The State of Opportunity

Undocumented Immigrant Honored in Arizona

• Latina Lista wrote about yesterday's ceremony in Arizona to honor Manuel Jesus Cordova Soberanes, the man who saved the eight-year-old boy who spent a night in the desert after his mother died in a car accident. Given that Cordova gave up his opportunity to find work in order to ensure the boy's safety, "U.S. Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz. wants to reward Manuel for his selfless act of kindness with a special visa that would allow him to come to work in the US."  Grijalva's aide Ruben Reyes admitted the chances of having a such visa issued are slim, but spoke of the importance of recognizing Cordova's generosity:

"We think he actually brings another tone into the discussion of immigration. Unfortunately the discussion of immigration is (mostly) negative but with his acts of heroism it counters so many of the other negative aspects," Reyes said. "It brings a face of dignity, humanity and a bond that the two countries can share and he's a shining example of that."

Author Marisa Treviño had another take on the situation, however, on which makes a valid point about underlying economic inequalities and family integrity:

There is no doubt Manuel is that and so much more when you compare him to the critics of illegal immigrants in this country whose rhetoric is violent and hate-filled.

Yet, if Rep. Grijalva really wanted to help Manuel, why not award the man enough money to help him do something constructive in his hometown so that he doesn't have to leave his own children again?

Grijalva already knows the chances for a special visa are next to nil for passage. So, basically the Congressman is dangling another false hope in front of Manuel to give the appearance of helping him when in reality, he's not.

And in the end, Manuel will still have disappointment and poverty — along with, a certificate of heroism.

• The Inteligenta Indiĝena Indigenismo Novaĵoservo blog reposted a New York Times article on 'Brazilians Giving Up Their American Dream.'  Hundreds of middle-class Brazilians who had immigrated to the US years ago in search of social and economic security are now choosing to return to Brazil.  For undocumented Brazilians, life has become too difficult to justify the risk of staying, when they are unable to obtain driver's licenses and there is no comprehensive immigration reform in sight.  As the American dollar loses value and Brazil's economy is booming, it seems only logical to follow the job opportunities back to the Southern hemisphere.

• Too Sense has given us an update on the Jena Six case: While it looks like the six students will all be accepting plea bargain agreements, the victim of the beating has just brought suit against "the adults accused of beating him, the families of the juveniles allegedly involved and the board of the school where the attack occurred."

• Prometheus 6 linked to a Birmingham News article about the local school district's decision to acquire and distribute 15,000 of the new $200 XO laptops which were created to increase computer access in the developing world. According to they city's mayor Larry Langford, "We live in a digital age, so it is important that all our children have equal access to technology and are able to integrate it into all aspects of their lives...we are proud that Birmingham is on its way to eliminating the so-called 'digital divide' and to ensuring that our children have state-of-the-art tools for education." While the laptops are available for purchase in the US (for every laptop bought, another goes to a child in a developing country), this is the first reported large-scale purchase for use within the country -- and one which highlights inequalities in access to technology within our nation.

• The Huffington Post has reported on today's Supreme Court hearing on "whether the detainees at Guantánamo have habeas corpus rights - a cornerstone of civilization and a principle established 800 years ago in England, giving prisoners the right to challenge the basis of their detention in court."  The ACSBlog is also covering the case, which is a matter concerning basic human rights in America.

Heartland Forum Highlights Support for Community Values

• As mentioned previously, this Saturday saw the Heartland Presidential Forum in Des Moines, Iowa, an opportunity to talk with candidates about 'real issues facing real people in our communities' with attention to our values and policies of interconnection. You can watch a webcast of the forum on the Center for Community Change's Movement Vision Lab blog. Additionally, The Huffington Post linked to a Des Moines Register article on the event, and Adam Bink over at Open Left liveblogged summaries of statements made by each of the participating candidates: Clinton, Obama, Edwards, Dodd, and Kucinich.

• The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog has reposted a Texas Observer article about the challenges faced in the expansion of drug courts in Texas.  While courts geared towards rehabilitation and redemption (rather than simply inflicting prison time) are much more effective than traditional courts in helping people overcome addiction, court practices vary widely according to the judge on the stand.

