Why You Might Not Want to Be Pregnant in Pennsylvania
The health issues associated with fracking just keep piling up. The unconventional gas drilling method, officially known as hydraulic fracturing, not only damages the environment by injecting toxic chemicals into the ground, which poisons groundwater, interrupts natural water cycles, releases radon gas and causes earthquakes, but it has also been connected to numerous health conditions, including asthma, headaches, high blood pressure, anemia, neurological illness, heart attacks and cancer.
But perhaps most heartbreaking is the effect that fracking may have on babies. Studies have linked fracking to increased infant mortality and low birth babies. Now researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health have found that expectant mothers who reside near active fracking sites in Pennsylvania have a higher risk of giving birth prematurely and having high-risk pregnancies.
The retrospective cohort study, which was published online on September 30 in the journal Epidemiology, analyzed electronic health record data on 9,384 mothers living in northern and central Pennsylvania linked to 10,946 neonates from January 2009 to January 2013. The researchers found that expectant mothers living in the most active fracking areas were 40 percent more likely to give birth prematurely, i.e., a gestation period of less than 37 weeks. In addition, those pregnant women are 30 percent more likely to have a high-risk pregnancy, a label that refers to a variety of factors that include excessive weight gain and high blood pressure.
"Prenatal residential exposure to unconventional natural gas development activity was associated with two pregnancy outcomes," write the researchers in the study's abstract, "adding to evidence that unconventional natural gas development may impact health."
Today, Pennsylvania is one the most heavily fracked states, and the rapid development of the practice has occurred in just a few years: In 2005, there were no producing wells. In 2013, there were 3,689. Now, there are more than 8,000.
"The growth in the fracking industry has gotten way out ahead of our ability to assess what the environmental and, just as importantly, public health impacts are," said study leader Brian S. Schwartz, a professor in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the Bloomberg School. "Our research adds evidence to the very few studies that have been done showing adverse health outcomes associated with the fracking industry."
It should be noted that while the study shows a correlation between fracking and negative maternal issues, it does not establish any causation as to why pregnant women who live near active wells experienced worse outcomes. However, Schwartz points out that there is some kind of environmental impact associated with every facet of the fracking process, from increased noise and traffic to poor air quality — all of which can increase maternal stress.
"Now that we know this is happening, we'd like to figure out why," Schwartz said. "Is it air quality? Is it the stress? They're the two leading candidates in our minds at this point."
While the impacts of fracking on public health are far from fully understood, early research should be incorporated in policy decisions about how best to regulate the industry.
"The first few studies have all shown health impacts," said Schwartz. "Policymakers need to consider findings like these in thinking about how they allow this industry to go forward."
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Does Joe Biden Have a Real Shot at Winning the Nomination?
Vice-President Joe Biden is said to be ready to announce that he will run for president in 2016.
According a series of sources, starting with Fox News, confidantes of the vice-president said that he would make an official announcement within the next two days and is looking to hire campaign staff.
As The Nation’s Joan Walsh wrote Monday, a string of top-level Washington reporters with sources in the White House, were saying that Biden was unimpressed by the field challenging Hillary Clinton in the first Democratic Party debate (the Washington Post’s Dan Balz); that he would not be “bullied” by the Clinton campaign (CBS); that he stood for Biden “values” as opposed to Clinton values (The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd); and that Biden would make an announcement within days (NBC’s Kristen Welker and CNBC’s John Harwood).
We don’t know yet if these are the final trial balloons, which can burst with “What are you thinking Joe?” pushbacks, or real scoops.
But we know that Biden has run for the presidency twice before, in 1987 and in 2008, where Obama picked him as his running mate. After serving under President Obama for almost seven years, it is not surprising that he has thought considerably about jumping into the ring.
Seeing the presidency from his vantage point, it is likely that he felt more qualified than ever, even if he is getting started late and faces formidable competition from Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. As anyone who has been around presidential campaigns will tell you, it is impossible to shake off the presidential bug once bitten.
But that doesn’t mean it’s a wise, smart or shrewd idea—and that’s especially true for Biden. If he’s getting advice from players who are as far on the inside as the D.C. journalists who were breaking or leaking this story, that’s not a good sign. After all, the race is one where political outsiders are flourishing. Doesn’t Biden realize that he can only run as the most inside of Washington insiders?
How Biden’s would-be entrance into the race will affect the increasingly tight Democratic contest remains to be seen. Presumably, he has Obama’s backing, which is a big deal, as Obama is still the party leader. Although it is possible that Obama will take a hands-off approach until he has to get involved in order to protect his legacy. Right now, there’s no pressure on Obama to do anything.
How Biden reshuffles Democratic polling numbers is another question. According to a recent survey by Public Policy Polling, Clinton is still the top choice of Democrats nationwide but Biden would have slightly more support that Sanders.
On October 6, PPP included Biden in its questioning and subsequently wrote, “We also tested a fantasy field in which all of the names that have been thrown out there as possible Clinton challengers in recent months were included. Clinton gets 37% to 20% for Biden, 19% for Sanders, 11% for Elizabeth Warren, 4% for Al Gore, 2% each for Michael Dukakis and John Kerry, and 1% for Martin O'Malley. When you throw Warren, Gore, Dukakis, and Kerry into the mix Clinton still holds on to 83% of the people who support her in the actual field of candidates, compared to 80% for Biden, and 69% for Sanders.”
PPP's report continued, “We also tested Clinton head to head against Biden, Sanders, Gore, Warren, and Kerry. Biden comes the closest—in a head to head against Clinton he trails only 51/38. No one else can come within 20 points of Clinton when it comes to a one on one contest. Sanders trails 54/34, Warren 58/28, Gore 67/22, and Kerry 69/17. That’s not to say Democratic voters don’t like these other faces. Gore has a 62/21 favorability rating, Kerry a 57/20 one, and Warren comes in at 51/18. But for the most part Democrats are content with nominating Clinton next year and aren’t looking for some new face (beyond possibly Biden) to enter the race so they can flock to them.”
The Nation’s Walsh wrote that a Biden candidacy could cut into Sanders’ support among working class whites, as that is his natural base. But even that is not exactly a given in today’s Democratic field.
As she noted, Biden cannot run to the left of Clinton. He was elected and re-elected six times as a U.S. Senator before becoming vice president. His record in the Senate is not as liberal as hers. Biden may go after Clinton for representing Wall Street as New York’s senator, but he has been the credit card industry’s man in the Senate for decades. He helped toughen the laws on bankruptcy, which has been criticized by Elizabeth Warren. In a party where the Black Lives Matter movement counts, he’s been pushing get-tough criminal justice reforms for years—the very drug and sentencing laws that Clinton and Sanders say they would repeal (even as Hillary’s husband, Bill Clinton, signed them; he recently apologized).
It’s also hard to imagine that Biden could come in and raise the requisite campaign cash to compete with Sanders and Hillary, or that he could build an an-the-ground organization that could win in the first four Democratic contests: Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina. In a crowded field, he has to show that he can do well early on and have staying power for a longer haul.
The New York Times just reported that Clinton has spent more early money getting her campaign up and running in more states than anyone else now running, suggesting that was one of her biggest takeaways from losing to Obama in 2008. The Sanders campaign has been following a similar template, trying to get people on the ground in more than the first few states where Sanders is likely to win. Does Biden really have a comparable cache of donors and local activists ready to go?
It is understandable that Biden could not sit still as his last likely shot to run for president slipped by. But sitting feet away from Obama in the White House and thinking that “I could do this job,” and being urged by D.C. insiders to go for it—especially reporters who love covering chaotic campaigns—is a far cry from being in drafty meeting halls and bland hotel ballrooms across America waiting for crowds to come.
What is Biden really thinking? We’ll soon find out.
Related Stories5 of the Biggest Acts of Corporate Hypocrisy in America
American 'exceptionalism' exists in the minds of super-patriots who are more than willing to overlook their own faults as they place themselves above other people. The only question may be which of their self-serving hypocrisies is most outrageous and destructive.
1. Corporations Hoarding $2 Trillion in Profits, Asking Taxpayers to Pay Their Employees' Wages
Citizens for Tax Justice just reported that Fortune 500 companies are holding over $2.1 trillion in accumulated profits offshore for tax purposes, with estimated taxes due of over $600 billion. But high-profile businessmen Peter Georgescu and Warren Buffett both recently recommended that government subsidies be used to increase worker wages, and Marco Rubio agreed, suggesting that government should pay the sick leave for corporate employees.
Georgescu proclaimed: "This country has given me remarkable opportunities." In return, he concludes, taxpayers should "provide tax incentives to business."
2. Mourning American Lives, But Not Foreign Lives
Two days after President Obama expressed grief and anger about the Oregon school shootings, a hospital in Afghanistan was bombed by the U.S., killing 22 people. Our government admitted its mistake. But we haven't apologized for funding Saudi Arabia's attacks in Yemen, which are killing hundreds of civilians. Or for our drone strikes in Pakistan, which led one 13-year-old to say, "I no longer love blue skies...The drones do not fly when the skies are gray."
Josh Earnest, the White House spokesman assured us that "If necessary, the President would implement changes that would make tragedies like this one less likely to occur in the future." But these are empty words. Professor Marc Herold'sresearch has shown that "as the U.S. bombs get smarter, civilian casualties increase." The military is encouraged to "drop bombs on sites which previously might not have been hit for fear of causing widespread civilian deaths."
3. Caring About Unborn Children, But Not Living Children
The anti-abortion element keeps attacking Planned Parenthood, even though the long-successful and essential organization saves women's lives through breast cancer screenings, and reduces abortions by providing contraceptive services.
Little mention is made of the 65% rise in homeless children in less than ten years. Or of the fact that only the United States and South Sudan have failed to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child. It's a curious phenomenon that a safe and secure fetus garners more attention than a child exposed to the harsh realities of the world outside.
4. Demanding Self-Reliance of People Who Can't Find a Living-Wage Job
The Koch-funded Heritage Foundation proclaimed, "Helping the poor should mean promoting individual freedom through self-reliance.." The Cato Instituteadded, "SNAP helps breed dependency and undermines the work ethic."
Here are the facts: Nearly two-thirds of all working-age poor are actually working, but unable to earn a living wage, forcing them to rely on food stamps, which only provide about $5 a day per person for meals. In addition, over 83 percent of all benefits going to low-income people are for the elderly, the disabled, or working households.
Black families have the least opportunities, and are most maligned. The Wall Street Journal blurted: "..Too few blacks...have taken advantage of the opportunities now available to them." But a recent study found that job applicants were about 50 percent more likely to be called back if they had "white" names. A hiring analysis study found that white job applicants with criminal records werecalled back more often than blacks without criminal records. Over half of the black college graduates of recent years were underemployed in 2013, working in occupations that typically do not require a four-year college degree.
Perhaps worst of all, Congress vilifies the poor for laziness while doing little to provide employment opportunities. In 2011 Senate Republicans killed a proposed $447 billion jobs bill that would have added about two million jobs to the economy. Members of Congress filibustered Nancy Pelosi's "Prevention of Outsourcing Act," even as a million jobs were being outsourced, and they temporarily blocked the "Small Business Jobs Act." In April, 2013 only one member of Congress bothered to show up for a hearing on unemployment. When asked what he would do to bring jobs to Kentucky, Mitch McConnellresponded, "That is not my job. It is the primary responsibility of the state Commerce Cabinet."
5. Turning Away People Who Were Displaced by Our "Free Trade" Pacts
Many Americans have sympathized with Donald Trump's anti-immigrant sentiments, despite his cruel assessment of Mexican people: "They're bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists."
Apparently few Americans are aware of, or concerned about, the hardships faced by Mexican families since the beginnings of NAFTA. Subsidies to U.S. corn farmers led to lower prices and a tripling of corn exports to Mexico over the first ten years of the trade pact. Prices collapsed in Mexico. Corn that earned growers 2.00 pesos per kilogram in 1994 dropped to .50 pesos in 2001. Production became concentrated in the hands of a few wealthy landowners. Over 1.3 million jobs were lost in agriculture since 1994, while 500,000 manufacturing jobs were gained, most of them at lower wages than before NAFTA, and many of them in the crime-filled and disease-ridden maquiladora factory towns at the U.S. border.
Ana Luisa Cruz would leave her house in Ciudad Juarez at 5 AM to work at a maquiladora factory for $7.60 a day, which was not enough to pay for both food and school fees for her three younger children. Mexico's wages fell further as factory jobs were lost to even lower-wage countries. For many like Ana Luisa, there was nothing else to do but seek work across the border, in the United States.
More...
Banks get bailouts, but homeowners and students can't declare bankruptcy. Drug companies increase prices by 5,000%, but Medicare is not allowed to negotiatefor lower drug prices. Charter schools are public when the money is being passed out, but private when we want to look at their books.
The list goes on and on.
Related StoriesCop Kills Black Musician Whose Car Broke Down, Police Leave Family in the Dark About Why
31-year-old musician Corey Jones was driving home from a show when his car broke down on a Florida interstate. He called his brother to tell him he was about to call a toll truck, and that's the last thing anyone in his family heard from him, family members told CBS 12. 13 hours later Palm Beach County Sheriff officer informed them that he had been killed in an officer involved shooting.
