We go to Wisconsin as the state’s Democratic Governor Tony Evers pushes back after Trump border czar Tom Homan says Wisconsin officials could be arrested over local policies that defy Trump’s mass deportation agenda. This comes after FBI agents arrested Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan. “I think what we’re seeing, in a broader sense, is just an absolute degradation of the rule of law,” says Lisa Graves, a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice, now the director of the policy research group True North Research and co-host of the podcast Legal AF. Her forthcoming book is Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Apr. 25, 2024. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.

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Federal agents arrested a sitting Wisconsin judge on Friday, accusing her of helping an undocumented immigrant evade arrest after he appeared in her courtroom last week, FBI Director Kash Patel said on social media.

In a since-deleted post, Patel said the FBI arrested 65-year-old Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan “on charges of obstruction.”

“We believe Judge Dugan intentionally misdirected federal agents away from the subject to be arrested in her courthouse… allowing the subject—an illegal alien—to evade arrest,” Patel wrote. “Thankfully, our agents chased down the perp on foot and he’s been in custody since, but the judge’s obstruction created increased danger to the public.”

It is unclear why Patel deleted the post. U.S. Marshals Service spokesperson Brady McCarron and multiple Milwaukee County judges confirmed Dugan’s arrest, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. McCarron said Dugan is facing two federal felony counts: obstruction and concealing an individual.

The Journal Sentinel reported that Dugan “appeared before U.S. Magistrate Judge Stephen C. Dries during a brief hearing in a packed courtroom at the federal courthouse” and “made no public comments during the brief hearing.”

Dugan’s attorney, Craig Mastantuono, told the court that “Judge Dugan wholeheartedly regrets and protests her arrest,” which “was not made in the interest of public safety.”

The FBI had reportedly been investigating allegations that Dugan helped the undocumented man avoid arrest by letting him hide in her chambers.

Wisconsin state Rep. Ryan Clancy (D-19) said in a statement Wednesday that “several witnesses report that [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] did not present a warrant before entering the courtroom and it is not clear whether ICE ever possessed or presented a judicial warrant, generally required for agents to access non-public spaces like Judge Dugan’s chambers.”

Clancy continued:

I commend Judge Hannah Dugan’s defense of due process by preventing ICE from shamefully using her courtroom as an ad hoc holding area for deportations. We cannot have a functional legal system if people are justifiably afraid to show up for legal proceedings, especially when ICE agents have already repeatedly grabbed people off the street in retaliation for speech and free association, without even obtaining the proper warrants.

While the facts in this case are still unfolding, it’s clear that actions like Judge Dugan’s are what is required for democracy to survive the Trump regime. She used her position of power and privilege to protect someone from an agency that has repeatedly, flagrantly abused its own power. If enough of us act similarly, and strategically, we can stand with our neighbors and build a better world together.

Prominent Milwaukee defense attorney and former federal prosecutor Franklyn Gimbel called Dugan’s arrest “very, very outrageous.”

“First and foremost, I know—as a former federal prosecutor and as a defense lawyer for decades—that a person who is a judge, who has a residence who has no problem being found, should not be arrested, if you will, like some common criminal,” Gimbel told the Journal Sentinel.

“And I’m shocked and surprised that the U.S. Attorney’s office or the FBI would not have invited her to show up and accept process if they’re going to charge her with a crime,” he added.

Julius Kim, another former prosecutor-turned defense lawyer, said on the social media site X that “practicing in Milwaukee, I know Judge Hannah Dugan well. She’s a good judge, and this entire situation demonstrates how the Trump administration’s policies are heading for a direct collision course with the judiciary.”

“That being said, given the FBI director’s tweet (since deleted), they are going to try to politicize this situation to the max,” Kim added. “That sounds an awful lot like weaponizing the DOJ, doesn’t it?”

Responding to Dugan’s arrest, U.S. Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) said on the social media site Bluesky: “The Trump admin has arrested a judge in Milwaukee. This is a red alert moment. We must all rise up against it.”

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

We go to Madison, Wisconsin, to speak with The Nation's John Nichols about Tuesday's pivotal state Supreme Court election, in which liberal Judge Susan Crawford convincingly defeated conservative candidate Brad Schimel. Crawford’s election is a major victory for Democrats after billionaire Trump ally Elon Musk poured about $25 million into the Wisconsin race, helping to make it the most expensive judicial election in U.S. history. “This is a huge signal from a battleground state that Americans are genuinely upset, genuinely angry, I think, with Trump and with Musk,” says Nichols. Tuesday also saw a pair of special House elections in Florida where Republicans held both seats, helping to maintain the party’s narrow majority in Congress. While Democrats were unlikely to flip the deep-red districts, Nichols notes “there was a huge shift in both of the Florida districts toward the Democratic candidates.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Why is billionaire Elon Musk spending about $20 million to shape the outcome of Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election on Tuesday, in what has become the most expensive judicial election in U.S. history, giving away $1 million checks to two voters who signed one of his petitions? We speak with longtime Wisconsinite John Nichols of The Nation about the pivotal race on Tuesday that will shape the majority of the state’s top court and have a far-reaching impact on issues like abortion and voting rights. The court is also expected to rule on congressional redistricting in the state, which could whittle down the razor-thin Republican majority in the House of Representatives. “The richest man in the world, Elon Musk, has since January been obsessed with this race,” says Nichols, who notes that a liberal victory would be widely interpreted as a rebuke of the Republican agenda. “This is a politically volatile moment for Donald Trump.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

After spending over a quarter of a billion dollars on Donald Trump’s presidential election campaign, Elon Musk is pouring money into a Supreme Court election in Wisconsin. Musk has spent more than $18 million to support Trump-backed candidate Brad Schimel over liberal Susan Crawford and has been paying Wisconsin voters $100 to help flip the state’s top court. This election could impact abortion rights, unions and Republicans’ ability to keep gerrymandered districts in place to control Congress. “The level of corruption at play here, the level of money at play here, really is a warning sign for what’s happening to our democracy,” says Ari Berman, voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones magazine.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

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Alexandria Ehlert has pursued a college education hoping to become a park ranger or climate scientist. Now she’s wondering whether she’ll ever finish her studies at College of Menominee Nation.

The scholarship that kept her afloat at the tribal college in Wisconsin vanished in recent weeks, and with it her optimism about completing her degrees there and continuing her studies at a four-year institution.

Ehlert is one of about 20 College of Menominee Nation students who rely on scholarships funded through a U.S. Department of Agriculture grant. The Trump administration suspended the grant amid widespread cost-cutting efforts. Unless other money can be found, Ehlert and the other scholarship students are in their final weeks on campus.

“It’s leaving me without a lot of hope,” said Ehlert, a member of the Oneida nation. “Maybe I should just get a warehouse job and drop school entirely.”

Many staff and students at the country’s 37 tribal colleges and universities, which rely heavily on federal dollars, have been alarmed by the suspension of crucial grants early in Donald Trump’s second presidency.

Even before he retook office, the schools essentially lived paycheck to paycheck. A 1978 law promised them a basic funding level, but Congress hasn’t come close to fulfilling that obligation in decades. Today, the colleges get a quarter-billion dollars less per year than they should, when accounting for inflation, and receive almost nothing to build and maintain their campuses. Water pipes break frequently, roofs leak, ventilation systems fail and buildings crumble. Other than minuscule amounts of state funding in some cases and a smattering of private donations, tribal colleges that lose any federal funding have few other sources of income.

“You freeze our funding and ask us to wait six months to see how it shakes out, and we close,” said Ahniwake Rose, president of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, which lobbies for tribal colleges in Washington, D.C. “That’s incredibly concerning.”

At least $7 million in USDA grants to tribal colleges and universities have been suspended, Rose said. The schools’ concerns have been magnified by a lack of communication from federal agencies, which she attributed partly to many federal workers being laid off as the Trump administration has made across-the-board cuts to the federal bureaucracy.

Staff at the College of Menominee Nation were seeking reimbursement for $50,000 spent on research and other work conducted in January, when a federal website indicated a grant from the USDA had been suspended. It was a technical issue, they were told when they first reached someone at the agency, and they needed to contact technical support. But that didn’t solve the problem. Then a few days later the department told the college to halt all grant activity, including Ehlert’s scholarship, without explaining why or for how long.

The frozen grants are administered by the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture, or NIFA. They stem from a 1994 law, the Equity in Educational Land-Grant Status Act, which designated the tribal colleges as land-grant institutions. Congress created the land-grant system in the 19th century to provide more funding for agricultural and vocational degrees.

The 1994 addition of tribal colleges to the list of land-grant institutions gave the schools access to more funding for specific projects, mostly focused on food and agriculture. Many grants funded food research and projects to increase the availability of food, which is particularly important in rural areas with fewer grocery stores and restaurants.

“It’s really precarious for tribal colleges,” said Twyla Baker, president of Nueta Hidatsa Sahnish College in North Dakota. Her college also lost access to NIFA funds that were paying for food research and a program that connects Indigenous farmers, ranchers and gardeners to each other. “We don’t have large endowments to fall back on.”

Several other college presidents said they were preparing for the worst. Red Lake Nation College in Minnesota was freezing salaries, travel and hiring, said President Dan King. So was United Tribes Technical College in North Dakota, which paused renovation of a dormitory originally built as military barracks in 1900. ProPublica reported in October that tribal colleges need more than half a billion dollars to catch up on campus maintenance.

“We’re hoping to get started soon, because we have a short construction season here,” said Leander McDonald, president of the United Tribes college.

At Blackfeet Community College in northern Montana, a NIFA grant is helping to create a program to train workers for the Blackfeet tribe’s new slaughterhouse. The college has started construction on a new building, but President Brad Hall worries that without access to promised federal funds, he might have to pause the project.

Like other tribal college leaders, Hall hasn’t been able to get clear answers from the USDA. Unlike some other schools, his college has been able to access federal funds, but he wonders for how long.

“Without the clarity and without the communication, it’s very hard to make decisions right now,” he said. “We’re in a holding pattern, combined with a situation where the questions aren’t being answered to our satisfaction.”

USDA spokespeople declined to answer questions. The agency emailed a written statement noting that “NIFA programs are currently under review,” but did not provide details on which grants have been suspended or for how long. The agency did not respond to requests for clarification.

Some tribal college leaders theorized they were targeted partly because of the formal name of the 1994 land-grant law: the Equity in Educational Land-Grant Status Act. The Trump administration has laid waste to federal spending on programs with “diversity,” “equity” or “inclusion” in the names.

While “equity” often refers to fairness in relation to race or sex, in the 1994 bill, Congress used the word to highlight that tribal colleges would finally have access to the same funds that 19th-century laws had made available to other land-grant colleges and universities. A spokesperson for the organization that represents nontribal land-grant institutions, the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, said he was not aware of any USDA funds to nontribal colleges being suspended.

Tribal colleges argue their funding is protected by treaties and the federal trust responsibility, a legal obligation requiring the United States to protect Indigenous resources, rights and assets. Cutting off funding to the tribal colleges is illegal, several university presidents said.

“We were promised education and health care and basic needs,” said King at Red Lake Nation College. “The fact that we’re being lumped in with these other programs — well, we’re not like them.”

The College of Menominee Nation was only a year into its game-changing $9 million USDA grant, which was funding workforce development, training students in local trades such as forestry, and improving food access for Indigenous people. The five-year grant was a “once-in-a-lifetime award,” said college President Christopher Caldwell.

“We want our students to graduate and have healthy job opportunities,” Caldwell said. “Now it just kind of got cut off at the knees.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Matt Krupnick for ProPublica.

We speak with The Nation's John Nichols in Wisconsin, where Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are spending a lot of their time in the closing days of the election in a tight battle for the state's 10 Electoral College votes. Nichols also discusses the battle for the Senate, with key races in Wisconsin and Nebraska; how New York races could tip control of the House to Democrats; and why Kamala Harris needs to expand her message beyond the threat of Trump’s authoritarianism. “At the doors, people want to talk about economics,” says Nichols.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

They are squat, stationary and seemingly innocuous. But ever since the high drama of the 2020 presidential election, humble drop boxes have been more than a receptacle of absentee ballots; they’ve morphed into a vessel for emotion, suspicion and even conspiracy theories.

In the battleground state of Wisconsin, especially, the mere presence of these sidewalk containers has inspired political activists and community leaders to plot against them, to call on people to watch them around the clock and even to hijack them.

They’ve been the subject of two state Supreme Court decisions, as well as legal memos, local council deliberations, press conferences and much hand-wringing.

Wausau Mayor Doug Diny was so leery of the box outside City Hall that he absconded with it on a Sunday in September, isolating it in his office. It had not yet been secured to the ground, he said, and so he wanted to keep it safe. The escapade was met with a backlash but also won the mayor some admirers online before he returned it.

“COURAGE IS CONTAGIOUS! WELL DONE SIR!” one person wrote on the conservative social media site Gettr.

As early voting for the November election begins and Wisconsinites receive their absentee ballots, they have choices on how to return them. Mail them. Deliver them in person to the municipal clerk. Or, in some communities, deposit them in a drop box, typically located outside a municipal building, library, community center or fire station.

Though election experts say the choices are designed to make voting a simple act, the use of drop boxes has been anything but uncomplicated since the 2020 election, when receptacles in Wisconsin and around the country became flash points for baseless conspiracy theories of election fraud. A discredited, but popular, documentary — “2000 Mules” — linked them to ballot stuffing, while a backlash grew over nonprofit funding that helped clerks make voting easier through a variety of measures, including drop boxes.

The movie’s distributor, Salem Media Group Inc., removed it from circulation in May and, in response to a lawsuit, issued a public apology to a Georgia voter for falsely depicting him as having voted illegally. A federal judge dismissed Salem Media Group as a defendant, but the litigation is proceeding against the filmmaker and others.

With all that fuss in the background, Wisconsin’s conservative-leaning Supreme Court outlawed the boxes in 2022. But then this summer, with the court now controlled by liberals, justices ruled them lawful, determining that municipal clerks could offer secure drop boxes in their communities if they wished.

The court’s latest ruling made clear it’s up to each municipal clerk’s discretion whether to offer drop boxes for voters. But the decision has done little to change minds about the boxes or end any confusion about whether they’re a boon to democracy or a tool for chicanery.

This year, four of Wisconsin’s largest cities are using drop boxes — Milwaukee, Madison, Green Bay and Racine. But numerous locales that offered drop boxes in 2020, including Kenosha, the fourth-largest city in the state, have determined they will not this year.

Voters have been getting mixed messages from right-wing activists and politicians about whether to use drop boxes, as the GOP continues to sow distrust in elections while, at the same time, urging supporters to vote early — by any means.

“Look, I’m not a fan of drop boxes, as is no great surprise, but if you have to have them, this is not a bad situation,” Catherine Engelbrecht, founder of True the Vote, which has fostered doubt about election integrity and helped inspire “2000 Mules,” said on a video posted to social media on Sept. 30. It showed her giving a brief tour of a drop box in Madison, Wisconsin’s capital and a bastion of Democrats.

With the camera trained on one of the boxes, Engelbrecht extolled that “the slot is really small, so that’s a good thing,” and that “most of these drop boxes appear to be close to fire stations,” which she also declared a good thing. About a week later, she wrote in a newsletter that True the Vote had collected exact drop box locations statewide and was working to arrange livestream video feeds of them.

Unlike in 2020 when Trump warned against the use of absentee ballots, this year he is urging supporters to “swamp the vote.” And the Wisconsin Republican Party is not discouraging voters from using ballot drop boxes if they are available in their community and are secure.

Still, Wisconsin’s GOP candidate for the U.S. Senate, Eric Hovde, has urged citizen surveillance brigades to watch the boxes. “Who’s watching to see how many illegal ballots are being stuffed?” Hovde told supporters in July, according to a recording of his remarks obtained by The Washington Post. “Look, we’re probably going to have to have — make sure that there’s somebody standing by a drop box everywhere.”

Most boxes have security cameras trained on them. Those surveillance tapes could be used as purported evidence in legal cases if Trump loses on Nov. 5.

Already, Engelbrecht has filed a public records request with the Dane County Clerk’s Office for “copies of video recordings from security cameras used to surveil all exterior and interior ballot drop boxes in Dane County for the November 2024 Election.” The county, whose seat is Madison, does not have access to camera footage, which is kept by municipalities, the county clerk told ProPublica.

After this year’s state Supreme Court ruling allowing the drop boxes, the Wisconsin Elections Commission issued guidance to the state’s roughly 1,800 municipal clerks recommending more than a dozen security practices related to the boxes.

The instructions include that they be “affixed to the ground or the side of the building,” “sturdy enough to withstand the elements,” “located in a well-lit area,” “equipped with unique locks or seals” and “emptied often.”

The commission recommended that clerks keep a record of the times and dates of retrieval, number of ballots retrieved and the names of the people doing the retrieving.

It also referred clerks to federal guidelines.

But even with updated guidelines in place and ballot harvesting prohibited in Wisconsin (individuals can only submit their own ballot, unless helping a disabled person), concerns persist.

In August in Dodge County, some 60 miles northwest of Milwaukee, the sheriff, Dale Schmidt, emailed three town clerks, telling them he had “serious concerns” about drop boxes, according to records obtained by the news site WisPolitics. “I strongly encourage you to avoid using a drop box,” he wrote. The sheriff asked the clerks numerous questions about the boxes, explaining that: “Even if set up the best way possible to avoid the potential for fraudulent activity, criminal activity many times finds ways to subvert even the best plans.”

Two of the clerks — from the towns of Ashippun and Beaver Dam — replied to the sheriff that they would not use them and the clerk from Hustisford told Wisconsin Public Radio that, while she received Schmidt’s email, the town board had already decided against using a drop box out of security concerns. In an email to ProPublica, Schmidt said, “No one was intimidated into choosing not to use the boxes and none of them had heartburn over not using them.”

Brittany Vulich, Wisconsin campaign manager for the nonpartisan voting rights group All Voting is Local, is bothered by how mayors, council members and other officials are seeking to influence these decisions. She notes that municipal clerks — the vast majority of whom are women — are the top election officials in each municipality.

“It’s the undermining of their authority. It’s the undermining of their office,” she said. “It’s the undermining of their autonomy to do their job and to make that decision on whether to use drop boxes or not. And that is what is very alarming.”

Other towns have also balked.

In the city of Brookfield, the Common Council took up a resolution Aug. 20 and voted 10-4 not to have a drop box after reviewing a memo by City Attorney Jenna Merten who found the recommended precautions burdensome.

“The guidance states that for unstaffed 24-hour ballot drop boxes, the City would need a video surveillance camera and storage of the video footage, as well as decals, extra keys and security seals,” she wrote. “Removing the ballots from the drop box would require at least two people and the completion of chain of custody logs.”

During the debate, Alderman Gary Mahkorn, an opponent of drop boxes, argued that they served a purpose during the COVID-19 pandemic but then “became a hugely political issue, and that’s what makes me want to, you know, puke in a way.” He worried that “the further we get away from people trusting our elections, the more our democracy is at stake.”

Instead of having drop boxes, the city will have extended voting hours, 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., most weekdays during in-person absentee voting for the two weeks prior to the election.

In Wausau, the box that Diny took to his office is back, bolted to the ground and being used for early voting.

At first, Diny resisted pressure from the city clerk and members of the City Council to return it. The clerk, Kaitlyn Bernarde, reported the matter to the Marathon County District Attorney’s Office and the state elections commission. And Diny arranged to have the clerk reclaim it.

The Wisconsin Department of Justice is investigating. There have been no charges. Diny told ProPublica he believes he did nothing wrong, saying: “None of this was done in a nefarious, secret way.”

At a City Council meeting on Tuesday night, Diny attempted to force a vote on allocating additional funds for drop-box security. But the council showed no interest.

During the public comment period, residents both praised and lambasted the mayor. One local resident rose to say, “Arguing about a box is dumb.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Megan O’Matz.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

The sprawling business empire created by tribal leaders in northern Wisconsin was born of desperate times, as the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians faced financial ruin. Its subsequent success would be built on the desperate needs of others far from the reservation.

The tribe had made some poor choices as it sought to expand its fortunes beyond a modest casino in its home state of Wisconsin two decades ago. Grand plans for a floating casino off Cancun, Mexico, collapsed, and a riverboat gambling venture in Mississippi required more cash than the tribe had on hand.

The resulting loans — $50 million in bonds issued in 2008 at 12% — proved crushing. Struggling to make debt payments, tribal officials soon were forced to slash spending for essential programs on the reservation and lay off dozens of employees.

Protests erupted, with demonstrators barricading themselves inside a government building and demanding audits and investigations. When angry tribal members elected a new governing council, it refused to pay anymore. The tribe defaulted on a loan it had come to regret.

The LDF tribe turned to the one asset that could distinguish it in the marketplace: sovereign immunity.

This special status allowed it as a Native American tribe to enter the world of internet lending without interest rate caps, an option not open to other lenders in most states. The annual rates it charged for small-sum, installment loans frequently exceeded 600%.

Business partners, seeing the favorable math, were easy to find. So, too, were consumers who had run out of options to pay their bills. Their decisions to sign up for LDF loans often made things worse.

ProPublica traced the key decisions that put LDF on the path to becoming a prominent player in a sector of the payday lending industry that has long skirted regulation and drawn controversy.

LDF did not just dabble in this type of lending; it fully embraced it. Like other tribes that have taken this route, LDF built its success on a series of complex business arrangements, with roles and motives difficult to unravel.

Over time, ProPublica found, LDF signed off on deals involving outsiders with histories of predatory practices — associations that carried profound implications for the tribe. Not only did they put the tribe’s reputation at risk, they generated a barrage of costly lawsuits and questions of whether LDF was allowing partners to take advantage of tribal rights to skirt state usury laws.

In Boston, Brian Coughlin initially had no idea that a Native American tribe was involved in the small loan he took out with a high interest rate. He only learned about LDF after he filed for bankruptcy to seek protection from his creditors.

“I was definitely surprised,” he said. “I didn’t think they operated things like that.”

During the bankruptcy process, an LDF partner still hounded him to pay, which Coughlin said pushed him to a breaking point and a suicide attempt. Federal law prohibits chasing debtors who have filed for bankruptcy, and Coughlin sued the tribe in a dispute that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Last year, the court — in a decision with far-reaching implications for tribes — ruled that LDF could be held liable under the Bankruptcy Code.

His and other consumer lawsuits paint LDF as a front for outsiders who take an oversized cut of the proceeds, leaving LDF with only dollars per loan. Interviews and ProPublica’s review of records also show how heavily LDF relies on its partners for most of the essential operations. These descriptions are disputed by LDF, which has told ProPublica that it merely is outsourcing for much-needed expertise while still maintaining control.

In a statement to ProPublica this year, John Johnson Sr., LDF’s president, described the tribe’s lending business as “a narrative of empowerment, ethical business practice, and commitment to community enrichment.” He has declined to be interviewed and did not respond to written questions for this story.

Over time, LDF has set up at least two dozen internet lending companies and websites, ProPublica determined. Its loans are so pervasive the LDF tribe showed up as a creditor in roughly 1 out of every 100 bankruptcy cases sampled nationwide, as ProPublica reported in August.

This year, LDF and some of its business affiliates agreed to a federal class-action settlement in Virginia that, if finalized, will erase $1.4 billion in consumer debt and provide $37 million in restitution. Tribal defendants are responsible for $2 million of that; the tribe in a statement has indicated that its business arm would pay.

Tribal officials have consistently denied wrongdoing. A newsletter to tribal members as LDF was starting up its venture said the tribe “is not practicing any type of predatory lending.” In his statements to ProPublica for the August story, Johnson stressed that the tribe complies with tribal and federal law, that its lending practices are transparent, that its collections are done ethically and that the loans help distressed borrowers who have little access to credit.

LDF leaders have not publicly stated any desire to alter their business practices, even as some community members express concern.

“Feeding greed with unscrupulous business practices is crushing us,” one LDF member recently wrote on a community Facebook page.

After the bond debacle in the 2000s, LDF leaders felt stung by their outside financial advisers, believing they were deceived about the terms of the transaction and risks involved.

Moving forward, they wanted someone they could trust. They found that in Brent McFarland.

McFarland was not a tribal member, but he grew up near the reservation and had friends on the Tribal Council. McFarland, an investment adviser who’d run a restaurant and worked in real estate, offered some helpful advice to the tribe, and the council eventually hired him for a wider role. He helped it establish the Lac du Flambeau Business Development Corporation in 2012, governed by a board answerable to the Tribal Council. And he looked for ways LDF could make money, apart from gaming.

“I ended up meeting some people that were doing online lending,” he said in an interview.

Tribes could get into the industry — attracting willing partners with expertise in lending — without putting up any capital because sovereign immunity was its own bounty.

But as certain as LDF was that state laws wouldn’t apply to its operations, the tribe took a careful approach. LDF decided it would not lend to people in Wisconsin, including its own members. “It keeps our relationship with the state of Wisconsin healthy,” McFarland told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Peter Bildsten, who ran the state Department of Financial Institutions then, remembers visiting the reservation as it was embarking on the new venture. He recalled that he met some of LDF’s business partners, who recognized that the lending operation would be extremely lucrative but also potentially controversial.

“They talked about yeah, we are doing it, and we know there’s virtually nothing you can do about it and especially if we don’t lend to any people in Wisconsin. You can’t do anything,” Bildsten said. “It was almost kind of a dare.”

Many tribes, still suffering from a legacy of racism and inadequate federal resources, struggle to find economic solutions for their people. McFarland, who no longer works for LDF but does consulting for tribes, defended LDF’s decision to move into high-interest loans as a legitimate option.

“The business is offering a service where the interest rates and cost of borrowing are well disclosed to consumers,” he told ProPublica in an email. “It’s expensive, but if used responsibly can be more affordable than many other options. The costs and risks are not hidden from consumers.”

Johnson, LDF’s president, has said there was a rational reason for the tribe’s business partnerships: It needed outside expertise as it entered a new industry.

“But let me be more specific: Zero I.T. enterprise architects, data analysts, or marketing strategists lived on the Lac Du Flambeau reservation when the Tribal Council decided to enter this industry,” he wrote in an email to ProPublica in August.

LDF’s partners run their operations far from tribal land. ProPublica identified several Florida lawsuits that allege a straight-forward process: “The LDF Tribe mints a new ‘tribal’ limited liability company, supposedly organized under Tribal law, for each new investor. Each new investor then runs his or her own ‘tribally owned’ website, offering consumers loans at interest rates between 450% and 1100% annually.”

Those cases were settled or dismissed without LDF addressing the allegations.

LDF does not publicly disclose its partners. ProPublica identified one of them as RIVO Holdings, a fintech firm based in a high-rise in downtown San Diego that has serviced two LDF websites.

RIVO is an acronym for respect, integrity, value and opportunity. The company’s founder and CEO is Daniel Koetting. His personal website touts his employment of “over 200 local employees at RIVO.” His brother Mark, of Kansas, managed a separate lending portfolio for the tribe.

The brothers entered the tribal lending industry after facing regulatory scrutiny for previous lending operations. In 2006, Califonia issued a cease-and-desist order to both men for unlicensed lending; Daniel Koetting received a similar demand from New Hampshire in 2011.

Initially, the Koettings partnered with the Big Lagoon Rancheria tribe in California to offer high-interest loans beginning in 2013. But that relationship began to fall apart several years later.

The tribe alleged that the Koettings surreptitiously pushed customers to new lending companies set up with LDF, and an arbitrator awarded Big Lagoon Rancheria $14 million in 2018. Years of litigation followed as the Koettings fought the decision. The case is still pending.

“I actually called Lac du Flambeau and warned them and informed them that they were getting into business with Big Lagoon’s client list,” Virgil Moorehead, Big Lagoon Rancheria’s chairperson, told ProPublica.

Joseph Schulte Jr., who once worked at RIVO, likened one area of the company’s San Diego office to a Wall Street trading floor, with exuberant staff celebrating short-term wins, such as meeting daily sales goals. To keep the staff pumped up, he said, management brought in pallets of free Celsius energy drinks.

“People were making a lot of money working there,” Schulte said of RIVO Holdings.

Although figures for LDF’s loan portfolios are private, Daniel Koetting’s previous venture with the Big Lagoon Rancheria amassed approximately $83 million in revenue over five years, according to a legal filing.

Court papers, including divorce filings, show Daniel Koetting enjoying a lavish lifestyle in recent years, living in a five-bedroom, five-bath house in La Jolla, an affluent seaside enclave of San Diego. He owned thoroughbred horses, drove a Porsche and dabbled in motion pictures. He and his wife had three children. In the divorce, he reported household expenses in 2021 that included an average of $7,000 a month on groceries and eating out, plus an additional $5,000 a month for “entertainment, gifts and vacation.”

Daniel and Mark Koetting did not reply to emails, calls or letters from ProPublica seeking comment.

Meanwhile, the two companies that RIVO and LDF run — Evergreen Services and Bridge Lending Solutions — are associated with more than 200 complaints from customers since 2019, frequently about onerous interest rates and payment terms. “I just don’t understand how people can do this,” a California resident protested to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. “This is a predatory lender and I am a victim.”

Bildsten, the former Wisconsin department head, believes that LDF tribal leaders are trying to help the reservation improve services, such as dental care, for its members and that the lending business is part of that laudable goal.

“They’re able to do some good stuff,” Bildsten said, “but the money is dirty.”

Brian Coughlin lit a cigar. Sitting in his Chevy Malibu with the sunroof open to let out the smoke and a bottle of pills next to him, he wondered: When will this end?

He’d faced many hurdles in life, from serious physical and mental health issues to the loss of his father. He’d also used bad judgment, overspending and loading up on multiple credit cards as he blew through a decent paycheck as head of trash collection for the city of Boston.

Like many other Americans with little to no savings and poor credit scores, he was enticed by online pitches for quick cash — offers that came with exorbitantly high interest rates.

Months earlier, in December 2019, he’d filed for bankruptcy, expecting relief. There would be payment plans and a court injunction halting contact from creditors — a key protection laid out in U.S. bankruptcy law. But one creditor would not give up.

Lendgreen, one of LDF’s initial companies, had loaned Coughlin $900 at an annual percentage rate of 741%. At the time of the bankruptcy, he owed $1,595. The company continued to call, email and text him, fueling his anxiety. A phone log shows Lendgreen called Coughlin 50 times during one four-month period.

“This is all for nothing,” Coughlin recalls thinking of the bankruptcy process.

That night in his Chevy, Coughlin took a fistful of pills and ended up in the hospital. Lendgreen still was calling him while he recovered. But now he was ready to fight.

Coughlin’s attorney filed a motion with the bankruptcy court in March 2020 asking a judge to order Lendgreen, the LDF tribe and LDF Business Development Corporation to stop harassing him.

The case was about more than just harassment, however. Coughlin wanted compensation for all that had happened. He asked the court to award him attorneys fees, medical costs, expenses for lost time from work while hospitalized and punitive damages.

To Coughlin’s surprise, LDF told the court that sovereign immunity protected it even in a federal bankruptcy case, and the bankruptcy judge in Massachusetts agreed. When Coughlin took the case to the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and won, the tribe appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

As they dug into who actually violated the collections ban, Coughlin’s attorneys needed to unravel the business relationships surrounding Lendgreen, which no longer has an active website. That led them on an international paper chase from Wisconsin to Ontario, Latvia and Malta, an island in the Mediterranean, where an entity that provided capital for Lendgreen appeared to be based.

In gathering evidence, Coughlin’s lawyers obtained an agreement between Lendgreen and another company — Vivus Servicing Ltd. of Canada — showing Vivus was to handle most all operations of issuing and collecting the loans made in Lendgreen’s name. It also would retain most of the profits.

For each new or renewed loan, the contract called for Vivus to share $3.25 with LDF as well as $3.25 per loan payment, or not less than $10,000 a month.

Vivus Servicing had subcontracted certain administrative functions of the Lendgreen loans to 4finance Canada, an affiliate company of a European lending conglomerate based in Latvia, court records show. An attorney who represents Vivus and 4finance declined to comment.

“There’s money flowing to all sorts of places,” Coughlin’s attorney Richard Gottlieb said.

As he began to better understand the web of connections, Gottlieb concluded that LDF’s role in its lending operations was minimal. The partners, he said, performed all the key functions — “from the creation of the loans themselves to the maintenance of the computer software and internet sites to the collections personnel to the customer service reps to the management.”

Even though LDF fought in court to be able to pursue collections against people in bankruptcy, internal documents indicate that the head of LDF Holdings, which oversees the tribe’s lending enterprise, was not pleased with how a business partner treated Coughlin.

Coughlin inquires with Lendgreen about why its phone calls have not ceased.

Jessi Lorenzo, president of LDF Holdings at the time, communicated in May 2020 with 4finance Canada about Coughlin’s loan. Why had they not stopped soliciting repayment once notified that Coughlin had filed for bankruptcy, she asked in an email.

“Everything should have ceased then,” wrote Lorenzo, who was based in Tampa.

In a brief interview on her porch, Lorenzo declined to comment on the Coughlin case and said she did not want to be part of a tribal lending story that might be negative. Later, in an email, she wrote that she was proud to have worked for LDF as it “built a business that benefited their community, providing modern careers with upward mobility and good benefits in a remote part of Wisconsin.”

LDF tribal leaders don’t talk much about their business with outsiders. But there is little doubt that the lending business has altered the shape of the tribe’s finances, allowing LDF to move past its costly mistake of issuing $50 million in bonds for the Mississippi casino boat.

The Tribal Council agreed in 2017 to pay $4 million and finance an additional $23 million to settle claims against it after defaulting.

But the tribe and its partners continue to face new threats from a range of legal actions.

The attorneys in the Virginia case have promised future litigation against more LDF partners. And as LDF keeps lending, it opens its companies up to additional consumer lawsuits. Dozens of such cases have been filed since 2019, most of which end quickly, with undisclosed settlements.

McFarland takes issue with these types of cases against tribes. “The law firms filing class action lawsuits seek to paint tribes as either victims or villains in online lending,” he said in an email. “This approach has been employed against tribes since Europeans came to the Americas, whether Tribes are entering gaming, cannabis, selling tobacco, and a host of business opportunities.”

When Coughlin’s suit reached the Supreme Court, some of the issues involving tribal-lending partnerships were touched on, if only briefly.

During a hearing in April 2023, Justice Samuel Alito interrupted LDF’s lawyer as he was talking about sovereign immunity and the Constitutional Convention. Alito inquired about the tribe’s relationship with Lendgreen.

“Who actually operates this?” he asked.

“The tribe does, Your Honor,” replied attorney Pratik Shah, representing LDF. “This is not a rent-a-tribe situation.”

Shah said the enterprise employed 50 to 60 people working out of a headquarters on the reservation, though “they use third-party vendors, servicers and all, like any other business.”

Shah added: “This is a fully tribal operation.”

But the central issue was whether the tribe could be held liable for violating bankruptcy rules.

“What the tribe is saying is you can’t sue them for hundreds of thousands of dollars of actual damages,” Shah told the court. “That’s at the core of sovereign immunity.”

In June of last year, the high court sided with Coughlin, ruling 8-1 that there’s no sovereign immunity for tribes when it comes to the Bankruptcy Code.

Justice Clarence Thomas concurred in the ruling, not because of his reading of the Bankruptcy Code, but because he held that sovereign immunity does not apply to lawsuits arising from a tribe’s commercial activity conducted off-reservation.

Back in Bankruptcy Court, Coughlin continued to pursue LDF and Lendgreen for damages and legal fees. In mid-August, in the midst of settlement talks, Coughlin asked the court to pause the process required to unmask the outside entities involved with LDF as all sides tried to resolve the dispute. In September, a judge approved a settlement in which the tribe and Lendgreen agreed to pay Coughlin $340,000. LDF denied liability as part of the agreement.

At the same time, pressure is mounting on the tribe’s business partners. As part of the deal, the tribe will give Coughlin documents “with respect to the culpability and responsibility” of the outside partners, according to the settlement. That will enable Coughlin’s lawyers to dig further. LDF also will make a corporate representative available to testify in legal actions against their former business allies, if necessary.

“I want to see all the actors that are actually part of this scheme brought to justice, in a way,” said Coughlin, who now lives in Florida.

“I don’t necessarily believe the tribe is the orchestrator of this whole mess. I think they’re a pawn, unfortunately.”

To do the best, most comprehensive reporting on this opaque industry, we want to hear from more of the people who know it best. Do you work for a tribal lending operation, either on a reservation or for an outside business partner? Do you belong to a tribe that participates in this lending or one that has rejected the industry? Are you a regulator or lawyer dealing with these issues? Have you borrowed from a tribal lender? All perspectives matter to us. Please get in touch with Megan O’Matz at megan.omatz@propublica.org or 954-873-7576, or Joel Jacobs at joel.jacobs@propublica.org or 917-512-0297. Visit propublica.org/tips for information on secure communication channels.

Mariam Elba contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Megan O’Matz and Joel Jacobs.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

The Dane County Sheriff’s Office in Wisconsin has agreed to make a series of reforms meant to ensure that residents who speak little or no English can get the services they need.

The agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice resolves a civil rights inquiry that followed ProPublica reporting last year on how the sheriff’s office had mistakenly blamed an immigrant worker for his son’s 2019 death on a dairy farm. The reporting revealed that a language barrier between the worker and a sheriff’s deputy had led to the misunderstanding.

Under the Civil Rights Act, agencies that receive federal funding, such as the sheriff’s office in Dane County, cannot discriminate against people because of their country of origin or ability to speak English. The Justice Department said that there was no finding of discrimination against the sheriff’s office and that it “fully cooperated” with the inquiry.

As part of the agreement, which was signed over the past week, Dane County says it will finalize a language access policy that includes staff training, quality controls and outreach initiatives, and will undergo a period of departmental monitoring. The new policy — which has been in progress for months — will set standards on when deputies can use children, bystanders and tools such as Google Translate to communicate with non-English speakers. It also creates a process to ensure that, after an emergency situation is over, deputies can confirm the accuracy of information that was gathered via unqualified interpreters.

José María Rodríguez Uriarte, the father of the dead boy, said he was relieved to learn of the agreement.

“I think this will really put pressure on police to obtain clearer translations when they can’t understand a person,” he told ProPublica in Spanish. “A lot of us get into a panic when we’re pulled over by the police or when something happens because of the language issue; we don’t know if officers are truly there to help us or, on the contrary, to harm us. So this is a good thing.”

ProPublica’s reporting had found that a different worker had accidentally killed Rodríguez’s son, a precocious 8-year-old named Jefferson. That worker told ProPublica that it was his first day on the job and that he’d received little training before operating a skid steer, a large piece of equipment used on the farm to scrape up cow manure; he said he wasn’t aware the boy was behind him when he put the machine in reverse.

Deputies never interviewed the man, who like the boy’s father was a recent immigrant from Nicaragua and didn’t speak English. A deputy on the scene who considered herself proficient in Spanish interviewed Rodríguez, but she made a grammatical mistake that led her to misunderstand his account of what actually happened.

In a statement, Dane County Sheriff Kalvin Barrett said his office is committed to equality and inclusion. “By proactively addressing language barriers, we are fostering a more connected community where everyone can fully participate,” he said. Last week, the department posted a page on its website about its efforts to improve language access and included the material in six languages, including English, Spanish and Hmong.

The agreement is part of a Justice Department initiative intended to help law enforcement agencies overcome language barriers to better serve communities and keep officers safe.

“To serve and protect all communities in the United States, our state and local law enforcement agencies must be able to communicate effectively with crime victims, witnesses, and other members of the public who do not speak fluent English,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement.

The story of what happened to Jefferson brought unprecedented attention to the plight of the mostly undocumented immigrant workers who milk cows and shovel manure in America’s Dairyland. Local and state officials began calling for reforms. In the months after ProPublica’s investigation was published, county officials allocated $8 million to create new housing for farmworkers and established a countywide coordinator position to help all departments implement language access plans and engage community members with limited English proficiency. Jefferson’s parents also reached a settlement with the farm where he died and its insurance company, neither of which admitted wrongdoing. The case had been scheduled for trial but was resolved weeks after the story was published.

Since his son’s death, Rodríguez has been working on another dairy farm in the area. He said he hopes to return to Nicaragua in December to be reunited with his remaining son, Jefferson’s younger brother, Yefari. The boy is now one year older than Jefferson was when he died.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Melissa Sanchez and Maryam Jameel.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

In bankruptcy filings and consumer complaints, thousands of people across the country make pleas for relief from high-interest loans with punishing annual rates that often exceed 600%.

Although they borrowed small sums online from a slew of businesses with catchy names — such as Loan at Last or Sky Trail Cash — their loans stemmed from the same massive operation owned by a small Native American tribe in a remote part of Wisconsin.

