The People's Record

California Domestic Workers Demand Bill of Rights

California farm workers fired for leaving fields during wildfire
May 8, 2013

More than a dozen farm workers in Southern California were out of a job after walking out of the fields last week, forced indoors because of heavy smoke from a massive wildfire burning nearby.

“Oh, yeah, the smoke was very bad. That’s no doubt about that,” said Lauro Barrajas, of the United Farm Workers.

As the blaze, dubbed the Springs Fire, continued to grow in Camarillo May 2, farm workers 11 miles south in Oxnard said they started to feel the effects of the smoke in the strawberry fields.

The ashes were falling on top of us, one of them explained, adding “it was hard to breathe.”

Air quality in the region was at dangerously poor levels and 15 workers at Crisalida Farms decided they could not handle it any longer. They left, even though their foreman warned them they would not have a job when they returned.

When they went back to the fields May 3, the farm fired them.

Barrajas, who is a representative of the UFW, said the workers contacted him for help, even though they were not members of the union.

Union representatives met with the farm’s upper management and applied a union rule.

“No worker shall work under conditions where they feel his life or health is in danger,” Barrajas said.

In a statement to Telemundo, the farm representative said the workers left without permission while orders still needed to be filled. The company offered to pay them for the hours they’d worked.

Later, the company settled with the union and offered to rehire all 15 workers. But only one worker returned.

The others took jobs on other farms.

One worker said while it hurts to lose work, one’s health is more important.

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California prisons punish inmates by racial bloc, not offense
April 13, 2013

Are California prisons determining inmates’ punishments based solely on their race? Though it’s not said to be official policy, a new report shows that at least five state prisons maintain a color code system to racially segregate their populations.

According to a number of documents, including a state response, collected by the ProPublica investigation, some California prison facilities separate and label prisoner blocks by ethnicity in order to “provide visual cues that allow prison officials to prevent race-based victimization, reduce race-based violence, and prevent thefts and assaults.”

Though few would argue that maintaining a prison population as large as California’s is an easy task, organizations like the ACLU and the Prison Law Office are fighting the practice, arguing that besides being an uncomfortable reminder of the days of racial segregation, it is an ultimately ineffective way to maintain order.

One document collected by ProPublica describes color signs placed above cell doors at men’s prisons across the state: blue for black inmates; white for white; red, green or pink for Latino; and yellow for everyone else.

“Rather than targeting actual gang members, they assume every person is a gang member based on the color of their skin,” said Rebekah Evenson, an attorney with the Prison Law Office.

According to an analysis conducted by Evenson’s group, nearly half of the 1,445 security lockdowns enacted between January 2010 and November 2012 impacted specific racial or ethnic groups. The report showed that Hispanics were the most habitual target, while inmates categorized as “other” were least likely to be restricted.

Though correctional officials with the state of California deny racial targeting, some inmates have come forward with complaints, and in 2011 filed a class action lawsuit claiming racial discrimination.

Robert Mitchell, an inmate at High Desert State Prison, testified that he had been swept up into recurring lockdowns because he is black, and had suffered muscular atrophy and pain as he was prevented from exercising a leg injury.

Hanif Abdullah, another black inmate suing the state, says he was placed on “modified programming” multiple times, and was kept from attending religious services as well as receiving adequate health care. Modified programming refers to security situations requiring that inmates be prohibited from seeing visitors, visiting the prison yard, or even from attending classes and drug rehabilitation meetings.

Though the state’s total prison population recently dropped, with nearly 200,000 inmates the system is still at 150 per cent of its maximum capacity.

In 2005, the US Supreme Court ruled that racial classifications must be limited to a narrowly defined and compelling “state interest.” In its opinion brief, which pertained to racially segregating prisoners prior to entering a new correctional facility, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote, “When government officials are permitted to use race as a proxy for gang membership and violence … society as a whole suffers.”

Currently, California is the only state in the country known to employ race-based lockdowns, according to the ACLU National Prison Project.

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No charges in police murder case that ignited Anaheim unrest
March 20, 2013

Officer Nick Bennallack was on a gang-enforcement patrol in the Anna Drive neighborhood on the afternoon of July 21 when he pulled up to a small group of men. Manuel Diaz, 25, a convicted gang member, bolted, the Orange County District Attorney’s Office concluded.

The officers gave chase, down an alley and into the front yard of an apartment house. There, Bennallack fired two shots, one hitting Diaz in the back-right side of his head, the other hitting him in his right buttock, District Attorney Tony Rackauckas said.

The police association said shortly after the shooting that officers saw Diaz pull something from his waistband and turn. Diaz was found to be unarmed; investigators found a cell phone registered to Diaz, as well as the two ammunition cartridges from Bennallack’s gun and a drug pipe, the District Attorney’s Office said.

Diaz’s mother, Genevieve Huizar, said she plans to stage a demonstration Thursday morning in front of the courthouse in Santa Ana.

