As 2012 comes to an end I would like to take time to enumerate a few accomplishments of the American people towards creating a more perfect nation that you may have missed. These positives provide us with hope but not with wishful idealism. These positives illustrate to the American people that we are capable of making changes through strong, individual voices and direct action by the masses.

Corruption:

In a small step towards government reform, Former Governor of Illinois, Blagojevich gets sentenced to 14 years in prison for corruption charges. 

After JP Morgan reveals a 2 billion dollar training loss on May 10th, 2012, U.S. regulators begin investigating trades and the corporate decision making process while affirming the Volcker Rule, which puts limits on a bank’s ability to invest on themselves.

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The Stand Your Ground law is most widely associated with the Feb. 26 shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed 17-year-old killed in Florida by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch captain who claimed he was acting in self-defense.

But as a recent Tampa Bay Times investigation indicates, the Martin incident is far from the only example of the law’s reach in Florida. The paper identified instances since 2005 where the state’s Stand Your Ground law has played a factor in prosecutors’ decisions, jury acquittals or a judge’s call to throw out the charges. (Not all the cases involved killings. Some involved assaults where the person didn’t die.)

The law removes a person’s duty to retreat before using deadly force against another in any place he has the legal right to be – so long as he reasonably believed he or someone else faced imminent death or great bodily harm. Among the Stand Your Ground cases identified by the paper, defendants went free nearly 70 percent of the time.

Although Florida was the first to enact a Stand Your Ground law, 24 other states enforce similar versions. Using the Tampa Bay findings and others, we’ve highlighted some of the most notable cases where a version of the Stand Your Ground law has led to freedom from criminal ...

On May 29, The New York Times published an extraordinarily in-depth look at the intimate role President Obama has played in authorizing US drone attacks overseas, particularly in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. It is chilling to read the cold, macabre ease with which the President and his staff decide who will live or die. The fate of people living thousands of miles away is decided by a group of Americans, elected and unelected, who don’t speak their language, don’t know their culture, don’t understand their motives or values. While purporting to represent the world’s greatest democracy, US leaders are putting people on a hit list who are as young as 17, people who are given no chance to surrender, and certainly no chance to be tried in a court of law.

Who is furnishing the President and his aides with this list of terrorist suspects to choose from, like baseball cards? The kind of intelligence used to put people on drone hit lists is the same kind of intelligence that put people in Guantanamo. Remember how the American public was assured that the prisoners locked up in Guantanamo were the “worst of the worst,” only to find out that hundreds were innocent people who had been sold to the US military by bounty hunters?

Why should the public believe what the Obama administration says about the people being assassinated by drones? Especially since, as we learn in the New York Times, the administration came up with a semantic solution to keep the civilian death toll to a minimum: simply count all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants. The rationale, reminiscent of George Zimmerman’s justification for shooting Trayvon Martin, is that “people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good.” Talk about profiling! At least when George Bush threw suspected militants into Guantanamo their ...

In the last two months, sixteen companies and other institutional supporters of the American Legislative Exchange Council announced that they would part ways with the organization — likely costing the conservative group hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual funding. Similarly, several dozen lawmakers broke ties with ALEC due to a progressive campaign highlighting the organization’s harmful impact on state lawmaking. ALEC drafts and promotes “model” conservative legislation, including bills disenfranchising, and the so-called “stand your ground” laws that may shield Trayvon Martin’s killer George Zimmerman from justice.

Today, eleven more state lawmakers announced that they would no longer associate with ALEC. According to an email from the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, the ex-ALEC lawmakers are:

• 8 Pennsylvania legislators (Sen. Lisa Boscola, Sen. Leanna Washington, Sen. Anthony Williams, Rep. Nick Kotik, Rep. Ted Harhai, Rep. William Keller, Rep. Joseph Markosek, Rep. Joseph Petrarca)
• 2 Illinois legislators (Rep. Mary Flowers, Rep. Brendan Phelps)
• 1 Iowa legislator (Rep. Brian Quirk)

All eleven of these lawmakers are Democrats. In total, 39 Democratic lawmakers have dropped ALEC.