Over the past decade, the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians has grown to become a prominent player in the tribal lending industry, generating far-reaching impact and leaving a legacy of economic despair. A ProPublica analysis found companies owned by the LDF tribe showed up as a creditor in roughly 1 out of every 100 bankruptcy cases sampled nationwide.

That’s the highest frequency associated with any of the tribes doing business in this sector of the payday loan industry. And it translates to an estimated 4,800 bankruptcy cases, on average, per year.

ProPublica also found that LDF’s various companies have racked up more than 2,200 consumer complaints that were routed to the Federal Trade Commission since 2019 — more than any other tribe in recent years.

“THIS IS THE TEXTBOOK DEFINITION ON LOANSHARKING,” one Californian with an LDF loan complained in all caps in June 2023 to federal regulators. The person, whose name is redacted, argued that “no one should be expected to pay over $11,000 for a $1,200 loan,” calling the 790% rate “beyond predatory.”

In a separate complaint, a Massachusetts customer wrote, “I thought this kind of predatory lending was against the law.”

Such confusion is understandable. Loans like these are illegal under most state statutes. But tribal-related businesses, including LDF, claim that their sovereign rights exempt them from state usury laws and licensing requirements aimed at protecting consumers. And so these businesses operate widely, facing little pushback from regulators and relying on the small print in their loan agreements.

As LDF climbed in the industry, it kept a low profile, garnering little publicity. For years it operated from a call center above a smoke shop in the community’s small downtown, before moving to a sprawling vocational training building, built in part with federal money, off a less visible, two-lane road.

But staying under the radar just got harder. Court filings show that LDF tribal leaders and some of their nontribal business partners have come to an agreement with consumers in a 2020 federal class-action lawsuit filed in Virginia. Nearly 1 million borrowers could finally get relief.

The deal calls for the cancellation of $1.4 billion in outstanding loans. Tribal officials and their associates would also pay $37.4 million to consumers and the lawyers who brought the suit. Although they settled, LDF leaders have denied wrongdoing in the case, and its president told ProPublica it adheres to high industry standards in its lending operations.

A final resolution of the case will take months. If approved, the total settlement would be the largest ever secured against participants in the tribal lending industry, lawyers told the court.

“This is a big one,” said Irv Ackelsberg, a Philadelphia attorney who has faced off in court against other tribal lenders and followed this suit closely. “Is it going to stop tribal lending? Probably not because it’s just a fraction of what’s out there.”

The LDF tribe is central to the suit but is not named. Nor is LDF Holdings, the corporate umbrella over the various lending subsidiaries.

Knowing that both those entities likely would have been entitled to sovereign immunity, lawyers for the borrowers chose a different approach. Instead, they brought the case against members of the tribe’s governing council; high-level employees of LDF’s lending operations; and a nontribal business partner, Skytrail Servicing Group, and its owner, William Cheney Pruett.

Pruett also denied wrongdoing in the case. He did not respond to requests for comment from ProPublica.

The proposed settlement notes that the tribal leaders and their partners understood that continuing to defend the case “would require them to expend significant time and money.” LDF, under the settlement, can continue its loan operations.

In emails to ProPublica, LDF President John Johnson Sr. defended the tribe’s lending business as legal and beneficial to both borrowers and the tribal members. He said the loans help people “without access to traditional financial services,” such as those with bad credit histories and people facing financial crises. Many borrowers, he said, have had positive experiences.

He also emphasized the economic benefits to the tribe, including jobs and revenue for vital services. “Please make no mistake: the programs and infrastructure developed through LDF Holdings’ revenue contributions have saved lives in our community and are helping preserve our culture and way of life,” he wrote in an email.

Johnson, who is a named defendant in the suit, and other tribal leaders declined requests to be interviewed.

Historically, some financial services firms formed alliances with tribes, gaining an advantage from the tribes’ sovereign immunity. For years, consumer lawyers and even federal prosecutors have raised questions about whether some tribal lending operations were just fronts for outsiders that received most of the profits and conducted all the key operations — from running call centers to underwriting and collecting.

The LDF tribe is one of only a few dozen of the nation’s 574 federally recognized tribes that have turned to the lending business as an economic lifeline. Typically those tribes are in isolated areas far from large population centers needed to support major industries or hugely profitable casinos. Online lending, or e-commerce, opened opportunities.

“If you look at the tribes who do it, they tend to be rural and they tend to be poor,” said Lance Morgan, CEO of a tribal economic development corporation owned by the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska. “Because they don’t really have any other options to pursue from an economic development standpoint. They just don’t. That’s why this appeals to some tribes.”

He said his tribe considered getting into the lending industry but decided against it.

Tribes in the U.S. still suffer from the legacy of racism and betrayal that saw the U.S. government steal land from Native Americans and destroy cultures. Now, with limited economic resources and taxing options, tribal governments draw upon federal grants and subsidies to help fund essential community services — support promised in long-ago treaties, laws and policies in exchange for land. But these programs have proven to be “chronically underfunded and sometimes inefficiently structured,” according to a 2018 report from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

On the LDF reservation, which is home to about 3,600 people, the median household income is under $52,000, and 20% of the population lives below the federal poverty line, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. On lands that are chock-full of lakes, streams and wetlands, the LDF people operate a fish hatchery, hunt deer and cultivate wild rice. The tribe also has a casino, hotel and convention center.

LDF entered the loan business in 2012 and has set up at least two dozen lending companies and websites on its way to massive expansion, a ProPublica examination found. LDF owns the companies and works with outside firms to operate its businesses, which offer short-term installment loans.

Unlike traditional payday loans, these are not due by the next pay period but have longer terms. Borrowers show proof of income and typically authorize the company to make automatic withdrawals from their bank accounts.

To do the best, most comprehensive reporting on this opaque industry, we want to hear from more of the people who know it best. Do you work for a tribal lending operation, either on a reservation or for an outside business partner? Do you belong to a tribe that participates in this lending, or one that has rejected the industry? Are you a regulator or lawyer dealing with these issues? Have you borrowed from a tribal lender? All perspectives matter to us. Please get in touch with Megan O’Matz at megan.omatz@propublica.org or 954-873-7576, or Joel Jacobs at joel.jacobs@propublica.org or 917-512-0297. Visit propublica.org/tips for information on secure communication channels.

Details of the tribe’s business operations are not public. A July 2014 tribal newsletter reported that LDF had three lending companies employing four tribal members. By 2022, an LDF attorney told the Virginia judge that LDF Holdings, the lending parent company, employed about 50 people on the reservation. Johnson told ProPublica it currently employs 170 people “who live on or near the reservation,” of which 70% are tribally enrolled.

Each year, on reservation land, LDF now hosts the Tribal Lending Summit, a gathering of staff, vendors and prospective partners. Attendee lists posted online show dozens of representatives of software companies, call centers, marketing firms, customer acquisition businesses and debt collection agencies.

After this year’s event, in June, the LDF business hosts posted a congratulation message on social media: ”Here’s to another year of growth, learning, and collaboration! We look forward to continuing this journey together and seeing you all at next year’s summit."

Like many operators in this corner of the lending industry, LDF has been forced to defend its business practices in court. It has been subject to at least 40 civil suits filed by consumers since 2019, ProPublica found.

The suits typically allege violations of state usury laws and federal racketeering or fair credit reporting statutes. Johnson, in his statements to ProPublica, said LDF follows tribal and federal regulations, and he cited LDF’s sovereign status as the primary reason state laws on lending don’t apply to its business practices.

“Expecting a Tribe to opine on and/or submit to State regulatory oversight is akin to expecting Canada to submit to or speak on the laws of France,” he wrote.

Most suits against LDF’s lending companies settle quickly with the terms kept confidential. Consumers can be at a disadvantage because of the arbitration agreements in the fine print of their loan contracts, which attempt to restrict their ability to sue.

Karen Brostek, a registered nurse in Florida, borrowed $550 in 2017 from LDF’s Loan at Last at an annual percentage rate of 682%. The contract required her to pay back $2,783 over nine months.

The agreement with LDF required her to pay $2,233 in finance charges on a $550 loan.

It wasn’t her first foray into short-term borrowing. She said her salary did not cover her expenses and she had “to borrow from Peter to pay Paul.”

Loan at Last tried numerous times to collect the debt, even threatening in one phone call to have her jailed, she said. Finally, in August 2019, she satisfied the obligation.

Brostek sued LDF Holdings in small claims court in Pasco County in 2021. The suit cited Florida laws that make it a third-degree felony to issue loans with APRs over 45%.

The parties settled within weeks. Brostek recalls receiving about $750. LDF’s Johnson did not comment on Brostek’s case in his response to ProPublica.

She said she does not begrudge the tribe making money but said, “We need to find another way to help them so they don’t feel they’re backed into a corner and this is their only alternative.”

The Virginia class-action suit claimed that LDF’s governing council delegated the daily operations of the lending businesses “to non-tribal members.” Mirroring allegations in other civil actions, the suit claims that LDF’s partnerships were exploiting sovereign immunity to make loans that otherwise would be illegal.

According to the plaintiffs, LDF Holdings entered into agreements that allow nontribal outsiders to handle and control most aspects of the lending businesses. That includes “marketing, underwriting, risk assessment, compliance, accounting, lead generation, collections, and website management for the businesses,” the suit said. For years, the president of LDF Holdings was a woman who lived in Tampa, Florida. She is a named defendant in the suit, which says she is not a member of the tribe.

Johnson told ProPublica that early on the tribe lacked expertise in the industry and that its partnerships were simply an example of outsourcing, “a standard practice in many American business sectors.”

His statement added, “Recruiting outside talent and capital to Indian country is a mission-critical skill in Tribal economic development.”

The amount of revenue that comes to the tribe is undisclosed, but the class-action suit says the contract with one of its partners, Skytrail Servicing, resulted in only “a nominal flat fee” for LDF.

The 2014 servicing agreement between Skytrail Servicing and LDF is sealed in the court record, and details about the arrangement are largely redacted. In one filing, Skytrail Servicing denies an allegation from the plaintiffs that the tribe received only $3.50 per originated loan.

In a separate filing in the suit, Johnson, the tribal president, said LDF’s lending profits are distributed to the tribe’s general fund, which helps pay for the tribal government, including essential services such as police, education and health care.

The legal strategy crafted by the Virginia consumer protection firm Kelly Guzzo PLC relied heavily on a 2021 federal appeals court decision that concluded that tribal lending was off-reservation conduct to which state law applied. The court found that while a tribe itself cannot be sued for its commercial activities, its members and officers can be.

The class-action suit alleges that tribal officials and their associates conspired to violate state lending laws, collecting millions of dollars in unlawful debts. “In sum, we allege that they are the upper level management of a purely unlawful business that makes illegal loans in Virginia, Georgia, and elsewhere throughout the country,” lawyer Andrew Guzzo said in a September 2022 hearing, referring to LDF officials.

“What I’m trying to say, in other words, is this isn’t a case that involves a lawful business, such as a real estate brokerage firm, that happens to have a secret side scheme involving a few rogue employees,” he said. “The people that are overseeing this are overseeing a business that makes unlawful loans and nothing else.”

The most consequential aspect of the settlement plan is the debt relief it would offer an estimated 980,000 people who were LDF customers over seven years — from July 24, 2016, through Oct. 1, 2023. Those who had obtained loans during that period and still owed money would not be subject to any further collection efforts, canceling an estimated $1.4 billion in outstanding debt.

Eligibility for cash awards is dependent on the state where borrowers live and how much they paid in interest. Nevada and Utah have no interest rate restrictions, so borrowers there aren’t entitled to any money back.

The tribal officials who are listed as defendants have agreed to pay $2 million of the $37.4 million cash settlement. The remaining amount would come from nontribal partners involved in five of the tribe’s lending subsidiaries.

That includes $6.5 million from Skytrail Servicing Group and Pruett, a Texas businessman who has been involved in the payday loan industry for more than two decades.

The largest portion of the settlement — $20 million — would come from unnamed “non-tribal individuals and entities” involved with LDF’s Loan at Last, the company that gave Brostek her loan.

The consumer attorneys are not done. They noted in a memorandum in the case that other LDF affiliates who did not settle in this instance “will be sued in a new case.”

Because tribal lenders are not licensed by states, there is very little public information about the size of the industry.

Bankruptcies give a rare window into the prevalence of the industry because when people file for bankruptcy, they must list all the creditors they owe money to. Bankruptcies are filed in federal court and are tracked in PACER, the federal courts’ electronic records system. But PACER charges a fee for every document viewed and cannot be comprehensively searched by creditor list, making it impractical to identify every bankruptcy case with a tribal lender.

Instead, we selected a random sample of 10,000 bankruptcy cases using the Federal Judicial Center’s bankruptcy database, which lists every case filed nationwide (but does not include creditor information). We looked at Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 cases — the types used by individuals — filed from October 2020 to September 2023. We then scraped the creditor list for each of these cases from PACER and identified which cases involved tribal lenders.

We ultimately identified 119 cases with LDF companies as creditors — 1.19% of our total sample, the most of any tribe. Extrapolating these figures across all 1.2 million Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 bankruptcy cases during these three years gave an estimated 15,000 cases involving LDF loans during this period (with a 95% confidence interval of +/- 2,600). That comes out to an estimated 4,800 cases per year, on average. Many factors can contribute to bankruptcy, and LDF loans were not the only debts these bankruptcy filers faced. Still, these figures showed that LDF stood out among other tribal lenders and had a substantial presence across bankruptcies nationwide.

We also looked at consumer complaint data that we acquired through public records requests to the Federal Trade Commission, which collects complaints made to various sources including the Better Business Bureau, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the FTC itself. We focused our requests on several categories we found to be related to lending products, such as payday loans and finance company lending. Our tallies are likely an undercount: Complaints against tribal lenders may have fallen under other categories, such as debt collection, though our explorations found this to be less common. We found more than 2,200 complaints about LDF companies since 2019, the most of any tribal lending operation.

We compiled hundreds of tribal lending company and website names that we used to search through the creditor and complaint data. However, due to the ever-shifting industry landscape in which websites often go offline while new ones pop up, it is possible that we did not identify every complaint and bankruptcy involving tribal lenders.

Mariam Elba contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Megan O’Matz and Joel Jacobs.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Wisconsin Watch. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

In the fall of 2022, Phoebe Petrovic, an investigative reporter at Wisconsin Watch and a member of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network, noticed a pastor and his church appearing in local news coverage for their anti-LGBTQ+ protests. Looking closer revealed Pastor Matthew Trewhella’s startling history. And digging even deeper, she noticed an untold story: his broader influence on modern Republican politics. His rise helps illustrate the growing power of the Christian right in the Republican party. Here, Petrovic describes how she reported the story and what she learned.

• A few decades ago, Trewhella was known as a militant anti-abortion activist. Today, he’s got a different reputation: thought leader on the far right, increasingly welcomed by Republicans.
• Trewhella helped to rehabilitate his reputation through his 2013 self-published book, “The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates,” which uses a 16th-century Protestant doctrine to argue that government officials have a God-given right and duty to defy laws, policies or court opinions deemed “unjust or immoral” under “the law of God.”
• He’s preached this doctrine to county Republican parties and local groups across the country, even to the National Sheriffs’ Association, a preeminent law enforcement organization.
• His book has influenced Second Amendment sanctuary resolutions. At least 10 measures across the country refer to lesser magistrates. One of the earliest, issued in 2019, was authored by a county commissioner who has described reading Trewhella’s book as a “turning point” for him.
• A prominent booster of debunked election conspiracy claims is using Trewhella’s book to disrupt future elections.

• In the cast of characters who might influence the upcoming election, Trewhella is not rallying crowds the same way as Steve Bannon, the former Donald Trump strategist, or Charlie Kirk, the founder of the conservative student group Turning Point USA. Trewhella is more behind the scenes, providing a religious justification for some far-right policies and causes.
• Trewhella says that he promotes nonviolence. But after an activist killed an abortion provider in 1993, he signed a document describing the murder of these doctors as “justifiable.”
• In a brief interview, I asked Trewhella about his reputational shift over the decades. He responded: “Most people will always only care about three things in life: me, myself and I. … It’s only because of their mundane, self-absorbed lives that they would think someone like me is an extremist. That’s my answer.”
• Trewhella did not respond to over a dozen attempts to set up a second interview. He did not answer written questions by email and refused a certified letter containing them.

• Frederick Clarkson, a senior research analyst at Political Research Associates, which studies threats to democracy and human rights, has tracked Trewhella for decades. Clarkson said, “All of those county commissioners and mayors and whatnot who are entertaining this stuff, they’re putting people’s lives and the entirety of civil order at risk by playing footsie with Matt Trewhella.”
• Another extremism researcher, Devin Burghart, said, “I think that the public needs to know that he’s a dangerous theocrat, who would fundamentally alter the United States in irreparable ways that would harm many, including women, people of color and the LGBTQ community.” Burghart is president of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, which tracks the far right.

• Trewhella has given sermons about violence, saying that pacifism is “heresy” and that “violence is a tool.” After the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, he gave a sermon titled “A Gathering of Patriots” in which he said, “Tyrants must be confronted with force or violence at times because that is the only way to defeat them and to cause their harm and their injustice to others to stop.”
• Timothy Bachleitner, a member of Trewhella’s church, is the chair of the Republican Party of Fond du Lac County. Reached by phone, Bachleitner said he received Trewhella’s blessing before seeking the position and that he has brought the doctrine of the lesser magistrates into his role.
• Trewhella is focused on counties. He organized a conference called “County before Country” with the goal of “expanding God’s Kingdom through Christian localism.”

Some Republican operatives in Wisconsin questioned why we were doing this story. They said Trewhella was old news from the ’90s. That’s not what our reporting showed. We found him cited by county commissioners, state lawmakers and former Trump administration officials, all in the past several years. In my home state of Wisconsin, the Republican Party of Waukesha County, the heart of the state’s Republican politics, has invited Trewhella to speak twice and promotes his teachings and book on its website, although its leaders downplayed the link when asked for comment.

“I just can’t imagine that they’d support this person,” said Bill Kruziki, a Republican former sheriff in Waukesha County, Wisconsin. “You can quote me on this: I think it’s a shame they do that.”

The reporting process itself was one of the most interesting I’ve had. One of my first steps entailed sending records requests to local officials who served in areas where Trewhella had given presentations. Within days, Trewhella had obtained a copy of the request and shared it on his social media profile and email newsletter, writing, “The wicked are trembling!”

And in the final stages of the reporting, I requested an interview with Republican Oklahoma state Sen. Dusty Deevers, who cited Trewhella when defending his calls to ignore federal law that violated “God’s word.” An aide denied my request and included in his email “a brief gospel exhortation,” urging me and my readers “to turn from sin, run to Christ, trust Him, and enjoy fellowship with him forever.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Phoebe Petrovic, Wisconsin Watch.

Activists and community members in Milwaukee gathered in the streets Tuesday to condemn the police killing of 43-year-old Milwaukee resident Samuel Sharpe. The officers who killed Sharpe, an unhoused Black veteran, are from Ohio, part of a group of 4,500 law enforcement officials in Milwaukee for the Republican National Convention. But the shooting took place a mile from the RNC’s proceedings. Sharpe appeared to be in the middle of an altercation with another man when the police officers charged toward him before fatally shooting him. Journalist Bob Hennelly, who is in Milwaukee to cover the convention, says the shooting is what happens “when you militarize your politics.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin, holds significance for today’s Republican Party, not only as the site of the 2024 Republican National Convention, but also as a bellwether for American conservatism, argues Dan Kaufman, author of The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics. Kaufman shares Wisconsin’s history of progressive state politics, and how that progressivism was overtaken and eroded by Republican governance, particularly under former Governor Scott Walker, who dismantled organized labor’s power in the state. “Walker himself boasted that, 'If we can do it here, we can do it anywhere,'” explains Kaufman. “So, in terms of becoming a national laboratory, [Wisconsin] became an important symbol for the transformation of Republican politics.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

• Biden campaigns in Wisconsin, defiantly vows to stay in the race and win.
• New British Prime Minister Keir Starmer takes over Number 10 after his Labour Party sweep to victory in general election.
• Trump lawyers ask federal judge for pause in his Florida document mishandling case.
• New jobs numbers show employment growth continued in June, though down slightly over May.
• Hurricane Beryl hits Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula knocking out power, before heading back out to the Gulf.

The post The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – July 5, 2024 Biden campaigns in Wisconsin, defiantly vows to stay in the race and win. appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

Lea o escuche la versión en español.

This guide will be released in Spanish in several formats to make this information more widely accessible. If you want to receive printed booklets that you or your organization can share with dairy workers in Wisconsin, or if you want to be notified when we post related videos on TikTok and YouTube, sign up here.

We are reporters at ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative news organization. Over the past two years, we have reported on the lives of dairy workers in Wisconsin and the dangers they face on the job.

Dairy workers are excluded from many state and federal legal protections that help other workers. As a result, if they are injured on the job, they often face obstacles to getting medical care or the time needed to recover.

Many dairy workers have seen relatives or co-workers lose their jobs and get kicked out of farm housing after an injury. Others have ended up with disfigured bodies and massive medical debt.

Many are undocumented. They worry about being deported if they speak up about an injury.

We heard these concerns repeatedly in our interviews with more than 100 immigrant workers. We know people often feel hopeless.

But while there are real challenges, our reporting has shown us that for some workers, there can be a path toward getting treatment after an injury. Here is some of what we found:

• Workers who are injured on larger farms have more protections. This is because of an insurance system called workers’ compensation. You can benefit even if you are undocumented.
• The workers’ compensation system is complex and difficult to navigate. Employers sometimes discourage workers from filing claims. Getting a lawyer can be critical, especially if you have a permanent disability.
• Workers who are injured on smaller farms usually can’t access workers’ compensation. The only way to compel an employer to cover medical costs is to file a lawsuit. These lawsuits can be extremely difficult to win. Because of that, attorneys may not want to take your case.
• You may be able to access free or low-cost medical care. Ask about hospital charity, free clinics and a Wisconsin insurance plan called BadgerCare Plus.

Few of the workers we’ve interviewed understood their rights after an injury. This guide is our attempt to explain your options, as limited as they are. We also want to answer questions that many workers have asked based on situations they’ve found themselves in. It is based on conversations with workers, attorneys, health care providers, community advocates, interpreters, researchers and farmers. It covers what you can do before you get to a farm, how to navigate the workers’ compensation system, and your options if you get injured on a farm that doesn’t have workers’ compensation.

The guide is especially focused on the workers’ compensation system because it is one of the few areas where injured dairy workers have a right to medical care. We know this system has limitations and isn’t available to everybody. However many workers have found it to be useful, particularly if they get help from an attorney.

This guide does not provide legal or medical advice. We strongly encourage you to talk to a lawyer or a doctor about your situation. We’ll point you to some resources in the last section.

We welcome your thoughts and questions. Please feel free to write us an email or call us by phone or WhatsApp. Thank you.

Maryam Jameel: Maryam.Jameel@propublica.org or 630-885-6883

Melissa Sanchez: Melissa.Sanchez@propublica.org or 872-444-0011

Farming in general has one of the highest fatality rates of industries in the U.S. Almost every year in Wisconsin, dairy farmers or their employees die on the job, crushed under tractors or drowned in manure lagoons or trampled by cows.

Injuries are even more common. But they are not always reported. That makes it impossible to accurately compare the dangers on dairy farms with other types of jobs. In our reporting, however, most workers told us they had been injured on the job. “If you haven’t been injured,” one former worker said, “then you haven’t really worked on a farm.” Cows can be unpredictable; workers told us they’d been kicked, stepped on and smashed against barn walls by the 1,500-pound animals.

We have spoken to several workers who lost fingers inside of machinery, a man whose legs were crushed by heavy metal gates and a woman who got trampled and thrown over a fence by a bull. Other workers have chronic pain from the repetitive motions of attaching tubes to cow teats hundreds of times a day.

In the winter, temperatures in Wisconsin can drop below zero, with high winds, snow and ice. Many workers have suffered serious injuries after they slipped on ice-covered concrete floors. Others have suffered frostbite.

Medical and public health officials said some workers develop infections and other issues from their exposure to animal feces and other harmful substances common on farms.

No government agency rates dairy farms on safety. In fact, even when workers die or are injured, dairy farms are not always inspected.

There is no guarantee that you will be safe on any farm. But farms can take steps to protect their workers and make sure they receive the medical treatment they need after an injury. One of the best ways to learn about safety issues on a farm is by talking to current or former employees.

Some questions you can ask:

• What kind of training do workers get when they are hired?

• Did you feel that the training was enough to help you do your job safely?

• What is the pace of work? Are there enough workers to do the job?

• Can cows easily kick you as you milk them?

• Can you describe a recent injury that happened to you or a coworker and how the supervisor responded? Did that worker get medical care or time off to heal?

• Do you know whether the farm has workers’ compensation insurance?

• How do the supervisors treat you? Do they speak to you respectfully?

We have also found that local Latino grocery stores can be good places to learn more about specific farms. Workers cash their checks at these businesses and often share information about work conditions with the clerks and owners. Ask them about a farm’s reputation and if there is anything they think you should know.

One sign that a farm may be a good place to work is if workers stay there for a long time.

The answer depends on how many workers the farm employs.

In general, if the farm has six or more employees, it should have a type of insurance called workers’ compensation that is supposed to cover these costs. Workers’ compensation is different from medical insurance. (If you are counting how many workers a farm has, don’t count the farm owners and their close relatives who work on the farm.)

If a farm has fewer than six employees, it does not have to have workers’ compensation under state rules. Workers who are hurt at these farms have only one legal avenue to get help paying for medical care. They may be able to file a lawsuit. (See the “Resources other than workers’ compensation” section for more information.)

You can ask your employer or look it up yourself online. If the farm has workers’ compensation insurance, it should be listed here: https://www.wcrb.org/coverage-lookup/. But the site, run by the Wisconsin Compensation Rating Bureau, is only available in English.

You’ll need to know the farm’s name or its address to do a search. If you don’t find the farm listed, you can email the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development, which oversees the workers’ compensation system, at WCINS@dwd.wisconsin.gov, or call 608-266-3046. If you speak Spanish, you can ask for an interpreter.

You may know a farm by a nickname. To find out a farm’s official name, look at the upper left-hand corner of your paycheck, above the address. Or you can check the main entrance, where many farms have signs with their name.

State officials and lawyers say you should tell your employer right away that you got hurt and get the medical treatment you need. The Department of Workforce Development said any delays may hurt your workers’ compensation case.

Gabriel Manzano Nieves, a workers’ compensation attorney in Madison, said many people he works with don’t want to report what seems like a minor injury. He said he’s had clients who thought at first that they had a sore shoulder or a sprain. Weeks later a doctor told them that they had a permanent injury. He added: “Later their employer might say, ‘How do I know this didn’t happen at home?’ Reporting time is really important for proving it happened at work.”

1. After you report your injury, your employer is supposed to file a claim with their insurance company within seven days. (Your employer can be fined if they delay filing a claim on purpose.) Your medical provider — usually that’s your doctor — can also file a claim for you.
2. Then the insurer is supposed to report this information to the state.
3. Once the claim is filed, the insurer will usually send you a letter or call and ask for your permission to get your medical records related to the injury.
4. The insurer will look at your records to decide whether to accept the claim and pay the medical costs. The company may also send you to an independent doctor or nurse who may make a different decision about your injury and treatment.
5. You may be entitled to some of your pay if you need days off work to recover from your injury. You should get a check from your employer’s insurance carrier, usually 14 days after your injury or illness, though lawyers say it can take longer.

Explain how you got injured and that it happened at work. Otherwise you may not get workers’ compensation. State officials recommend that you say this before you get treated. Give the name of the farm and the workers’ compensation insurer, if you know it, so that the hospital or doctor’s office can bill the insurer. Attorneys suggested that if you get any medical bills, you send them to the insurer.

Be open and detailed about your pain so your doctor can accurately assess your health. We know some workers sometimes don’t tell their doctors everything because they are embarrassed, they want to seem strong, they fear the cost of treatment, or for other reasons. Many other workers say their employers have told them not to tell the hospital that their injury was work-related in order to avoid filing a workers’ compensation claim. In some cases, employers promise to pay the medical bills out of pocket.

You have the right to choose your own doctor and to be alone with them during your visits; that means your employer does not have a right to be in the room if you do not want them there. Several attorneys said you can also ask your doctor if they would recommend any restrictions on how or how much you work, such as limiting how much weight you carry or how many hours a day you work.

The Department of Workforce Development encourages workers to try to return to work anyway. “You will be in a stronger position to obtain additional benefits if you attempted to return than if you refused an offer of work,” state officials said. But if you have work restrictions, tell your employer you are willing to work within them, attorneys said. And if you feel any pain, tell your supervisor. Your employer should report it to their insurance company. Also, see a doctor to reassess your health, attorneys said.

No. In Wisconsin, your immigration status does not affect your eligibility. Nearly every part of the Wisconsin Workers’ Compensation Act applies to workers regardless of their immigration status.

“Whether you’re in the country legally or not, it’s not relevant,” said Douglas Phebus, an employment attorney who has represented dozens of dairy workers in Wisconsin.

However, he said workers have told him their bosses threatened to get them deported after they asked about workers’ compensation. “That’s ridiculous but it’s scary,” Phebus said.

Deporting undocumented immigrants who are not a threat to national security or public safety is not a priority for the Biden administration, according to official guidance.

The state’s Department of Workforce Development said it does not share information with federal immigration authorities.

Many undocumented immigrants work under fake names and Social Security numbers. Martha Burke, a workers’ compensation attorney, said that when she fills out workers’ compensation paperwork, she often includes both names that workers use. State officials said workers don’t have to provide a Social Security number.

If you need less than three days to recover, you won’t be paid for that time off of work. State law only allows payment to start on the fourth day off from work. You could get paid two-thirds of your wages.

At this stage — as medical bills may be piling up — many workers and advocates suggest talking to an attorney.

You can also call the Department of Workforce Development’s workers’ compensation division to discuss problems with a claim. (See the resources page at the end of this guide to find this contact information.) You can ask state officials to review your claim and try to resolve your dispute with the insurance company, or ask for a formal hearing. The vast majority of workers who ask for hearings have attorneys, state officials said.

You may qualify for other benefits. How much depends in part on how much a doctor thinks your injury will affect your ability to work and earn money in the future.

Doctors might not try to determine if your injury is permanent or note that in your file unless you ask them to. You have to be your own advocate, said Marisol González Castillo, a personal injury attorney who used to specialize in workers’ compensation.

To get permanent disability benefits, you may need help from an attorney. We spoke to two workers whose fingers were amputated in farm accidents. Both got their initial medical bills paid but didn’t get any permanent disability compensation. Years later, each of them wondered if they should have looked for an attorney to help them make a claim.

State law gives workers six years after their injury or most recent workers’ compensation payment to file for permanent disability benefits. (If your injury happened before March 2, 2016, you have 12 years after the date of injury to file a claim.)

The dead worker’s dependents, usually their spouse or children, may be able to qualify for death benefits and burial expenses from the workers’ compensation insurer. Employers are supposed to report deaths to the state within one day.

You can file a claim to request benefits through the state’s Uninsured Employers Fund (UEF). You must call (608) 266-3046 to ask for an application. There is an option for Spanish speakers. You will be asked to give them certain documentation, such as copies of check stubs and medical records.

Some attorneys said you may want to collect information to help the state confirm the actual number of workers on the farm; this could include the names of your coworkers or copies of work schedules.

Thousands of farm workers are excluded from the state’s workers’ compensation system because the farms where they work are too small to be required to have insurance. In addition, many workers who get injured on large farms told us their employers refused to file a claim for them. The workers said they didn’t get medical care because they were afraid their employer would retaliate against them.

Given this reality, we wanted to explain what your options are, even though there aren’t very many, and point you to resources that could help you.

You are not automatically entitled to get help from your employer. This means you could end up with thousands of dollars in medical bills. Hospitals can sue you over unpaid medical debt, which could lead to a court-ordered garnishment of your wages. Garnishment is when money is automatically taken out of your paycheck to pay down your debt.

We know of several farmers who have paid out of pocket for their workers’ medical costs. So you should ask for help, several workers and attorneys said. But the only legal avenue to get your employer to pay your medical bills is to file a personal injury lawsuit.

Given their limited protections, workers who get injured on small farms are in a difficult situation, said Matthew Keifer, a doctor who specializes in occupational safety and is the former director of the National Farm Medicine Center. He said workers should think about finding a job on a larger farm where they would have workers’ compensation. “I know a lot of small farmers who are just wonderful people and would bend over backwards for their employees,” he said. “But there’s a lot that are not.”

These are lawsuits against the employer that ask for money for an injury that a worker thinks was the employers’ fault. Workers can also ask for more money for their pain and suffering.

But unlike in workers’ compensation cases, you have to prove that your employer was to blame for your injury. For example, you may have to show that your employer knew about a workplace hazard but did not fix it.

It can be hard to prove that someone was negligent, said Phebus, the employment attorney. He said he turns away about two-thirds of the dairy workers who call his office asking about personal injury lawsuits.

“People come to see us and they got hurt, but it wasn’t any particular act of negligence,” he said. “It’s just that farming is very dangerous.”

One worker who was injured by a bull on a small farm said she spoke to several attorneys before she found one who took her case.

Brian Laule, a personal injury attorney in River Falls, agreed that these cases can be difficult. But he said workers should not feel hopeless. Instead he encouraged workers to do their research and call several attorneys. “Run the situation by them,” he said. “You can reach out to attorneys for free and find out if you have any recourse.”

You may have to pay your own medical bills. Here are some programs that may help you:

• Charity care: Many hospitals offer charity care programs that cover some or all medical bills for uninsured, low-income patients. You will likely need to fill out an application and share information about your income to find out if you qualify. Ask hospital staff if this is an option.
• Payment plans: Several medical professionals and attorneys also recommended that workers ask about payment plans to avoid having their bills sent to collections. (This is when debt collectors try to make you pay and sometimes charge fees or interest that can make your debt bigger.) Many hospitals have “patient navigators” on staff who can help you apply for charity care or get on a payment plan.
• BadgerCare Plus: This is a state public health insurance program for low-income residents. Undocumented immigrants who have children can get coverage in medical emergencies. (You can also qualify if you are pregnant.) You can call your local health agency to find out if you qualify. Visit this page and click on your county to find the phone number. If you speak Spanish, you can ask for an interpreter.
• Free and low-cost clinics: We also know many workers have long-term pain from repetitive motion injuries, which is damage caused by doing the same actions, such as milking cows, over and over. You may be able to get medical care for these and other nonemergency injuries from “safety net” clinics for free or at a low cost. Wisconsin’s Department of Health Services maintains a page with the names, addresses and phone numbers of these clinics across the state. These facilities are not where you should go if you have serious or life-threatening injuries.
• Urgent care clinics: Hospital emergency room visits can be extremely expensive, warned Aida Bise, the director of migrant and seasonal agricultural worker services for Family Health La Clinica, a community health clinic in Wautoma. For minor injuries, Bise says that workers should think about going to an urgent care clinic. “These are way cheaper,” she said.

One worker whose shoulder was injured when a cow slammed him against a wall on a small farm in 2022 said his employer refused to pay his hospital bills. As a result, the man, an undocumented and uninsured immigrant from Mexico, didn’t initially get the treatment he needed.

“It’s an immense, intolerable pain that’s hard to describe,” he said. “I just want to get the bills paid and recover.” More than five months passed before he got treatment; a community advocate helped him get surgery and other treatment covered by the hospital’s charity care.

The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is in charge of enforcing workplace safety laws in Wisconsin. It investigates deaths and injuries that happen on the job. You can file a confidential complaint online or call 1-800-321-6742.

Not every complaint will lead to an on-site inspection, which is when an OSHA official comes to the farm and checks for safety hazards. Once again, workers on small farms have fewer protections. If a farm has fewer than 11 employees, federal law may ban OSHA from investigating deaths, injuries or complaints. (Read our story about inconsistencies in OSHA's work on small farms.)

We have talked to many workers who were fired, kicked out of farm housing or threatened with deportation after an injury.

It can be hard for workers to challenge these actions. Each case is different, so you may want to talk to an attorney.

If you lose your housing: Your rights depend on whether you’re considered a tenant under Wisconsin law. You may be a tenant if you pay rent or if your landlord takes rent out of your wages.

• If you are a tenant: You cannot be forcibly removed from housing without a court order. You have a very short amount of time when you can defend against an eviction in court; several attorneys said you should call an attorney quickly if you want to challenge the process or if you have been forced out without a court order.
• Legal Action of Wisconsin has this explainer about tenants’ rights.
• If you are not a tenant: Your rights are more limited. Some attorneys said they have negotiated more time for their clients to move out of farm housing. Again, call an attorney early to explore your options.

If you got fired: If you believe that you were fired because an injury left you with a disability, you may be able to file a discrimination complaint with the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development’s equal rights division. Call 608-266-6860 to learn more; if you speak Spanish, you can request an interpreter. If you work on a farm with at least 15 employees, you may be able to file a discrimination charge with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Call 1-800-669-4000 to learn more; there is an option for Spanish speakers.

Separately, your employer can be penalized for refusing to hire you back after an injury because you filed a workers’ compensation claim.

We’ve talked to many workers who were not paid for their last week of work before getting fired. You can file a complaint with the Department of Workforce Development’s equal rights division to try to get your wages back. You can do that online here, though that form is not in Spanish. Or you can call 608-266-6860 and ask to speak to somebody in Spanish and have a complaint form mailed to you.

If you are worried about being deported: If you are in a dispute with your employer over unpaid wages or another workplace issue, or if you are cooperating with a labor-related investigation at your job, you may qualify for deferred action. This is a temporary protection from deportation. An OSHA investigation can count as a labor dispute. The agency would have to write a letter on your behalf to request deferred action. The U.S. Department of Labor has information about how this program works.

How to report retaliation: You have the right to file a whistleblower complaint with OSHA if you believe your employer retaliated against you for exercising certain rights, such as expressing concern over a workplace safety issue. You can file a complaint online or call 1-800-321-6742. These complaints are not confidential, which means your employer will know you filed one.

If two or more workers have come together to discuss collective concerns about their workplace — including safety or injuries — they have another protection against retaliation. They can file a complaint under the Wisconsin Employment Peace Act with the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission. Call 608-243-2424 to learn more; Spanish speakers need to request an interpreter. This process can be complex, even for people who don’t have a language barrier, several attorneys said; you may want to get an attorney or somebody who can help you file the complaint.

There is no single place where you can get information about what to do if you get injured on a Wisconsin dairy farm. But we wanted to share a list of some of the resources we learned about that can be helpful.

Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development: This is the agency that oversees the state’s workers’ compensation system. You can call 608-266-1340 to speak to a specialist about problems with a claim, discuss late payments, ask for a hearing application, or talk about any other related issues. Spanish speakers can request an interpreter when they call.

Farmworker Project: This is part of the Legal Action of Wisconsin, a nonprofit organization that provides legal services to low-income residents. Attorneys can’t take every case but may be able to provide a consultation. They can also refer workers to bilingual private attorneys. You can call or text 920-279-7025 with questions. This phone number is also available on WhatsApp.

State Bar of Wisconsin: This organization has a search tool on its website that lets you look for attorneys by county and learn whether they speak a language besides English. The site is only available in English.

211 Wisconsin: If you are in Wisconsin, you can dial 2-1-1 and get connected to a free phone-based information service. It is available in Spanish. This program can connect you to specialists who can get you referrals for thousands of programs and services across the state. It is available 24 hours a day. The nonprofit United Way of Wisconsin manages this program.

Voces de la Frontera: This is the state’s largest immigrant rights organization. Voces offers workers’ rights training and has a network of advocates across the state who may be able to connect you to resources in your area. You can contact Voces at 414-643-1620.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by .

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

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Wisconsin’s dinosaur-shaped legislative district could soon be history.

The curiously drawn district and other oddities associated with the state’s extreme gerrymandering would be erased in new voting maps passed this week by the Wisconsin Legislature.

A state Supreme Court decision finally forced Wisconsin Republicans to cede an advantage they enjoyed for more than a decade with maps that made the state one of the nation’s foremost examples of gerrymandering.

The Senate and Assembly voted to adopt voting maps drawn by the office of Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat. Evers said a week ago that he would sign his redistricting plan into law if passed unchanged by the Legislature, and proponents of fairer maps have encouraged him to do so.

The surprising legislative development promises to end a six-month battle in front of the state’s now left-leaning high court, which ruled the GOP maps unconstitutional shortly before Christmas.

