ACLU
We are still wounding.
November 18, 2020
From the ACLU:
You may have heard “Come and Get Your Love,” but did you know that Redbone’s “We Were All Wounded at Wounded Knee” was banned by several radio stations in the ’70s? This Native American Heritage Month, we honor the group.
Democracy persists.
And just because I played it on the radio so many times, here’s Redbone performing on the Midnight Special in 1974. ‘Come and Get Your Love’ peaked at #5 on The Billboard Hot 100 chart and spent 18 weeks in the Top 40. It landed as the fourth-most popular song on the Hot 100 for 1974. -dayle :)
Debra Anne Haaland (born December 2, 1960) is an American politician serving as the U.S. Representative from New Mexico’s 1st congressional district. The district includes most of Albuquerque along with most of its suburbs. Haaland is a former leader of the Democratic Party of New Mexico. Sharice Davids and Haaland are the first two Native American women elected to the U.S. Congress. Haaland is a member of the Laguna Pueblo people. [wikipedia]
The Hill
by, Rebecca Beitsch
The Biden transition team is in the process of vetting Rep. Haaland for the Interior secretary post.
If tapped by President-elect Joe Biden, Haaland’s nomination would be historic, making her the first Native American Cabinet secretary, overseeing an agency with vast responsibility over tribal issues and public lands.
More than half of the president-elect’s transition team is comprised of women and nearly half of its members are people of color; Biden has also vowed that his new Cabinet and administration will be very diverse and “look like America.”
‘…and it bends towards justice.’
January 20, 2020
‘Superman could bend steel with his bare hands.
Along the way, we’ve been sold on the idea that difficult tasks ought to be left to heroes, often from somewhere far away or from long ago. That it’s up to them, whoever ‘them’ is.
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. quoted Theodore Parker: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
But it’s not bending itself. And it’s not waiting for someone from away to bend it either.
It’s on us. Even when it doesn’t work (yet). Even when it’s difficult. Even when it’s inconvenient.
Our culture is the result of a trillion tiny acts, taken by billions of people, every day. Each of them can seem insignificant, but all of them add up, one way or the other, to the change we each live through.
Sometimes it takes a hero like Dr. King to wake us up and remind us of how much power we actually have.
And now it’s our turn. It always has been.’
-Seth Godin
“5 friends.”
January 26, 2019Follow-up, 24 minute update with Dale Ho, head of the ACLU Voting Rights Project, running litigation against the Commerce Department and DT administration about adding a citizenship question that Wilbur Ross of the Commerce Dept…the “let them eat cake guy”…for, well, basically, a distribution of political power that would benefit Republicans. It was determined that Ross lied to congress about motivations for adding the citizenship question. A very big deal. And it isn’t over, because DT has “5 friends” who sit on the Supreme Court (Republicans), and those “5 friends” are very interested in this case.
6.5 million people, it has been determined, would not answer the question. And that’s a very big deal.
Here’s why.
♥
November 3, 2018
#NOV6
#VOTE
Jane Adams co-founded with Ellen Gates Starr an early settlement house in the United States, Chicago’s Hull House that would later become known as one of the most famous settlement houses in America . In an era when presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson identified themselves as reformers and social activists, Addams was one of the most prominent reformers of the Progressive Era. She helped America address and focus on issues that were of concern to mothers, such as the needs of children, local public health, and world peace. In her essay “Utilization of Women in City Government,” Jane Addams noted the connection between the workings of government and the household, stating that many departments of government, such as sanitation and the schooling of children, could be traced back to traditional women’s roles in the private sphere. Thus, these were matters of which women would have more knowledge than men, so women needed the vote to best voice their opinions. She said that if women were to be responsible for cleaning up their communities and making them better places to live, they needed to be able to vote to do so effectively. Addams became a role model for middle-class women who volunteered to uplift their communities. She is increasingly being recognized as a member of the American pragmatist school of philosophy, and is known by many as the first woman “public philosopher in the history of the United States”. In 1889 she co-founded Hull House, and in 1920 she was a co-founder for the ACLU.
“We’ve been out-organized.”