"Bennett and Leon Grizzard are the two judges who oversee Travis County's drug diversion court. They steer addicts into a court-supervised treatment program instead of prison. In the past decade, drug courts like the one in Travis County have successfully handled nonviolent defendants with drug and alcohol addictions—if success is defined as increasing public safety at the least cost to the taxpayer. People who complete drug-court programs rarely tumble back into substance abuse. According to four drug-court judges surveyed, about 10 percent of program graduates commit new crimes—a recidivism rate roughly one-fifth that of traditional probation routines. That means drug courts can ease the strain on overcrowded prisons and save taxpayer money. A study of the Dallas drug court by Southern Methodist University showed that every government dollar spent on diversion courts saved taxpayers more than $9.

Though criminal justice reform groups have advocated drug courts for years, Texas until recently lagged behind the rest of the country.

...

But as drug courts become more widespread, it appears that—like the narcotics they were created to fight—the courts can be abused. State and federal governments have instituted few regulations and set up no oversight. Judges have wide latitude to decide people's fates. In the hands of the right judges, the drug court model performs marvelously. Other judges appear to have trouble reconciling their punitive role with this new therapeutic one. The U.S. Department of Justice designed a set of guidelines and best practices—but they're the criminal justice equivalent of blueprints without building codes. The guidelines suggest that judges receive ongoing training and partner with treatment programs and community groups.

Because drug courts grow mostly from the local level, there is little standardization. Texas law broadly defines a drug court, but places hardly any restrictions on what judges can do. There is no oversight specifically for the drug courts. A recent case in Houston demonstrates the potential risks behind the courts' expansion. Judge K. Michael Mayes of Montgomery County is facing a federal lawsuit by a defendant who claims his treatment in Mayes' drug court was arbitrary and violated his rights to due process."

• Firedoglake has written a post on a bill under consideration in the Senate known as the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act.  This Democratically-authored legislation, which has already passed the House by a large margin, has many progressives questioning its vague definition of 'ideologically-based violence,' arguing that this law would be a step towards a fascist state in which citizens can by prosecuted for 'thought crimes.' We must remember that democracy in America is dependent upon our ability to raise our voices, on our rights to free speech and fair elections.  Any law that seeks to contradict our capacity to participate fully in our communities is a violation of our human rights.

• In a related story, the Latina Lista blog has been the subject of a recent spam attack, bad enough that the site's commenting feature has temporarily been disabled.  Offering "Anything and Everything from a Latina Perspective," the blog often discusses issues of immigration, American history and culture.

Framing the Immigration Debate

• The ImmigrationProf Blog has revisited a 2006 essay by George Lakoff and Sam Ferguson about the language we use when discussing immigration.  Here's the abstract on the Rockridge Institute's website:

"Framing is at the center of the recent immigration debate. Simply framing it as about “immigration” has shaped its politics, defining what count as “problems” and constraining the debate to a narrow set of issues. The language is telling. The linguistic framing is remarkable: frames for illegal immigrant, illegal alien, illegals, undocumented workers, undocumented immigrants, guest workers, temporary workers, amnesty, and border security. These linguistic expressions are anything but neutral. Each framing defines the problem in its own way, and hence constrains the solutions needed to address that problem. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, we will analyze the framing used in the public debate. Second, we suggest some alternative framing to highlight important concerns left out of the current debate. Our point is to show that the relevant issues go far beyond what is being discussed, and that acceptance of the current framing impoverishes the discussion."

• In other immigration news, Burger King is under fire for its refusal to join McDonald's and Taco Bell in an agreement to pay historically-underpaid migrant workers in Florida an extra penny per pound of tomatoes picked. Also, a federal court in Canada ruled in favor of a lawsuit challenging the Safe Third Country Agreement, which had designated the US as a "safe third country" for asylum-seekers, meaning "if they make it to the U.S. before entering Canada can be returned there."  The court found that "the United States fails to comply with Convention on Torture or Article 33 of the Refugee Convention and [therefore] the U.S./Canada safe third country agreement was flawed as there was no ongoing meaningful review mechanism."

