Welcome to Coffeyville, Kansas, where the judge has no law degree, debt collectors get a cut of the bail, and Americans are watching their lives — and liberty — disappear in the pursuit of medical debt collection.

On the last Tuesday of July, Tres Biggs stepped into the courthouse in Coffeyville, Kansas, for medical debt collection day, a monthly ritual in this quiet city of 9,000, just over the Oklahoma border. He was one of 90 people who had been summoned, sued by the local hospital, or doctors, or an ambulance service over unpaid bills. Some wore eye patches and bandages; others limped to their seats by the wood-paneled walls. Biggs, who is 41, had to take a day off from work to be there. He knew from experience that if he didn’t show up, he could be put in jail.

Before the morning’s hearing, he listened as defendants traded stories. One woman recalled how, at four months pregnant, she had reported a money order scam to her local sheriff’s office only to discover that she had a warrant; she was arrested on the spot. A radiologist had sued her over a $230 bill, and she’d missed one hearing too many. Another woman said she watched, a decade ago, as a deputy came to the door for her diabetic aunt and took her to jail in her final years of life. Now here she was, dealing with her own debt, trying to head off the same fate.

Biggs, who is tall and broad-shouldered, with sun-scorched skin and bright hazel eyes, looked up as defendants talked, but he was embarrassed to say much. His court dates had begun after his son developed leukemia, and they’d picked up when his wife started having seizures. He, too, had been arrested because of medical debt. It had happened more than once.

Judge David Casement entered the courtroom, a black robe swaying over his cowboy boots and silversmithed belt buckle. He is a cattle rancher who was appointed a magistrate judge, though he’d never taken a course in law. Judges don’t need a law degree in Kansas, or many other states, to preside over cases like these. Casement asked the defendants to take an oath and confirmed that the newcomers confessed to their debt. A key purpose of the hearing, though, was for patients to face debt collectors. “They want to talk to you about trying to set up a payment plan, and after you talk with them, you are free to go,” he told the debtors. Then, he left the room.

The first collector of the day was also the most notorious: Michael Hassenplug, a private attorney representing doctors and ambulance services. Every three months, Hassenplug called the same nonpaying defendants to court to list what they earned and what they owned — to testify, quite often, to their poverty. It gave him a sense of his options: to set up a payment plan, to garnish wages or bank accounts, to put a lien on a property. It was called a “debtor’s exam.”

If a debtor missed an exam, the judge typically issued a citation of contempt, a charge for disobeying an order of the court, which in this case was to appear. If the debtor missed a hearing on contempt, Hassenplug would ask the judge for a bench warrant. As long as the defendant had been properly served, the judge’s answer was always yes. In practice, this system has made Hassenplug and other collectors the real arbiters of who gets arrested and who is shown mercy. If debtors can post bail, the judge almost always applies the money to the debt. Hassenplug, like any collector working on commission, gets a cut of the cash he brings in.

Across the country, thousands of people are jailed each year for failing to appear in court for unpaid bills, in arrangements set up much like this one. The practice spread in the wake of the recession as collectors found judges willing to use their broad powers of contempt to wield the threat of arrest. Judges have issued warrants for people who owe money to landlords and payday lenders, who never paid off furniture, or day care fees, or federal student loans. Some debtors who have been arrested owed as little as $28.
Пост был сокращён. Нажмите [] для просмотра.

In 12 months, Australian welfare payments were stopped an extra 1m times thanks to automated technologies. Money is stopped first and questions asked later, causing untold misery

Bad news comes to Australia’s welfare recipients in different ways.

Sometimes, the message comes in the post. More often than not, though, word arrives through a special email portal, or by text to a smartphone. The sender always says the same thing: “Your payments have been suspended.”

It happened to Keelan two months ago. He got a notification on his MyGov account, the online portal he uses to receive emails from Centrelink, Australia’s social security agency.

The 26-year-old has been surviving on Australia’s jobseekers’ payment, Newstart allowance, ever since his medical conditions – anxiety, depression and OCD – started affecting his studies.