The campaign against ALEC already pressured the conservative group to eliminate its Public Safety and Elections task force, which was ...

What do you call a law that allows a person to shoot and kill another human being when they could otherwise walk away safely?

I can only call it immoral.

With George Zimmerman soon headed to a pre-trial hearing to evaluate whether he will be protected by the “Stand Your Ground” law in Florida, it is important to understand exactly how the law has made permissible the use of lethal force and legalized acts of murder that previously never would have been deemed “justifiable homicides.”

In the wake of Zimmerman’s slaying of unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin, I have frequently heard people claim, “The ‘Stand Your Ground’ law does not allow you follow someone!” Often, the people claiming this are the ones responsible for the law, like the bill’s sponsor, Florida House Representative Dennis Baxley and former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, who signed it into law.

But, of course, Zimmerman had been carrying a gun and following — some would say stalking — young black men in his community for months before he ever encountered Trayvon Martin. He even notified police when he did so. More important, however, is the fact that Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law removes an individual’s duty to retreat from a conflict in public even ...

As the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) works to distance itself from the NRA-bill it backed as a “model” adopted in dozens of states, it may be hoping that people will not continue to dig into the damage done by its long love affair with gun groups, like the gun-industry funded NRA and fringe groups with ties to white supremacists like Gun Owners of America (GOA).

GOA’s Executive Director is Larry Pratt. In the early 1980s, Pratt and the GOA were outspoken supporters of the white rulers in South Africa during apartheid, calling a press conference in 1984 to present “evidence” that allegedly tied Bishop Desmond Tutu to an effort to violently overthrow the white minority regime in the country. In 1990, Pratt wrote a book titled “Armed People Victorious” based on his study of death squads in Guatemala and the Philippines, and advocated for similar “citizen defense patrols” in the United States. The idea reportedly caught on in 1992, when Pratt addressed a three-day meeting of neo-Nazis and Christian Adherents organized by white supremacist Pete Peters. He shared the stage with a former Ku Klux Klan leader and an Aryan Nation official.

Pratt also held leadership roles in ALEC for many years. His relationship with ALEC began in 1978, when ALEC began an effort to oppose a constitutional amendment giving the District of Columbia full voting rights in Congress. When Pratt was elected to the Virginia State Legislature in 1981, he took a leadership position in ALEC. He sat on ALEC’s board even after he left the ...

Yesterday, the candy company Mars, Inc. and the Arizona Public Service Company (Arizona’s largest electric utility) became the latest in a group of high-profile companies to part ways with the American Legislative Exchange Council. They join Kraft, Wendy’s, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Intuit, and the Gates Foundation.

ALEC, as the group is better known, describes itself as “a constructive forum for state legislators and private sector leaders to discuss and exchange practical, state-level public policy issues.”  READ FULL POST 18 COMMENTS

45 days after shooting unarmed high school junior Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman is now behind bars and faces the possibility of life in prison. He went free from arrest after shooting Martin in Florida and many rallies about this incident have occurred since. Rev. Jesse Jackson believes that the mobilizing shouldn't end. He goes to say "We must revive the ban on assault weapons and stop these attacks.”

Software company Intuit, the makers of programs such as Turbo Tax and Quicken, announced today that they will join Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Kraft as the fourth company to end their partnership with the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council this week.

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The call to action in rallies across the country following Trayvon Martin’s death is a wake-up call for our country to confront racial profiling in our communities. Racial profiling may have killed Trayvon Martin, but it is the so-called prosecutorial discretion that allowed, and may still allow, his killer to escape justice.

It must be pointed out that his killer, George Zimmerman, has until now not been charged with murder because of Florida’s Stand Your Ground self-defense law that allows people who feel threatened to use deadly force in self-defense and says they have no duty to retreat. The law has been at the center of the Feb. 26 shooting of Martin.

As the tragedy of his death calls the country to examine the racial inequities of the criminal justice system, it must go beyond our common, and justified, focus on the racist zealots or inept police officers. It has to go where the real power lies – with the prosecutors – the ones who control the levers of the system in counties and states across the country. In Martin’s case, it was prosecutor Norm Wolfinger who allowed his killer to walk free. It is Wolfinger’s face that should be on signs, posted next to George Zimmerman in news articles, whose name should be woven into chants for justice.

