Testing, funding top protest issues
Times Union - December 9, 2013, by Kristen Brown - Education, labor and civic organizations gathered Monday at the Capitol to call for more public school funding and an end to the "tyranny of...
Times Union - December 9, 2013, by Kristen Brown - Education, labor and civic organizations gathered Monday at the Capitol to call for more public school funding and an end to the "tyranny of standardized testing" — a small showing that was part of a larger "National Day of Action" on which dozens of similar events took place across the state and nation.
The day was only the latest demonstration of a growing opposition against what critics deride as an education reform movement dominated by excessive standardized testing and the use of those tests as the chief measure of assessing schools, students and teachers.
In New York, that opposition has taken shape largely as criticism of the state's implementation of the Common Core, the rigorous new curriculum standards intended to give students a deeper understanding of what they learn.
On Monday, New York State United Teachers, the Alliance for Quality Education, Citizen Action of New York and others largely reiterated past demands: a three-year moratorium on using Common Core-aligned test results to judge performance, more dollars for public education and movement away from corporate influence in education reform.
Maria Neira, NYSUT's vice president, said that those assembled at the Capitol wore blue in a showing of solidarity and also because they were "feeling blue" over the state of public education.
"What's happening is school funding has dropped and emphasis on testing has risen," said Billy Easton, Alliance for Quality Education's executive director.
Shenendehowa PTA President Kerensa Rybak said testing is "stripping classrooms of creativity" and caused her own daughter to "dread each weekday."
Assemblywoman Patricia Fahy, D-Albany, a former president of the Albany city school board, said testing has caused "a lot of stress in the classroom."
But on a Monday visit to the Times Union, Education Commissioner John King rejected a slew of criticisms launched against the Common Core and him in recent months.
He countered that it is a misconception that the Common Core itself has increased the amount of testing students are required to complete, charging that it "has not added any tests" and questioning "from what exactly" opponents are seeking a moratorium.
"We have been very careful to make sure that the first year of (test) results didn't disadvantage anyone," he said.
King also addressed a major public critique of his personal life: Though he is the head of New York state's public education system, King sends his two young daughters to Woodland Hill Montessori, a private school that describes itself as "nestled in the hills of North Greenbush."
Asked what it might take to make him comfortable sending his kids to public school, King responded, "It's not that I'm uncomfortable."
"It's not about public versus private; it's about finding the right environment for your child," he said. "Woodland Hills has been great for my girls."
Some of the criticism of King's decision to send his own children to private school stems from an accusation that his daughters are not subject to the same Common Core standards and assessments the state is rolling out. King refuted that point as well, arguing that Woodland Hills has also implemented the new standards.
"Woodland Hills has been great for Common Core," he said.
NYSUT has also drafted a letter to King at the state Board of Regents outlining a set of "resolutions for 2014" to "reclaim the promise of public education."
The letter states that "underfunding, an undemocratic tax cap, lack of access to public higher education, rushed implementation of new standards and evaluations, an obsession with testing, lack of support for teaching and learning, insufficient staffing and layoffs all jeopardize the promise of public education."
The Regents are slated to present their proposal for state aid to schools for the 2014-15 school year next week.
On Monday, the advocates coalition called for $1.9 billion in additional aid for the coming fiscal year, which begins in April. That number could be wishful thinking: Gov. Andrew Cuomo has proposed using surplus state funds for a tax relief of some kind.
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CFPB: Financial firms can no longer force consumers to use arbitration in group disputes
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CFPB: Financial firms can no longer force consumers to use arbitration in group disputes
Consumers can now sue banks in class-action lawsuits.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said Monday financial companies will no longer be allowed to force customers to use...
Consumers can now sue banks in class-action lawsuits.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said Monday financial companies will no longer be allowed to force customers to use arbitration to settle group disputes, restricting the industry's favored legal tool after years of review.
Read the full article here.
Some Retailers Promote Decision to Remain Closed on Thanksgiving
New York Times - November 14, 2014, Steven Greenhouse - This...
