Police arrest 155 health care protesters at U.S. Capitol
Police arrest 155 health care protesters at U.S. Capitol
U.S. Capitol Police officers arrested at least 155 demonstrators Wednesday at Senate office buildings, as health care...
U.S. Capitol Police officers arrested at least 155 demonstrators Wednesday at Senate office buildings, as health care advocates continued to pressure lawmakers two days after a Republican effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act collapsed.
Police officials said in a statement that officers responded to “demonstration activity” at 45 separate locations in Senate office buildings beginning about 2:15 p.m. Authorities said demonstrators were warned “to cease and desist with their unlawful demonstration activities” before police made arrests, the statement said.
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Advocates Demand More Money for Opioid Crisis
Advocates Demand More Money for Opioid Crisis
Today, advocates for expanded funding to address opioid misuse will take to the Capitol to push Congress for $45...
Today, advocates for expanded funding to address opioid misuse will take to the Capitol to push Congress for $45 billion for treatment and overdose prevention. While President Donald Trump declared the opioid epidemic a federal public health emergency last month, his administration hasn’t asked for additional money to help states address the crisis, and Congress hasn’t made any moves or come up with its own emergency authorization, either.
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After Volkswagen scandal, can consumers trust anything companies say? (+video)
After Volkswagen scandal, can consumers trust anything companies say? (+video)
Adam Galatioto’s loyalty to diesel Volkswagens predates his ability to drive. The 29-year-old’s parents...
Adam Galatioto’s loyalty to diesel Volkswagens predates his ability to drive.
The 29-year-old’s parents first bought a Jetta TDI in 1998, and he drove the little sedan through high school, college, and a master’s program before selling it in 2013. Mr. Galatioto and his girlfriend now share a 2011 Jetta TDI SportWagen, which he helped encourage her to buy.
“They get really good mileage,” he says. “Mine got 50 m.p.g. on the highway. By proxy that means you are being environmentally friendly.”
He’s not alone. Volkswagen has long enjoyed a reputation for reliable engineering, cheerful affordability, and, largely thanks to its efforts in clean diesel, sustainability. In Consumer Reports’ 2014 survey on how people perceive leading car brands, the German automaker was singled out (alongside Tesla) for its fuel efficiency.
That made recent revelations that VW had duped environmental regulators for years, installing software on 11 million diesel vehicles worldwide allowing them to run cleaner during emissions tests than they did on the road, all the more unnerving.
“I don’t generally trust corporations on what they say, and this was so intentionally devious it just lumps them in with any other car company for me,” Galatioto says.
This is a worst-nightmare scenario for companies trying to attract customers that increasingly want to make not just quality or affordable purchases, but ethical ones. It’s an impulse nearly every consumer industry is racing to capitalize on, from restaurant chains shifting to cage-free eggs and fair-trade coffee to retailers pledging to raise wages and give workers more predictable scheduling.
But with such promises being made left and right, and especially in the wake of Volkswagen’s fall, conscientious consumers may be wondering: Can any of them really be trusted?
Not always, clearly, but there is some comfort to be had on that front. Brands that fail to deliver risk even greater financial and reputational fallout than ever before (Volkswagen lost a third of its stock value when the scandal broke, and it faces billions in future losses from EPA fines, repairs, and lost sales). Combined with effective third-party oversight, it’s a powerful motivator for companies on the whole to behave better, experts say.
Consumers, particularly younger ones, are armed with easier access to information about what they buy than previous generations, and it’s affecting their choices. Millennials (adults ages 21 to 34) are more than twice as likely as their Gen-X and baby boomer counterparts to be willing to pay extra for products and services billed as environmentally and socially sustainable, according to a 2014 Nielsen survey. They are equally more prone to check product labels for signs of sustainable and ethical production.
“There’s an increased attention to more intangible characteristics of a product,” says Dutch Leonard, a professor who teaches corporate responsibility and risk management at Harvard Business School. “When I buy a shirt, it has a particular color, it’s soft, or wrinkle-free. But now people are also paying attention to where it was made, if the workers are being exploited, and if the company is environmentally conscious or not.”
