Crossposted from AlterNet:

Kindergartener A.J. Paches was kicked out of Brookside Elementary School earlier this year because his homeless mother used a friend’s address to register him in the wealthy district of Norwalk, Connecticut. After expelling A.J., Norwalk authorities charged his mother with first-degree larceny for enrolling her son under a false address, a felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

Sadly, A.J.’s story is not unique. He is one of several low-income students whose parents use the residence of a relative or friend to provide their children with educational opportunities that are severely lacking in poor districts. In the recession era of budget deficits and cuts to public education, wealthy school districts are cracking down hard on these families, going to extreme lengths to identify the kids and prosecute the parents.

Bounties, Private Investigators, Tipsters, and Stakeouts

One popular method is to offer bounties to tipsters who report students who turn out to be illegally enrolled. As of 2008, the Bayonne Board of Education in New Jersey offers a $100 bounty for tips about students suspected of lying about their residency. In the middle-class suburban enclave of Clifton, New Jersey, the bounty is set at $300 for informants who correctly report a boundary hopper. According to the New York Times, the district immediately follows up with a visit by an “attendance officer” to the suspected students home.

In anticipation of the growing demand for residence verification, private companies like VerifyResidence.com and LiarCatchers.comare offering their investigative services aimed directly at public school districts. According to its Web site, VerifyResidence.com not only offers residence audits, but also surveillance stakeouts by investigators using “the latest in covert video technology and digital photographic equipment to photograph, videotape, and document subject activity when logistically possible.” Read More

This is my latest at AlterNet about Occupy Wall Street:

As Occupy Wall Street protests spring up in cities across the country, authorities are thinking up creative ways to contain this peaceful and inspiring uprising. Although laws and municipal ordinances vary from city to city, there is a consistency in the tactics being used to stifle the movement. More importantly, as demonstrated by the protesters at Zuccotti Park who kept strong in the face of a looming eviction that never came to fruition, these maneuvers are not working.

Still, there is no shortage of justifications and rationales behind the constantly evolving schemes being implemented to destroy the spirit of Occupy Wall Street. Here are 12 desperate and unsuccessful measures the authorities are using to discourage, deter and crack down on peaceful protests.

1) No Snoozing In Public

Most cities have an anti-camping ordinance on the books that prohibits camping or sleeping in public spaces, particularly public parks, to minimize the risk of nighttime criminal activity. But the ordinances are frequently used to cleanse cities of the inconvenient and uncomfortable scenery of homeless people; police in San Francisco are known for enforcing the city’s camping ordinance primarily against the homeless.

But now, all over the country, anti-camping ordinances are being used to arrest and deter protesters from occupying public spaces.

Local news stations covering Occupy Dallas report that police plan to begin enforcing the city’s ordinance against sleeping in public, first with warnings, then tickets, and eventually arrest. Due to a city ordinance that prohibits sleeping in Los Angeles public parks, Occupy LA activists move their tents to the sidewalk every night, and move them back to the park every morning. Occupy Chicago protesters have resorted to staying awake in shifts, then switching with one another to sleep in cars or someone’s home nearby to get around the ban against sleeping on the public sidewalk.

2) No Umbrellas

Officials in various cities are citing ordinances that prohibit the erection of permanent or semi-permanent structures, referring to tents, tarps, sleeping bags, and in one city, umbrellas.

According to Seattle’s newsweekly, The Stranger, the Seattle Police Department warned protesters that, “You can’t have an umbrella open unless you’re standing and holding it,” otherwise they are considered structures and will be confiscated. Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn later clarified the reasoning in a statement, saying, “As for umbrellas, police were concerned that protest participants were using umbrellas and tarps to create makeshift tents to evade the no-camping rule.”

In a city known for its heavy rains, it’s rather extreme to ban the use of umbrellas. But the absence of tents, tarps and even umbrellas during downpours in New York City and Washington DC has yet to discourage protesters.

3) Curfews

Fortunately for the Occupy Wall Street protesters in NYC, the privately owned Zuccotti Park is open 24 hours a day, unlike city-owned parks that are usually closed in the late night to early morning hours. In city and state-owned parks occupied by protesters throughout the country, authorities are using park curfews to their advantage. Just after 3am on the morning of Friday, Oct. 14, Denver police raided the Occupy Denver encampment citing an 11pm to 5am curfew at state parks, making at least 21 arrests. A similar 11pm curfew in Iowa led to 32 arrests on Oct. 9. The same thing happened at Occupy Sacramento.

