Saturday, September 27, 2025
spot_img
spot_img
Home Blog Page 24

San Pedro Named Co-Host for 2028 Olympic Sailing Events

Reporters Desk
-
0
San Pedro Named Co-Host for 2028 Olympic Sailing Events

By Cris Miller, columnist

As of June 2025, San Pedro has been named a co-host alongside Long Beach for the sailing events of the 2028 Summer Olympics. Of the 10 events, Long Beach will host men’s and women’s windsurfing and kiteboarding in Alamitos Bay, while San Pedro’s Port of Los Angeles will host men’s and women’s dinghy and skiff, mixed dinghy and mixed multihull events in Hurricane Gulch and nearby waters.

This is not the first time the area has hosted Olympic sailing. The Port of LA was the first Southern California location to do so in the 1932 games, with races viewable from Point Fermin Park. That year featured four sailing classes: snowbird, star, 6 meter, and 8 meter. The U.S. took gold in the star and 8-meter, and silver in the 6-meter. Half a century later, Long Beach hosted the 1984 Olympic sailing events. The U.S. earned gold in fleet match keelboat, flying Dutchman mixed, and two-person keelboat, along with silver in two- and one-person dinghy men, mixed multihull, and men’s windsurfer — placing in every event.

San Pedro also hosted SailGP events in 2023 and 2025, reinforcing its status as a major sailing hub.

Olympic Qualification Process

To qualify for the Olympics, countries must secure berths through events like the World Sailing Championships, Continental Championships, or a Last Chance Regatta. Once a country earns the required number of berths, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) grants it official entry. The host nation automatically receives entries in all 10 events, giving the U.S. a home-field advantage.

Once a country qualifies, its National Olympic Committee (NOC) — in the U.S., this is U.S. Sailing — selects individual athletes based on performance, physical fitness, technical skill, and adaptability.

Although the U.S. qualifies automatically, the selection process remains competitive. The U.S. regularly meets qualification standards through global racing, and automatic entry allows earlier focus on athlete selection and preparation.

U.S. Team Selection: Tiered Criteria

U.S. Sailing’s athlete selection is structured in two tiers:

Tier 1 includes athletes who competed in the 2024 Olympic Games and finished in the top 10 overall. These sailors may maintain Tier 1 status through the next two scheduled World Championships if their class and equipment remain in the 2028 games.

Tier 2 is for those who did not compete in 2024. These athletes must finish in the top 20 (and within the top 50% of the fleet) at one of the two most recent Class World Championships, with events and equipment relevant to the 2028 games.

All tier athletes must submit a performance plan for approval by the U.S. Sailing Team high performance director and head of operations. Tier 1 athletes receive $30,000 annually in direct funding; Tier 2 athletes receive $15,000.

Athletes can move between tiers based on performance. Funding adjusts accordingly and is prorated from the first of the month following a qualifying event. Athletes who fail to qualify for Tier 1 or 2 across two consecutive World Championships are removed from the team.

Changes and Special Circumstances

If an athlete’s schedule conflicts with a qualifying event, they may retain their tier status pending review. Status extensions may also be granted in cases of injury, illness, or pregnancy.

Athletes changing teammates or boat classes must submit a new performance plan for approval. This provisional tier status remains valid until the next qualifying event.

Elite Athlete Health Insurance (EAHI) is available to all athletes who meet qualification standards, regardless of tier status.

Athletes must also sign the 2024 U.S. Sailing Athlete Participation Agreement and Team Agreement and comply with all related obligations. The performance plan and agreements must be submitted to Olympic@ussailing.org.

Hahn Honors 15 Purple Heart Recipients Ahead of Purple Heart Day in LA County

Reporters Desk
-
0
Hahn Honors 15 Purple Heart Recipients Ahead of Purple Heart Day in LA County

 

LOS ANGELES — Los Angeles County Supervisor Janice Hahn July 22 honored 15 local Purple Heart recipients during the meeting of the Board of Supervisors. The Purple Heart honors individuals wounded or killed in combat while serving in the United States Armed Forces. The presentation comes just a week after the board approved Hahn’s motion to proclaim August 7 Purple Heart Day in Los Angeles County for the first time in the county’s history.

