New York City's Undocumented Immigrants Will Get Municipal IDs, Says Mayor De Blasio
Huffington Post - February 10, 2014 - New York City's undocumented immigrants will soon be able to obtain municipal ID...
Huffington Post - February 10, 2014 - New York City's undocumented immigrants will soon be able to obtain municipal ID cards, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Monday.
"We will protect the almost half-million undocumented New Yorkers, whose voices too often go unheard," the mayor said during his first State of the City speech. "We will reach out to all New Yorkers, regardless of immigration status -- issuing municipal ID cards available to all New Yorkers this year -- so that no daughter or son of our city goes without bank accounts, leases, library cards… simply because they lack identification. To all of my fellow New Yorkers who are undocumented, I say: New York City is your home too, and we will not force ANY of our residents to live their lives in the shadows."
"La ciudad de Nueva York es el hogar de todos los que vivimos aqui. No dejaremos que ninguno de nuestros residentes viva en las sombras," de Blasio repeated in Spanish, a nod to the city's large Latino population.
A source in the mayor's office told Spanish-language El Diario la Prensa on Monday that de Blasio will officially submit the proposal soon.
The city ID card would not operate as a driver's license, nor would it be accepted as a form of identification by federal agencies.
It does fulfill one of de Blasio's many campaign promises. "These identification cards will also help foster better relations between the police and undocumented people, who often choose not to report crimes out of fear they may be deported," reads a section of de Blasio's campaign website from last year. "In New Haven, Connecticut -- which offers a municipal ID to undocumented people -- crime in the largely-immigrant Fair Haven community declined 20 percent in the two years after the IDs were introduced, even as crime-reporting increased."
City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito told Politicker she has “full confidence” that “a universal ID will become a reality as soon as possible.”
Ten other cities across the country including San Francisco, Trenton, and Washington, D.C. have already created their own municipal ID programs.
New York State Senators Adriano Espaillat (D) and Jose Peralta (D), both of New York City, expressed support for de Blasio's proposal in a joint statement. They also took the opportunity to advance another cause: allowing immigrants to apply for drivers licenses. From the statement:
"...it is unacceptable that hardworking immigrants are made to break the law in order to commute to work or take their kids to school," they wrote. "Providing undocumented immigrants the opportunity to obtain drivers licenses will ensure that all New York drivers are properly credentialed, educated and operating registered, inspected and insured vehicles, making our roads safer and benefiting all New Yorkers."
De Blasio himself has previously supported allowing undocumented immigrants in New York to apply for driver's licenses.
Source
Progressives Urge Warren to Tow Democrats to Left for 2016
Newsmax - 05-06-2015 - Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren held a set of private meetings on April 22 with a group of...
Newsmax - 05-06-2015 - Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren held a set of private meetings on April 22 with a group of progressive activists, including several involved in the draft Warren for president campaign, Politico reported.
The discussion centered on social and economic issues, police brutality, and immigration. The attendees would like Warren to help move the Democratic dialogue — and the presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton — further to the left.
Jonathan Westin of New York Communities for Change said the goal of the meeting was to see "how Elizabeth Warren with her platform could work with us to move a progressive vision for the country and really engage with communities of color," Politico reported.
Westin has been active through the New York Working Families Party and MoveOn.org in calling for her to run for president.
"This was about someone who we want to be sharing the issues that are affecting communities of color and working class communities to make her the strongest possible champion on those issues," said Daniel Altschuler, another "Draft Warren" advocate.
There is no indication that the presidential issue was raised.
Also taking part in the meetings were Shabnam Bashiri of Rise Up Georgia, Bill Bartlett of Action United, and Brian Kettenring of the Center for Popular Democracy.
Democracy for America and MoveOn.org are key players behind the draft Warren campaign and also coordinate with the Ready for Warren group, Politico reported.
Many progressives in the Democratic Party argue that a primary race would push Clinton into adopting positions closer to those of the party's base.