And just as Zimmerman – a racist with a gun – represents a real threat to America, so too does Wolfinger – a prosecutor who’s given the completely subjective discretion to deliver or deny justice without any explanation or measure of accountability to the public.

The term “prosecutorial discretion” has the ring of legal jargon that would only be used by lawyers and judges, but it is a power that extends out of the courthouse and into the streets. As such, it needs to be worked into the vernacular of any civil rights movement that is hoping to bring justice to the Trayvon Martins of ...

The name in the headlines this month is George Zimmerman, shooter of Trayvon Martin. But another Zimmerman named the phenomenon we're witnessing almost fifty years ago, when he described the unnamed gunman who shot civil rights leader Medgar Evers:

The deputy sheriffs, the soldiers, the governors get paid
And the marshals and cops get the same
But the poor white man's used in the hands of them all like a tool
He's taught in his school ...
That the laws are with him, to protect his white skin
To keep up his hate, so he never thinks straight
'Bout the shape that he's in, but it ain't him to blame
He's only a pawn in their game.

We can engage in quasi-theological debates about whether the half-Caucasian, half-Hispanic George Zimmerman is 'white' - but he's certainly been taught to fear and hate the Other, the dark-skinned and hooded menace to his well-watched neighborhood. Bob Dylan (original name: Bobby Zimmerman) found the right phrase to describe shooters like George Zimmerman: 'only a pawn in their game.'

Whose game? As it turns out, the 'Stand Your Ground' laws used to protect shooters like Zimmerman were written and promoted by ALEC - the American Legislative Exchange Council. As the Center for Media and Democracy notes, the corporate-funded right wing group behind Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's attack on worker rights is the same group that has promoted 'Stand Your Ground' laws all around the country.

You could put a thousand people on Neighborhood Watch and they'd never see the real threats to Zimmerman's community. Those threats can't be seen with the eye. The real threats are things like joblessness, financial insecurity, hunger, and lack of medical care. They're ...

Like most things that happen in America these days, the Trayvon Martin case is turning into yet another hearse trundling the Republican Party to its doom in November.

Here's a brief outline of the facts. It's Feb. 26. Trayvon Martin is a 17-year-old black kid watching a big basketball game in the home of his father's fiancée in Sanford, a small-town outlier of Orlando, Fla. Sanford has a population of 55,000, about a third black. The fiancée lives in a mixed-race, gated community. At halftime Martin goes to the corner store and buys an iced tea and a bag of Skittles.

It's raining, and Martin has his hood up over his head and is talking to his girlfriend on his cellphone. On his way back, he is spotted by 28-year-old George Zimmerman, a cop wannabe, self-appointed neighborhood crime watcher. Apparently, he has pestered the police station for months with reports of "suspicious 12-year-olds" walking through the neighborhood. Zimmerman — white dad, Latina mother — is wearing a red jacket and blue jeans. In his pocket is a Kel-Tec 9 mm automatic pistol.

Zimmerman calls the local station and says he's following a suspicious character. He describes Martin as black and says he's acting strangely and could be on drugs. The teenager starts to run, Zimmerman says. A 911 dispatcher asks Zimmerman whether he's following Martin, and Zimmerman says he is. The dispatcher says clearly that Zimmerman doesn't need to do that.

There's a lull in the transmission, and you can hear Zimmerman mutter clearly to himself, "These assholes, they always get away." On the call between Zimmerman and the 911 dispatcher, he also says "fucking coons." CNN says the words are indistinct, which they aren't. CNN also says the case is "complicated," which it isn't.

Later, the Martin family lawyer relays Trayvon's girlfriend's account of her last call with him. She ...

I was George Zimmerman. I can speak from personal experience and tell you why he needs to be charged for the murder of Trayvon Martin.