This makes responsible changes effective marketing tools, which can create domino effects as companies try to keep up with and outdo standards in their particular industries. When Wal-Mart, the biggest retailer in the world, raised its minimum pay rate at the beginning of this year, competitors such as Target and Kohl’s quickly followed suit. The success of Chipotle, which has a carefully detailed food-sourcing policy, has been followed by major supply chain overhauls for McDonald’s, General Mills, and other giants of the corporate food world.
“Customers want 'food with integrity,' ” Warren Solochek, a restaurant-industry analyst with NPD Group, a market-research firm, told the Monitor in May. “[Companies] that choose locally sourced, fresh ingredients can put that on their website and know that people are looking at it.”
But especially for major corporations, “when you say you are doing things, you will attract attention from outside business groups," Professor Leonard says. "You can bet some NGO [nongovernmental organization] is going to try and figure out if that’s true or not.”
Indeed, Volkswagen isn’t the first brand to have its positive positioning face pushback, especially as global companies work to strike an operational balance between ethics and profitability. Wal-Mart’s wage hikes were followed by cutbacks in worker hours when the retailer’s earnings suffered, a move that led labor advocacy groups to call the earlier wage hikes “a publicity stunt.” Earlier this week, the Center for Popular Democracyreleased a report showing that Starbucks has so far failed to live up to a much-publicized vow from a year ago to give workers more consistent schedules.
While Volkswagen eluded the Environmental Protection Agency, it was eventually found out by the International Council on Clean Transportation, an independent nonprofit aided by researchers at West Virginia University.
In addition to catching such discrepancies, watchdog groups can be helpful in weeding out credible claims of positive change from the less so. In the mid-2000s, the Unions of Concerned Scientists’ annual environmental consumer guide largely dispelled the idea that washable cloth diapers are significantly better for the environment than disposable ones.
Furthermore, some major corporations and industry groups have partnerships with independent, NGO-like organizations to set ethical industry standards and submit to outside monitoring. Unilever, for example, teamed up with the the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) in the 1990s to create the Marine Stewardship Council, a certification program for sustainable fisheries. In 2008, Starbucks embarked on a decade-long project with Conservation International to improve the sustainability of its coffee supply around the world. Home Depot sells lumber certified by an outside organization.
Such collaborations may not catch everything, Leonard says, but they are effective because they are “constructed in such a way that the [certification groups] are not beholden to an industry. We may not be able to get full agreement on the standards, but we might make real progress by creating safe harbors through development of standards that are negotiated in advance.”
Source: The Christian Science Monitor
Nina Tassler, Denise Di Novi Launch Independent Studio for the Time's Up Era
Nina Tassler, Denise Di Novi Launch Independent Studio for the Time's Up Era
PatMa has already forged strategic partnerships with several organizations with shared common values, including the...
PatMa has already forged strategic partnerships with several organizations with shared common values, including the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, Center for Popular Democracy and Planned Parenthood. The studio, whose formation was orchestrated by CAA, Evolution Media and top attorney Cliff Gilbert-Lurie, is designed to create content across platforms, including film and TV, theater, and publishing.
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ACTIVISM Big Corporations Are Openly Backing Trump's Hate Agenda—Let's Boycott Them
ACTIVISM Big Corporations Are Openly Backing Trump's Hate Agenda—Let's Boycott Them
"You must pick a side," Deborah Axt said of corporate America on a recent press call. "Either you stand with our...
"You must pick a side," Deborah Axt said of corporate America on a recent press call. "Either you stand with our communities or with hate."
Axt, who is the co-executive director of immigration advocacy organization Make The Road New York, was launching Corporate Backers of Hate, a new campaign from Make The Road New York and the Center for Popular Democracy in collaboration with a coalition of other immigrant and labor advocacy organizations. The new campaign targets nine companies—JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, IBM, Disney, Boeing, BlackRock, Uber, and Blackstone—that are close to the Trump administration and have a financial stake in his most abusive policies, particularly immigrant detention and attacks on workers' rights.