"Some of the people I know who were in the 'Draft Warren' movement are people we work with and know, because they're part of the broader progressive ecosystem. I'd say more of us are stepping up to define the terms of the debate," said Kettenring.
"The point of the meeting was to discuss economic and social justice issues," a Warren aide told Politico. "As Sen. Warren has said many times, she does not support the draft group's efforts and is not running for president."
Source: Newsmax
Left-Wing Group is Investing $7 Million in Grassroots for November General Election
Left-Wing Group is Investing $7 Million in Grassroots for November General Election
What is the GOP and the conservative Right doing in response? A leading left-wing community organizing group is...
What is the GOP and the conservative Right doing in response?
A leading left-wing community organizing group is building a massive grassroots advocacy and voter turnout operation in battleground states that could decide November’s presidential and Senate elections, documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon reveal.
The Center for Popular Democracy is working to raise more than $7 million to support local and state-level organizing work that it hopes will translate issue-oriented advocacy into political power in November.
Documents detailing those efforts shed new light on how the left’s organizing apparatus is collaborating with prominent progressive groups such as MoveOn.org, labor unions, and foundations to build a campaign apparatus that can win short-term policy victories and translate those victories into a lasting political operation.
By Spencer Irvine
Source
What working moms really need for Mother's Day this year
What working moms really need for Mother's Day this year
When Mother's Day became a national holiday in the U.S. more than a century ago, women were a relative rarity in the...
When Mother's Day became a national holiday in the U.S. more than a century ago, women were a relative rarity in the workforce. Today's mom, by contrast, is largely a working mom.
In half of American households, women are either the primary breadwinner or contribute more than 40 percent of the income. For most families, the added income from women going to work is the only thing that's kept family income steady, as individual worker wages have stagnated for the better part of four decades.
Read full article here.
Legal Defense To Detained Immigrants
Latin Times - Nov 07, 2013 Like the other 13 detainees set to appear before an immigration judge on Wednesday...
Latin Times - Nov 07, 2013
Like the other 13 detainees set to appear before an immigration judge on Wednesday afternoon, Maximiliano Ortiz had been roused in the wee hours of the morning from his cell in a county jail. Facing the judge at the Varick Street Immigration Court in Lower Manhattan, clothed in an orange jumpsuit, he looked groggy.
"Are you arriving at this decision voluntarily?" the judge asked. The interpreter translated the question into Spanish.
"Yes," said Ortiz, and shortly afterward, having agreed to concede the charge of "entry without inspection" and accept an order of removal from the country, the first of about 190 poor, detained immigrant to receive pro bono legal representation via the city of New York was escorted out of the courtroom, chains jangling at his wrist and waist.
On Wednesday, a coalition of seven public defender, legal advocacy and community activist groups unveiled the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project (NYIFUP), the first program in the nation to win public funding for legal defense of detained immigrants who cannot afford to hire lawyers. In June, the New York City Council appropriated $500,000 for the pilot, which organizers say will be enough to meet about 20 percent of each year's need. Under the program, detainees whose income falls at no more than 200 percent of the federal poverty line can receive pro bono legal counsel from New York Immigrant Defenders, which consists of public defender offices The Bronx Defenders and Brooklyn Defense Services.
Organizers of the project trace its descent to the efforts of Second Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Robert Katzmann, who in 2010 commissioned two separate studies of detained immigrant representation in the city. The odds those reports gave detainees were dim: of the 4,818 detainees who had to argue their case from 2005 to 2010, one found, only 3 percent of them did it successfully, compared to 74 percent of those who were represented and weren't held in detention in the time leading up to their appearance. A separate study carried out previously by the City Bar Justice Center concluded that 39.2 percent of the 400 detainees it interviewed had "possibly meritorious claims for various forms of relief from removal".