The new design resolves many of the irregularities in the current electoral maps, chief among them the “Swiss cheese” appearance that stranded some constituents in segments detached from the rest of their districts.

One of the more obvious examples of partisan artifice was in the northwest corner of the state, in the 73rd Assembly District, where the GOP had strategically added Republican areas and subtracted Democratic ones in a plan enacted in 2022. Residents joked the contours came to resemble a Tyrannosaurus rex.

The maneuver was successful. That year, a Republican won the seat, which had been held by Democrats for 50 years. The new map completely redraws that district and others.

“The legislature will be up for grabs,” Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos said from the floor on Tuesday, the day the vote was taken.

In an unusually magnanimous gesture, Vos said, “Pains me to say it, but Gov. Evers gets a huge win today.”

Even under the governor’s maps, the GOP is still expected to retain majorities in both chambers, though the party’s advantage would likely be slimmer than the absolute authority it now commands, particularly in the Senate. Currently, the GOP has a supermajority in the Senate and a near supermajority in the Assembly.

Vos acknowledged in a news conference that running under Evers’ map is “going to be more challenging, there’s no doubt about that.” But, he said, “I still think we can win because we have a better message.”

Prior to the legislative action, justices had been set to select new district maps from a group of proposals, including the one from Evers. Indications were the decision would not be favorable to the GOP.

Rather than take their chances, Republicans decided to approve the governor’s maps, which are considered to be “friendlier” to the GOP than the others when measuring partisan bias and incumbent matchups.

A Marquette University analysis determined that if the 2022 election had taken place under Evers’ maps, it’s likely that Democrats would have won an additional 11 seats in the Assembly and five in the Senate, neither enough to flip control.

Nine Senate Democrats voted against Evers’ plan, signaling concerns that the GOP’s approval was a strategic ploy to be followed by a challenge in federal court from a Republican ally. “I am voting no because I do not trust what you guys are up to,” said Sen. Chris Larson, a Milwaukee Democrat.

But Vos downplayed the likelihood of more court action, telling reporters Tuesday that he preferred to get on with the business of campaigning and talking about ideas with voters. “I think that is a better answer than drawn-out court battles and going through millions of dollars of taxpayer expense when there’s really no need to do so,” he said.

The Assembly passed the governor’s maps without debate. Only one Democrat voted yes.

Democrats were unhappy with a provision in the bill that would stall the implementation of the new maps until November — a move seen to benefit Vos, who is facing a recall effort from constituents on the far right. Democrats also indicated a desire to let the state Supreme Court case play out.

It was only six months ago that a new justice, Janet Protasiewicz, took office, tilting the court decidedly to the left. During her campaign, which she won in a landslide, she made it clear she would welcome the chance to review the constitutionality of the maps, flatly describing them as “rigged.”

A day after her swearing-in ceremony, a maps case landed on the court’s doorstep, brought by 19 Democratic voters. For months after Protasiewicz’s election, Vos threatened to impeach her if she did not recuse herself from the case, claiming her remarks on the campaign trail made her biased. He later abandoned that tactic.

On Dec. 22, the high court overturned the current maps and ordered the parties to propose new ones. The vote on the decision was 4-3, with Protasiewicz siding with the majority.

The court hired two academic consultants to analyze the proposals and issue a report evaluating the plans for their conformity to standard districting requirements, including compactness and equal population distribution.

The consultants found that plans offered by GOP lawmakers and by a conservative policy group constituted “partisan gerrymanders” and should not be considered.

The four remaining proposals greenlit by the consultants were submitted by the plaintiffs, Evers’ office, a group of Democratic senators, and a team of mathematicians and data scientists. The consultants — from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and the University of California, Irvine — determined that those four plans were “similar on most criteria.”

Good-government groups applauded the possibility of a legislative agreement, largely because it brings about stability and a measure of political certainty until the next redistricting process, after the 2030 census. Besides, said Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause Wisconsin, “The governor’s maps are pretty darn good.”

One of the key problems with the current maps, the court concluded, was that the districts had noncontiguous shapes.

The state’s constitution stipulates that Assembly members must be elected from districts consisting of “contiguous territory.” Likewise, Senate districts, which are each made up of three Assembly districts, must consist of “convenient contiguous territory.”

Fifty-five of the state’s 99 Assembly districts and 21 of 33 Senate districts contained “disconnected pieces of territory,” according to the petition presented to the Supreme Court.

“A map can’t be fair if it doesn’t meet the requirements of the constitution,” said Debbie Patel, founder of North Shore Fair Maps, a group of suburban Milwaukee residents who have been fighting for statewide maps that are not skewed in favor of either party.

The random islands or irregular blobs in the current maps are largely due to the annexation of land over time by cities and villages, resulting in disjointed municipal boundaries.

The Evers maps and the others under consideration fix that problem.

The 88th Assembly District, for example, which currently includes eastern portions of Green Bay, has a couple of islands and a hole that would be eliminated under Evers’ plan.

The district’s current occupant, Republican Rep. John Macco, voted yes Tuesday, even though his home would no longer be within the district’s boundaries. “They literally carved me out by 581 feet. Intentionally,” he said.

He expects to have to sell his house and move to compete again there. “I’ll do whatever I have to do to represent the people of the 88th District,” he said in an interview.

In northwest Wisconsin, Democrats hope they can reclaim the 73rd District under a new map. All four maps under court consideration relegate the “T. rex” to fossil status.

Under Evers’ iteration, the district would no longer stretch more than 100 miles south from the Minnesota border city of Superior. Instead, it would be more homogeneous, encompassing much of Douglas County, and reach farther east, embracing more of the coastal communities along Lake Superior.

“Historically, you’ll see from voting records, it’s always been blue up here right along the lake,” said Laura Gapske, a Democrat who narrowly lost in 2022 to the district’s current representative, Republican Angie Sapik. Gapske handily carried Douglas County, with 58% of the vote. She’s now running for the Superior School Board.

Sapik, who wrote social media posts cheering on the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, has announced her reelection bid. She declined to speak to ProPublica but complained on Facebook in early February that the proposed maps “would make this district upwards of 65% Dem to 35% Republican. Does that sound like a ‘Fair Map’ to you?”

One area where the four maps differed was in how they handled redistricting for territories aligned with Wisconsin’s federally recognized Native American tribes.

The current GOP map divides four of 10 reservations into multiple Assembly districts, “disrespecting Tribal communities of interest,” according to a brief filed by the Midwest Alliance of Sovereign Tribes and the Lac du Flambeau tribe in Wisconsin. Lawyers for the tribes have argued that dividing tribal members among different districts dilutes their voting power.

The Lac du Flambeau tribe and the Midwest Alliance did not favor the governor’s plan, supporting instead a proposal put forward by the group of mathematicians, in which each tribe would have had its own Assembly voting district.

In its brief, the alliance called the mathematicians’ proposal “hands down, the best map for all of Wisconsin, including Wisconsin’s Indian people and communities.”

A spokesperson for Evers told ProPublica in an email that “the governor’s maps do unite tribal communities in several respects while still complying with constitutionally required criteria to minimize splitting community and county lines.”

The Wisconsin Fair Maps Coalition, while celebrating the prospect of new maps, is vowing to continue to push for a nonpartisan body, rather than politicians, to handle future redistricting plans.

“The coalition isn’t done,” said Debra Cronmiller, executive director of the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin, which is part of the coalition. “We still need a legislative fix. We need an independent commission. We need, likely, a constitutional amendment that would codify that. So our work is not done.”

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Megan O’Matz.

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The inability of police to communicate with immigrants who don’t speak English has long created problems, sometimes with tragic consequences. Those obstacles can inhibit crime victims from calling law enforcement for help and make it difficult for investigators to solve crimes.

But as part of an initiative by the Biden administration, the U.S. Department of Justice is pushing law enforcement agencies to better serve people who don’t speak proficient English.

Last week, for example, the King County Sheriff’s Office in Washington agreed to appoint a manager for a language-access program, restrict the use of children and others who aren’t qualified to serve as interpreters to narrowly defined situations, and develop a training program and complaint process.

In December 2022, the Justice Department agreed to similar measures with the city and county of Denver and the Police Department there in response to complaints that officers had failed to provide language assistance to Burmese- and Rohingya-speaking residents, including during arrests.

And in Dane County, Wisconsin, the Justice Department is now working with the sheriff’s office on its first-ever written policy on how to respond to incidents involving people with limited English proficiency.

This development follows a ProPublica report last year about the flawed investigation into the death of a Nicaraguan boy on a dairy farm in the county.

A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment on its work in Dane County but referred reporters to its law enforcement language access initiative, launched in December 2022. Under the initiative, law enforcement agencies can get help improving how they respond to people with limited English proficiency, including technical assistance, resources and training.

“We have seen that a failure to provide such meaningful access can chill reporting of crimes, leave victims and witnesses with [limited English proficiency] vulnerable to flawed investigations and even wrongful arrest, and threaten the safety of officers and the general public alike,” Kristen Clarke, the assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s civil rights division, wrote in a December letter to law enforcement agencies.

Under the federal Civil Rights Act, agencies that receive federal funding are prohibited from discriminating against people because of their national origin; as a result, they must provide meaningful language assistance to people with limited English proficiency.

ProPublica had found that, due to a language barrier, the Dane County Sheriff’s Office wrongly concluded that the boy’s father, José María Rodríguez Uriarte, was operating a piece of farming equipment that killed 8-year-old Jefferson. The sheriff’s deputy who questioned Rodríguez made a grammatical error in Spanish that contributed to her misunderstanding of what had happened.

Jefferson’s death was ruled an accident, but Rodríguez was publicly blamed.

At the time of Jefferson’s death, the sheriff’s office lacked any written policies on what officers should do when they encounter people who speak a language other than English or when they should bring in an interpreter. The sheriff’s office also relied on employees to self-report their proficiency in foreign languages.

As a general practice — though not a rule — patrol deputies are supposed to ask if any of their colleagues speak that language and, if none are available, seek help from other agencies, the sheriff’s office said previously. On the night Jefferson died, the deputy who interviewed the father was the only Dane official on the scene who self-reported speaking any Spanish.

In response to our findings, the sheriff’s office has said that its goal is to conduct thorough and factual investigations, and that it would welcome any new information from any witnesses or parties who wanted to come forward.

After our story was published, the sheriff’s office drafted a proposed policy on how to respond to incidents involving residents with limited English proficiency. It establishes a testing process to determine employees’ foreign language skills, breaks down how deputies are supposed to identify what language somebody speaks and commits to providing training so employees know when and how to access professional interpreters.

Elise Schaffer, a spokesperson for the sheriff’s office, told ProPublica in an email that the draft policy was created based on the Justice Department’s standards and had been written “prior to any inquiries from DOJ.” Schaffer said the draft policy has been “submitted to the DOJ for their input and any recommendations they may have.”

In our reporting in Wisconsin, we found that workers on dairy farms routinely encounter language barriers in their interactions with law enforcement. Records showed that police officers and sheriff’s deputies responding to incidents on farms often rely on workers’ supervisors, co-workers, relatives and sometimes even children to interpret. During traffic stops, officers routinely turn to Google Translate on their phones rather than professional interpreters.

Mariah Hennen, the program manager of the Farmworker Project at the nonprofit Legal Action of Wisconsin, said language gaps can lead to serious consequences for immigrant farmworkers when they are victims of crimes.

“Farmworkers want to be able to report what happened to them,” she said. “But often [they] are not able to do that fully when they cannot communicate clearly with law enforcement.”

Rodríguez said his experience led him to believe that, because he’s an immigrant, authorities weren’t concerned about figuring out what happened to his son. “I am Hispanic and so, of course, they didn’t care about trying hard to do their job,” he said in Spanish in a recent interview.

He said he hopes federal attention to language access in Dane County will help other immigrants who encounter law enforcement. “When police feel like they’re required to do so,” he said, “maybe they’ll try harder.”

Mariam Elba contributed reporting.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Melissa Sanchez and Maryam Jameel.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

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When Judy Kalepp became the municipal court judge in Abbotsford, Wisconsin, more than a decade ago, she was shocked to see how many Latinos were ticketed for driving without a license. She asked herself: Couldn’t they just get licensed and stop breaking the law?

Then she got to know some of the drivers, mostly Mexican immigrants who lived and worked in the community. Despite not speaking Spanish, she was able to communicate with many of them and learn that they were undocumented and prohibited by state law from getting driver’s licenses.

Over time, her views changed. While she still worries about road safety with so many unlicensed immigrants driving, she’s also come to recognize how important their labor is to the area around Abbotsford, a Central Wisconsin town that’s home to a meatpacking facility and is surrounded by dairy farms.

“The more I see of it,” Kalepp said, “the more I think we’re probably wrong in not allowing them to get a license.”

Last week ProPublica reported on how Wisconsin, a state that bills itself as “America’s Dairyland,” relies on undocumented immigrants to work on its dairy farms but doesn’t let them drive. As a result, many undocumented dairy workers struggle to take care of some of their most basic needs — from buying groceries and cashing in checks to visiting the doctor or taking their kids to school. They say they are trapped on the farms where they work and often live, dependent on others to take them where they need to go.

Immigrants who break the law and drive anyway risk getting ticketed and receiving hefty fines or even being arrested or deported. “It’s scary to drive,” said an undocumented Honduran immigrant who works on a farm near Abbotsford.

He’s lived mostly in isolation in his 10 years in Wisconsin: He’s never visited Milwaukee, he rarely sees friends from back home (they can’t legally drive either), and he doesn’t know how or when he’d ever meet a romantic partner. But he still gets behind the wheel six days a week to get to work — and then again every two weeks to go into town to cash his check, buy groceries and do his laundry. “To get anything done,” he said, “you have to drive.”

For years, advocates for immigrants have tried to persuade lawmakers in Wisconsin to allow undocumented immigrants to get driver’s licenses. Democrats have been mostly on board, with Gov. Tony Evers inserting the issue into his budget proposals. The challenge has been convincing Republicans, who control the state Legislature, to take an action that some of their constituents might fiercely oppose.

“I have some Republican voters and Republican colleagues that say, ‘Hey, they came here illegally. They didn’t come here through legal channels, so they shouldn’t be rewarded,’” said Rep. Patrick Snyder, a GOP lawmaker whose district sits a little to the east of Abbotsford and includes parts of Marathon County. “I understand their concerns. But in the same sense, if we suddenly kicked out all of the people here, the undocumented, our dairy farms would collapse. We have to come up with a solution.”

Snyder is one of a number of Republican lawmakers and local officials from the area who met with law enforcement officials, dairy farmers, civic leaders and immigration rights advocates in Abbotsford in March to discuss the impact on the community of a 2006 law banning undocumented immigrants from obtaining driver’s licenses. Wisconsin is one of 31 states that doesn’t allow undocumented immigrants to drive legally.

The meeting in Abbotsford, which straddles the border of Clark and Marathon counties, offers a window into how the politics around this issue might be changing. Some local officials who live in these places and routinely interact with undocumented immigrant drivers or hear from local dairy farmers are becoming more vocal about changing the law.

Like much of rural Wisconsin, both counties voted solidly in 2020 for then-President Donald Trump, whose stance against illegal immigration was a hallmark of his presidency.

Abbotsford, with a population of about 2,100, has a downtown that’s lined with Mexican restaurants and grocery stores. Local residents and dairy workers from around the area drive in to cash their checks, buy tortillas and other staples from back home, and go to the municipal court to pay their tickets for driving without a license.

This $124 citation is, by far, the most common processed in the municipal court, accounting for nearly one in three cases that ended with a guilty disposition and more than $19,000 in fines last year, records show. The court does not track defendants’ race or ethnicity, but ProPublica found that 134 of the 157 tickets for driving without a valid license involved defendants with common Hispanic surnames, such as Cruz, Lopez and Garcia. (The U.S. Census Bureau says more than 85% of people with these last names are Hispanic.)

Jason Bauer, the chief of the Colby-Abbotsford Police Department, said he wishes the state would allow undocumented immigrants to get trained and tested to get driver’s licenses. But in the meantime, he said, he can’t tell his officers to stop enforcing the law when they encounter a driver without a license. “Then I’d have to say, ‘You’ve got to treat everybody the same,” he said, “including the 15-year-old white kids” who are driving.

Still, tickets for driving without a license are so common that Bauer has asked his officers to stop seeking criminal charges on repeat offenses — which is what typically happens — to help drivers avoid mandatory court appearances. Bauer said he also wants to avoid overwhelming his local county district attorneys. (Melissa Inlow, Clark County’s district attorney, said she stopped pressing criminal charges on repeat offenses for driving without a license last fall due to limited resources, but drivers still have to pay a fine.)

Abbotsford Mayor Jim Weix said he talks to Bauer several times a week and knows just how frequently drivers are ticketed for this offense. Weix is a Republican who backs Trump and supports tougher border policies. But he doesn’t think the current state law, which lets undocumented immigrants own cars but prohibits them from driving, makes sense.

“We need these people to learn how to drive and our rules and regulations and everything,” Weix said.

But like many fellow Republicans, Weix worries about voter fraud and said he wouldn’t want undocumented immigrants to use driver’s licenses to vote illegally. Since Wisconsin residents can use driver’s licenses as proof of ID for voting, he would urge lawmakers to ensure that any type of driver’s license that’s created for undocumented immigrants be clearly marked “not to be used for voting.”

At the March meeting, law enforcement officials expressed concern about having so many people on the road who haven’t passed a local driving test. “That’s a danger. We want to keep roads safe,” Clark County Sheriff Scott Haines said in an interview. “I am looking more for the safety of all citizens.”

Haines said the meeting opened his eyes to the issue’s complexities. But he said changing the law “is out of our hands.” Like Bauer, he said that unless the Legislature allows undocumented immigrants to get licenses, he has to enforce the law.

Dairy farmers at the meeting spoke about how the state law makes it difficult for their workers to get to and from work without risking tickets and arrest. Among the farmers: Hans Breitenmoser, who operates a 470-cow farm in Lincoln County, northeast of Abbotsford.

“Dairy cows are 24/7,” Breitenmoser said in an interview. “I don’t have the luxury of just shutting down the machines. We have to milk them every single day, three times a day. If someone doesn’t show up it’s kind of a big deal compared to in other industries; we’re dealing with live creatures.”

ProPublica reached out to the four Republican lawmakers who attended, as identified by the meeting’s organizers and other attendees. Sen. Jesse James declined to comment, though he recently told Wisconsin Public Radio he would be open to considering legislation to give undocumented immigrants access to driver’s licenses. Rep. Calvin Callahan did not respond to interview requests. But in a June press release, he explained how Republicans had removed “liberal wish list” items from the governor’s budget proposal, including driver’s licenses and other “new benefits for illegal immigrants.”

Meanwhile, Snyder and Rep. Donna Rozar, whose district includes Abbotsford, said they’d support legislation restoring driving privileges to undocumented immigrants in Wisconsin. But both acknowledged it’d be a tough sell to some of their Republican colleagues.

The real problem, they said, is Congress’ failure to fix the country’s broken immigration system.

“There are a lot of us that believe we’re being invaded and the federal government doesn’t care,” Rozar said. “And I get the sense that some of my colleagues believe that if we start chipping away at this undocumented worker issue, we are taking some of the responsibility away from the federal government to do their job.”

Maryam Jameel contributed reporting.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Melissa Sanchez.

Margaret Rose Bostelmann’s ideals are clear from one glance at her well-kept ranch-style house in central Wisconsin.

A large American flag is mounted near the front door, and a “We Back the Badge” sign on her front lawn announces her support for law enforcement. Bostelmann, a Wisconsin elections commissioner, said she voted for Donald Trump in 2020 and added: “I will always vote Republican. I always have.”

But her fellow Republicans have exiled her and disparaged her, sought to upend her career and, on this day in July, brought the 70-year-old to tears as she discussed what she’s been through over the last several years because she refuses to support false claims that Trump won the state in the 2020 presidential election.

Bostelmann, who goes by Marge, previously served for more than two decades as the county clerk in Green Lake County, overseeing elections without controversy. But two years into her term in a Republican slot on the Wisconsin Elections Commission she became a target, denounced and disowned by the Republican Party of Green Lake County, which claimed she had failed to protect election integrity in the state.

Now a suit filed in June by a Wisconsin man who promotes conspiracy theories about election fraud seeks her removal from the commission. Citing her estrangement from the county party, the suit claims she’s not qualified to fill a position intended for a Republican.

The elections commission, which has an equal number of Republican and Democratic members, has faced an onslaught of discredited claims about election fraud in Wisconsin. The most recent drama involves the commission’s nonpartisan administrator, Meagan Wolfe, whose term is expiring and whose future in the role is in doubt. After the three Republican members of the commission supported Wolfe in a June vote, Republicans in the state legislature made it clear they wanted to find a way to get rid of her.

The Republican clashes in Wisconsin exemplify ongoing discord seen across the country, with elections officials shunned, berated and even driven away by members of their own party over their defense of the integrity of the 2020 election.

In Hood County, Texas — a solid red block in a red state — hard-line Republicans successfully pushed for the resignation of the elections administrator, even though Trump won 81% of the vote in the county. In Surry County, North Carolina, where Trump also won overwhelmingly, the Republican elections administrator was threatened with firing or a pay cut for refusing to give a GOP party leader access to voting equipment to conduct a forensic audit. And in Clare County, Michigan, officials are considering possible charges against a GOP activist accused of kicking the party chair in the groin.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission has been sued by numerous parties, verbally attacked by voters and earmarked for elimination by GOP lawmakers. It has survived only because a Democrat still occupies the governor’s office and wields veto power.

In an April survey of local election officials nationwide, the Brennan Center for Justice, an independent, nonpartisan law and policy organization, found that nearly one in three reported being abused, harassed, or threatened because of their job.

In a rare interview, Bostelmann wept at one point. For the most part, though, she was defiant, insisting the 2020 election was not stolen by Joe Biden.

“I’m a Republican who stands up for the truth and not for a lie,” Bostelmann said. And she predicted the latest legal gambit, which seeks her removal, would fail.

Don Millis, the Republican who chairs the Wisconsin Elections Commission, also has expressed frustration with the election conspiracy theorists. At the commission’s June meeting, he said he considered some of the agitators to be “grifters” who are conning people of goodwill into thinking there is something wrong with the election system.

“It’s not about winning or preventing fraud,” he said of the conspiracy theorists’ motives. “It’s about getting publicity or attention. It’s about grifting, convincing others to donate to their cause.”

In a recent interview with ProPublica, Millis said he was referring to a small set of people he believes are trying to raise money by spreading lies through social media or newsletters. “There are many people who believe them, who don’t know any better,” he said.

The man who brought the suit against Bostelmann is Peter Bernegger, grandson of the founders of Hillshire Farm, the Wisconsin deli meat and sausage company. Now 60, Bernegger has described himself as a “data analyst” and an “independent journalist.”

He has engaged in relentless — and so far futile — legal efforts to prove fraud in the 2020 election. This mirrors a different kind of legal fight from earlier in his life: trying to overturn his own fraud conviction.

A 2008 indictment accused Bernegger and a business partner in Mississippi of deceiving investors, bilking them of $790,000 in various ventures — including the development of a gelatin, intended for pharmaceutical or cosmetic companies, made from the carcasses of catfish. A federal jury acquitted the partner, who has since died, but convicted Bernegger of mail and bank fraud. He was sentenced to 70 months in prison and ordered to pay nearly $2.2 million in restitution.

Bernegger overwhelmed the courts with claims to clear his name, alleging procedural errors, insufficient evidence, judicial bias, ineffective counsel, violations of his constitutional rights and other misconduct.

“Mr. Bernegger, you file an awful lot,” said U.S. District Court Judge William Griesbach of Wisconsin. “Just let me say that. You file so many things. And in all honesty, I don’t have time to keep up on it all.”

Though most of his claims failed, Bernegger did succeed on one front: He got his restitution reduced to roughly $1.7 million. Ordered in 2019 to get a steady job to make payments on the debt, Bernegger testified that he had limited options.

He said his health was too poor for him to be able to lift heavy objects, drive a truck or operate heavy equipment. “I work odd jobs, a wide variety of them. And it is cash, but it's legal,” he explained.

When ProPublica reached Bernegger by phone for this story, he immediately hung up. He did not respond to letters and emails seeking comment.

Much of his energy, it appears, is now devoted to stoking doubt about election integrity. In his social media posts and podcast appearances, he has railed against Wolfe, the Wisconsin elections commission administrator, while repeating sweeping, unsubstantiated claims about problems in voting systems across the country. Along the way, he has made alliances with like-minded individuals beyond his home state.

Bernegger has ties to Omega4America, a website promoting a super-fast computing method to identify fraud by matching voter data with property tax records and other large databases. The site solicits donations to a nonprofit called Election Watch Inc.; Bernegger founded a tax-exempt organization with that same name in 2022.

The Texas Tribune has reported that the Omega4America project was initially funded by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, a conspiracy theorist close to Trump. Omega4America makes glowing claims about programming marketed by Texan Jay Valentine as a powerful tool that could replace the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, a multistate consortium that ferrets out duplicate voter registrations across states. ERIC has been the subject of heavy criticism from conservatives who believe its work identifying unregistered voters for states bolsters the rolls for Democrats.

In a podcast, Bernegger mentioned that he has access to the “Valentine fractal programming system” as he seeks to uncover voter fraud. Valentine, who is listed on the Omega4America website as the site contact, declined to discuss his work or Bernegger, telling a ProPublica reporter: “I have nothing to say to you.”

In an April episode of a podcast called The AlphaWarrior Show, Bernegger said he’s now part of a team of 10 scouring federal campaign data for oddities. He named James O’Keefe as a member of that team. O’Keefeis the former head of Project Veritas, a conservative group known for secretly recording liberal organizations, and has a new media company that encourages “citizen journalists” to investigate election fraud. ProPublica’s attempts to reach O’Keefe for comment were unsuccessful.

Toward the end of the AlphaWarrior podcast, the host urged viewers to “smash” the blue donate button on an Election Watch website to show support for Bernegger and his team.

“It means we sacrifice a movie or a fancy dinner and we throw a couple dollars their way,” he said.

Marge Bostelmann still doesn’t fully understand how it got to this point, how she became such a target of Bernegger and others, including people she once thought held similar values.

But she does know that things in Green Lake began to change in 2020, during Trump’s reelection bid. Bostelmann said she stopped paying membership dues to the county party after the party chair became critical of her and of the way the 2020 election had been run in Green Lake County by her successor.

By November 2021, as conservatives carried out investigations into voting accommodations made in Wisconsin during the pandemic — including the use of drop boxes and allowing unsupervised absentee voting in nursing homes — Bostelmann and others on the elections commission came under attack for their votes shaping those procedures.

Kent McKelvey, the Green Lake County GOP chair at the time, issued a press release saying Bostelmann’s actions on the Wisconsin Elections Commission “do not reflect the principles, values and beliefs of the Green Lake County Republicans, in this case, supporting the proper enforcement of the law and of election integrity.”

The press release said flat-out that “Ms. Bostelmann is no longer a member of the Republican Party of Green Lake County.” McKelvey did not respond to requests for comment.

The snub hurt. Bostelmann, a former foster parent who knows many local Republicans through her activities with her church and the Rotary Club, said she stopped attending many local GOP events. “I don’t know that I’d be welcome,” she said.

Even as efforts to prove fraud in Wisconsin fizzled, the pressure on the commission remained intense. Powerful Republicans in the state Senate called for Wolfe’s ouster, blaming her for what they saw as regulatory overreach by the commission, though in her role she carries out the orders of the six voting members.

Prior to the commission’s key June vote on Wolfe, Bostelmann said, she received a disturbing phone call from an acquaintance who had been critical of Wolfe. “The patriots would not be happy” with her, she was told, if she backed Wolfe. Bostelmann took that as a threat.

Still, she and the panel’s two other Republicans voted to reappoint Wolfe. Bostelmann defended Wolfe publicly at the June meeting, saying the administrator had been unfairly targeted “as the scapegoat” by people dissatisfied with the commission and the outcome of the 2020 election.

In a tactical move, Democrats abstained from voting, leading to a final tally of three yes votes. That appeared to mean that the panel did not have the requisite four votes to send the matter to the state Senate for final consideration, and it was widely thought Wolfe would continue in her post because of the impasse.

But the Senate, surprisingly, decided the three affirmative votes were enough for it to take up her nomination. Wolfe’s reappointment is now pending before the Senate elections committee. No public hearing or vote has been scheduled.

Lawsuits are expected, though for now she remains on the job.

“Some judge will tell us who our administrator is. That’s my guess,” said the commission chair, Millis, a tax attorney who favored retaining Wolfe.

Like Bostelmann, Millis has been the target of Bernegger, who on Twitter has ranted about Millis ignoring election system problems, referring to him as “Blind Don.”

Robert Spindell, the third Republican member of the commission, said he hasn’t been chastised for his renomination of Wolfe. He said he thought it best that the Senate take up the matter. “I haven’t had anybody call or criticize me,” he said, noting: “Most of the people I know on this election stuff are not shy.”

Through a spokesperson, Wolfe declined a request for an interview.

Bernegger’s suit against Bostelmann demands that the circuit court remove her from her seat on the commission, citing the disavowal from Green Lake County Republican Party. “She cannot prove she is a member of the Green Lake County Republican Party and is otherwise qualified to hold the designated Republican seat,” he wrote.

The statute that governs commission appointees does not specifically require them to be dues-paying party members.

Records show Bernegger has bombarded the Wisconsin Elections Commission with official complaints and demands for data, often accompanied by threats of legal action and accusations of criminal conduct. In one email he referred to a commission staffer as a “prick.”

“Please note that I am becoming increasingly uncomfortable with this individual’s erratic behavior that is directed at myself, our staff and local election officials,” Wolfe wrote to the commission in October 2022. In May of this year, Wolfe told the commission Bernegger made her feel “incredibly unsafe” when he noted her home address in bold in an email to the commission and called her a “pathological liar.”

The commission fined Bernegger $2,403 in March 2022 for filing frivolous complaints. Records show commission staff have, at times, forwarded his correspondence to the Wisconsin Department of Justice.

On July 7, the Wisconsin Department of Justice’s Criminal Investigation Division served Bernegger with a letter at his home in New London, stating that his actions could reasonably have made Wolfe and others at the commission feel “harassed, tormented or intimidated.” It warned that he could be arrested for stalking if he continued his behavior.

One of Bernegger’s lawsuits over records against the commission is still ongoing.

He has also sued officials in Dane, Door, Grant, Marathon, Milwaukee and Ozaukee counties, the town of Hudson, the city of Hudson, the city of Milwaukee and the town of Richmond in Walworth County. The suits are related to broad public record requests he made for absentee ballot applications, images of ballots, router logs and other materials and involve disputes over costs and access. While many of those have been dismissed, four are still pending.

“We’re all trying to do our jobs to the very best of our abilities. It makes it difficult when we are constantly being undermined and questioned,” said Marathon County Clerk Kim Trueblood. Her office provided Bernegger with some information when he inquired but denied him certain documentation that Trueblood said was exempt from release. He sued, but a judge dismissed the case.

Another clerk, Vickie Shaw of the town of Hudson, said she had to go to court three times to deal with a Bernegger suit over records. A judge threw out the case, Bernegger appealed, and it was tossed again.

Before Bernegger’s suit, Shaw had quit in 2021, finding the job too burdensome and confrontational. But she returned the following year because, she said, the town “didn't have anybody to run the April election.”

Bostelmann expressed dismay with Bernegger’s tactics against her and the other election clerks.

“It’s bullying is what it is. It’s truly bullying,” she said. “It’s almost like they are trying to get people who are knowledgeable, and do a good job, to quit to have people who don't know how to do the job to come in.”

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Megan O’Matz and Mariam Elba.

We speak with first-grade teacher Melissa Tempel, who was fired last week for a viral tweet in which she criticized the Waukesha, Wisconsin, board of education’s decision to ban her students from singing “Rainbowland” during a school concert earlier this year. The hit song about inclusivity by Miley Cyrus and Dolly Parton includes the lyrics “We are rainbows, me and you / Every color, every hue / Let’s shine on through.” The school district said Tempel’s firing was not about the song but about the way she protested the decision. Tempel says the Waukesha school district’s so-called controversial content policy, which bans discussions about race, LGBTQ identity and other speech considered political, is “disturbing” and “dangerous.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Meagan Wolfe’s tenure as Wisconsin’s election administrator began without controversy.

Members of the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission chose her in 2018, and the state Senate unanimously confirmed her appointment. That was before Wisconsin became a hotbed of conspiracy theories that the 2020 election had been stolen from Donald Trump, before election officials across the country saw their lives upended by threats and half-truths.

Now Wolfe is eligible for a second term, but her reappointment is far from assured. Republican politicians who helped sow the seeds of doubt about Wisconsin election results could determine her fate and reset election dynamics in a state pivotal to the 2024 presidential race. Her travails show that although election denialism has been rejected in the courts and at the polls across the country, it has not completely faded away.

One of the six members of the election commission has already signaled he won’t back Wolfe. That member is Bob Spindell, one of 10 Republicans who in December 2020 met secretly in the Wisconsin Capitol to sign electoral count paperwork purporting to show Trump won the state, when that was not the case.

If retained by a majority of the commissioners, Wolfe would have to be confirmed by the state Senate. But the Wisconsin Legislature is dominated by Republicans who buttressed Trump’s false claims about fraud in the 2020 election. The Senate president has in the past called for Wolfe’s resignation after a dispute over how voting was carried out in nursing homes. Some other senators have registered their opposition to reappointing Wolfe, as well.

Republicans and Democrats have fought to a power stalemate in Wisconsin in recent months. Voters reelected a Democratic governor in November of last year and this year elected a new Supreme Court justice who tilts the court away from Republican control.

A December 2022 report by three election integrity groups looking at voter suppression efforts nationwide concluded that in Wisconsin the threat of election subversion had eased. “The governor, attorney general, and secretary of state, all of whom reject election denialism, were re-elected in the 2022 midterm election,” they wrote.

Still, the groups warned, Wisconsin continues to be a state to watch, noting “the legislature now has an election subversion-friendly Republican supermajority in the senate and a majority in the assembly.”

“We are in a better place,” attorney Rachel Homer of Protect Democracy said of the national landscape in a recent press conference following an update to that study. “That said, the threat hasn’t passed. It’s just evolved.”

There are fears that the state Senate could refuse to reappoint Wolfe and instead engineer the appointment of a staunch partisan or an election denier, tilting oversight of the state’s voting operations.

“It could be a huge disruption in our elections in Wisconsin,” said Senate Democratic leader Melissa Agard. “If you have someone who has this pulpit using it to spew disinformation and harmful rhetoric, that is terrible.”

As for Wolfe, she mostly only speaks out about election processes and stays out of the political fray.

Through a spokesperson, Wolfe declined to comment in response to ProPublica’s questions. In a public statement issued last week, she said she found it “deeply disappointing that a small minority of lawmakers continue to misrepresent my work, the work of the agency, and that of our local election officials, especially since we have spent the last few years thoughtfully providing facts to debunk inaccurate rumors.

“Lawmakers,” she continued, “should assess my performance on the facts, not on tired, false claims.” The commission created a page on its web site to address rampant misinformation.

Wolfe has maintained the support of many election officials throughout the state.

She has been “a great patriot” for not quitting despite the attacks and for being willing to be reappointed, said the executive director of the Milwaukee Election Commission, Claire Woodall-Vogg. “I think she understands the pressure and understands the peril that the state could face if she’s not in that position.”

The state commission was created in 2016 by Republican state officials unhappy with the independent board of retired judges that then oversaw elections. They created a panel of three Democrats and three Republicans, advised by an administrator with no political ties.

The commission provides education, training and support for the state’s roughly 1,900 municipal and county clerks, who in recent years have faced cybersecurity threats, budget woes, shortages of poll workers and other challenges. The commission also handles complaints, ensures the integrity of statewide election results and maintains Wisconsin’s statewide voter registration database. The administrator manages the staff, advises commissioners and carries out their directives.

At first the newly established commission had someone else at the helm: Michael Haas, who had served the prior agency, the Government Accountability Board, which had investigated GOP Gov. Scott Walker for campaign finance violations. (The state Supreme Court halted the probe in 2015, finding no laws had been broken.) As a result, Haas did not win state Senate confirmation and stepped down.

The six commissioners then unanimously promoted Wolfe, the deputy administrator, to the top post in March 2018. She won unanimous confirmation in May 2019 in the Senate, which then-state Senate majority leader Scott Fitzgerald said looked to her to “restore stability.”

“I met with Ms. Wolfe last week and was impressed with her wide breadth of knowledge regarding elections issues,” Fitzgerald, now a U.S. representative, said at the time. “Her experience with security and technology issues, as well as her relationships with municipal clerks all over the state, will serve the commission well.”

The bliss did not last.

Wisconsin was one of the first states to put on an election following the start of the pandemic in 2020, amid lockdowns, fear and uncertainty. The primary that April was chaotic, with legal fights over whether to even hold the contest. Local officials closed some polling places. There were long lines in Milwaukee, Green Bay and elsewhere. The governor deployed the state National Guard to assist, and mail-in voting soared.

Later in the year, after it became clear that Trump had lost Wisconsin to Joe Biden in the election the previous November, state Republicans blasted the elections commission for accommodations made during the pandemic, such as the wider use of ballot drop boxes and unmonitored voting in nursing homes. Critics claimed the moves increased the likelihood of fraud and tainted the election.

U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisconsin, proposed dissolving the commission and transferring its duties to the GOP-controlled Legislature. Talk of that ended with the reelection last year of Democratic Gov. Tony Evers. The Legislature would need his approval to disband the commission.

“What’s happened over the last six years, in particular since the Trump years, is there’s been a systematic attempt to undermine the work of the Wisconsin Elections Commission,” said Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause in Wisconsin. “Because it’s apparently not as responsive in a partisan way to the Republicans as they would like.”

Wolfe became a target. Many Republicans accused her of facilitating the awarding of private pandemic-related grants to election clerks that those critics claimed fostered turnout in Democratic areas, though the money was widely distributed.

They also criticized Wolfe for allowing the commission to vote in June 2020 to send absentee ballots to nursing homes during the health emergency rather than have special poll workers visit to assist residents and guard against fraud. Republicans discovered that some mentally impaired people in the facilities who were ineligible to vote cast ballots in Nov. 2020, though the numbers were small and not enough to change the election results. Municipal clerks had received only 23 written complaints of alleged voter fraud of any type in the presidential election, the state’s nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau found.

Wolfe was the target of lawsuits and insults. Michael Gableman, a former state Supreme Court justice and Trump supporter tapped by the Assembly Speaker to lead a 2020 election investigation, mocked her attire: “Black dress, white pearls — I’ve seen the act, I’ve seen the show.”

One conservative grassroots group, H.O.T. Government, has been sending out email blasts urging Wolfe’s ouster, referring to her as the “Wolfe of State Street.”

Wolfe does have champions, but they are not as vocal as her critics. “I think she’s done an outstanding job with running the Wisconsin Elections Commission here,” said Cindi Gamb, deputy clerk-treasurer of the Village of Kohler. “She’s been very communicative with us clerks.”

Gamb is the first vice president of the Wisconsin Municipal Clerks Association, but she said the group’s rules bar it from making endorsements.

Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell finds the assaults on the once-obscure bureaucrat troubling. “What has Meagan done to deserve the abuse she's gotten?” he said. “Nothing.”

Wolfe did receive the support of 50 election officials nationwide who called her “one of the most highly-skilled election administrators in the country” in a 2021 letter to the Wisconsin Assembly speaker. Wolfe is a past president of the National Association of State Election Directors.

And she has had the backing of a bipartisan business group that in February of last year sent a letter of appreciation to her and the commission. “Although the 2020 elections were among the most successful in American history thanks to your efforts, we recognize election administrators nationwide are facing increasing unwarranted threats and harassment. We hereby offer our sincere gratitude and full support,” said the letter from Wisconsin Business Leaders for Democracy.

The 22 signers included the president of the Milwaukee Bucks, the former CEO of Harley-Davidson and two top members of the Florsheim shoemaker family.

Wolfe’s term expires July 1.

To avoid a showdown, some legal experts are exploring whether the commission could take no action and just allow Wolfe to continue past June 30, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. They’ve pointed to the example of Fred Prehn, a dentist appointed to the state Natural Resources Board who refused to leave after his term expired in May 2021, preserving GOP control over the board.

The state Supreme Court ruled last year that Prehn had lawfully retained his position, finding that the expiration of a term does not create a vacancy. And because there was no vacancy, the governor could not make a new appointment unless he removed Prehn “for cause.” Prehn ultimately resigned last Dec. 30.

