Original Post: The Star
WASHINGTON—The White House and its critics faced off Tuesday over the legality of drone strikes to kill U.S. citizens abroad, in a likely preview of arguments that will be raised during this week’s confirmation hearing for President Barack Obama’s choice to head the CIA.
The disclosure of an unclassified Justice Department memo laying out the legal framework for the U.S. government’s ability to attack its own citizens drew criticism from civil liberties groups. But the White House strongly defended the controversial policy as legal and ethical.
The memo, first obtained by NBC News, argues that drone strikes are justified under American law if a targeted U.S. citizen had “recently” been involved in “activities” posing a possible threat and provided there is no evidence suggesting the individual “renounced or abandoned” such activities. A top U.S. official must determine that the targeted person “poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States,” cannot be captured, and that the strike “would be conducted in a manner consistent with applicable law of war principles.”
White House spokesman Jay Carney defended current U.S. drone policy, saying they are used to mitigate threats, stop plots, prevent future attacks and save American lives.
“These strikes are legal, they are ethical and they are wise,” he said.
Civil liberties groups expressed concerns, while lawmakers called on the White House to release more of its legal underpinning for the assertion that the president has the power to kill U.S. citizens abroad without trial.
“My initial reaction is that the paper only underscores the irresponsible extravagance of the government’s central claim,” Jameel Jaffer of the American Civil Liberties Union wrote on the ACLU’s blog. “Even if the Obama administration is convinced of its own fundamental trustworthiness, the power this white paper sets out will be available to every future president.”
The use of drones figures to be a prime topic for White House counterterrorism chief John Brennan when he faces the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday in a confirmation hearing on his nomination to become CIA director.
The U.S. government has dramatically increased its use of drones abroad in recent years to target Al Qaeda figures in far-flung places from Pakistan to Yemen.
The document was disclosed as a bipartisan group of U.S. senators called on the Obama administration to release to Congress “any and all” legal opinions laying out the government’s understanding of what legal powers the president has to authorize the killing of American citizens.
The senators who signed the letter, including members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the administration’s co-operation would “help avoid an unnecessary confrontation that could affect the Senate’s consideration of nominees for national security purposes.”
One national security official said the leak of the Justice Department memo may have been timed to blunt such congressional demands for the release of additional documents.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the Democrat who chairs the Intelligence Committee, said in a statement on Tuesday that she had been calling on the administration to release legal analyses related to the use of drones for more than a year. Feinstein said the document obtained by NBC had been given to congressional committees last June on a confidential basis, and that her committee is seeking additional documents, which are believed to remain classified.
Attorney General Eric Holder on Tuesday said he was concerned that the release of more documents could put sources and operations at risk.
There is “a real concern to reveal sources, to potentially reveal sources and methods and put at risk the very mechanisms that we use to try to keep people safe, which is our primary responsibility,” he said at a news conference.
The memo is drawing new attention to the 2011 strike that killed U.S.-born Anwar al Awlaki, who U.S. investigators say was a major player with Al Qaeda’s Yemen-based affiliate and linked to a botched plot to blow up a U.S. airliner with a bomb hidden in a man’s underwear on Christmas Day 2009. His teenage son was also killed in a drone strike.
Targeted killings carried out by remotely piloted unmanned aircraft are controversial because of the risks to nearby civilians and because of their increasing frequency. The United Nations recently launched an investigation into their use.
Most such attacks have been carried out by the United States, but Britain and Israel have also used drones.
Hina Shamsi of the ACLU, which has sued for more information on the drone program, called the memo “profoundly disturbing” and “a stunning overreach of executive authority.”
Shamsi, head of the ACLU’s National Security Project, in a statement called on the Obama administration to release what she said was a 50-page classified legal document on which the 16-page summary is based.
“Among other things, we need to know if the limits the executive purports to impose on its killing authority are as loosely defined as in this summary, because if they are, they ultimately mean little,” she said late Monday.
Thursday, February 7, 2013
IRS: ObamaCare plans to cost families at least $20,000 per year
Original Post: United LIberty
During the debate over his health care reform proposal, President Barack Obama and his apologists in Congress insisted that it would hold down insurance premiums for American families. But despite these promises, Jonathan Gruber, the architect of the plan, acknowledged that insurance premiums would still rise under ObamaCare.
So it comes as no surprise to see read an IRS report released last week showing that the cheapest health insurance plan under ObamaCare will cost a family $20,000 in 2016:
In a final regulation issued Wednesday, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) assumed that under Obamacare the cheapest health insurance plan available in 2016 for a family will cost $20,000 for the year.
The IRS’s assumption that the cheapest plan for a family will cost $20,000 per year is found in examples the IRS gives to help people understand how to calculate the penalty they will need to pay the government if they do not buy a mandated health plan.
The examples point to families of four and families of five, both of which the IRS expects in its assumptions to pay a minimum of $20,000 per year for a bronze plan.
“The annual national average bronze plan premium for a family of 5 (2 adults, 3 children) is $20,000,” the regulation says.
While the individual mandate is supposed to ensure that Americans purchase health insurance coverage, a nearly $1,700 per month premium is going to be too much for many families to afford. CNS News notes that the failure to purchase health insurance coverage would result in a $2,085 penalty per family (or 2.5% of taxable income) in 2016.
Like businesses who are dropping coverage to avoid heavy costs, it’s cheaper for Americans to remain uninsured, especially now that ObamaCare has further driven up costs, rather than purchase health insurance coverage.
During the debate over his health care reform proposal, President Barack Obama and his apologists in Congress insisted that it would hold down insurance premiums for American families. But despite these promises, Jonathan Gruber, the architect of the plan, acknowledged that insurance premiums would still rise under ObamaCare.
So it comes as no surprise to see read an IRS report released last week showing that the cheapest health insurance plan under ObamaCare will cost a family $20,000 in 2016:
In a final regulation issued Wednesday, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) assumed that under Obamacare the cheapest health insurance plan available in 2016 for a family will cost $20,000 for the year.
The IRS’s assumption that the cheapest plan for a family will cost $20,000 per year is found in examples the IRS gives to help people understand how to calculate the penalty they will need to pay the government if they do not buy a mandated health plan.
The examples point to families of four and families of five, both of which the IRS expects in its assumptions to pay a minimum of $20,000 per year for a bronze plan.
“The annual national average bronze plan premium for a family of 5 (2 adults, 3 children) is $20,000,” the regulation says.
While the individual mandate is supposed to ensure that Americans purchase health insurance coverage, a nearly $1,700 per month premium is going to be too much for many families to afford. CNS News notes that the failure to purchase health insurance coverage would result in a $2,085 penalty per family (or 2.5% of taxable income) in 2016.
Like businesses who are dropping coverage to avoid heavy costs, it’s cheaper for Americans to remain uninsured, especially now that ObamaCare has further driven up costs, rather than purchase health insurance coverage.
Tuesday, February 5, 2013
ATF's Milwaukee sting operation marred by mistakes, failures
Original Post: JS Online
A store calling itself Fearless Distributing opened early last year on an out-of-the-way street in Milwaukee's Riverwest neighborhood, offering designer clothes, athletic shoes, jewelry and drug paraphernalia.
Those working behind the counter, however, weren't interested in selling anything.
They were undercover agents from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives running a storefront sting aimed at busting criminal operations in the city by purchasing drugs and guns from felons.
But the effort to date has not snared any major dealers or taken down a gang. Instead, it resulted in a string of mistakes and failures, including an ATF military-style machine gun landing on the streets of Milwaukee and the agency having $35,000 in merchandise stolen from its store, a Journal Sentinel investigation has found.
When the 10-month operation was shut down after the burglary, agents and Milwaukee police officers who participated in the sting cleared out the store but left behind a sensitive document that listed names, vehicles and phone numbers of undercover agents.
And the agency remains locked in a battle with the building's owner, who says he is owed about $15,000 because of utility bills, holes in the walls, broken doors and damage from an overflowing toilet.
The sting resulted in charges being filed against about 30 people, most for low-level drug sales and gun possession counts. But agents had the wrong person in at least three cases. In one, they charged a man who was in prison - as a result of an earlier ATF case - at the time agents said he was selling drugs to them.
Other cases reveal that the agency's operation was paying such high prices that some defendants bought guns from stores such as Gander Mountain and sold them to the agents for a quick profit. The mistakes by agents are troubling and suggest a lack of planning and oversight, according to veterans of the ATF, who learned about the operation from the Journal Sentinel. The newspaper combed through police reports, court documents, social media and materials left behind by the ATF, all of which provide a rare view inside an undercover federal operation.