New York Times - November 14, 2014, Steven Greenhouse - This Thanksgiving, the open-versus-shut debate has grown even louder.
Walmart, Kmart, Macy’s, Target, RadioShack and many other major retailers are proclaiming that they will be open on Thanksgiving Day to make shoppers happy. But Costco, Marshalls, GameStop and T. J. Maxx are riding the backlash against holiday commerce by boasting that they will not relent: They will remain closed that day to show that they are family-friendly and honoring the holiday.
But even as retailers vie for every dollar during a very competitive season, Tony Bartel, the president of GameStop, views this debate as open-and-shut. “For us, it’s a matter of principle,” said Mr. Bartel, whose company has 4,600 stores nationwide. “We have a phrase around here that we use a lot — it’s called ‘protecting the family.’ We want our associates to enjoy their complete holidays.”
“It’s an important holiday in the U.S., and our employees work hard during the holiday season, and we believe they deserve the opportunity to spend Thanksgiving Day with their family and friends,” said Richard A. Galanti, executive vice president and chief financial officer at Costco Wholesale, the nation’s second-largest retailer after Walmart. “We’ve never opened on Thanksgiving, and when the trend to do so occurred in the last couple or three years, we chose not to because we thought it was the right thing to do for our employees.”
More than two dozen major retail chains plan to stay dark on Thanksgiving, including Barnes & Noble, Bed Bath & Beyond, the Burlington Coat Factory, Crate and Barrel, Dillard’s, Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus and Patagonia.
Johan Araujo, a senior game adviser at GameStop’s flagship store in Herald Square in Manhattan, applauded his company’s decision. “It’s good to know they’re thinking about us and what we want,” he said. His plans involve cooking the turkey for his fiancée and friends this year.
Sidney Bartlett, the manager of Mr. Araujo’s store, said that when the store used to be open on Thanksgiving — it started closing for the holiday last year — it was painful to figure out which employees to inconvenience and schedule to work that day. “I thought it’s great the C.E.O. decided to close for the holiday,” he said.
He said it saddened him to see so many stores open that day. “We’ve shifted as a nation — it’s not so much about the family, it’s all about business,” said Mr. Bartlett, who is studying for an M.B.A. at Columbia.
“We don’t believe we will lose any ground to competitors,” said Mr. Bartel, the company’s president. “Even if we lose some ground to competitors, we are making it corporate principle — we have committed to associates that we will not open on Thanksgiving.”
Pushed by competitive forces, some malls are opening on Thanksgiving Day for the first time. In Paramus, N.J., Westfield Garden State Plaza and Paramus Park will open from 6 p.m. to 11 p.m., prodded by Macy’s decision to open its stores in those malls.
Walden Galleria, a mall with over 200 stores near Buffalo, threatened to fine retailers about $200 an hour if they don’t open at 6 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day.
Carrie Gleason, director of the Fair Workweek Initiative, a campaign pushing retailers to adopt schedules that are more friendly to workers, said, “What’s different from years past is there are more and more retailers coming out publicly and saying, ‘We’re staying closed on Thanksgiving.’ ” They want to demonstrate to their customer base that they’re family-friendly.”
More than 55,000 people have signed a petition on change.org urging Target to remain closed on Thanksgiving, while the Boycott Black Thursday Facebook page has more than 87,000 likes.
Walmart officials say they are doing consumers a favor by opening on Thanksgiving. To reduce the long lines that have upset many shoppers on Black Friday, Walmart announced on Tuesday that it would spread Black Friday over five days.
“It became Black Friday, then it became Thursday, and now it’s becoming weeklong,” said Duncan Mac Naughton, chief merchandising officer at Walmart. “Maybe it’s going to be November.”
Deisha Barnett, a Walmart spokeswoman, said many shoppers were happy that the company would be open on Thanksgiving. “We’re in the service industry, and we’re just like airports and grocery stores and gas stations that are open on Thanksgiving so they can provide what customers need,” she said. “We’ve been open on Thanksgiving for 20-something years.”
