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Truthdiggers of the Month: The Striking, and Winning, L.A. Teachers

They showed up in force, in the streets of Los Angeles, and in the driving rain. Numbering in the tens of thousands, their movements affected more than half a million students in the Los Angeles Unified School District, and they shared a single focus.

After rallying for six straight days, their efforts paid off. On Jan. 22, some 32,000 striking LAUSD teachers reached a deal with district officials that would improve educators’ working conditions and pay on many of their terms. By the end of the month, class was back in session.

Such a basic rundown of the recent showdown between highly activated Los Angeles teachers and resistant officials doesn’t give that episode its due. Nor does it put in context what was really only the latest, most public display of conflict between the two parties — as many sources noted, this was the first LAUSD teachers’ strike in 30 years, and it happened after nearly two years of attempted negotiations failed to produce a workable result.

So, to blow it up to its rightful size, we’re bringing back our Truthdigger of the Week feature, adding four times the prestige, and naming the striking L.A. teachers as this year’s first Truthdiggers of the Month.

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Tens of Thousands of L.A. Teachers Cut Class to Strike



by Kasia Anderson

The success of the teachers’ high-stakes bid is all the more significant considering the tenor of the current moment — not to mention previous decades of vigorous efforts by a host of politicians and pundits to cast labor unions, and teachers’ unions in particular, as enemies of the state. And if anyone still mistakes that campaign as just another byproduct of the unholy alliance between, say, Fox News and Scott Walker, teachers union leader Alex Caputo-Pearl was ready to correct the record as he kicked off the strike at a Jan. 14 press conference:

At a 7:30 a.m. news conference, United Teachers Los Angeles President Alex Caputo-Pearl addressed fellow union members, parents and students at John Marshall High School, 3939 Tracy St., where picketing had begun about the same time.

“Here we are on a rainy day in the richest country in the world, in the richest state in the country, in a state that’s blue as it can be — and in a city rife with millionaires — where teachers have to go on strike to get the basics for our students,” Caputo-Pearl said.

“Here we are in a fight for the soul of public education,” Caputo-Pearl said. “The question is: do we starve our public neighborhood schools so that they (become) privatized, or do we re-invest in our public neighborhood schools for our students and for a thriving city?”

As the previous walkouts and organized actions by teachers in many other states would suggest, Los Angeles does not represent a special case so much as a case study for what is happening in public schools around the country. The terms on which L.A. teachers refused to budge highlighted challenges — overflowing classrooms, inadequate support staff, low pay -– affecting their colleagues from Arizona to Texas, North Carolina to Washington state.

Still another, having to do with the steady and cultivated creep of charter schools into the American educational field, is part of a bigger project often touted as “education reform.” Such an optimistic, philanthropy-ready phrase is sure to appeal across party lines, to others besides Education Secretary Betsy DeVos – and it does.

But at least for the moment, and despite more or less predictable reactions from sources along the political spectrum, L.A. teachers have reason to count this one as a clear win. For his part, Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer certainly did, remarking Wednesday that the strike represented a “great victory for trade unionism” and that LAUSD teachers had “called out the neoliberals” with their mass demonstration. “There’s a big struggle between those with a Bill Gates-type sensibility [that would suggest] they know how to fix these schools,” Scheer continued, “and the people who are in the classrooms hour after hour.”

Meanwhile, the impact of the strike has ranged beyond Scheer and those students, parents, non-teacher employees , food truck vendors and crossover celebrities from the L.A. area who supported the cause. According to The Washington Post, public-school educators in at least five other U.S. cities are ready to take action, making L.A. the “first major teachers strike of 2019” — but probably not the last.

 

The Trump Administration Is Breaking Up Families Because It Can

In early November, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers accused a Salvadoran father – known in court documents only as “Mr. A” – of being an MS-13 gang member.

They didn’t show him any evidence to back up their claim. Mr. A denied he was ever part of the group and stripped off his clothes to prove he wasn’t hiding any gang-related tattoos.

Still, the officers didn’t believe him. On Nov. 5, officers hauled Mr. A out of a Texas immigration detention facility to court for a hearing. When he returned to his cell that day, his 11-year-old daughter and 9-year-old son were gone.

He hasn’t seen them in the nearly three months since, even though the government hasn’t offered any proof of his gang membership. Mr. A’s lawyers have compiled a stack of evidence to the contrary.

They’ve submitted a document from El Salvador’s Ministry of Justice and Public Safety confirming that their client doesn’t have a criminal record. A letter from his former employer, an art supply store in San Salvador where Mr. A worked for the past 13 years, describes him as an upstanding colleague and manager.

They’ve also filed a photo that shows Mr. A at the beach with his daughter, to prove he doesn’t have any MS-13 tattoos.

“We’ve asked for information, and we haven’t been given any,” said Laura Peña, a lawyer in Mr. A’s case who works with the Texas Civil Rights Project. “We don’t know what information the government has, so it’s hard for us to counter the allegation.”

More than six months after President Donald Trump announced the end of his administration’s family separation policy, Mr. A’s case highlights the government’s ongoing practice of breaking up families at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Between April and June, officials separated more than 2,700 children from their families under the so-called “zero tolerance” policy. After increasing backlash from lawmakers and the public, Trump ended the practice June 20.

