Protest Matters: Senate Asks F.B.I. to Investigate Kavanaugh After Flake Is Confronted by Sexual Assault Survivors
Protest Matters: Senate Asks F.B.I. to Investigate Kavanaugh After Flake Is Confronted by Sexual Assault Survivors
The Senate Judiciary Committee abruptly halted the effort to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court on Friday,...
The Senate Judiciary Committee abruptly halted the effort to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court on Friday, agreeing to a request from Sen. Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican, to delay a final vote for one week, to give the FBI time to investigate three allegations of sexual assault and harassment against the judge.
Read the full article here.
Let’s Be Real Episode 6: We’re Fed Up!
Let’s Be Real Episode 6: We’re Fed Up!
This episode, we take a look at a campaign that focuses on the Federal Reserve System and its impact on working people...
This episode, we take a look at a campaign that focuses on the Federal Reserve System and its impact on working people and people of color. We take you to a rally in front of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York where we spoke with two protesters about how the Fed impacts their communities. Then, we sit down with the Director of the Center for Popular Democracy’s Fed Up! Campaign to hear about the fight to put working people and communities of color at the center of the Fed’s decision-making process.
Read the full article here.
De Blasio, Chicago, L.A. Mayors Form Initiative to Help Immigrants
AM New York - September 17, 2014, by Ivan Pereira - Mayor Bill de Blasio and two of his national counterparts are...
AM New York - September 17, 2014, by Ivan Pereira - Mayor Bill de Blasio and two of his national counterparts are banding together to help immigrants become U.S. citizens.
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti will join New York City in the Cities for Citizenship (C4C) initiative that helps streamline the citizenship process for foreigners. De Blasio said all three cities recognize that if they work on immigration reform the right way, it will be beneficial for all residents.
"From increased economic activity to larger voting and tax bases, the advantages of citizenship will not only expand opportunity to our immigrant families, but to all New Yorkers and residents nationwide," he said in a statement Wednesday.
Citi Community Development, the banking giant's wing that provides financial help for needy people, contributed $1.15 million to the initiative. Two national immigration groups, the Center for Popular Democracy and the National Partnership for New Americans, will coordinate the efforts among the three cities.
"Citi believes that citizenship is an asset that enables immigrants to gain financial capability, and building a national identity must go hand-in-hand with building a financial identity," Bob Annibale, the global director of Citi Community Development and Citi Microfinance, said in a statement.
New York City for NYCitizenship, the city's immigration aid group, will use the money to provide legal assistance for naturalization applications and help foreigners with any financial assistance during the citizenship process.
Naturalizing 684,000 immigrants will add up to $4.1 billion over 10 years to the city's economy, according to de Blasio.
"This win-win effort will help us create more inclusive cities that lift up everyone," he said.
Source
Progressive Activists Keep Up Campaign to Thwart Rate Rises
NEW YORK—A group of activists lobbying the Federal Reserve to hold off on raising interest rates is pressing its...
NEW YORK—A group of activists lobbying the Federal Reserve to hold off on raising interest rates is pressing its campaign amid signs from the central bank that it is moving closer to lifting borrowing costs.
Members of the Fed Up Coalition, a left-leaning organization affiliated with the Center for Popular Democracy and connected with labor unions and community groups, met with Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen and other central bank governors late last year.
They recently have met with the leaders of the Boston, Kansas City and San Francisco Fed banks, and are scheduled to meet next with Atlanta Fed President Dennis Lockharton Aug. 12 and with New York Fed President William Dudley on Aug. 14.
Most Fed officials, including Ms. Yellen, have indicated they expect to start raising short-term interest rates this year if the economy keeps improving. They have held their benchmark rate near zero since December 2008 to bolster the economy.
The activists say they want the Fed to hold off a bit longer to ensure the expansion benefits all Americans, not just the wealthiest.
They also want the Fed to become more open about its actions and how it selects the presidents of the 12 regional reserve banks.
And they want the Fed to engage with banks to promote affordable housing.
“Over the last few weeks we’ve had a lot of success engaging with Fed officials,” said Ady Barkan, who leads the Center for Popular Democracy Fed campaign. His group is “seeing that [Fed officials] are really being responsive” to the case they are making, he said.
