VAN JONES
National executive director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and executive director of Bay Area Police Watch, Jones said: “We have a great deal of concern about the plans of the LAPD given their long history of unlawful police violence and disregard for civil liberties. Both parties have participated in building up larger and larger and less accountable police forces coast to coast, and it’s not surprising that both parties are now relying on those overgrown police forces to stifle dissent.”
TRACY KATELMAN
Environmental co-chair of the Alliance for Sustainable Jobs and the Environment, Katelman said today: “The administration has convinced most of the public that they are environmentalists, but if you look deeper, you find that their actions are token. The corporations are making money and the environment is losing. In the case of the Headwaters forest, ancient redwoods are still being cut, the marbled murrelet and other species are being driven to extinction, and Charles Hurwitz and his Maxxam corporation are profiting while Clinton-Gore got the green points.”
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REV. WILLIAM CAMPBELL
Co-chair of MAGI (Ministers Against Global Injustice) and pastoral associate at the Second Baptist Church of Los Angeles, Campbell said today: “Both at the global level and at the local level, there’s a propensity to be guided by the corporate interest and being blind to the moral dimensions of economic decisions being made. A just-released report from the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, ‘The Other Los Angeles: The Working Poor in the City of the 21st Century,’ shows that one in four workers are poor. These are people who are working but are still below the poverty level.”
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MICHAEL EVERETT
For 27 years, Everett has been a lighting electrician in the Hollywood film and television industry. He is a spokesperson for the Hollywood Fair Trade Campaign and a labor activist. He said today: “The Hollywood job base has been deteriorating because of NAFTA, many movies are made in Canada because the Canadian dollar is soft and Canadian subsidies are permitted by NAFTA. These subsidies are supposed to go to protect the native Canadian film industry, but instead have been used to raid the U.S. film industry. In 1998, 24,000 jobs were lost to overseas production. There have been downward pressures in wages and conditions for the remaining jobs.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy: Sam Husseini, (415) 552-5378 or cell: (415) 518-3611