But nearly 120 migrant children were split up from families between the formal end of family separation and early November, according to a recent report by the Department of Health and Human Services’ inspector general’s office. In the majority of these new cases, the report notes, parents are accused of having criminal records or gang affiliations. Allegations in some cases are based on unsubstantiated claims or minor infractions, ProPublica reported in November.

It’s an issue that’s garnered the attention of Lee Gelernt, the lead ACLU attorney in the case that resulted in the reunification of families split up during zero tolerance.

“We have raised this issue with the court and plan to keep doing so,” he said. “We have received information about these types of separations only after pushing hard for information, and the information we have received is usually minimal and inadequate.”

The Department of Homeland Security declined to comment. Lawyers representing the government have not filed records in court supporting its claim against Mr. A.

The Texas Civil Rights Project regularly visits the McAllen immigration court near the border to screen immigrants being prosecuted for illegal entry who may have been separated from their children. They’ve identified a few cases similar to Mr. A’s in which the basis for separation is unclear.

“That’s the big problem with these vague allegations,” said Peña, a former federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorney. “You have a Border Patrol agent out in the field who looks up some system and sees a flag. It’s not a criminal conviction. There’s just some sort of information in a system.”

Mr. A’s case was delayed due to the government shutdown, but is expected to progress in the coming weeks.

According to the inspector general’s report, the Department of Homeland Security also shares few details about the basis for separations with other government agencies. The federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, for instance, must evaluate the criminal record of parents as part of its process for placing children in homes.

“From a child welfare perspective, not all criminal history rises to a level that would preclude a child from being placed with his or her parent,” the report states. But in some cases, the department provided little information about the nature of parents’ criminal records to the refugee agency. That could “impede ORR’s ability to determine the appropriate placement for a child,” the report says.

Mr. A maintains he’s never been involved with MS-13. “We believe him,” Peña said.

Court records provide a detailed account of his case. In April, gang members began threatening Mr. A and gave him a choice: Pay $1,300 or his children would die. Mr. A moved his family to another city in El Salvador on Oct. 7. But the threats continued.

“They told me to think about my children,” Mr. A told an asylum officer, according to a transcript of the interview the government conducts to establish whether someone has a “credible fear” of returning to his or her home country. He reported the threats to the authorities in El Salvador, but a prosecutor told him officials couldn’t help without the names of the gang members.

After crossing into the U.S. on Nov. 2, the family was apprehended by border officers, who took them to a detention facility. Two days later, they were shuffled on a bus to another holding area called the “ice box,” where migrants are kept in a cold concrete room. On Nov. 5, when Mr. A returned from a court hearing, his children were gone.

“Mr. A was not informed of, and did not consent to, the impending separation and was given no opportunity to contest it,” court filings state. “In fact, the officers concealed the impending separation from Mr. A by promising that his children would still be at the detention facility when he returned from his court appearance.”

Since their separation, Mr. A “grew increasingly despondent and withdrawn,” his lawyers say. He’s lost more than 20 pounds and has frequent nightmares and depression. During his credible fear interview, he asked for his son and daughter. He failed the interview, records state, and is being held at the Webb County Detention Center in Laredo, Texas. His lawyers are appealing the asylum case.

His children remain at a Texas shelter, Peña said, and have spoken to their father only a few times since they were separated.

“The emotional and mental trauma is severe for both kids,” Peña said. “The harm is being done every day.”

Bernie Sanders Introduces Dramatic Plan to Tax the Rich

Proposals for taxing wealthy Americans are gaining traction among Democrats in Congress leading up to the 2020 election. First, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suggested in a “60 Minutes” interview that a 70 percent marginal tax rate for income earned above $10 million could help pay for the Green New Deal, a set of environmental policies designed to offset the effects of climate change. Then, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who recently announced her run for the presidency, proposed a 2 percent tax on Americans whose net worth is above $50 million, with, as CNN explains, “an additional 1 percent levy on billionaires.”

On Thursday, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders joined the chorus, with a bill that would, according to The Washington Post’s Jeff Stein, “dramatically expand the federal estate tax on the wealthy, including a new 77 percent rate on billionaires’ estates.”

Called the For the 99.8% Act, Sanders’ plan aims to tax only the estates of Americans who inherit over $3.5 million, just 0.2 percent of the population. Everyone else “would not see their taxes go up by one penny under this plan,” aides to Sanders told Stein.

This is not the first time that Americans with estates over $1 billion were taxed at 77 percent. MarketWatch points out that the figure “is a return to the top rate from 1941 to 1976.” MarketWatch adds that for those who are millionaires but not billionaires, “The tax would kick [in] at a 45% rate on estates valued at as little as $3.5 million.”

According to Sanders’ staff, Stein reports, “[T]he plan would raise $2.2 trillion from 588 billionaires, but over an unknown period of time because it would only take effect once they die. … Over the next decade, the tax would raise $315 billion.”

Warren says her plan, which she calls an “ultra millionaire tax,” would raise $2.75 trillion over the next decade. That figure, Natasha Korecki reports in Politico, was the conclusion of University of California at Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, who wrote in a letter obtained by Politico:

We estimate that about 75,000 American households (less than 0.1%) would be liable for the wealth tax and that the tax would raise around $2.75 trillion over the ten-year budget window 2019-2028, of which $0.3 trillion would come from the billionaire 1% surtax.

