Death Cab for Cutie Disses Donald Trump in New Song 'Million Dollar Loan'
Death Cab for Cutie Disses Donald Trump in New Song 'Million Dollar Loan'
It's the first installment in a 30-day series of anti-Trump songs, from artists including R.E.M., Aimee Mann and Jim...
It's the first installment in a 30-day series of anti-Trump songs, from artists including R.E.M., Aimee Mann and Jim James.
One of Donald Trump’s many claims from the 2016 campaign trail that got fact checkers scurrying to their records was that he’d built his massive empire off a small loan from his father. As it turns out, Fred Trump loaned his son nearly a million dollars to help him build New York’s Grand Hyatt hotel in 1978 -- the move that put the younger Trump on the map. In a brand new song to kick off a multi-faceted anti-Trump initiative, Death Cab For Cutie has made the Republican candidate's dubious claim its target.
It’s called “Million Dollar Loan,” and it's the first installment of a Dave Eggers-headed series called 30 Days, 30 Songs. Every day through Election Day 2016, an artist will share a previously-unreleased song geared towards ensuring Trump never sniffs the White House. From Death Cab, we get the lyric video for "Million Dollar Loan," produced by Simian Design. It’s actually a soothingly catchy song, as strong as anything off their 2015 album Kintsugi. It doesn’t sound outwardly bitter, but their point is clear:
“You reap what you sow / From a million dollar loan / Call your father on the phone / And get that million dollar loan.”
With gentle acoustics and percussive clatter behind them, Ben Gibbard’s vocals lament one-percenter excess in much the same way they’ve previously pined for lost loves.
30 Days, 30 Songs will also include submissions from Aimee Mann, Thao Nguyen, clipping., My Morning Jacket’s Jim James, Bhi Bhiman and a previously unreleased live recording from the still-broken-up R.E.M. All proceeds will go towards the Center for Popular Democracy (CDP), particularly its efforts to register all American citizens to vote.
Find Gibbard's statement on "Million Dollar Loan" below:
Lyrically, “Million Dollar Loan” deals with a particularly tone deaf moment in Donald Trump’s ascent to the Republican nomination. While campaigning in New Hampshire last year, he attempted to cast himself as a self-made man by claiming he built his fortune with just a “small loan of a million dollars” from his father. Not only has this statement been proven to be wildly untrue, he was so flippant about it. It truly disgusted me. Donald Trump has repeatedly demonstrated that he is unworthy of the honor and responsibility of being President of the United States of America, and in no way, shape or form represents what this country truly stands for. He is beneath us.
By Chris Payne
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Death and democracy: How a dying activist is spending his final days
Death and democracy: How a dying activist is spending his final days
Diagnosed with ALS in 2016, activist Ady Barkan is living on borrowed time. As his body deteriorates rapidly, he’s...
Diagnosed with ALS in 2016, activist Ady Barkan is living on borrowed time. As his body deteriorates rapidly, he’s spending his last moments fighting for the causes he believes in, hoping to leave the world a better place for his young son.
Watch the video here.
Minority Groups Rally Outside Fed Against Interest Rate Hike
Observer - March 5, 2015, by Will Bredderman - Minority activist organizations demonstrated in the snow outside the...
Observer - March 5, 2015, by Will Bredderman - Minority activist organizations demonstrated in the snow outside the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, insisting that the institution keep interest rates low until stubbornly high unemployment rates in nonwhite communities drop further.
Immigrant advocacy group Make the Road NY and neighborhood organizers New York Communities for Change joined other left-leaning groups outside the lower Manhattan headquarters of the New York Fed, a branch of the national system that controls the interest rates at which lending institutions may borrow money from the United States government. The Fed has left the rates near zero since the financial crisis of 2008 in order to encourage investment, but it has indicated it might raise them this summer amid an improving economy.
The protesters, however, argued that black and Hispanic communities in New York City are still languishing in an economic doldrums, with jobless rates sitting at 11.2 percent and 5.7 percent respectively.
“These unemployment rates are not going to be better by this summer. We’re not a couple months away from a recovery,” said Shawn Sebastian from the Center for Popular Democracy, arguing that the Fed is looking only at a general joblessness picture that averages in the relatively low unemployment rates among whites. “They’re trying to look at the aggregate levels of unemployment and ignore how it’s disproportionately affecting minority communities to push this narrative about a recovery that we’re not experiencing.”
