system was actually based on the Haudenosaunee Confederacy’s tribal system—our principal chief is our president.

Our Tribal Council is our Congress. We have a Supreme Court, we have a marshal service, we have a healthcare service. Forbes just named us one of the top 10 employers in the state of Oklahoma. We are not a race that you just check on a box.

I vote in tribal elections. I see this as, my citizenship to Cherokee Nation is no different than my rights as a citizen to the US.

But, I think, one, there’s a level of ignorance on the part of the justices and the lawyers, everyone, that just don’t understand what tribal sovereignty is. But I think it’s also very intentional. Matthew McGill, who argues for the Brackeen family, also argued for Energy Transfer Partners’ Dakota Access Pipeline, which was very fiercely fought by Native people from around the world.

But McGill actually said during the hearing, “Citizenship is a proxy for race.” Well, citizenship is not race. It was very frustrating.

There’s a level of ignorance, but there’s also a level of intention that it’s very clear they know what they’re doing, they know what they’re arguing, and they know how all of these cases move together. Gibson Dunn, the law firm representing the Brackeens, they actually went looking for the Brackeen family; the Brackeens didn’t go to them. They actually represent, I believe, two of the world’s largest casinos. They just filed a casino-related lawsuit in Washington state.

They know what they’re doing. They know, and the states know too.

JJ: That’s exactly it. Gibson Dunn has filed a complaint that tribal gaming is unconstitutional. They’re using the exact same argument that they’re using in Brackeen, and so we’re looking for journalists to zoom out and connect those dots. Like, why is it in their interest to abolish tribal rights, and what will ensue as a result of that?

New York Times (8/23/16)

But I wanted to talk about media in the sense that, again, coming back to tribal rights— Standing Rock and NoDAPL introduced a lot of media coverage for folks, and a lot of it was good, but I was struck by a New York Times article that was talking about the Dakota Access Pipeline, and they counterposed it, they describe the opposition as tribes who

viewed the project as a wounding intrusion onto lands where generations of their ancestors hunted bison, gathered water and were born and buried, long before treaties and fences stamped a different order onto the Plains.

To me, this is corporate media doing Native Americans as, like, a Pinterest page, but also talking about treaties as something that are just in a misty past, and certainly not a legal reality.

I just wonder what you make of media coverage in general of this set of issues.

JD: I think non-Native media coverage of pretty much all Native issues is pretty deplorable.

I feel like even when I read things written by non-Natives, and I can tell that they’re friendly to Native people, Native issues, still their ignorance comes through.

You know, not properly citing people: I was interviewed by Mother Jones a few years back, and I told them, you need to say that I’m a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. If you don’t say that, it’s wrong. And they still just listed me as Cherokee. Well, that’s not accurate, you know?

But with the New York Times, for example—we’ll go with the more egregious example —the New York Times doesn’t have a single Native journalist. Not one. In fact, I believe it was in this last year, they even published what we would call a pretendian, which is a non-Native who was faking Native identity.

So they have a long history of doing really horrible things to us, but their coverage of Haaland v. Brackeen and ICWA in general—because ICWA has actually been legally challenged more times than the Affordable Care Act, so this is all very, very complex—but their coverage of it has been pretty awful.

I read the article that they wrote right before the court hearing and right after the court hearing, and there was a lot of racism in there. There was a lot of factually incomplete reporting. For example, they actually said in one of those articles that before the Supreme Court hearing, the Brackeens kept a “low profile.”

But they actually didn’t. Jennifer Brackeen had a whole blog where she talked about the entire process of stealing these Native children from their families. She also says that they knew that they weren’t legally going to be the first option for adopting a Native child as well.

New York Times didn’t talk about how the Brackeens have still been allowed to adopt at least one of these Native children. They didn’t talk about that. How can the Brackeens assert that they’ve been racially discriminated against when they still got what they wanted?

New York Times (11/7/22)

JJ: Exactly. And you know, I was frankly irked by a Times story that started off saying that the case “primarily pits the Brackeens in Texas against the US Department of the Interior and five tribes.”

JD: Yes.

JJ: And then later they say, oh, well actually, a brief on the case was endorsed by 497 tribes, and they were signed by 87 members of Congress and 23 states and the District of Columbia, and the American Academy of Pediatrics and the AMA and the APA all said that ICWA helps redress physical and psychological trauma, and yet the headline is like, “families against the state.” It’s such a misrepresentation.

JD: I read that article. I remember that. When I read that, I went, “Huh, well this is off to a bad start.”

And it was either that article or another, this was also something that’s been very upsetting that I’ve seen across non-Native press on the ICWA case, is that they don’t often talk about how many of the children who are removed from their homes are not being removed because of abuse.

It’s generally a welfare issue, sometimes even poverty. Some of these people who are arguing to overturn ICWA are saying that these families that want to adopt these children have money and resources, so they’re a better fit for raising Native children than Native people are.

The New York Times didn’t mention that, but they did mention that both mothers in this Brackeen case, the Native mothers, had tested positive for methamphetamine.

So they have no problems portraying us as all being drug addicts and bad parents. But they don’t actually talk about the reality of the system, and they don’t talk about, as was pointed out by Chairman Tehassi Hill of the Oneida Tribe in Wisconsin, and that I said earlier: in data, Native families are the least likely to get any sort of family support to help them so that they can be reunified in issues of, we’ll say, drug use or other traumas.

Also the New York Times didn’t acknowledge the fact that we Natives, we are still facing genocide. We are all struggling with trauma, but there’s a reason for it, you know?

There’s just so much that was left out and that was just done so poorly. They also, when they talked about Navajo Nation, because the Navajo Nation is involved in this case, because both of the children the Brackeens are, after all, Navajo Nation, as well as one is Cherokee Nation.

But the New York Times, every time they talk about Navajo Nation tribes, they just say “the Navajo,” which is a little confusing and also a little insulting. They’re a tribe, they’re a government. They’re not showing that. They’re not actually putting forward what this story really is.

I’m not sure whether to say it’s just sloppy, poor journalism, or if it’s purposely misleading. I’m not sure which one it is.

JJ: I hear that. The way that elite media talk about tribes and tribal law makes it sound as though we’re supposed to think it’s kind of a joke. “That’s not for real! What if we want the resources that are underneath them on their land? I mean, obviously we don’t need to honor anything that existed from the beginning of this country.”

I just feel there’s an unseriousness with which elite news media address Indigenous issues.

JD: They do. Absolutely. And there’s also a reason for that, beyond the fact that we’re not employed by them. But also, even Native media has issues reporting sometimes, because of access to government.

I’ve learned from a Native journalist friend of mine, who works for an established news organization, that they’ve been denied a press pass for Congress, for hearings, because they’re owned by a tribal government.

Well, much of our Native press is owned by tribal governments, because we wouldn’t have press otherwise, but the congressional press people say that that means they’re a foreign agent, so they can’t have access to press passes for Congress, which is just wild.

So, which is it, US government? Are we foreign agents? Are we sovereign nations, or are we just a race of people? Make up your mind. And the fact that this just gets left out of reporting is just maddening.

JJ: I’m going to end it right there, but just for today. We’ve been speaking with Jen Deerinwater, executive director at CrushingColonialism.org.

You can find Jen’s work there, as well as at Truthout.org and other outlets. Jen is the co-editor of Sacred and Subversive, and you can also find her work in the anthologies Disability Visibility and Two-Spirits Belong Here.

Thank you so much, Jen Deerinwater, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

JD: Thank you for having me on.

The post ‘A Crucial Part of Colonization Is Taking Our Children’ appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

Truthout (11/12/22)

This week on CounterSpin: Those listeners who have heard about Haaland v. Brackeen will know that that Supreme Court case is about considering the Indian Child Welfare Act—which is aimed at keeping Native communities together—to be “race-based,” and therefore unfair and unconstitutional. Opposing the actual mission of those who want to eliminate the Indian Child Welfare Act is just…reality: the reality that made the Act necessary in the first place, and the reality that will likely ensue if it is repealed. We’ll learn more from Jen Deerinwater, who writes for Truthout, among other outlets, and is founding executive director of Crushing Colonialism.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent media conflation of crime and homelessness.

The post Jen Deerinwater on Indian Child Welfare Act appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Searchlight New Mexico. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

A team of experts monitoring child welfare reform in New Mexico has found that foster kids have been placed in homeless shelters and other inappropriate settings, corroborating an investigation by Searchlight New Mexico and ProPublica that showed struggling teens have languished for weeks or months in shelters without the mental health services they need.

These teens often have complex, trauma-related mental health problems that cannot be addressed in shelters, Searchlight and ProPublica found. In some cases, teens were moved from psychiatric hospitals directly to shelters.

Across the state from 2019 through 2021, someone at a shelter that accepts foster teens called 911 nearly once a day to report runaways, suicide attempts and other emergencies, according to dispatch records.

In years past, the state Department of Children, Youth and Families often sent foster children with serious mental health needs to residential treatment centers. But the majority of residential treatment beds in New Mexico have been eliminated amid state investigations and lawsuits alleging physical and sexual abuse.

Instead, New Mexico promised to build a “statewide, community-based mental health system that all children and families will be able to access.” That system has yet to be built. And the state doesn’t have enough foster homes to meet the need.

So caseworkers turn to youth homeless shelters, also known as children’s crisis shelters, which are licensed to temporarily house kids. Those facilities don’t provide psychiatric care, and the state has agreed to use them as foster placements only in “extraordinary circumstances” — essentially, when needed to protect the child.

Shelter staff, attorneys and child advocates say shelter stays are much too common, with kids sometimes staying for weeks or months and moving from one facility to another. There’s a name for the frequent turnover: “the shelter shuffle.”

The team of experts found evidence of that practice. In a single month, December 2021, CYFD placed foster kids in shelters 30 times, the team found. None of those placements met the state’s standards, they wrote. Forty percent occurred right after another shelter stay.

Not only did CYFD inappropriately place youth in shelters, the report found, it also housed foster kids in caseworkers’ offices, a practice the department had agreed to end by December 2020.

Prior to the report’s release, officials at CYFD had told legislators that the number of kids in congregate care, a category that includes shelters and residential treatment centers, had fallen 61% since 2018. Shelter managers attributed much of that drop to the pandemic, when shelters had to freeze admissions if a resident tested positive for COVID-19. Nearly 3,000 kids entered the foster system in 2021.

Still, the monitors found that the share of children placed in an office, hotel or out-of-state facility had doubled between 2019 and 2021, from 2% to 4% of the state’s foster youth.

One of those kids was Isaiah Stewart, a 14-year-old who had been placed in three shelters as of this summer. In a July interview, he said he spent his days at CYFD’s main Albuquerque office while he waited for a bed in a shelter.

“I see a lot of kids who have stayed there too long because they have nowhere else to go,” Isaiah said. “Eventually they just get fed up. Any kid would, to be honest.” Kids often run away from shelters after losing hope, he said.

“I’m just trying to get placed with a family that will care for me,” he said. In September, CYFD placed Isaiah with a foster family, according to his attorney.

The team of monitors was appointed as part of a settlement between CYFD, the state Human Services Department, and a group of 14 foster children who sued the state. That lawsuit, filed in 2018, claimed the state was “locking New Mexico’s foster children into a vicious cycle of declining physical, mental and behavioral health.”

The state settled the suit in 2020 and agreed to wide-ranging reforms, including putting an end to inappropriate placements in shelters and other congregate care settings.

As of December 2021, the report said, the state hadn’t met any of the 34 key goals laid out in the settlement.

In interviews, state officials have touted progress in reducing shelter placements and said they’ve opened more sites to support families and keep kids out of inpatient facilities. And they have created plans to recruit foster families, the report noted.

“We are continuing to push hard to make every change needed to ensure that every New Mexico child in the CYFD system receives the very best care possible,” CYFD Secretary Barbara Vigil said in an emailed statement. “While we have more work ahead, I am certain we are on the right path.”

Interviews this year with foster youth showed that many of the problems described in the report have not been resolved. Calls to 911 from shelters continued into this year. Data from one shelter showed CYFD placed kids there 30 times from January to June, with many staying two weeks or longer. (A senior staffer at the shelter shared the data, which didn’t include any identifying information about residents, on the condition that the shelter not be identified, out of fear of retaliation by CYFD.)

In June, the plaintiffs in the lawsuit entered into a formal dispute resolution process to get the state to comply with the settlement. The state agreed to take specific steps to move toward compliance.

“It’s still not fixed,” said Bette Fleishman, the attorney for the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit. If the report were based on the situation as it stands today, she said, “we’d still have a lot of those same issues.”

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Ed Williams, Searchlight New Mexico.