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‘A Declaration of War on Immigrants’: Reactions to Trump’s DACA Decision
‘A Declaration of War on Immigrants’: Reactions to Trump’s DACA Decision
The Trump administration announced on Tuesday that it would stop issuing permits under the Obama era Deferred Action...
The Trump administration announced on Tuesday that it would stop issuing permits under the Obama era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA and renew existing permits only over the next six months to give Congress a short window to come up with a replacement program. Here is a sampling of the reaction.
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Can Game-Changing "Community Schools" Model Survive Dallas ISD Politics?
Can Game-Changing "Community Schools" Model Survive Dallas ISD Politics?
On a sunny morning in early May, a wayward DART bus pulled to a stop in front of Paul Laurence Dunbar Learning Center...
On a sunny morning in early May, a wayward DART bus pulled to a stop in front of Paul Laurence Dunbar Learning Center in South Dallas. From the porches of tumbledown homes, neighbors glanced with mild curiosity as the school’s principal, Dionel Waters, stepped aboard. Waiting for him on the bus was an array of local dignitaries, including a city council member, a state representative, a U.S. Congressman, a Dallas County judge, and the guest of honor, Robert Kaplan, the president of the Dallas Fed. The riders had accepted an activist group's invitation to tour hardscrabble Dallas neighborhoods that remain untouched by the region’s booming economy.
Waters stood at the front of the idling bus with a microphone and described for Kaplan some of Dunbar’s challenges. The previous school year, all but two of the campus’ 594 students qualified as low-income. The median household income for the surrounding neighborhood, which borders the sprawling parking lots on Fair Park’s eastern edge, is around $10,000 per year. Broken families are the norm, as are parents with criminal records. Unemployment in the area is staggering, with only a third of working-age men and around 40 percent of working-age women with jobs, according to census data.
Then, Waters pivoted. Together with Hank Lawson, who works for the community development nonprofit Frazier Revitalization Inc., Waters described a vision for transformational change at Dunbar. With support from the Texas Organizing Project, which organized the bus tour, Dunbar would open the 2016-17 school year as Dallas ISD’s first ever “community school.”
Community schools are built on the idea that education doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Poverty levels, family structure, health and nutrition, emotional well-being, and all manner of other outside factors impact academic performance and school quality. Creating a better school, then, requires addressing not only what happens in the classroom but outside social and economic factors as well.
Exactly what a community school looks like depends on the specific needs of the individual school and the surrounding community. Generally speaking, though, the model emphasizes getting parents, community members and teachers greater input in campus decision-making; forging partnerships with local businesses and nonprofits to provide programming and services the school can’t; and finding non-punitive ways to address student behavior.
It is billed as a more humane alternative to No Child Left Behind-style school reform, which can punish poor and heavily minority schools for poor performance without doing much to address root causes.
Community schools are meant to be transformational. A report released in February by the Center for Popular Democracy profiled eight campuses and school districts across the country that have implemented the community schools model with tremendous success.
One of the more dramatic turnarounds took place in Austin. Webb Middle School, a perennially low-performing campus in a working class Hispanic neighborhood in northeast Austin, was on the brink of closure in 2007 when neighbors rallied and convinced the district to give them a final chance to save the school. They turned to the community schools model and crafted a detailed plan based on feedback from parents and neighbors.
The school restored music and art to the curriculum, adding band, orchestra and a dance troupe. The Boys and Girls Club began offering after-school programs. Another nonprofit provided college mentoring. A mobile clinic offered free immunizations and physicals. Other organizations provided parents help with employment, housing and health issues and offered them ESL classes.
Test scores climbed. So did enrollment. By 2015, Webb had gone from the worst middle school in the district to one of its best.
