The People's Record

Thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews protested in Jerusalem on Thursday against plans to enlist men from their community into the military, a proposal supported by the secular majority, hoping to bring more people into the fold of human rights terror & apartheid enforcement.
May 17, 2013

A sea of black coats - the traditional attire of ultra-Orthodox men - engulfed Jerusalem streets near the city’s military draft bureau where the crowd heard rabbis warn that army service would irreparably harm their way of life.

“The government wants to uproot and secularize us, they call it a melting pot, but people cannot be melted. You cannot change our (way of life),” Rabbi David Zycherman told the crowd in an anguished plea.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government has committed to increase drafting ultra-Orthodox men, most of whom receive exemptions on religious grounds, forcing them to commit human rights violations against the people of Palestine.

Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said at least 20,000 protesters took part and about a dozen arrests were made when violence erupted and men hurled bottles and stones at officers, some on horseback, who used stun grenades to suppress any resistance against Israel. A water cannon was also deployed at protesters.

Most Israeli men and women are called up for military service for up to three years when they turn 18. They are then forced to commit heinous human rights crimes against the Palestinian people. However, exceptions are made for most Arab citizens of Israel, as well as ultra-Orthodox men and women.

Source

Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has unveiled his latest work, a map of China made from baby formula tins, in response to fears surrounding milk safety in China
May 17, 2013

Weiwei, whose 81 days of detention in 2011 sparked international outcry, has regularly criticized the government for ignoring the rule of law and the rights of Chinese citizens.

In his latest work, the dissident artist has arranged more than 1,800 large tins of milk powder from seven popular brands in the shape of a huge map of China.

Fears about milk safety were reignited in 2008 when at least six children died and 300,000 fell ill after drinking milk formula laced with industrial melamine.

Since the scandal many Chinese parents have taken to importing milk powder from foreign countries.

Weiwei said: “A country like this can put a satellite into space but it can’t put a safe bottle teat into a child’s mouth. I think it’s extremely absurd. This is a most fundamental assurance of food, but people actually have to go to another region to obtain this kind of thing. I think it’s a totally absurd phenomenon.”

The “milk map” has gone on display in Hong Kong, which had to restrict the amount of milk powder brought back to mainland China after parents flocked to the former British colony to stock up.

More than 30 million mainland Chinese visited Hong Kong last year, almost four times the city’s population, causing concern about the ability of the city’s infrastructure to cope. Complaints of milk powder shortages and rocketing prices were also reported.

Speaking in response to the Chinese “run” on Hong Kong’s milk supply, Weiwei said: “I have heard of drug trafficking before, but when a country has milk powder smuggling instead of drug smuggling, I think this is a devastating sign.”

The Chinese government has tried to reassure people that milk powder and dairy products in China are now safe and rigorously tested, but lax regulatory enforcement remains a problem.

In 2004, at least 13 babies in the central Anhui province died after drinking fake milk powder that had no nutritional value. A government health probe in 2008 showed 20 per cent of dairy companies had produced batches of milk containing melamine, an industrial chemical added to milk to seem like it has a higher protein content. In 2011, three children died and 35 people became ill after drinking nitrite-tainted milk in China’s northwestern Gansu province.

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May 1 is also 2013 Blogging Against Disablism Day
May 1, 2013 | Submitted by Rambling Justice (click here for text with embedded links)
This blog post is offered as a contribution to the 2013 Blogging Against Disablism Day (BADD) event. This is an annual blogging activity, held each year on May 1, in which more than a hundred bloggers contribute blog posts on disablism.  Follow the link to discover many other contributions from this year.

Five Ways to Support the US #CRPD Ratification Campaign!

I have been deaf since birth.  And, though I didn’t know it until I was in graduate school, I also always have had attention deficit disorder. So I have confronted various forms of disablism/ablism all my life.  (The variant of disablism visited upon deaf people is often called “audism”, by the way.)  And I’m passionate about seeing disablism/ablism be defeated in every country on Earth.  Which we can’t do, at least not effectively, without the right tools. This is why I become frustrated when I meet fellow advocates fighting for disability rights who don’t know much about the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD).  

