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Justice

In Alabama Prisons, The Less Sheriffs Spend On Food For Inmates, The More They Earn

By Adam Peck on Jun 25, 2012 at 6:30 pm

Cullman County Sheriff Mike Rainey

It took almost three quarters of a century, but one Sheriff in Alabama is finally speaking out against a 1939 law that allows for the state’s 67 sheriffs to keep leftover money the state provides to each municipality for feeding inmates in local prisons.

Sheriff Mike Rainey reportedly received $295,294 from the local, state and federal governments to spend on food for the county’s inmate population. But thanks to the old law, Rainey is entitled to pocket any money left over after he fulfills his responsibility of feeding his inmates.

It’s not hard to imagine how such a system could lead to massive corruption. In 2009, former Morgan County Sheriff Greg Bartlett was himself put behind bars after he admitted to keeping more than $200,000 from the prison’s food budget while the inmates he oversaw were provided with inadequate food.

Remarkably, Bartlett may not have actually broken any laws, a point the Alabama Sheriffs Association made to defend Bartlett during his trial.

Sheriff Rainey, who is calling on the legislature to end the current system in favor of allowing county commissions to oversee the funding, says he has donated most of his potential earnings to charity, upwards of $10,000 so far. He also wants to ensure that inmates are served fresh, healthy food, he told the Montgomery Advertiser:

“Incarceration is punishment. I know some people think you shouldn’t worry about what an inmate eats, but I think it’s a moral issue,” Rainey said. “They’re not getting filet mignon, but they’re certainly not being served green bologna, nor will they be served something like that.”

The Alabama legislature has tried to pass bills before repealing the 1939 law, most recently in 2009, but those bills have failed to advance to the Governor’s desk.

NEWS FLASH

Arizona Governor: Obama ‘Doesn’t Think We’re Part Of The Country Anymore’ | Arizona governor Jan Brewer lashed out at the Obama administration for pulling back “on a program known as 287(g), which allows the feds to deputize local officials to make immigration-based arrests” following the Supreme Court’s decision invalidating substantial sections of SB 1070. “Guess what he’s telling us is Arizona, ‘you’re on your own. Take it or leave it. You know?” she said during an interview with CNN’s John King. “I guess he doesn’t think we’re part of the country anymore.” Watch it:

Brewer is cheering the the Court’s decision, arguing that the justices preserved the “heart” of the law which “lets police check a person’s immigration status while enforcing other laws if ‘reasonable suspicion’ exists that the person is in the United States illegally.”

Economy

More Women Are Breadwinners, But They Still Can’t Get Out Of The Kitchen

By Annie-Rose Strasser on Jun 25, 2012 at 6:15 pm

Women are a growing part of the American workforce. In the last 25 years, the number of working women has grown by 44.2 percent, while 59.4 percent of working-age women are currently in the labor force. Sixty percent of women are the primary or co-bread winner for their household.

But despite those historic numbers, most women are still left doing the majority of the house work.

A new report out from the Bureau of Labor Statistics details how both men and women spend their days, and it comes as no surprise that women do a larger portion of the cooking, cleaning, laundry, and other chores:

On an average day, 83 percent of women and 65 percent of men spent some time doing household activities such as housework, cooking, lawn care, or financial and other household management.

On the days that they did household activities, women spent an average of 2.6 hours on such activities, while men spent 2.1 hours.

On an average day, 19 percent of men did housework–such as cleaning or doing laundry–compared with 48 percent of women. Forty percent of men did food preparation or cleanup, compared with 66 percent of women.

The numbers can be in part explained by the women who don’t work or who have part-time jobs. But the disproportionate burden of housework on women shows that a “second shift” still exists for those who work. While women have earned more rights in the office place (though they still aren’t fairly paid for their work), there is still the burden for them to be the primary housekeepers and caretakers.

Economy

STUDY: The Societal Cost Of A Growing Financial Industry

By Guest Blogger on Jun 25, 2012 at 5:30 pm

When an aspiring rocket scientist abandons ship to join a hedge fund, how much does it actually cost society?

In its annual report, the Bank of International Settlements points to a recent study that attempts to measure the societal cost of a growing financial sector. The study found that the financial industry — which continues to lure top college graduates — hampers productivity and growth in manufacturing sectors that are R&D-intensive, especially when finance booms.

The conventional wisdom is that a robust financial system fueled by young geniuses distributes capital and improves overall economic growth, but according to the study:

The financial industry competes for resources with the rest of the economy. It requires not only physical capital, in the form of buildings, computers and the like, but highly skilled workers as well. Finance literally bids rocket scientists away from the satellite industry. The result is that erstwhile scientists, people who in another age dreamt of curing cancer or flying to Mars, today dream of becoming hedge fund managers. [...]