His payments – A$600 a fortnight – were automatically stopped because he missed a phone appointment. It mattered little that he was not in a great state at the time.

“I wasn’t sure what day it was because my OCD was quite bad,” Keelan tells the Guardian. “I got a phone call that I didn’t register. It turned out to be Centrelink and they cut off my payments. And I didn’t hear from them again after that.”

Keelan, who did not want his surname published, says he spent hours on the phone over several days trying to get his welfare payments back. Most of the money was delayed for about a week. He was broke and couldn’t afford his medication.
Пост был сокращён. Нажмите [] для просмотра.

During the Cold War, the US military moved natives out of the Bikini Atoll so that they could perform nuclear testing in the area. As a result, the area is said to be contaminated with so much radiation that natives were unable to return there to live. Those that did, experienced radiation-related issues including genetic abnormalities, stillbirths and miscarriages.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7569201/Professor-says-SpongeBob-SquarePants-violent-racist-new-academic-journal-article.html

Justice for Atatiana Jefferson can’t be about locking up guilty police officers. We need to be more ambitious than that.

Last month, a judge sentenced former Dallas Police Officer Amber Guyger to 10 years in prison for entering the wrong apartment in her building and killing Botham Jean, her neighbor. Lee Merritt, the Jean family attorney, boasted: “This is a victory for black people in America. It is a signal that the tide is going to change here. Police officers are going to be held accountable for their actions, and we believe that will begin to change policing culture all over the world.”

But it would not. Guyger’s conviction didn’t even change police culture near Dallas. Before the ink could dry on the sentencing papers, a Fort Worth police officer entered into Atatiana Jefferson’s home. He shot and killed her within seconds. She was playing video games with her nephew. A neighbor called a non-emergency number for a wellness check because Atatiana’s door was open late at night. In 2013, Fort Worth police also killed a man in his own garage during a wellness check. The officers were not prosecuted.

Merritt and some activists have issued calls for “more justice.” I understand this impulse. After a police killing, prison is something, and that something can feel like justice when the other option seems like nothing. People understandably want police officers to be punished for killing black people. They also hope that prison will send a warning message to other officers that they cannot get away with murder. But that’s not how policing works. If we want black people, or anybody, to be safe from police violence, then we must first be clear about one thing: prison is not justice. It is punishment, and contrary to popular belief, sending more cops to prison may not make other black people safe.

Cop convictions are increasing, but cop killings roughly remain constant. As I have written before, police have killed about 14,000 people in the last 13 years, but only about 20 officers have been convicted of murder or manslaughter charges- an all time high. On average, police officers kill about 20 black people each year in Texas, and over 200 every year nationwide. Prison time certainly punishes some police for past behavior, but the US supreme court grants police so much legal protection for violent behavior that most of the killings are legal, constitutional or unexamined.

Safety for black people could be less about sending individual cops to prison, and more about creating the conditions where people do not rely on police to feel safe. I was 13 years old when I saw a police officer shoot somebody. He was arguing with a teenager at a recreation center over a sign-in sheet. The officer stormed down the side of the basketball court, pulled out his gun, and shot the boy in his arm. After the horrific scream, I grabbed my sister and hid in the locker room for hours. The officer was not arrested. I doubt he was prosecuted. But he left after a few days, soon replaced by another officer with another gun who argued with more black kids over sign-in sheets. As police officers are transferred or sent to prison, new ones replace them, but the job description does not change. Thus, organizing around a single cop’s conviction misses the point that policing is problematic, and one officer’s punishment is a job opening for a future officer to inflict more harm and violence on communities of color.

So what can happen instead of calling the police? Atatiana’s death is tragic because her neighbor called a non-emergency number for help. He sought an alternative, but the police came anyway, guns blazing. One immediate lesson here is to not send police officers for non-emergency calls. There are ways that people practice safety intervention everyday. Scholar and prison abolition organizer Rachel Herzing instructs us to “prepare for emergencies when not in crisis.” This means memorizing numbers of neighbors close by, securing someplace to go if home is not an option, encouraging people to build small teams to share resources and protection with each other, and ultimately organizing to reduce the size and scope of police.

