“He owned the gun legally and had a concealed carry permit.”

That matters?

In an otherwise neutral and informative article, this reads like a bit of legal fetishism. Another human being is dead, oh so needlessly and pointlessly, thanks to a moment of lethally armed anger in a convenience store parking lot in Clearwater, Florida last month. But the killer’s weapon was bureaucratically correct: clean as a whistle.

This is more than merely irrelevant. There’s something wrong here that our legal system is, apparently, incapable of addressing.

An issue might be burning through the community. Friends and colleagues might always be talking about a nagging issue. A problem or grievance that might have seemed personal turns out to be shared by many who want a vehicle to demand justice and win change. Whatever triggers the drive to build an organization dedicated to building power and achieving change, if is worth doing, it is important to keep alive, and that means that sustainability always matters.

Sustainability in organizing is a euphemism for self-sufficiency. Self-sufficiency requires organizational control of financing.

There are two sources of organizational funding. One is external funding and the other is internal financing. Sustainability privileges either source if it is driven and determined by the organization itself.

Privatized detention and incarceration centers are hell on earth--and they are big business for private companies. Ending private detention is a way to start ending detention - period.

Between 2014 and 2018, the Office of Refugee Resettlement paid private companies $3.4 billion to house migrant children. Further, 44 percent of those companies face serious, well documented reports and allegations of child maltreatment.

In these centers children suffer from:

• Forced administration of psychotropic drugs
• Jail-like conditions with armed officers
• Physical abuse, sexual abuse and even death

Sign this petition to demand Congress end privatizing detention and incarceration now!

“I survived because I was walking to a building that was behind a small hill that faced downtown. I was standing in such a way that the building was to my right and the stone garden was to my left. It was my daughter’s wedding day and I was pushing the wedding dresses in a wheelbarrow to the wedding hall. All of a sudden, for no obvious reason, I was just knocked to the ground. I never heard the bomb. . . I was about to get up when suddenly wood and debris fell from the sky and hit me on the head and back, so I stayed on the ground. . . . I couldn’t even hear the wood falling. . . . When I did start to hear, it was an odd sound. I ran to a hill area where I could look down to the city. I couldn’t believe my eyes. The whole city of Hiroshima was gone. And the noise I heard — it was people. They were moaning and walking like zombies with their arms and hands stretched out in front of them and their skin was hanging off their bones.”

BANGKOK, Thailand -- A defrocked Buddhist monk, extradited from the U.S., received a 114-year prison sentence for fraud and money laundering while police raided some of Thailand's most important Buddhist temples, jailing monks and officials allegedly involved in a separate case of money laundering and kickbacks totaling $10 million.

Investigators are now hunting suspects in that $10 million case who reportedly fled to the U.S., England, Germany and elsewhere.

"This is the purge of a lifetime. Never have there been such high-profile arrests and so many prominent monks falling from grace," said Yale-educated constitutional law scholar Khemthong Tonsakulrungruang.