Immigration law is one of the most notoriously complex types, comparable to tax law. But Lisa Schreibersdorf, founder and executive director of Brooklyn Defense Services, says detainees could win the right to remain in the country through a wide range of ways. Some have status and don't know it. "We had a kid who came to the country when he was two with his mom and dad. The parents got separated, and he went to live with his mom. His dad became a citizen before the kid turned 18. Now, that's automatic citizenship for the child, but the kid didn't know. When he was being interviewed by immigration officials, they'd ask if he was documented and he'd say, 'no'. So off he goes."
Others who have green cards or visas might be able to stay because of a US citizen spouse; those without papers might be able to receive legal status of some sort - for example, victims of domestic violence or trafficking could apply for U or T visas, or young people who grew up in the US could apply for DACA.
"People sometimes don't know, or they don't follow through and do it," she said. "Even now that they're facing deportation, it's not too late. You can still apply for those things, and that should actually negate the deportation proceeding. That's really where I think most of the benefit is going to come from."
"Then there's the low-level criminal cases where deportation is not required and the judge has the ability to cancel the removal. In that situation, a lawyer's very helpful because they explains to the judge what's going on with that family. It's very hard for an individual who's unrepresented to know what to tell the judge, what kind of things are going to help them. Plus it's very hard for people to speak in public. That's what we're good at."
On Wednesday, 10 of the 14 detainees who showed up for their initial court hearings were represented by lawyers provided by one of the two groups. All of them were from Latin American countries. Marianne Yang, the director of the immigration unit at Brooklyn Defense Services, says they expect demographics of clients to vary. But according to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse(TRAC), a database of information obtained from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agencies, out of the top ten most common nationalities, eight of them are in Latin America. The most typical profile for a detainee in NYC's immigration system is a Mexican (26 percent of all nationalities; Dominicans make up another 15 percent) who has been charged with "entry without inspection" -- a charge which accounts for about 47 percent of all detainees and some 89 percent of those who are from Mexico.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials say the agency only goes after immigrants who fit in its priority categories: someone who has committed serious crimes while in the US lawfully, people who crossed the border illegally in recent times and has few community ties, and "egregious immigration violators", or those have committed fraud or violated immigration law on multiple occasions. But organizers point to the case of Carlos Rodríguez Vásquez, a 27-year-old cook from the Dominican Republic and husband to a US citizen wife who was arrested by the NYPD for "trespassing" in the apartment building of a friend in Washington Heights. "In court, they dropped the charges right away, because I'd never had any kind of trouble with the law," he said. But he'd never filed the paperwork to declare his marriage to his wife in the United States, and the NYPD passed him off to ICE, which transferred him to a detention facility in Hudson County, New Jersey.
His family shelled out for a lawyer. But when his case went before a judge, Vásquez says, "The lawyer I hired made me sign a voluntary deportation agreement without talking to me about it, without me knowing." He ended up calling the Northern Manhattan Coalition for Immigrant Rights, which helped him win a retrial, but not before remaining in detention for an additional eight months.
In a report released on Thursday, the project's organizers argue that it makes good financial sense for the public, saying it will save New York state nearly $1.9 million per year in public health insurance spending, foster care services, and lost tax revenues. It also says it'll help employers save $4 million annually which they lose through turnover when immigrants are forced to leave their jobs. "Taken together," the report says, "these savings offset the majority of the investment needed to establish he program."
"It's presented as something which is just for immigrant families," said Brittny Saunders, senior staff attorney at the Center for Popular Democracy. "But in reality it's for everybody."
Source:
5 Reasons Billionaire GOP Donor and Public School Privatizer Betsy DeVos Should Not Be Secretary of Education
Billionaire Betsy DeVos, a major GOP funder and party activist from Michigan, has been tapped by Donald Trump to become...
Billionaire Betsy DeVos, a major GOP funder and party activist from Michigan, has been tapped by Donald Trump to become the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education and faces a Senate confirmation hearing on Tuesday.
