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On Monday, the Center for Constitutional Rights filed a request to the U.S. Supreme Court for judicial review of Blum v. Holder, a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. The request, and the history that led up to it, provides a glimpse into the ways in which the free speech rights of political activists continue to be eroded as a result of the defining legal and constitutional framework of our era, the “War on Terror.”
The brainchild of the American Legislative Exchange Council, the AETA was crafted as a direct response to the extraordinary success of an animal rights campaign called Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC). SHAC had effectively employed what its members believed to be legal, constitutionally protected activity to disrupt the business practices of a notorious animal testing corporation accused of engaging routinely in horrific abuses of animals,
» Read more about: Fear for the First: Is Activist Speech Terrorism? »
A Ventura County judge Monday issued a setback to anti-pension zealots who have been working to roll back public employee benefits. The judge’s tentative ruling found fundamental flaws in a ballot measure to cut county employee pensions and concluded that putting it before voters would amount to nothing more than a waste of public tax dollars – a rebuke that must smart among groups who identify themselves as taxpayer advocates.
One of their central tactics has been to stir up resentment among the public, most of whom have seen their own benefits shrivel up over the years, then place measures on the ballot to slash public employee pensions. As Capital & Main’s Gary Cohn reported, anti-tax activists saw this particular Ventura measure as a template for what would be a wave of pension rollback measures.
“I guarantee you that when this passes, in 2016 every ’37 Act county will have this on their ballot,” Ventura County Supervisor Peter Foy said at the time.
» Read more about: Illegal Ballot Measure a Setback for Anti-Pension Activists »
https://vimeo.com/101205760
Alone and Afraid from Capital & Main on Vimeo.
The clock is ticking for six refugee children from El Salvador and Guatemala who are plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit that seeks to compel the Obama administration to ensure access to legal representation for tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors facing deportation proceedings.
The plaintiffs are among the more than 50,000 Central American children who have illegally crossed the border into the Southwestern United States in recent months, fleeing threats of violence by transnational street gangs that arguably exert more effective control over the daily lives of residents in large swathes of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras than those countries’ national governments.
Over a period extending from this month to early next year, the six plaintiffs are scheduled to appear for their own deportation hearings.
» Read more about: Refugee Children Seek Representation in Courts »
The Internet’s Own Boy —the title says it all. Writer-director Brian Knappenberger‘s weak and propagandistic hagiography is as infantilizing to its audience as it is to its subject, and adds no luster to the memory of pioneering programmer and information activist Aaron Swartz, who was 26 when he took his own life in January 2013.
At the time of his suicide, the federal government was prosecuting Swartz on computer crime charges in connection with downloading (but never distributing) nearly five million academic journal articles from the online repository JSTOR, which he had accessed via a computer in a supply closet at MIT. The indictment was patently ludicrous; JSTOR itself had declined to press charges against Swartz. But the Justice Department was determined to make an example of him anyway, as it has repeatedly done with other hackers whom it has harassed and even jailed. That Swartz was gravely wronged by prosecutors Carmen Ortiz and Stephen Heymann is as plain as day.
You can mail a letter anywhere in the domestic United States for just 49 cents. Think about that for a second. Your letter literally can travel thousands of miles – over mountains, across great lakes and through the desert – for less than the cost of a bag of M&M’s.
But some want to outsource the postal services and its workers to giant retail stores such as Staples, which would destroy what is perhaps the greatest bargain still available in America. A recent piece by David Morris in the Huffington Post explains why this is a bad idea.
There is something we can do about it. The American Postal Workers Union has launched a campaign, Stop Staples: The U.S. Mail is Not for Sale, which is garnering strong support from millions of Americans, including teachers. And as a huge seller of notebooks, pens and other school supplies,
Truck drivers in California’s ports have been fighting for decades for rights most workers take for granted: The right to a minimum wage, the right to proper employee classification, and especially the right to form a union. In the wake of the deregulatory wave of the 1980s, downward pressure on trucking companies led to destructive competition, which led first to union-busting, and then to the widespread misclassification of truck drivers as independent contractors. This, despite the fact that legal and factual analyses have shown – theoretically in 2010 and based on a wave of then-recent rulings in 2014 – that these truck drivers are subject to the control and direction of the trucking companies they haul for. (Full disclosure: I was a co-author of the 2014 report.) Under any legal test, these are employee drivers being deprived of their employee rights; their condition has been compared to that of sharecropping and involuntary servitude.
» Read more about: Recent Court Rulings Aid Port Truck Drivers »
This is the first in an occasional series of interviews with California business leaders.
When it comes to shaping the conversation about business in Southern California, few people wield as much influence as Charles Crumpley. As editor of the Los Angeles Business Journal, Crumpley oversees one of the more impressive news operations in the region, garnering numerous awards for the publication during his eight-year tenure. And while the Business Journal is very much a tribune for conventional ideas about business and the economy, Crumpley has been remarkably open-minded about printing other perspectives, including those of activists with a sharp critique of corporate America.
