Juvenile Court Fees Punish Children for Their Families’ Poverty ⚖️

Low-income children across the US are being imprisoned when they or their families cannot afford to pay court fees.  Aside from court costs, low-income children also face fees for probation, health tests, care, and other services in juvenile facilities. This amounts to “punishing children for their families’ poverty which many believe may be unconstitutional.

This article drew on a 2016 report by the Juvenile Law Center, a legal aid advocacy group, which reviewed statutes in all fifty states and the District of Columbia to assess “the legal framework for financial obligations placed on youth in the juvenile justice system and their families.” 

The article identified “myriad ways” that juvenile court systems levy fines on children’s families “and then imprison those children when their families are too poor to pay the mounting costs.” These include, for example, monthly fees on families whose children are sentenced to probation, the costs of “diversion” programs intended to keep children out of detention, and charges for court-ordered evaluations and tests (such as mental health evaluations, tests for sexually-transmitted diseases, and drug and alcohol assessments). When families cannot afford to pay these fees and fines, children may be incarcerated instead.

The Juvenile Law Center report described the fines imposed by juvenile court as “highly burdensome.” For example, in Alameda County, California, the average cost of juvenile system involvement is $2,000 per case. Cost can be “significantly higher,” according to the report, in cases in which young people are incarcerated for extended periods of time.

Furthermore, the article states, in some states parents themselves may also face imprisonment if they fail to pay fees and fines levied against their children. Incarcerating parents puts children further at risk and adds to the stresses on families already struggling with the consequences of poverty. According to the report’s authors, “When parents face incarceration or mounting debt for failure to pay, they have even fewer resources to devote to educating, helping, and supporting their children.”

While noting that a detailed analysis of these policies’ constitutional implications went beyond its scope, the Juvenile Law Center report noted prior legal decisions in which the Supreme Court has held that courts must consider “alternative measures of punishment other than imprisonment” for poor defendants. The Supreme Court has also repeatedly held that constitutional protections must be calibrated to the unique developmental needs of adolescents.

In August 2016, the New York Times published a substantial article on the Juvenile Law Center’s study, describing low-income juveniles—and especially racial minorities—as overburdened by fees. However, the Times article did not mention that parents in some states were also being jailed, and the report overlooked the precedent of Supreme Court decisions upholding additional protections for adolescents.

Nika Knight, “Debtors’ Prison for Kids: Poor Children Incarcerated When Families Can’t Pay Juvenile Court Fees,” Common Dreams, August 31, 2016, http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/08/31/debtors-prison-kids-poor-children-incarcerated-when-families-cant-pay-juvenile-court.

Student Researcher: Raquel Guerrero (Sonoma State University)

Faculty Evaluator: Diana Grant (Sonoma State University)

Over Six Trillion Dollars in Unaccountable Army Spending⁉️

According to a July 2016 report by the Department of Defense’s Office, over the past two decades the US Army has accumulated $6.5 trillion in expenditures that cannot be accounted for, because two government offices—the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army and the Department of Defense’s Finance and Accounting Service—“did not prioritize correcting the system deficiencies that caused errors . . . and did not provide sufficient guidance for supporting system-generated adjustments.” In the complex language of the report, the expenditures themselves are referred to as “unsupported adjustments” and the lack of complete and accurate records of them are described as “material weakness.” In other words, as Dave Lindorff reported, the DoD “has not been tracking or recording or auditing all of the taxpayer money allocated by Congress—what it was spent on, how well it was spent, or where the money actually ended up.”

In 1996, Congress enacted legislation that required all government agencies—including not only the Department of Defense but also the federal government’s departments of education, veterans affairs, and housing and urban development to undergo annual audits. As Thomas Hedges reported for the Guardian in March 2017, “the Pentagon has exempted itself without consequence for 20 years now, telling the Government Accountability Office (GAO) that collecting and organizing the required information for a full audit is too costly and time-consuming.” 