Mr. Barkan said a recent meeting with St. Louis Fed President James Bullard was particularly fruitful. Mr. Bullard said in an interview with the Journal Friday the Fed has a balancing act when it comes to setting interest rate policy.
He favors raising interest rates this year and says the central bank’s September meeting is likely a good time to start.
“I think I have the better policy for the type of people they want to help,” Mr. Bullard said. “If you go for too much in monetary policy you can get some sort of financial bubbles and imbalances that fall apart and cause a recession,” and modest rate rises soon will help reduce those risks.
The activist group also is calling for greater representation on regional banks’ boards of directors for noncorporate interests. By law, the regional Fed directors are drawn from a mix of financial industry professionals, community and business leaders. Each board oversees individual reserve bank operations, and the directors from outside the financial sector manage the selection of new reserve bank presidents.
Mr. Barkan said Fed boards are dominated by the perspectives of leaders from large institutions. While he welcomes union and nonprofit representation on the boards, Mr. Barkan said the diversity should extend further and include a more ground-level perspective on how the economy is functioning.
Jean-Andre Sassine, age 48, of New York City, plans to attend the group’s meeting with Mr. Dudley. Mr. Sassine, who said he works on television and advertising productions, became interested in the Fed when his family ran into difficulties during the recession. He said that led him to ask questions about the role the central bank was playing to help everyday people.
When he went with the group to the meeting with Ms. Yellen, Mr. Sassine said he walked away with “the sense they aren’t used to dealing with people. It seems like they just get reports” and work off that data, and little else, to make their decisions, Mr. Sassine said.
“We are supposed to have input and recognition and we don’t have it,” Mr. Sassine said. “It can’t all be corporate heads and bankers…We’ve got to have real people who buy groceries” on the Fed’s various advisory boards, he said.
The Fed has tried to broaden its public outreach in recent years. The central bank this year has been recruiting people to serve on a new Community Advisory Council, which will meet twice a year with Washington-based Fed governors. Ms. Yellen last year visited a job-training program in Chicago and a nonprofit in Chelsea, Mass., that helps unemployed people find work.
Mr. Dudley has conducted a number of public tours of the New York Fed’s district, in which he has met with business leaders, academics, community groups and others. In a Wall Street Journal interview in March 2014 he explained he had been using the tours to make the Fed seem less abstract. And he also said the visits had in particular deepened his understanding of the housing crisis and sharpened his response to those troubles.
Staff at the regional Fed banks who have met with the activists say their meetings are part of regular efforts to engage with their communities, and can offer valuable insight into the state of the economy.
In a statement, the Atlanta Fed said it regularly meets with community based interest groups “through its various outreach programs including community and economic development, economic education, and supervision and regulation.”
Source: The Wall Street Journal
Seis meses después de “María”, Puerto Rico sigue en lucha por reconstrucción
Seis meses después de “María”, Puerto Rico sigue en lucha por reconstrucción
“Tuesday, March 20th from organizations across the nation take to the streets in DC to make sure that @fema, Congress,...
“Tuesday, March 20th from organizations across the nation take to the streets in DC to make sure that @fema, Congress, and the Trump Administration hear our demands.”
Read the full article here.
Bank Workers Tell Their Bosses: Stop Making Us Sell Shady Products To Poor People
ThinkProgress - April 9, 2015, by Alan Pyke - The newest line of criticism for the banking industry is coming from...
ThinkProgress - April 9, 2015, by Alan Pyke - The newest line of criticism for the banking industry is coming from within, as a group of rank-and-file banking employees prepare to demand that their employer stop ordering them to use predatory sales tactics and start treating them as a valued piece of the workforce.
A group of tellers, loan officers, and customer service representatives from the country’s largest commercial banks will rally Monday outside office towers in Minneapolis to call attention to their own low pay and to consumer-harming sales policies they say are imposed on them by management. As part of the demonstrations, workers will ask to meet with executives at Wells Fargo to deliver a petition calling for the bank to do away with high-pressure sales quotas for its customer service staff.
In a new report from the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD), one teller “says she has to ‘practically chase customers out of the door hawking unwanted credit and debit card accounts'” or face reproach from her manager, despite corporate policy that ostensibly prohibits disingenuous or high-pressure tales tactics.
