How can supporting human rights, individual rights, the 1st and 4th Amendments, and lobbying to outlaw costly capital punishment be Socialistic, Communistic, or anti-American? Some folks refer to the ACLU as though it were a pariah that that was against everything that just, humane, and supported by our Constitution. To the contrary the ACLU has been a staunch advocate for justice, equality, and constitutional adherence.
The ACLU publishes a seasonal newsletter that outlines many of their key projects. The following are issues that appeared in the “Spring 2011” newsletter that are at the forefront of some present day ACLU advocacy:
The ACLU has been a fervent advocate for abolishing California’s costly, inhumane, unjust, and ineffective death penalty. Our state faces a $20 billion plus budget shortfall; ending capital punishment is estimated to save the state approximately $1 billion over 5 years. By converting California’s 710 death sentences to permanent imprisonment, we would insure that each of those death row prisoners would remain in prison with absolutely no possibility of parole, and would be accountable to victim’s families through work and restitution to them.
In a quest to purchase drugs for lethal injections, the ACLU uncovered that the State of California had to go to the UK to find a source for 521 grams of lethal injection drugs. The California Department of Corrections paid a total of $36,415 for these imported drugs that were not available in the U.S. Included in the purchase price was $20,000 in fees, with the explanation of $10,000 in fees blacked out. Last year the CDCR paid only $1,210 for injection drugs purchased in the U.S.
States with the death penalty actually have a higher murder rate; capital punishment has not proven to be a murder deterrent. When do we ever hear of an affluent person being put on death row? Very seldom as capital punishment falls primarily on the poor, mentally handicapped, people color, and those who can ill afford expensive private legal representation. O J Simpson is the “poster boy” that proves that expensive legal advice coupled with sloppy state prosecution is the perfect equation for getting away with murder. ACLU staff attorneys have filed Freedom of Information Act requests for more records from the FDA and Customs and Border Protection to trace exactly where the drugs came from and the highly irregular process used to obtain them. The question begs what other secretive, deceptive, and irregular behavior are state officials employing?
The Tehama-Trinity Chapter of the ACLU and The North State Tea Party Alliance teamed up to protect First Amendment rights. The city of Redding attempted to impose new restrictions on when, where, and how residents may hand out leaflets in front of the public library. The unholy alliance of the “Tea Party” and the ACLU proved successful, with the help of a Tea Party activist Tim Pappas, who is also Shasta’s public defender. Recounted Yost the ACLU representative, “We explained our belief that speech is for everyone, regardless of whether one agrees with their point of view. Everyone listened with interest and respect. There seemed to be lots of agreement”.
“California has some of the best laws in the country to protect students who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT), or who are perceived to be. The unfortunate reality is that anti-LGBT harassment is still far too widespread. Schools don’t always have tools or knowledge to adequately protect students from bullying, harassment, and discrimination”.
A tragic case in point is Seth Walsh who was a sweet intelligent, 13 year old boy, who loved his family and was also gay. He endured years of bullying, harassment, and verbal abuse in school. Last September as a result of desperation he hanged himself from a tree in his family’s backyard. After nine days on life support he died. After Seth’s death his family contacted the ACLU to perform an investigation of the local school and board of education. The school was urged to take immediate proactive action to remedy the destructive environment of LGBT harassment. In a national survey, nine out of ten LGBT students reported being harassed at school. According to the most recent California Healthy Kids Survey, 12 percent of seventh graders and 10 percent of ninth graders reported being harassed based on their actual or perceived sexual orientation.
The ACLU is co-sponsoring a new bill in the California Legislature (Seth’s Law) which would strengthen existing state laws by requiring every school district to “Create strong and clear anti-harassment programs, if they don’t have them already”. Passing laws is a positive first step, but without programs to reculturate fearful and ignorant people, human rights progress will not be meaningful.
The ACLU recognizes that with more advancement in internet technology, that users of these technologies become mindful of the inherent risks to personal privacy. In addition, the ACLU also is a strong public advocate for First Amendment rights in the alternative media as well as internet blogs and social networks such as Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook.
The ACLU recommends the following ways to upgrade our much needed privacy protections:
• Holds a conversation among industry leaders, the public, and speech and privacy advocates to reinforce the idea that the Internet is a necessary and powerful platform for free speech that benefits all Californians.
• Ensure that companies doing business in California comply with laws requiring them to inform customers about sharing their personal information with other companies.
The ACLU is supporting SB 602, the Reader Privacy Act, in order to safeguard reader privacy in the digital age. This law would help insure that the government and third parties cannot access our private digital reading records without proper justification.
