New Clear Vision

Insisting on Responsibility and Justice

by Diane Lefer

Stephen F. Rohde, Chair of the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, holds the distinction of having confronted John Yoo twice. As you’ll recall, Yoo was one of the torture apologists in the Bush administration who came up with tortured legal reasoning to justify the president’s violation of federal and international law. He became notorious for asserting that if the president felt it necessary, he could order a child’s testicles crushed in order to get the father to talk. The first time Rohde confronted him, giving Yoo the opportunity to amend his statement, the former Office of Legal Counsel mouthpiece still insisted torture was OK, as long as “limited to what is necessary.” (more…)

A Nonviolent Approach to ‘Criminal Justice’

by Michael N. Nagler, with Stephanie N. Van Hook

“San Quentin may you rot and burn in hell, may your walls fall and may I live to tell; May all the world forget you ever stood, may all the world regret you did no good.” — Johnny Cash

In Camus’s The Stranger his main character, Meursault, has murdered another man in cold blood on the beach one hot summer day for no evident reason.  Days before his execution, gazing at the sky in his cell, Meursault suddenly realizes that freedom is still possible, still immanent, even with his body in chains. On the exact nature of this realization Camus makes no comment, but as the gates of San Quentin penitentiary closed behind me on May 27, 2011, the scene came to mind and gave me perhaps a similar notion of the absurd, and of truth not served, and the horrible secret of our “democracy”: that there is no such thing as criminal justice. (more…)

Food Justice, Out of the Mouths of Babes

by Randall Amster

“Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength because of thine enemies, that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger.” — Psalm 8:2

My oldest son recently “graduated” from preschool. In the endearing ceremony, each of the children was asked what they want to be when they grow up. His precocious, divergent, and unanticipated response was, “I want to be a farmer like my dad.” And I couldn’t have been more proud.

To be sure, I’m hardly a “farmer” in any real sense of the word. Yes, I do work hard to scratch out a good-sized family garden each year in this high-desert habitat, and in our five years here we’ve planted an orchard and built a large chicken coop, among other interventions. So while I definitely get my hands dirty and spend a fair bit of time building soil and coaxing vegetables from the granite and clay, my skills are much closer to the hobby side of the coin than anything that can rightly be termed “farming.” (more…)

An Indomitable Spirit Rises Up to Meet the Challenges Ahead

by Randall Amster

Humankind stands at the cusp of its gravest challenge, and the prospective survival of the species itself hangs in the balance. While there is a clear attempt on the part of many invested in the status quo to depict this crisis as debatable or the product of “fuzzy science,” the reality is that an unprecedented and near-unanimous consensus exists among all credible sources that indeed the predicament is real and the window of action is rapidly closing. Against this backdrop of deniers and the potential disempowerment inherent in dire predictions, a global movement has arisen to meet the challenges of climate change in all of its dimensions — from the social to the ecological, and as to both its short- and long-term impacts.

Brian Tokar’s essential new book, Toward Climate Justice, chronicles the theoretical foundations and pragmatic aims of this emerging global movement. In so doing, the work embodies a critical spirit that embraces challenges by seeing them as equivalent opportunities, and yet does not shirk from starkly depicting the magnitude of the crises before us. (more…)

Restoring Justice for the Children of Incarcerated Parents

by Victoria Law

In 2004, I facilitated a discussion on incarcerated mothers at the MamaGathering, an alternative parenting conference in Minneapolis. The 20-plus parents who attended the discussion were politically conscious, if not politically active. Among them was a social worker who worked with children in foster care.

In 1997, Congress passed the federal Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA), which stipulated that states must begin terminating the legal rights of parents whose children are in foster care for 15 of the past 22 months. The termination is irrevocable. Only three states made exceptions in cases of parental incarceration; the third state, New York, only passed its discretion act in August 2010.

The results were dramatic: termination proceedings involving incarcerated parents increased 108 percent nationwide from 260 in 1997 to 909 in 2002. In contrast, in the five years before ASFA, the number of termination proceedings increased from 113 in 1992 to 142 in 1996. (more…)

Building a World of Wealth and Wellbeing for All

by Diane Lefer

Okay, so the headline to this article may not garner as many hits as Sarah Palin or Charlie Sheen, but maybe it will bring in more readers than “Cumulative Environmental Impacts in Los Angeles: Public Health’s Role in Emerging Policy Solutions.” I’m trying to put into practice something I learned at a conference by that name where I also got enough facts to delight any data junkie. But speaker Dr. Tony Iton, senior vice president of the California Endowment said the public health community has put “too much emphasis on facts and data” out of the belief that “once people know the truth, things will change.” But they don’t change. So instead of offering data, I’d rather tell a story about two neighborhoods. (more…)

Restoring National Unity Through Collective Compassion

by Brian J. Trautman

My reaction to news of the targeted assassination of al-Qaeda founder and most wanted terrorist Osama bin Laden was unlike many Americans’. Celebrating killing and death felt wrong, and to witness my fellow citizens cheering jubilantly and chanting nationalist slogans with joy and pride was disheartening. Instead of reveling in more militarism and murder, our energies should be devoted to bringing home the roughly 150,000 American soldiers still deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq and in harm’s way every minute of every day.

National unity shouldn’t be born of and driven by acts of aggression; it should be shaped and inspired by individual and collective compassion and an altruistic desire to advocate for and alleviate the suffering of the tens of millions of civilians around the world, especially the children, who live in conflict zones and engage in a daily struggle to avoid the inhumanity and indiscriminate brutality of oppression and war. (more…)