But that's about all the family was told, CBS12 reports.
"We don’t know where his body is, we don’t know what’s going on, all we know is someone knocked on the door and said this has happened," Jones’ cousin, Ava Wright told CBS12.
According to a police statement released Monday, the plainclothes officer went to investigate what he thought was an abandoned vehicle. They claim the shooting happened after the officer was confronted by an "armed subject," but Jones' family and friends describe the musician as unlikely to start a fight with police. They told the Washington Post that he didn't carry a gun.
A bandmate that performed with Jones that night told CBS12, "I don't understand how anyone could ever perceive Corey is a threat he's the most level-headed, calm kind-hearted person."
On the website Patheos, a man who says he's a close friend of Jones talks about the pain of seeing a loved one's name become a hashtag:
I wasn’t ready to see someone I knew, someone I worked with, and someone I considered to be a friend in a hashtag.
When I saw his name behind a hashtag, the reality of every story of police shootings over the past year weighed down on me so heavily that all the work in the world could not distract me from the realization that someone I knew had been taken away from us by the very people deputized to protect and serve us.
The officer is on paid administrative leave.
Watch news report from CBS12 below. (h/t Raw Story)
Toddlers with Guns Shoot Someone About Once a Week in America: 6 Horrifying Recent Incidents
You'd be surprised how often a toddler with a gun accidentally injures or kills someone.
This is flippant language to use about tragic situations, but the scenario of a small child finding a firearm, being curious about it and accidentally shooting someone, is staggeringly common—about once a week by the best count. It’s a scenario the pro-gun forces never talk about, perhaps because it can’t by any stretch be solved by still more guns. According to a recent report in the Washington Post, toddler gun accidents happen on at least a weekly basis, that we know of. Only the most tragic cases make the news, and otherwise, no one is really counting.
Sometimes the toddler is on the receiving end, as in Chicago this past weekend when a 6-year-old killed his 3-year-old brother while playing a game of cops and robbers. Other times, a curious wee tot is the one who fires what he (and it is usually a boy) presumes to be a toy. Two weeks ago, a 2-year-old in South Carolina found a gun in the backseat of the car and shot his grandmother who was sitting up front.
Wonder how Dr. Ben Carson feels about carnage that exceeds deaths caused by terrorism easily this year? Unperturbed, presumably, since this "doctor" does not find bodies full of bullet holes all that disturbing, even, we suppose, really young bodies. He’d probably recommend that next time the grandmother in the passenger seat rush the kid, instead of just sitting there and allowing him to shoot her. Or in the Chicago case, maybe arming all the toddlers, so they could shoot and kill the 6-year-olds before being shot by them.
The real tragedies make the news, but there are likely countless near-misses that don’t. Still, the deaths are horrifyingly common. More often than not, in 31 out of the 43 cases of toddler gun accidents, the toddler accidentally shoots himself. In 2015 so far, 13 toddlers have accidentally killed themselves, like the 21-month-old in St. Louis in August, who shot himself in the torso and died, and the Michigan 3-year-old who shot himself in the head in June, and died.
When cases like these do get publicity, there’s a lot of talk about the need for people to practice increased gun safety, and sure, that’s a no-brainer. People should not leave guns lying around. But when there are more guns than people, and NRA-backed politicians calling for even more guns, especially in schools where there are loads and loads of kids, well, Jeb Bush is kind of right on this one, stuff happens.
Here are just six of the most horrifying and stupefying recent incidents where toddlers got hold of just one of the ubiquitous firearms in this country.
1. Three-year-old shoots both parents with a single bullet. The 3-year-old son of Justin Reynolds and Monique Villescas was looking for an iPod in his mom’s purse in their Albuquerque hotel room, when he found her gun instead. He accidentally fired a single shot which managed to strike both of his parents—dad in the buttock and pregnant mom in the shoulder—but missed his 2-year-old sister. Both parents survived their injuries. The kids were taken away from their parents, but not, presumably the guns. Because freedom.
2. Twenty-one-month-old fatally shoots self in torso. This tragedy happened in the St. Louis area in August at around 1 in the afternoon. The youngster was apparently at his grandmother’s house at the time. There was an arrest, so that’ll help.
3. Three-year-old shoots self in the head, dies. On a fine June day in Clinton, Michigan, Jonathan Kaufman found a loaded .40 caliber pistol in a closet while his dad and older brother were outside. He accidentally shot himself in the head. At 3, he probably should have known better.
4. Three-year-old shoots self in the head, dies. This is not a repeat, though it could be a toddler copycat. Damon Holbrook found a gun, also in a Michigan home, and shot himself in the head. Hours later, his dad, Brian Holbrook, went on Facebook to defend the right to bear arms. “I have nothing wrong with guns,” [sic] he wrote. “It’s with this country was built on.” [sic, again]
5. Six-year-old shoots 3-year-old in Chicago, but let’s face it, it could have been the reverse. Toddlers aren’t the only ones finding guns and accidentally killing people. Kindergartners and first graders also do this (as well as older kids.) The genius dad in this case was a former gang member who had bought the gun to protect his family, wrapped it in pajamas and put it on a shelf, and then very sensibly showed it to his son. The dad was arrested.
6. Two-year-old shoots and kills sleeping dad. In Hoover, Alabama in late August, a mother came home to find Divine Vaniah Chambliss dead of a gunshot wound. Prime suspect: their 2-year-old son. The semi-automatic handgun that killed Chambliss was his own. He always carried it. For protection, of course.
Related StoriesThe US Has Been Pushing to Overthrow Assad in Syria for 10 Years
The accepted story in the United States of what's happened in Syria is just that, a story told to make narrative sense of something completely un-understood.
In Southern Sweden a giant round rock lies on flat farmland, and the lovely story my ancestors used to tell to explain how it got there came down to this: a troll threw it there. As evidence, in a nearby castle, one can find a horn and a pipe that come into the story. The horn contained what today would be called chemical weapons, which burned the back of a horse when the hero of the story was smart enough to dump it over his shoulder rather than drinking it. Man and horse got away by riding across the furrows of a field, because everyone knows that trolls must run back and forth the full length of each furrow, which slows them down tremendously. The facts all fit. Some fringe conspiracy theorists may question the very existence of trolls, but such arguments need not be taken seriously.
A peace activist recently sent this video link to a listserve with a note stating that this video got the Syria story pretty much right. I had a number of objections:
That the United States got involved in Syria in 2006 is revealed in WikiLeaks. That the Pentagon was intent on overthrowing the Syrian government in 2001 is revealed by the Donald Rumsfeld memo shown to Wesley Clark, and by Tony Blair in 2010. So the story in this video of the U.S. taking an interest -- purely humanitarian of course -- only in 2013 is highly misleading.
That misdirection also facilitates leaving out of the story the U.S. brushing aside of a peace process proposed by Russia in 2012.
The statement, presented in the video as fact, that Assad used chemical weapons in that attack in 2013 is outrageous, as that has never been established. What ought to have been said was that someone used chemical weapons and Obama claimed falsely to have incontrovertible evidence that it was Assad.
Quoting Obama on a 2013 proposal for a "targeted military strike" blatantly avoids Seymour Hersh's report on the massive bombing campaign Obama had planned.
The video's conclusion that because the war is complicated there is therefore "just no end in sight" is reckless, as an end could be achieved if some effort were put into it, beginning with an honest assessment of the facts, and a retelling of 2013 as something other than "the United States backing down."
What would an honest account about the same length as this video look like? Perhaps like this:
Sad to say, the global policeman of humanitarian intent is no more real than a troll or a "Khorasan Group."
At least as early as 2001, the United States had the Syrian government on a list of governments targeted for overthrow.
In 2003, the United States threw the Middle East into a whole new sort of turmoil with its invasion of Iraq. It created sectarian divisions, and fueled and armed and facilitated the organization of violent groups.
At least as early as 2006, the United States had people in Syria working for the overthrow of the government.
The U.S. response to the Arab Spring, and the U.S.-led overthrow of the Libyan government made matters worse. ISIS was developing long before it burst into the news, its leaders organizing in U.S. prison camps in Iraq. The region was heavily armed with weapons from outside the region, primarily from the United States. Three-quarters of weapons shipped to Middle-Eastern governments were and are from the U.S. The weapons of the U.S. military itself and of its allies, such as Saudi Arabia and Iraq, were intentionally and accidentally supplied to new violent groups.
The Arab Spring in Syria was made violent almost immediately, with support for violence from one side coming from the United States and its Gulf dictatorship allies, and from the other side from Iran and Hezbollah and Russia. The Free Syrian Army became one player in a civil and proxy and regional war, recruiting fighters from around the region of "liberated" disaster states. Al Qaeda became another player, as did the Kurds. The U.S. government, however, remained focused on overthrowing the Syrian government, and took no serious steps to halt support for al Qaeda and other groups from U.S. Gulf allies or Turkey or Jordan (steps such as cutting off the flow of weapons from the United States, imposing sanctions, negotiating a cease-fire or arms embargo).
In 2012, Russia proposed a peace-process that would have included President Bashar al-Assad stepping down, but the U.S. brushed the idea aside without any serious consideration, suffering under the delusion that Assad would be violently overthrown very soon, and preferring a violent solution as more likely to remove the Russian influence and military -- and perhaps also due to the general U.S. preference for violence driven by its weapons industry corruption. Meanwhile the Iraqi government was bombing its own citizens with weapons rushed to it by the U.S., violently fueling the coming ISIS assault. And the U.S. had "ended" its military occupation of Iraq without ending it.
In 2013, the White House went public with plans to lob some unspecified number of missiles into Syria, which was in the midst of a horrible civil war already fueled in part by U.S. arms and training camps, as well as by wealthy U.S. allies in the region and fighters emerging from other U.S.-created disasters in the region. The excuse for the missiles was an alleged killing of civilians, including children, with chemical weapons -- a crime that President Barack Obama claimed to have certain proof had been committed by the Syrian government. He never produced so much as a horn or a pipe or a pleasant story as evidence.
Seymour Hersh would later reveal that the U.S. plan had been for a massive bombing campaign. And Robert Parry, among others, would report on the debunking of White House lies about the chemical weapons attack. While Syria might have been guilty, the White House almost certainly did not know that, and the U.S. public seemed to recognize that even such guilt would not justify entering the war. A Russian proposal to eliminate Syria's chemical weapons had already been known to the White House and been rejected. What compelled Obama to accept diplomacy as the last resort in 2013 was the public's and Congress's refusal to allow war. But Obama went right on arming and training fighters in the Syrian war, and sending more troops back into Iraq.
When ISIS burst onto the scene it openly begged the United States to attack it, viewing this as a huge recruitment opportunity. The United States obliged, attacking ISIS from the air in Iraq and Syria (and getting numerous allies to do so as well), in addition to continuing its arming and training operations -- now supposedly aimed at both ISIS and Assad. ISIS thrived, as did various anti-Asad groups. Turkey joined in by attacking Kurds rather than ISIS or Assad. Russia joined in by bombing ISIS and anti-government groups in Syria. This dangerously increased already high tension between Russia and the United States, as Russia intends to keep the Syrian government from being overthrown, and the United States intends to overthrow it -- and to bring in more allies, with the UK planning a vote on adding their bombs to the mix.
Of course, a ceasefire, an arms embargo, actual aid and reparations, regional disarmament and diplomacy, and the departure from the region of foreign powers all remain possible if pursued.
Related StoriesThis election campaign wasn’t about the economy
Photo by Charlene Vickers
When this election campaign began two months ago, the main party leaders pledged to focus on the economy.
“Now is not the time for the kind of harmful economic schemes that are doing so much damage elsewhere in the world,” Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper said as he kicked off the 78-day campaign.
“If you want to create jobs and grow the economy, you have to give the middle class a real and fair chance to succeed,” said Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau then.
In those early August days, New Democratic Party Leader Tom Mulcair vowed that his number-one priority would be to “kick-start the economy and get Canadians back to work.”
Headline writers and pundits predicted that the economy would dominate the campaign.
Now, with just two days left in the campaign, a fundamental debate over the economy has yet to emerge.
There are differences among the major parties. Harper’s Conservatives are sticking with their old-time religion, one that looks on the free market to sort out all difficulties in the national economy.
The Liberals and NDP envisage a more positive, if modest, role for government.
There is also some debate over what might be called household economics — such as who gets which boutique tax breaks.
Yet the needs of the overall economy have barely been addressed by any party.
Both the Liberals and NDP say they would reform the Employment Insurance system to make it more responsive to part-timers and other engaged in so-called precarious work. But they don’t specify how.
Both opposition parties also talk of increasing Canada Pension Plan benefits. But they don’t say by how much. In this year’s platform, the NDP has quietly dropped its 2011 pledge to eventually double CPP benefits.
Can new jobs be created to replace those lost by the decline in manufacturing? The Liberals would spend about $300 million a year encouraging businesses to be innovative. Their platform mysteriously talks about promoting “incubators and accelerators.”
The NDP, like the Conservatives, would offer tax breaks to manufacturers.
All three major parties accept the globalization agenda in that they favour free-trade deals. The Liberals insist that such deals be “properly negotiated and implemented.” The NDP would ensure that free trade pacts “support Canadian jobs.”
