San Bernardino Sun Editorial
Federal lawmakers are poised to take action on long-awaited legislation that would better protect the public from tainted food.
It's about time.
It is unconscionable that consumers have had to endure a disgusting litany of contamination incidents - spinach, peanut butter and eggs, to name a few - before Congress was prompted to action.
The bill that the Senate is set to vote on today calls for more frequent inspections of processing plants. It also would give the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which regulates 80 percent of the country's food supply, the ability to order recalls of contaminated products.
Currently, the government can only ask that companies pull tainted goods off shelves; it cannot require it.
The measure would require food processors to have plans in place to identify and address contamination risks. These plans would be available for inspection by the FDA.
And it would mandate that food importers verify the safety of all foods they bring into the country. It gives the FDA authority to require certification for imported foods at a high risk of contamination.
One of the raps against the Senate's earlier version of the bill was that it would impose too harsh a burden on small farmers in an attempt to address problems caused by large agribusiness companies.
A sensible agreement pushed by Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., addresses those concerns. It would give small, local farms a less costly way of meeting certain planning requirements.
A small farm is defined as one that sells at least half its products to stores, restaurants and consumers within its state or within 275 miles of the farm, and has a gross annual income of less than $500,000.
Food production regulation should not be a one-size-fits-all proposition, and it makes sense to us to make accommodations for smaller producers so long as safety is not compromised. The FDA could revoke the exemption for any small farm involved in a contamination outbreak.
The House passed a version of the bill last year with broad bipartisan support. Given today's climate on government spending, lawmakers must find a way to pay for increased government inspections called for in the food safety act.
But there is already a large cost: A report by the Produce, under the auspices of the Pew Charitable Trusts at Georgetown University, estimates annual costs at $152 billion for health-related foodborne illness.
The FDA is operating under laws written more than seven decades ago, at a time when food contamination didn't present the same sort of complications it does now. It is time to update these laws to better match the way food is produced and consumed today.
Courtesy of SB Sun
Monday, November 29, 2010
Friday, November 26, 2010
HIV Prevention Breakthrough Electrifies Movement to End Epidemic
By Linda Villarosa
A version of this article originally appeared in the Black AIDS Institute’s Black AIDS Weekly e-mail. ColorLines joins other black community media in co-publishing content from the Black AIDS Weekly.
Years ago, when scientists predicted that some day you would be able to take a pill once a day to keep from contracting HIV, that idea sounded more Orwellian than real.
But the future is now.
The results of a large, international clinical trial published online this week in The New England Journal of Medicine found that a daily dose of an anti-retroviral pill reduced the risk of contracting HIV by 43.8 percent among gay and bisexual men and transgender women. The study, known as iPrEx, found even higher rates—72.8 percent effectiveness—in participants who adhered most closely to their daily drug regimen. Pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP as it’s known, uses tenofovir, a medication that is already effective in treating HIV infection.
In the scientific world, these findings signal a major coup. Those in the field say that this is the best news since this summer’s breakthrough results of a microbicide gel that proved highly effective for preventing HIV in women. That news electrified both the scientific community and the media last summer—Christmas in July in a 30-year pandemic that has offered up few wins.
“The need for new HIV prevention methods is critical,” says Robert Grant, M.D., M.P.H., an associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, who chaired the study. “PrEP, in combination with other prevention methods, such as HIV testing, counseling and consistent condom use, could represent a major step forward for efforts to control the global epidemic.”
The finding holds particular promise for black Americans, who account for 45 percent of the over 56,000 new HIV infections that occur in the United States each year—particularly for Black gay and bisexual men, who comprise 18 percent of new annual infections. “Black communities need as many weapons in our efforts to fight HIV and AIDS as possible,” says Phill Wilson, president and CEO of the Black AIDS Institute. “This study shows that there is a possibility to develop a new weapon. That is extremely important.”
The iPrEx study involved 2,499 men who have sex with men—called MSM in public health circles—and transgender women who have sex with men at 11 sites in Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, South Africa, Thailand and the United States in San Francisco and Boston. Between 8 and 9 percent of study participants described themselves as black, either from the U.S. or South Africa. Over half of participants were from the Andean region and described themselves as mixed race. No difference in efficacy was observed by race. Around the world, including in Africa and Asia, gay and bisexual men are often at highest risk. IPrEx is one of the largest HIV prevention trials to focus on men who have sex with men, the first HIV prevention study looking at men in either Africa or Asia and the first time a method using medication has been shown to prevent infection in MSM.
MSM account for nearly half of the people living with HIV in the U.S. and 53 percent of of all new infections.
Launched in 2007, the research was sponsored by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) through a grant from the David Gladstone Institutes, a non-profit group in San Francisco. In the study, participants were randomly assigned to receive either a daily antiretroviral tablet containing tenofovir and emtricitabine (brand name Truvada) or a placebo. This kind of study, known as double blind, since neither the researchers administering the study nor the participants knew who was receiving medication and who was receiving a placebo, is considered the gold standard of research. In the end, 36 HIV infections occurred among the 1,251 participants who received the antiretroviral therapy compared with 64 HIV infections among the 1,248 participants who received the placebo. The study also found this method to be safe.
“We now have strong evidence that pre-exposure prophylaxis with an antiretroviral drug…can reduce the risk of HIV acquisition among men who have sex with men, a segment of the population disproportionately affected by HIV/AIDS,” says Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., director of NIAID. “Additional research is needed, but certainly this is an important finding that provides the basis for further investigating, developing and employing this prevention strategy.”
Fauci and others are careful to temper joy with caution. Forty percent or even 70 percent effectiveness isn’t the same as 100 percent. “No single HIV prevention strategy is going to be effective for everyone,” adds Fauci, “and it is important to note that the new findings pertain only to the effectiveness of PrEP among men who have sex with men and cannot at this point be extrapolated to other populations.”
Before today’s results, the general concept of PrEP has had its critics. Some worry that PrEP could turn into a party pill, something you take before a night of unprotected fun—especially since it works best in HIV-negative people whose sexual practices place them at high risk of becoming infected.
“I can hear in my head people saying, ‘This is just another way to let those irresponsible homosexuals have sex,’” Jeffrey Crowley, director of the White House Office of National AIDS Policy, once remarked during a hearing about PrEP. “We have to be conscious of the political risk.”
However, in the iPrEx study, participants, who were provided with HIV prevention counseling and testing, showed a significant decrease in HIV risk behavior. The reported numbers of partners decreased and condom use increased whether the subjects were taking the placebo or the antiretroviral pill.
Access to treatment has also been part of the PrEP debate. Around the world, 33 million people live with HIV/AIDS—over 1 million in this country—and the majority of those infected don’t have access to lifesaving treatment. So is it fair to use desperately needed medication for prevention rather than to save lives—especially when anyone can walk into a drugstore and buy a package of condoms? Also, scientists worry that people could become resistant to the drug. Tenofovir, the researchers noted, is less likely to create resistance than many other antiretroviral medications.
In the wake of today’s research, scientists are already working to figure out how best these finding will translate into real life, for real people.
“It’s critical for black people to be engaged as this research unfolds and this strategy is developed. We have to be at the table,” Wilson notes.
Meanwhile, correct and consistent condom use and a reduced number of sexual partners remain the most effective ways for gay and bisexual men—and everyone—to protect against HIV infection.
Courtesy Colorlines
 |
| HIV patients prepare to take medicine. Photo: Getty Images/Ulet Ifansasti |
Years ago, when scientists predicted that some day you would be able to take a pill once a day to keep from contracting HIV, that idea sounded more Orwellian than real.
But the future is now.
The results of a large, international clinical trial published online this week in The New England Journal of Medicine found that a daily dose of an anti-retroviral pill reduced the risk of contracting HIV by 43.8 percent among gay and bisexual men and transgender women. The study, known as iPrEx, found even higher rates—72.8 percent effectiveness—in participants who adhered most closely to their daily drug regimen. Pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP as it’s known, uses tenofovir, a medication that is already effective in treating HIV infection.
In the scientific world, these findings signal a major coup. Those in the field say that this is the best news since this summer’s breakthrough results of a microbicide gel that proved highly effective for preventing HIV in women. That news electrified both the scientific community and the media last summer—Christmas in July in a 30-year pandemic that has offered up few wins.
“The need for new HIV prevention methods is critical,” says Robert Grant, M.D., M.P.H., an associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, who chaired the study. “PrEP, in combination with other prevention methods, such as HIV testing, counseling and consistent condom use, could represent a major step forward for efforts to control the global epidemic.”
The finding holds particular promise for black Americans, who account for 45 percent of the over 56,000 new HIV infections that occur in the United States each year—particularly for Black gay and bisexual men, who comprise 18 percent of new annual infections. “Black communities need as many weapons in our efforts to fight HIV and AIDS as possible,” says Phill Wilson, president and CEO of the Black AIDS Institute. “This study shows that there is a possibility to develop a new weapon. That is extremely important.”
The iPrEx study involved 2,499 men who have sex with men—called MSM in public health circles—and transgender women who have sex with men at 11 sites in Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, South Africa, Thailand and the United States in San Francisco and Boston. Between 8 and 9 percent of study participants described themselves as black, either from the U.S. or South Africa. Over half of participants were from the Andean region and described themselves as mixed race. No difference in efficacy was observed by race. Around the world, including in Africa and Asia, gay and bisexual men are often at highest risk. IPrEx is one of the largest HIV prevention trials to focus on men who have sex with men, the first HIV prevention study looking at men in either Africa or Asia and the first time a method using medication has been shown to prevent infection in MSM.
MSM account for nearly half of the people living with HIV in the U.S. and 53 percent of of all new infections.
Launched in 2007, the research was sponsored by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) through a grant from the David Gladstone Institutes, a non-profit group in San Francisco. In the study, participants were randomly assigned to receive either a daily antiretroviral tablet containing tenofovir and emtricitabine (brand name Truvada) or a placebo. This kind of study, known as double blind, since neither the researchers administering the study nor the participants knew who was receiving medication and who was receiving a placebo, is considered the gold standard of research. In the end, 36 HIV infections occurred among the 1,251 participants who received the antiretroviral therapy compared with 64 HIV infections among the 1,248 participants who received the placebo. The study also found this method to be safe.
