Dick Price: “You can take it all the way back to Columbine. We have had 31 mass murders since Columbine. We get upset for six or eight months and then we go back to sleep again.
Safer Foods, Saner Prison Sentencing, No Death Penalty Vie for Voter Attention
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Dick Price: At the American Civil Liberties Union’s Pasadena/Foothills Chapter forum this past Tuesday, September 11th, advocates made their case for three particularly contentious initiatives on California’s November ballot:
Voter Suppression: The Unraveling of American Democracy
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Ruth Rosen: The election looms closer and people who cannot meet the new requirements get fed up, feel helpless, and are less likely to go to the polling place on Election Day.
Do US Prisons Violate European Human Rights Law?
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Angola 3 News: In this interview, Ahsan and Stahl discuss the extreme importance of the upcoming Grand Chamber ruling on a personal level for the six appellants fighting their extradition.
Foreclosure Crisis Discussion Marries Activists Old and New
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t’s an old saw that the Vietnam War was ended not by protests on college campuses, as dramatic as they were, nor when the political elites in the nation’s capital stopped playing with dominoes. Rather, it was only when the war’s relentless horror and pointlessness became the main topic of conversation at Rudy and June’s [...]
ACLU Asks, More Jails or Better Sentencing?
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Dick Price & Sharon Kyle: California’s 58 counties must deal with a sudden influx of state prison inmates, straining their jails and requiring innovative sentencing and supervisory programs.
Conversation with Stephen Rohde on Peace and Justice 10 Years After 9/11
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Robert Link: ICUJP doesn’t have the luxury of pursuing a single issue which can realistically be brought to an end in the short term. Economic, political, sociological, and religious forces in the U.S. are addicted to war.
Soul of a Nation, Audacity of Nope
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The Progressive Caucus and Veterans Caucus present a joint presentation at the California Democratic Party’s E-Board meeting on July 30th.
FBI Probe of VA Crime Should Expand
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Jeff Norman: Now that the FBI is investigating a homicide committed on VA property, federal authorities may also investigate shady land use deals the VA made.
The Assault on Labor: Protecting Worker Rights
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Workers and voters concerned with the increasing attacks on labor should participate in the panel discussion “Assault on Labor” on Tuesday, July 12th, 7 p.m. at Neighborhood Church in Pasadena.
Internment and Detainment for National Security?
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The politics of fear led to the post-Pearl Harbor internment of 120,000 Japanese-Americans yet, not a single one of the interned was ever found to have any connection to the bombing. For them, simply being born Japanese-American was reason enough to be treated like criminals.
Missouri Supreme Court Deciding Undocumented Immigrants’ Child Custody Rights
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Andrea Nill: Ultimately, the only thing more messed up than changing the Constitution to deny the American-born children of undocumented immigrants citizenship is deporting their parents, snagging the U.S. citizen kids, and giving them to an American couple.
ACLU Challenges Arizona Immigration Law
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Andrea Christina Nill: The suit, which represents labor, domestic violence, day labor, human services and social justice organizations, along with ten individuals who would allegedly be subject to harassment or arrest, claims that not only is SB-1070 “un-American,” it’s also unconstitutional.
On SB 1070, Arizona Governor Says She Will Do The ‘Right Thing So That Everyone Is Treated Fairly’
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Andrea Christina Nill: Since the Arizona legislature passed the “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act,” a bill which will probably end up establishing the harshest set of state immigration laws in the country, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer’s phone has been reportedly ringing off the hook with residents encouraging her to either sign or veto Senate Bill 1070. Though Brewer has refused to comment on which action she plans on taking, she did assure attendees of the Arizona Hispanic Chamber of Commerce’s Black and White Ball this Saturday that she will do what is fair.
First Solve Prison Crisis, Then Fix California’s Budget
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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.
ICE Claims It’s Not Legally Responsible For Immigration Detention Death
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Andrea Nill: This week, a judge will decide on whether the federal government bears culpability for another immigration detention slip up: the August 2008 death of Chinese immigrant, Hiu Lui “Jason” Ng. ICE is also arguing that this case should be dismissed on grounds that staffers at the jail at which Ng died are contractors — not government employees.
Reporter Discloses List Of 186 Secret Immigrant Detention Facilities
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Andrea Christina Nill: According to a report published by Jacqueline Stevens in this week’s The Nation, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is confining an unknown number of people in 186 secret, unmarked, and unlisted subfield offices. Since the subfield offices are designed to hold detainees in transit, they are not subject to ICE Detention Standards. As a result, Stevens claims ICE has essentially been able to hold individuals charged with a civil infraction in “conditions approaching those no longer authorized for accused terrorists.”
JPL Employee Privacy Fight Comes to a Head
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For the past two years, a small band of senior scientists and engineers at Pasadena, California’s Jet Propulsion Lab have pursued a lawsuit against their employers at Caltech and NASA to protect themselves—and by extension, all federal employees—against the unreasonable invasions of their privacy under a presidential order signed by former President George W. Bush.
Plugging Pasadena’s School-to-Prison Pipeline
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As Governor Arnold Swartzenegger and the Democratic-controlled state legislature strip education funding wholesale to meet California’s budget collapse, Pasadena’s public school district offers a microcosm of the woes besetting school districts that are already in crisis across the state. Recent months have seen a drumbeat of distressing reports of alarmingly high dropout rates in Pasadena’s [...]
Another U.S. Citizen ‘Accidentally’ Deported
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Earlier this month, U.S. citizen, Irving Palomo, was detained and put in a van headed for Mexico due to an ICE mix-up. A few months ago Mark Lyttle, a U.S. citizen who suffers from mild retardation, was deported to Mexico. Mexican officials then deported him to Honduras, and Honduras deported him to Guatemala. After spending [...]
Prop 8: 18,000 Same-Sex Marriages Hang in Balance at California Supreme Court Hearing
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Within the next week, the California Supreme Court will hear oral arguments to help determine the constitutionality of Proposition 8, the November 2008 election ballot constitutional amendment that removed the right of same-sex couples to legally marry in California. The Court will convene in San Francisco on March 5, at 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. [...]
“No Child Left Behind” Is a Trojan Horse for Pentagon Recruiters: Second in a Three-Part Series
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by Sherwood Ross – The Pentagon has used the No Child Left Behind Act as a Trojan Horse to propagandize vulnerable teenage students, invade their privacy, harass them, and get them to enlist.
U.S. Breaks International Pledge Not to Recruit Children Under 17: First in a Three-Part Series
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by Sherwood Ross – In violation of its pledge to the United Nations not to recruit children into the military, the Pentagon “regularly target(s) children under 17,” the American Civil Liberties Union(ACLU) says.
Obama Delegate Purge: Slash and Burn in California
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By dusk on Wednesday, the California Obama campaign had purged almost all progressive activists from its delegate candidate lists. Names of candidates, people who had filed to run to represent Obama at the August Democratic Party National Convention, disappeared, not one by one, but hundreds at a time, from the Party web site listing the [...]
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Long-time LA Timesman Decries Media Concentration
Justin Chapman: The coming concentration of the media is probably a bigger threat to your civil liberties than anything the government’s doing right now, according to Tim Rutten