Saez and Zucman, who also wrote a New York Times op-ed in support of Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal, have been advising Warren’s campaign.

Sanders, Stein reports, supports both Warren and Ocasio-Cortez’s plans, adding that in 2017, Sanders “pitched a wealth tax on those with assets over $21 million as part of a suite of financing options for his ‘Medicare-for-all’ health-care plan,” in addition to supporting a surcharge on estates worth over $1 billion, and a top marginal tax rate of at least 60 percent as a presidential candidate in 2016.

Sanders and Warren’s proposals face fierce opposition from Senate Republicans. Earlier this week, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa and Sen. John Thune of South Dakota introduced a plan to repeal the estate tax.

The estate tax was already weakened by a 2017 law that applies it only to couples passing on estates of over $22 million. Thune argues in a press release that the estate tax “threatens families’ agricultural legacies and makes it difficult and costly to pass these businesses down to future generations.”

Sanders shot back at Republicans while introducing his bill, saying, “It is literally beyond belief that the Republican leadership wants to provide hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks to the top 0.2 percent of our population. … This is not only insane, it tells us the degree to which the billionaire class controls the Republican Party.”

Public opinion may be catching up with Sanders, Warren and Ocasio-Cortez. As longtime Democratic pollster Celinda Lake told Stein, “A lot of the conventional wisdom says, ‘Stay away from tax increases,’ but it’s actually quite popular. … Even in the last six months, you’re seeing a shift.”

 

Campaign Cash Paid Trump Foe’s Legal Bills After #MeToo Fall

NEW YORK—Former New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman used nearly $340,000 in political campaign funds to pay the law firm that represented him during an investigation of allegations that he physically abused several women, according to campaign finance reports reviewed by The Associated Press.

The practice is legal, but reform activists say Schneiderman and other politicians are exploiting lax campaign finance rules.

“By and large, if you are an elected official, you can use your campaign contributions as a Get Out of Jail Free card,” said Blair Horner, the executive director of the New York Public Interest Research Group.

Schneiderman’s re-election committee, Schneiderman 2018, began paying the Clayman & Rosenberg LLP law firm the week after his abrupt May 7 resignation from office, the records show. The last payment was made Dec. 7, a month after a special prosecutor closed the investigation without filing charges.

Schneiderman, a Democrat and nemesis of President Donald Trump, announced his resignation hours after The New Yorker published an expose saying four women had accused him of slapping or choking them. Some said Schneiderman was a heavy drinker.

The allegations tarnished Schneiderman’s reputation as a defender of women an supporter of the #MeToo movement. Months before he left office, he filed a lawsuit aimed at securing better compensation for movie mogul Harvey Weinstein’s sexual misconduct accusers.

Michelle Manning Barish, a Democratic activist and writer who accused Schneiderman of abusing her when they dated in 2013, said he should have been forced to pay his lawyers out of his own pocket.

“That money was given in good faith by donors who expected Mr. Schneiderman to help women,” Manning Barish said. “What a luxury to be able to assault women who donated to your campaign and then use their money to defend yourself.”

Schneiderman’s personal legal bills, totaling $339,710, accounted for almost half of his re-election committee’s spending in the eight months since he left office, the records show. Other costs included rent for a Manhattan office and wages for a few employees.

The committee has also refunded about $1.5 million in contributions since Schneiderman’s resignation, including $5,000 to singer and actress Bette Midler. It still had about $6.5 million as of mid-January.

Asked for comment, a spokeswoman for Schneiderman referred to a prior statement that said the campaign is “honoring its commitments and paying bills in accordance with applicable law and precedent.”

“Once the committee has honored all its commitments, the remaining funds will be donated to worthy and appropriate causes, consistent with the law,” the statement said.

Isabelle Kirshner, the Clayman & Rosenberg lawyer who represented Schneiderman during the investigation, did not respond to a message.

Manning Barish encouraged Schneiderman’s donors to speak up and demand that he donate the remaining funds to charities that help victims of intimate partner violence and sexual abuse.

“Mr. Schneiderman is obviously incapable of doing what is morally right on his own, so I am asking that the people demand he donate those campaign funds to help women,” Manning Barish said. “That money does not belong to him.”

In a statement after the investigation concluded, Schneiderman said: “I accept full responsibility for my conduct in my relationships with my accusers, and for the impact it had on them.”

Spending campaign cash on personal legal bills is a tried-and-true tradition in New York politics. Former State Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos and former Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver have each spent millions of dollars from their campaign war chests fighting corruption charges in recent years. Both were convicted.

Under the law, elected officials are allowed to pass legal costs onto a campaign when they involve matters touching on their official duties. In Schneiderman’s case, part of the investigation looked at whether he used attorney general’s office staff and resources to facilitate or cover up his abuse.

Advocates for change are looking to the new Democratic majority in the state legislature to tighten the rules on campaign spending. One bill would force a politician to close down a campaign committee within two years of being convicted of a felony.

“The system is a scandal,” Horner said. “New York State’s campaign finance system is generally a scandal, and this is another example of it.”

Democrats Can’t Lose Their Nerve on ‘Medicare for All’ Now

David Leonhardt of the New York Times has highlighted a survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation that, if true, would suggest that Medicare for All is not nearly as popular as initial polling would suggest. Based on this survey’s results, Leonhardt concludes that Democrats who support the idea are committing an “unforced error.”