Waters and Lawson hoped something similar could happen at Dunbar, which had been placed on the state’s list of failing schools in the 2014-15 school year. So did Ed Turner, the Texas Organizing Project staffer who’d already spent months laying the groundwork and joined Waters and Lawson on the bus. And so, for that matter, did DISD administrators. Cynthia Wilson, Superintendent Michael Hinojosa’s chief of staff, told the Observer the following day that the district was supporting the community schools model in general and the Dunbar pilot in particular. “From our perspective, [it’s] a win-win,” she said.
On the bus, Kaplan nodded along as Waters spoke; turning Dunbar into a community school certainly seemed like a no-brainer.
But then, rather abruptly, DISD pulled the plug. Alendra Lyons, a community leader in the Dunbar neighborhood who both works at the school and serves on its site-based decision-making committee, was told at a committee meeting in June that the community schools pilot had been moved elsewhere.
Why, after months of planning and the showy presentation to the VIPs on the DART bus, the Dunbar project had been unceremoniously scrapped, Lyons couldn’t say, only that it definitely wasn’t happening.
DISD’s official explanation is, in a word, bureaucracy.
In a July 25 email, DISD spokesman Andre Riley said the community schools initiative had been moved from under Wilson and into the school leadership department.
Stephanie Elizalde, the chief of school leadership, said in a subsequent interview that she decided that John Neely Bryan Elementary in East Oak Cliff was a better fit for the pilot. Like Dunbar, John Neely Bryan is overwhelmingly low-income and has struggled academically, bouncing on and off the state’s list of failing schools. Last August, it received its second consecutive “improvement required” designation from the Texas Education Agency; a third would mean implementation of a “campus turnaround plan” and potentially drastic changes at the campus.
Unlike Dunbar, however, Bryan is part of DISD’s “Intensive Support Network,” two dozen struggling schools targeted by district administrators for special oversight. It also has a more seasoned principal. Elizalde describes Waters as “likeable, intelligent [but] also relatively inexperienced” – barely 30 with just two years as a principal under his belt. Elizalde felt that Bryan’s principal, DISD veteran Tonya Anderson, was better equipped to make the pilot a success.
For advocates of community schools, the stakes are high. A high-profile failure in the pilot could taint the model in DISD and cripple efforts to expand to other campuses. “That is what I don’t want to have happen,” Elizalde said. "I’ve got to think bigger picture."
But several people familiar with the discussions say Dunbar was the victim less of ordinary bureaucratic machinations but of DISD’s toxic internal politics. Specifically, they point to a long-simmering feud between the Texas Organizing Project and trustee Bernadette Nutall.
The rift dates back to efforts to rescue Dade Middle School, which, thanks to poor planning, sky-high turnover, and heavy-handed interventions by then-Superintendent Mike Miles, spun into chaos soon after it opened for the 2013-14 school year. The Texas Organizing Project was heavily involved in the turnaround effort, mobilizing parents and pushing DISD to make Dade the first of 20 community schools in the district. So, for that matter, was Nutall, who was famously removed from the campus following a confrontation with Miles.
By all accounts, the turnaround effort has been a success. There is much less agreement on whether Dade’s resurgence has more to do with the Texas Organizing Project’s community work, Nutall’s close oversight, or, alternately, a belatedly successful intervention by Miles, whose administration found a hyper-competent principal in Tracie Washington and offered the district’s best teachers a hefty salary bump to teach at Dade.
Nutall has bristled at the Texas Organizing Project’s credit-taking. In response to a KERA story this spring focused on the organization’s efforts to turn Dade and other campuses into community schools, Nutall sent an indignant email to trustee Miguel Solis, who was quoted in the piece broadly endorsing the community schools concept, and several DISD administrators saying Dade’s success had been “hijacked.”
Dade staff and community members had long been trying to have a meaningful role in the school, Nutall wrote, but they were consistently rebuffed by Miles and the previous campus administration.
“However, since the new administration has been in place, the staff, parents, students and community members have been able to implement the very same suggestions that were ignored before,” she wrote. “The results have been tremendous. Yet, they weren’t recognized for their efforts. Instead, they believe that their results have been hijacked in an effort to falsely attribute their success to a concept that had little to do with the results.”
