Clear It with Sidney | Hillman Foundation

Clear It With Sidney

The best of the week’s news by Lindsay Beyerstein

Clear It with Sidney

#Sidney's Picks: Video Shows Fatal Tasing by Border Patrol

  • Need to Know and the Investigative Fund of the Nation Institute have obtained explosive video that casts doubt on the U.S. Border Patrol’s claims about the death of a 42-year-old migrant at the hands of Border Patrol agents. According to the official story, the father of five was Tased while he combative and out of control, but the video shows that he was tased after he was already handcuffed and immobilized on the ground. The preview segment, above, has already racked up nearly 80,000 hits on YouTube. The full program will air on PBS tonight. [HT: Talking Points Memo]
  • Be sure to check out USA Today’s sweeping investigation of lead poisoning in children whose homes were built near long-shuttered lead smelters, which contaminate the soil to this day. The EPA knew the risks, but largely failed to act, or even to warn the residents. 
  • The Pineapple and The Hare: Bizarre questions from the New York State English exam.

The 2012 Elections: Is a Multi-Racial Working-Class Coalition Still Possible?

Friday’s labor breakfast panel asked: Is a multi-racial working class coalition still possible? Moderator Dorian Warren, a professor of political science at Columbia, framed the discussion in terms of America’s enduring racial divide; the Baby Boomers vs. the Milennials; the role of money in politics; and the electoral wildcard of the Occupy Movement.

Political scientist Ruy Teixeira explained that Obama won 80% of the non-white vote in 2008, but lost the white working class by 21 points. Journalist Thomas Edsall argued that the current Democratic coalition is strong enough to put the Democrats back into office, but that the Dems need to win more white working class votes in order to credibly claim to represent the average working person.

AFL-CIO official Julie Greene described the AFL-CIO’s strategy going into 2012: Building infrastructure to mobilize voters and protect the electorate from voter disenfranchisement. Minority voters are most likely to be disenfranchised by voter ID laws and other Republican-backed initiatives to make voting more difficult. Massive minority turnout helped put Obama over the top in 2008 and that surge did not go unnoticed by the other side, Greene said. Voter ID laws were introduced in all but three states. She estimated that 5 million people were disenfranchised across the 6 states that enacted voter ID laws.

The panel was sponsored by the Murphy Institute, CUNY, and the Sidney Hillman Foundation.

[Photo credit: Lindsay Beyerstein, all rights reserved.]

Ghost Factories: Lead's Toxic Legacy

A 14-month USA Today investigation has found dozens of long-shuttered lead smelters that continue to contaminate the surrounding soil and endanger public health:

Ken Shefton is furious about what the government knew eight years ago and never told him — that the neighborhood where his five sons have been playing is contaminated with lead.

Their Cleveland home is a few blocks from a long-forgotten factory that spewed toxic lead dust for about 30 years.

The Environmental Protection Agency and state regulators clearly knew of the danger. They tested soil throughout the neighborhood and documented hazardous levels of contamination. They never did a cleanup. They didn’t warn people living nearby that the tainted soil endangers their children. [USA Today]

An environmental researcher compiled a list of over 400 suspected lead-contaminated sites and turned it over to the Environmental Protection Agency, but the agency largely failed to act on the information.

Most residents in lead-contaminated areas were shocked to learn that they were living near, or in some cases on top of, an old smelter site. Medical records supplied to USA Today show that some of their children had dangerously high lead levels. Lead is a potent neurotoxin, especially in young children.

This is a deeply researched, hard-hitting piece of old school investigative journalism. Read the whole thing.

Reminder: Breakfast Forum on Class, Race, and the Election, Friday

Join us Friday April 20th for a breakfast forum titled: The 2012 Elections: Is a multi-racial working-class coalition still possible?  With Tom Edsall, Ruy Teixeira and Ana Avendano, 8:30 to 10:30 a.m. at the Murphy Institute, CUNY, 25 W. 43 rd St. 18th Floor, New York 10036.

View full-sized flyer.

Tonight on FRONTLINE: Does CSI Lie?

Tonight on FRONTLINE, correspondent Lowell Bergman casts a critical eye on crime scene investigation techniques. Is bad science sending innocent people to jail and keeping murderers on the street? Watch the preview.

Here’s another recent FRONTLINE clip about the threat of cognitive bias in fingerprint analysis. A neuroscientist describes how he was able to make half of the fingerprint examiners he studied change their verdict on whether two prints matched by changing his description of the case. Examiners who declared two prints to be a match under one case description sometimes deemed the same two prints a non-match when they were presented with a different description.

(Aside: I’m amused by the ad for Goldman Sachs that runs before the fingerprint segment. Goldman is now calling itself “The Game-Changing Yes Network.”)

[Photo credit: Flick, Creative Commons.]

Sidney Winners Ganim and Kocieniewski Win Pulitzer Prizes

Congratulations to Sara Ganim and the Patriot-News on winning the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting; and to David Kocieniewski of the New York Times on his win for Explanatory Reporting.