As for what should happen to police officers after they kill someone right now, I deeply sympathize with fence sitters who believe in prison abolition, but feel wrong about including cops in that vision. What pushes me to the abolition side is knowing that whatever punishment we demand for police is going to come back tenfold on black people. If a black man mistakenly kills a white woman police officer in Texas, her brother is not going to forgive him. A judge will certainly not warmly embrace him with a hug. He will not get sentenced to ten years. He will slowly die in a cage or quickly by execution on a cold table.
Пост был сокращён. Нажмите [] для просмотра.

When Bill and Hillary Clinton travelled to the Caribbean nation of Haiti as newlyweds in 1975, they were enchanted. Bill had recently lost a race for Congress back home in Arkansas, but by the time they returned to the US, he had set his mind to running for Arkansas state attorney general, a decision which would put him on the path to the White House. “We have had a deep connection to and with Haiti ever since,” Hillary later said.

Over the next four decades, the Clintons became increasingly involved in Haiti, working to reshape the country in profound ways. As US president in the 1990s, Bill lobbied for sweeping changes to Haiti’s agricultural sector that significantly increased the country’s dependence on American food crops. In 1994, three years after a military coup in Haiti, Bill ordered a US invasion that overthrew the junta and restored the country’s democratically elected president to power. Fifteen years later, Bill was appointed United Nations’ special envoy to Haiti, tasked with helping the country to develop its private sector and invigorate its economy. By 2010, the Clintons were two of Haiti’s largest benefactors. Their personal philanthropic fund, The Clinton Foundation, had 34 projects in the country, focused on things such as creating jobs.

Over their many decades of involvement there, the Clintons became two of the leading proponents of a particular approach to improving Haiti’s fortunes, one that relies on making the country an attractive place for multinational companies to do business. They have done this by combining foreign aid with diplomacy, attracting foreign financing to build factories, roads and other infrastructure that, in many cases, Haitian taxpayers must repay. Hillary has called this “economic statecraft”; others have called it a “neoliberal” approach to aid.

The most significant test of this approach in Haiti began on 12 January 2010, when a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck just west of the capital, Port-au-Prince. In a nation of 10 million people, 1.6 million were displaced by the disaster, and as many as 316,000 are estimated to have died. The earthquake also dealt a huge blow to Haiti’s economic development, levelling homes and businesses in the most populous area of the country and destroying crucial infrastructure, including the nation’s biggest port.

Within days of the earthquake, the Clintons stepped up to lead the global response. Bill was selected to co-chair the commission tasked with directing relief spending. As US secretary of state, Hillary helped to oversee $4.4bn that Congress had earmarked for recovery efforts by the US Agency for International Development, or USAid. “At every stage of Haiti’s reconstruction – fundraising, oversight and allocation – a Clinton was now involved,” Jonathan Katz, a journalist who has covered Haiti for more than a decade, wrote in 2015.

There was no greater embodiment of the neoliberal approach to aid in Haiti than the US’s largest post-earthquake project – a $300m, 600-acre industrial park called Caracol, on the country’s northern coast. To make the park more attractive, the US also agreed to finance a power plant, and a new port through which firms operating at Caracol could ship in materials such as cotton, and ship out finished products including T-shirts and jeans.

The Clintons and their allies believed the Caracol project would attract international manufacturers, which they saw as the primary fix to Haiti’s faltering economy. “Haiti has failed, failed and failed again,” wrote the British economist Paul Collier and his colleague Jean-Louis Warnholz, who have both advised the Clintons, in the Financial Times two weeks after the earthquake. By building “critical assets such as ports”, they argued, the US and its allies could help Haiti attract private, foreign investment and create the stable jobs it needed to prosper.

