TASK DEFINITION: Given a paragraph, generate a claim that is supported by the given paragraph. 1) The claim must contain information from within the paragraph. 2) A sentence within the paragraph can be used as a claim. 3) The claim should not have contradictions within the paragraph. 4) The claim should be at most one sentence long.
PROBLEM: A March 5 2020 r/SandersForPresident (and r/all) thread featured a title maintaining that Democratic Party presidential candidate Joe Biden “passed the bill” making student loans “ineligible for financial relief,” and an attached ten-second clip featured fellow presidential Bernie Sanders making a similar statement:Joe Biden passed the bill that made student loans ineligible for financial relief. Joe Biden is the reason so many of us don’t have families yet. Joe Biden is why we can’t afford houses. Joe Biden is why we’re working longer hours for lower wages. from SandersForPresidentThat thread had a long title: “Joe Biden passed the bill that made student loans ineligible for financial relief. Joe Biden is the reason so many of us don’t have families yet. Joe Biden is why we can’t afford houses. Joe Biden is why we’re working longer hours for lower wages.”By contrast, in the ten-second video, Sanders said:Joe Biden voted for a bankruptcy bill, on behalf of the credit card companies, and that bill has done a lot of harm to working families all over this country … I voted against it.A difference in wording between the title and the clip was important — the original poster stated Biden “passed the bill,” while Sanders stated that Biden had “voted for a bankruptcy bill.” Here, we are examining whether Biden voted for a bankruptcy bill with the described features, as Biden himself was not empowered to “pass” a bill — presumably the submitter was echoing Sanders’ claims in the clip.The snippet originated from a longer interview with Sanders conducted by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on March 4 2020. Although MSNBC curated short clips from the interview, none was specifically labeled as having to do with Sanders’ claim about Biden and the bankruptcy bill. (We were unable to find a transcript. )In the clip we transcribed above, Sanders didn’t mention a specific bill. However, it wasn’t difficult to narrow down specific legislation due to the prominence of student debt as an issue in the 2020 primary.In December 2019, The Guardian published an article with a headline (“How Biden helped create the student debt problem he now promises to fix”) making claims similar to those made by Sanders in the brief video shared to Reddit. With a subheading claiming that the “former vice-president and 2020 presidential hopeful backed a 2005 bill that stripped students of bankruptcy protections and left millions in financial stress,” it reported in part:In [February 2020] Joe Biden will lay “Joe’s vision for America” at the feet of Iowa’s caucus-goers in the hope that the first voters in the Democratic presidential race will put him on the road to the White House.Among his promises is that he will fix the student loan crisis saddling 45 million Americans with crippling debt now totalling a staggering $1.5tn … [Biden’s] pledge is one of the most striking policies on offer from Democratic candidates in the 2020 race, given how the problem Biden now proposes to resolve came about in the first place. Private student loans were largely stripped of bankruptcy protections in 2005 in a congressional move that had the devastating impact of tripling such debt over a decade and locking in millions of Americans to years of grueling repayments.The Republican-led bill tightened the bankruptcy code, unleashing a huge giveaway to lenders at the expense of indebted student borrowers. At the time it faced vociferous opposition from 25 Democrats in the US Senate.But it passed anyway, with 18 Democratic senators breaking ranks and casting their vote in favor of the bill. Of those 18, one politician stood out as an especially enthusiastic champion of the credit companies who, as it happens, had given him hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions – Joe Biden.The Guardian quoted University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill law professor Melissa Jacoby on Biden’s role in the bill’s passage:Biden was one of the most powerful people who could have said no, who could have changed this. Instead he used his leadership role to limit the ability of other Democrats who had concerns and who wanted the bill softened[. ]In January 2020, TheIntercept.com covered the origins and progression of student loan debt in the United States, up to and including its prevalence in Democratic primary debates and platforms.