Photograph Source: Ernest Mettendorf – Public Domain

Attacks on the Indian Child Welfare Act

On Wednesday, November 9^th, 2022, the Supreme Court began hearing oral arguments in Haaland v. Brackeen.This case is centered on the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978, which was adopted to prevent family separation, specifically, the removal of Native American children from tribal lands. In this case, “Baby O” who was left in a hospital after birth under Nevada’s Safe Haven Laws, was adopted by the white foster parents, Heather and Nick Libretti. Investigation of Baby O’s family identified her biological father and other blood relatives, finding that she is eligible for citizenship in the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo, a federally recognized Native American tribe. [1] Under the ICWA, preferred placement of Native children rests first with parents, then grandparents and other non-nuclear family blood relatives. The parents were notified that they would not be able to adopt Baby O, and they decided to contact all potential blood relatives with whom Baby O might be placed, to try to convince them to give up their custody rights. The Libretti’s approached Baby O’s grandmother, requesting she renounce tribal citizenship to remove Baby O from ICWA’s coverage. The Libretti’s hired attorneys and worked with biased social workers who did not reach out to many of Baby O’s blood relatives until a court ordered them to do so, and when they did, they tried to convince them from accepting custody of the child.[1]

The Libretti’s eventually won full custody of Baby O, though this was not enough. The Libretti’s charge that their difficulties in adopting Baby O were a result of a racially discriminatory law—the ICWA—which devalues white parents in preference for Native parents. The Libretti’s claim that they were racially discriminated against and therefore, under the equal protection clause, the ICWA is unconstitutional. Their case is only one of four that has been brought under the single name of Haaland v. Brackeen. [1]

The United States and Canada have terrifying histories of “family separation.” What has been witnessed across the Trump and Biden administration’s family separation of migrants, largely coming from Central and Latin America (and almost exclusively constituting black and brown families amongst their ranks) is only the most visible and contemporary form of dehumanization of other ethnic groups via the exploitation and abuse of that group’s minors. In the United States, the effort to forcibly assimilate through cultural or human genocide of Native populations has been exposed time and again. Whether it be via the continual encroachment upon territorial lands despite treaties with nations, the Indian Removal Act of 1830, or the Massacre at Wounded Knee in 1973, the United States government has repeatedly demonstrated its commitment to elimination of Native culture, territory, and families.

In the late 19^th century, the United States opened boarding schools for Native children, removing them from tribal lands, punishing use of Native languages, enforcing English or French, educating students of their cultural inadequacies, and often lying to children, claiming that their parents did not want them.[2] When the minors arrived at these boarding schools, they were physically and symbolically stripped of identity via hair cutting and aggressive washing and scrubbing: their Native life cleaned off their bodies, they were, from then on out, to act like Caucasians in a white society. Many Native children who attended these boarding schools were physically and sexually abused, were neglected or outright murdered, and their parents were refused visitation or even notice of their child’s passing. [3]Even in the past few years, newly unearthed mass graves at former boarding schools in Canada demonstrate the continued trauma these boarding schools have caused generations of Native peoples, along with showing the public just how much we all do not yet know but was done in the name of “saving” Native peoples. [4] As the founder of a boarding school said in 1892: “all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” [5] When children were not taken to boarding schools, or after a period at a boarding school, they were adopted by white families. Here we find the harrowing stories of those Native children who were adopted to be slaves and servants to white families, and who continued to experience cultural genocide and second-class status inside of their adoptive homes. [1]

By the time the ICWA was adopted in 1978, 25-35% of Native children had been forcibly removed from tribal lands, some communities having no children left. [1] [4] Many victims of boarding schools still live today, and have reported the physical, emotional, and sexual abuse they experienced in boarding schools and in their white adopted families’ homes alike. [5]

It is through the lens of these historical truths that the ICWA was adopted by Congress in 1978; it was a modest attempt at placing guards against the cultural genocide and abuse of Native children, and it rests on a legal framework identifying the independence of tribal governments in relation to the United States government.

Attacks on Affirmative Action

Relatedly, Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina and Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard are currently challenging the constitutional foundations of affirmative action in the Supreme Court. [6] Though in 2003, Grutter v. Bollinger declared that race could be used as a factor in consideration of admissions for colleges and universities to tamper unconscious bias and improve student diversity. [6]In these two cases, conservative attorney Edward Blum used his own Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) group to argue that there is anti-white racial discrimination in university admissions, but these cases were unsuccessful. The current cases brought to the Supreme Court argue that now, rather than anti-white racial discrimination in university admissions processes, race-conscious admissions in previous decades discriminated against Jewish students, and contemporarily discriminate against Asian Americans. [7]

Social and political scholars have long documented the “model minority” or “buffer” role into which Asians and Asian Americans have been thrust, essentially using colorism and the promise of “better than” treatment to pit Asian communities against black communities in the United States. [8] Perhaps the clearest model minority myth perpetuated in US society is that Asians and Asian Americans are studious and academically—especially mathematically—endowed. Often portrayed as the minority who knows how to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps,” Kim details a tortured history in the United States of Caucasians inflating and then pointing to Asian American successes to justify lack of social provision for black and brown communities, essentially arguing “if they can do it, why can’t you?” [8]

Thus, the new claims that race-conscious admissions practices discriminate against Asians and Asian Americans is to claim that the minority that, stereotypically in the minds of Americans, deserve their academic positions, are being discriminated against in favor of undeserving minorities. Unfortunately, these claims do not hold, as various Asian American think tanks and representative institutions find that Asian Americans have experienced great benefits from race-conscious admissions practices, striking down such logic. [9] Given that claims of anti-white discrimination did not work for Blum, Asian Americans are being portrayed through a racist model minority stereotype to present affirmative action as discriminatory, even towards minorities themselves.

Uplifting White Supremacy and Dismantling Minority Protections

Both sets of cases brought to the Supreme Court during this session share a central theme: the Supreme Court is going to decide whether to legitimate the claim of “reverse racism” or anti-white discrimination. The parents of Baby O have claimed that their adoption process was made difficult due to discrimination against their being white, and Blum is using Asian Americans as a second-best and near-white minority to claim that university admissions processes unfairly discount the value of Asian (read “also white”) students in favor of undeserving others.

This is only the most recent and perhaps damning presentation of white fragility, denial of systemic inequality, and white supremacy that conservatives are attempting to use to unravel the hard-fought civil rights protections of minority groups. We should subsequently address these issues that lack substantial evidence as equally as irrational and potentially inducing of violence as unsubstantiated claims of 2020 election fraud.

Reverse racism does not exist. What makes white supremacy, in fact, supremacy, is the way in which policing, courts, legal structure, de facto housing preferences and housing market values, teacher interaction with students, bureaucratic interaction with citizens and every other aspect of society give preference to lighter skin or to those with European heritage. White supremacy is not simply the individual being able to say or think terrible things; it is also the existence of a socio-legal political structure that will support that individual, even to the oppression of the human rights of many others. Ethnic and racial minorities in the United States do not receive this systemic support. Ethnic and racial minorities are targeted by a systemically racist policing system [10], excluded by a weakening education system, particularly because of the coronavirus pandemic [11], and disenfranchised by an intensifying assault on voting rights. [12]

What these two cases show us then, is not that there is any credence to the claims of reverse racism. We should not assume that evidence-based reasoning is the goal of the extreme right in the United States; their election denialism and their refusal to address medical necessities and human rights show as much. Instead, what these cases show the public is the continued ratcheting in intensity and reach of white supremacist narratives. It is, after all, the Great Replacement Theory that claims that black and brown minorities are in collusion with international Jewish conspirators to commit white genocide in the United States. What better way to prevent this “white genocide” than to “protect” the rights of white parents and white students through the revocation of minority rights? The sitting Supreme Court that has agreed to hear both series of cases has proven that it also is not concerned with evidence-based reasoning, demonstrating how civil rights for Native Americans are deeply rooted in the protections afforded by the ICWA, and it is not concerned with providing opportunities to students of color: the Supreme Court and the conservative groups supporting these appeals are only concerned with the maintenance of white supremacy via the dismantling of a network of minority civil rights.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Sakura Shinjo.

The post The Deadly Cost of Police Welfare Checks appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John W. Whitehead – Nisha Whitehead.

Pigs arrive to the Farmer John slaughterhouse in Vernon, Calif., on September 27, 2018.

Photo: David McNew/Getty Images

Ruling in favor of industry would set yet another grim precedent, potentially curtailing the ability of states to enforce progressive industry regulations.

Related

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Many of the industry giants are not aggressively siding with the National Pork Producers Council.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Natasha Lennard.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Searchlight New Mexico. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Four years ago, kids in New Mexico’s child welfare system were in a dire situation. Kids were being cycled through all sorts of emergency placements: offices, youth homeless shelters, residential treatment centers rife with abuse. Some never found anything stable and ended up on the streets after they turned 18.

A lawsuit brought by 14 foster children in 2018 claimed the state was “locking New Mexico’s foster children into a vicious cycle of declining physical, mental and behavioral health.” The state settled the case in February 2020 and committed to reforms.

But two and a half years later, New Mexico has delivered on just a portion of those promises, leaving some of the state’s most vulnerable foster youth without the mental health services they need.

In a settlement agreement for the suit, known as Kevin S. after the name of the lead plaintiff, the state committed to eliminating inappropriate placements and putting every child into a licensed foster home. It also agreed to build a new system of community-based mental health services that would be available to every child in New Mexico, not just those in foster care.

Yet the Children, Youth and Families Department continues to make hundreds of placements in emergency facilities every year. Although CYFD has reduced the number of children in residential treatment centers, it continues to place high-needs children and teens in youth homeless shelters. Mental health services for foster youth, which includes all kids in CYFD protective services custody, not just those in foster homes, are severely lacking, lawyers and child advocates say.

The department said it has worked to build new mental health programs and services for kids. “Most of these efforts are successful and are on a path to expansion,” Rob Johnson, public information officer for CYFD, said in a written statement.

“This is an incredible amount of progress made in a relatively short time in a system that had been systemically torn down and neglected,” he wrote. “We’re not where we want to be, and we continue to look and move ahead to create and strengthen the state supports for those with behavioral health needs.”

The Kevin S. lawsuit was filed amid a national reckoning over child welfare agencies’ reliance on residential treatment centers. Similar lawsuits in Oregon, Texas and elsewhere accused states of inappropriately placing kids in residential treatment centers, often far from their homes, and in other types of so-called congregate care. Kids placed in those facilities got worse, not better, the suits argued.

After Texas failed to comply with court-ordered fixes to its child welfare system, a federal judge said she plans to fine the state. The Oregon lawsuit is proceeding despite the state’s efforts to have a judge dismiss the case.

Several months before the New Mexico suit was filed, federal lawmakers passed the Family First Prevention Services Act, which redirected federal funding in order to pressure states into phasing out large residential treatment centers. In their place, the law called for a new type of facility to treat children with acute mental health needs: small, strictly regulated facilities called qualified residential treatment programs.

Child welfare advocates across the country welcomed these reforms. But they warned that shutting down residential treatment centers without alternatives could leave kids in an equally desperate situation — a scenario they said was reminiscent of the effort to shut down mental hospitals starting in the 1950s.

“I believe we do need a change in group care,” U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, said during a 2016 debate in Congress. “One has to ask where these children will go if those group facilities are no longer available.”

The first residential treatment center in New Mexico to close, in early 2019, was the state’s largest: a 120-bed facility in Albuquerque called Desert Hills that was the target of lawsuits and an investigation into physical and sexual abuse.

Many of the lawsuits’ claims — which Desert Hills and its parent company Acadia Healthcare denied or claimed insufficient knowledge of — remain unresolved pending trials. Other cases have been settled, with undisclosed terms.

A spokesman for Acadia said Desert Hills decided not to renew its license “given the severe challenges in the New Mexico system” and worked with CYFD on a transition plan.

“Of course we are not going to drop kids on the street,” CYFD’s chief counsel at the time, Kate Girard, told the Santa Fe New Mexican soon after. “We know we can find them better beds.”

Some of the kids who had been living at Desert Hills were sent to homeless shelters. Others went to residential treatment centers in other states, which the CYFD secretary at the time publicly admitted put kids out of sight and at higher risk of abuse.

State officials have said they send kids out of state when they don’t have appropriate facilities in New Mexico, and they make placements based on individualized plans for each child.

Those out-of-state residential treatment centers included facilities run by Acadia. One foster teen was raped by a staffer at her out-of-state placement, according to an ongoing federal lawsuit. The facility has denied the allegation in court; Acadia has denied knowledge of the alleged assault.

In January 2019, a few months after the Kevin S. lawsuit was filed, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham took office after promising during her campaign to address the state’s dismal national standing in child welfare. She asked for an increase in CYFD’s annual budget, and the legislature complied, appropriating an 11% increase over the year before.

“A top CYFD priority is increasing access to community-based mental health services for children and youth,” Lujan Grisham said in a speech in June 2019. “We are expanding and will continue to expand these programs aggressively and relentlessly.”

State officials settled the Kevin S. suit in February 2020, agreeing to a road map for reforming its foster care system. Among them: a deadline later that year to stop housing kids in CYFD offices when workers couldn’t find a foster home.

That deadline passed, but CYFD didn’t stop. The practice continues today.

While the state is committed to do everything it can to keep children from sleeping in offices, sometimes — such as in the middle of the night — the best option is to let children stay in an office while staff search for an appropriate placement, CYFD spokesperson Charlie Moore-Pabst wrote in an email.