Unfortunately, that survey is deeply misleading. While pollsters made it clear that they were merely presenting “some arguments some people have made for or against a national Medicare-for-all plan,” they only presented partial arguments in favor of Medicare for All while presenting deeply deceptive arguments against it. Their questions almost certainly skewed the results.

The poll finds that 56 percent of voters surveyed initially support “Medicare for All” and 42 percent oppose it, for a net favorability rating of +14 percent. When arguments in favor of Medicare for All are presented—it will guarantee coverage to all Americans and reduce out-of-pocket costs—net favorability rises to +45 percent. (KFF does not provide the raw numbers here.)

Support reportedly falls dramatically when people hear arguments against the program. The problem, however, is in the presentation.

The pros, as presented, are understated. Medicare for All would not “reduce” out-of-pocket costs. It would eliminate them for all medical interventions, including hospitalization, surgery, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and doctor visits. The use of “reduce” suggests that any out-of-pocket savings would be marginal at best, which is not true.

The KFF survey told respondents that Medicare for All would “require most Americans to pay more in taxes.” It did tell them that health insurance premiums would be eliminated, but failed to explain that the vast majority of families would pay considerably less in taxes than they currently pay in premiums and out-of-pocket costs. Many working Americans with employer-based insurance are unaware of how much is deducted from their paychecks in premiums, which also dilutes the impact of this question.

The survey told respondents that Medicare for All would “eliminate private health insurance companies,” but it did not tell them why: these corporations add to the overall cost of health care without providing anything of value.

It gets worse. The pollsters then presented the statement that Medicare for All will “threaten the current Medicare program.” While this is a common Republican line of attack, it is an openly deceptive one. Medicare for All proposals would expand and improve coverage for seniors and the disabled under the current program, by expanding the scope of services rendered and eliminating out-of-pocket costs in most cases.

Surveyors also offered the argument that Medicare for All could “lead to delays in people getting some medical tests and treatments.” There is no evidence to support this assertion, and no reason to believe it’s true. The opposite should be the case, in fact. While increased demand could lead to limited delays, the elimination of insurance company bureaucracy, paperwork, network restrictions, and pre-certification procedures means that overall wait times should be reduced.

Despite the survey’s methodological flaws, Leonhardt uses it to conclude that Medicare for All is politically unfeasible. He suggests that Democrats embrace another plan instead: the Center for American Progress proposal (in Leonhardt’s words from an earlier column) “through which any American, regardless of age, could buy health insurance” from the government.

There are serious actuarial problems with this approach, however. As has been seen with Medicare Advantage, the private-insurance option for today’s Medicare, insurance companies are experts at “cherry-picking” healthy enrollees. (As some whistleblower cases demonstrate, they can also be expert at committing fraud.) This would create service problems for enrollees and financial problems for the government.

The immediate questions are these: Why was the KFF survey so flawed, and why has Leonhardt (and presumably others) been so quick to embrace it? Leonhardt describes KFF as “one of the country’s most respected health care pollsters,” and so it has been. But KFF, like other mainstream health institutions, is deeply embedded in the current health care system’s political culture. A centrist Democrat and two former Republican senators sit on its Board of Trustees, one of whom is former Senate majority leader and physician William Frist. Frist is the son of Thomas Frist, founder of Hospital Corporation of America. The Washington Post reported that his HCA holdings represented a “significant source of his wealth” (a reported $13 million in 1994).

Given its internal culture, it may not have been possible for KFF to present the arguments for and against Medicare for All in an unbiased manner.

It’s true that the GOP (and centrist Democrats) will likely present these misleading arguments in much the same way they do. But why should Democrats tailor their platform to voters’ reactions, when those reactions are based on a biased or one-sided set of arguments? An important proposal like Medicare for All should be subjected to public debate, so that the public gets a deeper understanding of its ramifications. That is, after all, why we have elections.

And why would Leonhardt or political scientist Brendan Nyhan (whom he quotes) embrace such a flawed survey instrument so quickly? It may be a simple case of confirmation bias, since the survey appears to support their ideas about Medicare for All. That doesn’t make its findings accurate or meaningful. The nation deserves a meaningful debate about Medicare for All.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Facebook Quietly Moves to Block Ad Transparency Tools

A number of organizations, including ProPublica, have developed tools to let the public see exactly how Facebook users are being targeted by advertisers.

Now, Facebook has quietly made changes to its site that stop those efforts.

ProPublica, Mozilla and Who Targets Me have all noticed their tools stopped working this month after Facebook inserted code in its website that blocks them.

“This is very concerning,” said Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., who has co-sponsored the Honest Ads Act, which would require transparency on Facebook ads. “Investigative groups like ProPublica need access to this information in order to track and report on the opaque and frequently deceptive world of online advertising.”

For the past year and a half, ProPublica has been building a searchable database of political ads and the segments of the population advertisers are paying to reach. We did this by enlisting thousands of volunteers who installed a web browser extension. The tool shared the ads users see as well as Facebook’s details on why the users were targeted.

In a statement to ProPublica, Facebook said the change was meant to simply enforce its terms of service. (The Guardian also published a story Sunday flagging the change.)