• The DMI Blog points to this week's New York Times coverage of the successes of a re-entry program in Brooklyn which offers counseling, drug testing, and work and training programs to former inmates.  Re-entry programs not only support the value of redemption, or the right to a second chance, but they are also effective in helping people reintegrate into the community and remain there.  According to a recent study of the comAlert program,

"ComAlert graduates are less likely be re-arrested after leaving prison and much more likely to be employed than either program dropouts or members of the control group. Participants who complete the Doe Fund work-training component do even better. They have an employment rate of about 90 percent, somewhat higher than the ComAlert graduates generally and several times higher than the control group."

• Finally, Jack and Jill Politics offers further analysis of inequities in Wednesday's CNN/YouTube Republican debate, as compared with its Democratic counterpart:

Of 34 total questions aired, 24 were from white men (including 2 cartoon versions) in the GOP debate. That's 71%. For the Dem debate, counting was a little more challenging since one video aired combined video submissions from several people. Still I'd estimate 22 of 38 questions aired were from white men (I did not count the snowman as white because snow does not have an ethnicity) or 58%.

Further, there were 8 questions shown that featured African-Americans during the Democratic debate and a measly 2 in the GOP debate. Hmm.

Also, strikingly -- astonishingly, no questions whatsoever during the GOP debate on:

Healthcare in America
Katrina
Climate Change or Environment
Darfur
Iraq Troop Withdrawal
Afghanistan and Pakistan -- Resurgence of the Taliban
Racial Profiling
Voting Machines and Voting Rights
The Failure to Capture Osama bin Laden

As Elections Near, We Need to Hear Candidates Debate Community Values

• The Huffington Post offers an introduction to last night's CNN/YouTube debate for Republican presidential candidates, noting that "people from across the country submitted more than 3,500 videos posing questions" to the candidates, of which 40 were selected to be broadcast during the debates.  The Opportunity Agenda was among those submitting questions, with four videos created for the purposes of promoting community values in our nation's political debate.  Mike Connery has written two posts about the debate over at Future Majority, the first offering a comprehensive summary of the event and the second publicizing the fact that CNN did not coordinate with YouTube at all in order to select the forty questions that were aired.  By single-handedly shaping the content of the debate, CNN was able to bypass the debate's original intention, that of providing a voice to a diverse group of Americans.
  

• In other event news, the Heartland Presidential Form will be held this Saturday December 1 in Des Moines, Iowa, only weeks before the Iowa caucus.  Five of the Democratic presidential candidates will be in attendance at the forum, the focus of which will not be on specific issues but on progressive vision and values.  According to the website:

The Iowa Heartland Presidential Forum is part of a new nationwide Campaign for Community Values Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, the Center for Community Change is - and hundreds of grassroots partner groups - are coordinating this groundbreaking effort to challenge the "go it alone" mentality that has dominated politics and build a new politics for the common good.

• In preparation for the Heartland Forum, The Opportunity Agenda collaborated with Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement to write an opinion piece which was published in today's Des Moines Register.  Entitled 'Activist: We need to hear candidates debate community values,' the piece begins:

'Tis the season for presidential politics, and with it, the debate over what values propel voters to the ballot box.

A recent debate in Florida claimed to represent and display the interests of so-called "values voters." The dissection of the nation's "moral values" took up a good bit of ink following the 2004 elections. And we're all familiar with the "family values" that guided policy throughout the '80s and '90s. But in all this talk of values, why are so many core American values consistently missing?

Instead of concentrating on people's individual moral decisions, or their family life, we should focus on our collective values, the ways we can move forward together and the policies that work toward the common good. We need to reintroduce to the debate the ideals of equality, opportunity and fairness. And we need to acknowledge that our individual stories and circumstances add up to a national community best positioned to solve our problems together. In short, we should be talking about our community values.

Spitzer Drops Plan to Provide Drivers Licenses to Undocumented Immigrants

• New York's governor Spitzer has done an about-face and decided that he does not wish to issue drivers licenses to the state's undocumented immigrants.  The Immigration Equality blog and The Huffington Post both spread the news that Spitzer is "shelving" the controversial plan because "immigration is a federal issue to be handled by Washington" instead of at the state level. Yet the absence of federal immigration reform has left thousands of immigrants at a loss for an identity that would allow them contribute fully to the success of our society.
  