In that context, it is important to note that Mulcair has not said he’s unequivocally opposed to Harper’s just-completed Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal with the U.S. and 10 other nations. He just says the pact should be renegotiated in order to improve it.
Trudeau says he is withholding judgment until after the election.
Income inequality? The Conservatives don’t address it. The NDP would direct a little more to the working poor. The Liberals would rejig the tax system to favour those earning between roughly $45,000 and $200,000 – at the expense of those earning more than $200,000.
As efforts to reduce income equality, the Liberal and NDP schemes are more than nothing. But they are hardly transformative.
Politically, none of this may matter. In this campaign, when the leaders talk about the economy they are not trying to lay out well-considered alternatives for debate. Rather they are talking in code.
When 56-year-old Harper talks of the need to stay the economic course, what he’s really saying is that Trudeau, 43, is a callow youth and Mulcair, 60, a wild-eyed socialist.
When Mulcair talks of encouraging small business, what he’s really saying is that the NDP is no longer left wing.
When Trudeau boasts that he’ll run deficits for three years, what he’s really saying is that he’s bolder than balanced-budget aficionado Mulcair.
When Trudeau and Mulcair talk of the need for change, they are not appealing to those who dislike Harper’s economic policy. Rather, they are appealing to those who dislike Harper.
Will Monday’s election be decided on the economy? Perhaps it will. But it’s equally likely the outcome will be decided by how Quebecers view the niqab or whether voters in the 905 region outside Toronto believe Harper’s claim that Trudeau wants to set up brothels in their neighbourhoods.
This article originally appeared in The Toronto Star.
Syria's Going to Get Even Worse If the US and Other Powers Don't Start Negotiating
As war between President Bashar al-Assad and various rebel forces raged across Syria, as the Obama administration and the CIA armed rebel factions of their liking while continuing an air campaign against the militants of the Islamic State (ISIS), as Russia entered the quagmire with its own airstrikes, and as millions of Syrians fled for their lives amid untold violence, a Connecticut congressman decided to do something.
At the end of September, Connecticut Representative Jim Himes, a House Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, corralled 54 of his colleagues intosending a letter to President Obama calling for the start of international negotiations that would include Iran and Russia and be aimed at ending the Syrian civil war. President Obama is reportedly listening.
This could prove to be a critical turning point in a brutal conflict that has, until now, seemed without end -- not because Himes has a quick, sure-to-succeed solution, but because every other course of action is overwhelmingly likely to fail. To understand why, it’s necessary to take a brief look backward.
Pouring Gasoline on Syria’s Fire
More than four years ago, in 2011, passionate Arab Spring protesters rose up to overthrow despised leaders from Tunisia to Libya, Egypt to Yemen. In Syria, citizens filled the streets, voicing their opposition to the murderous regime of President Bashar al-Assad. His government responded by unleashing its military on the protesters. Some of them, along with soldiers from Assad’s forces, went on to form the Free Syrian Army (FSA), thanks, in part, to financing from the CIA and the Saudis, and a civil war began. As months of fighting turned into years, hundreds of thousands of civilians died, and millions more were uprooted.
In the process, more extreme factions among the rebels, including the al-Qaeda-aligned al-Nusra Front, gained ever greater traction, while ISIS spread across parts of Syria and Iraq, proclaiming a “caliphate” and drawing foreign volunteers by the thousands. ISIS had grown and prospered within the mayhem and power vacuum created by the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq and then its dismantling of Saddam Hussein’s army. (Some future ISIS leaders, in fact, first met inside U.S. military prison camps during those years.)
Turning the fog of the Syrian civil war to its advantage, ISIS claimed ever more land in northern Syria and, emboldened, launched an offensive in Iraq,routing the army the U.S. had created there and taking the country’s second largest city, Mosul. But ISIS was more than a brutal, terrorist insurgency. It was also a darkly savvy PR operation. In September 2014, it filmed beheadings of American prisoners and put them online.
That was the moment when the U.S. public really began paying attention to Syria.
And so, just over a year ago, relying on a 2001 authorization to wage war against al-Qaeda, President Obama ordered the first of what are now more than 7,000 airstrikes against ISIS, stationed thousands of U.S. military advisers and trainers in Iraq, and soon launched what would be a disastrous program to vet, arm, and train “moderate” Syrian rebels to counter the militants of the Islamic State.
In the year that followed, the Syrian refugee crisis escalated dramatically, thanks to the growing strength of ISIS, the brutality of the Syrian regime, and an ever more violent civil war. The entry of the U.S. and other countries into the conflict likely only increased the chaos and misery.
As a result, Lebanon alone, with a population of around 4.5 million, has taken in more than a million refugees. In other words, approximately one in every five people in that country is now a refugee from Syria. And while Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey have struggled to accommodate this deluge of asylum seekers, refugee Syrian families endure chronic and debilitating poverty, inadequate health care, and lack of access to education for their children.
Enter Russia, Stage Right
Just a couple of weeks ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin, a longstanding supporter of Assad, launched his own air war against ISIS. On September 30th, soon after Russian explosives began dropping, reports started to surface that they were hitting FSA fighters and infrastructure. In other words, Russia was dropping bombs on some of the rebels who have been receiving support from Washington.
Defense Secretary Ashton Carter promptly (and accurately) accused Russia of “pouring gasoline on a fire.” And he would know, since the U.S. has been among the biggest gas pourers of all.
According to the National Priorities Project, U.S. taxpayers have already forked over an astonishing $6.5 billion in the administration’s failed air war against ISIS, even as Pentagon officials acknowledge that airstrikes alone won’t snuff out the terrorists or their “caliphate.”
Meanwhile, Congress allocated $500 million for the failed “train and equip program” that was meant to produce 5,000 “moderate” Syrian rebels to fight ISIS. That program yielded only a handful of fighters, some of whom the al-Nusra Front reportedly kidnapped or killed. Some American-supplied trucks and ammunition were also turned over to Nusra Front fighters.
Yes, you read that correctly. The U.S. effectively supplied arms to al-Qaeda in Syria, just as -- thanks to the collapse of Iraqi army units, which abandoned their equipment in Mosul, Ramadi, and elsewhere -- we in effect helped equipISIS, too. How’s that for gasoline?
What matters most, however, is the staggering human toll of all this. More than 6.5 million Syrians are now displaced, impoverished, and adrift inside their own country. Another four million have become refugees, spilling into Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey, and more recently heading for Europe in staggering numbers.
Their misery and utter desperation are beyond imagining as they push off rocky coasts heading for Europe, clinging to shoddy rubber rafts, or arecrammed into suffocating cargo trucks -- sometimes to be met on arrival bywater cannons and tear gas. A Syrian father recently laid bare the choices his family faced. Asked why he was “risking the lives of his children on an illegal and potentially lethal seaborne passage,” he answered, "in Syria, they are dead already."
A Congressman Decides to Do Something
Until Congressman Himes sat down to write his letter, there had been remarkably little talk of international negotiations as an alternative to this endless devastation. It should be clear enough by now that continued violence, with ever more parties joining the fray, will bring only what it’s brought for the past four years: chaos and destruction. While some war hawks in Washington have previously urged more “decisive” military action to oust Assad as well as destroy the Islamic State, that path would most likely leave Syria in still greater chaos -- and ripe for further exploitation by ISIS, the al-Nusra Front, and other extremist outfits.
Negotiations it must be. They won't be quick or easy. It’s a guarantee, in fact, that they'll be messy and wrenching. When it comes to Syria, that's nothing new. But diplomacy does promise gains over the situation as it stands today. The hard-nosed and principled diplomatic negotiations involving the U.S., Russia, China, Great Britain, France, and Germany around Iran’s nuclear program prevailed when naysayers swore that they would fail. They stand as a remarkable example of what’s possible when nations resolve conflicts with diplomacy instead of bloodshed.
Philip Gordon, the former White House Coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa, and the Gulf Region, has laid out a blueprint for how such negotiations might proceed on Syria. All the international players would have to be brought to the table, including Russia, Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Gordon notes that, since this group includes vehement supporters of Assad as well as those who are invested in his departure, negotiators would have to postpone any decision about Assad's fate and focus first on common interests.
And there are common interests -- in de-escalating the violence, addressing the refugee crisis, and defunding and defeating ISIS. Shared objectives might include negotiating localized ceasefires between the government and rebel forces and establishing a structure in which representatives of Assad’s regime could begin a dialogue with the rebels. Then the group of negotiating nations could turn its focus to ISIS. Indeed, the ongoing wars and the disintegrating states of the region have created a fertile habitat for that terrorist group to spread its radical agenda and claim new ground. A de-escalation of the civil war, paired with meaningful humanitarian aid and cohesive and coordinated international efforts against ISIS, could prove the best hope for changing the fate and fortunes of the region.
Here, Washington bears responsibility -- both to quit pouring gasoline and to help repair some of the devastation. President Obama has recently taken modest steps in the right direction, ending the failed program to train moderate Syrian rebels and stating his willingness to work with Russia and Iran to find a solution to the civil war. Yet these positive developments come as the U.S. renews its pledge not to train but to equip “vetted leaders” of rebel groups with new weaponry (including TOW anti-tank missiles), and as tensions and fighting escalate not just between Assad and the rebels but also, by proxy, between the U.S. and Russia. That will make finding a diplomatic solution all the more difficult, yet all the more urgent.
A Path to a Different History
Meanwhile, the U.S. has been roundly criticized by the international community for its closed-door policy toward the millions of Syrians who are running for their lives. While Germany will have admitted 800,000 of them by year's end, the U.S. has taken in only 1,500 to date. For that reasonmayors, faith leaders, and thousands of ordinary citizens are calling for more refugees to be welcomed into our country.
It appears that this movement has helped build a political appetite for such an approach, as some members of Congress are now demanding that the U.S. admit tens of thousands more Syrians and expand humanitarian aid. President Obama has announced an increase to 10,000 refugees next year, but some lawmakers are advocating taking in 10 times more. In a letter co-signed by 26 of his Senate colleagues, Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticutcompared the paltry number the Obama administration has announced to the more than 700,000 Vietnamese the U.S. admitted in the years after the Vietnam War. They insist that on this subject Washington must not “sit on the sidelines.”
Another step in the right direction came from a bipartisan duo in the Senate. Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Patrick Leahy of Vermontunveiled legislation to provide $1 billion in humanitarian aid for the refugees, noting that the Syrian crisis “dwarfs anything we have seen for decades.” Such funding could be used to resettle Syrian refugees more quickly as well as to provide immediate lifesaving assistance, since the World Food Program has run out of money to feed the millions of Syrians currently outside its camps and has been forced to make painful cuts even within its settlements. The approach of winter threatens food supplies still further, leaving some refugees so desperate that they are returning to war-torn Syria.
If asylum and humanitarian aid are essential measures to heal the wounds of millions, diplomatic negotiations are essential for preventing a future crisis that could leave this one in the shade.
As Russian missiles rain down alongside American ones, as ever more groups, nations, and areas are embroiled in the Syrian conflict, as yet more innocent blood is spilled, it’s obviously time for international negotiations to finally begin. Diplomacy doesn’t promise a speedy end to the almost unfathomable suffering in the region, but it does offer a potential path to a different history, a path away from ceaseless violence and toward the imperfect rule of law.
Related StoriesI Read Donald Trump’s Favorite Book (His Own) So You Don't Have to
What’s the appeal of Donald Trump, who continues to be immensely popular among Republican voters despite longstanding predictions that his support would fade?
One of the key lines in Mark Leibovich’s much-quoted New York Times magazine story is that Trump preaches the secular version of prosperity gospel, “the idea that you follow a minister because he is rich and has his own plane and implicitly and sometimes explicitly promised that you, too will be rich.”
That complicated and entirely baseless promise is part of what attracted countless readers to the mogul’s first book, “The Art of the Deal,” which came out in 1987 and remained stuck at the top of the bestseller list for almost a year.
The book also reveals some of Trump’s unpleasant qualities, even though he wrote it with a co-author and was clearly doing his best to seem charismatic, reasonable, and good-natured.
The book is a series of victory laps about the deals Trump was proudest of – his acquisitions of various hotels and casinos in what it sometimes a blow-by-blow of phone calls, zoning battles, and financial exchanges. Through it all, Trump remains sunny, confident, happy-go-lucky. “I don’t do it for the money,” he tells us at the book’s beginning. “I’ve got enough, much more than I’ll ever need. I do it to do it. Deals are my art form.”
Though he also describes the relentlessness of his time on the phone – more than 50 calls a day, sometimes more than 100 – he also makes it all look easy. “I play it very loose. I don’t carry a briefcase. I try not to schedule too many meetings. I leave my door open. You can’t be imaginative or entrepreneurial if you’ve got too much structure. I prefer to come to work each day and just see what develops.”
Wow, that sounds great. This is the young Trump, one not ranting about immigrants or insulting women. (He tells us, in fact, that “I’ve hired a lot of women for top jobs.”) A kind of breeziness blows through much of the book. Much of this comes, surely, from the airbrushing that’s typical of many books in which an author wants to seem likable. But it also comes from the fact that Trump, despite what one reviewer called a “streetwise” tone, was from the start an entitled child of privilege who had his father’s money to play with.