As Lindorff wrote, in fiscal year 2015 total federal  spending—which includes everything from education, to housing and community development, to Medicare and other health programs—amounted to just over $1.1 trillion, and the $6.5 trillion in unaccountable Army expenditures represents approximately fifteen years’ worth of military spending.

In Lindorff’s words, “politicians of both major political parties are demanding accountability for every penny spent on welfare,” and they have also been engaged in pervasive efforts “to make teachers accountable for student ‘performance.’” Yet, he observed, “the military doesn’t have to account for any of its trillions of dollars of spending . . . even though Congress fully a generation ago passed a law requiring such accountability.”

Corporate media have not covered the $6.5 trillion in unaccountable Army expenditures, as documented in the July 2016 Department of Defens  study, and reported by Dave Lindorff. In December 2016, the Washington Post published an article about a “buried” January 2015 DoD report, which had found “$125 billion in administrative waste” in Pentagon business operations. As the Post reported, “After the project documented far more wasteful spending than expected, senior defense officials moved swiftly to kill it by discrediting and suppressing the results.” The Huffington Post and TomDispatch cross-posted William Hartung’s May 2016 piece, “The Pentagon’s War on Accountability,” which made many of the same points raised by Lindorff, but did not address the $6.5 trillion in unaccountable Army expenditures. CounterPunch and OpEdNews reposted Lindorff’s original report.

Dave Lindorff, “Ignoring the Pentagon’s Multi-Trillion-Dollar Accounting Error,” FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), September 2, 2016, http://fair.org/home/ignoring-the-pentagons-multi-trillion-dollar-accounting-error/.

Dave Lindorff, “The Pentagon Money Pit: $6.5 Trillion in Unaccountable Army Spending, and No DOD Audit for the Past Two Decades,” This Can’t Be Happening!, August 17, 2016, http://thiscantbehappening.net/node/3262.

Thomas Hedges, “The Pentagon Has Never been Audited. That’s Astonishing,” Guardian, March 20, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/20/pentagon-never-audited-astonishing-military-spending.

THE FUKASHIMA RADIATION DISASTER STILL EFFECTING US TODAY☢️☣️ 👀

HTGT’S(Here Today Gone Tomorrow) are subjects that make national headlines for about a week to a month and then the MSM(Main Stream Media) stops carring so in which the public does as-well. We Fix That!  🙌🏼 🙌🏼

The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant was one of the 15 largest nuclear power stations in the world, until it sustained massive damage when Japan was hit first by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake, and then a massive tsunami, on March 11, 2011. Almost 16,000 people died in the disaster, and another 160,000 lost their homes and employment. Japan has been involved in an extensive clean-up campaign ever since. Now, the Telegraph is reporting that the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), which operates the nuclear plant and has been responsible for cleaning up the mess, has announced the release of radioactive tritium straight into the Pacific Ocean. 

The announcement has been met with outrage by environmental groups and locals alike. Among those most affected by the disaster were the fishermen of Fukushima. Even two years into the cleanup operations, The Guardian reported that over 300 tons of radioactive groundwater was still seeping into the Pacific Ocean on a daily basis, not only killing marine life, but obliterating the local fishing industry. After all, nobody wants to risk eating radioactive fish “I haven’t been able to fish since the tsunami,” Kazuo Niitsuma, a 63-year-old local fisherman, told The Guardian at the time. “People want to be reassured that they are buying fish that is safe to eat, and we can’t give them that guarantee at the moment. … At times like this, it feels like the nuclear problem will never be resolved, and for that Tepco and the government must take responsibility.” [Related: London grocery stores have been selling Fukushima rice, despite fears of radioactive contamination.] TEPCO has done anything but accept that responsibility. After they initially failed to deal with the contaminated water and then did all they could to hide the extent of the problem, very few people have much faith in anything they say. They are now adamantly insisting that the radioactive tritium they are going to release into the ocean will not be a problem because it will be diluted in the vast body of water. The company has been struggling to find a way to deal with the 770,000 tons of contaminated radioactive water being stored in 580 tanks at the site. While most of the radioactive materials have been filtered from the water, they have not been able to get rid of the tritium. 