“This is completely unjustified,” Huizar said. “The D.A. appointed himself the judge and jury for this officer. I’m never going to stop fighting until Nick Bennallack is in prison.”

Huizar has sued Anaheim for $50 million. Her attorney, Dana Douglas, said several witnesses reported seeing Diaz hit first in the buttocks. He fell to his knees, she said, and then was hit in the back of the head.

The D.A.’s account of events and his decision not to file charges does not change anything about the family’s civil lawsuit, Douglas said.

“This is exactly the result we unfortunately expected,” she said.

Bennallack said in a statement to investigators that he fired because he thought Diaz had a gun and was about to shoot at him and the officer with him. The other officer, Brett Heitmann, told investigators that he heard Bennallack shout something like “Guhhh!” immediately before the shooting, which he took to be the start of a warning: “Gun!”

The District Attorney’s Office concluded that Bennallack believed he was in imminent danger of being killed by Diaz, Rackauckas said.

“It is our legal opinion that the evidence does not support a finding of criminal culpability on the part of Officer Bennallack,” Assistant District Attorney Dan Wagner said. “There is significant evidence that the officer’s actions were reasonable and justified under the circumstances.”

At the time of the shooting, Bennallack was under investigation in an earlier fatal shooting at an Anaheim apartment building. The District Attorney’s Office cleared him in that unrelated January 2012 shooting a few months ago.

Bennallack is a five-year veteran and a department rookie of the year. He returned to duty two weeks after the shooting of Diaz, after officials reviewed preliminary results of their investigation.

On Anna Drive on Wednesday, few residents wanted to speak about the District Attorney’s Office’s findings, saying they were afraid to give their names after a gang sweep targeted the neighborhood last year.

But Margarita Flores, 42, who runs a produce truck on Anna Drive, said the officer should have faced charges.

“What he did was not right,” she said. “Those who were fond of (Diaz) are going to be mad – against the police, against everybody.”

The Diaz shooting touched off more than a week of unrest in Anaheim and helped expose deep and long-standing divisions in the city.

It started in the hours after the shooting, when residents who knew Diaz from the neighborhood gathered at the site, yelling at officers and demanding answers. Officers fired bean-bag rounds and pepper balls into the crowd at close range; a police dog charged into the crowd, toppling a baby stroller and biting at least one person.

Anaheim police Chief John Welter later apologized, saying the police dog broke loose from its handler.

A few nights later, after another fatal police shooting about which D.A.’s Office has not issued a report, a crowd estimated at 1,000 gathered in front of Anaheim’s City Hall, where a City Council meeting was under way. Some had come to demand greater accountability for police and a greater voice for neighborhoods such as Anna Drive. Others had come from outside of Anaheim to protest police brutality.

Scores of officers in riot gear confronted them and, when they would not disperse, fired pepper balls and bean-bag rounds at them. As the crowd scattered, a few people smashed windows and vandalized storefronts.

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Justice for Manuel Diaz, Kimani Gray & all other victims of police murder now!

California gets face scanners to spy on everyone at once
November 19, 2012

In a single second, law enforcement agents can match a suspect against millions upon millions of profiles in vast detailed databases stored on the cloud. It’s all done using facial recognition, and in Southern California it’s already occurring.

Imagine the police taking a picture: any picture of a person, anywhere, and matching it on the spot in less than a second to a personalized profile, scanning millions upon millions of entries from within vast, intricate databases stored on the cloud.

It’s done with state of the art facial recognition technology, and in Southern California it’s already happening.

At least one law enforcement agency in San Diego is currently using software developed by FaceFirst, a division of nearby Camarillo, California’s Airborne Biometrics Group. It can positively identify anyone, as long as physical data about a person’s facial features is stored somewhere the police can access. Though that pool of potential matches could include millions, the company says that by using the “best available facial recognition algorithms” they can scour that data set in a fraction of a second in order to send authorities all known intelligence about anyone who enters a camera’s field of vision.

“Live high definition video enables FaceFirst to track and isolate the face of every person on every camera simultaneously,” the company claims on their website.

“Up to 4 million comparisons per second, per clustered server” — that’s how many matches a single computer wired to the FaceFirst system can consider in a single breath as images captured by cameras, cell phones and surveillance devices from as far as 100 feet away are fed into algorithms designed to pick out terrorists and persons of interest. In a single setting, an unlimited amount of cameras can record the movements of a crowd at 30-frames-per-second, pick out each and every face and then feed it into an equation that, ideally, finds the bad guys.

“I realized that with the right technology, we could have saved lives,” Joseph Rosenkrantz, president and CEO of FaceFirst, tells the Los Angeles Times. He says he dreamed up the project after the attacks of September 11, 2001 and has since invested years into perfecting it. Not yet mastered, however, is how to make sure innocent bystanders and anyone who wishes to stay anonymous is left alone as he expands an Orwellian infrastructure that allows anyone with the right credentials to comb through a crowd and learn facts and figures of any individual within the scope of a surveillance cam.

