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On May 17, 18 & 19 hundreds of people including parents, students and teachers have taken to the streets in Chicago, US, to protest against local education authority’s plan to close public schools
May 19, 2013
The protest, organized by the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), started on Saturday and is set to last until Monday evening. This comes after the Chicago Central District released a list of 54 elementary and middle schools to be closed before the next school year. The Chicago Board of Education is planning to vote on the closures in the coming days.
City officials say the closures are needed in order to deal with a one-billion-dollar annual deficit. In March, thousands of activists, union leaders, teachers, parents, and students participated in a similar protest in the city.
The closures involve the highest number of schools to be closed down in a single year in any city in the United States. The plan will shift about 50,000 students to different schools, while threatening the careers of more than 1,000 teachers. Over the past decade, at least 70 cities in the US have closed down public schools.
Capitalism’s austerity is diminishing our education infrastructure. I desperately hope to see an escalation of education activism in this country – from unsustainable student loan debt to busted teachers’ unions to mass school closures & the school-to-prison-pipeline. We need a movement to demand massive, drastic, radical reform to the way we address education in this country. I think it’s obvious that people’s frustration is growing.
‘Global Capitalism: A Monthly Update’ published on May 15, 2013
Economics Professor Richard Wolff publishes these monthly updates on developments relevant to capitalism around the world. His analysis is really on point. It’s long but it’s worth watching, listening to & learning from.
- Professor Wolff’s website
- Professor Wolff’s podcast
- Democracy at Work (an organization co-founded by Richard Wolff)
Outraged against austerity, students & teachers in Philadelphia resist the machine of capitalism
May 17, 2013
Dozens to hundreds of Philadelphia students, teachers and school staff protested outside one of the city’s premiere high schools in an effort to fight proposed budget cuts to the district.
Wearing signs and handing out pamphlets to drivers, members of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers lined the sidewalk outside the Philadelphia High School for the Creative and Performing Arts along South Broad Street Friday morning. The teachers are fighting a series of severe budget cuts proposed by the district to close a more than $300 million funding gap. The proposed cuts include ending arts and music programs, sports and cutting auxiliary staff like secretaries, librarians and counselors.
“With the austere budgets schools have received, schools will not be able to provide a high-quality education for Philadelphia’s children,” said Jerry Jordan, president of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers. Jordan says the teacher’s union has been discussing labor concessions with the district. However, he says a concession that results teachers taking a pay cut is a non-starter.
“The school district is asking for salary cuts for all PFT members of anywhere between 5, 10 and 13-percent,” he said. “I don’t think that you’ll find employee in the school district and the PFT…who are going to tell you that they can afford to take that kind of pay cut.”
The teacher protest is just the first of many demonstrations planned Friday over the funding flap.
Students from Philadelphia public schools around the city have also walked out of class and are marching on the School District of Philadelphia and Philadelphia City Hall. Similar walkouts were organized last week by students, who also marched on the same spots.
District spokesman Fernando Gallard says staff will not stop students from walking out, but says officials have asked principals remind students that leaving early will results in being marked as cutting. “Schools will follow the district’s attendance policy and will take the appropriate action which triggers at least a phone call to parents to notify them of the student’s absence, a request for a parent conference at the school, or after school detention,” he said.
Students are using Twitter to organize and document their protests. The group Philly Student Union is promoting the hashtag #walkout215 as a digital rally point during the event.
California Domestic Workers Demand Bill of Rights
Greek workers walk out to protest ban on teachers’ strike
May 14, 2013
Greek public sector workers walked off the job on Tuesday to protest against a government decision to ban a strike by high-school teachers, shutting down several schools and reducing staff at hospitals to a minimum. Invoking emergency legislation, Prime Minister Antonis Samaras has threatened teachers with arrest and dismissal if they go ahead with a planned walkout on Friday that would disrupt university entrance exams, as he tries to show Greece’s foreign lenders that Athens is sticking to unpopular reforms.
The action on Tuesday was the latest in a string of anti-austerity strikes since 2010, when Greece adopted severe budget and wage cut measures as part of its international bailout. The turnout was not near someone of the movement’s larger demonstrations; turnout in demonstrations last year topped 100,000 at times. But activists insist that they are committed to fighting for humanity.