“We regularly improve the ways we prevent unauthorized access by third parties like web browser plugins to keep people’s information safe,” Facebook spokesperson Beth Gautier said. “This was a routine update and applied to ad blocking and ad scraping plugins, which can expose people’s information to bad actors in ways they did not expect.”

Facebook has made minor tweaks before that broke our tool. But this time, Facebook blocked the ability to automatically pull ad targeting information.

The latest move comes a few months after Facebook executives urged ProPublica to shut down its ad transparency project. In August, Facebook ads product management director Rob Leathern acknowledged ProPublica’s project “serves an important purpose.” But he said, “We’re going to start enforcing on the existing terms of service that we have.” He said Facebook would soon “transition” ProPublica away from its tool.

Facebook has launched an archive of American political ads, which the company says is an alternative to ProPublica’s tool. However, Facebook’s ad archive is only available in three countries, fails to disclose important targeting data and doesn’t even include all political ads run in the U.S.

Our tool regularly caught political ads that aren’t reflected in Facebook’s archive. Just this month, we noticed four groups running ads that haven’t been in Facebook’s archive:

the National Rifle Association
an electoral reform advocacy group targeting Bernie Sanders supporters
a local anti-corruption group and
a union advertising to Democrats about health care policy.

After we contacted Facebook, the company canceled the ads and said it is “investigating why these particular ads weren’t classified as political so we can learn and update our protocols.”

Journalists in other countries — including those with impending elections like Canada, Ukraine, Guatemala and Israel — currently have no way to track political ads or targeting information. Facebook announced Monday that it plans to expand its archive to those countries this year and will debut a global tool “by the end of June.”

Facebook’s archive doesn’t disclose the targeting advertisers do by racial, ethnic, religious, partisan and other sensitive attributes. Some of those microtargeting categories have been used to affect the political process: For instance, Russian agents targeted many African-Americans during the 2016 election.

In an email, Facebook said it doesn’t plan to disclose sensitive targeting categories in its archive because doing so “could expose people’s information.” It didn’t elaborate on how that might happen.

The proposed Honest Ads Act, which is expected to be re-introduced in Congress this year, would require Facebook to publish “a description of the audience targeted by the advertisement.”

Facebook has also developed another tool that it says will allow researchers to analyze political ads more easily. That tool, called an API, is in “beta” and restricted to a few participants, including ProPublica, who had to sign a nondisclosure agreement about the data it provided.

One researcher with access said the API is not sufficient. It only allows searching by keyword, said Laura Edelson, a researcher at New York University who studies online political advertising. “You can only find ads about things that you already know you’re looking for,” Edelson said. “So any kind of emerging activity is potentially undiscoverable.”

What it all adds up to, said Knight First Amendment Institute senior attorney Alex Abdo, is “we cannot trust Facebook to be the gatekeeper to the information the public needs about Facebook.”

How Our Tool Worked and What Facebook Has Done

All Facebook users can find details about how they’re being targeted by clicking through a series of options on the site. Our tool, the Political Ad Collector, automated the process. Every time one of our over 16,000 participants in crowdsourcing project scrolled past an ad like this one …

… our extension automatically captured the text and related picture. It also opened the ellipses on the top right of the ad, which leads to this menu:

From there, it read the information contained in “Why Am I Seeing This” and copied that to the database as well:

We have collected more than 100,000 political ads in this way. But Facebook’s latest update blocks tools like ours from clicking on the “Why Am I Seeing This” menu.

The company added code that prevents clicks generated by computers — including browser extensions — on just that one button. Web browsers make a distinction between a click generated by the computer and one generated by your mouse. Clicks from your mouse are marked “isTrusted“ and those generated by computer code are not.

Facebook pointed out that other options, besides seeing the explanation for an ad’s targeting, exist behind that menu, like the ability to hide an ad or report it.

Facebook’s site does not make such a distinction between user or computer-generated clicks on other behaviors that have been abused by bad actors. For example, it is still possible to automatically like a page, watch a video or click through on an ad — loopholes exploited by bots and misinformation campaigns attempting to gain credibility or turn a profit.

When we asked Facebook why it does not use a similar filtering mechanism on other parts of the platform, it said it prevents “bot-like behavior” in other ways, including a collaboration with an effort to help take down an ad fraud ring.

This is not the first time Facebook has changed its code in a way that has broken our tool. For example, all ads are supposed to contain the word “sponsored” as part of a mandatory disclosure, so users can distinguish between ads and their friends’ posts. Our tool recognized ads by searching for that word. Last year, Facebook added invisible letters to the HTML code of the site. So, to a computer, the word registered as “SpSonSsoSredS.” Later, it also added an invisible “Sponsored” disclosure to posts from your friends. Many of the participants in our project noticed the effects of this change because it caused some menus to pop open unexpectedly or the page to scroll to the top repeatedly. Nowadays, the disclosure says “SpSpSononSsosoSredredSSS.” Some of these changes were likely also intended to thwart ad blockers.

Here’s what the change looks like in the JavaScript code.

The same new section of code that blocks our tool also sends a “log event” to Facebook, noting when an ad transparency tool is detected. Facebook says the change is meant to document “what percent of the traffic was from plugins that identify content without our permission versus Facebook users checking [Why am I seeing this] manually.”