In an interview, Nutall said she supports community schools but that there “has to be buy in from all parties.” That wasn’t present at Dade, and it wasn’t present at other campuses where Texas Organizing Project wanted to implement the model. “I understand them [the Texas Organizing Project] getting upset,” she said, adding that “they wanted the whole Lincoln-Madison feeder pattern.”
“I am not going to force something on principals and teachers,” Nutall said. “That is not good governance.”
At the same time, Nutall distanced herself from the decision to move the community schools pilot from Dunbar. The decision, Nutall said, was a judgment call by Elizalde and other DISD administrators.
Allison Brim, organizing director for the Texas Organizing Project, was also careful to downplay the friction between her group and Nutall.
“Essentially what happened, there had just been turnover in the administration,” Brim said.
In early 2016, former chief of school leadership Robert Bravo, with whom the Texas Organizing Project had been in discussions, was replaced by Elizalde. “She was very supportive of the community school concept but really wanted to reconsider where we were going to do the first pilot, which we were open to in some ways as well.”
John Neely Bryan, in everyone’s view, could benefit as much from the community schools model as Dunbar. Perhaps even more, given the comparative lack of outside resources directed at Bryan by churches and nonprofits.
“We were also interested in having full support from the trustee,” Brim said. She described Nutall as “supportive” of community schools but said that John Neely Bryan’s trustee, Lew Blackburn,”was pretty eager to find a school in his district” for a pilot.
In the end, for the Texas Organizing Project as well as for Elizalde, the most important thing “was really getting the opportunity to prove that this model was an effective, successful model for school turnaround,” Brim said.
All parties – Brim, Elizalde, and Nutall – were quick to say that the idea of turning Dunbar into a community school isn’t dead. Discussions are ongoing, and DISD and the Texas Organizing Project may well get around to implementing the model in the coming years.
Dunbar, after all, is still in sore need of a turnaround. State accountability ratings the Texas Education Agency will release in the coming days will show that Dunbar is on the state’s list of failing schools for the second consecutive year, which has made Elizalde rethink the decision to move the pilot.
“If I had a crystal ball and could have seen that Dunbar was going to wind up in [improvement required]-2 status," she said, "I would have left it there anyway.”
By ERIC NICHOLSON
Source
Campaign regulatory board stymied by Legislature
Campaign regulatory board stymied by Legislature
Minnesota’s campaign finance regulatory board heads into election season with its slimmest possible board membership...
Minnesota’s campaign finance regulatory board heads into election season with its slimmest possible board membership for taking action after the Legislature failed to confirm two appointees before adjourning its session.
Two appointments before lawmakers got hung up over concerns raised by Senate Republicans about the DFL political background of Emma Greenman. Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board appointments require confirmation from the House and Senate on a three-fifths vote; the House supplied sufficient votes to confirm Greenman and former Republican state Rep. Margaret “Peggy” Leppik during the session’s final day.
Board chairman Christian Sande said Friday that it could be August before the board is back to full strength. That’s because of the legal steps Gov. Mark Dayton must take to fill the slots, by which time election contests will be in full swing and campaign finance complaints will be streaming in.
“It means for the board to take any action the votes have to be unanimous,” Sande said. “I don’t know that it handicaps us. But it certainly does indicate that where in the past with six active members of the board it might be easier to arrive at four votes to achieve something.”
Absence of a single member would deprive the board of the quorum it needs to even meet.
The remaining members would have to be in complete agreement to impose any penalties, issue any advisory opinions or take other substantive action because state law requires four votes in favor when the typically six-member board makes decisions.
Campaign finance board appointments always have come with more political sensitivity and scrutiny than most agencies. In fact, state law dictates a specific political makeup and that some members be former lawmakers.
Greenman and Leppik had been serving on the board pending confirmation but their appointments were considered null when the Legislature adjourned without positive votes.
A Dayton spokesman says the governor plans to resubmit their names once the openings are posted, which would allow them to serve again until the Legislature returns next year and takes another look. It’s not clear when that could happen.
