This week current and retired public employees in Detroit agreed to a 4.5% cut in their pensions to help the cash-strapped city make ends meet, while the city agreed to subsidize a stadium for the Detroit Red Wings. David Sirota reports:

As U.S. states and cities grapple with budget and pension shortfalls, many are betting big on an unproven formula: Slash public employee pension benefits and public services while diverting the savings into lucrative subsidies for professional sports teams.

Detroit on Monday made itself the most prominent example of this trend. Officials in the financially devastated city announced that current and future municipal retirees had blessed a plan that will slash their pension benefits. On the same day, the billionaire owners of the Detroit Red Wings, the Ilitch family, unveiled details of an already approved taxpayer-financed stadium for the professional hockey team. [IHT]

The city claims that a new stadium will spur economic development, but stadiums have historically offered lousy returns on taxpayer investment. 

[Photo credit: Jeff Powers, Creative Commons.]

Federal prosecutors in New York are using a legal loophole to read jailhouse emails between defendants and their lawyers, Stephanie Clifford revealed in the New York Times, yesterday. Inmates have the right to send confidential snail-mail to their lawyers under the ancient principle of attorney-client privilege, but all electronic communications from jail are monitored. In order to use the email system, the inmate must consent to monitoring. Those messages sometimes show up in court as evidence against the defendent. 

The Editorial Board of the New York Times assailed this email monitoring as an affront to attorney-client privilege, “one of the oldest, broadest, and most important privileges” in the American legal system.

The Best of the Week’s News

• Hillman judge Harold Meyerson urges Democrats to give class war a chance.

• Eight reasons why immigrant rights activist and 2011 Sidney Award-winner Jose Antonio Vargas will not be deported. 

• The demise of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 proves the Russia/Ukraine conflict “out of control,” says Julia Ioffe.

• An investigative journalist teaches you how to eat seafood without destroying wild fish stocks. 

[Photo credit: Wander Mule, Creative Commons.]

Immigration rights activist Jose Antonio Vargas is in Border Patrol custody in Texas. Vargas, who won a Sidney Award in 2011 for his autobiographical New York Times story, “My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant,” recently travelled to McAllen, Texas to gather information on unaccompanied children in federal immigration detention. Huffington Post reports that Vargas was detained when he tried to pass through security at the McAllen airport, Tuesday morning. 

Vargas has been living openly as an undocumented person in the United States since 2011. He has no official U.S. ID, but he has been able to fly domestically using his Philippines passport. However, security is unusually tight in the border city of McAllen. Last week, Vargas published a report in POLITICO entitled, “Trapped on the Border,” explaining his situation.

Border Patrol is active at the McAllen Airport, looking for visa stamps that signal that passport holders are in the United States legally. Vargas doesn’t have a visa. He was brought to the U.S. as a child and only learned of his undocumented status as a teenager. 

Vargas was unable to drive north out of Texas because all roads from McAllen pass through the Falfurrias border station, in internal checkpoint where all crossers are grilled about their immigration status.

This incident does not necessarily mean that Vargas will be deported. Vox.com reports that the government still has the power to let Vargas stay in the United States.