Many have decried the choice as a looming disaster for public schools in America, with NEA president Lily Eskelsen Garcia observing that DeVos' "efforts over the years have done more to undermine public education than support students. She has lobbied for failed schemes, like vouchers--which take away funding and local control from our public schools--to fund private schools at taxpayers' expense."
Randi Weingarten, the president of AFT, stated that "Betsy DeVos is everything Donald Trump said is wrong in America--an ultra-wealthy heiress who uses her money to game the system and push a special-interest agenda that is opposed by the majority of voters. Installing her in the Department of Education is the opposite of Trump's promise to drain the swamp."
The choice signals the President-elect's intention to put the expansion of taxpayer-funded charter schools and vouchers for private and religious schools at the center of his national agenda on education.
Through her riches, Betsy DeVos has had a disproportionate influence on national and state policies affecting millions of Americans, helping to force through changes to the law that gut the rights of workers and redirect American tax dollars to fund risky charter school experiments that have repeatedly failed for America's children.
She has also applauded efforts to gut election laws that are designed to prevent corruption, recasting the issue of money in politics as free speech and her right to speak "as loudly as we please." (Her remarks about this and her praise for Tom DeLay's "honesty" begin at the 52-minute mark here.)
Here are five facts to get smart about who Betsy DeVos is and what her nomination could mean for America.
1. Betsy DeVos Refused to Send Her Children to Public Schools in Grand Rapids, Michigan.Betsy and her husband Dick DeVos, Jr., have four children they raised in the prosperous town of Ada, Michigan, which is the headquarters of AmWay, the multi-level marketing company that made the DeVos family billionaires. She is also an heir to the Prince Corporation fortune from sun visors and other car parts.
The public elementary, middle, and high school in Ada, a suburb of Grand Rapids, Michigan, are highly ranked, but she did not send her children to public schools. She has said that her two daughters were home-schooled for a number of years.
Instead of sending their children to public schools, for nearly three decades, Betsy and Dick have focused on pushing vouchers for private schools and bankrolling politicians to advance their agenda to redirect American tax dollars away from truly public schools.
2. She Retained a Convicted Felon to Lobby for Her Wish List of Education Reforms (and There Are Other Scandals).In 2004, Betsy DeVos hired Scott Jensen to aid the legislative agenda of her group "American Federation for Children" (AFC), a 501(c)(4) arm of Alliance for School Choice, her 501(c)3), which push so-called education reform measures.
The problem is that in 2002, Jensen had been charged with three felonies and a misdemeanor for misconduct in office--for illegally using his office as the Republican Assembly Speaker to direct that state employees to perform campaign work at public expense. He and the others who were charged challenged the reach of state statutes in court through various appeals from 2002 through 2004, but they lost their efforts to prevent criminal trials.
But, the fact that Jensen was charged with felonies for misusing public tax dollars for partisan political purposes did not deter Betsy DeVos from hiring him in 2004 to advance her personal agenda to change American schools on behalf of AFC.
In 2005, he was tried in state court and convicted on all counts. The presiding judge told Jensen "what you did was a great wrong to the citizens of this state" because "You used your power and your influence to run an illegal campaign funding operation." The judge sentenced Jensen to five years, including 15 months of confinement along with supervised release.
That conviction and public condemnation did not end Jensen's job for Betsy DeVos. Jensen appealed his conviction, and he also lost his office in the legislature, but he had a job with DeVos.
For the next five years, Jensen was a convicted felon and DeVos' point person in pushing her school choice agenda in the states.
In 2010, after changes in the judiciary, Jensen won an appeal of his conviction and agreed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor crime to settle the case.
His conviction for that crime also had no impact on DeVos' decision to keep him on to push school choice.
Accordingly, perhaps it should come as no surprise that while all that was going on, another DeVos family school choice PAC was fined for $5.2 million by the Ohio Elections Board in 2008 for circumventing Ohio campaign finance laws. It was the largest fine for violating election laws in state history.
Do the ends justify the means for Betsy DeVos?