All of CYFD's county offices have places for children to sleep, he explained. “These rooms are furnished like a youth’s bedroom, with beds, linens, entertainment, clothing, and access to bathrooms with showers,” he wrote. "They’re not merely office spaces."

The state continued to crack down on residential treatment centers. In 2021, a facility for youth with sexual behavior problems closed after the state opened an investigation into abuse allegations. Some of those residents were moved to homeless shelters.

“From our point of view, it was almost clear that the state didn’t want us to be there,” said Nathan Crane, an attorney for Youth Health Associates, the company that ran the facility. Crane said that to his knowledge, none of the allegations against the treatment center were substantiated. “We mutually agreed to shut the door and walk away.”

Johnson said that when it learned of safety concerns at these facilities, it promptly investigated. “Following the investigations,” Johnson wrote, “CYFD determined that it was in the best interest of the children in its care to assist in the closure of the facilities and find alternate arrangements for each child.”

Meanwhile, the state lagged in meeting its commitments to build a better mental health system. The state had met only 11 of its 49 targets in the Kevin S. settlement as of mid-2021, according to experts appointed to monitor its progress.

Although the parties to the suit agreed to extend deadlines during the pandemic, the plaintiffs said in a November 2021 press release, “This dismal pace of change is not acceptable. The State’s delayed and incomplete responses demonstrate that children in the State’s custody are still not receiving the care they need to heal and grow.”

In December 2021, an Albuquerque residential treatment center called Bernalillo Academy closed amid an investigation into abuse allegations. The largest remaining facility at the time, Bernalillo specialized in treating kids with autism and other developmental disabilities.

“Being accused of abuse and neglect is a serious offense that questions our integrity and goes against what we are working hard for here at Bernalillo,” Amir Rafiei, then Bernalillo Academy’s executive director, wrote in an email to CYFD challenging the investigation.

Child welfare officials called an emergency meeting of shelter directors, looking for beds for the displaced kids. CYFD went on to place some of those kids in shelters.

”It’s important to note that placements were only made to shelters that fit their admission criteria,” Johnson wrote in the statement to Searchlight and ProPublica.

Michael Bronson, a former CYFD licensing official, said state officials had no plan for where to put the kids housed in those residential treatment centers.

“I thought it was almost criminal,” said Bronson, who conducted the investigations into Desert Hills and Bernalillo. “I was sick to my stomach after they put all those kids on the street.”

CYFD Secretary Barbara Vigil insisted in an interview that officials did have a plan. Teams of employees involved in the children’s care discussed each case in detail, she said: “Each of those children had a transition plan out of the facility into a safe and relatively stable placement.”

But Emily Martin, CYFD Protective Services Bureau Chief, acknowledged, “When facilities have closed, it has left a gap.”

There are now 130 beds in residential treatment centers in the state, less than half the number before the Kevin S. suit was filed.

Frustrated with the lack of progress, the Kevin S. plaintiffs’ attorneys started a formal dispute resolution process in June. The state agreed to take specific steps to comply with the settlement agreement.

The monitors have written another report on the state’s compliance with the settlement, which is due to become public later this year. Sara Crecca, one of the children’s attorneys involved in the settlement, said her team has been involved in discussions with the monitors about the report, but she’s not allowed to disclose them.

“What I can say is that my clients have seen no substantial change,” she said. “If the state was following the road map in the settlement, that wouldn’t be the case.”

Officials stressed that they are making progress. They say they have opened more sites that can work with families to create plans of care; expanded programs for teen parents and teenagers aging out of care; and made community health clinics available to foster children.

CYFD also has funded community health workers and created a program to train families as treatment foster care providers. Four families are participating in that program, Johnson, the CYFD spokesperson, wrote. The department plans to open two small group homes, with six beds each, for youth with high needs, including aggression.

Four years after the federal Family First Act was passed, New Mexico has not licensed a single qualified residential treatment program, the type of facility that is supposed to replace residential treatment centers. The state said in an email to Searchlight and ProPublica that it is “laying the foundation” to create those facilities.

In the meantime, because of the law, the state is on the hook to pay for any stays in congregate care settings that last longer than two weeks.

In August, Vigil appeared before New Mexico legislators to update them on the department’s progress in building a new system of mental health services. In response to pointed questions, she said the department is required by law to serve the highest-needs kids, but it wasn’t doing so. “Quite frankly,” she said, “we don't have a system of care in place to do that.”

Another deadline looms. By December, the state must have all of those new programs available to the children in its care.

“Will it be 100%?” Vigil said in an interview. “Again, I would say no, but that doesn't mean that the system of care is not improving tremendously under this administration.”

We're working to investigate the state’s treatment of teenagers who are in the custody of the Children, Youth and Families Department. To get to the bottom of what’s actually happening, we need help from the people who see the issues firsthand. Filling out the survey below will help us understand the situation and figure out where we should direct our investigation. We’re trying to reach as many people as possible who deal with teenagers in CYFD custody.

We take your privacy seriously. We are gathering these stories for the purposes of our reporting and will not publish your name or information without your consent.

We are the only ones reading what you submit. If you would prefer to use an encrypted app, you can reach out via Signal at 505-699-6401. You can also email ed@searchlightnm.org.

Mollie Simon contributed research.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Ed Williams, Searchlight New Mexico.

The facts are clear: well-designed social protection programs slash poverty. And so—with an estimated 37.2 million people experiencing poverty in the U.S.—it defies reason why the country's welfare system excludes millions of eligible individuals by design, condemning them to destitution and wasting public resources.

Take the Supplemental Security Income (SSI), a federal social assistance program to lift older persons and people with disabilities out of poverty. Only 58% of eligible families actually receive it, as eligibility conditions are so stringent that most applications for the disability support are rejected. Income and asset thresholds that determine eligibility were last set in 1989 and haven't been updated or adjusted for inflation, despite the skyrocketing cost of living.

The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) has similar design flaws. Maximum TANF benefits are well below the federal poverty line in all states, and amounts have actually declined in inflation-adjusted value since 1996 in all but six states. TANF was only received by 21% of families in poverty in 2020, down from 68% in 1996.

It defies reason why the country's welfare system excludes millions of eligible individuals by design, condemning them to destitution and wasting public resources.

Part of the problem is the limited awareness in the U.S. about what social protection actually is. Even Supreme Court justices appear to lack an understanding of its main rationale, excluding Puerto Rican residents from the SSI on the basis that they do not pay certain taxes. But the SSI, as a social assistance program, is by definition allocated based on need and not tax contributions. Exclusions on this basis are absurd at best, and a legacy of colonialism at worst.

What cuts across all these cases is an ideological view that sees social protection not as an investment in people, but as the minimal support provided by governments to avoid extreme destitution among the "deserving poor."

But the result is that many who should be supported are de facto excluded because of the multiple hurdles they must overcome to prove that they are eligible. In a report I presented to the UN Human Rights Council earlier this year, I show how this "non-take-up" of welfare benefits stifles the ability of social protection to improve school and health outcomes, increase work rates and boost local economies.

It is also sometimes argued that the imposition of hurdles to access social protection benefits is necessary to prevent fraud. This is disingenuous. Less than 1% of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits went to households that were ineligible in 2014, mostly not due to recipient fraud but to errors in the system.

Others argue that support going to low-income households may discourage work and be spent on the wrong things. But the evidence simply doesn't support such fears. Increased child allowances are not a disincentive to work, and are not spent on alcohol or tobacco, as is often argued, but rather on health and education. This should not come as a surprise—time and again studies have shown that social protection does not discourage work and that benefits are largely spent on daily necessities.

To fix its broken welfare system, the U.S. must move away from its fixation on fraud, exclusions by design, and the stigmatization of people in poverty. Only then will it benefit from the transformative results that we know social protection can yield.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Olivier De Schutter.

The facts are clear: well-designed social protection programs slash poverty. And so—with an estimated 37.2 million people experiencing poverty in the U.S.—it defies reason why the country's welfare system excludes millions of eligible individuals by design, condemning them to destitution and wasting public resources.

Take the Supplemental Security Income (SSI), a federal social assistance program to lift older persons and people with disabilities out of poverty. Only 58% of eligible families actually receive it, as eligibility conditions are so stringent that most applications for the disability support are rejected. Income and asset thresholds that determine eligibility were last set in 1989 and haven't been updated or adjusted for inflation, despite the skyrocketing cost of living.

The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) has similar design flaws. Maximum TANF benefits are well below the federal poverty line in all states, and amounts have actually declined in inflation-adjusted value since 1996 in all but six states. TANF was only received by 21% of families in poverty in 2020, down from 68% in 1996.

It defies reason why the country's welfare system excludes millions of eligible individuals by design, condemning them to destitution and wasting public resources.

Part of the problem is the limited awareness in the U.S. about what social protection actually is. Even Supreme Court justices appear to lack an understanding of its main rationale, excluding Puerto Rican residents from the SSI on the basis that they do not pay certain taxes. But the SSI, as a social assistance program, is by definition allocated based on need and not tax contributions. Exclusions on this basis are absurd at best, and a legacy of colonialism at worst.

What cuts across all these cases is an ideological view that sees social protection not as an investment in people, but as the minimal support provided by governments to avoid extreme destitution among the "deserving poor."

But the result is that many who should be supported are de facto excluded because of the multiple hurdles they must overcome to prove that they are eligible. In a report I presented to the UN Human Rights Council earlier this year, I show how this "non-take-up" of welfare benefits stifles the ability of social protection to improve school and health outcomes, increase work rates and boost local economies.

It is also sometimes argued that the imposition of hurdles to access social protection benefits is necessary to prevent fraud. This is disingenuous. Less than 1% of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits went to households that were ineligible in 2014, mostly not due to recipient fraud but to errors in the system.

Others argue that support going to low-income households may discourage work and be spent on the wrong things. But the evidence simply doesn't support such fears. Increased child allowances are not a disincentive to work, and are not spent on alcohol or tobacco, as is often argued, but rather on health and education. This should not come as a surprise—time and again studies have shown that social protection does not discourage work and that benefits are largely spent on daily necessities.

To fix its broken welfare system, the U.S. must move away from its fixation on fraud, exclusions by design, and the stigmatization of people in poverty. Only then will it benefit from the transformative results that we know social protection can yield.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Olivier De Schutter.

The post Animal Welfare in the Bible appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jon Hochschartner.

Photograph Source: Guérin Nicolas – CC BY-SA 3.0

For years, U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) inspectors dutifully documented extensive animal suffering at Moulton Chinchilla Ranch(MCR), a chinchilla breeding facility in Minnesota. In 2021, MCR was the only USDA-licensed supplier of chinchillas for research, according to National Geographic and Science. Meanwhile, USDA inspections of MCR reported seeing chinchillas, many destined for experimentation, with eyes swollen, weeping, and sealed shut; a thin, unresponsive chinchilla, missing part of her leg, brutally “euthanized” by breaking her neck; a dead chinchilla left on top of a cage for so long that her decaying body had to be peeled off of it.

After failing to confiscate a single chinchilla from MCR—even as the USDA’s own inspectors issued citation after citation for Animal Welfare Act (AWA) violations over a period of five years from 2013 to 2018—the department finally filed a case in November 2018 against MCR’s owner, dealer Daniel Moulton. Following even more incomprehensible delays, the case finally went to court in 2021.

In October 2021, USDA Administrative Law Judge Jill Clifton ruled from the bench—a highly unusual move—that Moulton’s dealer license must be permanently revoked, calling his 213 “willful” violations “absolutely astounding.” Nevertheless, he was fined a mere $18,000—less than 1 percent of the amount allowed under the law. To make matters worse, he was permitted to keep nearly 700 chinchillas languishing on his ranch for months while he decided whether or not he would file an appeal (and was even granted multiple extensions to do so).

In November, less than a month after the judge’s ruling, the USDA once again documented multiple failures to comply with the law as the chinchillas at the ranch continued to suffer from a lack of adequate veterinary care and staffing. The following month in December, my organization, the Animal Welfare Institute (AWI), sent a letter to the USDA, copying three Department of Justice (DOJ) attorneys, noting that Moulton continued to place his chinchillas “in serious danger.” One of the unambiguous statutory remedies for his violations is confiscation. Again, however, the USDA confiscated none of the ailing animals.

In Judge Clifton’s ruling, she expressed regret “that it took this many years for me to get to this complaint, which was filed November 29, 2018” and explained that the “very, very long delay” was caused by government shutdowns, the COVID-19 pandemic, and “some other difficulties.” Notably, Judge Clifton added, “It should not have taken this long for us to get to this point.”

It took until February 2022 before Moulton stated that he no longer held any chinchillas, according to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

Meanwhile, last fall, the USDA finally revoked the license of Iowa dog breeder Daniel Gingerich, who amassed an unprecedented number of citations for horrific animal mistreatment. Inspectors documented multiple dogs under severe heat stress with no access to drinking water, even as the heat index soared to 119 degrees Fahrenheit; one was in an emaciated state. Another report noted a severely neglected one-month-old poodle puppy crying out and dying before the inspectors’ eyes. Under a settlement, Gingerich was forced to surrender more than 500 dogs and puppies, but only after the DOJ obtained a historic injunction against the breeder after indefensible USDA delays.