This Is How Much the Republican Party Fears Democracy

Voting rights groups and Democratic lawmakers looked on in alarm Wednesday as Republican leaders broadcast open hostility toward policies that would curb corruption and make it easier for Americans to vote.

Speaking on the Senate floor, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) mocked a provision in the For the People Act (H.R. 1) that would make Election Day a federal holiday, calling it a “power grab” that would allow federal workers to have a day off to campaign for Democrats.

“Just what America needs, another paid holiday and a bunch of government workers being paid to go out and work for I assume our folks—our colleagues on the other side, on their campaigns,” McConnell said.

What @senatemajldr is trying to say is that he’s scared to make Election Day a federal holiday because it allows more people to vote and that would be bad news for Republicans.

They win when they suppress the vote. #VoteThemOut #KYSen pic.twitter.com/368Mc8jTOK

— American Bridge (@American_Bridge) January 30, 2019

The government watchdog group Public Citizen was among those to swiftly condemn the Senate Majority Leader’s bizarre comments: 

Imagine being such an anti-democratic sink-hole of a human being that you consider making voting easier a “power grab” https://t.co/QycM6IjoRe

— Public Citizen (@Public_Citizen) January 30, 2019

The group was hardly alone in noting what McConnell’s reaction to the set of pro-democracy policies signifies:

When you’re worried that you’ll lose your job if more people get the day off from work to vote https://t.co/ZhTX7LlBao

— Rachel Curley (@rachEcurley) January 30, 2019

McConnell is saying the quiet part out loud, admitting Republicans lose when more people vote https://t.co/53LhPfaAxf

— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) January 30, 2019

Republicans have been attacking #HR1, which would clean up govt corruption and make it easier to vote.

Why would republicans be against cleaning up govt corruption and making it easier to vote? https://t.co/bTzYc8ruR6

— Bill Pascrell, Jr. (@BillPascrell) January 30, 2019

“Voting isn’t a ‘power grab,'” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) tweeted. “It’s democracy, and it’s literally the entire point of our representative government. And by the way: Not only should Election Day be a federal holiday, we need automatic voter registration and universal mail voting, too.”

Along with making participatory democracy possible for millions of Americans who aren’t able to get to take time off work to get to the polls, H.R. 1 would strengthen ethics and financial disclosure rules, establish automatic and same-day voter registration as well as early voting across the country, and enact gerrymandering reform to mend the damage done by years of partisan and racial re-districting to benefit Republicans.

“The title of the legislation itself—the For the People Act—is a good reminder of who democracy is here to serve: the people,” said Craig Holman of Public Citizen on Tuesday as the first hearing on H.R. 1 got underway. “Lawmakers have a chance to show the American people that America truly cares about transformational and comprehensive pro-democracy reforms by ensuring election access, restoring voting rights, reforming ethics laws, and protecting the integrity of our elections.”

But Republicans made clear this week that any reforms which benefit voters will seriously endanger their control over the U.S. government. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) joined in McConnell’s fearmongering over the bill on Twitter, expressing suspicion over a provision that would pre-register 16-year-olds and 17-year-olds. Jordan suggested that the measure—already in effect in 13 states and Washington, D.C.—is a ploy to allow people to vote before they’re legally allowed to.

Democrats: “We don’t want 16 year olds to vote! We only want them to REGISTER to vote. Trust us.”

IN OTHER NEWS—Democrats file a Constitutional Amendment to lower the voting age to 16.

— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) January 30, 2019

“When you insist that a bill designed to support voting rights for everyone, shine a light on billionaire donors, crack down on lobbyists’ influence, and protect our elections from foreign interference would just help Democrats, that’s a pretty big tell,” historian Kevin M. Kruse wrote of the GOP’s rhetoric.

ICE Is Force-Feeding Detainees on Hunger Strike

Federal immigration officials are force-feeding six immigrants through plastic nasal tubes during a hunger strike that’s gone on for a month inside a Texas detention facility, The Associated Press has learned.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement says 11 detainees at the El Paso Processing Center have been refusing food, some for more than 30 days. Detainees who reached the AP, along with a relative and an attorney representing hunger strikers, said nearly 30 detainees from India and Cuba have been refusing to eat, and some are now so weak they cannot stand up or talk.

Another four detainees are on hunger strikes in the agency’s Miami, Phoenix, San Diego and San Francisco areas of responsibility, said ICE spokeswoman Leticia Zamarripa on Wednesday.

The men say they stopped eating to protest verbal abuse and threats of deportation from guards. They are also upset about lengthy lock ups while awaiting legal proceedings.

In mid-January, two weeks after they stopped eating, a federal judge authorized force-feeding of some El Paso detainees, Zamarripa said. She did not immediately address the detainees’ allegations of abuse but did say the El Paso Processing Center would follow the federal standards for care.

ICE officials say they closely monitor the food and water intake of detainees identified as being on a hunger strike to protect their health and safety.

The men with nasal tubes are having persistent nose bleeds, and are vomiting several times a day, said Amrit Singh, whose two nephews from the Indian state of Punjab have been on hunger strike for about a month.

“They are not well. Their bodies are really weak, they can’t talk and they have been hospitalized, back and forth,” said Singh, from California. “They want to know why they are still in the jail and want to get their rights and wake up the government immigration system.”

