Citizen, Ink.

Action Alert! Citizen's Coal Ash Hearing in Tennessee

Here's a video on the Citizen's Coal Ash hearing in Harriman, Tennessee. I'll update with more background information and links below the video.

EPA's Fossil Fuel Combustion Waste page is here.

EPA's page on Coal Combustion Residuals is here.

To see EPA's page for official hearings on the coal ash rule go here. A link to the proposed rule is toward the end of the text on that page.

via tennesseehawk.typepad.com

Whereas, I'm totally disgusted with Tennessee House Joint Resolution 1253

and

Whereas, the Tennessee legislature’s HJR 1253 praises Arizona for becoming “the first state to enact a statute that creates a state trespassing violation for unlawful presence;” now, therefore,
 
Be it resolved that I will go through HJR 1253 – whereas by whereas – and list all the evidence I see that this resolution is deceitful, arrogant and exposes the yay-sayers as totally disconnected from historical truth.

This is going to take awhile. Until then – when I come back to name names -- please take a look at this awesome video that dramatizes some core difficulties I have with Arizona’s SB 1070:

It's Time for a Hard Look at Our Criminal Justice System

Among several action alert emails I received today was one from the NAACP asking that I support S 714, the National Criminal Justice Commission Act, introduced last year by Virginia's Senator Jim Webb.

On Tuesday, a House version of the bill (HR 5143) was introduced by Representatives Bill Delahunt (D-MA), Darrell Issa (R-CA), Marcia Fudge (D-OH), Tom Rooney (R-FL), and Robert C. “Bobby” Scott (D-VA).

This bill has support from a diverse list of organizations in addition to the NAACP, including the ACLU, and Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM). And for good reason.

The United States has only 5% of the world's population, but incarcerates 25% of the world's prisoners (at least those that have been reported). Over the past 30 years, drug-related incarcerations have risen by 1200%, contributing to serious overcrowding of an infrastructure never built to hold that many people.

But the systematic injustice especially reveals itself in the warehousing of people with mental illness without access to effective treatment, failure to consistently help prisoners transition from prison back into society, and the disproportionate incarceration of African-American men and boys compared to other groups of people.

According to the NAACP, these disparities for African-Americans hold true from one end of the judicial process to the other:

Initial contacts with police officers are often driven by racial profiling and other racially tainted practices, and the disparities exist through the sentencing phase:  African Americans routinely receive more jail time and harsher punishments.  Although African Americans make up just over 12% of the national population, 42% of Americans currently on death row are African American.  Nearly a million African Americans today are incarcerated in prisons and in jails, and unless there is a change, a black male born today has a one-in-three chance of going to prison in his lifetime. Furthermore, African American women have the highest rate of incarceration among women in our nation, a rate that is four times higher than that of White women.

"The goal of this legislation," says Senator Webb, "is nothing less than a complete restructuring of the criminal justice system in the United States. Only an outside commission, properly structured and charged, can bring us complete findings necessary to do so."

Webb says that fixing our broken criminal justice system will require us to take a hard look not only at who goes to prison and for how long, but how we deal with the long-term consequences of their incarceration. If we can't do this, he says, these problems will undermine the notion that ours is a society founded on fundamental fairness.

The NAACP has similar concerns about the impacts to society as a whole:

The bottom line is that under our current criminal justice system too many people are being incarcerated and otherwise caught up in the criminal justice system and we still have too many Americans who do not feel safe in the homes or their communities.  Furthermore, because of the disparities that result from our current system, entire communities within our country do not have confidence in the criminal justice system.

For more information, follow these links:

America's Cradle to Prison Pipeline (2007)

Prison Activist Resource Center

The Criminal Injustice System (Paul Craig Roberts)

States Must Think Outside the Box on Employment for Former Felons (Monique Morris, NAACP)

House Introduces Criminal Justice Commission Bill (Amanda Simon, ACLU)

FAMM Commends House Leaders for Commission Bill

To take action, you can access the NAACP's pdf with information and sample letter here.

So what kind of shoes does an illegal immigrant wear?

"Stop S.B. 1070 and pass real immigration reform, not racial profiling!"

I don't live in Arizona, so I can't bear first person witness to what causes such fear, hate or desperation that could require such legislation. I did live next door in New Mexico for a few years. Living in rural communities and working in a mental health center there, I saw that there are serious issues that require a serious approach to a number of complex problems, including immigration reform, immigrant rights and dismantling racism in the United States.

Stopping and interrogating people because of what they are wearing (and hair style and skin color, etc.) is not a serious approach:

The immigration enforcement bill signed by Governor Brewer yesterday does nothing to address any of these issues. If you'd like to sign a petition to President Obama to investigate the recent legislation (SB 1070) in Arizona, go here.

See some other blogs and news story links on this issue here.