“Our message, that we fully condemn these policies, was sent, despite the low turnout,” ADEDY’s general secretary Ilias Iliopoulos told Reuters. “The government must make up its mind and show that it does care about students and teachers.
The conservative-led coalition wants teachers to put in two more hours of work each week to reach the average levels of high school teachers’ working hours in Europe, and transfer 4,000 of them to remote parts of Greece to plug staffing gaps.
These measures would allow the government to dismiss about 10,000 part-time teachers when their temporary contracts expire, causing outraged unions & citizens alike to call for the 24-hour strike on Friday and rolling strikes next week.
The government responded by invoking a law that allows it to mobilize workers in the case of civil disorder or natural disasters.
ADEDY had disagreed with the high school teachers’ decision to hold a strike on the first day of exams because it would inconvenience students. However, it opposed the government using emergency laws to pre-emptively ban the action, saying this was undemocratic and violated workers’ constitutional rights. ADEDY and GSEE, Greece’s largest private sector union, are also planning a four-hour work stoppage on Thursday.
More than 1,000 high-school teachers marched to parliament late on Monday, holding banners reading: “No to the civil mobilization and this terror!” and “It won’t pass”.
GSEE and ADEDY represent more than half of Greece’s workforce, which has been shrinking rapidly during the crippling recession after years of austerity. As unemployment grows, unions may not yield as strong of turn outs as they have when they had higher membership, but the increasingly impoverished people of Greece will not tolerate limitless government oppression.
Massive crowd in Barcelona; banner: “Stop financial genocide, together we can!”
Unconfirmed reports that upwards of 200,000 people are marching in Spain today. Madrid Anti Austerity Demonstration Panorama of Sol Plaza now. On the second Anniversary of the movement.
GR.TV will be covering the events live all day: http://globalrevolution.tv/
Via Occupy LosAngeles
“To you who will create the twenty-first century, we say, from the bottom of our hearts, to create is to resist. To resist is to create.” —Stéphane Hessel, Indignez-Vous! (Time for Outrage)
The American Dream of upward mobility is dead, thanks to the neoliberal ministrations of capital and government. But a new dream could rise from the mess left by globalization, off-shoring and austerity.
May 10, 2013
The continuation of the economic crisis of 2008 up to the present has driven home a social trend that has been evident since the late 1970s, the decline of what is usually called “the middle class” and the accompanying American Dream.
As Richard Wolff has pointed out in Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to do About it, this upward mobility was a reality for most citizens of the United States for several generations, from 1820 to 1970. For 150 years, real wages rose. In the quarter century from 1947 to 1973, average real wages rose an astounding 75 percent. But that shared prosperity came to a halt in the mid ’70s. In the next 25 years, from 1979 to 2005, wages and benefits rose less than 4 percent. The sustained rise in standards of living had been made possible by a conjunction of historical circumstances, circumstances that began to reach exhaustion by the mid 1970s.
In recent decades, the economy has grown, and there was a gain in total wealth. But where did it go? From 1983 to 2008, total GDP grew from $6.1 trillion to $13.2 trillion in constant 2005 dollars. The unequal distribution of the total wealth gain during this period is revealing. The wealthiest 5 percent of American households captured 81.7 percent of the gain. The bottom 60 percent of households not only failed to share in the overall increase, they suffered a 7.5 percent loss. Some of what the top 1 percent gained came directly from that bottom 60 percent.
Downward mobility
Between 2001 and 2008, entry level wages declined 7 percent for college graduates and 4 percent for high school graduates. Entry into middle-level incomes is becoming more difficult.