“We now have strong evidence that pre-exposure prophylaxis with an antiretroviral drug…can reduce the risk of HIV acquisition among men who have sex with men, a segment of the population disproportionately affected by HIV/AIDS,” says Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., director of NIAID. “Additional research is needed, but certainly this is an important finding that provides the basis for further investigating, developing and employing this prevention strategy.”
Fauci and others are careful to temper joy with caution. Forty percent or even 70 percent effectiveness isn’t the same as 100 percent. “No single HIV prevention strategy is going to be effective for everyone,” adds Fauci, “and it is important to note that the new findings pertain only to the effectiveness of PrEP among men who have sex with men and cannot at this point be extrapolated to other populations.”
Before today’s results, the general concept of PrEP has had its critics. Some worry that PrEP could turn into a party pill, something you take before a night of unprotected fun—especially since it works best in HIV-negative people whose sexual practices place them at high risk of becoming infected.
“I can hear in my head people saying, ‘This is just another way to let those irresponsible homosexuals have sex,’” Jeffrey Crowley, director of the White House Office of National AIDS Policy, once remarked during a hearing about PrEP. “We have to be conscious of the political risk.”
However, in the iPrEx study, participants, who were provided with HIV prevention counseling and testing, showed a significant decrease in HIV risk behavior. The reported numbers of partners decreased and condom use increased whether the subjects were taking the placebo or the antiretroviral pill.
Access to treatment has also been part of the PrEP debate. Around the world, 33 million people live with HIV/AIDS—over 1 million in this country—and the majority of those infected don’t have access to lifesaving treatment. So is it fair to use desperately needed medication for prevention rather than to save lives—especially when anyone can walk into a drugstore and buy a package of condoms? Also, scientists worry that people could become resistant to the drug. Tenofovir, the researchers noted, is less likely to create resistance than many other antiretroviral medications.
In the wake of today’s research, scientists are already working to figure out how best these finding will translate into real life, for real people.
“It’s critical for black people to be engaged as this research unfolds and this strategy is developed. We have to be at the table,” Wilson notes.
Meanwhile, correct and consistent condom use and a reduced number of sexual partners remain the most effective ways for gay and bisexual men—and everyone—to protect against HIV infection.
Courtesy Colorlines
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Proof once again tax breaks DON’T prevent job loss
By HHS Network of California
In the weeks leading up to the November 2 midterm election, corporate interest groups poured millions of dollars into a campaign to defeat Proposition 24 (which would have repealed the $1.3 billion in tax breaks to corporations secretly passed in 2008), claiming that losing these tax breaks would cost California thousands of jobs.
Last week, however, Genentech, one of the top contributors to the anti-Proposition 24 campaign, announced plans to layoff 800 California workers.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Genentech spent an estimated $1.6 million to defeat Prop 24 – only to waste no time in eliminating hundreds of California jobs while still qualifying for the tax breaks.
Jean Ross, Executive Director of the California Budget Project, aptly summarized Genentech’s actions as “payoffs for layoffs” - observing that the tax breaks are costing California “over a billion dollars a year in tax revenues that could have gone to support schools, health care, and other public structures essential to the state’s future,” but don’t require wealthy companies like Genentech to add jobs in California or even maintain current employment. Click here to read more from Jean Ross.
Given California’s severely strained economic situation, the time has come to stop blindly spending billions on tax breaks that don’t create jobs. Just as health and human services programs have been scrutinized and pared for years to eliminate waste and inefficiency, corporate tax breaks that fail to provide (or at the very least – maintain) jobs for Californians should be scrutinized and pared back; while those that have a proven track record of producing private & public sector jobs (such as investments in health and human services) and business activity should be given serious consideration.
Federal unemployment benefits set to expire Nov. 30
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of struggling California families could find themselves in an even more disastrous situation if federally supported unemployment insurance benefits are allowed to expire at the end of this month.
By allowing these critical benefits to expire, Congress would also be jeopardizing California’s economic & family recovery – according to a new report from the California Budget Project. The report shows how, “without UI, these jobless workers would be forced to scale back their spending, which means businesses would have fewer customers and weaker sales – and that could ultimately cost jobs.”
Among the ways in which California would be harmed by the loss of federal unemployment insurance benefits include:
• Hurts small businesses by depriving families of much-needed spending power.
• Cutting benefits right before the holiday season hurts California by inflicting a heavy blow on retailers – one of the largest employers in all of California.
• Abandons one of the most effective means of economic recovery – models show that for every dollar towards unemployment insurance boosts California’s economic activity by $1.56.
Click here to read the report.
And be sure to check back at the HHS Network website for more actions, updates & resources at www.hhsnetworkca.org.
In the weeks leading up to the November 2 midterm election, corporate interest groups poured millions of dollars into a campaign to defeat Proposition 24 (which would have repealed the $1.3 billion in tax breaks to corporations secretly passed in 2008), claiming that losing these tax breaks would cost California thousands of jobs.
Last week, however, Genentech, one of the top contributors to the anti-Proposition 24 campaign, announced plans to layoff 800 California workers.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Genentech spent an estimated $1.6 million to defeat Prop 24 – only to waste no time in eliminating hundreds of California jobs while still qualifying for the tax breaks.
Jean Ross, Executive Director of the California Budget Project, aptly summarized Genentech’s actions as “payoffs for layoffs” - observing that the tax breaks are costing California “over a billion dollars a year in tax revenues that could have gone to support schools, health care, and other public structures essential to the state’s future,” but don’t require wealthy companies like Genentech to add jobs in California or even maintain current employment. Click here to read more from Jean Ross.
Given California’s severely strained economic situation, the time has come to stop blindly spending billions on tax breaks that don’t create jobs. Just as health and human services programs have been scrutinized and pared for years to eliminate waste and inefficiency, corporate tax breaks that fail to provide (or at the very least – maintain) jobs for Californians should be scrutinized and pared back; while those that have a proven track record of producing private & public sector jobs (such as investments in health and human services) and business activity should be given serious consideration.
Federal unemployment benefits set to expire Nov. 30
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of struggling California families could find themselves in an even more disastrous situation if federally supported unemployment insurance benefits are allowed to expire at the end of this month.
By allowing these critical benefits to expire, Congress would also be jeopardizing California’s economic & family recovery – according to a new report from the California Budget Project. The report shows how, “without UI, these jobless workers would be forced to scale back their spending, which means businesses would have fewer customers and weaker sales – and that could ultimately cost jobs.”
Among the ways in which California would be harmed by the loss of federal unemployment insurance benefits include:
• Hurts small businesses by depriving families of much-needed spending power.
• Cutting benefits right before the holiday season hurts California by inflicting a heavy blow on retailers – one of the largest employers in all of California.
• Abandons one of the most effective means of economic recovery – models show that for every dollar towards unemployment insurance boosts California’s economic activity by $1.56.
Click here to read the report.
And be sure to check back at the HHS Network website for more actions, updates & resources at www.hhsnetworkca.org.
Monday, November 22, 2010
Twenty days after Election Day and California is still counting
By Shonda Hutton
Enough is enough it’s time for the Cooley camp to face the music, Kamala Harris is California’s Attorney General and she is the right person for the job.
As the pinnacle of California’s law enforcement authority, her innovative approach and passion for justice is exactly what the state needs in an official. Her credentials have proven to not only be tough on crime, but invested in reducing recidivism. Re-entry initiatives and the Back on Track program are great examples of her commitment to the cause.
As San Francisco’s District Attorney, she combated gun violence by doubling gun felony convictions by 90 percent, while using the current laws on the books and not adding new ones. She expanded victim services, created new prosecution divisions focused on child assault, fought gang violence, and developed innovative alternatives to handling narcotics and quality-of-life crimes. Under her leadership, Harris has tripled misdemeanor cases taken to trail, established free legal clinics to immigrant neighborhoods, fought public integrity and environmental crimes, and boosted the overall felony conviction rates in San Francisco reaching its highest point in 15 years.
Surely she can be trusted to defend California’s interests.
When it comes to issues that matter most to everyday citizens, Kamala Harris will be the voice for the people as she fights corporate fraud, environmental injustice, consumer protection, and stronger public safety. She recognizes that California needs more from an attorney general than someone who is apt to overlook the law to fulfill a personal agenda, unlike her opponent Harris does not believe in the effectiveness and power of the death penalty as a deterrent. But has a strong willingness to follow the law in the quest to make a better California.
It’s time to end the charade. The people of California have made their decision that’s why Harris continues to hold the lead by roughly 42,500 votes. She is intelligent, results-driven, and California’s first Afro-Asian Attorney General.
 |
| http://www.dtsc.ca.gov/ |
Enough is enough it’s time for the Cooley camp to face the music, Kamala Harris is California’s Attorney General and she is the right person for the job.
As the pinnacle of California’s law enforcement authority, her innovative approach and passion for justice is exactly what the state needs in an official. Her credentials have proven to not only be tough on crime, but invested in reducing recidivism. Re-entry initiatives and the Back on Track program are great examples of her commitment to the cause.
As San Francisco’s District Attorney, she combated gun violence by doubling gun felony convictions by 90 percent, while using the current laws on the books and not adding new ones. She expanded victim services, created new prosecution divisions focused on child assault, fought gang violence, and developed innovative alternatives to handling narcotics and quality-of-life crimes. Under her leadership, Harris has tripled misdemeanor cases taken to trail, established free legal clinics to immigrant neighborhoods, fought public integrity and environmental crimes, and boosted the overall felony conviction rates in San Francisco reaching its highest point in 15 years.
Surely she can be trusted to defend California’s interests.
When it comes to issues that matter most to everyday citizens, Kamala Harris will be the voice for the people as she fights corporate fraud, environmental injustice, consumer protection, and stronger public safety. She recognizes that California needs more from an attorney general than someone who is apt to overlook the law to fulfill a personal agenda, unlike her opponent Harris does not believe in the effectiveness and power of the death penalty as a deterrent. But has a strong willingness to follow the law in the quest to make a better California.