“What they want, what they need, isn’t important to us. Selling them a product is,” a call-center worker at another bank said, summarizing the approach her managers take toward customers.
The CPD report details how the largest banks exacerbate inequality on the macro level and prey upon trusting customers on the micro-level. It argues that the largest American consumer banks are contributing to economic inequality and mining huge profits while freezing tens of millions of un-banked Americans out of basic financial services.
The kinds of basic banking products that are essential to working people trying to save for their retirement or their children “are what industry insiders consider ‘low-value’ or ‘low-margin’ services,” CPD notes, and “are not currently a priority for the big banks.” Instead, banks have put tellers and call center employees under ever more pressure to sell people credit cards and additional bank accounts regardless of whether those products suit the customer’s real needs. At one bank, customer service staff must “make 40 percent of the sales of the top seller to avoid being written up.”
For providing this warped version of “customer service” and surviving the high-pressure work environment the banks create for them, frontline workers are rewarded with falling pay. Pay for tellers fell by more than 5 percent from 2007 to 2013 after adjusting for inflation. Bank workers who conduct interviews for people requesting loans have seen their wages drop by 3.2 percent, and customer service reps have gotten a 2.5 percent cut in that same window.
Out of every 10 bank tellers in the country, three are enrolled in food stamps or another public assistance program. Considering that most such programs have far fewer people enrolled than are eligible for them, it’s likely that the ratio of tellers who qualify for public aid is even higher. Taxpayers spend nearly $900 million a year providing benefits to bring bank tellers and their families up to a subsistence-level income, which means everyone in the country is helping to subsidize bank profits.
Those profits are massive, as the CPD report notes. For every dollar in revenue that the 10 largest consumer banks in America bring in, they manage to keep 20 cents as pure profit after paying workers, overhead, and taxes. That large profit margin leaves plenty of room to pay workers enough to avoid poverty.
Source
Pro-Yellen Ad Hits the Air
Pro-Yellen Ad Hits the Air
The Wall Street Journal’s Michael Derby reports. “The Center for Popular Democracy’s Fed Up campaign broadcast a 30-...
The Wall Street Journal’s Michael Derby reports. “The Center for Popular Democracy’s Fed Up campaign broadcast a 30-second TV spot urging Mr. Trump to offer Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen a second term. The ad ran during 'Fox & Friends,' a morning show the president watches and often reacts to on Twitter.” The group is behind Twitter ads bashing Kevin Warsh, another candidate for the chairmanship, that have popped up in my feed over the past couple of weeks, too.
Read the full article here.
Use of Employee Scheduling Software Raises Union Concerns About Seniority, Work Hours
Reproduced with permission from Daily Labor Report, 97 DLR C-1 (May 20, 2014). Copyright 2014 by The Bureau of National...
Reproduced with permission from Daily Labor Report, 97 DLR C-1 (May 20, 2014). Copyright 2014 by The Bureau of National Affairs, Inc. (800-372-1033) <https://www.bna.com/>
Bloomberg BNA - May 19, 2014, by Rhonda Smith — Although employee scheduling software is helping employers control labor costs and boost productivity, its impact on retail and restaurant workers is far more bleak, advocates for employees told Bloomberg BNA May 8-19.
“In New York, we're interviewing workers at all big retail chains—Gap, Banana Republic and others,” said Stephanie Luce, an associate professor of labor studies at City University of New York. The interviews are part of an ongoing research project focused on scheduling challenges facing retail workers in New York City.
“What is prevalent in our interviews is just huge frustration with scheduling,” she said. “It's arbitrary. It feels like it's unpredictable. And it can change from week to week or season to season. So this concern about who gets to set the schedule, and do employees have any voice or protections in that, is very prevalent.”
‘On Call' Scheduling Has Drawbacks
The Retail Action Project, a New York-based campaign sponsored by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, released a video May 1 highlighting the conundrum retail employees face daily over their work schedules. RWDSU is an affiliate of the United Food and Commercial Workers.
“Even though the technology enables [employers] to predict 80 percent of their labor costs well in advance, they are scheduling workers according to the smaller percentage of hours that they can't predict,” Carrie Gleason at the Center for Popular Democracy said.