Ganim won the Pulitzer and the December Sidney Award for her expose of the Penn State sex abuse scandal. David Kocieniewski won his Pulitzer for explaining how the richest people and businesses get out of paying taxes. He won the March 2011 Sidney Award for a story on how General Electric minimizes its tax bill.

Congratulations also to Danny Hakim and Russ Buettner whose investigation of abuse and neglect in New York group homes made the New York Times a Pulitzer finalist for Public Service. That investigation also garnered an honorable mention for the 2012 Hillman Prize.

Tom Morello to Receive Officers' Award from the Sidney Hillman Foundation

NEW YORK - Musician and activist Tom Morello will receive a special public service award at the annual 2012 Hillman Prizes ceremony on May 1 at The TimesCenter. The Board of Directors of the Sidney Hillman Foundation is honoring Morello with the Officers’ Award for his advocacy for and support of working people across the world.

Morello will receive the award at the ceremony and reception to honor this year’s Hillman Prize-winners for excellence in journalism in service of the common good. Previous Officers’ awards have gone to such figures as Eleanor Roosevelt, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Harry Belafonte, and others.

Morello will be performing at this year’s ceremony.

In 2011, Tom Morello sang on the capitol steps in Madison, Wisconsin to support the public employees in their fight to protect collective bargaining. He visited and performed at Occupy Wall Street protests in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Vancouver. He donated the proceeds from his Justice Tour concerts in Madison WI, Flint MI, and Cleveland OH to the Nation Institute.

“Tom Morello’s work in pursuing social and economic justice - and in telling the stories of working men and women - is exemplary and inspiring,” said Bruce Raynor, president of the Sidney Hillman Foundation. “Tom’s music, energy and leadership brings attention to causes that matter and inspires others to become more active on the public commons. In the words of another American songwriter, there’s a battle outside and it’s ragin’ - and almost any time we look, there’s Tom Morello right out in front.”

The awards ceremony will take place at 6pm Tuesday, May 1, 212, at The TimesCenter, in New York City.

#Sidney's Picks: Foreclosure Follies; Car Wash Wars; Nasty Nail Polish

The best of the week’s news. Submit your favorite investigative and public interest stories by tweeting the link to @SidneyHillman with the hashtag #Sidney.

  • A woman and her severely disabled daughter nearly had their house foreclosed upon even though Bank of America agreed to lower the monthly payments on the home equity loan the mother took out to retrofit the dwelling to care for her daughter, Gale Holland reports for the LA Times. Dirma Rodriguez had been keeping up with her modified payments, awaiting a final renegotiation, but the bank sold the home out from under her. Holland found out about the case through Occupy Fights Foreclosure, an offshoot of the 99% Movement that defended the home in March.
  • The Public Advocate’s office is calling on New York City to stop washing its fleet at car washes owned by Lage Management Company because the owner John Lage is under investigation for stealing wages from his own employees, Erica Pearson reports for the New York Daily News. This story is part of Pearson’s ongoing coverage of a campaign to improve working conditions at New York City car washes.
  • So-called “toxin-free” nail polishes aren’t toxin free after all, according to a new report by California regulators, the announcements raise health concerns for the state’s 120,000 licensed nail technicians, four fifths of whom are Vietnamese women, Anna Gorman reports in the LA Times.
  • Is your employer quietly pocketing your state income taxes? David Cay Johnston of Reuters reports that 2700 companies, including big names like Sears and General Electric, are allowed to keep their employees’ state tax contributions without telling them under so-called tax diversion agreements with state governments.
  • Part memoir, part reportage: Gabriel Arana of the American Prospect takes an in-depth look at the fraudulent “ex-gay” movement.

The 2012 Elections: Is a Multi-Racial Working-Class Coalition Still Possible? [Event: April 20]

The Sidney Hillman Foundation invites you to a special event on Friday, April 20: Distinguished panelists Ruy Teixiara, Thomas Edsall, and Ana Avendano, and moderator Dorian Warren will discuss the pressing question: Is a multi-racial working-class coalition still possible for the 2012 elections? 

Click here to view the full-sized flier.

Trymaine Lee Wins Sidney Award for Trayvon Martin Coverage

Trymaine Lee has won the April Sidney Award for his coverage of the Trayvon Martin shooting. Lee, a senior reporter at the Huffington Post, spearheaded his site’s reporting effort, which helped turn the killing of Martin into a national cause.

On Feb. 26, 2012, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot and killed in Sanford, Florida by George Zimmerman, a 28-year-old self-appointed neighborhood watch captain who claims he shot the unarmed black youth in self-defense.

Lee’s March 8th story drew national attention to the killing which, until then, was only being covered by local media. As the story garnered ever greater attention, he persuaded his editors to send him on assignment to Florida.

Lee unearthed facts about George Zimmerman’s history of violence. In Florida, he obtained an interview with the youngest witness to the shooting, a 13-year-old black youth who told the reporter, “If I was like two years older, that could have happened to me.”

Lee’s work on this story demonstrates the power of a single, enterprising journalist to shape the national conversation.

Click here to read my interview with Lee.

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