Speaking to reporters with Find Biometrics in August, Rosenkrantz said that the system is already in place in Panama, where computers there process nearly 20 million comparisons per second “using a FaceFirst matching cluster with a large number of live surveillance cameras on a scale beyond any other system ever implemented.”

“Within just a couple of seconds whoever needs to know receives an email containing all the evidence and stats about the person identified along with the video clip of them passing the camera so they may be approached then and there,” he says.

Earlier this year, RT broke the story of TrapWire, a surveillance system marketed by global intelligence firm Stratfor to law enforcement agencies across the world. Through investigation of TrapWire and its parent companies, it became apparent that surveillance devices linked to the system could be monitored from remote fusion centers with access to an endless array of cameras and databases. According to FaceFirst’s developers, their technology doesn’t need a second person to scour video feeds to find suspected terrorists. Complex algorithms instead make finding a match the job of a computer and positive IDs can be returned in under a second.

“It doesn’t do me any good if I’m able to look at a face with a camera and five minutes later, there’s a match,” says Paul Benne, a security consultant who tells the Los Angeles Times that he recommended his clients use FaceFirst in high-security areas. “By then, the person’s gone.”

Rosenkrantz admits in his interview to the use of the technology at Panama’s Tocumen airport, as well as other border crossings along the perimeter of the country. The deployment of FaceFirst in the United States still begs questions concerning the relationship between security and privacy, though, and is likely to remain an issue of contention until agencies in San Diego and elsewhere explain what exactly they’re up to.

According to a report in Southern California’s News 10 published this week, an unnamed law enforcement agency in San Diego County has been testing a handheld version of FacecFirst for about five months now. On the record, though, no agency in the US has been forthcoming with why it’s using those specific facial scanners or even confirming it’s in their arsenal of ever expanding surveillance tools.

“If they spot someone who doesn’t have identification, they can take their picture with their phone and immediately get a result,” Joseph Saad, business development director for FaceFirst, tells News 10.

Saad says his company predicts that “facial recognition will be in every day society” soon, perhaps before many Americans want to admit. According to filings available online, Airborne Biometrics was already cleared by the Government Services Administration (GSA) last year to have FaceFirst sold to any federal agency in the country.

“The ability to apply our technology for the advancement of our country has always been my number one goal,”Rosenkrantz said in April 2011 when Airborne was awarded an IT 70 Schedule contract for FaceFirst by the GSA. Because that contact has since been signed with Uncle Sam, Rosenfratz and company can see that goal through, at least until its up for renewal in 2017, through a deal that lets them sell FaceFirst to “all federal agencies and other specified activities and agencies.”

In a demonstration video on the FaceFirst website, the company touts their product as being a great addition to any acquisition device, specifically suggesting that clients consider integrating the software with tactical robots, mobile phones and surveillance drones. Coincidently, just last month the sheriff of Alameda County, California asked the US Homeland Security department for as much as $100,000 in order to have an unmanned aerial vehicles — a drone — in his agency’s arsenal for the sake of protecting the security of his citizens.

Weeks earlier, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told congressional lawmakers that she endorses the idea of sending drones to California to aid with law enforcement efforts. Pleads like the one out of Alameda have been occurring across the country in a rate considered alarming by privacy advocates, but rarely has that opposition brought into the spotlight the scary surveillance capabilities that any police agency may soon have in their hands. While the issues of Fourth Amendment erosions and privacy violations have indeed emerged, the actual abilities of surveillance devices — snagging faces from large crowds in milliseconds and sending info to the authorities — have not.

“Facial characteristics become biometric templates compared against multiple watch lists created from customer photos or massive criminal databases,” the promo explains. Those lists can be custom created by law enforcement agencies to track a ‘most-wanted’ roster of suspected criminals but can pull from databases where any biometric information is already available or can be inputted on the fly.

Discovery of San Diego’s use of FaceFirst comes just two months after the FBI announced it had already rolled out a program to upgrade its current Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) that keeps track of citizens with criminal records across the country with one that relies on face recognition. The FBI expects the Next Generation Identification (NGI) program will include as many as 14 million photographs by the time the project is in full swing in just two years, relying on digital images already stored on federal databases, such as the ones managed by state motor vehicle departments. In the state of New Jersey, the DMV has recently told drivers that they are not allowed to smile for driver’s license photos because it could cause complications in terms of logging biometric data in their own facial recognition system.

The FBI said that, by rolling out NGI, they “will be able to provide services to enhance interoperability between stakeholders at all levels of government, including local, state, federal and international partners.” The unnamed San Diego law enforcement agency already with the ability to match millions of faces in a single moment may be relying right now on that connectedness to keep track of anyone they wish.

