Legal Activists of Color

Critical Concepts of Race Privilege

2011-10-08T15:31:00.001-07:00

Critical Concepts of Race Privilege1

In the mid-1980s, two sociologists affiliated with Ethnic Studies developed and promulgated the

theory of racial formation, which explains that race is a social construct, a concept that people impute

with evolving meanings as societies change historically.2 The theory of racial formation is foundational to

understanding the centrality of race and racism in the United States and offers a significant challenge to

other paradigms of race, including those that are biologistic or based on constructs of ethnicity, class, or

nation.

A few years later, some feminist scholars adapted critiques of patriarchy to extend critical

understandings of race in the United States. They conceptualized white privilege—the sometimes hidden

yet significant motivation for the continued subordination of minority social groups in the United States.3

By the early 1990s, feminist legal scholars had extended critical knowledge about race and racism by

naming the transparency phenomenon—a key component of white privilege that explains why most

people who are socially constructed as white tend not to think about how race affects their daily lives but

instead think of race as something that other people have.4 Race is a colored thing; race marks some

people’s differences from the (putative) norm.5

Responding to these ideas about race and racism, critical race theorists critiqued and supplemented

the concepts of white privilege and the transparency phenomenon to extend critical comprehension of the

social construction of whiteness and the maintenance of white supremacy in the United States.6 One of their

several important insights is that the transparency phenomenon incompletely explains white privilege:

throughout the United States’ racial formations, law has naturalized the constitutive privileges of racial

whiteness. By statute and judicial opinion, legislators and judges reified the social construction of racial

whiteness as a biological reality that is confirmed by everyday common sense.7

These critical concepts can help people who are dedicated to effecting social justice better

understand the current era of “colorblind constitutionalism”8 promulgated by the Renquist Court and to

intervene against this aspect of the neoconservative project (shared by the Federalist Society), which

directly supports the United States’ racial hierarchy. Additionally, developing critical understanding of how

race has been socially constructed to privilege the white social group by subordinating all social groups

defined as non-white and dubbed minorities may help people of good will work together successfully

across the diverse categories of social difference to which we are all subject, e.g., age, dis/ability, gender,

race, sexuality, etc. Developing such critical understandings is a project of critical race praxis and

interracial justice.9

1 Prepared by Marc-Tizoc González for the “Race Privilege Town Hall Meeting,” held on Wednesday January 26,

2005 at the U.C. Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall) and hosted by the Center for Social Justice as part of its Spring

2005 “Privilege Series,” with minor revisions on October 11, 2006 for the “Introduction to LatCrit Theory:

Scholarship and Practical Applications” panel of the Tenth Annual National Latina/o Law Student Conference.

2 MICHAEL OMI & HOWARD WINANT, RACIAL FORMATION: FROM THE 1960S TO THE 1980S (1987).

3 See e.g., Peggy McIntosh, White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, in Working Paper 189: White

Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming To See Correspondences through Work in Women’s

Studies (1988), available at http://www.utoronto.ca/acc/events/peggy1.htm.

4 See BARBARA J. FLAGG,WAS BLIND, BUT NOW I SEE:WHITE RACE CONSCIOUSNESS & THE LAW (1998); STEPHANIE

M. WILDMAN, ET. AL., PRIVILEGE REVEALED: HOW INVISIBLE PREFERENCE UNDERMINES AMERICA (1996); Stephanie

M. Wildman, with Adrienne D. Davis, Language and Silence: Making Systems of Privilege Visible, 35 SANTA CLARA

L. REV. 881 (1995); Barbara J. Flagg, “Was Blind, But Now I See”: White Race Consciousness and the Requirement

of Discriminatory Intent, 91 MICH. L. REV. 953 (1993); and Trina Grillo & Stephanie M. Wildman, Obscuring the

Importance of Race: The Implications of Making Comparisons Between Racism and Sexism (or Other-Isms), 1991

DUKE L.J. 397 (1991). Professor Wildman was the first director of Boalt’s CSJ. She now teaches at the University of

Santa Clara School of Law where she directs its Center for Social Justice and Public Service.

5 See Angela Harris, Race and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory, 42 STAN. L. REV. 582, 604 (1990).

6 See e.g., IAN F. HANEY LÓPEZ,WHITE BY LAW (1996).

7 Id. at 160-64.

8 See Neil Gotanda, A Critique of “Our Constitution is Colorblind”, 44 STAN. L. REV. 1 (1991).

9 See Eric K. Yamamoto, Critical Race Praxis: Race Theory and Political Lawyering Practice in Post-Civil Rights

America, 95 MICH. L. REV. 821 (1997); and Eric Yamamoto, Rethinking Alliances: Agency, Responsibility and

Interracial Justice, 3 ASIAN PAC. AM. L.J. 33 (1995).

ALABAMA MANIFESTO

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ALABAMA MANIFESTO

The United People of Color Caucus (TUPOCC) of the National Lawyer's Guild (NLG) is an alliance of law

students, legal workers, attorneys and other people of color within the NLG community. The necessity of

such an organization is borne from the historical context of the capitalist United States where economic

prowess is dependent on the furthered and continued subjugation of people of color, women, the poor,

queers and other oppressed people. We are dedicated to fostering and supporting the growth and

empowerment of all people of color, particularly within the organization of the NLG. We believe that

meaningful social change and actual justice can only be attained when people of color and all other

beleaguered communities are more than mere afterthoughts. Equality must be woven throughout the fabric

of the organization. We seek to further educate ourselves and inform the larger NLG community about the

issues that affect us and investigate the relationship of these issues to social justice. We strongly believe

that this work cannot be done unaided, and we encourage support from our allies throughout the NLG in

furtherance of our goals. We wish to provide all people of color opportunities in support of these goals, and

when such opportunities are not available, to work with our associates and allies to create them. We seek to

unite ourselves, represent our communities, achieve our potential, and function as a powerful force within

the NLG, our chapters, schools, communities, the United States of America and the global population.

The United People of Color Caucus (TUPOCC) of the NLG has a multi-point strategy that we shall use to

advance our mission:

1. Elect students of color and people of color into leadership positions within the NLG

2. Demand that white and privileged Guild members take accountability for their racism and other

oppressive behaviors by joining us in examining and effectively changing the culture of the NLG.

Together we believe that we can accomplish this goal by:

a. Meeting as people of color regularly to deal with oppression and other issues we uniquely

experience as people of color

b. Encouraging all members who are not of this caucus to regularly attend meetings of the Anti-

Racism Committee, or preferably, to join such committees.

c. Institutionalize an anti-racist agenda by creating policies in favor of and beneficial to

eliminating racism and other oppressions. (e.g. making anti-racism an active and prioritized

component of the National Convention)

3. Alter the focus of the NLG by learning how to be accountable to the communities that it seeks to support

and protect.

Membership

Membership is open to all members of the NLG community who self-identify as people of color. There will

be no arbitrary exclusion from membership on the basis of sexuality, religion, gender, gender presentation or

identity, sexual orientation, disability or age. All other members of the NLG are invited to work with and

support TUPOCC as allies in the pursuit of true justice.

READING LIST FOR TUPOCC DISCUSSION GROUP AT 2011 NATIONAL LAWYERS GUILD CONVENTION IN PHILADELPHIA, PA.

2011-10-08T15:11:00.000-07:00

READING LIST FOR TUPOCC DISCUSSION GROUP AT 2011 NATIONAL LAWYERS GUILD CONVENTION IN PHILADELPHIA, PA.

TUPOCC Alabama Manifesto

Marc-Tizoc Gonzalez, “Critical Concepts of Race Privilege”

Andrea Smith, “Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy: Rethinking Women of Color Organizing” in Color of Violence: The Incite! Anthology (Incite! Women of Color Against Violence eds., South End Press 2006)

Julie A. Su and Eric K. Yamamoto, “Critical Coalitions: Theory and Praxis” in Crossroads, Directions and a New Critical Race Theory (Francisco Valdes, Jerome McCristal Culp, and Angela P. Harris eds., Temple University Press 2002)

Francisco Valdes, “Outsider Scholars, Critical Race Theory, and 'Outcrit' Perspectivity: Postsubordination Vision as Jurisprudential Method” in Crossroads, Directions and a New Critical Race Theory (Francisco Valdes, Jerome McCristal Culp, and Angela P. Harris eds., Temple University Press 2002) [redacted]

Mari Matsuda, “Chapter 7: Standing Beside My Sister, Facing the Enemy” from Where is Your Body (Beacon Press, 1996)

FURTHER READING BY THEME

We thought we'd make available to you this list of the other articles we considered for discussion; and for your convenience, we grouped them by theme. It by no means represents a definitive reading list on the themes listed.

Racial Formation/Theories of Race

Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the U.S. (1986)

Ian Haney López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (NYU Press 1996)

Ian Haney Lopez, "The Social Construction of Race" 29 Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 1 (1994)

Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 106 Harv. L. Rev. 1709 (1993)

Devon W. Carbado and Mitu Gulati, “The Fifth Black Woman”, 11 J. Contemp. Legal Issues 701 (2001)

Devon W. Carbado and Mitu Gulati, “Working Identity”, 85 Cornell L. Rev. 1259 (2000)

Intersectionality, Multidimensional Analysis, Coalitions

Lisa Kahaleole Hall, "Compromising Positions" in Beyond a Dream Deferred: Multicultural Education and the Politics of Excellence (Becky W Thompson and Sangeeta Tyagi eds., 1993)

Herb Green, "Turning the Myths of Black Masculinity Inside/Out" in Names We Call Home: Autobiography on Racial Identity (Becky Thompson and Sangeeta Tyagi eds., 1996)

Kimberle Crenshaw, "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics" 1989 U. Chi. Legal F. 139 (1989)

Adrien Wing, "Brief Reflections towards a Multiplicative Theory and Praxis of Being, in Critical Race Feminism: A Reader 27 (Adrien Wing ed., NYU Press, 1997)

Francisco Valdes, Queers, Sissies, Dykes and Tomboys: Deconstructing the Conflation of "Sex," "Gender" and "Sexual Orientation" in Euro-American Law and Society, 83 Cal. L. Rev. 1 (1995)

Francisco Valdes, "Legal Reform and Social Justice: An Introduction to LatCrit Theory, Praxis and Community" (2003), available at http://www.latcrit.org/latcrit/publications/monographs/lcfvenglish.pdf

Role of Lawyers, Legal Activists, and Academics

Sumi Cho & Robert Westley, “Historicizing Critical Race Theory’s Cutting Edge: Key Movements that Performed the Theory”, in Crossroads, Directions and a New Critical Race Theory 32 (Francisco Valdes, et al. eds., 2002)

Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller & Kendall Thomas, Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement (New Press 1996)

Mari Matsuda, "Looking to the Bottom: Critical Legal Studies and Reparations" 22 Harv. C.R.-C.L. L. Rev. 323 (1987)

Richard Delgado, "The Imperial Scholar: Reflections on a Review of Civil Rights Literature" 132 U. Pa. L. Rev. 561 (1984)

Derrick A. Bell, Jr., "Serving Two Masters: Integration Ideals and Client Interests in School Desegregation Litigation" 85 Yale L. J. 470 (1976)

TUPOCC Stipend Awardees

2011-10-08T15:09:00.000-07:00

Dear friends:

We're writing to all of you - awardees of the TUPOCC travel stipend for 2011 - to send our warm greetings, and to begin a conversation that we hope to continue with you next week at the NLG Law for the People Convention in Philadelphia.

First, thank you for reaching out to participate in this convention and to share with us your commitment to organizing and eradicating oppression. You represent a group of diverse legal activists of color - law students, legal workers, and recent graduates - from different parts of the country and the world, engaged in organizing and solidarity work in immigration, education rights, self-determination and indigenous rights, human rights, criminal defense, international law, juvenile justice, civil rights, racial justice, LGBTQIA rights, environmental justice, prisoner rights, labor and employment - the list goes on. We are very excited to meet with you at the convention and to give all of you an opportunity to connect with each other and with TUPOCCers who are involved in the same kind of work that you are. Before then, please don't hesitate to reach out to us if you have any questions about the Convention, TUPOCC, or the Guild.

Building a Stronger, More Accountable Movement

As you know, part of the travel stipend process this year involves engaging in thought and discussion prior to the Convention about anti-oppression principles to which TUPOCC, as a caucus of legal activists of color in the National Lawyers Guild, is committed. TUPOCC formed as a caucus within the NLG in 2005 at the annual convention in Birmingham, Alabama. At the time, legal activists of color came together out of a pressing need to address racial justice and anti-oppression within the NLG. In other words, the NLG, like other organizations in the Left, must work actively to ensure that the anti-oppression principles we fight for in the courts or on the streets are reflected within the movement and within our organization

The TUPOCC travel stipend is part of changing the fabric of the Guild. Encouraging TUPOCCers to run for positions of leadership is another part of that process. Ensuring that anti-subordination principles are internalized at the national leadership level, during our convention, and in the work that Guilders do is another important part of that movement.

Another very important part of TUPOCC's work involves creating a space for legal activists of color to come together. On Saturday, October 15, from 9 to 12, TUPOCC will be convening our annual TUPOCC session for legal activists of color. During that time, we gather to organize as legal activists of color to connect and heal with each other, build skills that we can use in movement and organizing work, and create a sense of unity amongst each other, so that we can rely on each other, as a network, as we move forward in this work together.

This year, our session is entitled "Critical Race Theory and Community-Based Activism: Building a Stronger, More Accountable Movement." The goal of the session is to help all of us take a closer look at the ways in which we can strengthen our activism through an anti-oppression analysis and practice.

Max Rameau - Take Back the Land
We are very honored to have Max Rameau join us as a presenter and comrade for the TUPOCC session on Saturday morning! Max is a Pan-African theorist and organizer. In the summer of 2006, in response to the severe housing and gentrification crisis impacting low income communities, Max helped form what would become Take Back the Land (http://takebacktheland.org). The organization took over a vacant lot in the Liberty City section of Miami and built a full urban shantytown, housing 150 otherwise homeless people in all, until a suspicious fire burned the settlement to the ground. Afterwards, Take Back the Land shifted attention to vacant government owned and foreclosed homes, "liberating" them and moving families in, without permission from the government.

In 2008, Max authored Take Back the Land: Land, Gentrification and the Umoja Village Shantytown, recounting the experiences and political theory behind the action. In 2009, organizations from across the country began expressing interest in Take Back the Land style actions and the organization went national.

Max will spend time with all of us at the TUPOCC session to discuss his experiences in organizing as an activist of color, with reflections upon the importance of the movement being led by impacted communities.

Critical Race Theory and Critical Coalitions

In addition to hearing and learning from Max, TUPOCCers will also facilitate, in the same session, a discussion of core principles of Critical Race Theory and related movements that have been developed by scholars of color to help identify, examine, and dismantle manifestations of racism and subordination in the legal profession and in the communities that we serve. The core principles, perspectives and tools that we are going to examine during our session include (1) identifying manifestations of white supremacy, (2) the importance of working in critical coalitions, and (3) organizing around intersectionality and multidimensional visions of justice.

These tools lie at the heart of what it means to organize for justice as a radical legal activist of color. They apply to the ways in which we read and dissect the "law" and interact in the legal "profession," the ways that we listen to and receive direction from those we represent, the ways that we identify and develop legal strategies to reflect the needs and leadership of the communities we serve, and the ways that we engage in the movement.

Reading Materials and Resources

In advance of the convention, we ask that you take the time to read the following attached materials. Each of these address, in some way, the principles we highlight above. Also attached is the Alabama Manifesto, TUPOCC's founding document drafted after the Birmingham convention when TUPOCC formed. You'll notice that TUPOCC was committed from its inception to organizing along principles we identify here. We also hope to send to you, in the next few days, some excerpts from Max's writings that also highlight these principles.

These materials are, by no means, an exhaustive list of resources- but they begin a discussion that we will expand upon at the convention. While reading these materials, please think about what they mean to you - jot down thoughts, ideas, or questions. Please feel free to respond to this list with thoughts or ideas about the readings, and to begin the discussion ahead of the convention with your comrades. As always, please feel free to contact us ahead of time with questions!

We will be in touch again as we lead up to the convention, with additional information about how you can connect with other Guilders and TUPOCCers engaged in movement work.

Until then, and in solidarity,

Ranya Ghuma and Malika Chatterji
TUPOCC Co-chairs

APR 30 MAY DAY PARTY (Fundraiser for TUPOCC)

2011-04-11T12:06:00.001-07:00

APR 30 MAY DAY PARTY (Fundraiser for TUPOCC)

Date & Time: Saturday April 30, 2011 doors open 6pm, program starts 7pm, party goes to midnight

Location: Space Lounge located at Saturn Café, 2175 Allston Way, Berkeley, California

Suggested donation: $15 (please donate more if you can afford to, NOTAFLOF)

Description:

TUPOCC will host a party and fundraiser in honor of May Day and in commemoration of what is known as International Workers Day. The event will feature musicians, performers, artists, and speakers on the theme of May Day, racial justice, immigration, and workers. There will be DJs, dancing, beer, and kombucha on tap. Raffles for great prizes from local businesses and organizations throughout the night.

About TUPOCC:
Proceeds from the event go to the United People of Color Caucus (TUPOCC). TUPOCC was founded in 2005 by a small group of diverse NLG law students of color. We are dedicated to fostering and supporting the growth and empowerment of all people of color, and particularly
legal activists of color inside and outside of the NLG. We believe that an injury to one is an injury to all, and to this end, believe all forms of oppression need to be dismantled before any of us can
reach true liberation. Since 2005, we’ve grown to hundreds of members.

The NLG was founded in 1937 as an association of progressive lawyers created as an organization working in the service of the people and committed to the concept that human rights are more sacred than property interests.

Solidarity with the UC San Diego Black Student Union and the March 4 Strike to Defend Public Education

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With social struggle erupting repeatedly in California, it seems vital for TUPOCC -- The United People of Color Caucus of the National Lawyers Guild -- to step up our organizing of people of color with "left, radical, progressive" (you name it) political principles and commitments to become lawyers and other legal workers who truly "serve the people."

What are the distinctive qualities, sensitivities, skills, etc. that people bring to lawyering when they come from a subjugated community -- whether it be a community shaped by race, gender, sexuality, ability, age, national origin, citizenship, religion or some other salient dimension of social power and identity?

How can our identities help us become the best, most impactful and empowering social justice advocates and community-based lawyers?

How can our identities, imagined and practiced in principled ways that strike against "every possibility of oppression" and cultivate love, joy and community for all our people, help us resist becoming incorporated into the larger system that apportions social justice in for-profit "civil rights" lawyering or the "non-profit industrial complex?"

These are the questions that TUPOCC has been posing for six years now, and 2010 is the time for us to get down in ever more serious ways -- primarily by getting to know ourselves and each other better, so we can share the trust necessary for any meaningful collaboration.