4) No Open Flames

The “burn ban” generally applies to outdoor cooking, like grilling in the park, and is strictly followed by Wall Street protestors who refuse to give NYPD any reason to evict them. In the early days of Occupy San Francisco, SFPD issued protesters a notice of the local laws and ordinances they were allegedly violating, to justify a pending police crackdown. Included in the list was a “fire code prohibiting open flames that applied to outdoor cooking setups.” The lesson here is no barbequing.

5) No Sitting or Lying Down

SFPD’s notice also informed protesters that they were in violation of a sit-lie law that prohibits sitting or laying down on San Francisco sidewalks between 7am and 11pm. This criminal offense can result in a fine starting at $50 and possibly lead to jail time.  Read More

Crossposted from AlterNet:

Chances are that basketball fans cheering on the Orlando Magic’s star center Dwight Howard haven’t a clue they’re also supporting the radical right-wing ideology of the team’s billionaire owner, Richard DeVos. And when hockey fans root for the Philadelphia Flyers, they are likely unaware that the team’s war-mongering owner, Ed Snider, is profiting off of their support.

While establishment pundits often claim that sports and politics don’t mix, David Zirin, author of Bad Sports: How Owners Are Ruining the Games We Love and sports editor for theNation, argues just the opposite. He recently told AlterNet that, “The ability to manipulate politics, the ability to pull strings, and the ability to do so without an ounce of public scrutiny — that is your typical major sports owner.”

The exploitation of professional sports by the powerful is most evident in the hyperpatriotism that saturates almost every major sporting event. The aftermath of 9/11 has seen professional sports, particularly the National Football League and Major League Baseball, co-opted to promote a culture of war under the guise of patriotism and “supporting the troops.” The military is more visible than ever in professional sports with fighter jet flyovers that follow the national anthem, the NFL’s military recruitment stations at preseason games, and soldiers returned from war surprising their families for all to see.

Andrew Bacevich recently wrote about the spectacle he witnessed at a Red Sox game on the 4th of July. The Navy and the Red Sox teamed up to perform a “public relations triumph” by reuniting Bridget Lydon, a sailor “serving aboard the carrier USS Ronald Reagan” to aid in the Afghanistan war, with her family for the entire ballpark to see. The crowd went wild, erupting in cheers and applause to “honor the families whose sons and daughters are serving our country,” just as the voice from the loudspeaker had requested.

While the ever-increasing patriotic fervor is easy to recognize, there are less visible connections between politics and sports on the part of professional sports team owners, who are among the wealthiest people in the world. They’re also some of the most influential right-wing ideologues in the country.

The intermingling of professional sports ownership and right-wing politics is no more apparent than in the case of President George W. Bush. Long before Bush entered the world of politics, he was part owner of the MLB’s Texas Rangers beginning in 1990. The connections he made during his time with the Rangers helped propel him to White House. In 2004, the Associated Press reported that “More than a dozen current and former owners and family members are among the president’s top re-election fundraisers.” The report added, “The Bush campaign has also received direct contributions from owners and executives of more than half of the sport’s 30 teams.”

During his years as part team owner, Bush and his ownership crew pressured the Texas government into building them a new taxpayer-funded stadium by threatening to relocate the team. In the end, the owners succeeded in securing $135 million from the local government to build a $190 million ballpark. Meanwhile, Bush’s investment in the Rangers skyrocketed. According to Zirin, by the time Bush “cashed out in 1998, the return on his original $600,000 investment in the Rangers was 2,400 percent, upping his takeaway to a cool $14.4 million.”

While all team owners take advantage of their power and the taxpayer subsidies that often finance their stadiums, six go even further by using their ownership power and privilege to push their radical right-wing ideology onto an unsuspecting fan base. Read More

Crossposted from AlterNet:

“Why, in a world that produces more than enough food to feed everybody, do so many – one in seven of us – go hungry?”  — Oxfam   

Famine is spreading like wildfire throughout the horn of Africa. As 12 million people battle hunger, the UN warns that 750,000 people in Somalia face imminent death from starvation over the next four months, in the absence of outside intervention. Over the course of just 90 days, an estimated 29,000 children under the age of five died in Southern Somalia, with another 640,000 children suffering from acute malnourishment.