February 27, 2018
How our current tax laws prohibit the nation’s best leaders from fully confronting mass incarceration
[And other social/political issues.]
by, Shaun King
MEDIUM
“But let me make it even more personal for the world I operate in. At last count, we have over 70,000 black churches in America. It is the most consistent and influential institution in black communities from coast to coast, but the leaders of those churches, because of various tax laws, are not allowed to use their buildings or pulpits for explicit political endorsements. They can’t email it to you either. They can’t do it anywhere on church property or with church equipment. Even though those churches and those communities are ravaged by mass incarceration, they aren’t allowed to really get into the fight to inform people of what to do and who to vote for that will change the system. So, what we end up having are 2,400 District Attorneys in power, often fighting against the health and well-being of black communities, with 70,000+ pastors who cannot freely campaign for alternatives. I’m not even saying we should remove this prohibition — I just need you to know it’s there — and for black communities — this is problem is heightened — because the primary leaders in the community can’t get very specific about criminal justice reform.
It goes much deeper than that.
Because of tax laws governing charities, including almost every single civil rights organization you’ve ever heard of, including the NAACP, the Urban League, the ACLU, and others, those organizations are not allowed to endorse political candidates or use their resources in political campaigns of any kind. They can skirt around the issue. They can host forums with every candidate. And that stuff helps, but not enough. They can’t tell you which sheriff and jailer and DA is corrupt or violent or horrible. They can’t tell you who needs to be replaced and who you should replace them with.
The same is true for most fraternities and sororities — who have deep influence around the country. It even includes hardcore justice organizations that do amazing work — organizations that I love and respect — but would lose their non-profit status if they actually endorsed a political candidate.
So guess what they say when it comes time to vote?
“Go vote.”
That’s about it. If they say much more than that, it could truly jam them up legally. So all they can tell people, is “go vote.” That’s it.
Can I be frank?
“Go vote” is not enough. And the proof is the very system itself.
If “go vote” was enough, our 2,400 prosecutors would look and feel and act very differently.
If “go vote” was enough, Republicans would not control the House, Senate, Presidency, Supreme Court, and the majority of governorships and state legislatures right now.
“Go vote” is a not a political strategy. It’s hardly a slogan. Hell, it’s not even a good tweet. It lacks the specificity and nuance that people to know who to vote for and against. It lacks the detail needed to actually change the system.
So what happens is people go vote, normally down a single party line, often voting for complete strangers, often choosing random names from among Democrats, hoping they are great. Often, they aren’t. Some of the worst DA’s and judges in America are Democrats. Good people run against them, but the leaders people know and trust can’t tell you that. I can tell you 20 cities off the top of my head where this is the case right now.
What I am about to say pains me. I am not pointing at you. I am owning it.
We got where we are right now because we’ve been out-organized.
People who mean us great harm are in power right now because they have out-organized us.
Yes, they’ve often gerrymandered their way into success, but even that was them out-organizing us.”
Full article:
People Power
March 12, 2017
ACLU rallies tens of thousands of people across the US on Saturday, March 11th, to organize and #resist.
Washington Post
3.12.17
David Weigel
The ACLU is spending millions of dollars on a plunge into grass-roots politics — a “People Power” campaign. It’s the newest and largest development from a sprawling “resistance” movement that regularly moves faster than the Democratic Party’s leaders can think and isn’t waiting on politicians for cues.
People Power debuted this weekend in south Florida and, by the organization’s estimate, at thousands of weekend house parties nationwide. Everyone who showed up received a nine-point plan to turn blue America into a network of “freedom cities” by defying the president’s executive orders, his health-care agenda and his Justice Department. Anyone who missed it could click on PeoplePower.org, the latest catchall website to find actions that would get results.
The key to the effort: targeting Trump’s policies, rather than the man or his words. If 2016 taught Democrats anything, it’s that attacking Trump isn’t enough.
“We’ve seen this exponential growth in people becoming card-carrying members of the ACLU,” Romero (Anthony Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union) said in an interview after his speech. “They’re younger. They’re in every state around the country. The biggest danger was in not doing something like this, where people get apathetic and they fall asleep.”
There’s little apparent risk of that, and the biggest organizations on the left, broadly defined, are staffing up to give it direction. The Center for American Progress is planning a grass-roots conference for “rising” activist groups in California next month, and an ideas conference in Washington one month later. Super PACs such as American Priorities have become promotion machines for the Indivisible movement, which in just a few months has begun to organize some local chapters as official nonprofit groups.
…no organization is transforming as quickly or as boldly as the ACLU. Since the 2016 election, it has tripled its membership to more than 1.2 million and raised more than $80 million, with plans to add 100 staff members to a team of about 300.