Raising Cain...

Janell Ross: Michigan Welfare Cuts Forcing People Back To Work Or Straining Safety Net?

Last week, while working on a documentary about hunger in Michigan, Russ Russell had an experience that left him speechless.

“I was visiting with this family and one of the little boys said he wasn’t going to eat,” said Russell, development director for Forgotten Harvest, a Detroit-based nonprofit that rescues and redistributes fresh food. “He said, ‘Oh, I’m not eating dinner because it’s my brother’s turn tonight. Tomorrow is my night.’”

via www.huffingtonpost.com

Rutherford sheriff hires mosque foe to train deputies | The Tennessean

If I wanted to get to know more a about a group of people different from me, common sense tells me to ask somebody from that group to teach me...and certainly not to find somebody outside of that group who already fears or hates the group I want to know more about. The group and trainer mentioned below have already been exposed for their warped view on Muslims.

A former FBI agent who claims Nashville’s mosques have no legal right to exist is training the Rutherford County Sheriff’s Office about Islam and the threats of terrorism.

John Guandolo, vice president of the Arlington, Va.-based Strategic Engagement Group, is leading training being held at World Outreach Church in Murfreesboro. He spoke at an anti-Shariah law event at Cornerstone Church in Madison on Nov. 11, calling local mosques front organizations for the Muslim Brotherhood with no right to exist.

“They do not have a First Amendment right to do anything,” Guandolo said then.

Rutherford Sheriff Robert Arnold said his department simply wants to learn about Muslim culture.

via www.tennessean.com

Push To Privatize US Prisons Lurks in Corporate Investment Scheme | Common Dreams

I smell a very big rat in this scheme...

As state governments wrestle with massive budget shortfalls, a Wall Street giant is offering a solution: cash in exchange for state property. Prisons, to be exact.

Corrections Corporation of America, the nation's largest operator of for-profit prisons, has sent letters recently to 48 states offering to buy up their prisons as a remedy for "challenging corrections budgets." In exchange, the company is asking for a 20-year management contract, plus an assurance that the prison would remain at least 90 percent full, according to a copy of the letter obtained by The Huffington Post.

via www.commondreams.org

Book Burning in Arizona: Disposable Knowledge and Disposable Bodies / Henry Giroux

Every once in a while, events flash before us that might, at first, seem trivial or commonplace given how in tune they are with the political and ideological temper of the times, but, in reality, they sometimes contain a hidden order of politics and flight from social and moral responsibility that convey a frightening truth about the dark authoritarian forces driving American society. Such forces are often associated with a passion against equality, driven by an appeal to nationalism and defended as an act of patriotism.  In actuality, the willingness to defend persistent and deeply rooted forms of racial, economic and social inequality is often driven by a fear of those deemed "other," whose presence, voices and ideas defy the crippling registers of intellectual conformity and forms of knowledge that merely reinforce "common sense," the status quo and right-wing populism.

via www.truth-out.org