Seven years ago, when I told my mom I wanted to make a film to help end America’s War on Drugs, she asked me, with a look of some concern, whether I was ever going to make a feel good film.
In announcing new emissions standards of U.S. power plants on Monday, many of the nation’s largest green groups are championing the Obama administration’s new EPA regulations as the strongest proposals ever put forth by a U.S. president in the fight to rein in greenhouse gases or mitigate against climate change.
Over the last four decades, the United States has undertaken a national project of over criminalization that has put more than two million people behind bars at any given time, and brought the U.S. incarceration rate far beyond that of any other nation in the world.
Ta-Nehisi Coates’ brilliant essay, “The Case for Reparations,” recounts centuries of ongoing and persistent racism in America. The sprawling article incorporates slavery, Jim Crow laws, sharecropper abuse, lynching, and many other forms of oppression. But Coates in large part illustrates formal racism by looking at housing policy, specifically in the Chicago neighborhood of Lawndale in the 1960s.
There was no surprise that in between U.C. Santa Barbara’s mass murderer Elliot Rodger’s warped, sick, and perverse harangues against women, he also laced in a generous dose of racist rage and stereotyping.
For more than a decade, researchers across multiple disciplines have been issuing reports on the widespread societal and economic damage caused by America’s now-40-year experiment in locking up vast numbers of its citizens.
On Saturday, May 10, the third annual “National Dignity March” converged in Mexico City, with hundreds of marchers having walked for a full month from cities and towns all over Mexico.
The standard debate about marijuana legalization has been “Should we, or shouldn’t we?” For better and for worse, the country appears to be moving toward answering that question in the affirmative.