"I have never heard of those kinds of problems in an operation," said Michael Bouchard, who retired five years ago as assistant director for field operations for the agency. "Sure, small bits and pieces, but that many in one case? I have never heard of anything like that."
The agency has been on the defensive in recent years following the ill-fated Fast and Furious operation, run out of Arizona, where agents allowed sales of more than 2,000 guns to gun traffickers but then failed to keep track of most of them. Many turned up at crime scenes in Mexico, including two at the site where a U.S. border guard was killed.
And now, in the wake of the school shooting in Connecticut, as President Barack Obama considers new restrictions on guns, the agency is poised to take on additional responsibilities.
The ATF has run storefront stings in other cities, holding news conferences trumpeting results and showing off the guns and drugs seized. In Milwaukee, the operation has been kept quiet.
Residents of the area, tucked between N. Humboldt Blvd. and the Milwaukee River, are angry the ATF secretly drew drug dealers and gun-toting felons to their neighborhood, which is rallying to improve.
Federal authorities said they could not say much about the Milwaukee operation because court cases have not been resolved and the ATF is still seeking suspects.
U.S. Attorney James Santelle, whose office was briefed on plans for the sting, declined to comment on problems in the operation, focusing instead on the number of defendants charged and the 145 guns seized, including three sawed-off shotguns, 10 stolen guns and eight guns with obliterated serial numbers.
Santelle said all federal investigations are not the same and noted in this case four of the defendants are facing long prison terms for being career armed criminals.
"They are plainly a threat to the community," he said.
ATF spokesman Special Agent Robert Schmidt said he is convinced the operation didn't bring crime to the neighborhood and instead made the streets of Milwaukee safer.
Schmidt declined to say how much the sting operation cost.
"Our number one responsibility is denying criminal access to firearms and that is what we are trying to do," Schmidt said. "It is our duty to purchase these firearms to protect the American public and citizens of Milwaukee."
Suspicious operation
When David Salkin put his single-story building on E. Meinecke Ave. up for rent on Craigslist, he had a choice: Lease to a church or Fearless Distributing.
He went with the upstart Fearless operation because they were willing to take all 8,000 square feet of the building and pay the $3,200 in monthly rent in cash.
The agent who signed the lease gave Salkin a fake name and home address. Fearless was not registered with the state. The agents told Salkin their operation was new and they would get to that.
The agents, wearing shirts that said "Brew City Hustle," carved out a part of the warehouse for a showroom of jeans, coats, shoes and purses along with bongs and fake urine, for those trying to beat a drug test. They also set up an office with a cash-counting machine.
They installed secret cameras and a command center where the sting would be run.
The operation created a Facebook page and chose a striking logo - a skull with a slew of guns and knives fanned out behind - ripped off from a recent Sylvester Stallone movie, "The Expendables." The store didn't say it was in the gun business but the logo suggested that.
Agents "let it be known" they were willing to buy guns and drugs, according to documents from the circuit court charges. The records don't say how they did that, but agents had business cards with the Fearless logo and the words "Buy, sell, or trade." The cards were found by the landlord after agents left.
Salkin, who previously ran his sign business from the building, was a first-time landlord. He said he saw little of the Fearless operation because they mostly kept him out. What he saw gave him suspicions. It looked to him like they were selling counterfeit goods. But the rent was coming in - a relief after months without a tenant.
As secretive as the ATF was with Salkin, there were hints of what was going on. Workers at the tannery across the street noticed people going into the store carrying packages and guns, then coming out empty-handed. Odd for a place that was supposed to be selling things, they thought.
Mike Zielinski, a UPS driver in the area, said he asked the people running the operation if they needed to get an account for deliveries. What they said puzzled him.
"They said they wouldn't be sending or getting anything. I thought that was odd because 'distributing' is in their name. Fearless Distributing," he said. "I was wondering, what kind of business is that."
They never sent or received anything via UPS in 10 months, Zielinski said.
Targeting 'hot spots'
Milwaukee is among 31 cities where the ATF has dedicated a Violent Crime Impact Team. The teams are supposed to target "hot spots" - small, high-crime areas - and go after the "worst of the worst" violent criminals, according to the agency's Best Practices report.
The agency launched the initiative in 2004 and quickly reported "enormous" success. Agency officials touted a drop in firearm-related homicides in pilot cities and credited the $35 million effort with helping local police departments solve other crimes.
But a U.S. Department of Justice Inspector General's report two years later found no evidence that the teams reduced firearm crimes in the targeted areas. Authors of the report cited "inadequate direction" and "ineffective oversight" by the agency.
"We found that ATF based its analysis on insufficient data and faulty comparisons," the report stated.
In some cases agents located their operations in areas where violent firearm crimes had already been declining, according to the report.
In more than half the cases studied, the ATF used citywide data rather than numbers from the target areas, favorably skewing their analyses when reporting on homicides committed with firearms, the report found. And, teams in several of the cities failed to implement key strategies, such as compiling "worst of the worst" lists, engaging in community outreach or utilizing tracing and other technological resources.
Still, the initiative expanded in 2006 with the addition of Birmingham, Ala.; Baton Rouge, La.; Milwaukee and other cities.
In Milwaukee, agents located Fearless Distributing in a neighborhood where aggravated assaults had been declining since at least 2008, according to an analysis by the Journal Sentinel relying on Milwaukee Police Department numbers.
Aggravated assaults within a mile radius of the storefront dropped to 109 last year from 193 in 2008. Homicides in the area ranged from zero to three per year during the last five years, far fewer than other crime-laden areas in the city.
ATF spokesman Schmidt would not say why the agency chose that location for a storefront sting.
"We pick a neighborhood if there is a property appropriate for what our needs are," Schmidt said. "You look for pockets in the city . . . and you look for a number of other mechanisms that go into it in order to make a decision."
Schmidt said he did not know of any recent evaluation, local or regional, examining the effectiveness of their operations.
"Look at how many cases have gone to the U.S. attorney," he said.
Nationally, the agency's website touts numbers showing teams referred an average of 671 cases per year for criminal charges from 2006-'09, with 14-year average prison sentences for those convicted. The Department of Justice issued news releases in Baltimore, Atlanta and elsewhere in the last couple of years praising the successes of individual operations.
In March, an undercover ATF sting made news in Richmond, Calif., for other reasons: when a gun-buying deal went bad and agents shot a suspect in the parking lot of a restaurant, sending customers diving for cover.
ATF officials defended the operation and agents' actions.
Schmidt said funding for Violent Crime Impact Teams is being reduced in the agency's $1.2 billion budget and that the ATF is launching a new, improved initiative in coming months called Frontline.
Top dollar paid for guns
Fearless Distributing was buying guns and drugs by March of last year. The sellers came from outside the Riverwest neighborhood, mostly from the near north side of Milwaukee, according to court documents.
The amount of drugs involved ranged from a gram of cocaine or an ounce of marijuana to an ounce of cocaine and seven grams of heroin on the high end. One charge is for selling fake drugs.
Gun charges also varied.
The ATF generally targets gun sellers using statutes that prohibit felons from having guns. The number of guns seized ranged from a single firearm to 25 to 30 guns.
ATF agents were paying top dollar for the guns, court documents show. For instance, Vance Fields sold a Smith & Wesson .40 caliber handgun to agents at Fearless in September for $1,250, according the criminal complaint. That model has sold for roughly $400 to $700 in online auctions recently.
In one case, Brandon Gladney sold more than 30 guns to ATF agents, including some that he and Courvoisie Bryant bought at Gander Mountain, according to court documents. Bryant is charged in federal court with being a straw buyer - someone who purchases firearms for another person who is prohibited from having them.
Daniel Stiller, head of the federal defender's service in Milwaukee, said such undercover operations are rare. The case involving Gladney and Bryant suggested to him that those defendants weren't major criminals given they got guns from a store, not the street.
"I have to guess a true criminal on the streets of Milwaukee has the ability to obtain a firearm when needed from something other than a store," Stiller said.
Guns stolen from ATF SUV
As the gun and drug buys continued, the operation went awry. In September, an agent parked his Ford Explorer at the Alterra on N. Humboldt Blvd., about a half mile away, with three ATF guns stored in a metal box in the back.
About 3 p.m. Sept. 13, an Alterra employee spotted three men breaking into the Explorer. They stole three guns: a Smith & Wesson 9mm handgun, a Sig Sauer .40-caliber pistol and an M-4 .223-caliber fully automatic rifle. They also made off with ammunition and an ATF radio, according to a police report. It does not appear from the reports that the agent was at Alterra at the time of the break-in.
