Georgianne Nienaber: Relief efforts are limping along. There are thousands of foreign NGOs on the ground, but no overall organized effort to distribute aid. Compounding the problem is the fact that IDP camps are springing up overnight, and rural areas face a different set of problems than those faced in the city of Port-au-Prince.
Read the full story »
Coverage on the national and statewide debate on healthcare reform including the public option and single-payer
Articles discussing the way in which our country can reform its immigration policy.
Covering electoral politics, from local, state and national races, to how to make elections fairer and more transparent.
Abuse of power including discrimination based on race, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability, nationality, or religion
Articles addressing mainstream media, cable, radio, the blogosphere and the many ways we are informed
When kids get in trouble, it’s better to provide community-based services than lock them up in one of the county’s expensive and scandal-ridden juvenile halls or probation camps. Everyone seemed to agree on that, including Cal Remington, interim Acting Chief of the LA County Probation Department, at a public meeting called by Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas and the Empowerment Congress on Wednesday night at the supervisor’s Exposition Park offices.
Problems in the department–the largest probation department in the world–are well known. Probation, with its $700-million budget, is monitored by the Department of Justice and sued by the ACLU. Young people are incarcerated for offenses no more serious than truancy and curfew violations. Probation officers known for physically abusing youth in their care remain on the job. The department releases illiterate minors — high school degrees in hand — who’ve been deprived of any meaningful education while locked up.
It incarcerates a disproportionate number of Black and Latino youth. It fails to assess and treat the mental illnesses that contribute to the trouble kids get into and fails to coordinate with the Department of Mental Health or take sufficient advantage of the funding provided for mental health services by Proposition 63. It releases young people with no support for their re-entry into the community, often without such basics as a Social Security card, school transcript, or other documents they will need to move on with their lives. Read the full story »
International Women's Day (Photo: Grettel Cortes)
The influence of mainstream media has often made it difficult for Western women to draw parallels between sexist oppression of women in the West and that of Middle Eastern women. Programmed to see Middle Eastern women as the “other,” shackled by backward, terroristic Islamist regimes, many uncritically accept the mainstream media’s portrayal of the “secularist” enlightened West as the liberator of Middle Eastern women.
As an activist in the Iranian women’s movement, Sussan Gol has been outspoken in making connections between her struggle and the global implications of women’s oppression. Gol recently traveled to Los Angeles to participate in the commemoration of International Women’s Day on March 8th. She went to high school in L.A. and moved back to Iran after the fall of the U.S.-backed Shah government in 1979.
The rise of the Ayatollah Khomeini led to the repeal of virtually all of the civil rights women had begun to enjoy prior to the Revolution. Compulsory implementation of the hijab (a practice which entails modest traditional dress, such as the veil) and the draconian restrictions of Sharia (Muslim law) have severely limited women’s basic mobility, access to education, rights within the family and in the political sphere. Read the full story »
Steve Poizner
California gubernatorial candidate and state Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner (R-CA) thinks he’s capable of single-handedly fixing the nation’s broken immigration system. During a debate with challenger and former eBay chief executive Meg Whitman (R-CA), Poizner boldly proclaimed that, if elected, he wants to “end illegal immigration once and for all.” The San Diego News Network reports:
Repeating a point he made during the state party convention over the weekend, Poizner said California needs to “turn off the magnets” of state-funded services such as health care and education that he said draw illegal immigrants.
“We just really differ here. I want to end illegal immigration once and for all. … Meg doesn’t want to go that far,” he said. After the debate, he told reporters he’d support bringing an anti-illegal immigration initiative to voters if reforms aren’t enacted in the Legislature.
He did not specify what that initiative would say, but his remarks echoed the debate over Proposition 187 in 1994, which denied publicly funded social services to illegal immigrants. A federal court later found the law’s provisions unconstitutional. Read the full story »
Julianna Marguiles and Andy Garcia, in City Island
On March 5, I saw Andy Garcia at the Independent Spirit Awards ceremony and approached his table to congratulate him on City Island, the delightful comedy scheduled to open today. The nattily dressed Garcia, who portrays City Island’s lead character, Vince Rizzo, was appreciative and introduced me to his onscreen and off-screen daughter Dominik Garcia-Lorido, who plays Vivian Rizzo. To tell you the truth, I didn’t recognize Dominik with her clothes on – which should suggest what her character’s secret is in this family farce about private lives, where nobody is exactly what they appear to be.
