First Amendment includes more than the press

Thoughts turned to the First Amendment on World Press Freedom Day May 3, when Reporters Without Borders announced that the United States’ global rank in nations’ levels of press freedom fell to its lowest ever: 64^th out of 180 countries – down seven places in a year. (The U.S. was 17^th out of 139 in 2002.)

Of course, the First Amendment is about more than the press. (In a college press law class, we used the mnemonic device “GRASP,” for rights tied to Grievance, Religion, Assembly, Speech and Press.)

Religion is increasingly under fire, in unusual ways.

A few days before World Press Freedom Day, Stateline news reported a disturbing revival of anti-Islam attacks by Republican candidates as midterm-election campaigns get going, “a strategy aimed at energizing voters by claiming without evidence that Muslim culture and religious tenets threaten American political values,” said journalist Anna Claire Vollers.

MAGA politicians have made Muslims a target in their fight to hang onto power. (Muslims say the rhetoric is misleading and misrepresents Islam’s values – and threatens their faith and its adherents.)

It’s a far cry from 25 years ago, when days after Sept. 11’s terror attacks GOP President George W. Bush visited a Washington, D.C., mosque and met with Muslim leaders, declaring “Islam is peace” and condemning retaliation against Muslim Americans.

Today, even the conservative Cato Institute scoffs at candidates’ shameless tactic.

“To think that American Muslims – which make 1% of the whole population – can enforce Shariah or force it on other people, that’s a very exaggerated claim,” said Mustafa Akyol, a Cato researcher who’s Muslim.

Explicit disrespect and outright attacks on the First Amendment’s first point – “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof …” – goes beyond Muslims and the troubling resurgence of antisemitism..

In the Southwest, President Trump’s expansion of the border wall damaged a rare Native American site in the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge in the desert near Mexico. Lorraine Marquez Eiler, an elder of the Hia-ced O’odham Indigenous people, said the site held special significance for Native Americans.

“If someone came to Washington and started destroying all the different sites that people in the United States revere, it’s the same thing for us,” she told the Washington Post.

Some faiths are not accepting marginalization by powerful political interests.

A coalition of Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus and others is suing the Trump administration over its White House Religious Liberty Commission. They say it’s illegally skewed toward evangelical Christians, plus one Orthodox Jewish rabbi.

Represented by lawyers from Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the Democracy Forward organization, the suit cites the 1972 Federal Advisory Committee Act, which says all such government panels should reflect varied viewpoints and competing ideas.

The Religious Liberty Commission, which meets behind closed doors at the new Museum of the Bible near the U.S. Capitol, doesn’t have variety and competition, the coalition says, They want judges to order its proceedings opened up and minutes published as the law requires, and that any future report to note that the commission was illegally tilted.

The suit also draws on the U.S. Constitution and U.S. history. From before the American Revolution, there was no “established church,” unlike Great Britain’s Church of England. Mark Gruenberg of Press Associates Union News Service writes, “Most New England pilgrims were Protestant dissenters. Roman Catholics founded Maryland. Quakers established Pennsylvania. Jews first arrived in Nieuw Amsterdam (New York) in the 1600s, which was already inhabited by members of the Dutch Reformed Church. White Baptists, then persecuted in Europe, were prevalent in the deep South. And Roger Williams established freedom for all religions in Rhode Island.”

Unlike some conservatives’ recent rewrites of history, the Founders were varied, too, according to the suit, which quotes George Washington’s letters about religious freedom to various denominations. The most famous Washington letter was in 1790 to the elders of Touro Synagogue in Rhode Island, where he wrote the government “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”

The case challenges the composition and secrecy of the Religious Liberty Commission, which was supposed to defend religious liberty for all Americans but does not.

“All members of the commission advocate for increased religiosity, and specifically their brand of Judeo-Christian religiosity, in public life. Members promoted the primacy of a Judeo-Christian world view in the public sphere, advocated for discrimination against minority groups under the guise of ‘religious liberty,’ and otherwise supported policies that threaten religious freedom for all those who do not conform to their particular worldview.”