A major push began to find the weapons and the men who stole them, police records show. Two men were quickly arrested. An informant told police one of the suspects was showing off the guns and eight magazines of ammunition shortly after the vehicle burglary, according to police records.
One of the suspects hid the machine gun under a bed and took the handguns with him. He was questioned by police and refused to talk. He was released. No one has been charged in the burglary of the ATF guns, according to Milwaukee County Assistant District Attorney Karen Loebel. She declined to say if charges would be coming.
The ATF soon had one of its stolen guns back, however.
The very next day, according to court documents, 19-year-old Marquise Jones contacted agents at Fearless Distributing and sold the Sig Sauer - and another unrelated handgun - back to agents.
The price: $1,400.
But Jones would not be arrested for two months. And when he was, it was not for the theft. His name does not appear on the police reports related to the vehicle break-in. He was charged with having a stolen gun.
Meanwhile, the hunt for the machine gun and the other stolen handgun continues.
"We are actively looking for any missing firearms that might be out there right now," the ATF's Schmidt said.
Gerald Nunziato, a retired ATF agent who supervised undercover operations, said he was shocked at the number of mistakes made during the operation. He questioned the decision to leave the agent's truck at the coffee shop with guns inside.
"That bothers me the most," Nunziato said. "The last thing you want to have is a gun stolen. If that gun is used to shoot someone, that is so personal."
ATF operation ripped off
The operation ran into more trouble in October, when burglars broke into the building housing Fearless and cleaned out the ATF operation.
Late on Oct. 9, a resident, who didn't want to be identified, spotted four men in the area in a car and a U-Haul truck who looked suspicious. He called police, but when they didn't come quickly enough he went to the district station and reported what he saw in person. Police reports show officers came to investigate the next day. A Milwaukee police spokesman did not return a call for comment Tuesday.
The burglars made off with jewelry, clothing, auto parts, purses, Nike shoes and more, according to police reports. No one has been charged in the burglary.
The lease states that the alarm is included in the rent. But shortly after Fearless moved in, Salkin said he told the people running the store he was cutting the phone line, which connected the alarm. He said he assumed they would hook up their own alarm. They did not.
"You would think the ATF would know that," Salkin said.
The day after the burglary, Salkin and his wife met with an ATF supervisor, who assured them that they would take care of everything.
Salkin said by going over on the $800 a month utility allotment and damage to walls, doors and carpeting, the ATF owes him about $15,000, which includes a month of lost rent.
The ATF has balked, saying there was less than $3,200 in damage and telling Salkin to return the security deposit. They told him to file a claim with the federal government and warned him to stop contacting them.
In an email to Salkin, ATF attorney Patricia Cangemi wrote, "If you continue to contact the Agents after being so advised your contacts may be construed as harassment under the law. Threats or harassment of a Federal Agent is of grave concern. Utilizing the telephone or a computer to perpetrate threats or harassment is also a serious matter."
Nunziato said he worked in undercover ATF storefront operations in the 1980s near Detroit. He said they too didn't tell the landlord, but when they left, they fixed the property to make it as good or better than when they moved in. Nunziato said he could not fathom the Milwaukee agents just walking away from a damaged building.
"To back up a toilet? Not paying bills? And then damaging the building?" he said. "It seems like the planning of this case was not done very well. Looks like it was done as they went along."
The Riverwest neighborhood where ATF ran its operation is a mix of Milwaukee bungalows, flats and duplexes, with many longtime homeowners mingled with renters. A few bars are sprinkled in the area along with the tannery and Salkin's former sign company.
The area has rallied against crime, lobbying to get a drug house closed. Neighbors developed a tight bond with their beat cop after a homicide occurred several blocks to the north.
"It's a whole mix of people here and that is what I really love," said Lorraine Jacobs, a resident for 27 years. "I wouldn't want to live anywhere else."
Jacobs and others feel betrayed by the ATF operation bringing drug dealers and gun sellers to their area.
"I feel like we were fooled, taken advantage of," she said. "It is unfortunate for our neighborhood. We are trying to bring it up and we are close to that. We just didn't need this."
Jason Reichel, who lives near Jacobs, said he would have preferred the operation wasn't in his neighborhood, but wouldn't want to push it off on another area. He said he is concerned ATF did not have control over the operation, given the store was ripped off.
"I would expect that the ATF wouldn't get robbed, that they would have security measures," he said. "Maybe I watch too many movies. You would think it would be hard to rob an ATF operation."
Turns out, the ATF has weapons stolen or loses them more frequently than the public might think, according to a 2008 report from the Office of the Inspector General with the U.S. Department of Justice.
In a five-year span from 2002-'07, for example, 76 ATF weapons were stolen, lost or missing, according to the report. That's nearly double the number compared with the FBI and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, when considering rates per 1,000 agents.
Todd Roehl, a resident for five years, wonders if the ATF operation explains two unusual crimes in the neighborhood. Over the summer, the wheels were stolen off his wife's SUV, which was left up on rocks. A couple of months later, thieves attempted to break in to his shed. The ATF operation was buying stolen goods, but he is unsure if his wife's wheels ended up there.
He said the ATF should have chosen a less residential area, perhaps an industrial park or retail area.
"I have two small children and this is going on while they are playing outside?" he said. "The stigma is damaging. Every neighborhood tries to make things better. It does not help to have your own government planting crime here, which takes down, destroys and damages that. It's like, 'Thanks.' "
Botched arrests
After the burglary, agents wound down the operation and prepared to make arrests in November. The defendants charged with drug crimes generally went to state court while defendants facing gun cases, which also may include drug charges, went to federal court.
But during the roundup, ATF arrested and sought charges against three defendants who proved to be the wrong people, even though they had video of the defendants.
One of those was Adrienne Jones. ATF agents said Jones sold them six grams of marijuana on March 7. Problem was, Jones reported to a federal prison in Pennsylvania to start a sentence on March 1, according to Chris Burke, spokesman for the federal Bureau of Prisons - on an ATF case.
"He was definitely in our custody," Burke said. "He never left."
Loebel, the prosecutor, dismissed the charges against Jones and the other two. She said agents told her that they could not prove elements of the charge.
"Under those circumstances, we want to make sure we get the right one," she said. "You don't want to charge the wrong person. You certainly don't want to prosecute the wrong person. That is not something you strive for."
Asked about the quality of the remaining 15 cases, Loebel would only say she is proceeding with the prosecution of them and that all are important.
"It is really a gamut of individuals and offenses," she said. "My position is any amount of drugs, they have bad effects on people and on the community."
ATF's Schmidt said the agency always strives to identify the correct person before seeking charges against them.
"Certainly it is a concern," he said. "I think they put their best effort forward and it was their belief and information that these were the correct people."
I've come to a conclusion. If you want to get illegal guns off the streets the first step is to get rid of the ATF. Apparently that can't not sell guns to Mexican drug lords. Apparently they can't not get guns stolen from Milwaukee and apparently they can't not accuse innocent people of crimes (even ones that the ATF already has in jail). I used to look up to those sorts of agencies. I used to think they were the creme of the crop, now I'm just disgusted as I laugh at them. It's truly pathetic.
A store calling itself Fearless Distributing opened early last year on an out-of-the-way street in Milwaukee's Riverwest neighborhood, offering designer clothes, athletic shoes, jewelry and drug paraphernalia.
Those working behind the counter, however, weren't interested in selling anything.
They were undercover agents from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives running a storefront sting aimed at busting criminal operations in the city by purchasing drugs and guns from felons.
But the effort to date has not snared any major dealers or taken down a gang. Instead, it resulted in a string of mistakes and failures, including an ATF military-style machine gun landing on the streets of Milwaukee and the agency having $35,000 in merchandise stolen from its store, a Journal Sentinel investigation has found.
When the 10-month operation was shut down after the burglary, agents and Milwaukee police officers who participated in the sting cleared out the store but left behind a sensitive document that listed names, vehicles and phone numbers of undercover agents.
And the agency remains locked in a battle with the building's owner, who says he is owed about $15,000 because of utility bills, holes in the walls, broken doors and damage from an overflowing toilet.
The sting resulted in charges being filed against about 30 people, most for low-level drug sales and gun possession counts. But agents had the wrong person in at least three cases. In one, they charged a man who was in prison - as a result of an earlier ATF case - at the time agents said he was selling drugs to them.