“Workers are unable to get sufficient hours, and are forced to endure ‘on call' scheduling, where they must wait by the phone to see if they'll be called upon to work,” RAP organizers said on the union's website. “They can't take other jobs, or do anything else that would interfere with their unstable, unpredictable work hours.”
The video is part of an effort to educate workers and policy makers about the need for “fair, stable and predictable schedules for millions of underemployed low wage workers in one of America's biggest job creating industries,” RAP said.
Employment of retail sales workers is projected to grow 10 percent from 2012 to 2022, according to the Labor Department. That growth is about as fast as the average for all occupations, the agency said, but because many workers leave retail there will be a large number of job openings in that sector.
There were 4.6 million retail jobs in 2012, the agency said. It projected that 450,200 will be added in that sector by 2022.
Wanted: ‘Family-Sustaining' Practices
Carrie Gleason, director of a new initiative at the Center for Popular Democracy that focuses on work scheduling issues, told Bloomberg BNA May 16 that new policy protections are needed to ensure “family-sustaining practices” in low-wage sectors.
The technology currently available could be used to actually improve scheduling practices for workers, she said.
“Burgeoning low-wage industries are now relying heavily on a part-time workforce and increasingly using scheduling technology according to fluctuating market demand,” she said. The ultimate result for workers is “very little say in how they work and when they work.”
Gleason also said, “Even though the technology enables [employers] to predict 80 percent of their labor costs well in advance, they are scheduling workers according to the smaller percentage of hours that they can't predict.”
Giving workers more access to the technology would allow them to self-schedule, she said, adding that this would really elevate the quality of workers' jobs. “But, unfortunately, companies like Macy's are not using the technology to the workers' potential,” she said.
Unions have criticized Macy's for not considering employee seniority when using scheduling software to decide who works and when.
Some Retailers Address Scheduling Concerns
Retailers and restaurants in some cities have taken steps to address workers' scheduling concerns, either because they made a business decision to do so or union members pushed for changes during negotiations over collective bargaining agreements.
Employers cited as trailblazers include United Parcel Service of North America Inc., Costco Wholesale Corp., Lord & Taylor, In-N-Out Burgers Inc., and, after new contracts were negotiated, Macy's and Bloomingdale's Inc. in New York City.
All part-time workers at Costco receive their schedules at least two weeks in advance and are guaranteed a minimum of 24 core hours each week, according to a policy brief the Center for Law and Social Policy and two other groups released in March (49 DLR A-6, 3/13/14).
“We want people to work for us who consider us a career,” Mike Brosius, the company's assistant vice president of human resources, said in the brief. “Long-term employees are more productive and serve the needs of our customers better. So we give our employees what's fair and what they need to make a living.”
In a Harvard Business Review article titled “Why ‘Good Jobs' Are Good for Retailers,” Zeynep Ton, an adjunct associate professor of operations management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management, highlighted Costco, Trader Joe's, QuikTrip and Mercadona, a supermarket chain in Spain. She said these retailers invest in their employees and, in return, reap healthy profits.
“Not surprisingly, I found that unpredictable schedules, short shifts, and dead-end jobs take a toll on employees' morale,” Ton wrote. “When morale is low, absenteeism, tardiness, and turnover rise, increasing the variability of the labor supply, which, of course, makes matching labor with customer traffic more difficult.”
Unions have pushed to shape employers' scheduling policies in collective bargaining agreements.
Union Turns to NLRB for Help
UFCW Local 888, in East Rutherford, N.J., filed an unfair labor practices charge April 28 with the National Labor Relations Board against Century 21 Department Stores LLC. The family-owned, discount retail clothing company operates eight stores in New York and New Jersey and plans to open another one in Philadelphia, a company spokeswoman said May 20.
In its charge, the union alleged that Century 21 refused to bargain “over the implementation and effects of a change in the work schedule system at its Manhattan facility, in violation of the National Labor Relations Act.”
“Until two years ago, we had no issue with scheduling,” Max Bruny, president of UFCW Local 888, told Bloomberg BNA May 16. “Everyone had a fixed schedule. The model was full-time employment. We had members there for 40 years. They had a good schedule [and] good predictability.”
Now, workers are being assigned fewer hours or shifts that require them to work later than they traditionally have—regardless of seniority.