Chanting “don’t raise the rate,” the demonstrators insisted that New York Fed President William Dudley meet with their organizations to discuss the special needs of minorities.
“We need to sit down with him and have an honest conversation about why he needs to keep interest rates low in order to fight for our communities of color, so that we can make sure we are supplying jobs to all,” said Victoria Ruiz of Make the Road.
The protesters also lashed out at the Fed, which has the additional duty of regulating large banks, for failing to prevent lenders from issuing, packaging and selling dubious mortgage loans—which disproportionately went to black and Hispanic homeowners, with areas like Southeast Queens now leading the country in foreclosures.
“The banks, while the Fed was not watching what they were doing, was not doing its job supervising them, they went around snapping up subprime lenders and fueling all of that toxic subprime lending that happened,” said Alexis Iwanisziw of the New Economy Project, noting many major financiers have since paid out massive settlements to the Department of Justice for their activities.
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York referred the Observer to chairwoman Janet Yellen’s remarks after the Fed’s meeting last December, when she said “it can be patient in beginning to normalize the stance of monetary policy.”
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US Activists Target Fed's Rate-hike Talks
Taipei Times - November 16, 2014 - US labor and community organizers meeting with US Federal Reserve Chair Janet...
Taipei Times - November 16, 2014 - US labor and community organizers meeting with US Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen challenged officials who are ready to raise interest rates to first come visit the poorest neighborhoods with them before saying that the economy has recovered.
Kati Sipp, one of about two dozen activists meeting Yellen, said at a press conference on Friday in front of the central bank in Washington that she would show Philadelphia Fed President Charles Plosser “what life is like in this economy” for his city’s unemployed.
“Clearly Charles Plosser hasn’t been coming out the way that I work,” Pennsylvania Working Families director Sipp said. “I work on 60th Street in West Philadelphia in a storefront office and every single day someone or a couple of people come in to my office because they are looking for work.”
Members of the group met with Yellen and Fed governors Stanley Fischer, Jerome Powell and Lael Brainard. The coalition of 20 community groups, labor unions and religious leaders from around the US wants the Fed to hear the concerns of ordinary US residents as it prepares to raise rates. It is part of wider public pressure, including from legislators of both parties, who want more accountability and transparency from the central bank.
The Fed has been criticized by Democratic and Republican party groups over its rescue of big Wall Street banks in the financial crisis that began in 2008, and over subsequent steps to support the economy through zero interest rates and massive bond purchases.
The group meeting with Yellen and her colleagues on Friday included individuals struggling to find work despite the improving economic picture in the US, Ady Barkan, senior staff attorney at the Brooklyn-based Center for Popular Democracy, one of the organizers of the meeting, said in an interview.
“They all listened very intently and asked questions,” Barkan said of Yellen and the three governors. “They were very interested in hearing about the personal stories of the folks we brought.”
Barkan said Rounds told the Fed officials that “sky-high unemployment” in the St Louis area had contributed to “desperation” in the town.
Another speaker was Shemethia Butler, an unemployed woman from Washington. She recounted for Yellen how she was laid off from a job that offered no paid sick days after becoming ill and missing time at work, Barkan said.
The jobless rate has fallen to 5.8 percent from a 26-year high of 10 percent in October 2009. Interest rates have been held near zero since December 2008 and most Fed officials project that they will raise borrowing costs sometime next year.
Still, millions of US citizens can find only part-time work, while average hourly wages have risen at about a 2 percent pace for the past five years, barely outpacing inflation.
“The economy is not working for the vast majority of people,” Barkan told reporters before the meeting in front of the central bank headquarters facing the National Mall. “It’s too important of an institution to be controlled and dominated by big banks and corporations, rather than the public.”
In addition to low rates to help the unemployed, the groups are pushing for a more open and transparent search process for regional bank presidents that includes more community input. Barkan said the group asked Yellen for support in arranging meetings with each regional Fed president.
While formal changes to the process of selecting regional Fed leaders would require legislation, Barkan said the Fed board of governors held significant informal influence over the process.