Other cases reveal that the agency's operation was paying such high prices that some defendants bought guns from stores such as Gander Mountain and sold them to the agents for a quick profit. The mistakes by agents are troubling and suggest a lack of planning and oversight, according to veterans of the ATF, who learned about the operation from the Journal Sentinel. The newspaper combed through police reports, court documents, social media and materials left behind by the ATF, all of which provide a rare view inside an undercover federal operation.
"I have never heard of those kinds of problems in an operation," said Michael Bouchard, who retired five years ago as assistant director for field operations for the agency. "Sure, small bits and pieces, but that many in one case? I have never heard of anything like that."
The agency has been on the defensive in recent years following the ill-fated Fast and Furious operation, run out of Arizona, where agents allowed sales of more than 2,000 guns to gun traffickers but then failed to keep track of most of them. Many turned up at crime scenes in Mexico, including two at the site where a U.S. border guard was killed.
And now, in the wake of the school shooting in Connecticut, as President Barack Obama considers new restrictions on guns, the agency is poised to take on additional responsibilities.
The ATF has run storefront stings in other cities, holding news conferences trumpeting results and showing off the guns and drugs seized. In Milwaukee, the operation has been kept quiet.
Residents of the area, tucked between N. Humboldt Blvd. and the Milwaukee River, are angry the ATF secretly drew drug dealers and gun-toting felons to their neighborhood, which is rallying to improve.
Federal authorities said they could not say much about the Milwaukee operation because court cases have not been resolved and the ATF is still seeking suspects.
U.S. Attorney James Santelle, whose office was briefed on plans for the sting, declined to comment on problems in the operation, focusing instead on the number of defendants charged and the 145 guns seized, including three sawed-off shotguns, 10 stolen guns and eight guns with obliterated serial numbers.
Santelle said all federal investigations are not the same and noted in this case four of the defendants are facing long prison terms for being career armed criminals.
"They are plainly a threat to the community," he said.
ATF spokesman Special Agent Robert Schmidt said he is convinced the operation didn't bring crime to the neighborhood and instead made the streets of Milwaukee safer.
Schmidt declined to say how much the sting operation cost.
"Our number one responsibility is denying criminal access to firearms and that is what we are trying to do," Schmidt said. "It is our duty to purchase these firearms to protect the American public and citizens of Milwaukee."
Suspicious operation
When David Salkin put his single-story building on E. Meinecke Ave. up for rent on Craigslist, he had a choice: Lease to a church or Fearless Distributing.
He went with the upstart Fearless operation because they were willing to take all 8,000 square feet of the building and pay the $3,200 in monthly rent in cash.
The agent who signed the lease gave Salkin a fake name and home address. Fearless was not registered with the state. The agents told Salkin their operation was new and they would get to that.
The agents, wearing shirts that said "Brew City Hustle," carved out a part of the warehouse for a showroom of jeans, coats, shoes and purses along with bongs and fake urine, for those trying to beat a drug test. They also set up an office with a cash-counting machine.
They installed secret cameras and a command center where the sting would be run.
The operation created a Facebook page and chose a striking logo - a skull with a slew of guns and knives fanned out behind - ripped off from a recent Sylvester Stallone movie, "The Expendables." The store didn't say it was in the gun business but the logo suggested that.
Agents "let it be known" they were willing to buy guns and drugs, according to documents from the circuit court charges. The records don't say how they did that, but agents had business cards with the Fearless logo and the words "Buy, sell, or trade." The cards were found by the landlord after agents left.
Salkin, who previously ran his sign business from the building, was a first-time landlord. He said he saw little of the Fearless operation because they mostly kept him out. What he saw gave him suspicions. It looked to him like they were selling counterfeit goods. But the rent was coming in - a relief after months without a tenant.
As secretive as the ATF was with Salkin, there were hints of what was going on. Workers at the tannery across the street noticed people going into the store carrying packages and guns, then coming out empty-handed. Odd for a place that was supposed to be selling things, they thought.
Mike Zielinski, a UPS driver in the area, said he asked the people running the operation if they needed to get an account for deliveries. What they said puzzled him.
"They said they wouldn't be sending or getting anything. I thought that was odd because 'distributing' is in their name. Fearless Distributing," he said. "I was wondering, what kind of business is that."
They never sent or received anything via UPS in 10 months, Zielinski said.
Targeting 'hot spots'
Milwaukee is among 31 cities where the ATF has dedicated a Violent Crime Impact Team. The teams are supposed to target "hot spots" - small, high-crime areas - and go after the "worst of the worst" violent criminals, according to the agency's Best Practices report.
The agency launched the initiative in 2004 and quickly reported "enormous" success. Agency officials touted a drop in firearm-related homicides in pilot cities and credited the $35 million effort with helping local police departments solve other crimes.
But a U.S. Department of Justice Inspector General's report two years later found no evidence that the teams reduced firearm crimes in the targeted areas. Authors of the report cited "inadequate direction" and "ineffective oversight" by the agency.
"We found that ATF based its analysis on insufficient data and faulty comparisons," the report stated.
In some cases agents located their operations in areas where violent firearm crimes had already been declining, according to the report.
In more than half the cases studied, the ATF used citywide data rather than numbers from the target areas, favorably skewing their analyses when reporting on homicides committed with firearms, the report found. And, teams in several of the cities failed to implement key strategies, such as compiling "worst of the worst" lists, engaging in community outreach or utilizing tracing and other technological resources.
Still, the initiative expanded in 2006 with the addition of Birmingham, Ala.; Baton Rouge, La.; Milwaukee and other cities.
In Milwaukee, agents located Fearless Distributing in a neighborhood where aggravated assaults had been declining since at least 2008, according to an analysis by the Journal Sentinel relying on Milwaukee Police Department numbers.
Aggravated assaults within a mile radius of the storefront dropped to 109 last year from 193 in 2008. Homicides in the area ranged from zero to three per year during the last five years, far fewer than other crime-laden areas in the city.
ATF spokesman Schmidt would not say why the agency chose that location for a storefront sting.
"We pick a neighborhood if there is a property appropriate for what our needs are," Schmidt said. "You look for pockets in the city . . . and you look for a number of other mechanisms that go into it in order to make a decision."
Schmidt said he did not know of any recent evaluation, local or regional, examining the effectiveness of their operations.
"Look at how many cases have gone to the U.S. attorney," he said.
Nationally, the agency's website touts numbers showing teams referred an average of 671 cases per year for criminal charges from 2006-'09, with 14-year average prison sentences for those convicted. The Department of Justice issued news releases in Baltimore, Atlanta and elsewhere in the last couple of years praising the successes of individual operations.
In March, an undercover ATF sting made news in Richmond, Calif., for other reasons: when a gun-buying deal went bad and agents shot a suspect in the parking lot of a restaurant, sending customers diving for cover.
ATF officials defended the operation and agents' actions.
Schmidt said funding for Violent Crime Impact Teams is being reduced in the agency's $1.2 billion budget and that the ATF is launching a new, improved initiative in coming months called Frontline.
Top dollar paid for guns
Fearless Distributing was buying guns and drugs by March of last year. The sellers came from outside the Riverwest neighborhood, mostly from the near north side of Milwaukee, according to court documents.
The amount of drugs involved ranged from a gram of cocaine or an ounce of marijuana to an ounce of cocaine and seven grams of heroin on the high end. One charge is for selling fake drugs.
Gun charges also varied.
The ATF generally targets gun sellers using statutes that prohibit felons from having guns. The number of guns seized ranged from a single firearm to 25 to 30 guns.
ATF agents were paying top dollar for the guns, court documents show. For instance, Vance Fields sold a Smith & Wesson .40 caliber handgun to agents at Fearless in September for $1,250, according the criminal complaint. That model has sold for roughly $400 to $700 in online auctions recently.
In one case, Brandon Gladney sold more than 30 guns to ATF agents, including some that he and Courvoisie Bryant bought at Gander Mountain, according to court documents. Bryant is charged in federal court with being a straw buyer - someone who purchases firearms for another person who is prohibited from having them.
Daniel Stiller, head of the federal defender's service in Milwaukee, said such undercover operations are rare. The case involving Gladney and Bryant suggested to him that those defendants weren't major criminals given they got guns from a store, not the street.
"I have to guess a true criminal on the streets of Milwaukee has the ability to obtain a firearm when needed from something other than a store," Stiller said.
Guns stolen from ATF SUV
As the gun and drug buys continued, the operation went awry. In September, an agent parked his Ford Explorer at the Alterra on N. Humboldt Blvd., about a half mile away, with three ATF guns stored in a metal box in the back.