Walmart will again face a wave of protests this holiday season. Our Walmart, a union-backed group of Walmart workers pushing for higher pay, said on Friday that it would hold protests at 1,600 Walmarts on Black Friday.
After keeping almost all its stores closed last Thanksgiving, the financially troubled RadioShack said that it planned to open its stores from 8 a.m. to midnight this Thanksgiving. But after some employees voiced dismay, the company changed course to give them time for their feast. Its stores will open from 8 a.m. to noon, close for five hours and reopen from 5 p.m. until midnight, and again at 6 a.m. on Friday.
The University of Connecticut Poll conducted a survey last November that found that nine out of 10 Americans said they didn’t plan to spend Thanksgiving hunting for bargains, while 7 percent said they planned to visit stores on Thanksgiving Day.
The poll of 1,189 adults, with a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percent, found that 49 percent disapproved of stores opening on Thanksgiving Day, with 16 percent approving and 34 percent neutral.
Last Thanksgiving, J. C. Penney, Kohl’s, Macy’s, Sears and Target all opened at 8 p.m. This year, Kmart plans to open at 6 a.m. and remain open for the next 42 hours.
“All these companies were closed for decades,” said Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. “What’s changed is that some have chosen to remain open, and those companies should be getting demerits. People should ask, ‘Is this the sort of society we want to live in that people aren’t even given the option of celebrating holidays?’ ”
He said that if stores decided to open on Thanksgiving, working that day should be voluntary, not mandatory. He said many part-time workers were eager to work on Thanksgiving.
Mr. Appelbaum praised the Macy’s store in Herald Square for using only workers who volunteer to work that day
Macy’s plans to open at 6 p.m. this Thanksgiving, two hours earlier than last Thanksgiving — and Sears is doing the same thing. “Customer response to the 8 p.m. opening last year was exceptionally strong,” said Jim Sluzewski, Macy’s senior vice president for communications. “At Macy’s Herald Square store, we had 15,000 customers waiting outside when the doors opened. The experience was similar across the country. Many customers asked why we couldn’t open a little earlier.”
In contrast, he said Bloomingdale’s, a Macy’s subsidiary, would remain closed on Thanksgiving Day, saying it was “less promotional” than Macy’s.
Roger Beahm, executive director of the Center for Retail Innovation at Wake Forest University, said it was smart competitively for retailers to open on Thanksgiving. “Did the folks who questioned the sanctity of Thanksgiving learn a lesson?” he said. “A good start to the holiday retail season can really make your year, and a late start can really cripple retailers.”
Dan Evans, a spokesman for Nordstrom, said his company kept its stores closed on Thanksgiving, with a few employees completing holiday decorations that day, before they are unveiled on Black Friday.
“If our customers really wanted us to open on Thanksgiving, that’s what we’ll do,” Mr. Evans said. “We used to be closed on the Fourth of July. We used to be closed on New Year’s Day, but customers wanted us to be open on those days, so now we’re open on those days. Our customers guide us. We don’t guide them.”
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Starbucks employees still face ‘clopening,’ understaffing, and irregular workweeks
Starbucks employees still face ‘clopening,’ understaffing, and irregular workweeks
Starbucks employees say their schedules aren’t nearly as sweet as those pumpkin spice lattes they’re serving up this fall.
In a new report from the ...
Starbucks employees say their schedules aren’t nearly as sweet as those pumpkin spice lattes they’re serving up this fall.
In a new report from the Center for Popular Democracy, a nonprofit that works with community groups, Starbucks workers said the coffee company has failed over the past year to make good on a promise to improve employees’ schedules. Instead, employees said they still face unpredictable workweeks, obstacles to taking sick leave, insufficient rest and staffing, and a failure to honor their availability.
“Starbucks’ frontline employees bear the brunt of the management imperative to minimize store labor costs, which takes precedence over attempts to stabilize work hours, provide healthy schedules, and to ensure employees have real input into their working conditions,” the report states.
The issues detailed in the report are familiar to anyone to many who work on “non-standard” schedules common among low wage jobs.