It’s time to end the charade. The people of California have made their decision that’s why Harris continues to hold the lead by roughly 42,500 votes. She is intelligent, results-driven, and California’s first Afro-Asian Attorney General.
Friday, November 19, 2010
I Am HIV Positive and I Don’t Blame Anybody—Including Myself
By Kirk Grisham
I am HIV positive, and I don’t blame anybody for it—not myself or anybody else.
He didn’t rape me and he did not trick me. It was through our unprotected sex that I became HIV positive. Since seroconverting, I have been very conscious of the language I use to discuss transmission, particularly my own. To say “he gave me HIV” obscures the truth, it was through a mutual act, consensual sex, that I became HIV positive. When speaking to him a couple months after my diagnosis I gathered that he knew he was positive when we had sex. But that is beside the point; my sexual health is mine to control, not his.
We are encouraged to think about prevention and transmission in terms of responsibility. Someone must be at fault. Culturally, we hunt for secret villains. Today’s “down low” black man is but the latest boogeyman at which we’ve pointed our fingers—the latest of the so-often racialized monsters at which we can direct HIV blame rather than have honest conversations about sex and relationships.
In recent weeks, another recurring villain has re-emerged: the HIV-positive criminal who callously infects others. Last month, long-standing accusations that baseball legend Roberto Alomar hid an alleged HIV infection from his wife and girlfriends returned to the news. This summer, German pop star Nadja Benaissa made international headlines as she was tried for failing to disclose her HIV status to sex partners. These stories rarely fail to steal the news spotlight, and often throw local communities into HIV panics.
There must be a reason they are so resonant, right? They are evidence that HIV transmission from knowingly positive persons is rampant, right? Wrong. The reality is that the vast majority of HIV infections occur between two consenting people who believe they are doing nothing more risky than making love—or, at least getting laid.
People who know their HIV status are actually more likely to use condoms than not. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports one snapshot study that found 95 percent of those living with HIV infection in 2006 did not transmit the virus to others that year. Another CDC study, released in September, found that while one in five “men who have sex with men”—public health jargon for gay and bisexual men—in 21 major cities has HIV, nearly half of those men (44 percent) don’t know it. The agency estimates that the majority of new infections each year result from sexual contact in which the positive person does not know he or she has HIV.
HIV disproportionately affects African Americans, regardless of sexuality. They account for half of the people living with HIV/AIDS, but just 13 percent of the overall U.S. population. Studies also suggest African Americans are least likely to know their HIV status, with the younger being less aware. Similar patterns exist among men who have sex with men, of all races. No talking and no testing, just finger pointing.
The communication problems that help drive these trends don’t stop with finding monsters to blame. People I love and talk to about my status do not always have the language or tools to express their grief and worry. They ask things like, “How could you be so irresponsible?” Or, “How could you fuck up like this?”
This language hurts, but more importantly it shifts the discussion from meaningful conversation about risk and vulnerability to simplistic directives: if only people used condoms, transmission would cease. But this idea relies on a complicated array of misconceptions and idealistic assumptions of equality, equal access to information, and how to use that information to stay HIV negative.
It is irresponsible to just tell people to use condoms without acknowledging that conditions like poverty, patriarchy and homophobia play roles in the so-called risks we all take. Even with people who have seemingly escaped these broader contexts—say, a working-middle class white man such as myself—stigma can prevail. Stigma that is produced by homophobia and general ignorance, yes, but also by American society’s desperate need to discipline and punish, to affix blame on individuals rather than confront the systems in which individuals live. So the AIDS epidemic becomes a challenge of personal responsibility rather than a damning indictment of global public health. That personal responsibility, however, is tricky: I bore no responsibility for the epidemic, until I had HIV, when it became entirely my problem.
When I used to get tested at the city clinic, they would tell me that people stay negative by disclosing their negative status. Having a conversation is paramount—negotiating whether and how you want to use protection, talking about the last time you were tested and asking the same of your partner. This dialogue cannot be taken for granted, but for many, before these conversations can happen, we need the tools to do so. So here, we lead by example. Three people of varying HIV status offer their own testimonies on how they think about their sexual health, and what it means.
Go to Colorlines to read the dialogue amount three people who agreed to share their status.
Courtesy Colorlines.com
 |
| Photo: istock/Les Byerley |
He didn’t rape me and he did not trick me. It was through our unprotected sex that I became HIV positive. Since seroconverting, I have been very conscious of the language I use to discuss transmission, particularly my own. To say “he gave me HIV” obscures the truth, it was through a mutual act, consensual sex, that I became HIV positive. When speaking to him a couple months after my diagnosis I gathered that he knew he was positive when we had sex. But that is beside the point; my sexual health is mine to control, not his.
We are encouraged to think about prevention and transmission in terms of responsibility. Someone must be at fault. Culturally, we hunt for secret villains. Today’s “down low” black man is but the latest boogeyman at which we’ve pointed our fingers—the latest of the so-often racialized monsters at which we can direct HIV blame rather than have honest conversations about sex and relationships.
In recent weeks, another recurring villain has re-emerged: the HIV-positive criminal who callously infects others. Last month, long-standing accusations that baseball legend Roberto Alomar hid an alleged HIV infection from his wife and girlfriends returned to the news. This summer, German pop star Nadja Benaissa made international headlines as she was tried for failing to disclose her HIV status to sex partners. These stories rarely fail to steal the news spotlight, and often throw local communities into HIV panics.
There must be a reason they are so resonant, right? They are evidence that HIV transmission from knowingly positive persons is rampant, right? Wrong. The reality is that the vast majority of HIV infections occur between two consenting people who believe they are doing nothing more risky than making love—or, at least getting laid.
People who know their HIV status are actually more likely to use condoms than not. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports one snapshot study that found 95 percent of those living with HIV infection in 2006 did not transmit the virus to others that year. Another CDC study, released in September, found that while one in five “men who have sex with men”—public health jargon for gay and bisexual men—in 21 major cities has HIV, nearly half of those men (44 percent) don’t know it. The agency estimates that the majority of new infections each year result from sexual contact in which the positive person does not know he or she has HIV.
HIV disproportionately affects African Americans, regardless of sexuality. They account for half of the people living with HIV/AIDS, but just 13 percent of the overall U.S. population. Studies also suggest African Americans are least likely to know their HIV status, with the younger being less aware. Similar patterns exist among men who have sex with men, of all races. No talking and no testing, just finger pointing.
The communication problems that help drive these trends don’t stop with finding monsters to blame. People I love and talk to about my status do not always have the language or tools to express their grief and worry. They ask things like, “How could you be so irresponsible?” Or, “How could you fuck up like this?”
This language hurts, but more importantly it shifts the discussion from meaningful conversation about risk and vulnerability to simplistic directives: if only people used condoms, transmission would cease. But this idea relies on a complicated array of misconceptions and idealistic assumptions of equality, equal access to information, and how to use that information to stay HIV negative.
It is irresponsible to just tell people to use condoms without acknowledging that conditions like poverty, patriarchy and homophobia play roles in the so-called risks we all take. Even with people who have seemingly escaped these broader contexts—say, a working-middle class white man such as myself—stigma can prevail. Stigma that is produced by homophobia and general ignorance, yes, but also by American society’s desperate need to discipline and punish, to affix blame on individuals rather than confront the systems in which individuals live. So the AIDS epidemic becomes a challenge of personal responsibility rather than a damning indictment of global public health. That personal responsibility, however, is tricky: I bore no responsibility for the epidemic, until I had HIV, when it became entirely my problem.
When I used to get tested at the city clinic, they would tell me that people stay negative by disclosing their negative status. Having a conversation is paramount—negotiating whether and how you want to use protection, talking about the last time you were tested and asking the same of your partner. This dialogue cannot be taken for granted, but for many, before these conversations can happen, we need the tools to do so. So here, we lead by example. Three people of varying HIV status offer their own testimonies on how they think about their sexual health, and what it means.
Go to Colorlines to read the dialogue amount three people who agreed to share their status.
Courtesy Colorlines.com
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Resisting Gender Violence and the Prison Industrial Complex
An interview with Victoria Law
By Angola 3 News
Victoria Law is a longtime prison activist and the author of the 2009 book, Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women (PM Press). Law’s essay “Sick of the Abuse: Feminist Responses to Sexual Assault, Battering, and Self Defense,” is featured in the new book, entitled The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism, edited by Dan Berger.
In this interview, Law discusses her new article, which provides a history of radical feminist resistance to the criminalization of women who have defended themselves from gender violence. Furthermore, Law presents a prison abolitionist critique of how the mainstream women’s movement has embraced the US criminal justice system as a solution for combating violence against women.
Previously interviewed by Angola 3 News about the torture of women in US prisons, Law is now on the road with the Community and Resistance Tour.
Angola 3 News: In your essay “Sick of the Abuse,” you write that “a woman’s right to defend herself (and her children) from assault became a feminist rallying point throughout the 1970s.” You focus on the four separate stories of Yvonne Wanrow, Inez Garcia, Joan Little, and Dessie Woods. All four women were arrested for self-defense and their cases received national attention with the support of the radical women’s movement. Can you briefly explain their cases and why they were so important for the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s?
Victoria Law: Yvonne Wanrow was an American Indian mother of two living in Washington State in the 1970s. In 1972, her 11-year-old son was grabbed from his bike by William Wesler, a known child molester. He escaped and fled to the house of a family friend named Shirley Hooper, whose 7-year-old daughter had been raped by Wesler earlier that year. When Hooper called the police, they refused to arrest Wesler.
Understandably shaken, Hooper called Yvonne Wanrow and asked her to spend the night. Wanrow, who was 5 foot, 4 inches, and had recently broken her leg, brought her gun. At five in the morning, Wesler came to their house. When he refused to leave, Wanrow went to the front door to yell for help. She turned around to find Wesler, who, at 6 foot 2, was towering over her. She shot and killed him.