• The ImmigrationProf Blog continues to provide a balanced view of immigration, in part via its 'Immigrant of the Day' series. This week saw a feature on Sona Babai, who immigrated to the US from Iran in 2000 at the ripe age of ninety-nine in order to live with her sons in California.  Another inspiring piece involves a recent lawsuit won against the Esmor corporation that owns and runs a detention center for refugees. After being granted asylum, Somali immigrant Hawa Jama has been awarded $100,001 in damages for routine violations of her rights while in custody.

• A number of blogs such as Racialicious and The Unapologetic Mexican have been writing about a fairly complementary Boston Globe article entitled Blog is Beautiful on the work of bloggers of color who are "fighting racial stereotypes and getting their voices heard in the mainstream media." However, Rachel's Tavern has pointed out that the author trivializes racial and cultural identity by suggesting that bloggers of color "discard the handcuffs of their ethnic origins to tackle subjects affecting a range of racial or ethnic groups."

• Finally, the Tennessee Guerilla Women blog has featured a clever new ad campaign by the Center for American Progress and the Glaser Progress Foundation on what it means to be progressive.  The 'Progressive. And Proud of It' campaign includes a series of YouTube videos such as the two below which are meant to illustrate the historical context behind the term as it relates to social services supported by the majority of Americans. The second video in particular provides an entertaining assessment of the arguments being used by progressive and conservative groups.

WITNESS Launches 'The Hub' For Human Rights Media

• In exciting new media news, human rights organization WITNESS has just launched The Hub, a global platform for human rights media and action or "a YouTube for human rights."  According to the website:
  

"The Hub is a grassroots-driven, participatory media website that enables anyone anywhere in the world with access to the internet to upload, share, discuss and take action around human rights-related media and resources. Through the Hub, organizations, networks and groups around the world are able to bring their human rights stories and campaigns to global attention.

The Hub has three main areas: See It – where you can view and interact with human rights media uploaded by the Hub community; Share It – where you can create and join groups or discussions that coincide with your interests or expertise; and Take Action – where you can get involved to make a difference,  and activate other users around your campaigns and events.

The Hub is a project of WITNESS. WITNESS uses video and online technologies to open the eyes of the world to human rights violations. We empower people to transform personal stories of abuse into powerful tools for justice, promoting public engagement and policy change."

• Another favorite bit of news this week is that the FBI has apparently been tracking sales of Middle Eastern food in San Francisco grocery stores in hopes that it will lead to terrorist communities. So far there have been no reports of falafel consumption leading to arrests.

• Immigration News Daily has written about a study just released by the University of Florida which claims that news laws intended to crack down on undocumented immigrants are actually having the opposite effect.  Based on interviews with a community of Brazilian immigrants, the report has concluded that "restrictions to keep illegal immigrants from entering the United States are having the perverse effect of encouraging those who are already here to stay by any means necessary." It is time for the US to abandon these policies of isolation in order to engage in comprehensive immigration reform that will create a fair and just system to provide everyone in America the opportunities needed to achieve their full potential.

• The 'Just News' and ImmigrationProf blogs both touched upon a case in Arizona in which an undocumented high school student was found in posession of marijuana, his school called the cops who then called the border patrol, and the student's entire family was deported.  After significant protest by fellow students, "the Tucson police has changed its policy: no longer will they call the Border Patrol to schools or churches, though they will share information." In addition, immigration law  professor Kevin Johnson discusses official agency policies surrounding arrests at school:

"The Border Patrol has a policy saying that Border Patrol agents, who work for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, must have written approval from a supervisor before conducting any enforcement-related activity at schools or places of worship. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement—which falls under a different branch of the U.S. Homeland Security Department than Border Patrol—has a policy that 'arresting fugitives at schools, hospitals, or places of worship is strongly discouraged, unless the alien poses an immediate threat to national security or the community.'"