With the offshoring of manufacturing, the industrial regions of the northeast and the Great Lakes were transformed into a Rust Belt. United States manufacturing employment peaked in 1979 at almost 20 million and fell under neoliberalism to about 11.5 million in 2010. Today, 80 percent of the world’s industrial workforce is now in the global South. Most of it used to be in the United States. This is in no small measure the result of corporate policies over the last 30 years - policies encouraged by our political leaders - to offshore those low-skilled industrial jobs that used to be the entry point to the middle “class” for many. As less-skilled industrial jobs were offshored, at first, in the ’90s, we were told by Robert Reich, labor secretary in the first Clinton administration, that to remain competitive in the global economy, US workers needed to upgrade their skills. We were told the new economy would be the new road to the American Dream. We are still being told that. But offshoring of jobs has not been limited to low-skilled assembly line work. Corporate capital has discovered that any job that can be done by computers can be done anywhere in the world and consequently will be done wherever the cheapest workers with the requisite knowledge can be found. So the knowledge-economy jobs are now also being offshored to countries like India. The knowledge workers there will work for far less than in the United States. And many of our college graduates today are saddled with heavy debt and unable to find work.
As a result of corporate policies and public policies purchased by corporations, there has been wage stagnation for the past 30 years, even as worker productivity rose sharply. This is shown clearly in the above graph. Capital took the bulk of productivity gains (shown by the upper pink line) over the 1993-2006 period by holding wages down (shown by the lower blue line). But then with the 2008 financial crisis, median family income declined further, by nearly 10 percent. Overall, as incomes have declined, corporate profits have soared.
For a while, wealth appeared to increase for average citizens because of inflating real estate values. But the financial crisis of 2008 wiped out that fictitious wealth. Median family wealth in 2010 was the same as it had been 20 years earlier.
It is corporate capital’s unquenchable thirst for profit and political leaders’ easy purchasability under capitalism that is destroying what was once called ‘the American dream’ (of upward mobility). Political leaders, Democrats and Republicans alike, embrace Charles Wilson’s adage that “what’s good for General Motors is good for America.”
Corporate-led neoliberal globalization has transformed nation-states into what I call globalized states, that is, states that serve the interests of transnational capital above the interests of national populations. This has resulted in a limitation of sovereignty and of the possibility for democratically-shaped national policies. Increasingly, the countries’ fates depend more on powerful transnational corporations rather than on their own people.
Support for neoliberalism bipartisan
In the United States, there has long been bipartisan consensus behind globalization and the neoliberal policies that promote it. Both parties have long embraced basic public policies that undermine the economic security of millions of working people. Both parties favor no-strings Wall Street bailouts, expanded unregulated trade, weakened unions and fiscal austerity as an economic priority, with its concomitant shredding of social programs. There may be some difference in degree on these issues, but both parties are in basic agreement.
One-third of all working families are now poor; their annual income, for a family of four, is below the $45,622 poverty threshold - an income insufficient to meet basic needs.
This bipartisan consensus is illustrated by Senate approval this last year of free-trade agreements with Colombia, Panama and South Korea. While all politicians were calling for more jobs, they approved a free-trade agreement that they knew would destroy jobs. This was evident in the fact that approval of the free-trade agreement was accompanied by extended unemployment benefits for displaced workers. They just can’t help themselves when an opportunity arises to favor transnational corporations. And now the Obama administration is set to expand this folly even further with the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
Legitimacy of systems questioned
With the growing downward mobility now being experienced, the social contract is unraveling. The legitimacy of the dominant institutions is being questioned. Public confidence in Congress as well as government is at an all-time low; large banks are viewed (correctly) as criminal; blind faith in market magic has been dispelled - and corporations are even seen as having betrayed the nation. The legitimacy of the system of capitalism is in crisis as sizable percentages now have a positive view of socialism as an alternative, particularly among the young (who have not known the rabid anticommunism of the Cold War era). As the national elections in 2008 and 2012 have shown, the people of the United States are asking for far-reaching changes, more change than the political elite is willing or even able to deliver.
Without new major innovations to offer opportunities for profitable investment, where is all the accumulated capital to go? Here again we have a classic over-accumulation crisis. One fix that has been deployed by the corporate wealthy is to reduce their tax burden, shifting it to the popular classes below. This has been the agenda of their sector of the political elite for decades. That has been combined with the neoliberal offensive against social programs, again at the expense of the popular classes. In effect, the plutocracy has come to understand that growth of their wealth will no longer come mainly from productive investment, but must come out of the hides of those below them. That requires imposing austerity on others so they can continue to prosper.
