We Fight Low Information
Victoria Defrancesco Soto: The last thing we should do is keep banging our heads against the D.C. wall or just sit around strategizing for the 2014 or 2016 election. If immigration reform fails at the federal level then the emphasis must move to our state capitals and city councils.
Dan Bluemel: Upset with Wells Fargo’s foreclosure practices, protesters held a demonstration on May Day that briefly shut down one of the bank’s branches in downtown Los Angeles.
Randy Shaw: The President is repeating his own failed script from 2009, once again shifting right just as the GOP is on the ropes and his own base is primed for mobilizing.
Lauren Windsor: I am competing to win a scholarship to an important political media conference, Netroots Nation, and I need your help.
ach year, we ask for your help in developing and organizing the sessions you’ll attend at Netroots Nation. Your submissions will help us create an inclusive and engaging agenda.
Dan Bluemel: Despite government programs designed to improve the situation, the light at the end of the tunnel seems very far indeed for foreclosure victims. Thus the desperate turn to organizations like Occupy Fights Foreclosure..
Randy Shaw: Activists now must write a new script for the post-2012 election by pushing the President to keep his progressive campaign commitments on taxes, the budget, and, most urgently, comprehensive immigration reform, where the time for action is now.
Mark Naison: The transformative role that Occupy activists have played in coordinating relief to the hardest hit victims of Hurricane Sandy has shown me that the Occupy networks that survived the evictions were much stronger than I realized.
Randy Shawo: While Obama draws overwhelming support among African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans, single women and organized labor, some progressives continue to attack him. But with Romney-Ryan posing a dire threat to progressive interests, this criticism should stop until after Election Day.
Randy Shaw: Obama implemented his “most ambitious immigration initiative” in response to both growing Latino political power and the courageous and inspiring grassroots pressure from young DREAM ACTivists.
Cheryl Aichele: Occupy LA Activists hope its chalk-art campaign will hit LAPD in the pocket books and others in their hearts to raise awareness and encourage others to participate.
Ann Robertson and Bill Leumer: The 99% Spring is the latest effort by those close to the Democrats to take advantage of Occupy, but the results were less than spectacular.
Cheryl Aichele: Occupy Fights Foreclosures won the home back of an LA homeowner whose home Bank of America fraudulently foreclosed on and sold, even after dutiful payments on a temporary loan modification were made for over a year.
Cheryl Aichele: Rodriguez asserts that in addition to the threat against Marroquin, Redy used high-pressure tactics to get her sign away her Rights.
Randy Shaw: My chief concern about Occupy’s future is that I do not see enough resources devoted to organizing new people to get involved.
Rudy Acuña: Today the rights of Mexican Americans and immigrants are being blatantly violated by state and local officials in Arizona. Where are the voices of middle-class Latinos? Where is the fight back?
Bruce Reilly: ALEC and for-profit prison lobbyists are fighting to stop the decriminalization of marijuana, to lengthen sentences, eliminate Good Time credits, curtail parole, incarcerate immigrants, maintain mandatory minimums, and increase Three Strikes laws because these efforts will increase their profits. But is this in the public’s best interest?
Cheryl Aischele: Occupy Fights Foreclosures (OFF), a sub-committee of Occupy LA, joined neighbors in the South Adams community to help a widow who fell victim to foreclosure fraud by at least three companies.
Please join peace activist Marcy Winograd, the Goo Goo Dolls’ Mike Malinin, Violinist Lili Haydn and others for the Green Party Music Benefit in Santa Monica.
Shamus Cooke: Occupy has amazing potential in its ability to coordinate actions across a vast country, but the only way to draw in the broader working class is to listen to their issues and fight to achieve their goals. Any other path unnecessarily wastes precious movement fuel.
This week, Fordham professor Mark Naison’s article “The Coming Revolt: When Will the Sleeping Giant Awake?” took top honors as the week’s most read piece.
Tina Dupuy: Livestreamers now feel they’re holding the torch for truth but also nonviolence as a way to build a broad coalition movement. This means they get attacked online and threatened as part of their vocation. You know, just like real journalists.
Vivan Rothstein: In my first act of civil disobedience, I mixed up all the index card files of clients and contracts so no one could figure out who had received which threatening letter, effectively destroying the company’s system of harassment.
Randy Shaw: The Occupy movement could greatly benefit from choosing a similar big target that could engage activists across the world.
Hayden’s arrest is of course just the latest example of both the out-of-control racial profiling and stop and frisk tactics of the NYPD and; its targeting of Anti-Police Terror Activists.
Mark Naison: It’s time that liberals stop trying to scare disillusioned activists with the prospect of a Republican presidency and start trying to scare the White House and the Democratic leadership into doing something to show they are worthy of activists votes.
Stephen Box: As community activists continue to fight for a ban on city park advertising, the Mayor is pursuing an overhaul of LA’s sign ordinance that will create “innovative revenue sources” such as wilderness advertising.
Sharon Kyle: Kwazi Nkrumah, a long-time civil rights activist, has been arrested in Long Beach where the Occupy Movement was gathering as part of “Occupy the Ports”, a coordinated West Coast port shutdown.
Bruce Reilly: I came to New Orleans knowing but a few criminal justice activists, legal professionals, and some friends of friends. It was good to have folks who knew I had spent twelve years locked in prison.
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.
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.”
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.”
PCL offers monthly Open House Events on the 2nd Saturday at 2pm and 3rd Thursday at 6pm. Click here to learn more.
Pat Robertson: Words Matter
Nomiki Konst and Lindsay Bubar: After a broadcast last week, Pat Robertson’s millions of viewers now think it is acceptable to beat their wives. You heard that right. Robertson suggested that one of his viewers, having some challenges in his marriage, should beat his wife.