Local TUPOCC gatherings from now until late June, are a must. Our proud beautiful sisters and brothers in the UC San Diego Black Student Union, who have been resisting another outburst of old-style white supremacy, are showing us that we need to get down locally and regularly.

Similarly, all our relations across (and beyond) California, who have marched, rallied and protested vibrantly today against the ancien regime and its myriad vested interests, in order to call for solidarity across the many social differences that divide the people and to demand that the state prioritize our fundamental rights to dignified labor, education, healthcare, liberty and welfare, are calling us to organize ourselves more deeply and thoroughly than ever.

In June 2010, the US Social Forum will gather gente de corazón y conciencia (people of heart and awareness) across the United States of America. We will gather in Detroit -- Motown, Motor City baby -- in order to know each other better and build principled, powerful multi-dimensional social movements for justice.

TUPOCC must be there. What say you? Digame (talk to me).

How to vote for Teague as Exec. VP of NLG

2009-11-02T08:56:00.001-08:00

UPDATE

The National Office is in the process of sending post cards (not mail ballots) to current NLG members who did not vote at the Convention. The postcards contain instructions on how to vote online, or to request a mail ballot if preferred.

Many of us voted at the plenary in Seattle, but with the Executive Vice President election being contested, voting goes to all membership to be completed by mail-in ballot. Only current, dues-paying NLG members are eligible to vote. If you haven't received your ballot in the mail yet, you should receive it from the NLG National Office by November 17. If you believe you are a current, dues-paying member and have not received a ballot by mistake, please contact the National Office at nlgno@nlg.org.

It's hard to find an exact description of how this election-by-mail works, but here is the appropriate excerpt from the NLG By-laws:

Section 8.3 Mail or Electronic Ballot Voting Procedure
The following voting procedure * * *
(a) Mail or electronic ballots shall be mailed or electronically posted within 30 days of the last day of the National Convention to current dues paid members at their last address, electronic mail address (email) on record at the National Office (NO), or posted on a secure section of the NLG website created for voting purposes by the NO.
(b) Ballots cast must be returned to the NO by First Class U.S. Mail postmarked not later than the 21st day after the date the ballots were mailed to the membership or when
electronically posted to email or on the NLG website. The ballot shall prominently specify the date by which it must be postmarked returned or replied to the NO to be counted.
(c) The NO shall be responsible for vetting ballots to ensure they were cast by current dues paid members only.

¡En La Lucha! Endorsement of Teague Briscoe for NLG Executive Vice President

2009-11-02T06:39:00.001-08:00

Greetings comrades:

¡TUPOCC is endorsing the candidacy of Teague Briscoe and calling on all allies to do the same!

TUPOCC endorses Teague Briscoe for the following reasons:

Teague has the experience, passion and intelligence to lead the Guild in the second decade of the 21st century. President of the SF-Bay Area NLG Chapter, the largest staffed NLG chapter, for the past year, Teague has proven her dedication, strength of character, and ability to lead. Teague has national experience, having already served two years on the NEC--and on its Executive Committee--as Student National VP (SNVP) from 2005-07. The year before her election as SNVP, she raised $8,000 as the Law Student Vice President of the NLG-SF. As NLG-SF president, she helped raised $20,000 in foundation grants for her chapter's strategic planning process.

Appealing broadly to a diverse array of constituencies, Teague has the charisma, coalition-building skills and know-how to make the NEC, and its EC, become the cooperative efficient collective that we need at our highest leadership in the Guild. She has the vision to grow new membership in innovative and principled coalitions that will realize the relevancy of the NLG in the 21st century, helping us chart its way to truly become the legal servant of a massive people's movement working towards the eradication of injustice and the liberation of us all.

In deciding on candidates, you may hear discussion about "experience" and "ability." Teague brings both to the table. She has spent two years as part of a strategic planning committee: first raising funds and then selecting a consultant. With that consultant, she has spent a year contemplating the relevancy of the NLG. Where are we? How have we gotten here? Where do we want to go? Teague believes we need to ask these questions at every level of the organization. The skills and lessons she has learned as president of the NLG-SF chapter can and need to be applied at the national level.

We urge you to also consider her creativity, passion and commitment to people's movements. She is active in the San Francisco Immigrant Rights Defense Committee, was part of coalition to stop cut to welfare in Alameda County, was one of the first members of the Oakland City ID Card Coalition which saw Oakland City Council pass legislation so that all its residents can carry identification, and sits on the San Francisco Homeless Rights Project with the ACLU, Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, Bay Area Legal Aid, East Bay Community Law Center, and the Coalition on Homelessness.

Finally, we ask you to consider the principles to which this organization has committed itself as it moves towards supporting and developing young leaders of color in the NLG. Teague is part of a movement of young, radical legal activists of color coming from the community and serving the community. She is a dedicated member of TUPOCC. She believes in the power of a radical, legal activist organization standing in solidarity with sisters and brothers who oppose injustice, and that belief and love shines in everything that she does!

Teague's candidate statement is below. Please join us in supporting her candidacy!

In solidarity,

Karen Jo Koonan, past NLG President, Past Legal Worker VP*
Barbara Dudley, past NLG President*
Marjorie Cohn, past NLG President*
Russell Bloom, NEC member/NLG Executive Vice President*
Tory Gavito, NEC member/TUPOCC Co-Chair*
Marc-Tizoc Gonzales, NEC member/TUPOCC Co-Chair*
Renee Quintero Sanchez, NEC Member/Far West Regional Vice President, LA-Chapter Board Member, Founding TUPOCC Co-Chair*
Ranya Ghuma, NEC Member/ Mid-Atlantic Regional Vice President, Maryland NLG Chapter Co-Chair, Founding TUPOCC Co-Chair*
James M. Branum, NEC Member/ Texoma Regional Vice President, Military Law Task Force Co-Chair
Carl Williams, NEC Member/Northeast Regional Vice President*
Azadeh Shahshahani, NEC Member/Southeast Regional Vice President & International Committee Co-Chair*
Dan Spalding, NEC Member/National Vice President, Former Legal Worker Representative, Midnight Special Law Collective Member*
Michael Flynn, NEC member/Anti-Racism Committee Co-Chair *
Garrett Wright, NEC member/Anti-Racism Committee Co-Chair*
Aliya Karmali, NEC member/Anti-Sexism Committee Co-Chair, NLG-SF Board member, Former Law Student Vice Present (NLGSF)*
Stephanie Morin-Taylor, NEC member/Anti-Sexism Committee Co-Chair, NLG-NY Board member*
Nikhil Shah, NLG-LA Board member*
Steve Bingham, NLGSF Board member*
Brenna Bell, Former NextGen Co-Chair*
Ashlee Albies, Former NextGen Co-Chair*
David Waggoner, NLG-SF Vice-President member, Former NEC member/National Queer Committee Co-Chair , Former co-Student NVP*
Anne Befu, Former NEC member/National Queer Committee Co-Chair, Former TUPOCC Co-Chair, Former NLG-SF Chapter Board Member*
Matt Nelson, Former NEC member/Past TUPOCC Co-Chair, incoming NLG-SF board member*
Zafar Shah, Former NEC member/Past TUPOCC Co-Chair*
Sara Sturtevant, Former NEC member/Past National Queer Committee Co-Chair*
Robert Bloom, NLG-SF chapter member*
Maunica Sthanki, Former NEC member/Past Student National Vice President, Founding TUPOCC member*
Kerry Mclean, Former NEC member/Past Anti-Sexism Committee Co-Chair, Africa SubCommittee Founder and Chair, NLG-NY Board member*
Christina Alicia Varner, past NLG-SF board member*
Christine Stouffer, NLG-SF Immigration Committee Co-Chair, past NLG-SF board member*
Katy Schuman Clemens, Former NEC member/Past Queer Caucus Co-Chair*
Laura Raymond, Past NLG National Student Organizer*

*For identification purposes only.

Teague Briscoe, Candidate for Exec. VP of National Lawyers Guild

2009-10-31T09:52:00.001-07:00

Teague Briscoe, Bay-area Chicana Activist/Lawyer and former NLG Student VP, is running for Executive Vice President of the NLG. Below is Teague's candidate statement.

"At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. . . . We must strive every day so that this love of living humanity will be transformed into actual deeds, into acts that serve as examples, as a moving force." – Che Guevara
Sisters and Brothers:
I humbly submit my name as a candidate for the position of Executive Vice President of the National Lawyers Guild. I do so out of a space of great love – love for the struggle, love for those who oppose injustice, and love for the NLG’s history. I believe in the importance of a national organization of legal advocates embodying that struggle by challenging and inspiring ourselves to be better advocates and activists. My commitment to you is to honor the past, present and future of the NLG by approaching the EVP position with perspectives informed by my experiences as an activist and with an eye towards promoting solidarity amongst our members, so that we may advance in our mission to work tirelessly as the legal arm of the movement.
I currently serve as President of the NLG’s San Francisco Bay Area chapter, the country’s largest staffed chapter. I was instrumental in securing $20,000 in foundation grants for strategic planning. Our chapter has embarked on a process that brings members across generation, class, and race together.
As President, I work closely with executive director, Carlos Villarreal, to advance our deficit reduction plan. Like the national office, the NLGSF chapter is experiencing the effects of a depression economy. At Finance, CLE, Strategic Planning, membership, and Board meetings, Carlos and I abide by the principles of effective meetings. In doing so, we foster a board culture that is productive and non-hostile. I look forward to bringing these skills to the NEC.
During my presidency, I worked diligently at assembling a diverse board. Prior to serving as President, I was Vice-President of the chapter from 2007-2008 and Secretary from 2006-2007. My NLGSF EC experience has taught what an EC can accomplish as a strong unit, embodying the diversity of communities that are resented in our organization. I also bring to the table experience representing the interests of NLG students at the national level. From 2005-2007, I served on the NEC EC as National Law Student Vice President. In 2004-2005, I was Law Student President for NLGSF. That year, I won Board approval to raise $8,000 to send students to the convention.
If elected, I will continue to increase and broaden our membership and ally our organization with other folks pushing for radical, progressive change in the law. I will promote and foster communication and solidarity on the EC. I will assist in efforts to raise money for, and awareness of, the NLG. And I will always remain mindful of why we are here: to act, and struggle, with love, in the service of the people and towards the elimination of all oppression.

Back from Seattle

2009-10-22T07:01:00.000-07:00

It was uplifting to meet up with so many legal activists of color as the NLG Law for the People Convention went down last weekend. Among others folks, I ran into Loyola New Orleans law student Adrienne Wheeler, who researched race and social movements while doing her masters degree. Adrienne dug up this short bibliography on the topic. "There are a number of sociological studies on race and social movements," she says. "There are compelling arguments that [people of color] put energy into local activism and that white folks put energy into 'saving the world.'"

Here's a mid-decade list:

Brown-Nagin, Tomiko. 2005. “Social Movements, and the Law: The Case of Affirmative Action.” Columbia Law Review, 105(5), 1436-1528.

Cable, Shery and Tamara L. Mix. 2003. “Economic Imperatives and Race Relations.” Journal of Black Studies, 34(2), 183-203.

Chong, Dennis and Reuel Rogers. 2005. “Racial Solidarity and Political Participation.” Political Behavior, 27(4), 347-374.

James, David R. 1988. “The Transformation of the Southern Racial State: Class and Race Determinants of Local-State Structures.” American Sociological Review, 53(2), 191-208.

Jenkins, J. Craig, and Michael Wallace. 1996. “The Generalized Action Potential of Protest Movements: The New Class, Social Trends, and Political Exclusion Explanations.” Sociological Forum, 11(2), 183-207.

McVeigh, Rory and Christian Smith. 1999. “Who Protests in America: An Analysis of Three Political Alternatives—Inaction, Institutionalized Politics, or Protest.” Sociological Forum, 14(4) 685-702.

Polletta, Francesca and James M. Jasper. 2001. “Collective Identity and Social Movements.” Annual Review of Sociology, 27, 283-305.

Tsutsui, Kiyoteru. 2004. “Global Civil Society and Ethnic Social Movements in the Contemporary World.” Sociological Forum, 19(1), 63-87.

Winant, Howard. 2000. “Race and Race Theory.” Annual Review of Sociology, 26, 169-185.

Seattle's DJ Daps1 will be breaking it down at our Breakin' Bread party 10/16

2009-10-13T15:45:00.000-07:00

Big update on the TUPOCC Breakin' Bread event, scheduled for this Friday, Oct. 16, starting at 8pm. With the help of Prison Law Project's Ian Head and the generous support of the Hidmo restaurant, we will have DJ Daps1 on hand to make sure the night is fabulous.

To cover the cost, we will ask that everyone in attendance donate $5.

TUPOCC administrative matters will be squeezed into 8-9 PM. After 9, friends and allies are more than welcome to party down.

More info on the location and the event below.

You can check out Daps1's summer mix here.

TUPOCC Breakin' Bread, Friday 10/16 8pm

2009-10-12T17:08:00.001-07:00

Each year at the NLG Convention, TUPOCC holds an "administrative meeting" where we vote for a new co-chair and discuss "administrative" matters pertinent to the committee. This year, we are doing things a little differently.

It's the five-year anniversary of the United People of Color Caucus. This Friday, as the NLG Convention really hits its stride, we are coming together not just to vote for a new leader to join the inestimable now-senior co-chair Tory Gavito, but also to really break bread together -- to have a great time in solidarity and companionship. We'll talk about what we really want to do five years after the birth of this project. Where is our mission going, how far has our vision come.

There will be cheap drinks and great food, as well as a local Seattle hiphop deejay (TBA!) on the decks. The locale is Hidmo restaurant on 2000 S. Jackson Street, accessible by bus (15 minutes) or cab (4 minutes). See map below.

View Larger Map

Also, updated TUPOCC Seattle Highlights schedule (download PDF from Google)

Where will the color be in Seattle?

2009-10-07T08:11:00.001-07:00

As TUPOCC gets set to convene at the National Lawyers Guild convention in Seattle, we also mark our committee's fifth anniversary and the tenth anniversary of the "N30" WTO demonstrations in Seattle. We have the most opportune moment to re-examine questions that many of us, both whites and POCs on the left, were asking about anti-capitalism movements at the beginning of this decade.

Four months after N30, the anti-capitalism movement reconvened in Washington, D.C., on April 16, 2000. ColorLines magazine asked, "Where was the color at A16?"

While Seattle is a relatively white location, D.C. promised a far better opportunity to mobilize people of color: its majority African American population has a long history of international action and other large East Coast populations of color are nearby.... Indeed, a significant number of people of color participated in the D.C. actions, as they had in Seattle. Still, A16 was probably proportionately even whiter....

Writing for the Village Voice, Andrew Hsiao captured the erupting class/race tension after N30 and A16, as the Republican National Convention loomed.

While the demonstrations electrified activists across the country, the fact that the ranks of protesters were overwhelmingly white has itself sparked protest. As radical black scholar robin d.G. Kelley, puts it, 'the lack of people of color involved in these demonstrations is a crisis.' *** [S]ome have groused that activists of color are missing the global point, or that their complaints are based in an identity politics that has been transcended by the all-inclusive politics of economics. Framing the issue this way, however, misses what's distinctive about new activism in communities of color.

I marvel at how that framing -- race politics doesn't get it -- continues to thrive. We saw it last fall, at the Detroit convention, when NLG members formed an ad-hoc "Marxism and the Law" committee. Following a pattern identified in Hsiao's July 2000 article, the predominantly white organizers of the "Marxism" committee never reached out TUPOCC -- or the Anti-Racism Committee, Anti-Sexism Committee, or Queer Caucus, for that matter. Why would they bother reaching out to the "identity politics" contingent?

For TUPOCC, coming into this convention, we can intuit that unless POCs raise the problematic issue of whiteness in anti-capitalism movements, it is doubtful our white "Marxist" allies will examine it. My doubts are not entirely borne of cynicism. "Where was the color" was a question never fully answered with respect to Seattle and the demos that came afterward. Bush v. Gore happened. September 11, 2001 happened. The invasions of non-white nations happened. Out of necessity, we shifted the object of the "where was the color" examination from anti-capitalist activism to anti-war activism. With the election of an African American president, neo-liberal corporate welfare and war continue to escalate. One cannot but assume that these trends add a certain myopic substance to the argument that "race politics doesn't get it."

If anything, this year's national convention should demonstrate that "race politics" does get it. TUPOCCers and other activists of color already know that race consciousness and class analysis have never been distinct politics. We also know that institutions that espouse anti-capitalism and other class analyses operate within immutable structural racism that only handcuffs their capacity to address economic justice issues. Often we only hope that our allies "get" these realities. At some of the events at the Seattle Convention, we will have the opportunity to speak to these realities concretely.

The TUPOCC/ARC training Racial Justice and Equity will set the stage for a true reckoning between anti-racism and color-blind marxism as we establish an institutional assessment of racism in the NLG and work toward new visions for the NLG's anti-racist work.
The major panel Police Occupation of Communities of Color also presents an opportunity to speak to the value of race conscious political organizing.
The "hot topic" event Post-election Crisis in Iran: What Role for the U.S. Left? will likely explore the tension that arose this summer when anti-imperialist critics took issue with Iranian Americans' support for the reformist movement.

TUPOCC at the Seattle Convention: highlight schedule

2009-10-04T08:26:00.000-07:00

Before you get to Seattle for the Law for the People Convention, be sure to download this PDF flier of TUPOCC's convention highlights.

TUPOCC Seattle Highlights (download PDF from Google or print from Scribd below)

You can download the full NLG Convention schedule and annotated schedule here

Announcing the People of Color Travel Stipend for the Seattle Convention

2009-08-26T12:24:00.000-07:00

The annual NLG Law for the People Convention is coming up in October. The Seattle Chapter welcomes Guilders back to the sites of the 1999 WTO protests -- and now, as then, it's important for people of color to be there in numbers that truly represent our collective role in social movements. For that reason, the NLG and TUPOCC are happy to begin the application process for the 2009 POC Travel Stipend for the Seattle convention.

You can find the online application at http://bit.ly/travelstipend09 -- please share the link with anyone who might be interested. Every year we meet folks who had no idea there was a stipend available to help them attend the convention. Let's get the word out!

The stipend covers transportation costs only and is open to legal workers of color, law students of color and recent law grads of color. Is that unfair to white people who need funding, too? The NLG has recognized that it is problematic that, historically, so few people of color participate in the convention. The stipend is one way of changing that problem and plays a significant role in the NLG's commitment to ending institutionalized racism in this organization.

Some self-mockery for "Independence Day"

2009-07-01T13:27:00.001-07:00

At the moment, POC friends and TUPOCC allies are passing along this zinger from someecards.

"Independence day reminds me how fortunate we are to live in a country that eschews violent street protests in favor of snarky blog commentary."