These two high-profile cases graphically illustrate how the USDA continues to drag its heels instead of jumping into action to protect animals from immense and avoidable suffering. AWI and other animal advocacy organizations have long documented the department’s inexcusable failure to enforce the Animal Welfare Act, the primary federal law intended to afford basic protections to certain animals that are bred for commercial sale.

The AWA applies to animal dealers, breeders, exhibitors, handlers, and carriers in addition to research laboratories, and sets minimum standards of care that must be provided for animals—including housing, handling, sanitation, food, water, veterinary care, and protection from extreme weather. The law covers warm-blooded species, but expressly excludes mice, rats, and birds bred for research, as well as most farm animals.

It is the responsibility of the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service administrator, its animal care officials, and its general counsel to urgently act on inspectors’ disturbing reports of cruelty, seize animals in need of rescue, and ensure that such appalling mistreatment doesn’t continue. The situation has reached a tipping point.

From 2016 to 2020 (while former President Donald Trump was in office), there was a 67 percent drop in the number of AWA inspections where citations were documented, according to AWI’s research. New investigations plunged by nearly 90 percent during this period. In a July 2021 article about Moulton Chinchilla Ranch, National Geographic pointed out that the USDA under the Trump administration had been hamstrung when it came to enforcing animal welfare law. But the USDA’s failure to adequately enforce the AWA predates the Trump administration and has persisted for decades, as National Geographic later reported in October 2021.

Gingerich, the former dog breeder, was permitted to continue operating after he hid dogs from USDA inspectors, destroyed required acquisition records, and operated “facilities in 10 different locations throughout Iowa, several of which are unlicensed,” stated the Iowa Capital Dispatch, citing federal records. In 2021 alone, before the USDA took action, inspections of Gingerich’s operation yielded 25 reports and more than 200 citations.

In the case of MCR, the USDA has known about the abysmal conditions since at least 2013. Yet the department never followed through on what its inspectors conscientiously recorded by confiscating a single chinchilla or notifying the DOJ, as mandated by the AWA, once it determined that the chinchillas’ health was in serious danger. Since 2014, Moulton has racked up more direct citations (the most severe type of critical citation) than any of the other 10,000-plus AWA-regulated licensees and registrants. The USDA documented direct citations each year from 2014 through 2021, including a 2018 announced inspection, which found 22 chinchillas needing veterinary care.

Chinchillas have large ears, and their hearing is similar to humans, so they are often used for invasive and terminal research on ear diseases. Moulton Chinchilla Ranch has supplied chinchillas to studies affiliated with the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Navy, Harvard Medical School, and more—even though lab animals with unaddressed health issues can compromise the integrity of the research. Taxpayers’ money has not only been used to fund potentially flawed research but also to support Moulton’s operations.

On the first full day of testimony during Moulton’s administrative hearing, veteran inspector Brenton Cox—discussing inspections from 2014—stated that MCR was the worst facility he had ever seen, that it gave him nightmares, and that he used MCR as a training tool for what a facility should not be. During the hearing (which AWI monitored), the USDA stated that some chinchillas suffered from swellings the size of eggs or golf balls and indicated (over Moulton’s objections) that they were in pain.

But where was this outrage and validation of the inspectors’ vital work years ago, when the department could have acted on their findings and saved so many chinchillas from this ongoing abuse? Instead, in 2019, the USDA helped Moulton with the paperwork to renew his license to operate as a dealer.

Moreover, the research industry enabled Moulton’s cruelty. The Laboratory Animal Science Buyers Guide, published by the American Association for Laboratory Animal Science (AALAS), listed MCR as the only chinchilla supplier despite knowing about the USDA citations. In July, National Geographic stated that the guide also included MCR in its vendor showcase, which touts reaching customers within the “trusted network” of AALAS. Prominent research figures, including Sanford Feldman, director of the Center for Comparative Medicine at the University of Virginia, testified for Moulton and were actively involved in his defense.

It is clear that there needs to be political will to ensure that the USDA will stop allowing facilities to remain persistently and egregiously out of compliance with the AWA regulations and start taking action sooner—not merely when a case becomes highly publicized. In May 2021, U.S. Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois reintroduced the Animal Welfare Enforcement Improvement Act, which would protect animals from unscrupulous dealers and exhibitors and close existing loopholes in the USDA’s licensing process that endanger animals and allow chronic violators to escape punishment. These violators include marine theme parks, roadside zoos, and exotic wildlife operations such as the infamous Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park featured in the Netflix series “Tiger King,” which has now been closed to the public.

Additionally, legislation introduced in December 2021 by Iowa Representative Cindy Axne would require USDA inspectors to document and report all AWA violations, confiscate suffering animals, and impose penalties against dog dealers. The bill has been named Goldie’s Act in memory of a golden retriever who was one of the hundreds of dogs neglected and abused at Gingerich’s USDA-licensed facility.

Both these bills demand greater accountability from a department that, for many years, has been unwilling to enforce even basic AWA standards for animal care. Moulton and Gingerich are simply the latest well-publicized egregious examples. If the USDA continues to neglect its responsibilities, then the only way to adequately protect nonhuman animals may just be for Congress to empower another federal agency to safeguard animal welfare.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Nancy Blaney.

The post What Do Fertility and Football Have to Do with Clinton-Gingrich Welfare Reform? Read This to Find Out appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Shawn Fremstad.

On July 28, US Senators Ed Markey (D-MA) and Ron Wyden (D-OR), along with US Representative Doris Matsui (D-HI) introduced a bill to reclassify Internet Service Providers from Title I “information services” to Title II  “common carrier services.”

Why this bill? Because the term “Net Neutrality” polls well among those who don’t bother to look into the details.

Why now? Because Democrats are playing every card in the deck as they cast about for ways to stem their likely bleeding in this November’s midterm elections.

In 2015, the Federal Communications Commission published an “Open Internet Order” magically turning ISPs into “common carriers” and requiring them to treat some, but not all, network traffic “neutrally.”

But since the rule was imposed unilaterally by one FCC, it could be withdrawn by the next. One of the few fortunate outcomes of Donald Trump’s election as president in 2016 was the appointment of a new FCC chair and withdrawal of the rule.

The new law, if passed, would require, rather than merely allow, the FCC to impose “Net Neutrality” on America.

What is “Net Neutrality?” It’s really three different things, none of them good.

First, it’s corporate welfare for companies whose business models involve pushing lots of bits (like streaming high-definition video) through the Internet and into your home, and who’d rather not foot the bill for the infrastructure to carry their product.

Second, it’s the Internet censorship camel’s nose pushing its way into the administrative state’s regulatory tent.

Third, it’s a sexy-sounding solution desperately in search of a problem that does not and never has existed. The Internet has become incrementally better and more accessible for 30 years now without it.

“Net Neutrality” requires ISPs to treat some data “neutrally”: An email from your mom can’t receive higher priority than your neighbor’s weekend Stranger Things binge in all its 4k glory.

Instead of Netflix, or your neighbor, getting the bill for the bandwidth and  infrastructure required to accommodate your neighbor’s insane bandwidth consumption — or, heaven forbid, his screen freezing during the chorus of “Running Up That Hill” — both your ISP bills will go up to pay for fatter pipes. You get to subsidize your neighbor, and Netflix, whether you like it or not.

Notice that I said “some” data must be treated “neutrally.” Not all of it. The FCC’s previous order mandated such “neutrality” only for “legal” content.

Who gets to rule content “legal” or “illegal?” For the most part the FCC, although occasional pro-censorship input from Congress is a given (hint: Content from sanctioned US Enemies of the Week will be “illegal”).

The FCC will  also receive sage advice from the aforementioned corporate welfare queens, who wouldn’t want you getting your movies and music from unapproved sources (i.e. sites that don’t make them money).

The purpose of the TERM “Net Neutrality” is to fool you into voting for people who sound like they’re promising you something cool and even necessary.

The purpose of  “Net Neutrality” POLICY is to leave you with less money and less choice.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Thomas Knapp.

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders on Monday again took aim at the CHIPS Act, proposed bipartisan legislation the Vermont independent noted contains tens of billions of dollars in "corporate welfare" for tech giants—taxpayer money he says would be better spent on programs of social uplift.

"The question we should be asking is this: Should American taxpayers provide the microchip industry with a blank check of over $76 billion?"

"What the CHIPS bill represents is the question of whether or not we will have priorities in this country that represent the needs of working families and the middle class, or whether this institution, the entire Congress, is totally beholden to wealthy and powerful corporate interests," Sanders said Monday during a Senate floor speech.

The Associated Press reports the Senate was set to vote on advancing the bill on Monday. However, stormy East Coast weather disrupted several lawmakers' travel plans and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said the vote will be held Tuesday morning. The House will take up the measure after the Senate votes.

"I do not argue with anyone who makes the point that there is a global shortage in microchips and semiconductors which, is making it harder for manufacturers to produce the cars, the cellphones, the household appliances, and the electronic equipment that we need," Sanders continued. "This shortage is, in fact, costing American workers good-paying jobs and raising prices for families. That is why I personally strongly support efforts to expand U.S. microchip production."

The senator continued:

The question we should be asking is this: Should American taxpayers provide the microchip industry with a blank check of over $76 billion at the same exact time when semiconductor companies are making tens of billions of dollars in profits and paying their CEOs exorbitant compensation packages?... I think the answer to that is a resounding no. This is an enormously profitable industry.

For $76 billion we could expand Medicare to provide senior citizens with the high-quality hearing aids and eyeglasses that they desperately need. And for a bit more we could provide dental care as well. For $76 billion we could eliminate homelessness in America and create good-paying jobs from Maine to California building hundreds of thousands of affordable rental units. For $76 billion we could make every community college in America tuition free for the next seven years. And on and on it goes.

Sanders' speech came days after the two-time democratic socialist presidential candidate introduced an amendment to the CHIPS Act that would impose restrictions on the billions of dollars in federal subsidies and tax credits Congress is set to give the already booming U.S. microchip industry.

Some critics have noted that lawmakers pushing for passage of the CHIPS Act have apparent pecuniary conflicts of interest. For example, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's (D-Calif.) husband purchased as much as $5 million worth of Silicon Valley software and chipmaker Nvidia's stock ahead of the expected CHIPS Act vote.

"When signed into law, the impacts of this bipartisan chips and innovation bill will last years if not decades," Schumer said Monday on the Senate floor. "It will mean an increase in American jobs, increased manufacturing here at home, relief for our supply chains, and lower costs for the American people."

However, Sanders contended that "at a time when the working families of this country are falling further and further behind while the very rich are getting much richer, let us get our priorities right."

"Not only would this bill be providing corporate welfare to profitable American corporations, but we would literally be handing over U.S. taxpayer dollars to corporations that are owned or controlled by other countries," he continued.

"If private companies are going to benefit from generous taxpayer subsidies, the financial gains made by these companies must be shared with the American people, not just wealthy shareholders," Sanders added. "In other words, if microchip companies make a profit as a direct result of these federal grants, the taxpayers of this country have a right to get a reasonable return on that investment."

"Bottom line: Let us rebuild the U.S. microchip industry," he argued, "but let's do it in a way that benefits all of our society, not just a handful of wealthy, profitable, and powerful corporations."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders on Monday again took aim at the CHIPS Act, proposed bipartisan legislation the Vermont independent noted contains tens of billions of dollars in "corporate welfare" for tech giants—taxpayer money he says would be better spent on programs of social uplift.

"The question we should be asking is this: Should American taxpayers provide the microchip industry with a blank check of over $76 billion?"

"What the CHIPS bill represents is the question of whether or not we will have priorities in this country that represent the needs of working families and the middle class, or whether this institution, the entire Congress, is totally beholden to wealthy and powerful corporate interests," Sanders said Monday during a Senate floor speech.

The Associated Press reports the Senate was set to vote on advancing the bill on Monday. However, stormy East Coast weather disrupted several lawmakers' travel plans and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said the vote will be held Tuesday morning. The House will take up the measure after the Senate votes.

"I do not argue with anyone who makes the point that there is a global shortage in microchips and semiconductors which, is making it harder for manufacturers to produce the cars, the cellphones, the household appliances, and the electronic equipment that we need," Sanders continued. "This shortage is, in fact, costing American workers good-paying jobs and raising prices for families. That is why I personally strongly support efforts to expand U.S. microchip production."

The senator continued:

The question we should be asking is this: Should American taxpayers provide the microchip industry with a blank check of over $76 billion at the same exact time when semiconductor companies are making tens of billions of dollars in profits and paying their CEOs exorbitant compensation packages?... I think the answer to that is a resounding no. This is an enormously profitable industry.

