Archive for April 13th, 2010

April13

Picking up where the mainstream media left off

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Mainstream journalism crowned the annual winners of its prestigious Pulitzer Prize yesterday, except with a twist: This time, for the first time, a non mainstream media company took home top honors — ProPublica, a nonprofit organization that does journalism in the public interest. ProPublica’s Sheri Fink won a Pulitzer for investigative reporting for her joint project with the New York Times that “chronicles the urgent life-and-death decisions made by one hospital’s exhausted doctors when they were cut off by the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina.”

But that’s not all. ProPublica not only took home the top prize but snared a coveted “finalist” designation in Public Service for Charles Ornstein’s and Tracy Weber’s outstanding series of stories examining California’s failure to properly oversee its nurses.

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April13

When will the Justice Dept. get involved in financial crisis?

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David Dayen at FireDogLake wonders why no major Wall Street figure has been convicted of fraud since the beginning of the financial crisis:

I don’t know how you keep hearing these stories of fraud – accounting fraud, investor fraud, what have you – without the Justice Department getting involved. We want to make banking boring again, and the simplest way to do that is by making absolutely clear that anyone who takes these kinds of risks and plays these kinds of games will go to jail for a long time. If we had a culture of accountability in Washington that would already be happening.

Also,  This American Life provides a catchy show tune, “Bet Against the American Dream,” that helps explain how the banksters got rich while America’s economy crashed.

Posted in: Congress0 comments

April13

Census Bureau discriminates, class action suit says

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The U.S. Census Bureau has been systematically discriminating against people by requiring them to produce information about prior arrests — even if the person was never convicted. This allegation comes in a class action lawsuit filed today in federal court in New York. Public Citizen is co-counsel in the case.

According to the suit, thousands of African Americans, Latinos and Native Americans have been rejected for Census jobs during the federal government’s massive hiring campaign for because of systematic discrimination. The bureau requires applicants to produce within 30 days the “official” court disposition for any arrest record — regardless of whether a conviction resulted, the nature of the arrest or its relationship to the job.

 “The procedures being used by the Census Bureau result in unnecessary barriers to employment for minorities interested in working on the Census effort,” said Public Citizen attorney Michael Kirkpatrick. “We’re involved in this lawsuit to help dismantle those barriers.”

 

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