Capital & Main sat down with Crumpley, whose 30-year journalism career has included stints in Kansas City and New Orleans, in the Business Journal‘s Miracle Mile offices to discuss economic inequality,
» Read more about: A Talk With the L.A. Business Journal’s Charles Crumpley »
The charges against several McDonald’s franchises were as familiar as items on a Happy Meals menu: “illegally firing, threatening or otherwise penalizing workers for their pro-labor activities,” to quote the New York Times. What was novel about them was the news, first reported Tuesday by Associated Press, that the National Labor Relations Board’s general counsel had found that the fast-food giant is responsible for these crimes when they are committed by the chain’s individual franchise owners. (Of 181 cases that came before the NLRB, 43 were found to have merit, 64 are still pending investigation and the rest were dismissed.)
This is big – very big. If there is any doubt, look no further than the Wall Street Journal’s headline for the story: McDonald’s Ruling Sets Ominous Tone for Franchisers. The reason for this “ominous” forecast is the knowledge that the NLRB’s findings could establish the principle that the corporation and the chain’s franchise owners are “joint employers,” sharing equal responsibility for their employees’ welfare – and equal blame when workers’ rights are trampled on.
» Read more about: NLRB: McDonald’s Is Responsible for Franchises’ Behavior »
For Oneil Cannon, breaking the color line of L.A.’s lily-white printers’ union didn’t simply mean facing a night of scalding verbal abuse during his first union hall meeting – moments before it began he’d been refused service at knifepoint at a nearby restaurant. Jackie Goldberg says her activist’s DNA was shaped less by Berkeley’s celebrated Free Speech Movement than by a little-noticed women’s conference held the year before the U.C. campus erupted. Peter Douglas’ journey from the frozen roads of war-torn Poland to Redondo Beach’s balmy Esplanade led the father of California’s Coastal Act to become a “radical pagan heretic.”
These and more than 40 other reminiscences by Southern California social activists have been recorded by Julie Thompson and her husband, Brogan de Paor, as part of an ambitious yet shoestring-funded project called the Activist Video Archive. So far the couple’s subjects have also included Haskell Wexler, Cheri Gaulke,
» Read more about: Setting the Record Straight: L.A.’s Activist Video Archive »
Whenever I hear something that sounds a little fishy, I always follow my mom’s advice to consider the source. So when two professors from Temple University touted a study praising the quality and cost effectiveness of private prisons, advocates wanted to know who funded it. Not surprisingly, it turned out that the private prison industry paid for the study, a fact conveniently missing from the professors’ early draft and media appearances.
In the Public Interest’s friend and colleague Alex Friedmann, managing editor of the monthly Prison Legal News and associate director of the Human Rights Defense Center, filed an ethics complaint with Temple University. In addition, ITPI and 15 other organizations demanded that Temple conduct an ethics review.
In response, Temple University has disassociated itself from the study. In addition, the methodology behind the study has also been called out for being misleading and its conclusions for being inaccurate.
I have a friend who is intelligent, thoughtful and holds a responsible position in a major firm. From time to time we exchange ideas about the condition of American society, particularly how the economy shapes our democracy these days. We often agree about the dimensions of the problem, but disagree about what should be done about it. When it comes to the inheritance tax, we stand at opposite poles.
He thinks that what a person has accumulated in their lives is theirs to do with as they please, period. If they want to hide it offshore in the Virgin Islands, fine. If they want to give it all away, fine. And if they want to just pass it along to their children, no problem. As far as he is concerned the 400 who own as much as half the American population can do whatever they want – it’s their money.
I’ve always thought the opposite.
America’s education system is unequal and unfair. Students who live in wealthy communities have huge advantages that rig the system in their favor. They have more experienced teachers and a much lower student-teacher ratio. They have more modern facilities, more up-to-date computer and science equipment and more up-to-date textbooks. They have more elective courses, more music and art offerings and more extracurricular programs. They have better libraries, more guidance counselors and superior athletic facilities.
Not surprisingly, affluent students in well-off school districts have higher rates of high school graduation, college attendance and entry to the more selective colleges. This has little to do with intelligence or ability. For example, 82 percent of affluent students who had SAT scores over 1200 graduate from college. In contrast, only 44 percent of low-income students with the same high SAT scores graduate from college. This wide gap can’t be explained by differences in motivation or smarts.
» Read more about: California’s Public Schools: Separate and Definitely Unequal »
Some of us, who as kids read Edward Everett Hale’s short story, “The Man Without a Country,” might wonder if its cautionary lesson about the dangers of renouncing citizenship could be applied to American corporations. They, after all, have been declared “people” by the Supreme Court – and so if companies, like the Army officer in Hale’s story, turn their backs on their country, do they lose their right to ever set foot on its soil again?
The question begs an answer as the new corporate fad of “inversion” takes off. This is the practice of an American corporation purchasing a smaller foreign one that makes the same products in order to claim the national “citizenship” of the purchased company. By doing so, the U.S. company dodges a tax bill from Uncle Sam without its CEO having to learn a single word of the language of his or her company’s adopted country.