About 3 p.m. Sept. 13, an Alterra employee spotted three men breaking into the Explorer. They stole three guns: a Smith & Wesson 9mm handgun, a Sig Sauer .40-caliber pistol and an M-4 .223-caliber fully automatic rifle. They also made off with ammunition and an ATF radio, according to a police report. It does not appear from the reports that the agent was at Alterra at the time of the break-in.
A major push began to find the weapons and the men who stole them, police records show. Two men were quickly arrested. An informant told police one of the suspects was showing off the guns and eight magazines of ammunition shortly after the vehicle burglary, according to police records.
One of the suspects hid the machine gun under a bed and took the handguns with him. He was questioned by police and refused to talk. He was released. No one has been charged in the burglary of the ATF guns, according to Milwaukee County Assistant District Attorney Karen Loebel. She declined to say if charges would be coming.
The ATF soon had one of its stolen guns back, however.
The very next day, according to court documents, 19-year-old Marquise Jones contacted agents at Fearless Distributing and sold the Sig Sauer - and another unrelated handgun - back to agents.
The price: $1,400.
But Jones would not be arrested for two months. And when he was, it was not for the theft. His name does not appear on the police reports related to the vehicle break-in. He was charged with having a stolen gun.
Meanwhile, the hunt for the machine gun and the other stolen handgun continues.
"We are actively looking for any missing firearms that might be out there right now," the ATF's Schmidt said.
Gerald Nunziato, a retired ATF agent who supervised undercover operations, said he was shocked at the number of mistakes made during the operation. He questioned the decision to leave the agent's truck at the coffee shop with guns inside.
"That bothers me the most," Nunziato said. "The last thing you want to have is a gun stolen. If that gun is used to shoot someone, that is so personal."
ATF operation ripped off
The operation ran into more trouble in October, when burglars broke into the building housing Fearless and cleaned out the ATF operation.
Late on Oct. 9, a resident, who didn't want to be identified, spotted four men in the area in a car and a U-Haul truck who looked suspicious. He called police, but when they didn't come quickly enough he went to the district station and reported what he saw in person. Police reports show officers came to investigate the next day. A Milwaukee police spokesman did not return a call for comment Tuesday.
The burglars made off with jewelry, clothing, auto parts, purses, Nike shoes and more, according to police reports. No one has been charged in the burglary.
The lease states that the alarm is included in the rent. But shortly after Fearless moved in, Salkin said he told the people running the store he was cutting the phone line, which connected the alarm. He said he assumed they would hook up their own alarm. They did not.
"You would think the ATF would know that," Salkin said.
The day after the burglary, Salkin and his wife met with an ATF supervisor, who assured them that they would take care of everything.
Salkin said by going over on the $800 a month utility allotment and damage to walls, doors and carpeting, the ATF owes him about $15,000, which includes a month of lost rent.
The ATF has balked, saying there was less than $3,200 in damage and telling Salkin to return the security deposit. They told him to file a claim with the federal government and warned him to stop contacting them.
In an email to Salkin, ATF attorney Patricia Cangemi wrote, "If you continue to contact the Agents after being so advised your contacts may be construed as harassment under the law. Threats or harassment of a Federal Agent is of grave concern. Utilizing the telephone or a computer to perpetrate threats or harassment is also a serious matter."
Nunziato said he worked in undercover ATF storefront operations in the 1980s near Detroit. He said they too didn't tell the landlord, but when they left, they fixed the property to make it as good or better than when they moved in. Nunziato said he could not fathom the Milwaukee agents just walking away from a damaged building.
"To back up a toilet? Not paying bills? And then damaging the building?" he said. "It seems like the planning of this case was not done very well. Looks like it was done as they went along."
The Riverwest neighborhood where ATF ran its operation is a mix of Milwaukee bungalows, flats and duplexes, with many longtime homeowners mingled with renters. A few bars are sprinkled in the area along with the tannery and Salkin's former sign company.
The area has rallied against crime, lobbying to get a drug house closed. Neighbors developed a tight bond with their beat cop after a homicide occurred several blocks to the north.
"It's a whole mix of people here and that is what I really love," said Lorraine Jacobs, a resident for 27 years. "I wouldn't want to live anywhere else."
Jacobs and others feel betrayed by the ATF operation bringing drug dealers and gun sellers to their area.
"I feel like we were fooled, taken advantage of," she said. "It is unfortunate for our neighborhood. We are trying to bring it up and we are close to that. We just didn't need this."
Jason Reichel, who lives near Jacobs, said he would have preferred the operation wasn't in his neighborhood, but wouldn't want to push it off on another area. He said he is concerned ATF did not have control over the operation, given the store was ripped off.
"I would expect that the ATF wouldn't get robbed, that they would have security measures," he said. "Maybe I watch too many movies. You would think it would be hard to rob an ATF operation."
Turns out, the ATF has weapons stolen or loses them more frequently than the public might think, according to a 2008 report from the Office of the Inspector General with the U.S. Department of Justice.
In a five-year span from 2002-'07, for example, 76 ATF weapons were stolen, lost or missing, according to the report. That's nearly double the number compared with the FBI and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, when considering rates per 1,000 agents.
Todd Roehl, a resident for five years, wonders if the ATF operation explains two unusual crimes in the neighborhood. Over the summer, the wheels were stolen off his wife's SUV, which was left up on rocks. A couple of months later, thieves attempted to break in to his shed. The ATF operation was buying stolen goods, but he is unsure if his wife's wheels ended up there.
He said the ATF should have chosen a less residential area, perhaps an industrial park or retail area.
"I have two small children and this is going on while they are playing outside?" he said. "The stigma is damaging. Every neighborhood tries to make things better. It does not help to have your own government planting crime here, which takes down, destroys and damages that. It's like, 'Thanks.' "
Botched arrests
After the burglary, agents wound down the operation and prepared to make arrests in November. The defendants charged with drug crimes generally went to state court while defendants facing gun cases, which also may include drug charges, went to federal court.
But during the roundup, ATF arrested and sought charges against three defendants who proved to be the wrong people, even though they had video of the defendants.
One of those was Adrienne Jones. ATF agents said Jones sold them six grams of marijuana on March 7. Problem was, Jones reported to a federal prison in Pennsylvania to start a sentence on March 1, according to Chris Burke, spokesman for the federal Bureau of Prisons - on an ATF case.
"He was definitely in our custody," Burke said. "He never left."
Loebel, the prosecutor, dismissed the charges against Jones and the other two. She said agents told her that they could not prove elements of the charge.
"Under those circumstances, we want to make sure we get the right one," she said. "You don't want to charge the wrong person. You certainly don't want to prosecute the wrong person. That is not something you strive for."
Asked about the quality of the remaining 15 cases, Loebel would only say she is proceeding with the prosecution of them and that all are important.
"It is really a gamut of individuals and offenses," she said. "My position is any amount of drugs, they have bad effects on people and on the community."
ATF's Schmidt said the agency always strives to identify the correct person before seeking charges against them.
"Certainly it is a concern," he said. "I think they put their best effort forward and it was their belief and information that these were the correct people."
I've come to a conclusion. If you want to get illegal guns off the streets the first step is to get rid of the ATF. Apparently that can't not sell guns to Mexican drug lords. Apparently they can't not get guns stolen from Milwaukee and apparently they can't not accuse innocent people of crimes (even ones that the ATF already has in jail). I used to look up to those sorts of agencies. I used to think they were the creme of the crop, now I'm just disgusted as I laugh at them. It's truly pathetic.
Thursday, January 17, 2013
N.Y. Times Op-Ed bashes Obama on drone strikes for assassination
Original Post:Yahoo
By Rachel Rose Hartman
"Who Says You Can Kill Americans, Mr. President?" a scathing New York Times op-ed asked Thursday.
The opinion piece, written by Vicki Divoll, former general counsel to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and former deputy legal adviser to the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, heaps criticism on the administration for the practice of using drone strikes for assassination and calls for greater transparency. Divoll writes:
Mr. Obama should declassify and release, to Congress, the press and the public, documents that set forth the detailed constitutional and statutory analysis he relies on for targeting and killing American citizens. Perhaps Mr. Obama still believes that, in a democracy, the people have a right to know the legal theories upon which the president executes his great powers. Certainly, we can hope so. After all, his interpretation might be wrong.
Divoll notes the known killings of three American citizens who were suspected terrorists: Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical American-born Muslim cleric; Samir Khan, a naturalized American citizen who edited an English-language magazine and was with Awlaki at the time of his death; and Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, who were all killed overseas.