Thomas B. Edsall, author of The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics, sums up the situation as follows:
Affluent Republicans - the donor and policy base of the conservative movement - are on red alert. They want to protect and enhance their position in a future of diminished resources. What really provokes the ferocity with which the right currently fights for regressive tax and spending policies is a deeply pessimistic vision premised on a future of hard times. This vision has prompted the Republican Party to adopt a preemptive strategy that anticipates the end of growth and the onset of sustained austerity - a strategy to make sure that the size of their slice of the pie doesn’t get smaller as the pie shrinks.
It is in this light that we can understand the death march the Republican Party has set out on. Its survival and that of its patrons is at stake. It leads them to adopt scorched-earth policies that ought to spell certain electoral defeat were it not for their gerrymandering, voter suppression, election rigging and other antidemocratic measures needed to maintain political power within the existing political duopoly. What they are so desperate to protect is not only their own political careers, but the insatiable hunger of capital.
For its part, the Democratic Party is also beholden to the interests of transnational capital, as I pointed out earlier. As Jeff Faux has documented, as early as the Carter administration, the Democratic Party embraced the neoliberal ideology. New Democrat Bill Clinton extended the Reagan-Bush I program of globalization with free trade and deregulation of finance capital. The Obama administration has continued on the same course. The political elite is united on its basic priorities. As Faux remarks, the United States is no longer rich enough to continue to finance America’s three principal national dreams:
1. The dream of the business elite for subsidized, unregulated capitalism.
2. The dream of the political elite for global hegemony.
3. The dream of the people for a steadily rising standard of living.
We can certainly continue to have one out of three, and perhaps even two out of three. But three out of three? No.
It is the dream of the US people that will have to go. That is the reality that no US politician dares to utter. If he did, it might spark popular demands that dreams 1. and 2. be sacrificed instead. The hard truth is that none of the three can be sustained indefinitely. Capitalism is in crisis. The military costs of global hegemony have become more than a debt-burdened state can sustain, as well as more than much of the world will continue to tolerate.
As for rising living standards, even if the dreams of Wall Street and Washington did not trump those of the people, are they really sustainable? With only a small portion of the world’s population, the United States consumes an immensely disproportionate share of the world’s resources. The current rate of use of world resources globally would be sustainable if we had one and one-half planet Earths. But guess what? We have only one. And the rest of the world’s peoples also have dreams of rising standards of living. If all the people in the entire world enjoyed US standards with the same per capita ecological footprint, five Earths would be needed.
My favorite slogan from the Occupy movement was “Wake up from the American Dream. Create a livable American reality.” That is the challenge We the People face in the 21st century. And we have to face it with little help from our political elite and none from capital. We have to do it ourselves. It will take social movements and prolonged struggle. It will take courage and bold experimentation. And for starters, it will take speaking the truth: The American Dream is over. For good or ill, history will move on without it.
Postscript: Besides this dominant American Dream, there is an alternative one in the background. It has its roots in the 18th century Enlightenment and was expressed in the French Revolution with the slogan “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” That was the dream of a society in which all could live in community, a society of mutual support among equals, where each individual was free to develop his/her human capacities supported by the community. The basic values of that vision are deeply rooted in the American culture. It can be the basis of an alternative - sustainable - American Dream.
Source (I heavily reduced weaker/less-engaging paragraphs so read the full thing if you’re interested)
NAACP, clergy, and activists step-up activity in North Carolina against racist, oppressive austerity regime
May 6, 2013
Human-rights activists against the vision of oppression offered by North Carolina’s Republican leaders say they’re stepping up the nonviolent demonstrations until they are rightfully heard. The protesters are resisting the oppresive, backward, Republican-ledeffort to block Medicaid expansion, cut unemployment, cut tax credits for the working class and promote policies that defund education, among other grievances.
The NAACP and other activists say they’re ready to be arrested again Monday as they protest decisions of the General Assembly. A prayer demonstration against the harmful, destructive policies last Monday led to 17 arrests.
Rev. William Barber, president of the NC NAACP, said the evening will begin with a news conference at Davie Street Presbyterian Church where protesters will introduce themselves and lay out their disagreement over GOP lawmakers’ plans for Medicaid, unemployment benefits, the earned income tax credit, voting rights, public education and the state’s pre-kindergarten education program. He expects the crowd to include Triangle-area college professors and clergy from Charlotte. Barber said those who were arrested last week will again try to get into the legislative building. He hopes lawyers for the NAACP and General Assembly Police can work out a plan ahead of time to keep the protest peaceful. Barber said last week that the NAACP is planning a tour of up to 20 counties that are home to lawmakers most associated with Republican policies.