For $76 billion we could expand Medicare to provide senior citizens with the high-quality hearing aids and eyeglasses that they desperately need. And for a bit more we could provide dental care as well. For $76 billion we could eliminate homelessness in America and create good-paying jobs from Maine to California building hundreds of thousands of affordable rental units. For $76 billion we could make every community college in America tuition free for the next seven years. And on and on it goes.

Sanders' speech came days after the two-time democratic socialist presidential candidate introduced an amendment to the CHIPS Act that would impose restrictions on the billions of dollars in federal subsidies and tax credits Congress is set to give the already booming U.S. microchip industry.

Some critics have noted that lawmakers pushing for passage of the CHIPS Act have apparent pecuniary conflicts of interest. For example, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's (D-Calif.) husband purchased as much as $5 million worth of Silicon Valley software and chipmaker Nvidia's stock ahead of the expected CHIPS Act vote.

"When signed into law, the impacts of this bipartisan chips and innovation bill will last years if not decades," Schumer said Monday on the Senate floor. "It will mean an increase in American jobs, increased manufacturing here at home, relief for our supply chains, and lower costs for the American people."

However, Sanders contended that "at a time when the working families of this country are falling further and further behind while the very rich are getting much richer, let us get our priorities right."

"Not only would this bill be providing corporate welfare to profitable American corporations, but we would literally be handing over U.S. taxpayer dollars to corporations that are owned or controlled by other countries," he continued.

"If private companies are going to benefit from generous taxpayer subsidies, the financial gains made by these companies must be shared with the American people, not just wealthy shareholders," Sanders added. "In other words, if microchip companies make a profit as a direct result of these federal grants, the taxpayers of this country have a right to get a reasonable return on that investment."

"Bottom line: Let us rebuild the U.S. microchip industry," he argued, "but let's do it in a way that benefits all of our society, not just a handful of wealthy, profitable, and powerful corporations."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday introduced an amendment that would impose restrictions on the billions of dollars in federal subsidies and tax credits that Congress is poised to hand to the profitable U.S. microchip industry, which has been lobbying aggressively for the handouts.

Sanders' proposed changes to the CHIPS Act, which cleared a key procedural hurdle in the Senate Tuesday evening, would prohibit companies that receive subsidies under the bill from using the funds to buy back their own stock, offshore U.S. jobs, or crack down on unionization efforts. The senator argues that no-strings-attached giveaways to the microchip industry would amount to "corporate welfare."

"If private companies are going to benefit from generous taxpayer subsidies, the financial gains made by these companies must be shared with the American people, not just wealthy shareholders," Sanders said in a floor speech. "In other words, if microchip companies make a profit as a direct result of these federal grants, the taxpayers of this country have a right to get a reasonable return on that investment."

The latest version of the CHIPS Act, which now clocks in at 1,054 pages of legislative text, comes with an overall price tag of around $250 billion, tens of billions of which would be used to subsidize U.S. semiconductor manufacturing. Fresh tax language included in the bill increased the benefits to the microchip industry from around $52 billion to $76 billion.

The approval of such subsidies would be a major boon for companies like Intel, whose CEO took to the airwaves last week to implore Congress to do everything it can to pass the microchip bill.

"Do not go home for August recess until you have passed the CHIPS Act," Pat Gelsinger, who was one of the highest-paid CEOs in the U.S. last year with a total compensation package of $179 million, said in a CNBC appearance on Friday.

"I and others in the industry will make investment decisions," Gelsinger added. "Do you want those investments in the U.S., or are we simply not competitive enough to do them here and we need to go to Europe or Asia?"

Sanders responded directly to Gelsinger's remarks during his floor speech Tuesday, saying, "I am thankfully not a lawyer, but that sure sounds like extortion to me."

"What Mr. Gelsinger is saying," Sanders continued, "is that if you don't give the industry a blank check—here's $76 billion, and they want more by the way—despite the needs of the military for advanced microchips... despite the needs of the medical industry for advanced microchips, despite the entire needs of the American economy for advanced microchips, the industry is threatening to abandon this country and move abroad."

"Mr. Gelsinger says we should stay in session, if necessary, through August in order to pass this legislation," he added. "Well, I think we might want to stay in session through August. But not necessarily to pass his legislation. Because what I hear from people in Vermont and people all across this country is that the job they want done is not a massive handout to large, profitable corporations."

As The Daily Poster's Julia Rock reported Tuesday, "Gelsinger's company and its well-connected lobbyists are pushing Congress to allow it to potentially use the subsidies" in the CHIPS Act "to put more money into its factories outside of the country."

"Intel has been one of the bill's staunchest supporters—and Gelsinger was even invited to President Joe Biden's State of the Union address to show his support for the subsidies," Rock noted. "In that speech, Biden said that Intel was prepared to increase its investment in a new chip factory in Ohio from $20 billion to $100 billion, if only Congress passed the CHIPS Act. Intel is now holding that factory hostage."

In his remarks Tuesday, Sanders likened companies lobbying for passage of the CHIPS Act to "pigs at the trough."

"They want more and more and more," the senator said. "Their needs are insatiable."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jake Johnson.

Sen. Bernie Sanders took to the Senate floor Wednesday to criticize fellow members of Congress for working to approve billions of dollars in handouts to major corporations as the country is embroiled in a worsening cost-of-living crisis, a deadly pandemic, and an intensifying climate emergency.

"This may be a radical idea in the halls of Congress, but no, I do not believe that this legislation should approve a $10 billion bailout for Jeff Bezos."

"What is Congress doing right now, at a time when we face so many massive problems?" asked Sanders, the chair of the Senate Budget Committee. "The answer is that for two months, a 107-member conference committee has been meeting behind closed doors to provide over $50 billion in corporate welfare with no strings attached to the highly profitable microchip industry."

"No, we're not talking about healthcare for all," the Vermont senator lamented. "No, we're not talking about making higher education affordable. No, we're not talking about making sure that young people can earn decent salaries when they become teachers. No, we're not talking about leading the world in combating climate change. We're talking about giving $50 billion in corporate welfare with no strings attached—a blank check—to the highly profitable microchip industry."

Watch:

The legislation drawing Sanders' ire is the long-stalled United States Innovation and Competition Act (USICA), a bill purportedly designed to bolster domestic semiconductor manufacturing—an industry that has been lavished with taxpayer subsidies in recent years—and ramp up investment in research and development.

As Politico describes it, the USICA "would shower the semiconductor industry with $52 billion of incentives to ramp up chip-making in America."

"China hawks like the bill because it makes the U.S. less reliant on Chinese imports," the outlet adds. "The Biden administration hails it as a policy that will strengthen the supply chain, boost domestic manufacturing, and 'help us outcompete China.'"

A bipartisan conference committee made up of lawmakers from both the House and the Senate is currently working to reconcile the differences between versions of the legislation passed by each chamber.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), meanwhile, is threatening to tank the bill entirely if Democrats move ahead with a party-line reconciliation package that aims to lower prescription drug prices and boost renewable energy funding.

Punchbowl reported Thursday that top Senate Democrats are mulling whether to just "pass $52 billion in funding for semiconductor manufacturers instead of a broad USICA package."

Sanders, who voted against the Senate bill's passage in March, has argued that the USICA should contain safeguards to ensure that taxpayer funding doesn't go to companies that engage in union-busting, offshore U.S. jobs, or buy back their own stock. In May, Republican and Democratic senators voted down motions from Sanders that encouraged such conditions.

The progressive senator has also spotlighted a provision of the USICA that would approve $10 billion in NASA funding for moon landers, money that Sanders has warned could benefit billionaire Jeff Bezos. Sanders has urged lawmakers to strip the provision from the bill.

"If you can believe it," Sanders said Wednesday, "this legislation may... provide a $10 billion bailout to Jeff Bezos, the second-wealthiest person in America, so that his company, Blue Origin, can launch a rocket ship to the moon."

"I know this may be a radical idea in the halls of Congress, but no, I do not believe that this legislation should approve a $10 billion bailout for Jeff Bezos to fly to the moon," Sanders added. "Maybe, just maybe, a middle class which is struggling, which is falling behind, should not see their taxpayer dollars go to the second-wealthiest person in America."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jake Johnson.

Sen. Bernie Sanders took to the Senate floor Wednesday to criticize fellow members of Congress for working to approve billions of dollars in handouts to major corporations as the country is embroiled in a worsening cost-of-living crisis, a deadly pandemic, and an intensifying climate emergency.

"This may be a radical idea in the halls of Congress, but no, I do not believe that this legislation should approve a $10 billion bailout for Jeff Bezos."

"What is Congress doing right now, at a time when we face so many massive problems?" asked Sanders, the chair of the Senate Budget Committee. "The answer is that for two months, a 107-member conference committee has been meeting behind closed doors to provide over $50 billion in corporate welfare with no strings attached to the highly profitable microchip industry."

"No, we're not talking about healthcare for all," the Vermont senator lamented. "No, we're not talking about making higher education affordable. No, we're not talking about making sure that young people can earn decent salaries when they become teachers. No, we're not talking about leading the world in combating climate change. We're talking about giving $50 billion in corporate welfare with no strings attached—a blank check—to the highly profitable microchip industry."

Watch:

The legislation drawing Sanders' ire is the long-stalled United States Innovation and Competition Act (USICA), a bill purportedly designed to bolster domestic semiconductor manufacturing—an industry that has been lavished with taxpayer subsidies in recent years—and ramp up investment in research and development.

As Politico describes it, the USICA "would shower the semiconductor industry with $52 billion of incentives to ramp up chip-making in America."

"China hawks like the bill because it makes the U.S. less reliant on Chinese imports," the outlet adds. "The Biden administration hails it as a policy that will strengthen the supply chain, boost domestic manufacturing, and 'help us outcompete China.'"

A bipartisan conference committee made up of lawmakers from both the House and the Senate is currently working to reconcile the differences between versions of the legislation passed by each chamber.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), meanwhile, is threatening to tank the bill entirely if Democrats move ahead with a party-line reconciliation package that aims to lower prescription drug prices and boost renewable energy funding.

Punchbowl reported Thursday that top Senate Democrats are mulling whether to just "pass $52 billion in funding for semiconductor manufacturers instead of a broad USICA package."

Sanders, who voted against the Senate bill's passage in March, has argued that the USICA should contain safeguards to ensure that taxpayer funding doesn't go to companies that engage in union-busting, offshore U.S. jobs, or buy back their own stock. In May, Republican and Democratic senators voted down motions from Sanders that encouraged such conditions.

The progressive senator has also spotlighted a provision of the USICA that would approve $10 billion in NASA funding for moon landers, money that Sanders has warned could benefit billionaire Jeff Bezos. Sanders has urged lawmakers to strip the provision from the bill.

"If you can believe it," Sanders said Wednesday, "this legislation may... provide a $10 billion bailout to Jeff Bezos, the second-wealthiest person in America, so that his company, Blue Origin, can launch a rocket ship to the moon."

"I know this may be a radical idea in the halls of Congress, but no, I do not believe that this legislation should approve a $10 billion bailout for Jeff Bezos to fly to the moon," Sanders added. "Maybe, just maybe, a middle class which is struggling, which is falling behind, should not see their taxpayer dollars go to the second-wealthiest person in America."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jake Johnson.

Screenshot of a porg from the movie The Last Jedi – Fair Use

The Sequel Trilogy is controversial in the Star Wars fandom, perhaps even more so than the prequels. I don’t understand this. The themes George Lucas explored in his return to the franchise, about a republic descending into fascism, were interesting. But the actual storytelling was atrocious. The sequels, while flawed, were very watchable.

Maybe we’ve just had more time to digest the Prequel Trilogy, or maybe the people who grew up with them are now old enough to look back on the films with nostalgia. I was young when The Phantom Menace arrived, but not young enough to absorb the movie and the two that followed uncritically. I was aware of the drubbing they received from reviewers and mostly agreed with it.

My criticism of the Sequel Trilogy isn’t unique. In retrospect, it’s clear there was no plan. If neither J.J. Abrams or Rian Johnson wanted to direct three films, I wish one of them would have been put in charge of creating an overall narrative the other would follow. As things turned out, the trilogy feels like a car being driven by two people fighting for control of the wheel.

Personally, I prefer the Abrams movies, even if  The Force Awakens is derivative and The Rise of Skywalker is incoherent. They just feel more like Star Wars to me. Plus, the relationship between Han Solo and Kylo Ren is one of my favorite parts of the trilogy and that mostly plays out in the first and last installments. Their dream reconciliation could be the most moving scene in the whole franchise.

Count me among those who doesn’t appreciate Luke Skywalker’s portrayal in The Last Jedi, or the various ways Johnson undercuts what Abrams establishes in the first film. One thing I do like about the middle entry, however, is that it introduces animal welfarism as a concern in the Star Wars series. I wanted to revisit the movie with this in mind.

I should say that I don’t think cultural analysis is particularly important as a means for activists to change minds. I enjoy it, and it’s a nice break from other, more effective forms of activism. In that sense, it is important. Being an activist, especially in a period of backlash like we’re in now, can be a thankless pursuit. Anything that helps you keep going should be prioritized.