That scenario now is unlikely. Commission chair Don Millis, a Republican attorney, told ProPublica Wednesday that “there will be a vote” in the near future to consider the appointment of an administrator.

“If someone didn’t think we should have a vote, and we should rely on the Supreme Court decision in the Prehn case, they could move to adjourn,” he said, but added: “I’m not excited about that. To me it would be avoiding our responsibility if we didn’t act.”

Millis declined to say if he would back Wolfe but said he feared that if the commission did not take a vote “that would only add fuel to the fire of the conspiracy theories that we get hit with.”

He warned, “If we decide no vote is required and Megan Wolfe keeps her position after July 1, I can guarantee you we’ll be sued and the courts will decide.”

Arguing that Wolfe does not have the confidence of Republicans, Spindell said, “I did tell her that I’m not going to vote for her.” He stressed, however, that he thought she was unfairly blamed for long-standing policies set by the commission.

In a letter Wednesday to clerks statewide, Wolfe acknowledged that “my role here is at risk” but said she preferred that the Legislature act quickly to confirm someone, even if it isn’t her. Still, she made it clear she considers herself the best choice to serve the commission. “It is a fact that if I am not selected for this role, Wisconsin would have a less experienced administrator at the helm,” she wrote.

And she also made clear what she thinks is driving the questions about her future, writing that “enough legislators have fallen prey to false information about my work and the work of this agency that my role here is at risk.”

If the commission does vote on Wolfe, Agard said, she expects Wolfe will secure at least one Republican vote, moving her nomination on to the Senate — and what could be a hostile environment.

Senate President Chris Kapenga, a Trump loyalist, told the Associated Press this week that “there’s no way” Wolfe will be re-confirmed by the Senate. “I will do everything I can to keep her from being reappointed,” he said. “I would be extremely surprised if she had any votes in the caucus.”

In the Senate, the matter could first be considered by the Committee on Shared Revenue, Elections and Consumer Protection — chaired by GOP Sen. Dan Knodl. In the weeks after the 2020 election, Knodl signed on to a letter calling on Vice President Mike Pence to delay certifying the results on Jan. 6.

Spindell already is envisioning a future without Wolfe. He said there is talk of conducting a national search for a new administrator, but Millis said there doesn’t appear to be an appetite among the commissioners for this approach. He noted the commission is pressed for time: Come July 1, the state will be only about 16 months away from a presidential election.

State law restricts who can be appointed as election administrator. Appointees cannot have been a lobbyist or have served in a partisan state or local office. Nor can they have made a contribution to a candidate for partisan state or local office in the 12 months prior to their employment.

If the position is vacant for 45 days, the Joint Committee on Legislative Organization, chaired by Kapenga and GOP Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, can appoint an interim commissioner.

As for Wolfe, Spindell said: “She’s experienced. She’s been on all the various boards. I’m sure she would have no problem getting a job anywhere else.”

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Megan O’Matz.

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Local officials in Wisconsin are planning to improve how sheriff’s deputies communicate with people who don’t speak English in response to a ProPublica report that found that an investigation into the death of an 8-year-old Nicaraguan boy living on a dairy farm was mishandled due to a language barrier.

Dane County supervisors said that their goals include making language access a key part of department equity plans and creating a dedicated countywide language-access coordinator.

The efforts come as the parents of the boy, Jefferson Rodríguez, have settled a lawsuit against the farm and its insurance company over the July 2019 death in rural Dane, about a half hour north of Madison. As ProPublica reported in February, sheriff’s deputies wrongly concluded that the boy’s father, José María Rodríguez Uriarte, had accidentally run his son over with farming equipment.

But it was another worker, on his first work day at D&K Dairy, who had been driving the 6,700-pound Bobcat skid steer that crushed Jefferson, ProPublica found. The man had waited at the scene, expecting to be questioned, on the night Jefferson died. But deputies never interviewed him, in part due to a language barrier. ProPublica was able to reach him and he acknowledged he was driving the skid steer that night.

Jefferson’s death was ruled an accident and nobody was charged criminally. But Rodríguez was blamed in the official account. Rodríguez and Jefferson’s mother, María Sayra Vargas, who lives in Nicaragua, filed a wrongful death lawsuit in August 2020 against the farm and its insurer, Rural Mutual Insurance Company.

The trial was originally scheduled to begin this week in Dane County Circuit Court. But, about a month after ProPublica published its story, Jefferson’s parents reached a tentative agreement with the farm and insurance company, neither of which admitted wrongdoing. The agreement was later finalized in court and the lawsuit was dismissed in April.

Lawyers for Rural Mutual and the farm declined to comment.

Rodríguez said that the truth about his son’s death “has come to light” because of ProPublica’s reporting. He declined to share the settlement amount, but said the money will be helpful to him and his family.

“It doesn’t mean I’m happy. The sadness remains,” said Rodríguez, who now works on another dairy farm in Wisconsin. “All the money in the world wouldn’t make me the person I used to be. … I would like to be able to share this with Jefferson. That is what would fill me with joy.”

In the weeks after our initial story was published, more than a half-dozen members of the Dane County Board of Supervisors told ProPublica they were horrified to learn of the conditions leading up to Jefferson’s death and the flawed law enforcement investigation that followed. Jefferson lived with his father above the farm’s milking parlor, the barn where hundreds of cows were brought day and night to be milked by heavy, loud machinery.

The Board of Supervisors sets the budget for and can make recommendations to the sheriff’s office. But it is limited in its ability to set policy.

A spokesperson for the sheriff’s department, which was not a defendant in the wrongful death lawsuit, said there have been no changes to its language access practices. The department has no written policies on what deputies should do when they encounter people who speak a language other than English or when to bring in an interpreter. The department relies on deputies to self-report their ability to speak languages other than English.

County Supervisor Dana Pellebon said one way she and her colleagues on the county board hope to improve language access at the department is through its equity work plan, a road map that each county agency lays out for how it can become more inclusive and fair. County departments are now updating those plans, she said, and the plans are then approved by the Equal Opportunity Commission, which she chairs. “Language access is something that will be a part of all the plans,” Pellebon said.

One area she hopes the sheriff’s office can address is ensuring language access in rural parts of the county where cellphone reception is weak and phone-based interpretation services aren’t available. “We want to make sure there is a workaround,” Pellebon said. “Either get to a space where there is cellphone service or find a landline at the space they’re at.”

She and other county officials are also considering the possibility of testing deputies’ proficiency in a foreign language instead of relying on their self-assessments. The deputy who interviewed Rodríguez the night his son died had described herself as a proficient Spanish speaker. But when a ProPublica reporter interviewed her, we discovered that the phrase she had used to ask Rodríguez whether he had run over his son with the farm machinery didn’t mean what she thought it did: It lacked a verb and a subject, and the result was confusing.

Rodríguez later told ProPublica he thought the deputy had asked whether his son had been run over by the skid steer, not whether he was driving the machine.

Dane County Supervisor Heidi Wegleitner said she will prioritize creating a countywide language-access coordinator position in next year’s budget to help agencies fulfill their obligations and organize the county’s plans and resources.

“It’s a basic access-to-government civil rights issue that permeates every department,” Wegleitner said. County departments that receive federal funding are required by Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to take steps to make their services accessible to people who speak limited English.

The challenges that non-English-speaking immigrants face in communicating with law enforcement officials extend beyond Dane County. ProPublica found that sheriff’s deputies and police officers across the state routinely fail to communicate directly with Spanish-speaking immigrant workers on dairy farms when responding to incidents ranging from assaults to serious accidents. Records from dozens of incidents show that law enforcement officials routinely rely on employees’ supervisors and coworkers to communicate with immigrant workers. Often they turn to Google Translate. Sometimes they don’t speak with the workers at all or ask children to interpret.

Language access is “haphazard throughout the system,” said Nancy Rodriguez, a criminology professor at the University of California, Irvine who co-authored a May supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation on the issue. The report, which was based on a survey of criminal justice agencies and organizations across the country, recommended that agencies do more to understand the language needs of the people they serve and to monitor compliance with a language-access plan.

Our investigation into Jefferson’s death was the first story in our series “America’s Dairyland.”

We plan to keep reporting on issues affecting immigrant dairy workers across the Midwest. Among those issues: traffic stops of undocumented immigrants who drive without a license; difficulty accessing medical care or workers’ compensation after injuries on the job; and problems with employer-provided housing.

Do you have ideas or tips for us to look into? Please reach out to us using this form.

And if you know a Spanish speaker who might be interested in this topic, please share with them a translation of the story about Jefferson’s death — which also includes an audio version — or this note about how to get in touch with us.

Help ProPublica Journalists Investigate the Dairy Industry

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Melissa Sanchez and Maryam Jameel.

He’s a short red-bearded white cop standing over me and my friend, KK (initials to be revealed soon). We are in KK’s hometown, Merrill, Wisconsin, population 9,300.

“What’s up, officer?”

“We have a complaint from a resident who says you were on his property taking pictures of his house and a juvenile daughter.”

So begins the morning in Merrill, or at least, after a few hours of photographing KK’s old haunts with a borrowed Canon — his schools, churches, and, yep, the house he grew up in. It was 9 am when I got him to stand on the sidewalk to photograph KK in front of the small house where he spent his youth. It was his grandparents’ home. Small, sort of shotgun clapboard style no with faded vinyl siding.

Four shots, and we took off, turned for some of the street scenes where he played, and, then we moved on out with the pick-up and my shutterbug disease.

I call these drive-by shoots, so we drove and then stopped, posed, and then shot film. He is a 65 year old who I met on the “internet” who has been a good friend, a good reader of my stuff, including books, for more than a year. His wife died in October 2022, in River Falls, where they moved to decades before leaving Merrill, hometown for both of them. Merrill is his and his deceased wife’s birthplace and family locales. Bad memories for KK, and I don’t know about his wife, Cheri.

“The owner of the home accused you have trespassing, stepping on his lawn and photographing his teenage daughter. He is wanting you arrested.”

Welcome to America, and sure, I knew I’d get out of this stupidity, but what flashes in my mind is the mindlessness of America, the flyover states’ policing and politics, the rural places with contradictory “values,” old sagging towns with closed businesses, tired homes, and more which I will cover in this series. Lots of strip malls and drive-thru food joints you see all over America.

“I’m a journalist, and I have been taking photos of Merrill the past few hours, and I can tell you we did not go on the lawn, and I was photographing KK who is from Merrill. I saw no girl in a window, and there is no girl in a window in the four shots I took of a guy out in front of his childhood house.”

“The house owner said his daughter was upstairs, wondering what you were photographing and said you photographed her.”

The conversation when from here and there, and we gave up our IDs, and alas, yeah, KK is an ex-con (with air quotes), ten years behind bars total, six in prisons throughout Wisconsin. He’s known in these parts, and he’s still on paper, which means he is on “supervision,” not allowed to leave the state, and his name and his “crimes” would be coming up on the ID check.

I went outside to the camper and pulled out the Canon. The shots showed I was on the public access, sidewalk and road, and there is no peeping woman in any photograph looking at these aliens. KK stayed on the sidewalk. I shot him there.

America. The big burly guy/father followed the cops who went around town looking for this camper/pick-up truck combo, a unique looking rig. They spotted us at the local restaurant, The Pine Ridge.

America. This guy came up to me, as the cop was facing me, and while I showed him the photos in question; this guy, the so-called victim, pulled out his phone camera and started filming me and the cop.

America. “I’m telling you if they come back and start photographing my house, I will shoot them. I’ll shoot anyone coming onto my property.”

“Well, we’ll deal with that if that happens.”

“I’m not fucking joking. I will get my rifle and shoot the sons of bitches.”

America. After he went back to the five other police vehilces, I gave the cop the old thought exeperiment: “So, in this little Wisconsin town, you have people shooting anyone going onto lawns, with all these homes with no fences, no signs about no tresspassing, you really think I am supposed to believe you can arrest me for stepping on a lawn and photographing my friend’s old childhood home?”

America. “Well, it is trespassing.”

“So you have a lot of shootings in Merrill? Especially in the summertime when kids and teens and their dads and aunts and uncles might be throwing frisbees and balls for dogs and then errant throws and tosses might get a ball or frisbee near the house and some innocent ball player retrieving it by some window or wall?”

America. “It’s trespassing to step on someone’s property and you can get arrested.”

America. “So Merrill has a lot of arrests for kids and dads trespassing? You bust dogs pooping on property, too?”

America. “So, you did background checks on us, what about this guy?”

“Yes.”

“And, you found some ‘interesting’ things in his background?”

The cop smiled. “Yep, there are some rough things in his past.”

America. “So, put the shoe on the other foot. Now, if I was in this parking lot, and say, none of this happened, but I started photographing the parking lot, the cool sign, and then this guy with his Duck Dynasty beard, I know this asshole would go after me hard, no questions asked. I’ve been around the block, around many parts of the world, worked in prisons, and I KNOW for a fact this punk would go after me for photographing him in a public place. Just like he just did with me.”

America. The cop smiled, nodded his head. “Look, think about it, officer. If say I was in Madison, on a street around the university, and had buddies and me tossing footballs, and maybe me photographing them, and then one ball ended up on a lawn, the home owner/resident could call the cops and have us arrestred? And then this shoot to kill crap, you think in a university town the cops would be allowing this? The city’s lawmakers, they’d be okay with college students or faculty or whomever getting arrested for going after a loose beachball or softball off the lawn?”

America. “I’ve never been a policeman anywhere but here, in Merrill. I don’t know about other cities’ ordinances.”

America. Ahh, imagine the headlines: “Trick or Treaters Shot in Merrill, Wisconsin, after a dozen home renters pulled out AR-15s and Glocks and started firing away.” Or, “Local Photographer Dies after Homeowner Plugs him Between the Eyes for Photographing old Historic Home.”

America. And, it only gets worse. “Look, we will be keeping him here until you all get on your way to make sure he doesn’t follow you. Are you done photographing in that area of town?”

America. “I am photographing bridges, pubs, old fronts of buildings, and more. And, we have a graveside service at the cemetary at one. His wife just passed last October and there is a monument marble bench in the graveyard and 20 family members showing up. I’m officiating it.”

America. “Well, we’ll keep him here. You should be fine. The cemetary is a good mile from his house.”

America. “So, this guy wanted to have you ticket us?”

“Actually, he wanted us to arrest you both for trespassing and stalking his daughter.”

America. “You know this is bullshit, really. Smalltown Wisconsin, and I take other small towns in this cheesehead state have similar values, similiar ‘shoot first, ask questions later’ ordinances.”

“Well, he lives in a sketchy part of town and they are worried about their stuff in the yard and on porches.”

America. Shoot to protect the barbeque and patio furniture.

City of Parks. Well, the next iteration of this first part deals with The City of Bars.

“At one time there were 53 bars in Merrill,” KK said. “I knew them all. That’s what people did when I was growing up. They still do, but there aren’t that many now. Many closed up.”

Bars and churches, on every street corner. All Aboard, Gesundheit, and so many run-down joints and holes in the wall, even back when KK was taking fast cars and noisy motorcycles through town to push the oppressiveness out of his skin. His first take down by the law was when he was 16. Booze.

America. The Chatterbox, Hub Inn, Newwood Tap, Ali Baba’s, Dee’s Bear Den, Northway Club, Hinz’s Cork and Dine, 1-900 Club, Beacon Bar, Dick and Shirl’s, Victory Lane.

The victory in this town is working in bone numbing mill jobs, living in a town of killing deer and yanking walleyes from the lakes and rivers, beatings at home, knuckling the young ones in the head, and, drinking at those favorite watering holes.

America. The best Friday Fish Fries are had at those booze joints. Hamburger runs, deep-fried Wisconsin cheese curds, and puffy fries. Bars. Pubs. Clubs. Lounges.

America. In Eagle River north of Merrill, we have the Pioneer, where you pay a buck for an ashtray to smoke inside, so the collected tray fees are used if anytime the bar gets cited for allowing cigs and combustion inside.

America, the land of Disney thinking, cutesy names, and one’s legacy emblazoned on some Blatz or PBR lighted sign, passed from generation to generation.

Merrill, America: Plowman’s Playhouse, Mid-City Tap, Frish’s Place, Clubs 64 or 107, Club Morder, Gail’s Place, Urban Darlene’s, E and K Tap, The Robber’s Roost, Corner Bar, Avenue Bar, Gil’s Bar, Ballyhoo’s, Trophy Bar, Legion Lounge, Rock Island Resort and we can’s forget S & S Bar — Social and Sick. This one gives money gained from liver damage and all night with the boys and a $100 tab to the local hospital. You know, smoke up a pack of Kools, down whiskey a-go-go, and then at the end of the year, S & S’s proprietors hand over some of that mullah go to cancer education, treatments, what have you.

America. Drink, carouse, stay away from the kids, pound back the beers and shots, yell at the top of your lungs how you are right, and the America is about might makes right, aervednd then, maybe, just maybe, a head-on collision with a tree. Or pond. Death by exposure, drowning, all in a night’s bar hopping.

KK got wrapped up into drinking young. Nature and nurture. He’s more than just a smart guy, and he holds a boyhood with no interest in school, a whipper snapper in math, and alas, that teacher who wacked him on the head many times while he struggled to do division. That was grade three.

Imagine, years later, he’s working as a CNA, and lo and behold, this monster teacher is in memory care, in need of bathing and all that. She called him “my sweet Kelly.” All those math division wacking sessions long dust to the wind roiling him her Merrill brain. From sadistic teacher to broken brained old lady dying in a care facility.

So when we traversed this town, one he moved away from decades ago, the lights of nostalgia and nightmares came pulsating out. He knows every nook and cranny, every business that was, every place where he hung out at after ditching school. And the bars.

So when the fuzz came buzzing into our Pine Ridge Diner, more than just flashbacks were surfacing. He, KK, haven been fighting the law all his life, with a total of 10 years behind bars, he shook his head and laughed.

Since I was the accused perpetrator — photographer — I calmly dealt with the cops and their stupidity. Five or six cop vehicles, and big bearded bruisers holding onto their flak jackets and holsters.

Yeah, the illogic of having cops tell me I should have knocked on the guy’s door at 8:30 am on a Saturday, well, this is America. Imagine, I shot 130 pics in a two hour period. Courthouse, churches, cool architecture, funky yards, Trump and Go Brandon signs next to a white cross, you know, all that artsy fartsy stuff. The thought experiment is this: So, a photographer has to knock on what, a dozen, two dozen, more doors? Ask permission to photograph a man standing in front of the old broken down home?

I’ve talked with a few people about this, and hands down they say this is absurd, and then all the photos they took in places like Juarez or throughout the world. Kids and chickens. Three-legged dogs next to a woman hanging out clothes. Vietnam or Venice.

America. You will have the cops come blazing in to interrogate you about photo shoots. We are talking shoot and dash.

Yeah, the guy’s got a rough background, i.e., criminal background. But still, an ex-con was yelling and spitting that he wanted me arrested. A 66 year old guy from Oregon.

America — Friendliest place on the planet.

A sidenote to this is I just opened up my phone call log, and there is a message from the investigating officer. He wanted to let me know that when we drove off by him standing with the accuser, it was the pissed off father who returned back and wanted to apologize for his threats and bullshit. He was, again, Duck Dynasty addled, and no matter how many people reading this think I should have or could have might have done this or not done that, it’s all in a day’s work for me, and while the dramatic overtones may sound as if I am frazzled, well, I am not.

America. Within thirty minutes of the guy’s threats and his bullshit filming me with his toy phone, well, he apologized, and wanted the cop to let me know he was just overprotective and that there was a past, that is, some past incidents with his two daughters. I just listened to the cop’s message, two days later.

America. Triggered. Triggers. Trigger locks. Unlocked trigger locks. Rapid-fire triggers. Triggers all lined up while the weeds take over the yard and the Walmart shit piles up.

America. Wisconsin. Shooting ranges all over the place. Golf courses and shooting ranges. And a shitload of shit factories, that is, dairies.

America. Dairies and fields of GMO corn and soy. You gotta get the cows fed. Shit factories, those daity cows. America. What to do with the shit? America. America Don’t Take No Shit from Anyone (bumper sticker I saw on the highway).

A cautionary tale of manure, insurance and the neighbor’s well – Ohio Ag Net | Ohio’s Country Journal America. Hair triggers and trigger brains. Lots of shit.

Graveyards and dairies. So, some of those 53 Merrill haunts are gone, turned into chiropractor offices.

One’s a florist. Old, sagging boarded up. You have to look closely for a bright beacon coming from a foggy window. “No Coors Served Here!”

Those cemetaries are loaded with German and Polish names. Wisconsin, the state with the most beer:

From grain to glass—a complete illustrated history of brewing and breweries in the state more famous for beer than any other

Few places on Earth are as identified with beer as Wisconsin, with good reason. Since its first commercial brewery was established in 1835, the state has seen more than 800 open and more than 650 close—sometimes after mere months, sometimes after thriving for as long as a century and a half. The Drink That Made Wisconsin Famous explores this rich history, from the first territorial pioneers to the most recent craft brewers, and from barley to barstool.

From the global breweries that developed in Milwaukee in the 1870s to the “wildcat” breweries of Prohibition and the upstart craft brewers of today, Doug Hoverson tells the stories of Wisconsin’s rich brewing history. The lavishly illustrated book goes beyond the giants like Miller, Schlitz, Pabst, and Heileman that loom large in the state’s brewing renown. Of equal interest are the hundreds of small breweries across the state started by immigrants and entrepreneurs to serve local or regional markets. Many proved remarkably resistant to the consolidation and contraction that changed the industry—giving the impression that nearly every town in the Badger State had its own brewery. Even before beer tourism became popular, hunters, anglers, and travelers found their favorite brews in small Wisconsin cities like Rice Lake, Stevens Point, and Chippewa Falls. Hoverson describes these breweries in all their diversity, from the earliest enterprises to the few surviving stalwarts to the modern breweries reviving Wisconsin’s reputation as the place to find not just the most beer but the best.

Within the larger history, every brewery has its story, and Hoverson gives each its due, investigating the circumstances that meant success or failure and describing in engaging detail the people, the technology, the marketing, and the government relations that delivered Wisconsin’s beer from grain to glass.

America. Americana: things associated with the culture and history of America, especially the United States.

This is part one to KK’s magical mystery re-tour of Merrill, the roots of where the hell started for him. I’ve been in small towns in Mass. and Delaware and New Jersey, for sure, and the bars and pubs and wreckless legacy of cops owning booze joints, all of that, it’s been taught to me early. As a traveler. I’ve seen the idiocy of men and women plastered in Edinburgh and Dublin. And in Hamburg and Munich.

Limey monsters in British Honduras and now Belize slamming drinks and spewing the shit of military men high on rum and beer. Yeah, one of the worst times was when my former wife and I were in Athens, and the four Brits — military on R & R — in the room adjoining went from toasting and hoisting to singing and yelling to actually beating the shit out of each other, the walls pounding, some of the pictures in our hotel room crashing down.

KK isn’t that kind of a drinker, but the drinking started for a dark hidden reason, and that too will be explored in part two. Booze, meth, fentynal, the whole nine yards of America.

Smalltowns in rural America, shuttering some of the businesses. Farms going belly up. Big bruiser Germanic men, brothers and fathers, working the manure and the milking machines. Endless winds and chill and snow and rain. Hot as hell in the summer. A lot of flat land. Marshy land and swamps all over.

Guns and butter, Wisconsin. America. One kid with higher ambitions, locked into a mold for a while, a product of father beatings as a kid, beatings by teachers, the kid, KK, always throwing in to protect the bullied fat boys. Wisconsin. Ten years behind bars in more than a dozen shitholes, from county lock-ups to state correctional institutions.

KK fought the law, and the law waylaid him.

I met KK a year ago when he tracked me down via email. Reading my stuff over at DV, and alas, I learned about his River Falls life, his wife of 41 years struggling with small cell lung cancer. And she eventually succumbed to the cancer. More about that in parts two and three.

“How did you meet him?” some have asked. “You are flying all the way to Wisconsin for eight days to see a fellow you never met, some guy with a shady past?”

Yeah, and that’s also in parts two and three. Why I came, and what transpired, again, more microcosm of the flagging United States of Go Find Bradon and Trump Derangement Syndrome . . . America, my first time in Minnesota and Wisconsin.

America. Trigger warnings. Meth and cancer, family estrangement, pedophilia, violence, hoarding what you have, endless cycles of have’s and have’s not.

America. On the surface, all fine and dandy in those cul-de-sac hoods and on those thousand acre farms. Soy and corn. A belly full of toxins and a belly full of Friday Fish Fry and Old Milwaukee. But boy, so many addiction clinics, so many lost grandkids on meth.

America. Where oh where are the Red Nations?

• Brothertown Nation

• Forest County Potawatomi

• Ho-Chunk Nation

• Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin

• Stockbridge-Munsee Community Band of Mohican Indians

• Oneida Nation

• Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa

• Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Chippewa

• Lac Du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa

• Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa

• Sokaogon Chippewa Community (Mole Lake Band of Lake Superior Chippewa)

• St. Croix Chippewa Indians of Wisconsin

That’s a whole other story, Red Nations, USA. America. Trigger Warnings. Tribes. Prisons and PBR. Endless mud pits and manure ponds. Wisconsin Cheese, the Best in Show. Where are the tribes?

TBC. Wisconsin First Nations.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

A longtime Republican lawyer who aided former President Donald Trump's effort to overturn the 2020 election told GOP donors that the party should be working to roll back voting on college campuses and other initiatives aimed at expanding ballot access, according to audio obtained by progressive journalist Lauren Windsor.

"What are these college campus locations?" Cleta Mitchell, a top GOP attorney and fundraiser asked during a presentation at the Republican National Committee's donor retreat in Nashville last weekend.

"What is this young people effort that they do? They basically put the polling place next to the student dorm so they just have to roll out of bed, vote, and go back to bed," lamented Mitchell, an avid voter suppression campaigner who has represented Republican organizations, individual lawmakers, and right-wing groups such as the National Rifle Association.

According to The Washington Post, which reviewed a copy of Mitchell's Nashville presentation, the GOP attorney's remarks "offered a window into a strategy that seems designed to reduce voter access and turnout among certain groups, including students and those who vote by mail, both of which tend to skew Democratic."

"Mitchell focused on campus voting in five states—Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Virginia, and Wisconsin—all of which are home to enormous public universities with large in-state student populations," the Post reported Thursday. "Mitchell also targeted the preregistration of students, an apparent reference to the practice in some states of allowing 17-year-olds to register ahead of their 18th birthdays so they can vote as soon as they are eligible."

\u201cEXCLUSIVE AUDIO: Trump coup attorney Cleta Mitchell wants to "combat" voting on college campuses, citing North Carolina and Wisconsin, and says that when Republicans win the state Senate in Virginia, they can eliminate 45 days of early voting and same day voter registration.\u201d

— Lauren Windsor (@Lauren Windsor) 1682005267

Ben Wikler, the chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, noted in response to Mitchell's presentation that "Wisconsin has 320,000 college students."

"If the GOP had won the state Supreme Court race, they would've—as this speech makes clear—engineered a crackdown on student voter freedoms," Wikler wrote on Twitter. "Instead, thanks in part to student turnout, democracy lives on in Wisconsin."

"The Trump machine wants to disenfranchise students," Wikler added. "We're fighting them in WI. They've got their eye on our state, and NC and VA too."

Republican lawmakers in dozens of states across the country have introduced at least 150 bills aimed at restricting ballot access this year, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

"Two of the more radical proposals include a Texas bill that would allow presidential electors to disregard state election results and a Virginia bill that would empower a random selection of residents to void local election results," the group observed.

In her speech to Republican donors, Mitchell said GOP lawmakers should be using their dominance in state legislatures to "combat" voting by college students and measures such as same-day voter registration.

Mitchell pointed specifically to North Carolina, where Republicans now have veto-proof majorities in both legislative chambers thanks to erstwhile Democratic state Rep. Tricia Cotham, who recently switched parties.

"Instead of fighting for the people or actually earning the votes, Republicans' only plan is to try to 'combat' voting on college campuses and prevent students and young people from participating in our democracy," Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.) wrote Thursday. "They are SHAMELESSLY and DESPERATELY saying the quiet part out loud."

The New York Times reported last month that Republicans, "alarmed over young people increasingly proving to be a force for Democrats at the ballot box," have already been "trying to enact new obstacles to voting for college students" in recent weeks.

"In Idaho, Republicans used their power monopoly... to ban student ID cards as a form of voter identification," the newspaper reported. "But so far this year, the new Idaho law is one of few successes for Republicans targeting young voters. Attempts to cordon off out-of-state students from voting in their campus towns or to roll back preregistration for teenagers have failed in New Hampshire and Virginia."

"Even in Texas, where 2019 legislation shuttered early voting sites on many college campuses, a new proposal that would eliminate all college polling places seems to have an uncertain future," the Times added.

The intensifying GOP campaign against youth voting comes after young people had a major impact on the 2022 midterms. As researchers noted in a recent analysis for the Brookings Institution, strong enthusiasm and turnout among young voters "enabled the Democrats to win almost every battleground statewide contest and increase their majority in the U.S. Senate."

"To the GOP: I hope you're afraid," tweeted Olivia Julianna, director of politics and government affairs at Gen-Z for Change. "I hope you wake up every morning haunted by the chants of young voters protesting your attacks on our rights. You should be afraid. Because you're going to lose power, one vote at a time."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

What is it about many modern day Republican candidates?

If they win an election, everything is on the up and up. If they lose, something was amiss and certainly unfair.

Defeated Supreme Court candidate Dan Kelly is the most recent example. After it became clear Tuesday night that Janet Protasiewicz would defeat him by a wide margin, he had nothing but bad things to say about his opponent.

She's a serial liar, he proclaimed in a speech at the swank Heidel House Hotel in Green Lake.

"I wish that in a circumstance like this, I would be able to concede to a worthy opponent," he told his assembled supporters. "But I do not have a worthy opponent to which I can concede."

Kelly called Protasiewicz's campaign "deeply deceitful, dishonorable and despicable."

"My opponent is a serial liar," he continued. "She's disregarded judicial ethics; she's demeaned the judiciary with her behavior. This is the future that we have to look forward to in Wisconsin."

This from the candidate whose campaign backers, including Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, sponsored an ad that used a Milwaukee rape victim's case to declare that Protasiewicz had a soft spot in her heart for sexual predators.

The ad, which claimed the Milwaukee judge had unleashed the perpetrator to again prey on the innocent, so upset the victim that she spoke out in Protasiewicz's defense.

"It immediately took my breath away," she said of the ad. "To see it in action, I wondered if there was any thought put into the human beings behind the cases."

Both sides in the campaign used inflammatory, low-ball TV spots, but for Kelly to suggest he was above it all is nothing short of laughable. In fact, the former justice was up on TV early and often suggesting his opponent was soft on criminals, cherry picking a handful of sentences out of the hundreds she had administered while on the circuit court bench.

What was so ludicrous about all those multimillion dollar attack ads is that Supreme Court justices don't rule on such cases in the first place.

Kelly closed his concession talk with, "I wish Wisconsin the best of luck, because I think it’s going to need it."

No, it's the other way around. Kelly, absurdly claiming that he would only rule on the principles of law and not his political beliefs, was all set to rubber stamp the right-wing Republican legislative agenda, as had the justice he was hoping to replace, Patience Roggensack. The gerrymanderers, the opponents of a woman's right to choose, the vote suppressors were all lined up.

Lucky for us, the voters sent them away.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Dave Zweifel.

History was made this week when Donald Trump became the first president to be criminally charged. He pleaded not guilty to 34 counts of falsifying business records. He has yet to be indicted, however, for the far more serious offense of promoting an insurrection and attempting to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election. Most prominent Republicans have refused to criticize Trump for any of his alleged crimes.

The traditional view that fascism can’t happen here seems obsolete as the Republican Party appears increasingly comfortable embracing authoritarianism. Several elections this week remind us that “democracy” is not a noun but a verb – the outcome of collective efforts, not just on election day, but every day.

Wisconsin serves as a prime example. While the state is roughly evenly split between liberals and conservatives, Republicans have aggressively gerrymandered the state’s legislative and congressional districts, capturing huge majorities in the state Senate and Assembly. As Wisconsin’s Democratic U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin puts it, “That’s politicians deciding who their voters are rather than the converse.” This has allowed them to enact a barrage of democracy-constricting laws including voter suppression, gutting reproductive rights and campaign finance regulations, and attacking the right to organize unions.

“Wisconsin is a case study for how Republicans are dismantling democracy in real time right now, but also it’s a project that dates back over a decade, where Republicans have tried to create a situation where their majorities are voter-proof, that they control the state no matter what happens politically,” Ari Berman, national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones, said on the Democracy Now! news hour last October, just before the pivotal 2022 midterm elections.

Ari came back on Democracy Now! this week as a statewide vote was underway for a Wisconsin state Supreme Court seat, which would decide whether liberals or conservatives control the Supreme Court. “This is an incredibly important race in Wisconsin,” Ari said, “probably the most important race of the 2023 election cycle” in the entire country.

As Madison, Wisconsin-based national affairs correspondent for The Nation, John Nichols explained on Democracy Now!, after liberal judge Janet Protasiewicz won the race, “the Wisconsin Supreme Court, to a greater extent than almost any court in the country, has entertained many of the Republican efforts to assault voting rights, suppress votes, alter ways in which elections are managed and handled. This court came within a vote of really opening the door for many of Trump’s challenges to the 2020 election results.”

In what was expected to be a very close race, Janet Protasiewicz defeated rightwing extremist, insurrection-supporting Republican Dan Kelly by a whopping eleven percentage points. Overcoming voter suppression and unprecedented amounts of out-of-state dark money contributions, the voters of Wisconsin achieved a critical win in the fight to reclaim their democracy. Democrats expect the court, with its new 4-3 liberal majority, to hear challenges soon to both Wisconsin’s recently revived 1849 near-total abortion ban and to the state’s Republican-gerrymandered political map.

In nearby Chicago, an election took place to choose a new mayor for the Windy City’s 2.8 million people. Incumbent Mayor Lori Lightfoot lost her reelection bid in February, sending two challengers to a runoff: establishment and police union favorite Paul Vallas, a former CEO of Chicago Public Schools, and Brandon Johnson, a progressive teachers’ union organizer and county commissioner. Vallas, as a public education executive in several major school districts around the country was well-known for aggressive privatization and promoting charter schools. He campaigned for mayor on a “law and order” platform, promising to increase Chicago’s police force.

Brandon Johnson ran on a progressive platform with pledges to make “the suburbs, airlines & ultra-rich pay their fair share.” He proposes a “Mansion Tax” and a speculation tax on financial transactions to fund investments in public transit, schools, and a broader approach to public safety compared to Vallas’ pledge to simply throw more police at Chicago’s problems.

Brandon Johnson proved pollsters wrong, winning the race, albeit by a slim majority. His surprise victory was attributed to the development of a broad, multi-racial/multi-ethnic coalition and the tactical, on-the-ground campaign support from some of Chicago’s largest unions.

It might seem extreme to include a contest between two wings of the Democratic Party in a discussion of rising fascism. But politicians like Paul Vallas who actively seek to increase police power enable the creation of a police state – a prerequisite for authoritarianism.

Author Jeff Sharlet describes the attraction of fascism as an undertow, able to slowly draw people in. Electoral victories alone will not stem the rising tide of fascism. Grassroots organizing to address the systemic inequities often used by demagogues to fan the flames of division is essential. This week’s victories in Wisconsin and Chicago demonstrate that people power is still a force more powerful.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Denis Moynihan.

Daniel Kelly, the right-wing former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice who lost his bid to re-join the high court on Tuesday as liberal circuit court judge Janet Protasiewicz won by a decisive margin, refused to concede to his opponent in a speech that one critic said personified the Republican Party's approach to electoral politics in recent years.

"It brings me no joy to say this," Kelly told supporters. "I wish that in a circumstance like this, I would be able to concede to a worthy opponent. But I do not have a worthy opponent to which I can concede."

Kelly acknowledged that he lost the election and said he "respected" the decision made by more than 55% of Wisconsin voters who chose Protasiewicz, a Milwaukee County Circuit judge who was outspoken about her support for abortion rights and labor unions, to join the court, giving Democratic-aligned justices a 4-3 majority.

But he denounced Protasiewicz as a "serial liar" and accused her of disregarding judicial ethics and demeaning the judiciary "with her behavior."

"This is just what Republicans do now," said New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie.

Progressive Chicago-based news outlet Heartland Signalaccused Kelly of going "full sour grapes."

In the two-and-a-half years since former Republican President Donald Trump urged his supporters to attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election results and refused to acknowledge his loss, a number of losing GOP candidates have demanded recounts, claimed their elections were "rigged," and spread baseless conspiracy theories about voting irregularities.

"Among the Trumpian core of the Republican Party, this has become mainstream," Rick Hasen, the director of UCLA Law's Safeguarding Democracy Project, toldAxios last year. "It's exceedingly dangerous, because a democracy depends on losers' consent."

As Common Dreamsreported earlier this week, Kelly claimed to be nonpartisan during the campaign, but has received funding from vehemently anti-union billionaires and has ruled in the past in the favor of allowing people to carry concealed weapons on public transit. He has also written blog posts in the past saying that people who support abortion rights want "to preserve sexual libertinism" and denouncing marriage equality and people who rely on Medicare and Social Security benefits.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.

Democrat-backed Judge Janet Protasiewicz won a high-stakes Wisconsin Supreme Court race Tuesday, giving liberals a majority on the court for the first time since 2008 and renewing hopes the state’s abortion ban can be reversed. Protasiewicz’s rival, former Justice Dan Kelly, had support from Republicans and anti-abortion groups. The Wisconsin Supreme Court is also likely to weigh in on gerrymandering and voting access, with the potential to impact national elections for Congress and president. We get an update from John Nichols, national affairs correspondent for The Nation, who joins us from Madison, Wisconsin.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Wisconsin voters wrested control of the state Supreme Court from conservatives for the first time in 15 years on Tuesday by electing Milwaukee County Judge Janet Protasiewicz—an outspoken supporter of abortion rights, ballot access, and union protections—to fill an open seat.

Protasiewicz defeated former Supreme Court Justice Dan Kelly in the high-stakes and expensive contest, which drew close national attention given its implications for voting rights, reproductive freedoms, worker protections, and more in the key battleground state.

"Judge Protasiewitz's victory is a huge win for protecting Wisconsinites' fundamental freedoms," said Sean Eldridge, founder and president of the progressive advocacy group Stand Up America. "For more than three decades, Judge Protasiewicz has defended Wisconsinites' constitutional rights, maintained judicial independence, and earned recognition for her commitment to the community. She will continue that important work on the Supreme Court."

"Judge Protasiewicz will act as a check on conservative efforts to take away reproductive freedom, disenfranchise voters of color through racial gerrymandering, and overturn election results they don't like. Her victory helps build a firewall for our democracy and the freedom to vote ahead of 2024," Eldridge continued. "This election was a sound rejection of MAGA extremism, including their attacks on the freedom to vote and the right to access abortion care. The people of Wisconsin spoke through the ballot box and their message was undeniable: MAGA extremism has no place on our court, and neither does Dan Kelly."

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinelreported that Protasiewicz's win puts "the state laws most celebrated by conservatives at risk of being overturned—including a 19th Century-era ban on abortions."

Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul, a Democrat, filed a lawsuit over the 1849 abortion ban after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, imperiling abortion rights across the nation.

In her victory speech late Tuesday, Protasiewicz said that "our state is taking a step forward to a better and brighter future where our rights will be protected."

Protasiewicz, whose Supreme Court bid was backed by labor unions, said during the campaign that she believes Act 10—a Wisconsin law backed by former GOP Gov. Scott Walker that gutted public employees' collective bargaining rights—is "unconstitutional."

Kelly's campaign was notably supported by the GOP billionaire megadonors Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, who have worked to dismantle union rights nationwide.

Dean Warsh, president of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers' Wisconsin State Conference, said in a statement late Tuesday that "Wisconsin's working families made a clear statement today."

"Our local unions throughout Wisconsin put in the work to turn out every voter possible in this pivotal spring election and we are ready to continue to do what it takes to finally take back our state from the divisive Walker-era politics that have plagued us for far too long," said Warsh. "On behalf of the over 15,000 members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers here in Wisconsin, I congratulate Judge Janet on her win and look forward to what is next for our state and the labor movement."

Ari Berman of Mother Jonesnoted Tuesday that while Protasiewicz's impact "could be felt quickly" given the abortion rights and gerrymandering cases that are expected to reach the Wisconsin Supreme Court in the near future, "Republicans will likely do everything they can to maintain their dominance in the legislature and have already floated the idea of impeaching Protasiewicz, which could trigger a constitutional crisis in the state."