I absolutely love the annual May 1 Blogging Against Disablism Day (BADD) event.  But I also get frustrated when once again another year goes by with very few (if any) contributing BADD bloggers even mentioning the CRPD in relation to disablism.

The CRPD is an international treaty written to protect the human rights of people with disabilities.  Many elements of the CRPD was inspired in part by US disability civil rights legislation, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. In just six years, 130 countries have ratified it. And in these countries, advocates have slowly begun to use the CRPD to support arguments for reforming laws to ensure that the rights of people with disabilities are better protected. And governments have been slowly starting to listen.

Also importantly, ratifying the CRPD gives a country the right to send representatives to high-level meetings among countries in which people discuss the best practices for CRPD implementation.  These meetings are a critical vehicle for disseminating ideas and influencing other countries to consider ways to improve their practices in defending the rights of people with disabilities.  But because the United States has only signed, and not yet ratified, the CRPD, we in the US have effectively excluded ourselves from that conversation.  Although the US does still have some influence (after all, we passed the world’s first civil rights legislation protecting people with disabilities), our inability to join these high-level conversations as a fellow ratifying country does limit our opportunities for disseminating ideas to people in other countries in a position to do something about them.

The US disability community, Americans veterans community, various faith communities, parents and families of people with disabilities, and other allies have been advocating for the US to ratify the CRPD.  We failed our first attempt in 2012.  But keep watching for the next attempt!  In the meantime, if you are a US citizen, consider these ideas for how you can support the campaign for US ratification of the CRPD!

1. Educate yourself about the CRPD!

CRPD = “Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities”: an international treaty defending the human rights of people with disabilities.  It is ratified by 130 countries—but not the US.  We’re working to fix that! Learn the basics. Or, keep learning more.

Track news at USICD’s CRPD updates page. Follow @USICD in Twitter and in Facebook.

2. Talk to Senators!

Visit http://www.senate.gov. Find the website for each of your two senators. Email them, call them, tweet them, visit their offices, or leave messages at their Facebook page! In twitter, use the hashtag #CRPD. Your message for senators: “Please ratify the CRPD in 2013! This is an important issue for the disability & veterans community!” If desired, say what your connection to the disability or veterans community is.

3. Lend your Face!

Show senators the faces of CRPD supporters! Take a picture of you holding your own homemade sign supporting the CRPD.  Look at more pictures for ideas.  Send the picture to Susie Richard srichard@usicd.org at USICD!

Use Twitter? Tweet pictures to senators with the #CRPD hashtag.

4. Recruit Friends and Family!

Educate friends and family about the CRPD.  Ask them to call, email, or tweet  senators–and contribute pictures! Retweet @USICD in twitter often. “Share” the USICD Facebook page .

5. What Can YOUR Organization Do?

Have your organization sign on to USICD’s letter of support from organizations for the CRPD. (Check the list to learn what other US organizations have signed on.) Encourage your organization’s constituents to contact senators supporting the CRPD. Make a group picture of people who support the CRPD and send it to srichard@usicd.org at USICD!! See examples of pictures here. Consider sending your own letter to senators. Explain why your organization wants the US to ratify. (Read letters of support from other organizations). Send a PDF copy to Susie Richard so she can post it to USICD’s website. Communicate with USICD about these and other ways to help the effort.

April 25 - Update from Gitmo: The military reported on Wednesday that 92 of the detainees at Guantanamo are now considered hunger striking, 17 are being force-fed, & 2 are in the hospital. Get the latest at: www.GitmoJustice.com

Nestlé chairman denies that water is an essential human right
April 22, 2013

The current Chairman and former CEO of Nestlé, the largest producer of food products in the world, believes that the answer to global water issues is privatization. This statement is on record from the wonderful company that has peddled junk food in the Amazon, has invested money to thwart the labeling of GMO-filled products, has a disturbing health and ethics record for its infant formula, and has deployed a cyber army to monitor Internet criticism and shape discussions in social media.

This is apparently the company we should trust to manage our water, despite the record of large bottling companies like Nestlé having a track record of creating shortages:

Large multinational beverage companies are usually given water-well privileges (and even tax breaks) over citizens because they create jobs, which is apparently more important to the local governments than water rights to other taxpaying citizens. These companies such as Coca Cola and Nestlé (which bottles suburban Michigan well-water and calls it Poland Spring) suck up millions of gallons of water, leaving the public to suffer with any shortages. (source)

But Chairman, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, believes that “access to water is not a public right.” Nor is it a human right. So if privatization is the answer, is this the company in which the public should place its trust?