It's reassuring that the Tucson community has been able to bring about the procedural changes they felt were necessary to ensure that their schools will be a safe and secure learning environment.

• Bloggernista posted about yesterday's vote on the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which passed the House by a vote of 235-184.  While this vote is important and historic for its extension of fair workplace practices to lesbian, gay, and bisexual communities, Pam's House Blend guest author Autumn Sandeen has declared that she is "not celebrating" given the bill's failure to include 'real or perceived gender identity' in the list of protected identities.
  

Writers Guild Fighting for Fair Pay While TV Networks Threaten To Cut Jobs

• There has been a lot of discussion on The Huffington Post about the Writers Guild of America strike that started on Monday, as TV networks and screenwriters failed to reach an agreement before the end of their previous contract. Union members are essentially demanding that networks begin to distribute profits from new media airings of their work, but have made little headway in negotiations on the issue. In a move that will endanger the financial security of many Americans, some networks are now threatening large-scale firings of their employees. According to an opinion in the LA Times:

"A day after Hollywood's writers went out on strike, the major studios are hitting back with plans to suspend scores of long-term deals with television production companies, jeopardizing the jobs of hundreds of rank-and-file employees whose names never appear in the credits.

Assistants, development executives and production managers will soon be out of work, joining their better-paid bosses who opted to sacrifice paychecks as members of the Writers Guild of America. At some studios, the first wave of letters are going out today, hitting writer-producers whose companies don't currently have shows in production."

• Migra Matters has done an interesting post on the results of yesterday's election in Virginia, where the Republican party had chosen to make an immigration crackdown its biggest campaign selling point.  Curiously, the Democrats appear to have gained control of the state Senate, leading the author to advise us with respect to upcoming national elections: "If the Republicans were looking at immigrant-bashing as a silver bullet to stem the national tide against them, surely tonight's results in Virginia will should give them second thoughts."

• The House of Representatives has begun debate on the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), a measure to extend federal workplace protections to those targeted for their sexual orientation.  Pam's House Blend discusses the fact that a coalition of civil and gay rights organizations announced their support yesterday for the current version of the bill which does not include the same protections for transgender individuals, thus leaving the LGBT community divided.

• The Sentencing Law and Policy blog featured an editorial in today's New York Times about the Second Chance Act, a bill which has had bipartisan support in Congress since 2004 but has yet to move through the legislature. The Times describes the need for the government policies to support redemption, or the idea that we all deserve a second chance:

"If past patterns hold true, more than half of the 650,000 prisoners released this year will be back behind bars by 2010. With the prison population exploding and the price of incarceration now topping $60 billion a year, states are rightly focusing on ways to reduce recidivism. Congress can give these efforts a boost by passing the Second Chance Act, which would provide crucial help to people who have paid their debts to society....

The Second Chance Act would add to what the country knows about the re-entry process by establishing a federal re-entry task force, along with a national resource center to collect and disseminate information about proven programs....  The programs necessary to help former prisoners find a place in society do not exist in most communities. The Second Chance Act would help to create those programs by providing money, training, technical assistance — and a Congressional stamp of approval."

• Last up, blogger Sudy is working on a video project to "feature, support, and highlight the work done by feminists of color."  She's included a preview of the video on her site which has been cross-posted by Vox et Machina.

San Francisco Hospital Closure Will Deny Health Care Access to Underserved Communities

• The Happening Here blog has a new post up on a newly-announced hospital closure in San Francisco's Mission District.  While a hearing will be held next week on the plan to shut down St. Luke's Hospital, author Janinsanfran notes:

"Opponents of the closure quickly discovered unearthed evidence that the impact of CPMC's plan would be to dump most of their Black, Brown and charity care patients. CPMC wants to build yet another North of Market Street hospital on Cathedral Hill, while leaving the South of Market area entirely to the care of the over-crowded, under-funded county hospital."

Decreasing access to medical care for communities of color and low-income communities is a reality in New York City as well, as illustrated by our google map mash up Health Care That Works. This process continues despite the fact that the majority of New Yorkers agree that health care is a human right.

