About: Sherwood Ross

Email : sherwoodross10@gmail.com

Sherwood Ross worked as an executive for a national civil rights organization, as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News and as a columnist for several wire services. Reach him at sherwoodross10@gmail.com

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Minorities Giving up Affirmative Action Have Right to a Level Playing Field

Minorities increasingly are going to have to push harder for their own advancement without affirmative action, says the cofounder of a law school purposefully dedicated to the education of minority, immigrant, and low-income students.

African-Americans Have 7 Times Greater Chance of Imprisonment

ShareMany factors contribute to the incarceration today of more blacks than whites even though blacks make up just 13 percent of the U.S. population.
These factors go beyond the higher poverty and unemployment rates among black youth and include the higher arrest rate of blacks, judicial and prosecutorial discretion, better deals in plea bargaining for whites, [...]

Ms. Clinton Says Iran Headed For Military Dictatorship

Well may Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warn students in Qatar that “Iran is moving toward a military dictatorship.” She is, after all, an authority on the subject, representing a country where the Pentagon has long been ascendant. Her comment was followed up by Robert Gibbs, President Obama’s press secretary, who, at a February 16th news conference refused to deny the possibility of the U.S. taking military action against Iran, stating, “I wouldn’t rule out anything.”

SEC Repeatedly Turned a Blind Eye to Valid Complaints of Madoff Fraud

The SEC’s own Inspector General(OIG) has found that between 1992 and 2008 the SEC received six substantive complaints about fraudster Bernie Madoff’s hedge fund operations yet never conducted a thorough and competent examination of them. The SEC conducted two investigations and three examinations based on credible complaints about Madoff’s operations but never verified Madoff’s trading or conducted a Ponzi scheme probe.

Employers Take a Beating by Laying Off Employees

It’s not only employees who suffer when they get laid off but the firms responsible for handing them the pink slips can take a beating, too.
As millions of Americans have been fired by employers struggling to remain profitable, we have all borne witness to Corporate America’s calloused disregard of its workers. Now, canny business economists claim the layoffs have hurt employers, too.

US Says It Has Right To Kill American Terror Suspects Abroad Without Trial

Ben Wizner, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project, said, ”It is alarming to hear that the Obama administration is asserting that the president can authorize the assassination of Americans abroad, even if they are far from any battlefield and may have never taken up arms against the U.S., but have only been deemed to constitute an unspecified ‘threat.’”

Cowardly Congress Thinks Backing White House Plays It Safe

While the Constitution’s Article I, Section 8, invests Congress with the power “to declare War,” the law school dean points out this has been largely ignored since President Harry Truman in 1950 “de facto changed the Constitution so that not the Congress, but the President, and he alone, makes the decision on war.”

Not Holding Leaders Responsible For Crimes Only Breeds More War

In Viet Nam, for example, U.S. leaders caused the deaths of thousands of their own men and several million Vietnamese after they already knew they had made probably the worst mistake in American history. Velvel writes, “Our top military men create(d) free fire zones where civilians are killed on sight, and bomb and defoliate to the nth degree.” In Iraq, our leaders unleashed “a horrendous reign of terror from the skies, create a thus far thoroughly destabilized post-war society, and then, when all their other myths have shown to be myths, retroactively justify the war by saying that we got rid of an admittedly horrible dictator, his equally horrible sons, and his entirely horrible government.”

Why is America In So Many Wars? Part 1

Since World War Two, an indisputably necessary conflict, Velvel points out the U.S. has fought the Korean War, the Viet Nam War, secret wars in Laos and Cambodia, the First Gulf War, Afghanistan, and the Second Gulf War in Iraq. It has also invaded, bombed or “quarantined” Panama, Grenada, Cuba, Haiti, Somalia, the Sudan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Serbia and Libya, and has “declared” a global war on terrorists.