The new scheduling system is “hard on the workers' life—a nightmare,” Bruny said.
Employees who have worked for Century 21 for decades are now being scheduled to work erratic hours, sometimes at night, he said.
“Grievances we're filing relate to workers not being able to schedule for school or take care of sick family members,” Bruny said.
ACA Could Lead to Drop in Workers' Hours
Neil Trautwein, vice president and employee benefits counsel at the National Retail Federation, told Bloomberg BNA May 19 that the Affordable Care Act could be a factor in employer decisions about how many hours employees are scheduled to work. The NRF represents retailers, chain restaurants and grocery stores.
ACA rules mandate that employers with 50 or more full-time workers provide health care coverage. Anyone who works at least 30 hours a week is considered a full-time employee. A tax penalty of as much as $3,000 per employee is levied for noncompliance.
“The 30-hour definition under the ACA is unnecessary and distorts how we manage employees,” Trautwein said.
The NRF supports the Save American Workers Act (H.R. 2575), proposed legislation that calls for raising the threshold from 30 hours per week to 40 hours per week. The bill's backers say this would preserve employee wages and working hours.
“There will be an [employer] incentive, particularly for less well-performing employees, to be held below 30 hours,” Trautwein said. “That's a natural consequence of the ACA structure.”
He added that employee scheduling software also helps employers move high-performing workers into certain positions at certain times.
“Broadly speaking, part-time jobs have been valued in retail and chain restaurants, particularly over the years because of flexibility they allow to wrap work around school or other family responsibilities,” Trautwein said. “A lot of part-time workers aren't interested in working a large number of hours.”
Union Wants More Input About Schedules
UFCW Local 888, which represents more than 2,500 workers at Century 21, would like more input about the new scheduling system and its impact on workers, Bruny said.
“[Century 21] says we should negotiate for all the stores at one time in two years,” when the union's five-year contract with the stores expires, he said.
“Our argument is, ‘This is a drastic change in the workers' lives,' ” Bruny said. “Workers are becoming part-timers overnight. I think that should trigger negotiations. That has to be bargained collectively before a change can be made.”
Bruny also would like to negotiate with Century 21 over whether hourly employees can be cross-trained so they are prepared to work in different store departments should they agree to do so based on the scheduling system. “That would make it easier on the workers,” he said.
Without negotiating over such matters, Bruny added, “we are losing quite a few longtime, full-time workers.”
A Century 21 spokeswoman declined to discuss the NLRB charge, but said to ask “Kronos directly for a statement.”
Kronos Inc. is a workforce management company in Chelmsford, Mass., that sells electronic scheduling systems to organizations. The company did not respond to a Bloomberg BNA request for comment on the NLRB charge UFCW filed against Century 21.
Macy's West Scheduling Proposal
During recent contract negotiations in California, leaders of UFCW Local 5 in San Jose described as “problematic” a Macy's West proposal to implement an electronic scheduling system the company calls “My Schedule Plus.”
“While the computer-based program would create greater scheduling flexibility and an opportunity for more hours for those that want them,” the union said May 5 in an online post, “without modification it would eliminate base schedules and ignore seniority around shift selection.”
Mike Henneberry, a spokesman for UFCW Local 5, told Bloomberg BNA May 8: “At first the company said, ‘We can't change it.' But it turned out they could.”
Macy's did not respond to a Bloomberg BNA request for comment.
Henneberry said Kronos created the Macy's scheduling system.
Charles DeWitt, vice president of business development for Kronos, said such software can be adapted to suit employers' unique needs.
“If the employer wants to maintain a base schedule or respect seniority, it can,” he told Bloomberg BNA May 12. “Various employers have different policies. With the Kronos system, we've tried to capture all that in a system and let retailers, hospitals, and manufacturers put their policies in place.”
Respecting Employee Seniority
Members of RWDSU Local 3 in New York in 2012 ratified a five-year collective bargaining agreement with Bloomingdale's that gave some 2,000 employees at the company's flagship store in New York City more control over hours and scheduling, the union said (86 DLR A-8, 5/3/12).
RWDSU said at the time that scheduling flexibility in the Bloomingdale's contract went further than any other union contract with a large retail company. Under the contract, senior employees have first choice of their preferred hours, and all workers are able to choose one weekend off a month and the late nights they want to work.