• Feministing has blogged about a recent Kansas City ruling on women's access to contraception, in a lawsuit in which women had alleged discrimination because AT&T refused to provide health insurance coverage for birth control for female employees. The appellate court ruled that "contraception was not 'related to' pregnancy for purposes of the law" and therefore AT&T's actions did not comprise discrimination.

• The Sentencing Law and Policy blog has featured an innovative new website created by the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition ("CCJRC").  The site includes a Drug War Clock depicting the millions of dollars spent yearly on the war on drugs, the Think Outside the Cage blog, and a series of devastating statistics on modern mass incarceration such as "65% of women in prison are mothers of children under 18 years old."

• The Facing South blog has posted about the recent introduction of the Gulf Civil Works bill in Congress, legislation aimed at addressing the problem that "there are still about 100,000 fewer jobs in the Gulf than there was pre-Katrina." In the spirit of the New Deal construction works, the program would create these jobs working on much-needed public infrastructure projects. According to Stephen Bradberry, head state organizer of ACORN Louisiana, the region’s largest association of low and middle income families,

“Communities across the Gulf Coast suffer from crumbling roads and water systems, ill constructed flood protection, and closed police stations, fire house, schools and hospitals...We have an opportunity to jumpstart the recovery by empowering communities with the resources they need to lead.”

• Finally, Ezra Klein has written an insightful piece on Affluence vs. Security.  Discussing whether or not American living standards are getting better or worse, Klein says:

"I haven't quite worked this theory out yet, but my sense is that economic status has been cleaved free of economic security. So the sort of goods that signal affluence -- iPods and iPhones and laptop computers and plasma televisions -- are becoming much cheaper, more broadly accessible, and thus more widely owned. Lots of people, particularly young people, can thus claim economic status. The trappings of our wealth are all around us.

Yet economic security is quite a bit further from reach. It's impossible for me to imagine how I'll ever buy a home. Further education for me and eventual education for my kids are far beyond what my salary seems able to bear. And let's not get into health care. Point being: The affluence I can easily purchase into my 20s seems liable to crash right into the security I discover is out of reach in my 30s.

Meanwhile, from where I sit, the American Dream is a pretty weak force. White picket fences aren't the culturally transmitted vision of prosperity. Electronics are. Awesome stuff is. We're seeking goods, not security. And we can buy goods. Which makes us feel prosperous. And if you feel prosperous, if you consider yourself affluent, you can't merge that self-conception with economic insecurity, and thus it's hard to consider yourself part of a coalition in need of economic reform, or more advantageous public policy. By offering status without security, folks lose the class discontent that would turn them into a constituency for the security. And so they don't get it."

Do we agree that true economic security remains elusive for our younger generations? What can we do to bolster the American Dream, to promote policies that will create opportunities and stability for everyone in America?

Human Rights and New Media in America

• The ImmigrationProf Blog has written a post featuring the new Guantánamo Testimonials Project, a project of the University of California, Davis Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas (CSHRA). The goal of the project is to collect and make available testimonies of detainees' experiences at Guantánamo and includes statements by "prisoners, FBI Agents, interrogators, prosecution and defense lawyers, military physicians, a chaplain, a marine, a CIA asset, and others. "

• Yesterday saw an article in The Huffington Post entitled Dangerous Toys are a Human Rights Issue.  Author David Nassar discusses the connections between this controversial issue and a lack of protections for workers:

"These dangerous toys aren't putting just our children at risk: they also endanger the lives of the factory workers who make them.

The same forces that make manufacturers cut corners on paint and plastic also make manufacturers cut corners on labor costs. Working long hours in appalling conditions - often with toxic chemicals and no protection - laborers in China bear the true cost of America's low price toys. Stores like Wal-Mart demand bottom dollar costs, but the costs come back not only to us and our children, but to entire communities overseas. Today's news stories regarding children making clothing for the Gap, Inc. in India's factories are another harsh reminder of that truth.

Last week's Congressional hearing on toy safety and working conditions in China's factories highlighted the fact that without ensuring the safety of employees in supplier factories, it is challenging at best to ensure the safety of the products that come out of those factories and ultimately the safety of our children."

