Jim Caton lives in Southeast Michigan where he teaches English and works as a freelance writer. A graduate of Wayne Law School, he writes on matters of constitutional law, public policy and international affairs. He is currently at work on a book of economic and social criticism entitled Ass Backward.
What went wrong with the meeting Wednesday night was miscommunication. That there was no busload of people from Flint was disappointing, but could be overcome. That the teachers present—if there were teachers present—did not choose to speak removed from the evening some of the feeling of direct contact with the issue, but not entirely. For
The greedy thieves who came around and ate the flesh of everything they found, whose crimes have gone unpunished now, who walk the streets as free men now, they brought death to my hometown. –Bruce Springsteen Much ado about nothing. That sums up the media response to the news that bond insurer Ambac Financial Group
This is not your father’s working class. On Wednesday evening at Detroit’s Wayne State University, the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) held an “emergency meeting” that was to feature residents of Flint, whose water has been poisoned with lead and other contaminants, and Detroit Public Schools (DPS) teachers who have been staging “sickouts” for the past
They are untouchable. Unlike you and I, who can be held legally accountable for our negligence and wrongdoings, they are beyond the reach of the law. Unlike those wrongly arrested who are forced to plead guilty to crimes they did not commit in order to avoid going on trial for crimes with even longer
A bill before a committee of the Indiana Senate proposes to raise the cap on medical malpractice payments in the state. According to an article on nwitimes.com, the proposed legislation, sponsored by Republican Senator Brent Steele, would increase the current limit on victims’ awards by $400,000, to $1.65 million. It would be the first increase
In his excellent memoir of 1920’s and 30’s Berlin, Defying Hitler, German historian Sebastian Haffner recounts an experience he had as an apprentice lawyer. He describes the reading room of the Kammergericht, Berlin’s large, imposing law building at the time. Haffner recalls the proud satisfaction he felt to be working among professionals in the beautiful
Where are the professors? The students are in the streets, but where are the professors? The people of Ferguson, of Baltimore, of Cleveland are in the streets, but where are the professors? The Bill of Rights has been traduced and eviscerated, and where are the law professors? Mainstream news is a product of the Pentagon
More than eight years after the market crash of 2007-08, no bank or mortgage company executive has faced criminal charges for fraudulent activities that resulted in millions of foreclosures and the Great Recession. Just as no General Motors executive will see the inside of a jail cell for the deaths of hundreds of car-owners who
As the scales of the American criminal justice system continue to tilt against the interests of defendants, developments in Louisiana’s Orleans Parish threaten to pull us back to the days before Gideon v. Wainwright, the 1963 Supreme Court case that established the constitutional right of indigent defendants to court-appointed counsel. The American Civil Liberties
The rulers of the earth are now gathered to determine our fate. It should be abundantly clear to anyone in America who has been paying attention for the past fifteen years that no one in Davos, Switzerland, has our best interests in mind. One need not subscribe to any implausible conspiracy theory to recognize the