“Each of you have endured what most cannot imagine,” said Hahn to the honorees during the presentation. “You have borne wounds in defense of this country – physical, emotional, and spiritual. Today we honor that sacrifice. Our nation owes you not only gratitude, but our support.”

The Purple Heart is one of the oldest and most distinguished military decorations in the United States. Its origins date back to August 7, 1782, when General George Washington, unable to promote soldiers based on merit due to restrictions from the Continental Congress, created the Badge of Military Merit. In his order he authorized the badge, a purple heart-shaped cloth symbol, to recognize soldiers who performed “singularly meritorious action.”

“On behalf of my fellow veterans and myself, we want to thank the County and each supervisor for giving us this wonderful chance to be recognized, especially our own supervisor for me, Janice Hahn. She’s the one that got us together. Thank you for this wonderful proclamation,” said Louis Dominguez during the presentation.

Dominguez is a longtime community leader and former teacher in San Pedro who voluntarily enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1966 and served in the Vietnam War where he suffered serious injury. Dominguez was later recognized with various awards for his service, including a Purple Heart. In 2023, Hahn opened a 60-room interim housing site for formerly homeless veterans in San Pedro and named it the Louis Dominguez Veterans Center in Dominguez’s honor.

All of the veterans Hahn honored reside in the Fourth District and served in the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, and the War in Afghanistan and are listed below:

Louis Dominguez – U.S. Army, Vietnam War

Rodolfo “Rudy” Casas – U.S. Army, Korean War

Zeferino John Madrigal III – U.S. Army, Afghanistan War

Bladamir Rodriguez – U.S. Army, Iraq War

Aeron Rimando – U.S. Army, Afghanistan War

Jesus Esquivel – U.S. Army, Afghanistan War

Alberto Lopez – U.S. Army, Afghanistan War

Santiago Rios – U.S. Army, Vietnam War

Michael Whiting – U.S. Army, Vietnam War

Leonard Pijpaert – U.S. Army, Iraq War

Robert Castillo – U.S. Army, Korean War

Alfred Mota – U.S. Army, Korean War

Ruben Valencia – U.S. Marine Corps, Vietnam War

Richard “Dickie” Rivas – U.S. Marine Corps, Korean War

James Stephen Dolan – U.S. Marine Corps, Vietnam War

Port of Long Beach Cargo Slows in June

Reporters Desk
-
0
Port of Long Beach Cargo Slows in June

 

LONG BEACH — Cargo moving through the Port of Long Beach slowed in June, but a pause on tariffs could drive a rebound for trade in July.

Dockworkers and terminal operators processed 704,403 twenty-foot equivalent units in June, down 16.4% from the same month last year. Imports declined 16.9% to 348,681 TEUs and exports dropped 10.9% to 87,627 TEUs. Empty containers moving through the port decreased 17.4% to 268,095 TEUs.

“We’re anticipating a cargo surge in July as retailers stock up on goods ordered during the 90-day pause placed on tariffs and retaliatory tariffs,” said Port of Long Beach CEO Mario Cordero. “The Port of Long Beach is prepared to handle the influx by tracking trade moving through the harbor with the Supply Chain Information Highway, our digital solution to maximize visibility and efficiency in cargo movement.”

The port has moved 4,746,631 TEUs through the first half of 2025, up 10.6% from the same period in 2024.

Dept. of Youth Development Contractor Detained and Removed

Reporters Desk
-
0
Dept. of Youth Development Contractor Detained and Removed

LOS ANGELES — On July 16, about 7:29 a.m., a Department of Youth Development or DYD employee, contracted through Apple One, was detained after attempting to bring a concealed weapon into Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall.

During the routine security screening at the facility entrance, Citiguard Security personnel discovered a flat, concealable knife inside the employee’s bag. The employee was immediately denied entry into the facility, and probation personnel were notified. A subsequent search of the employee’s belongings revealed a canister of pepper spray.

Both items were collected and secured as evidence. The employee was escorted from the premises and instructed not to return pending further investigation. The incident was referred to the appropriate authorities.