Trump credits his success to trusting his instincts, knowing the market, aiming high, and so on. But while he praises his developer father as “my most important influence,” he seems entirely unconscious of the fact that his ability to “think big” and all the other business-book bromides his tosses out would be impossible if he didn’t start the game with significant riches. When Trump was in college, for instance, he and his father purchased a 1,200 unit apartment complex in Cincinnati, Swifton Village, for about $6 million: It becomes Trump’s first big deal.
His description of the way it went down shows some common sense smarts along with the usual nastiness (“I can always tell a loser when I see someone with a car for sale that is filthy dirty.”) And nobody expects him a sociological analysis or apology for his family wealth. But there’s no sense that all this was possible because Trump had millions to play with before he’d collected his diploma.
His beginning on third base and thinking he’d hit a triple – to borrow the phrase applied to George W. Bush – robs the book of any kind of arc or drama: Despite superficial similarities, it’s no “Wall Street” — or even “Wolf of Wall Street.” There are some individual enemies here, but no big obstacle to overcome. There’s a kind of obliviousness when he says things like, “When I graduated from college, I had a net worth of perhaps $200,000, and most of it was tied up in buildings in Brooklyn and Queens.” Despite its up-from-the-bootstraps tone, the book describes a rich-boy Horatio Alger.
Trump talks about the roots of his famous belligerence, writing about punching a music teacher in second grade (“I didn’t think he knew anything about music”) and his taste for trouble-making as an adolescent. (“I’d throw water balloons, shoot spitballs, and make a ruckus in the schoolyard and at birthday parties. It wasn’t malicious so much as it was aggressive.”) But while he talks about his admiration for loathsome attorney Roy Cohn, and occasionally tosses out an insult, and boasts a lot (the president of a social club was worried Trump would steal members’ wives “because I was young and good-looking”), this is mostly not the mean-spirited Trump we know now.
And two things we hear very little about in “The Art of the Deal” – from a man now running for president who has called the Bible his “favorite book” – are religion or politics. (More on one of those in a future post.)
We also learn that he hates market research, dislikes postmodern architecture, and learned a long time ago that controversy, even bad press, sells.
Trump is full of himself at times, entirely unreflective, and seemingly allergic to empathy for others. But he’s never as obnoxious or narcissistic as we’ve seen on television or on the campaign trail.
The back jacket of the paperback bears a blurb from Mike Wallace, who calls this early Trump “vainglorious” and “combative.” But compared to what Trump’s turned into, he seems almost laid-back and likable.
It shows how much more sensitive we were to personal arrogance back then — and how much more tolerant of it we’ve become since — that this milder Trump was seen as a swaggering ego at the time. You almost want to affix a cautionary preface to the book. Be warned, if you keep paying attention to this guy, his self-regard and aggressiveness will balloon beyond limit. The Trump in “The Art of the Deal” is at times brash and combative, sure, but clearly he was just getting started.
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Is the Mighty McDonald's Empire Facing Its Final Days?
McDonald's is facing a "deep depression" and could be in its "final days," according to some US franchise owners who were surveyed about the restaurant chain's recent performance.
In an attempt to shore up a slump, McDonald's introduced all-day breakfasts in its US stores, part of CEO Steve Easterbrook's 'turnaround plan' which also included digital ordering kiosks and other new menu items.
However, it seems like the new initiatives have simply caused headaches for restaurant operators, as they said in a survey conducted by analyst Mark Kalinowski.
"We are in the throes of a deep depression, and nothing is changing," wrote one franchisee.
"The CEO is sowing the seeds of our demise. We are a quick-serve fast-food restaurant, not a fast casual like Five Guys or Chipotle. The system may be facing its final days," said another.
The all-day breakfast has reportedly thrown a spanner in the works of the kitchens, with an extra range of menu items resulting in more pressure on the staff and a higher chance of mistakes.
Other new ideas from head office currently in place in the US is the 'Create Your Taste' option, which allows customers to create their own burger from 30 different ingredients - obviously a big change for a restaurant chain more accustomed to dishing out a few staples at fast pace.
Other initiatives, some of which have been restricted to a few locations, include 'healthier' menu items like the kale breakfast bowl, and a gritty reboot of the chain's beloved Hamburglar character.It's part of McDonald's plans to reverse an almost two-year decline in sales in the US, but some restaurant operators aren't impressed."The system is very lost at the moment. Our menu boards are still bloated, and we are still trying to be too many things to too many people."
"Things are broken from the franchisee perspective," one wrote.
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Robert Reich: Working Full Time and Living in Abject Poverty - That's What Today's Minimum Wage Will Get You
Have you noticed how often conservatives who disagree with a policy proposal call it a “job killer?”
They’re especially incensed about proposals to raise the federal minimum wage. They claim it will force employers to lay off workers worth hiring at the current federal minimum of $7.25 an hour but not at a higher minimum.
But as Princeton University economist Alan Krueger pointed outrecently in the New York Times, “research suggests that a minimum wage set as high as $12 an hour will do more good than harm for low-wage workers.”
That’s because a higher minimum puts more money into the pockets of people who will spend it, mostly in the local economy. That spending encourages businesses to hire more workers.
Which is why many economists, like Krueger, support raising the federal minimum to $12 an hour.
What about $15 an hour?
Across America, workers at fast-food and big-box retail establishments are striking for $15. Some cities are already moving toward this goal. Bernie Sanders is advocating it. A national movement is growing for a $15 an hour minimum.
Yet economists are nervous. Krueger says a $15 an hour minimum would “put us in uncharted waters, and risk undesirable and unintended consequences” of job loss.
Yet maybe some jobs are worth risking if a strong moral case can be made for a $15 minimum.
That moral case is that no one should be working full time and still remain in poverty.
People who work full time are fulfilling their most basic social responsibility. As such, they should earn enough to live on.
A full-time worker with two kids needs at least $30,135 this yearto be safely out of poverty. That’s $15 an hour for a forty-hour workweek.
Any amount below this usually requires government make up the shortfall – using tax payments from the rest of us to finance food stamps, Medicaid, housing assistance, and other kinds of help.
What about the risk of job loss? Historically, such a risk hasn’t deterred us from setting minimum work standards based on public morality.
The original child labor laws that went into effect in many states at turn of last century were opposed by business groups that argued such standards would raise the costs of business and force employers to lay off large numbers of young workers.
But America decided the employment of young children was morally wrong.
The safety laws enacted in the wake of the tragic Triangle Shirt Waste Factory fire of 1911, which killed 145 workers, were also deemed “job killers.”
“We are of the opinion that if the present recommendations [for stricter building codes] are insisted upon…factories will be driven from the city,” argued New York’s association of realtors.
But New York and hundreds of other cities enacted them nonetheless because they viewed unsafe sweatshops morally objectionable.
It was the same with the 1938 legislation mandating a forty-hour workweek with time-and-a-half for overtime, along with the first national minimum wage.
“It will destroy small industry,” predicted Georgia Congressman Edward Cox. It’s “a solution of this problem which is utterly impractical and in operation would be much more destructive than constructive to the very purposes which it is designed to serve,” charged Rep. Arthur Phillip Lamneck of Ohio.
America enacted fair labor standards anyway because it was the right thing to do.
Over the years America has decided that certain kinds of jobs – jobs that were done by children, or were unsafe, or required people to work too many hours, or below poverty wages – offend our sense of decency.
So we’ve raised standards and lost such jobs. In effect, we’ve decided such jobs aren’t worth keeping.
Even if a $15 an hour minimum wage risks job losses, it is still the right thing to do.
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How Chicago Police 'Disappeared' 7,000 People in an Off-the-Books Interrogation Warehouse
Police “disappeared” more than 7,000 people at an off-the-books interrogation warehouse in Chicago, nearly twice as many detentions as previously disclosed, the Guardian can now reveal.
From August 2004 to June 2015, nearly 6,000 of those held at the facility were black, which represents more than twice the proportion of the city’s population. But only 68 of those held were allowed access to attorneys or a public notice of their whereabouts, internal police records show.
The new disclosures, the result of an ongoing Guardian transparency lawsuit and investigation, provide the most detailed, full-scale portrait yet of the truth about Homan Square, a secretive facility that Chicago police have described as little more than a low-level narcotics crime outpost where the mayor has said police “follow all the rules.”
The police portrayals contrast sharply with those of Homan Square detainees and their lawyers, who insist that “if this could happen to someone, it could happen to anyone.” A 30-year-old man named Jose, for example, was one of the few detainees with an attorney present when he surrendered to police. He said officers at the warehouse questioned him even after his lawyer specifically told them he would not speak.
“The Fillmore and Homan boys,” Jose said, referring to police and the facility’s cross streets, “don’t play by the rules.”
According to an analysis of data disclosed to the Guardian in late September, police allowed lawyers access to Homan Square for only 0.94% of the 7,185 arrests logged over nearly 11 years. That percentage aligns with Chicago police’s broader practice of providing minimal access to attorneys during the crucial early interrogation stage, when an arrestee’s constitutional rights against self-incrimination are most vulnerable.
But Homan Square is unlike Chicago police precinct houses, according to lawyers who described a “find-your-client game” and experts who reviewed data from the latest tranche of arrestee records obtained by the Guardian."Not much shakes me in this business – baby murder, sex assault, I’ve done it all,” said David Gaeger, an attorney whose client was taken to Homan Square in 2011 after being arrested for marijuana. “That place was and is scary. It’s a scary place. There’s nothing about it that resembles a police station. It comes from a Bond movie or something.”
The narcotics, vice and anti-gang units operating out of Homan Square, on Chicago’s west side, take arrestees to the nondescript warehouse from all over the city: police data obtained by the Guardian and mapped against the city grid show that 53% of disclosed arrestees come from more than 2.5 miles away from the warehouse. No contemporaneous public record of someone’s presence at Homan Square is known to exist.
Nor are any booking records generated at Homan Square, as confirmed by a sworn deposition of a police researcher in late September, further preventing relatives or attorneys from finding someone taken there.
“The reality is, no one knows where that person is at Homan Square,” said Craig Futterman, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School who studies policing. “They’re disappeared at that point.”
A Chicago police spokesman did not respond to a list of questions for this article, including why the department had doubled its initial arrest disclosures without an explanation for the lag. “If lawyers have a client detained at Homan Square, just like any other facility, they are allowed to speak to and visit them,” the police claimed in a February statement.
Numbers are ‘hard to believe’Twenty-two people have told the Guardian that Chicago police kept them at Homan Square for hours and even days. They describe pressure from officers to become informants, and all but two – both white – have said the police denied them phone calls to alert relatives or attorneys of their whereabouts.
Their accounts point to violations of police directives, which say police must “complete the booking process” regardless of their interest in interrogating a suspect and must also “allow the arrestee to make a reasonable number of telephone calls to an attorney, family member or friend”, usually within “the first hour” of detention.
The most recent disclosure of Homan Square data provides the scale behind those accounts: the demographic trends within the 7,185 disclosed arrests at the warehouse are now far more vast than what the Guardian reported in August after launching the transparency lawsuit – but are consistently disproportionate in terms of race and constitutional access to legal counsel.
- 82.2% of people detained at Homan Square were black, compared with 32.9% of the Chicago population.
- 11.8% of detainees in the Homan Square logs were Hispanic, compared with 28.9% of the population.
- 5.5% of the detainees were white, compared with 31.7% of the population.
- Of the 68 people who Chicago police claim had access to counsel at Homan Square, however, 45% were black, 26% were Hispanic and another 26% were white.
“Operating a massive, red-brick warehouse between two of the most crime-filled areas in the city of Chicago, equipped with floodlights, cameras, razor-wire – this near-paramilitary wing of the government that we’ve created, I would say that people who live close to it know what purpose it serves the most,” said the attorney Gaeger. “The demographics that surround it speak for themselves.”
Despite the lack of booking and minimal attorney access at Homan Square, it is not a facility for detaining and interrogating the most violent of Chicago’s criminals. Drug possession charges were eventually levied in 5,386 of the disclosed Homan Square arrests, or 74.9%; heroin accounted for 35.4% of those, with marijuana next at 22.3%.
The facility’s use by police has intensified in recent years. Nearly 65% of documented Homan Square arrests since August 2004 took place in the five years since Rahm Emanuel, formerly Barack Obama’s top aide, became mayor. (The Guardian has filed a Foia request with Emanuel’s office to disclose the extent of its involvement in Homan Square.)
The 68 documented attorney visits are actually slightly higher, statistically speaking, than the extremely minimal legal access Chicago police provide suspects in custody during the initial stages of their arrest. The 2014 citywide total at declared police stations, according to First Defense Legal Aid, was 0.3%. On face value, the lawyer visit rate at Homan Square, according to the newly disclosed documents, was 0.9% over nearly 11 years.
But those documents do not tell the entire story of Homan Square. Chicago police have not disclosed any figures at all on people who were detained at Homan Square but never ultimately charged. Nor has it released any information about detentions or arrests before September 2004, claiming that information is burdensome to produce because it is not digital. (Chicago purchased the warehouse in 1995.)