For many folks who have family abroad, for folks whose memory of a life outside the US is hardly faded, the "snarky blog commentary" (and snarky e-cards) probably don't elicit too many laughs. At the end of the day, most of our engagement with episodes of upheaval lies in confrontational debate and raising of correct positions. The past week of exchanges about the legitimacy of popular movement in Iran and Honduras have demonstrated one thing quite clearly: others of us have a far more personal stake.

Often perceived as unamerican and even disloyal, those of us with "rooting interets" may find July 4th evocative of a question long unanswered. Why, for so many nations, does independence and self-determination hinge on how Americans are feeling at any given time?

The US ties to the military coup in Honduras

2009-06-30T08:26:00.001-07:00

Start with the fact that each central american nation has repudiated the overthrow of the elected Zelaya. The Organization of American States has condemned the coup as an unacceptable return to form for the region. Then, appreciate the fact that Romeo Vasquez, the military ringleader of the coup, is formerly a student of the US government's School of the Americas. What is the degree of American interest in the fall of Zelaya's left-friendly regime?

Elizabeth DiNovella at The Progressive writes:

Let's hope that when the story behind the coup emerges, taxpayer dollars, through groups such as USAID, are not found to be supporting the coup plotters, like it did in Venezuela. President Obama has said he was "deeply concerned" and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Zelaya's arrest should be condemned. At least Obama did not endorse this ill-fated coup, unlike the Bush Administration's immediate diplomatic recognition of coup plotters in Venezuela in 2002. But Obama could do more.

And sources from Institute of Public Accuracy:

GREG GRANDIN, professor of history at New York University:

"Obama needs to align his position with the rest of the American republics, and not just express 'concern' about events in Honduras, but repudiate the coup and its plotters, and demand the restoration of Manuel Zelaya to the presidency."

JUAN ALMENDARES, president of the Honduran Peace Committee: "What we are looking [at] now is, we are going back to [a] repressive situation. Some of the advisers of the [new] government have been perpetrators, torture perpetrators, of the 1980s. Some of these people think like Pinochet, and they are comparing Zelaya with Salvador Allende. And we have here in Honduras a different situation. We have a government who were doing not a referendum; they were doing just a survey, a simple survey, to ask people whether they want to have a constitutional reform. But we have an alliance between the very powerful class in this country [and] the military."

Report back from NYC solidarity rally

2009-06-25T07:21:00.000-07:00

Yesterday at Union Square in New York, people rallied in solidarity with the demonstrators in Iran. Here's a report back by TUPOCC member Adrienne Wheeler:

There were a couple hundred people and a sea of green in Union Square. The general tenor was a call to stop the killing (in Farsi and in English). There was also a common childhood song from Iran about kids sticking together when the teacher is beating one with the alphabet stick. (My friend translated; I dont speak Farsi.)

Some signs were about the elections. Many held signs that read "I am Neda" or some variation. Neda also means voice in Farsi.

Framing the protests in Iran

2009-06-24T12:04:00.001-07:00

While the MSM spin machine churns a dazzling array of images and angles regarding the protests in Iran, the Institute for Public Accuracy released these contextual insights from Reese Erlich and Eileen Clancy.

REESE ERLICH, author of "The Iran Agenda: The Real Story of U.S. Policy and the Middle East Crisis":

This isn't a 'Twitter Revolution.' That description trivializes the broad mass movement that has swept Iran. It is not just the affluent of northern Tehran who are protesting. It's poorer people from southern Tehran -- who organize by plain old phone calls and word of mouth.

The movement has gone beyond protesting election fraud and now challenges the system. Some protesters want a more moderate Islamic government, others want a return to a parliamentary system that existed in the early 1950s under Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh. Mossadegh headed the last democratic government in Iran, which included freedom for political parties to organize, free press and freedom of religion. It was overthrown in a CIA coup in 1953. That's why the government is cracking down so hard; it is threatened to its core.

There's a big controversy in the U.S. about President Obama's statements on Iran. But they are largely irrelevant to the people of Iran. Given the long history of U.S. meddling in Iran, it's best that the U.S. not further intervene and [instead] let the people of Iran deal with their own government. The U.S. has a long history of sanctions [and] supporting terrorist attacks against Iran that bolster the rightwingers in Iran. The U.S. cannot and should not try to intervene in Iran's upheaval; anything the U.S. does would be counterproductive. It's much more important that Iranians receive people-to-people support in the form of rallies, marches, etc. from American grassroots groups.

EILEEN CLANCY, founder of I-Witness Video:

Protesters in Iran are managing to get some video out to the broader world that challenges the official Iranian government narrative. We've seen similar efforts to expose government repression using cell phone video and the Internet in several countries including Egypt, Turkey and Burma.

While it's fashionable right now for U.S. politicians to stick up for the peaceful protesters and citizen journalists in the streets of Iran, those sentiments ring hollow. In the U.S., protest events are typically deemed marginal events by the news media, even when extraordinary things happen there. In 2004, 1,800 people were arrested at the Republican National Convention in New York City; 90 percent had charges dismissed; the city's legal bill to date is $8.2 million and hundreds of lawsuits are pending.

In 2008, the Republican Convention was the most repressive I've ever seen in the U.S.; police were using concussion grenades. I-Witness Video members were followed by undercover police and we were raided twice, once with guns drawn. It was clear that there was an effort to disrupt people who could get video to the broader world. Local reporters were swept up and charges were later dropped. We were actually told by the police that they were tracking us in real-time using geo-location data from our cell phones. Twitter was key for us doing our work.

What the U.S. should learn from the high cost of protest in Iran

2009-06-24T06:42:00.001-07:00

Azadeh Shahshahani is a member of TUPOCC and the chair of the NLG South regional chapter. Today she published this guest column on the struggle for religious freedom among Muslims in the U.S.

Religious freedom unkept vow in U.S.
By Azadeh Shahshahani
Wednesday, June 24, 2009

I have been watching with interest and apprehension the movement reverberating in my birthplace over the past few weeks. The cries of "Azadi" by the people who have poured out in the tens of thousands into the streets of Iran to demand greater freedom have defied the distance between us.
I was born in Iran four days after the 1979 revolution. My name, Azadeh, means free-spirited, signifying the great hopes that my parents and the many other parents who named their daughters Azadeh that year bore for the revolution.
Their hopes were soon dashed, however, as the oppressive regime of the shah was replaced by a theocracy where rules governed every aspect of people's lives in public, and even private, spaces.
In this system, advancement in professional and especially official ranks depends in part on the extent to which one chooses to profess religiosity, as dictated by the regime.
With this background, one of the freedoms that was most appealing to me when I came to the United States at age 16 was the right, free from governmental interference, to practice religion — or no religion at all.
I learned that this right is among the most fundamental of the freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. In my trips back to visit family and friends, I often boasted about the guarantee of religious freedom in the United States.
This fundamental right has been increasingly denied, however, to Muslim-Americans in the years after Sept. 11, tarnishing America's reputation as a beacon of religious freedom.
Last week, the ACLU released a report demonstrating how American Muslims' right to practice zakat, or charitable giving, has been violated.
Zakat is a religious obligation for all observant Muslims and is one of the five pillars of Islam. Given annually and in a calculated amount, zakat is a proportionately fixed contribution collected from surplus earnings of Muslims.
The ACLU report shows that U.S. terrorism finance laws and policies have had a chilling effect on Muslim charitable giving by creating an atmosphere of fear.
These laws have authorized executive branch officials to target charities based on secret evidence — without notice, charges, an opportunity to respond or meaningful judicial review.
Closer to home, I recently joined Lisa Valentine and her husband before the Georgia Committee on Access and Fairness in the Courts.
Valentine testified about the experience she faced at a Douglasville courthouse, where she was made to choose between her right to free exercise of religion and her right to access the court.
Valentine, also known by her Islamic name, Miedah, spoke about the experience of being denied access to the courthouse on Dec. 16 because she wore a head scarf, or hijab.
She found herself in handcuffs and in jail with her hijab removed after Douglasville Municipal Court Judge Keith Rollins sentenced her to 10 days in jail for contempt.
Valentine and other Muslim women were denied access to the Douglasville Municipal Court, even after they expressly conveyed to court officials that the wearing of the head scarf is an expression of their faith.
Muslim-Americans, like all people in the United States, should have the right to express their religious beliefs free from discrimination.
As eloquently stated by President Barack Obama in his Cairo speech last month, "freedom in America is indivisible from the freedom to practice one's religion."
The president acknowledged the right of Muslim women and girls to wear the hijab and recognized the adverse effect of terrorism finance laws on Muslim charitable giving.
The administration and governments on the state and local levels need to follow up on this premise by ensuring that our laws, policies and practices are in fact consistent with American values of due process and religious freedom.
These freedoms are too important to be violated, as evidenced by the willingness of people in my birthplace to risk their lives to secure them.
Azadeh Shahshahani is the National Security/Immigrants' Rights Project director for the ACLU of Georgia.

The gift of an "empty box" -- Senate passes hollow apology for slavery and segregation (S.Con.Res.26)

2009-06-18T17:34:00.000-07:00

Press release from the office of U.S. Representative Bobby L. Rush (IL-01), on the meaning of the Senate's passage of S. Con. Res. 26, "A concurrent resolution apologizing for the enslavement and racial segregation of African Americans":

[T]hough today the U.S. Senate adopted a resolution offering a formal national apology for slavery and the era of “separate but equal” Jim Crow laws that followed, the legislation stops drastically short at helping to repair the “centuries of economic and social damage” to generations of African Americans.

Rush said because S.CON.RES. 26 does not include the force of law, the gesture may fall on deaf ears when so many African-Americans remain trapped in systemic poverty and suffer from acute health problems due to a lack of access of quality health care. “Blacks in this country have suffered centuries of economic and social exploitation and while this resolution is noted for the spirit in which it was drafted, it falls short in addressing the systemic issues impacting African American communities as a direct result of racial segregation and economic injustice due to racism.

“The resolution further adds insult to injury by including a disclaimer against reparations, “he said. “This can be likened to a child unwrapping Christmas present only to find an empty box.” The non-binding resolution, which does not have the force of law, includes a disclaimer stating that the measure does not authorize or support reparations for the descendants of African slaves brought to the United States before the Civil War.

Also, today, Congressman Rush released a letter to President Barack Obama days before the president will travel to Ghana in what will be his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa since being elected the nation’s highest officer. “I strongly encourage you to expand the commitment of the United States with Sub-Saharan Africa,” he wrote. “Our interest should far transcend the humanitarian concerns that have frequently underpinned U.S. engagement with the continent. Economic development, natural resource management, human security, capacity building and global stability as well as traditional humanitarian assistance are inextricably linked.”

Arizona legislators want unlawful presence to be a felony crime

2009-06-18T12:01:00.000-07:00

From an interview with Jennifer Allen, executive director of Border Action Network, on legislative developments in Arizona.

Arizona’s ‘False Leadership’ on Immigration Policy - New American Media

What would the Illegal Aliens Enforcement and Trespassing bill entail?

It has two components to it. The first part is that the bill would prohibit any city, country or town of the state of Arizona to adopt any kind of policy that would limit the enforcement of federal immigration laws to the full extent permitted by federal law.

In the legislature, they’ve been talking about this as trying to attack these so-called sanctuary cities in the state of Arizona, of which there are none. At all. We have a couple of police departments around the state, Tucson, Phoenix, Chandler, that have police policies that provide protections to victims and witnesses of crimes, that if they are undocumented, immigration will not be called.

The other piece of the bill – I think it would be the first one in the country – would say that anyone who is on public or private land in the state of Arizona could be charged with a felony, with criminal trespass, if they cannot prove that they are in the country legally.

Essentially it would become this statewide racial profiling law, where law enforcement sees somebody who, completely based on their appearance, they think may not be in the country legally, they can go up and ask them to prove their lawful presence in the country. And if they can’t prove it, the state can then charge them with criminal trespass.

What are the arguments behind this bill?

There are two really disturbing and shameful statements. One is that Russell Pearce thinks that the Border Patrol is simply too effective. They pick people up, and then they’re so promptly deported that they never serve any time in the state of Arizona. So he wants people to be picked up and sent off to Joe Arpaio’s tent cities or other county or city jails, and then handed over to immigration. And last year, the Phoenix Police Officers’ Association had said that they liked this bill because it would give them “preventative police powers.”

SB 1175, as grossly unconstitutional as it seems -– I mean it kind of destroys the notion of probable cause for stopping and questioning people -- this bill is moving quickly through the legislature. It was heard in Committee on the 10th, and by the 15th it passed the entire Senate and was passed over to the House.

United States to South Africa: white supremacy lingers

2009-06-17T18:05:00.001-07:00

Lingering White Supremacy In South Africa Sounds Much Like United States
by Robert Jensen

I learned that even with all the differences in the two countries there are equally important similarities, and as a result the sense of entitlement that so many white people hold onto produces similar dodges and denials.

Those similarities: South Africa and the United States were the two longstanding settler states that maintained legal apartheid long after the post-World War II decolonization process. The crucial term is “settler state,” marking a process by which an invading population exterminates or displaces and exploits the indigenous population to acquire its land and resources, with formal slavery playing a key role at some point in the country’s history. Both strategies were justified with overtly racist doctrines about white supremacy, and both required the white population to discard basic moral and religious principles, leading to a pathological psychology of superiority. Both of those settler strategies have left us with racialized disparities in wealth and well-being long after the formal apartheid is over.

The main difference: The United States struggles with its problem with a white majority, while South Africa has a black majority. But what I found fascinating his how little difference that made in terms of the psychological pathology of so many white people. So, as is typically the case, my trip to South Africa taught me not only about racism in South Africa but also in the United States, which reminded me that perhaps we travel to observe others so that we can learn about ourselves.

First plans for NLG Convention in Seattle

2009-06-15T12:59:00.001-07:00

The annual National Lawyers Guild Law for the People Convention will be held in Seattle October 14-18, 2009. We just received a tentative schedule, including two workshops co-sponsored by TUPOCC. We are working with our comrades to present Deportation Defense: Representing Immigrant Detainees in Bond Hearings (co-sponsored by TUPOCC, NLG San Francisco Immigration Committee, and National Immigration Project of the NLG) and Women and Migration (co-sponsored by TUPOCC and the Anti-Sexism Committee).

Here are some highlights of the tentative schedule:

FRI October 16
8:30-9:45AM Workshops I
Comprehensive Immigration Reform

Out of Africa
Counter Recruitment Strategies

1:30-2:45PM Workshops II
Representing Immigrant Detainees in Bond Hearings

SAT October 17
1:00-2:15PM Workshops III
Immigrants and the Military
Transgendered and Incarcerated

2:30-4:00PM Major Panels

Mass Defense: Police Occupation of Communities of Color

SUN October 18
10:45AM-12:00PM Workshops IV
Responding to Immigration Law Enforcement Abuse

Gaza
Women and Migration
Enhancing Right of Workers to Organize

New online political platform for latina/o unity

2009-04-28T06:19:00.000-07:00

Presente.org just launched. It's still hard to tell who is behind it -- there are no affiliations or contacts listed in the "about" section of the new site.

We seek to bring together Latinos of all backgrounds, generations, and regions, with allies from all races. We are from the East, the West, and everywhere in between; we are residents, recent immigrants, and US Citizens. While we are diverse and won't always agree on every issue, we do have a common goals and vision: to build our communities, provide for our families, and enrich the country where we live-all without being denied the basic rights afforded to others. Protecting and promoting those goals are the focus of Presente.

We also recognize that there are numerous organizations doing important work to strengthen Latino communities and advocate for our interests. Our aim is to magnify their efforts, not replace them. We'll build a sustained, national movement that changes the public conversation, holds leaders accountable, and impacts policy, helping community and national organizations be more effective in their efforts.

May 1: March for Just and Humane Immigration Reform

2009-04-28T06:06:00.000-07:00

Great flyer for the the DC march coming up this week.

3 pm- Gather in Malcolm X Park: 16th and W Streets NW Washington, DC
4 pm- March to the White House

Our Demands:
Stop the Raids and Deportations
Just and Humane Immigration Reform
End the 287g Agreements--No Local Enforcement of Broken Immigration Laws
This is a critical time for the immigrant community. For years, raids and deportations have divided families and terrorized workers. Last fall's election marked a sea change in U.S. politics. Now, President Obama has restated his commitment to immigration reform. We march to make this change a reality--to bring the voices of immigrants into the national debate over what kind of reform we need. Just and humane immigration reform must be a central component of economic recovery. Immigrants are workers who produce tremendous wealth in our society and deserve to be treated with dignity and respect. Please join us on May 1st to say that now is the time to stop the raids and deportations and move towards an inclusive legalization of immigrant workers and families.

Doing something far away from the war in Sri Lanka

2009-04-22T06:53:00.001-07:00

What If You Had One ~~Week~~ Day Left To Stop Mass Ethnic Cleansing? (Updated) | pass the roti on the left hand side

1. Read up to date news from International Red Cross on civilians in the North East

2. If you are an Indian citizen or a membner of the Indian diaspora, sign Professor Qadri Ismail's petition to the Indian Mission at the UN.

3. If you are a resident of the United States or otherwise interested, call your Congresspeople and tell them to pay attention and to stop the war in Sri Lanka or whatever message you think is most useful for making sure that 100,000 people don't end up destroyed in the next few days/weeks/months..

4. For all, a petition circulated by the World at a Crossroads conference

5. Write, call, e-mail, fax or otherwise contact the Sri Lankan embassy or consulate in your area or whatever one you want and tell them what you think. My suggestion is to stop any military action that does not allow civilians to live and that does not allow for international monitoring of the same, but there are many other points of view that people have, which you can see in the comments below or the links people have provided. You can look up a Sri Lankan embassy/consulate contact information by entering the host country in the top dropbox and clicking on search below the bottom box.

Economic crisis yields support for Legal Services funding -- but not for prisoners and undocumented immigrants

2009-04-21T16:12:00.001-07:00

Legal Services Corporation Changes Introduced | OMB Watch

On March 26, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) introduced the Civil Access to Justice Act of 2009 (S. 718) that ends the LSC restrictions on the use of non-federal funds, except those related to abortion litigation. "Lifting these restrictions allows individual states, cities and donors the ability to determine themselves how best to spend non-federal funds to ensure access to the courts," said Harkin. The bill also seeks to increase the LSC budget from $390 million to $750 million.

According to a Harkin press release, the Civil Access to Justice Act would remove "many of the restrictions currently placed on legal tools that LSC-funded attorneys can use to represent their clients. [. . .] In the spirit of compromise, the bill does maintain the prohibition on abortion related litigation as well as many of the limits on whom LSC-funded programs can represent, including undocumented immigrants (with limited exceptions such as victims of domestic violence), prisoners challenging prison conditions and people charged with illegal drug possession in public housing eviction proceedings." The measure would also create a program to expand law school clinics.