While they are booming, these industries draw in resources at a phenomenal rate. It is only when they crash, after the bust, that we realize the extent of the over-investment that occurred. Too many companies were formed, with too much capital invested and too many people employed. Importantly, after the fact, we can see that many of these resources should have gone elsewhere.

That many top grads from elite universities eschew science and engineering for Wall Street is well known. Even after the crisis, finance remained the most popular career path for 2011 Harvard graduates. And at Princeton, an astonishing 35.9 percent of 2011′s class were coaxed by the large salaries that finance offers.

But when the financial sector grows, essential industries that are also skilled-labor-intensive — computing, aircraft, engineering, and the like — are disproportionately harmed by the Wall Street brain drain and the competition for financial resources.

– Steven Perlberg

(HT: FT Alphaville)

LGBT

Clues That Publication Of The Anti-Gay Parenting ‘Study’ Was Politically Calculated

By Zack Ford on Jun 25, 2012 at 5:18 pm

Mark Regnerus

Mark Regnerus’ parenting paper, with its faulty negative claims about gay parenting, has been roundly criticized by LGBT groups and mainstream psychological organizations and widely praised by anti-gay groups, in particular the National Organization for Marriage. Regnerus’ paper was published simultaneously in Social Science Research with a brief by professor Loren Marks critiquing the American Psychological Association’s support of same-sex parenting.

Scott Rose at The New Civil Rights Movement is building a compelling case that the publication of these two papers was coordinated with anti-gay groups who would capitalize on its political implications. Here are some of the clues Rose has discovered:

  • Regnerus and Marks published their pieces together, but Marks cited Regnerus’ paper, so he clearly had foreknowledge of its conclusions. This suggests it is likely they intentionally published simultaneously as a “one-two election year punch.”
  • Marks was originally called to testify in favor of Proposition 8, but admitted in deposition that he only had read parts of the studies from which he drew conclusions and had considered no research on gay and lesbian parents. His present research, published just two years later, attempts to make the same claims.
  • Marks also made his paper available for the House Republican legal team defending the Defense of Marriage Act long before it was published in a peer-reviewed journal.
  • There are multiple obvious ties between NOM co-founder Robert George, the Witherspoon Institute (which funded Regnerus’ research), Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion (which is defending the research), National Review (where NOM’s Maggie Gallagher frequently writes and where she has promoted the paper), and Mark Regnerus himself, suggesting particularly convenient collusion for spinning the political implications of the paper’s publication.

Anti-gay organizations have been quite intentional about promoting the paper’s fraudulent results since its publication, ignoring not only 30 years of past precedent but conflicting research that has been published in the interim. The number of convenient intersections allowing them to do so are becoming too plentiful to ignore. Fortunately, the study’s conclusions remain unfounded in the data and can continue to be disregarded as such.

Justice

Justice Scalia Makes Mathematically Challenged Attack On Obama’s DREAM Initiative

By Ian Millhiser on Jun 25, 2012 at 5:15 pm

As ThinkProgress previously explained, today’s majority opinion striking down much of Arizona’s harsh immigration law SB 1070 includes several passages suggesting that an Obama Administration initiative allowing undocumented college students and veterans to remain in the country is lawful. In a dissenting opinion joined by no other justice, however, conservative Justice Antonin Scalia takes a swipe at President Obama’s immigration policy:

After this case was argued and while it was under consideration, the Secretary of Homeland Security announced a program exempting from immigration enforcement some 1.4 million illegal immigrants under the age of 30. If an individual unlawfully present in the United States

“• came to the United States under the age of sixteen;

“• has continuously resided in the United States for at least five years . . . ,

“• is currently in school, has graduated from high school, has obtained a general education develop­ment certificate, or is an honorably discharged veteran . . . ,

“• has not been convicted of a [serious crime]; and

“• is not above the age of thirty,” . . . .

The husbanding of scarce enforcement resources can hardly be the justification for this, since the considerable administrative cost of conduct­ing as many as 1.4 million background checks, and ruling on the biennial requests for dispensation that the nonen­forcement program envisions, will necessarily be deducted from immigration enforcement.

The Obama Administration justifies its new policy under a doctrine known as “prosecutorial discretion.” Because Congress has not appropriated enough money to deport every undocumented immigrant in the country — the $285 billion cost of doing so adds up to more than six times to Department of Homeland Security’s entire annual budget — the executive branch has the authority to decide how to use its limited enforcement resources by focusing on undocumented immigrants who commit serious offenses and shifting resources away from college students and veterans.