Ria Chakrabarty of Hindus for Human Rights commented, “Religious liberty means religious liberty for everyone, not just one faith community. By stacking this Religious Liberty Commission with a narrow set of voices and hiding the commission’s work from the public eye, the Trump administration is evading the transparency and balance that federal law requires. Hindus for Human Rights is proud to stand with our multifaith partners to defend a pluralistic democracy where Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Jews, Christians, Buddhists, and nonreligious people all belong as equals.”

Early in the U.S. war on Iran, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth asked Americans to “pray for victory in the name of Jesus Christ.”

That irked Pope Leo XIV. The Chicagoland native, Catholicism’s first U.S.-born Pope, said the Christian mission “has often been distorted by a desire for domination.”

Superfund sites upstream remain a concern for the Illinois River

In her 1997 book “Living Downstream,” Pekin native Sandra Steingraber wrote, “Giving people cancer in order to ensure them a water supply safe from disease-causing microbes is not necessary. Our drinking water should not contain the fear of cancer. The presence of carcinogens in groundwater, no matter how faint, means we have paid too high a price for accepting the unimaginative way things are.

“A so-called private industry is engaging in a very public act when it releases toxic chemicals into a community’s air, water and soil.”

Elsewhere, the Environmental Working Group’s 2024 drinking water quality report found Peoria’s tap water contains dozens of contaminants many times the recommended levels in EWG’s health guidelines, between 2.2 times (1,4-Dioxane) to 2,149 time (Perfluorohexane sulfonate).

“Tap water provided by this water utility was in compliance with federal health-based drinking water standards,” EWG said, adding, “Legal does not necessarily equal safe.”

Former Community Word columnist William Rau (“Heat Waves in Red and Black”) commented from his home in Bloomington, “If I were living in Peoria, I would find their results very disturbing.”

It could get worse.

Concentrations of hazardous materials are sometimes segregated as Superfund sites (See below), and three of them are at or near the Illinois River some 70 miles upstream from metro Peoria. Technically, they and their substances are secured, but like almost anything else, they’re not invulnerable to catastrophes, such as earthquakes or floods.

On April 23, a mild, magnitude-4.0 earthquake was felt in Illinois, Indiana and Missouri when the New Madrid Seismic Zone made its presence felt. The New Madrid fault system, covering almost 1 million square miles from Arkansas to Illinois, has been mostly quiet since a series of large earthquakes in 1811-1812, but the U.S. Geological Survey says the probability of a quake of 6.0 to 7.0 on the New Madrid Fault Line is 28-46% over the next 50 years.

(As for floods, Illinois already has had four “100-year floods” in the 2020s, including one in Central Illinois in 2021.)

Here's a summary of those sites, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency:

* LaSalle Electric Utilities in LaSalle--

Until 1982, the "industrial complex" made capacitors for electric power transmission. It has “contaminated soil and groundwater with polychlorinated biphenyl (PCBs) and chlorinated solvents.” The EPA removed 23,000 cubic yards of PCD-contaminated soil and thermally destroyed them, but consolidated drummed wastes; years later the complex was demolished and non-destructible material was shipped off-site. In 1995, groundwater monitoring and treatment started.

* East about 20 miles are the “Ottawa Radiation Areas,” EPA says, “ -- 16 areas contaminated by material from two companies, the Radium Dial Co., and Luminous Processes, Inc.” EPA says it removed radium-contaminated soil from five of the areas affected, but “ongoing work consists of securing funding to implement remedies at a local landfill, “which the agency says is a “capped stockpile” to be inspected at unspecified intervals.