Starbucks first came under fire after a New York Times article from August 2014 described the struggle of a Starbucks barista and single mother, whose irregular work schedule caused turbulence in her personal relationships, other jobs and parental routine. The source of such chaos was supposedly Starbucks’s sophisticated scheduling software that cuts labor costs by arranging workers’ weeks based on sales patterns.
While this technology can boost a business’s profits, it can also leave workers working back-to-back shifts (also known as ‘clopening’), or not receiving enough hours to make ends meet. Sometimes, as the Timesarticle pointed out, employees would commute to work just to find their schedule changed.
After the public backlash, Starbucks promised to revise its policies and end the irregular scheduling practices for its roughly 130,000 baristas in the U.S.
To achieve this, Starbucks said it would post all work hours 10 days in advance, and give any baristas with more than an hour long commute the option to transfer to a more convenient location. Starbucks also said it would revise the scheduling technology and kill the clopening shift.
But much has remained unchanged, according to the 200 workers across 37 states the Center for Popular Democracy interviewed.
Nearly half of the surveyed Starbucks employees said they received their schedule one week or less in advance, and one in four workers said they still had to work clopening shifts.
Employees also reported feeling as though managers disregarded their availability, and denied them more hours when they needed additional work. Finally, 40 percent of employees said they faced barriers to taking sick leave when they were ill.
None of this seems to fit with Starbucks’s reputation as a “fabulous company” to work for, as jobs and recruiting website Glassdoor described it in its annual ranking of the 50 best places to work in 2014. Starbucks came in at No. 39.
The Center for Popular Democracy’s report did have some suggestions for improvement, however, recommending that Starbucks guarantee minimum hours and full-time work for those who want it. It also said the company should mandate that managers provide predictable schedules so working families can have a more stable work-life balance, in addition to taking the pressure off sick employees to find a replacement for a shift.
Source: Boston.com
Warren calls for diversity in Federal Reserve leadership
WASHINGTON – The latest crusade in the name of diversity commenced on Thursday, this time aimed squarely at the makeup of the Federal Reserve’s leadership and spearheaded in part by Elizabeth...
WASHINGTON – The latest crusade in the name of diversity commenced on Thursday, this time aimed squarely at the makeup of the Federal Reserve’s leadership and spearheaded in part by Elizabeth Warren, the senior U.S. senator from Massachusetts.
The Cambridge Democrat recently linked up with fellow Democrat, Michigan U.S. Rep. John Conyers, to send a letter to Janet Yellen, chair of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, asking the former Clinton administration adviser to take action. They cited a 1977 law that requires the bank regulator to reflect the nation’s diversity.
The progressive duo began their missive by praising her work under President Barack Obama before stating that they “remain deeply concerned that the Federal Reserve has not yet fulfilled its statutory and moral obligation to ensure that its leadership reflects the composition of our diverse nation.” Instead, they said, the central bank’s leadership “remains overwhelmingly and disproportionately white and male,” and is drawn mainly from major banks and corporations.
The letter cites a statistic reported in February by the left-leaning Center for Popular Democracy that indicates that “83 percent of Federal Reserve head office board members are white” while “men occupy nearly three-fourths of all regional bank directorships.”
The lawmakers assert that the discussions among Fed leaders regarding labor market conditions never once mentioned the situation confronting blacks in 2010, the most recent year for which full transcripts are available. The lawmakers point out that the unemployment rate for blacks that year never fell below 15.5 percent, while the nation’s average jobless rate hovered just below 10 percent during most of that post-recession period.
Fellow Massachusetts U.S. Sen. Ed Markey put his signature on the letter, alongside those of more than 120 other Democrats in Congress
Warren and Conyers later took to social media to rally the public around the cause:
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, was also quick to throw her support behind the call for diversity:
“The Fed needs to be more representative of America as a whole,” Jesse Ferguson, a Clinton campaign spokesman, told the Associated Press Thursday, adding that Clinton also opposes the fact that three private-sector bankers currently sit on each regional Fed bank board.