There are two plot lines in The Last Jedi that establish animal welfarism as a concern within the Star Wars franchise. The first involves Chewbacca and the porgs. Chewie travels to the ocean planet Ahch-To with Rey, who is trying to recruit Luke Skywalker to join the Resistance. Off-screen, the wookiee presumably hunts and kills some small bird-like creatures.

We see Chewbacca roasting the porgs’ carcasses over a fire, when he is surrounded by other members of this adorable species, looking at him with horrified disbelief. The scene is played for laughs, but ultimately the wookiee adopts the porgs, allowing them to take up residence in The Millennium Falcon. To borrow a phrase, he comes to see them as friends, not food.

The second relevant storyline involves Rose, Finn, and the fathiers, a species of horse-like creatures used on the Canto Bight racetracks. Explaining her distaste for the city, Rose tells Finn to take a closer look at the treatment of the fathiers, who we see are whipped and abused. Their treatment is used to symbolize the broader moral rot of Canto Bight.

When the opportunity presents itself, Rose and Finn free the fathiers from their stables. The portrayal isn’t ideal from an animal-rights perspective, as the pair ride on the back of one of the creatures as part of their escape. But it’s a step in the right direction. I’m glad The Last Jedi includes both these scenes and the ones with Chewbacca and the porgs.

I can only hope that future Star Wars films — and I do hope we get more films soon, not just television shows — explore the question of animal ethics in greater detail. While I understand the series is really closer to fantasy than science-fiction, I wonder if the universe might have its own version of cultivated meat.

Perhaps certain Jedi branches could be vegan. This would make sense to me, given the overall Jedi ethos, but it probably couldn’t be a universal requirement, given what we know of Obi-Wan Kenobi’s occupation on Tatooine or Luke’s diet on Ahch-To. Then again, both are in exile and disillusioned with the Jedi at these points, so maybe it could be waived away.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jon Hochschartner.

Students from West Papua desperate to stay in New Zealand after having their scholarships cut are pinning their hopes on finding an employer to sponsor new working visas.

About 40 students from the Indonesian province of Papua have been studying at different tertiary institutions in New Zealand.

In December they received a letter from the provincial government of Papua saying their living allowances, travel and study fees were stopping and they had to return home because their studies had not met expectations.

• READ MORE: West Papuan students face ‘hardship and stress’ over scholarship loss
• Open letter to Minister Faafoi – an appeal to help 34 abandoned Papuan students
• Other West Papuan student reports

About 12 have returned home, but the rest fear for their future.

The Papuan provincial government has not responded to requests for comment.

Laurens Ikinia, an Auckland-based West Papua student, is advocating for the group.

He said eight of the students had finished their carpentry course at Palmerston North polytech UCOL last week.

Hopeful for work
Those students were hopeful of securing work for a company that would sponsor them to get work visas and provide them with jobs.

Ikinia said there were more job opportunities in New Zealand.

“Every one of us, we have that dream and we came here, apart from studying, hoping to get two or three years’ experience,” he said.

Ikinia said the mental wellbeing of the students who had lost their scholarships was a concern, and they were fighting for their rights in education.

“The students are unstable. After having met students and hearing from them, they are really concerned about visas and living expenses because it really stresses them.”

Some tertiary institutions have been supporting the affected students, including UCOL, which has been assisting 15 students with living costs.

Humanitarian aid requested
Ikinia has asked the New Zealand government for humanitarian support.

“If we get experience we can go back home, we contribute to our families and communities.”

One of the students, Roy Towolom, has been in New Zealand since 2016, having attended high school and has now completed his carpentry course at UCOL.

He said it was not an option to go home and wanted to stay in New Zealand.

Immigration New Zealand’s general manager of border and visa operations Nicola Hogg said officials from the Indonesian Embassy in Wellington had met with the students and provided care packages.

An immigration options sheet has been distributed to the affected students.

“There is nothing preventing the students from applying for a new visa if they are lawfully in New Zealand,” she said.

‘No restriction in instructions’
“There is no restriction in immigration instructions requiring foreign government-sponsored students to return home if their scholarship ceases, or if they have completed their scholarship.”

Some of the students have applied for subsequent visas, including work visas, which would be assessed according to the immigration policy instructions.

Hogg said the students would need to meet the requirements of the new visa they applied for, including financial, health and character.

If their visa was declined because they did not meet the instructions, they should leave New Zealand voluntarily. The provincial government of Papua would cover repatriation costs.

Immigration is working with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade on the issue and both agencies have met with the Indonesian ambassador.

A spokesperson for the Indonesian Embassy told Stuff earlier in May the decision to repatriate some Papuan students overseas was based on academic performance and the time of their scholarships.

Only those who had exceeded the allocated time for the scholarship and those who could not meet the academic requirements were being recalled, they said.

George Heagney is a Stuff reporter. Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Southern Illinoisan. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Two Southern Illinois lawmakers are calling on Gov. J.B. Pritzker to improve access to mental health and substance abuse treatment and other services to ensure that families repeatedly investigated by the state’s child welfare agency can access the help they need.

“It’s time for the governor to be a leader and figure out how to solve this problem in Southern Illinois,” said State Sen. Terri Bryant, a Murphysboro Republican who sits on a subcommittee focused on family and child welfare issues.

The calls to action come on the heels of reporting by The Southern Illinoisan and ProPublica about the large number of parents who are investigated by the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services time and again for allegations of child abuse or neglect.

The reporting involved an analysis of departmental investigative case data by ProPublica and The Southern Illinoisan and found that parents and caregivers in Southern Illinois were more likely to face repeat DCFS investigations compared with those in other parts of the state. Numerous parents cycling through DCFS investigations told reporters they were having difficulty accessing the services they needed in order to keep or reunite with their children after an abuse or neglect allegation was reported to the department.

State Rep. Patrick Windhorst, a Republican from Metropolis, at the state’s southern border with Kentucky, also called on the governor and other state policymakers to take swift action to improve the lives of children and families involved with DCFS in Southern Illinois. The agency, he said, “is deeply in need of reform.”

Statewide, Illinois is experiencing escalating rates of “recurrence,” which measures the percentage of child abuse and neglect victims who are the subject of a subsequent substantiated DFCS investigation within a year of an earlier substantiated investigation. Illinois’ recurrence rate reached a 10-year high in fiscal year 2020 and was among the nation’s worst.

The analysis also found that most parents facing repeated investigations have not physically abused their children but instead face numerous allegations of neglect. Neglect is broadly defined as a failure to provide for basic needs such as food, clothing, shelter and supervision.

Bryant said that she called DCFS Director Marc Smith late last month, on the day the story was published, demanding answers about his agency’s plans for Southern Illinois families. She also expressed frustration that Smith, a Pritzker appointee, was quoted in the article blaming problems on the state’s budget woes, particularly during the administration of former Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner. Pritzker, a Democrat, ousted Rauner in the 2018 election and faces reelection this November. In recent months, Prtizker’s DCFS has faced intense scrutiny from child welfare officials and lawmakers from both parties.

Still, Bryant described her conversation with Smith as productive. He acknowledged to her the need to expand services in Southern Illinois, she said. He also told her — according to Bryant, and echoing his prior comments to reporters — that solving this issue can’t be the work of DCFS alone. The state’s other social service agencies, especially the Department of Human Services and the Department of Healthcare and Family Services, also play a role, he told her. They are responsible for ensuring that there’s a robust menu of drug treatment and mental health services available across the state, and that they’re accessible to low-income Illinoisans, including to the families involved with child welfare services. (A spokesman for DCFS confirmed that Bryant and Smith spoke about the need for a multi-agency response to these challenges.)

“The gist of it was that all three of those agencies have responsibilities when it comes to certain things for youth in care and their parents, and as he said that to me, it made sense.”

Still, Bryant questioned why the governor, who oversees all of those departments, isn’t doing more to bring them together to solve these issues. The 27 Southern Illinois counties served by DCFS’ Marion office and its satellite offices have collectively experienced a 120% spike in the number of children in foster care in a decade. “The time for DCFS, HFS and DHS to point fingers at each other is long past over,” she said.

While those agencies have acknowledged difficulties providing services in the region, officials emphasized recent efforts to solve those issues. In a statement, Alex Gough, Pritzker’s senior deputy press secretary, reiterated the administration’s claim that the service deserts and the worsening child welfare trends are attributable to Rauner’s budget policies.

“After social service programs were hollowed out over four years under the previous administration, Governor Pritzker has worked tirelessly to restore reliable services in every corner of the state,” Gough said. Numerous attempts to reach Rauner were unsuccessful.

Pritzker has “invested hundreds of millions of dollars in programs that help families build better lives,” Gough added. That has included increasing funding for mental health and substance abuse treatment, and expanding access to housing, child care and food programs for low-income families. Further, he said, the governor tapped two experienced executives in March to lead an overhaul of the state’s behavioral health support systems for adults and children, and to oversee the expansion of services into areas where they are lacking.

DHS spokesperson Patrick Laughlin said the governor has committed more resources for substance abuse prevention and recovery, as well as for family support services, “than ever before.”

Jamie Munks, spokesperson for HFS, acknowledged that accessing specialty and behavioral health services “has long proven challenging in certain parts of the state.” But in this administration, she said, the department is working under a mandate to increase equitable access to health care services. The department launched a program last year aimed at improving health care access in rural and underserved areas.

In recent years, Windhorst said the General Assembly has considered several proposals to make child welfare services more responsive locally. One proposal called for fracturing DCFS’ statewide authority and placing regional branches under the control of the chief judge of each circuit. Another proposal called for expanding court involvement for parents in substantiated cases of abuse or neglect but whose circumstances do not necessitate immediate removal of their children. But before any reform efforts can be implemented, they “require the needed services to be available,” he said.

“That has long been an issue in southernmost Illinois and will require DCFS to focus on how it uses resources that are sometimes scarce in our region and are often more readily available out of state,” Windhorst said.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Molly Parker, The Southern Illinoisan.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Reporters at ProPublica and NBC News are conducting research on Arizona’s child protective services agency (the Department of Child Safety, or DCS) and how it investigates Black families in the Phoenix area at a higher rate than white families. We would like to hear directly from people who have been affected by this issue.

We’re especially interested in speaking with Black families who have had any interaction with DCS, which used to be called Child Protective Services, or CPS. We’d also like to hear from others who know about this topic, such as educators and community organizers.

We know this can be difficult to talk about. We appreciate you sharing your story, and we take your privacy seriously. It is important to us. We are gathering these stories for the purposes of our reporting, and we will contact you if we wish to publish any part.

Filling out the short questionnaire below will help us shine a light on the important issue of racial disparities in Arizona’s child protective services system.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Eli Hager and Asia Fields.

Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont blasted the warped priorities of the U.S. Senate on Wednesday as the Democratic-controlled chamber moved to advance legislation that he warned would provide a $53 billion "blank check" to the profitable microchip industry under the guise of promoting innovation, domestic manufacturing, and job creation.

"We have strange priorities here in the Senate," Sanders, the chair of the Senate Budget Committee, said in floor remarks. "We can't extend the child tax credit to combat child poverty. We can't deal with the crisis in child care. We can't provide dental care to seniors on Medicare. We can't deal with climate change."

"But somehow," the senator added, "we can provide a massive amount of corporate welfare to a handful of corporations."

Sanders' comments came as the Senate began holding votes on dozens of motions related to the COMPETES Act, which is currently in conference committee as the House and Senate reconcile their differences on the legislation before final passage. The motions are aimed at instructing the conferees' work on the bill.

In recent weeks, Sanders has vocally warned on the Senate floor and in the pages of major newspapers that the measure in its current form would do nothing to prevent taxpayer funding from going to large corporations that bust unions, outsource U.S. jobs, and buy back their own stock.

The Vermont senator has specifically targeted a provision that would authorize an additional $10 billion in NASA funding for moon landers, money that could wind up benefiting billionaire Jeff Bezos' space flight company Blue Origin.

"Clearly, Mr. Bezos desperately needs this federal assistance," the Vermont senator said sarcastically. "He is only worth $150 billion."

On Wednesday, Sanders introduced motions that would attach a number of safeguards to the legislation's funding and cut the $10 billion NASA provision.

"At a time when 70 million are uninsured, when 600,000 people are homeless in this country, while we are seeing a growing gap between the very rich and everybody else," Sanders said, "it does not make a lot of sense to give $10 billion to the second-wealthiest person in this country."

By overwhelming margins—6-87 and 17-78—the Senate voted down both of Sanders' proposals while approving several Republican-led motions unrelated to the bill's core objectives, including one that would instruct conferees to prohibit President Joe Biden from lifting the terrorism designation on Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The Senate's votes came days after the leak of a draft opinion signaling that the Supreme Court's right-wing majority is set to overturn Roe v. Wade, imperiling abortion rights and more across the country.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has vowed to hold another vote on the Women's Health Protection Act, House-passed legislation that would codify the right to abortion care into federal law. But the bill will fail again as long as Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) continues to oppose it and the 60-vote filibuster remains intact—thanks in large part to Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.).