On April 7, the Brennan Center for Justice released a fact sheet that shows how the LSC restrictions harm foreclosure prevention efforts. Homeowners who are losing their homes to foreclosure are in need of legal help, yet the legal services available to them are limited and underfunded. The fact sheet details accounts of ordinary Americans and how the LSC restrictions have impacted homeowners in their struggle to keep their homes.

During this time of economic recession, there appears to be strong public support for legal services. Reportedly, two-thirds of those polled on behalf of the American Bar Association said they favor federal funding for people who need legal assistance.

A Washington Post editorial on March 14 went even further. It asked lawmakers to "unshackle Legal Services from congressionally-imposed restrictions that have kept it from working more efficiently and broadly." For example, unlike most others who represent plaintiffs, Legal Services lawyers who prevail in a civil case are prohibited from seeking legal fees from an opponent. The editorial also called for support of the Harkin bill.

Sean Bell, Oscar Grant, the list goes on

2009-01-27T14:28:00.001-08:00

Via Current.com

50 Artists, 50 Shots: We Are All Sean Bell // Current

In reaction to the 2008 acquittal of three police officers in the killing of Sean Bell in 2006, a group of New York City community artists, poets and activists organized an event called "50 Artists, 50 Shots: We Are All Sean Bell." The event featured poets, spoken word performers, musicians, painters, dancers, photographers etc., who each agreed to take one bullet for the 50 that were fired at Sean Bell and his friends, and transform each bullet into their art in order to honor his memory, and to express rage and grief for the decision to let the officers free.

The intention of this event was to have an open and safe space for New Yorkers to fully express themselves about the outcome of the Sean Bell case- to educate, to learn, to mourn, to grow, and to have honest dialogues. But most of all, to give inspiration for everyone to take action that would result in a real change in how police officers are trained, so that they can learn to respond to certain situations in a less aggressive and careless manner.

This video has been uploaded three weeks after Oscar Grant was unjustly killed in Oakland by a police officer who shot him at point blank range early on New Year's Day, 2009. Police brutality continues to plague our communities. How can we, as civilians, organize to help make fundamental, systematic changes to stop these tragedies from happening?

Tense shifts in a racial moment

2009-01-20T07:40:00.000-08:00

The phrases "history in the making" and "this historic day" are going berzerk right now. What does it mean to have one foot in history and the other in there here-and-now? Does it mean that we have permission today to recognize racism as a hallmark of the past? Does it mean we are recognizing that race matters even now, in the present?

It's interesting that we are hearing these phrases so abundantly and with virtually no reference to race at all.

Celebration now, protest later?

2009-01-20T06:41:00.001-08:00

All reports indicate that Washington, D.C., has been shut down by people-traffic. It is virtually impossible to navigate through the center of the city. Photos, for those of us far away, give the appearance of a massive mobilization.

But the cynical part of me sees this more as a massive celebration. There should be no gainsayers. No party-poopers.

The question that pops out of these pictures: how long will the fanfare last? How long will our satisfaction with Obama stall at this "historical moment." When will we again see such a massive gathering of Americans, and will it be in protest instead of congratulation?

Finding Rev. King

2009-01-19T09:38:00.001-08:00

Dr. King didn't just have dreams. He had strategy.

With Selma and the voting rights bill one era of our struggle came to a close and a new era came into being. Now our struggle is for genuine equality, which means economic equality. For we know that it isn't enough to integrate lunch counters. What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn't earn enough money to buy a hamburger and cup of coffee?

SleptOn.org:

[The] portrayal of Dr. King has been mass marketed as an accommodationist figure and is now so pervasive in our schools, media, etc. that it threatens to neutralize and placate the most ambitious, daring and challenging of King's critique along with his struggle to confront and organize against not only racism, but economic exploitation and militarism-imperialism as well.

Zionism, Manifest Destiny, and the stake of Black House Reps

2009-01-16T12:36:00.001-08:00

Speaking of the woven projects of American Manifest Destiny and Israeli Zionism, the Black Agenda Report's Glen Ford takes note of where African Americans are situated in such obviously racist politics. Ford scrutinizes the roles played by Black Congressional Caucus members in the passing of a House resolution supporting Israeli's war in Gaza.
Glen Ford: Sullying Dr. King's Legacy

Could it be that Los Angeles Congresswoman Maxine Waters and Milwaukee's Gwen Moore are the only Black Caucus members who remember that Israel was racist South Africa's closest ally, the apartheid regime's hi-tech weapons quartermaster and godfather to its nuclear bomb project? Do the seven members that voted "present" - Donna Edwards (MD), Keith Ellison (MN), Hank Johnson (GA), Carolyn Kilpatrick (MI), Barbara Lee (CA), Donald Payne (NJ), Diane Watson (CA) - believe that by refusing to take a position on Israeli crimes against humanity in Gaza, they somehow salvage the Caucus's claim to be the "conscience of the Congress?"

Where has John Conyers' conscience disappeared to?

**** The Zionist ideology, and especially the chilling effect of Zionist power, is probably the second-greatest impediment to creation of a sustained American peace movement - the first obstacle being the ideology of American Manifest Destiny, which is in practice quite compatible with Zionism.

However, African Americans are least susceptible to the Manifest Destiny/Zionist Mythology combo. Both ideologies wreak of racism, and most Black people know it. The Congressional Black Caucus knows it, too, but they are terrified of offending Israel's innumerable political hit men.

Zionist power helped knock off two CBC members who refused to tow Tel Aviv's line, in 2002. Georgia's Cynthia McKinney and Alabama's Earl Hilliard found themselves heavily outspent and ultimately unseated by otherwise puny challengers in Democratic primary contests. AIPAC bragged of its ability to shut down independent-minded Black politicians who fail to understand that U.S. foreign policy is shaped by whatever is deemed good for Israel. Bullying works, especially against the meek. Except for Maxine Waters and Gwen Moore, the Congressional Black Caucus is out of the anti-war business.

That also goes for the Congressional Progressive Caucus which, with 71 members, claims to be the "single largest partisan caucus" in the U.S. House, but whose members voted overwhelmingly in support of Israeli barbarity. About two-thirds of the voting members of the Black Caucus also belong to the Progressive Caucus - meaning, they are members of two defunct organizations, and doubly useless to the cause of peace.

U.S. exporting ‘Indian country’ to the Holy Land

2009-01-15T12:46:00.001-08:00

This article passed through the TUPOCC listserv. It strikes me as a biting reality-check for those in the US who understand Palestinians as nothing more than an oppositional concept. Extermination of people doesn't just happen, and those of us who live in the US rarely take pause to understand the mechanism that turned "indians" into geographical references or sports team mascots. We are so blind that we cannot even recognize that those same mechanics are turning in our midst, albeit by satellite and internet feeds.

Good Fox: Palestine: Stop the re-creation of ‘Indian country’ in the Holy Land | Indian Country Today | Opinion

As historians and scholars will remind us, Jewish people generally thrived and lived in respectful coexistence with Christians and Muslims in Palestine while they were subjected to prejudice (and far worse) in Europe and the United States. It was only during the mid-20th century that sustained violence began to occur between the populations – when the U.S. and Europe, out of their collective guilt for allowing the Shoah to happen, formed the state of Israel on top of Palestine.

This formation did not occur on empty land. Known as “Al-Nakba” (Arabic for “the Cataclysm”), this 1948 event involved the expulsion of an estimated one million Palestinians from cities and villages, massacres, torture and rape, and the destruction of nearly 500 Palestinian villages. Zionism, which activist Gabe Camacho has correctly described as synonymous with manifest destiny, is the hegemonic ideology of the colonizers in the Holy Land. And one of the ideas of Zionism/Manifest Destiny is the concept of “Indian country,” an anti-human rights activity that the U.S. exports internationally.

“Indian Country” is a U.S.-designated term for our remaining and secondary homelands; however, the term also is common in the U.S. military and colonization parlance such as when it was employed in the invasion of Vietnam or as seen in the ongoing occupation of Iraq. We see this term in action, too, in Palestine.

Matt Nelson on Oscar Grant shooting: INDEFENSIBLE

2009-01-10T14:19:00.000-08:00

Matt Nelson is a former co-chair of TUPOCC.

INDEFENSIBLE
By Matt Nelson
Spokesperson
Milwaukee Police Accountability Coalition

The shooting of Oscar Grant is indefensible. The inaction from the Alameda County District Attorney and Oakland mayor is also indefensible. Recently, I watched a clearer version of the videotape of the shooting. I saw a blatant execution, a total failure of the officers to act to help Oscar live, a clear attempt by all of officers shown in the video to cover up this crime.

All officers involved should be criminally prosecuted by the Alameda County District Attorney. It is likely that this fool, the Alameda County DA Tom Orloff, will not do what is just. So perhaps, the officers will be federally prosecuted, but this means turning over police accountability to the US Department of Justice. This is akin to having the fox guard the hen house.

It is likely the Oakland mayor will do little to halt the daily occurrence of police brutality. With California law as it is now [see Copley Press v. Superior Court, 63 Cal.App.4th 367 (1998)] it is unlikely that true reforms to the BART system of police accountability will be fruitful in Fruitvale, without a protracted legislative struggle.

So what do we want? Remember point #7:

WE WANT AN IMMEDIATE END TO POLICE BRUTALITY AND MURDER OF BLACK PEOPLE, OTHER PEOPLE OF COLOR, ALL OPPRESSED PEOPLE INSIDE THE UNITED STATES (Black Panther Party, Platform and Program- What We Want, What We Believe, 1968).

So what can we do?

Force the DA to bring charges against the officers involved. He has the power to do this. The public should be in his face (office, house, favorite restaurant, bingo hall, bridge club, golf club, and night club) at all times until he concedes.

Expose the corrupt police union(s) which protect criminal cops. If you know how to expose criminal politicians, criminal corporations, and Ponzi scheme criminals, you know how to expose criminal police unions. They will scatter like roaches when the light shines upon them.

Do our own police accountability work, everyday and every night. Safe (cop free) zones, cop watch, know your rights workshops, and the like. We have to be inspired by the great public camera work done to capture the murder of Oscar Grant. We can multiply that by thousands. Let us take care of each other and be accountable for our own neighborhood safety.

Another stolen life taken has been by police violence. It will continue without a powerful, strategic and consistent resistance. We grieve together, but we will fight together for justice. We will stand with the family of Oscar Grant and we know that we cannot allow officers to act above the law.

In the last few years we have witnessed an increase in harassment, racial profiling, false arrests, beatings, and wrongful deaths against young people of color in our cities. Pledging to eradicate police violence and create effective structures of police accountability are necessary first steps in order to keep our people and our families safe. We must continue to offer direct support to the family knowing that they are under tremendous pressure to be silent.

Justice for Oscar Grant is justice for all!

Contact Matt Nelson at: mattnelson64@hotmail.com

Free Palestine Alliance: it's colonialism, stupid

2009-01-09T13:04:00.001-08:00

FPA Statement 12: Signs of Zionist Defeat Despite Palestinian Tragedy

Effectively, this is what this entire onslaught is about: control over the Arab nation and the placement of obedient functionaries as the effective powers over millions of impoverished Arabs. In this context, consider the position of Hugo Chavez. A similar position would not be possible by the Arab regimes due to their servitude to their colonial and neo-colonial powers. The real independence of Venezuela allows not only principled positions, but also the appropriate use of its wealth in the service of its own people and the people of the world.

Such was the essence of the conflict during the decolonization era of the fifties, sixties, and seventies, when the primary struggle was between colonists attempting to control wealth and resources and the colonized struggling to assert power over their own destiny. In 1956, the Tripartite attack on Egypt was in response to a Pan-Arabist perspective championed by Gamal Abdel-Nasser that Arab wealth belongs to the Arab people, and hence nationalized the Suez Canal to secure funds to build the Aswan dam and rebuild Egypt. France, Britain and Israel found that unacceptable and attacked, including attacking Gaza. The international solidarity that existed at that time, and the steadfast of the Egyptian leadership and people, secured a victory in the face of the onslaught. In the same context, consider the CIA coup in Guatemala in 1954 against Jacobo Arbenz, who dared to challenge the robbery of United Fruit Company and the impoverishment of the Guatemalan people. Such were, and continue to be, the same pretexts used against the people of Cuba, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and other Latin American countries to destabilize liberation movements and sovereign nations in favor of colonial or neo-colonial control. On the African continent, Amilcar Cabral, Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lumumba, and many similar unique leaders for national liberation were targeted for attempting to secure freedom for colonized people.

Essentially, the wrath of colonists is aimed not only at destroying the lives of people and the robbery of nations, but also at the cumulative reservoir of the culture of resistance that humanity continuously achieves. The assault on Gaza, futile and horrendous as it maybe, could and has destroyed many lives. But certainly, it will be defeated in its attempt to destroy the Palestinian resistance movement to colonial control.

New Study Finds Race Not Deciding Factor on Prop. 8 same-sex marriage ban

2009-01-08T12:22:00.001-08:00

via RaceWire... any interesting parsing of the Prop. 8 vote and subsequent uproar that people of color tipped the scale against the more egalitarian white communities of California. basically, the academics are saying it's not race, it's religion! this sounds obvious enough, if you care to look at how homophobic politics are propagated. unfortunately, a lot of disheartened folks chose not to look that deeply. challenging religious institutions, rather than blaming othered people of color, is a more unifying and pragmatic strategy.

New Study Finds Race Not Deciding Factor on Prop. 8 same-sex marriage ban | RaceWire

Terry Keleher
New Study Finds Race Not Deciding Factor on Prop. 8 same-sex marriage ban

A new study released this week finds that neither African Americans nor any other ethnicity were disproportionately in support of Proposition 8, which amended California’s constitution to ban same-sex marriage.

Some of the key findings of the study, co-authored by Patrick Eagan at New York University and Kenneth Sherill at Hunter College and released under the auspices of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute, include:

• The way someone voted on the ballot measure was influenced mostly by the person’s age, religiosity, party affiliation and general political ideology.

• Though post-election media reporting pegged African American support for Prop. 8 as high as 70 percent, this study found the actual number to be between 57 and 59 percent.

• The level of support for the initiative by African Americans exceeded that of white and Asian American voters, but the study attributes this to religiousity more than race because 57 percent of African Americans attend church at least once a week, compared with 42 percent of whites and 40 percent of Asian Americans.

The study may take some of the edge off of the racial wedge, but it doesn’t lessen the necessary work that lies ahead for building a lot more bridges across LGBT, racial and religious communities--starting especially with where these communities already intersect.

In response to the study, the Chicago Tribute reports that the Rev. Mark Wilson, of Oakland, a former pastor of Berkeley's McGee Avenue Baptist Church and currently the outreach coordinator for the African-American activist group And Marriage for All said it's time to "redouble our work with people of faith" and suggests building long-term relationships between African-American churches and the LGBT community.

Download the Egan-Sherrill study

TUPOCC Condemns "Israel's" On-Going Genocide Against the Palestinian Arab People and Crimes Against Humanity in the Gaza Strip

2009-01-07T20:26:00.001-08:00

DISCLAIMER: The viewpoint expressed in the following statement is not the viewpoint of the National Lawyers Guild or the National Lawyers Guild Foundation.

TUPOCC-NLG Palestine Sub-Committee & NLG Middle-East Steering Committee Strongly Condemn "Israel's" On-Going Genocide Against the Palestinian Arab People and Crimes Against Humanity in the Gaza Strip

January 7, 2009

The United People of Color Caucus (TUPOCC) Palestine Sub-Committee of the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) and the NLG Middle-East Steering Committee (NLG-MESC) call upon the international community to join us in our strong condemnation of "Israel's" on-going genocide, crimes against humanity, and brutal six-decade-old occupation of Palestine. "Israel" has, yet again, intensified its ruthless campaign to intentionally destroy the Palestinian Arab People by murdering over 700 Palestinians—including scores of women and children—and brutally injuring over 3100 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

Over the past twelve days "Israel" has perpetrated round-the-clock carpet-bombing of Palestinian civilians, civil infrastructure, and civil institutions, including schools, markets, and refugee camps/neighborhoods in the Gaza Strip--one of the most densely populated areas on Earth. "Israel's" savage bombardment and deadly siege against Gaza has relentlessly deprived Palestinians of any ability to obtain the necessary fuel, electricity, food, clean water, medical supplies and basic necessities of life—"Israel's" admitted "starvation diet" campaign. "Israel" now demands that Palestinians leave Gaza to "avoid" death – a blatant and transparent attempt at permanently expelling Palestinians from their land.

"Israel" is callously perpetrating the "holocaust" against Palestinians as threatened by "Israeli" official Matan Vilnai in February 2008. "Israel's" on-going saturation bombing campaign savagely targets the over 1.5 million Palestinians civilians in the Gaza Strip—a majority of whom are refugees from the 78% of Palestine illegally occupied by Zionist forces in 1948.

"Israel's" genocide, occupation, and grave crimes against humanity in Gaza and the whole of occupied Palestine could not have been perpetrated without the direct and indirect complicity of the world governments, including the US, EU, and puppet Arab regimes. Moreover, the "green light" for genocide also stems from the dehumanization of Palestinian Arabs by Western corporate media outlets only to be reinforced by organizations who fail to condemn Zionism and its product, "Israel," or who advance the patently false symmetry between the occupied Palestinians and their Zionist occupiers.

Accordingly, TUPOCC's Palestine Sub-Committee and the Middle-East Steering Committee of the NLG call upon the international community and all people of good conscience to stand with the victims of Zionism and its product "Israel" by taking immediate action to put an end to the Zionist genocide against Palestinians. In reaffirming TUPOCC's "Statement in Support of Palestinian Liberation and Dissent from the National Lawyers Guild's Official Position on Palestine and Zionism," TUPOCC's Palestine Sub-Committee and NLG-MESC urge the international community to:

1) Support a full and comprehensive campaign of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions against "Israel";

2) Send desperately needed humanitarian aid to the Palestinian People suffering due to the on-going genocide by "Israel." Please go to http://www.kinderusa.org and make an online donation of $500, $250, $100, or whatever you can afford;

3) Demand an immediate end to all "aid" to "Israel," including the billions of taxpayer dollars which fund Israel's on-going genocide, occupation, and crimes against humanity waged against the Palestinian People;

4) Immediately end any recognition, legitimization, or normalization with "Israel";

5) Demand that the United Nations live-up to its Charter by immediately and permanently expelling "Israel" from the United Nations;

6) Support the Palestinian Arab People's right of self-determination and liberation throughout all of occupied Palestine—both the areas occupied in 1948 and 1967—as guaranteed to Palestinians by international law and the UN Charter;

7) Support and reaffirm the legitimacy of the Palestinian Arab People's right to struggle for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial and foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, particularly armed struggle. (United Nations Resolution A/RES/33/24 29 November 1978);

8) Demand all Governments and organizations, including the United Nations, to live-up to their obligations and unequivocally condemn Zionism as a form of racism as formally expressed under United Nations Resolution 3379 of 1975; and

9) Establish International Criminal Tribunals against "Israel" and all of its quasi-governmental organizations, including the World Zionist Organization, for their grave crimes against humanity including genocide and illegal occupation.