The Fed is actively working to further diversify its ranks, bank spokesman Dave Skidmore said in a statement provided to AP.
“Minority representation on Reserve Bank and Branch boards has increased from 16 percent in 2010 to 24 percent in 2016,” Skidmore told AP. “The proportion of women directors has risen from 23 percent to 30 percent over the same period. Currently, 46 percent of all directors are diverse in terms of race and/or gender (with a director who is both female and a minority counted only one time).”
“We are striving to continue that progress.”
By BY EVAN LIPS
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America Needs a Network of Rebel Cities to Stand Up to Trump
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America Needs a Network of Rebel Cities to Stand Up to Trump
“I want New Yorkers to know: we have a lot of tools at our disposal; we’re going to use them. And we’re not going to take anything lying down.” On the morning after Donald Trump was declared the...
“I want New Yorkers to know: we have a lot of tools at our disposal; we’re going to use them. And we’re not going to take anything lying down.” On the morning after Donald Trump was declared the victor in the U.S. presidential election, Mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, wasted no time in signaling his intention to use the city government as a bulwark against the policy agenda of the President-Elect. The move made one thing very clear; with the Republican Party holding the House and Senate, and at least one Supreme Court nomination in the pipeline, it will fall to America’s cities and local leaders to act as the institutional frontline of resistance against the Trump administration.
However, cities can be more than just a last line of defense against the worst excesses of an authoritarian central government; they have huge, positive potential as spaces from which to radicalize democracy and build alternatives to the neoliberal economic model. The urgent questions that progressive activists in the States are now asking themselves are, not just how to fight back against Trump, but also how to harness the momentum of Bernie Sanders’ primary run to fight for the change he promised. As we consider potential strategies going forward, a look at the global context suggests that local politics may be the best place to start.
The election of Trump has not occurred in a vacuum. Across the West, we are witnessing a wholesale breakdown of the existing political order; the neoliberal project is broken, the center-left is vanishing, and the old left is at a loss for what to do. In many countries, it is the far right that is most successful in harnessing people’s desire to regain a sense of control over their lives. Where progressives have tried to beat the right at its own game by competing on the battleground of the nation state, they have fared extremely poorly, as recent elections and referenda across Europe have shown. Even where a progressive force has managed to win national office, as happened in Greece in 2015, the limits of this strategy have become abundantly clear, with global markets and transnational institutions quickly bullying the Syriza government into compliance.
In Spain, however, things are different. In 2014, activists in the country were wrestling with a similar conundrum to their counterparts in the U.S. today: how to harness the power of new social and political movements to transform institutional politics. For pragmatic rather than ideological reasons, they decided to start by standing in local elections; the so-called “municipalist wager.” The bet paid off; while citizen platforms led by activists from social movements won mayoralties in the largest cities across the country in May of 2015, their national allies, Unidos Podemos, stalled in third place at the general elections in December later that same year.
In Spain, this network of “rebel cities” has been putting up some of the most effective resistance to the conservative central government. While the state is bailing out the banks, refusing to take in refugees and implementing deep cuts in public services, cities like Barcelona and Madrid are investing in the cooperative economy, declaring themselves “refuge cities” and remunicipalizing public services. U.S. cities have a huge potential to play a similar role over the coming years.
Rebel cities in the USA
In fact, radical municipalism has a proud history in the U.S. One hundred years ago, the “sewer socialists” took over the city government of Milwaukee, Wis., and ran it for almost 50 years. They built parks, cleaned up waterways and, in contrast to the tolerated level of corruption in neighboring Chicago, the sewer socialists instilled into the civic culture an enduring sense that government is supposed to work for all the people, not just the wealthy and well-connected.
More recently, too, cities have been proving their ability to lead the national agenda. In the last few years alone, over 200 cities have introduced protections against employment discrimination based on gender-identity and 38 cities and counties have introduced local minimum wages after local “Fight for 15” campaigns.