Obama’s Base Pact With Colombia Accelerates “Dangerous Trend”

The Obama administration’s pact to use seven Colombian military bases accelerates “a dangerous trend in U.S. hemispheric policy,” an article in The Nation magazine warns.
Although much of Latin America is in the vanguard of the “anti-corporate and anti-militarist global democracy movement,” Grandin writes, the Obama administration is “disappointing potential regional allies by continuing to promote a volatile mix of militarism and free-trade orthodoxy in a corridor running from Mexico to Colombia.” Grandin’s article in The Nation’s February 8th issue is titled, “Muscling Latin America.”

American Academics Disappointed with Obama

American academics are expressing disappointment in President Obama’s performance and believe he is headed toward a “mediocre” presidency.
That’s the term liberal historian Howard Zinn of Boston University uses in an article that solicited many viewpoints in the February 1st issue of The Nation magazine.

Panetta Turns Blind Eye To CIA Killings

Panetta admits in his own words, “In the past year we have done exceptionally heavy damage to al Qaeda. That’s why the extremists hit back.” Got that? It is extremism for al Qaeda to hit back but it is not extremism for the CIA to launch its drone aerial rocket strikes against al Qaeda—, strikes that a protesting Pakistan government has urged the U.S. halt as they are killing innocent civilians, in aggregate probably in the hundreds.

Obama Fanning War Flames to Engulf the Middle East

ShareBy Sherwood Ross
As President Obama steps up the war that is inflaming ever wider sectors of the Middle East, USA continues its rapid slide toward Third World status. The two developments are not unrelated. Spending on war does
not boost an economy as does domestic spending—and the Pentagon has been spending trillions on war.
At the start [...]

War Spending Exceeds State Government Outlays

ShareBy Sherwood Ross / Staff Writer
The U.S. spends more for war annually than all state governments combined spend for the health, education, welfare, and safety of 308 million Americans.
Joseph Henchman, director of state projects for the Tax Foundation of Washington, D.C., says the states collected a total of $781 billion in taxes [...]

No Chance Obama's War in Afghanistan Will Succeed

ShareBy Sherwood Ross / Staff Writer
“There isn’t the slightest possibility that the course laid out by Barack Obama in his Dec. 1 speech (at West Point) will halt or even slow the downward spiral toward defeat in Afghanistan,” writes Thomas Johnson in the current “Foreign Policy” magazine. And for emphasis, he adds [...]

Escalating War in Afghanistan Apt to Bring More Economic Woes

ShareBy Sherwood Ross / Staff Writer
If Iraq war spending helped plunge the U.S. economy into its worst slump since the Depression, what does President Obama think his escalation of the Afghan war will do it?
Besides forcing taxpayers to cough up fresh billions to enable the Pentagon to chase down a few [...]

Rename America As "The United States of Goldman, Sachs"

ShareBy Sherwood Ross / Staff Writer
In view of Goldman, Sachs’ pervasive influence over Washington and the bailout that benefitted it so extensively, America’s name should be changed to the “United States of Goldman, Sachs,” a law school dean said.
Since the government bailout that saved GS’s bacon, (and “about $85 billion worth of [...]

Federal Law Shields Jailers From Legal Claims

ShareCountless prisoners are being denied justice under a federal statute whose intent was to reduce frivolous law suits, two prominent legal authorities say.
Law professors Margo Schlanger of Washington University, St. Louis, and Giovanna Shay of Yale indict the federal Prison Litigation Reform Act(PLRA) of 1996 for “undermining the rule of law [...]

Obama Has No Legal Authority For Afghan War

ShareBy Sherwood Ross / Staff Writer
“President Obama’s surge of 21,000 troops now engaged in combat in Afghanistan comes on top of the 60,000 we already had there,” says Francis Boyle, professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law at Champaign.
“The Obama Administration simply ignored Section 4(a)(3) of the [...]

Rapid Increase In Law School Animal Rights Courses Reflects Growing Public Awareness Of This Issue

ShareBy Sherwood Ross / Staff Writer
"While some animal welfare groups have done a good job of raising awareness of the plights of the giant panda and the previously endangered bald eagle, the greatest strides are yet to be made and involve companion animals and their often-abominable treatment in the United States," [...]

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