According to an article in the Los Angeles Times last week, 70 percent of biometrics spending comes from law enforcement, the military and the government. The private sector is scooping up that scanning power too, though, with FaceFirst having already cut deals with Samsung to provide them with technology for use in closed-circuit surveillance cameras marketed to businesses. But while the Federal Trade Commission has informed companies and corporations that they need to be more transparent about how personally identifiable information is stored on their servers, the Times notes that no guidelines like that exist for law enforcement agencies, who may very well sit on mounds of intelligence without good reason.

“You don’t need a warrant to use this technology on someone,” Sen. Al Franken (D-Minnesota) said last year during a congressional hearing about the use of expanding surveillance technology. “You might not even need to have a reasonable suspicion that they’re involved in a crime.”

Aside from FaceFirst, law enforcement is using that excuse to pull data on persons — of interest and otherwise — even when their faces are protected. As RT reported recently, an ever-growing number of police departments are investing in license plate scanners that let officers identify as many as 10,000 vehicles and their registered owners in a single shift. Much like how FaceFirst can pick out dozens of suspects from a single photograph and send data to custom servers, those license plate readers can pick up the precise location of persons never suspected of a crime, making rampant invasion of privacy just collateral damage as the surveillance monster state grows larger

“The cameras will catch things you didn’t see, cars you wouldn’t have run, and the beauty of it is that it runs everything,” Lieutenant Christopher Morgon of the Long Beach, California Police Department says in promotional material for an automated license plate recognition device manufactured by PIPS Technology.

The Federal Trade Commission has offered the security industry best practice suggestions about how long to hold onto data picked up by surveillance cameras, but safeguards for law enforcement agencies are largely absent. In the case of the scanners used to find license plates on the streets of Southern California, Jon Campbell of LA Weekly writes,“The location and photo information is uploaded to a central database, then retained for years — in case it’s needed for a subsequent investigation.”

Rosenkrantz says FaceFirst is experiencing triple digit growth in 2012 and expects sustainable expansion to continue throughout the next five years. By 2020, the Federal Aviation Administration expects that as many as 30,000 drones will be operating in US airspace.

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Prop 37 defeated: California voters reject mandatory GMO labeling
November 7, 2012

California voters rejected Prop 37, which would have required retailers and food companies to label products made with genetically modified ingredients.

Millions of dollars, mostly from outside of California, were poured into campaigns both for and against Prop 37. But the donations that came in weighed heavily in favor of Prop 37’s opponents.

Companies like Monsanto and The Hershey Co. contributed to what was eventually a $44 million windfall for “No on Prop 37,” while proponents were only able to raise $7.3 million, reports California Watch.

Still, despite the lopsided campaign funding power, voting on Prop 37 was relatively close. As of this story’s publish time (98.5 percent of precincts reporting), Prop 37 was able to gain 47 percent of California’s vote.

Opponents of Prop 37 blitzed California with campaign ads on a variety of different reasons GMO labeling would be costly for consumers and punitive to businesses like small farms and mom-and-pop stores. The anti-Prop 37 movement also gained endorsements from prominent publications like the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle — not necessarily because the newspapers were against GMO labeling, but because of the way the ballot initiative was written.

Meanwhile, Prop 37 found supporters among celebrities, the restaurant world and food movement activists like Michael Pollan. In a piece for the New York Times, Pollan hailed its potential for igniting a nationwide debate about the industrial food complex:

Already, Prop 37 has ignited precisely the kind of debate — about the risks and benefits of genetically modified food; about transparency and the consumer’s right to know — that Monsanto and its allies have managed to stifle in Washington for nearly two decades.

If California had passed Prop 37, it would have been the first state in the U.S. to pass GMO labeling legislation. China, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, countries in the European Union, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, India and Chile are just a few of the nations that already require GMO foods to be labeled.

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Look at all those countries who have stood up to GMOs. We have a right to know what we’re eating! 

Monsanto spends millions to keep public in the dark & silence dissent

October 12, 2012

An intense advertising blitz, funded by Monsanto Co and others, has eroded support for a California ballot proposal that would require U.S. food makers to disclose when their products contain genetically modified organisms.

If California voters approve the measure on November 6, it would be the first time U.S. food makers have to label products that contain GMOs, or ingredients whose DNA has been manipulated by scientists.

The United States does not require safety testing for GM ingredients before they go to market. Industry says the products are safe, but there is a fiery debate raging around the science.

Dozens of countries already have GM food labeling requirements, with the European Union imposing mandatory labeling in 1997. Since then, GM products and crops have virtually disappeared from that market.

For more than a week, an opposition group funded by Monsanto, PepsiCo Inc and others has dominated television and radio air time with ads portraying the labeling proposal as an arbitrary set of new rules that will spawn frivolous lawsuits and boost food prices, positions disputed by supporters of the proposed new measures.

Experts say the real risk is that food companies may be more likely to stop using GMOs, than to label them.

That could disrupt U.S. food production because ingredients like GM corn, soybeans and canola have for years been staples in virtually every type of packaged food, from soup and tofu to breakfast cereals and chips.

