This article should be read after: Rage at the police hits the streets of north London

Police Brutality and Tory Attacks Caused the Riots

The riots that swept large parts of London, Birmingham, Liverpool and Bristol last night are an explosion of bitterness and rage.

This is what happens in a society of deep and growing inequality, where there are great pools of unemployment and poverty, where there is systematic police harassment and racism, and where many young people feel they have no future.

Just as with the student protests last year, it is the “lost generation” created by the Tories who are at the centre of these struggles—although many older people were also involved.

THE SHAME OF CALIFORNIA 

    I’ve been eating well this summer, enjoying the local fruits and vegetables of northwest California, while sixty miles away a group of men risked their health by refusing to eat for three weeks. I’m in Big Lagoon, surrounded by ocean, lagoon, and forest in an area of coastal California described by National Geographic as among the top twenty “unspoiled” tourist destinations in the world. An hour’s drive north of here is Pelican Bay State Prison, a state-of-the-art hellhole that was recently the center of a three-week hunger strike led by prisoners in the Secure Housing Units (SHU).

Testifying and Witnessing Poverty as a Human Rights Violation

Date: September 30, 2011 (exact dates and locations TBA)

The U.S. World Court will focus on the hidden yet, brutal issues of poverty in the United States, making visible the invisible, listening to those voices that have been dispossessed, denigrated.

The World Court of Women will put the United States on trial for human rights violations. They will connect the affects of globalization and struggles in the U.S. to the struggles of poor people throughout the World.

In 2011-2012 there will be four regional Courts in the West, Midwest, South and East, leading to a national Court in Philadelphia. The U.S. World Court will be the first World Court held in the United States following over thirty eight World Courts of Women.

Introduction

New research shows precisely how the prison-to-poverty cycle does its damage.

By Sasha Abramsky, Posted Friday, Oct. 8, 2010

Forty years after the United States began its experimentation with mass incarceration policies, the country is increasingly divided economically. In new research published in the review Daedalus, a group of leading criminologists coordinated by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (which paid me to consult on this project) argued that much of that growing inequality, which Slate's Timothy Noah has chronicled, is linked to the increasingly widespread use of prisons and jails.

The Quality of Whose Life? An Introduction to America's Modern Anti-Poor Movement

It's clear that there's a huge disconnect between our ideals and public policy. For example, The Huffington Post recently reported: "Americans vastly underestimate wealth inequality and support a more equal distribution of wealth." If this is true, why are we wasting billions of tax dollars locking people up simply for being poor? The chart below graphically captures the policy consequences of this cognitive dissonance. (Remember it when your Mayor or Chamber of Commerce promises that a Quality of Life ordinance will bring prosperity and security to your community.)

This Is A Social Justice Movement!