Now we need a dual municipalist strategy that includes both supporting and putting pressure on existing progressive city governments from the streets, and standing new candidates with new policy platforms in upcoming local elections so that we can change institutional politics from within.
Why cities?
There are a number of reasons why city governments are particularly well-placed to lead resistance to Trumpism. Most obviously, much of the popular opposition to Trump is physically located in cities. With their younger, more ethnically diverse demographics, urban voters swung heavily against Trump and, in fact, played a large role in handing Hillary Clinton the majority of the national popular vote. Not only did Clinton win 31 of the nation’s 35 largest cities, but she beat Trump by 59% to 35% in all cities with populations of over 50,000. In most of urban America, then, there are progressive majorities that can be harnessed to challenge Trump’s toxic discourse and policy agenda.
But alternative policies will not be enough to create an effective challenge to Trump; different ways of doing politics will also be needed, and local politics has great potential in this regard. As the level of government closest to the people, municipalities are uniquely able to generate new, citizen-led and participatory models of politics that return a sense of agency and belonging to people’s lives. This new process must have feminism at its heart; it must recognize that the personal and the political are intimately connected, something that is clearer at the local level than at any other.
It’s for this reason that the municipalist movement need not be limited to the largest cities. Though large cities will inevitably be strategic targets in any “bottom-up” strategy, given their economic and cultural power, all local politics has radical democratic potential. Indeed, some of the most innovative—and successful—examples of municipalism around the world are found in small towns and villages.
Bringing the political conversation back to the local level also has a particular advantage in the current context; the city provides a frame with which to challenge the rise of xenophobic nationalism. Cities are spaces in which we can talk about reclaiming popular sovereignty for a demos other than the nation, where we can reimagine identity and belonging based on participation in civic life rather than the passport we hold.
Why a network of rebel cities?
By working as a network, cities can turn what would have been isolated acts of resistance into a national movement with a multiplier effect. Networks like Local Progress, a network of progressive local elected officials, allow local leaders to exchange policy ideas, develop joint strategies, and speak with a united voice on the national stage.
On the issue of racial equity, an essential question given the racist nature of Trump’s campaign and policy platform, cities across the U.S. have already started to mobilize to combat Islamophobia, as part of the American Leaders Against Hate and Anti-Muslim Bigotry Campaign, a joint project of Local Progress and the Young Elected Officials Action Network. The campaign pushes for local policies to tackle hate crimes against Muslims, including the monitoring of religious bullying in schools, intercultural education programmes, and council resolutions condemning Islamophobia and declaring support for Muslim communities.
Climate change will be another contentious issue over the coming years. While much has been made of the policy implications of Trump’s claim that global warming was invented by the Chinese, it has been local administrations, rather than the federal government, that have led on the environmental agenda over recent years. Sixty two cities are already committed to meet or exceed the emissions targets announced by the federal government and many of the largest cities in the country, including New York, Chicago and Atlanta have set emissions reductions goals of 80 percent or higher by 2050. U.S. mayors must continue on this path, working with international networks of cities like ICLEI and UCLG to exchange good practices and to lobby for direct access to global climate funds in the absence of support from the federal government.
Even on issues that are under the jurisdiction of the federal government, like immigration, cities have some room for maneuver. For example, although Trump has pledged to deport all undocumented immigrants from the U.S., 37 “sanctuary cities” across the U.S. are already limiting their cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainer requests to reduce deportations. The mayors of New York and Los Angeles have already pledged to continue with this practice, and De Blasio has promised New Yorkers that the city will protect the confidentiality of users of the city ID-card scheme and continue to ensure that police officers and city employees won’t inquire about residents’ immigration status, predicting that Trump will face “a deep, deep rift with all of urban America” if he does not re-evaluate his stance on sanctuary cities.
What next?
First we must push our allies who are already in office at local level, including self-identified “Sanders Democrats,” to use all available means to act against any attempt by the federal government to roll back civil liberties, cut services or sow division among communities. Such cities must work, not only to counteract the worst excesses of the Trump administration, but also to continue to move forward on issues like gay rights and climate change, as well as forging new ground by standing up to corporate interests, increasing citizen participation in decision-making, and promoting the social and cooperative economies.