Environmental groups refuse to accept that explanation, insisting that the company has had plenty of time to find a solution that will not further harm the local fishing industry and destroy more marine life. [Related: If you’re concerned about the health of our oceans, visit Enviro.news] “This accident happened more than six years ago and the authorities should have been able to devise a way to remove the tritium instead of simply announcing that they are going to dump it into the ocean,” Aileen Mioko-Smith, a campaigner with Green Action Japan, angrily told The Telegraph. Who can trust the word of a company that conspired with the government in the weeks and months after the disaster to cover up its severity? An insider report, which included the testimony of dozens of TEPCO employees, confirmed that they were instructed to remain silent about the meltdown. This lie of omission needlessly exposed hundreds of thousands of people to radiation and future health consequences, including cancer. TEPCO’s president, Naomi Hirose, admitted at the time, “I would say it was a cover-up. It’s extremely regrettable.” It is indeed regrettable that the company responsible for this disaster has not shouldered the responsibility of honorably cleaning it up and protecting the livelihoods of those in the area, like the now desperate fishermen of Fukushima. 

US “Vaccine Court” Has Paid over 3 Billion Dollars to Vaccine-Injured Families 🚑👶🏽👶🏻🤫

Since 1988, the US government program VICP (Vaccine Injury Compensation Program) has paid $3.9 billion to around 6,000 individuals and families for injuries and deaths attributed to shots for flu, diphtheria, whooping cough, and other conditions. Over that 29-year time period, 17,281 petitions have been adjudicated, with 6,085 of those determined to be compensable, while 11,196 were dismissed. Total compensation paid over the life of the program is approximately $3.9 billion. 

Though vaccines “remain one of the greatest success stories in public health,” Tracy Seipel reported, “for some Americans, rare side effects of inoculations have led to hardship, serious injury, and even death.”

On NPR’s All Things Considered, high-profile lawsuits against drug companies in the 1980s successfully charged that children immunized with the (DTP) vaccine experienced adverse reactions, including seizures and brain damage, leading to at least two court settlements worth millions of dollars. In response, drug companies threatened to stop producing vaccines for the US market because litigation risks were too great unless the government provided them with “no-fault” protection. NPR quoted Anna Kirkland, a professor of women’s studies and political science at the University of Michigan: “There was a real fear that some of our childhood vaccines would no longer be available.”

In 1986, that fear led Congress to establish the little-known Office of The "Vaccine Court". Also known as (Special Masters of the US Court of Federal Claims and the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program). NPR reported that the court administers a “no-fault compensation program that serves as an alternative to the traditional U.S. court system.” The vaccine court served to “shield the vaccine makers from liability.” It also created a fund to compensate injured vaccine recipients, through a 75-cent surcharge on every vaccine dose, stated by Anna Kirkland from NPR news.

As the NPR report also explained, “Petitioners don’t have to prove that the immunization caused their condition—the court operates under a presumption of causation if the injury develops within a certain period of time.” To win a claim, petitioners must provide proof of developing a condition listed on a vaccine injury table. Settlements for conditions not included in the table require a higher burden of proof. But, as Seipel reported, the other restriction that petitioners face is filing within strict time limits. A petition must be filed within three years of the first symptoms, within two years of death, or within four years after the first symptom of a vaccine-related injury that resulted in death.

The problem of the time limit is two-fold. First, and most fundamentally, most people simply do not know about the government’s vaccine-injury compensation program, and they may not learn about it in time to petition. Second, in cases where parents allege that a vaccine has injured a child of theirs, the full extent of the injury may not be known until the child is older. As Anna Kirkland, the Michigan professor who has studied the vaccine court, told NPR, publicizing the vaccine court and injury compensation program creates a dilemma: Once critics see compensation settlements, they conclude that “vaccines are dangerous and you shouldn’t vaccinate.” If the court were to achieve greater visibility, especially regarding payouts to injured patients, the public might conclude that vaccines are more generally dangerous than significant research and evidence indicates.