… as a senator from Delaware, Biden was one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the disastrous 2005 bankruptcy bill that made it nearly impossible for borrowers to reduce their student loan debt. The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act raised the bar for families to pursue Chapter 7 bankruptcy protections. It overwhelmingly passed in the Senate at the end of the Clinton administration, over the objections of [Elizabeth] Warren, then a bankruptcy expert who had tangled for years with Biden over the issue. She lobbied first lady Hillary Clinton, who herself persuaded Bill Clinton to veto it.Biden came back to the legislation under the Bush administration; it passed the Senate in 2005 on a 74-25 vote, with most Democratic lawmakers, including then-Sen. Barack Obama, voting against it. ([Hillary] Clinton, by then a senator from New York, voted for it.) George W. Bush signed it into law, and private student loan debt skyrocketed in the wake of its passage. The total amount of private student loan debt more than doubled between 2005 and 2011, growing from $55.9 billion to $140.2 billion, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.In February 2020, RealClearPolitics examined Biden’s 2020 campaign stance on student debt, and contrasted it with his support in the early 2000s for more restrictions on student borrowers:Biden’s student-loan plan represents a radical departure from positions he held during bankruptcy-law negotiations in the early 2000s. Then a senator from Delaware, he forcefully backed measures that made it much harder for private student-loan borrowers filing for bankruptcy to shed that debt. Representing many of the big financial institutions based in his home state, Biden was such a reliable advocate for the financial services industry that he was often referred to as “the senator from MBNA,” the credit-card company that regularly doled out contributions to his campaigns.In promoting a 2005 bankruptcy reform measure, Biden argued that too many people were skipping out of their debts too easily and sticking other borrowers with the bill while interest rates rose as a result… A bankruptcy court judge also testifying [the same day as Biden] took issue with Biden’s stance, arguing that government-backed student loans aren’t dischargeable – something that has remained the case since then, as well.“You would never be able to [discharge government-backed student loans like] that,” Judge Randall Newsome said.“Like heck you can’t,” Biden countered. “…You are full of malarkey, judge.”Newsome was just one of the many opponents of the bill whom Biden sparred with at the time. Elizabeth Warren, then a Harvard law professor, opposed the bankruptcy bill so aggressively that she says it inspired her to run for the Senate.“I got in that fight because [families] just didn’t have anyone, and Joe Biden was on the side of the credit card companies,” Warren said at an April rally in Iowa. “It’s all a matter of public record.”As Newsome noted, discharging government-backed student loans is, and has always been, nearly impossible. However, the 2005 bill was described as involving private student loan debt, not debt held by the federal government.In January 2020,  the American Prospect reported that Biden had voted several times against “softening” the effects of that bill (abbreviated as BAPCPA) on myriad demographics hardest hit by its provisions:Biden also consistently voted against efforts to soften BAPCPA’s blow on vulnerable populations. He voted against three amendments to ease bankruptcy requirements for consumers whose financial troubles stem from medical expenses. He voted against an amendment that would have helped seniors keep their homes. He voted against exempting servicemembers and widows of servicemembers killed in action from the law’s eligibility restrictions. He voted against an amendment to exempt women whose financial troubles stemmed from deadbeat husbands’ failure to pay child support or alimony. And Biden even voted against an amendment that would have ensured that children of debtors could still be given birthday and Christmas presents. Biden also voted against allowing debtors to pay their union dues during bankruptcy, potentially imperiling their employment and ability to achieve financial rehabilitation.In excerpts above, the bill Biden was often accused of supporting was referenced by its name — the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005. Text of the bill was available on Congress.gov, and Section 220 of the bill declared both private and federal student debt exempt from being discharged in bankruptcy. A summary of all of the bill’s points can be viewed here.In the clip, Sanders made two claims about voting on the bill, stating that Biden voted for it, and that he — Sanders — had voted against it. According to Senate.gov, Biden voted in favor of the bill in the Senate on March 10 2005. Per GovTrack.us, Sanders (then in the House of Representatives) did vote against the same bill on April 14 2005.On Reddit, a post to r/SandersForPresident misstated Sanders’ statement on the 2005 bankruptcy bill making it virtually impossible to discharge private student debt. Sanders said that Biden “voted for a bankruptcy bill, on behalf of the credit card companies, and that bill has done a lot of harm to working families all over this country … I voted against it.” Sanders was correct — Biden was among the few Democrats voting in favor of that 2005 bill in the Senate, and when it came around to the House the following month, Sanders voted against it.