By Rachel Rose Hartman
"Who Says You Can Kill Americans, Mr. President?" a scathing New York Times op-ed asked Thursday.
The opinion piece, written by Vicki Divoll, former general counsel to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and former deputy legal adviser to the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, heaps criticism on the administration for the practice of using drone strikes for assassination and calls for greater transparency. Divoll writes:
Mr. Obama should declassify and release, to Congress, the press and the public, documents that set forth the detailed constitutional and statutory analysis he relies on for targeting and killing American citizens. Perhaps Mr. Obama still believes that, in a democracy, the people have a right to know the legal theories upon which the president executes his great powers. Certainly, we can hope so. After all, his interpretation might be wrong.
Divoll notes the known killings of three American citizens who were suspected terrorists: Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical American-born Muslim cleric; Samir Khan, a naturalized American citizen who edited an English-language magazine and was with Awlaki at the time of his death; and Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, who were all killed overseas.
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
Profiting From a Child’s Illiteracy
Original Post: NY Times
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
THIS is what poverty sometimes looks like in America: parents here in Appalachian hill country pulling their children out of literacy classes. Moms and dads fear that if kids learn to read, they are less likely to qualify for a monthly check for having an intellectual disability.
Many people in hillside mobile homes here are poor and desperate, and a $698 monthly check per child from the Supplemental Security Income program goes a long way — and those checks continue until the child turns 18.
“The kids get taken out of the program because the parents are going to lose the check,” said Billie Oaks, who runs a literacy program here in Breathitt County, a poor part of Kentucky. “It’s heartbreaking.”
This is painful for a liberal to admit, but conservatives have a point when they suggest that America’s safety net can sometimes entangle people in a soul-crushing dependency. Our poverty programs do rescue many people, but other times they backfire.
Some young people here don’t join the military (a traditional escape route for poor, rural Americans) because it’s easier to rely on food stamps and disability payments.
Antipoverty programs also discourage marriage: In a means-tested program like S.S.I., a woman raising a child may receive a bigger check if she refrains from marrying that hard-working guy she likes. Yet marriage is one of the best forces to blunt poverty. In married couple households only one child in 10 grows up in poverty, while almost half do in single-mother households.
Most wrenching of all are the parents who think it’s best if a child stays illiterate, because then the family may be able to claim a disability check each month.
“One of the ways you get on this program is having problems in school,” notes Richard V. Burkhauser, a Cornell University economist who co-wrote a book last year about these disability programs. “If you do better in school, you threaten the income of the parents. It’s a terrible incentive.”
About four decades ago, most of the children S.S.I. covered had severe physical handicaps or mental retardation that made it difficult for parents to hold jobs — about 1 percent of all poor children. But now 55 percent of the disabilities it covers are fuzzier intellectual disabilities short of mental retardation, where the diagnosis is less clear-cut. More than 1.2 million children across America — a full 8 percent of all low-income children — are now enrolled in S.S.I. as disabled, at an annual cost of more than $9 billion.
That is a burden on taxpayers, of course, but it can be even worse for children whose families have a huge stake in their failing in school. Those kids may never recover: a 2009 study found that nearly two-thirds of these children make the transition at age 18 into S.S.I. for the adult disabled. They may never hold a job in their entire lives and are condemned to a life of poverty on the dole — and that’s the outcome of a program intended to fight poverty.
THERE’S no doubt that some families with seriously disabled children receive a lifeline from S.S.I. But the bottom line is that we shouldn’t try to fight poverty with a program that sometimes perpetuates it.
A local school district official, Melanie Stevens, puts it this way: “The greatest challenge we face as educators is how to break that dependency on government. In second grade, they have a dream. In seventh grade, they have a plan.”
There’s a danger in drawing too firm conclusions about an issue — fighting poverty — that is as complex as human beings themselves. I’m no expert on domestic poverty. But for me, a tentative lesson from the field is that while we need safety nets, the focus should be instead on creating opportunity — and, still more difficult, on creating an environment that leads people to seize opportunities.
To see what that might mean, I tagged along with Save the Children, the aid group we tend to think of as active in Sudan or Somalia. It’s also in the opportunity business right here in the United States, in places like the mobile home of Britny Hurley — and it provides a model of what does work.
Ms. Hurley, 19, is amiable and speaks quickly with a strong hill accent, so that at times I had trouble understanding her. Ms. Hurley says that she was raped by a family member when she was 12, and that another family member then introduced her to narcotics. She became an addict, she says, mostly to prescription painkillers that are widely trafficked here.
Equipped with a crackling intelligence, Ms. Hurley once aspired to be a doctor. But her addictions and a rebellious nature got her kicked out of high school, and at 16 she became engaged to a boyfriend and soon had his baby.
Yet there are ways of breaking this cycle. That’s what Save the Children is doing here, working with children while they’re still malleable, and it’s an approach that should be a centerpiece of America’s antipoverty program. Almost anytime the question is poverty, the answer is children.
Save the Children trains community members to make home visits to at-risk moms like Ms. Hurley, and help nurture the skills they need in the world’s toughest job: parenting. These visits begin in pregnancy and continue until the child is 3 years old.
I followed Courtney Trent, 22, one of these early childhood coordinators, as she visited a series of houses. She encourages the mothers (and the fathers, if they’re around) to read to the children, tell stories, talk to them, hug them. If the parents can’t read, then Ms. Trent encourages them to flip the pages on picture books and talk about what they see.
Ms. Trent brings a few books on each visit, and takes back the ones she had left the previous time. Many of the homes she visits don’t own a single children’s book.
She sat on the floor in Ms. Hurley’s living room, pulled a book out of her bag, and encouraged her to read to her 20-month-old son, Landon. Ms. Hurley said that she was never read to as a child, but she was determined to change the pattern.
“I just want him to go to school,” she said of Landon. “I want him to go to college and get out of this place.” Ms. Hurley said she was clean of drugs, working full time at a Wendy’s, and hoping to go back to school to become a nurse. I’d bet on her — and on Landon.
“When kids come to us through this program and come here, we can see a big difference,” Ron Combs, the principal at Lyndon B. Johnson Elementary School here, told me. “They’re really ready to go. Otherwise, we have kids so far behind that they struggle to catch up.
“By second or third grade, you have a pretty good feeling about who’s going to drop out,” he added.
A group of teachers were in the room, and they all nodded. Wayne Sizemore, director of special education in Breathitt County, puts it this way: “The earlier we can get them, the better. It’s like building a foundation for a house.”
I don’t want to suggest that America’s antipoverty programs are a total failure. On the contrary, they are making a significant difference. Nearly all homes here in the Appalachian hill country now have electricity and running water, and people aren’t starving.
Our political system has created a particularly robust safety net for the elderly, focused on Social Security and Medicare — because the elderly vote. This safety net has brought down the poverty rate among the elderly from about 35 percent in 1959 to under 9 percent today.
BECAUSE kids don’t have a political voice, they have been neglected — and have replaced the elderly as the most impoverished age group in our country. Today, 22 percent of children live below the poverty line.
Of American families living in poverty today, 8 out of 10 have air-conditioning, and a majority have a washing machine and dryer. Nearly all have microwave ovens. What they don’t have is hope. You see it here in the town of Jackson, in the teenage girls hanging out by the bridge over the north fork of the Kentucky River, seeking to trade their bodies for prescription painkillers or methamphetamines.
A growing body of careful research suggests that the most effective strategy is to work early on children and education, and to try to encourage and sustain marriage. Bravo to Mayor Julián Castro of San Antonio for backing a landmark initiative to add one-eighth of 1 percent to the local sales tax to finance a prekindergarten program. Early interventions are not a silver bullet, and even programs that succeed as experiments often fall short when scaled up. But we end up paying for poverty one way or another, and early childhood education is far cheaper than adult incarceration. I hope that the budget negotiations in Washington may offer us a chance to take money from S.S.I. and invest in early childhood initiatives instead.
One reason antipoverty initiatives don’t get traction in America is that the issue is simply invisible.
“People don’t want to talk about poverty in America,” Mark Shriver, who runs the domestic programs of Save the Children, noted as we drove through Kentucky. “We talk more about poverty in Africa than we do about poverty in America.”
Indeed, in the 2012 election campaign, poverty was barely mentioned. A study by Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, a liberal watchdog organization, found substantive discussion of poverty in just 0.2 percent of campaign news reports.