Source
Photo source/Huff post article with context
Open letter from NAACP protesters
The French left hold socialist President Hollande accountable, march through Paris to protest his selling out & becoming an austerity puppet for capitalists Brussels & Berlin
May 6, 2013
At least tens of thousands of far-left protesters have marched through Paris, to vent their anger over economic austerity. Sunday’s demonstration came on the eve of the first anniversary of Francois Hollande’s election as French President.
The crowd were fired up by far-left leader Jean-Luc Melenchon. “We don’t want the financial sector in power,” he told the crowds.“We do not accept austerity policies that usher in endless suffering for our people, like all others in Europe.”
The protest highlighted fierce opposition on the left to the Socialist president’s market-friendly reforms.- and the loosening of labor rules which makes hiring and firing slightly easier.
“A number of economists, whose thoughts are well regarded, have recently said that this policy of austerity is driving us into the wall. The people of the world are getting poorer and poorer,” said one demonstrator.
France is on the edge of recession and unemployment is at an all time high. Hollande has suffered the sharpest fall in popularity of any president in more than half a century.
The protesters held brooms to symbolize the need to clean the government of it’s dependence on the capitalist financial sector.
Prospects for social unrest high; dim prospects for the class of 2013
April 27, 2013
The Great Recession that began in December 2007 was so long and severe, and the government response so inadequate, that the crater it left in the labor market continues to be devastating for workers of all ages. The U.S. labor market still has a deficit of nearly 9 million jobs, and the unemployment rate has been at 7.6 percent or higher for more than four years. (In comparison, the highestunemployment rate in the two recessions prior to the Great Recession was 7.8 percent, for one month in the early 1990s downturn.) The weak labor market has been, and continues to be, very tough on young workers: At 16.2 percent, the March 2013 unemployment rate of workers under age 25 was slightly over twice as high as the national average. Though the labor market is now headed in the right direction, it is improving very slowly, and the prospects for young high school and college graduates remain dim.
This paper’s title, The Class of 2013, is admittedly something of a misnomer, as we do not yet know the labor market outcomes of these soon-to-be graduates. However, the outcomes of recent high school and college graduates provide a good sense of the labor market conditions the young men and women graduating in the Class of 2013 this spring will face. This briefing paper examines the labor market that confronts young graduates who are not enrolled in further schooling—specifically, high school graduates age 17–20 and college graduates age 21–24—and details the following findings:
- Unemployment among young graduates is extremely high today not because of something unique about the Great Recession that has affected young people in particular, but because young workers always experience disproportionate increases in unemployment during downturns. The Great Recession and its aftermath has been the longest, most severe period of economic weakness this country has experienced in more than seven decades.
- The large increase since 2007 in the unemployment and underemployment rate of young college graduates, and in the share of employed young college graduates working in jobs that do not require a college degree, underscores that today’s unemployment crisis among young workers did not arise because these young adults lack the right education or skills. Rather, it stems from weak demand for goods and services, which makes it unnecessary for employers to significantly ramp up hiring.
- Unemployment and underemployment rates of most young graduates have only modestly improved since last year, and rates among all graduates are substantially higher than before the recession began.
- For young high school graduates, the unemployment rate is 29.9 percent (compared with 17.5 percent in 2007) and the underemployment rate is 51.5 percent (compared with 29.4 percent in 2007).
- For young college graduates, the unemployment rate is 8.8 percent (compared with 5.7 percent in 2007) and the underemployment rate is 18.3 percent (compared with 9.9 percent in 2007).
- There is no evidence that young adults have been able to “shelter in school” from the labor market effects of the Great Recession; college and university enrollment rates of both men and women have not meaningfully departed from their long-term trend since the start of the Great Recession.
- The long-run wage trends for young graduates are bleak, with wages substantially lower today than in 2000. Between 2000 and 2012, the real (inflation-adjusted) wages of young high school graduates declined 12.7 percent, and the real wages of young college graduates declined 8.5 percent.