* Another 12 miles east is the former Matthiessen and Hegeler Zinc Co., which until 1978 did zinc smelting and rolling, and manufactured chemicals. The site has a slag pile on the Little Vermillion River, a tributary to the Illinois River, containing “cadmium, copper, chromium, lead, nickel and zinc,” says the EPA, which placed a soil cover over the area and has “short-term groundwater monitoring.”

 

Dr. Peter Schwartzman, who teaches environmental studies at Knox College in Galesburg, says, “Many chemicals mentioned (and emitted by industrial facilities) do not break down easily and thus can be found in measurable concentrations decades after they were ‘freely’ emitted into the air and water. These chemicals – PCBs, cadmium, etc. – are definitely harmful to life, even at low concentrations.”

In “Living Downstream,” Steingraber highlighted the Illinois River as an example of industrial pollution, utilizing the U.S. EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) data to map toxic hotspots and connections to Superfund sites. The award-winning author’s analysis connected the historical and ongoing pollution of the Illinois River to contaminated sites requiring environmental remediation, highlighting the ecological impact of industrial waste.

It doesn’t take an earth-shaking disaster to see material migrate from Superfund sites.

“Numerous Superfund sites in Illinois have contaminated groundwater and surface/river water, primarily due to industrial waste, landfills and chemical dumping,” Rau added. “I would not want to live downstream from one of these sites if my drinking water from came from a river adjacent to these sites.”

And the sites themselves are just part of the picture.

“There are additional sites in Illinois that had ‘scores’ in excess of Superfund status that were not declared as such,” Schwartzman says. “So, the current map is missing heavily contaminated, and likely hazardous, sites.”

Awareness of sites and the risks is key, Schwartzman says.

“We’ve had more than a century’s worth of toxic waste disposed – some legal, some illegal – and to ensure public safety requires vigilance and public involvement,” he says.

 

What are Superfund sites and how they came to be

Superfund sites contain a wide variety of hazardous materials — not only toxic, but sometimes corrosive or flammable. All of them can hurt people, more so when they seep into drinking water.

Historically, there were few to no state or federal laws forbidding the disposal of those hazardous materials in places where they could poison or harm people. They might have been buried in unstable terrain, or left in 55-gallon drums that would rust and leak. This happened for decades.

The Superfund story began with Love Canal in the southeast corner of Niagara Falls, N.Y.. Starting in the 1940s, the Hooker Chemical Co. had used the upstate site as a dump for harmful chemical wastes. Then it was covered over, and a housing development was built on top of it. In the 1960s and 1970s, people living there got sick with diseases like leukemia. Eventually, the health harms were traced to the toxic wastes mobilized by shallow groundwater. Neighbors organized and demanded help. In 1980, Congress finally passed the Superfund law to deal with similar problems all over the United States. That law held hazardous waste dumpers strictly liable for the damages they had caused. Once those “responsible parties” were identified, victims and governments could go after them in court to recover cleanup costs.

In cases where danger was immediate, the EPA could step in and do immediate stabilization of the site. This was called “removal,” although it was rarely so simple as merely trucking away some drums. This was paid for by the multibillion-dollar Superfund, which was originally paid for by a tax on petrochemical companies. What followed was a complex array of lawsuits against (and between) companies.

There are currently about 1,342 contaminated sites on the EPA’s Superfund National Priority List. These are the worst of the worst. There’s at least one in almost every state. The EPA estimates that some 78 million people live within three miles of a Superfund site. That’s almost a quarter of the U.S. population. Many more are not on the list.

Although normally Superfund cleanups have been slow, the EPA under Trump 1.0 and 2.0 has made a big deal over efforts to speed up the process. One worry that has arisen is that faster cleanups will be superficial, temporary and less clean.

-- By Joseph A. Davis, Society of Environmental Journalists

Profitable corporate tax skinflints

Eighty-eight profitable corporations reported paying no taxes last year, according to a new report from the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), a non-profit, non-partisan research firm.

U.S. taxpayers are still feeling trickled-down on.