Singh’s nephews are both seeking asylum. Court records show they pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge in September after illegally walking across the border near El Paso.

There have been high-profile hunger strikes around the country at immigration detention centers in the past, and non-consensual feeding and hydration has been authorized by judges in court orders. Media reports and government statements don’t indicate immigration detainees actually underwent involuntary feeding in recent years, opting to end their hunger strikes when faced with nasal intubation. ICE did not immediately respond to queries about how often they are force-feeding detainees.

To force-feed someone, medical experts typically wind a tube tightly around their finger to make it bend easily, and put lubricant on the tip, before shoving it into a patient’s nose. The patient has to swallow sips of water while the tube is pushed down their throat. It can be very painful.

The El Paso detention facility, located on a busy street near the airport, is highly guarded and surrounded by chain-link fence.

Ruby Kaur, a Michigan-based attorney representing one of the hunger strikers, said her client had been force-fed and put on an IV after more than three weeks without eating or drinking water.

“They go on hunger strike, and they are put into solitary confinement and then the ICE officers kind of psychologically torture them, telling the asylum seekers they will send them back to Punjab,” Kaur said.

Eiorjys Rodriguez Calderin, who on a call from the facility described himself as a Cuban dissident, said conditions in Cuba forced him and other detainees to seek safety in the U.S., and they risk persecution if they are deported.

“They are restraining people and forcing them to get tubes put in their noses,” said Rodriguez, adding that he had passed his “credible fear” interview and sought to be released on parole. “They put people in solitary, as punishment.”

Those “credible fear” interviews are conducted by immigration authorities as an initial screening for asylum requests.

ICE classifies a detainee as a hunger striker after they refuse nine consecutive meals. Federal courts have not conclusively decided whether a judge must issue an order before ICE force-feeds an immigration detainee, so rules vary by district and type of court, and sometimes orders are filed secretly.

In Tacoma, Washington, where immigration detainees have held high-profile hunger strikes in recent years, courts have ordered force-feeding at least six times, according to court records. In July 2017, a federal judge refused to allow ICE to restrain and force-feed a hunger striking Iraqi detainee who wanted to be housed with fellow Iraqi Chaldean Christians detained Arizona facility.

Since May 2015, volunteers for the nonprofit Freedom for Immigrants have documented 1,396 people on hunger strike in 18 immigration detention facilities.

“By starving themselves, these men are trying to make public the very suffering that ICE is trying keep hidden from taxpayers,” said Christina Fialho, director of the group.

While court orders allowing force-feeding have been issued in cases involving inmates, Fialho couldn’t recall a situation when involuntary feeding actually occurred in immigration detention facilities because the inmates opted to eat.

The force-feeding of detainees through nasal tubes at Guantanamo Bay garnered international blowback. Hunger strikes began shortly after the military prison opened in 2002, with force-feeding starting in early 2006 following mass refusals to eat.

After four weeks without eating, the body’s metabolic systems start to break down, and hunger strikers can risk permanent damage, including cognitive impairment, said Dr. Marc Stern, a correctional physician at the University of Washington in Seattle who has previously consulted with the Department of Homeland Security.

“You can become demented and lose coordination, and some of it is reversible, some of it isn’t,” Stern said. “The dangers are not just metabolic. If you are very weak, you could very simply get up to do something and fall and crack your skull.”

Force-feeding raises ethics issues for medical professionals who work inside ICE facilities.

The American Medical Association has expressed its concerns about physicians participating in the force-feeding of hunger strikers on multiple occasions, and its own principles of medical ethics state “a patient who has decision-making capacity may accept or refuse any recommended medical intervention.”

The association also endorses the World Medical Association Declaration of Tokyo, which states that when prisoners refuse food and physicians believe they are capable of “rational judgment concerning the consequences of such a voluntary refusal of nourishment, he or she shall not be fed artificially.”

The Most Effective Way to Stop the Destruction of Black Wealth

Want an impossible task? Try identifying the most disturbing trend in America today. Consider the choices: Climate change denial, extreme political polarization, gun violence, etc.

Those are just the ones on the national radar. Here’s one that isn’t, but needs to be: the systematic destruction of black wealth.

The reality is horrific, according to the recent Institute for Policy Studies report Dreams Deferred. “Between 1983 and 2016, the median black family saw their wealth drop by more than half after adjusting for inflation,” the report notes, “compared to a 33 percent increase for the median white household.”

Further, the report finds, “the median black family today owns $3,600 — just 2 percent of the $147,000 of wealth the median white family owns.”

This affects you regardless of your color. Because inextricably connected to the widening racial wealth divide has been the extreme concentration of wealth at the very top.

During the same three decades over which black wealth eroded, three of the wealthiest American families — the Koch, Walton, and Mars clans — increased their wealth by an astounding 6,000 percent. With the racial wealth gap dragging down America’s median wealth, that gives these billionaires ever greater say over what happens to the rest of us.

Does the concentration of wealth at the very top also explain why the racial wealth gap existed in the first place? No — but two and a half centuries of slavery and another century of Jim Crow do. (Although those same immoral laws also created incredible family fortunes for plantation owners and others, whose descendants still benefit today from that accumulation of extreme wealth.)