Support for the GMO labeling proposal has plummeted to 48.3 percent from 66.9 percent two weeks ago, according to an online survey of 830 likely California voters conducted for the California Business Roundtable and Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy by M4 Strategies.

At the same time, the proportion of respondents likely to vote “no” on the measure - known as Proposition 37 - jumped to 40.2 percent from 22.3 percent two weeks ago, according to the survey results released on Thursday.

“Clearly the ‘No’ side has more money and the advertising is having an effect,” Michael Shires, a Pepperdine professor who oversees the survey, told Reuters.

Funding for the effort to defeat the “Right to Know” ballot is led by chemical giants Monsanto and DuPont, each of which owns businesses that are the world’s top sellers of genetically modified seeds.

Monsanto has contributed just over $7 million to fight the proposal, while DuPont has kicked in about $5 million. In all, the “No on 37” camp raised a total of $34.6 million, according to filings with the California Secretary of State.

“Yes on 37” supporters, led by the Organic Consumers Association and Joseph Mercola, a natural health information provider, have donated $5.5 million.

“When there’s an initiative that’s going to affect an industry that can rally resources, they’ve usually been able to stop it,” said Shires. “It still could go either way.”

ADVERTISING WAR

Supporters of the new labeling measures on Thursday accused the “No on 37” group of “pounding Californians with lies and deception”, but the group says it is simply underscoring flaws in the labeling proposal.

The “No on 37” group recently had to pull an ad that identified its star, Henry Miller, as a Stanford University doctor rather than as a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution think tank on the university’s campus. The group corrected the affiliation after Stanford complained.

Supporters of the ballot initiative, including food and environmental activists as well as organic growers, say consumers have the right to know what’s in the food they eat.

Because foods made with GMOs are not labeled, it is impossible to trace any food allergies or other ill effects suffered by humans or animals, they say.

Drafters of Proposition 37 say they excluded certain foods from the labeling rules to make them simpler and less burdensome for businesses. Exemptions include restaurant food as well as milk and meat from animals that eat GM feed.

California is the top milk-producing state in nation and its restaurant industry has annual sales of about $58 billion. It is not a significant producer of GM crops.

Opponents of the bill have seized on the exclusions. Their ads question why a frozen pizza (sold in a supermarket) would be labeled, while delivery pizza (from a restaurant) would not.

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It seems like everyday I read about some new thing that Monstanto is doing that they definitely shouldn’t be doing. 

New California legislation targets BDS movement as “anti-Semitic”
September 26, 2012

The California State Assembly has passed a resolution declaring criticism of Israel to be anti-Semitic—in a clear attack on the boycott, divestment and sanction (BDS) movement.

Passed by a bipartisan majority of Democrats and Republicans, the resolution—known as HR 35—specifically defines as anti-Semitic any speaker, film and event that describes Israel as “guilty of heinous crimes against humanity such as ethnic cleansing and genocide,” as well as “student- and faculty-sponsored boycott, divestment, and sanction campaigns against Israel.”

HR 35 smears the BDS movement as anti-Semitic by mixing it in among genuinely anti-Semitic phenomena, like campus vandalism involving swastikas—actual hate crimes which have been perpetrated with disturbing frequency in recent years on California campuses.

But the reality is that in opposing racist and genocidal policies of the Israeli state, BDS is an anti-racist movement, and it is supported by people of all races and faiths around the world, including many prominent Jewish voices, such as Israeli historian Ilan Pappé,Holocaust survivor Hedy Epstein, South African anti-apartheid fighter Ronnie Kasrils, and the organizations Jewish Voice for Peace and International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network.

The California resolution is the latest in a series of attacks on an increasingly effective BDS movement. Last year, members of pro-Israel groups filed lawsuits attempting to force campuses to put a halt to such activism, but were rebuffed when the court dismissed the suit.

These attacks come after several years of highly visible and successful actions in support of Palestine on University of California (UC) campuses and throughout the state—such as the protest of Israeli ambassador Michael Oren in 2010 at UC-Irvine and the successful blockade of an Israeli cargo ship in 2008.

It is because of these successes that supporters of Israel are employing more aggressive methods of intimidation against activists in an attempt to slow the movement’s progress in delegitimizing Israel’s colonial project.

The intent of HR 35, which is a non-binding resolution, is to intimidate the BDS movement in order to create a political climate on campuses that is more favorable to Zionists and the right wing. Already, UC administrators have reacted with severe repression against students who dare to speak out against Israel’s crimes and challenge the UC’s complicity with them.

For example, UC administrators and the Orange County District Attorney (DA) cracked down on the 11 students who interrupted a speech by Israeli ambassador Michael Orenat UC Irvine in 2010. Oren was speaking in defense of Israel’s crimes during Operation Cast Lead, in which 1,417 Palestinians in Gaza were killed, and the Israeli military targeted major components of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure, including schools, governmental and administrative offices, and water-treatment and energy facilities.