The 88 includes these companies (and their 2026 profits): Ameren ($1.60 billion), Citigroup ($4.45 billion in profits), CVS Health ($6.57 billion), GoDaddy ($981 million), Live Nation ($98 million), Palantir ($1.58 billion), PayPal ($1.43 billion), Tesla ($5.7 billion– although Tesla paid more than $1 billion in taxes to China and other countries), United Airlines Holdings ($4.29 billion), Walt Disney ($8.3 billion), and Yum Brands, the parent company of KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell, ($1.03 billion).,

U.S. corporations’ statutory tax rate is supposed to be 21%, so together the total $105 billion in profits the 88 corporations reported in 2026 should have contributed $22.1 billion without the carefully crafted breaks they got. Instead, rather than paying that amount, those companies collectively “received $4.7 billion in tax rebates,” ITEP reports.

Historically, corporations paid a greater share of the costs of the federal government. For most of the 1950s, the top statutory tax rate was 52%, and that revenue was almost one-third of all federal receipts. Now, U.S. corporations’ share is about 8.6%.

As recently as 1969, the rate remained at about 62%;  the Reagan administration cut it to 34%, and in Trump’s first term, it was “temporarily” reduced to 21%. However, Trump and the Republican majority in Congress last summer passed H.R. 1 (the GOP dubbed it the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill”), which made that 21% rate permanent AND also kept perks for executive stock options, bonus “depreciations,” and expenses for research & development, and INCREASED tax exemptions for federal gift, estate, and generation-skipping transfers

“This is a policy choice,” writes journalist Judd Legum in his online newsletter Popular Information.

The continuation of the false “trickle-down” theory that enriching the wealthy eventually will help everyone else prioritizes corporations and shareholders over working people and individual taxpayers – who have to shoulder more of the costs of government.

The AFL-CIO last month reminded the nation that President Trump in January promised taxpayers that they’d see tax refunds increase by $1,000 this year.

“That’s not even close to what most of us are actually getting back,” the labor federation said.

Meanwhile, the Congressional Budget Office estimated the disparity worsened by the One Big Beautiful Bill will ultimately give the largest benefits to the richest Americans.

Whatever refunds are coming, they’ll go to higher prices in food, housing, utilities and child care because of inflation, especially at gas pumps (thanks to the war on Iran) and health care (cut by Congress).

“Those big, ugly tax cuts for the rich [are] the biggest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in American history,” the AFL-CIO continued, noting that the Trump administration’s budget proposal released in April “would make even bigger cuts to food, housing, education, heating and workforce development programs.”

Few taxpayers enjoy paying taxes, but Americans are very unhappy now, according to polls.

Fox News reported that 70% of us think taxes are too high (compared to 60% last year), and 64% of us disagree with how Trump is handling taxes – up from 53% a year ago.

Gallup polling from March also found about 6 in 10 U.S. adults say the amount of federal income tax they have to pay is “too high,” and another poll, from Pew, showed that 60% of Americans are bothered “a lot” by corporations and wealthy Americans don’t pay their fair share of taxes.

Made worse, as Sharon Williams reported in last month’s Labor Paper, is the “hidden” burden that taxpayers are forced to cover when many profitable corporations pay wages so low that their workers are eligible for Medicaid and food assistance – which taxpayers underwrite.

Also, last month, economist and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich offered an “Your April Fools' Day reminder that trickle-down economics is the greatest trick of all. It's nothing more than a cruel hoax designed to enrich corporations and the super-rich at your expense.

“It does not work.,” he’s said. “This economic approach has been tried ... and the result is that nothing trickles down. Instead, it leads to an incredibly larger federal deficit and debts.”

What a difference (for workers' safety and health) 55 years makes

The U.S. labor movement recently marked Workers Memorial Day, mourning those who were sickened, injured or killed on the job.

It was an occasion to realize how much Republicans have changed. It was during the Nixon administration, on April 28, 1971, that the Occupational Safety and Health Act went into effect -- after three years of lobbying.

