Tina Dupuy: If liberals were doing to their country what extremist tea party Republicans are doing to theirs – it would be called unpatriotic. A whole tsunami of sound bites would sweep the country calling for the sabotage to stop.
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.
Reimagining Capitalism: An End to Mythologies
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John Peeler: The economy, like the polity, ought to be democratically controlled. Democracy should operate at the level of the firm as well as the community: employees should be owners.
First Amendment of the United States Constitution
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Elizabeth Knipe: Of course, this most free-wheeling of all the Amendments in the Bill of Rights is probably the most controversial. The old saying, one man’s poison is another man’s remedy might apply here.
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.
Dangerous Distortions: Anti-Abortion Fascists and Third World Allies
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Sikivu Hutchinson and Diane Arellano: As with the abortion-as-black-genocide billboards unleashed by the far right Radiance Foundation, the Latino billboards evoke reductive hyper-religious narratives of sinning promiscuous bad women and “breeder” good women.
States with Arizona-style Immigration Laws Face Costly Legal Battles
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Seth Hoy: Despite repeated warnings from business groups, tourism and industry boards and advocates about the hefty price tag attached to Arizona-style legislation, state lawmakers continued to push “get tough” copycat proposals.
Election Results March 2011
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Election results for the March 8, 2011 election in Los Angeles are almost completely tallied. The results shown here were obtained from the Los Angeles City Clerk’s office. As newer information becomes available, this post will be updated. Check here for continuing updates.
Hiding Military Sexual Trauma
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John Lasker: The mysterious deaths of female soldiers coincide with an increase in reported sexual violence against women in the military.
Cops Are Missing the Bad Guys While Profiling the Black Guys
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David Love: Reading 12 Angry Men: True Stories of Being a Black Man in America Today made me angry, not because the subject matter was brand new to me, but because it was far too familiar – not only as a black man, but also as a human rights advocate who worked with police brutality victims and their families back in the 1990s, and decided to go to law school as a result.
ACLU Pasadena-Foothills: Bullying and Our Children
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ACLU-SC Pasadena-Foothill Chapter Presents: Bullying and Our Children, a discussion with James Gilliam Deputy Executive Director of the ACLU-SC March 8, 7 p.m;
Womanist and Saying Who We Are
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Rev. Irene Monroe: The secular use of “womanist” is by African-American women who have either left the Black Church because of its gender bias and homophobia, or who do not come from the Black Church religious experience. These women use the term to identify a culturally specific form of women-centered politics and theory.
New Politics, Patriotic Capitalism
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Brent Budowsky: This is the first in a series of columns that will propose that progressive populist Democrats and conservative populist Republicans unite behind new economic policies that I will call patriotic capitalism.
Winner-Take-All
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John Peeler: “Winner-Take-All Politics” provides a well-documented analysis of how the United States government, since the 1970s, has systematically enriched the top one percent of the country at the expense of everyone else. Written by distinguished political scientists, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, the book shows how big business interests ratcheted up their national organizations to defend their interests in national policy debates. In addition to employing far stronger lobbying, these interests created think-tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, designed to challenge the liberal conventional wisdom of the New Deal and Great Society and replace it with an explicitly conservative, free-market-oriented way of thinking.
Amazing Germany’s Declining Unemployment: How Do They Do It?
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Steve Hill: the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel not only pursued different economic policies than the Obama administration, but Germany also has a greater degree of economic democracy than the U.S.
Heretics, Humanism, and the Hood
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Sikivu Hutchinson: The mental health crisis amongst African Americans is a devastating indicator of racial and social inequity, of which the prayer as therapy epidemic is an insidious symptom. Frederick Douglass once wrote, “I prayed for twenty years and received no answer until I prayed with my legs.” What would Douglass, a trailblazing male feminist, have made of the brutal ironies of twenty first century black America?
Our Holocaustic Global Empire: Wars, Famines, Slavery
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Gary Corseri: Each of the 16 authors in this collection of contemporary essays and articles about our New-World-Order socio-political-economic mess are digging at the roots of evil; each exposes another layer of lies, frauds, half-truths, myths or cover-ups about the way our global system actually operates.
Re-introducing Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Women of African Descent
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Rev. Irene Monroe: After nearly two decades of LBT women of African descent’s invisibility on a national level Zuna is causing a revolution by taking the bold step in this era of single-issue queer politics to remind us all we, too, matter.
Free Speech about Saggy Pants
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Steve Hochstadt: The most unfortunate recent development in American politics is that Constitutional questions cannot be discussed calmly. Too many people care less about defending our Constitution than using it as a club to smash political opponents.
Is Social Media Useless for Change?
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Social networking websites can play and are playing an important role in finding and connecting people who are beginning to think and feel similar things. They can help participants deepen their understanding and form common perspectives. They can help inform those who use them of possible courses of action.
Will Militarization of the First Amendment Undermine the Republic?
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Ivan Eland: Why has this reverence for the military arisen and become patriotic when it runs counter to the nation’s founders’ suspicions of large standing armies and foreign military adventures? A skeptic would attribute the excessive exaltation to guilt.
Time for a More Militant American Left?
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Sylvia Moore: The American left must be feared and respected by the politicians — instead of ignored and insulted. The way to do that is to be defiant in who we are as liberals and what we stand for.
Repubs Winning, Dems Whining
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Michael Sigman: The Right’s genius for manipulating people’s sense of grievance — combined with liberals’ weak brew of tepid policy proposals and corporate coziness — leads ordinary voters to cast their ballots against their own economic interests time and time again.
PCL offers monthly Open House Events on the 2nd Saturday at 2pm and 3rd Thursday at 6pm. Click here to learn more.
Racism in Review, A Look Back and a Look Ahead
Jessie Daniels: Amid all the racist flame throwing of 2010, politicians managed to achieve a bipartisan consensus when it came to one boogeyman. China-bashing profilerated on both sides of the aisle as candidates blamed the ascendant superpower for America’s economic woes