Not only did the DA level criminal charges against the students, but UC administrators violated the students’ right to privacy when they voluntarily turned over their personal e-mail accounts to prosecutors, who then published them in an act of brazen public intimidation. The 11 were ultimately convicted of misdemeanor charges and sentenced to community service time as well as academic sanctions at school.

The persecution of the Irvine 11 illustrates the close relationship between university administrators and elected officials—and how the two work together to stymie protest and dissent, especially when it comes to solidarity with Palestine.

By officially declaring protests like those of the Irvine 11 to be anti-Semitic, California political representatives want to embolden administrators to stifle opposition to Israel’s crimes and the UC system’s complicity with them. HR 35 will be a handy statement for administrators to reference and employ in order to justify repression of Palestine solidarity activism.

Full article

This comes out on the day I begin to read Omar Barghouti’s “Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights.” A full review will come soon after I finish it. 

California is attempting to stifle a human rights movement centered around ending the Israeli apartheid & allowing Palestinians the right to a safe existence, clean resources, education, healthcare, etc. without being terrorized by Zionist soldiers.

The BDS movement will not back down. Zionism is racism. Free Palestine.

Opponents of genetically engineered foods on Wednesday blocked shipments and deliveries at Monsanto Co’s vegetable seed company in California that developed a new genetically modified sweet corn that will hit stores this fall.

September 14, 2012

The protesters, who want to remove all so-called genetically modified organisms (GMOs) from the food supply, say their action is a preview of about five dozen other events planned for countries around the world next week.

They also hope to drum up support for a California ballot measure that would require food sellers to label a broad range of products, including soup, soy milk, breakfast cereals and chips, that contain GMOs.

Monsanto and other developers of these biotech crops say they are safe. But U.S. regulators do not require any independent safety tests that would put a lid on doubts raised by consumers and some scientific and health groups.

More than 40 countries around the world have some requirements for labeling foods containing ingredients from genetically modified crops. But U.S. regulators have rejected requests by many groups for similar labeling rules, and as a result many Americans do not know that they have been eating GMOs for years.

At the protest on Wednesday, about a dozen people organized by a network of anti-GMO activists called Occupy Monsanto stopped trucks from entering or leaving Monsanto’s Oxnard, California-based Seminis for nearly six hours.

The activists, some dressed in biohazard suits, blocked truck entrances with cars and chained themselves to the vehicles.

Police arrested nine of the protesters and charged them with trespassing, organizers said.

Seminis’ biotech sweet corn is one of the newest GMO crop products to make it to market. The corn was altered genetically to withstand dousings of a common weedkiller and to ward off certain pests.

“We deserve to know what we are eating and we should put GMO crops back in the lab and off the kitchen table,” protester Rica Madrid said.

Occupy Monsanto is not affiliated with the backers of a California proposal to label foods that are made with crops or from animals that have had their genetic makeup altered in the laboratory.

Monsanto did not directly address Wednesday’s events but said the company’s work helped improve farm productivity and food quality.

“We respect each individual’s right to express their point of view on these topics,” Thomas Helscher, a Monsanto spokesman, said of the Seminis protest.

DIFFERENT VIEW IN EUROPE

GMOs are deeply unpopular in Europe and many other countries, but they eventually came to dominate key crops in the United States after Monsanto in 1996 introduced a soybean genetically altered to tolerate Monsanto’s Roundup weed killer.

Using genes from other species, Monsanto and rivals including DuPont and Dow Chemical have since introduced an array of genetically altered crop varieties.

The most popular genetically engineered crops in the United States include corn, soybeans, sugar beets and canola - staple ingredients in a wide array of popular packaged foods.

Proponents of GM crops say they make farming more efficient by making plants resistant to pesticides, pests and harsh growing conditions, such as drought. They say genetically modified crops are no different from conventional types and that increasing demand for food, biofuels and livestock feed can only be met with help from the biotech industry that Monsanto dominates.

Critics say GM crops have not always lived up to their promise and that the benefits to farmers do not outweigh myriad risks to human and animal health and to the environment.

Assessing such risks is difficult in the United States. The government does not require GMO crops to undergo independent safety testing before they are approved, and it does not require labeling for GMO content which makes it next to impossible to track any links to human health problems.

The World Health Organization says “individual GM foods and their safety should be assessed on a case-by-case basis.”

Recently, some U.S. scientists have raised alarm bells over what they see as potentially dangerous implications from overuse of GMO crops.

Among the concerns is the fact that the rapid adoption by U.S. farmers of genetically engineered corn, soybeans and cotton has promoted increased use of herbicides, which critics say has triggered an epidemic of herbicide-resistant weeds and more chemical residues in foods.

This week, the Center for Food Safety vowed to sue the U.S. government if it approves a new type of genetically altered corn developed by Dow.

Source

LA woman claims two officers beat her during traffic stop
August 30, 2012

A commanding officer in the LAPD has been removed from active duty for excessive use of force against a woman during a routine traffic stop, prompting an internal investigation into the incident.