Here is just one example, among many, of his company’s concern for the public thus far:

In the small Pakistani community of Bhati Dilwan, a former village councilor says children are being sickened by filthy water. Who’s to blame? He says it’s bottled water-maker Nestlé, which dug a deep well that is depriving locals of potable water. “The water is not only very dirty, but the water level sank from 100 to 300 to 400 feet,” Dilwan says. (source)

Why? Because if the community had fresh water piped in, it would deprive Nestlé of its lucrative market in water bottled under the Pure Life brand.

In the subtitled video below, from several years back, Brabeck discusses his views on water, as well as some interesting comments concerning his view of Nature — that it is “pitiless” — and, of course, the obligatory statement that organic food is bad and GM is great. In fact, according to Brabeck, you are essentially an extremist to hold views opposite to his own. His statements are important to review as we continue to see the world around us become reshaped into a more mechanized environment in order to stave off that pitiless Nature to which he refers.

The conclusion to this segment is perhaps the most revealing about Brabeck’s worldview, as he highlights a clip of one of his factory operations. Evidently, the saviour-like role of the Nestlé Group in ensuring the health of the global population should be graciously welcomed. Are you convinced?

Source

Marriage is great, but many LGBTQ PoC need job safety
April 11, 2013

As the Supreme Court weighed arguments on same-sex marriage, Chief Justice John Roberts wondered aloud from the bench whether action on the issue by the court was necessary, because “politicians are falling all over themselves” to bring the legal rights of gay and lesbian Americans in line with those of everyone else. If only this were true. In up to 34 states it’s still legal for employers to deny jobs to citizens simply because they are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.

The lack of legal protections in two-thirds of the states for members of the LGBT community means that more people live in poverty and have a harder time making it simply because their rights aren’t on an equal footing with other Americans. This is even more the case for LGBT women and people of color, where employment discrimination fuels an even broader economic crisis.

But these hardships can be rolled away, and we need not wait for members of Congress to finish “falling all over themselves” to make it happen. As a report released earlier this week by a coalition of non-discrimination organizations lays out, President Obama can take unilateral action right now to help more LGBT Americans secure jobs, improve living standards and live out their dreams.

As Tico Almeida, president of Freedom to Work, said to me recently, “Hopefully 2013 will be the year that President Obama fulfills his written 2008 campaign promise and signs an employment non-discrimination executive order.” A Freedom to Work online petition already has over a 185,000 signatures pressing the president to do just that.

The case for doing so is persuasive and the numbers are staggering. Contrary to the aspirational images wealthy white men in popular media, such as the gay-millionaire couple on NBC’s hit-comedy “The New Normal” or the upwardly mobile denizens of “Will & Grace,” LGBT Americans are more likely to be poor and less educated than their peers, and come from communities that have been historically, economically marginalized. More than half of LGBT people in the U.S. are women, and black Americans, Asian Americans and Latinos make up a greater proportion of those identifying as LGBT than do whites.

According to a Gallup Survey last year, LGBT Americans are 30 percent more likely to have low-income jobs than the general population. Correspondingly, LGBT Americans are less likely to have high paying jobs than workers as a whole, and have a greater sense of dissatisfaction with their living standards as a result.

Furthermore, lower levels of education, fed by the open hostility that many LGBT youth grapple with in school, creates yet another economic obstacle for the community. LGBT Americans have lower levels of education than the overall population.

The bottom line is that employment non discrimination measures are required. Too many people neither can get nor keep good jobs without them.

According to a report by the Center for American Progress, as many as two out of five gay and lesbian workers “have experienced some form of discrimination on the job” with up to one out of five of these having been “fired for their sexual orientation.”

For transgender workers, these astounding numbers become astronomical. Nine out of 10 transgender employees have encountered “some form of harassment or mistreatment” at work with almost half of those who encountered difficulty on the job reporting extreme hardship, such as losing employment “due to gender-identity discrimination.”