At her first trial, the judge instructed the jury only to consider what had happened at or immediately before the killing. This omitted (1) Wesler’s record as a sex offender; (2) Wesler’s assault on Hooper’s 7 year old; (3) His attempted assault on Yvonne’s son
Wanrow was convicted of murder and sentenced to 25 years.
However, various groups and people involved in the women’s movement and the American Indian movement had taken up her cause. They recognized that a woman had the right to defend herself and her family from assault. They held events that raised awareness, educated people, and tied her case into issues of violence against women and the systemic violence against Native people in the US. They also raised funds for her legal defense, which enabled her to have a better defense than she might have been afforded otherwise.
As a result, in 1977, the Washington State Supreme Court granted her a new trial, partially on the basis that the jury should have considered ALL relevant facts when considering self-defense. At her new trial in 1979, Wanrow pled guilty to reduced charges & received a suspended sentence, 5 years’ probation and 1 year of community service. The court decision also established that that women’s lack of access to self-defense training and to the “skills necessary to effectively repel a male assailant without resorting to the use of deadly weapons” made their circumstances different from those of men.
Two years later, in 1974, Inez Garcia shot and killed the man who had blocked her escape from rape. She was arrested and charged with 1st degree (or premeditated) murder. Like Wanrow, her cause was taken up by the women’s movement, which organized teach-ins and fundraisers and galvanized popular support with the recognition that women had the right to defend themselves against rape.
During her first trial, the judge did not allow testimony about the rape as part of the evidence. After her conviction, the women’s movement continued to rally on her behalf and hired feminist attorney Susan Jordan to take over her defense.
Two years later, an appeals court reversed her conviction because the trial judge had instructed the jury not to consider the rape
During the re-trial, Susan Jordan challenged potential jurors about their preconceptions of rape, making the assault an integral part of the case from the beginning. Garcia was acquitted. The entire jury agreed that the rape and threat of further harm were adequate provocation for Garcia’s action.
That same year, Joan Little, a black woman and the only female prisoner in North Carolina’s Beaufort County Jail, killed Clarence Alligood, a sixty-two-year-old white male guard, after he had entered her cell, threatened her with an ice pick and forced her to perform oral sex. Little was charged with first-degree murder which, in North Carolina, carried a mandatory death sentence.
Again, there was a HUGE outpouring of support from various movements, including people and groups in the women’s liberation and Black Liberation movements as well as more mainstream groups. During her trial, Little’s defense exposed the chronic sexual abuse and harassment endured by women in the jail and prison system. Countering the prosecution’s argument that Little had enticed Alligood into her cell with promises of sex, the defense team called on women who had previously been held at the jail. They testified that Alligood had a history of sexually abusing women in his custody.
Little herself testified about Alligood’s assault.
After seventy-eight minutes of deliberation, a jury acquitted Little, establishing a precedent for killing as a justified self-defense against rape.
Dessie Woods was a Black woman in Georgia who shot and killed a man who tried to rape her and her friend while they were hitchhiking. She was sentenced to 22 years. Black nationalist women took up the case of Dessie Woods, framing it as a case of colonial violence. Radical (White) feminists also took up her cause and used it as a way to challenge white feminists to examine not only sexism and patriarchy but also racism and colonialism.
However, unlike the cases of Little, Wanrow and Garcia, the larger White feminist movement(s) did not rally to her cause.
Even though she did not have the massive outpouring of support as the other three women, the prolonged support that she did have eventually won Woods her freedom in July 1981. A lawyer from the People’s Law Center challenged the use of circumstantial evidence and the use of a special prosecutor (hired by the dead man’s family). The U.S. Court of Appeals determined that there had been insufficient evidence to convict and imprison her.
The first three cases were groundbreaking in that they established legal precedents stating that women had a right to defend themselves (and their children) from sexual assault. In the case of Inez Garcia, her lawyer Susan Jordan extended the legal interpretation of “imminent danger” beyond the immediate time period, thus laying the groundwork for battered women’s defense—that a woman who kills her abuser is acting in self-defense even if she is not under attack at that time.
A3N: What impact did activism have in these four cases?
VL: The activism and organizing around those four cases enabled the women to have better legal defenses than they would have otherwise been afforded. For example, $250,000 was raised for Joan Little’s defense. Almost $39,000 was spent on social scientists who devised an “attitude profile survey:” designed to detect patterns of (racial) prejudice. The defense used their findings to win a change of venue from conservative/racist Beaufort County to Raleigh, which was key in her acquittal. Without the money garnered by supporters, Joan Little, a poor Black woman, would never have been able to have that kind of legal support. Instead, she would have been convicted and executed.
A3N: How are things different today, in 2010?
VL: We don’t see the same outpouring of support for women arrested for self-defense today. We can look at the case of the New Jersey Four, who are four Black lesbians arrested and incarcerated for defending themselves against a homophobic attack on the street. Their case has garnered support from groups working around incarcerated women’s issues and queer issues, but it hasn’t been taken up as widely as, say, the case of Joan Little or even Dessie Woods. Women who are incarcerated for defending themselves against partner violence receive even less public attention and support.
A3N: Shifting our focus to the issue of domestic violence, you write that the early women’s shelters formed by the radical women’s movement in the 1970s “utilized the self-help methods, egalitarian philosophies, and collective structures that had developed within the women’s liberation movement, striving to be democratic alternatives in which women had the space to safely communicate, share experiences, examine the root causes of the violence against them, and begin to articulate a response. However, these efforts received nowhere near the amount of attention, publicity, and support that the women’s movement paid to Wanrow, Garcia, Little, and Woods.”
Why do you think these projects, as well as court cases where women defended themselves from intimates, did not receive the attention they deserved?
VL: Then (and now), people saw battering as a “personal” issue and were reluctant to get involved. Some felt that marriage (or partnership) somehow condoned abuse. Others felt that this was not an issue that a movement could be built on. Perhaps it was also recognized that the issue could divide a movement. After all, when reading histories of revolutionary groups during the 1960s and 1970s, we see that abuse and misogyny often went unaddressed.
A3N: What did these radical activists identify as the “root causes” of violence against women were? What is your personal opinion regarding these root causes?
VL: Radical activists identified society’s misogyny and patriarchy as root causes of violence against women. They pointed out that women are most often the ones who are attacked and abused because they are often the ones with less power (both physically and in terms of resources).
I strongly agree with this analysis and feel that only when we radically transform societal attitudes around gender and power will we be able to have a world without gendered violence.
A3N: The number of battered women’s shelters grew (by 1982, there were an estimated 300-700 shelters nationally), but you write that “the increased interest in the issue by those who did not identify with the women’s liberation movement resulted in a watering down of the radical feminist analyses that led to the first refuges for battered women. These emerging institutions emphasized providing services without analyzing the political context in which abuse occurred. There was a shift from calling for broad social transformation to focusing on individual problems and demanding greater state intervention.”
How do you think this watering down and shift towards greater state intervention has since played out in later decades, leading up to today?
VL: Today, abuse is treated as an individual pathology rather than a broader social issue rooted in centuries of patriarchy and misogyny. Viewing abuse as an individual problem has meant that the solution becomes intervening in and punishing individual abusers without looking at the overall conditions that allow abuse to go unchallenged and also allows the state to begin to co-opt concerns about gendered violence.
For example, 29 states have some form of mandatory arrest policy in a DV call. There is also the possibility of dual arrests (in which both parties are arrested). In addition, many states now have “no-drop prosecution” in which the District Attorney subpoenas the battered spouse to testify with threats of prosecution if she recants or refuses.
The shift towards greater state intervention has also resulted in resources such as battered women’s shelters mirroring some of these same abusive practices (such as isolating the survivor). It also ignores ways in which the state inflicts violence upon women. I would greatly recommend the INCITE! anthology, entitled The Color of Violence, which explores various aspects of violence against women.
A3N: If you were dialoguing with those sectors of today’s anti-violence movement that embrace the criminalization approach, what are the key points you would make in arguing that prisons are not the answer? What do you think is the best way to reduce and prevent violence against women both inside and outside prisons?
VL: The threat of imprisonment does not deter abuse; it simply drives it further underground. Remember that there are many forms of abuse and violence and not all are illegal. It also sets up a false dichotomy in which the survivor has to choose between personal safety and criminalizing/imprisoning a loved one.
Arrest/imprisonment does not reduce, let alone prevent, violence. Building structures and networks to address the lack of options and resources available to women is more effective. Challenging patriarchy and male supremacy is a much more effective solution (although not one that funders and the state want to see).
A3N: Can you please tell us about recent cases of women who are facing charges or have been wrongly convicted for defending themselves?
VL: There’s the case of the New Jersey Four, whom I mentioned above.
http://www.amyewinter.net/nj4/
There’s also Sara Kruzan,(http://www.freesarakruzan.org/) a 31-year-old woman incarcerated at the California Institution for Women. When Sara was 11, she met a 31-year-old man named G.G. who molested her and began grooming her to become a prostitute. By the age 13, she began working as a child prostitute for G.G. and was repeatedly molested by him. At age 16, Sara was convicted of killing him. She was sentenced to prison for the rest of her life despite her background and a finding by the California Youth Authority that she was amendable to treatment offered in the juvenile system.
There’s been a letter-writing campaign to the governor urging clemency. Sara is also up for resentencing and needs letters of support. The Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth and the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP) are working on publicizing and garnering support for her case. However, we’re not seeing a fraction of the support from women’s or other non-prison groups that the cases of Wanrow, Garcia and Little received in the 1970s even though you would think that her story would provoke widespread outrage and calls for release.
I recently received an e-mail from CCWP about Mary Shields, a domestic violence survivor incarcerated for nineteen years on a seven-to-life sentence for attempted murder. This past September, Mary was found suitable for release by the Board of Parole Hearings. In 2006, the Parole Board had also found Mary “suitable for release” but rescinded its decision after Governor Schwarzenegger recommended against release. This time around, the governor has until January (when his term will be up) to either let the Board's decision stand or recommend that it be reversed and so CCWP is calling for people to send letters supporting Mary’s release.