Colbert’s Termination Is a Corporate Assault on Dissent and a Victory for Trump

Reporters Desk
-
0

 

By Jeff Cohen

When media critic A.J. Liebling wrote in The New Yorker 65 years ago that “freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one,” he might have glimpsed a media system dangerously dominated by a small number of companies.

But it’s unlikely he could have foreseen a president as authoritarian as Donald Trump, and media conglomerates eager to capitulate to him.

Thanks to the Paramount conglomerate and its greed-fueled boss, Shari Redstone, the “Late Show with Stephen Colbert” will vanish next year. After the Trump administration responds by approving the Paramount merger with Skydance, Redstone will be roughly $2 billion richer than she is today, and Paramount/CBS may become even more Trump-friendly.

Months ago, when I predicted the demise of Colbert or “The Daily Show,” another Paramount property, it sounded paranoid. But now it’s reality. (“The Daily Show” may be next on the chopping block.)

In recent months, we’ve seen one media conglomerate after another offer what amounted to multimillion-dollar bribes to Trump by settling frivolous Trump lawsuits that these companies could not possibly have lost in court.

Last December, the Disney Company paid Trump a thinly-disguised bribe — $15 million to Trump’s future presidential library – to settle a harassment lawsuit against ABC News over a segment mentioning E. Jean Carroll’s victorious case against Trump.

In January, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta made a bribe-like payment of $25 million to Trump to settle a ridiculous lawsuit after the company followed its own well-understood guidelines and suspended Trump from Facebook and Instagram for inciting violence on January 6, 2021 at the Capitol. (Zuckerberg dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in November and Meta donated $1 million to Trump’s 2025 inaugural fund.)

But there was a snag in settlement negotiations between Paramount and Trump over an even more laughable suit he could never win in court. This one concerned how CBS “60 Minutes” had edited an interview with Kamala Harris, a suit that Paramount had called “meritless.”

During negotiations, respected executive producer of “60 Minutes” Bill Owens resigned over Paramount meddling, soon followed by the resignation of the CEO of CBS News. But that wasn’t enough to get the suit settled, and it was far from sufficient to get the Trump administration to approve the Paramount merger. That’s when I worried that Colbert or Jon Stewart would have to be sacrificed to placate the authoritarian-in-chief and get Paramount and Redstone the riches that a merger would bring.

Three weeks ago, Paramount agreed to pay Trump $16 million to settle the suit, amid rumors of side-deals that content would shift at the new Paramount. And now Colbert, one of Trump’s most effective critics, is being shown the door. On last Monday’s show, Colbert carried on at length, making fun of what he called Paramount’s “big, fat bribe.”

Colbert is funny.

What’s not funny is that our country’s democratic experiment is on the verge of collapse – and it has less to do with Trump than with the capitulation of corporate liberals and corporate centrist institutions to Trump.

Big universities have capitulated. Big law firms have capitulated. Big media companies have capitulated.

The lesson to be learned from today’s political reality is that big corporate institutions don’t care about democracy or free speech. They will bend the political system toward their own economic benefit – and be complicit with authoritarianism if it keeps getting them wealthier.

The conglomerates that dominate our media and our society have one and only one value: profit-maximization. This was pretty-much admitted by Shari Redstone’s late father, Sumner, who built the Viacom (now Paramount) media conglomerate. Sumner Redstone was considered a liberal, a son of Massachusetts who’d been friendly with Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic candidate for president. But Redstone famously endorsed George W. Bush for president in 2004.

As Redstone explained: “I vote for what’s good for Viacom. I vote, today, Viacom. . . I don’t want to denigrate Kerry, but from a Viacom standpoint, the election of a Republican administration has stood for many things we believe in, deregulation and so on.”

I know I’m not the only progressive who has survived the Trump years with my sanity intact thanks in large part to TV comedians employed by media conglomerates: Colbert (Paramount), Jon Stewart and team (Paramount), Jimmy Kimmel (Disney), Seth Meyers (Comcast); and the best investigative journalist on mainstream TV, John Oliver (Warner Discovery).

There’s a quote usually attributed — perhaps inaccurately — to George Orwell: “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

I’ve offered a twist on this quote for the Trump era: “In a time of political craziness, keeping one’s sanity is a revolutionary act.”