In the rush to find a culprit to blame for the tragedy unfolding in East Africa, the mainstream news outlets attributed the cause to record droughts, a rise in food prices, biofuel production and land grabs by foreign investors with an added emphasis on the role of the Somali terrorist group Al-Shabaab. Yet these factors alone are not responsible for the famine; instead they have intensified an already dire hunger crisis that has persisted in Sub-Saharan Africa for decades, thanks to lending policies pushed by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) that transformed a self-sufficient, food-producing Africa into a continent dependent on imports and food aid, leaving the continent vulnerable to food emergencies and famine.

Since 1981, when these lending policies were first implemented, Oxfam found that the amount of sub-Saharan Africans surviving on less than one dollar a day doubled to 313 million by 2001, which is 46 percent of the population. Since the mid-1980s, the number of food emergencies per year on the continent has tripled.

According to Oxfam International spokesperson Caroline Pearce, the IMF and World Bank structural adjustment programs of the ’80s and ’90s led to “huge disinvestments in the agricultural sector.” Pearce concludes, “What we’re seeing now in poor agricultural systems partly relates to those kind of policies. In many cases, we’re actually calling for things to be reestablished that were dismantled under structural adjustment programs in the past.”

Yet the impoverished countries of Africa, imperiled by mass starvation, continue to pay for a “free market” agenda, and it’s costing them their lives. Read More

This is my latest article at AlterNet:

As the economy continues to tank in the wake of congressional budget showdowns and stock market crashes, stories of those hardest hit remain hidden from view. The unemployed and underemployed, the homeless and the hungry have all been relegated to the back pages of our local newspapers; that is, if they are reported on at all.

As America’s economic disaster continues its destructive rampage throughout our communities, leaving behind record levels of unemployment, home foreclosures, mounting debt and unaffordable bills, how are those on the edge of the economy coping? Read More

Check out my latest article at AlterNet:

In the wake of the terrorist attack in Norway by right-wing Christian extremist Anders Breivik, conservative media pundits rushed to vilify anyone who brought up the underlying far-right ideology that fueled Breivik’s violence.

The uproar that follows any suggestion that right-wing extremism is on the rise works to silence the conversation about the danger of right-wing militancy. According to disturbing revelations by a former Homeland Security Intelligence Analyst, the consequences of this dynamic extend to the highest branches of the US government.

For six years, Darryl Johnson headed a Department of Homeland Security team tracking domestic extremist groups. Now Johnson, who is no longer with DHS, says that conservative furor over the report’s findings pressured Homeland Security to abandon reporting on and monitoring the rising threat of right-wing extremism for the past two years.  Read More

This is my most recent article about the School to Prison Pipeline, originally published at AlterNet:

A few months back, 18-year-old Tyell Morton was enjoying his senior year at Rushville High in Indiana. Today, he faces the prospect of being labeled a felon for the rest of his life for a harmless senior prank.

Morton was arrested for sneaking a blowup doll into a bathroom stall on the last day of school. He was caught by surveillance cameras that captured Tyell entering the bathroom with a package and leaving empty handed.  School officials responded by evacuating the premises and calling in the Indiana State bomb squad. Although “no one was injured, no property damaged and no dangerous materials found,” the ACLU says Morton, who had a clean record prior to the prank, is being charged with disorderly conduct (a misdemeanor) and institutional criminal mischief (a class C felony), carrying the potential of two to eight years in prison.

Tyell Morton’s case has received nationwide media attention and there is even a website called Free Tyrell Morton. Unfortunately, his case is hardly the only one of its kind. The overzealous response to Morton’s harmless, albeit immature senior prank, is just the most recent in a long string of over-the-top punishments visited upon American students.

In Pearl, Mississippi, Pearl High School’s rivalry with Brandon High School has lasted since 1949, until last year, when Perl high’s brand new field house was defaced with big paw prints and the bright, red letters B H S.  This prompted Brandon High officials to launch an investigation. The culprits, 17-year-olds Tyler Dearman and Adam Cook, were found and charged with felony malicious mischief.

Young people across America are being suspended, expelled and charged with criminal offenses for behavior as innocuous as doodling on a desk, skipping class, and in the case of Tyell Morton, participating in the well-established American tradition of “senior pranking.”  Suspension and expulsion are poles apart from arrests and criminal charges, but all of these disciplinary measures stem from a zero-tolerance culture that promotes harsh punishment for common childhood mistakes. Why is this happening? Read More