- The erosion of job quality for young graduates is also evident in their declining likelihood of receiving employer-provided health insurance or pensions.
- Between 1989 and 2011, the share of employed young high school graduates who receive health insurance from their own employer dropped from 23.5 percent to 7.1 percent. Over the same period, the share of employed young college graduates who receive health insurance from their own employer dropped from 60.1 percent to 31.1 percent.
- Between 2000 and 2011, the share of employed young high school graduates who receive pension coverage from their employer dropped from 9.7 percent to 5.9 percent. Over the same period, the share of employed young college graduates who receive pension coverage from their employer dropped from 41.5 percent to 27.2 percent.
- Young graduates with jobs lack opportunities for advancement, a trend underscored by the fact that there are now more than 20 percent fewer total voluntary quits each month than there were each month in 2007.
- Graduating in a bad economy has long-lasting economic consequences. For the next 10 to 15 years, those in the Class of 2013 will likely earn less than if they had graduated when job opportunities were plentiful.
- The safety net of federal and state assistance programs often does not cover young workers due to eligibility requirements such as significant prior work experience.
- The cost of higher education has grown far more rapidly than median family income, leaving students with little choice but to take out loans which, upon graduating into a labor market with limited job opportunities, they may not have the funds to repay.
- The scarcity of job opportunities for the Class of 2013 is a symptom of weak demandfor workers more broadly. What will bring down young workers’ unemployment rates most quickly and effectively are policies that will generate strong job growth overall, such as fiscal relief to states, substantial additional investment in infrastructure, expanded safety net measures, and direct job creation programs in communities particularly hard-hit by unemployment.
Unemployment rate twice as high for young workers
In economic recessions as well as expansions, the unemployment rate of young workers (those under age 25) is typically around twice as high as the overall unemployment rate (see Figure Afor national data and Appendix Table A1 for state-level data). This trend persists over time because young workers are relatively new to the labor market—often looking for their first or second job—and they may be passed over in hiring decisions due to lack of experience. As for young workers who are already employed, their lack of seniority makes them likely candidates for being laid off when their firm falls on hard times or is restructuring. Young workers also tend to be more mobile than older workers, moving between jobs, employers, careers, or even cities, and thus spend a larger share of their time as job seekers.
Source (with more interactive graphs & much more text)
College Textbook Prices Increasing Faster Than Tuition And Inflation
This is the reality of austerity: Greek children are starving
April 22, 2013
Force-feeding Greece with budget cuts and tax increases gets a predictable, and tragic, results.
It’s not fair to blame Rogoff and Reinhart for the austerity craze that has gripped Europe. It is fair to say that their presentation of flawed data about the last half-century of growth and debt was used as intellectual ammunition in a total war on deficits that has destroyed families across the continent.
In Greece, the fog of austerity is more than a metaphor. This winter, a very real cloud of smoke haunted the city at night, as families burned felled trees and broken chairs to stay warm. While the economy has shrunk by a fifth and youth unemployment has screamed past 50 percent, the real tragedy can’t really be told with numbers. It’s simple, really. Children are starving.
The New York Times reports the heart-breaking details:
“He had eaten almost nothing at home,” Mr. Nikas said, sitting in his cramped school office near the port of Piraeus, a working-class suburb of Athens, as the sound of a jump rope skittered across the playground. He confronted Pantelis’s parents, who were ashamed and embarrassed but admitted that they had not been able to find work for months. Their savings were gone, and they were living on rations of pasta and ketchup.
The euro was supposed to tie Europe together as a single unified economic powerhouse. When Greek children go malnourished while unemployment falls in Germany, you can see very clearly that unity is just another European myth. In the United States, we have an answer for weak state economies. It’s called Mississippi. They get a permanent “bail out” through an annual transfer of money: tax credits, Medicaid spending, infrastructure assistance, and so on. In Europe, the answer for failing state economies is: You get this bag of money if you take the following measures to destroy your economy.
You don’t need to know how to fact-check Harvard economists to understand a simple truth: Force-feeding austerity to a country starving for money and growth will only get you more starvation.