It’s hard to stay sane without laughter, and the comedians listed above are often uplifting. But just as we’ve moved to independent news outlets out of distrust for corporate news, we’re likely to be looking outside the media conglomerates for our comedy when many a truth is truly spoken in jest.

 

Jeff Cohen is co-founder of RootsAction.org, a retired journalism professor at Ithaca College and author of “Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media.” In 1986, he founded the media watch group FAIR.

Mayor Bass Issues Statement Following Reports of Planned Withdrawal By U.S. Marines: “This is another win for Los Angeles”

Reporters Desk
-
0
Mayor Bass Issues Statement Following Reports of Planned Withdrawal By U.S. Marines: “This is another win for Los Angeles”

LOS ANGELES — Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass July 21 issued the following statement following reports that U.S. Marines would be withdrawing from Los Angeles:

“This is another win for Los Angeles but this is also a win for those serving this country in uniform,” said Mayor Bass. “Just this morning I stood with Veterans, families of active duty officers, and business leaders to show the impact of this unnecessary, unprecedented, and unconstitutional assault on our city. We took the administration to court and won, now we continue that momentum with today’s news. Los Angeles stands with our troops, which is why we are glad they are leaving.”

Reports of the Marine withdrawal followed a press conference this morning led by Mayor Bass and California State Senator and U.S. Marine Corps Veteran Caroline Menjivar to highlight the impact the deployment has had on the troops, their families, local businesses and Veterans themselves. The event was hosted at the Veteran Resource Center of Los Angeles Mission College and was attended by business leaders, organizations and organizers. Each speaker was either a Veteran or had an active-duty member of the military in their family. Los Angeles Community College District Chancellor Dr. Alberto Roman highlighted the significance of the Resource Center, where Veteran students are assisted throughout the year.

“I stood in solidarity this morning with my Marine brothers and sisters, demanding that we release our servicemembers from this charade of a deployment,” said Senator Menjivar. “We need to return the trust and dependability that our armed forces have earned from our community. We will not get used to this, this will not be our norm, and the Pentagon just now announcing withdrawing the Marines is the only way to honor their service.”

Since the beginning of these reckless raids, Mayor Bass has:

  • Signed an executive directive to support Los Angeles’ immigrant communities in the wake of unlawful raids conducted by the federal government. She has instructed City Departments to bolster their protocols and training to prepare for federal immigration activity occurring on City property, establishes an LAPD working group and expands access to resources for impacted families. The order also seeks records from the federal government on unlawful raids from federal agencies.
  • Taken legal action to put a stop to the unconstitutional reckless raids in the LA region in coordination with LA City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto and regional Mayors in Los Angeles County. This resulted in a temporary restraining order by a federal judge.
  • Met with children who had to leave MacArthur Park because of a military-style operation designed to strike fear.
  • Visited businesses in Boyle Heights, Westlake, Pico-Union and Little Tokyo that have been economically impacted by this assault on Los Angeles.
  • Organized Angelenos, community leaders and elected officials for Shine LA to revitalize areas vandalized by the individuals that took advantage of the chaos created by the federal government.
  • Led more than one hundred labor, business and community leaders and immigrant rights groups calling for an end to immigration raids.
  • Hosted webinars to make resources and information available to impacted businesses in collaboration with Councilmember Ysabel Jurado and City departments.
  • Met with the Consul General of Mexico in Los Angeles and the Mayor of Morelia to find ways to work together in support of Angelenos who have been impacted by the reckless raids.

Clearwater Tunnel Collapse: Project Update and Community Meeting

Reporters Desk
-
0
Clearwater Tunnel Collapse: Project Update and Community Meeting

 

On July 9, a portion of the Clearwater Tunnel, a major construction project that will traverse seven miles through council district 15, from Wilmington to White Point in San Pedro, collapsed while workers were in active construction. The failure was more than 370 feet underground, beneath Western Ave., just south of Weymouth Ave. Thankfully, all 31 workers, 27 of whom were about six miles into the tunnel, were safely evacuated. Paramedics evaluated everyone as they emerged, and none sustained visible injuries, according to the Los Angeles Fire Department.