Passed by Congress in 1970 and signed into law by GOP President Richard Nixon that December, it created federal program ensuring nationwide standards for job safety and healthy working conditions for U.S. workers.

PICTURED: Seated at the signing of OSHA are, left to right, AFL-CIO President George Meany, President Richard Nixon, and Labor Secretary George Schultz.

Involvement of labor crucial for democracy to endure, study shows

Democracy’s survival needs labor unions.

A study of different countries’ experiences drifting from democracies to authoritarian regimes shows that the success of resisting that result dramatically improves with the involvement of organized labor.

Overall, the success of preventing democracies from becoming dictatorships is about 50-50. However, a key factor in helping democracies survive is unions’ participation in civil resistance, according to research by Tarso Ramos, who explained the history last May at a City University of New York conference, “Labor in the Age of Authoritarian Politics.”

Ramos, a long-time analyst with Political Research Associates now with Future Currents, specializes in the study of Right-wing movements, and he found that with union involvement, societies successfully saving democracies increases from 50% to 80%.

Ramos drew on previous work by Erica Chenoweth of Harvard’s Kennedy School and co-author Maria J. Stephan of the Horizons Project, work that tracked more than 100 years of mass campaigns against authoritarianism. They showed that nonviolent civil resistance was twice as effective as armed struggles against aspiring dictatorships. Also, democracy movements that mobilized at lest 3.5% of a population never failed to protect democratic norms.

Scot Nakagawa in the Anti-Authoritarian Playbook Substack site attributes a few important factors:

* Unlike legal challenges, political efforts and protests alone, unions – especially through workplace actions – are powerful. As the late Gene Sharp of the Albert Einstein Institution asserted in his pillars-of-support theory, “authoritarian power rests on the cooperation of the governed, and the most consequential form of cooperation is economic,” Nakagawa wrote. “Regimes need revenue, production, logistics, public services. Workers control all of it.”

* Civil resistance needs organizations, and labor is capable of mobilizing a lot of people on short notice.

* Unlike the Right’s tendency to divide the population by race, religion, gender, geography, “the Other,”  etc., “unions organize across every one of these divisions, because workplaces are already diverse,” Nakagawa says. “Diverse participation as the single most important predictor of success.”

* Unions have experience taking collective action against power – and taking sustained action for a while through various tactics: work to rule, slowdowns, and sick-outs, declining optional overtime work, boycotts, (direct or informal), and labor’s ultimate tool, a strike.

* Finally, unions can draw on their history, legitimacy and popularity despite years of attacks, whether by employers or governments. When facing accusations that protestors are paid actors, mythical “Antifa” forces, “outside agitators” or extremists, unions stand their ground.

“When working people across multiple industries join a movement that [attack] narrative collapses,” Nakagawa says. “The broader public sees people like themselves standing up, and the regime’s framing loses its power.”

That’s why public support for labor unions in the United States is at an historic high, with Gallup reporting 68% approval last year, maintaining a five-year trend of 67%-71% support, levels not seen since the 1950s.

“Without active central participation by working people in the organizations that represent them, we don’t win,” Ramos says. “Or it’s a coin toss whether we do.”

Trump is taking billions from Illinois, blue states

As reported in the March Labor Paper, Gov. JB Pritzker’s proposed Illinois budget faces a huge hit by the Trump administration rescinding more than $8 billion, according to the state’s office of Management and Budget.

But the scale of the consequences from what Sen. Dave Koehler (D-Peoria) called “inconsistent federal policies” is far worse for everyday Illinoisans, who’ll lose programs and services AND pay more in taxes and higher costs.

The effect of Trump’s financial targeting of states with Democratic governors and legislatures would take $61.5 billion from Illinois over the next 10 years, according to an analysis by Crain’s Chicago Business.