California has the dubious honor of being the world’s leader when it comes to locking up its residents. The state’s budget for corrections now outpaces university spending. California’s criminal justice system, based on independent studies, has proven to be largely ineffective, unfair, and racially discriminatory. In addition, locking people up for non-violent crimes is way too costly and is a poor choice of human resources. Revenge and retribution are not civil or rational solutions to anti-societal behavior.
The ACLU makes the following recommendations to improve the criminal justice system:
• Stop sending non-violent offenders to prison. Tax payers could save millions of dollars by not incarcerating non-criminal drug users. Drug use should be seen as a misdemeanor, medical disability, not a felony.
• Emphasize rehabilitation. Transfer part of expensive incarceration costs to local jurisdictions for drug treatment programs and skills development.
• Ease the way for people with past criminal convictions to move forward and lead positive lives-to find jobs. People who are incarcerated typically are poor, hopeless, undereducated, and suffer emotional disabilities. Having the stigma of being a criminal only adds another unneeded burden of successful integration into society.
• Support efforts to provide services to all victims of crime, even those with felony convictions. This means that many crime victims are deprived of basic support services such as grief counseling or minimal financial or educational support.
• Issue guidelines to regulate police surveillance and intelligence gathering that targets individual or groups engaged in political or religious activities. This will help to reduce racial or religious profiling, or targeting political activists.
• Investigate and begin to remedy patterns of police misconduct in California. The attorney general has the authority to intervene in cases of police departments or officers engaging in misconduct, excessive force, or false arrests.
The ACLU has also set guidelines for immigrant rights. Procedures and guidelines would be set to ensure that racial and ethnic profiling, or excessive and prolonged detainment would be greatly reduced.
It is important that every Californian be they LGBT, an Internet user, or one voicing dissent that their constitutional, individual, and human rights be respected and upheld. Society prospers as a whole when every individual can be the best they can be without censorship, harassment, injustice, and discrimination. It is advocacy groups such as the ACLU that work for our collective behalf for those noble ends.
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Poverty: Misconceptions and Reality
There are misconceptions that abound that poverty is primarily the fault of the impoverished. Using a simplistic linear mindset one may sometimes be justified in drawing this myopic observation about the poor. There are different factors that contribute to poverty. The challenge on the table is how do we break the chain of generational poverty, and mitigate the maladies of those in situational poverty.
Several months ago my partner and I were invited to be members of the “Safety Net Summit Planning” board of Solano County. This board is overseen by the First 5 Solano Children’s and Family Commission (FFFC). April 27th we attended a symposium in Fairfield sponsored by United Way in concert with FFFC that was attended by many people from Solano County government who in some way affect positively or negatively the lot of the impoverished. The FFFC is a not for profit agency primarily funded by a $6 million dollar yearly grant from United Way. The mission of FFFC, headed up by Christina Arrostuto, is to reduce poverty in Solano County, by 50% in ten years primarily amongst families with children.
The keynote speaker, Dr. Donna Beegle, Phd, told a very inspiring story about how she ascended from a family of abject poverty. She shared with us her personal feelings about what being poor means and how one’s self esteem and personal perception in the community is perceived..Dr. Beegle was one of six children, who’s mother and grandmother was an itinerant cotton picker and who’s father, who was also unskilled scraped by doing odd jobs. Her brothers all suffered from learning disabilities, substance abuse addictions, and a history of incarceration At the age of 15, Dr. Beegle was a high school dropout, pregnant with her first child, without marketable skills who had to survive on $400 a month in welfare and food stamps. Skipping ahead in this story she worked to receive her GED, be accepted to the University of Portland, and ultimately receiving her doctorate in psychology. Dr. Beegle explained the differences in generational and situational poverty. Dr. Beegle is primarily the rare exception to upward mobility than the norm.
Poverty is a complex issue where factors of physical, emotional, environmental, and perceptions of one’s power, or lack thereof perpetuates, hopelessness and desperation. We live in an affluent developed nation where one in eight people nationally live below the poverty level. The poor have very few advocates relative to the wealthy and powerful. Most laws do not promote the interests of the poor. Someone who is poor in our materialistic narcissistic society is seen typically in the abstract, as an inanimate drag on society, who is an uncomfortable reminder that we are all our brothers’ keeper. We sometimes negatively stereotype the poor as a way of assuaging our guilt about having to take more responsibility for solving the problem of poverty.
Poverty does not only effect the poor, but more importantly society in general. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, and more specifically the Head Start program was successful in reducing child poverty by 23%. In the next administration a societal malaise seemed to affect the electorate any many of these supportive anti-poverty programs were reduced or eliminated, but we had the money for B-52 bombers and thousands of tons of bombs that killed 2 million innocent Cambodian civilians.
Modern European nations are more humanistic and responsible in their views of dealing with poverty. Many people who are in poverty can be advanced out of this suffocating state of affairs by external forces in society if there is a genuine national will and priority to improve the lot of the poor.