But we also need a new generation of local leaders, particularly women and people of color, who are prepared to take the leap from protest to electoral politics. The recent announcement by Black Lives Matter activist, Nekima Levy-Pounds, that she will be standing for election as mayor of Minneapolis is an inspiring example of the kind of candidate that is needed; someone with real-world experience and an insider’s understanding of social movement politics. But the search for new local leaders needs to be scaled up so that there is a pipeline of candidates to stand for school boards, zoning boards and local councils in 2017 and beyond. This is something that the Working Families Party is already doing successfully in many states, as well as supporting these candidates in primary campaigns against Establishment Democrats.
Finally, we must undertake new ways of doing politics at the local level to prove that there is an alternative to corporate lobbying, secret donors and career politics. There is no reason why candidates should wait until taking office to invite people to participate in decision-making. Local candidates should open up their policy platforms to public participation, integrating demands from social movements and local residents. There is also no reason why elected officials should use only the most generous interpretation of the law to guide their conduct; in Spain, the citizen platforms drew up their own codes of ethics for their elected representatives, including salary and term limits and strict transparency requirements. By leading by example, local movements can send a very powerful message: there is another way.
A resurgence of rebel cities in the U.S. would tap into a long-forgotten American tradition of radical municipalism and align with a new and growing international network of municipalist movements. Now is the time for us to seize this opportunity and to reclaim democracy from the bottom up.
BY KATE SHEA BAIRD AND STEVE HUGHES
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Exigirán en Washington Ayuda a Puerto Rico a Seis Meses Después del Huracán
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Exigirán en Washington Ayuda a Puerto Rico a Seis Meses Después del Huracán
“Los manifestantes partirán desde diversos estados y Puerto Rico y harán una primera parada en la sede central de la Agencia para el Manejo de Emergencias (FEMA), para finalizar su protesta en el...
“Los manifestantes partirán desde diversos estados y Puerto Rico y harán una primera parada en la sede central de la Agencia para el Manejo de Emergencias (FEMA), para finalizar su protesta en el Congreso. Será un día con una cargada agenda que además de la protesta incluirá reuniones con congresistas y en la que no descartan los actos de desobediencia civil para llamar la atención sobre la crisis humanitaria en la isla, dijo a Efe Sammy Nemir, portavoz de The Center for Popular Democracy. De acuerdo con la coalición, que incluye también sindicatos, la "desastrosa respuesta del Gobierno federal ha sido más devastadora y dañina que el huracán".
Lea el artículo completo aquí.
Corporate power on the agenda at Jackson Hole
Protesters from the Fed Up group will once again be on hand this year as they campaign for central bankers to focus more on inequality and depressed wages.
Protesters from the Fed Up group will once again be on hand this year as they campaign for central bankers to focus more on inequality and depressed wages.
Islas freed pending deportation appeal; ‘double victory’ as Malloy signs TRUST Act into law
New Haven Register – July 20, 2013, by Luther Turmelle - Jose Maria Islas returned to Connecticut Friday, after the federal Immigration and Custom Enforcement agency released him from a...
New Haven Register – July 20, 2013, by Luther Turmelle - Jose Maria Islas returned to Connecticut Friday, after the federal Immigration and Custom Enforcement agency released him from a Massachusetts jail pending his appeal of a deportation order.
A tired but happy Islas stood on the steps of the New Haven People’s Center Friday evening as a small group of supporters held a rally in his honor. Islas, who has been in the United States since 2005 after entering the country illegally, began his day at a detention center in Boston with other undocumented immigrants the United States is seeking to deport
Megan Fountain, a volunteer with Unidad Latina en Accion, credited the public pressure on ICE officials created by more than 3,000 of Islas’ supporters including U.S. Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, both D-Conn.
“This movement started small and just got bigger and bigger,” Fountain said.