"A new era for the court is beginning," Berman added, "but the fight over democracy in Wisconsin, with huge implications nationwide, is far from over."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jake Johnson.

Trump, now a 2024 Republican presidential candidate, faces 34 felony counts for allegedly "falsifying New York business records in order to conceal damaging information and unlawful activity from American voters before and after the 2016 election."

As Free Speech for People noted, the twice-impeached former president still has not faced legal consequences for alleged "crimes related to the January 6, 2021 insurrection and the events leading up to it; crimes related to Trump's January 2, 2021 phone call demanding that the Georgia Secretary of State 'find 11,780 votes'... the obstruction of justice crimes identified by Special Counsel Robert Mueller in the second part of his report; crimes identified by the inspector general of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence related to Trump's attempts to extort Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy; and others."

"Trump may be the first former president to face criminal prosecution, but that fact in and of itself is a damning condemnation of the U.S. system of impunity."

Trump's prosecution in New York "is a good first step," according toThe Intercept's Jeremy Scahill, but it "is not evidence that our much-vaunted justice system can actually be applied fairly and evenly to all, even a former president."

"Trump may be the first former president to face criminal prosecution, but that fact in and of itself is a damning condemnation of the U.S. system of impunity that has long permeated our system of American exceptionalism," the journalist argued Tuesday. "This case against Trump would be a mere footnote of history, albeit a wild one, if the U.S. actually believed in holding presidents and other top officials accountable for their crimes, including those committed in office."

Pointing to former U.S. President George W. Bush; his vice president, Dick Cheney; and Henry Kissinger, who served as secretary of state and national security adviser in the Nixon and Ford administrations, he asserted, "The truth is that all of them should be serving substantial prison sentences for directing and orchestrating the gravest of criminal activity: war crimes."

However, former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) "steadfastly refused to even consider impeachment proceedings against Bush," and former President Barack Obama made clear that "no one would be prosecuted for running a secret global kidnap and torture regime under Bush and Cheney," Scahill wrote. "The system depends on such bipartisan impunity."

The prosecution of Trump comes on the heels of the 20th anniversary of Bush's illegal invasion of Iraq. Just ahead of that milestone last month, the U.S-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) renewed its call for reparations and accountability.

"Reparations are rooted in precedent and international law, as well as a strong tradition of justice-based organizing by civil rights movements, and we should not let the difficulty of securing justice deter us from seeking it—for Iraqis and for all others harmed by U.S. imperialism, exploitation, and genocide," CCR said. "Justice also entails accountability for the perpetrators of these horrific crimes, including those responsible for the torture at Abu Ghraib and other detention centers in Iraq."

CCR further demanded justice for those tortured and detained in the broader war against terrorism that Bush declared in response to the September 11, 2001 attacks—while also acknowledging that "legal efforts against high-level political and military leaders for the invasion itself and the many crimes committed in the 'war on terror' pose a different set of challenges, as demonstrated by our efforts to hold high-level Bush administration officials accountable at the International Criminal Court for crimes in or arising out of the war in Afghanistan or under universal jurisdiction."

The United States is notably not a party to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), the treaty which established the Hague-based tribunal to investigate and prosecute people from around the world for genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the crime of aggression.

Nearly a year after 9/11, Bush signed into law the American Servicemembers' Protection Act. Dubbed the "Hague Invasion Act" by critics, it empowers the president to use "all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release" of any U.S. or allied person "who is being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court."

Last month, roughly a year into Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the ICC issued international arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Commissioner for Children's Rights Maria Lvova-Belova for allegedly abducting Ukrainian children.

While Putin has "exhibited zero concern about his indictment," his "invasion of Ukraine has created an interesting predicament for the U.S. empire on these matters," Scahill highlighted, explaining that though President Joe Biden has called the Russian leader a war criminal, the United States has long "encouraged ad hoc tribunals" rather than supporting ICC prosecutions.

"The whole purpose of this from the U.S. perspective is to ensure that these laws will never be applied to Americans or their friends," he wrote. "The prosecution of Trump should thus serve as a reminder that the U.S. does not actually believe in holding its most powerful citizens accountable for even the most serious of acts. And that position has real consequences, including in how it can be weaponized by criminals like Putin."

"Make no mistake, Trump should be prosecuted for a variety of crimes, committed both as a private citizen and public official," Scahill concluded. "But if we want to claim that our system is exceptional, then the same fate should be brought to bear on the Bushes, Cheneys, and Kissingers of the world as well."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice.

• Donald Trump arraigned on 32 charges in Manhattan courtroom
• Tennessee Republican lawmakers move to expel three Democrats for their role in a gun safety protest on House floor
• Finland joints NATO; peace group Code Pink responds
• U.N. officials call for end to terrifying legacy of land mines

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The post Trump pleads not guilty to 32 counts in Manhattan courtroom; Finland becomes 31st member of NATO; Wisconsin voters choose new Supreme Court justice in race with national implications: The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – April 4, 2023 appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

A crucial election in Wisconsin on Tuesday will decide the fate of democracy in the state and have major ramifications for the 2024 presidential election, says reporter Ari Berman, national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones. At stake is a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which currently has a 4-3 conservative majority. Although technically nonpartisan, the election is a showdown between Democratic-backed Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Janet Protasiewicz and Republican-backed former state Supreme Court Justice Daniel Kelly. Berman says the outcome of the race could determine if abortion remains illegal in Wisconsin, as well as the future of voting laws and redistricting. “Every time the state Supreme Court under conservative control has been asked whether or not they want to expand democracy or constrict democracy, they have fallen on the side of constricting democracy,” says Berman.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Progressives in Wisconsin and across the United States are warning that Tuesday's upcoming state Supreme Court election will have implications for working families nationwide, as a liberal judge who has been outspoken about her support for abortion rights and labor unions faces a right-wing former justice funded by dark money.

Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Janet Protasiewicz is running against former state Supreme Court Justice Dan Kelly. The contest, which will decide whether the high court leans left or right, has become the most expensive judicial race in U.S. history, with the candidates, political parties, and outside groups pouring $30 million into the election.

Wisconsin Watch at the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism reported last week that Protasiewicz has raised nearly $12 million more than her opponent as the judge issues warnings that a victory for Kelly would mean the court would almost certainly uphold an 1849 law that went into effect after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, making abortion illegal in almost all cases including pregnancies that result from rape or incest.

"I can tell you that if my opponent is elected," Protasiewicz told supporters recently, "that 1849 abortion ban will stay on the books."

\u201cThe Wisconsin Supreme Court could play a pivotal role shaping reproductive freedom in the state. Judge Protasiewicz is running against Daniel Kelly, who is endorsed by anti-choice extremists.\u201d

— NARAL (@NARAL) 1680547613

While Kelly has claimed during the campaign that he is nonpartisan, political commentator Brian Tyler Cohen explained in a video produced with pro-worker media outlet More Perfect Union that the former state Supreme Court justice has made his political leanings perfectly clear in previous public statements and rulings.

"For candidates who have a lot to hide, never talking about your politics is actually extremely convenient," Cohen said of Kelly, who before launching his supposedly nonpartisan campaign ruled that people in Madison, Wisconsin should be permitted to carry concealed weapons on public transit and that a fossil fuel company should not be required to protect the public from water it polluted.

Kelly's funders include Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, "a pair of billionaires who are laser focused on transforming their home state of Wisconsin," Cohen said. The Uihleins have previously donated to anti-democracy causes like "the dismantling of unions" through the passage of Act 10, which eliminated collective bargaining for most public employees and contributed to a dramatic decline in union membership in the state.

Kelly's backers had spent about $2 million more than Protasiewicz's supporters on ads as of March 27, according to Wisconsin Watch.

"If they succeed," said More Perfect Union on Monday, "MAGA Republicans will control the state's highest court—a disaster for working people."

The Wisconsin AFL-CIO and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) are working "to reach every union member in the state and as many other voters as possible" ahead of the election, according to IBEW Local 494 political director Ryan Neibauer, by canvassing door-to-door, visiting job sites, and phonebanking.

"We're letting people know that labor is supporting Judge Janet, and we think that can pull her across the finish line with a win," Neibauer said in a statement late last month. "There are so many things on the table and so many things we can do with a pro-worker majority."

Anti-union justices have had a 4-3 majority prior to the election, but with right-wing Justice Patience Roggensack retiring, "a Protasiewicz win levels the playing field and gives working families and their allies a fighting chance," said IBEW.

As progressive Wisconsin columnist John Nichols wrote in The Capital Times on Sunday, electing Protasiewicz to secure a liberal majority on the high court would give the state its first chance to address a "radically gerrymandered" district map drawn by Republican lawmakers in 2011, which allowed the party to hold both legislative chambers for more than a decade even as Democrats have won 14 of the last 17 statewide elections.

"This pattern will not change unless a majority of justices agree to revisit the issue," wrote Nichols. "That certainly won't happen if conservatives retain their current 4-3 majority following the April 4 election... If the seat flips and liberals take charge of the court, however, Wisconsin's legislative and congressional maps could be challenged on a variety of grounds, and perhaps redrawn."

"The stakes could not be higher," Nichols added. "And the contrast between the candidates could not be clearer."

Cohen noted that Tuesday's election could also decide whether former President Donald Trump will be able to successfully challenge the 2024 election results, as he attempted to in 2020, if he continues his campaign for president.

"Just look how close he came to doing it in Wisconsin in 2020," Cohen said. "The state Supreme Court narrowly sided with empirical reality in a 4-3 ruling, and it's not a huge mystery how Kelly might rule if he were presented with a similar case. That's bad news for all of us."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Julia Conley.

The fate of the 2020 presidential election may have come down to one vote. At the Wisconsin Supreme Court, President Donald Trump’s bid to throw out around a quarter million ballots from Democratic strongholds was dismissed — by a 4-3 margin. The decision secured the upper-Midwestern state’s electoral votes for Joe Biden, ensuring his White House win.

The decision put the already conservative-leaning Wisconsin court in the sights of MAGA Republicans.

This year, with an election for a seat on the court looming on Tuesday, far-right political funders — including those who continued pouring money into attempts to overthrow the 2020 race after the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol — are putting millions into trying to throw the race to the right-wing candidate.

In the days after the attack, Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, two of the country’s largest conservative political donors, gave more than $5 million to groups seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. The same couple has spent more than $5 million so far backing the campaign of former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Daniel Kelly. If Kelly wins, the court would maintain a 4-3 conservative majority, but shift further in favor of the extreme right.

“It’s coming down to a couple of billionaires and the nefarious dark-money groups that they back hemorrhaging tens of millions of dollars into their candidates.”

Elizabeth Uihlein, left, at the White House on Sept. 20, 2019, in Washington, D.C. Richard Uihlein, right, a major conservative political donor and co-founder of shipping giant Uline, on Oct. 23, 2019.

Photos: Paul Morigi/Getty Images (l), Mark Hertzberg/ZUMA/Alamy (r)

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Kelly advised the Wisconsin Republican Party in its efforts to create a fake elector scheme to challenge the state’s presidential election results.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Akela Lacy.

Learn how to help us investigate the dairy industry. Haz click aquí para aprender cómo ayudarnos a investigar la industria lechera.

State and local officials in Wisconsin said they were horrified to learn of the conditions leading up to the 2019 death of an 8-year-old Nicaraguan boy on a dairy farm, as well as the flawed law enforcement investigation that followed. Now they say they want to address some of the issues highlighted by a ProPublica investigation, published last month, into Jefferson Rodríguez’s death.

“What happened should never have happened,” said state Rep. Sylvia Ortiz-Velez, a Milwaukee Democrat whose mother’s family worked as migrant farm laborers in Wisconsin in the 1960s.

Jefferson was run over late one summer night in 2019 by a worker operating a skid steer on a farm in rural Dane County, about a half-hour north of Madison, the state capital. It was the worker’s first day on the job, and he told us that he had received only a few hours of training. Our investigation showed how the authorities who investigated Jefferson’s death wrongly concluded that his father had run him over.

The failure was due in large part to a language barrier between the boy’s father, José María Rodríguez Uriarte, and the Dane County sheriff’s deputy who interviewed him. Rodríguez does not speak English; the deputy considered herself proficient in Spanish, but not fluent. When we interviewed the deputy, we learned that when she questioned Rodríguez in Spanish about what happened, her words didn’t mean what she thought and would likely be confusing to a Spanish speaker.

Jefferson’s death was ruled an accident. Nobody was charged criminally.

“Proficiency in a crisis isn’t good enough,” said Dana Pellebon, who sits on the Dane County Board of Supervisors. “Unfortunately, until a situation like this happens, sometimes we don’t see the gaps in service.”

Pellebon and several other supervisors told ProPublica they were looking into measures that could improve language access for non-English speakers who interact with the sheriff’s office. According to estimates from the U.S. census, more than 10% of Dane County residents speak a language other than English at home.

“This theme of language barriers for people to exercise and enforce their rights — from law enforcement to human services to our court system — it is widespread,” said county Supervisor Heidi Wegleitner. “There really needs to be a thorough examination countywide into these barriers, because it’s not fair.”

The Board of Supervisors sets the budget for and can make recommendations to the sheriff’s office. But it is limited in its ability to set policy.

In a statement, a spokesperson for the sheriff’s office said the agency has a skilled and diverse staff that’s equipped with the tools it needs, including “unfettered access” to language translation services. The department “is always looking for ways to improve the services provided to the community which include the evaluation of current practices and consideration [of] received recommendations,” the spokesperson said.

At the state level, Ortiz-Velez pointed to a bill that would allow DACA recipients to become police officers or sheriff’s deputies. (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals is a federal program that gives some undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children temporary protections from deportation.) Currently, only U.S. citizens can work as police officers or sheriff’s deputies in Wisconsin. “For us to have officers that are fluent, that were born in other countries and can speak the language, I think that could be a great help,” Ortiz-Velez said.

Our story on Jefferson’s death is the first in our series, America’s Dairyland, that intends to explore work, housing and other conditions for immigrant dairy workers in Wisconsin and across the Midwest. Here are three takeaways from our reporting efforts so far:

Under the Civil Rights Act, agencies that receive federal funding are required to ensure that their services are accessible to people who speak limited English. The Department of Justice, which drafted guidelines for law enforcement agencies on this issue nearly two decades ago, occasionally investigates departments that fail to meet this requirement.

Last year, we began requesting records of law enforcement agencies’ responses to incidents ranging from work-related injuries to assaults on dairy farms across Wisconsin. What those records show us is that officials routinely encounter language barriers when interacting with dairy workers. Frequently they rely on farm supervisors or employees to serve as interpreters; sometimes they turn to Google Translate or to children.

The Dane County Sheriff’s Office has no written policy about how deputies should respond to incidents involving people who do not speak English, or on when to bring in an interpreter. The department does not assess the language skills of employees, who instead self-report their proficiency. But as a general practice, department officials have said, when deputies need to communicate with residents who speak a language other than English, they are supposed to put out a call to ask if any of their colleagues speak that language and, if none are available, ask for help from other nearby agencies.

Because workers are undocumented, they often have a harder time speaking up about unfair or unsafe conditions.

Rodríguez and his son immigrated to the U.S. from Nicaragua in early 2019 in search of economic opportunity. As an asylum-seeker, Rodríguez did not have a work permit. He used fake papers to get a job at D&K Dairy. (In a deposition, the farm’s owner said he was not aware of Rodríguez’s citizenship status.)

Rodríguez earned $9.50 an hour and, like other workers, routinely worked 70 to 80 hours a week. Agricultural work is excluded from many of America’s labor protections, so there was no overtime pay for working more than 40 hours. Like many Wisconsin dairy farms, D&K Dairy provided free housing. But the housing Rodríguez and his son used was not in a house; they lived in an apartment above the milking parlor, the barn where hundreds of cows were brought day and night to be milked by heavy, loud machinery.

For years the dairy industry, complaining of labor shortages, has lobbied unsuccessfully to access the federal H-2A guest worker program, which allows employers to temporarily bring in foreign employees when they can’t find local workers. Currently, the program is limited to seasonal agricultural work; dairy is a year-round job.

Critics say the guest-worker program lends itself to abuse and exploitation, as immigrants’ ability to remain in the U.S. is tied to a single employer, which has led to several high-profile cases of forced labor, wage theft, substandard housing and high recruitment fees, among other problems.

When Jefferson died, an investigator with the Dane County Medical Examiner’s Office alerted the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which is responsible for workplace safety. But OSHA did not investigate because the boy was not a farm employee.

Even when workers die or are injured on small farms, OSHA is limited in its ability to respond. Farms with fewer than 11 workers are often exempt from oversight. (Some states with their own OSHA plans do more, but Wisconsin isn’t one of them.) And the federal agency has few safety standards for agricultural work sites.

In recent years, OSHA has attempted to inspect fewer than a dozen of the thousands of dairy farms in Wisconsin each year. The year Jefferson died, six of the nine inspections that OSHA initiated ultimately were not done because the farms were too small to fall under the agency’s jurisdiction; three of those six involved fatalities.

“Dairy operations these days are big factories, basically,” said Michael Engelberger, a Dane County supervisor. “They should not be exempt from any OSHA regulations or special agriculture labor laws. To me that’s just wrong.”

Wegleitner said she hopes to convene a group of supervisors, community advocates, county staff and others to talk about next steps in the coming weeks.

“Language access is one piece,” she said. “We have unsafe housing, lack of inspections and oversight, and all those things may not be things the county can legislate. But if we are talking to and advocating with state and federal policymakers and groups and working in coalition, I think this needs to be addressed on multiple levels.”

We plan to keep reporting on issues affecting immigrant dairy workers across the Midwest. Among those issues: traffic stops of undocumented immigrants who drive without a license; access to medical care or workers’ compensation after injuries on the job; and employer-provided housing.

Do you have ideas or tips for us to look into? Please reach out using this form.

And if you know a Spanish speaker who might be interested in this topic, please share with them a translated version of the story about Jefferson’s death — which also includes an audio version — or this note about how to get in touch with us.

Aquí está nuestra investigación — y una versión en audio — en español, así como una carta explicando cómo usted se puede comunicar con nosotros si quiere compartir información sobre la industria lechera de Wisconsin y estados cercanos.

Help ProPublica Journalists Investigate the Dairy Industry

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Melissa Sanchez and Maryam Jameel.

Tucked away at a technical college, citizens of the rural town of Peshtigo, population 4,006, try to get comfortable in plastic chairs, ready to hear from state officials, once again, about ways they may one day safely drink their home’s well water.

Cindy Boyle, the town’s board chair, is there with her husband, Chuck, one row up from the back. Cindy recently took to the political arena after years of cooking and cleaning with just bottled water. 

Across the room, Jeff Budish, an avid angler and outdoorsman, waits to speak. He’s footed thousands of dollars buying his own bottled water and water filters; he also just wants to be able to fish safely. A few rows up from him sits Doug Oitzinger, a founding member of a local clean water advocacy group, taking diligent notes.

If a clear solution was sought by those in attendance at the state’s most recent in-person Peshtigo PFAS meeting, residents walked away empty handed. Officials told residents that plans to provide new groundwater wells are coming from the company responsible for the pollution, but not everyone gets a well. 

Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, or DNR, employees spoke at length about new data from water testing, but, without clear guidance from both the state and the federal government, and the mounting costs of providing alternative drinking water, officials’ hands are tied. Boyle, the town supervisor, said the DNR was doing everything in their limited power to help, but the company responsible is “uncooperative.”

Residents in Peshtigo are exposed to dangerously high levels of a group of toxins known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, in their groundwater, the source of their drinking water. PFAS are called “forever chemicals” because they are hard to break down in the environment. They’re also linked to high blood pressure in middle-aged women and stunted developmental growth in children, as well as kidney and testicular cancers.

Peshtigo’s PFAS problems stem from a local manufacturing facility that produces firefighting foam — a source of the chemicals so toxic that the Department of Defense recently banned their use. Over decades, a plume of PFAS spread through the community’s vast groundwater networks. Now, residents in this rural part of Wisconsin are forced to use bottled water to cook, clean, and drink until officials find ways to lower the chemicals’ concentrations.

The chemicals can be found everywhere: outdoor clothing, cosmetics, beef, rain, and even your blood. Cities from California to North Carolina have wrestled with contamination, with nearly every state having some form of pollution from these toxins and many now banning PFAS in all products sold within their borders.

At the start of this year alone, communities in Washington State, Massachusetts, and along the Mississippi River have reported elevated PFAS levels in groundwater and drinking water. The chemicals will take forever to break down in their environment, and if the rural town of Peshtigo is any indicator, the cleanup process will be just as long and arduous. Without enforceable standards from the federal level, states are scrambling to set their own standards and clean up procedures, a process that is often mired in politics.

Peshtigo residents are torn over their options for getting clean water, which include the possibility of being absorbed into a nearby city and its public utilities, digging new wells at the expense of the company responsible, or building a brand new water utility system for Peshtigo itself. Hundreds of households are living on bottled water and water filtration systems. The town, state, and individuals have sued the company responsible. 

Budish told Grist what he wants is simple: “What I’m looking for is clean water.”

But when PFAS are found in thousands of products, used in a variety of industries, and are now polluting every city in the country, determining who is responsible for the contamination and how it will be cleaned up gets messy.

In 2017, the state learned that Tyco, a subsidiary of global chemical conglomerate Johnson Controls International and one of the largest employers in the region, had been discharging PFAS into local streams and ditches in the region. According to state records, Tyco knew about these elevated levels at least four years earlier and failed to warn residents.

“This community has not been treated fairly,” Boyle told Grist.

The pollution stems from Tyco’s operations at a fire testing center that operated from the 1960s to 2017. This facility is located on the southern edge of the city of Marinette, roughly a mile from the town of Peshtigo. 

First responders and military personnel would light planes, automobiles, and other heavy-duty equipment on fire at a location near the area high school, and then test the fire-suppressant foam Tyco sold. Afterward, gallons of foam would be washed away off the pavement into nearby streams where it would seep into the surrounding groundwater, eventually making its way into Peshtigo drinking wells. 

Tyco also has found elevated levels of the chemicals in groundwater near a Johnson Controls chemical production plant, known locally as the Stanton Street plant, in the city of Marinette on the Lake Michigan shore. With PFAS present, Marinette residents are cautioned against recreation and fishing in local waterways, but their drinking water is safer than their neighbors as Marinette draws its municipal water from Lake Michigan. 

Founded in 1915 as Ansul Corporation, the company had been making fire suppression technology in the area since 1934. It eventually merged with the publicly traded Johnson Controls International in 2016.

Tyco still tests the firefighting foam at its facility in the region, but these tests are now done indoors, company officials told Grist, and all foam and water used are captured and disposed of properly. Johnson Controls International has been working on bringing a PFAS-free foam to market, but the product is not available yet. 

But these new testing procedures don’t erase decades of PFAS pollution into area streams. Town of Peshtigo residents living near the testing facility have cited ongoing health problems, such as stomach cancers and developmental delays in children, that they believe to be linked to years of drinking PFAS-contaminated water. Craig Koller, who grew up drinking Peshtigo well water, was diagnosed with two forms of testicular cancer right after he graduated high school. 

He said he’s seen classmates with the same cancer, and friends’ parents with stomach cancers and immunity disorders, all of which are linked to prolonged exposure to the chemicals.

“There was always a looming comment of ‘There’s something in the water’,’” Koller told Grist. 

Since his initial diagnosis, he estimates he’s had hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of invasive treatments and surgeries, and is spending at least $1,200 a year on his weekly, post-surgical testosterone treatment.Koller, who now lives in the suburbs of Milwaukee, said the response from Tyco has been disingenuous and help at the local, state, and federal level has been disjointed. 

“Normally FEMA [or the Federal Emergency Management Agency] would come in if a flood wiped out an entire community,” Koller said. “But this response is not conducive to helping people move on with their lives.”

The area has been severely impacted by PFAS contamination, with levels of the chemicals found reaching astronomical numbers over the state standards.

Concentrated, PFAS-filled foam, which looks like a pillowy, toxic cloud, has been found throughout the region’s waterways. DNR testing has found levels of the chemicals as high as 750,000 parts per trillion, or ppt, for the foam that sits on top of surface water. 

Some of the area’s creeks have reported levels as high as 3,800 ppt. Groundwater wells closest to the facility have reported concentrations of roughly 2,100 ppt, or 30 times the state’s drinking water standards. Nearly ten miles away from the fire testing facility, wells have tested positive for chemical levels over five times the state regulations.

Wisconsin recently established a drinking water standard of 70 ppt, which affects municipal water utilities. But this doesn’t change much for Peshtigo, or the other nearly third of the state that relies on groundwater for drinking. Groundwater standards are being reviewed again this year after political football struck them down last year. 

The state created a grant program for replacing contaminated private wells last year, including those impacted by PFAS, and Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers, a Democrat, recently announced a 2023 budget proposal that would invest $100 million in PFAS cleanup across the state.This budget, however, has to make it through the state’s Republican majority. 

At the federal level, the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, has found that basically no consumption of these chemicals is safe. The agency is in the midst of a review of its practices and regulations of drinking water standards for the chemicals. Currently, there is no national standard for PFAS in drinking water.

Peshtigo residents have urged federal officials to declare the fire testing facility and the Stanton Street plant as a Superfund site, which would allow the EPA to clean up the site on Tyco’s dime. The agency said it is still reviewing the petition, which noted that the sites are a threat to human health and the environment after half a century of firefighting foam testing went unregulated. The EPA told Grist that it expects to respond to the petition by March of this year.

To Liz Hitchcock, director of federal policy for Toxic-Free Future, a national consumer safety nonprofit that studies and advocates for PFAS cleanup in various industries,  the federal government isn’t moving quickly enough. Most federal responses, she noted, have been prompted by a bubbling up of state-level action.

“This is not a problem that’s happening in isolation,” Hitchcock told Grist. “It’s happening all over the country because PFAS chemicals have been in use for years without adequate regulation.”

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Because of the ubiquitous use of these chemicals, the federal response has varied by different agencies, from the military to the Food and Drug Administration. 

“There are so many uses of PFAS,” Hitchcock said. “It’s not just an issue of cleaning it up, but preventing the problem in the first place.”

Johnson Controls acknowledges its role in the contamination and has pledged to fix the problem for the area’s most impacted residents.

Katie McGinty is Johnson Controls International’s Chief Sustainability Officer and a former environmental advisor to the Clinton administration.

“Tyco takes full responsibility for the impact of the water of these 169 neighbors from our historic activities,” she said.

This 169 number, however, is controversial. 

According to McGinty, Tyco currently provides water filtration systems and bottled water for those homes because they fall within what is known as the “potable well sampling area,” or PWSA: a sliver of the town that both the company and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, or DNR, agree that Tyco polluted. The company has also constructed a  $25 million Groundwater Extraction & Treatment System to remove the chemicals from the groundwater surrounding the fire testing facility. Outside of that, the two can’t agree on much. 

Since the public announcement of the contamination, the DNR has conducted tests to study the spread of the contamination  throughout the area’s groundwater systems. Forever chemicals have been found at elevated levels outside of the area Tyco takes responsibility for, a region known as the “expanded site area.”

Tyco is required to complete a site investigation to define the degree and extent of contamination related to its discharges of PFAS. In a statement, the DNR said results from Tyco’s completed site investigation, which the agency monitors, will be used to determine the company’s responsibility. Results are expected to be released this spring.

McGinty denies the company’s responsibility for these additional properties, arguing that the widespread prevalence of PFAS from various industries and consumer behaviors could have also played a role in contaminating groundwater in these expanded sites. 

“We hope that the DNR will take action to determine and stop the sources of PFAS in that area, but Tyco is not the source,” McGinty said. 

Last year, the Wisconsin Department of Justice filed an environmental enforcement lawsuit against the company for alleged failure to adhere to the state’s hazardous spill laws. 

As the back and forth of enforcement and corporate finger-pointing unfurls in legal battles and slow testing, residents that live outside the agreed-upon contamination area are on their own.

Budish, the angler from the Peshtigo town meeting, has lived at his property for 30 years, just off a state highway tucked behind rows of thick pine trees that stretch for miles, where neighbors get around using four-wheelers.

He lives outside of Tyco’s recognized area, but his drinking water is contaminated. He’s paid for private testing on his property and found high PFAS levels in his private well water, nearly 10 miles from the fire facility and even farther from the other plant,prompting him and his wife to buy their own bottled water for cooking and consumption for the past five years. 

Speaking at the October meeting, he said he wonders if the ponds, creeks, and ditches surrounding his property on the outskirts of Peshtigo are also contaminated, but so far, he’s only been able to afford to test his groundwater drinking well. 

He told Grist he estimates that he’s spent at least $100 a month on bottled water for the past five years. He has also purchased a water filtration system, which can range between $1,000 and $3,000.

Budish, wearing a camo hat and a blue sweater noting his love of fishing, lives in a state and region plagued by “don’t eat” advisories for both fish and deer, due to PFAS contamination. 

“Why should I have to take everything out of my own pocket?” he asked.

Tyco is standing firm that its operations have not had anything to do with the contamination that residents like Budish face. The chemical signature of the PFAS found in the potable well sample area, the region it takes responsibility for, is vastly different from the ones found in the DNR’s expanded area, McGinty told Grist. 

“If anybody in that expanded area is using dental floss, they’re putting some PFAS down their drain every day,” McGinty said. “If they’re doing some laundry, they’re putting PFAS down their drain. If they’re washing their frying pan, they’re putting some PFAS down their drain.”

Independent researchers from the University of Wisconsin, however, released research in January that tied Tyco’s chemical signature, or “PFAS fingerprint,” to a growing plume of chemicals in Green Bay, a freshwater bay of Lake Michigan located two miles from Stanton Street. Tyco said it has plans to review the study. 

For the contamination it does claim responsibility for, Tyco will pay for new deep wells and water quality monitoring for residents. The wells will be drilled 500 feet into the ground and draw water from the deep aquifer in the area; Tyco will cover all expenses for 20 years. In addition, the company is paying out a $17.5 million class-action lawsuit, but only to those inside of the agreed-upon contaminated area.

Wisconsin environmental officials have been skeptical of Tyco’s deep well plans and have urged the company to not advertise new wells as a final, long-term solution. In a statement provided to Grist, the DNR said it agrees with the company’s design criteria for the deep wells, but concern for other contaminants, such as radium, strontium, and high iron, exist in the region.

As other states take aim at PFAS polluters, Governor Evers and state Attorney General Josh Kaul joined more than a dozen other states in suing large companies for their role in the contamination. The two Wisconsin officials filed a lawsuit last July against Tyco, 3M, DuPont, and other PFAS polluters in the state, alleging they should have known that the ordinary and intended use of their products would lead to dangerous impacts on public health and the environment across Wisconsin. 

As company officials, regulators, and residents continue to fight over who is responsible for this growing crisis, costs are mounting. Since Tyco only claims responsibility for a sliver of the plume, the state is tasked with providing bottled water for residents outside the PWSA while the chemical company and the DNR hash out responsibilities in court. State testing and bottled water funds, however, are running out.

Christine Sieger, director of the agency’s remediation program, said just over half a million dollars has been spent by the DNR to provide bottled water to residents in the state, with the majority of those funds going to Peshtigo and French Island, Wisconsin, a community with newly discovered PFAS contamination. She told Grist that the agency has not been provided new or additional money from the legislature to supply bottled water to residents with PFAS-contaminated drinking water. 

At the beginning of 2022, the DNR had tested over 400 wells in the extended area. Over 300 had PFAS detected in them. But funding ran out to conduct any more.

Melissa Agard, a Democratic Wisconsin state senator and lead author of a comprehensive bill to address PFAS and other pollutants, said the lack of appropriate funding for the DNR is part of a larger problem in the state — her colleagues across the aisle.

“The biggest roadblock we have is the majority party,” Agard, who represents the capital city Madison, a community also polluted with PFAS, and surrounding cities, told Grist. 

Currently, Wisconsin has a Republican majority in both houses of the state legislature. Agard said she has attempted to introduce the bill multiple times in past years, but it has not seen the light of day through public hearing sessions, a process set by the majority party. 

Republican members of the state’s finance committee have expressed interest in using the state’s historic surplus funding to address the problem, while a newly appointed DNR secretary has called for increased oversight and funding from the state legislature.

Agard said a lack of funding for bottled water is concerning, but bottled water is not a long-term solution. 

“We are not taking a comprehensive, holistic approach to address PFAS contamination in the state of Wisconsin right now,” Agard said. 

The Peshtigo town board is investigating the idea of creating a water utility district and paying for the utility by way of a lawsuit lodged by the rural town against the company last year. This costly infrastructure project recently secured $1.6 million of federal funds as part of a variety of PFAS remediation funds earmarked by Wisconsin Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin.

Still, not everyone in the town wants the increased taxes that potentially come with a public water supply, again highlighting the fractured nature of the area’s response to this national problem. 

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Jennifer Friday, a Peshtigo resident who lives in the PWSA, is pursuing yet another approach.

She doesn’t want the water utility district and has been involved with efforts to annex select households into Marinette, their bigger neighbor to the north. If this process moves forward, these residents would become citizens of Marinette and receive the city’s municipal water. Friday, who is now running against Boyle for the town chairperson seat, said she estimates 90 residents are interested in this process, but the group still needs a vote before Marinette’s city council. 

If these residents annex themselves into the neighboring city, they would forgo their private wells for water from Lake Michigan’s Green Bay. As more and more communities around the Midwest are experiencing problems with their groundwater, be it contamination, aging infrastructure, or drying aquifers, Lake Michigan water is an increasingly hot commodity. 

But that doesn’t mean it’s safe. While Green Bay has had low levels of the chemicals present in its waters in the past, concerns now linger after the University of Wisconsin study was released. 

Tyco said it would provide neighbors in Peshtigo with the legal support they need to meet the requirements of the annexation process as well as offer to pay for the new costs associated with annexation, which include 20 years of increased property taxes and water bills for the annexed property. The annexation process has to be resident-driven and the city of Marinette must receive a petition from interested parties and vote on the annexation.

“I’m not pushing annexation,” Friday said. “I’m pushing resident choice.”

Andrea Maxwell, a Peshtigo resident for 10 years who has been provided water by Tyco for the last several, chose the deep well route instead, with the new system installed in early December. Her home is right in the center of the plume. While her well has not tested positive for PFAS, her neighbors’ have.

According to the company, more than 40 deep-well agreements have been signed; contractors are waiting for the ground to thaw to begin construction in the spring. Tyco will pay for the well maintenance, filters, water salt, testing, and other associated costs, including fixing any future PFAS contaminations. 

“That’s a pretty good deal, we feel like,” Maxwell said, “rather than us sitting around worrying if we could maybe be contaminated in five years.”

Standing on Kayla Furton’s lawn in Peshtigo, you can see Green Bay. Around the corner, there’s a ditch with chemical hazard signs warning not to touch or consume the water in it. 

Two houses down, no obvious geographical barriers exist, but her neighbors are outside of the zone Tyco claims responsibility for and have to fend for themselves to get clean water, much like Budish. 

“It’s just an arbitrary line,” Furton, a town supervisor, told Grist.

To her, the fragmented, neighbor-versus-neighbor response has been hard on the community. She does qualify for a free well, but in doing so, she waives her liability rights. She also doesn’t see new deep wells for a small group of people as a permanent answer for the thousands of residents in the region. 

“I do think people are tired,” she said. “I know I am. I know my kids are sick of hearing about PFAS.”

When asked if she has considered moving out of the area, Furton, who recently filed a lawsuit against Tyco, said she gets that question a lot, and it can be loaded. She believes her home is more than just a property, it’s where she grew up and where her children have planted roots. 

“Yes, we could,” Furton said. “We could, but there’s no guarantee there’s not PFAS contamination somewhere else.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Cleaning up ‘forever chemicals’ is costly and messy — just ask this Wisconsin town. on Feb 2, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by John McCracken.

Voting rights advocates in Wisconsin on Thursday called on a far-right conspiracy theorist and member of the state's election authority to resign following revelations that he boasted about suppressing Black and Brown Milwaukee voters during last year's midterms.

Urban Milwaukeefirst reported that Bob Spindell, chairman of the 4th Congressional District GOP and a member of the Wisconsin Elections Committee (WEC), gloated in an email to thousands of Republicans that "we can be especially proud of the city of Milwaukee (80.2% Dem Vote) casting 37,000 less votes than cast in the 2018 election, with the major reduction happening in the overwhelming (sic) Black and Hispanic areas."

"From participating in a criminal conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election results, to now boasting about the suppression of votes from people of color, Spindell clearly cannot be trusted to fairly and adequately carry out a position directly related to the integrity of the Wisconsin election system."

Spindell explained that "this great and important decrease in Democrat votes in the city" was due to a "well thought out multifaceted plan," which included negative ads targeting Black voters, Republican lawsuits that increased voting restrictions, and an effort to convince Democratic voters to stay home on Election Day.

"While this is incredibly disturbing, we are not surprised by this recent revelation of additional Republican tactics used for voter suppression," the political action group Black Leaders Organizing for Communities (BLOC) said in response to Spindell's email. "Many of us have been sounding the alarm about how sinister voter suppression tactics have become, and Spindell's comments reinforce what we already knew."

"It is incredibly racist to brag about lowering Black and Brown turnout, it is also unacceptable to have these comments and views held by an election official," BLOC added. "We join calls from various grassroots partners... to rescind Spindell's appointment to the Wisconsin Election Commission."

Chris Walloch, executive director of A Better Wisconsin Together, a progressive research hub, tied Spindell's email to the official's support for former President Donald Trump's "Big Lie" about the last presidential election.

"There's no easier way to put it—Spindell is a Trump faction conspiracy theorist who has actively tried to sabotage and influence the outcome of Wisconsin elections based upon his own partisan bias," Walloch said in a statement.

"From participating in a criminal conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election results, to now boasting about the suppression of votes from people of color, Spindell clearly cannot be trusted to fairly and adequately carry out a position directly related to the integrity of the Wisconsin election system," Walloch added. "Wisconsinites deserve better, and we are demanding better."

Spindell was already a controversial figure. A prominent purveyor of Trump's "Big Lie," he was one of 10 fake Republican electors who plotted to fraudulently hand Trump a second White House term.

"The comments Commissioner Spindell made are not only egregious, they are the antithesis to what a true democracy is all about," Samuel Liebert, the Wisconsin state director for the advocacy group All Voting Is Local, said in a statement. "Nobody should be celebrating the disenfranchisement of Wisconsin voters, least of all an election official serving on the Wisconsin Elections Commission."

"The targeting of Black and Brown voters and the rejoicing over tens of thousands of us casting fewer ballots than in previous elections is alarming and leaves little doubt that barriers to the ballot and the spreading of disinformation regarding voting and elections have specifically been implemented and utilized to prevent us from voting," he continued.

"No matter our color, background, or zip code, most Wisconsinites believe that voters pick our leaders, our leaders do not pick their voters," Liebert added. "Elections officials, such as those serving on the WEC, should deliver the promise of American democracy to all, regardless of party affiliation."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

Filed in Polk County Circuit Court in October, the lawsuit pits local farmers against the municipality, where decisions are made by a single town chair and two supervisors. Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, or WMC, a lobbying group that defines itself as the state’s “largest and most influential business association” is representing the residents suing the town through its litigation center.

Early this year, WMC sent a letter to the town board that they would see legal action if the ordinance was not repealed. The notice of claim, sent in April, argues the town passed an ordinance with various illegal provisions under state law. The Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce Litigation Center, who have previously filed lawsuits to rollback state protections against water pollution, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

“They see this ordinance, if not challenged, as something that may become more the norm around the state,” Adam Voskuil, staff attorney for the nonprofit law office Midwest Environmental Advocates, told Grist. This law office has issued its support for Laketown’s ordinance in the past but is not representing the municipality in this ongoing litigation.

As the agricultural industry increasingly forces farmers to “get big or get out,” CAFOs have become plentiful across Wisconsin and the country at large, with more and more animals living on CAFO operations in recent years. The size of these farms varies within a state but generally are seen as operations with 2,000 or more pigs, 700 or more dairy cattle, or over 1,000 beef cattle. 

The growth of these operations has been linked to public health problems like various cancers as well as infant death and miscarriages, caused by water contaminated with waste runoff from farms. On the other side of Wisconsin, residents in Kewaunee County have seen manure coming out of their faucets from one the largest CAFOs in the state, who sued the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resource last year when they were denied a request to nearly double their size.

When communities try to respond with local-level enforcement, both industry interests and a lack of power at the local level cause townships to get creative with their responses. 

Every state has some form of a “right to farm” law, which stops farms from being targeted for nuisances related to the daily operations of the industry, such as odor, noise, and effects on the environment. From there, each state has some form of a regulatory process that outlines how large farms are allowed to operate.