A 2011 contract settlement covering some 4,000 workers at Macy's in New York City also improved employees' control over their scheduling, the union said (121 DLR A-13, 6/23/11).
Allen Mayne, RWDSU's director of collective bargaining, told Bloomberg BNA May 9: “The main problem with the Macy's system is it did not recognize an employee's seniority. It lumps all employees together in the same pool and hours are divided up depending on your availability.”
This has a detrimental impact on long-term employees, especially in retail, Mayne said. “In a union environment, where benefits are even better, many employees have many years of seniority,” he said.
RWDSU was able to negotiate in the contract a work rule that allows employees with seniority to have priority access to the scheduling system, Mayne said.
“But there's not enough oversight,” he said. “This is done kind of on the honor system, but people can get in there and input out of seniority order.”
Luce at CUNY said there's a “disconnect” between how sophisticated and helpful to employers the scheduling software has become in the past 15 years and how rudimentary it remains for most retail employees.
“Employees are still submitting their scheduling requests on paper or going into the store to look at their schedules,” she said. “Clearly, the software could allow for employees to be at home and swap shifts. But they are not given access to those systems.”
Source
Activists Deliver Climate Plan for Just Transition to EPA Offices Nationwide
On January 19, activists at each of the Environmental Protection Agency's 10 regional offices issued their own...
On January 19, activists at each of the Environmental Protection Agency's 10 regional offices issued their own corrective on the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan. Days before the end of the federal comment period, the Climate Justice Alliance's Our Power Campaign - comprised of 41 climate and environmental justice organizations - presented its Our Power Plan, which identifies "clear and specific strategies for implementing the Clean Power Plan, or CPP, in a way that will truly benefit our families' health and our country's economy."
Introduced last summer, the CPP looks to bring down power plants' carbon emissions by 32 percent from 2005 levels within 15 years. The plan was made possible by Massachusetts vs. EPA, a 2007 Supreme Court ruling which mandates that the agency regulate greenhouse gases as it has other toxins and pollutants under the Clean Air Act of 1963. Under the CPP, states are each required to draft their own implementation plans by September of this year, or by 2018 if granted an extension. If they fail to do so, state governments will be placed by default into an interstate carbon trading, or "Cap and Trade," system to bring down emissions.
Michael Leon Guerrero, the Climate Justice Alliance's interim coordinator, was in Paris for the most recent round of UN climate talks as part of the It Takes Roots Delegation, which brought together over 100 organizers from North American communities on the frontlines of both climate change and fossil fuel extraction. He sees the Our Power Plan as a logical next step for the group coming out of COP21, especially as the onus for implementing and improving the Paris agreement now falls to individual nations.
"Fundamentally," he said, "we need to transform our economy and rebuild our communities. We can't address the climate crisis in a cave without addressing issues of equity."
The Our Power Plan, or OPP, is intended as a blueprint for governments and EPA administrators to address the needs of frontline communities as they draft their state-level plans over the next several months. (People living within three miles of a coal plant have incomes averaging 15 percent lower than average, and are eight percent more likely to be communities of color.) Included in the OPP are calls to bolster what CJA sees as the CPP's more promising aspects, like renewable energy provisions, while eliminating proposed programs they see as more harmful. The CPP's carbon trading scheme, CJA argues, allows polluters to buy "permissions to pollute," or carbon credits, rather than actually stemming emissions.
The OPP further outlines ways that the EPA can ensure a "just transition" away from fossil fuels, encouraging states to invest in job creation, conduct equity analyses and "work with frontlines communities to develop definitions, indicators, and tracking and response systems that really account for impacts like health, energy use, cost of energy, climate vulnerability [and] cumulative risk."
Lacking support from Congress, the Obama administration has relied on executive action to push through everything from environmental action to comprehensive immigration reform. The Clean Power Plan was central to the package Obama brought to Paris. Also central to COP21 was US negotiators' insistence on keeping its results non-binding, citing Republican lawmakers' unwillingness to pass legislation.