My understanding is that generational poverty is where generations of families pass on an acculturated mindset that being impoverished is their prescribed destiny. Many people who are in generational poverty have distinct characteristics that mark them as outcasts in the general populace. For example their external dress, lack of etiquette, poor language skills, health challenges, eating habits, hopelessness, lack of financial skills, and little clear vision of exiting out of their predicament. There is a definite poverty mentality that needs to be broken with the help of external support from society. Many of us who own homes, have money set aside, investments, adequate food, transportation, and a clear plan for our lives cannot fully comprehend what it means to have to sleep in a car, or bounce from relative to friend, or not be able to afford a Costco card or enough money to buy at reduced prices by purchasing in bulk. Try having to move around the Bay Area without a car or adequate money for public transportation? If you have children, envision not having medical insurance and having to wait countless hours in clinic waiting rooms. Think about all the money you have to waste on check cashing services, money order costs, and shopping in local convenience stores because you do not have transportation to the local super market or discount store. Would your child want to attend school regularly, dressed in ragged dirty clothing, and be ostracized by their classmates for being less than? How do you feel when you are in the company of wealthy people, even though you are reasonably comfortable; well a poor persons feels the same way in the company of a working person who has steady financial health?
Out of desperation many of the generational poor self medicate their emotional pain with illicit drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes. As a society do we take a proactive role to try to mitigate these diseases that unfortunately are viewed as crimes? The US has one of the highest rates of incarceration in the world. The poor have a much greater chance of being incarcerated than those that are affluent. Many of the people in prison are there as a result of system that deals with drug abuse in a punitive way instead of first using a medical solution. The financial resources used for predominately punitive reasons could be better used to work proactively with many of the poor, who out of hopelessness and desperation become substance abusers.
During economic recessions and with more jobs being outsourced, more and more people are falling into situational poverty. Situational poverty can be caused by being under employed and not being eligible for any or little public assistance. Those without adequate medical insurance, who are unable to work and have no other safety net fall into situational poverty.
Those in continual or prolonged situational poverty have a much greater chance of continuing in poverty because they become conditioned to have no hope. Ironically those poor who come from other countries, and most specifically third world nations perceive a myth about the US that our streets are paved with gold; ergo they have tremendous hope and optimism of exiting out of poverty. Unfortunately those US nationals have lost most hope.
The following is the most recent data on poverty in Solano County:
• The poverty threshold level is $18,310 for a family of four
• High school graduation rate was 75% in 2008-9; in CA it was 79%.
• 34% could not afford adequate food.
• 18% of families with children under 18 live in poverty.
• 21% of children 0-5 were living in poverty (many do not live in families)
• Unemployment is 12% (probably a low figure).
• Approximately 4,000 foreclosures
There are stories of families with children losing the homes in foreclosure, one or both parents lose their jobs, they have to sleep in their car or a cheap one room motel, the children are ostracized in school for being homeless, do not have a comfortable place to do their homework, and have to put their few belongings into mini-storage.
There is something very wrong in a population that sees its way clear to spend over a trillion dollars a year on defense, give tax cuts to the top 1% who many times will invest their money abroad for a higher return, subsidize major corporations, oil and agribusiness. Corporate profits were up 81% over the previous year, the income divide is it at its greatest since the Great Depression. Poverty is a major cost not just to those impoverished, but a loss/cost of over $500 billion per year to our nation as a whole. With all these misallocated resources in this country, how in good conscience can we blame poverty on the lot of the poor?
Several months ago my partner and I were invited to be members of the “Safety Net Summit Planning” board of Solano County. This board is overseen by the First 5 Solano Children’s and Family Commission (FFFC). April 27th we attended a symposium in Fairfield sponsored by United Way in concert with FFFC that was attended by many people from Solano County government who in some way affect positively or negatively the lot of the impoverished. The FFFC is a not for profit agency primarily funded by a $6 million dollar yearly grant from United Way. The mission of FFFC, headed up by Christina Arrostuto, is to reduce poverty in Solano County, by 50% in ten years primarily amongst families with children.
The keynote speaker, Dr. Donna Beegle, Phd, told a very inspiring story about how she ascended from a family of abject poverty. She shared with us her personal feelings about what being poor means and how one’s self esteem and personal perception in the community is perceived..Dr. Beegle was one of six children, who’s mother and grandmother was an itinerant cotton picker and who’s father, who was also unskilled scraped by doing odd jobs. Her brothers all suffered from learning disabilities, substance abuse addictions, and a history of incarceration At the age of 15, Dr. Beegle was a high school dropout, pregnant with her first child, without marketable skills who had to survive on $400 a month in welfare and food stamps. Skipping ahead in this story she worked to receive her GED, be accepted to the University of Portland, and ultimately receiving her doctorate in psychology. Dr. Beegle explained the differences in generational and situational poverty. Dr. Beegle is primarily the rare exception to upward mobility than the norm.