Police ‘cleaning up’ Detroit by kidnapping the homeless, stranding them in other cities
April 22, 2013
Imagine that you are homeless in Detroit. You have an area where you know you are safe, where you can find food and shelter if you ask. Now imagine that a cop grabs you from the street, throws you into a van, drives you to the edge of the city or even a suburb and then kicks you out. That’s what the ACLU is accusing the Detroit PD of doing.: they filed a complaint with the Justice Department against the DPB this week.
The complaint comes at the end of a year-long investigation into claims that the department routinely drove homeless people to areas unfamiliar to them, leaving them to get back on their own. They will approach homeless people, especially in tourist areas like Greektown, force them into vans and drive them miles away, the complaint alleges. Sometimes the officers would even take what little money they had, leaving them with no recourse but to walk back to the city. Sometimes the homeless victims would even be left in neighboring towns and suburbs like Dearborn and River Rouge.
Speaking for the ACLU of Michigan, staff attorney Sarah Mehta told the local CBS affiliate:
“DPD’s practice of essentially kidnapping homeless people and abandoning them miles away from the neighborhoods they know – with no means for a safe return — is inhumane, callous and illegal. The city’s desire to hide painful reminders of our economic struggles cannot justify discriminating against the poor, banishing them from their city, and endangering their lives. A person who has lost his home has not lost his right to be treated with dignity.” (source)
The ACLU was contacted by the St. Peter and Paul Jesuit Church Warming Center, a homeless shelter. They told the organization about several homeless people who were “taken for a ride” by DPB officers. One such story came from Andrew Sheehan, a 36-year-old who used to be homeless but is now working at a grocery store:
“I had my back turned to him and I did not see him approaching, and the first thing he did was he kicked me. He didn’t identify himself as an officer and he kicked me and told me to get up. I asked him if I was free to go. He told me no.” (source)
The organization has published the stories of five homeless people who were kidnapped and harassed by Detroit police. According to the ACLU’s complaint, some of the homeless who were taken had to walk many miles to get back to downtown shelters. This puts them in danger from a variety of sources, especially in the middle of winter.
The ACLU has asked the Department of Justice to investigate the allegations. They have also asked the city to issue a directive to police officers to desist this practice immediately.
This is unconscionable, but it’s not new. Removing the vagrants and undersirables from where the “regular” people might be upset by them is an old practice, according to Samuel Walker, a police accountability expert:
“This is a familiar story with a long history in policing. You do wonder what did this Police Department learn from the consent decree experience?” (source)
Detroit’s Chief of Police, Chester Logan, declined to comment, saying that he had not yet seen the complaint. The AP was also unable to get comments from Mayor Dave Bing or the city’s emergency manager, Kevyn Orr. Not surprising.
This bad economy has seen an uptick in the homeless situation. Yes, it makes some of us uncomfortable to see them, perhaps because we see more of ourselves in them than we would care to admit. But ignoring the problem won’t solve it and taking these people to the edge of town and exposing them to danger is not the way to handle it. Detroit’s police need to look inside and find their better nature before they get someone killed.
At least 28 immigrants shot at Greece strawberry plantation after not being paid for six months
April 19, 2013
Greek police are hunting three strawberry plantation foremen, who are suspected of shooting nearly 30 workers, mostly Bangladeshi, after immigrants demanded wages they had not been paid for six months.
Officials have promised “swift and exemplary” punishment for the three foremen who disappeared after the incident that took place on April, 17 in Nea Manolada, about 260km (160 miles) west of Athens.
So far police arrested the owner of the farm, in the rural south of the country and a local man on suspicion of hiding the three foremen.
The violence allegedly occurred when one of the supervisors opened fire on a crowd of about 200 foreign workers gathered to request their unpaid salaries.
According to one of the immigrants, they were promised wages of 22 euros ($28.70) a day.
“They keep telling us that we will get paid in a month, and this has been going on for more than a year,” Reuters quoted a man who refused to be identified.
The conflict resulted in at least 28 people being injured. Seven Bangladeshi workers are still receiving treatment in local hospitals, but none of them has life-threatening injuries.
The Greek government has condemned the “inhuman, unprecedented and shameful” shooting.