12th day of the Gazan war: we must condemn our own silence

2009-01-07T11:32:00.001-08:00

Bush policy: people don't have a right to self-defense if they freely voted for what we consider to be an enemy of our own national interests

2009-01-06T12:18:00.001-08:00

the following press conference exchange between White House Press Sec Dana Perino and indefatigable journalist Helen Thomas ends up elucidating the "blind spots" (willful disregard) in US foreign policy with respect to international law and self-defense.

Democracy Now! | Israeli F-16 Attack Kills Father of Palestinian Journalist; Israel Bombs UN School, Killing Three

On Monday, the veteran correspondent Helen Thomas question White House Press Secretary Dana Perino.

HELEN THOMAS: Why is the President letting more people be killed in this situation, instead of going for a ceasefire and calling for restraint, as they have in the past, on both sides?

DANA PERINO: We are calling for a durable ceasefire. That’s what we are trying to establish.

HELEN THOMAS: But why don’t you call it today and stop people from being killed?

DANA PERINO: Well, I think, Helen, strong views are held on this by all sides. We believe that Israel has a right to defend itself, and—

HELEN THOMAS: Do the Gazans have a right to defend themselves?

DANA PERINO: I think that what the Gazans deserve is a chance to live in peace and security. What President Bush has worked for is a chance to establish a two-state solution, so that the Palestinians could have their own state, so that they could live in their own democracy. And that’s what President Abbas, who is the President of all Palestinians, has been working towards.

HELEN THOMAS: The President did not recognize their election, which was fair and square under international law, as observers—

DANA PERINO: Look, when—the President did call for the—did support the elections. And when the elections were held, I don’t think that Hamas was elected because they said, “Vote for us, we’ll take you to war” or “We’ll hold you hostage” or “We’ll send rockets into Israel every day.” But they won because they were tired—the people of—the Palestinians, people of Gaza, were frustrated with the services that they were getting from the Fatah party, which was a wake-up call for the Fatah party as well. And they have worked to try to improve what they could provide governance-wise for all of the Palestinians.

HELEN THOMAS: So knowing that, why did the US cut off all relation—all aid to the people?

DANA PERINO: We certainly have not done that to the people of Gaza. We do not deal with the terrorist organizations, of which Hamas is designated as one.

Video captures officer shooting unarmed black man; news story points to invisible hand

2009-01-06T12:03:00.001-08:00

never point a finger at the officer holding the smoking gun. that seems to be the SF Gate's rule here, when you read the photo caption. apparently, this isn't a big story yet, but maybe it's the odd use of passive-voice that is confusing everyone....

SF Gate: BART appeals for calm as footage shows shooting

Oscar Grant, an unarmed man who was shot early New Year's Day, worked for an Oakland supermarket. (Courtesy of Johnson Family)

For a new year of standing in solidarity

2008-12-14T12:34:00.001-08:00

I watched this for the first time yesterday, and it just struck me as a much more meaningful expression of values and goals for "the holiday season" than any card or prayer.

Playing For Change: "Stand By Me"

From the award-winning documentary, "Playing For Change: Peace Through Music", comes the first of many "songs around the world" being released independently. Featured is a cover of the Ben E. King classic by musicians around the world adding their part to the song as it travelled the globe. This and other songs such as "One Love" will be released as digital downloads soon; followed by the film soundtrack and DVD early next year.

Houston Police abuse of Sikh crime victims: action alert and video

2008-12-10T15:07:00.001-08:00

the latest from the Police Brutality On Sikhs blog:

(Houston, Texas) December 10, 2008 - As reported on Monday, a Sikh family that reported a burglary last week was handcuffed, asked about the "bombings in Mumbai", and told by an officer that "he knows Muslims." Watch video on what happened here and here. The Sikh Coalition requests that the community show its response and take action now:

Sign a Petition
Harris County Sheriff-Elect Adrian Garcia is visiting the Sikh Center of Houston on Sunday, December 14, 2008. He will be the new Sheriff for Harris County next year. This petition will be directly handed over to him, so please help us gain as many signatures as possible.

Submit a Question
Harris County Sheriff-Elect Adrian Garcia is visiting the Sikh Center of Houston on Sunday, December 14, 2008. During his visit the Tagore family and sangat members will be able to ask him questions on the actions he will take in response to the treatment of the Tagore family by police officers. Submit a question for the Tagore family to ask Sheriff-Elect Garcia directly when he visits the Gurdwara.

Make a Call
Harris County Sheriff-Elect Adrian Garcia (when he takes office) along with Judge Ed Emmet are charged with running the Harris County Sheriff's Office. Please call their offices directly and register your concern with the conduct of Harris County Sheriffs' deputies towards the Tagore family.

Aarti Shahani on the Obama's DHS pick

2008-12-10T12:02:00.001-08:00

formerly of the immigrants' rights community organization Families for Freedom, Aarti Shahani was on DN to add some cautionary words about the "liberal" track records of Janet Napolitano, Obama's pick for Secretary of Homeland Security.

Democracy Now! | As Obama Considers Napolitano For Homeland Security Chief, A Look at Her Immigration Policies as Arizona Governor

I think the salient part of Governor Napolitano as a federal executive as opposed to a state one, is that on the state level she pushed some of the most right-wing agendas on immigration enforcement. She went full speed ahead with the Bush agenda to move them from Federal to local hands. She lobbied for federal money and for federal resources to up immigration and enforcement in Arizona. So now the question is going to be, once she becomes a federal executive, is she going to continue with the same legacy she had on the state level? Is she going to continue to bang the drum saying, we need to get money to states so they can do their own immigration enforcement just like the state of Arizona did? Is she trying to replicate the Arizona model around the country? Or is she going to take pause and say maybe immigration enforcement as the leading strategy on immigration is not the right thing? And I think when you look also at what she’s proposing, I mean, governor Napolitano actually approved the first state level employer sanctioned bill in the country. She believes in a state level guest worker program in the state of Arizona. Now we all know that guest worker programs are not the way to ensure immigrant rights, immigrant workers rights, American workers rights in the coming administration. And so I think that the fact that’s such a cutting part of her agenda is reason to be afraid.

From red lines to subprimes -- understanding race and mortgage foreclosures

2008-12-09T09:38:00.001-08:00

It's not breaking news and cutting edge analysis, but the New York Times editorial board reminded readers today that

[t]he mortgage crisis that has placed millions of Americans at risk of losing their homes has been especially devastating for black and Hispanic borrowers and their families. It seems clear at this point that minorities were more likely than whites to be steered into risky, high-priced loans — even when researchers controlled for such crucial factors as income, loan size and location.

In perfect synchronicity, via RaceWire I caught these incredibly useful resources from the Kirwan Institute at Ohio State Univ that take us behind the opinion sections and into the data about race and the mortgage crisis/financial collapse.

Subprime Lending, Foreclosure and Race: An Introduction to the Role of Securitization in Residential Mortgage Finance (pdf)
Subprime Lending, Mortgage Foreclosures and Race: How Far Have We Come and How Far Have We to Go? (pdf)
A Structural Racism Lens on Subprime Foreclosures and Vacant Properties (pdf)
Reprint: Credit, Capital and Communities: The Implications of the Changing Mortgage Banking Industry for Community Based Organizations (pdf)

DVD review: "The Visitor" -- from outside to inside immigrant detention

2008-12-09T09:29:00.001-08:00

Kirwan Institute Blog

Yusuf Sarfati, Graduate Research Associate at the Kirwan Institute

The debate on immigration, specifically on the conditions and the future of the undocumented immigrants, is a heated topic in the U.S. “The Visitor”, which I watched on DVD last week, focuses on different aspects of this debate. The movie mainly revolves around a friendship between Tarek (Haaz Sleiman), a Syrian drummer, and Walter (Richard Jenkins), an economics professor, in New York City. Towards the end, the movie takes a dramatic turn, when Tarek was put in a detention center because of his lack of immigration documentation after he was held by cops over a trivial issue in a subway station.

From then on the movie explores the problems with the U.S. detention system, such as the isolated nature of the facility that transforms Tarek from a cheerful drummer to an anxious individual, the movement of the detainees from one center to the other without any information provided to the families or friends, the targeted criminalization of the immigrants (Tarek in the movie, like many others in the real world is locked up for an innocent incident in the subway), the lack of training of the officials in the centers to provide basic human needs for the detainees, and the difficulties of finding representation for the detainees in the centers. Tarek in the movie was “fortunate” that his new acquired friend Walter provided him an immigration lawyer.

In addition to the issue of detention, there was a larger discussion in the movie on the role of the immigrants in the formation and transformation of the U.S. national identity.

Facing Race Conference: videos of speeches/plenaries now online

2008-11-26T10:04:00.001-08:00

Facing Race Conference main speeches and plenaries
Courtesy the folks at ColorLines....

Watch the major speeches and full plenary presentations from the Facing Race 2008 Conference, Nov 13-15 in Oakland CA. The Conference was attended by over 900 participants. **** Check back to racewire.com for more followup videos and blogs on the Facing Race Conference and the Compact for Racial Justice

Blaming POCs for Prop 8 is not progressive politics.

2008-11-24T14:49:00.001-08:00

Sometimes you catch yourself just waiting for someone out there to print and publish that bewilderment you've been having but can't seem to express very articulately or persuasively. Robert Chlala helps out:

Beyond Black vs. Gay: A Wake-Up Call to Gay Marriage Activists in California

I’m not quite sure when the mainstream gay rights advocates adopted George W. Bush's "you are either with us or against us” mantra, became obsessed about exit polls, and started to believe that it's OK to marginalize people of color, but here we are.

Caught this on RaceWire -- 'hat tip'!

Uncovering the racism of nativism in the US

2008-11-22T14:59:00.000-08:00

Recent reports about the murder of Marcelo Lucero in the TUPOCC Yahoo! group prompted me to ask us to consider how legal activists of color, and our friends, might use critical legal theory and our experiential insights to uncover the racism of US nativism and and change popular understandings of today's anti-immigrant movement.

I referred to a Facing Race conference workshop that some of us attended on this subject last week, and a compañero in New York just mentioned today's Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI)'s conference on Galvanizing our Power for Action: Building Bridges between African-American and Immigrant Communities.

BAJI does great work, and I think we should all learn and talk about the relationship of US racism and nativism. In my Chicanos, Law, and Criminal Justice class at UC Berkeley, I teach about how the US has historically racialized Latinas/os vis-a-vis Indigenous and African peoples. In this post I share some resources and sketch my understanding of the racism of US nativism.

Let's start with the Anglo seizure of Tejas and the US invasion of México in the first half of the 19th century.

(N.B. Before continuing, it's important to acknowledge that all history is highly complicated, and we have imperfect means from fragmented sources to know the past. Certainly some Tejano elites joined Anglos in establishing Texas as an independent republic in 1836; similarly, the US-Mexican War had multiple factors. However, as I have asserted, my critical analysis of these past events has led me to frame them as the Anglo seizure of Tejas y the US invasion de México.)

As many have written, relations between the US and México soured in that early to mid 19th century period. In particular, numerous influential US congressmen railed against México as a nation of degenerate mongrels and expressed fear about incorporating territories with substantial numbers of them (us, colored folks).

I use a few excerpts to teach about this history, including Chapter Four, "Latinas/os" of Perea, Delgado, Harris, Stefancic & Wildman's Race and Races: Cases and Resources for a Diverse America, 2d ed. (2007), and the excerpt of Ian Haney López's The Social Construction of Race: Some Observations on Illusion, Fabrication, and Choice in Davis, Johnson & Martínez's A Reader on Race, Civil Rights, and American Law (2001).

The important point vis-a-vis conventional ideas about the "black-white binary" of race in the US today is that Latinas/os--particularly Mexicans and Puerto Ricans--in the 19th century challenged the US Anglo imaginary with a somewhat different dilemma than that posed by "the peculiar institution" of slavery.

Instead of an internal non-white "minority," México y Porto Rico presented the specter of already racially-mixed societies. And, according to the US Anglo conceptualization of race in the 19th century, the inferiority of a racially-mixed mongrel was even greater than that of a non-white Indian or African. Contemporary ideas promulgated at that time held that mixing the races produced an inferior breed to any of the "pure" races.

(Contrast these ideas with the 1990's celebration of multi-racial minorities, or the (re)discovery of bi-raciality. In turn, understand that always already, folks be hella mixed. Racial purity is a lie and an invidious illusion.)

From these first moments when the US incorporated of parts of México (starting with Tejas from 1836 to 1845, then including the lands ceded under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 and finally those later acquired in the Compromise of 1850 and the Gadsen Purchase of 1853), the idea of US nativism became even more complexly tied to racism. Previously the notion of US nativism was already fraught with contradictions given the genocide of Indigenous people and the situation of "native-born" African Americans, who were nonetheless legally excluded from enjoying their (our) human rights, including of course U.S. and state citizenship.

In the two decades prior to the Civil War and Reconstruction, however, the US incorporated a massive new territory inhabited by a substantial new "minority," which demaned an evolution in the means of subordination, i.e., the racialization of "Mexicans," first as "Greasers" (as in the infamous California anti-vagrancy law of 1855) and later as "cheap labor."

A foundational resource for understanding this history is Tomás Almaguer's Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (1994, new edition forthcoming 2008). Chapter One, "'We Desire Only a White Population in California' - The Transformation of Mexican California in Historical-Sociological Perspective," is particularly useful. Another useful resource is Gilbert Paul Carrasco's Latinos in the United States: Invitation and Exile in Juan Perea's Immigrants Out! The New Nativism and the Anti-Immigrant Impulse in the United States (1997).

A new book that I will likely incorporate into this section of my class is Laura Gómez's Manifest Destinties: The Making of the Mexican American Race (2008), which provides critical insights into this history beyond the California context. Understanding "Mexican" racialization in New Mexico is particularly important because that region remained a territory for 62 years -- from 1850 to 1912 -- until the Anglo population outnumbered the Hispano population. New Mexico is also important en la conciencia xican@ (in Chicana/o consciousness) because the New Mexico Territory was broken into parts to form Arizona, parts of Colorado and eventually New Mexico; it also has great importance as a site of centurial armed resistance to Anglo domination, from Las Gorras Blancas of the late 19th century through the efforts of Reies López Tijerina y La Alianza Federal de Mercedes in the 1960s.)

As Almaguer argues persuasively, using archival historical sources, the racialization of "Mexicans" in the US extended and evolved earlier forms of US racism against Indigenous and African people. In turn, Carrasco's chapter details how the racialization of "Mexicans" was particularly linked to the evolving labor demands of the 19th and 20th century, e.g., the Gold Rush, agricultural work, World War I, the Great Depression and the so-called "repatriation" campaigns of the 1930s, World War II and the second Bracero Program, "Operation: Wetback" and the H-2 visa program. (Gómez's arguments complement these by advancing her notion of Mexican Americans being "off-white," meaning sometimes defined as legally white but almost always defined as socially non-white, and grounding her concept in the particular history of New Mexico.)

Here is the take away point for folks open to understanding (and interested in articulating clearly) how racism is at the root of US nativism: Anglos evolved and extended US racism from the history of Indigenous genocide and African slavery as the US conquered and annexed the vast Mexican territory now known as the Southwest. In so doing, the US force a terrible Faustian pact onto Mexican Americans (and by implication all Latinas/os): deny your Indigenousness, denigrate your Blackness and aspire to racial Whiteness, or be ready for subjugation like an African and slaughter like an Indian.

Geography, region and social space is the critical factor that blinds some of us from seeing the connections between historical and contemporary racism(s) and nativism(s). Without understanding the foundational historic racialization of "Mexicans" (and the also salient historic racialization of Puerto Ricans) vis-a-vis Anglo American government, citizenship and political economy, it might be confusing to hear me say that US nativism is a form of racism, or and to understand how these ideologies overlap substantially.

However, to one who knows this history, today's nativism--whether it be in Congress, en la frontera or in Long Island--looks like it clearly continues the sorry past.

***

I'll end by citing two more important texts about these ideas. See Robert S. Chang & Keith Aoki, Centering the Immigrant in the Inter/National Imagination, 85 California Law Review 1395, 10 La Raza Law Journal 309 (1997) (published simultaneously in both journals). While I have not taught it yet, I read Chang & Aoki's explanation of "nativistic racism" during law school and recall it being rich with insights on this subject.

Second, Juan Perea's, Demography and Distrust: An Essay on American Languages, Cultural Pluralism, and Official English, 77 Minnesota Law Review 269 (1992) is a well structured history of the hidden past of US multilingualism, e.g., French, German, Spanish and English, at the founding and throughout the history of the US and its various states.

Facing Race

2008-11-16T17:14:00.000-08:00

Responding to a call by TUPOCC founding co-chair Renée Sánchez, and organized by USF 3L and NLG-SF Student Vice President, Aliya Karmali, about ten TUPOCC members and our friends attended the Applied Research Center's Facing Race: A National Conference in downtown Oakland, California this past weekend.

Attending plenary panels and workshops from Thursday's opening keynote by Sherman Alexie to Saturday's closing plenary on Race and the Global Economy, TUPOCC was present and representing radical "queer, colored" legal activism, as we connected with our friends and allies from other organizations dedicated to interracial justice, as a critical dimension of the people's intergenerational movement toward social justice.

While there were many interesting panels and workshops, I found two workshops particularly helpful to my interests in helping us build TUPOCC and creating community in Oakland.

BYOB: Build Your Own Blog was led by Liza Sabater of CultureKitchen.com and Chris Rabb of Afro-Netizen. Beyond an introduction to blogs and blogging, Liza and Chris provided great information about technologies that could substantially help us represent our racial justice work like Utterli (mobile audio/video sharing) Shoebox (photo management) and Drupal.

That last software, an open source package (as in GNU and the free software movement) seems particularly promising in helping us build TUPOCC's infrastructure beyond our previous and present attempts with Yahoo! Groups, the TUPOCC website and our Legal Activists of Color blog. Liza particularly indicated that Drupal has a module that can realize my idea of literally mapping TUPOCC's membership, by integrating Google Maps with a membership database that we could create based on the 141 folks in our Y! group.

While I have yet to download Drupal and likely won't start learning it until mid-December, I am very excited about its potential for TUPOCC and the several other organizations for which I volunteer, e.g., Latina & Latino Critical Legal Theory, Inc., the East Bay La Raza Lawyers Association, the Berkeley Law Foundation and the National Latina/Latino Law Student Association (NLLSA).

It's been a while since I've focused my energies on non-law and non-text learning and culture making, and I miss photography and film-making a great deal.

The second workshop I attended, Creating a Culture of Racial Justice, was powerfully synergistic. Moderated by Melanie Cervantes of Dignidad Rebelde and Taller Tupac Amaru, this workshop also featured Favianna Rodriguez, co-founder del mismo taller, Tumi's Design and the Eastside Arts Alliance; and DJ Phatrick and Samantha Chanse -- popular educators, community builders and radical cultural workers of color who are (or in the recent past were) based in the SF Bay Area.