Jessica Boehm of Cronkite News reported that vaccine information statements, which include information about both possible side effects and the vaccine compensation program, are provided to patients before each shot. However, few people read the fine print. According to Drew Downing, a lawyer who specializes in vaccine injury cases, “That’s really the only place that the vaccine program is really ever talked about.” As Seipel reported, other critics have noted that, when patients seek medical attention for an adverse reaction, they should be informed about the court system and compensation program.

Since 2002, the Washington Post has published a handful of editorials, opinion pieces, and letters to the editor that have addressed the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. In 2009 it ran a front-page article on the vaccine court’s finding of no link between vaccines and autism in children. Coverage of the vaccine court and its injury program in the New York Times appears to have been limited to a single story from 1994, sourced from the Associated Press, on a new vaccine for whooping cough, which mentioned the program and compensation fund in passing.

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Vaccine Injury Compensation Data

https://www.hrsa.gov/vaccine-compensation/data/index.html

Anders Kelto, “Vaccine Court Aims to Protect Patients and Vaccines,” All Things Considered (NPR), broadcast June 2, 2015, edited transcript, http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/06/02/411243242/vaccine-court-aims-to-protect-patients-and-vaccines.

Tracy Seipel, “Vaccine Battles Call New Attention to Obscure Compensation Court,” Marin Independent Journal, August 2, 2015, http://www.marinij.com/article/NO/20150802/NEWS/150809969.

Jessica Boehm, “Vaccine Injury Fund Tops $3.5 Billion, as Patients Fight for Payment,” Cronkite News (Arizona PBS), May 8, 2015, http://cronkitenewsonline.com/2015/05/vaccine-injury-fund-tops-3-5-billion-as-patients-fight-for-payment/.

Student Researchers: Brittany Oldham, Dorsa Abyaneh, and Emiko Osaka (San Francisco State University)

Faculty Evaluator: Kenn Burrows (San Francisco State University)

Queen Elizabeth II the largest landowner on Earth. 🌍 ㊏

Queen Elizabeth II, head of state of the United Kingdom and of 31 other states and territories, is the legal owner of about 6,600 million acres of land, one sixth of the earth’s non ocean surface.

She is the only person on earth who owns whole countries, and who owns countries that are not her own domestic territory. This land ownership is separate from her role as head of state and is different from other monarchies where no such claim is made – Norway, Belgium, Denmark etc.

The value of her land holding. £17,600,000,000,000 (approx) or $33,000,000,000,000.

This makes her the richest individual on earth. However, there is no way easily to value her real estate. There is no current market in the land of entire countries. At a rough estimate of $5,000 an acre, and based on the sale of Alaska to the USA by the Tsar, and of Louisiana to the USA by France, the Queen’s land holding is worth a notional $33,000,000,000,000 (Thirty three trillion dollars or about £17,600,000,000,000). Her holding is based on the laws of the countries she owns and her land title is valid in all the countries she owns. Her main holdings are Canada, the 2nd largest country on earth, with 2,467 million acres, Australia, the 7th largest country on earth with 1,900 million acres, the Papua New Guinea with114 million acres, New Zealand with 66 million acres and the UK with 60 million acres.

She is the world’s largest landowner by a significant margin. The next largest landowner is the Russian state, with an overall ownership of 4,219 million acres, and a direct ownership comparable with the Queen’s land holding of 2,447 million acres. The 3rd largest landowner is the Chinese state, which claims all of Chinese land, about 2,365 million acres. The 4th largest landowner on earth is the Federal Government of the United States, which owns about one third of the land of the USA, 760 million acres. The fifth largest landowner on earth is the King of Saudi Arabia with 553 million acres

Largest five personal landowners on Earh

• Queen Elizabeth - II6,600 million acres
• King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia - 553 million acres
• King Bhumibol of Thailand - 126 million acres
• King Mohammed IV of Morocco - 113 million acres
• Sultan Quaboos of Oman - 76 million acres