Ten years later, the industrial park is widely considered to have failed to deliver the economic transformation the Clintons promised. But less attention has been paid to the fate of the port. Last year, after sinking tens of millions of dollars into the port project, the US quietly abandoned it. The port is now one of the final failures in an American post-earthquake plan for Haiti that has been characterised by disappointment throughout. It is also the latest in a long line of supposed solutions to Haiti’s woes that have done little – or worse – to serve the country’s interests. “The neoliberal, exploitative economic model currently being imposed” on Haiti “has failed many times before,” Antony Loewenstein, author of Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe, has written. The result, he adds, is that many Haitians are living “in a state of despair and daily desperation”.
Пост был сокращён. Нажмите [] для просмотра.

Adobe is shutting down service for users in Venezuela in order to comply with a U.S. executive order issued in August that prohibits trade with the country. The company sent out an email to customers in Venezuela today to let them know their accounts would be deactivated, and posted a support document further explaining the decision. In the document, Adobe explains: "The U.S. Government issued Executive Order 13884, the practical effect of which is to prohibit almost all transactions and services between U.S. companies, entities, and individuals in Venezuela. To remain compliant with this order, Adobe is deactivating all accounts in Venezuela."

Users will have until October 28th to download any content stored in their accounts, and will lose access the next day. To make matters worse, customers won't be able to receive refunds for any purchases or outstanding subscriptions, as Adobe says that the executive order calls for "the cessation of all activity with the entities including no sales, service, support, refunds, credits, etc."

https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/7/20904030/adobe-venezuela-photoshop-behance-us-sanctions
https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/Programs/Documents/13884.pdf

Social media has shaped my generation – and it has also helped stoke a loneliness epidemic that needs to be addressed

It might seem vaguely ludicrous that the generation that grew up in the “social” world, graduating from Bebo and MySpace to Facebook and Instagram, has trouble with loneliness. But among millennials, it’s incredibly common. One YouGov poll found that nearly a quarter of all millennials could not name a single friend. The same survey showed that close to a third of this generation – my generation – “always” or “often” feel lonely.

Loneliness is hard to address because it can be symptomatic of other forms of emotional turmoil – depression, for instance. Although feeling lonely is not a mental illness in its own right, the two are often strongly linked, and it is often a complex response to perceived isolation or lack of social connection. The fact that it is invisible – and that there is still considerable stigma attached to it – compounds the problem.

It perhaps makes sense that loneliness is especially taboo among those whose friendships ostensibly number in the thousands. But this is part of the problem: in fact, the connection between loneliness and social media is well established. For all their virtues, we know that social media platforms exploit the psychology of the user to keep that user glued to the screen. Having grown up with (and to at least some extent been shaped by) social media, millennials have been especially vulnerable to its worst psychological effects, such as creating an illusory impression of connection and the sense that everyone else is living an impossibly rich, varied and active life. And this, unsurprisingly, can translate to a feeling of loneliness in the real world.

Of course, millennials don’t have the monopoly on social isolation; older people are also increasingly feeling lonely. I’m fortunate: I have many close relationships, a family and a job. But when seemingly happy friends started telling me they were lonely and lost, I signed up to be a volunteer counsellor with Shout, a 24/7 text service for people in crisis.

But much more needs to be done with millennials specifically in mind. In addition to more counselling, GPs should consider “prescribing” millennials social activities to tackle these feelings of isolation. Book clubs, sports teams and meet-ups can all help young people build face-to-face relationships, as well as digital ones they already have on social media.

Despite what you might read, millennials are generally resourceful, passionate, imaginative people. We are entirely capable of facing up to the challenges of the coming years. But we also need to recognise the limits of social media in providing genuine relationships and preventing loneliness. Technology has transformed our lives and mostly for the better, but it is not a panacea – and we need to recognise that.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/oct/08/millennials-social-media-loneliness-epidemic

Corporations keep committing crimes, and the U.S. Department of Justice keeps refusing to prosecute them.