Melanie's prompts and questions were particularly stimulating and merit mentioning three of the most memorable:

How do people create a racial justice culture to support social justice movement(s)?
How do folks who have become artists inspire and materially support others who desire to make art but feel unable to do so vis-a-vis their racial subordination and other forms of oppression?
How can artists serve as visionaries for the racially just world we want to create?

By themselves these questions may not seem revolutionary to some, but witnessing Favianna, Melanie, Patrick and Samantha share how they have made their lives and their art into living visions of racial, immigrant, gender and sexual justice was deeply inspiring.

I have lived, loved and worked hard to develop mi conciencia (a radical racial, political, sexual and spiritual awareness of my place in people's history), but to study law I stopped making photographs and films, dancing, journaling and writing poesía. While I tried to remain aware of the importance of "in xochitl, in cuicatl, flor y canto, flower-and-song" (art, poetry, dance, singing), my daily practice of making art basically stopped, as I focused on learning the law, reading critical legal scholarship and organizing students.

Witnessing Favianna, Melanie, Patrick and Samantha, reminded me of the crucial necessity to make soul and face as our elder compañera Gloria Anzaldúa and other radical lesbian Chicana poetas, artistas, scholars y filósofas have written.

While directly serving the people as a community lawyer in West Oakland's Homeless Action Center is a powerful practice of transgression against class norms and teaches me daily about solidarity across the many dimensions of power and identity (especially interracial and gender justice), Creating a Culture of Racial Justice reminded me that I also need to regularly practice love-inspired art-making -- in order to feel joyful and strong enough to serve nuestra lucha por justicia para el pobre (our struggle for justice for the poor), as the old La Raza Law Students Association slogan goes.

I have a lot more to write but more has already been reported.

I will end by mentioning four mujeres with whom I spoke briefly on the last day of Facing Race.

First, I briefly saw Tiny, aka Lisa Gray-Garcia, the fierce and fearless poverty scholar and co-founder of San Francisco-based POOR Magazine / Poor News Network. Tiny mentioned that POOR is on the move to the Mission District, after having resisted its threatened eviction, naming "development" for the 21st century colonization that it recapitulates and organizing the people to take back the land by holding a ceremony that calls upon the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People.

I also caught a glimpse of Evelyn Sanchez of the Bay Area Immigrant Rights Coalition (BAIRC), whom I spoken with briefly at Friday afternoon's plenary on The Race Debate: Challenging Colorblindness with Race Conscious Solutions.

Next, I took the opportunity to speak with Elizabeth "Betita" Martínez, who was book-signing at the AK Press table and whose sixth book, 500 Years of Chicana Women's History / 500 Años de la Mujer Chicana, was recently published.

I first read Betita's work while surviving law school: as I did at least once a semester, I left campus and got lost until I found myself in a bookstore, seeking words to nurture my spirit against the profound alienation of formal legal education.

In San Francisco's Mission District, I came across De Colores Means All of Us: Latina Views for a Multi-Colored Century, which introduced me to Betita's profound writings on mujerista and youth activism from New Mexico a California and across much of the twentieth century. I had most recently seen Betita across the table during La Raza Centro Legal's 35th anniversary dinner earlier this year, and when I mentioned it, she told me that she recalled how I was sitting to her right and asked about my work in West Oakland and the meaning of my middle name, Tizoc.

As she carefully composed the brief inscription she wrote on the book's frontispiece, I waited, kneeling before the table and feeling ever more deeply the significance of our brief momento conjuntos. I thought of my dad y abuelitas and my mom y tías and knew I was exactly where I should be.

Afterwards, thanking her and moving on, I was pleased to share the book con alguna de nuestras compañeras, Teague Briscoe (an El Paso homegirl and president-elect of the National Lawyers Guild - San Francisco Bay Area Chapter).

Finally, I had the fortune of seeing Tommy Escarcega, another El Paso Tejana and long time community activist who was organizing in support of the voting rights of people in county jails this past election.

We first met four or five years ago when she knocked on the door of La Raza Law Students Association at the UC Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall), saying she had heard there were Raza law students and asking for our support of her work in Proyecto Common Touch, which she founded to protect the due process rights of convicted women on parole or in custody.

Since then I've seen La Tommy a few times over the years, like when her project was based at Centro Legal de la Raza in Oakland's Fruitvale District. We spoke briefly about her recent work on the voting rights of people in jail, and I introduced her to other TUPOCC xicanas as the conference ended.

+++

As I've tried to show, the ARC's Facing Race was a powerful meeting of what Liepollo L. Pheko, of The Trade Collective, dubbed "the manys" who remain committed to the compact for racial justice. I encourage you to read more reporting on Facing Race.

Muchismas gracias a Renée y Aliya for motivating and organizing TUPOCC to represent at Facing Race. We did good outreach work in identifying allies and nurtured relationships con nuestr@s compañer@s across the law / non-law divide.

As Betita wrote, "Thank you for your good work, ¡Adelante juntos!"

The majority 'minorities'

2008-11-05T09:06:00.001-08:00

As people around the world take a deep breath -- in relief, excitement, or skepticism -- it cannot be understated how this election has politicized and mobilized people of color. and our allies.

now, what are we going to do with all that energy and determination?

Barack Obama's Many Majorities

America still has lines of division. But Obama's many majorities are, in some, the measures of a unity not seen in some time. Obama won with overwhelming support from African Americans (96 percent), Jews (77 percent), gays and lesbians (71 percent), first-time voters (68 percent), Latinos (67 percent), Asians (63 percent), voters under 30 (66 percent), union members (59 percent) and women (55 percent). But, in key battleground states, the Democrat was taking one in 10 votes cast by Republicans, one in five cast by conservatives, one in three cast by evangelical Christians.

Obama was, as well, redrawing that map of red and blue states, winning across every time zone of the continental U.S.: all of New England, the Great Lakes states, three states of the old Confederacy, three states of the southwest and all of west coast.

The map is still red and blue. But the mix is such that it is possible to imagine a blurring toward purple. Impossible? The president-elect would suggest that we think again. "If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy," Obama said in victory, "tonight is your answer."

Election protection: geared up for the most documented election in US history.

2008-11-03T17:04:00.001-08:00

A lot of us our going to be watching the election tallies tomorrow, and we'll be watching the polls, too.

Breaking Voter Problems:

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Callers have reported receiving robocalls telling them that Election Day is November 5^th.
Ohio: Voters have been falsely told that they can send in absentee ballots as late as November 14th.
North Carolina: Fliers were left on cars at a shopping mall instructing Republicans to vote on Tuesday, Nov. 4^th (actual Election Day) and Democrats to vote on Wednesday Nov. 5^th.
Louisiana: People who moved out of their damaged homes after Hurricane Katrina are reporting confusion about their registration status and voting precinct.
New Jersey: The state registration database is operating too slowly to update with the names of recent registrants.
Maryland and Virginia: Voters report receiving calls from the purportedly from the Obama campaign with inaccurate polling place location.
Indiana: Early voting centers are closing at noon and many people left standing in line have been sent away without getting to vote. Election law is unclear about this situation.
Michigan: Many registered voters’ names are not appearing on the state web site that verifies registration status. This also means that people can’t find their polling location on the site.
Kansas City, Missouri: Reports are coming in from voters at a largely African American polling location, who are being warned of a 6-8 hour wait to vote (despite the line being short) and forced to put their names on a list while in line to vote.

Emerging Trends from the 866-OUR-VOTE Hotline at OurVoteLive.org

Over 80,000 voter calls have now been received at the Election Protection Command Center.

Some emerging trends:

· Broward County leads Florida in voter requests for assistance.

· Registration-related problems rank #1 in nearly every battleground state - hundreds of calls focus on that problem, most often in Texas, New York, New Jersey, Georgia, Florida, Colorado, and California

· Georgia voters are reporting more incidents of voter intimidation than any other state. Other reports of voter intimidation, scams or misinformation are also emerging in Ohio and Missouri.

· Florida voters rank #1 in requests related to criminal status and voting.

· Early voting problems are also being noticed particularly in Ohio, Missouri, Georgia, Florida and California

Other News

REJECTED REGISTRATIONS.

Officials in Delaware County, Pennsylvania have rejected 250 voter-registration applications and questioned more than 4,000 others, alleging concerns over voter fraud and potential mismatches. In Georgia, Secretary of State Karen Handel is proceeding with an effort to send letters to 4,770 registered voters believed to be non-citizens. The secretary’s office took up the charge after counties stopped their verifications processes over DOJ questioning.

ALL IN POLLWORKERS’ HANDS.

Lines, registration problems, what you can or can’t wear. All of these issues now and on Election Day may come down to how they are handled by volunteer pollworkers. Pollworkers work long hours often with minimal compensation. Many states and localities are actively recruiting more volunteers in an effort to stay ahead of the rush on Election Day.

NLG-LA, ACLU, NILC Sue for Release of Government Documents Related to Local Immigration Raid

2008-10-29T10:15:00.001-07:00

National Immigration Law Center v. Dept. of Homeland Security: Groups Sue for Release of Government Documents Related to Local Immigration Raid

LOS ANGELES — A coalition of civil rights lawyers is suing federal immigration officials who have illegally failed to release information about reported racial profiling, intimidation and denial of access to counsel by workers detained during a huge workplace raid in Los Angeles.

On Tuesday, the National Immigration Law Center (NILC), the ACLU of Southern California and the National Lawyers Guild of Los Angeles filed a federal lawsuit asserting that the government’s lack of response violates the Freedom of Information Act. The three groups first requested basic information from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security nearly seven months ago. The government has failed to release a single document.

“The government has squandered an opportunity to allay community concerns about the manner in which it is conducting immigration raids. If the government truly believes that it is conducting these raids in a humane and lawful manner, it should release the documents this lawsuit seeks,” said NILC staff attorney Karen Tumlin.

Army Warns of Twitter Dangers... and vegetarians and human rights groups -- seriously

2008-10-29T10:07:00.001-07:00

This is just too ridiculous/crazy not to post. It brings to mind the question of who is really one step ahead technologically, the military or the college students?
Army Warns of Twitter Dangers

Army Warns of Twitter Dangers
October 25, 2008
Agence France-Presse

A draft US Army intelligence report has identified the popular micro-blogging service Twitter, Global Positioning System maps and voice-changing software as potential terrorist tools.

The report by the 304th Military Intelligence Battalion, posted on the website of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), examines a number of mobile and web technologies and their potential uses by militants. ****

A chapter on "Potential for Terrorist Use of Twitter" notes that Twitter members sent out messages, known as "Tweets," reporting the July Los Angeles earthquake faster than news outlets and activists at the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis used it to provide information on police movements.

"Twitter has also become a social activism tool for socialists, human rights groups, communists, vegetarians, anarchists, religious communities, atheists, political enthusiasts, hacktivists and others to communicate with each other and to send messages to broader audiences," the report said.

Did anyone tell these "intelligence" folks about facebook? Actually, the full-report is pretty comprehensive..

Straight outta Detroit: winding down from the NLG Law for the People Convention

2008-10-19T22:08:00.001-07:00

Well!

I just got back from the Detroit Convention. Five days of constant contact with Guilder folks and especially with TUPOCCers. It is energizing to come out of our meetings together, our conversations in the hallways and taxi rides.

At the TUPOCC Organizing Meeting, this past Friday, we transitioned into what I feel is a new era for TUPOCC. We ratified leadership and committee structures. We discussed our thoughts on the history and future of our caucus. And we elected our incoming co-chair Tory Gavito.

I just added 31 new names to our membership. A strong fistful of these new TUPOCCrs were so inspired by this Convention, they helped raise nearly $5,000 for the NLG in TUPOCC's name.

WE are stronger than ever. We are organized and organizing. We keep stepping up collectively and individually to subvert institutionalized racism and foster a community of radical legal activists of color. If there's one thing I'm most excited about it's the fact that we had folks of color from the generation before us, who came to our meetings and felt inspired by the NLG in a way they hadn't felt in a really long time. When we have law students, legal workers, and attorneys coming together, strategizing and knowledge-sharing across the lines of race and age, it is impossible for TUPOCC to stall. We are moving toward something the Guild has never seen.

In the coming days I'll post more about our work (and play) in Detroit. For now, it's time to get some rest, finally.

Onward!

Detroit Convention: on tap for Thursday...

2008-10-16T08:47:00.001-07:00

The Convention is underway here in Detroit, in a mammoth building that only the weighty hand of American capitalism could design. The Rennaisance Center has the likeness of a freeway system on the inside, so whatever you plan on doing at the NLG Convention, make sure you know where the room is and make sure you've given yourself time to get there.

There's a TUPOCC table in the "Ambassador" lobby, so be on the look out -- to pick up fliers, materials, and to connect with TUPOCC members!

This afternoon, at 1pm, a couple of us TUPOCCers are heading to a panel on ICE raids; it's not the only event this weekend dedicated to strategizing around the raids and their community-wide impact. Check out the workshop schedule at http://nlg.org/convention.

Tonight's keynote address is of particular interest to TUPOCC members and allies. The legendary activist Grace Lee Boggs will be address the Convention tonight. The scheduled time is 6:45-8:45PM. She won't be speaking the entire time -- probably just 30 minutes of it.

Here's a link to Grace Lee Boggs' essay 2050 Will Be What We Make It:

Living for Change; 2050 Will Be What We Make It

January 04, 2001
by Grace Lee Boggs

As we enter the 21st century, I believe we are in the early stages of the second American democratic revolution in my lifetime.

The first began 45 years ago with the Montgomery Bus Boycott triggered by the Emmett Till lynching. Now, in the wake of the Supreme Court coup awarding the presidency to Bush, Americans in all walks of life are questioning the legitimacy of the American political system and wondering how to create a "government of, by and for the people" to replace the "government of, by and for corporations" that we have now.

The revolution, as Karl Marx once wrote, sometimes needs the whip of the counter-revolution.

TUPOCC @ Detroit Convention: Locations announced!

2008-10-13T10:41:00.001-07:00

We now have the rooms listed for TUPOCC events at the 2008 NLG Law for the People Convention!

TUPOCC Organizing Meeting
- FRI, 7:30-9:00PM, at the Ambassador 1 room

TUPOCC PARTY! hosted by Detroit Summer
- FRI, 9ish-midnight, at the 555 Gallery (4882 Grand River Ave.)

TUPOCC Workshop: Study and Struggle: Organizing across generational lines
- SAT, 9:00AM-12:00PM, at the Ambassador 1 room

Major Panel: Legal and Political Strategies to Support the Liberation of Palestine
- FRI, 10:00-11:30AM, at the Ambassador 1 room

Constituency Panel: Displacement and Occupation of our Cities: Understanding Post-Fascist Amerika
- FRI, 10:00-11:30AM, at the Ambassador 2 room

Workshop: Women of Color, Labor Activism and Rights
- SAT, 1:00-2:15PM, at the Richard A room

Major Panel: Alternatives to Prison Profiferation
- SAT, 2:30-4:00PM, at the Ambassador 2 room

TUPOCC at the NLG Convention 2008: Study and Struggle: Organizing across generational lines

2008-10-13T05:37:00.001-07:00

TUPOCC SKILLS TRAINING WORKSHOP
Study and Struggle: Organizing across generational lines
Saturday October 18, 2008, 9:00am-12:00pm

"And here in this country, it has been my own observation that when you get into a conversation on racism and discrimination and segregation, you will find young people more incensed over it, they feel more filled with an urge to eliminate it." --Malcolm X

Fact is our public schools are looking more like jails and their jails and prisons are capturing more of our young people. Fact is youth organizing and older people of color having their back can change these conditions. Join us as we welcome youth organizers from Detroit Summer and veteran anti-racist organizer Ron Scott to lead our TUPOCC skill-building session addressing inter-generational politics and power. Our presenters have tackled issues of criminalization of youth, militarization of schools, the school to prison pipeline, and police brutality head-on and will share their knowledge from first hand experience in effective youth and inter-generational organizing. The presentation will provide ways for radical lawyers, legal worker and law students (us) to engage in these struggles, and win!

Detroit Summer is a multi-racial, inter-generational collective in Detroit, working to transform ourselves and our communities by confronting the problems we face with creativity and critical thinking.

Ron Scott is a Co-Founder of the Detroit Branch of the Black Panther Party; is a member of the Detroit Coalition Against Police Brutality; the Detroit Council of Elders; and the National Lawyers Guild. He is an Emmy Award-winning producer who has completed documentary projects on current affairs, cultural icons, entertainment, and politics in North American the Caribbean.

•Links for more on Detroit Summer
•Ron Scott's blog at Detroit News
•Grace Lee Boggs on Detroit Summer

International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network launches

2008-10-09T12:10:00.001-07:00

The new IJAN launched this week, publishing their charter. Here is the press release, dated October 7, 2008.

For Further information, Flo Razowsky 612 850 4942

Announcing the Launch of the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN)

Over the Jewish High Holidays - Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur - which are a time for reflection and atonement for the individual and collective injustices we have committed or have allowed to happen...

In honor of the 60th anniversary of Al Nakba ('Catastrophe' in Arabic) and the eighth anniversary of the second Palestinian intifada which inspired a stronger solidarity movement and growing criticism of Israel...

And with hope for a year of greater possibility for justice in Palestine, the broader region and our world...

We launch the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network - IJAN - with the release of our founding charter.
Our pledge in the Charter will be carried out through our commitments to: 1) solidarity with Palestinian self-determination, 2) participation in global movements to end imperialism, and 3) the extrication of Jewish history, politics, community, and culture from the grip of Zionism.

Charter of the International Jewish anti-Zionist Network

We are an international network of Jews who are uncompromisingly committed to struggles for human emancipation, of which the liberation of the Palestinian people and land is an indispensable part.
From Poland to Iraq, from Argentina to South Africa, from Brooklyn to Mississippi, Jews have taken up their quest for justice, and their desire for a more just world, by joining with others in collective struggles. Jews participated prominently in the workers' struggle of the depression era, in the civil rights movement, in the struggle against South African Apartheid, in the struggle against fascism in Europe, and in many other movements for social and political change. The State of Israel's historic and ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people from their land contradicts and betrays these long histories of Jewish participation in collective liberation struggles.
For the people of this planet to live in safety, justice and peace, the Israeli colonial project must be brought to an end. We joyfully take up this collective task of undermining a system of conquest and plunder that has tormented our world for far too long.
We pledge to: Oppose Zionism and the State of Israel
We pledge to: Reject the colonial legacy and on-going colonial expansion
We pledge to: Challenge Zionist organizations
We pledge to: Commit our solidarity and work toward justice
Do you stand against racism in all its forms? Then we call you to join with us in ending Israeli apartheid.

