Category — Activism

AlterNet has launched its Top Ten Hottest Take Action campaigns for social change — a tool for you to check out what’s bubbling among the most important progressive campaigns in the country, and what you can do to get involved. This week, they’re highlighting Amnesty International’s campaign to save death row inmate Troy Davis’s life, efforts to hold Shell Oil accountable for its environmental and human rights crimes, and CODEPINK’s Mothers for Peace action for Mother’s Day.

Check out AlterNet’s 10 Hottest Activist Campaigns

- NYTimes.com. A job that has not been all that alluring to college graduates is in resurgence, according to leading community organizers and educators. Once thought of as a destination for lefty radicals committed to living lives of low pay, frustration and bitter burnout, community organizing is now seen by many young people an exciting career.

via A Career in Community Organizing Becomes an Enviable Option – NYTimes.com.

 ACORN member Donna Hanks re-took her home.Foreclosed on last Fall, the house has stood empty since then, a stark reminder of the failure of the system. But Donna joined with 30 ACORN Home Defenders to liberate her home from the bank. Her act of civil disobedience was covered by 2 radio stations, 2 TV stations, the Baltimore Sun, and the Huffington Post. 

Donna used bolt cutters to break the lock to the door and re-enter the home. Unfortunately, in the six short months since the home was seized, it has been extensively damaged, essentially partially gutted. The toilets are missing, and the upstairs ceiling is badly damaged. The greatest tragedy here is that Donna worked for months with ACORN sister organization ACORN Housing Corporation to try to get the bank to modify the loan so it could be affordable, but they refused, taking the home and now allowing it to be a haven for squatters and a target of looters.  

My Mother and I Dont Leave | Video | AlterNet

Lawmakers in Georgia and Florida are beginning to use ‘budget cuts’ as an excuse for targeting programs and courses on sexuality, queer and women’s studies. Georgia State University is being forced to testify TODAY in front of the state senate about ‘questionable’ faculty research and course offerings on sexuality. At Florida Atlantic University, the administration is trying to suspend the Women’s Studies program.

Please help by signing the petition below, and forwarding this to anyone else who may be interested in signing on. We have the support of several hundred academics so far, we need more.

McCarthyism is alive and well in these states. Your state could be next.

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/savesexualitystudiesnow

Local gay, lesbian, straight citizens to protest passage of anti-gay constitutional amendments in Arizona, Florida, California 

A group of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) and straight citizens will take to the streets of dozens of cities to protest the passage of Proposition 8, California’s anti-gay marriage amendment, as well as other anti-gay ballot initiatives in Arkansas, Arizona and Florida. 

Every day since Election Day, thousands have protested up and down streets in cities across California, including in Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco and Sacramento. A national, grassroots coalition of LGBT activists have followed in their footsteps. 

On Nov. 15, 1:30 p.m. EST/10:30 a.m. PST, in large cities and state capitals across the country, Pro-Equality supporters will raise public awareness of the need for LGBT equality in marriage and in other civil right

JOIN THE IMPACT: UNITE FOR LGBTQ EQUALITY – Join the Impact

In her acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention,  Vice Presidential nominee and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin said,

Come join Boston Psychologists for an Ethical APA, Physicians for Human Rights and other sponsors in protesting the American Psychological Association’s continued acceptance of psychologists involvement in military interrogations. 

In the eyes of the world psychologists are being seen as aiders and abettors of torture. The damage to the profession grows day by day, and the shamefulness of it reflects on all of us, whether we like it or not.

This is the third consecutive annual convention in which APA has presented new reasons for refusing to explicitly state that psychologists are not to participate in detention centers where torture is being used. In 2006 we were told, among many things, that torture was not occurring, and that it was sufficient for APA to reiterate its 1986 resolution “opposing torture.” Last year we were told that psychologists’ presence at the detention centers was actually necessary to prevent the torture whose very existence these same APA officials denied the previous year. Bizarrely, APA outlawed nineteen specific forms of torture, as if in some way the large number of proscribed techniques would cripple torture efforts.

More>> Psyche, Science, and Society » Bryant Welch on the APA referendum

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