“It’s hard to believe that 7,185 arrests is an accurate number of arrestees at Homan Square,” said the University of Chicago’s Futterman. “Even if it were true that less than 1% of Homan arrestees were given access to counsel, that would be abhorrent in and of itself.”
‘Try finding a phone number for Homan’Chicago attorneys say they are not routinely turned away from police precinct houses, as they are at Homan Square. The warehouse is also unique in not generating public records of someone’s detention there, permitting police to effectively hide detainees from their attorneys.
“Try finding a phone number for Homan to see if anyone’s there. You can’t, ever,” said Gaeger. “If you’re laboring under the assumption that your client’s at Homan, there really isn’t much you can do as a lawyer. You’re shut out. It’s guarded like a military installation.”
The difficulty lawyers have in finding phone numbers for Homan Square mirrors the difficulties that arrestees at the warehouse have in making phone calls to the outside world. Futterman called the lack of phone access at Homan Square a critical problem. “They’re not given access to phones, and the CPD’s admitted this, until they get to lockup – but there’s no lockup at Homan Square,” he said. “How do you contact a lawyer? It’s not telepathy.
“Often,” Futterman continued, “prisoners aren’t entered into the central booking system until they’re being processed – which doesn’t occur at Homan Square. They’re supposed to begin that processing right away, under CPD procedures, and at Homan Square the reality is, that isn’t happening or is happening sporadically and inconsistently, which leads to the whole find-your-client game.”
Additionally, some of those who Chicago police listed as receiving lawyer visits at Homan Square disputed the accounts or said the access provided was superficial.
According to police, when they took a woman the Guardian will identify as Chevoughn to Homan Square in May 2007 regarding a theft, they allowed her attorney to see her. Chevoughn says that never happened.
“I was there a very long time, maybe eight to 10 hours,” said Chevoughn, who remembered being “petrified”, particularly as police questioned her in what she calls a “cage”.
“I went to Harrison and Kedzie,” Chevoughn said, referring to the cross streets of central booking. “That’s where I slept. It’s where they did fingerprinting, all that crap. That’s when my attorney came.”
Police arrested another man, whom the Guardian will call Anthony, in 2006 on charges of starting a garbage fire, and moved him to Homan Square. Police identified him as receiving an attorney there. But Anthony told the Guardian: “That’s not true.”
Lawyer Rajeev Bajaj was allowed into Homan Square to see one of his clients in 2006. Police stopped Bajaj from entering for approximately an hour, and by the time they let him in he saw “the secretive nature” of officers and prosecutors there – exactly what he visited the warehouse to stop them from doing.
“When I got there, there were two prosecutors questioning, knowing fully that I was down there to see him,” Bajaj said. “When I walked in, they seriously walked away, acting like they weren’t speaking to him or anything. It’s typical Chicago police, typical Homan Square, typical Cook County prosecutors’ office.”
‘They squeeze people. That’s what they do’Jose, a 30-year-old Chicagoan whose last name the Guardian agreed not to publish, did not have access to his attorney at Homan Square. He is among 19 people identified among the 7,185 arrests who turned themselves into police at the warehouse – and whose access to a lawyer ended inside.
According to court and police documents from Jose’s case, an anonymous informant told officers a man nicknamed “Chuie” sold him marijuana from the address where Jose lived. (Not only did the search warrant not name Jose, it described a taller man.) Police showed up at his house in force in February 2013, guns drawn.
Jose wasn’t home. But his wife and 10-year-old daughter were, as well as his daughter’s friend, who had come over to work on a school project.
Police took a substantial amount of marijuana and what Jose said was about $10,000 in cash. The arrest report listed the cash at $4,670. Jose said he never got his money back.
After consulting with his attorney, Jose and lawyer Nick Albukerk traveled to Homan Square the following month. Albukerk said he advised officers that Jose was invoking his rights against self-incrimination and was not to be questioned. But the lawyer did not enter Homan Square as his client was led inside and placed in a room by himself. According to the police report, it was 10pm. Jose took a Xanax for his nerves. He began to nod off, until he heard banging on the door and a demand to “get up”.
“Are you going to help yourself?” Jose remembered the officer telling him.
“What do you mean, help myself? ‘Are you going to talk to me?’ ‘Nah, my lawyer was just here. You could have just said this in front of my lawyer. I know my rights’ … He wasn’t trying to hear it. He was just blabbing away, like ‘Oh, you think you’re a smart-ass,’ this and that.
“That’s what they do, man: they get people who don’t know their rights,” Jose continued. “That’s probably how they came upon me and my house – probably someone ended up talking to them and they dry-snitched on me. All they knew was that I lived there.
“They squeeze people, and then they go get somebody else. That’s what they do.”
Additional reporting by Zach Stafford and Phillipp Batta in Chicago and the Guardian US interactive team
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Obesity researchers then were eying sugary drinks with great suspicion. For decades, dietary guidelines had told Americans to cut back on fat. When it came to weight gain, most experts thought, a calorie is a calorie, no matter the source. Because fat has more than twice as many calories per gram as carbohydrates or protein, people should avoid fat. Then in the 1990s, some nutrition experts—watching obesity rates surge despite that advice—started rethinking carbohydrates.
Some scientists argued that eating carbs floods the bloodstream with sugar, which triggers a sharp release in the hormone insulin. Insulin brings blood sugar down and also tells the body’s cells to store fat rather than burning it. After a carb-led surge in blood sugar, the scientists argued, the outpouring of insulin is so great that within about two hours the blood sugar level crashes down to below normal. That low blood sugar makes people feel hungry, prompting them to eat more. By this line of thinking, a calorie wasn’t just a calorie.
At around the same time, Dr. Robert Lustig was arguing that sugar is not just another carbohydrate but is uniquely bad—he called it toxic. When the fructose in sugar hits the liver, he said, it sets off a hormonal chain reaction causing chronically high insulin levels that, over years, lead to obesity and diabetes.
Yet another group of researchers was showing that calories in beverages are not nearly as filling as calories in food. In one study, when people ate calories in food they compensated by eating less later in the day, but when they drank their calories they actually ate more food later.
In the end, it didn’t matter much to the health department whether soda leads to weight gain because it delivers unnecessary calories, or because those calories come from carbohydrates, or because those carbohydrates are sugar, or because the sugar is in liquid form. Sugary drinks make people fat.
And that mattered very much, because Americans were guzzling sugary drinks. Over the previous quarter century, per capita sugary drink consumption in the United States had more than doubled, in parallel with the rise in obesity. In 2000, the average teenager drank 300 calories (24 ounces) of sugary drinks a day, and many teens drank twice that. With consumption levels like that, sugary drinks – while not accounting for the entire epidemic – appeared to be the single most important culprit.
Those massive consumption levels also were the biggest obstacle we faced in solving the problem. The non-alcoholic beverage industry takes in about $50 billion a year in the U.S. alone, mostly from full-sugar drinks. Coke, Pepsi, and the other soda companies wouldn’t give up that money without a fight.
In June 2008, as Mayor Bloomberg neared the end of his second term, Frieden pitched the idea of a soda tax. Sitting at a round mahogany table in a conference room in the 1800’s-era City Hall, he put up a slide showing the state’s projected $8 billion budget gap. “New York State is broke,” he said. “This is a good thing for us.” Much of that deficit came from soaring Medicaid costs, especially for illnesses related to obesity. Aside from the human suffering that obesity caused—700,000 New Yorkers with diabetes, 2,900 of whom needed amputations and 1,700 of whom died from the condition annually—the epidemic, Frieden explained, was costing city residents more than $4.5 billion a year in medical care. A tax on soda would encourage people to drink less. It would cut rates of obesity and diabetes, and over time, save lives. And it was a tax that no one would be forced to pay because everyone could buy unsweetened beverages or drink water for free.
It wasn’t a difficult sell. The businessman in Bloomberg understood economics and was proud that New York City’s cigarette tax was cutting smoking rates. He was deeply worried about the obesity epidemic and was eager to take it on. Getting a soda tax through the state legislature would be very tough, but he was willing to try.
By the end of 2008, New York State’s plunging tax revenues from the Wall Street crash had ballooned the state’s projected deficit to $15.4 billion, creating the largest budget crisis in the state’s history. On December 17 Governor David Paterson, telling legislators “we’re going to take some extreme measures,” proposed $9 billion in spending cuts, including big whacks in education and a $1 billion cut in payments to hospitals, nursing homes and other medical providers. He also proposed 137 new taxes and fees, one of which he called an “obesity tax”—an 18 percent sales tax on sugary drinks. It was Frieden’s tax, only reworked by the state’s budgeteers, and it caught everyone, including the soda companies, by surprise.
Then almost as suddenly he launched the idea, Paterson – who was appointed Governor after Eliot Spitzer abruptly resigned in a prostitution scandal and who appeared overwhelmed by the job – seemed to shoot it down. At a town hall meeting with college students, Paterson told the “soda addicts” not to worry. “The tax on soda was really a public policy argument,” he said. “In other words, it’s not something that we necessarily thought we would get.” His spokesperson tried to backpedal, saying that “the governor stands firmly behind his soda tax proposal,” but the damage was done. In budget negotiations with legislators opposed to the tax, Paterson quickly abandoned it. We had lost round one.
*
By mid-2009 Bloomberg was running for a third term, Frieden had become the Director for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and I had followed him as New York City’s Health Commissioner.
In Bloomberg’s first two terms, the health department had sharply cut smoking rates with a combination of an indoor smoking ban, cigarette taxes, and tough anti-smoking “counter-advertising” on television. It was a tempting model. As we thought about a second run at a soda tax, we decided to try some counter-ads against sugary drinks.
We faced a problem with deep roots. Like cigarettes, soda isn’t just sold—it’s marketed. Its brilliant advertising, about $1 billion a year in Coke polar bears and Pepsi pop stars, overwhelms our televisions, sports stadiums, movie theaters, delis, bodegas, pizza joints, and snack counters. Coke and Pepsi reinforce those powerful ads by inserting their sodas into movies and TV shows and by sponsoring museums, parks, sports teams, and the Olympics. The marketing has welded an intense emotional attachment to the Coke and Pepsi brands. To tell New Yorkers that Coke and Pepsi meant blubber and diabetes would provoke ugly emotions.
Jeffrey Escoffier, the health department’s media head, ordered up some anti-sugary-drink ads from Jose Bandujo, who ran an advertising agency on contract with the department. “Don’t worry if it’s tasteful or anything,” he later remembered telling Bandujo. “Just do whatever you can so that it’s strong and a hard-hitting thing on soda.” Then Escoffier showed them to focus groups of soda drinkers, some of whom were overweight.
The problem we faced showed up immediately. In the warm-up, the participants commented that they didn’t think of sugary drinks as healthy, but they didn’t see them as truly unhealthy either. “Anything in moderation is okay,” said one woman. Yeah, said another, drinking one or two sodas a day wasn’t a problem. In fact, an additional one or two sodas every day might be enough to drive the entire obesity epidemic.
The moderator passed around several sets of ads, face down, then asked the participants to turn them over one set a time. One pair of ads made our problem even clearer. The images showed morbidly obese men in stained T-shirts, guzzling soda from 2-liter bottles, and the text said that soda “just dumps sugar and calories into your system. This can lead to obesity, high blood pressure, and diabetes.” The participants refused to believe it. Bandujo remembered, “Immediately people said, ‘He didn’t get that fat from just soda. He got fat from McDonald’s. He got fat from fast food. He got fat from other stuff.’”
Other ads mocked soda brands, with labels like “Dr. Diabetes” and “Mountain Don’t.” The participants were offended on behalf of the soda companies. “It was like we were talking bad about their mother,” said a health department staffer. “And they even got their legal hat on,” said Bandujo. “‘Oh, are you allowed to do that?’ Poor Mountain Dew!”
Another group of ads mixed a tough message with a touch of humor. A woman’s huge buttocks were labeled “Soda Can.” A guy’s gut (going after “sports drinks”) was branded “Sports Section.”
When a group of women turned over the pictures, there was a flutter of nervous laughter. “That’s what my stomach looks like.” “I’m like, wow, I could look like this.” “This is really offensive because it is real.”
One ad from this group showed a little girl’s fat stomach pushing out her bathing suit, with the label “Juice Container.” This one was too painful even to laugh at. “I felt sorry for her,” one man said sadly. “It’s cruel to show kids.”
We couldn’t run ads like those. Even if they worked, they would spark a firestorm among overweight New Yorkers and light up the tabloids.
Bandujo’s team had come up with another idea, one that went directly at people’s disbelief. “People could easily rationalize in their head that when you eat a cupcake, it turns to fat,” he said. “When you eat a hot dog, it turns to fat. . . . People weren’t thinking of a liquid turning into a solid—fat!” The ad just showed a can of soda being poured into a glass, but as the soda fell, it turned into yellowish globules of fat laced with thin red blood vessels. In big letters beneath, the ad asked, “Are you pouring on the pounds?”
Among women, the ad worked beautifully. One said, “I can’t even look at this.” Another said, “It has my stomach churning.” She thought she might vomit right then. Another said, “I would put it on my refrigerator” to remind her not to drink soda. But the men shrugged; to them, the fat globules weren’t disgusting enough. One man said helpfully, “Maybe if you showed somebody drinking it . . .”