A3N: Anything else to add?
VL: I want to remind readers that if we’re not coming up with solutions to gender violence, then the fall-back becomes relying on prisons and policing to keep women (and other vulnerable people) safe. It is also imperative to support women incarcerated for killing their abusers as well as to support battered women on the outside and to remember that abuse isolates people.
We should be working to end violence against women without strengthening government control over women’s lives or promoting incarceration as a solution to social problems.
--Angola 3 News is a new project of the International Coalition to Free the Angola 3. Our website is www.angola3news.com where we provide the latest news about the Angola 3. We are also creating our own media projects, which spotlight the issues central to the story of the Angola 3, like racism, repression, prisons, human rights, solitary confinement as torture, and more.
This and other news about women and organizing can be found at www.realcostofprisons.org/blog/
By Angola 3 News
 |
| By Denverabc |
In this interview, Law discusses her new article, which provides a history of radical feminist resistance to the criminalization of women who have defended themselves from gender violence. Furthermore, Law presents a prison abolitionist critique of how the mainstream women’s movement has embraced the US criminal justice system as a solution for combating violence against women.
Previously interviewed by Angola 3 News about the torture of women in US prisons, Law is now on the road with the Community and Resistance Tour.
Angola 3 News: In your essay “Sick of the Abuse,” you write that “a woman’s right to defend herself (and her children) from assault became a feminist rallying point throughout the 1970s.” You focus on the four separate stories of Yvonne Wanrow, Inez Garcia, Joan Little, and Dessie Woods. All four women were arrested for self-defense and their cases received national attention with the support of the radical women’s movement. Can you briefly explain their cases and why they were so important for the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s?
Victoria Law: Yvonne Wanrow was an American Indian mother of two living in Washington State in the 1970s. In 1972, her 11-year-old son was grabbed from his bike by William Wesler, a known child molester. He escaped and fled to the house of a family friend named Shirley Hooper, whose 7-year-old daughter had been raped by Wesler earlier that year. When Hooper called the police, they refused to arrest Wesler.
Understandably shaken, Hooper called Yvonne Wanrow and asked her to spend the night. Wanrow, who was 5 foot, 4 inches, and had recently broken her leg, brought her gun. At five in the morning, Wesler came to their house. When he refused to leave, Wanrow went to the front door to yell for help. She turned around to find Wesler, who, at 6 foot 2, was towering over her. She shot and killed him.
At her first trial, the judge instructed the jury only to consider what had happened at or immediately before the killing. This omitted (1) Wesler’s record as a sex offender; (2) Wesler’s assault on Hooper’s 7 year old; (3) His attempted assault on Yvonne’s son
Wanrow was convicted of murder and sentenced to 25 years.
However, various groups and people involved in the women’s movement and the American Indian movement had taken up her cause. They recognized that a woman had the right to defend herself and her family from assault. They held events that raised awareness, educated people, and tied her case into issues of violence against women and the systemic violence against Native people in the US. They also raised funds for her legal defense, which enabled her to have a better defense than she might have been afforded otherwise.
As a result, in 1977, the Washington State Supreme Court granted her a new trial, partially on the basis that the jury should have considered ALL relevant facts when considering self-defense. At her new trial in 1979, Wanrow pled guilty to reduced charges & received a suspended sentence, 5 years’ probation and 1 year of community service. The court decision also established that that women’s lack of access to self-defense training and to the “skills necessary to effectively repel a male assailant without resorting to the use of deadly weapons” made their circumstances different from those of men.
Two years later, in 1974, Inez Garcia shot and killed the man who had blocked her escape from rape. She was arrested and charged with 1st degree (or premeditated) murder. Like Wanrow, her cause was taken up by the women’s movement, which organized teach-ins and fundraisers and galvanized popular support with the recognition that women had the right to defend themselves against rape.
During her first trial, the judge did not allow testimony about the rape as part of the evidence. After her conviction, the women’s movement continued to rally on her behalf and hired feminist attorney Susan Jordan to take over her defense.
Two years later, an appeals court reversed her conviction because the trial judge had instructed the jury not to consider the rape
During the re-trial, Susan Jordan challenged potential jurors about their preconceptions of rape, making the assault an integral part of the case from the beginning. Garcia was acquitted. The entire jury agreed that the rape and threat of further harm were adequate provocation for Garcia’s action.
That same year, Joan Little, a black woman and the only female prisoner in North Carolina’s Beaufort County Jail, killed Clarence Alligood, a sixty-two-year-old white male guard, after he had entered her cell, threatened her with an ice pick and forced her to perform oral sex. Little was charged with first-degree murder which, in North Carolina, carried a mandatory death sentence.
Again, there was a HUGE outpouring of support from various movements, including people and groups in the women’s liberation and Black Liberation movements as well as more mainstream groups. During her trial, Little’s defense exposed the chronic sexual abuse and harassment endured by women in the jail and prison system. Countering the prosecution’s argument that Little had enticed Alligood into her cell with promises of sex, the defense team called on women who had previously been held at the jail. They testified that Alligood had a history of sexually abusing women in his custody.
Little herself testified about Alligood’s assault.
After seventy-eight minutes of deliberation, a jury acquitted Little, establishing a precedent for killing as a justified self-defense against rape.
Dessie Woods was a Black woman in Georgia who shot and killed a man who tried to rape her and her friend while they were hitchhiking. She was sentenced to 22 years. Black nationalist women took up the case of Dessie Woods, framing it as a case of colonial violence. Radical (White) feminists also took up her cause and used it as a way to challenge white feminists to examine not only sexism and patriarchy but also racism and colonialism.
However, unlike the cases of Little, Wanrow and Garcia, the larger White feminist movement(s) did not rally to her cause.
Even though she did not have the massive outpouring of support as the other three women, the prolonged support that she did have eventually won Woods her freedom in July 1981. A lawyer from the People’s Law Center challenged the use of circumstantial evidence and the use of a special prosecutor (hired by the dead man’s family). The U.S. Court of Appeals determined that there had been insufficient evidence to convict and imprison her.
The first three cases were groundbreaking in that they established legal precedents stating that women had a right to defend themselves (and their children) from sexual assault. In the case of Inez Garcia, her lawyer Susan Jordan extended the legal interpretation of “imminent danger” beyond the immediate time period, thus laying the groundwork for battered women’s defense—that a woman who kills her abuser is acting in self-defense even if she is not under attack at that time.
A3N: What impact did activism have in these four cases?
VL: The activism and organizing around those four cases enabled the women to have better legal defenses than they would have otherwise been afforded. For example, $250,000 was raised for Joan Little’s defense. Almost $39,000 was spent on social scientists who devised an “attitude profile survey:” designed to detect patterns of (racial) prejudice. The defense used their findings to win a change of venue from conservative/racist Beaufort County to Raleigh, which was key in her acquittal. Without the money garnered by supporters, Joan Little, a poor Black woman, would never have been able to have that kind of legal support. Instead, she would have been convicted and executed.
A3N: How are things different today, in 2010?
VL: We don’t see the same outpouring of support for women arrested for self-defense today. We can look at the case of the New Jersey Four, who are four Black lesbians arrested and incarcerated for defending themselves against a homophobic attack on the street. Their case has garnered support from groups working around incarcerated women’s issues and queer issues, but it hasn’t been taken up as widely as, say, the case of Joan Little or even Dessie Woods. Women who are incarcerated for defending themselves against partner violence receive even less public attention and support.
A3N: Shifting our focus to the issue of domestic violence, you write that the early women’s shelters formed by the radical women’s movement in the 1970s “utilized the self-help methods, egalitarian philosophies, and collective structures that had developed within the women’s liberation movement, striving to be democratic alternatives in which women had the space to safely communicate, share experiences, examine the root causes of the violence against them, and begin to articulate a response. However, these efforts received nowhere near the amount of attention, publicity, and support that the women’s movement paid to Wanrow, Garcia, Little, and Woods.”
Why do you think these projects, as well as court cases where women defended themselves from intimates, did not receive the attention they deserved?
VL: Then (and now), people saw battering as a “personal” issue and were reluctant to get involved. Some felt that marriage (or partnership) somehow condoned abuse. Others felt that this was not an issue that a movement could be built on. Perhaps it was also recognized that the issue could divide a movement. After all, when reading histories of revolutionary groups during the 1960s and 1970s, we see that abuse and misogyny often went unaddressed.
A3N: What did these radical activists identify as the “root causes” of violence against women were? What is your personal opinion regarding these root causes?
VL: Radical activists identified society’s misogyny and patriarchy as root causes of violence against women. They pointed out that women are most often the ones who are attacked and abused because they are often the ones with less power (both physically and in terms of resources).
I strongly agree with this analysis and feel that only when we radically transform societal attitudes around gender and power will we be able to have a world without gendered violence.
A3N: The number of battered women’s shelters grew (by 1982, there were an estimated 300-700 shelters nationally), but you write that “the increased interest in the issue by those who did not identify with the women’s liberation movement resulted in a watering down of the radical feminist analyses that led to the first refuges for battered women. These emerging institutions emphasized providing services without analyzing the political context in which abuse occurred. There was a shift from calling for broad social transformation to focusing on individual problems and demanding greater state intervention.”
How do you think this watering down and shift towards greater state intervention has since played out in later decades, leading up to today?
VL: Today, abuse is treated as an individual pathology rather than a broader social issue rooted in centuries of patriarchy and misogyny. Viewing abuse as an individual problem has meant that the solution becomes intervening in and punishing individual abusers without looking at the overall conditions that allow abuse to go unchallenged and also allows the state to begin to co-opt concerns about gendered violence.
For example, 29 states have some form of mandatory arrest policy in a DV call. There is also the possibility of dual arrests (in which both parties are arrested). In addition, many states now have “no-drop prosecution” in which the District Attorney subpoenas the battered spouse to testify with threats of prosecution if she recants or refuses.