3. DeVos Has Pushed Policies Cloaked as "Choice" that Undermine Public Schools in Michigan and Nationwide.Her particular area of interest is the deregulation and privatization of the education system, initially through the introduction of education "vouchers."
The primary organizations that DeVos has bankrolled to carry out these policy goals are the dark money group, American Federation for Children (AFC), which is a 501(c)(4), and its affiliated 501(c)(3) nonprofit group, Alliance for School Choice. These groups have become major contributors to the right-wing corporate education reform echo chamber.
AFC describes itself as "creating an education revolution" through what is described as "school choice," via vouchers (tax dollars spent on private schools including religious schools), tax credits, and non-taxable "Education Savings Accounts."
AFC has gone through several evolutions since its 1998 founding including name changes. Some of these changes occurred after political controversies such as violations of campaign finance laws in Ohio and Wisconsin, as noted above.
AFC is and always has been a very important player in local state and national politics, helping to strongly support Republican candidates who move her education privatization agenda forward.
For example, AFC invested heavily in Wisconsin's recall elections to protect its political allies, including Republican Governor Scott Walker. Since 2010, AFC has spent at least $4.5 million on independent expenditures and issue ads in Wisconsin. This amount doesn't include the individual donations given by members of the DeVos family, or any spending on dark money groups trying to influence the elections without disclosing their donors.
AFC also aggressively promotes the school privatization agenda via the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), where Jensen has represented AFC's lobbying agenda.
ALEC, describes itself as a voluntary association of state legislators but it operates as a corporate bill mill where the corporations that fund most of ALEC's operations and where corporate lobbyists and special interest representatives get an "equal voice and vote" with elected officials to approve "model" bills without the press or public present. AFC has been a "trustee" level sponsor of ALEC and is a member of ALEC's Education Task Force.
AFC works alongside ALEC to push so-called "model bills" promoting "school choice" and tax changes to subsidize private schools. Essentially, both ALEC and AFC want that national priority to be expanded funding for charter schools, which defunds truly public schools.
The nomination of Betsy DeVos to be the head of the Department of Education is a clear sign that the nation is about to embark on a dangerously extreme national experiment in the privatization of our education system that could deal a death blow to our public schools as we have known them.
There's little doubt that DeVos would use her power to undermine one of America's greatest innovations that helped make our country and economy so strong in the 20th century--quality public schools--and instead, use the idea of 'reform' to further subsidize private schools along with for-profit companies and non-profits operating charter schools.
The expansion of charters has marched forward despite the fact that fly-by-night charter operators that have committed more than $200 million dollars in fraud and waste in recent years, as documented by the Center for Popular Democracy.
Some of that expansion has occurred through for-profit companies, like K12 Inc., getting tax dollars for so-called "virtual schools," to operate as charters or as part of the public school system.
Dick DeVos, in a joint interview with Betsy DeVos, noted that he "commended to homeschoolers to consider is check out K12... Bill Bennett reviews the K12 personally, ... it's very consistent with our Christian world view..."
Like Betsy DeVos' AFC, K12 has had a seat and vote on ALEC's Education Task Force, and K12 has a seat on ALEC's corporate board. K12 has paid its CEO millions in stock in the company, whose revenues come overwhelmingly from public school budgets. CMD has called one of the leaders of K12 the highest paid "teacher" in America.
As the Center for Media and Democracy has detailed, the federal government has spent nearly $4 billion in tax dollars on the charter school experiment advanced by DeVos and other billionaires, like the Kochs and the Walton family.
CMD has also documented how charter schools in the DeVos backyard of Michigan have been embroiled in fraud and scandal, and how the state has even received federal tax dollars for charters that never even opened. That does not include the nearly $1 billion state spending that the Detroit Free Press has documented have gone to charters in that state.
4. Theocracy: She Has Pushed for Vouchers and More to Get Tax Money to Support Christian Schools.DeVos has approached the issue of education as a religious issue for her personally and as an area which she wants to change the law to reflect her personal views. A long-time partisan activist, she got involved in education "reform" in the early 1990s, around the time that her husband ran for a seat on the Michigan state Board of Education.