For the complete Charter, http://www.ijsn. net/about_ us/charter/

Blaming people of color instead of multinational financiers

2008-10-09T11:20:00.001-07:00

Pundits (Coulter, Cavuto, Dobbs, etc.) have been pointing the public's attention away from banks and financiers as the US and world economies continue to flounder. they have targeted the Community Reinvestment Act (1977) as the point of origin for the mortgage crisis and are blaming everyone from Barack Obama to work-a-day folks who "have[] a good jump shot" (Ann Coulter's words...). wonder what she was coding there!

these conservative free-marketeer pundits have a lot in common with the financial experts and advisors who have run the 'developing world' into massive, generational debt. if the favored financial system is ruining a country, they seem to suggest, then blame the poor dark-skinned people, not the financiers.

Ed Morales, at The Progressive, answers back:

Bailout blame game unfairly targets minorities

But that line of thinking is extremely flawed.

First, since the Community Reinvestment Act was crafted over 30 years ago, why is it that only now subprime mortgages have created a crisis?

Second, most of the disastrous subprime loans were made by mortgage brokers and disreputable lenders unregulated by the Community Reinvestment Act.

Third, white and affluent borrowers took out 58 percent of higher-cost loans, with blacks and Latinos accounting for 18 percent each, according to data from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act

Homeland Guantanamos

2008-10-08T14:39:00.001-07:00

Breakthrough presents Homeland Guantanamos | RaceWire

Breakthrough presents Homeland Guantanamos

H/T Sepia Mutiny

Homeland Guantanamos is Breakthrough tv’s latest use of technology to explain the harsh realities that immigrants face in the United States. From the same people that brought you ICED, a video game that puts you in the shoes of real immigrants, this virtual tour of a detention facility where men and women face abuse and inhumane conditions.

Along with a look inside a dentention center, there are real interviews with immigrants that are currently being detained, a memorial wall to honor the many immigrants that are died in detention centers, and a guide to help you take action against unfair polices of the Department of Homeland Security.

300 arrested in South Carolina ICE raid

2008-10-07T10:24:00.001-07:00

Immigration Officials Raid Poultry Plant - Greenville News Story - WYFF Greenville

GREENVILLE, S.C. -- Federal immigration agents are executing a criminal search warrant Tuesday at the Columbia Farms poultry processing plant on Rutherford Road in Greenville County.

More than 300 people suspected of being illegal immigrants have been detained, agents said.

The raid by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency is part of ICE's ongoing 10-month investigation into unauthorized employment of workers at the plant.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin McDonald said the raid began shortly before 9 a.m. Tuesday during a shift change at the plant.

Federal prosecutors and immigration agents have been investigating the plant's hiring practices. McDonald says a recent review of immigration paperwork of 825 workers showed more than 775 contained false information.

South Carolina U.S. Attorney Walt Wilkins and ICE have called a news conference for Tuesday afternoon in downtown Greenville.

Wilkins said that there are between 400 and 450 ICE agents involved in the raid, but not all are at the site.

"We're here to enforce the laws of the United States against those who use identification documents to unlawfully obtain jobs as well as those employers who knowingly hire and harbor undocumented aliens," Wilkins said. "That's what we're doing here."

House Raid Undermines San Francisco's Sanctuary Status

2008-09-17T13:06:00.001-07:00

Immigrant Raid Undermines San Francisco's Sanctuary Status | Immigration | AlterNet

SAN FRANCISCO -- Immigration agents entered a private home in San Francisco on Sept. 11, 2008, arresting six undocumented immigrants in what residents see as the most recent evidence that this is no longer a "sanctuary city."

"They say this is a sanctuary city, but they're throwing us away like garbage," says Freddie Herrera, 21, who was in the middle of dinner with his family when he heard the doorbell ring.

"Sanctuary doesn't affect ICE's efforts to enforce immigration law," explains Lori Haley, a spokesperson for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. "ICE officers are sworn to enforce federal law."

But Jamal Dajani, chairman of the city's Immigrant Rights Commission, disagrees. He calls the arrests last Thursday "a total violation of the sanctuary ordinance. This is exactly why the sanctuary ordinance was created," he says.

New FBI Guidelines: race as a 'generalized threat'

2008-09-14T19:06:00.001-07:00

From the ACLU...

New FBI Guidelines Open Door to Further Abuse (9/12/2008)

Washington, DC - Following a briefing today at the Department of Justice (DOJ), the American Civil Liberties Union reiterated its deep concern over new guidelines that would govern FBI investigations. The new guidelines would lower standards for beginning "assessments" (precursors to investigations), conducting surveillance and gathering evidence, and would replace existing guidelines for five types of existing guidelines: general criminal, national security, foreign intelligence, civil disorders and demonstrations.

The rewritten guidelines have been drafted in a way to give the FBI the ability to begin surveillance without factual evidence, stating that a generalized "threat" is enough to use certain techniques. Also under the new guidelines, a person's race or ethnic background could be used as a factor in opening an investigation, a move the ACLU believes will institute racial profiling as a matter of policy. The guidelines would also give the FBI the ability to use intrusive investigative techniques in advance of public demonstrations. These techniques would allow agents to conduct pre-textual (undercover) interviews, use informants and conduct physical surveillance in connection with First Amendment protected activities.

Florida to enforce 'no-match, no-vote' law for Nov. election

2008-09-14T13:22:00.000-07:00

Florida has apparently ended felony disenfranchisement (de jure, of course), but how about tossing out your vote because of a misspelling in the state's voter database? Sounds frivolous and unconstitutional, but Flordia will likely get its way (compare with the US Supreme Court's decision earlier this year re: Indiana's voter-I.D. requirements, William Crawford et al. v. Marion County Election Board, et al.
). State officials are ready to pick off thousands of people of color from the voting lines in November... you know, because our names are so gosh-darn hard to spell!

Florida Voting Law May Disenfranchise Thousands | AlterNet

Voting rights advocates are alarmed over the Florida Secretary of State's September 8th decision to enforce the state's "no-match, no-vote" law, a voter registration law that previously blocked more than 16,000 eligible Florida citizens from registering to vote, through no fault of their own, and could disenfranchise tens of thousands more voters in November.

Secretary of State Kurt Browning's last-minute decision to implement the law in the final month before the registration deadline will post a significant hurdle to eligible Florida citizens hoping to vote in November. It will disenfranchise voters who do not send or bring a photocopy of their driver's license to county election officials' offices after voting, even though these voters will have shown their driver's licenses when they went to vote at the polls.

"This 11th-hour decision is an ill-advised move to apply a policy the state has never enforced in its current form, at a time when registration activity is at its highest," stated Beverlye Neal, director of the Florida State Conference of the NAACP, a plaintiff in a lawsuit that challenges Florida's matching law. "The Secretary's decision will put thousands of real Florida citizens at risk due to bureaucratic typos that under the 'no-match, no-vote' law will prevent them from voting this November," said Alvaro Fernandez of the Southwest Voter Registration and Education Project, another plaintiff in the case.

Immigration Raid Breaks Up Organizing Drive at Iowa Meatpacking Plant

2008-09-09T19:56:00.001-07:00

the largest immigration enforcement raid in US history -- in Laurel, Mississippi, last month -- was built on the blueprint of last winter's raid in Pottsville, Iowa. both raids share a disturbing anti-labor, anti-solidarity design....

Immigration Raid Breaks Up Organizing Drive at Iowa Meatpacking Plant | Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace | AlterNet

UFCW claims ICE actions hamper union activity by intimidating potential members. The union sued the agency in 2007 following similar raids at five Swift meatpacking plants where the union has members.

Lauritsen noted that the Postville arrests amounted to eliminating hundreds of witnesses to labor violations at the plant.

Ironically, the raid did bring proof of allegations against Agriprocessors. Of the raid's detainees, 29 were underage. Three months after the raid, the Iowa DOL released a report detailing 57 child labor violations at the Postville plant -- including children as young as 13 working on the kill floor -- and has recommended the state prosecute the company.

Houston police used Tasers more on blacks

2008-09-09T03:39:00.001-07:00

Newsvine - Study: Houston police used Tasers more on blacks

Of 1,417 Taser deployments by officers between December 2004 and June 2007, nearly 67 percent were used on black suspects, according to an audit conducted for the city by a team of criminology, statistics and mathematics experts. About 25 percent of Houston's population is black.

The audit was requested by Houston Mayor Bill White in 2006, after several high-profile incidents. ...

Minister Robert Muhammad, with the southwest regional headquarters for The Nation of Islam, said the study shows that police are more apt to use the weapons on black suspects than suspects of other races.

"Can we say it's racism? Yes, and some people would argue no," said Muhammad. "The greater argument is abuse of authority. We give them authority to protect us. But instead of using that authority to protect us, they abuse us with it."

Houston police said their use of Tasers was not tied to race, but to a person's behavior.

"It's not a racial issue. A Taser device is no different from a radar gun. It's race neutral," Executive Assistant Police Chief Charles McClelland said after the Houston City Council meeting during which the report was released.

Pakistan: Zardari, from 'Mr. 10-percent' to President 10-percent

2008-09-07T02:25:00.001-07:00

Tariq Ali: Asif Ali Zardari is Pakistan's worst choice for president | guardian.co.uk

Khalilzad is an inveterate factionalist and a master of intrigue. Having implanted Hamid Karzai in Kabul (with dire results as many in Washington now admit), he had been livid with Musharraf for refusing to give 100% support to his Afghan protege. Khalilzad now saw an opportunity to punish Musharraf and simultaneously try and create a Pakistani equivalent of Karzai.

Zardari fitted the bill. He is perfectly suited to being a total creature of Washington. The Swiss government helpfully decided to release millions of dollars from Zardari's bank accounts that had, till now, been frozen due to the pending corruption cases. Like his late wife, Zardari, too, is now being laundered, just like the money he made when last in office as minister for investment. This weakness will make him a pliant president of Pakistan.

Immigrants Gain DHS Assurance: No Checkpoints in Gustav Evacuation

2008-08-31T16:50:00.001-07:00

Press Release from the New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice:

Immigrant workers demanding a safe evacuation from the path of Hurricane Gustav received key assurances from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that no immigration enforcement actions or checkpoints would occur in the evacuation process or along evacuation routes. The New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice gained the assurances for safe passage of immigrant workers just as mandatory evacuations began across the Gulf Coast. ...

As Gustav approached, immigrant workers and their families feared evacuation due to anticipation over Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Border Patrol checkpoints. Of the over 200 surveys of day laborers which the Workers' Center conducted as Hurricane Gustav approached, the fear of detention and deportation by DHS was identified as the single greatest obstacle to accessing humanitarian relief. "We want to take our families to safety. We should not have to face deportation as we escape from the storm," said Dennis Soriano, an organizer with the Congress of Day Laborers.

Excerpt of the agreement:

OFFICE FOR CIVIL RIGHTS AND CIVIL LIBERTIES

Gustav
· All residents of the Gulf Coast region need to evacuate.

· There are no immigration enforcement operations, and there are no immigration enforcement checkpoints associated with the evacuations.

· The Department of Homeland Security's top priorities in any emergency are life-saving and life-sustaining activities, preventing the loss of property to the extent possible, and assisting with a speedy recovery of the affected region.

Gustav

· Todos los residentes del la region de la Costa del Golfo
deben evacuar.

· No hay operacions de inmigracion, y no hay puntos de inmigracion asociados con las evacuaciones.

· Las prioridades mas altas del Departamento de Seguridad Nacional (DHS por sus siglas en Ingles) en cualquier emergencia son las de salvar y sostener la vida, preevenir la perdida de propiedad lo tanto posible, y asistir con la recuperacion de la region afectada.

Prisoners' plight during hurricane Gustav: CR and INCITE action alerts

2008-08-31T14:31:00.001-07:00

Forwarded message:

Hey folks - please make this call today in between your Labor Day Weekend activities. Also, INCITE! New Orleans tells us that women prisoners are being shipped to Angola State Prison, an infamous maximum security men's prison, rather than to the state women's facility. This happened last time, and resulted in terrible human rights abuses. We particularly need the "big" organizations among you to make this call - but everyone's voice is needed. MAKE SURE WHEN YOU CALL TO DEMAND TO KNOW WHY WOMEN PRISONERS ARE BEING SHIPPED TO A MEN'S FACILITY, AND THAT THEY BE MOVED TO A WOMEN'S FACILITY IMMEDIATELY.

Also, we are raising money to help get low income women of color, who, as we all know, were devastatingly impacted by Hurricane Katrina's aftermath, out of town safely and back to the City as soon as it is safe. You can donate at INCITE!'s website http://www.incite-national.org, put New Orleans in the "purpose" line of the Pay Pal form, and we will be transferring it directly to the INCITE! New Orleans bank account for distribution to the 500 + constituency and patients of the New Orleans Women's Clinic, created post Katrina by INCITE! New Orleans to meet the overwhelming need for health care for low income uninsured women of color in the wake of public hospital closings and ongoing environmental contamination...

...
What will happen to the prisoners of Orleans Parish Prison located in New Orleans this time?

Critical Resistance (CR) is demanding that the elected officials of New Orleans will not create the same devastating wrongs as they did to the prisoners of Orleans Parish Prison during hurricane Katrina.

we demand a full and safe evacuation of all prisoners
we demand to know what the evacuation plan for prisoners is
we demand to see a public document about that plan immediately
we demand information about how we can find people after an evacuation

We are urging every member, ally and comrade of New Orleans across the country, to make at least one call to:

Sheriff Malrin Gusman: 504.827.8505
(James Carter's secretary said "Orleans Parish Prison is Gusman's prison")
James Carter: 504.658.1030
(Criminal Justice Council Member who is able to put pressure on the sheriff even if they say they can't)
You can also send an email: JCarter@cityofno.com
please put in your email subject: How will you protect prisoners this time?

Please call as many times as you can to put pressure on them and let them know our demands and it is their job to be accountable to us!!!!!!!!

For further information from us please contact Critical Resistance New Orleans:
Mayaba: 917.385.5472 or mayaba@criticalresistance.org
Koolblack: 504.813.4714 or koolblack@criticalresistance.org

(If you can't get through due to evacuation please contact:
pilar@criticalresistance.org for further information)

In solidarity,
Critical Resistance

US Air Strike Massacres Civilians In Western Afghanistan

2008-08-28T06:37:00.001-07:00

US Air Strike Massacres Civilians In Western Afghanistan
By James Cogan
26 August, 2008
WSWS.org

In one of the worst atrocities of the US-led occupation of Afghanistan, as many as 90 civilians were massacred by an American air strike last Friday in the western province of Herat. At least 60 of those killed were children under the age of 15, according to Afghan government and military sources.

The slaughter was carried out by what is, for defenceless people on the ground, one of the most terrifying warplanes in the US arsenal, the AC-130 “Spooky” gunship. Equipped with a rapid-fire five-barrel 25mm Gatling gun, a 40mm cannon and a 105mm howitzer, it is designed to lay waste to exposed targets with a torrent of bullets and artillery shells.

The victims were part of a large crowd that had gathered in the village of Azizabad—a community near the government airfield at Shindand, some 120 kilometres south of the city of Herat—for a customary commemoration of the 40th day after the death of a local leader. Many of the men in the village work as security guards at the airfield.

How they came to be targeted by US aircraft is still shrouded in a fog of contradictory reports.... [link]

Terror watchlist "upgrade" is "imploding," legislator says

2008-08-26T09:44:00.001-07:00

Need another reason to oppose "watchlists," besides racial profiling? The Bush Admin has bungled everything from the administration to the coding. Caught this on slashdot, sourcing from ars technica:

Terror watchlist "upgrade" is "imploding," legislator says
By Julian Sanchez
| Published: August 25, 2008 - 12:03PM CT

The database used to produce the government's terror watch lists is "crippled by technical flaws," according to the chairman of a House technology oversight subcommittee—and the system designed to replace it may be even worse.

In a letter to the inspector general at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence last week, Rep. Brad Miller (D-NC) complained that the National Counterterrorism Center's "Railhead" initiative, designed to upgrade the government's master database of suspected terrorists, "if actually deployed will leave our country more vulnerable than the existing yet flawed system in operation today."

Miller, who chairs the Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee of the House Science and Technology Committee, cited "severe technical troubles, poor contractor management, and weak government oversight," which he said had brought the Railhead program to the "verge of collapse."

The NCTC's Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, established pursuant to the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, is the government's centralized master database of people with suspected terror links. Containing some half a million names, it is used to create more specific watchlists used by other government agencies, such as the Transportation Security Administration's much-derided "no-fly" list.

ICE raid in Mississippi

2008-08-25T08:52:00.001-07:00

Immigration agents raid Laurel plant |The Clarion-Ledger

Federal immigration agents raided a major manufacturing plant in south Mississippi on Monday, but it wasn’t immediately clear how many illegal workers were taken into custody.

Barbara Gonzalez, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman, said the target of the operation was Howard Industries Inc. in Laurel, a town of about 18,000 people located about 85 miles southeast of Jackson.

NYT: Blacks Debate Civil Rights Risk in Obama’s Rise

2008-08-25T06:26:00.001-07:00

Not exactly a revelation, but ...

Blacks Debate Civil Rights Risk in Obama’s Rise - NYTimes.com

Mr. Obama has received overwhelming support from black voters, many of whom believe he will help bridge the nation’s racial divide. But even as they cheer him on, some black scholars, bloggers and others who closely follow the race worry that Mr. Obama’s historic achievements might make it harder to rally support for policies intended to combat racial discrimination, racial inequities and urban poverty.

They fear that growing numbers of white voters and policy makers will decide that eradicating racial discrimination and ensuring equal opportunity have largely been done.

“I worry that there is a segment of the population that might be harder to reach, average citizens who will say: ‘Come on. We might have a black president, so we must be over it,’ ” said Mr. Harrison, 59, a sociologist at Howard University and a consultant for the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies here.

Tariq Ali : Pakistan After Musharraf

2008-08-22T17:05:00.001-07:00

With elections set in Pakistan for September 6, "the senior party in Pakistan’s governing coalition on Friday nominated Asif Ali Zardari, widower of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, as its candidate." Tariq Ali offers some perspective on the possible transition in power:

Pakistan After Musharraf: How Long Before the Military is Back at the Helm?
By Tariq Ali
August 18, 2008

Now Musharraf will go in disgrace, threatened with impeachment and abandoned by most of his cronies, who grew rich under his rule and are now sidling shamelessly in the direction of the new power-brokers. The country has moved seamlessly from a moth-eaten dictatorship to a moth-eaten democracy. Six months after the old, morally obtuse, political gangs returned to power, the climate has further deteriorated. The widower Bhutto and his men are extremely unpopular. The worm-eaten tongues of long discredited politicians and resurrected civil servants are on daily display. Removing Musharraf, who is even more unpopular, might win the politicians some time, but not for long.