"Congress must pass legislation that codifies Roe v. Wade as the law of the land in this country NOW," Sanders tweeted late Monday. "And if there aren't 60 votes in the Senate to do it, and there are not, we must end the filibuster to pass it with 50 votes."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jake Johnson.

Repurposing a phrase right-wing Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin recently used to obstruct social spending and climate legislation, Sen. Bernie Sanders on Wednesday called for a "strategic pause" in corporate welfare, referring specifically to a bill that would hand around $53 billion in subsidies to the U.S. semiconductor industry.

"The time has come to take a strategic pause when it comes to providing tens of billions of dollars in corporate welfare."

The bill, known as the COMPETES Act, would also authorize an additional $10 billion in federal funding for moon landers, a provision that Sanders (I-Vt.) has slammed as "a bailout to Jeff Bezos so that his company Blue Origin can launch a rocket ship to the moon."

In a speech on the Senate floor Wednesday, the Vermont senator made the case for amendments that would attach conditions to the $53 billion in federal subsidies and strip out the $10 billion "bailout to Blue Origin."

Politico reported last week that "since NASA chose [billionaire Elon Musk's company] SpaceX a year ago to build its lunar lander, Blue Origin has been lobbying Congress and NASA to open the program back up for competition."

If approved, the $10 billion in the COMPETES Act would be granted to NASA to pick a company to build a second lander.

"Let me be very clear. Mr. Bezos has enough money to buy a very beautiful $500 million yacht—looks very nice to me," Sanders said Wednesday, pointing to a picture of the vessel.

Sanders went on to note that Bezos, the billionaire founder and executive chairman of Amazon, "has enough money to purchase a $23 million mansion with 25 bathrooms."

"Not quite sure you need 25 bathrooms, but that's not my business," the senator added. "So, no, count me in as somebody who does not think that the taxpayers of this country need to provide Mr. Bezos a $10 billion bailout to fuel his space hobby."

Sanders also urged lawmakers "not to provide $53 billion to the highly profitable micro-chip industry without protections for the American taxpayer."

"This is not a radical idea. These exact conditions were imposed on corporations that received taxpayer assistance in the bipartisan CARES Act, which passed the Senate 96 to 0," said Sanders, referring to a coronavirus relief package enacted in 2020. "In other words, every member of the U.S. Senate has already voted for the conditions that are in this amendment."

The House and Senate have both passed versions of the COMPETES Act, but the two bills must be reconciled before they can reach President Joe Biden's desk.

"One of my colleagues in the Democratic caucus has... suggested that we need to take a 'strategic pause' when it comes to making urgent federal investments in childcare, healthcare, education, affordable housing, paid family and medical leave, and home healthcare—policies that would substantially improve the lives of the American people," Sanders said in his floor remarks Wednesday.

"Well, you know what I believe?" he continued. "I believe that, maybe, just maybe, the time has come to take a 'strategic pause' when it comes to providing tens of billions of dollars in corporate welfare to some of the most profitable corporations and wealthiest people on this planet."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jake Johnson.

Repurposing a phrase right-wing Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin recently used to obstruct social spending and climate legislation, Sen. Bernie Sanders on Wednesday called for a "strategic pause" in corporate welfare, referring specifically to a bill that would hand around $53 billion in subsidies to the U.S. semiconductor industry.

"The time has come to take a strategic pause when it comes to providing tens of billions of dollars in corporate welfare."

The bill, known as the COMPETES Act, would also authorize an additional $10 billion in federal funding for moon landers, a provision that Sanders (I-Vt.) has slammed as "a bailout to Jeff Bezos so that his company Blue Origin can launch a rocket ship to the moon."

In a speech on the Senate floor Wednesday, the Vermont senator made the case for amendments that would attach conditions to the $53 billion in federal subsidies and strip out the $10 billion "bailout to Blue Origin."

Politico reported last week that "since NASA chose [billionaire Elon Musk's company] SpaceX a year ago to build its lunar lander, Blue Origin has been lobbying Congress and NASA to open the program back up for competition."

If approved, the $10 billion in the COMPETES Act would be granted to NASA to pick a company to build a second lander.

"Let me be very clear. Mr. Bezos has enough money to buy a very beautiful $500 million yacht—looks very nice to me," Sanders said Wednesday, pointing to a picture of the vessel.

Sanders went on to note that Bezos, the billionaire founder and executive chairman of Amazon, "has enough money to purchase a $23 million mansion with 25 bathrooms."

"Not quite sure you need 25 bathrooms, but that's not my business," the senator added. "So, no, count me in as somebody who does not think that the taxpayers of this country need to provide Mr. Bezos a $10 billion bailout to fuel his space hobby."

Sanders also urged lawmakers "not to provide $53 billion to the highly profitable micro-chip industry without protections for the American taxpayer."

"This is not a radical idea. These exact conditions were imposed on corporations that received taxpayer assistance in the bipartisan CARES Act, which passed the Senate 96 to 0," said Sanders, referring to a coronavirus relief package enacted in 2020. "In other words, every member of the U.S. Senate has already voted for the conditions that are in this amendment."

The House and Senate have both passed versions of the COMPETES Act, but the two bills must be reconciled before they can reach President Joe Biden's desk.

"One of my colleagues in the Democratic caucus has... suggested that we need to take a 'strategic pause' when it comes to making urgent federal investments in childcare, healthcare, education, affordable housing, paid family and medical leave, and home healthcare—policies that would substantially improve the lives of the American people," Sanders said in his floor remarks Wednesday.

"Well, you know what I believe?" he continued. "I believe that, maybe, just maybe, the time has come to take a 'strategic pause' when it comes to providing tens of billions of dollars in corporate welfare to some of the most profitable corporations and wealthiest people on this planet."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jake Johnson.

Time is running out for a group of West Papuan students in New Zealand whose scholarships were cut — out of the blue — by the Indonesian government

The sudden removal of government funding for the Papuan students has left many of them in financial dire straits on visas that are running out.

Forty two students learned of the termination of their scholarships at the beginning of this year. With deadlines approaching they have appealed to both the Indonesian government and MPs in New Zealand to see if they can fix their dashed hopes of a completed education.

• READ MORE:  Papuan students caught by Indonesian grants cutback plead for NZ help
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• Papuan students form global umbrella body, reaffirm campaign for education rights
• Papuan students succeed in NZ – ‘the golden generation from Papua’
• Mahasiswa Papua di luar negeri deklarasikan IAPSO – Tabloid Jubi [Bahasa Indonesian]
• Other reports on the Papuan education controversy
• WATCH: Te Ao Māori News video

Green Party MPs Ricardo Menendez March, Golriz Ghahraman and Teanau Tuiono penned a letter to Minister of Foreign Affairs Nanaia Mahuta requesting government to support for the students before they are deported.

They are calling for a scholarship fund to support the impacted students, a residency pathway for West Papuan students whose welfare has been affected, and an assurance that the students will have access to safe housing in affordable accommodation.

But according to Menendez March, the most urgent issue is the students’ visas — he is calling on the government to extend them due to special circumstances, such as those for Ukrainian nationals.

“What the situation in Ukraine taught us is that when there is political will, our immigration system can move relatively fast to provide solutions for people who are facing uncertainty,” he said. “The special visa that was created to support Ukrainian families show we could have an intervention to support these students.”

Quick move for Ukraine
Immigration moved quickly to ensure Ukrainians with family in New Zealand had an easier avenue to a two-year work visa as a part of the humanitarian support developed in response to the refugee crisis.

“Immigration Minister Kris Faafoi said last week when the details were unveiled: ‘This is the largest special visa category we have established in decades to support an international humanitarian effort and, alongside the additional $4 million in humanitarian funding also announced today, it adds to a number of measures we’ve already implemented to respond to the worsening situation in Ukraine.'”

The Ukraine policy is expected to benefit around 4000 people, with Immigration streamlining processes to make sure they are supported sooner rather than later.

With just 42 West Papuan students now in this visa crisis, Menendez March said it would be easy enough for the Government to create a special category.

And more than that, it would be an opportunity for New Zealand to stand up for a Pacific neighbour.

“As a Pacific nation we do have a responsibility to support West Papuans,” he said. “I think this is a small but really tangible way that we could supporting the West Papuan community.”

For some of the students, returning home isn’t just a matter of giving up on whatever ambitions lay past graduation day – but also a safety risk.

Openly communicated
“The students have openly communicated in the past some of them may not necessarily face safe living conditions back at home,” Menendez March said, who met with the students last week along with Greens spokesperson for Pacific people Teanau Tuiono to discuss possible solutions.

Tuiono said there were multiple reasons why the New Zealand government should step in and offer support to the students.

“First, there’s the consistency thing — if we’re going to do this for people from the Ukraine, why not for West Papuans,” he said. “Also, we are part of the Pacific and we have signed the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.”

The declaration, first adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2007, establishes a framework of minimum standards for the survival, dignity and well-being of the indigenous peoples of the world.

“West Papuans are indigenous peoples who have been occupied by Indonesia, so there’s that recognition of a responsibility on an international level that we have signed up to,” Tuiono said.

The letter signed by the Green MPs was sent to Mahuta at the beginning of this month, but they say there has been no meaningful response. Meanwhile, some of the students are potentially just a matter of weeks away from deportation.

The decision to rescind the scholarship funds came as a shock to West Papuan students in New Zealand like Laurens Ikinia, who is in the final year of his Master of Communication at AUT. He hopes he will be allowed in the country until his upcoming graduation.

But despite the International Alliance of Papuan Student Associations Overseas calling on the Indonesian government to consult with it to try and resolve the issue, there has been no response.

“It is really heartbreaking for us as the central government of Indonesia and the provincial government have not given any positive responses to us,” Ikinia said. “The government still stick to their decision.”

Matthew Scott is a journalist writing for Newsroom on inequality, MIQ and border issues. Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Across the Southwest, states are reconsidering how they approach welfare, with several legislatures enacting or considering new laws to ensure that more assistance is made available to low-income families struggling to afford rent, child care, groceries and diapers. The moves follow months of ProPublica reporting on punitive and outdated welfare policies in this part of the country and come amid a yearslong surge in the region’s cost of living.

In New Mexico, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham on Wednesday signed into law a budget that will allow an estimated $6.96 million in child support to go directly to children instead of to the government. Until now, the state had intercepted these dollars as reimbursement for the custodial parent previously having received welfare, as ProPublica reported in September.

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All of that money will now go to kids in poverty.

In Arizona, lawmakers introduced a bill in February that would, among other provisions, increase the amount of cash assistance available to poor parents and keep adjusting it for inflation going forward. The legislation would also extend the limit — currently the shortest in the nation — on the number of months that these families can receive aid.

Advocates said the potential reforms were directly informed by ProPublica’s reporting on a mom in Phoenix named Arianna Bermudez who was cut off from welfare assistance that she desperately needed to be able to afford child care — only to have welfare funding instead be used to help pay for an investigation of her parenting. (Her son was removed from her care for more than six months, even though she was not accused of of child abuse or neglect.)

And in Colorado, a bill was introduced late last month that would make several similar changes, including removing restrictive barriers to accessing cash aid and increasing monthly payments, in part to reflect how rents and prices have been increasing in that state, as they have been around the Southwest.

The New Mexico policy shift is the most dramatic one, and it has been in the works since last year. Making sure that the child support is actually going to children is an administration initiative, according to Nora Meyers Sackett, the governor’s press secretary.

ProPublica’s investigation of this issue found that single mothers applying for public assistance in New Mexico, which has one of the highest child-poverty rates in the U.S., first have to reveal under penalty of perjury who fathered their kids and the exact date when they got pregnant, among other deeply personal details. The state then uses that information to pursue child support from the dads — and pockets much of the money it collects, sharing a large portion with the federal government.

The 1996 welfare reform law signed by then-President Bill Clinton encouraged states to recoup money spent on public assistance in this way, and most states still do it.

It may take several months for the change to take effect, likely until July, according to Jodi McGinnis Porter, a spokesperson for the New Mexico Human Services Department. The fixes that still need to be made, she said, include updates to the state child support computer system and informing the federal government that the new policy is in place.

Arizona, for its part, has been a national outlier in its punitive approach to applicants for public assistance. Only 6% of families in poverty in the state are able to access cash aid, and if they do get help, the amount — $278 a month for a family of three — is one of the lowest in the country.

That’s partly because, during the Great Recession over a decade ago, Arizona started redirecting the majority of its welfare funding to its Department of Child Safety, which investigates parents and in many cases removes their children. Often those under investigation are poor and could have better supported their kids if provided cash assistance.

But the new legislation, which would aim to increase benefits back to pre-Recession levels, is unlikely to pass the Republican-led, fiscally conservative state Legislature. No lawmakers have explicitly come out against the bill yet, but in the past, efforts to expand government programs for the poor have routinely failed in Arizona.

Meanwhile, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox was asked at a December news conference about the restrictive welfare policies that ProPublica investigated in his state. Our reporting found that the Utah Department of Workforce Services has an agreement with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to count a percentage of the church’s charitable work as the state’s own welfare spending, as a way of spending less state money on public assistance.