Scalia’s dissent essentially claims that the Obama Administration’s invocation of prosecutorial discretion is a sham because their new immigration directive would also cost money to implement. Scalia would have done well, however, to actually crunch some numbers before making this claim.

Although it is true that the administration’s directive requires immigrants to “pass a background check” and undergo a “case by case” examination of their circumstances before they can take advantage of the new policy, such review will cost only a fraction of how much it would cost to round up, detain, process and deport each of these immigrants. As a Center for American Progress report explains, it costs an average of $18,310 to apprehend a single undocumented immigrant, $3,355 to detain the immigrant while they are facing removal proceedings, $817 to conduct the proceeding itself and another $1,000 to actually deport the immigrant to their country of origin — for a total cost of more than $23,000 for each college student or U.S. military veteran removed from the country.

Private companies, by contrast, offer criminal background checks for as low as $34.95. Federal employees undergo somewhat more expensive screening — those background checks start out at $125 — but even top secret clearances only require $4,000 to conduct. In other words, even if every single person eligible for relief under the Obama Administration’s directive were subjected to the same rigorous screening process required of top security officials who handle information that would cause “exceptionally grave damage” to national security if it became public, that would still cost about $19,000 less per immigrant than the cost of rounding up and deporting undocumented students and veterans.

Security

Romney Campaign Can’t Explain How He Would Boost Military Spending To $945 Billion And Cut The Deficit

By Guest Blogger on Jun 25, 2012 at 5:13 pm

Romney adviser Dov Zakheim

According to experts at the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, Mitt Romney’s proposed defense budget would boost military spending to $945 billion by 2021 — 53% more than Obama’s defense budget plan for that year — despite polling data showing the U.S. public wants cuts in Pentagon spending. This could amount to $2 trillion in additional military spending within the next decade.

Leave aside that a recent study conducted by the Center for Public Integrity showed that both Democrats and Republicans alike have advocated for cuts in military spending and that the U.S. ended its war in Iraq and is on the path to doing the same in Afghanistan. What’s most troubling about Romney’s military budget’s disconnect from Romney’s own goals for the national deficit. L.A. Times columnist Doyle McManus writes today that Romney’s boost in military spending “flies in the face of, well, arithmetic.”

Budget experts have already said that Romney’s military budget numbers don’t jibe with his plan to reduce the federal deficit. When McManus asked Romney adviser Dov S. Zakheim, the former George W. Bush Pentagon official, about the apparent lack of coherence, Zakheim deflected. McManus writes:

Zakheim said Romney was serious about the goal but hasn’t specified a date for reaching it — and as a result, no specific spending forecast is possible.

“It is a target,” he said. “The sooner we reach it, the better. And we can build up faster as the economy grows.”

Zakheim said that building up military spending to 4 percent of GDP “isn’t exactly a lot,” but McManus retorts that “needs to explain how he plans to balance the federal budget while adding trillions in new military spending” — something Zakheim, like the Romney campaign at large, dodged.

Military leaders such as Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have all defended President Obama’s defense spending plan. The President’s proposal to essentially keep the Pentagon budget flat for the next 10 years has been praised and touted as sufficient by the nation’s top military experts.

But that doesn’t satisfy Romney’s platitudes. Instead, he forges ahead with a military budget that confounds experts. As McManus writes, Romney needs to proffer “more details, and soon.”

– Angela Guo

Alyssa

A Smart Project to Improve Movies About Women

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Jun 25, 2012 at 5:06 pm

I’m sure many of you have heard of the Black List, a project to round up the best unproduced movie scripts, based on recommendations from executives at movie studios and production companies. Getting a script on the Black List is a mark of esteem, something that might get a script into production that had been previously been overlooked, and that marks a writer as a creative and original thinker. So I’m excited about a new endeavor* that’s creating a similar list of scripts that pass the Bechdel Test, and trying to get producers to commit to reading at least two of the scripts on the list.

I’m excited by the prospect of turning rich female characters from something that’s seen as a way to placate a certain number of vocal women or to get a certain kind of critical acclaim to an objective measurement of quality, creativity and intelligence. And I think it’ll be fun to see the scripts themselves: it’s interesting to see what people come with outside the established formulas of Hollywood genres. But I think I’m also curious to see how long it takes for the list to take off, and many of these scripts get picked up as compared to Black List scripts. If nothing else, that’s useful data about what kinds of smart and creative Hollywood values, and how far we have to go to make fascinating female characters part of that equation.

Economy

Arizona City Considered Using Police Station And City Hall As Collateral To Cover Payments To National Hockey League

By Pat Garofalo on Jun 25, 2012 at 4:25 pm

Glendale mulled offering city hall as collateral to pay for the Coyotes.

