We Fight Low Information
Dick Price: If a meeting this past weekend between representatives from a half dozen Occupy encampments in California and perhaps 200 members of the California Progressive Caucus is any guide, the Occupy Movement has already tapped into older generations of progressive activists who are eager to support, leverage, and amplify the Occupyers’ ground-breaking work.
Survey Saturday: With upwards of ten thousand Occupy protesters flooding through downtown Oakland yesterday to close shipping facilities there and organizers here in Los Angeles planning a full teach-in weekend with the likes of Robert Reich and Robert Scheer, the Occupy Movement has the world’s attention.
Saturday Survey: Keeping its lead in the nation’s death penalty derby, Texas yesterday conducted its twelfth execution this year, putting a mentally impaired Frank Garcia to death for killing Hector Garcia, a police officer, ten years ago. In line with another execution yesterday in Texas, this week’s poll gathered your thoughts on the effectiveness and morality of the death penalty in America.
Veterans’ Vox: Honoring Veterans — Tuesday, 1 November, 7 p.m., LA City Hall Mayor Bradley Room, 200 N. Spring Street, Los Angeles. Free to public.
Saturday Survey: Much more common (51%) was the thought that mainstream media is corporate owned, so they are wise to downplay or belittle anything that might upset the economic apple cart. And 35% thought today’s journalists much too closely identify with wealthy elites, which slants their coverage of things like Occupy Wall Street.
Overall, LA Progressive readers who took this survey are quite enthusiastic about Occupy America’s potential. Five or 10 years from now, most think we’ll look back upon these days fondly
President Obama has adopted notably harder rhetoric during his nationwide campaign to drum up support for his jobs bill. A near majority (45.5%) feel this will be an effective way to rally support for the Obama re-election campaign.
Dick Price: The mood was both festive and earnest, with one third the crowd chronicling the proceedings with their cameras, the second third looking for a bit of shade on a warmish Los Angeles afternoon, and the rest holding a disparate array of mostly hand-painted protest signs.
Dick Price: You see the depth of Kovic’s anger–or perhaps it’s his love–that has propelled him through 40 long years of activism, making him a leading antiwar speaker, leading to Saturday’s award, and making him such a valuable voice in stopping this generation’s senseless wars.
Dick Price: The documentary “The Harvest/La Consecha” puts a human face on the 400,000 children who help harvest America’s crops as migrant farm workers season after season.
Dick Price: The issue is much bigger than the killing — in your name and my name — of Osama bin Laden. The bigger issue is our endless warmaking, the callous assumption that the United States has the right to bomb or strafe or attack anyplace it pleases.
Dick Price: I want someone who will stand on the corner and raise some hell. Lord knows, Washington has all the “go along to get along” it needs.
Dick Price: “More African American men are in prison or jail, on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War began,” Michelle Alexander told a standing room only house at the Pasadena Main Library this past Wednesday
Dick Price: A woman in the seat behind us said this was the dirtiest campaign she’d seen since Antonio Villaraigosa challenged Nick Pacheco for this same CD-14 City Council seat nearly a decade ago. “But that’s how politics goes in Northeast LA,” she said.
Dick Price: Perhaps Common Cause can be a kind of can opener in offering its resources as a clearinghouse for information about progressive causes and as an organizing agent to pull together like-minded individuals and organizers as it did last Sunday.
Dick Price: “I was a child of the Great Depression. It never occurred to me our strong and vital nation could fall and fail as it has today,” he says. “I was brought up to have a sense of justice and truth as a basis of our country’s governance. That belief has been shattered, particularly in the past decade.”
Dick Price: Aside from writing nine published books, Diane Lefer has picked potatoes, typed autopsy reports, surveyed parolees and drug addicts about their sex lives, and taught creative writing to gang-bangers.
John Peeler’s work for the LA Progressive draws on his extensive experience as a political science professor and researcher, coupled with a deep desire to move the country’s political conversation in more progressive directions.
As that rare bird—a union-card-carrying, left-leaning NASCAR fan—Berry Craig brings four strong threads to his writing for the LA Progressive: Years working as a daily newspaper reporter and opinion columnist, a full career as a college history professor, strong attachment to his Kentucky roots, and deep involvement in union organizing.
To kick off what we hope will be a year-long series to highlight the work our many fine writers contribute to the LA Progressive, we’d like to give you a fuller view of Georgianne Nienaber’s life and work.
Dick Price: Certainly, a recent tour through packed political venues around Los Angeles will tell you that there’s no lack of enthusiasm among Democrats, at least in this part of the world.
Dick Price: “Ruined,” tells the improbably uplifting story of a tawdry haven from an unimaginably cruel world where soldiers and the rebels they fight routinely rape, mutilate, and murder women for sport.
Dick Price: Amir Bar-Lev’s powerful documentary, “The Tillman Story,” fleshes out the tragic arc of Pat Tillman’s life in what becomes less an anti-war movie and more the story of one indomitable family’s struggle for truth and justice in the face of arrogant indifference by our nation’s top military and civilian leaders, abetted by a cheerleading press.
Dick Price: LA’s progressive political community is rallying behind David Segal, a rising young star looking to capture the Congressional seat Patrick Kennedy is leaving in Rhode Island.
Dick Price: But what if all hundred people at my workplace followed suit? That’s 50,000 plastic bags per year that wouldn’t be fouling the environment. Or the 800 members of my church? Another 400,000 bags not killing wildlife. All 10 million LA County residents? Five billion bags. All Californians? That’s 19 billion bags—and now e’re waist deep in the Big Plastic.
Dick Price: The reason we’ve got oil rigs drilling a mile deep into the ocean and fouling Alaska’s wilderness is because you and I insist on filling up our car’s gas tank anytime we want, right to the top, at a fraction of the cost others around the world pay, almost as an inalienable right. It’s why we’ve got soldiers dying in Afghanistan and Iraq these many years down the road, too, you know.
Dick Price: Not so long ago, you would most likely call a Democrat running for office in many parts of Orange County quixotic if not just flat foolish. Beth Krom, a lifelong Democrat who has won five consecutive local elections in Irvine—the crustiest of upper crust Orange County—begs to differ.
Dick Price: To get a handle on the damage California’s current approach to incarceration is having on its citizens, consider this: In a recent 23-year period, California erected 23 prisons—one a year, each costing roughly $100 million dollars annually to operate, with both Democratic and Republican governors occupying the statehouse—at the same time that it added just one campus to its vaunted university system, UC Merced.
Dick Price: Next week, Georgianne Nienaber departs on a 12-day investigative research trip to Haiti where she will look to fill in gaps in the mainstream media’s news coverage while also providing emergency medical assistance to rural Haitians. As she works with Haitian human rights organizations to develop story ideas, she also invites LA Progressive readers to contribute their thoughts on where else she might look.
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.
Ivan Eland: Less scrupulous Republicans, such as McCain and Graham, should realize that their line of attack on Benghazi is not strong–Americans don’t usually vote on foreign policy unless a huge catastrophe has occurred.
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.
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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