Social Justice Magazine
Randy Shaw is the Director of San Francisco's Tenderloin Housing Clinic and the Editor-in-Chief of the online daily newspaper "Beyond Chron." He is the author of three books, "Beyond the Fields", "The Activist's Handbook", and "Reclaiming America".
ccording to the media, recent European elections in France, Greece and Germany show that voters have a “throw the bums out” mentality. As the Los Angeles Times described it, “in recessions, voters tend to punish the party in charge.”But the real election lesson is quite different. Voters are rebelling against austerity, and giving pro-austerity candidates/parties the heave-ho. This … [Read more...]
ichard Mourdock’s defeat of longtime Indiana Senator Richard Lugar has increased chances that Democrats can win the seat in November, reaffirmed the Republican Party’s identification as “extremist,” and boosted partisan politics over “bipartisanship” in Washington, DC. But what the outcome primarily shows is the further erosion of the corporate media’s core value that the best … [Read more...]
t’s not easy being a tourist in Los Angeles. Unlike New York City or San Francisco, destinations are not easily reached by walking or public transportation. As Dionne Warwick sang in 1968, L.A. is a great big freeway; finding cultural landmarks off the beaten track can be an exhausting task.Laura Pulido, Laura Barraclough and Wendy Cheng, the authors of the newly released A People’s Guide … [Read more...]
hile Occupy May Day events occurred throughout the nation, the larger and most publicized events were in New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, Oakland and Seattle. These traditional activist strongholds routinely have thousands marching in the streets, which is why the national media did not give the May 1 events anywhere near the coverage it gave to immigrant rights marches in the Spring … [Read more...]
hen the media revealed Mitt Romney’s plan to eliminate the federal agency in charge of affordable housing, it was the classic one-day news story. Instead of interviewing any of the seniors, disabled and low-income families impacted by such a move, the media went all out covering Ann Romney’s response at the same April 15 gathering to a political consultant’s claim that Ms.Romney “had … [Read more...]
rom April 9-15, thousands of Occupy activists got direct action training in preparation for the “99% Spring.” The goal is recapturing Occupy’s momentum, with a greater focus on targeting specific corporate wrongdoing. But getting large turnouts may not be easy. On April 24, expected massive protests at San Francisco’s Wells Fargo shareholder meeting drew only roughly 1,000 people.The … [Read more...]
ccording to the U.S. media, the real story in the first round of the French election was the surprising strength of the “far-right” and “extremist” candidate Marine Le Pen. Le Pen promoted anti-immigration and law-and-order themes, and questioned France’s involvement in the European Union.Yet when Republican Presidential nominee Mitt Romney promoted the “self-deportation” of … [Read more...]
hat do the following recent news headlines have in common? Cuban-Americans in South Florida express outrage at baseball manager’s Ozzie Guillen’s support for Fidel Castro; a white man is not arrested despite shooting and killing an unarmed black youth in Florida; Alabama defends its law targeting racial minorities; the federal government cracks down on marijuana use in California; the Catholic … [Read more...]
ast week, the Republican Party and Mitt Romney laid down the gauntlet to the Occupy movement by promoting a “Robin Hood-in-reverse” tax and budget plan that makes income inequality even worse. Congressmember Paul Ryan’s proposal takes from the 99% to give even more to the 1%, and also privatizes Medicare.The GOP has decided to challenge head on Occupy’s tapping public anger over … [Read more...]
oday’s Cesar Chavez Day comes during the 50th anniversary of Chavez’s setting off on his seemingly impossible goal of organizing California farmworkers. This period has seen a remarkable growth in Latino political power, electoral clout, and in unionized Latino workers, while the plight of farmworkers has gone backward since the UFW’s high point at the end of the 1970’s.Chavez always … [Read more...]
Mitt Romney bores Republicans, but he is galvanizing progressive support for President Obama. Romney’s attacks on immigrants, refusal to challenge Rush Limbaugh’s calling women sluts, and Dick Cheney-like rhetoric about waging war against Iran have bolstered the President among three key constituencies disappointed with his first term: Latinos, young people, and anti-war … [Read more...]
In accepting a Texas case of a white student challenging racial preferences, the United States Supreme Court is again set to reverse decades of court precedents and impose its own conservative agenda.Since President Obama’s election, the Court has ended decades of campaign finance laws, eliminated damage claims in class action employment discrimination cases, promoted … [Read more...]
Of all of the issues to mobilize around in 2012, Republicans have drawn a line in the sand around contraception. Rising presidential candidate Rick Santorum has made ending birth control central to his presidential campaign, saying it harms women and our society. Mitt Romney has yet to publicly oppose contraception, but given his adoption of virtually every other far right policy, it is only a … [Read more...]
After Occupy Oakland’s efforts to occupy the Kaiser Convention Center were met with police violence, a larger question about the group’s choice of targets was ignored: what part of our democracy entitles people identifying as “Occupy Oakland” to seize a public building for their own purposes? The Kaiser facility is hardly a “public space,” and unlike a bank, financial institution, or … [Read more...]
When a movement completely changes the way a nation looks at itself in its first month – as Occupy did in getting even Republicans to talk about growing income inequality – it’s not easy to quickly come up with a second act. This helps explain the floundering that Occupy exhibited at the end of 2011, which led some to question the movement’s future.But events targeting Wall Street and … [Read more...]
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