Amidst the hullabaloo there was one hugely diverting moment last week that remind[ed] one of pots and kettles. Asif Zardari, the caretaker-leader of the People’s Party who runs the government and is the second richest man in the country (funds that accrued when his late wife was Prime Minister) accused Musharraf of corruption and siphoning official US funds to private bank accounts. For once the noise of laughter drowned the thunder of money.

...Other problems persist. The politicians are weak and remain divided on the restoration of the judges sacked by Musharraf. The Chief Justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, is the most respected person in the country. Zardari is reluctant to see him back at the head of the Supreme Court. A possible compromise might be to offer him the Presidency. It would certainly unite the country for a short time.

Over the last fifty years the US has worked mainly with the Pakistan Army. This has been its preferred instrument. Nothing has changed. How long before the military is back at the helm?

LA Gov. Jindal Won't Renew Non-Discrimination Ban

2008-08-22T06:04:00.001-07:00

GLAAD: Louisiana Gov. Won't Renew Non-Discrimination Ban

Louisiana’s Governor Bobby Jindal announced that he will not renew Louisiana’s anti-discrimination law, enacted in 2004 by executive order by former Governor Kathleen Blanco. The order banned discrimination in government employment, providing government services and in government contracts with private companies. Under the order, private businesses contracting with the state also needed inclusive non-discrimination policies. Blanco’s executive order added sexual orientation to the categories race, religion, gender, national origin, political affiliation, and disability.

The comrades over at PassTheRoti posted a succinct response: "How do you spell a$$hole? J-I-N-D-A-L."

Launched: Don't Buy Apartheid - Hang Up On Motorola

2008-08-20T09:10:00.001-07:00

from the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation:

after a year of research and polite engagement, the US Campaign to End the Israeli occupation is officially launching a consumer boycott against Motorola until they stop profiting from Israeli apartheid policies. Sign our pledge to say "Goodbye Moto" today.

The Campaign's research has turned up the following facts, among others:

Producing the 980 Low Altitude Proximity Fuse for the MK-80 series of high-explosive bombs. On July 30, 2006, during its war on Lebanon, the Israeli Air Force dropped an MK-84 high-explosive bomb on an apartment building in Qana, Lebanon. The bomb killed at least 28 civilians, many of whom were children, who had taken shelter in the basement of their apartment building.
Developing and supplying the Israeli military with the “Mountain Rose” secure cell phone communication system, which is the exclusive communications system in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
Supplying Israel with the Wide Area Surveillance System (WAAS) to monitor and maintain the illegal wall it has constructed in the Palestinian West Bank. Motorola Israel’s provision of the WAAS to Israel contradicts the International Court of Justice (ICJ) advisory opinion in July 2004.
Providing radar detection devices and thermal cameras for 47 illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian land. According to the Fourth Geneva Conventions, Article 49, it is a war crime for an occupying power to transfer its civilian population in to occupied territories.

Pakistan Justice Coalition welcomes Musharraf’s resignation

2008-08-19T07:45:00.001-07:00

The NLG-affiliated Pakistan Justice Coalition has posted remarks on General/President Musharraf's exit from power in Pakistan:

Along with the Pakistani people, we welcome the resignation of Pervez Musharraf as a victory in the struggle for democracy, rule of law and human rights. Musharraf’s rapid fall from power demonstrates the bankruptcy of the Bush administration’s policy of advocating liberty while supporting autocracy. As we have stated, the real struggle today is not between democracy and terror, but between those who support expansion of democratic and human rights and those who seek to infringe upon them. The Bush Administration supported the Musharraf regime on the grounds that it was an ally in the so-called “war on terrorism” and overlooked its violations of the most fundamental democratic rights. Both Administrations also refused to respect judicial independence, accepting the removal and incarceration of over half of Pakistan’s legitimate judges. In the face of popular opposition that even potentially rigged elections could not conceal, the Musharraf presidency was finally — and fortunately — doomed to failure. President Bush often claims liberty is the birthright and natural desire of all people. Had he really believed his rhetoric, however, he would have supported the heroic lawyers of Pakistan in their demands, rather than the now-deposed and discredited Musharraf.

The Lawyers Movement has represented the legal profession at its best. We stand with it and share the joy of its triumph. While Pakistan’s future remains far from certain, it has taken an enormous step forward

U.S. Immigration In an Age of Global Apartheid

2008-08-18T09:01:00.001-07:00

Story of U.S. Immigration In An Age of Global Apartheid

August, 14 2008
By Ben Terrall
Z-net

In his 2001 book, Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the ‘Illegal Alien' and the Remaking of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary (Routledge), Joseph Nevins focused on the Clinton Administration's initiatives to heighten security at the U.S.-Mexico border.

That book showed how the alleged goal of reducing immigration to the U.S. by pushing potential migrants from "urban corridors" to remote regions only made the crossing more dangerous, and thus contributed to more needless deaths of poor Mexicans and Central Americans. It also made clear that previous to the 1970s, travel between Mexico and the U.S. was not a national issue.

Nevins's new book, Dying to Live: A Story of U.S. Immigration In An Age of Global Apartheid (City Lights Publishers, 2008), continues his earlier examination of border policies, but personalizes its analysis by looking at the tragic story of one hard-working family man, Julio Cesar Gallegos, who died with five other men and one young woman in 1998 in Southern California's Imperial Valley Desert.

Report of disparities between Baltimore, suburban trials

2008-08-18T08:20:00.001-07:00

Jury study raises hackles in city

Prosecutor objects to report of disparities between Baltimore, suburban trials

By Julie Bykowicz | Sun Reporter
August 18, 2008

An Abell Foundation report that found disparity between the verdicts of Baltimore jurors and their suburban counterparts has infuriated the city's top prosecutor.

After reading a March draft of the report, which recommends the creation of a regional jury pool, Baltimore State's Attorney Patricia C. Jessamy called the study "potentially divisive" and asked in a letter to Abell President Robert C. Embry Jr. that it "be shelved" or its recommendations reworked.

"Disparities in Jury Outcomes - Baltimore City vs. Three Surrounding Jurisdictions - An Empirical Examination" was supposed to come out in April.

...In the March draft of the Abell report, which was obtained by The Sun, Shawn Flower of Choice Research Associates said she examined 293 cases from July 1, 2005, to June 30, 2006. That included all jury trials in Anne Arundel, Baltimore and Howard counties, and a random sample of jury trial cases from the city.....

...[Flower] wrote that the disparity in jury outcomes might be explained by "population characteristics and socioeconomic factors" and said the state should explore the concept of a regional jury pool to "neutralize city residents' negative perceptions of the criminal justice system."

"Generally speaking, citizens in the three comparison jurisdictions tend to be more advantaged in all respects than those in Baltimore City - they are better educated, are wealthier and are more likely to own their own homes," she wrote. Prospective jurors in the counties "are also less likely to suffer from the structural disadvantage and social disorganization which often results in the higher incidence of crime and victimization from crime."

...Jessamy condemned Flower's theories about Baltimore jurors and her suggestion of a regional jury pool - a concept she called "extreme and I believe unconstitutional."

"I am simply appalled that in the name of science and research, you reach a conclusion that because a large number of city residents [live in poverty and among crime], they are incapable of performing their civic duty," she wrote.

Police, Feds Set Tone for SF Chronicle Attack of Sanctuary Ordinance

2008-08-18T03:39:00.000-07:00

by Carlos Villarreal and Angela Chan, 2008-08-13

Carelessly referencing vague sources and leading with off the cuff remarks by law enforcement, the San Francisco Chronicle and reporter Jaxon Van Derbeken have published a series of damaging articles about juvenile immigrant offenders and the city's sanctuary ordinance. The implication in the series of stories that began to appear on June 29, is that violent felons and crack dealers are taking advantage of the City's Sanctuary Ordinance and specifically a policy at the Juvenile Probation Department that has shielded felons, according to the Chronicle spin, from deportation at taxpayers' expense. A few major facts rarely tempered this incitement of reactionaries: the juvenile court system is very different from the adult criminal courts, the Sanctuary Ordinance never dictated the various tactics used by the Juvenile Probation Department, and the Sanctuary Ordinance doesn't cause violence. To the contrary, the ordinance encourages people to communicate with law enforcement and other government agencies regardless of immigration status.

[link to story]

Race sometimes a problem in eyewitness IDs

2008-08-17T16:01:00.000-07:00

Posted on Sun, Aug. 10, 2008
By MARK SHERMAN
Associated Press Writer

Thompson-Cannino, who is white, had mistakenly picked out one black man; another was guilty of the crime.
"Between the composite sketch and the photo identification, I had messed it up," she said, recalling the 1984 rape and its aftermath. "By the time I got to the physical lineup, Ron Cotton had become my attacker and that was that."
And as she came to learn, she was not the only one to make a mistake so devastating that it deprived someone else of his freedom.
Since 1991, 218 people have been exonerated through DNA testing, and in more than three-quarters of the cases, mistaken eyewitness identifications were crucial in the wrongful convictions, according to The Innocence Project, a legal group that has sought genetic testing and led the charge to free innocent inmates.
Of those, nearly half, roughly seven dozen, involved a person of one race wrongly identifying someone of a different color.

[link to story]

Blog Action Day 2008

2008-08-17T15:43:00.000-07:00

via eHub...

Today is the launch of Blog Action Day 2008. If you're a blogger, you can register at the site. "Blog Action Day itself is on October 15th and on that day we ask bloggers everywhere to publish a post on the same day on the same issue, with the intent to hijack the conversation on the internet that day and examine the issue from a thousand different angles...This year we've got a really important issue - Poverty - and it's going to be really fascinating to see how people come at it from different angles."

More info:

If you have a blog, podcast or videocast, you can commit your blog or website to participate in Blog Action Day.

From August 15th to October 15th bloggers are asked to register to participate so we can track how many blogs will be involved, as well as their approximate audience size.

On October 15th participating blogs will put up a post, video or podcast about poverty. You many also wish to donate the day’s ad revenue to a poverty-related charity.

alternet.org - Army Recruiter Threatens High School Student with Jail Time

2008-08-09T16:03:00.000-07:00

A Texas army recruiter was recently suspended for telling a teenager he would be
sent to jail if he chose college over the military.

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/94192

Tell your Congressperson to cosponsor the Paid Family Leave Bill!

2008-08-09T10:11:00.000-07:00

http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/1768/t/5365/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=25313

Tell your Congressperson to cosponsor the Paid Family Leave Bill!

kucinich.us - Petition to Impeach the Prez

2008-08-09T05:11:00.000-07:00

kucinich.us - Petition to Impeach

http://kucinich.us/impeachment/petition/index2.php?FName=&LName=&email=&Zip=&phone=

startribune.com - ACLU won't appeal ruling on security restrictions for Democratic convention in Denver

2008-08-08T15:04:00.000-07:00

ACLU won't appeal ruling on security restrictions for Democratic convention in Denver

http://www.startribune.com/politics/26390954.html

commondreams.org - After Split Decision In Guantanamo, Legal Debate Rages On

2008-08-07T20:24:00.000-07:00

After Split Decision In Guantanamo, Legal Debate Rages On

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/08/07/10864/

nytimes.com - Panel Sentences bin Laden Driver to a Short Term

2008-08-07T20:22:00.000-07:00

Military Panel Sentences bin Laden Driver to a Short Term

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/08/washington/08gitmo.html?hp

nytimes.com - 500: Deadly U.S. Milestone in Afghan War

2008-08-07T20:10:00.000-07:00

500: Deadly U.S. Milestone in Afghan War

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/07/us/07afghan.html

truthdig.com - Threats, Lies and Audiotape

2008-08-07T20:09:00.001-07:00

Threats, Lies and Audiotape

By Amy Goodman
August 7, 2008, TruthDig.com

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080806_threats_lies_and_audiotape/

It was like an action movie. A young man held at night in a hotel, threatened with prison. He is to be shipped off to war in the morning. His friends desperately trying to find him. The 'down' button on the elevator had been disabled. He considered jumping from the window. When his friends arrive, they encounter military personnel patrolling the grounds. One sneaks in, gets his friend out, and they drive off into the night. This was real life for 17-year-old Eric Martinez, a
student at Aldine High School in a poor neighborhood of Houston. He responded to an Army recruitment pitch, called the delayed enlistment program.

But then, as 17-year-olds are wont to do, Eric changed his mind. When the recruiter came to his house and threatened his mother, she went to the recruiting station to meet with the officer in charge: 'She talked to Sgt. Marquette and told him that I didn't want to go, and that's it. And Marquette said that I had to go, and if I didn't, that I'd have a warrant for my arrest, and I wouldn't be able to get no government loans or nothing like that. So, my mom doesn't really know anything about it, so she believed it, and she told me. And I believed it, too, because I didn't know much about it either.' It was then that they took Eric to the hotel.

truthout.org - Not All Veterans Salute McCain

2008-08-07T20:06:00.000-07:00

Not All Veterans Salute McCain

http://www.truthout.org/article/not-all-veterans-salute-mccain

Democracy Now! - DN!: Army Recruiter Suspended for Threatening High School Student with Jail Time, Sparks Bipartisan Call for Investigation

2008-08-07T15:19:00.000-07:00

DN!: Army Recruiter Suspended for Threatening High School Student with Jail Time, Sparks Bipartisan Call for Investigation

Democracy Now!, a daily independent radio and TV news program:

A story involving an Army recruiter in Texas last week has led to a bipartisan call for an investigation. The recruiter from the Greenspoint Recruiting Station in Houston was suspended after a recording of his threats aired on a local TV station. The recruiter, Sgt. Glenn Marquette, warned eighteen-year-old Irving Gonzalez that he would be sent to jail if he decided to go to college instead of joining the military, even though Gonzalez had signed a non-binding contract that left him free to change his mind before basic training. We play the recording of their conversation, and we speak with two of the teenage Army recruits involved. We also question a spokesman for the US Military Recruiting Command and speak with a Texas Congressman who is calling for an investigation. [includes rush transcript]

To read, listen to, or watch the whole story:
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/8/6/army_recruiter_suspended_for_threatening_high

U.S. segregates violent Iraqi prisoners in crates - CNN.com*

2008-08-07T15:09:00.000-07:00

U.S. segregates violent Iraqi prisoners in crates - CNN.com*

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/08/07/segregation.boxes/index.html

motherjones.com - There's Something About Mary: Unmasking a Gun Lobby Mole

2008-08-07T14:05:00.000-07:00

There's Something About Mary: Unmasking a Gun Lobby Mole

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2008/07/mary-mcfate-sapone-gun-lobby-nra-spy.html

http://www.motherjones.com

National Lawyers Guild President and Past Presidents Urge Texas Governor Rick Perry to Stay Execution of Jose Medellin

2008-08-04T22:49:00.000-07:00

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, August 4, 2008

Contact: President Marjorie Cohn, NLG president, marjorie@tjsl.edu,
619-374-6923

Jeanne Mirer, NLG International Committee, mirerfam@earthlink.net,
313-515-2046

National Lawyers Guild President and Past Presidents Urge Texas
Governor Rick Perry to Stay Execution of Jose Medellin

Urges Congress to Act on Avena Case Implementation Act, Which Impacts
Medellin

New York. The National Lawyers Guildâ€™s president and past presidents
have written to Governor Rick Perry of Texas asking him to stay the
execution of Jose Medellin, scheduled for tomorrow, until Congress
acts on the Avena Case Implementation Act. This legislation has been
introduced in the House of Representatives as H.R. 6481 with similar
legislation to be introduced in the Senate. The Guild has also called
on each individual Senator and Representative to ask that they request
immediate action the Avena Act.

If passed, the Act will address the concerns raised in the Supreme
Court ruling in Medellin v. Texas and will require the State of Texas
to comply with federal legislation directly on point to Mr. Medellinâ€™s
situation. The Avena case was filed by Mexico against the United
States on behalf of various Mexican nationals (including Mr. Medellin)
alleging that the United States had violated its obligation under the
Vienna Convention on Consular Relations to notify foreign nationals
arrested in the United States of their right to consult with people at
their countryâ€™s consulate before talking to the authorities. The ICJ
ruled that the Convention had been violated and called for review of
the convictions of individuals obtained in the absence of this notice.

The importance of this legislation is enormous, as failure to
implement the Avena decision in the Medellin case has serious
implications for Americans traveling, working, and volunteering
abroad. The security of Americans volunteering abroadâ€"as missionaries,
aid volunteers, and private citizen ambassadorsâ€"has been placed at
risk by U.S. noncompliance with Vienna Convention on Consular
Relations obligations. American citizens working abroad are at times
detained by oppressive or undemocratic regimes, and access to the
American consulate is critical to their safety, and to the United
Statesâ€™ ability to support them and provide for their needs.

Founded in 1937 as an alternative to the American Bar Association,
which did not admit people of color, the National Lawyers Guild is the
oldest and largest public interest/human rights bar organization in
the United States. Its headquarters are in New York and it has
chapters in every state.

To read the letter to Governor Perry, please visit:
http://nlg.org/news/statements/LetterRickPerry.doc

To read the letter to members of Congress, please visit:
http://nlg.org/news/statements/SenatorLtr.pdf

# # #

-----------------------------------------------

FOCUS | Sexual Assault in the Military: A DoD Cover-Up?

2008-08-03T10:57:00.000-07:00

-----Original Message-----
From: t r u t h o u t

Sent: Sun, 3 Aug 2008 12:00 pm
Subject: FOCUS | Sexual Assault in the Military: A DoD Cover-Up?

FOCUS | Col. Ann Wright: Sexual Assault in the Military: A DoD Cover-Up?

http://www.truthout.org/article/sexual-assault-military-a-dod-cover-up

Col. An Wright, writing for Truthdig, says: "There was quite a struggle in

Congress this week. The Department of Defense refused to allow the senior

civilian in charge of its Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office (SAPRO)

to testify in Thursday's hearing on sexual assault in the military. Rep. John

Tierney, chair of the House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign

Affairs, angrily dismissed Principal Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Michael

Dominguez from the hearing when Dominguez said that he, the DoD chief of

legislative affairs and the chief of public affairs, had ordered Dr. Kaye

Whitley, chief of SAPRO, to refuse to honor the subpoena issued by the

subcommittee for her appearance. "

You Tube - Critical Mass Bicyclist Assaulted by NYPD

2008-07-30T17:14:00.000-07:00

You Tube - Critical Mass Bicyclist Assaulted by NYPD
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUkiyBVytRQ

Man dies after cop hits him with Taser 9 times - CNN.com*

2008-07-30T04:15:00.001-07:00

Man dies after cop hits him with Taser 9 times - CNN.com*

*This article can also be accessed if you copy and paste the entire address below into your web browser.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/07/22/taser.death/index.html

Marjorie Cohn | End the Occupation of Iraq - and Afghanistan

2008-07-29T17:21:00.001-07:00

Marjorie Cohn | End the Occupation of Iraq - and Afghanistan
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/07/29/10670/