“I’m sure they could change the process if they wanted to,” he said.
Plosser and Richard Fisher of Dallas both plan to retire next year and the “Fed Up” coalition wants more public input in naming their successors. Both banks have said they have hired executive search firms to find candidates.
Economist Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, said the Fed’s willingness to arrange the meeting was “incredibly encouraging” because the central bank “is one of the most important institutions in the world, but few Americans know it.”
While the unemployment rate has declined to a six-year low, there remains “too large a gap between today and a healthy economy,” he said, adding that stakes are highest for disadvantaged groups, including African-Americans. Their unemployment rate tends to be twice as high as the broader US level both “in good times and in bad,” Bivens said.
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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
Freedom To Thrive: Criminalization, Policing, and Mass-Incarceration: Interview with Jennifer Epps-Addison - Audio
Freedom To Thrive: Criminalization, Policing, and Mass-Incarceration: Interview with Jennifer Epps-Addison - Audio
Listen to a discussion with Jennifer Epps-Addison about The Center for Popular Democracy's new report, Freedom To Thrive: Criminalization, Policing, and Mass-Incarceration.
Presentan plan para obtener la ciudanía estatal en NY El proyecto concedería a los indocumentados neoyorquinos gran parte de los derechos que otorga la ciudadanía federal
El Diario - June 16, 2014 by Juan Matossian - Nueva York - Ante la inoperancia del Congreso para aprobar una reforma...
El Diario - June 16, 2014 by Juan Matossian - Nueva York - Ante la inoperancia del Congreso para aprobar una reforma migratoria federal, legisladores neoyorquinos presentaron el lunes una propuesta para conceder la ciudanía estatal a los casi 2.7 millones de indocumentados del estado de Nueva York.
El proyecto de ley “New York is Home” (Nueva York es el hogar) concedería a los indocumentados neoyorquinos gran parte de los derechos que otorga la ciudadanía federal. Entre ellos, la posibilidad de tramitar una licencia para manejar, de obtener licencia profesional para trabajar, solicitar ayudas para estudiar en la universidad, acceder a cuidado de salud a través del Medicaid estatal, o de votar en las elecciones municipales y estatales.
“El estado debe de reconocer las contribuciones que hacen los residentes no ciudadanos que cumplen las reglas, trabajan aquí y pagan sus impuestos”, dijo el senador estatalGustavo Rivera (D-Bronx), que introdujo la medida en la legislatura estatal junto al asambleísta Karim Camara (D–Brooklyn). “La inclusión de los inmigrantes en nuestro sistema político y económico nos beneficiaría, mientras su exclusión nos perjudica a todos”.
Si la ley es aprobada, los indocumentados deberían cumplir una serie de requisitos para ser elegibles para la ciudadanía estatal. Los principales serían tener una prueba de identidad, demostrar que se ha residido al menos tres años en el estado y que se han pagado los impuestos durante ese tiempo, y un compromiso de cumplir las leyes neoyorquinas y la constitución estatal.
Las posibilidades de que la propuesta salga adelante son escasas, después que Albany ha rechazado o ni siquiera ha querido votar medidas menos ambiciosas de ayuda para los inmigrantes, como el DREAM Act o la licencia de manejar para indocumentados. Además, la legislatura estatal cierra su curso legislativo esta misma semana, por lo que la ley no podrá ser votada hasta el otoño.
El otro gran objetivo que persiguen los impulsores de la propuesta, que está respaldada por una gran coalición de organizaciones pro inmigrantes como Make the Road New York o Hispanic Federation, es que otros estados también presenten sus planes paralelos y seguir metiendo presión al Congreso para que vote la reforma migratoria.
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Meet the Activists Who Want to Make the Fed Listen to Workers for a Change
Vox - August 22, 2014, by Dylan Matthews - The Jackson Hole conference, an ...
Vox - August 22, 2014, by Dylan Matthews - The Jackson Hole conference, an annual retreat in Wyoming organized by the Kansas City Fed, is usually frequented by central bankers, private sector economists, and academics. It's not usually frequented by everyday workers.
This year was differrent. A group of community activists traveled to the conference to urge policymakers to not do what an increasing number of voices in the Fed system and in the financial sector have been urging them to do: raise interest rates.
