Liberal Perspectives on the Day's News

Over the past six years, Colorado has conducted one of the largest experiments with long-acting birth control. If teenagers and poor women were offered free intrauterine devices and implants that prevent pregnancy for years, state officials asked, would those women choose them?

They did in a big way, and the results were startling. The birthrate among teenagers across the state plunged by 40 percent from 2009 to 2013, while their rate of abortions fell by 42 percent, according to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. There was a similar decline in births for another group particularly vulnerable to unplanned pregnancies: unmarried women under 25 who have not finished high school.

[...] Proponents say the program is working. The state health department estimated that every dollar spent on the long-acting birth control initiative saved $5.85 for the state’s Medicaid program, which covers more than three-quarters of teenage pregnancies and births.

[...] The private grant that funds the state program has started to run out, and while many young women are expected to be covered under the health care law, some plans have required payment or offered only certain methods, problems the Obama administration is trying to correct.

The WikiLeaks analysis explains that this lets firms "sue" governments to obtain taxpayer compensation for loss of "expected future profits."

Let that sink in for a moment: "[C]ompanies and investors would be empowered to challenge regulations, rules, government actions and court rulings -- federal, state or local -- before tribunals...." And they can collect not just for lost property or seized assets; they can collect if laws or regulations interfere with these giant companies' ability to collect what they claim are "expected future profits."

The Times' report explains that this clause also "giv[es] greater priority to protecting corporate interests than promoting free trade and competition that benefits consumers."

The tribunals that adjudicate these cases will be made up of private-sector (i.e., corporate) attorneys. These attorneys will rotate between serving on the tribunals and representing corporations that bring cases to be heard by the tribunals. This is a conflict of interest because the attorneys serving on the tribunals will have tremendous incentive to rule for the corporations if they want to continue to get lucrative corporate business.

His aides, trying to deflect attention from the reshuffling, said Monday that Mr. Bush would raise $100 million in the first six months of the year, a figure that they once waved off as unrealistic and that almost certainly will be higher than any other Republican contender.

[...]

[Jeb Bush's] aides say they believe the friction will subside with the change in leadership and with the cordoning off of Mr. Bush’s super PAC, which Mr. Murphy will run from Los Angeles. Last Thursday, the super PAC and the campaign team were formally separated; legally, once Mr. Bush is a candidate, the two entities cannot coordinate in any way.

While Mr. Bush has raised millions of dollars for the super PAC, he has yet to begin raising campaign dollars — limited to $2,700 per donor for the primary race.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton plans to call for an early voting period of at least 20 days in every state.

Clinton will call for that standard in remarks Thursday in Texas about voting rights, her campaign said. She will also criticize what her campaign calls deliberate restrictions on voting in several states, including Texas.

[...] Clinton and her allies claim the changes are aimed at narrowing the electorate in ways that benefit Republicans.

“This is, I think, a moment when we should be expanding the franchise,” Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta said in an interview. “What we see in state after state is this effort by conservatives to restrict the right to vote.”

The legal effort began late last month with lawsuits in Wisconsin and Ohio, both presidential battleground states.

“This lawsuit concerns the most fundamental of rights guaranteed citizens in our representative democracy — the right to vote,” lawyers wrote in a federal complaint filed Friday in Wisconsin.