In Iowa, which leads the country in CAFOs, the state government sets all regulatory requirements and local towns and counties are out of luck when it comes to enforcement, according to John Robbins, Planning and Zoning Administrator for Cerro Gordo County, Iowa. He said the county once had a restrictive ordinance for CAFO zoning on the books, but after a state law took control, counties now have “very limited authority.” 

Last year, when a Missouri hog farm spilled 300,000 gallons of waste into nearby waterways, two counties attempted to regulate CAFOs differently than the state government. Those counties had to sue to challenge state-level laws and are now awaiting trials in the state Supreme Court. 

Further West, Gooding County, Idaho has seen the whole gambit of what Wisconsin towns could be facing. In 2007, the central Idaho county named after a famed state sheep rancher passed an ordinance regulating CAFOs in the county limits. A month later, industry groups Idaho Dairymen’s Association and Idaho Cattle Association started a court battle with the county that ended two years later, with the state supreme court ruling in the county’s favor. Gooding County’s legal representatives did not respond to a request for comment.

Wisconsin’s Livestock Facility Siting Law generally restricts how local municipalities can stop or slow new CAFOs or expansions to current facilities. This law is at the crux of arguments in opposition to Laketown and other surrounding communities’ proposed or passed ordinances. 

Other Wisconsin communities have enacted local level ordinances to regulate these large farms. In 2016, northern Bayfield County enacted a CAFO ordinance that imposed a one-time fee and required operators to have increased manure storage options. After a large hog farm estimated to produce over 9 million gallons of manure a year was proposed in Polk County a few years ago, the county attempted a moratorium on CAFOs, but the measure did not pass.

Since then, at least five neighboring towns of Laketown have passed similar ordinances.

The Laketown ordinance that sparked the lawsuit is an operations ordinance, unlike Bayfield’s ordinance which focused on zoning. Laketown CAFO operators are asked to file a one-time fee equal to a dollar for every animal unit as well as give detailed plans of how they will prevent ground and air pollution stemming from their facilities. Passed in 2021, the ordinance states it is based upon Laketown’s obligation to “protect the health, safety and general welfare of the public.” 

All along the way, industry groups Venture Dairy Cooperative and the Wisconsin Dairy Alliance, its website features the slogan “Fighting for CAFOs Every Day,” have sent threatening letters to towns that passed ordinances or moratoriums, with the help of WMC.

“This is standard operating procedure for the Big Ag boys,” said Lisa Doerr, a Laketown resident of over 20 years who raises horses and commercially farms hay and alfalfa with her husband.

Doerr has been involved at the local level in opposition to CAFO since Polk County learned of a proposed 26,000-hog farm. Doerr, who worked with the Large Livestock Town Partnership, a multi-town committee that examines the environmental impact of CAFOs, said she worried that the landscape of the town and county would change if local action wasn’t taken.

“The name of our town is Laketown because we’ve got lakes everywhere,” she said. “We still have a middle class farming community. We haven’t had corporate ag take over everything.”

In its recently filed response letter, Laketown’s attorney said WMC’s argument falls flat as it is based solely on the state-level zoning law, while the town’s ordinance regulates the operations and conduct of a facility. They also noted that since the ordinance passed, no facilities have applied for a permit, which means the town has not yet enforced any actions WMC says are unlawful. Laketown board chair Daniel King declined to comment, citing the ongoing lawsuit.

Midwest Environmental Advocates attorney Voskuil said he was heartened to see that Laketown has been holding its ground. “This is one of the first times I’ve seen a town refuse to back down to some of these letters,” he said.

Farther south in Wisconsin, another county is reeling from letters threatening legal action. Crawford County, which borders Iowa, enacted a CAFO moratorium in 2019 but did not renew the moratorium after studying the issue for a year. Forest Jahnke, a coordinator with the Crawford Stewardship Project, said the decision to not renew the moratorium was highly influenced by the deluge of similar threats of litigation and backlash, which had a “chilling effect” on efforts to move forward. 

“The fear of litigation is a very strong and deep one in our local municipalities and county governments,” Jahnke, who was a member of the committee studying the CAFO moratorium in Crawford County, said. 

Since the moratorium rolled back, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources greenlit a Crawford County hog farm, home to 8,000 pigs and expected to generate 9.4 million gallons of manure each year. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A tiny Wisconsin town tried to stop pollution from factory farms. Then it got sued. on Dec 5, 2022.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by John McCracken.

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The 45,000 or so residents of Dunn County live off on the western side of Wisconsin, not far from central Minnesota, but not close to much of anything. Like other rural counties, it leans heavily Republican, going by double digits to Donald Trump in 2020. This year, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., notched a 14-point margin there, and Tim Michels beat the incumbent Democratic Gov. Tony Evers by 9 percentage points.

But when it came to health care, Dunn County voters said they would support a national health insurance program. The overwhelmingly Republican residents of this farming community approved a ballot measure that affirms their support for a single-payer public health insurance program. The idea, which passed 51-49, ran 11 points ahead of Evers, who was reelected statewide, and 16 points ahead of Senate candidate Mandela Barnes.

The largely unnoticed rural election result affirmed support for nationalizing and expanding health insurance, a program popularly known as Medicare for All. While the national media discourse about the election largely ignored health care issues beyond abortion rights, voters across the country registered support for progressive reforms focused on improving health care access and reining in the for-profit industries that dominate the medical system.

In Arizona and South Dakota, like in Dunn County, progressive health care initiatives outpaced Democratic Party candidates by a wide margin. Arizona voters passed Proposition 209, a measure that reduces the allowable interest rate for medical debt and expands exemptions for what can be garnished by medical debt collectors, with a landslide 72 percent in favor. South Dakota became the 40th state to expand Medicaid coverage, making an additional 40,000 residents eligible.

Oregon passed Measure 111, making it the first state to enshrine a right to “cost-effective, clinically appropriate affordable health care” for every resident in the state constitution. In Massachusetts, voters enacted Question 2, which forces dental insurance companies to spend at least 83 percent of premiums on actual dental care, rather than administrative costs and profits.

President Joe Biden speaks about protecting Social Security and Medicare and lowering prescription drug costs, at OB Johnson Park Community Center in Hallandale Beach, Fla., on Nov. 1, 2022.

Photo: Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ryan Grim.

The balance of power in Congress is still up in the air after Democratic candidates outperformed expectations in much of the country in Tuesday’s midterm elections. Control of the Senate now rests on four states: Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada. We speak with The Nation’s John Nichols, who says Democratic Senate candidate Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes could still close the gap with Republican incumbent Ron Johnson in Wisconsin, who now has the advantage. He also says that while Republicans look favored to win the Senate seat in Nevada, the race has ended up closer than expected. “Nevada can surprise you at the end,” says Nichols.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Is cutting taxes for the wealthy, while increasing them for the middle class and working poor, a good idea?

Well, that’s exactly what many Republican gubernatorial candidates are suggesting. Most egregiously, the idea is being floated in Wisconsin by GOP gubernatorial candidate Tim Michels who proposes resuscitating the idea of a “Flat Tax” for Wisconsin. Much US government policy since Ronald Reagan has waterboarded the rich with money in hopes of it leading to their investing it, thus creating more growth for all. At least, that has been the supply-side argument in its favor. A flat income tax is one more failed policy step in that direction. A flat income tax is used in neighboring Illinois, which is perpetually in fiscal trouble and has a higher sales tax (inherently regressive) than Wisconsin. Yet, Wisconsin’s wealthy want another pass at the all you can buffet that comes at the expense of the state’s working people.

The flat income tax in fact is a “Republican In Name Only” (RINO) plan. The Republican Party’s first President, Abraham Lincoln, certainly knew this. In 1862, Lincoln needed revenue to develop the nation’s infrastructure and pay for the Civil War against the Confederacy. So, he and Congress jettisoned the US flat tax, which he considered an unfair burden on the nation’s workers and insufficient for raising needed revenue, passed the Revenue Act of 1862.

This historic legislation left impoverished workers untaxed while taxing better-paid workers at a lower rate than the nation’s wealthy.  This was and is called “progressive taxation.”

However, after Lincoln’s assassination and the end of the Civil War, the extremely wealthy consolidated their power, repealed the progressive income tax, and the US entered the most corrupt period in our history, known as the “Gilded Age.”  The eventual growth of the labor union movement and the middle class around the turn of the century resulted in citizens rejecting the excesses and corruption of the time and ushered in what is called the “Progressive Era.”

Wisconsin was the nation’s leader during the Progressive Era and was known at that time for clean government and  the nation’s “laboratory of democracy” that among other innovations, was developing Social Security, a program that current Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, wants to privatize. In 1911, despite feverish attempts by wealthy special interests to stop it, Wisconsin’s Republican Governor, Francis McGovern, in signed into law a progressive income tax that became a model for the entire United States.

This progressive tax model has been periodically attacked by the uber-wealthy, often with a “flat tax” as the proposed solution. For example, Republican billionaire Steve Forbes proposed a flat tax a few years ago that would shift the tax burden to the already overtaxed middle class and working poor, while handing the wealthiest citizens a tax cut.

Following the lead of his Republican primary opponent Rebecca Kleefisch, multi-millionaire Tim Michels says he is open to replacing Wisconsin’s mildly-graduated income tax with a flat tax. Let’s see at how a flat tax would look in Wisconsin. Setting the flat tax at 5.22% would raise the same revenue as our current tax rates in order to remain “revenue neutral.” Doing so would result in a tax increase for the 96.6% of Badger State taxpayers with “adjusted gross income” (AGI) between $20,000 and $300,000.

In sharp contrast, such a flat tax would present the state’s 3.3% of filers with an AGI of $500,000 and above an estimated average tax cut of $22,280. So a “revenue neutral” flat tax would be a boon for Michels and his ultra-wealthy campaign funders, while the rest of us would be stuck paying higher taxes to fund this welfare for the wealthy.

Michels now says he’s only interested in the flat tax if it doesn’t raise taxes on anyone.  For that to happen, the flat tax rate would need to be 3.54%.  Such a low rate — while being a windfall for the state’s richest taxpayers — would reduce our state’s revenue by $5.59 billion in the first year, and $3.855 billion per year thereafter. It would also almost surely require raising the sales tax.

A flat tax would essentially bankrupt Wisconsin and require draconian cuts to state services including public safety, K-12 education, healthcare, environmental protection, the University Wisconsin and Technical College systems.

The flat income tax has also been used by failed states and autonomous regions such as, Abkhazia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Belarus, Uzbekistan, and Transnistria. The only result has been them becoming rich in oligarchs, but poor in democracy and development.”

Republicans like Abraham Lincoln and Francis McGovern had a better idea. Wisconsin should follow their lead of a progressive income tax rather than Michels’ proposal that would be a huge gift to himself.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jeffrey Sommers.

With Republicans set to make major gains in the November midterms, we speak with reporter Ari Berman, who says Republican control of the Legislature in Wisconsin is a preview of the damage the party could do if empowered in Washington. Berman’s latest piece for Mother Jones is titled “How Wisconsin Became the GOP’s Laboratory for Dismantling Democracy.” It looks at how severely gerrymandered districts there give Republicans nearly two-thirds of the seats in the statehouse with less than 50% of the popular vote, and how they have used those inflated majorities to undermine Democratic Governor Tony Evers by stripping his powers, refusing to confirm his nominees and ignoring his legislative proposals. Berman says the takeover of the Wisconsin Legislature is part of a larger GOP plan to empower swing state officials to assist former President Trump in staging a coup in 2024.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Ever since claims of election fraud arose in 2020, Wisconsin has seen its share of quixotic attempts to taint the presidential results.

A group of phony electors tried to claim the state’s electoral votes for Donald Trump. Wisconsin’s top lawmaker launched a yearlong inquiry led by a lawyer spewing election fraud theories. And its courts heard numerous suits challenging the integrity of the 2020 election and the people administering it.

All those efforts failed, sometimes spectacularly.

But on a more fundamental level, the election deniers succeeded. They helped change the way Election Day will look in 2022 for crucial midterm elections in Wisconsin — and they are creating an even more favorable climate for Trump and Republicans in 2024.

This summer, the conservative majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court banned most drop boxes for ballots, which had provided another quick and convenient method of voting during the pandemic, rather than relying on the mail. Until a federal judge intervened, the ruling also meant that people with disabilities could not have help delivering their ballots to their municipal clerks.

More recently, in Waukesha County, a judge sided with the Republican Party in a ruling that barred local clerks from fixing even minor errors or omissions — such as a missing ZIP code — on absentee ballot envelopes. The clerks could contact the voter or return the ballot to be corrected. In a state already known for limiting voter access, this was another example of a push toward more controls.

And the Wisconsin Assembly and the Senate, both dominated by Republicans, have passed a raft of bills that would tighten voting laws. Each was vetoed by Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat. But Evers is in a close race for reelection against Republican Tim Michels, who has said that “on day one” he will call a special session of the Legislature to “fix the election mess.”

Philip Rocco, associate professor of political science at Marquette University in Milwaukee, describes a dynamic he has seen across the country playing out on a large scale in Wisconsin. An onslaught of attacks on the voting process, he said, produces “an atmosphere of procedural chaos going into Election Day.”

“Just in general, it’s created a dangerous environment for elections to occur in.”

Republicans, who often benefit from lower turnout, frame the battles around issues of law, while Democrats argue that the fight is over voting rights. Neither side sees any benefit in giving in.

The seemingly daily news of legal machinations, legislative committee hearings, proposed laws or official investigations of Wisconsin’s election system have left many voters worried about what to expect when they next try to cast a ballot and unsure of whether their vote will count.

A swing state with 10 electoral votes and a history of razor-thin margins, Wisconsin will once again be a key prize in the 2024 presidential race.

Just how important the state is became clear in August, when the Republican National Committee announced that it will hold its 2024 convention in Milwaukee, a typically overlooked, Democratic-led city. The convention will saturate the state’s largest media market, reaching the conservative-leaning suburbs and the quiet towns and farms beyond.

But first comes November’s midterm election, with a chance to consolidate Republican power in the state and shape oversight of coming elections. Both ends of the political spectrum are keenly aware of the stakes.

“What can happen in 2024 is largely going to be determined by what happens this November,” said Wisconsin attorney Jeffrey Mandell, president of a progressive firm dedicated to protecting voting rights.

Nine attorneys, a parade of dark suits and briefcases, descended on a Waukesha County courtroom in southeast Wisconsin in September. Once again, the extreme minutiae of Wisconsin election law was being litigated.

The question before them: how to deal with absentee ballot envelopes that arrive with only partial addresses of witnesses?

Until then, municipal clerks had been able to simply fill in the information. Now, the Republican Party of Waukesha County argued that was unlawful and wanted to prohibit clerks from doing so. For some voters, that could mean having their ballots returned and figuring out how to fix them in time to have their vote counted.

A lawyer for the GOP-controlled Legislature favored a prohibition. Lawyers for government regulators, Democrats and the League of Women Voters argued against it. Ultimately, the GOP side prevailed.

In his ruling, Circuit Judge Michael J. Aprahamian added his voice to the doubts about absentee voting in Wisconsin and about the oversight provided by the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission, which has seen its every move scrutinized since Trump and his allies started questioning the 2020 results in Wisconsin.

Aprahamian excoriated the commission, saying that “it is little wonder that proponents from all corners of the political spectrum are critical, cynical and suspicious of how elections are managed and overseen.”

As court scenes like these play out elsewhere in Wisconsin, a healthy slice of the litigation can be traced to one man: Erick Kaardal, a Minnesota lawyer and special counsel to the anti-abortion Thomas More Society, a nonprofit law firm.

Despite some high-profile setbacks in Wisconsin, Kaardal told ProPublica he plans to keep scrutinizing the fine points of Wisconsin election law, a subject that takes up at least 122 pages in state statute.

His ongoing targets include the Wisconsin Elections Commission, which interprets laws and gives guidance to municipal clerks around the state; the Electronic Registration Information Center, a voter roll management consortium; and the Center for Election Innovation & Research, a progressive nonprofit that seeks to improve turnout.

“We’ll be litigating with the WEC and ERIC and CEIR for years to come,” Kaardal said.

Kaardal’s persistence is not appreciated by everyone. A federal judge admonished him for “political grandstanding” and filing bad-faith litigation against then-Vice President Mike Pence in December 2020 to prevent the counting of electoral votes. And in May, a judge in Madison said it was “ridiculous” for Kaardal to label pandemic-related grants to election offices as bribes.

In defending his tactics, Kaardal cited his years of legal experience and investigative abilities. He said he merely wants to hold government accountable and make elections fair.

Among Kaardal’s most passionate causes is his ongoing effort to document election fraud at nursing homes. During the pandemic, Kaardal alleges, an unknown number of cognitively impaired people ruled incompetent to vote under court-ordered guardianships somehow voted, perhaps with illegal assistance. He believes the voter rolls are not being updated to accurately reflect the court orders.

Kaardal brought lawsuits against 13 probate administrators across Wisconsin to force the release of confidential documents revealing the names of individuals under guardianship who have had their right to vote stripped by the court. His petition was denied in one case, but the others are ongoing.

Dane County Clerk of Court Carlo Esqueda worries that Kaardal’s quest is giving people the wrong impression. He points out that a person under guardianship can still vote. In some instances, that right is taken away because of extreme cognitive issues.

“Talk radio is saying everybody under guardianship should not be able to vote. That’s simply not true,” he said.

Election clerks, too, cite disinformation as they face mounting pressure over how they handle absentee ballots.

Celestine Jeffreys, the clerk in Green Bay, was forced to defend her integrity when a local resident represented by Kaardal filed a formal complaint with the Wisconsin Elections Commission this year, accusing her of “ballot harvesting” in the spring 2022 municipal elections by accepting multiple absentee ballots from an individual voter. The complaint is still pending.

Matt Roeser, the resident who filed the complaint, told ProPublica that the heavy reliance on absentee voting during the pandemic “opened up a door we’ve never had opened before. It created a lot of suspicion.”

Jeffreys said in a court filing that she had the discretion at the time to accept multiple ballots if they involved someone delivering their own ballot and a ballot for a disabled person.

Her legal brief called the complaint “another attempt by Attorney Kaardal to court scandal where there is none — intentionally undermining public confidence in legitimately-run elections in the process.”

Wisconsin resident Harry Wait drew national attention in July when he announced that he’d gone on a state website and arranged for absentee ballots in the names of the Racine mayor, the state Assembly speaker and several others to be sent to his home.

The site requires only that voters enter their name and date of birth, and Wait claimed it had insufficient safeguards to prevent fraud.

The antic angered the Wisconsin Elections Commission, which held that it was a serious breach meant to undermine the state’s election system. Authorities charged Wait with election fraud, a misdemeanor, and misappropriation of ID information, a felony.

Notwithstanding the charges, Wait was treated like a hero a week later at a meeting of the right-leaning group he leads inside a Racine dive bar.

Wait formed H.O.T. Government, which stands for honest, open, transparent, four years ago over perceived government misconduct in Racine. It’s now focused on rooting out what it sees as widespread election fraud throughout Wisconsin and is taking special interest in absentee ballots. The group even briefly considered a plan to steal leftover drop boxes in southeast Wisconsin to ensure they couldn’t be used after the state Supreme Court ruling.

Wait has made it clear he’s no fan of the Wisconsin Elections Commission. “I’m going to make a declaration today that WEC is our enemy,” he told the crowd inside the bar.

He was proud how, in his view, he had exposed the flaws in the state government’s MyVote website, set up to help Wisconsinites find their polling place, register to vote or order an absentee ballot. The website, he said, “really needs to be shut down.”

Wait said in an interview that he plans to defend his action in court on the basis that, in his view, the MyVote system is “not a legal channel to order a ballot. It’s a rogue system.”

The administrator of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, Meagan Wolfe, has defended the online system. It “requires a person to provide the same information or more information than he or she would have to provide if the person made the ballot request through traditional mail,” she said at a commission meeting.

Still, the commission agreed to a new safeguard: When it gets a request to send an absentee ballot to a new address, it will notify the voter via postcard. The commission also asked clerks to be on the lookout for unusual requests.

At a preliminary hearing on his case, in September, Wait was represented by Michael Gableman, a leading figure among Wisconsin election deniers.

A former state Supreme Court justice, Gableman was special counsel for the Wisconsin Assembly, tasked with investigating the 2020 election. While spending more than $1 million in taxpayer money, he lent oxygen to election-fraud theories — including Kaardal’s accusations about nursing home irregularities — but couldn’t prove any. Attempts to reach Gableman for comment for this story were unsuccessful.

Even after being dismissed from that role by the Assembly speaker, Gableman has continued to exert influence within the state Republican Party to stoke the anger of citizens. Among hard-right activists, Gableman’s view of Wisconsin as a hotbed of election fraud is now taken for granted, as is the belief that voting options should be restricted, not opened up.

“I want it back to in-person, one day,” said Bruce L. Boll, a volunteer with We the People Waukesha, one of numerous groups supporting tighter controls. “Voting should not be a whim. It should be something you plan for and you do. Like your wedding day.”

Responding to this new atmosphere of distrust, the Wisconsin Elections Commission has proposed creating an Office of Inspector General to help it investigate the growing number of complaints and allegations of impropriety.

The chaos and controversy around voting rules has caught some Wisconsinites off guard. The drop-box ruling was especially disconcerting to people with disabilities and their relatives.

Before the August primary, Eugene Wojciechowski, of West Allis, went to City Hall to pay his water bill and drop off his ballot and his wife’s at the clerk’s office. A staffer asked him for ID and then told him he could not deliver his wife’s ballot. Not even spouses of the disabled could do so at the time, thanks to the state Supreme Court decision.

“I said: ‘What do you mean? She’s in a wheelchair,’” Wojciechowski recalled. He noted that the ballots were “all sealed and witnessed and everything.”

The voting constraints were “stupid,” he said, but ultimately he decided he would just mail his wife’s ballot for her, even though it was unclear at the time whether that was permitted.

He has filed an official complaint with the Wisconsin Elections Commission and weeks later remains exasperated.

“I mean, what the hell is going on in this city? I’ve lived here all my life,” Wojciechowski said.

“They’re stopping people from voting, that’s all it is.”

The state Supreme Court decision came in response to a suit brought by a conservative group, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty. An attorney for the group, Rick Esenberg, argued that regulators had issued unlawful guidance allowing ballots to be delivered on behalf of others, including potentially “paid activists, paid canvassers who go around and collect ballots and place them in a mailbox.” Those allegations echoed a widely circulated conspiracy theory about people, labeled mules, delivering heaps of fraudulent ballots.

Esenberg conceded in his oral arguments that he had no evidence of that type of activity in Wisconsin.

Four people with disabilities sued in federal court, including Martha Chambers, of Milwaukee, who was left paralyzed from the neck down after being thrown from a horse 27 years ago.

“Here they are making things more difficult for me, and my life is difficult enough,” she said.

A federal judge ruled in favor of the plaintiffs and ordered the state elections commission to tell local clerks that voters with disabilities must be allowed to receive help from someone of their choosing to return their absentee ballots. The clerks do not have to confirm that the voter is disabled or ask the emissary for ID.

Still, it’s not at all certain that the ruling will be followed uniformly.

The state has approximately 1,850 local clerks who administer elections in cities, towns and villages. Even before the federal ruling, practices were wildly inconsistent, said Barbara Beckert, director of external advocacy for Disability Rights Wisconsin.

“There is continuing confusion in Wisconsin as voting practices and policies continue to change in response to litigation as well as action by the Legislature,” Beckert said.

Political observers say there’s increased trepidation among all kinds of voters over whether their ballot will count and who will be watching at the polls.

“People are afraid,” said Milwaukee native Bruce Colburn, a union activist and lead organizer of Souls to the Polls, a traditional get-out-the-vote drive in Black communities. “Are they going to do something wrong? Then you have all these lawyers and people making complaints in the court system for nothing. And it makes it more difficult. It scares people. If they get something wrong or they don’t do it exactly right, something’s going to happen to them.”

Jeffreys, the clerk in Green Bay, described poll watchers on primary day this year as “aggressive and interfering.” Rather than being cordial and unobtrusive, she said, some observers were repeatedly questioning voting officials and disrupting the process.

“That, I think, is a really big change with elections in Wisconsin. There’s just a lot more of a gaze, and the gaze is not always friendly and cooperative.”

Unlike poll workers, who carry out official duties and must be local residents, poll watchers can come from anywhere. They are not required to undergo training.

“Observers are a very important part of the process,” Jeffreys said. “They lend transparency; they help educate people. They themselves become educated. But sometimes observers have anointed themselves as the people who will uncover problems. And oftentimes observers are not equipped with the information in order to do that.”

The result, she said, can be baseless allegations.

If Republicans in Wisconsin want to find a way around the Democratic governor, Evers, and his veto pen, they have two choices.

They can unseat him in November or bulk up their legislative advantage to what is called a supermajority. Achieving supermajorities in both the Assembly and the Senate, which would make bills veto-proof, is considered the longer shot. Winning the governor’s race is not.

Michels, the Republican nominee, is the owner of a construction company and has never held public office. He was endorsed by Trump in the primary.

Michels has embraced the idea that the 2020 election was not run fairly, even though a state recount showed Biden won and multiple courts agreed. Asked if the 2020 election was stolen, Michels told the “Regular Joe Show” on the radio in May: “Maybe, right. We know there was certainly a lot of bad stuff that happened. There were certainly illegal legal ballots. How many? I don’t know if Justice Gableman knows. I don’t know if anybody knows. We got to make sure. I will make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

A Michels victory would set the stage for reconsideration of a range of restrictive voting laws that were vetoed by Evers.

Among the bills passed by Republicans and blocked by Evers were proposals that would require the state to use federal databases to check citizenship status; remove voters from the rolls based on information submitted for jury selection; make it harder to request an absentee ballot; and classify it a felony to incorrectly attest that a person is “indefinitely confined” so they can vote absentee (a provision widely used during the pandemic).

Wisconsin already is a place that researchers have identified as difficult for voters to navigate. The Cost of Voting Index, a Northern Illinois University project that studies each state, lists it near the bottom, at 47th, because of a strict voter ID law, limits on early voting and proof of residency requirements that affect registration drives.

“Over the last several election cycles, other states have adopted policies that remove barriers to voting,” one of the researchers, Michael J. Pomante II, now with the election protection group States United Action, said in an email.

But Wisconsin, he added, “has continued to pass and implement laws that create barriers to casting a ballot.”

In 2024, all these factors — from who is able to vote to who runs the executive branch and who runs the Legislature — will play a role in determining which presidential candidate gets Wisconsin’s electoral votes.

The governor and the Wisconsin Elections Commission are part of the state’s certification process, with the secretary of state making it official by affixing the state seal. And the state Supreme Court stands ready to rule on election law disputes.

The Nov. 8 midterm election will determine which party holds the office of governor and secretary of state when voting occurs in 2024. Michels has proposed a “full reorganization” of the Wisconsin Elections Commission if he is elected.

He hasn’t explained what that would look like, other than to say in a primary debate that he envisioned replacing it with a board made up of appointees named by each of the state’s congressional districts. Wisconsin now has eight seats in the U.S. House, five held by Republicans and three by Democrats.

Evers, by contrast, backs the commission in its current form. He noted its origins in the state’s Legislature seven years ago.

“Republicans created this system, and it works,” he said in a statement released to ProPublica. “Our last election was fair and secure, as was proven by a recount, our law enforcement agencies, and the courts.”

Help ProPublica Investigate Threats to U.S. Democracy

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Megan O’Matz.

Citizens of Dunn County, Wisconsin, have a plan to place national, publicly-funded health care for everyone on their November 8th county ballot.  In June and July at meetings of the County Board of Supervisors, many spoke of a broken health care system and their proposal to fix it.  After the third meeting, the Board voted unanimously to put the following question on the ballot:  

“Shall Congress and the President of the United States enact into law the creation of a publicly financed, non-profit, national health insurance program that would fully cover medical care costs for all Americans?”

Located in central west Wisconsin and blessed with lakes and farmland, Dunn County is far from bustling cities. About 16,000 of its 45,000 residents live in Menomonie, the county seat, named by the Smithsonian as “One of the Best Small Towns in the USA.”

“Nobody in my family is going to retire sitting pretty and most of the reason for that can be laid at having to pay off medical expenses, even though we were insured, for months and months and months, and that is money we did not spend on all the things that you can spend money on right here in beautiful Dunn County.”

By focusing on the health care crisis in America’s heartland, the people of Dunn County hope to propel the issue onto the nation’s agenda.  They believe that rural concern for neighbors just may outweigh the rancorous partisan divide, and with the idea spreading, influence a Congress that has, so far, refused to consider Medicare for All.

On July 27, 2022, between the pledge of allegiance and the story of how the county fair proceeded despite the windstorm that took out the electric milking machines, they stepped to the microphone at the Board of Supervisors’ meeting to insist that those who represent them allow their voices to be heard in a ballot referendum.  

Margie Hagerman of Menomonie spoke first. “The health care of the majority of Americans has been declining in recent years with lower life expectancy than other developed countries. Other… countries have found ways to cover everyone through a national, non-profit, health insurance system. Why can’t the United States?”

“If you put a referendum out you're giving a voice to the people--you need to do that because we exist only by the consent of the people,” said Michel Brandt.

John Hoff said, “currently the drug pharmaceutical system is totally stacked against the individual—yes, they're working on something in congress but that's only for 20 drugs.” 

Tom Walsh told of his son, a small business owner, who, since the Affordable Care Act, has paid $750 a month for insurance with a $5,000 deductible. “He can get one physical exam a year—that will be free…but the rest of it he pays out of his pocket.  We need Medicare for All basically to save small business owners, save people that are susceptible to bankruptcy because they can't afford to pay for their insurance and if they do have it the deductible is so high it really doesn't help that much…so we really need a national health insurance program.”

Steve Hogseth called attention to the top 23 countries ranked for their democracy and asserted that, of them, the United States was the only one without universal health care of some form.

Lenore Mercer spoke of working in a clinic when the former governor suspended Badger Care. “I'll always remember a clean-cut, hard-working, full-time employed father breaking down and saying I’m not worried about myself, but for my kids, how will they get to see a doctor? I thought this is so wrong.” 

“Our for-profit driven system balloons profits for insurance companies and drug manufacturers and now millions of Americans can't afford health care,” Mercer concluded.

Retired physician Lorene Vedder ended her comments by asking those in the audience who supported putting this measure on the November 8th ballot to please stand. All rose.

Monica Berrier, Dunn County Supervisor for District 13, weighed in at the Legislative Committee Meeting. “I want to make the argument that it really is in the county's interest to be advocating for a better health care system… I'll do this through the perspective of our budget and whether the current system is a responsible use of taxpayer dollars.”

She said that the county spends about $500,000 each month on health insurance and that in the 2022 budget, $10 million out of a $90 million budget has been set aside for health insurance. The $90 million is not just for personnel but includes all county operations. 

“So we’re spending a lot but when we compare that to what the employees are actually getting it’s a pretty bad deal. They’re part of a system where delays and even outright denials of care are routine.  I believe that as elected officials and stewards of taxpayer dollars we have a responsibility to demand better of the federal government that serves us.”

Berrier laid it out. “I want to close by thinking about what we could do with this money instead.  We all know that the budget process comes down to higgling over fifty dollars here a hundred dollars there.  A couple months ago we had a good discussion about the wheel tax and many of us including myself are worried about the potential impact that this might have on people who can't afford it.  For comparison, the wheel tax brings in just $700,000 every year and that's peanuts compared to the 10 million dollars we are budgeted to spend on health insurance this year…instead of wringing our hands over the wheel tax we could be just fixing the roads instead. I think that we as elected officials really have a responsibility to advocate for a more efficient health care system”

Dr. Vedder had spoken earlier to the Dunn County Executive Committee.  “My chief concern is a decreasing life expectancy that we have in this country. If you compare Canada to the United States, they live 4.5 years longer than we do.  Back in 1970 we lived the same life expectancy so why are we seeing this difference?

“People are afraid here in our country to access health care because of the excess cost of medical care--30 million people in this country don't have health care insurance, 44 % don't have the funds to obtain medical care even if they have insurance.

“We access health care a lot less than any developed country in the world. By avoiding health care we have our people…coming to emergency rooms when it's too late to treat them, their disease is too advanced.  We bankrupt people over medical bills—nowhere else in the developed world are people bankrupted by their health.”  

Someone announced that the issue would be placed on the agenda for the Legislative Committee.

The health care advocates came prepared to speak at the Legislative Committee Meeting on July 20.  At a couple of minutes per person, they filled the first 35 minutes of the meeting.  Dr. Steve Brown told of his wife using health care services in Portugal, receiving x-ray, lab services and IV antibiotics.  She was diagnosed with Legionnaires disease and received good care.  He said that even though they did not have travel insurance, the bill was reasonable—about $160.

Steve Carlson of Trego spoke of a precedent in Wisconsin for a health care ballot question fourteen years ago when county voters agreed that everyone in the state should have health care coverage equal to state officials.  He said that people in Washburn, Douglas, and Portage counties are working on placing referenda, like the current one proposed in Dunn County, on the ballot for the Spring election.

Louisa Gerasimo told of medical bills that depleted retirement savings. “Nobody in my family is going to retire sitting pretty and most of the reason for that can be laid at having to pay off medical expenses, even though we were insured, for months and months and months, and that is money we did not spend on all the things that you can spend money on right here in beautiful Dunn County.”

Commission Hager commented that this issue had roused the most public interest and comment since the ATV county road expansion.  The supervisors voted unanimously to place the issue on the ballot.  Chair Kelly McCullough said, “Looks like we will be having the referendum all right…that also answers the question of pressuring your legislators—does it work—it looks like it all right.”

Rural health care is in deep crisis. Over 800 rural hospitals are under threat of closing.  Rural physicians struggle to survive on the meager payments of Medicaid.  Mergers and acquisitions accelerate the pain as hospitals are bought up by those whose only concern is profit.  Delayed care causes untold suffering and death.  Is it possible that the people of these rural communities, under the stress of a broken health care system, can spark a movement to fix health care for the nation?

Some people in Dunn County think so and are working to make it happen. 

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Kay Tillow.

A weekly offering of fried fish stands out as a cultural institution in a state known for its beer, football, and cheese. The Wisconsin fish fry— a regional dish consisting of battered and fried fish, generally served with fries or potato pancakes, cabbage or coleslaw, rye bread or a dinner roll, and topped off with a lemon slice —has been a hearty Friday night staple of local bars, village halls, and supper clubs.

This dish is more than just a line on a menu, it’s how people have defined their Friday nights for decades.

Now, fish frys will have to adapt to a changing climate. From the Hatch green chiles in New Mexico to gumbo in Louisiana, climate change is altering regional food traditions across the country. 

Wisconsin lakes are warming and becoming more hospitable to invasive species and extreme weather conditions thanks to a global rise in temperature, challenging the future of this statewide ritual. Commonly fried fish species like perch, lake trout, and whitefish have declined, causing Wisconsin restaurants to look beyond their own lakes for certain fish, or abandon some altogether. 

Two Great Lakes — Michigan and Superior — touch Wisconsin’s shores and have experienced a steady rise in temperature since 1995. Even the deepest depths of the lake system are starting to warm up and the average maximum ice cover on the Great Lakes has dropped over 20 percent in the last 50 years. 

The fish fry is predicated on Wisconsin “geography, religion, and history,” said Terese Allen, an expert on the state’s culinary history and a co-author of Flavor of Wisconsin: An Informal History of Food and Eating in the Badger State.

Cooking fish for large groups predates settlers, with evidence of Indigenous fishing practices dating back thousands of years in the Great Lakes. Allen said when Indigenous communities and colonizers intermingled in a region “surrounded by and intertwined with waterways,” the settlers found preparing fish in mass to be a useful skill. Many immigrants who settled the state were also Catholic and wouldn’t eat meat on Fridays, a factor in the dish’s growth and popularity.

Fish frys boomed during Prohibition, Allen said, as taverns would sell fried fish for cheap to get customers in the door during a time when bars struggled to survive. By the 1960s, in a post-Prohibition era and the end of the Friday meat ban for Catholics, Wisconsinites across the state were hooked.

As a definition for the uninitiated, Allen said a fish fry is simply an “end-of-the-work-week rite, in restaurants plain and simple to fancy, that brings people together to celebrate everyday life. It’s not a holiday, but it is a regular special occasion.”

It used to be that the fish for those occasions came from the state’s shorelines. Unfortunately, years of overharvesting and strained ecosystems led to a rapid decline in fish populations in these lakes. By the turn of the 20th century, a growing interest in commercial fishing across all Great Lakes (Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior) led to the near-death of Atlantic salmon, lake trout, and ciscoes, with whitefish on a rapid decline. In 1954, the Great Lakes Fishery Commission was formed to protect and manage fish populations, protect the lakes from overharvesting, manage water quality, and fight another persistent problem — invasive species. 

Two invasive species have caused lasting effects on Wisconsin fish; sea lampreys and zebra mussels. Sea lampreys are a parasitic fish famed for their rows of sharp teeth and funnel-shaped mouths, also known as the vampire fish, and have been called North America’s first invasive species. Sea lamprey nearly decimated all Great Lakes fish life, dropping the average catch weight from 15 million pounds down to a dismal 300,000 by the 1960s, according to the fishery commission. Baby vampire fish are killed using a set of chemicals known as lampricides, but climate change has made it harder to terminate these bloodsuckers. A study found that rising lake temperatures make lamprey larvae more resistant to chemicals meant to kill them.

Yellow perch used to be caught, doused in batter, and fried by the bushel in the Great Lakes region until zebra mussels invaded. Zebra mussels are natives of Russian and Ukrainian freshwater systems and by the 1980s, found their way to Wisconsin’s lakes and bays. Spawning perch and zebra mussels both feed on and fight over phytoplankton and zooplankton. 

This feud has left yellow perch populations in freefall from a few decades ago, with Lake Michigan perch on a continued decline, according to the Wisconsin DNR. Zebra mussels, much like a lamprey, will thrive in a warmer climate, according to a 2020 Hydrobiologia study, especially in northern higher North American latitudes, such as Wisconsin lakes. The infestation of zebra mussels has reached over 250 lakes in Wisconsin and once they set up shop, the invasive species is hard to get rid of.

Besides invasive species, extreme weather events on lakes, such as turbulent windstorms, are already harming Lake Michigan fish. The loss of ice cover has caused lakes to thaw faster and expose still developing fish to the elements. “If you have loss of ice cover, then you’re going to potentially have more wind events that could cause turbulence [and] could potentially bury eggs,” said Abby Lynch, a fish biologist and researcher with the United States Geological Survey’s Climate Adaptation Science Center.

Lynch’s research focuses on how climate change is impacting inland fish across the globe. Given the complexity of a given lake’s ecosystem, she said factors such as increased precipitation and periods of drought will also change how fish survive. Lake temperatures, she added, are a major concern when looking at the future of fish populations.

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Climate change has also affected how whitefish, another popular fish fry option, are spawning. Whitefish spawn in the fall, egg in the winter, and hatch in the spring, leaving them vulnerable to seasons experiencing warming temperatures. As these changes to the lake systems happen, one of the most immediate impacts is where certain fish are staying or moving. 

Lynch said anglers, fisheries, and shoreline communities are already seeing that when a lake changes, the species available at a specific location will change with time. Once certain species move out of a lake, the regional identity and industry associated with that fish will be forced to acclimate. 

“Fish might be able to move and their populations may end up in a reasonable place, but there’s still a lot of political and social implications for those shifts that are not simple to deal with,” Lynch said. 

Wisconsin perch reigned supreme at fish fries for decades. As the population shifts, stalwart fishers look for ways to get perch on plates. 

Doug Sackett, a retired firefighter and EMT from Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, started farming yellow perch at his Cedar Hill Farm pheasant hunting retreat eight years ago. Halfway between Madison and Milwaukee, his property now has three half-acre 15-foot-deep perch ponds with around 60,000 fish. He said he’s seen how limits on commercially harvested perch and other species harvest has caused restaurants and suppliers to look for other options.

“They’ve been cutting back on how many fish they are able to harvest which puts a big hurt on the Friday night fish fry industry,” Sackett said. 

As taverns look to fill in the gaps left by declining populations, Sackett said he’s seen buyers supplement local freshwater fish for imported zander, a freshwater fish that resembles perch and is found in Finland and other European countries, as well as ocean perch, imported from fisheries in the Pacific Ocean. 