Predictably, the CPP has faced legal challenges from the same forces, who decry the president for having overstepped the bounds of his authority. Republican state governments, utility companies, and fossil fuel industry groups have all filed suit against the CPP, with many asking for expedited hearings. Leading up the anti-CPP charge in Congress has been Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who hascalled the plan a "regulatory assault," pitting fossil fuel industry workers against the EPA. "Here's what is lost in this administration's crusade for ideological purity," he wrote in a November statement, "the livelihoods of our coal miners and their families."
Organizers of Tuesday's actions, however, were quick to point out that the Our Power Plan is aimed at strengthening - not defeating - the CPP as it stands. Denise Abdul-Rahman, of NAACP Indiana, helped organize an OPP delivery at the EPA's Region 5 headquarters in Chicago, bringing out representatives from Black Lives Matter Minneapolis, National People's Action and National Nurses United.
"We appreciate the integrity of the Clean Power Plan," she said. "However, we believe it needs to be improved - from eliminating carbon trading to ensuring that there's equity. We want to improve CPP by adding our voices and our plan, and we encourage the EPA to make it better." Four of the six states in that region - which includes Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin - are suing the EPA.
Endorsed by the National Domestic Workers' Alliance, Greenpeace and the Center for Popular Democracy, among other organizations, yesterday's national day of action on the EPA came as new details emerged in Flint, Michigan's ongoing water crisis - along with calls for Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder's resignation and arrest. The EPA has also admitted fault for its slow response to Flint residents' complaints, writing in a statement this week that "necessary [EPA] actions were not taken as quickly as they should have been."
Abdul-Rahman connected the water crisis with the need for a justly-implemented CPP. "The Flint government let their community down by not protecting our most precious asset, which is water," she said. "The same is true of air: we need the highest standard of protecting human beings' air, water, land."
Source: Truthout
Many residents stand against Donald Trump
Many residents stand against Donald Trump
Queens residents have been among the thousands protesting President-elect Trump in Manhattan since the election. “It...
Queens residents have been among the thousands protesting President-elect Trump in Manhattan since the election.
“It was a rally and a march called together primarily by immigrants rights groups to provide a space for immigrant communities, people that are undocumented to be able to raise up the voices and the perpsectives of immigrant communities,” DRUM — South Asian Organizing Center Executive Director Fahd Ahmed told the Chronicle, adding that Sunday’s march would not be the last that they attend.
According to the immigrant advocacy group Make the Road New York, more than 15,000 immigrant New Yorkers and their supporters attended the event.
“Well, basically we were marching because we will not tolerate the hate agenda, we’re here to stay and we reject that,” Ozone Park resident Julissa Bisono said. “We want to make sure that New York City continues to be a sanctuary for immigrant families and that’s why we decided to march yesterday, to make sure that President-elect Trump hears our message.”
Kenneth Shelton, a St. John’s University student, organized the march on Saturday from Union Square to Trump Tower with the news outlet BlackMatters US.
“It was just for people to vent their frustration, get out there and protest but also to show that we’re unified,” Shelton said. “We need to organize ourselves into a movement socially, politically and economically.”
“We reject his hate and refuse to live in constant fear under a president who does not regard us as human,” Queens resident Ana Maria Archila, co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy, said in a prepared statement. “[Sunday’s] rally and march marks our first, though certainly not last, line of resistance against Trump’s brutal anti-immigrant regime.”
Queens is believed to have more unauthorized immigrants than any other borough, nearly 250,000, who could face deportation.
“The immigrant communities here, they’re real hard-working families and they’re scared,” Bisono said.
According to Bisono, there is a serious fear among immigrants that they could be harmed after last week’s election.
“We had kids that came who didn’t even go to school because they were afraid to not come back the next day,” she said. “We shouldn’t be living in fear.”
For people who feel like they may be threatened by the Trump administration, the protests were an opportunity to stand in solidarity with others who are as worried.
Ahmed, whose group is based in Jackson Heights and used to be called Desis Rising Up and Moving, said that the protests are “to get people out of fear, to get them out of isolation and to build with each other.”
Although Trump has urged his supporters to not hurt others and commit hate crimes, those have spiked nationwide in the days following his election victory.
“The large number of people that came to these actions have been black communities, Latino communities — the people explicitly being told that they need to watch out and will be targeted,” Ahmed said.
By Ryan Brady
Source
1 month ago
1 month ago