LA County Supervisor Janice Hahn and councilmember Tim McOsker were on scene and released available information that evening. The next day, Hahn and McOsker sent a joint letter to the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts asking for further information on the cause of the collapse, the proposed repair, how the rest of the tunnel will be secured, how long construction may be delayed, and whether homes or streets above the project are at any risk. The district responded with preliminary information (click here). More investigation and information will be forthcoming.

Work is now on hold pending CalOSHA’s approval of a safety plan. Only after that review will contractors re-enter the tunnel to assess the damage and surrounding structure. The timeline for resuming work is still unclear, but the Sanitation Districts have shared that they are committed to resuming work only after all safety concerns have been fully addressed.

Supervisor Hahn and councilmember McOsker will be scheduling a community town hall soon so that residents can hear directly from project leaders.

LA Sues Airbnb: City Attorney Alleges Price Gouging, Deception During Wildfires

Reporters Desk
-
0
LA Sues Airbnb: City Attorney Alleges Price Gouging, Deception During Wildfires

 

LOS ANGELES — City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto July 18 filed a civil enforcement action against Airbnb. The lawsuit alleges that the home renting platform, in the wake of the January wildfires in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena, increased rental prices of at least two thousand, and possibly over three thousand, properties within the City of LA in violation of California Penal Code section 396, the Anti-Gouging Law.

The protections of this law came into effect on January 7, 2025, when Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency in Los Angeles. The law prohibits the prices of essential goods and services – including rental housing – from being increased by more than 10% after an emergency is declared.

Since then, the Governor, Mayor Bass and the LA County Board of Supervisors have repeatedly extended the state of emergency – most recently by the supervisors on June 24 – making it illegal for Airbnb to increase the pricing of its rentals by more than 10%.

In addition, the suit alleges that Airbnb misleadingly represents to prospective renters that Airbnb has “verified” the accuracy of the identities of hosts and locations of properties on the site. In reality, Airbnb’s “verified hosts” include “hosts” with non-existent or false identities, and “verified” property addresses include addresses that are incorrect or non-existent.

Feldstein Soto’s lawsuit, filed for violations of the CA Unfair Competition Law, seeks a permanent injunction barring Airbnb from charging illegal rents during the current state of emergency and from misrepresenting host identities or property locations, and requests restitution to consumers who were charged illegal rents. The suit also seeks civil penalties of up to $2,500 for each violation to deter price-gouging and unfair, unlawful and/or fraudulent representations to consumers.

“It’s unconscionable that Airbnb permitted prices to be jacked up on thousands of rental properties at a time when so many people lost so much and needed a place to sleep,” said LA City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto. “Although Airbnb subsequently took steps to curtail price gouging, evidence indicates that illegal gouging on the site continues and may be ongoing. This lawsuit sends a clear message that we will not allow people, particularly at their most vulnerable moments, to be exploited without consequences.”

The wildfires in early January created an immediate and overwhelming need for local short-term rental housing. Airbnb, the world’s most popular online advertiser and broker of short-term rentals, had 2024 revenue of $11.1 billion with estimated 80% market share in Los Angeles. It is believed that hundreds and perhaps thousands of Angelenos who were forced to evacuate their homes in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena, as well as residents of nearby neighborhoods at risk for being evacuated, booked rentals on Airbnb.

Airbnb is aware that its verification processes are inadequate, yet it continues to falsely, deceptively, unfairly, and/or misleadingly represent otherwise, potentially luring prospective tenants into a false sense of security about its hosts and locations. Tenants at Airbnb properties have been victims of identity theft, robbery, sexual assault, invasion of privacy, voyeurism and other crimes.

This litigation is being managed by the City Attorney’s Public Rights Branch.

Link to press release online: https://shorturl.at/2nKKG

To Resist Injustice in Gaza and the Wider World

Reporters Desk
-
0
To Resist Injustice in Gaza and the Wider World

 

By Charles Glass

Egyptian-born Omar El Akkad had studied in the United States and been 10 years a journalist when, in the summer of 2021, he became an American citizen. Covering the War on Terror in Afghanistan and at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay exposed him to the “deep ugly cracks in the bedrock of this thing they called “the free world.” Yet he believed the cracks could be repaired – “Until the fall of 2023. Until the slaughter.”