The shift towards greater state intervention has also resulted in resources such as battered women’s shelters mirroring some of these same abusive practices (such as isolating the survivor). It also ignores ways in which the state inflicts violence upon women. I would greatly recommend the INCITE! anthology, entitled The Color of Violence, which explores various aspects of violence against women.
A3N: If you were dialoguing with those sectors of today’s anti-violence movement that embrace the criminalization approach, what are the key points you would make in arguing that prisons are not the answer? What do you think is the best way to reduce and prevent violence against women both inside and outside prisons?
VL: The threat of imprisonment does not deter abuse; it simply drives it further underground. Remember that there are many forms of abuse and violence and not all are illegal. It also sets up a false dichotomy in which the survivor has to choose between personal safety and criminalizing/imprisoning a loved one.
Arrest/imprisonment does not reduce, let alone prevent, violence. Building structures and networks to address the lack of options and resources available to women is more effective. Challenging patriarchy and male supremacy is a much more effective solution (although not one that funders and the state want to see).
A3N: Can you please tell us about recent cases of women who are facing charges or have been wrongly convicted for defending themselves?
VL: There’s the case of the New Jersey Four, whom I mentioned above.
http://www.amyewinter.net/nj4/
There’s also Sara Kruzan,(http://www.freesarakruzan.org/) a 31-year-old woman incarcerated at the California Institution for Women. When Sara was 11, she met a 31-year-old man named G.G. who molested her and began grooming her to become a prostitute. By the age 13, she began working as a child prostitute for G.G. and was repeatedly molested by him. At age 16, Sara was convicted of killing him. She was sentenced to prison for the rest of her life despite her background and a finding by the California Youth Authority that she was amendable to treatment offered in the juvenile system.
There’s been a letter-writing campaign to the governor urging clemency. Sara is also up for resentencing and needs letters of support. The Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth and the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP) are working on publicizing and garnering support for her case. However, we’re not seeing a fraction of the support from women’s or other non-prison groups that the cases of Wanrow, Garcia and Little received in the 1970s even though you would think that her story would provoke widespread outrage and calls for release.
I recently received an e-mail from CCWP about Mary Shields, a domestic violence survivor incarcerated for nineteen years on a seven-to-life sentence for attempted murder. This past September, Mary was found suitable for release by the Board of Parole Hearings. In 2006, the Parole Board had also found Mary “suitable for release” but rescinded its decision after Governor Schwarzenegger recommended against release. This time around, the governor has until January (when his term will be up) to either let the Board's decision stand or recommend that it be reversed and so CCWP is calling for people to send letters supporting Mary’s release.
A3N: Anything else to add?
VL: I want to remind readers that if we’re not coming up with solutions to gender violence, then the fall-back becomes relying on prisons and policing to keep women (and other vulnerable people) safe. It is also imperative to support women incarcerated for killing their abusers as well as to support battered women on the outside and to remember that abuse isolates people.
We should be working to end violence against women without strengthening government control over women’s lives or promoting incarceration as a solution to social problems.
--Angola 3 News is a new project of the International Coalition to Free the Angola 3. Our website is www.angola3news.com where we provide the latest news about the Angola 3. We are also creating our own media projects, which spotlight the issues central to the story of the Angola 3, like racism, repression, prisons, human rights, solitary confinement as torture, and more.
This and other news about women and organizing can be found at www.realcostofprisons.org/blog/
Monday, November 15, 2010
Big government laments protections for taxpayers
Lawyers, lobbyists, politicians scramble to determine impact of Prop. 26
By Margot Roosevelt, Los Angeles Times
From the Capitol in Sacramento to the boardrooms of county supervisors and city councils, lawmakers and lobbyists are scrambling to assess the fiscal and political effects of the measure, one of the most sweeping ballot-box initiatives in decades. Proposition 26 reclassifies most regulatory fees on industry as "taxes" requiring a two-thirds vote in government bodies or in public referendums, rather than a simple majority. Approved by voters 53% to 47% on Nov. 2, it is aimed at multibillion-dollar statewide issues such as a per-barrel severance fee on oil and a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gases. It's also aimed at local ordinances that add fees on cigarettes to pay for trash pickup and on alcohol to fund education and law enforcement programs. Last week, the American Chemistry Council warned Los Angeles County supervisors that a proposed ordinance banning plastic grocery sacks and imposing a 10-cent fee on paper bags falls under the voting requirements of Proposition 26. "We think it was a fair way to go," said Allan Zaremberg, chief executive of the California Chamber of Commerce, the biggest contributor to the Proposition 26 campaign. "It clarifies what is a tax and what is a fee. Right now, the public doesn't want any taxes." In addition to its fee-to-tax redefinition, Proposition 26 contains a provision imposing a two-thirds vote on "revenue-neutral" tax swaps — a complex legislative maneuver that balances a tax increase with a tax decrease.
By Margot Roosevelt, Los Angeles Times
 |
| prop26.dirtyenergymoney.com |
Friday, November 12, 2010
Governor Schwarzenegger calls special budget session
By Torey Van Oot
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said Thursday he will call legislators into a special session to attempt to close the current-year budget deficit in his final month in office.
"I know this will be difficult, but as we know from experience, putting off the hard decisions to bring spending in line with our revenues only makes solving the problem more difficult," Schwarzenegger said in a statement.
The announcement came one day after the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office projected that the deficit will climb to $25.4 billion by June 30, 2012. The estimate included a $6.1 billion shortfall in the current fiscal year, attributed in part to overly optimistic assumptions for spending reductions and federal aid included in the record-late spending plan passed last month.
Read more: http://www.sacbee.com/2010/11/12/3179201/schwarzenegger-calls-special-session.html#ixzz156KqWhrv
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said Thursday he will call legislators into a special session to attempt to close the current-year budget deficit in his final month in office.
"I know this will be difficult, but as we know from experience, putting off the hard decisions to bring spending in line with our revenues only makes solving the problem more difficult," Schwarzenegger said in a statement.
The announcement came one day after the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office projected that the deficit will climb to $25.4 billion by June 30, 2012. The estimate included a $6.1 billion shortfall in the current fiscal year, attributed in part to overly optimistic assumptions for spending reductions and federal aid included in the record-late spending plan passed last month.
Read more: http://www.sacbee.com/2010/11/12/3179201/schwarzenegger-calls-special-session.html#ixzz156KqWhrv
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
CSU board approves tuition increases
By: Kelly Puente
LONG BEACH -- The Cal State University Board of Trustees today approved of a 5 percent tuition increase for students next spring and an additional 10 percent hike for the 2011-2012 school year.
In a meeting at the Chancellor's office in Long Beach, the board voted 14 to 2 in favor of the 5 percent increase and 13 to 3 in favor of the 10 percent increase.
The increase means full-time undergraduates would pay $4,884 in the 2011-2012 school year.
Tuition has been climbing steadily in recent years as CSU struggles to offset state budget cuts. In fall 2002, tuition for full-time undergraduates was $1,507.
Officials say CSU needs at least $115 million in revenue to sustain current levels of enrollment, instruction and student services. The planned 2011-12 tuition increase would generate $121.5 million in revenue.
Due to financial aid, an estimated 180,000 students - half of all CSU undergrads - will be fully covered for the tuition increases, they said.
"While we appreciate the funding that we did receive in this year's budget, the reality is our state support is roughly the same as it was five years ago and we have 25,000 more students," said Benjamin F. Quillian, CSU executive vice chancellor for business and finance.
"In addition, part of the funding we received -- $106 million -- was one-time federal stimulus money that is being used at the state's direction to admit 30,000 more students."
In an organized protest outside of the Chancellor's office, outraged members of Students for Quality Education and CSU faculty members said students shouldn't have to pay the price for budget woes.
"It's egregious to students," said Professor Dori Levey, who teaches nonverbal communication in dance at Cal State Long Beach. "(Board members) are acting like accountants and treating education like a business when it's not a business. There are lives at stake."
They say many students will not be able to afford the nearly $5,000 tuition for the 2011-2012 year.
"CSU says the increase in fees will give more access to classes, but the increase actually cuts of access for students who can't afford it," said Lillian Taiz, president of the California Faculty Association.
CSULB senior Dalia Hernandez, who was one of more than two dozen students protesting, said she did not qualify for financial aid last year and had to take on two part-time jobs to pay for her tuition.
"It's been really hard and the costs just keep adding up," she said.
Hernandez, who is the first in her family to attend college, said it was always her dream to attain a higher education. She hopes to get her master's degree in sociology.
"I'm might have to wait," she said. "I don't know if I'll be able to afford it."
Courtesy Press-Telegram
 |
| Photographer Reed Saxon Staged Student Protest after the Board Hearing |
In a meeting at the Chancellor's office in Long Beach, the board voted 14 to 2 in favor of the 5 percent increase and 13 to 3 in favor of the 10 percent increase.
The increase means full-time undergraduates would pay $4,884 in the 2011-2012 school year.
Tuition has been climbing steadily in recent years as CSU struggles to offset state budget cuts. In fall 2002, tuition for full-time undergraduates was $1,507.
Officials say CSU needs at least $115 million in revenue to sustain current levels of enrollment, instruction and student services. The planned 2011-12 tuition increase would generate $121.5 million in revenue.
Due to financial aid, an estimated 180,000 students - half of all CSU undergrads - will be fully covered for the tuition increases, they said.
"While we appreciate the funding that we did receive in this year's budget, the reality is our state support is roughly the same as it was five years ago and we have 25,000 more students," said Benjamin F. Quillian, CSU executive vice chancellor for business and finance.
"In addition, part of the funding we received -- $106 million -- was one-time federal stimulus money that is being used at the state's direction to admit 30,000 more students."
In an organized protest outside of the Chancellor's office, outraged members of Students for Quality Education and CSU faculty members said students shouldn't have to pay the price for budget woes.
"It's egregious to students," said Professor Dori Levey, who teaches nonverbal communication in dance at Cal State Long Beach. "(Board members) are acting like accountants and treating education like a business when it's not a business. There are lives at stake."