“This unprecedented and shameful act is foreign to Greek ethics,” government spokesman Simos Kedikoglou said.
At the same time, the country’s main labor union, GSEE, has accused the government of failing to properly investigate conditions at Manolada.
“The criminal act in Manolada … shows the tragic results of labor exploitation, combined with a lack of control” [by the government labor inspectorate]”, a GSEE statement said. “In Manolada, and particularly in the strawberry plantations, a sort of state within a state has been created.”
Wednesday’s attack has been called the worst of all recent attacks on migrant strawberry workers in Greece, the country that mostly Asian and African asylum seekers see as a gateway to the European Union.
The Greek department of the Doctors of the World medical aid group suggested the shooting should be treated as a case of racist violence, a felony which carries more severe penalties.
“The protracted financial crisis, combined with a constantly growing mood of xenophobia and tolerance for racist violence, is leading to incidents of barbarity and brutality that … insult Greece,” the group said.
Following the violence, local supermarkets, Vasilopoulos and Chalkiadakis, announced that they would stop selling strawberries from the company that employed the alleged shooters.
Activists are now calling for a boycott of what they call slavery, by not buying Manolada berries.
“By boycotting #Manolada’s #bloodstrawberries you’re sending a clear message that you do not condone slavery,” reads the statement on Twitter.
However, there are some who believe that illegally hired immigrant workers should be deported from crisis stricken Greece.
With unemployment hitting a record 27 percent, anti-immigrant sentiment has been rising in the country.
Right-wing extremist political party, Golden Dawn, which holds 18 seats of the 300-member Parliament, said in a statement Thursday that they “condemn those who illegally employ illegal immigrants, taking the bread away from thousands of Greek families.”
“All illegal immigrants must be immediately deported,” it said.
A Facebook friend of mine sent me this video and asked for my thoughts
April 16, 2013
My response was so long, I thought it a waste not to post here. Response starts below:
Well, you may not have known what you were getting yourself into when you asked for my thoughts cos I have a whole essay’s worth of thoughts – lol!:
On our financial system: our financial system for sure doesn’t make any sense – it is unstable and crisis is built into our capitalist system. Among other problems, competition & unsustainable growth are built into the system – there is no way our system can continue for very long without serious reforms or absolute fundamental change (which is really what needs to happen). Competition is great, but the problem with competition is that somebody eventually wins. And when they do, power & money & the ability to accumulate more of both concentrates in the hands of a few, driving the disparity, subverting regulation, and eventually leading to economic disaster.
I can imagine a few alternatives & solutions to this problem and I have in-mind what I believe would be the most possible/likely-to-succeed/least-bloody solution, but ultimately, I’ll jump on board to pretty much anything that answers the problems created by our capitalist system if it becomes popular enough & has strong enough of a possibility of success & doesn’t involve hurting lots of other people.
On RussiaToday as a news source: RussiaToday, like all large news providers (save for Democracy Now, if you want to count that), is biased toward the agenda of the powers they are beholden to. For us in the United States, that’s the corrupt corporate interests that govern our system.
For RussiaToday, that’s Russian state interests. They use real information & real facts, but often frame them in misleading or hyperbolic ways. Amidst major crises, they report facts early and incorrectly often. They feature U.S. stories predominately featuring violence, brutality, and crisis in the U.S. They intentionally try and foster negative feelings about the U.S. and give extensive coverage to news relevant both to the American left and to libertarian/Ron-Paul people – the two largest ‘dissident’ communities in the U.S. That’s their U.S. audience – people who could cause problems for U.S. state interests.
As part of that community, it’s a great & powerful resource. Lots of good information covered extensively about police brutality & our military-industrial-complex that doesn’t get that kind of coverage otherwise. At the same time, when they cite statistics or post stories about how the U.S. government is finally coming ‘for your guns’, I kind of just roll my eyes and tune them out and wait to see if I see it reported on DemocracyNow or TruthOut or SocialistWorker or AlJazeera (which has it’s own problems). So… I find them to be a good source for conglomerated news stories that a ‘dissident’ or a leftist might be interested in, but it’s always important to me, when reading RussiaToday, that I find other sources to confirm what is being reported.
Recommended related sources:
Sorry for the really long response!
-Robert