34-year-old Michelle Jordan, a registered nurse, was arrested in the Tujunga area on August 21 after being pulled over for talking on a cellphone while driving.

The woman got out of the car and swore at the officers, who then forced Jordan to the ground and handcuffed her. After she got up and was being led to the cop car, one of the policemen tackled her to the ground again. The incident was captured by fast-food restaurant CCTV cameras.

Jordan’s attorney, Sy Nazif, told a local TV station ABC 7 that, “She made some unwise moves, but certainly nothing that warranted a physical assault from the LAPD. … If anyone on the street attacked an innocent woman, they would be in jail. We expect the LAPD officers to be held to the same standard.”

Nazif described his client as “a defenseless woman in a sundress,” and asked why the officers would use excessive force against her.

Two officers involved in the incident have been removed from active duty. One has served in the police force for 22 years, while the other had only been active for 10 months, and was still in his probationary period.

Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck said at a news conference that “every Los Angeles police officer, regardless of rank, will be held accountable for their actions.”

This is the third accusation of excessive force leveled against LAPD officers in the past month. On Monday, Deutsche Bank executive Brian Mulligan filed a $50 million lawsuit against the LAPD, claiming two officers beat him in May.

The latest incident comes almost two weeks after Ron Weekley Jr., a 20-year-old student, accused the LAPD of using excessive force while arresting him.

Source (click to see photos of Jordan after the incident)

San Francisco police found to underreport arrest rates for Latinos, Asians
August 15, 2012

The San Francisco Police Department has underreported the arrest rates of the city’s two largest minority groups for years, misclassifying Latino arrestees as “white” and Asian arrestees as “other,” The Bay Citizen has learned.

The state has been publishing the erroneous statistics in a report called “Crime in California” since at least 1999, when the state Department of Justice first began posting the data online.

Because of the misclassifications, the department and federal and state officials have no accurate record of how often minorities are arrested in the city, creating skewed statistics and leading to widespread concern among local civil rights groups.

According to the reported data, African Americans are arrested at a much higher rate than whites. But by misclassifying Latinos, the department has inflated the number of whites arrested, indicating that the gap between the arrest rates for whites and blacks is even wider.

Over the years, concerns about racial profiling in the city’s African American and Latino communities have sparked city hearings and policy changes. Accurate, credible crime statistics were supposed to be a way to hold the department accountable. In 1999, the Police Commission ordered the police department to begin tracking racial data from all traffic stops. But disciplinary records show many officers still fail to fill out such tracking forms. And the misclassifications of Latino and Asian arrestees suggest other problems persist.

“This is just extremely troubling,” said Francisco Ugarte, senior immigration attorney at the San Francisco Immigrant Legal and Education Network. “If San Francisco is effectively unable to categorize those in the city being arrested, that would undermine our ability to monitor police practices – particularly in San Francisco, with such a huge Latino population.”

The Bay Citizen discovered the discrepancies after the California Department of Justice released the crime statistics for the year 2010 in June.

According to that report, 8,198 African Americans and 9,151 whites were arrested in San Francisco in 2010, along with 316 Hispanic adults and nine Hispanic juveniles. About 2,800 arrests are listed under “other.”

The Hispanic arrest figures included in the report come from other agencies in San Francisco, such as the California Highway Patrol, that have the authority to make arrests in the city but don’t share the police department’s antiquated computer system. Those numbers have fluctuated over the years, from a high of 705 Hispanic arrests in 2000 to a low of 283 Hispanic arrests in 2005.

San Francisco police commanders acknowledge that some of those statistics are incorrect.

“We have certainly made more than 300 arrests in the Hispanic community,” said Deputy Chief Lyn Tomioka. “I look at that number as a police officer and I can tell that it is inaccurate.”

Police officers mark whether an individual is Latino or Asian on arrest reports, but Tomioka and other department officials blamed an outdated computer system for the inaccuracies. Installed in 1972, the system lists three categories for identifying arrestees by race: blacks, whites and other. Although the department could calculate the numbers manually, officers have been identifying Latinos as “white” and Asians as “other” in the computer system for years.

“You’re making it sound like officers choose to do this. It’s what the system has available to the officers to put in,” Tomioka said.

She said she did not know when the department began misclassifying arrestees but said it does not plan on “looking back at those statistics.”

The police department has no idea if any of the statistics it reports to the state are accurate, according to Susan Giffin, its chief technology officer.

“Not only can we not tell you if the numbers are right, we really can’t articulate what the problems are, or if there are problems,” Giffin said.

By law, the police department is required to report crime and arrest statistics to the California Department of Justice each month. The state attorney general’s office and the FBI publish the data in their annual crime reports. The statistics also have been used in countless studies on racial disparities and trends in arrest rates.

Source

Groups sue Calif. Dept. of Health for failing to protect against toxic water
August 15, 2012

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the Environmental Working Group (EWG) sued the California Department of Public Health on Aug. 14 for failing to protect millions of Californians from hexavalent chromium, the cancer-causing chemical made infamous in the movie Erin Brockovich for contaminating drinking water and sickening residents in the town of Hinkley, California.