They say many students will not be able to afford the nearly $5,000 tuition for the 2011-2012 year.
"CSU says the increase in fees will give more access to classes, but the increase actually cuts of access for students who can't afford it," said Lillian Taiz, president of the California Faculty Association.
CSULB senior Dalia Hernandez, who was one of more than two dozen students protesting, said she did not qualify for financial aid last year and had to take on two part-time jobs to pay for her tuition.
"It's been really hard and the costs just keep adding up," she said.
Hernandez, who is the first in her family to attend college, said it was always her dream to attain a higher education. She hopes to get her master's degree in sociology.
"I'm might have to wait," she said. "I don't know if I'll be able to afford it."
Courtesy Press-Telegram
Monday, November 8, 2010
No More Prisons – Santa Barbara Voters Say No to Measure S
By: Craig Gilmore
Buried under instant analysis of California’s seeming return to being the Left Coast of American politics was a significant vote in Santa Barbara County.
Santa Barbara is one of 11 counties across California to have been offered funds —$56 million in this case— to expand its jail system as a part of Schwarzenegger’s plan to build 40-50,000 new jail and prison cells. State funds would have paid for part of the cost of construction and none of the ongoing operations costs while voters were asked whether to extend a temporary 1/2 cent sales tax increase to pay the county’s share.
In the only ballot measure in California in which voters were allowed to decide whether to expand the prison and jail systems, Measure S went down hard: 61 percent voted NO; 39 percent YES.
Is Santa Barbara another of those hyper-liberal coastal counties? Jerry Brown’s margin of victory statewide over Meg Whitman was 13 percent; he carried Santa Barbara County by only two percent. Steve Cooley, Republican candidate for Attorney General, is in a dead heat with Democrat Kamala Harris statewide. His margin in Santa Barbara was a comfortable five percent.
Was the vote simply anti-tax? Santa Barbara voters approved new bonds for secondary schools (69%-31%) and for primary schools (71%-29%). The statewide proposal to increase vehicle license fees to pay for parks lost (53% NO – 47% YES), but by a far narrower margin than the jail tax. Significantly more voters were willing to pay higher taxes or fees for parks than for jails.
In fact, Santa Barbara votes were in line with every statewide poll result of the past 10 years. Californians have consistently listed prisons as their lowest budget priority, calling for cuts in prison spending in order to preserve or restore K-12 education.
Sacramento has known for years that voters won’t approve new debt for prison expansion, which explains the fact that most counties have not allowed their jail expansion plans to go before voters. When the state legislature approved Schwarzenegger’s massive prison and jail building plan they were careful to ensure that Californians would not be allowed to vote on whether to borrow the $7.7 billion price; instead, they financed it with more expensive lease revenue bonds that don’t require voter approval.
In response to a question of how he will deal with California’s ongoing budget crisis, Governor-elect Brown said he would be guided by these three questions: “What does California need, what does California want and what is California prepared to pay?"
Santa Barbara voters reaffirmed what everyone paying attention to California politics has known for a decade; Californians don’t want more prisons, Californians don’t need more prisons and Californians can’t afford more prisons
Santa Barbara is one of 11 counties across California to have been offered funds —$56 million in this case— to expand its jail system as a part of Schwarzenegger’s plan to build 40-50,000 new jail and prison cells. State funds would have paid for part of the cost of construction and none of the ongoing operations costs while voters were asked whether to extend a temporary 1/2 cent sales tax increase to pay the county’s share.
In the only ballot measure in California in which voters were allowed to decide whether to expand the prison and jail systems, Measure S went down hard: 61 percent voted NO; 39 percent YES.
Is Santa Barbara another of those hyper-liberal coastal counties? Jerry Brown’s margin of victory statewide over Meg Whitman was 13 percent; he carried Santa Barbara County by only two percent. Steve Cooley, Republican candidate for Attorney General, is in a dead heat with Democrat Kamala Harris statewide. His margin in Santa Barbara was a comfortable five percent.
Was the vote simply anti-tax? Santa Barbara voters approved new bonds for secondary schools (69%-31%) and for primary schools (71%-29%). The statewide proposal to increase vehicle license fees to pay for parks lost (53% NO – 47% YES), but by a far narrower margin than the jail tax. Significantly more voters were willing to pay higher taxes or fees for parks than for jails.
In fact, Santa Barbara votes were in line with every statewide poll result of the past 10 years. Californians have consistently listed prisons as their lowest budget priority, calling for cuts in prison spending in order to preserve or restore K-12 education.
Sacramento has known for years that voters won’t approve new debt for prison expansion, which explains the fact that most counties have not allowed their jail expansion plans to go before voters. When the state legislature approved Schwarzenegger’s massive prison and jail building plan they were careful to ensure that Californians would not be allowed to vote on whether to borrow the $7.7 billion price; instead, they financed it with more expensive lease revenue bonds that don’t require voter approval.
In response to a question of how he will deal with California’s ongoing budget crisis, Governor-elect Brown said he would be guided by these three questions: “What does California need, what does California want and what is California prepared to pay?"
Santa Barbara voters reaffirmed what everyone paying attention to California politics has known for a decade; Californians don’t want more prisons, Californians don’t need more prisons and Californians can’t afford more prisons
Thursday, November 4, 2010
Dems Suffer Without Young Voters of Color Who Stole the ‘08 Show
By: Jamilah King
Today, as Democrats are solemnly tallying up their losses, there’s one inescapable fact about what the midterm electorate looked like: it was overwhelmingly whiter and older than 2008. The questions for President Obama now are what happened to the energetic base of young voters of color who thrusted him to power in 2008? And what will it take to bring them back into his party’s fold before 2012?
According to exit polls’ early tabulation, people under the age of 29 accounted for only 11 percent of voters on Tuesday, a decrease from the 18 percent mark of 2008. More than 20 percent of voters who showed up at the polls this time were over the age of 65, a marked increase from the 15 percent who showed up on Election Day in 2008. These numbers may shift as more data becomes available, but the larger picture is clear: The youth wave of 2008 receded.
Granted, it’s dangerous to compare presidential elections to midterms. Voter turnout is always much lower. The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) released a report this morning arguing that exit poll numbers aren’t really that bad, when taken into context. The group estimates that the youth voter turnout in 2010 was only three percentage points lower than in 2006. But to many observers, the numbers still suggest Democrats are widely underestimating the importance of one of its key constituencies.
“My sense is that young people did turn out where there was infrastructure,” says Rob “Biko” Baker, executive director of the League of Young Voters. Baker noted that the 2012 presidential election begins in March of 2011, and that the youth organizations that helped drive massive numbers of voters in 2008 need to once again be taken seriously.
“We need a bold leadership that inspires young people from both sides of the aisle to fight for our interests,” Baker continued. “Without that, we’re gonna lose a whole generation of young people we just activated in 2008.”
As I reported last week from Milwaukee, young voters of color were the unsung heroes of the Democratic cause two years ago. An historic 66 percent of voters under the age of 29 supported Obama in 2008. Young African Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 voted in higher numbers than any other ethnic group, and two million more headed to the polls in 2008 than 2004. Two million more young Latino voters headed to the polls in 2008, too, along with over half a million more young Asian voters.
That demographic shift was unprecedented and offered encouraging political potential to progressives broadly and Democrats in particular. In a recent New York Times letter to the editor, political scientist and University of Chicago professor Cathy Cohen urged the party to pay special attention to the black youth vote.
“If the party is able to mobilize these young people, it can build a cadre of committed political activists that can carry its message forward for years to come,” Cohen wrote. “Just as the Reagan Revolution embraced people in their 20s who today run the Republican Party, President Obama has the chance to embrace a different group of young people so that they can help shape a transformative political agenda supported by the Democratic Party of the future.”
But so far, it seems that party leadership has completely missed that message. And now, Democrats are paying for it.
Some youth voting organizers have called the president out for his seemingly top-down approach. A recent New York Times story, for instance, featured young voters sounding off against Democrats for focusing the heated healthcare debate so intently on older adults, and for limiting Obama’s late campaign outreach to massive campus rallies. That type of approach stifles innovation and creativity, two elements that made 2008 so appealing to a part of the electorate that had long felt alienated from civic life.
“[Obama] made young people feel important, then he got into office and there was no one talking to us,” Jessica Kirsner, a 21-year-old college student from Florida, told the Times.
The president’s outreach to African American voters overall also seems to have been lackluster. Though the Democratic National Committee spent an unprecedented $3 million dollars on advertising aimed at African Americans during this year’s midterm elections, at least some of the organizers I met in Milwaukee expressed frustration with being talked at, instead if engaged with.
“The future is yours to shape,” President Obama said in an eleventh hour appeal to black radio listeners in Los Angeles on Tuesday. “But if you don’t get involved, then somebody else is going to shape it for you.”
Right now, that appears to be exactly what’s happening.
Courtesy Colorlines
 |
| Photo: Getty Images/Jeff Fusco |
According to exit polls’ early tabulation, people under the age of 29 accounted for only 11 percent of voters on Tuesday, a decrease from the 18 percent mark of 2008. More than 20 percent of voters who showed up at the polls this time were over the age of 65, a marked increase from the 15 percent who showed up on Election Day in 2008. These numbers may shift as more data becomes available, but the larger picture is clear: The youth wave of 2008 receded.
Granted, it’s dangerous to compare presidential elections to midterms. Voter turnout is always much lower. The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) released a report this morning arguing that exit poll numbers aren’t really that bad, when taken into context. The group estimates that the youth voter turnout in 2010 was only three percentage points lower than in 2006. But to many observers, the numbers still suggest Democrats are widely underestimating the importance of one of its key constituencies.
“My sense is that young people did turn out where there was infrastructure,” says Rob “Biko” Baker, executive director of the League of Young Voters. Baker noted that the 2012 presidential election begins in March of 2011, and that the youth organizations that helped drive massive numbers of voters in 2008 need to once again be taken seriously.
“We need a bold leadership that inspires young people from both sides of the aisle to fight for our interests,” Baker continued. “Without that, we’re gonna lose a whole generation of young people we just activated in 2008.”