The slaughter was Israel’s razing of Gaza following Hamas’s rampage into Israel on October 7, 2023. The Israeli assault escalated to include massive bombardment, enforced hunger, destruction of hospitals and schools, bulldozing of dwellings deprivation of medical care, torture and the slaughter of tens of thousands of men, women and children. The onslaught caused Akkad to despair for Gaza’s Palestinians and for his adopted country, whose financing and weapons enabled it. He channelled that despair into the rage that inspired this excellent and troubling book.

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is neither polemic nor memoir, although it contains elements of both. Akkad’s prose is an appeal to readers not to wait for “one day” in the distant future to resist injustice not only in Gaza, but in the wider world: “In the coming years there will be much written about what took place in Gaza, the horrors that have been meticulously documented by Palestinians as they happened and meticulously brushed aside by the major media apparatus of the western world.” When the killing ceases, as with genocides of native Americans, Tasmanians, Namibia’s Hereros and Namas, Armenians, Jews and Tutsis, it will be too late.

Akkad’s condemnation of U.S. policy in the formerly-colonized world sits uneasily beside his choice to live and raise his children in the land that torments people who, like him, are brown or Muslim or doomed to live under American-supported Arab dictators or Israeli occupation. His rationale is as simple as it is understandable: “I live here because it will always be safer to live on the launching side of the missiles. I live here because I am afraid.”

He is unafraid to speak against the Biden administration’s veto of United Nations resolutions calling for ceasefires in Gaza (“untroubled when they say a ceasefire resolution represents a greater threat to lasting peace than the ongoing obliteration of an entire people”) and its termination of funding for the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) that was the primary supplier of food, medical care and education to Palestinian refugees. Yet speaking out seems futile. As the author of the award-winning novel American War and sometime columnist, he does not spare himself and other writers for political impotence: “What is this work we do? What are we good for?” He quotes Egyptian-American poet Marwa Helal:

 

this is where the

poets will say: show, don’t tell

but that

assumes most people

can see.

Too many seek refuge in propaganda that what is being done to Palestinians is necessary. Akkad quotes an Israeli newspaper post’s headline from seven months prior to October 7: “When Genocide is Permissible.” Palestinians are killed every day in Gaza, “but the unsaid thing is that it is all right because that’s what those people do, they die.”

This book is not devoid of hope, which he finds in resistance that can be positive (“showing up to protests and speaking out”) and negative (“refusing to participate”). He praises students “risking expulsion and defamation, risking their livelihoods, their entire careers” and Jewish protestors “being arrested on the streets of Frankfurt, blocking Grand Central Station in New York, fighting for peace.” Their efforts, however ineffective, absolve them of the culpability of waiting for everyone else to be “against this.”

___________________________

Charles Glass is a writer, journalist and broadcaster, who has written on conflict in the Middle East, Africa and Europe for the past 50 years. He was ABC News Chief Middle East Correspondent from 1983 to 1993 and has covered wars in Lebanon, Syria, Eritrea, Rhodesia, Somalia, Iraq, East Timor and Bosnia-Herzegovina. His many books have dealt with the First and Second World Wars as well as contemporary Middle East history.

Evil Scheme to Purge Half a Million Voters

Greg Palast
-
0
Evil Scheme to Purge Half a Million Voters

Will control of the US Senate come down to ugly ethnic cleansing?

by Greg Palast for RawStory and Substack July 17

It’s all over but the official count. Georgia Republicans can’t win the Senate seat now held by Democrat Jon Ossoff — the demographics will drown them: Georgia is now a “majority minority” state with non-whites predominant. EXCEPT. EXCEPT if the GOP can come up with a way to stop those un-white voters from voting.

And they have. This week, the violently partisan Republican Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, announced that he is removing tens of thousands of voters who live in addresses that Republicans rarely haunt: office spaces used as housing [and] homes with 10 or more registrants.

That’s ON TOP OF the 480,000 voters the State is about to remove as “inactive voters.”