As ThinkProgress has noted, the city of Glendale, Arizona, has laid of public sector workers and cut social services in order to hand millions of dollars to the Phoenix Coyotes, its National Hockey League franchise. The Coyotes are currently owned by the league itself, after the team declared bankruptcy, and the city had pledged $15 million per year over 20 years to any future owner.

As if that weren’t bad enough, the Arizona Republic reported that the city considered offering both its city hall and its police station as collateral for a loan in order to cover payments to the NHL (and payments related to a baseball spring training stadium in the city):

Glendale officials this week considered offering up City Hall and the main police station as collateral to obtain a $41 million loan to cover sports-related debts.

The city would use the money to cover payments to the National Hockey League and potentially to make payments on Camelback Ranch stadium, the city’s spring-training ballpark.

Glendale officials acknowledged the proposal wouldn’t bring the city any savings. [...]

The City Council on Tuesday decided there were too many unknowns for staffers to proceed with the plan now.

A referendum that would cut the support the city has pledged to the Coyotes could appear on the ballot in November, so the city shelved its plan to offer the buildings as collateral. Meanwhile, Glendale is far from the only city facing a professional sports related budget boondoggle: in five others, teams want taxpayer money to publicly finance stadiums, even though such structures rarely deliver on their economic promise.

Climate Progress

Noncompetitive Coal Leasing Policies Cost U.S. Taxpayers $29 Billion Since 1982

By Stephen Lacey on Jun 25, 2012 at 4:18 pm

Most Americans don’t realize just how much coal they own.

Consider this: coal accounts for two thirds of resources extracted from public lands for electricity generation. And Americans also own most of the Powder River Basin, a region stretching across Wyoming and Montana that accounts for roughly 43 percent of America’s coal.

With all that coal being the property of U.S. citizens, you’d think the taxpayers were getting a lot of revenue from selling the resource to the coal companies. Not so much.

A new report concludes that uncompetitive leasing and poor oversight has denied American taxpayers up to $28.9 billion since 1982.

According to an analysis from Tom Sanzillo, director of the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, the government allows coal companies operating on public lands to purchase the resource at a price far below market value by supporting “auctions” with only one bidder.

This is a problem that environmental groups have raised for some time. But the new analysis shows just how much it’s costing American taxpayers:

As a result of policy choices and an inherently subjective and flawed fair market value appraisal process—the problems of which are exacerbated by the agency’s failure to consider changing market dynamics—the U.S. Treasury has lost approximately $28.9 billion in revenue throughout the last 30 years. Despite past political scandals and promises of programmatic reform, neither the DOI nor the BLM coal leasing activities have been audited or the subject of any major publicly available, external review regarding the sale of PRB coal for almost thirty years. As applied by the federal government in the case of federal coal leasing, the term “fair market value” rings hollow.

Since 1991, the Bureau of Land Management has issued 26 leases to coal companies. According to Sanzillo, only four of these leases have ever featured more than one bidder. And in the cases where there was actual “competition,” the auction featured two bidders.

Today, as coal consumption drops in the U.S., companies are now purchasing coal from taxpayers at ridiculous discount rates and selling the dirty resource to the highest bidder on the international market — thus subsidizing the boom in global warming pollution in Asia. (See: The BLM’s Corrupt Coal Leasing Program: Billions In Subsidies To Peabody, Gigatons Of Carbon Pollution For The Rest Of Us.)

After a recent auction of Powder River Basin coal in which Peabody Energy was the only bidder, Grist’s David Roberts did some simple and shocking math:

The winning price in Thursday’s sale? $1.11 per ton.

Again: $1.11 per ton.

The price of a ton of Powder River Basin coal on U.S. spot markets? $9.15 per ton, as of May 11.

The price of a ton of coal exported to China? It averaged $97.28 per ton [PDF] in 2011. It’s now up to $123 per ton.

So, to summarize: You, the U.S. taxpayer, just leased another huge chunk of your land to Peabody Coal at $1.11 per ton of coal. Peabody will strip-mine that land and take the coal to China, where it will sell it for over $100 per ton. Peabody pockets enormous profits*, the U.S. taxpayer gets devastated land, and China accelerates global warming.

And it’s all being pushed through by the Obama administration.

Until now, the government has done nothing about the lack of competition in these auctions. But now that analysts, environmentalists, and lawmakers are finally elevating the issue, the Government Accountability Office is now set to do an audit of the leasing program.

Meanwhile, the BLM is set to “auction” another 721 million tons of taxpayer-owned coal from the Powder River Basin next week.

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