LA Progressive

IRS, Benghazi “Scandals” Won’t Hurt Dems in 2014

Randy Shaw: Democratic success in 2014 hinges not on the impact of the IRS and other “scandals” but on passing comprehensive immigration reform, rejecting the Keystone XL Pipeline, and avoiding a budget deal that undermines Social Security.
Progressivism

Walter Moss: What unites us, as it did the early Progressives, is resistance to--in John Muir’s memorable phrase--“trying to make everything dollarable.”
Bullying Pulpit: Racism, Barack Obama and the Selective Call for Personal Responsibility

Tim Wise: Perhaps it is President Obama who has internalized the idea that black people, even highly educated ones, are would-be malingerers, just waiting for a reason to go soft and “blame the world for trying to keep a black man down.”
$51 Billion in Student Loan Profits

Julie Driscoll: Students and their parents' only hope is Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown, two Democratic Senators who have the cojones to take on big banks, Wall Street, and the powers that be.
Global Capital and the Nation State

Robert Reich: The fact is, global corporations have no allegiance to any country; their only objective is to make as much money as possible — and play off one country against another to keep their taxes down and subsidies up.
Protesting Walmart: The New Freedom Riders

Berry Craig: Called the “Ride for Respect,” the demonstration at Walmart corporate headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, will be modeled on civil rights volunteers who rode buses into the South in the 1960s to protest Jim Crow racial injustice.
The Get Money Out Campaign

Lauren Windsor: Prop C is a fitting rollout for Get Money Out. Voters of Los Angeles, join your city council and put your money where your mouth is. On Tuesday, May 21, vote yes on Proposition C!
Standing Tall for Landowner Rights

Walter Brasch: “The gas companies pay a one-time fee for your land, but you lose the right to utilize it as anything more than grassland forever. . . . You can never build on those easements. They took my retirement away by eminent domain.”
What’s Really Behind All Those Village Voice Layoffs

Michael Sigman: For many old-media types I talked to, there was more resignation than outrage this time around, as though a cherished institution were already gone.

Events

Stop the Koch Brothers Buy of the LA Times – May 23 Rally

Lauren Steiner: Please help us spread the word across Los Angeles! Come with signs that say “Bruce Karsh, please don’t sell the LA Times to the Kochs” and “Bruce Karsh, our democracy is not for sale” We are gathering Thursday, May 23 for a rally and march.

Passing Proposition C in Los Angeles on May 21st

We’re working from all angles to get the word out and drive turnout to pass Proposition C in Los Angeles on May 21st (vote by mail begins May 1st).

Stop Sale of the LA Times to the Koch Brothers – May 23rd

Lauren Steiner: The president of Oaktree Capital Management, is poised to sell the LA Times to the Koch Brothers but Angelenos don’t have to sit by and let that happen.

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LGBT

Hey, Supremes: We’re Here, We’re Queer…

Carl Matthes: June 2013 may well become one of the most remembered Gay Pride months in the amazingly rapid march by the LGBT community towards equal rights under the law.

When Homophobia Trumps Misogyny

Irene Monroe: Joyner points to the ongoing struggle in the African American community with its unresolved homophobia and misogyny that falls on the backs of its women and LGBTQ population, pitting one disenfranchised group against another.

What Niall Ferguson’s Attack on John Maynard Keynes Has Wrought

Irene Monroe: While Ferguson’s gay-bashing of Keynesian economics was to discredit Keynes and his entire body of work, it has rather done the reverse, bringing renewed international attention to a renown economist and to another one of our LGBTQ unsung forebearers.

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The Media

Mainstream Media Acrostic

Gary Corseri: Mealy-mouthed assassins state halt-truths/non-truths, swearing they are all-true.

What’s Really Behind All Those Village Voice Layoffs

Michael Sigman: For many old-media types I talked to, there was more resignation than outrage this time around, as though a cherished institution were already gone.

Bill Maher v Glenn Greenwald

JP Sotille: Like so many of the so-called “Left” in America, Maher has basically accepted the key notion that a whole population of like-minded people have decided to kill Americans because of an irrational religious belief system.

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Law & Justice

Hiawatha Asylum for Insane Indians: The Parallel of Honor

Dana Lonehill: If they were not mentally ill upon arrival before they entered the Canton’s Hiawatha Asylum for Insane Indians, they soon would be with their living conditions including laying in a darkened room with windows nailed shut for days at a time.

Protesting 22 Consecutive Years in Solitary

Angola3News: Ultimately, the people of the U.S. need to rise up and fight back against the imperial prison state, which is also an imperial torture state, decimating minds, bodies, and souls throughout the country on a daily basis.

Fear and Loathing in Houston

Tom Degan: Four months ago on the day after the massacre of innocents in Newtown, Connecticut, I predicted that, in spite of the carnage, nothing would change. Nothing has. Nothing will.

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Environment

Standing Tall for Landowner Rights

Walter Brasch: “The gas companies pay a one-time fee for your land, but you lose the right to utilize it as anything more than grassland forever. . . . You can never build on those easements. They took my retirement away by eminent domain.”

Urban Farming — An Idea Whose Time Has Come

Urban farming is taking root because it makes sense. It conserves dwindling water supplies, makes little plots of land productive, reduces food bills, provides healthy produce free of salmonella and chemicals and gets people off the couch and in motion.

Big Oil’s War on the Sun

JP Sotille: Just imagine—what if people could stop burning oil and gas and even coal, and just use these miracle devices to transform Old Sol’s sunny disposition into the power needed to run just about everything?

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Veterans

Help Advantage US Vets Put Veterans to Work

By purchasing and dedicating commemorative bricks, Americans everywhere will be helping Advantage US Vets establish the Roots & Sprouts Farmstead as a not-for-profit workplace which will directly hire jobless honorably discharged veterans.

Women Veterans: Celebrating Service and Fighting for Change

Diane Lefer: Keynote speaker, Brigadier General (Ret) Ruth Wong, and the many highly motivated women in attendance were living examples of the positive strengths and attributes employers can find in women vets.

Lieutenant Elle Helmer at the Vietnam War Memorial, US Marine Corps.

Military Sexual Trauma: Beyond Zero Tolerance

Karen Finney: While there is much to celebrate in the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act recently passed by Congress and signed by President Obama, the rights of one group of Americans remain inadequately protected: the women and men in our armed forces who are victims of military sexual trauma.

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Elections

IRS, Benghazi “Scandals” Won’t Hurt Dems in 2014

Randy Shaw: Democratic success in 2014 hinges not on the impact of the IRS and other “scandals” but on passing comprehensive immigration reform, rejecting the Keystone XL Pipeline, and avoiding a budget deal that undermines Social Security.

Cruz vs. Clinton in 2016

Brent Budowsky: Don’t laugh. Ted Cruz is apparently thinking of bringing his ability to outrage a majority of voters and alienate a majority of his Senate Republican colleagues to a campaign to be commander in chief.

Don’t Vent, Organize — And “Primary” a Democrat Near You

Norman Solomon: If there’s a defining issue that now separates the Obama party leadership from social decency, it is the president’s push to cut Social Security benefits.

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