Poverty is a complex issue where factors of physical, emotional, environmental, and perceptions of one’s power, or lack thereof perpetuates, hopelessness and desperation. We live in an affluent developed nation where one in eight people nationally live below the poverty level. The poor have very few advocates relative to the wealthy and powerful. Most laws do not promote the interests of the poor. Someone who is poor in our materialistic narcissistic society is seen typically in the abstract, as an inanimate drag on society, who is an uncomfortable reminder that we are all our brothers’ keeper. We sometimes negatively stereotype the poor as a way of assuaging our guilt about having to take more responsibility for solving the problem of poverty.
Poverty does not only effect the poor, but more importantly society in general. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, and more specifically the Head Start program was successful in reducing child poverty by 23%. In the next administration a societal malaise seemed to affect the electorate any many of these supportive anti-poverty programs were reduced or eliminated, but we had the money for B-52 bombers and thousands of tons of bombs that killed 2 million innocent Cambodian civilians.
Modern European nations are more humanistic and responsible in their views of dealing with poverty. Many people who are in poverty can be advanced out of this suffocating state of affairs by external forces in society if there is a genuine national will and priority to improve the lot of the poor.
My understanding is that generational poverty is where generations of families pass on an acculturated mindset that being impoverished is their prescribed destiny. Many people who are in generational poverty have distinct characteristics that mark them as outcasts in the general populace. For example their external dress, lack of etiquette, poor language skills, health challenges, eating habits, hopelessness, lack of financial skills, and little clear vision of exiting out of their predicament. There is a definite poverty mentality that needs to be broken with the help of external support from society. Many of us who own homes, have money set aside, investments, adequate food, transportation, and a clear plan for our lives cannot fully comprehend what it means to have to sleep in a car, or bounce from relative to friend, or not be able to afford a Costco card or enough money to buy at reduced prices by purchasing in bulk. Try having to move around the Bay Area without a car or adequate money for public transportation? If you have children, envision not having medical insurance and having to wait countless hours in clinic waiting rooms. Think about all the money you have to waste on check cashing services, money order costs, and shopping in local convenience stores because you do not have transportation to the local super market or discount store. Would your child want to attend school regularly, dressed in ragged dirty clothing, and be ostracized by their classmates for being less than? How do you feel when you are in the company of wealthy people, even though you are reasonably comfortable; well a poor persons feels the same way in the company of a working person who has steady financial health?
Out of desperation many of the generational poor self medicate their emotional pain with illicit drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes. As a society do we take a proactive role to try to mitigate these diseases that unfortunately are viewed as crimes? The US has one of the highest rates of incarceration in the world. The poor have a much greater chance of being incarcerated than those that are affluent. Many of the people in prison are there as a result of system that deals with drug abuse in a punitive way instead of first using a medical solution. The financial resources used for predominately punitive reasons could be better used to work proactively with many of the poor, who out of hopelessness and desperation become substance abusers.
During economic recessions and with more jobs being outsourced, more and more people are falling into situational poverty. Situational poverty can be caused by being under employed and not being eligible for any or little public assistance. Those without adequate medical insurance, who are unable to work and have no other safety net fall into situational poverty.
Those in continual or prolonged situational poverty have a much greater chance of continuing in poverty because they become conditioned to have no hope. Ironically those poor who come from other countries, and most specifically third world nations perceive a myth about the US that our streets are paved with gold; ergo they have tremendous hope and optimism of exiting out of poverty. Unfortunately those US nationals have lost most hope.
The following is the most recent data on poverty in Solano County:
• The poverty threshold level is $18,310 for a family of four
• High school graduation rate was 75% in 2008-9; in CA it was 79%.
• 34% could not afford adequate food.
• 18% of families with children under 18 live in poverty.
• 21% of children 0-5 were living in poverty (many do not live in families)
• Unemployment is 12% (probably a low figure).
• Approximately 4,000 foreclosures
There are stories of families with children losing the homes in foreclosure, one or both parents lose their jobs, they have to sleep in their car or a cheap one room motel, the children are ostracized in school for being homeless, do not have a comfortable place to do their homework, and have to put their few belongings into mini-storage.
There is something very wrong in a population that sees its way clear to spend over a trillion dollars a year on defense, give tax cuts to the top 1% who many times will invest their money abroad for a higher return, subsidize major corporations, oil and agribusiness. Corporate profits were up 81% over the previous year, the income divide is it at its greatest since the Great Depression. Poverty is a major cost not just to those impoverished, but a loss/cost of over $500 billion per year to our nation as a whole. With all these misallocated resources in this country, how in good conscience can we blame poverty on the lot of the poor?
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