"They need to stimulate the economy," says Kendra Brooks, a former bank manager from Philadelphia who's been unemployed for about a year. "Increasing the interest rate here isn't going to help the people without jobs. It's going to put us further into debt."
"I want to at least get our voices heard before they make their decisions,"Tyrone Raino, who recently took a job requiring a 40 mile commute from his home in Minneapolis, says.
Brooks and Raino are both members of local community organizing groups — Minnesota Neighborhoods Organizing for Change and Action United in Philadelphia, respectively — which have, with the Center for Popular Democracy, come together to try to do something that hasn't really been done before: grassroots lobbying of the Fed. And they're being heard.
According to the Center's senior attorney, Ady Barkan, the group met with Kansas Fed chief Esther George for two hours, and spoke to Fed chair Janet Yellen, Chicago Fed chief Charles Evans, and Minneapolis Fed chief Narayana Kocherlakota. The last three are sympathetic to Brooks and Raino's perspective — Raino called Kocherlakota "one of the voices in the Federal Reserve system who understands the economy is far from recovery for most of us" in an article for MinnPost — George has expressed support for raising interest rates. For people trying to lobby a generally unlobbied institution, that's an impressive start.
To some extent, the Fed is designed to be impervious to outside pressure like this. Many economists believe that central bank independence — that is, having a central bank that is not directly controlled by legislatures or other democratically elected officials — is crucial to effective monetary policy. In 1993, future Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and his Harvard colleague Alberto Alesina authored a hugely influential paper arguing that countries with more independent banks have less variable prices and lower inflation overall. While that finding was controversial, the view that month-to-month policy decisions by the Fed should not be influenced by politicians — what Fed vice chair Stanley Fischer has called"instrument independence" — is widely accepted.
But Barkan argues that the independence the Fed currently enjoys is one-sided. "There are 108 board members across the 12 regional banks," he notes. "Under the law, 72 of them are supposed to represent the public interest and 36 are supposed to represent banking and financial interests. But of the 108, 97 are from financial institutions or corporations. Only 9 are from nonprofits, and even those are from major, wealthy nonprofits. Only 2 of the 108 board members represent labor organizations and workers."
"This desire for Fed independence really only goes in one direction," he concludes. "It's a desire for insulation from the needs of regular people."
Barkan, Brooks, and Raino avoid endorsing specific proposals for the Fed to get tougher on unemployment, like setting a nominal GDP target or abolishing paper money or allowing "helicopter drops." The emphasis is more on convincing the Fed that there is still a problem — that the labor market still has slack.
While some in the Fed worry that people are getting too many raises, Barkan argues that wage growth is still too slow — and that the labor market won't be healthy until it's significantly higher. "Real rising wages will represent tightening of the labor markets, and that's what you want to pull the long-term unemployed back into the market, and vulnerable workers back into the market," he says. "It's only once the labor market tightens that you can help vulnerable communities get out of this long recession."
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More on How Charter Schools Profit from Tax Dollars and Undermine Host School Districts
More on How Charter Schools Profit from Tax Dollars and Undermine Host School Districts
Recent weeks have brought a lot of press about the way charter schools are undermining public school districts and...
Recent weeks have brought a lot of press about the way charter schools are undermining public school districts and diverting tax dollars allocated for education too often to for-profit companies. Capital & Main in California just published a week-long expose explaining how rapid expansion of charters threatens the financial stability of the Los Angeles and Oakland school districts. The Salt Lake Tribune editorialized against for-profit charters after that newspaper’s scathing investigation explained how, “A handful of private companies have banked more than $68 million from Utah taxpayers over the past three years.” And in Ohio, after the legislature ended its spring 2016 session without considering an excellent law that would have required the notorious cyber charters to prove that the students the state is paying for are actually participating in the online program, the Columbus Dispatch editorialized: “The idea was that if student outcomes improved in charter schools, then the schools would continue… But the straightforward experiment went off the rails when some clever operators figured out how to get rich by sponsoring charter schools. And to keep the gravy flowing, they began making major political contributions to the lawmakers who control the gravy.”