Still, the focus group summary report read, “revulsion was the most effective approach.”
We posted three versions of the soda-turning-into-fat ads on the subways showing different beverages: a cola, a lime green sports drink, and an iced tea – each with the headline “Are you pouring on the pounds?”
But Jose Bandujo wasn’t finished. That focus group had given him an idea. He and a producer hired an acting student, sent colleagues to the grocery store to buy the “grossest stuff we could think of to make this yellowish orange-ish chunky concoction,” and turned on their video cameras. In the edited video, backed up by campy music, the actor pops open a can of soda to pour it into a glass, but what plops into the glass is globules of fat. Then the actor tips up the glass and gulps it down, the fat blobs overflowing onto his cheeks and sliding down his chin. Words drop onto the screen to the sounds of deep echoing booms: “Don’t drink yourself FAT.” Then, holding up the glass of fat as if to propose a toast, the young man turns to the camera, smiles, and gives a mischievous wink.
We had no money to run the ad on television, so we posted Man Drinking Fat on YouTube and sent out a press release. The ad incited a swarm of outraged “sharing.” In its first week online, Man Drinking Fat got nearly a half million views and a piece of Jay Leno’s monologue. With all the outrage, the ad was doing exactly what we wanted—getting people to talk about how sugary drinks make you fat.
*
In January 2010, Governor Paterson tried a soda tax again, alongside a dollar-per-pack increase in the state cigarette tax. His new proposal took Frieden’s idea intact: a 1-cent-per-ounce excise tax on sugary drinks, with the revenue paying for health care. The sugary drink distributors would pay the tax based on how many ounces they shipped. We assumed—from experience with cigarette taxes—that the distributors would pass the cost on to retailers, who would then raise the prices for sugary drinks at stores and restaurants. The tax would grow as the volume of soda grew, encouraging people to buy less. Channeling the tax revenue to health care would help get voters behind it. One poll found that while only 47 percent of voters supported an “obesity tax,” 76 percent supported “a tax on sugary soft drinks to balance the city budget.” In a second poll, 76 percent preferred a soda tax to cuts in health care.
This time we thought we had a good chance of winning. Pulling in the same direction were the governor, the mayor, the hospitals, the union of hospital workers, and a charged-up coalition of health organizations, including the American Heart Association, the American Cancer Society, and the American Diabetes Association. State health commissioner Richard Daines wrote op-eds, met with editorial boards, and barnstormed the state, haranguing anyone willing to listen about the soda tax’s “triple play”: better health, less need for treatment, more money for health care. The hospitals were among the biggest employers in the state, and their 1199 SEIU union supported political campaigns, so they both had clout. Together with the health advocacy coalition, they put in more than 7,000 phone calls to legislators, met with more than a hundred of them, held a rally with 250 health care workers at the capitol, and held symbolic “soda buy-back” events around the state. They also ran television ads that featured doctors and nutritionists talking about the damage obesity was causing in kids and the link to sugary drinks.
The soda companies fought back by bringing in the public relations company behind the “Harry and Louise” ad had that helped kill Bill Clinton’s health care reform plan. Under its new name Goddard Gunster, the agency today calls itself “the most sought-after guns for hire,” which is proud to be “among the first to apply aggressive political campaign strategies to issue advocacy efforts.” Its website explains its technique: “Through facts and research, we define the parameters of the public debate and align consumer, corporate, and government interests.”
The PR firm created an Astroturf group called New Yorkers Against Unfair Taxes and fired back with an ad campaign of its own. One ad featured a woman unloading groceries. “Making ends meet is a constant struggle for families like ours. . . . Instead of cutting out-of-control spending in Albany, [Governor Paterson would] tax families. . . . Tell Albany to trim their budget fat, and leave our grocery budgets alone.”
But the serious combat took place in back rooms. In New York State in 2009, the American Beverage Association had increased its donations to state legislators from nothing to $900,000, and the two soda companies increased their state lobbying spending to $3 million. That included $36,000 channeled to State Senator Jeff Klein, who then switched from being a soda tax supporter to one who was, according to an inside source for the Daily News, “instrumental in getting the soda tax off the table.”
In 2010, after Paterson’s second proposal, the companies went into higher gear. Coke and Pepsi sent workers to meet with the governor, telling him the tax would kill their jobs. They brought in the Teamsters, whose members drive soda delivery trucks, to pressure union-friendly legislators. The ABA opened its wallet further, spending nearly $13 million – more than lobbyists spent on any other issue.
The tax proposal went nowhere in the legislature. Coke and Pepsi had shown that they were stronger than a governor, a mayor, and the state’s health commissioners, hospitals, and most powerful union combined.
*
If any of the soda companies’ arguments against the tax had struck a chord with New Yorkers, it was that the government was just using the obesity epidemic to squeeze people for their money. And that made me think of a different angle.
It had to do with the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program – or SNAP, formerly Food Stamps. The program pays for groceries for low-income people, and by 2010 it reached 48 million people, or one in eight Americans, and paid for $65 billion in food a year.
Across the nation, SNAP funds bought mountains of unhealthy food, like candy, chips, snack cakes, and soda. No one outside of USDA knows how much the program spends each year for sugary drinks, but it is at least $1.7 billion and could be as high as $5 billion. The latter figure is nearly five times CDC’s budget to prevent chronic diseases. I thought that the government shouldn’t buy, and then hand out for free, the food that was the single biggest contributor to our nation’s number one nutritional problem—at all, but especially in a nutrition program.
In October 2010, Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Paterson held a press conference in the diabetes center of King County Hospital to announce that New York was submitting a request to the USDA for a two-year demonstration project that would exclude sugary drinks from the SNAP program in New York City. The rule change wouldn’t affect the size of the benefit. SNAP participants would get every penny of their monthly food allowance.
The idea wasn’t new or radical. When Congress started Food Stamps in 1964, the House version of the bill had excluded soda. Aside from SNAP, no federal nutrition program in 2008 included sugary drinks.
It wouldn’t have been a big change to the program. SNAP benefits are not cash. You can’t use them to buy cigarettes, beer, pet food, paper towels, or prepared food (including deli sandwiches). Our proposal would just add one more item to the excluded list.
And it wouldn’t have been a big change for people enrolled in SNAP. For most people, the average SNAP benefit of $133 per person each month was too little to cover the entire grocery bill. SNAP is a supplement. Families enrolled in SNAP used their own money after their monthly benefits ran out and to buy excluded items. If SNAP participants wanted to buy soda (instead of drinking water for free), they could spend their own money for it. And then they could use the SNAP benefits they saved by not buying soda to purchase healthier foods.
The SNAP proposal stirred up the press, roused opinion writers, and scrambled the usual political lineup. Most people viewed our other ideas as liberal, but Republicans and conservatives tended to like the SNAP proposal, and Democrats and liberals generally didn’t. At the same time Bill de Blasio then the city’s Public Advocate, endorsed it.
But the proposal enraged the soda companies. The day after our announcement, Coca-Cola CEO Muhtar Kent sent a letter to Bloomberg, calling the idea “unjustified and discriminatory.” PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi, writing the same day, was more threatening. “When we met earlier this summer,” her letter said, “we let you know that as we restructure our business, we are redoubling our commitment to retain and increase our investment in New York City and New York State. But apparently commitment and loyalty is a one-way street in New York. Since our meeting, attacks on our business by the City of New York have gone unabated. . . . I am particularly concerned that you have chose [sic] to focus on just one category, and assault it across the board. I am sincerely hoping we can meet and talk about how we can work together.”
Days later the grocery stores complained to the USDA: the Food Industry Alliance of New York State wrote that “no food inherently is bad within the context of a balanced diet. . . . Yet, by government imposing its directive into food choices . . . SNAP shoppers will be deprived of nutritional decisions heretofore left to their discretion.” The stores also argued that people might travel to the suburbs just to buy soda with SNAP.
The public face of the opposition, though, was not the soda companies or the grocery stores. It was “antihunger” organizations that ran food banks and advocated for SNAP. The same day the grocery store letter hit the USDA, the widely quoted antihunger activist Joel Berg sent the agency his own fiery eight-page letter. Under screaming heads like “The proposal would punish low-income people for the supposed crime of being poor,” he wrote that our proposal “violates the law, restricts freedom, and criminalizes hunger by eliminating the ability of low-income SNAP recipients to even occasionally obtain sugar-sweetened beverages.”
ADVERTISEMENTThe antihunger activists were cozy with the big food companies. Feeding America, a national network of two hundred food banks, has a board with members from ConAgra, General Mills, Mars, Kroger, Walmart, and Nationwide Agribusiness. And they looked well connected to the soda companies too; the spokesman for the American Beverage Association told the New York Times, “Fighting hunger is a pretty heavy lift. I think we need all the hands we can get working on that cause. I don’t see a conflict here.” The antihunger groups didn’t seem ashamed about doing the bidding of the big food corporations. Edward Cooney, executive director of the Congressional Hunger Center, told the Times, “We are in a coalition with major food companies for one reason only; that is, access to power.”
Meanwhile, I heard from New York City’s Washington office that as soon as we announced our idea, the American Beverage Association was lobbying black and Hispanic members of Congress against it. And in April 2011, eighteen members of the Congressional Black Caucus, including the ranking Democratic member of the House subcommittee overseeing the USDA, sent a letter to USDA secretary Thomas Vilsack attacking the proposal.
Ten months after we submitted our proposal, the USDA turned us down. The department didn’t argue that the federal government ought to buy sugary drinks for people. Instead, the agency only complained vaguely about the proposal’s details: the “scale and scope” were too large and complex, there were “a number of unresolved operational challenges and complexities,” and “the proposed evaluation design is not adequate.”
*
I pressed the health department staff for more ideas. Lynn Silver, the Assistant Commissioner for Chronic Disease Prevention, came back with the problem of ballooning portion sizes.
In the early 2000s, researchers were churning out studies highlighting an unnerving fact of human nature: when people are served bigger portions, they just eat more. Nutrition researcher Barbara Rolls had invited 51 men and women into her laboratory for lunch on four different days, offering them different (but all more than ample) portions of Kraft macaroni and cheese. When she served her volunteers a large portion, they ate 160 more calories than when she served them the smaller portion, without feeling any more full. “Most people are unaware of what constitutes an appropriate portion size,” Dr. Rolls wrote. “Thus, the ready availability of foods in large portions is likely to be facilitating the overconsumption of energy in many persons.” In separate studies, she found the same portion-size effect with deli sandwiches, bags of potato chips, fruits and vegetables, and soda.
Restaurants didn’t publish studies like these, but the cancerous growth of portion sizes showed that they understood the principle. When McDonald’s opened in the 1950s, the only size cup on the menu was 7 ounces. By 2010 a “medium” drink at McDonald’s had tripled to 21 ounces. And McDonald’s was responsible compared to KFC, which sold sodas in half-gallon tubs delivering 54 packets of sugar.
In theory, the solution was easy: give people soda in portions more appropriate to human needs. Even if they can choose seconds, they usually won’t.
But the details became messy. The sugary drink portion cap would apply to drinks with added caloric sweetener that delivered more than 25 calories in 8 ounces. That would allow unlimited portions of pure fruit juices (which had nutritional value and were rarely sold in huge portions) and some new teas that had just a hint of sweetener. We set the limit at 16 ounces, which was a common size and which was more than enough for one person.
What about drinks made of milk? McDonald’s had milk shakes, and Starbucks had “Frappuccinos” that walloped consumers with calories. But our health department encouraged people to drink more milk for the calcium and vitamin D. Milk-based drinks made up less than 3 percent of the drinks that people ordered at chain restaurants—too small a fraction to be very important. We should draw it where the studies on obesity were pointing to, I thought. Those studies focused on soda and fruit-flavored drinks—essentially sugar water—not on milk-based drinks. That meant we would allow big milk shakes.
The 16-ounce cap would apply in all “food service establishments” that had permits from the health department: the city’s 24,000 restaurants, cafeterias, and snack counters (including those at baseball stadiums and movie theaters), as well as outdoor food carts and food trucks. Those were the businesses that we regulated, that our sanitarians inspected, and that were covered by the city health code. Those were the businesses that we required to followed our trans fat ban. Grocery stores, on the other hand, were regulated by New York State, which preempts the city Board of Health. For the most part, that distinction fit well with a portion limit. Restaurants sold soda for one person to drink at one meal. Grocery stores sold soda in 2- and 3-liter bottles, but those bottles were to take home, share, and drink over time. Unfortunately, some stores licensed as groceries—like convenience stores—also sold “grab and go” bottles that people drank immediately. Our rule would not stop them from selling bottles larger than 16 ounces, and when a convenience store was next door to a restaurant, that looked inconsistent.
Although the rule applied to every restaurant, the impact was almost entirely on chains like McDonald’s and Subway, where most drinks sold were bigger than 16 ounces. A small fraction of the independent restaurants sold drinks larger than that, and those were mostly delis that sold 20-ounce bottles but also carried 12-ounce cans. The “small business” independents would barely notice the rule.