Look, there are no magic wands, and helping people is hard. One woman I met, Anastasia McCormick, told me that her $500 car had just broken down and she had to walk two miles each way to her job at a pizza restaurant. That’s going to get harder because she’s pregnant with twins, due in April.
At some point, Ms. McCormick won’t be able to hold that job anymore, and then she’ll have trouble paying the bills. She has rented a washer and dryer, but she’s behind in payments, and they may soon be hauled back. “I got a ‘discontinue’ notice on the electric,” she added, “but you get a month to pay up.” Life is like that for her, a roller coaster partly of her own making.
I don’t want to write anybody off, but I admit that efforts to help Ms. McCormick may end with a mixed record. But those twin boys she’s carrying? There’s time to transform their lives, and they — and millions like them — should be a national priority. They’re too small to fail.
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
THIS is what poverty sometimes looks like in America: parents here in Appalachian hill country pulling their children out of literacy classes. Moms and dads fear that if kids learn to read, they are less likely to qualify for a monthly check for having an intellectual disability.
Many people in hillside mobile homes here are poor and desperate, and a $698 monthly check per child from the Supplemental Security Income program goes a long way — and those checks continue until the child turns 18.
“The kids get taken out of the program because the parents are going to lose the check,” said Billie Oaks, who runs a literacy program here in Breathitt County, a poor part of Kentucky. “It’s heartbreaking.”
This is painful for a liberal to admit, but conservatives have a point when they suggest that America’s safety net can sometimes entangle people in a soul-crushing dependency. Our poverty programs do rescue many people, but other times they backfire.
Some young people here don’t join the military (a traditional escape route for poor, rural Americans) because it’s easier to rely on food stamps and disability payments.
Antipoverty programs also discourage marriage: In a means-tested program like S.S.I., a woman raising a child may receive a bigger check if she refrains from marrying that hard-working guy she likes. Yet marriage is one of the best forces to blunt poverty. In married couple households only one child in 10 grows up in poverty, while almost half do in single-mother households.
Most wrenching of all are the parents who think it’s best if a child stays illiterate, because then the family may be able to claim a disability check each month.
“One of the ways you get on this program is having problems in school,” notes Richard V. Burkhauser, a Cornell University economist who co-wrote a book last year about these disability programs. “If you do better in school, you threaten the income of the parents. It’s a terrible incentive.”
About four decades ago, most of the children S.S.I. covered had severe physical handicaps or mental retardation that made it difficult for parents to hold jobs — about 1 percent of all poor children. But now 55 percent of the disabilities it covers are fuzzier intellectual disabilities short of mental retardation, where the diagnosis is less clear-cut. More than 1.2 million children across America — a full 8 percent of all low-income children — are now enrolled in S.S.I. as disabled, at an annual cost of more than $9 billion.
That is a burden on taxpayers, of course, but it can be even worse for children whose families have a huge stake in their failing in school. Those kids may never recover: a 2009 study found that nearly two-thirds of these children make the transition at age 18 into S.S.I. for the adult disabled. They may never hold a job in their entire lives and are condemned to a life of poverty on the dole — and that’s the outcome of a program intended to fight poverty.
THERE’S no doubt that some families with seriously disabled children receive a lifeline from S.S.I. But the bottom line is that we shouldn’t try to fight poverty with a program that sometimes perpetuates it.
A local school district official, Melanie Stevens, puts it this way: “The greatest challenge we face as educators is how to break that dependency on government. In second grade, they have a dream. In seventh grade, they have a plan.”
There’s a danger in drawing too firm conclusions about an issue — fighting poverty — that is as complex as human beings themselves. I’m no expert on domestic poverty. But for me, a tentative lesson from the field is that while we need safety nets, the focus should be instead on creating opportunity — and, still more difficult, on creating an environment that leads people to seize opportunities.
To see what that might mean, I tagged along with Save the Children, the aid group we tend to think of as active in Sudan or Somalia. It’s also in the opportunity business right here in the United States, in places like the mobile home of Britny Hurley — and it provides a model of what does work.
Ms. Hurley, 19, is amiable and speaks quickly with a strong hill accent, so that at times I had trouble understanding her. Ms. Hurley says that she was raped by a family member when she was 12, and that another family member then introduced her to narcotics. She became an addict, she says, mostly to prescription painkillers that are widely trafficked here.
Equipped with a crackling intelligence, Ms. Hurley once aspired to be a doctor. But her addictions and a rebellious nature got her kicked out of high school, and at 16 she became engaged to a boyfriend and soon had his baby.
Yet there are ways of breaking this cycle. That’s what Save the Children is doing here, working with children while they’re still malleable, and it’s an approach that should be a centerpiece of America’s antipoverty program. Almost anytime the question is poverty, the answer is children.
Save the Children trains community members to make home visits to at-risk moms like Ms. Hurley, and help nurture the skills they need in the world’s toughest job: parenting. These visits begin in pregnancy and continue until the child is 3 years old.
I followed Courtney Trent, 22, one of these early childhood coordinators, as she visited a series of houses. She encourages the mothers (and the fathers, if they’re around) to read to the children, tell stories, talk to them, hug them. If the parents can’t read, then Ms. Trent encourages them to flip the pages on picture books and talk about what they see.
Ms. Trent brings a few books on each visit, and takes back the ones she had left the previous time. Many of the homes she visits don’t own a single children’s book.
She sat on the floor in Ms. Hurley’s living room, pulled a book out of her bag, and encouraged her to read to her 20-month-old son, Landon. Ms. Hurley said that she was never read to as a child, but she was determined to change the pattern.
“I just want him to go to school,” she said of Landon. “I want him to go to college and get out of this place.” Ms. Hurley said she was clean of drugs, working full time at a Wendy’s, and hoping to go back to school to become a nurse. I’d bet on her — and on Landon.
“When kids come to us through this program and come here, we can see a big difference,” Ron Combs, the principal at Lyndon B. Johnson Elementary School here, told me. “They’re really ready to go. Otherwise, we have kids so far behind that they struggle to catch up.
“By second or third grade, you have a pretty good feeling about who’s going to drop out,” he added.
A group of teachers were in the room, and they all nodded. Wayne Sizemore, director of special education in Breathitt County, puts it this way: “The earlier we can get them, the better. It’s like building a foundation for a house.”
I don’t want to suggest that America’s antipoverty programs are a total failure. On the contrary, they are making a significant difference. Nearly all homes here in the Appalachian hill country now have electricity and running water, and people aren’t starving.
Our political system has created a particularly robust safety net for the elderly, focused on Social Security and Medicare — because the elderly vote. This safety net has brought down the poverty rate among the elderly from about 35 percent in 1959 to under 9 percent today.
BECAUSE kids don’t have a political voice, they have been neglected — and have replaced the elderly as the most impoverished age group in our country. Today, 22 percent of children live below the poverty line.
Of American families living in poverty today, 8 out of 10 have air-conditioning, and a majority have a washing machine and dryer. Nearly all have microwave ovens. What they don’t have is hope. You see it here in the town of Jackson, in the teenage girls hanging out by the bridge over the north fork of the Kentucky River, seeking to trade their bodies for prescription painkillers or methamphetamines.
A growing body of careful research suggests that the most effective strategy is to work early on children and education, and to try to encourage and sustain marriage. Bravo to Mayor Julián Castro of San Antonio for backing a landmark initiative to add one-eighth of 1 percent to the local sales tax to finance a prekindergarten program. Early interventions are not a silver bullet, and even programs that succeed as experiments often fall short when scaled up. But we end up paying for poverty one way or another, and early childhood education is far cheaper than adult incarceration. I hope that the budget negotiations in Washington may offer us a chance to take money from S.S.I. and invest in early childhood initiatives instead.
One reason antipoverty initiatives don’t get traction in America is that the issue is simply invisible.
“People don’t want to talk about poverty in America,” Mark Shriver, who runs the domestic programs of Save the Children, noted as we drove through Kentucky. “We talk more about poverty in Africa than we do about poverty in America.”
Indeed, in the 2012 election campaign, poverty was barely mentioned. A study by Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, a liberal watchdog organization, found substantive discussion of poverty in just 0.2 percent of campaign news reports.
Look, there are no magic wands, and helping people is hard. One woman I met, Anastasia McCormick, told me that her $500 car had just broken down and she had to walk two miles each way to her job at a pizza restaurant. That’s going to get harder because she’s pregnant with twins, due in April.