After he stepped down from that post, in 1993 she and her husband took on the "Education Freedom Fund," which, she has said, "I would define as ultimately Christian in its nature because in excess of 90% of the parents who receive these scholarships choose Christian schools to go to." EFF provides private funding for private school tuition, and is supported with significant donations from the DeVos family.
Why did she and here husband choose to get involved in the political battles over public education even though they did not send their kids to public schools and they financially support private Christian schools?
In a joint interview for "The Gathering," a group focused on advancing Christian ideology through philanthropy, she and her husband said they decided to focus on reforming public education and funding for private education because the "Lord led us there" and "God led us."
At that meeting, they were asked if it would not have been simpler to fund Christian schools directly rather than fund political efforts like vouchers to get more tax dollars to fund Christian schools, and she replied: "There are not enough philanthropic dollars in America to fund what is currently the need in education versus what is spent every year on education in this country... So, our desire is to confront the culture in ways that will continue to advance God's Kingdom," adding that they want "to impact our culture [in ways] that may have great Kingdom gain in the long-run by changing the way we approach things."
Her husband added: "We are working .... to allow for our Christian worldview, which for us comes from a Calvinist tradition, and to provide for a more expanded opportunity someday for all parents to be able to educate their children in a school that reflects their world view and not each day sending their child to a school that may be reflecting a world view that may be quite antithetical to the worldview they hold in their families."
When asked if they are "against public education," they have denied that charge while trying to reframe the conversation.
Betsy DeVos responded: "No, we are for good education and for having every child have an opportunity for a good education. And having grown up in families that are in the business world, we both believe that competition and choices make everyone better, and that ultimately if the system that prevails in the United States today had more competition, if there were other choices for people to make freely that all of the schools would become better as a result and that excellence would be sought in every setting. So we are very strong proponents of fundamentally changing the way we approach education ... because there are hundreds of thousands and millions of children that are forced to go every day to a school that is not meeting their needs and it's not right."
Her husband added that they are for "public education" but that's not the same as "public schools." He said public funding for education of all kinds is a "laudable concept" that should not be forced to operate through "government-run schools."
He also stated: "In my opinion, the Church has sadly retrenched from its central role in our community, to where now as we look at many communities in our country the church which ought to be in our view far more central to the life in our community has been displaced by the public school as the center for activity the center for what goes on the community...."
He added, "it is certainly our hope that churches would continue no matter what the environment whether there is government funding someday through vouchers or tax credits or some other mechanism...that more and more churches will get more and more active and engaged in education. We just can think of no better way to rebuild our families and our communities than to have that circle of church, school, and family much more tightly focused and being built on a consistent world view."
Betsy DeVos did not disagree with this statement of their shared goals and responded: "If I can just add to that very quickly, I think for many years the church in general has felt that it is important for the children of the congregation to be in the schools to make a difference but in fact I think what has happened in many cases for the last couple of decades is that the schools have impacted the kids more than the kids have impacted the schools. The young children need to have a pretty solid foundation to be able to combat the kind of influences that they are presented with on a daily basis."
(All quotes above are transcribed from their hour-long interview for "The Gathering," available here.)
5. She Bragged that Her Family Was the Biggest GOP Funder of "Soft Money," Plus They Have Funneled Millions in Dark Money.Betsy DeVos has used her family fortune to distort public policy to suit her personal agenda through direct donations and dark money because, in her own words, she wants a "return on our investment."
The DeVos family is a major funder of the Republican party. In a 1997 op-ed that DeVos wrote for the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call, she pointedly admitted, "my family is the largest single contributor of soft money to the national Republican party." She also said that she decided to stop taking offense at the suggestion that they were buying influence and simply concede the point, admitting "we expect a return on our investment," to make America reflect their vision for it.