Later, I made the case to Mayor Bloomberg in City Hall. Under the watchful eyes of the 1800s-era New York State governors whose portraits hung on the walls, I went through the research on portion size. I also showed him a 1950s-era ad that shows a woman pouring Coke from a tall bottle at a table with three place settings. “Serves 3 over ice—nice!,” the caption read. “Big 16 oz size.” A short time ago, I argued, Coke advertised a 16-ounce bottle as big enough for a family of three, so how could it be wrong to limit single portions to that size?
Bloomberg immediately thought about it from the restaurants’ point of view. They should just shrink their drinks to 16 ounces and charge the same amount, he said. Could restaurants offer a buy-one-get-one-free in 16-ounce cups? They could, I said, and the rule would still work.
I could see that he was seriously considering the idea. I thought I owed him a warning. “This will be controversial,” I offered. He laughed. “Oh, you figured that out?”
*
When the story hit, we arranged for photographers a display of stacks of sugar cubes in front of soda cups ranging from 7 to 64 ounces. Even the stack of nine sugar cubes in front of the seven-ounce cup was impressive. The pyramid in front of the 64-ounce cup from KFC was a stunning 12 rows high and contained 87 sugar cubes.
The New York Times headline was “New York plans to ban sale of big sizes of sugary drinks.” The Post called the rule a “limit,” and the Journal a “restriction,” but after the Times used the word ban, the terrible label stuck. The story lit up the national press as if we were actually proposing to ban soda.
We had caught the soda companies off guard, but after a pause they hit back hard. Their PR firm created a new front group called New Yorkers for Beverage Choices, which put billboards on the backs of soda delivery trucks, with an athletic figure in silhouette defiantly raising a large cup, next to the words “Don’t let bureaucrats tell you what size beverage to buy.” They ran radio spots with “Noo Yawk”–accented actors saying “This is about protecting our freedom of choice,” and video ads asking “Are we gonna let the mayor tell us what size beverage to buy? If we let ’em get away with this, where will it end?” They flew banners attacking the rule from airplanes over Coney Island.
They mailed letters to hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers, asking them to sign and return enclosed cards opposing our rule. They organized a “Million Big Gulp March” on City Hall steps, attended by some fifty people, many wearing matching T-shirts saying “I picked out my beverage all by myself.” There, under a banner showing a Statue of Liberty–like figure, City Council members and a Teamsters leader rallied the group with words like tyranny and freedom.
Five days after the story broke, I testified to City Council at what was supposed to be a routine budget hearing and was pummeled by council members. One complained about the portion rule’s “arbitrariness” because we hadn’t regulated the sizes of candy bars or beer. Another called the “piecemeal” policy “insulting to our intelligence” because it didn’t address French fries and hamburgers. A third member, sitting behind a large soda cup, called the rule unfair because “90 percent” of the parents who go to movie theaters buy one large sugary drink and share it to “feed their families” while saving costs. After the hearing, as the council members filed out, they were warmly greeted by the lobbyist for Coca-Cola.
When we tried to rally supporters, we saw how deeply embedded the soda companies are in our society. One obesity researcher turned us down because she believed her endorsement might jeopardize her ability to get grants. The head of a health insurance company, which would benefit financially if people stayed healthy, told me that he couldn’t support the portion rule because he would “catch hell” from his clients, the bottling companies.
*
The day before the Board of Health was to hold its first meeting on the proposal, Coca-Cola CEO Muhtar Kent had asked Bloomberg to meet. Three days later he flew to New York City with Steven Cahillane, the CEO of Coca-Cola Refreshments, its North American bottling company, and two others. Deputy Mayors Howard Wolfson, Linda Gibbs, and I joined the mayor to meet them at the dining room table at Gracie Mansion, over a linen tablecloth and cans of Coke Zero.
Kent, the son of a Turkish consul-general who was born in New York City, has a broad chest, impeccable grooming, an accent that reflects his British education, and a big winning smile. After chatting for ten minutes with Bloomberg about the depression and the teetering financial system in Europe, he made his case. “We are a marketing company and a hydration company,” he said. “We are not perfect,” but his company was trying to do its part to solve the obesity problem. It was “not an accident” that sales of diet beverages had risen to 30 percent of the market. Now, though, our rule was killing them. He had just come from Europe, where everyone was saying, “‘I hear Mayor Bloomberg is banning your product in New York City.’ Even though we know that’s not exactly what you are proposing, that is the perception.” To have this iconic product, the global symbol of America, banned by the city that is the symbol of America was ruining its image. Instead of fighting each other, we should work together, he said. We could accomplish so much more if we did—Coke with its ability to influence the consumer and Mayor Bloomberg with his global reputation in health.
ADVERTISEMENTCahillane, the son of a New York firefighter with roots in Ireland, had a thin face, sandy hair, and a directness about him. He was a manager who had worked his way up through the beer business. Coke had done a pilot project in the Bronx, he said, that had led to a 10 percent increase in the sales of diet beverages and a 2.5 percent decrease in the sales of full-calorie sodas. That showed what they could do.
Kent proposed to take the Bronx pilot project citywide if we agreed to withdraw the rule for a year. It would have a greater impact on calorie consumption in New York City, he said, than our rule would. Dr. Farley could model the impact to verify that that was true, he said, opening his arms to show that he had nothing to hide. And he was sure that if we agreed, he could bring Pepsi along with the plan.
That set off some frantic negotiations. After spending some hours with spreadsheets, I was convinced that Coke’s proposal actually had the potential to cut sugary drink consumption substantially. But the Coke people knew so much more about the business than we did. I was worried that we could be hoodwinked.
I wrote my own balance sheet. On the plus side, Coke’s offer would affect more distribution channels than our policy, which affected restaurants only. The city might indeed see a health benefit, and the political pressure and the press noise would disappear.
But the minus side was long. Coke would have to get the other soda companies to agree. Coke hadn’t shown us any hard data from its Bronx pilot or offered any numbers to measure progress. We would be completely dependent on the corporation’s actions, with no way to verify what it was doing. In another eighteen months, we would be out of power; if Coke’s plan was going off track, we’d be helpless. Most of the changes the company proposed were ones that it was already making in response to public pressure on obesity—or should have been making.
In our final conversation, Cahillane warned that if we didn’t accept this offer, he would take it to another city, which would reap the benefits that New York City had declined. We turned him down anyway. He said Coke would fight the rule tooth and nail.
*
Coca-Cola made good on Cahillane’s threats. In October 2012, a month after the Board of Health passed the portion cap, the powerhouse law firm Latham & Watkins, working for the American Beverage Association, sued to block the rule. Their central claim was that the city Board of Health did not have the authority to pass the portion rule. The law firm channeled the public relations war into the courtroom, referring to the rule as “The Ban,” capitalized, and prominently citing the ninety-thousand-name petition and polls showing that a majority of New Yorkers opposed it.
Coca-Cola brought race in the argument too. The corporation’s longtime law firm King & Spalding delivered an amicus brief, signed by the NAACP and the Hispanic Federation. These organizations had “fought long and hard to protect and enliven the voices of their community members in the political system,” they wrote. But with the portion rule, the “Board of Health and unelected appointees, like Commissioner Farley, circumvented those voices, along with the voice of millions of New Yorkers, when the board told New Yorkers that it would selectively and unfairly harm small and minority-owned businesses.” The NAACP had deep ties to Coca-Cola and had recently received tens of thousands of dollars from Coke for a health education program. The former president of the Hispanic Federation had just taken a job at Coca-Cola.
Then in November, Cahillane stood with Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel and officials from PepsiCo and Dr Pepper Snapple Group to announce that the soda companies were giving that city $5 million. The money would go for a wellness competition between city employees in Chicago and San Antonio. In return, Emanuel promised to kill a proposed sugary drink tax and not pursue a New York City–style portion cap. It was the first of three payoffs that Coke would make to Chicago over the next nine months. In the second, it gave the city $3 million for nutrition and exercise classes. In the third, Emanuel put images of Coke products on 50,000 blue household recycling carts bought with $2.6 million from the Coca-Cola Foundation.
The lawsuit landed on the desk of Judge Milton Tingling, a fifty-nine-year-old African American from the Washington Heights neighborhood. Tingling was known for his sympathy and patience, but his rulings signaled that he was deeply skeptical of government power.
On March 11, 2013, the day before the portion rule was to go into effect, Tingling slapped the City down hard. He agreed that the Board of Health did not have the authority to pass the rule, but he went far beyond that. The rule was “arbitrary and capricious,” he wrote, riddled with what he considered “loopholes” like free refills. And even more breathtaking: he claimed that the Board of Health had powers only to address “communicable, infectious, and pestilent diseases.”
We were horrified. The judge’s opinion, if it stood, would destroy the Board’s ability to protect New Yorkers from the most important health problems of our time. It meant the board could not have banned trans fat, required calorie labeling, or banned lead in paint. According to the health department’s General Counsel Tom Merrill, the ruling “would pretty much have invalidated most of the Department.”
The flood of news stories about the ruling took an angle that was different but nearly as bad. Tingling’s verdict was strictly about which body of government, the Board of Health or the City Council, had the authority to pass a portion limit, but his words were so harsh that they implied that a soda portion limit was somehow morally wrong.
Mayor Bloomberg came out defiant. Obesity was “a health crisis,” he said to reporters. “People are dying every day. . . . This is about real lives.” The city would win on appeal.
*
The case made its way to the state’s highest court in June 2014, after Bloomberg had been succeeded by Bill de Blasio as Mayor. This last round became a magnet for advocates and legal experts. Coming to the city’s side were professors of New York constitutional law, national public health advocates, and a group of New York City–based minority organizations. Joining the soda companies were thirty-two members of the City Council and the Washington Legal Foundation, a group funded by the Koch brothers.
After a courtroom scene in which the judges hammered both sides with questions and allowed them no time to answer, the justices voted 4 to 2 that the Board of Health had exceeded its authority. The four-judge majority had to go through logical contortions to get there, though. The board had inappropriately “legislated” because the portion rule required “choosing among competing policy goals,” they wrote. At the same time, they agreed that the board did have the authority to “balance costs and benefits” when writing rules. And the board had acted within its authority when it passed rules banning lead paint in residences, requiring chain restaurants to post calorie labels, and requiring landlords to install window guards to prevent falls by toddlers, because, they claimed, for these rules “the choices are not very difficult or complex.”
The remaining two judges penned a scornful dissent. “There is no question that the Portion Cap Rule falls comfortably within the broad delegation granted to the board by the legislature,” they wrote. “What petitioners have truly asked the courts to do is to strike down an unpopular regulation, not an illegal one.” The majority’s decision to strike down the rule was little more than “camouflage for enforcement of judicial preferences.”
*
It was our third loss over sugary drinks, losses that bared the political and legal might of the soda companies. Staff in the health department were crushed. But some took solace that in taking on soda the department had begun something important. “I think we fired a pretty big shot across their bow,” said Tom Merrill. “We got the country and everybody talking about it.” The constant barrage of press stories over the battles effectively became counter-advertisements that gave sugary drinks an increasingly sinister image.
And as the policy battles raged, in what mattered most, public health was winning. From 2007 to 2013, the fraction of adult New Yorkers saying that they drank sugary drinks daily fell by more than a third, from 36 to 23 percent – a drop of some 700,000 people. In the same period, we noticed that, after rising for decades, obesity rates in children in the City had reversed course and were edging down. And then in 2013 we were shocked to see the obesity rate in adult New Yorkers, after years of relentless rises, dropping by a half percentage point. Maybe it was a fluke, or maybe it was a true inflection point.
The fight over sugary drinks – health advocates versus the soda companies – is only growing. Obesity is now an epidemic around the world, with some countries rivaling the United States, and the battle has spread to them. Mexico is hit hard by obesity and has the world’s highest per capita sugary drink consumption. There, Mexican health advocates – with the financial support of the Bloomberg foundation and against the fierce resistance of the soda companies – sprinted a bill through the legislature with taxes on soda and junk food. An early evaluation showed sugary drink purchases falling 10 percent.
The victory in Mexico washed back to the United States. In the November 2014 elections, voters in Berkeley, California, passed a referendum for a 1-cent-per-ounce excise tax on soda by a three-to-one margin, despite the soda companies spending some $2.4 million—or $30 per voter—trying to block it. The Berkeley group won with a sophisticated political strategy that painted the soda companies as bad guys, even with their organization name: Berkeley vs. Big Soda. Bloomberg donated $650,000 to the campaign. After the win, Howard Wolfson told reporters, “We stand ready to assess and assist other local efforts in the coming election cycle.”
Adapted from Dr. Tom Farley’s “Saving Gotham: A Billionaire Mayor, Activist Doctors, and The Fight for Eight Million Lives,” published from W.W. Norton in October 2016. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.
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Watch Jeb Bush Forced to Confront the Truth About His Brother and 9/11 on National TV
Over the past few days, a war of words has erupted between GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump and Jeb Bush over the 9/11 attacks. Bush was outraged over Trump's assertion that since his brother George W. Bush was president on 9/11, he bears responsibility for failing to stop the attacks.
