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Whistleblower Exposes Torture and Child Abuse at For-Profit Prison

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By Sarah Lazare / Common Dreams

A social worker formerly employed at a for-profit family immigrant detention center in Texas blew the whistle this week on the prison’s inhumane conditions—from solitary confinement to medical neglect—that she said amount to child abuse and torture.

The Karnes County Residential Center is operated by GEO Group—the second largest private prison company in the country that has faced numerous accusations of atrocities and civil rights violations. It is also the site of recent—and repeated—hunger strikes led by mothers incarcerated with their children, in protest of their conditions, detentions, and in many cases, their looming deportations.   [Read more…]

Chargers Stadium Financing Plan: Sell City Owned Unicorns and Fairy Dust

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By Doug Porter

This whole deal with using public money to build a stadium for a privately owned football team just keeps getting stranger.

Yesterday we learned the idea of using funds from developments adjacent to the Mission Valley site to fund the project was off the table. Ancillary development has been part of every stadium plan proposed over the past 15 years. That’s $225 million just vanishing. Gone. Poof!

Then where’s the stadium construction funding coming from? Mayor Kevin Faulconer’s spokesman, Craig Gustafson, emailed Scott Lewis at Voice of San Diego: “The plan the City/County team is developing is based on negotiations and discussions with the Chargers and the NFL.”   [Read more…]

Confederate Battle Flag Down, Donald Trump Up. Racism Continues

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By Doug Porter

The TV networks and printed media are all making a big deal as I write this morning about a battle flag of the Confederacy being removed from the grounds of the South Carolina statehouse.

I’m glad the stars and bars is coming down. It was first raised at that location back in 1961 as a symbolic reaction to efforts at desegregation. Now its removal is a symbolic reaction to racism run amok in a Charleston church.

It would be really nice if we could get beyond the symbolism in South Carolina and get to the heart of the matter. Even as Gov. Nikki Haley was preparing to sign the resolution bringing the flag down, what Salon.com described as a racism tantrum was going on at her Facebook page.

Now if removing the pervasive pollution of racism in the US were so easy….   [Read more…]

How to Fix California’s Housing Affordability Crisis

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By Murtaza H. Baxamusa, Ph.D., AICP / San Diego UrbDeZine

As the economy improves, California’s affordable housing crisis is worsening. The average rent in California ($1,240) is almost fifty percent higher than the national average. This is pricing out our state’s low-wage blue collar workers, who have flat incomes and rising commutes. It would take a service worker in San Jose 20 years to save up enough to buy a home.

Unfortunately, government programs that help developers build affordable housing have barely met a fraction of the need.   [Read more…]

Anti-Vaxxers’ Tactics Fail to Sway Legislature

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By Doug Porter

Gov. Jerry Brown signed off yesterday on legislation giving California one of the most far-reaching vaccination laws in the nation. Religious and personal-belief exemptions for schoolchildren will be phased out, starting next year.

Getting this bill passed turned out to be a major political battle. The combination of paranoia about government (on the right) and corporate greed (on the left) mixed with a solid dash of unfounded health concerns ended up being a recipe for political passion rarely seen on the legislative floor.

The anti-vaxxers, as they are popularly called, viewed this legislation as a battle for the lives of their children and the liberties of the nation. They’ve indicated that litigation will be their next step.   [Read more…]

Why Bree Newsome’s Action Was the “Amazing Grace” I Needed

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She showed us that we liberate ourselves through our actions. She reminded us, in the midst of deep sorrow, that we, who want to see a better America, must keep living, fighting, breathing, doing.

By Tanya Steele /YES! Magazine

On Friday, June 24, I turned on my television to watch the funeral for Reverend Clementa Pinckney, one of the nine people shot dead at the Emanuel AME church in Charleston, South Carolina.

President Obama sang “Amazing Grace” at a time when many in the nation are mourning not only for the lost lives of the Emanuel 9, but the loss of black life that is stitched into the fabric of this country.

I have heard “Amazing Grace” many times in my life. Black Americans singing, in moments of deep despair, is too familiar. I did not need to hear those sounds at this moment in our history.I needed something, but that was not it.   [Read more…]

A More Perfect Union: Let’s Just Call it “Marriage” Now

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“They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.”

The Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling Friday morning was a historic victory for gay rights. The majority said the Constitution requires that same-sex couples be allowed to marry no matter where they live.

This decision is the culmination of two decades of Supreme Court litigation over marriage, and gay rights generally, with Justice Anthony Kennedy writing the majority opinion, just as he did in three other major gay rights cases dating back to 1996.

As is true with any major shift in the political and social landscape, there are winners and losers. Today we’ll look at some of those reactions…
  [Read more…]

Obamacare Lives!

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By Doug Porter

There may be more symbolic votes to repeal the Affordable Care Act in the House of Representatives, but the days of broad challenges to the Obama administration’s signature health insurance reform legislation are over.

The Supreme Court today rejected a challenge (6-3, King v Burwell) constructed by conservative groups to eliminate the mechanism for insurance subsidies in states opting out of setting up their own exchanges.  The stated aim of this litigation was to “to drive a stake through [the ACA’s] heart.”

Chief Justice Roberts was joined by the court’s liberal justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, as well as Anthony Kennedy in defending the intent of the law.   [Read more…]

Protecting Mauna Kea: This Is A War

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By Will Falk

Sitting outside the 10 by 20 foot makeshift tent that has served as my home for the last 34 days on Mauna Kea, I watch the tent poles shudder to the concussion of US Army howitzer cannons firing live shells at their training grounds below. When the wind blows just right, from the south, the rattle of automatic rifle fire reaches the occupation. There’s no denying it: A war rages in Hawai’i.

It’s a war on native peoples, a war on women, a war on the land, a war on life itself. The war did not start in Hawai’i. The war began thousands of years ago with the dawn of civilization when some humans chose to live in population densities high enough that they overshot the carrying capacity of their homelands and turned to dominating other peoples in other lands. Imperialism was born, and one-by-one land-based, truly sustainable human societies were either eradicated or forced into assimilation.   [Read more…]

Don’t We All Have the Right to be Left Alone?

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By Ernie McCray

Someone on Facebook posted, regarding the recent “pool party” event in McKinney, Texas: “If you don’t like the interaction you’re having with the police, just trying obeying the law.” A comment was made saying that what happened could have been avoided if the girls had just acted responsibly and obeyed the laws.

I couldn’t help but think “There are pool party laws?” But, as to “obeying the laws,” I’m down with that. I’m just opposed to somebody, who is hired to uphold the law, slamming those who don’t obey the law to the ground or kicking them in the face or choking them or executing them in the streets.

And it was mentioned that if we, the public, had seen what happened before the officer went ballistic, we might change our minds about what we did see.   [Read more…]

The Border Patrol’s ‘Culture of Impunity’

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Border Patrol internal affairs department absolves agents in 67 lethal force cases

By Nadia Prupis / Common Dreams

In case after case involving U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) shooting and killing unarmed people, agents were cleared of wrongdoing by the CBP’s internal affairs department—including in the killings of children and U.S. citizens.

Investigations into 67 shooting incidents, 19 of which were fatal, absolved agents in all but three cases, which are still pending, the LA Times reported on Monday. Only two agents in total were disciplined—with an oral reprimand, the Times wrote.

Even in cases where evidence of criminal misconduct was presented, agents still went free of charges.   [Read more…]

Qualcomm Exec Gets Jail Time for Insider Trading

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By John Lawrence

Some guys just can’t resist the temptation to score an extra couple of hundred thousand bucks by using their position inside a company such as Qualcomm and the information they are privileged to know in order to buy and sell stock before the public has access to that information. Such a guy was Derek Montague Cohen, who knew about Qualcomm’s plans to buy Atheros Communications in 2011.

He knew that Atheros’ stock value would go up after it was publicly announced that Qualcomm would buy them. So he bought Atheros stock before it was announced publicly and before the stock price went up. After the announcement and the resultant surge in Atheros’ stock value, he sold the stock making a tidy $200,000 profit. But he was not the only one. Several other Qualcomm employees did the same thing.

Now Cohen faces jail time, something that rarely happens in white collar crimes.   [Read more…]

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