City Island reminds me of that old CBS game show I’ve Got a Secret, co-hosted by, among others, Steve Allen. Every major character in City Island has a secret, but in keeping with my anti-plot spoiler philosophy I won’t spill the beans by revealing them here. Let’s start with Garcia’s Vince, a prison guard who at first appears to be a proletarian son of the working class. But he rankles at the term “prison guard,” opting instead for a more highfaluting title, indicating that beneath his blue collar persona lies another aspiration. Early in the movie this is wittily disclosed by Vince’s choice of reading matter, which he conceals from his wife Joyce (Julianna Margolies). Read the full story »
Andrea Christina Nill: Poizner has proposed deploying the California National Guard and California Highway Patrol to secure the border with Mexico if the federal government doesn’t. Poizner has adamantly argued that undocumented immigrants should be denied emergency health care and that public schools should shut their doors in the face of undocumented children.
Ed Rampell: I highly recommend the filmic City Island, a delightful family comedy with a superb ensemble cast with an uplifting message. More than any other movie in recent memory it reminded me of William Shakespeare’s wise words ironically uttered by the foolish Polonius in Hamlet: “This above all else, to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.”
Sikivu Hutchinson: Although the U.S. and Europe are often regarded as the models for women’s political agency, Middle Eastern feminists like Gol emphasize their solidarity with the struggles of disenfranchised women in the West, particularly that of women of color.
Diane Lefer: Problems in the department–the largest probation department in the world–are well known. Probation, with its $700-million budget, is monitored by the Department of Justice and sued by the ACLU. Young people are incarcerated for offenses no more serious than truancy and curfew violations. Probation officers known for physically abusing youth in their care remain on the job…
Georgianne Nienaber: Relief efforts are limping along. There are thousands of foreign NGOs on the ground, but no overall organized effort to distribute aid. Compounding the problem is the fact that IDP camps are springing up overnight, and rural areas face a different set of problems than those faced in the city of Port-au-Prince.
Shamus Cooke: The anti-teacher hysteria looks diverse on the surface, but underneath, this public controversy seeks to dislodge teachers unions: the right-wing trashes teachers’ unions outright, while the “liberal” media takes a more subtle, sophisticated approach, blaming the state of public education on “bad teachers” who must be fired and replaced.
Ivan Eland: Although closing Guantánamo would be important symbolically, the law-free sanctuary that the Bush administration had achieved there has already been eroded by the Supreme Court’s demand that detainees have some legal rights. And even if the Obama administration closes Gitmo, some of Bush’s unconstitutional policies would continue in prisons around the United States—for example, the use of military tribunals for some detainees and the detention of some former Guantánamo detainees indefinitely without trial.
Randy Shaw: Prior to Brown’s win, national Democrats were adrift, the base was deeply demoralized, and a path to finally passing health care reform was unclear. But Brown’s win changed this, providing a desperately needed wake-up call to national Democrats and the Obama Administration.
Rev. Irene Monroe: Sometime in the late hours of Saturday night the call will come in. Philbert (not his real name) — like many of his Christian LGBTQ buddies — waits anxiously for the call to tell him the time and place of the van pickup, and where it’ll drop he and his friends off to a safe and secluded place for Sunday worship.
Carl Bloice: For anti-war activists in the Democratic Party, Emanuel is probably best known for his role after 2004 as chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. In primary races around the country he raised cash and secured endorsements for opponents of anti-war candidates.
Ron Wolff: Oh, by the way, country and western music will be studied as a cultural movement. High school freshmen will probably be assigned the task of writing lyrics to twangy melodies — when they’re not studying about the Contract with America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority, and the National Rifle Association. Yes, they’re all “in.”