Hey, it all sounds reasonable. But consider this: in the entire history of Georgia, since the days of its treasonous attack on America, NOT ONE person has been convicted of voting while dead, while non-existent, while an illegal alien. Not one.

In other words, this is a punishment looking for a crime. And it’s severe punishment, losing your voting rights, happens when you’re convicted of a felony crime.

But what you’re looking at is what we politely call, “institutional racism,” because, from what we learned from our in-depth study for the ACLU, is that the overwhelming number of Georgians purged are voters of color: the color ‘blue’ for Democratic: African-Americans, Asian-Americans, new young voters…you get it.

The Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the premier voting rights organization, warned,

“This would create new and unnecessary barriers to voting for Georgia’s unhoused and housing-insecure voters — a population estimated to include over 10,000 eligible Georgian voters. Among the segment of the homeless population that is residing in shelter facilities more than 50 percent of the time, 2022 data found 57 percent were Black and 31 percent were adult victims of domestic violence.“

And here’s one of the most evil schemes announced by Raffensperger. (I use “evil” most carefully). He’s announced Georgia will remove 87,027 voters because they’ve filed Change of Address forms with the post office. If you’ve seen my film, Vigilantes Inc., you know the story of Maj. Gamaliel Turner of Columbus, Georgia, because he filed a change-of-address to get his absentee ballot while assigned by the Pentagon to California. He was one of 4,000 who lost their vote to a challenge by the Georgia Republican Party on or near his military base.

Then there was Christine Jordan, MLK’s cousin, who put in a change of address form because, at 92, she wanted her daughter to review her mail.

Then there is the case of Dr. Carry Smith, expert on voter purges, who herself was removed for cockamamy reasons. But I want you to see the faces of American apartheid’s victims. If these were rare cases, I wouldn’t waste your time. But removing hundreds of thousands of voters can, and has, changed the presidency and control of the Senate.

And let’s not pussyfoot around the purpose of this ethnic cleansing of Georgia’s voter rolls: Governor Brian Kemp is termed out next year, so the only way he can climb up the greasy pole is to challenge the popular Senator Ossoff. Kemp can’t, and never has, won fair and square.

Marc Elias’ Democracy Docket raised the alarm this week about the new mass purges in Georgia. Elias cited my study for the ACLU that showed that 63.3% of voters, in 2020, were purged from the rolls even though the Postal Service and Amazon’s experts (they know where you live) verified that 198,351 of them still lived at their legal voting address. We gave the names of the wrongly purged to Raffensperger — who defied a federal judge in refusing to review our list. Still, Ossoff and Biden won the state: evidence that they can’t steal all the votes all the time.

But they can try. This year, the state has doubled the number of voters facing the elimination of their citizenship rights. Gerald Griggs, President of the Georgia NAACP, is staring at that list of half a million Georgia voters about to get the heave-ho. He says, “This is Jim Crow 2.0. We’ve warned you, America: what they test in Georgia they will take to your state.”

What about those voters living at “commercial addresses.” That would be me: I lived in a building zoned for business which my friends and me turned into apartments. Who could have dreamed that my right to vote depended on my zoning. By the way, Mr. Raffensperger: if you find illegal voters, arrest them. They’ll be in nursing homes…and, according to the Vera Institute, at least 10,000 are in Georgia’s jails awaiting trial. Mr. Raffensperger, a poor man who can’t make bail, sitting in the can awaiting trial for selling dime bags, should not lose their citizenship. We are not Russia. Yet.

Here’s what you can do:

  • Spread this story. Like it, and share it.
  • Check if you’ve been purged by CHECKING YOUR REGISTRATION at Vote.org — NOW!
1...232425...935Page 24 of 935

EDITOR PICKS

POPULAR POSTS

POPULAR CATEGORY

ABOUT US

Real people. Real news. Random Lengths is the Los Angeles harbor area's remaining independently owned progressive news magazine. We cover news in Carson, Wilmington, Long Beach, Lomita, Torrance, Rancho Palos Verdes and San Pedro.

Contact us: letters@randomlengthsnews.com

FOLLOW US

© Newspaper WordPress Theme by TagDiv