Instead of holding big corporations accountable when they violate the law, federal law enforcement officials go out of their way to avoid indicting them.

Instead of prioritizing protecting the victims of corporate crime, the Justice Department protects corporate profits and property.

Instead of prosecuting corporations, prosecutors make deals with them.

The deals prosecutors make to protect corporations from prosecution are called deferred prosecution agreements (DPAs) and non-prosecution agreements (NPAs). Prosecutors and corporate defense attorneys negotiate these deals behind closed doors to keep corporations out of the criminal justice system.

Under these agreements, the corporations pay a fine, agree to reforms and promise not to commit any more crimes. Sometimes they are supervised by a DOJ-approved monitor.

Usually after two or three years, as long as the corporation does not violate the agreement, the DOJ drops any charges it may have filed.

Corporations that enter DPAs and NPAs (also known as pre-trial diversions) technically have not been found guilty – but they’re not innocent, either. They almost always admit and accept responsibility for their wrongdoing, but they are protected from the full consequences off criminal prosecution – consequences that, if criminal corporations faced them, would serve as powerful punitive deterrents to corporate crime.
Пост был сокращён. Нажмите [] для просмотра.

The tech giant’s hope is that federal lawmakers will adopt much of its draft legislation.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says his company is developing a set of laws to regulate facial recognition technology that it plans to share with federal lawmakers.

In February, the company, which has faced escalating scrutiny over its controversial facial recognition tech, called Amazon Rekognition, published guidelines it said it hoped lawmakers would consider enacting. Now Amazon is taking another step, Bezos told reporters in a surprise appearance following Amazon’s annual Alexa gadget event in Seattle on Wednesday.

“Our public policy team is actually working on facial recognition regulations; it makes a lot of sense to regulate that,” Bezos said in response to a reporter’s question.

The idea is that Amazon will write its own draft of what it thinks federal legislation should look like, and it will then pitch lawmakers to adopt as much of it as possible.

“It’s a perfect example of something that has really positive uses, so you don’t want to put the brakes on it,” Bezos added. “But, at the same time, there’s also potential for abuses of that kind of technology, so you do want regulations. It’s a classic dual-use kind of technology.”

He did not provide details on what’s in the proposed legislation.

Bezos’s revelation comes a few months after Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon Web Services, which sells the Rekognition software, told Recode’s Code Conference audience that he hoped federal regulation happened soon.
Пост был сокращён. Нажмите [] для просмотра.

Sanders Vows, If Elected, to Pursue Criminal Charges Against Fossil Fuel CEOs for Knowingly 'Destroying the Planet'

"They knew that it was real," Sanders said, referring to fossil fuel CEOs' awareness of the climate crisis. "Their own scientists told them that it was real. What do you do to people who lied in a very bold-faced way, lied to the American people, lied to the media? How do you hold them accountable?"

"What do you do if executives knew that the product they were producing was destroying the planet, and they continue to do it?" the senator continued. "Do you think that that might be subject to criminal charges? Well, I think it's something we should look at."

" You're producing a product... and then you learn that the product you're producing is killing people, right? Which is the case, say, with the Purdue and Johnson & Johnson opioid manufacturers.

The evidence is pretty clear that in terms of Purdue and Johnson & Johnson, they learned at a certain point that the opioids they were producing were causing an epidemic and people were dying. And you know what they did? They continued to produce it and hire more salesmen to go out and sell it. What do you do to those folks.

Now, because you have in this country... a corrupt criminal justice system, CEOs and millionaires don't go to jail. People go to jail, kids go to jail, for selling marijuana, but if you kill hundreds of people, thousands of people, and you're a CEO and a billionaire, you don't go to jail. That's the nature of the system in America. It's a system I intend to change.

How do you hold fossil fuel executives who knew that they were destroying the planet but kept on doing it?"

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/09/20/sanders-vows-if-elected-pursue-criminal-charges-against-fossil-fuel-ceos-knowingly