These are some ways you can help the families and children affected by the abusive ICE raids in Worthington.
Democracy for Minnesota
Donate Food, Clothes, Toys
Thanks to Latino Communications Network, donations are being collected at the La Invasora station in Plaza Verde, 2nd floor, located on the corner of Lake St. and Bloomington Avenue. Families have expressed the need for basic foods such as tortillas, beans, rice, cereal, crackers, maseca, baby formula and juice. Due to the holiday season right around the corner, people would like to see toys and children's clothes donated as well. Please drop off your donation at the Plaza Verde building. All donations will be transported to Worthington on Sunday, thanks to the support of Latino Communications Network. Once the donations arrive in Worthington, they will be given to the Distribution Committee who will make sure that all the donations get evenly handed out to the various locations/organizations that are actively connecting with families and children who have been affected by the issue.
Volunteer
People are needed in Worthington to help translate (Spanish-English) in various settings, from helping the media to connect with human stories of this issue to helping lawyers fill out intake forms. People are needed to help the union with food distribution logistics and database building, increasing capacity to connect with families, and to help provide general support for local happenings.
The prohibition of drugs is perhaps the most disastrous policy currently pursued by the US government.
Johann Hari, Huffington Post
On January 20th 2009, either the president of the United States will be a man who used cocaine, or the First Lady will be a former drug addict who stole from charity to get her next fix. In this presidential campaign, there are dozens of issues that have failed to flicker into the debate, but the most striking is the failing, flailing 'War on Drugs.' Isn't it a sign of how unwinnable this 'war' is that, if it was actually enforced evenly, either Barack Obama or Cindy McCain would have to skip the inauguration -- because they'd be in jail?
At least their time in the slammer would feature some familiar faces: they could share a cell with Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and some 46 percent of the US population.
The prohibition of drugs is perhaps the most disastrous policy currently pursued by the US government. It hands a vast industry to armed criminal gangs, who proceed to kill at least excess 10,000 citizens a year to protect their patches. It exports this program of mass slaughter to Mexico, Colombia and beyond. It has been a key factor in reviving the Taliban in Afghanistan. It squanders tens of billions of dollars on prisons at home, ensuring that one in 31 adults in the US now in prison or on supervised release at any one time. And it has destroyed an entire generation of black men, who are now more likely to go to prison for drug offenses than to go to university.
The Russian writer, who died Sunday (July 3), survived eight years in Stalin’s notorious gulags and became one of his country’s most controversial critical thinkers.
BBC News | UK
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who has died at the age of 89, played a significant role in ending communism. His novels were beautifully crafted, damning indictments of the repressive Soviet regime.
Born into a family of Cossack intellectuals, Alexander Solzhenitsyn graduated in mathematics and physics, but within weeks the Soviet Union was fighting Hitler for its survival.
Solzhenitsyn served as an artillery officer and was decorated for his courage, but in 1945 was denounced for criticising Stalin in a letter.
He spent the next eight years as one of the countless men enduring the gulags. He was one of the lucky ones to survive.
There followed a period of internal exile in Kazakhstan during which Solzhenitsyn was successfully treated for stomach cancer.
On his return to European Russia, he was allowed, following Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin, to publish his largely autobiographical One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, in 1962.
Solzhenitsyn spent eight years in labour camps. This made him an instant celebrity. But with the subsequent fall from power of the reformist Khrushchev, the KGB stepped up its harassment of Solzhenitsyn, forcing him to publish his work abroad.
His novels The First Circle and Cancer Ward were further damning allegories of the Soviet system.
The Christian Right is adamant about their hatred of abortion and same-sex marriage. Now they're adding undocumented immigrants to the list.
Tarso Luís Ramos and Pam Chamberlain, PublicEye.org
If the September 2007 Values Voters Summit is anything to go by, the Christian Right is now nearly as worked up about illegal immigration as about abortion and same-sex marriage. At that political gathering—sponsored annually in Washington D.C. by such key groups as the Family Research Council and attracting grassroots activists from across the country —the Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector used fuzzy math as he told a packed room that low-skilled immigrants from Latin America actually drain, rather than bolster, the U.S. economy. A parade of Republican presidential hopefuls there to court support from right-wing Protestant evangelicals attempted to outdo each other with the aggressiveness of their border security plans and the severity of their proposed policies towards immigrants.
Even former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who once charged, “Some antiimmigrant Republicans are guilty of demagoguery and racism,” took a much harder line on this occasion—equating the issues of abortion and illegal immigration: “Sometimes we talk about why we’re importing so many people in our workforce. It might be because for the last 35 years we have aborted more than a million people [each year] who would have been in our workforce had we not had the holo-caust of liberalized abortion under a flawed Supreme Court ruling in 1973.”
Related:
A debate between two progressive legal experts on the FISA bill and the idea of prosecuting of Bush and White House officials for criminal acts.
Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!
The dominant role of corporations is one of a number of issues fueling skepticism around the 2008 campaign. Criticism has also mounted recently over presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama's perceived shift to the right.
In an apparent reversal, Obama backed a new bill authorizing the Bush administration's domestic spy program and granting immunity for the telecom companies that took part. He also supported a Supreme Court decision to overturn a D.C. handgun ban. On foreign policy, Obama said he'd be open to revise his pledge to withdraw US troops from Iraq and also called for a major increase to the size of the US occupation of Afghanistan. And like all top Democratic leaders, Obama has refused to support calls for the prosecution of President Bush and top White House officials for war crimes and other abuses of power.
The criticism of Obama's stances has come as part of a larger debate over whether efforts to hold the Bush administration accountable would jeopardize an ostensibly higher goal of ensuring a Democratic win this November.
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