This is the context in which the Center for Popular Democracy has just released its third annual report, Charter School Vulnerabilities to Waste, Fraud, and Abuse: “Two years ago, the Center for Popular Democracy issued a report demonstrating that charter schools in 15 states—about one-third of the states with charter schools—had experienced over $100 million in reported fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement since 1994. Last year, we released a new report that found millions of dollars of new alleged and confirmed financial fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement in charter schools had come to light, bringing the new total to $203 million. This report offers further evidence that the money we know has been misused is just the tip of the iceberg. With the new alleged and confirmed financial fraud reported here, the total fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement in charter schools has reached over $216 million.”
The new report examines fraud and mismanagement across the states and explains that, “State oversight systems are currently reactive by design. While states do require that charter schools submit budgets, financial reports and independent financial audits, most do not proactively monitor for fraud, waste, mismanagement, or other financial abuses.” The Center for Popular Democracy recommends that charter schools be required to institute internal fraud risk management assessments and that oversight agencies like state comptrollers’ offices should regularly audit charter schools.
Of course a huge problem is that charter schools are established and regulated in state law, and experience tells us that political pressures and financial contributions to state lawmakers have exacerbated the states’ failures to oversee charter schools in the public interest. It is for this reason that the Center for Popular Democracy recommends that the U.S. Department of Education should make the awarding of enormous federal grants to states for the expansion of charter schools contingent on states’ passage of laws to strengthen oversight: “Taxpayers invest billions of education dollars in charter schools, yet states offer too few protections to ensure that those taxpayer dollars are benefitting students. Therefore, we recommend that federal funding for charter school education should flow only to states that have… taxpayer protection provisions in place for their charter schools.”
The new report once again points to failed federal regulation of the federal Charter Schools Program. “The federal government alone has contributed over $3.3 billion through several grant programs specifically designed to increase the number of charter schools in the United States. With the recent passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the federal government has signaled its plan to spend another $3.3 billion over the next 10 years, which would double the federal investment in charter schools.”
And yet, according to Center for Popular Democracy’s new report, “In 2010, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) issued a memorandum to the Department of Education’s Office of Innovation and Improvement. The OIG stated that the purpose of the memorandum was to ‘alert you of our concern about vulnerabilities in the oversight of charter schools.’… In September of 2012, the OIG audited the Department of Education’s Office of Innovation and Improvement’s (OII) Charter Schools Program and found that OII did not adequately monitor the federal funds. Specifically, the audit report states that: ‘We determined that OII did not effectively oversee and monitor the SEA (State Educational Agencies) and non-SEA grants and did not have an adequate process to ensure SEAs effectively oversaw and monitored their subgrantees. Specifically, OII did not have an adequate corrective action… process in place to ensure grantees corrected deficiencies noted in annual monitoring reports, did not have a risk-based approach for selecting non-SEA grantees for monitoring, and did not adequately review SEA and non-SEA grantees’ fiscal activities.'”
In other words, the U.S. Department of Education has been giving billions of dollars to states to promote the expansion of charter schools and to other charter school sponsors without any kind of adequate tracking of how the money is being used. This allegation is certainly consistent with the findings of a new report released in Ohio last week by Innovation Ohio and the Ohio Education Association. Ohio has been a big recipient of federal Charter Schools Program Grants over the years, receiving CSP grants of $99.6 million since the 2006-2007 school year. Belly Up: A Review of Federal Charter Schools Program Grants explains that in Ohio, “At least 108 of the 292 charter schools that have received federal CSP (Charter Schools Program) funding (37 percent) have either closed or never opened, totaling nearly $30 million.” “Of those that failed, at least 26 Ohio charter schools that received nearly $4 million in federal CSP funding apparently never even opened and there are no available records to indicate that these public funds were returned.”
By janresseger
Source
Locals protest GOP tax plan
Last week, more than 100 disability rights and health care advocates were arrested in Washington D.C. during a civil...
Last week, more than 100 disability rights and health care advocates were arrested in Washington D.C. during a civil disobedience protest of the GOP tax plan. Among them were residents of Peterborough and Temple.
Lisa Beaudoin of Temple, the executive director of ABLE New Hampshire, a grassroots organization that advocates for families that include people with disabilities, said that she sees the tax plan as taking firm aim at some of the most vulnerable populations – including people with disabilities.
Read the full article here.
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