Islas’ case is being heard by the federal Department of Justice’s Board of Immigration Appeals. If the board declines to overturn efforts to deport Islas, the case will then be taken to the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, Fountain said.
Islas’ release came on the same day Gov. Dannel P. Malloy signed the Transparency and Responsibility Using State Tools or (TRUST) Act into law. The TRUST Act aims to discourage law enforcement officials from detaining undocumented immigrants when they report crime, either as witnesses or victims, so they may do so without fear of deportation. The act does so by placing limits on the federal Secure Communities program, which requires local and state law enforcement officials to share biometric information such as fingerprints and immigration status of detained individuals.
“The governor has been a longtime supporter of comprehensive immigration reform,” Andrew Doba, a spokesman for Malloy said Friday. “All this does is extend to the local level what has been the policy of state law enforcement.”
Charges of conspiracy to commit robbery against Islas were dropped after witnesses put him elsewhere at the time of an incident in Hamden last year. Other lesser charges have been wiped from his record after he was granted accelerated rehabilitation.
Islas, who has a wife and child living in Mexico, said he came to America “out of economic necessity.”
“I did it because my mother was sick,” he said.
Ana Maria Rivera, a legal and policy analyst, called Malloy’s signing the TRUST Act and Islas’ release “a double victory.” But she said that with the ongoing federal immigration debate in Washington, those who seek to reform the law must not become complacent.
“Many advocate that increased border militarization must be part of the path to immigration,” Rivera said.
Islas, his sister, Juana, and her family will head to the nation’s capital Monday to meet with federal lawmakers about immigration reform and participate in a series of rallies with groups from all over the country.
“Other people facing detention and deportation must keep fighting,” Juana Islas Santiago said.
Herman Zuniga, director of Comunidad de Inmigrantes de East Haven, called the Obama administration “the worst in United States history” in terms of immigration issues. Zuniga’s organization represents the Ecuadorean community in East Haven.
“Everybody has the right to choose where they live, where they work,” Zuniga said. “Deportation in not the solution.”
Fountain said the Obama administration has set up a quota system to deport 500,000 undocumented immigrants from the United States each year.
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Drafts on Scaffold Sought
Times Union - August 21, 2014, by Casey Seiler - The...
Times Union - August 21, 2014, by Casey Seiler - The Center for Popular Democracy, a labor-backed advocacy group that supports New York's controversial Scaffold Law, wants to see all the drafts of a controversial report authored by SUNY's Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government and paid for by the Lawsuit Reform Alliance, a business-backed organization that opposes Scaffold Law.
The Alliance paid almost $83,000 for the Institute's analysis of the law's economic impacts. That report, made public in February, has been the subject of fierce debate — over both the details of the study as well as larger issues of academic integrity. The Rockefeller Institute, which insists its work was done with independence and integrity, subsequently backed away from the most controversial chapter of the report, which included a statistical analysis that concluded gravity-related accidents fell in Illinois after the state ditched its version.
The law, which places "absolute liability" on employers for gravity-related workplace injuries, is supported by labor unions but opposed by business groups that claim it needlessly drives up construction costs. Opponents would like to see New York follow other states by adopting a "comparative negligence" standard that would make workers proportionately responsible when their actions contribute to an accident.
An initial Freedom of Information Law request from the Center for Popular Democracy resulted in SUNY's release of email communications between Rockefeller Institute researchers and Tom Stebbins of the Lawsuit Reform Alliance — contact that was required by the contract for the report.
On appeal, SUNY released an initial draft copy of the report that had been attached to one of those emails. The Times Union last week offered a side-by-side comparison of the draft and final versions. Changes between the two tended to increase the report's toll of the cost and impact of the law, though the researchers argue those edits represented good-faith efforts to seek the best data. The Center is now requesting to see all interim drafts of the report submitted to the Lawsuit Reform Alliance for review. "Given that the anti-worker groups behind this debunked report are still trying to use its flawed findings to weaken New York's safety laws, SUNY should release all of the drafts that we know exist," said Josie Duffy, a policy advocate with the group.
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