» Read more about: Corporations Avoid Taxes With Inversion Scam »
It was an incredibly busy and rewarding time last week at Netroots Nation in Detroit. Sifting mentally through the countless conversations, workshops, speeches, text messages, Tweets, business cards and campaign “swag” I’ve accumulated, I struggled to find a common thread.
Then I visited the Detroit Industry Murals — one of Diego Rivera’s most famous works of art. Rivera’s amazing fresco murals reflect ideas of duality: contrasting managers and workers, mechanized industry and the natural world, and the positive and destructive potential of science and technology. Rivera beautifully illustrated these concepts between 1932 and 1933 by painting images of biochemical weapons and passenger planes, female fertility figures with South and North American characteristics, doves and hawks, orderly production lines and fiery furnaces.
Then, it clicked. For me, Netroots Nation 2014 has been about the duality of art and war.
» Read more about: Netroots Nation in Detroit: The Art of War and the War of Art »
Talk about a big tent: Carolyn Finney’s new book looks at some important but unexplored terrain in our national parks and conservation movements – the relative absence of African Americans. Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans draws upon the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow laws, pop culture and the environmental justice movement to pose some provocative questions about the racialization of nature.
Was it a coincidence that Congress passed the Wilderness Act in 1964 – the same year as the signing of the Civil Rights Act? Why have environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and Audubon Society remained overwhelmingly white in their memberships? How are African Americans changing the dynamics of environmental preservation?
Finney, an assistant professor with U.C. Berkeley’s Environmental Science Department, will discuss her book and its findings on Tuesday, July 22, 7 p.m., at a signing at Eso Won Books,
» Read more about: Carolyn Finney Discusses ‘Black Faces, White Spaces’ »
When asked by the Los Angeles Times to explain the movement to raise the minimum wage for the city’s hotel workers, one worker said, “At $15 [an hour], we can make it. We can live just a little bit better, not drowning all the time.”
It’s no surprise that hotel workers would be in favor of having raising their hourly minimum wage raised from $9 to $15.37, as is currently being proposed. Nor is it surprising that they’ve found support from the extensive network of liberal organizations and labor unions in the L.A. area. Less predictably, however, many members of L.A.’s business community, ranging from 750 small business owners to shopping mall developers Rick Caruso and the Westfield Group, have endorsed the proposed legislation as well.
In a letter to Councilmember Mike Bonin, Westfield co-CEO Peter Lowy indicated his organization’s support for such a measure. Lowy described Westfield’s experience with the living wage requirements currently in place at Los Angeles International Airport and said that “the continued growth and prosperity of this City is vital not only to [Westfield’s] centers,
» Read more about: L.A. Hotel Workers Move Closer to $15.37 Hourly Minimum Wage »
Isabel Mejia was 17 years old when she arrived in the United States from El Salvador, having fled her home country for reasons even the most hardened immigration opponent might have trouble dismissing. Some local gang members had decided to conscript her as the “gang’s girlfriend” — to force her into a life of sexual slavery. At home, the situation was no better: She had been a victim of domestic sexual violence. Faced with rape, death or flight, she chose to flee.
Today, Isabel (not her real name), now 18, lives in a small apartment in Southern California with her aunt. Her respite is only temporary. After crossing over the Mexican border into Texas, she had been captured by Border Patrol agents and held in a Houston detention facility before being released into her aunt’s care. Some time in the next few months, she will go before an immigration judge and, with the assistance of a pro bono attorney,
As a nation we often talk about the importance of educating our children, but sometimes we talk the talk more than we walk the walk. In Michigan, a year-long investigation conducted by the Detroit Free Press showed that Michigan taxpayers pour nearly $1 billion a year into charter schools but fail to hold the schools accountable.
The investigation found that the lack of oversight allowed charter schools to cheat students out of a good education. The Free Press found “wasteful spending, conflicts of interest, poor performing schools and a failure to close the worst of the worst.”
In Michigan, specifically, the Free Press reports:
I wasn’t sure what to expect when arriving in Detroit, Michigan Wednesday. The city is heavy with symbolism in the American imagination – everything from Motor City and Motown to Broken Dreams and Bankruptcy. A recent article called Detroit “a mixed picture of hope and desolation.” Which side would reveal itself to me?
I craned my neck as the taxi cab sped along a highway. At first, I saw nothing special: clouds low and gray in the sky, SUVs on the road, overpasses and underpasses, and the occasional warehouse or big-box store.
And then I saw them: large, four- or five-bedroom, brick or wood houses alongside the highway. Every house was boarded up, caving in, spray-painted, overgrown with vines, or blackened with fire scars. The cab driver spoke angrily. “See those homes? It’s not safe there — looting and shooting. Do you see those homes?”
I did see them.
» Read more about: Coming Home to Detroit for Netroots Nation »