Joseph Palermo: Peter Baker’s profile of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel in the New York Times Magazine raises some interesting questions about President Barack Obama’s top aide. For Emanuel, it seems that all politics are electoral politics. He wouldn’t know a social movement if he saw one.
Georgianne Nienaber: Needs are many. Temporary classrooms are a must, but tents are impossible to come by here. The current school will never be used, but the field is secured at 83 Delmas Road. She needs $20,000 to pay it off completely. Haitian officials have promised tents, but it is doubtful they will arrive.
Sikivu Hutchinson: It’s simply not acceptable to blame the university’s egregious disregard for the needs of students of color on the bigoted acts of ignorant white or “minority” students. UCSD’s gross underrepresentation of Black students reflects the UC system’s institutional neglect of recruitment and outreach to African American high schools.
Emily Spence: Years ago, the founder of central Massachusetts’ food bank told me of the obscenely high salaries that the directors of a major, well-known Massachusetts charity providing funds for hungry Americans received every year, an amount that was purposefully not readily made public. The reason is that all of the volunteers for this charity, that raises millions of dollars each year, would be greatly dismayed that around a fourth of them were, actually, working to enrich upper management.
Michael Sigman: Community can be created in many ways — geographically, electronically, or around a shared interest or cause. The community of singers which has formed around SOS and its sister organizations needs help from another community: us listeners, whose lives have been so enriched by the wonderful singers — past and present — performing in Los Angeles and around the world.
Tracy Emblem: There has been no real plan explained to the American public for an exit strategy in Afghanistan as mounting injuries and deaths occur and we continue to put our loved ones in harm’s way. In fact, we have no guarantee our troops will be withdrawn from Afghanistan anytime soon. Some experts say it could take even longer than the six years we spent in Iraq.
John Peeler: Vice President Biden’s visit to Israel didn’t go so well. When the Interior Ministry announced plans for a major expansion of Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem just as Biden was helping to organize renewed—if indirect—negotiations with the Palestinians, he, on instructions from the White House, promptly condemned the plan, a condemnation, which was amplified in a long, “tough” conversation between Secretary of State Clinton and Prime Minister Netanyahu.
Randy Shaw: Organized by the Center for Community Change (CCC), the March 21 event will be the largest protest march since President Barack Obama took office. It will include activist groups from nearly every state, and revives the labor-religious-community coalition that built the mass marches of 2006.
Tom Hayden: Rep. Dennis Kucinich will step into the crosswinds this week and force the House of Representatives to wake up, pay attention, and vote up or down on the Afghanistan war.
Georgianne Nienaber: While Leogane is completely overrun with NGOs, Fayette gets visits from the occasional scientist, and the only camera lens focused on the village is aboard NASA’s EO-1 satellite. Villagers told us they have not seen any aid workers since the quake. Nestled in fertile, natural surroundings along the Momance River, the local population is self-sufficient. They are not requesting money, food or water, but they do not want to be forgotten, either.
Randy Shaw: Since film noir was rediscovered in the 1960’s, there have been many books analyzing the genre. One could understandably ask what Dennis Broe’s new work, Film Noir, American Workers, and Postwar Hollywood could possibly add to the subject. The answer is: quite a bit.
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Sikivu Hutchinson: Although the U.S. and Europe are often regarded as the models for women’s political agency, Middle Eastern feminists like Gol emphasize their solidarity with the struggles of disenfranchised women in the West, particularly that of women of color.
Robert Reich: Today’s Republican battle plan is exactly the same as it was sixteen years ago. In fact, it’s been the same since President Obama assumed office. They never were serious about compromise. They were serious only about regaining power. From the start, Republicans have remembered the lesson of 1994. Now, as they prepare to vote, House Dems should remember the lesson as well.
Andrea Nill: The majority of Americans, including Republicans and independents, support a solution to the nation’s broken immigration system that includes a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Chances are, many would also be turned off by ALIPAC and Tancredo’s impractical “deport them all” strategy and nativist vitriol.
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