SOLUTION: Joe Biden voted for a bill which made it difficult or impossible to discharge student loans during bankruptcy; Bernie Sanders voted against it.

PROBLEM: The Sackler family owns Purdue Pharma, the privately held drug company that has made billions from OxyContin, and Sacklers hold most of the seats on the board. Members of the family have been accused in a case brought by the state of Massachusetts of deceiving patients and doctors about the drug’s risks as deaths mounted. And documents recently released in the case shine new light on former Purdue Pharma President Richard Sackler’s role in the aggressive marketing of the powerful opioid. As the allegations mount, family members who made their fortunes well before OxyContin even went on the market have sought to distance themselves from their relatives. At the same time, activists have called on institutions to cut ties with the Sacklers, staging protests at museums that have received millions in donations. “The Sackler name is becoming synonymous with the opioid epidemic, and it is damning for these institutions to have their name up,” said Nan Goldin, a photographer whose works have been displayed at Harvard’s Arthur M. Sackler Museum and at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has a Sackler Wing. Lost in the outrage: One of the most generous and best known of the Sacklers died in 1987, nearly a decade before OxyContin was released. Arthur M. Sackler made his money from medical research, medical advertising and trade publications. His younger brothers, Raymond and Mortimer, bought out his stake after he died. Arthur Sackler’s name is on a gallery at the Smithsonian, a wing of galleries at London’s Royal Academy of Arts and a museum at Beijing’s Peking University. The Sackler Wing at the Met, which houses the celebrated Temple of Dendur from ancient Egypt, was funded by all three brothers. Richard has likewise donated heavily to various institutions. After a federal investigation, Purdue Pharma and three executives — none of them Sacklers — pleaded guilty in 2007 and agreed to pay more than $600 million for misleading the public about the risks of OxyContin. The Stamford, Connecticut, company has also been hit with a multitude of lawsuits over its role in the opioid crisis that killed more than 47,000 people in 2017 alone. Arthur’s nephew, Richard Sackler, who became president of Purdue Pharma in 1999 and remains on the board, is at the center of the litigation. He and other current and former executives have been accused of hiding the dangers of the drug from doctors and patients, encouraging physicians to prescribe more of the highest doses and minimizing the abuse crisis as it was unfolding. “This is not too bad. It could have been far worse,” he wrote to Purdue Pharma executives in 2001 after a federal prosecutor reported that 59 people in one state had died from OxyContin, according to documents released this week in the Massachusetts case. At the launch party for OxyContin in 1996, Richard Sackler boasted the drug would bring a “blizzard of prescriptions that will bury the competition,” the documents say. Years later, they say, he sought to shift blame onto drug users themselves, recommending the company “hammer on the abusers in every way possible.” “Richard followed that strategy for the rest of his career: collect millions from selling addictive drugs, and blame the terrible consequences on the people who became addicted,” attorneys in Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey’s office wrote. “By their misconduct, the Sacklers have hammered Massachusetts families in every way possible. And the stigma they used as a weapon made the crisis worse.” A spokesman for Richard Sackler’s family referred questions about the lawsuit to the company. Purdue Pharma said in a statement that Massachusetts’ case — the first one brought by a state to personally name members of the Sackler family — is “littered with biased and inaccurate characterizations.” The company said it will “aggressively defend against these misleading allegations.” Arthur Sackler’s widow and children insist that they never financially benefited from the sale of OxyContin. “It is a gross injustice to connect Arthur to the opioid crisis some 30 years after his death when he had nothing to do with it,” Dame Jillian Sackler said in a statement. “It denies the many important contributions he made working to improve world health and to build cultural bridges between peoples.” But activists have made no distinction between Arthur and his relatives. In July, dozens of activists led by Goldin held a protest inside the Arthur M. Sackler Museum at Harvard, scattering pill bottles and holding banners that read “SHAME ON SACKLER.” Similar demonstrations have been held at the Met and the Smithsonian. Goldin, who was addicted OxyContin for years, said that getting the institutions to act will be difficult. “Who is going to turn down the money? They offer millions to these institutions, and the board members are not necessarily committed to action, so it’s going to take a lot,” she said. A Met spokesman said that the Sackler family’s support began decades before the opioid crisis, but that the museum will be examining its gift acceptance policies. The Guggenheim, home to the Sackler Center for Arts Education, had no comment. A Harvard spokesman said in an email that Arthur Sackler’s donation in 1982 paid for the construction of the building that originally housed the museum but that his foundation does not fund the museum. ___ Associated Press reporter Verena Dobnik contributed to this report from New York. ___ Follow Alanna Durkin Richer at http://www.twitter.com/aedurkinricher

SOLUTION: Opioid crisis brings unwanted attention to wealthy family.

PROBLEM: The Sentinel & Enterprise reports that the Department of Public Health says more than half of the citations at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Shirley were for repeat violations. The department gave the prison 10 days to come up with a plan to fix the issues. A corrections department spokesman says prison maintenance staff is “working diligently” to address the problems. The prison houses about 1,000 of the state’s most dangerous inmates. It is where former NFL star Aaron Hernandez was being held when he hanged himself last year. ___ Information from: Sentinel & Enterprise (Fitchburg, Mass. ), http://www.sentinelandenterprise.com

SOLUTION:
Massachusetts prison cited for nearly 600 health violations.