DeVos has served as chairwoman of the Michigan Republican Party and was the finance chairwoman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
In addition to the disclosed and undisclosed political spending for controversial politicians like Tom DeLay--whom Betsy DeVos has called one of the most honest men in politics--the DeVos family through the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation has been a major funder of many extreme socially conservative organizations such as the Family Research Council, Focus on the Family and Coral Ridge Ministries.
The DeVos family fortune funds pro-education privatization, anti-union and pro-school voucher groups.
In 2011 alone, the DeVos foundation gave $3 million to David Koch's Americans for Prosperity, a conservative group created and funded by the Koch Brothers. The DeVos Foundation gave another $2.5 million to the Koch conduit DonorsTrust from 2009 to 2010.
The DeVos foundation has also contributed millions of dollars to other right wing organizations such as the State Policy Network, Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, FreedomWorks, Federalist Society, Mackinac Center for Public Policy, and others.
Betsy and Dick DeVos were featured at a meeting of the ALEC sibling group, the State Policy Network, which gave its highest award in 2014 to the Mackinac Center for pushing the misnamed "right to work" bill into law in Michigan, even though that think tank has claimed to the IRS that it engages in no lobbying.
Their fortune has helped to underwrite Mackinac's operations and agenda, which has included expanding powers for emergency managers to replace elected officials, which helped create the conditions for the Flint, Michigan, tragedy of kids being poisoned by lead in their water, as CMD has detailed in a history of those provision.
In 2015, DeVos money also helped fund the push for adoption of a statewide religious freedom restoration act, or RFRA law, that awards adoption agencies in Michigan the right to claim a religious exemption from having to serve LGBTQ couples. Both the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation and the Dick and Betsy DeVos Foundation gave money to Bethany Christian Services, which lobbied hard for passage of the controversial RFRA.
Recently, the DeVos family also helped fund two pieces of extreme state legislation in Michigan. The state preemption bill, dubbed the "death star," HB 4052, passed by the legislature in 2015 bans cities from enacting their own laws governing wages and benefits. In one fell swoop, the law preempted local regulation of nine wage and benefit policies ranging from minimum wage to worker training and organizing.
By Lisa Graves
Source
Wall Street, listo para lucrar con el muro de Trump
Wall Street, listo para lucrar con el muro de Trump
Buena parte de la discusión sobre el muro fronterizo del presidente Donald Trump se ha enfocado en su costo e...
Buena parte de la discusión sobre el muro fronterizo del presidente Donald Trump se ha enfocado en su costo e impracticabilidad, así como en la retórica antiinmigrante y racista que encarna. Sin embargo, se le ha prestado poca atención a quién específicamente podría beneficiarse de la construcción.
Lea el artículo completo aquí.
‘Look at me when I’m talking to you!’: Crying protesters confront Jeff Flake in Capitol elevator
‘Look at me when I’m talking to you!’: Crying protesters confront Jeff Flake in Capitol elevator
After Sen. Jeff Flake’s announcement that he would, in fact, vote to confirm Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the U.S....
After Sen. Jeff Flake’s announcement that he would, in fact, vote to confirm Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court, the emotional debate over the confirmation spilled into the halls of Congress — on live television — as two women loudly and tearfully confronted the Arizona Republican in an elevator Friday, telling him that he was dismissing the pain of sexual-assault survivors.
“What you are doing is allowing someone who actually violated a woman to sit in the Supreme Court,” one woman, who said she had been sexually assaulted, shouted during a live CNN broadcast as Flake was making his way to a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting. The Center for Popular Democracy, a left-leaning advocacy organization, later identified her as the group’s co-executive director, Ana Maria Archila.
“This is horrible,” she told Flake. “You have children in your family. Think about them.”
Read the article and watch the video here.
Chicago Activists Organize Against Massive Police Training Academy to Be Built As Schools Close
Chicago Activists Organize Against Massive Police Training Academy to Be Built As Schools Close
The city’s 2018 budget plan includes a $27.4 million investment in police reform and commitments to hire hundreds of...