The department does not appear to have proposed any changes to that policy and did not respond to a request for comment.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Eli Hager.

This post has been updated with additional details from NoiseCat.

As a policy analyst with the D.C. think tank Data for Progress, Julian Brave NoiseCat has a wonk’s gift for analyzing data. But he’s also a writer, which means that he’s good at explaining what the numbers actually mean. In this conversation, the 2020 Grist 50 Fixer explores the reasons behind Joe Biden’s shift to the left and offers a few predictions about what might be coming next. He sheds light on Biden’s new climate plan, the role of Black Lives Matter in reshaping racial politics, and why there’s a chance for hope and prosperity at the end of the coronavirus tunnel.

His remarks have been edited for length and clarity.

Why Joe’s going left

It is incredibly unusual, and perhaps historically unprecedented, for a Democratic presidential campaign to move left in the approach to a general election, like Biden is doing. But we have a young, progressive part of the party that really wants to see bold efforts on the part of political figures.

Public-opinion data and surveys show that this moment of national reckoning regarding police brutality — with a historic 15 to 26 million people participating in the Black Lives Matter uprising — has transformed views around race in this country. And we face an economy that requires New Deal–scale action. There’s significant precedent for pandemics playing an important role in shifts in global history, and COVID-19 has made the need for a robust government role and a social safety net incredibly clear. This gives Biden both the space and a push to move in that direction.

A climate platform FTW

Via polling and surveys, Data for Progress has seen support for a number of different social programs jump up by 10 points or more; programs like the Green New Deal jump up by 10 points, green jobs jump up by 10 points. We’ve also seen that both young and persuadable voters can be mobilized around a climate-change message. Climate change has become an incredibly favorable general-election issue for Democrats — it allows them to draw a very favorable comparison with Republicans, which has been the party of denial and of fossil-fuel henchmen for many decades. And those messages really do resonate with the electorate, in ways that give us a very strong advantage if we run on a strong climate message in November.

Data for Progress published research that helped inform some of Biden’s climate plan. Some things we advocated for, such as a $2 trillion investment over four years, also ended up in the plan, which is very encouraging. We would’ve liked to see more, but it’s a start. The transition to a clean-energy economy cannot happen without a robust public-sector role. One other big thing that we advocated for that ended up in the plan is for 40 percent of climate investments going toward frontline communities.

A new New Deal

I see parallels between current events and the original New Deal. The Great Depression led to the New Deal, which essentially led to creation of the American middle class, though primarily for white people. The hope this time is that we would not revive the welfare state in a way that would exclude people of color, like the New Deal did.

The hope, from my perspective, is that the Black Lives Matter movement is reshaping racial politics in this country, and that we will have a Democratic party that feels like it bears some responsibility to voters of color. And that’s why the 40 percent piece of the Biden plan seems so important to me: that we will invest in public goods, social services, health infrastructure, environmental infrastructure, solar panels, clean energy — all of those things in communities of color, when it’s time to rebuild from this pandemic. In my view, that would mark a significant shift in favor of social democracy and a more multiracial society — something that we’ve never really been able to achieve.

This post has been updated with additional details from NoiseCat.

As a policy analyst with the D.C. think tank Data for Progress, Julian Brave NoiseCat has a wonk’s gift for analyzing data. But he’s also a writer, which means that he’s good at explaining what the numbers actually mean. In this conversation, the 2020 Grist 50 Fixer explores the reasons behind Joe Biden’s shift to the left and offers a few predictions about what might be coming next. He sheds light on Biden’s new climate plan, the role of Black Lives Matter in reshaping racial politics, and why there’s a chance for hope and prosperity at the end of the coronavirus tunnel.

His remarks have been edited for length and clarity.

Why Joe’s going left

It is incredibly unusual, and perhaps historically unprecedented, for a Democratic presidential campaign to move left in the approach to a general election, like Biden is doing. But we have a young, progressive part of the party that really wants to see bold efforts on the part of political figures.

Public-opinion data and surveys show that this moment of national reckoning regarding police brutality — with a historic 15 to 26 million people participating in the Black Lives Matter uprising — has transformed views around race in this country. And we face an economy that requires New Deal–scale action. There’s significant precedent for pandemics playing an important role in shifts in global history, and COVID-19 has made the need for a robust government role and a social safety net incredibly clear. This gives Biden both the space and a push to move in that direction.

A climate platform FTW

Via polling and surveys, Data for Progress has seen support for a number of different social programs jump up by 10 points or more; programs like the Green New Deal jump up by 10 points, green jobs jump up by 10 points. We’ve also seen that both young and persuadable voters can be mobilized around a climate-change message. Climate change has become an incredibly favorable general-election issue for Democrats — it allows them to draw a very favorable comparison with Republicans, which has been the party of denial and of fossil-fuel henchmen for many decades. And those messages really do resonate with the electorate, in ways that give us a very strong advantage if we run on a strong climate message in November.

Data for Progress published research that helped inform some of Biden’s climate plan. Some things we advocated for, such as a $2 trillion investment over four years, also ended up in the plan, which is very encouraging. We would’ve liked to see more, but it’s a start. The transition to a clean-energy economy cannot happen without a robust public-sector role. One other big thing that we advocated for that ended up in the plan is for 40 percent of climate investments going toward frontline communities.

A new New Deal

I see parallels between current events and the original New Deal. The Great Depression led to the New Deal, which essentially led to creation of the American middle class, though primarily for white people. The hope this time is that we would not revive the welfare state in a way that would exclude people of color, like the New Deal did.

The hope, from my perspective, is that the Black Lives Matter movement is reshaping racial politics in this country, and that we will have a Democratic party that feels like it bears some responsibility to voters of color. And that’s why the 40 percent piece of the Biden plan seems so important to me: that we will invest in public goods, social services, health infrastructure, environmental infrastructure, solar panels, clean energy — all of those things in communities of color, when it’s time to rebuild from this pandemic. In my view, that would mark a significant shift in favor of social democracy and a more multiracial society — something that we’ve never really been able to achieve.

As a policy analyst with the D.C. think tank Data for Progress, Julian Brave NoiseCat has a wonk’s gift for analyzing data. But he’s also a writer, which means that he’s good at explaining what the numbers actually mean. In this conversation, the 2020 Grist 50 Fixer explores the reasons behind Joe Biden’s shift to the left and offers a few predictions about what might be coming next. He sheds light on Biden’s new climate plan, the role of Black Lives Matter in reshaping racial politics, and why there’s a chance for hope and prosperity at the end of the coronavirus tunnel.

His remarks have been edited for length and clarity.

Why Joe’s going left

It is incredibly unusual, and perhaps historically unprecedented, for a Democratic presidential campaign to move left in the approach to a general election, like Biden is doing. But we have a young, progressive part of the party that really wants to see bold efforts on the part of political figures.

Public-opinion data and surveys show that this moment of national reckoning regarding police brutality — with a historic 15 to 26 million people participating in the Black Lives Matter uprising — has transformed views around race in this country. And we face an economy that requires New Deal–scale action. There’s significant precedent for pandemics playing an important role in shifts in global history, and COVID-19 has made the need for a robust government role and a social safety net incredibly clear. This gives Biden both the space and a push to move in that direction.

A climate platform FTW

Via polling and surveys, Data for Progress has seen support for a number of different social programs jump up by 10 points or more; programs like the Green New Deal jump up by 10 points, green jobs jump up by 10 points. We’ve also seen that both young and persuadable voters can be mobilized around a climate-change message. Climate change has become an incredibly favorable general-election issue for Democrats — it allows them to draw a very favorable comparison with Republicans, which has been the party of denial and of fossil-fuel henchmen for many decades. And those messages really do resonate with the electorate, in ways that give us a very strong advantage if we run on a strong climate message in November.

Data for Progress published research that helped inform some of Biden’s climate plan. Some things we advocate for, such as a $2 trillion investment over four years, also ended up in the plan, which is very encouraging. The transition to a clean-energy economy cannot happen without a robust public-sector role. One other big thing that we advocated for that ended up in the plan is for 40 percent of climate investments going toward frontline communities.

A new New Deal

I see parallels between current events and the original New Deal. The Great Depression led to the New Deal, which essentially led to creation of the American middle class, though primarily for white people. The hope this time is that we would not revive the welfare state in a way that would exclude people of color, like the New Deal did.

The hope, from my perspective, is that the Black Lives Matter movement is reshaping racial politics in this country, and that we will have a Democratic party that feels like it bears some responsibility to voters of color. And that’s why the 40 percent piece of the Biden plan seems so important to me: that we will invest in public goods, social services, health infrastructure, environmental infrastructure, solar panels, clean energy — all of those things in communities of color, when it’s time to rebuild from this pandemic. In my view, that would mark a significant shift in favor of social democracy and a more multiracial society — something that we’ve never really been able to achieve.

No more.

“You had to arrive at 3 in the morning, and it might take you until the end of the day,” he said, pointing behind the office in the Maryvale neighborhood to show how long the lines got.

But no one lined up one recent weekday morning, and there were just a handful of people inside.

With new rules taking effect Monday that disqualify more people from green cards if they use government benefits, droves of immigrants, including citizens and legal residents, have dropped social services they or their children may be entitled to out of fear they will be kicked out of the U.S., said Velazquez and other advocates.

“This will bring more poverty, more homeless, more illness,” said Velasquez, a well-known leader among Spanish-speaking immigrants in the Phoenix area.

The guidelines that aim to determine whether immigrants seeking legal residency are likely to become a government burden are part of the Trump administration’s broader effort to reduce immigration, particularly among poorer people.

The rules that critics say amount to a “wealth test” were supposed to take effect in October but were delayed by legal challenges that allege the move violates due process under the U.S. Constitution. The Supreme Court last month cleared the way for the Trump administration to move forward while the legality of the rules are litigated in the courts.

A 5-4 vote Friday by the high court sided with the Trump administration by lifting a last injunction covering just Illinois. Justice Sonia Sotomayor issued a blistering dissent, criticizing the administration for quickly turning to the Supreme Court after facing losses in lower courts.

The White House over the weekend expressed gratitude for that final vote, saying it would help “safeguard welfare programs for truly needy Americans, reduce the federal deficit, and re-establish the fundamental legal principle that newcomers to our society should be financially self-reliant and not dependent on the largess of United States taxpayers.”

Federal law already requires those seeking to permanent residency or legal status to prove they will not be a burden to the U.S. — a “public charge,” in government lingo. But the new rules include a wider range of programs that could disqualify them, including using Medicaid, food stamps and housing vouchers.

“Self-sufficiency is a core American value and has been part of immigration law for centuries,” Ken Cuccinelli, acting deputy Homeland Security secretary, said last month. “By requiring those seeking to come or stay in the United States to rely on their own resources, families and communities, we will encourage self-sufficiency, promote immigrant success and protect American taxpayers.”

The chilling effect spreading through immigrant communities recalls how millions of refugees dumped social services during the welfare changes of the 1990s, even though the legislation that prompted the cuts explicitly exempted them.

Nazanin Ash, Washington-based vice president for global policy and advocacy for the nonprofit International Rescue Committee, pointed to research showing some 37 percent of refugees exempted from the Clinton-era changes in welfare benefits dropped food stamps they were entitled to.

Ash said the Trump administration rules would likely cause similar hardships for immigrants who contribute to the American economy.

“To call them a burden on society is factually incorrect,” she said.

The nonprofit Migration Policy Institute in Washington said in an August policy paper that it expects “a significant share” of the nearly 23 million noncitizens and U.S. citizens in immigrant families who use public benefits will drop them.

Julia Gelatt, a senior policy analyst with the institute, said the guidelines are so complicated that there have even been reports of parents dropping their kids’ free school lunches, which are not affected.

Gelatt noted that the rules apply only to social services used after Monday and do not affect citizens or most green card holders. Refugees vetted by the State Department and other federal agencies before their arrival in the U.S., as well as people who obtain asylum, are not affected.

The guidelines don’t apply to many programs for children and pregnant and postnatal women, including Head Start early childhood education and the Supplemental Food Program for Women, Infants and Children.

Nevertheless, Stephanie Santiago, who manages two Phoenix-area clinics for the nonprofit Mountain Park Health Center, said during the last three months of 2019 she suddenly saw scores of immigrants drop those and other benefits.

“People are very scared about the rules,” Santiago said. “The sad thing is that they even drop the services their U.S. citizen kids qualify for. A lot of these kids are going to school sick or their parents are paying out of pocket for services they should get for free.”

Cynthia Aragon, outreach coordinator for the nonprofit Helping Families in Need in Phoenix, said that because of the confusion, she is steering people to private sources of aid, like food banks and church-run clinics.

“I think people will start applying for government services again after it becomes clearer how things are going to work,” Aragon said. “In the meantime, we tell immigrants to look for some of the other resources out there and don’t feel like a victim.”

This content originally appeared on Ralph Nader Radio Hour and was authored by Ralph Nader Radio Hour.