Justin Kohlhagen, operating manager of VFW Memorial Post 9156 in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, stays tried and true to local fish as much as he can. The VFW, found just around the corner from a semi-pro baseball field and across the street from a Lutheran cemetery, has hosted a booming Friday night fish fry for the last nine years under his watch. Born and raised in Sheboygan, a city nicknamed the Malibu of the Midwest and known for freshwater recreation, Kohlhagen spent his childhood fishing perch with his family along Lake Michigan shores.

“You used to go off South Pier by the power plant and we could go out perch fishing,” Kohlhagen said. “You can’t do that anymore in Sheboygan, there’s no perch around here.”

Now Kohlhagen sources his perch from Lake Erie, a point of pride for the VFW. “It’s not zander and all that crap,” he said. “It’s actual fish.” 

This commitment to Great Lakes perch has caused prices to rise in recent years, with a perch plate costing $22.50 a plate and Kohlhagen paying over $17 a pound for Great Lakes perch, but he said his Sheboygan customers want and expect fresh fish. Kohlhagen said the VFW operates at the same scale as restaurants or supper clubs and they turn over “tons” of tables each Friday night. “We’re the busiest fish fry in Sheboygan County. I can promise you that,” he said.

At the northern tip of the state, a fish success story has spawned from decades of conservation and management efforts. Lake Superior communities Bayfield, Red Cliff, and the Apostle Islands have seen a growth in fish species commonly used for fish frys. 

“Whitefish populations, right now, in the Apostle Islands region of Lake Superior are doing fantastic,” said Ian Harding, a fish biologist for the Red Cliff Fisheries Department. The agency is operated by the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, one of Wisconsin’s eleven federally recognized Indigenous tribes. 

Harding said whitefish populations declined in Lakes Michigan and Superior in the early 20th century like other species, but since the 1970s-80s fight for treaty and fishing rights, Superior whitefish have boomed with help from Red Cliff and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources conservation methods.

He said Lake Superior also sets itself apart due to the “great luck” of its chemical makeup, which has far less calcium buildup than Lake Michigan, a crucial component to the growth of zebra mussels. This invasive species has been spotted in Superior, but nowhere close to the levels seen in other lakes. In addition to its chemical makeup, Lake Superior has far less shoreline development than Lake Michigan, which is home to larger cities like Green Bay or Milwaukee. The lack of development along Superior has played a role in the health of the lake, and thus its fish, and is something he wants to protect. 

“When projects pop up in the Lake Superior basin, or they want to develop Lake Superior shoreline, use water resources, or anything like that, generally in our position, we’re opposed,” Harding said.

The Red Cliff tribe operates its own fishing company that sells whitefish wholesale to restaurants across the state and beyond due to its booming harvest. Harding said Lake Superior whitefish and ciscoes, or lake herring, are among the most popular catches that make their way to plates in the state. Still, Lake Superior fish populations aren’t without problems. The lake is one of the fastest warming lakes in the world, and slowly but surely, warming waters have created growing toxic algae blooms. 

“We should really take notes and learn from what’s happened to Lake Michigan and Huron so we can take steps so that doesn’t happen here in Lake Superior,” Harding said. “We’re really fortunate to have what we have right now and things generally have been going pretty well, but there’s warning signs out there.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Friday night fish frys define Wisconsin. What happens when climate change adjusts the menu? on Aug 26, 2022.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by John McCracken.

Wisconsin's progressive Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes handily won the state's Democratic U.S. Senate primary on Tuesday, advancing to take on Republican Sen. Ron Johnson in a November matchup that could play a key role in determining which party controls the upper chamber next year.

"This is the honor of a lifetime," Barnes said following his landslide victory, which was expected after his top Democratic rivals dropped out last month.

"Now, we take the fight to Ron Johnson," Barnes declared on social media. "We're going to the Senate to rebuild the middle class. We're going to protect the right to choose. We're going to fight to make the American Dream an American reality. Are you with me?"

Barnes, a supporter of Medicare for All, won the backing of high-profile lawmakers including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who celebrated the lieutenant governor's victory as a win for efforts to reshape a chamber that has long stood as an obstacle to progressive change.

"We need strong progressives like Mandela in the Senate to fight for an agenda that looks out for the working class of this country, not billionaires and corporations," Sanders tweeted. "On to November!"

A survey conducted ahead of Tuesday's primary showed Barnes leading by two percentage points in a hypothetical general election matchup against Johnson, a Trump loyalist who recently said he would favor turning Social Security and Medicare into "discretionary spending" programs, further opening the door to cuts.

"Wisconsinites pay into Social Security through a lifetime of hard work, and they're counting on this program and Medicare—but Ron Johnson just doesn't care," Barnes said in response to Johnson's remarks last week.

Along with Pennsylvania, where Lt. Gov. John Fetterman is taking on ultra-rich ex-TV personality Dr. Oz, Wisconsin is one of several states where Democrats are looking to flip Senate seats in their bid to maintain control of the chamber and expand their razor-thin margins.

Analysts consider the Wisconsin race a toss-up, and progressives voiced confidence Tuesday that Barnes will succeed in denying the Republican incumbent a third term.

"Even before he got in the race, we knew Mandela was the candidate who could build a winning coalition to take on Ron Johnson," said Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party. "All his life, Mandela has been bringing people together across race and place. Tonight is the starting gun for what may be the make-or-break election of the year."

"If Mandela succeeds, we can change how the Senate works—and who it works for," Mitchell added. "We've been with Mandela from day one, and we'll be with him through November."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jake Johnson.

Political observers on Friday were alarmed by a Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling restricting the use of drop boxes for absentee election ballots—not just because the decision will make it harder for many residents to vote, but also because the high court's right-wing majority openly embraced in its ruling former President Donald Trump's lies about the 2020 election.

In the 4-3 decision, the court's conservative justices argued that the use of ballot drop boxes is unlawful because the boxes are not explicitly mentioned in the state's laws, which allow for absentee ballots to be returned to a municipal clerk.

"After the GOP lost Wisconsin in 2020, the GOP decided that the issue wasn't that they couldn't convince voters to support them—it was that people who didn't support them were able to vote."

The return of a ballot "does not mean nor has it been historically understood to mean delivery to an unattended ballot drop box," wrote Justice Rebecca Bradley in the majority opinion.

Bradley continued that the state's longtime use of hundreds of drop boxes "directly" harmed Wisconsin voters in 2020, when President Joe Biden won the state by about 20,000 votes, beating former President Donald Trump.

Trump and his allies took aim at the drop boxes after the election, saying their use is not explicitly allowed under state law and filing a number of lawsuits.

Bradley suggested that anyone who used a drop box for an absentee ballot did not qualify as a "lawful" voter and said their method of voting "weakens the people's faith that the election produced an outcome reflective of their will."

"The Wisconsin voters, and all lawful voters, are injured when the institution charged with administering Wisconsin elections does not follow the law, leaving the results in question," she wrote, adding that "throughout history, tyrants have claimed electoral victory via elections conducted in violation of governing law" and comparing Biden's win to that of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un.

Slate journalist Mark Joseph Stern called the language used in Bradley's opinion "outrageously irresponsible."

With the ruling, said journalist John Nichols, the right-wing majority "is not acting as a court. It's a political cabal with a partisan agenda."

The Wisconsin Democrats called the ruling "a slap in the face to democracy itself" and warned that the absence of ballot drop boxes that many voters have used for years will "impact people with disabilities, seniors, people living in rural communities, people with limited means, few transport options, and inflexible work schedules, who are disproportionately young people and people of color."

"For decades throughout Wisconsin, municipal clerks have used drop boxes to collect documents like tax returns, municipal bills—and absentee ballots," said Ben Wikler, chair of the state Democratic Party. "It's always been safe, secure, and convenient. Drop box use expanded dramatically in 2020, in red and blue areas alike."

"But then after the GOP lost Wisconsin in 2020, the GOP decided that the issue wasn't that they couldn't convince voters to support them—it was that people who didn't support them were able to vote," he added.

The three justices who dissented in the ruling denounced Bradley's claims of rampant illegal voting in 2020 as "nonsense."

"There is no evidence at all in this record that the use of drop boxes fosters voter fraud of any kind," they wrote. "None... But concerns about drop boxes alone don't fuel the fire questioning election integrity. Rather, the kindling is primarily provided by voter suppression efforts and the constant drumbeat of unsubstantiated rhetoric in opinions like this one, not actual voter fraud."

The court's right-wing justices also ruled in November that a new redistricting plan should make the least amount of changes possible to maps drawn by the Republican-led Legislature in 2011, ensuring a map that will favor GOP majorities in Wisconsin for at least another decade.

Former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman is also overseeing an investigation into the 2020 election and has suggested that state lawmakers should try to decertify the results.

Friday's ruling came "from what might be the most rogue and vehemently anti-democratic state court in the nation," said Daniel Nichanian, editor-in-chief of Bolts.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Julia Conley.

Political observers on Friday were alarmed by a Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling restricting the use of drop boxes for absentee election ballots—not just because the decision will make it harder for many residents to vote, but also because the high court's right-wing majority openly embraced in its ruling former President Donald Trump's lies about the 2020 election.

In the 4-3 decision, the court's conservative justices argued that the use of ballot drop boxes is unlawful because the boxes are not explicitly mentioned in the state's laws, which allow for absentee ballots to be returned to a municipal clerk.

"After the GOP lost Wisconsin in 2020, the GOP decided that the issue wasn't that they couldn't convince voters to support them—it was that people who didn't support them were able to vote."

The return of a ballot "does not mean nor has it been historically understood to mean delivery to an unattended ballot drop box," wrote Justice Rebecca Bradley in the majority opinion.

Bradley continued that the state's longtime use of hundreds of drop boxes "directly" harmed Wisconsin voters in 2020, when President Joe Biden won the state by about 20,000 votes, beating former President Donald Trump.

Trump and his allies took aim at the drop boxes after the election, saying their use is not explicitly allowed under state law and filing a number of lawsuits.

Bradley suggested that anyone who used a drop box for an absentee ballot did not qualify as a "lawful" voter and said their method of voting "weakens the people's faith that the election produced an outcome reflective of their will."

"The Wisconsin voters, and all lawful voters, are injured when the institution charged with administering Wisconsin elections does not follow the law, leaving the results in question," she wrote, adding that "throughout history, tyrants have claimed electoral victory via elections conducted in violation of governing law" and comparing Biden's win to that of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un.

Slate journalist Mark Joseph Stern called the language used in Bradley's opinion "outrageously irresponsible."

With the ruling, said journalist John Nichols, the right-wing majority "is not acting as a court. It's a political cabal with a partisan agenda."

The Wisconsin Democrats called the ruling "a slap in the face to democracy itself" and warned that the absence of ballot drop boxes that many voters have used for years will "impact people with disabilities, seniors, people living in rural communities, people with limited means, few transport options, and inflexible work schedules, who are disproportionately young people and people of color."

"For decades throughout Wisconsin, municipal clerks have used drop boxes to collect documents like tax returns, municipal bills—and absentee ballots," said Ben Wikler, chair of the state Democratic Party. "It's always been safe, secure, and convenient. Drop box use expanded dramatically in 2020, in red and blue areas alike."

"But then after the GOP lost Wisconsin in 2020, the GOP decided that the issue wasn't that they couldn't convince voters to support them—it was that people who didn't support them were able to vote," he added.

The three justices who dissented in the ruling denounced Bradley's claims of rampant illegal voting in 2020 as "nonsense."

"There is no evidence at all in this record that the use of drop boxes fosters voter fraud of any kind," they wrote. "None... But concerns about drop boxes alone don't fuel the fire questioning election integrity. Rather, the kindling is primarily provided by voter suppression efforts and the constant drumbeat of unsubstantiated rhetoric in opinions like this one, not actual voter fraud."

The court's right-wing justices also ruled in November that a new redistricting plan should make the least amount of changes possible to maps drawn by the Republican-led Legislature in 2011, ensuring a map that will favor GOP majorities in Wisconsin for at least another decade.

Former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman is also overseeing an investigation into the 2020 election and has suggested that state lawmakers should try to decertify the results.

Friday's ruling came "from what might be the most rogue and vehemently anti-democratic state court in the nation," said Daniel Nichanian, editor-in-chief of Bolts.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Julia Conley.

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Jay Stone grew up in the rough-and-tumble world of Chicago ward politics, the son of a longtime city alderman. But his own forays into politics left him distrustful of Chicago Democrats.

When he ran for alderman in 2003, he was crushed at the polls after party leaders sent city workers out to campaign against him. Even his own father didn’t endorse him.

Then when Stone sought the mayor’s office in 2010, he only mustered a few hundred of the 12,500 signatures needed to qualify for the ballot. He filed a federal lawsuit over the requirement and lost.

His father, Bernard Stone, who held office for 38 years, once told the Chicago Tribune: “My son is very good at what he’s trained to do. And that’s not politics.”

Jay Stone’s training was in hypnotherapy, and he eventually walked away from Chicago politics, carving out a living using hypnosis to help people with anxiety, weight gain, nicotine addiction and other issues. Only in retirement, and after a move to Wisconsin, did he finally find his political niche.

In 2020, Stone played a crucial, if little-known, role in making Wisconsin a hotbed of conspiracy theories that Democrats stole the state’s 10 electoral votes from then-President Donald Trump. The outcry emanating from Wisconsin has cast Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as a force of untoward political influence and helped create a backlash against using private grants, including large donations from Zuckerberg, to assist election officials across the country.

In Wisconsin, Stone has finally been embraced politically, by activists and politicians who, like him, didn’t approve of the so-called “Zuckerbucks” or of big-city Democratic mayors. They, too, are unhappy with the way the 2020 presidential election was run in Wisconsin and how it turned out. And they, too, show no inclination of giving up, even when their claims have been rejected and other Republicans have told them it’s time to move on.

“The best part of getting involved in politics in Wisconsin is the wonderful people I’ve been meeting,” Stone said in an interview. “They’re just a great group of men and women that I admire and respect.”

The questioning of the legitimacy of President Joe Biden’s 20,000-vote victory in Wisconsin continues thanks to Stone and others who have emerged to take on outsize roles after the election. Among them: a retired travel industry executive who has alleged voter fraud at nursing homes. Ten alternate GOP electors who signed documents to try to subvert the certification of Biden’s election. And some state legislators who are still looking for ways to hand the state to Trump, a year and a half after the election.

Stone hasn’t garnered much public attention, but records indicate that in the summer of 2020 he was the first person to complain to state authorities about grant money accepted by local election officials. The funds were earmarked for face masks, shields and other safety supplies, as well as hazard pay, larger voting facilities, vote-by-mail processing, drop boxes and educational outreach about absentee voting.

Stone, however, saw the election funding, which came from a Chicago nonprofit, as a way to sway the election for Biden by helping bring more Democratic-leaning voters to the polls in Wisconsin’s five largest cities.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission rejected Stone’s claim last year, on the grounds that he didn’t live in any of the cities he mentioned and that the complaint did not allege any violations that the commission had the authority to investigate. A separate complaint Stone filed with the Federal Election Commission, in which he objects to the Zuckerberg money, has not been resolved.

Nonetheless, the idea that the election was somehow rigged lives on.

Chief among the election deniers is Michael Gableman, who served on the state Supreme Court for a decade. A Trump ally, Gableman was named as special counsel by the GOP-controlled State Assembly to investigate the legitimacy of Biden’s victory in Wisconsin. Not only did Gableman give Stone’s accusations a platform, he took them even further. In his review for the Assembly, Gableman labeled the grants a form of bribery.

Gableman expressed his admiration for Stone during a March interview on the “Tucker Carlson Today” show, which streams online.

It’s “a private citizen, a guy named Jay Stone, who really deserves a lot of credit,” Gableman said, referring to questions about the election grants.

“He saw all of this coming,” Gableman said. “And he’s not a lawyer. I don’t know what his particular training is — he’s trained in the medical field. He filed a complaint with the Wisconsin Elections Commission back in August of 2020, well before the election. And he foresaw all of this, he foresaw the partisan nature of all of the Zuckerberg money and all of the Zuckerberg people coming in to influence the election.”

Gableman, who has not responded to requests for an interview, had hired Stone as a paid consultant for his review by the time he appeared on Carlson’s show.

But that’s not the only thing keeping Stone from a quiet retirement in Pleasant Prairie, not far from the Illinois border, where he grows his own fruits and vegetables and heats his home only with firewood. Once again, he’s got his eyes on political office. This time he’s running for the Wisconsin State Senate.

In the summer of 2020, cities across the U.S. were canceling Fourth of July firework celebrations. Public health departments were scrambling to put contact tracing measures in place to track the spread of COVID-19. Movie theaters remained shuttered. Vaccines were still undergoing testing.

Against this backdrop, the Center for Tech and Civic Life, a nonprofit based in Chicago, decided to get involved. Its stated mission is to ensure that elections across the country are “more professional, inclusive and secure.”

The group approached the mayors of Wisconsin’s five largest cities — Milwaukee, Madison, Green Bay, Kenosha and Racine — and encouraged them to draw up a “Safe Voting Plan” outlining how they would spend more than $6 million in grant money to make it easier for people to vote while also limiting their exposure to the highly contagious coronavirus.

Wisconsin’s April elections, including the presidential primary, had been a near-disaster. The state’s Democratic governor and GOP-controlled legislature bickered over whether to postpone the balloting. Election offices were deluged with requests for absentee ballots. National Guard troops stepped in to replace poll workers too scared to volunteer. Polling places closed or relocated. Some voters waited in long lines for hours.

The Safe Voting Plan envisioned a smoother election that November. The goals were to keep voters safe and educate them about how to cast a ballot properly, whether in person or by mail. The plan also expressed the desire to ensure the right to vote “in our dense and diverse communities.”

Green Bay, for example, proposed using $15,000 to partner with “churches, educational institutions, and organizations serving African immigrants, LatinX residents, and African Americans” to help new voters obtain documents needed to get a valid state ID that they could show at the polls or to get an absentee ballot.

The Center for Tech and Civic Life awarded the $6.3 million to Wisconsin’s five largest cities in early July 2020. That’s when a friend of Stone’s sent him a link to a newspaper article about the grants.

“Within 10 minutes, I knew this was a scam, because they were targeting the Democratic strongholds in the state of Wisconsin,” said Stone.

Stone recognized that the organization’s address on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile was in the same building that had once housed Barack Obama’s campaign headquarters, which he felt confirmed his instincts.

He took exception to the proposed outreach to communities that traditionally vote Democratic, saying such efforts are the responsibility of candidates and parties, not municipal election workers. On Aug. 28, 2020, he fired off a 27-page complaint to the Wisconsin Elections Commission, which included 167 exhibits.

The Center for Tech and Civic Life “exploited COVID-19” to help Democrats, Stone wrote. “All of CTCL’s $6.3 million expenditures will increase voter turnout in Wisconsin cities that are heavily Democratic and increase the likelihood that Democrat Joe Biden will win Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes.”

Less than a week later, CTCL made a major announcement: It had received a $250 million donation from Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. The couple later added an additional $100 million. CTCL’s previous funding had come from a variety of foundations.

Ultimately, CTCL awarded grants to more than 2,500 elections offices across 49 states, including rural parts of Wisconsin. The sums included $5,000 to small communities such as Ralls County, Missouri, and $10 million each for the city of Philadelphia and for Fulton County, Georgia, which encompasses most of Atlanta.

In an interview, Stone said he wouldn’t have objected if the grants had been awarded to each of Wisconsin’s 72 counties — with every county getting an equal amount per registered voter.

According to a ProPublica analysis, the biggest municipalities in Wisconsin received the most money and had higher per capita grants than smaller places like Waukesha, Brookfield and Fond Du Lac, which all had a history of voting for Trump. For instance, the per capita figure for Milwaukee was more than 10 times that of nearby Waukesha.

An analysis by Ballotpedia, a nonprofit focusing on elections, found that Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Michigan — swing states that ended up in the Biden column — received some of the highest per capita grants from CTCL. However, it’s nearly impossible to discern what may have turned the tide in those states and whether turnout was affected by the grant money, a motivation to vote against Trump, or other factors.

CTCL was formed in 2014. One of its founders, Tiana Epps-Johnson, was named an Obama Foundation fellow in 2018, providing her with leadership training and other resources to help her in her work. She has described CTCL as nonpartisan, but Stone said the Obama Foundation connection suggests otherwise.

Epps-Johnson, who is CTCL’s executive director, did not respond to a voice message left on her direct line, but the group replied with a statement saying the grant money was available to all parts of the country. “Every eligible local election office that applied was awarded funds,” CTCL stated.

The center also defended its actions in a lawsuit the Trump campaign filed against the Wisconsin Elections Commission; the suit alleged, in part, that the state election commission had improperly supported the five cities’ plan to promote expanded mail-in voting.

In an amicus brief in that case, CTCL wrote: “Most of those funds were used to purchase personal protective equipment for voters and election workers, to recruit and train additional staff, to provide improved security, to establish in-person polling places, to process mail-in ballots, and to ensure emergency preparedness. CTCL’s program thus helped officials throughout the nation to run secure, lawful, and efficient elections for all Americans.”

A federal judge appointed by Trump found no merit in the former president’s case and dismissed it.

Zuckerberg also denies having hidden motives in funding nonprofits that targeted voting issues. His spokesperson Brian Baker said in an email to ProPublica that Zuckerberg and his wife stepped in when “our nation’s election infrastructure faced unprecedented challenges” and the federal government “failed to provide adequate funds.” The goal, Baker said, was to “ensure that residents could vote regardless of their party or preference.”

When Wisconsinites went to the polls in November 2020, there were far fewer issues with people having trouble casting a ballot or having to wait in long lines than there had been in the spring election.

Stone’s skepticism was deeply rooted. His own family and his political failures were shaped by Chicago politics, giving him a close-up view of the unseemly tactics of loyalists associated with Democratic rule under Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley and then, to a lesser extent, his son Richard M. Daley.

Running for 32nd Ward alderman on Chicago’s North Side in 2003, Stone preached good government, transparency and election reform. He lost. Testimony in a 2006 federal corruption trial involving top Daley administration officials described how party bosses ordered city workers to campaign for Stone’s opponent, the sitting alderman.

“They wanted a puppet they could control,” Stone said.

After his election defeat, Stone filed a claim against the Daley administration as part of a class-action suit seeking compensation for damages related to political patronage. A federal monitor awarded him $75,000 based on Stone’s claims about city workers forced to campaign against him. His efforts taking on the Daley machine earned him a description as a “passionate independent” from a reporter for the Chicago Reader, an alternative weekly.

Reflecting on the experience, Stone said that even his father was unwilling to endorse him for fear of political retribution. (Stone’s father died in 2014. Jay Stone said that despite their political differences, they remained close.)

Undeterred, in 2010 Stone made a bid for mayor, hoping to take on Richard M. Daley, but Daley announced he would not run for a record seventh term.

Stone didn’t obtain enough signatures to qualify for the ballot and sued the city’s Board of Election Commissioners, claiming the requirement was onerous and unconstitutional, designed to keep the machine in power. The courts disagreed, and the case failed.

Stone never won an election in Chicago, but he was able to build a professional life there as a hypnotherapist in private practice. Stone decided to enter the field after earning first an undergraduate philosophy degree and then an MBA. He received a doctorate in clinical hypnotherapy through remote learning from a now-shuttered California institute.

Hypnotherapists are not licensed in Illinois. But the treatment has gained acceptance. According to the National Institutes of Health, hypnosis has been shown to help people manage some painful conditions and deal with anxiety.

Stone sought to help clients visualize a better future, a goal he said he wanted to achieve in politics, too. In hypnosis, Stone said, some of his patients experienced flashbacks to past lives that helped them find peace and change their behavior for the better. He wrote a paper, posted on his website, on the potential to use DNA to prove the existence of past lives.

Science, he noted, always starts with a theory. “And then you have to be able to prove it,” he said.

His theories about elections tend to lump all Chicago Democrats together, so that Michelle and Barack Obama are considered just as capable of unsavory political tactics as the two Daleys who governed Chicago for decades.

Stone maintains that the Obamas have unduly influenced elections through a network of former White House staffers associated with nonprofits Stone believes are inappropriately registering and influencing voters. (He said he soured on Barack Obama long ago because he believed that Obama had failed to confront the Chicago Democratic machine as a U.S. senator.)

He is particularly opposed to the star-studded nonprofit When We All Vote, set up by Michelle Obama to register voters and help “close the race and age gap.” By the 2020 election, more than 500,000 people had started or completed their voter registration process through When We All Vote, according to the group.

“I believe Michelle Obama’s When We All Vote is the most powerful political organization or political machine in the country,” Stone said in a video he posted on Rumble, a video platform that’s popular among some conservatives. “When We All Vote is more powerful than the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee combined.”

When We All Vote told ProPublica in an email that it is nonpartisan and works with schools and educators to increase civic engagement and voter participation, saying its “initiatives comply with the letter and spirit of the law.”

Stone filed a complaint with the Wisconsin Elections Commission against the former first lady, alleging criminal violations for offering financial prizes to schools that registered the most voters and for enticing people to early voting sites with food and music. The commission, in a 5-1 vote in April, dismissed the matter “due to a lack of reasonable suspicion” and fined him $500 for filing a “frivolous” complaint. (Stone on Friday appealed that decision in Kenosha County Circuit Court.)

Stone saw the supposed Obama network’s fingerprints on the 2020 election grants offered by the Center for Tech and Civic Life.

And while he measures his words more carefully than Gableman and others who see the 2020 Wisconsin election results as tainted, he clearly is in that camp.

“There was so much, I don’t want to say ‘fraud,’ but there was so much deviation from the election laws and the election norms, it raises serious questions,” he said of Trump’s loss in Wisconsin.

“I don’t think the election was fair and just.”

The CTCL money has become a central theme in complaints about Biden’s victory in Wisconsin — and in the review by Gableman. Under pressure from Trump, GOP Assembly Speaker Robin

Vos appointed Gableman to review whether the election was administered fairly and lawfully.

Gableman has fallen short of proving fraud, but did use an interim report and an appearance before the legislative oversight committee on March 1 to highlight the Zuckerberg money and call for disbanding the Wisconsin Elections Commission. He said the legislature should look into decertifying the 2020 election results, but even Republican officials balked at that.

​​Republican Assembly Majority Leader Jim Steineke tweeted that “handing authority to partisan politicians to determine if election fraud exists would be the end of our republic as we know it.”

Jay Stone sat in the front row behind Gableman during the meeting, where Gableman released a report of his findings thus far. It spanned 136 pages, half of which dealt with the CTCL grants, which he characterized as “election bribery.”

Stone helped in the review but won’t talk about what exactly he did in the ongoing investigation, which was budgeted by Vos to cost taxpayers $676,000. “I’m on a confidentiality agreement,” Stone said.

Stone billed Gableman $3,250 for 128 hours of work between Feb. 16 and March 1, according to an invoice obtained by the nonprofit group American Oversight, which has sued to get access to Gableman’s records.

Asked about Gableman’s bribery terminology, Stone sighed. “It’s not a typical case where somebody gives a politician money for, let’s say, a zoning change,” he said. “So, it’s not your typical bribery case, but certainly it’s worth looking into.”

Lawsuits in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Minnesota about the CTCL grants have failed, as did Stone’s complaint to the Wisconsin Elections Commission.

Just last week in Madison, Dane County Circuit Court Judge Stephen Ehlke called the election bribery allegation “ridiculous,” saying he saw no evidence that CTCL offered anything to change anyone’s vote. “I mean, what proof is there in the record anywhere of an inducement of bribery? That whole thing just falls away. There’s nothing in the record. Is there?”

Minnesota lawyer Erick G. Kaardal, who continues to challenge the grants, replied that he reads state law to mean: “We don’t want Wisconsin public officials taking money to get people to go to the polls.”

The county case is an appeal of the elections commission’s rejection of a similar complaint Kaardal filed there about the grants. Ehlke has yet to rule.

Gableman’s work, meanwhile, has been widely discredited, cast by politicians, including some Republicans, and legal analysts as unprofessional and amateurish. Wisconsin’s Democratic governor called the investigation a “colossal waste of taxpayer dollars.”

“This effort has spread disinformation about our election processes, it has attacked the integrity of our clerks, election administrators, and poll workers, and it has emboldened individuals to harass and demean dedicated public servants,” Gov. Tony Evers said in a prepared statement.

The issue of using private grants in administering elections, however, remains alive.

Zuckerberg will not be making future donations to election offices, his spokesperson told ProPublica earlier this month, calling it “a one-time donation given the unprecedented nature of the crisis.”

More than a dozen states, meanwhile, have banned or restricted the use of private funds for election offices. The Wisconsin legislature passed a bill in 2021 prohibiting counties or municipalities from applying for or accepting any private donations for elections, but left room for the Wisconsin Elections Commission to take outside grants so long as the money is distributed statewide on a per capita basis. Evers vetoed it.

In southeastern Wisconsin, however, the Walworth County Board of Supervisors passed its own ban last month, prohibiting the county from accepting donations or grants for election administration from individuals or nongovernmental entities.

Now that he’s left a mark as a political activist in Wisconsin, Stone is back on the campaign trail.

At an event hall near Kenosha this month, Stone addressed about 100 people gathered at a regular meeting of the H.O.T. Government group, a right-leaning Wisconsin grassroots organization that adopted an acronym for the words “honest, open and transparent.” (Stone is the group’s vice president.) A stuffed effigy of a torso with a white foam head hung from the rafters, wearing a shirt labeled “Corrupt Officials.”

Standing before a large American flag, he politely asked people to sign his nominating forms. Republican State Rep. Janel Brandtjen, who chairs the elections committee overseeing Gableman’s investigation and supports the effort to overturn Biden’s Wisconsin victory, jumped up from her seat to lead the crowd in a chant: “Jay Stone! Jay Stone!”

“Jay is the one who filed the complaint in the very beginning,” she told the audience. “Jay is a real hero in what he’s done for Wisconsin.”

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This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Megan O’Matz.

“It’s not a big corporate place,” Doerr said. “There’s a lot to protect here.” 

Now, Laketown is at the center of a battle over this rural character, as the town aims to limit pollution from large, industrial livestock farms, also known as concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs. Over the past few months, Laketown and two nearby towns, Trade Lake and Eureka, have passed laws regulating how CAFOs can operate, requiring them to show how they will dispose of dead animals and avoid polluting groundwater. But these policies have faced stiff pushback from the state’s powerful agricultural lobby, which has called the new regulations illegal. 

In the past decade, the industrialization of agriculture has led to a sharp rise in the number of CAFOs, as large livestock operations offer cheaper meat and crowd out smaller farmers. Between 2012 and 2017, the number of animals living on factory farms grew by 14 percent, even as the overall number of operations shrank. From North Carolina to Iowa, CAFOs have been found to pollute drinking water, release noxious gases, and encourage the spread of disease due to the animals’ confined conditions. In March, a nationwide outbreak of avian flu led an egg farm in Wisconsin to kill 2.7 million chickens, creating intolerable smells for a community downwind of the site where their bodies were dumped. 

Even when CAFOs legally dispose of animal waste — usually by spreading it on nearby fields as fertilizer — the sheer volume of manure can overload local streams and groundwater supplies with nitrates and bacteria, said Adam Voskuil, a Wisconsin-based attorney with the nonprofit Midwest Environmental Advocates. That’s especially problematic in states like Wisconsin, where more than 900,000 residents rely on private wells for their drinking water.

“There’s a health concern associated with that aggregation of contaminants and its transport into private households,” Voskuil said. 

In light of these risks, Polk County — where Laketown is located — enacted a one-year moratorium on CAFOs in 2019 to give it time to study the problem and develop a solution. The issue grew more urgent after an Iowa-based company announced plans to build a hog farm in nearby Trade Lake, which would house 26,000 pigs and produce 9 million gallons of waste each year. In 2021, Laketown and five other communities formed the Large Livestock Town Partnership to research potential problems with CAFOs and develop a model ordinance that individual towns could adopt to regulate them. 

The ordinance requires livestock operations with more than 700 animal units to apply for a permit from the town and pay an application fee. The owner has to share the facility’s plans to prevent the spread of infectious diseases, implement a waste management strategy, contain toxic air pollution and odors, report unusual animal deaths, maintain fire safety, and avoid damaging any nearby water resources, as well as demonstrate that the project will provide a net benefit to the town. The application has to be signed by at least one “qualified and professionally licensed” engineer or geoscientist who has reviewed the proposal.

Since Laketown passed its ordinance in February and two other towns followed in March, their efforts have faced stiff resistance. On April 13, two dairy lobbying groups wrote a letter to the  Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection, or DATCP, asking the state to review the ordinances and arguing that the “towns have clearly ignored current laws, regulations and related review and approval processes.” And late last month, two other dairy associations — Venture Dairy Cooperative and the Wisconsin Dairy Alliance — wrote to Laketown directly, telling the town clerk that the CAFO ordinance “contains at least 16 provisions that are preempted by state law and illegal,” including imposing fees and requiring plans for odor prevention.

In a statement, DATCP spokesperson Sam Otterson said the department is “gathering information and identifying the issues so that a legal review can determine the scope of Department authority and duty under applicable law and code provisions.” 

At the heart of the conflict is a 2004 law that prevents local governments from enacting stricter regulations for CAFOs than the state standards, which require CAFOs to submit “nutrient management plans” to show how they’ll dispose of their waste, set minimum “setbacks” or distances between these facilities and nearby properties, and establish standards for manure storage. If facilities meet these criteria, towns are required to issue them permits. 

Though the law allows exceptions if local governments can “clearly show that the requirements are needed to protect public health or safety,” Doerr, who chaired the Large Livestock Town Partnership, said the new ordinances don’t regulate where CAFOs are sited — only how they operate. Requiring them to have a plan to minimize air pollution, ensure fire safety, and deal with biohazards such as an avian flu outbreak is part of the towns’ police powers and necessary to protect citizens, she and others have argued. 

“We have attorneys that have looked at [the ordinance],” said Don Anderson, chair of the Eureka town board. “They helped us formulate it, and are quite confident that it’s within the law.”

Wisconsin isn’t the only state where local governments are facing off against industry-friendly state regulations for CAFOs. In Missouri, where an industrial hog farm spilled more than 300,000 gallons of waste into local streams last spring, a 2019 law bars counties from issuing rules for CAFOs that differ from the state’s policies in any way. Two counties sued to challenge the law, which is headed to the state Supreme Court. 

All 50 states have passed some form of “right-to-farm” laws, which protect livestock operations from being sued over “nuisances” like odors or pollution. And within Wisconsin, state officials are fighting to regulate CAFOs even under the scope of their current authority. Late last month, one of the state’s largest dairy farms sued the state Department of Natural Resources for denying its request to nearly double in size.

For Doerr and other Laketown residents, legal threats are a consequence of challenging the agricultural industry, which they say is not held accountable for its impact on health and the environment. 

“It’s pretty much our life’s work that we have invested in this farm,” Doerr said. “And we really aren’t going to sit here and have them tell us that they’re going to bring in some giant corporations and put a CAFO at the end of our driveway.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In Wisconsin, small towns want more regulations for big farms on May 3, 2022.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Diana Kruzman.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

About a month ago, three conservative candidates for school board seats in the west Wisconsin city of Eau Claire stoked controversy about a teacher training program that they claimed could exclude parents from conversations about their children’s gender identity or sexual orientation.

Right-leaning groups across the country seized on the issue, portraying it as another example of schools usurping the role of parents. A few weeks later, the school board president received a death threat.

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“I am going to kill you and shoot up your next school-board meeting for promoting the horrific, radical transgender agenda,” an anonymous email read.

Farther south in Holmen, in the scenic Driftless Area of Wisconsin, local police are investigating a social media post showing a postcard left on cars at a shopping center that read: “Keep Holmen Schools White and Christian.”

The postcard urged support for two board candidates. Neither candidate has been connected to the incident, and both decried the postcard on social media, calling it a “disgusting and vile fake political ad.”

“I really don’t want to make more statements on it. It’s been really exhausting,” Josh Neumann, the father of six said of the attention paid to the card. His running mate Chad Updike could not be reached for comment.

Voters in Wisconsin and three other states head to the polls Tuesday in what are some of the nation’s earliest school board elections this year. In a harbinger of what voters across the country will see in coming months, many of the traditionally nonpartisan school board races have become increasingly polarized.

Outsiders who have traditionally stayed out of local races are now trying to influence school board contests across the country, using tactics more typical of elections with higher stakes.

Republicans, and particularly the wing of the party that still supports former President Donald Trump, have come to see local races as a way to energize their base and propel voters to the polls — part of what some leaders have called a “precinct strategy.” Sen. Ron Johnson, the Wisconsin Republican, last year encouraged residents to “take back our school boards, our county boards, our city councils.”

Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, speaking on his “War Room” podcast last May, said: “The path to save the nation is very simple. It’s going to go through the school boards.”

“It’s the precinct committees. It’s you. It’s upon your shoulders,” he added, warning that “cultural Marxism” is being introduced in schools and promising a Tea Party-like revolt by parents of schoolchildren.

In Wisconsin, as elsewhere, some school board members and other school officials have quit without finishing their terms, saying that the anger directed their way has made serving untenable. Others have declined to run for reelection.

In Eau Claire, school board President Tim Nordin, who received the death threat, is standing firm and running for reelection. “This is Eau Claire’s election,” he said in a statement. “Others want to control this election by inciting fear in you and driving votes with outside money and news coverage. They, quite literally, are trying to threaten us into submission. I remain unbowed.”

The three conservatives candidates did not respond to messages seeking comment.

Michael Ford, an associate professor of public administration at the University of Wisconsin in Oshkosh who studies school board races, said it’s not surprising that the state, the birthplace of school vouchers and home to one of the most robust open-enrollment public school choice programs in the country, would be a focus for school board elections.

“We always, traditionally, are on the front lines of the changes in education policy, especially those that are highly premised on parental engagement,” he said. “I think it’s logical other states that have looked at Wisconsin as a pioneer on these things would look again.”

Parents, who during the pandemic saw their children struggle with remote learning and other issues, are demanding more control over school management and curriculum decisions. The backlash against mask-wearing by students has played neatly into conservative themes of parental freedom.

Some political observers and academics worry that the politicization of local offices will make it harder to deliver essential school services.

“It makes progress impossible,” Ford said.

Wisconsin school board races at times have had partisan undertones, but the issues at play have largely centered on controlling taxes and paring the benefits educators received.

Things began to change about a decade ago. That’s when Wisconsin school board candidates who had signed petitions to recall Republican Gov. Scott Walker over his push to limit collective bargaining for public employees became targets of conservative talk radio. On the other side, the state’s largest teachers union typically vetted and endorsed candidates it believed would support its aims at the bargaining table.

Today, school board elections are more heated and personal — framed in terms of saving schools, saving children and saving America. Also mentioned: COVID-19 protocols, critical race theory, equity, “divisive curriculum,” library book bans and parental rights.

Rebecca Kleefisch, the former lieutenant governor under Walker who is running for the GOP nomination for governor, recently endorsed 115 local candidates she calls conservatives, including 48 school board candidates — a product of two years of work recruiting and training people for local races. Her campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

Political experts say it is highly unusual for gubernatorial candidates to endorse school board candidates, except perhaps in their hometown. Democratic Gov. Tony Evers has not done so. “The governor generally has not gotten involved in nonpartisan races in Wisconsin,” his communications office said in an email.

Another sign this spring that the school board races are taking on a more partisan tone: Rather than campaigning as individuals, candidates in many of the state’s population centers are running on slates with common platforms and talking points.

“Attention Conservative Voters Don’t Stay Home: Vote For all Four Candidates,” a flyer for the village of Sussex states. Paid for by the Republican Party of Waukesha County, it features the names and photos of two candidates for village trustee and two for the school board.

A particular focus for Wisconsin Republicans has been the traditionally conservative communities ringing Milwaukee known as the WOW counties: Washington, Ozaukee and Waukesha.

The counties have shown some liberal leanings of late. In much of the area, Trump’s support slipped from 2016 to 2020. Biden even won the city of Cedarburg, in Ozaukee County, though by just 19 votes.

Campaign finance records filed to date show the Republican Party of Waukesha County has funneled at least $10,000 into elections in nine school districts in that county alone.

The Patriots of Ozaukee — a newly formed organization dedicated to “promoting conservative values and asserting our Constitutional rights” — is endorsing candidates in school board and municipal races.

The Patriots of Ozaukee did not respond to requests for comment.

National conservative advocacy groups, with members in Wisconsin and elsewhere, also are having an influence on local school district races in the state. They include Moms for Liberty, which has a chapter in Kenosha and on its Facebook page has recommended three of the six candidates running for school board.

“Our mission is preserving America through unifying, educating and empowering parents to preserve their rights at every level of government,” said Amanda Nedweski, the organization’s co-chair in Kenosha and an outspoken critic of the Kenosha Unified School District’s board.