Sen. Scott Newman of Hutchinson said he and his Republican colleagues weren’t willing to confirm Greenman because of past and present political activity.
“Is this someone who would be able to set aside partisan politics and render judgment as to violations of campaign finance laws? We really doubted it,” Newman said in a phone interview. “We were very concerned about it because of the degree of involvement in political partisanship.”
He added, “This is not a personal attack on her. It is simply a realization of her past activities. She was a very politically active person.”
Greenman, a 36-year-old Minneapolis lawyer, is director of voting rights and democracy for the Center for Popular Democracy. Past stints include work for the Wellstone Action organization formed after the death of Sen. Paul Wellstone and for a Minnesota unit of the Service Employees International Union. In her appointment materials, she lists her political affiliation as with the DFL.
Greenman didn’t immediately return a call or email inquiring about her intentions moving forward said in an email Friday that the lack of a vote was disappointing. She said she is considering reapplying and has been encouraged to do so.
“I have had the pleasure of of serving on the board since January and believe it plays an important role in supporting and protecting Minnesota’s democracy,” she wrote.
In a packet compiled in connection with her earlier appointment, Greenman disclosed details about her past political involvement and her present job, which she said posed no conflict with a campaign board role and didn’t encompass campaign finance matters.
“At this point in my career I am able to serve on the board without any direct conflicts of interest. I do not work for any candidates or any political campaign committees. I do not currently represent the Minnesota DFL or any party official or political candidate,” she wrote in a November letter to Dayton seeking the appointment.
By Brian Bakst
Source
The elevator moment: when to speak up, when to stay quiet, and the power of both
The elevator moment: when to speak up, when to stay quiet, and the power of both
Anger, pain, and courage. That was what the moment was about. Two women and their pain. A U.S. Senator in an elevator,...
Anger, pain, and courage.
That was what the moment was about.
Two women and their pain.
A U.S. Senator in an elevator, literally trapped and torn.
Frozen by their escalating anger and anguish over what he had just announced.
A yes vote for Brett Kavanaugh to join the Supreme Court.
Read the article and watch the video here.
Local leaders ask Obama to pardon criminal immigrants before Trump takes office
Local leaders ask Obama to pardon criminal immigrants before Trump takes office
Two San Diego elected officials have joined colleagues across the country calling for President Barack Obama to issue a...
Two San Diego elected officials have joined colleagues across the country calling for President Barack Obama to issue a blanket pardon of immigrants with green cards who have committed minor crimes.
San Diego Councilman David Alvarez and San Diego Unified School District Board President Richard Barrera, along with 57 others, signed a letter organized by Local Progress, a network of progressive municipal elected officials, that was sent to Obama this week.
The group wants to undercut President-elect Donald Trump’s ability to deport individuals who, without their minor criminal histories, would not be deportable. Between 100,000 and 200,000 families could be affected by such a pardon, according to the letter.
“From literally the day after the election, we started hearing concerns from teachers that students were worried and were afraid that they were going to be deported, that their parents were going to be deported, just based on the rhetoric from the campaign,” Barrera said by telephone. “What we’re trying to do is look for every avenue that’s available to us as elected officials to protect our young people and their families.”
The letter suggests that it would be within Obama’s power to make such a blanket pardon because of former President Jimmy Carter’s pardon of draft evaders in 1977 on his first day in office.
“We must protect the legal permanent residents of our city,” Alvarez said via email. “President-elect Trump proposed a deportation plan modeled after Operation Wetback from the 1950s. Dividing families by recklessly deporting hundreds of thousands of legal permanent residents would be morally wrong and economically destructive.”
Since 2014, the Obama administration has not prioritized minor convictions for immigration enforcement, as a matter of policy not any change in law. By law, green card holders can be deported for committing offenses that would not incur jail time in today’s criminal court system, like low-level drug offenses.
Trump campaigned on the idea of deporting millions of unauthorized immigrants, particularly criminals. His transition team has yet to set forth details about which immigrants and which criminals.
By Kate Morrissey
Source
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