3200 prisoners stuck in Ohio prisons with little or no hope of being released, despite being eligible for parole. These prisoners were sentenced to prison prior to the passing of Senate Bill 2 (SB2), which took effect in 1996. According to the law and the practices of the Parole Board before that time, these men and women had a reasonable hope of one day returning to society. Little did these prisoners know what was going to happen.

The death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin one month ago in Sanford, Fl has all the earmarks of the 1964 Mississippi murders of civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner... right down to an inept local police department that, while not involved in the actual crime, as County Sheriff and Deputy Sheriff Lawrence Rainey and Cecil Price respectively had been forty-eight years ago, has failed to effectively investigate and arrest the killer. At best, it's an egregious dereliction of duty, and at worst it's a chilling example of the rampant racism that still exists in America today.

In many regions of the country there's been little material change regarding racial intolerance since Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner were beaten and shot to death. In 2012, despite the presence of Lebron James, DisneyWorld and Northeast retirees, Florida is as much the bigoted deep South as 1964 Mississippi. Which is why both the Martin and Mississippi cases required intervention and investigation from the U.S. Department of Justice. So much for progress.

I think two opposing trends have been at work in U.S. history. One is that of allowing more people to vote. This is an ongoing struggle, of course, but in some significant sense we've allowed poor people and women and non-white people and young people to vote.

The other trend, which has really developed more recently, is that we've made voting less and less meaningful. Of course it was never as meaningful as many people imagine. But we've legalized bribery, we've banished third parties and independents, we've gerrymandered most Congressional districts into meaningless general elections and left one party or the other to exercise great influence over any primary. Rarely does any incumbent lose, and rarely does a candidate without the most money win.

Code Pink announced a new campaign to prevent an attack on Iran, a campaign encouraged by our sisters in Iran and Israel. Since then over 11,000 people have contacted three powerful women—Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice—imploring them to stop an attack on Iran. Will you join the rising chorus for peace?

Nine years ago CODEPINK sisters stood in front of the White House in an act of civil disobedience to try to stop our government from bombing Iraq. None of us could live with ourselves if we sat by and did nothing while a country filled with children was blown to bits using money we needed in the United States to build hospitals, housing and schools. Our government refused to listen, and now we see the tragic costs of that war and the continued war in Afghanistan. Have we learned nothing?

Please join me, Gloria Steinem, and Eve Ensler in calling for peace with Iran. Sign this petition today. Share it with your friends. Tweet it. Post it to your facebook. And consider making a donation to help this message get out farther.

Yours,

When I lived in New York 20 years ago, the United States was beginning a 20-year war on Iraq. We protested at the United Nations. The Miami Herald depicted Saddam Hussein as a giant fanged spider attacking the United States. Hussein was frequently compared to Adolf Hitler.

On October 9, 1990, a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl told a U.S. congressional committee that she’d seen Iraqi soldiers take 15 babies out of an incubator in a Kuwaiti hospital and leave them on the cold floor to die. Some congress members, including the late Tom Lantos (D., Calif.), knew but did not tell the U.S. public that the girl was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States, that she’d been coached by a major U.S. public relations company paid by the Kuwaiti government, and that there was no other evidence for the story. President George H. W. Bush used the dead babies story 10 times in the next 40 days, and seven senators used it in the Senate debate on whether to approve military action. The Kuwaiti disinformation campaign for the Gulf War would be successfully reprised by Iraqi groups favoring the overthrow of the Iraqi government twelve years later.