Yesterday, CNN's Jake Tapper stumped Bush with a simple question: If George Bush can't be held accountable for 9/11, why can former Secretary Clinton be held accountable for the Benghazi attacks? “Well I — the question on Benghazi which, is hopefully we’ll now finally get the truth to, is was the place secure? They had a responsibility, the Department of State, to have proper security. There were calls for security, it looks like they didn’t get it,” Bush responded. “And how was the response in the aftermath of the attack, was there a chance that these four American lives could have been saved? That’s what the investigation is about; it’s not a political issue. It’s not about the broad policy issue, is were we doing the job of protecting our embassies and our consulates and during the period, those hours after the attack started, could they have been saved?”
Jeb Bush failed to explain why George Bush should only be held accountable for the aftermath of the attack rather than the attack itself, and why the same standard doesn't apply to Secretary Clinton.
Recall that George W. Bush was warned about 9/11 prior to the attacks, a security failure Jeb is quick to forget. This is an argument that strikes right at the heart of the Bush legacy.
“Jeb said 'we were safe with my brother, we were safe,'" Trump said recently. "Well, the World Trade Center just fell down. Now, am I trying to blame him? I'm not blaming anybody. But the World Trade Center came down, so when he said we were safe, that's not safe."
Watch the exchange:
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Plutocrats in NYC Are Buying the Airwaves, and Trashing Public Schools Again
Public schools are among the primary institutions that serve the families in the 99 Percent. As primarily middle class institutions, they are coming under attack from the One Percent, the plutocrats—both Republican and Democrats—who control the levers of power.
In a piece earlier this week the NY Times profiled 158 families across the country who have provided nearly half of all the early money that has been underwriting the campaigns of the candidates currently vying for the 2016 Presidential nominations. The reporters quote the political analyst and demographic expert Ruy Teixeira: “The campaign finance system is now a countervailing force to the way the actual voters of the country are evolving and the policies they want.”
Last week, the NY Times op-ed page printed a commentary by Thomas Edsall on the same subject. Edsall describes the conclusions of political scientist Martin Gilens on the impact of our increasingly plutocratic system: “The majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose… Gilens notes that policies popular with the middle class but not with the affluent rarely win enactment: The majority are redistributive policies including raising the minimum wage or indexing it to inflation, increasing income taxes on high earners or corporations, or cutting payroll taxes on lower income Americans. Conversely, policies opposed by the middle-class but backed by the affluent include ‘tax cuts for upper income individuals, spending cuts in Medicare, and roll-backs of federal retirement programs’—policies that have been adopted.”
So what does all this mean for education? One need only look at television in New York City to get a sense of the power of money. If you are a parent or a teacher or even a teachers’ union, you are unlikely to be able to run television ads in support of the public schools. But if you contribute to the secretive Families for Excellent Education, nobody will even know that you are spending your money to undermine Mayor Bill deBlasio’s proposals to improve the traditional public schools that serve over 93 percent of New York City’s children and adolescents.
Families for Excellent Schools is what Politico NY calls a “charter school advocacy group,” affiliated for several years now with Eva Moskowitz’s chain of Success Academy Charters. Politico explains: “Charter school advocacy group Families for Excellent Schools is attacking Mayor Bill de Blasio in a television ad for the second time in just a few weeks, this time by targeting his K-12 education agenda. The new ad, called ‘Reality,’ started airing on Friday and attempts to rebut the educational policies de Blasio announced during a recent speech… FES, which is closely aligned with Success Academy and its CEO, Eva Moskowitz, has been one of de Blasio’s most relentless antagonists over the last two years.” This is the third anti-public schools ad aired on television by Families for Excellent Schools in the past 18 months.
Here is what Families for Excellent Schools is attacking in its new ad. In a recent major address, De Blasio committed to extending school improvement well beyond his vast expansion of pre-school over the past year. Well over 65,000 children in New York City are now enrolled in pre-K programs, including many low income children, even children living in shelters for homeless families. The district is also engaged in the ongoing transformation of New York City’s lowest-achieving schools into full-service, wraparound Community Schools. In the recent address de Blasio promised to ensure reading specialists across the city’s second grades and access to algebra for all students by ninth grade. He also promised that all of the small high schools created by Mayor Bloomberg will offer courses in advanced sciences and math. Many of these schools that have offered a more personalized education have not, until now, provided a curriculum with enough courses for students to earn a Regents diploma.
So, who are the contributors to Families for Excellent Schools, the organization that is attempting to undermine the mayor’s progressive education agenda? Nobody knows, though everyone suspects it is the hedge fund supporters who are known to support Success Academy Charters. Chris Bragg reported a year ago for Crain’s NY Business: “Lobbying records… show how Families for Excellent Schools was able to shield its donors’ names.” Critics have called it the “hedge-fund loophole.” “Founded several years ago by business executives including four Wall Street players, Families for Excellent Schools has two components: an apolitical 501(c)(3) tax-exempt nonprofit and a politics-focused 501(c)(4). The group’s 2012 tax returns reflect a heavy overlap between the staffs of the two entities, which share an office suite… New York’s 2011 ethics law requires issue-oriented nonprofits that spend more than $50,000 a year on lobbying to disclose sources of funds of more than $5,000… But the bulk of Families for Excellent Schools’ spending is not by its political arm but rather its 501(c)(3)—which does not have to disclose donors under state law.” Much of the organization’s expenditures have been for television advertising, but Bragg points out the ads do not explicitly advocate for legislation, and hence skirt the law.
More recently in the Albany Times Union, Bragg reports that in 2014, Families for Excellent Schools spent $9.7 million without disclosing its donors. He explains that at a meeting in February of 2015, the New York Joint Commission on Public Ethics acknowledged that some organizations have been able to “construct funding mechanisms that may avoid disclosure while still technically complying with the law and the regulations.” Bragg adds that, “David Grandeau, an attorney for Families for Excellent Schools and former top state lobbying regulator, has maintained that the IRS definition of lobbying is far narrower than the one found in New York law, a distinction that he says makes the heavy New York lobbying spending by the group permissible under federal regulations.”
We know that political advertisements distort the views of political candidates, but what if it became widespread for people to run TV ads focused on distorting the work of core civic institutions? Consider what it would be like to live in New York City these days with a bunch of wealthy plutocrats sponsoring political ads designed to trash your community’s public schools. Mayor de Blasio has committed to making significant improvements in the way the city’s public schools serve over 90 percent of the city’s young people. What are a few rich friends committed to helping Eva Moskowitz grow her charter network doing undermining the public interest?
This blog has covered the impact of hedge fund lobbying to promote charters and undermine public education here, here, and here.
Related StoriesWATCH: John Oliver's Hilarious Take Down of Pols Misquoting Founding Fathers
Ben Carson is always an absurd person, but sometimes he is quite funny, too, like when he rambled incoherently recently about something Thomas Jefferson supposedly said about gun control.
Ummm, no.
Rampant misquoting of founding fathers in presidential campaigns is a growing epidemic, John Oliver hilariously pointed out on HBO's Last Week Tonight Sunday night. Carson has plenty of company on the right among misquoters with Mike Huckabee, Scott Walker and Rand Paul all joining him. Gosh, even John Oliver has been misquoted.
“That is the problem with memes. If you have the right font and the right photo, any quote can seem real,” Oliver said. “And I’ll tell you how I know that. Because for years now you may have seen multiple photos of me comparing gun control to airport security. It’s an interesting thought. Here’s the thing: I never said that! Even though, I’ve now seen it so many times now I’m starting to genuinely wonder if I ever did.”
A favorite historical figure to misquote is Abraham Lincoln. Here, Democrats are just as bad as Republicans. Presidents Clinton, Reagan and Obama have all mis-attributed just made up Lincoln quotes wholesale.
So, helpfully, since actual truth does not seem so popular anymore, Oliver set up a website for the misquoters to consult for their made-up quotes. Definitelyrealquyotes.com,
Helpful.
Watch the video:
Related Stories7 Ways Police Will Break the Law, Threaten, or Lie to You to Get What they Want
Because of the Fifth Amendment, no one in the U.S. may legally be forced to testify against himself, and because of the Fourth Amendment, no one’s records or belongings may legally be searched or seized without just cause. However, American police are trained to use methods of deception, intimidation and manipulation to circumvent these restrictions. In other words, cops routinely break the law—in letter and in spirit—in the name of enforcing the law. Several examples of this are widely known, if not widely understood.
1) “Do you know why I stopped you?”Cops ask this, not because they want to have a friendly chat, but because they want you to incriminate yourself. They are hoping you will “voluntarily” confess to having broken the law, whether it was something they had already noticed or not. You may think you are apologizing, or explaining, or even making excuses, but from the cop’s perspective, you are confessing. He is not there to serve you; he is there fishing for an excuse to fine or arrest you. In asking you the familiar question, he is essentially asking you what crime you just committed. And he will do this without giving you any “Miranda” warning, in an effort to trick you into testifying against yourself.
2) “Do you have something to hide?”Police often talk as if you need a good reason for not answering whatever questions they ask, or for not consenting to a warrantless search of your person, your car, or even your home. The ridiculous implication is that if you haven’t committed a crime, you should be happy to be subjected to random interrogations and searches. This turns the concept of due process on its head, as the cop tries to put the burden on you to prove your innocence, while implying that your failure to “cooperate” with random harassment must be evidence of guilt.
3) “Cooperating will make things easier on you.”The logical converse of this statement implies that refusing to answer questions and refusing to consent to a search will make things more difficult for you. In other words, you will be punished if you exercise your rights. Of course, if they coerce you into giving them a reason to fine or arrest you, they will claim that you “voluntarily” answered questions and “consented” to a search, and will pretend there was no veiled threat of what they might do to you if you did not willingly “cooperate.”
(Such tactics are also used by prosecutors and judges via the procedure of “plea-bargaining,” whereby someone accused of a crime is essentially told that if he confesses guilt—thus relieving the government of having to present evidence or prove anything—then his suffering will be reduced. In fact, “plea bargaining” is illegal in many countries precisely because it basically constitutes coerced confessions.)
Cops may try to persuade you to “consent” to a search by claiming that they could easily just go get a warrant if you don’t consent. This is just another ploy to intimidate people into surrendering their rights, with the implication again being that whoever inconveniences the police by requiring them to go through the process of getting a warrant will receive worse treatment than one who “cooperates.” But by definition, one who is threatened or intimidated into “consenting” has not truly consented to anything.
5.) We have someone who will testify against youPolice “informants” are often individuals whose own legal troubles have put them in a position where they can be used by the police to circumvent and undermine the constitutional rights of others. For example, once the police have something to hold over one individual, they can then bully that individual into giving false, anonymous testimony which can be used to obtain search warrants to use against others. Even if the informant gets caught lying, the police can say they didn’t know, making this tactic cowardly and illegal, but also very effective at getting around constitutional restrictions.
6) “We can hold you for 72 hours without charging you.”Based only on claimed suspicion, even without enough evidence or other probable cause to charge you with a crime, the police can kidnap you—or threaten to kidnap you—and use that to persuade you to confess to some relatively minor offense. Using this tactic, which borders on being torture, police can obtain confessions they know to be false, from people whose only concern, then and there, is to be released.
7) “I’m going to search you for my own safety.”Using so-called “Terry frisks” (named after the Supreme Court case of Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1), police can carry out certain limited searches, without any warrant or probable cause to believe that a crime has been committed, under the guise of checking for weapons. By simply asserting that someone might have a weapon, police can disregard and circumvent the Fourth Amendment prohibition on unreasonable searches.
U.S. courts have gone back and forth in deciding how often, and in what circumstances, tactics like those mentioned above are acceptable. And of course, police continually go far beyond anything the courts have declared to be “legal” anyway. But aside from nitpicking legal technicalities, both coerced confessions and unreasonable searches are still unconstitutional, and therefore “illegal,” regardless of the rationale or excuses used to try to justify them. Yet, all too often, cops show that to them, the Fourth and Fifth Amendments—and any other restrictions on their power—are simply technical inconveniences for them to try to get around. In other words, they will break the law whenever they can get away with it if it serves their own agenda and power, and they will ironically insist that they need to do that in order to catch “law-breakers” (the kind who don’t wear badges).
Of course, if the above tactics fail, police can simply bully people into confessing—falsely or truthfully—and/or carry out unconstitutional searches, knowing that the likelihood of cops having to face any punishment for doing so is extremely low. Usually all that happens, even when a search was unquestionably and obviously illegal, or when a confession was clearly coerced, is that any evidence obtained from the illegal search or forced confession is excluded from being allowed at trial. Of course, if there is no trial—either because the person plea-bargains or because there was no evidence and no crime—the “exclusionary rule” creates no deterrent at all. The police can, and do, routinely break the law and violate individual rights, knowing that there will be no adverse repercussions for them having done so.
Likewise, the police can lie under oath, plant evidence, falsely charge people with “resisting arrest” or “assaulting an officer,” and commit other blatantly illegal acts, knowing full well that their fellow gang members—officers, prosecutors and judges—will almost never hold them accountable for their crimes. Even much of the general public still presumes innocence when it comes to cops accused of wrong-doing, while presuming guilt when the cops accuse someone else of wrong-doing. But this is gradually changing, as the amount of video evidence showing the true nature of the “Street Gang in Blue” becomes too much even for many police-apologists to ignore.
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