Generally, besides the negative economic effects from Trump’s tariffs and war in Iran – which increase costs for fuel, fertilizers and building materials – Illinois taxpayers will have to make up the difference (reportedly $1.45 billion through 2029) when the Trump administration drops the traditional federal role of sharing costs for programs such as SNAP benefits.

The Trump administration’s actions particularly threaten the Illinois Department of Public Health, withholding $86 million for, among dozens of program, efforts to reduce cases of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. Related work at risk includes the Public Health Infrastructure Block Grant, which funds lead-poisoning prevention grants to 25 local departments and grants that support 674 public health jobs at 96 local agencies, according to a lawsuit filed by Illinois, which joined with California, Colorado and Minnesota in February to sue the federal government after the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services told Congress the funds’ purposes “do not reflect agency priorities.”

That lawsuit argues that the cuts are unlawful because they’re arbitrary, exceed HHS’ authority and unconstitutional.

The IDPH cuts would put 99 jobs in jeopardy, and gut the Chicago Department of Public Health’s lead-poisoning prevention, plus hurt a host of grants originally destined for 96 local agencies, $100 million in aid for COVID programs, $50 million in criminal justice assistance and more.

It’s not just Illinoisans’ health either.

About $2 billion is set to be taken back from public transit.

Illinois Deputy Secretary of State Scott Burnham told the Chicago Tribune that the transportation grant Trump’s trying to kill was supposed to save lives, improve services, and prevent fraud.

“The Trump administration is trying to cut funding for improving road safety, preventing crashes and saving lives in Illinois,” Burnham said. “This grant was awarded by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration and executed through a legal agreement between the agency and the Secretary of State’s office.

“Attempts to cut this critical funding for political purposes is not only vindictive and irresponsible, but Illegal,” he continued. “The Secretary of State will fight to make sure Illinois gets every dollar that is owed.”

That’s considerable.

Elsewhere, Illinois government faces:

* cuts to Medicaid estimated to cost Illinois $1 billion.

* cuts of $1 billion earmarked for child care.

* less help made available for disaster relief.

* $100 million clawed back from the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency,

* $1 billion intended to underwrite food banks, school lunches and other low-income assistance, in addition to dramatic reductions for education and energy projects, and

* $170 million going to non-governmental organizations such as the American Medical Association, Lurie’s Children’s hospital and the American Academy of Pediatrics.

 

Also, the sizable tax cuts for corporations and the rich in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” decrease revenues to states since state taxes are coupled with the feds. That could mean $1.4 billion less in income taxes generated to run Illinois’ state government.

The federal grants are vital, not frivolous, Pritzker said in his State of the State address.

“These are not handouts,” he said. “These are dollars that real Illinoisans paid in federal taxes and that have been constitutionally approved by our elected Democratic and Republican representatives in Washington.

“I want to say to anyone on either side of the aisle: If you want to talk about our FY 2027 budget, you must first demand the return of the money and resources this president has taken from the people of Illinois,” he added.

Meanwhile, there was a glimmer of hope last month when federal Judge Manish Shah blocked some of what Trump is trying to withhold, ordering a Preliminary Injunction on Trump’s attempt to withhold $600 million in health-care grants while that lawsuit brought by Attorney General Kwame Raoul and other states’ AGs works its way through the courts. Shah previously issued a Temporary Restraining Order for a month, but on March 13 he bolstered the order to prevent the rescission for now.

“The loss of capacity to fund and maintain public-health infrastructure puts the health of plaintiffs’ residents in jeopardy,” wrote Shah, from the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division. “The states’ sovereign interests here outweigh the executive branch’s likely unlawful interest in using pre-authorized funding to shape state-run governance.”

In a prepared statement, Raoul praised Shah’s injunction.

“Thanks to the order we secured, hundreds of nurses, disease detectives and other essential public-health workers will keep their jobs as we fight the Trump administration’s unlawful attempt to terminate more than $600 million in health-related funding,” he said.