Last year I was living in central Florida, just 30 minutes from where Trayvon’s lifeless body was found soaking in the rain. My neighborhood had been on high alert because of a series of burglaries. My wife and I had tools stolen from our backyard and the security of my family weighed heavy on me. I owned a Bushmaster AR-15 variant, which is a semi-automatic assault rifle, and I was fully prepared to use it if needed. I was aware of Florida’s stand your ground law and took comfort knowing that I had the right to defend myself if threatened with physical danger.

Over the next week there were more crimes. Our alarms were triggered and I took my gun out of the house and into the yard looking for who did it. I didn’t find anything except a ripped t-shirt. Over those two weeks I called in a few police reports and we heard a few other alarms going off. Police were cruising our neighborhood more often. We felt unsafe. That heightened level of fear makes you begin to look at everyone with suspicion. It’s a situation I don’t wish on anyone.

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Although I have resided in New York City for many years, I was born in the Deep South. On a daily basis, I negotiate Manhattan's gridded streets and avenues, yet, in many ways, the terrain of my heart still winds like an Indian trail through a pine forest. I visit the south on a regular basis; the stain of red clay will never be scoured from my soul.

To this day, I retain close ties to a number of southern friends and contacts who did not ventured far from home.  As the years trundled on, I've witnessed the quality of life and emotional wellbeing of these friends, hailing from both laboring and middle class origins, experience a steep, accelerating decline.

I've gazed upon the tormented faces of men I know, now deep in middle age, who are facing the prospect of never again holding a steady job that affords them a sense of dignity. As a consequence, all too many of these men -- men who I thought I knew well -- have been rendered sullen, spiteful, and, much to my heart's duress, an unreachable shell of their former self.  

As their economic prospects diminished, their denial and displaced rage grew malignant. In the case of a couple of my friends, their resistance to reality became so vast, toxic, and all-encompassing that any attempt at dialog proved prohibitive. 

Emblematic of this situation is my strained to the limit friendship with Vince (not his real name) who, due to the carnage inflicted on the U.S. laboring class by so-called free market "values", has been chronically under or unemployed since the Wall Street bankster-perpetrated crash of late 2008. Yet Vince remains stubborn in his refusal to connect his dismal plight with the reality-resistant political notions he clutches. To this day, he describes himself as a "conservative libertarian -- a proud believer in the values of the free market"…This conviction, ...

In 2004, the National Rifle Association honored Republican Florida state legislator Dennis Baxley with a plum endorsement: Its Defender of Freedom award.

The following year, Baxley, a state representative, worked closely with the NRA to push through Florida’s unprecedented “stand your ground” law, which allows citizens to use deadly force if they “reasonably believe” their safety is threatened in a public setting, like a park or a street.

People would no longer be restrained by a “duty to retreat” from a threat while out in public, and would be free from prosecution or civil liability if they acted in self-defense.

Florida’s law is now under a cloud as a result of the controversial February shooting of Trayvon Martin, 17, in Sanford, Fla. The 28-year-old shooter, George Zimmerman, who was licensed to carry a gun — and once had a brush — claims he acted in self-defense after a confrontation with Martin, and some legal experts say Florida’s law could protect Zimmerman, who has not been charged. The case has inflamed passions nationwide in part because Zimmerman is Hispanic and Martin was African-American. Baxley, whose state party has benefited from large NRA donations, contends his law shouldn’t shield Zimmerman at all because he pursued Martin.

The NRA has been curiously quiet on the matter since the shooting as the nation takes stock — in light of the Martin case and other similar examples — of whether “stand-your-ground” laws are more dangerous than useful to enhance public safety. The gun-rights organization did not respond to requests for comment. But the group’s silence contrasts sharply with its history of unabashed activism on stand-your-ground legislation. Since the Florida measure passed, the NRA has flexed its considerable muscle and played a crucial role in the passage of more than 20 similar laws ...

On an August morning in 1955, a 14-year-old Chicago student, visiting relatives in Mississippi, stopped in a small-town grocery store with a group of friends.  While there, the visitor from Chicago was said to have whistled at the white woman working behind the counter, a profoundly dangerous thing to do in the world of Jim Crow America.

