Editorial: California fires reveal human power to ruin and heal

January 20, 2025

In California’s worst wildfires in its history, important factors include a century of land and water mismanagement and fossil fuel use that generates global warming. The fires brought out the best, mutual aid from below, and the worst, hateful scapegoating disguising climate denial. A global vision and humane principles in organizing ourselves are fundamental to a sustainable future.

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Handicap This! December 2022

December 8, 2022

Asian-American disability rights activist Alice Wong’s memoir “Year of the Tiger”; In Poland, caregivers of children with disabilities called for the right to work part-time jobs while keeping government stipends; and disability rights activists critique California’s CARE Courts Act, where courts can order involuntary treatment plans for people with psychotic disorders.

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Readers’ Views: July-August 2022, Part One

July 12, 2022

Readers’ Views on: Supreme Court’s Attack on Women’s Freedom; Abortion, Healthcare and Women’s Movement; Abortion Unseparated from All Freedom Struggles; Gay Pride: Whose Bodies? Ours!; Colonizers Past and Present; Let Them Eat Rockets; Oppression of Homeless; Only 14 More Mass Shootings!; Church, State and Football

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Youth in Action: September-October 2021

September 21, 2021

Youth in several Afghan cities resist Taliban; young Colombians become “First Liners” in resistance actions; high school students march in Los Gatos, Calif., and Ninnekah, Okla., to protest schools’ negligence regarding sexual abuse and harassment.

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LA pits poor against poorer Echo Park houseless

May 8, 2021

On March 24, around 200 activists protested against a surprise eviction of the tent encampment in Echo Park. There is antagonism between houseless people and the families and businesses close to them. For poor communities to scapegoat even poorer people is the way that the 1% keep us fighting for space and resources while they throw us bones.

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Handicap this!, March-April 2021

March 11, 2021

Autistic man in UK awarded damages in a discrimination case against Virgin Active; professor at Oxnard College put on leave for berating hard-of-hearing student; “little person” banned from a cooking class at Heart of Worcestershire College; London Stansted Airport pulls special assistance from woman because she “didn’t look ill.”

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Workers vs. Proposition 22

November 10, 2020

Gig companies pushed through California’s Prop 22 denying workers recognition as employees, and want similar laws in other states and countries. Other workers are bracing to see if the “gig economy” will be able to overtake their own industry.

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Queer notes: May-June 2020

May 3, 2020

Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruling against Peruvian government in favor of Trans woman Azul Rojas Marin; LGBTQ Asians fighting hate crimes; and a coalition of LGBTQ people demanding California enact the Emergency Transgender Wellness and Equity Fund.

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Prisons = death

April 29, 2020

Report on the #ClemencyCoast2Coast virtual town hall held on April 8, in which former prisoners took the floor to speak about the “death camps” that prisons have turned into in the COVID-19 pandemic and to demand early release.

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With COVID-19 prisons become ‘death camps’

April 13, 2020

Report on the #ClemencyCoast2Coast virtual town hall held on April 8, in which former prisoners took the floor to speak about the “death camps” that prisons have turned into in the midst COVID-19 pandemic and to demand early release.

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Free Sitawa Jamaa

January 21, 2020

It is more important than ever to free Sitawa Nantambu Jamaa, one of the four main representatives in the historic 2011-13 hunger strikes initiated in Pelican Bay prison’s Security Housing Unit, after his stroke.

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The truth of the ‘Woolsey Fire’

June 26, 2019

The Santa Susana Field Lab’s impact on the dangerous chemicals and isotopes released by the so-called “Woolsey Fire” are just the latest in an historic string of insults perpetrated by that lab on the environment of southeast Ventura County and Simi Valley.

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California Uber/Lyft workers strike!

April 4, 2019

Ex-Lyft driver reports on the strike of Uber and Lyft drivers in California and explains the hell that ridesharing businesses are foisting on their workers, the environment, and their customers.