At some point, Ms. McCormick won’t be able to hold that job anymore, and then she’ll have trouble paying the bills. She has rented a washer and dryer, but she’s behind in payments, and they may soon be hauled back. “I got a ‘discontinue’ notice on the electric,” she added, “but you get a month to pay up.” Life is like that for her, a roller coaster partly of her own making.
I don’t want to write anybody off, but I admit that efforts to help Ms. McCormick may end with a mixed record. But those twin boys she’s carrying? There’s time to transform their lives, and they — and millions like them — should be a national priority. They’re too small to fail.
Tuesday, November 13, 2012
Racist Madison to disenfranchise the elderly and minorities
Original Post:JS Online
University of Wisconsin students and employees have unlimited ride passes. There are concerns the bus passes are being used fraudulently. So, beginning Monday, an employment or school photo ID will be required.
UW-Madison employee and student bus passes are non-transferable. So, if the users don't have their IDs, the passes will be confiscated and a 1-day pass will be offered.
UW and UW Health employees who have their passes confiscated can get a replacement for $20. Students should contact the bus program office.
The university says no identification is needed for the free campus bus routes.
Well this is absolutely outrageous! This only hurts the people who need the bus the most. How can minorities and the elderly ride the bus now? Answer, they can't. We know only white males have Drivers Licenses and that it's not possible for anyone else to get them, even if they're free; so if you can't get an ID you can't ride the bus and you have no options. I'm absolutely disgusted by Madison.
Madison to require IDs for bus riders with passes
Madison - Riders who have an unlimited pass on Madison Metro buses will now have to show identification.University of Wisconsin students and employees have unlimited ride passes. There are concerns the bus passes are being used fraudulently. So, beginning Monday, an employment or school photo ID will be required.
UW-Madison employee and student bus passes are non-transferable. So, if the users don't have their IDs, the passes will be confiscated and a 1-day pass will be offered.
UW and UW Health employees who have their passes confiscated can get a replacement for $20. Students should contact the bus program office.
The university says no identification is needed for the free campus bus routes.
Well this is absolutely outrageous! This only hurts the people who need the bus the most. How can minorities and the elderly ride the bus now? Answer, they can't. We know only white males have Drivers Licenses and that it's not possible for anyone else to get them, even if they're free; so if you can't get an ID you can't ride the bus and you have no options. I'm absolutely disgusted by Madison.
ANOTHER ACTRESS ENDORSES ROMNEY, ANOTHER ACTRESS GETS MAULED BY THE LEFT: ‘I HOPE YOU F**KING DIE B**CH’
Original Post:The Blaze
Actress Melissa Joan Hart, best known for her roles in “Sabrina, the Teenage Witch” and “Clarissa Explains It All,” threw her support behind the Romney/Ryan ticket on Twitter Monday, swiftly prompting vicious attacks from the Left.
The actress first tweeted “Finish this sentence for me … Being a Republican in Hollywood is like…” She followed up with a full blown endorsement for GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney and his running mate Paul Ryan.
@MelissaJoanHart Can't get too political in only 140 chac but for those asking, I'm voting #RomneyRyan. 5 Nov 12 ReplyRetweetFavorite And that seemingly innocent tweet posted by an American female expressing her constitutional right to vote for the candidate of her choice was more than enough to shake the metaphoric bee hive of the “tolerant left,” as Hart put it.
Here are some of the ugliest attacks hurled at the actress (WARNING! Graphic language):
@MelissaJoanHart Ahhh the "tolerant left" at work!RT @BasiaMilewicz: On behalf of women everywhere, may I say 'Fuck you, bitch!' Washed-up has-been cunt. 5 Nov 12 ReplyRetweetFavorite
@MelissaJoanHart So to u that is a punishment? RT @17days: @trentvanegas @pitnb am incredible let down. I hope she ends up with a gay child. Clarissa sucks.
5 Nov 12 ReplyRetweetFavorite Big Crow@BIGCROENT “@MelissaJoanHart: Peace to all! Get out and #VOTE tomorrow! instagr.am/p/RrGrKhlHhs/” Fuck this bitch she's voting for bitch Romney and the hoe
5 Nov 12 ReplyRetweetFavorite Jah.@JaheemWith2Es Stupid bitch RT “@MelissaJoanHart: Can't get too political in only 140 chac but for those asking, I'm voting #RomneyRyan.”
5 Nov 12 ReplyRetweetFavorite Ghetto Ass Kass@WhamBamBitch Melissa Joan Hart is a stupid cunt. Her show is garbage and she should just give up on her sad, republican life.
5 Nov 12 ReplyRetweetFavorite Landon@WhoaLando You aint been shit since Sabrina bitch RT @MelissaJoanHart Can't get too political but for those asking, I'm voting #RomneyRyan.
5 Nov 12 ReplyRetweetFavorite Eddie Haskell ☜ ™@EddieisKrueger Go fuck yourself Sabrina "@HuffPostEnt Melissa Joan Hart's Last-Minute Romney Endorsement huff.to/Yy1fG3" 5 Nov 12 ReplyRetweetFavorite Though out of all of the disgustingly profane and ugly tweets, this one may take the cake:
PRETTY MOTHERFUCKA!!@RomanMinaj_ @MelissaJoanHart YOUR A FUCKING IDIOT AND I HOPE YOU FUCKING DIE BITCH #OBAMA2012
5 Nov 12 ReplyRetweetFavorite However, it should be noted, for every hateful message that Hart received, she got two or three supportive tweets. And she was appreciative.
“The amazing amount of love & kind messages were overwhelming today. Lets all get out and #vote tomorrow for whichever candidate u prefer!” she later tweeted.
Actress Melissa Joan Hart, best known for her roles in “Sabrina, the Teenage Witch” and “Clarissa Explains It All,” threw her support behind the Romney/Ryan ticket on Twitter Monday, swiftly prompting vicious attacks from the Left.
The actress first tweeted “Finish this sentence for me … Being a Republican in Hollywood is like…” She followed up with a full blown endorsement for GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney and his running mate Paul Ryan.
@MelissaJoanHart Can't get too political in only 140 chac but for those asking, I'm voting #RomneyRyan. 5 Nov 12 ReplyRetweetFavorite And that seemingly innocent tweet posted by an American female expressing her constitutional right to vote for the candidate of her choice was more than enough to shake the metaphoric bee hive of the “tolerant left,” as Hart put it.
Here are some of the ugliest attacks hurled at the actress (WARNING! Graphic language):
@MelissaJoanHart Ahhh the "tolerant left" at work!RT @BasiaMilewicz: On behalf of women everywhere, may I say 'Fuck you, bitch!' Washed-up has-been cunt. 5 Nov 12 ReplyRetweetFavorite
@MelissaJoanHart So to u that is a punishment? RT @17days: @trentvanegas @pitnb am incredible let down. I hope she ends up with a gay child. Clarissa sucks.
5 Nov 12 ReplyRetweetFavorite Big Crow@BIGCROENT “@MelissaJoanHart: Peace to all! Get out and #VOTE tomorrow! instagr.am/p/RrGrKhlHhs/” Fuck this bitch she's voting for bitch Romney and the hoe
5 Nov 12 ReplyRetweetFavorite Jah.@JaheemWith2Es Stupid bitch RT “@MelissaJoanHart: Can't get too political in only 140 chac but for those asking, I'm voting #RomneyRyan.”
5 Nov 12 ReplyRetweetFavorite Ghetto Ass Kass@WhamBamBitch Melissa Joan Hart is a stupid cunt. Her show is garbage and she should just give up on her sad, republican life.
5 Nov 12 ReplyRetweetFavorite Landon@WhoaLando You aint been shit since Sabrina bitch RT @MelissaJoanHart Can't get too political but for those asking, I'm voting #RomneyRyan.
5 Nov 12 ReplyRetweetFavorite Eddie Haskell ☜ ™@EddieisKrueger Go fuck yourself Sabrina "@HuffPostEnt Melissa Joan Hart's Last-Minute Romney Endorsement huff.to/Yy1fG3" 5 Nov 12 ReplyRetweetFavorite Though out of all of the disgustingly profane and ugly tweets, this one may take the cake:
PRETTY MOTHERFUCKA!!@RomanMinaj_ @MelissaJoanHart YOUR A FUCKING IDIOT AND I HOPE YOU FUCKING DIE BITCH #OBAMA2012
5 Nov 12 ReplyRetweetFavorite However, it should be noted, for every hateful message that Hart received, she got two or three supportive tweets. And she was appreciative.
“The amazing amount of love & kind messages were overwhelming today. Lets all get out and #vote tomorrow for whichever candidate u prefer!” she later tweeted.
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