As I reported last week from Milwaukee, young voters of color were the unsung heroes of the Democratic cause two years ago. An historic 66 percent of voters under the age of 29 supported Obama in 2008. Young African Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 voted in higher numbers than any other ethnic group, and two million more headed to the polls in 2008 than 2004. Two million more young Latino voters headed to the polls in 2008, too, along with over half a million more young Asian voters.
That demographic shift was unprecedented and offered encouraging political potential to progressives broadly and Democrats in particular. In a recent New York Times letter to the editor, political scientist and University of Chicago professor Cathy Cohen urged the party to pay special attention to the black youth vote.
“If the party is able to mobilize these young people, it can build a cadre of committed political activists that can carry its message forward for years to come,” Cohen wrote. “Just as the Reagan Revolution embraced people in their 20s who today run the Republican Party, President Obama has the chance to embrace a different group of young people so that they can help shape a transformative political agenda supported by the Democratic Party of the future.”
But so far, it seems that party leadership has completely missed that message. And now, Democrats are paying for it.
Some youth voting organizers have called the president out for his seemingly top-down approach. A recent New York Times story, for instance, featured young voters sounding off against Democrats for focusing the heated healthcare debate so intently on older adults, and for limiting Obama’s late campaign outreach to massive campus rallies. That type of approach stifles innovation and creativity, two elements that made 2008 so appealing to a part of the electorate that had long felt alienated from civic life.
“[Obama] made young people feel important, then he got into office and there was no one talking to us,” Jessica Kirsner, a 21-year-old college student from Florida, told the Times.
The president’s outreach to African American voters overall also seems to have been lackluster. Though the Democratic National Committee spent an unprecedented $3 million dollars on advertising aimed at African Americans during this year’s midterm elections, at least some of the organizers I met in Milwaukee expressed frustration with being talked at, instead if engaged with.
“The future is yours to shape,” President Obama said in an eleventh hour appeal to black radio listeners in Los Angeles on Tuesday. “But if you don’t get involved, then somebody else is going to shape it for you.”
Right now, that appears to be exactly what’s happening.
Courtesy Colorlines
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Vote Kamala Harris for Attorney General
As the pinnacle of California’s law enforcement authority, her innovative approach and passion for justice is exactly what the state needs in an official. Her credentials have proven to not only be tough on crime, but invested in reducing recidivism. Re-entry initiatives and the Back on Track program are great examples of her commitment to the cause.
Find yourself unimpressed with crime prevention and intervention due to “tough on crime” rhetoric? As San Francisco’s District Attorney, she combated gun violence by doubling gun felony convictions by 90 percent, while using the current laws on the books and not adding new ones. She expanded victim services, created new prosecution divisions focused on child assault, fought gang violence, and developed innovative alternatives to handling narcotics and quality-of-life crimes. Under her leadership, Harris has tripled misdemeanor cases taken to trail, established free legal clinics to immigrant neighborhoods, fought public integrity and environmental crimes, and boosted the overall felony conviction rates in San Francisco reaching its highest point in 15 years.
Surely she can be trusted to defend California’s interests.
When it comes to issues that matter most to everyday citizens, Kamala Harris will be the voice for the people as she fights corporate fraud, environmental injustice, consumer protection, and stronger public safety. She recognizes that California needs more from an attorney general than someone who is apt to overlook the law to fulfill a personal agenda, unlike her opponent Harris does not believe in the effectiveness and power of the death penalty as a deterrent. But has a strong willingness to follow the law in the quest to make a better California.
Remember, voting is a right that comes with privilege. If you have the legal right to vote you are fortunate to participate in making decisions that will impact California’s future. Be Responsible. Be Bold. Exercise Your Choice and vote for Kamala Harris as California’s new attorney general.
Monday, November 1, 2010
Take Action California - VOTE 2010!
With four days left to vote, we would like to offer some useful voter information to help you make the best informed decision. Your opinion counts so be sure to cast your ballot soon!
Remember, voting is a RIGHT that comes with privilege. If you have the legal right to vote you are fortunate to participate in making decisions that will impact California’s future. Be Responsible. Be Bold. Exercise Your Choice and VOTE TODAY!
Candidates
Governor
Democratic candidate
Jerry Brown
Republic candidate
Meg Whitman
Senate
Democratic candidate
Barbara Boxer
Republic challenger
Carly Fiorina
Attorney General
Democrat Kamala Harris
Republic Steve Cooley
Treasurer
Democrat incumbent
Bill Lockyer
Republican challenger
Mimi Walters
Lieutenant
Republican incumbent
Abel Maldonado Jr.
Democratic challenger
Gavin Christopher Newsom
Controller
Democratic incumbent
John Chiang
Republican challenger
Tony Strickland
School superintendent
Larry Aceves, no party designation
Democrat Tom Torlakson
Insurance commissioner
Democrat Dave Jones
Republican Mike Villines
Secretary of state
Democratic incumbent
Debra Bowen
Republican challenger
Damon Dunn
Propositions
19 LEGALIZE MARIJUANA UNDER CALIFORNIA BUT NOT FEDERAL LAW. PERMITS LOCAL GOVERNMENTS TO REGULATE AND TAX COMMERCIAL PRODUCTION, DISTRIBUTION, AND SALE OF MARIJUANA. INITIATIVE STATUTE.
SUMMARY
Put on the Ballot by Petition Signatures
Allows people 21 years old or older to possess, cultivate, or transport marijuana for personal use. Fiscal Impact: Depending on federal, state, and local government actions, potential increased tax and fee revenues in the hundreds of millions of dollars annually and potential correctional savings of several tens of millions of dollars annually.
20 REDISTRICTING OF CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICTS. INITIATIVE CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT.
SUMMARY
Put on the Ballot by Petition Signatures
Removes elected representatives from process of establishing congressional districts and transfers that authority to recently-authorized 14-member redistricting commission comprised of Democrats, Republicans, and representatives of neither party. Fiscal Impact: No significant net change in state redistricting costs.
21 ESTABLISH $18 ANNUAL VEHICLE LICENSE SURCHARGE TO HELP FUND STATE PARKS AND WILDLIFE PROGRAMS. GRANTS SURCHARGED VEHICLES FREE ADMISSION TO ALL STATE PARKS. INITIATIVE STATUTE.
SUMMARY
Put on the Ballot by Petition Signatures
Exempts commercial vehicles, trailers and trailer coaches from the surcharge. Fiscal Impact: Annual increase to state revenues of $500 million from surcharge on vehicle registrations. After offsetting some existing funding sources, these revenues would provide at least $250 million more annually for state parks and wildlife conservation.
22 PROHIBIT THE STATE FROM BORROWING OR TAKING FUNDS USED FOR TRANSPORTATION, REDEVELOPMENT, OR LOCAL GOVERNMENT PROJECTS AND SERVICES. INITIATIVE CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT.
Summary
Put on the Ballot by Petition Signatures
Prohibits State, even during severe fiscal hardship, from delaying distribution of tax revenues for these purposes. Fiscal Impact: Decreased state General Fund spending and/or increased state revenues, probably in the range of $1 billion to several billions of dollars annually. Comparable increases in funding for state and local transportation programs and local redevelopment.
23 SUSPENDS IMPLEMENTATION OF AIR POLLUTION CONTROL LAW (AB 32) REQUIRING MAJOR SOURCES OF EMISSIONS TO REPORT AND REDUCE GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS THAT CAUSE GLOBAL WARMING, UNTIL UNEMPLOYMENT DROPS TO 5.5 PERCENT OR LESS FOR FULL YEAR. INITIATIVE STATUTE.
Summary
Put on the Ballot by Petition Signatures
Fiscal Impact: Likely modest net increase in overall economic activity in the state from suspension of greenhouse gases regulatory activity, resulting in a potentially significant net increase in state and local revenues.
24 REPEALS RECENT LEGISLATION THAT WOULD ALLOW BUSINESSES TO LOWER THEIR TAX LIABILITY. INITIATIVE STATUTE.
Summary
Put on the Ballot by Petition Signatures
Fiscal Impact: Increased state revenues of about $1.3 billion each year by 2012–13 from higher taxes paid by some businesses. Smaller increases in 2010–11 and 2011–12.
25 CHANGES LEGISLATIVE VOTE REQUIREMENT TO PASS BUDGET AND BUDGET-RELATED LEGISLATION FROM TWO-THIRDS TO A SIMPLE MAJORITY. RETAINS TWO-THIRDS VOTE REQUIREMENT FOR TAXES. INITIATIVE CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT.
Summary
Put on the Ballot by Petition Signatures
Legislature permanently forfeits daily salary and expenses until budget bill passes. Fiscal Impact: In some years, the contents of the state budget could be changed due to the lower legislative vote requirement in this measure. The extent of changes would depend on the Legislature's future actions.
26 REQUIRES THAT CERTAIN STATE AND LOCAL FEES BE APPROVED BY TWO-THIRDS VOTE. FEES INCLUDE THOSE THAT ADDRESS ADVERSE IMPACTS ON SOCIETY OR THE ENVIRONMENT CAUSED BY THE FEE-PAYER'S BUSINESS. INITIATIVE CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT.
Summary
Put on the Ballot by Petition Signatures
Fiscal Impact: Depending on decisions by governing bodies and voters, decreased state and local government revenues and spending (up to billions of dollars annually). Increased transportation spending and state General Fund costs ($1 billion annually).
27 ELIMINATE STATE COMMISSION ON REDISTRICTING. CONSOLIDATES AUTHORITY FOR REDISTRICTING WITH ELECTED REPRESENTATIVES. INITIATIVE CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT AND STATUTE.
Summary
Put on the Ballot by Petition Signatures
Eliminates 14-member redistricting commission. Consolidates authority for establishing state Assembly, Senate, and Board of Equalization districts with elected representatives who draw congressional districts. Fiscal Impact: Possible reduction of state redistricting costs of around $1 million over the next year. Likely reduction of these costs of a few million dollars once every ten years beginning in 2020.
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