• Regarding education policy, the last few days have seen discussion of high schools functioning as 'dropout factories' (with one in ten American high schools seeing less than 60% of their original class finishing school) and the importance of the federal Head Start preschool program in increasing graduation rates (while also cutting crime rates). Others have discussed new legislation to help control college costs for American youth, while high-achieving immigrants in favor of the DREAM Act have expressed worries such as "I always worried that immigration (officers) would come if I didn't excel." It is important to continue these dialogues concerning the human rights issues of where we as a nation can do better in ensuring that our young people have the opportunities they need to achieve their full potential.


• Finally, the DMI Blog has posted on an innovative new media project of the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy, their just-launched website TheMiddleClass.org. The website is meant to function as "a dynamic site that will update throughout the year as members of Congress vote on legislation of significance to the current and aspiring middle class." Speaking of its democratizing role of holding politicians accountable to the voice of their constituents by reporting on legislation in an interactive fashion, the site says:

"For each bill, we begin with a brief description of the legislation, information about its status in the legislative process, and an analysis of its impact on the middle class. But themiddleclass.org also provides more extensive context: you’ll find informative online video about each piece of legislation, quotations from experts speaking out on the issue, and hard-hitting numbers from DMI’s Injustice Index. We look beyond the bill to what more could be done to address the issues as stake. And we provide links to further resources.

We also provide information on how each member of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives voted on the legislation. You can look at how every member voted on a particular bill, or how your own representative voted. You can search for legislation by issue area or keyword and look for legislators by name, state, or entering your zip code. And you can check out the grades we assign each member of Congress based on their votes."

DREAM Act Vote Today in Senate

• The DREAM Act legislation which would provide undocumented students the means to stay in the country legally if they attend college or join the military is up for a vote today in the Senate. The Border Line reports that it remains unclear if enough Senators will come out in support of the bill, measure which would provide many students who arrived in the US legally as young children with access to federal funding for continue their education in hope of giving back to their communities.


• As the wildfires continue to rage in Southern California, Immigration News Daily has posted that about fifty undocumented immigrants have turned themselves into border patrol agents out of fear for their safety. Various bloggers such as Prometheus 6 are starting to draw comparisons between the immense devastation of the wildfires and that of Hurricane Katrina, and how the socio-economic status of the displaced populations has affected the care and attention each received.


• RaceWire has done a piece about Blackwater's new bid to get involved with security on the US-Mexico border.  Author Seth Wessler explains how problematic this situation would be, despite apparent bipartisan support in Congress:

"Given Blackwater’s 'shoot first' policy, enacted with bloody clarity in Iraq and on the streets of New Orleans after Katrina, the plans to expand to the border region do not bode well. With vigilante groups like the Minutemen already taking their racist, nationalist stance to the front lines, guns in hand, the addition of Blackwater to the scene would only mean more dead immigrants with less accountability.

In a political climate where the rhetoric on immigration employs the lexicon of war, the possibility of Blackwater’s entry into the border security scene seems to fit the frame. As if it were not enough that the United States is building a wall along the border and the the total number of deportations has increased by over 400% in the past ten years, the border itself may be handed over to private firms whose interests could not be less in line with the common good."

• The Unapologetic Mexican has joined the ranks of those reporting on a coalition of major newspapers and television networks who are petitioning to gain access to Jena Six member Mychal Bell's sealed criminal trial.  Bell's lawyer seems to agree that the media presence may help temper further questionable rulings by District Attorney Reed Walters, and that the case has been publicized enough to date that Americans have a right to know what is going on.
  


• The Republic of T is spreading the news about the just-announced date of next July's 'Blogging While Brown' conference.  In a blogosphere in which people of color remain the minority, it is tremendously important for bloggers of color to organize themselves in order to maximize potential to publicize issues of import such as the Jena Six case.


• Feministing posts that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg spoke this past weekend about the Roe v. Wade abortion ruling, about how she doesn't forsee the ruling being overturned in the next few years.  She added, however, that if it were overturned, abortion would always be available to 'women of means' who could afford to travel to other states, but "would have a devastating impact on poor women."