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Queer Notes, July-August 2018

July 25, 2018

Queer notes on Delaware’s anti-Transgender legislation; Gay asylum seeker and detainee Udoka Nweke; Lesbian activist Constance Kurt; Aryman Menem, founder of Tea and Talk for Syrian LGBT; and Baltic Pride’s Pride Parade in Riga, Latvia.

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“Science Not Silence”

About 1,000 people rallied on Earth Day at the campus of Cal Tech in Pasadena, Calif., under the banner of “Science Not Silence,” part of nationwide protests.

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‘Science Not Silence’

June 4, 2017

Participants report on the April 22 Science Not Silence demonstration where about 1,000 people rallied at the campus of Cal Tech and made ready to march in defense of science and of rational thought itself.

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Left’s blame game

May 2, 2017

A reflection on the question “Where are all the women?” posed by a speaker at one of the several recent and massive immigrants’ rights marches in downtown L.A.

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Youth in Action: July-August 2016

July 9, 2016

In West Auckland, New Zealand, Massey High School students and their parents petition for weather-appropriate summer uniforms; 82 Huntsville, Alabama, Grissom High School students defy the dress code for girls because the code endorses rape culture and violates Title IX rights; across the USA Muslim youth are harassed in a variety of ways making them feel unsafe, so much so that the majority of Muslim youth believe that reporting the harassment won’t make a difference.

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Boycott Driscoll’s!

May 6, 2016

Chicagoans form picket line at local market in support of San Quintin, Baja California, Mexico, striking farmworkers and many shoppers show their support as well

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Philip Zimbardo and Marx’s Humanism

August 30, 2015

A discussion with Philip Zimbardo followed the San Francisco premiere of “The Stanford Prison Experiment,” a movie based on his notorious 1971 experiment. It raises questions about the meaning of being human, which for Marx turned on needing human beings as free beings whose self-determining, free, conscious activity is not a mere means but the first necessity of life.

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Workshop Talks: Reclaim our labor

Working in healthcare has been transformed in a very alienating way. The workplace is drowning in fancy hi-tech machines. Cadres of bureaucrats spend their working hours promoting the product of healthcare with marketing campaigns. The rank and file hear daily admonitions to smile more and are told, “Just be glad you have a job.” Bureaucrats preach “customers come first,” while cutting service and staffing. Hospital and HMO executives are in a race to eliminate labor as much as possible in their “product.”

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Being in the SHU

November 24, 2014

Crescent City, Calif.—The physical and emotional toll of being in the SHU (prisons’ “Secure Housing Unit”): • Manic guards off their meds. • That last good photograph stamped with a boot. • Classification hearings postponed for potlucks. • The daughter whose eyes fill when you ask innocently, who are you?…

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Workers can fix L.A.

November 22, 2014

Los Angeles—On Oct. 28, several thousand Los Angeles City workers (mostly Latina/o and Blacks) and community supporters marched through downtown to City Hall to protest the city’s proposed 30% cut in workers’ wages and benefits. The cuts included medical coverage, bonuses and retirement benefits, as more and more of the city’s infrastructure deteriorates….

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House of no justice

September 1, 2014

I am an inmate at New Folsom State Prison and was personally involved in the statewide hunger strike that started on July 1 in protest of California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitiation’s (CDCR) practices of cruel and unusual punishment.

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Readers’ Views, September-October 2014, Part 2

From the September-October 2014 News & Letters

THE FREE SPEECH MOVEMENT AND THE BLACK REVOLUTION

I am in the movement still because of the Free Speech Movement (FSM)—it turned my life around. I studied everything about the New Left. I came to Berkeley and decided this is where I needed to be. [=>]

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Readers’ Views, September-October 2014, Part I

From the September-October 2014 issue of News & Letters

U.S. CRISES: RACISM, POLICE, LABOR STRUGGLES

New York News and Letters Committee prepared a flyer on Eric Garner (see: “NYC Police murder Eric Garner” this issue) headlined: “Wanted For Murder: Daniel Pantaleo.” It denounced the fact that the cops who killed Garner are [=>]

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