Within a few days, the woman’s husband and his brother came to the home where the young boy was visiting.  They transported him to a barn, beat him, and gouged out one of his eyes only to shoot him through the head and dispose of his body in a river, weighing it down with a 70-pound cotton gin fan.

Days later, his body was found, dragged from the river and returned to his mother in Chicago.  She insisted that his body be shown publicly in the casket to demonstrate to the world the brutality and senselessness of the killing.  It was a murder that riveted the nation and showcased to the world the horror of the ruthless violence that befalls African-American youth.

That 14-year-old’s name was Emmett Till.  Trayvon Martin is the Emmett Till of this generation.

The death of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old cheerful high school senior, is a crime so horrifying that it has galvanized, if belatedly, the attention of the entire country.

By now, his story is well known.  The young man was walking through a gated community in a suburb of Orlando when a neighborhood watch captain, George Zimmerman, approached him.  Zimmerman called police saying that the young man looked suspicious and that he was Black.

The police told Zimmerman not to follow the young man, explaining that they were on their way.  Nonetheless, Zimmerman approached Martin.  There are 911 calls that carry the young man’s chilling and heartbreaking cries for help, followed by a gunshot.

Zimmerman said he shot the young ...

“Stand Your Ground,” “Shoot First," “Make My Day” — state laws asserting an expansive right to self-defense — have come into focus after last month’s killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.

While local prosecutors have not arrested the shooter, George Zimmerman, the case is now being investigated by the Department of Justice and a Florida state attorney. It’s not clear whether Florida’s self-defense law will be applied in the case. (The police report on the shooting refers to it as an “unnecessary killing to prevent unlawful act.”)

Still, in not arresting Zimmerman, local officials have pointed to Florida’s wide definition of self-defense. In 2005, Florida became the first state to explicitly expand a person’s right to use deadly force for self-defense. Deadly force is justified if a person is gravely threatened, in the home or “any other place where he or she has a right to be.”

In Florida, once self-defense is invoked, the burden is on the prosecution to disprove the claim.

Most states have long allowed the use of reasonable force, sometimes including deadly force, to protect oneself inside one’s home — the so-called Castle Doctrine. Outside the home, people generally still have a “duty to retreat” from an attacker, if possible, to avoid confrontation. In other words, if you can get away and you shoot anyway, you can be prosecuted. In Florida, there is no duty to retreat. You can “stand your ground” outside your home, too.

Florida is not alone. Twenty-three other states now allow people to stand their ground. Most of these laws were passed after Florida’s. (A few states never had a duty to retreat to begin with.)

Here’s a rundown of the states with laws mirroring the one in Florida, where ...

On the rainy night of Sunday, Feb. 26, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin walked to a convenience store in Sanford, Fla. On his way home, with his Skittles and iced tea, the African-American teenager was shot and killed. The gunman, George Zimmerman, didn’t run. He claimed that he killed the young man in self-defense. The Sanford Police agreed and let him go. Since then, witnesses have come forward, 911 emergency calls have been released, and outrage over the killing has gone global.

Trayvon Martin lived in Miami. He was visiting his father in Sanford, near Orlando, staying in the gated community known as The Retreat at Twin Lakes, where Zimmerman volunteered with the Neighborhood Watch program. The Miami Herald reported that Zimmerman was a “habitual caller” to the police, making 46 calls since January 2011. He was out on his rounds as a self-appointed watchman, packing his concealed 9 mm pistol, when he called 911: “We’ve had some break-ins in my neighborhood, and there’s a real suspicious guy ... this guy looks like he’s up to no good, or he’s on drugs or something.”

Later in the call, Zimmerman exclaims, “OK. These a—holes always get away. ... [Expletive], he’s running.”

Sounds of Zimmerman moving follow, along with a controversial utterance from Zimmerman, under his breath, considered by many to be “[Expletive] coons.” The sound of his running prompted the 911 operator to ask, “Are you following him?” Zimmerman replied, “Yeah,” to which the dispatcher said, “OK, we don’t need you to do that.”

One of the attorneys representing the Martin family, Jasmine Rand, told me: “The term ‘coon’ on the audiotape ... is a very obvious racial slur against ...