Events
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.
The House I Live In — May 30
Institute of Black World sponsoring a showing of the award-winning film “The House I Live In” as part of its campaign to educate and involve people in Los Angeles and Southern California regarding the so-called War on Drugs.
LGBT
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.
Jason Collins: The Great Black Hope
Rev. Irene Monroe: In a sports world that has become overwhelming shaped by African American male players and masculinity, Collins coming out celebration has everything to do with timing, gender, race and many more straight brothers embracing their gay brethren.
The Media
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.
Effort to Stop Koch Brothers’ Takeover of LA Times Gains Momentum
Steve Smith: A sale by Oaktree (which has controlling interest in the Tribune Co.) to the Kochs would be an affront to the values of Angelenos and working people everywhere.
Law & Justice
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.
More Guns, More Gun Profits, More Gun Deaths
Tina Dupuy: We lose the equivalent of a small city of Americans every year to gun violence. Each year an entire Bangor, Maine is gone. Virginia Tech has 30,000 students in total. Every year the equivalent of a Virginia Tech loses their lives.
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?
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.
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.
Elections
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.
Prop C: Battling Big Money in Politics
David Burke: By voting yes on Proposition C, we can make it clear that individuals should be at the center of the electoral process and that corporate speech does not deserve the same level of protection as individual speech.
Progressive Culture
Movies and Memories of Our Racist Past
Charles Hayes: What 42 makes crystal clear is how shallow and superficial the strain of contempt is that enables and sustains racism as prejudice is handed down from one generation to the next.
Robinson Jeffers: America’s Neglected-At-Our-Peril Poet-Prophet
Gary Corseri: Jeffers gaze was not so much bitter as it was unflinching, steady, resolute and sui generis. “The cold passion for truth,” he wrote, “hunts in no pack.”
On Entertainment and Cordite’s Combined Long Grave Dug
Charles Orloski: Thankfully, no Chechen-American bombs crashed “The Office Party,” and for the most part, it seemed likely that throngs of druggies kept inner habits silent
PCL offers monthly Open House Events on the 2nd Saturday at 2pm and 3rd Thursday at 6pm. Click here to learn more.
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