The agency was supposed to establish a safe drinking water standard for hexavalent chromium eight years ago, but has failed in its duty to safeguard citizens from the toxin.

“Millions of Californians are drinking toxic water today due to government neglect,” said Nicholas Morales, attorney at the NRDC. “The state has not protected our drinking water supply from this carcinogen, so we’re going to the courts to put a stop to it. Clean drinking water is a precious resource, and it’s about time it’s treated as such.”

An EWG analysis of official records from the California Department of Public Health’s water quality testing conducted between 2000 and 2011 revealed that about one-third of the more than 7,000 drinking water sources sampled were contaminated with hexavalent chromium at levels that exceed safe limits. These water sources are spread throughout 52 of 58 counties, impacting an estimated 31 million Californians.

In 2001, the California State Legislature mandated the agency adopt a standard by Jan. 1, 2004, giving it two years to do so. Eight years past its legal deadline, the agency still hasn’t made any visible progress and says it could take several more years before a final standard is completed. Filed in the California Superior Court of Alameda, NRDC and EWG’s suit contends the department’s delay is unjustified and it must rapidly proceed to finalize the standard.

“Communities all over California and the U.S. are being poisoned by this dangerous chemical,” said Erin Brockovich, an environmental and consumer advocate. “We have waited long enough and the people of California should not continue to be exposed to unsafe levels of this toxin in their tap water. The California Department of Public Health needs to do its job and adopt a strong standard for hexavalent chromium in drinking water.”

Drinking water sources in Sacramento, San Jose, Los Angeles and Riverside were found to exceed the safe limits of hexavalent chromium, according to a 2010 EWG report that tested 25 U.S. cities’ tap water for hexavalent chromium contamination.

The report also found this threat isn’t limited to California. At least 74 million Americans in thousands of communities across 42 states drink tap water polluted with “total chromium,” which includes hexavalent and other forms of the metal.

Even though hexavalent chromium is known to cause cancer, reproductive harm and other severe health effects, there is no national or state drinking water standard for hexavalent chromium. Therefore, water agencies don’t have to comprehensively monitor for or remove hexavalent chromium before it comes out of the tap.

“You’d think the state of California would have moved quickly to protect its citizens from this carcinogen, which, sadly, still flows from the taps of millions of residents,” Renee Sharp, a senior scientist and director of EWG’s California office said. “It’s absolutely unacceptable that at this minute countless children in California are likely drinking a glass of water laced with unsafe levels hexavalent chromium.”

Source

Activists revive shuttered library in East Oakland
August 14, 2012

Around 7 a.m. Monday, activists took over a vacant building in East Oakland’s San Antonio neighborhood, which they said had been left unlocked. After word spread on Facebook, about a dozen volunteers arrived and set to work, stocking it with donated books and clearing out grime, old mattresses, graffiti and other markings of abandonment. A bilingual banner hanging in front of the entrance at 1449 Miller Ave. welcomed passers-by to the “Victor Martinez People’s Library,” named for the late Latino author.

Decades ago, the building housed an official city library, an ornate space with built-in wooden bookshelves and high ceilings decorated with molding. Completed in 1918, it was one of four branches funded with a Carnegie grant. But that branch closed in the 1970s, and since then, the building has sat mostly unused, said Jaime Silva, one of the organizers. Squatters and illegal dumping have turned the property into an eyesore, he said.

I think everyone in the community is psyched this will no longer be a dumping ground,” said Silva, 43.

The building is owned by the City of Oakland’s Redevelopment Successor Agency within the Office of Neighborhood Investment. In an email Monday, an agency spokesman said the city would issue a dispersal order with a set time to vacate the property; his response didn’t include the city’s plans for the blighted building, which remains in disrepair.

Late Monday morning, people began trickling in. Some checked out books, shared their ideas, or asked how they could help.

“You open Monday through Friday?” one man asked a volunteer.

“We have no idea,” the volunteer responded.

Goldie Simmons of San Leandro, whose husband is the pastor of the nearby Agnes Memorial Church, said she and her husband had proposed that city officials turn the building into a youth center, but that they were told it needed to be retrofitted. She said she was glad people had taken matters into their own hands.

“There’s nothing in this area, really,” she said. “There’s really no place for kids to come.”

Silva and other activists say the goal is for the building to be used for a community purpose, whether it’s a library or a community center with a garden.

“All we ask is that you consider keeping it out of the hands of a city which will only seal the fence and doors again, turning the space back into an aggregator of the city’s trash and a dark hole in the middle of the community,” according to the group’s news release, aimed at residents of the surrounding neighborhoods.

Only thing is, without a permit and city approval, the police consider them squatters—and the building was raided tonight by Oakland PD. 

Source
Photo

I suppose the city would rather see an empty building go to waste rather than to have a library & garden open to the community.

Libraries, not raids!