“We attend meetings. We do research. We do a lot of public record requests,” she said. The tax-exempt organization only recently started asking for dues of $25 per year.

Another group urging greater activism is the Phoenix-based Turning Point USA, which has conservative political clubs on high school and college campuses nationwide. It does not endorse or fund candidates, but has a “school board watchlist” that names districts across the country it says push “Leftist, racist and anti-American propaganda.” Its website lists nine Wisconsin districts.

The group uses its watchlist to highlight mask mandates, diversity and other matters, Turning Point USA spokesman Andrew Kolvet said. “Those types of issues are obviously massively important to parents and other stakeholders in the community, and it’s not always easy to find out who supports what,” he said.

In Ozaukee County’s Mequon-Thiensville School District in the suburbs north of Milwaukee, one of the organizers of an unsuccessful recall election last fall that targeted four school board members is again seeking a board seat. Scarlett Johnson, the former vice president of the Wisconsin chapter of No Left Turn in Education, has said that she wants to bring a fresh perspective to the board.

“I think education has changed,” she said. “I think the way that parents look at education has changed. I think teachers are very frustrated as well. And so that’s why I say the status quo is just not going to work anymore. And I don’t get the feeling that our current board and our administrators really understand that.”

The recall effort was notable because it drew contributions from two out-of-state billionaires: $6,000 from Illinois billionaire Richard Uihlein, a Trump supporter and founder and CEO of Uline, a Wisconsin shipping supplies company, and $1,650 from the Chicago hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin. Johnson said members of the recall effort simply wrote letters to the two men asking for donations.

Representatives for Uihlein and Griffin did not respond to requests for comment.

Altogether, the recall effort brought in more than $58,000 in contributions.

A coalition of parents opposing the recall raised more than $36,000, according to campaign finance reports.

Both sides spent money largely on Facebook ads, direct mail, radio ads and yard signs.

Nicole Angresano, a leader in the coalition that turned back the recall, resents the coordinated attacks on the top-rated district. “I don’t think infuriating is hyperbole,” she said. “It’s infuriating to me.”

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• President-elect Joe Biden hosts top Democrats in the House and Senate
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One of the most shocking things I learned talking with a Los Angeles Police Officer I became friends with while working as a reporter on my first job in L.A. was that LAPD cops were trained to “empty your revolver” whenever you fired at a person.

It’s not like in Hollywood cop movies, where you see cops in gun fights with “bad guys” and they’re trading shots with each other.  What it usually involves is an officer feeling threatened, justifiably or not, and unloading his magazine as he or she pumps bullets into the target.

The explanation I was given was that if the person you’re shooting at is armed, or might be armed, you don’t want to just fire once, possibly not disabling your target, who can then fire back at you. So you just shoot everything you’ve got and odds are you’ve rendered your victim dead or incapable of responding.

Over and over, since that disturbing conversation, I’ve watched videos of police shootings, and it’s almost always the same:  multiple shots fired in rapid sequence . Worse yet, there is the phenomenon of multiple police officers confronting an armed or potentially armed person — often someone at quite a distance who may only have a small knife or a bat or some other not terribly lethal weapon — and all the officers file their guns (remember the 41 bullets police fired at unarmed African immigrant Amadou Diallo as he stood on his front porch fumbling for his wallet?).  This, by the way, my LAPD source explained, is considered a defense technique among officers: If everyone shoots, it’s not possible to assign blame for the police killing if it turns out the “perp” was unarmed and the shooting was unjustified.

And so it goes. This week it’s Kenosha, Wisconsin, where the apparently unarmed 29-year-old black father Jacob Blake who was gunned down with seven shots fired point blank into his back by one or two white officers among three trying to apprehend him as he tried to climb into his car, where his three boys, aged 3, 5 and 8 were sitting.

Incredibly, Blake is still alive following that murderous fuscillage, though doctors report it would “take a miracle” for him to ever walk again, since the cops’ bullets reportedly severed his spine and shattered several of his spinal vertebra. (It is not clear whether one or two of the police fired at Blake.)

Let’s play devil’s advocate here for a moment and assume that Blake, who reportedly had just stopped to break up a fight between two women and was going back to his vehicle, when the police for whatever bizarre reason decided to apprehend him.  Say they thought he was going into his car to retrieve a gun that he then might use to shoot him. Three big white cops, already armed, couldn’t gain control of his arms and pull him out of the car to be searched and cuffed and questioned?  Really?  Just look at them following him, guns pointed at him as he’s walking away from them before the shooting. What is the matter with these officers?

And if they really did think he was going for a gun, wouldn’t one shot, fired at point blank range so it clearly wouldn’t miss its target — say at his upper right arm, or a leg — have eliminated the chance for him to turn and shoot them? (There’s no evidence he had or was searching for a weapon. And believe me, if one existed, the police would have reported that by now, with the city of Kenosha erupting in riots and violence in the wake of the shooting of Blake!).

Cops in America like these trigger-happy racist thugs in Kenosha have been getting away with murder, especially of black males, for far too long. And part of the problem is this overuse of their guns to “make sure” their victims are not just wounded, but are well and truly dead. It’s a miracle already that Blake is not dead after those seven bullets, which reportedly also hit his stomach, kidney, liver and caused such damage to his intestines that he had to have some of his small intestine and most of his colon removed.

This shooting should never have happened. First of all, the police jeopardized the safety of three small children of Blake’s who could have been hit by  or ricocheting bullets or fragments. (They’ve also permanently scarred those little kids who had to witness the shooting of their dad.)

Second, there was plenty of time for the two cops to de-escalate the situation and talk Blake into coming out of his car with his hands up. They could alternatively have just slammed the door on him and watched his actions from outside the vehicle.

It’s not even clear why they went after him in the first place. The reports don’t make it appear that he had been threatening anyone, including the cops.

All that will eventually become clear in either a state investigation into the tragic shooting or in the inevitable civil suit for a wrongful shooting that will follow, with the Blake family already having retained the same attorney who is suing Minneapolis over the murder of George Floyd.

But let me say this again:  As long as American cops have a shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later ethos and adhere to “shoot every bullet you’ve got if you fire your sidearm” and an “if one officer shoots, everyone shoots” practices, we’re going to have tragedies like the grave injuring of Jacob blake and the murder of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, shot to death by a Cleveland cvop within seconds of the arrival of a squad car in Cleveland that pulled up next to where he was sitting in a park handling (and not pointing) a toy pistol in his lap.

There is a reason why black people like Blake and Rice are shot, and often killed, by police in America at a rate double the rate for white people, and it is racism, pure and simple. Here’s what the Chicago Tribune reports from a multi-year review of fatal shootings by police:

According to the most recent census data, there are nearly 160 million more white people in America than there are black people. White people make up roughly 62 percent of the U.S. population but only about 49 percent of those who are killed by police officers. African Americans, however, account for 24 percent of those fatally shot and killed by the police despite being just 13 percent of the U.S. population. As The Post noted in a new analysis published last week, that means black Americans are 2.5 times as likely as white Americans to be shot and killed by police officers.

What this suggests, and what I suspect, is that that ethos of shoot to kill and empty your weapon when firing is something police apply with some discretion, using the deadly approach much more often when confronting a black person than a white one.

There is nothing like the carnage caused by police here in countries like Europe, Japan, Taiwan or other places — even in more authoritarian regimes like Poland and Hungary. Police violence and killings here are an outlier in modern societies.

That should be unacceptable to all of us.

It’s dubious that America is the “land of the brave,” but certainly police, who whenever they kill an unarmed victim immediately explain that they “feared for their lives” as justification, cannot lay claim to that appellation.

This article was posted on Wednesday, August 26th, 2020 at 12:53pm and is filed under Police, Racism.

• 35,000 evacuees are able to return home, as firefighters make progress on Bay Area blazes.
• Hurricane Laura intensifies to a category 4 hurricane heading to Gulf Coast states.
• 17 year old armed vigilante accused of killing two Black Lives Matter protesters in Wisconsin.

Photo of Kyle Rittenhouse, accused Wisconsin shooter, from his Facebook profile.

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• Food and Drug Administration head rolls back blanket statement on COVID-19 treatment.

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The day after Bernie Sanders’s big win in Nevada, Joe Lockhart, Bill Clinton’s former press secretary, expressed the fear gripping the Democratic establishment: “I don’t believe the country is prepared to support a Democratic socialist, and I agree with the theory that Sanders would lose in a matchup against Trump.”

Lockart, like the rest of the Democratic establishment, is viewing American politics through obsolete lenses of left versus right, with Bernie on the extreme left and Trump on the far right. “Moderates” like Bloomberg and Buttigieg supposedly occupy the center, appealing to a broader swath of the electorate.

This may have been the correct frame for politics decades ago when America still had a growing middle class, but it’s obsolete today. As wealth and power have moved to the top and the middle class has shrunk, more Americans feel politically dis-empowered and economically insecure. Today’s main divide isn’t right versus left. It’s establishment versus anti-establishment.

Some background. In the fall of 2015 I visited Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Missouri, and North Carolina, researching the changing nature of work. I spoke with many of the same people I had met twenty years before when I was secretary of labor, as well as some of their grown children. I asked them about their jobs and their views about the economy. I was most interested in their sense of the system as a whole and how they were faring in it.

What I heard surprised me. Twenty years before, most said they’d been working hard and were frustrated they weren’t doing better. Now they were angry – at their employers, the government, and Wall Street; angry that they hadn’t been able to save for their retirement, and that their children weren’t doing any better than they did. Several had lost jobs, savings, or homes in the Great Recession. By the time I spoke with them, most were employed but the jobs paid no more than they had two decades before.

I heard the term “rigged system” so often I began asking people what they meant by it. They spoke about the bailout of Wall Street, political payoffs, insider deals, CEO pay, and “crony capitalism.” These came from self-identified Republicans, Democrats, and Independents; white, black, and Latino; union households and non-union. Their only common characteristic was they were middle class and below.

With the 2016 primaries looming, I asked which candidates they found most attractive. At the time, party leaders favored Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush. But the people I spoke with repeatedly mentioned Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. They said Sanders or Trump would “shake things up,” “make the system work again,” “stop the corruption,” or “end the rigging.”

In the following year, Sanders – a 74-year-old Jew from Vermont who described himself as a democratic socialist and wasn’t even a Democrat until the 2016 presidential primary – came within a whisker of beating Hillary Clinton in the Iowa caucus, routed her in the New Hampshire primary, garnered over 47 percent of the caucus-goers in Nevada, and ended up with 46 percent of the pledged delegates from Democratic primaries and caucuses.

Trump, a 69-year-old ego-maniacal billionaire reality TV star who had never held elective office or had anything to do with the Republican Party, and lied compulsively about almost everything – won the Republican primaries and then went on to beat Clinton, one of the most experienced and well-connected politicians in modern America (granted, he didn’t win the popular vote, and had some help from the Kremlin).

Something very big happened, and it wasn’t because of Sanders’s magnetism or Trump’s likeability. It was a rebellion against the establishment. Clinton and Bush had all the advantages –funders, political advisors, name recognition – but neither could credibly convince voters they weren’t part of the system.

A direct line connected four decades of stagnant wages, the financial crisis of 2008, the bailout of Wall Street, the rise of the Tea Party and the “Occupy” movement, and the emergence of Sanders and Trump in 2016. The people I spoke with no longer felt they had a fair chance to make it. National polls told much the same story. According to the Pew Research Center, the percentage of Americans who felt most people could get ahead through hard work dropped by 13 points between 2000 and 2015. In 2006, 59 percent of Americans thought government corruption was widespread; by 2013, 79 percent did.

Trump galvanized millions of blue-collar voters living in places that never recovered from the tidal wave of factory closings. He promised to bring back jobs, revive manufacturing, and get tough on trade and immigration. “We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country, and that’s what they’re doing,” he roared. “In five, ten years from now, you’re going to have a workers’ party. A party of people that haven’t had a real wage increase in eighteen years, that are angry.” He blasted politicians and financiers who had betrayed Americans by “taking away from the people their means of making a living and supporting their families.”

Trump’s pose as an anti-establishment populist was one of the biggest cons in American political history. Since elected he’s given the denizens of C-suites and the Street everything they’ve wanted and hasn’t markedly improved the lives of his working-class supporters, even if his politically-incorrect, damn-the-torpedo’s politics continues to make them feel as if he’s taking on the system.

The frustrations today are larger than they were four years ago. Even though corporate profits and executive pay have soared, the typical worker’s pay has barely risen, jobs are less secure, and health care less affordable.

The best way for Democrats to defeat Trump’s fake anti-establishment populism is with the real thing, coupled with an agenda of systemic reform. This is what Bernie Sanders offers. For the same reason, he has the best chance of generating energy and enthusiasm to flip at least three senate seats to the Democratic Party (the minimum needed to recapture the Senate, using the vice president as tie-breaker).

He’ll need a coalition of young voters, people of color, and the working class. He seems on his way. So far in the primaries he leads among white voters, has a massive edge among Latinos, dominates with both women and men, and has done best among both college and non-college graduates. And he’s narrowing Biden’s edge with older voters and African Americans. [Add line about South Carolina from today’s primary.]

The “socialism” moniker doesn’t seem to have bruised him, although it hasn’t been tested outside a Democratic primary or caucus. Perhaps voters won’t care, just as they many don’t care about Trump’s chronic lies.

Worries about a McGovern-like blowout in 2020 appear far-fetched. In 1972 the American middle class was expanding, not contracting. Besides, every national and swing state poll now shows Sanders tied with or beating Trump. A Quinnipiac Poll last week shows Sanders beating Trump in Michigan and Pennsylvania. A CBS News/YouGov poll has Sanders beating Trump nationally. A Texas Lyceum poll has Sanders doing better against Trump in Texas than any Democrat, losing by just three points.

Instead of the Democratic establishment worrying that Sanders is unelectable, maybe it should worry that a so-called “moderate” Democrat might be nominated instead.

Recently, a newsletter from the Bernie Sanders campaign laid out Joe Biden’s long record of supporting cuts to Social Security. The website PolitiFact weighed in on one part of that record, a speech Biden gave in 2018 in which he expressed enthusiasm for former House Speaker Paul Ryan’s plans to cut Social Security.

PolitiFact wrongly ranked the statement from the Sanders newsletter as “false” because they willfully refused to understand what Biden said in the speech—and how it represents decades of Washington establishment consensus on cutting the American people’s earned Social Security and Medicare benefits.

In the speech, Biden says, “we need to do something about Social Security and Medicare” and that Social Security “needs adjustments.” Biden did not elaborate on what these “adjustments” were, but a look at his long history on Social Security is telling.

In the 1980s, Biden sponsored a plan to freeze all federal spending, including Social Security. In the 1990s, Biden was a leading supporter of a balanced budget amendment, a policy that the Center for American Progress and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (two center-left think tanks who are hardly in the tank for Bernie Sanders) agree would be a catastrophe for Social Security.

More recently, Biden led “grand bargain” negotiations with Republicans during his time as vice president. This “grand bargain” would have given Republicans structural, permanent cuts to Social Security in return for tax increases on the wealthy that would be rolled back as soon as a Republican president got elected to office.

Time and time again, Biden kept coming back to the negotiating table, insisting that Republicans were dealing in good faith. Ultimately, the grand bargain fell through only because of hardline House Republicans refusing to make even an incredibly lopsided deal. Biden was fully prepared to make a deal that included Social Security cuts, including reducing future cost-of-living increases by implementing a chained CPI.

When Washington politicians talk about Social Security cuts, they almost always use coded language, saying that they want to “change,” “adjust,” or even “save” the program. That’s because cutting Social Security is incredibly unpopular with voters of all political stripes. When corporate-friendly politicians like Biden use those words, they are trying to signal to elite media and billionaire donors that they are “very serious people” who are open to cutting Social Security benefits, without giving away the game to voters.

One of those billionaires, Pete Peterson, spent almost half a billion dollars on a decades-long crusade to destroy Social Security and Medicare. Peterson died in 2018, but his money lives on in the form of think tanks like the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), which relentlessly advocate for benefit cuts while insisting that they are neutral arbiters because they are “non-partisan.”

Non-partisan and non-ideological are two very different things, but the media has an unfortunate tendency to treat them as one and the same. The CRFB and similar groups are zealously committed to an ideology of cutting the American people’s earned benefits. PolitiFact quotes a CRFB staffer to back up their article, without providing readers with any context about CRFB’s ideology or speaking to an expert opposed to Social Security cuts.

It’s easy for people in a D.C. elite bubble, working for think tanks or newspaper editorial boards, to support cutting Social Security. Cushioned by billionaire money, they have no idea what it’s like to live on the average Social Security benefit of less than $18,000 a year.

But in the rest of the country, it’s a very different story. People love Social Security, the only thing keeping their grandparents, their friend with a disability, and their young neighbors who recently lost a parent out of poverty. Grassroots activists across the country, working with congressional champions like Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, put pressure on Democratic politicians and changed the conversation on Social Security.

After years of hard work, Democrats are united in support of expanding, not cutting, Social Security. Ninety percent of House Democrats are co-sponsors of the Social Security 2100 Act, and every major Democratic presidential candidate has a plan to expand Social Security.

That includes Biden, who has disavowed benefit cuts and is running on a plan to modestly expand Social Security benefits. Politicians responding to activist pressure is a good thing, and people have the capacity to evolve and change. But Biden continually sows doubt that his change of heart is genuine by continuing to talk about the merits of “sharing power” with Republicans. He says that “there’s an awful lot of really good Republicans,” and has even stated that he’d consider making a Republican his vice president.

Biden doesn’t seem to have changed much from his time as vice president, when he offered Republicans “grand bargains” that included Social Security cuts again and again. At this point, it’s self-evident that the only agenda Republican politicians care about is cutting taxes for their billionaire donors and stealing earned benefits from the American people. When Biden says that he wants to work with them, it suggests that he remains open to that agenda. That’s very concerning for everyone who cares about the future of Social Security and Medicare.

Additionally, Biden’s past support for Social Security cuts is a major vulnerability should he become the Democratic nominee. In the 2016 election, Donald Trump continually promised to protect Social Security and Medicare. That was a lie. But lying has never bothered Trump, and he’ll be happy to use the same playbook in 2020.

There are numerous videos of Joe Biden calling for Social Security cuts. We can expect Trump to blanket Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania with ads containing that footage.

Democrats win when they can draw a clear contrast with Republicans on protecting and expanding our most popular government program, Social Security. Nominating Joe Biden would make that far more difficult than it needs to be.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Alex Lawson is the executive director of Social Security Works, a non-profit advocacy group that supports expanding benefits to address America’s growing retirement security crisis. Lawson has appeared on numerous TV and radio outlets and is a frequent guest host of The Thom Hartmann Program, one of the top progressive radio shows in the country.

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Mike Elrod voted for Donald Trump in 2016, hoping for a break from tight government oversight that his business had endured for years, which he often found unreasonable.

“There was a time when every day I dreaded opening the mail,” said Elrod, who founded a small firm in South Carolina called Eccotemp that makes energy-efficient, tankless water heaters. “The Department of Energy would put in an arbitrary rule and then come back the next day and say, ‘You’re not in compliance.’ We had no input into what was changing and when the change was taking place.”

Elrod also thought that big businesses had long been able to buy their way out of problems, either by spending lots of money on compliance or on lobbyists to look for loopholes and apply political pressure. Trump, of course, had promised to address that — to “drain the swamp.”

Elrod is in his mid-60s, tall with a white beard and deliberative drawl. He trusted the president even as Trump started a trade war with China, where Elrod manufactures his heaters. The administration said U.S. companies that could prove they had no other source for their imports and whose business would be gravely injured could be spared the punishing tariffs that Trump was imposing. They would simply have to file for an exemption.

“I had every reason to believe they were talking about us,” Elrod said. Eccotemp had spent 15 years developing different models of tankless heaters with manufacturers in China. Simply finding new factories in other countries seemed impossible.

So in the summer of 2018, Elrod settled in at his desk, strewn with brass valves, a pressure tester and a smiling jade Buddha from a Chinese supplier, and began typing. He and his dozen U.S. employees — designers, engineers, salespeople and customer service representatives — operate out of a squat cinder block building in a woodsy suburb of Charleston that used to be a film studio and now doubles as a distribution warehouse.

In letters to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, Elrod asked that gas-powered water heaters be exempted from the administration’s 25% tariffs, writing that the cost would be “devastating” for the company’s balance sheet. “We had all the boxes checked,” Elrod said. “Or so I thought.”

The process didn’t go as he expected. It’s the stuff that libertarians like Elrod dread: Low-level staffers with limited industry knowledge issuing seemingly arbitrary decisions that can save or smash a company’s bottom line.

Every few weeks, a list comes out with a new batch of lucky winners, and losers. “Non-electrical wall candelabras, of wood, each with 3 wrought iron candle holders” received a pass, for example, but none with one or two candles.

There is no mechanism for appeals.

Overall, Trump’s tariffs have not had the effect that the self-described “Tariff Man” promised. Companies have moved manufacturing out of China — and it has mostly gone to Vietnam, Taiwan and Mexico. Tariffs are chiefly behind a months-long decline in domestic manufacturing, Federal Reserve researchers have found. The total loss of jobs across the economy may be as high as 300,000.

But constantly up-in-the-air trade agreements and the byzantine, opaque exclusion process has been a blessing for one set of players: Washington’s influence industry, including the firms of former Trump officials and allies like inauguration committee chief Brian Ballard, former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus and Trump fundraiser Marc Lampkin.

Ballard was once Trump’s lobbyist in Florida. He’s since been dubbed “the most powerful lobbyist in Trump’s Washington.” A cancer therapy firm, Varian Medical Systems, paid Ballard and a colleague $540,000 to lobby the White House, the trade office and Vice President Mike Pence on trade issues, filings show. The outreach included a meeting with Trump’s director of trade and manufacturing policy, Peter Navarro.

Since then, four of Varian’s five exclusion requests have been approved — which, the company said in an SEC filing, boosted revenues by $23 million. (Navarro said he doesn’t intervene in the exclusion process.)

Priebus’ firm, Michael Best Strategies, was hired by a Wisconsin company, Primex, to handle exemptions for its timekeeping and temperature measurement devices. “You’re not gonna do it on your own,” Primex CEO Paul Shekoski said in an interview. “It’s suicide actually.”

Shekoski said he wanted help understanding the process and making sure all the requests were filed correctly. With Michael Best’s guidance, he personally wrote letters to and met with his representatives in Washington.

The collective effort may have made it all the way to the Oval Office. Shekoski said in an email last fall that he heard from his lobbyist at Michael Best, Denise Bode, that Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis. cited Primex as an example of a Wisconsin company suffering from tariffs when the senator took the issue to the president. “He not only called USTR, he was able to bring our specific case up to Trump directly,” Shekoski said. Bode did not respond to a request for comment, and a Johnson spokesman did not respond to questions about the Trump contact, saying only that Johnson had advocated for many Wisconsin companies.

Days before this story was published, Shekoski denied knowing whether Johnson brought up the issue with Trump. He said he was just trying to give his elected representatives concrete stories about small businesses struggling with tariffs that they could use to advocate for tariff relief.

Lobbying records show that Primex paid Priebus’ firm, Michael Best Strategies, $85,000 in 2018 and 2019 for its services. “I’m not selling access,” Priebus once told Politico. “I’m merely providing strategic advice and helping them handle their problems.” (Neither Priebus nor the White House responded to requests for comment.)

Primex got mixed results, with about half of its 205 exclusion requests granted and half denied.

Disclosure rules don’t require companies to say how much money they’ve spent lobbying on exclusions specifically. But records compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics show that the number of clients lobbying on tariffs and other trade issues are higher than any year on record. In 2018, the number jumped by 28% to 1,372, and 2019 will significantly exceed that once final figures are in.

There is also no comprehensive picture yet of how companies that have hired lobbyists have fared compared with those that haven’t. But there is evidence that agencies have bent the rules. In October, a government watchdog found that Commerce Department officials had secretly changed the rules for one exclusion category after “off-the-record” discussions with a favored company, creating a “perception of undue influence.”

Companies with enough resources and savvy can not only push their own cases, they can work to undermine those of competitors. Elrod began to understand that in early August. He had been on the trade office’s website, waiting to see if he would get his exclusion and watching for requests from competitors, when he noticed that an industry giant had formally objected to his application.

Rheem Manufacturing Company is a Japanese-owned conglomerate and one of the world’s largest producers of water heaters, including in the United States. It challenged Elrod and a handful of other companies that had claimed they couldn’t find alternative sources for their products outside of China, arguing that Elrod could find suppliers in Japan, Germany and South Korea — or buy from Rheem itself.

Elrod quickly fired back with another letter, laying out how difficult and expensive it would be in practice to move production to another country. Amid a rush out of China, factories in Vietnam are holding out for enormous orders and shunning the relatively small quantities that Eccotemp imports. Plus, after developing his heaters over more than a decade with a handful of suppliers, finding one that could meet his exacting standards would require months of tests and new certifications.

That did not sway the government’s trade office, the USTR, which in late September posted a one-page form letter saying that Elrod had failed to demonstrate his products weren’t available outside of China. Thinking that his original ask for exclusions might have been too broad, Elrod then filed individual requests for several of his models, hoping the government might exempt at least a few of them.

But Rheem had reinforcements. New comments in opposition arrived on the letterhead of King & Spalding, a law firm with sleek offices across the street from the White House and a complement of former government officials. Stephen Vaughn had left the firm in 2017 to serve on the administration’s “beachhead team” at USTR, served as the agency’s general counsel — where he oversaw the exclusion process — and then rejoined the firm in 2019.

Fees paid for legal services aren’t public, but records show that Rheem spent $610,000 on lobbying on all federal issues in 2018. Neither Rheem nor Vaughn responded to requests for comment.

“I don’t have anyone on Pennsylvania Avenue,” Elrod said. “That letter probably cost them more than we’ve spent on legal expenses in the last five years.”

His concern growing, Elrod met a staffer in the district office of Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and asked for a letter of support. He inquired with USTR about testifying at one of the agency’s multiday hearings on its sweeping tariff action.

Nothing worked. He didn’t make the witness list for USTR’s hearings, but the head of Rheem’s air conditioning division did. South Carolina’s Department of Commerce wrote letters on behalf of large employers like the fiberglass manufacturer China Jushi, but for the first few rounds of tariffs, no letters for small companies appear in the public record. (A spokeswoman said the state had written letters for “companies of various sizes and with varying numbers of employees.”)

Graham, who had filed seven letters supporting companies with a presence in South Carolina — several of them multinational or foreign-owned — also didn’t help.

“Lindsey Graham really did kick it to the curb,” Elrod said. (A spokesman for Graham did not respond to a request for further explanation.)

Finally, in November, the trade office rejected all of Elrod’s requests for relief in the same terse fashion it had the first. “After careful consideration, your request was denied because the request failed to show that this particular product is available only from China,” the letter read.

As a result, Eccotemp would get back none of the hundreds of thousands of dollars in duties that it had already paid out, and the bleeding would continue. Its profit margins vaporized and its employee head count sank by about 30%, as the company opted not to replace departing staff.)

For a while after receiving the denials, Elrod carefully watched the steady stream of response letters posted on the federal regulations portal, in case another company received an exclusion that would also cover his products. But no relevant approvals appeared.

Elrod has appreciated how under Trump, other regulators have been more business friendly. The government pesters him much less these days about energy and environmental rules. “Then you’ve got the USTR and the whole tariff thing that’s just a crusher,” he said.

“People our size, that don’t have K Street lawyers,” said Elrod, referring to the center of Washington’s lobbying industry. “We’re the ones that bear the brunt, we’re the ones that have the least tools in the box to work with.”

It’s not often that K Street gets handed the type of business development opportunity that Trump’s volatile trade policy offers.

With new tariffs being announced and lifted on a few days notice and trade agreements constantly being renegotiated, companies have scrambled to protect themselves. Tariff exclusions are highly sought after because they offer a huge competitive advantage — especially if a rival still has to pay. The review of exclusions is happening on a compressed time schedule, with little warning before tariffs and a complex set of rules that few people understand go into effect. And there are no second chances.

“When you’re running a process that has no appellate review, there’s a lot of room for questionable behavior because there’s no one really checking the process,” said one former USTR official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “It’s common knowledge in town that the best way to get a leg up on an exclusion request is to get a Republican House or Senate member to call the White House.”

Members of Congress frequently work the bureaucracy on their constituents’ behalf, but there’s a particularly large pile of money on the line with trade. So far, Trump’s new tariffs amount to an $88 billion annual tax increase for U.S. companies, according to the Tax Foundation.

Companies that can’t afford their own lobbyists often go through their trade associations, which can help open doors on the Hill on behalf of an industry’s interests. Still, even the trade groups are often baffled at why decisions come down the way they do. The National Marine Manufacturers Association has seen confoundingly mixed results — a fish finder is excluded while a depth finder isn’t, for example.

“We can’t make heads or tails out of why that happens,” said John-Michael Donahue, the association’s communications director. “I don’t think there’s a lack of help from Congress being loud about this issue, it’s more getting through to the administration and figuring out what the next step is in their mind.”

Some companies don’t need members of Congress or trade associations to make their case. Apple, for example, got 10 out of the 15 exclusions it asked for on items like computer chargers and mice, with 11 yet to be decided. The company spends more than $6 million on lobbying overall each year. Its CEO, Tim Cook, has met with Trump several times and the president cited Apple’s exclusion approvals during a public event at its Texas production facility.

“It’s difficult for me to see how this is a fair and transparent process,” said Nicole Bivens Collinson, head of the international trade and government relations practice for Sandler, Travis & Rosenberg. “When you’ve got Tim Cook who’s able to go in and meet with the president and get an exclusion, and someone who’s a very small company trying to submit through the regular process, and this is going to have a huge impact on their business.”

The federal government last set up an exclusion process in 2001, when George W. Bush imposed tariffs of up to 30% on $15 billion worth of steel imports in an attempt to bolster flagging mills. About half of the goods originally covered by the measure were exempted, which was one reason why the tariffs ultimately didn’t arrest the steel industry’s decline.

Trump’s tariffs are much less discriminate. Hefty new duties now cover about $364 billion worth of imports, or 12% of the overseas products Americans buy in a year. The tariffs don’t just fall on finished goods, like toasters or water heaters. They also cover many of product components, from motherboards to heat exchangers.

Because they’re so sweeping, the Commerce Department and USTR have been flooded with clemency pleas. As of mid-December, steel and aluminum users had requested exclusions on about 152,000 specific products. With two-thirds of the requests decided, about 79% had been approved. Importers of goods from China had requested about 44,000 exclusions, of which 43% had been decided and 35% approved, with a final round of exclusions under way.

For the first two rounds of China tariffs, which are worth about $50 billion in imports, the Peterson Institute for International Economics estimated that USTR had excluded products worth about $12.8 billion, in what it called “a substantial off-budget concession to lucky firms.”

Many of those affected simply submitted no requests, figuring they had slim chances of success. A handful of businesses submitted thousands, especially industrial suppliers that globally source tools and parts and distribute them to U.S. manufacturers, since a separate application was needed for every possible product variation. A single company — AEP Holdings, a private equity-owned supplier of aftermarket car parts — filed more than 10,000 exclusion requests. So far, about 2,600 have been denied and only a handful approved.

Adjudicating each request is an enormous undertaking, and the federal government was ill-prepared.

The Commerce Department at first had projected that it would see only about 4,500 applications — a threshold that was passed almost instantly. According to a regulatory filing, USTR estimated that each exclusion request would take applicants two hours to prepare, at a cost of $200 each, and two and a half hours for USTR to process. For the China tariffs, adjudicating cases is expected to take 175,000 staff hours over the course of a year, at a cost of $9.7 million.

To keep up, agencies have had to borrow staff from other departments and brought on dozens of contractors, giving them a crash course in tariff codes. (“The internet is useful to research the product,” reads one set of instructions for reviewers obtained by ProPublica.) There is no hard completion deadline, and companies can only track their applications’ progress via an online portal.

Very often, at least with the steel and aluminum process run by the Commerce Department, it was hard to believe that parties were being considered equally.

Christine McDaniel, an economist and a senior fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, has found that requests are rarely granted if objections are filed. A handful of steel producers have objected to thousands of applications, claiming that the importers should get no relief because U.S. manufacturers could make the necessary items. But McDaniel poked a hole in their argument: Added together, the producers’ claims far exceed what they’re realistically able to produce.

“It’s nearly costless for these guys to file objections, but the objection can prevent a company from getting its steel,” McDaniel said.

Capitol Hill has noticed. In early 2018, after receiving complaints from steel importers, Rep. Jackie Walorski, R-Ind., sent letters to the Commerce Department detailing problems with evaluations. The process had been a “masterclass in government inefficiency and plagued by maddening inconsistency,” she wrote in April. After receiving no formal responses, on Oct. 17 she wrote in exasperation, “It is difficult not to believe that there is a finger on the scale favoring objectors.”

In one letter, Walorski cited the case of National Tool & Manufacturing Company, a 45-person firm based in East Dundee, Illinois, that found itself in a fight with a multinational metals titan.

National Tool requested an exemption on a specialty grade of steel it buys in Italy and distributes to companies that make injection molds. EDRO Specialty Steels, which is owned by the Austrian conglomerate Voestalpine AG, objected on the grounds that it could produce the steel National Tool needed in the U.S. National Tool’s request was denied, so it had to keep eating the 25% tariff.

Then, EDRO itself requested exclusions for the raw material it imports from Slovenia to produce its proposed substitute — showing that the product it said it could supply wasn’t entirely American-made after all. (EDRO said this summary was “incomplete,” but declined to comment further.)

National Tool President Eric Sandberg suspects his exclusion request never had a chance.

“It truly is one of these big vs. small battles,” Sandberg said. “Because one of those big three companies wrote a letter, done. Without investigation, it was just done. It really feels like the government is working against you.”

In late October, the Commerce Department wrote back to Rep. Walorski, tersely rejecting her complaint. But Walorski’s concern was merited. On Oct. 28, the agency’s inspector general issued an alert finding that steel producers had back channel communications with Commerce Department staff that swayed their decisions. For example, the inspector general found that criteria for evaluating exclusions had been changed at an objector’s request, before decisions were posted publicly.

That apparent bias has percolated out to some Washington insiders, who see the steel and aluminum exclusion process as so slanted toward U.S. producers that it’s not worth the trouble. “I wouldn’t take anybody’s money against the U.S. steel industry,” said one prominent D.C. lobbyist who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “We say no a lot.”

Throughout his career, Mike Elrod has tried to follow the incentives that American trade policy has created for U.S. businesses.

In the 1990s, he owned a factory that made industrial rainwear. After China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001, which locked in low tariff rates, Elrod’s biggest client decided to relocate production there. “It killed the company,” Elrod said. “There was nowhere else to go.”

After that, Elrod decided to start importing from China himself, setting up a business that manufactured precision metal components before finding a type of water heater that he thought would sell well in the U.S.. Founded in 2006, Eccotemp grew steadily, adding people, new models and distribution centers overseas, to the point where Elrod started thinking about setting up assembly operations in the U.S. Even if labor is more expensive, not having to wait four months for new orders to ship across the world would allow him to more closely control inventory levels and turn around design changes faster.

Instead of accelerating that plan, however, Trump’s tariffs on Chinese imports took it off the drawing board. If the only place to get components is China, the duties would make bringing them into the U.S. for final assembly cost-prohibitive.

As the trade war began, Elrod had been looking forward to retirement. As soon as the tariffs were announced, Elrod and his successor as CEO, Joe Bolognue, had to formulate a new business strategy based on a 25% hike in the cost of goods: More higher-margin products, more non-U.S. sales, leaner operations.

They don’t want to walk away from the brand they’ve built, or put their employees out of work. “We don’t have the luxury to say, ‘We’re going out of business,’” Bolognue said. “We just don’t make as much money as we used to.”

The tariffs have also created other problems, like Chinese manufacturers selling directly into the U.S. on Amazon or Alibaba rather than going through companies like Eccotemp. They still have to pay tariffs, but they can undercut prices by avoiding one layer of markups.

Since the tariff decisions came down, Elrod has moved to Georgia and isn’t as involved in day-to-day operations. But he’s still heavily invested in the company, financially and emotionally. That’s why it was particularly devastating when the tariffs killed a potential deal to sell Eccotemp to a private equity firm, which would have allowed it to keep growing while ensuring his retirement.

“That’s usually what people see as the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow,” Elrod said. “My net worth, you’re sitting in it. I don’t have a 401(k). Everything that I’ve ever done has flown back into this business. I don’t have enough runway to do it again.”

Elrod says that despite it all, he still plans to vote for Trump in November, citing the administration’s friendlier stance to his company on regulations. As for draining the swamp, Elrod doesn’t blame the president.

“Maybe if Trump moved the capital to Dallas and put everyone with a DC address on the Do Not Fly List, maybe,” Elrod said. “You get all the justice you can afford.”

One hundred years ago, women won the right to vote in the United States. The women’s suffrage movement took decades of organizing to achieve success, from the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, to mass civil disobedience and protest leading up to the adoption and ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920. Now, a century later, the right to vote is on perilous ground, with aggressive and systematic efforts to disenfranchise voters in states across the country.

Voter suppression has long been a central strategy of the Republican party. In 1980, Paul Weyrich, a conservative Republican activist who founded right-wing institutions including The Heritage Foundation, said in a speech: “I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people, they never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now … our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

States in the so-called Rust Belt, including Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin, were critical to Donald Trump’s win in 2016. In each of those states save Ohio, Trump won by less than one percentage point. Now, in Wisconsin, a county judge ruling in a case brought by a conservative organization has ordered that 209,000 people be purged from the voter rolls. The state’s elections commission has delayed the purge while the case is appealed. In 2016, Trump won Wisconsin by just over 23,000 votes.

2016 was the first election in which Wisconsin’s strict voter ID law was in force. The progressive advocacy group Priorities USA reported that the law suppressed the votes of more than 200,000 residents in the 2016 election. Voter ID laws that require people to present photo identification at polling places disproportionately prevent poor people and people of colour from voting.

“The largest drop-off was among Black and Democratic-leaning voters,” investigative journalist Ari Berman said on the “Democracy Now!” news hour, commenting on the report. “They found that there was a much larger drop-off in Wisconsin than Minnesota, which does not have a voter ID law, that counties with a large African-American population had a larger drop-off.”

The Associated Press published a report two weeks ago based on a leaked audio recording from a November 21, 2019, meeting of the Wisconsin chapter of the Republican National Lawyers Association. “Traditionally it’s always been Republicans suppressing votes in places,” Justin Clark, a senior counsel to Trump’s re-election campaign, was recorded saying. “Let’s start playing offense a little bit. That’s what you’re going to see in 2020. It’s going to be a much bigger program, a much more aggressive program, a much better-funded program.” He was talking about organized poll watching activities, where party operatives position themselves at Democratic-leaning voting precincts to challenge voters, demanding election staff verify their identity or bar them from voting. Clark later said his words were misinterpreted.

In Georgia, the Republican-controlled state government purged 100,000 voters from the rolls in December. The move was approved by a federal judge, dismissing a lawsuit brought by Fair Fight, an organization founded after the 2018 election by Democrat Stacey Abrams to promote fair elections in Georgia and around the country.

The 2018 Georgia governor’s race pitted Abrams against Republican candidate Brian Kemp, who was the secretary of state at the time, responsible for overseeing the election and maintaining the voter rolls. In July 2018, months before the election, Kemp oversaw what has been called the largest mass disenfranchisement in U.S. history, purging over 500,000 voters from Georgia’s list of 6.6 million registered voters. Kemp received about 50,000 more votes than Abrams, out of close to 4 million cast, and claimed victory. Stacey Abrams refused to concede, noting Kemp’s corruption of the election, but did not fight the results.

Despite the aggressive efforts by the right wing to suppress the vote, voting rights advocates are making progress. In Florida, voters passed Amendment 4, restoring voting rights to 1.4 million ex-felons. Republican Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill forcing those prospective voters to pay “all fines and fees” associated with their earlier convictions, significantly slowing the restoration of these “returning citizens” to the voter rolls. Many call it a poll tax.

In five Western states from Colorado to Hawaii, mail-in ballots have increased voter participation, reduced costs and provided an auditable, paper ballot trail to allow easy verification of election results. The National Vote at Home Institute is working to expand the practice state by state. And the National Popular Vote project is working with state legislatures around the country to allocate electoral college votes to the candidate who wins the popular vote nationally.

Democracy is a constant struggle. From the suffragettes to today’s voting rights advocates, securing the right to vote should be a common pursuit of us all.