The city’s 2018 budget plan includes a $27.4 million investment in police reform and commitments to hire hundreds of new law enforcement officers. According to a report by the Center for Popular Democracy, Law for Black Lives, and Black Youth Project 100, Chicago spent 38 percent of its general fund expenditures on policing last year, and has the second-largest police force in the nation.
Read the full article here.
Lange, unregelmäßige Arbeitszeit: Starbucks weiter in der Kritik
Die Kritik vieler Mitarbeiter an den Arbeitsbedingungen bei der Kaffeehauskette Starbucks hat für einen neuen...
Die Kritik vieler Mitarbeiter an den Arbeitsbedingungen bei der Kaffeehauskette Starbucks hat für einen neuen Begriff im Wortschatz vieler US-Amerikaner gesorgt: "Clopening". Für viele Mitarbeiter ist das späte Schließen und das morgendliche Öffnen der Filialen durch ein und dieselbe Person eine hohe Belastung. Im vergangenen Jahr gelobte Starbucks Besserung, nachdem die "New York Times" ausführlich über Praktiken wie das "Clopening" berichtet hatte. Die Kritik richtete sich gegen die unregelmäßigen und zum Teil überlangen Arbeitszeiten, die den Mitarbeitern nur sehr kurzfristig mitgeteilt würden.
Hat sich seither etwas gebessert? Nein, schreibt die NGO Center for Popular Democracy in einer ausführlichen Analyse. Zuvor wurden Mitarbeiter befragt. Diese bemängeln nicht nur die weiterhin vorkommenden "Clopenings", sondern auch die Schwierigkeit, bei Krankheit Ersatz zu finden – ein Mitarbeiter bezeichnet es als anstrengender, selbst so lange durchzutelefonieren, bis er einen Springer gefunden hat, als einfach selbst krank zur Arbeit zu gehen. Problematisch sei auch die chronische Unterbesetzung der Filialen, die sich wiederum auf die Arbeitszeit auswirke.
Missstände auch in Europa
Starbucks ist nicht die einzige Kette, die ihren Mitarbeitern einiges abverlangt. Die Kritik findet in den USA deswegen so großes Echo, weil Starbucks seine Mitarbeiter als "Partner" bezeichnet und die Philosophie verfolgt, "den menschlichen Geist zu inspirieren und zu nähren". Es ist nicht das erste Mal, dass die sozial und umweltbewusst wirkende Unternehmensphilosophie (Fairtrade, Aktionen gegen Rassismus, bezahlte Ausbildung, Krankenversicherung) auf die Kaffeehauskette zurückfällt.
Beschwerden gab es in den vergangenen Jahren einige – auch außerhalb der USA. 2010 schleuste sich ein ZDF-Reporter in eine Starbucks-Filiale auf dem Frankfurter Flughafen ein und wurde Zeuge eines harten Arbeitsalltags: Abmahnungen gebe es teilweise wegen falscher Sockenfarbe, fiebrige Mitarbeiter durften nicht nach Hause gehen.
Dass sich bei Arbeitszeit und Dienstplänen nichts zum Positiven geändert hat, sieht man in der Führungsebene von Starbucks naturgemäß anders: "Wir sind die Ersten, die zugeben, dass wir viel Arbeit vor uns haben", sagte Unternehmenssprecherin Jaime Riley der "New York Times". Alle Angestellten würden ihre Dienstpläne mittlerweile mindestens zehn Tage im Voraus bekommen. In alle Filialen durchgedrungen sei diese Praxis aber noch nicht, heißt es in der Analyse des Center for Popular Democracy. (lhag, 25.9.2015)
Untersuchung des Center for Popular Democracy zu Dienstplänen
"New York Times"-Enthüllungen 2014
"New York Times"-Status-quo-Bericht 2015
Kooperation zwischen Starbucks und der Arizona State University
Source: derStandard.at
14 hours ago
14 hours ago