Concentration of wealth at the top doesn’t even explain fully the destruction of black wealth that’s occurred in recent decades. Structural and overt racism contributed as well. America’s policy of mass incarceration has hamstrung the ability of black Americans to reach parity with their white counterparts.

Narrowing the racial wealth divide must necessarily involve not only de-concentrating wealth — the nearly exclusively white wealth — at the very top. It also must address a moral imperative that’s been neglected for too long: America must repay its centuries’ overdue debt to the descendants of enslaved Africans, the children and grandchildren of Jim Crow, and the victims of mass incarceration.

Only one policy fits the bill: A reparations program. Wealthy Americans should pay the most, but nobody that’s benefitted from the discrimination should be exempt.

Designing an effective reparations program will be tricky, to say the least. At a time when the country’s billionaires are systematically fleecing not just black Americans, but all Americans, reparations would have to lift black America in way that isn’t temporary. That will be a monumental challenge.

But the challenge involved in designing a reparations program pales in comparison to the challenge that shouldn’t be a challenge at all: getting a critical mass of white Americans to recognize that the wrongs of the past have never been righted, that they’ve continued to this day, and that repaying America’s debt to black Americans cannot be ignored any longer.

And before we even begin the challenge of persuading white Americans to do right, we first must persuade ourselves to stop doing wrong. Racism, structural and overt, is alive and well in America today.

It’s time for decent Americans to recommit themselves to these challenges. If not now, when?

PG&E Put Profits Over Wildfire Safety, Judge Says

SAN FRANCISCO—A U.S. judge berated Pacific Gas & Electric Corp. on Wednesday, accusing the nation’s largest utility of enriching shareholders instead of clearing trees that can fall on its power lines and start fires and making “excuses” to avoid turning off electricity when fire risk is high.

Judge William Alsup in San Francisco did not immediately order PG&E to take any of the dramatic measures he has proposed to try to stop more wildfires.

But he warned that he was not ruling out at least some new requirements on the company if it did not come up with a plan to “solve” the problem of catastrophic wildfires in California.

“To my mind, there’s a very clear-cut pattern here: that PG&E is starting these fires,” Alsup said. “What do we do? Does the judge just turn a blind eye and say, ‘PG&E continue your business as usual. Kill more people by starting more fires.'”

Alsup is overseeing a criminal conviction against PG&E on pipeline safety charges stemming from a 2010 gas line explosion in the San Francisco Bay Area that killed eight people and destroyed 38 homes.

He proposed earlier this month as part of PG&E’s probation that it remove or trim all trees that could fall onto its power lines in high-wind conditions and shut off power when fire is a risk regardless of the inconvenience to customers or loss of profit. Alsup said his goal was to prevent PG&E equipment from causing any wildfires during the 2019 fire season.

PG&E shot back in a court filing last week that the judge’s proposals would endanger lives and could cost as much as $150 billion to implement.

Kevin Orsini, an attorney for the company, said PG&E shared the judge’s concerns about wildfire and was working to reduce risk. But there weren’t enough qualified tree trimmers, and shutting off power would have “repercussions that affect the community,” he said.

Power cutoffs impact first responders, critical medical care and phone service and are potentially fatal, the utility said in its court filing.

“PG&E is facing a fundamental problem. The state is facing a fundamental problem,” Orsini said.

PG&E announced last year that it would cut off power preemptively when fire danger was high and did so for the first time in October for about 60,000 customers in Northern California. The move prompted complaints and demands for reimbursement from some customers.

Attorneys for wildfire victims, California regulators and the U.S. Department of Justice also spoke at Wednesday’s hearing.

Alsup was also critical of the California Public Utilities Commission, accusing it of working slowly and using former PG&E employees. The judge later apologized for those comments but still questioned how so many fires broke out under the CPUC’s watch.

An attorney with the CPUC, Christine Hammond, said she couldn’t comment on fires that were still under investigation. But she said wildfires in California were an incredible challenge that involved factors such as climate change.

The utility’s return to a U.S. courtroom came a day after it declared bankruptcy in the face of billions of dollars in potential liability from wildfires in California in 2017 and 2018. PG&E in that case is seeking another judge’s approval to obtain up to $5.5 billion in financing and pay $130 million in bonuses to thousands of employees.

Alsup only briefly mentioned the bankruptcy case during Wednesday’s hearing. Filing for bankruptcy generally does not put criminal proceedings on hold, so PG&E’s Chapter 11 reorganization may not allow it to avoid any orders issued by Alsup.

The judge found separately that PG&E violated its probation for failing to notify probation officials that a prosecutor’s office had opened a full investigation into the utility’s role in a 2017 California wildfire. Alsup said he would set a sentencing date later.

Kate Dyer, another attorney for PG&E, said the company had communicated with probation officials and didn’t hear until recently that it had not met their expectations.

Alsup said he would wait to see a wildfire mitigation plan PG&E was scheduled to submit to the CPUC on Feb. 6 before deciding what, if any, additional requirements to order.

PG&E is facing hundreds of lawsuits from victims of wildfires in 2017 and 2018, including the nation’s deadliest wildfire in a century.

That blaze in November killed at least 86 people and destroyed 15,000 homes in and around the Northern California town of Paradise. The cause is still under investigation, but suspicion fell on PG&E after it reported power line problems nearby around the time the fire broke out.