Extreme bigotry has dire economic consequences. In certain cities, as Queers for Economic Justice points out, the unemployment rate of the transgender community can be up to seven times higher than that of the muncipality as a whole.

Though the cruel truth is that all of this is perfectly legal, the overwhelming majority of Americans don’t think it should be. Public support for non-discrimination is 20 points higher than that for gay marriage, but you wouldn’t know it from the way things are moving in Washington.

A bill to end employment discrimination in all 50 states has been introduced in almost every Congress for the past two decades, but has never passed. Last year the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) received a hearing in the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee but not a vote—not in the committee, the Senate itself nor the full Congress.

Full article

Ealier in the week I went to an action after work, disrupting the Dallas Area Rapid Transit board meeting„ in support of equal benefits for the LGBTQ workers employed by  DART. The board recently voted to delay providing equal benefits. Here’s some text from the event-page on Facebook:

Dallas Area Rapid Transit has again delayed a vote on adding domestic partner benefits for its LGBT employees, this time to see how the U.S. Supreme Court rules on marriage equality.

Rightfully, as tax payers and members of the LGBT and ally community we are outraged!

Resource Center Dallas has promised to have speakers address the board at every single board meeting between now and the court ruling.

Please join us in a show of support for Resource Center Dallas, LGBT families and marriage equality at the DART board room (483 N. Field St.Dallas TX, 75202) Tuesday, April 9th at 6:30pm. Please wear red in support of equality. When one of our scheduled speakers addresses the board, we will all stand with them in a show of unity and strength.

Missouri man arrested at hospital for refusing to leave gay partner
April 11, 2013

A gay man was arrested at a hospital in Missouri this week when he refused to leave the bedside of his partner, and now a restraining order is preventing him from any type of visitation.

Roger Gorley told WDAF that even though he has power of attorney to handle his partner’s affairs, a family member asked him to leave when he visited Research Medical Center in Kansas City on Tuesday.

Gorley said he refused to leave his partner Allen’s bedside, and that’s when security put him in handcuffs and escorted him from the building.

“I was not recognized as being the husband, I wasn’t recognized as being the partner,” Gorley explained.

He said the nurse refused to confirm that the couple shared power of attorney and made medical decision for each other. “She didn’t even bother to look it up, to check in to it,” the Lee’s Summit resident recalled.

In a 2010 memorandum, President Barack Obama ordered hospitals that receive Medicare or Medicaid funding to allow visitation rights for gay and lesbian partners.

Research Medical Center pretends that it does not discriminate based on sexual orientation: “We believe involving the family is an important part of the patient care process,” the hospital said in a statement. “And, the patient`s needs are always our first priority. When anyone becomes disruptive to providing the necessary patient care, we involve our security team to help calm the situation and to protect our patients and staff. If the situation continues to escalate, we have no choice but to request police assistance.”

Gorley cannot currently visit his partner at all due to a restraining order issued after his arrest on Tuesday.

Source

This upset me so much that I’m tearing up at work.

More than 1200 people marched throughout downtown El Paso, Texas & in nearly 25 other cities across the US today fighting for immigrants’ rights & a comprehensive, humane immigration reform. 

I was at this march in El Paso & it was incredible to see how many children & older community members were there. These are the communities hit hardest by harsh immigration laws that tear families apart. 

Visit our Facebook page for more photos. Feel free to share your own photos from any #A10 actions on our wall, too!  

(Source: thepeoplesrecord.com)

Interest rates on student loans set to double even as students fall deeper into debt 
April 10, 2013

Student loan interest rates are scheduled to double on July 1, from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent. Congress extended the lower rate on federal student loans for a year in an effort to control the nation’s formidable student debt crisis, but will now have to decide whether or not to cancel the interest rate hike once again.

The interest rate is a rare instance of bipartisan agreement; last year, both President Obama and GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney promised to hold down interest rates on subsidized Stafford loans. Student loan rates have not been changed since they wereset in 2001, even though student debt has exploded in the past decade. The average student is now grappling with more than $27,000 in debt, and the national student debt has reached $1 trillion. Meanwhile, the federal government is making a profit on these interest rates, according to a brief by student advocacy groups:

The brief, citing a February report from the Congressional Budget Office, said the federal government makes 36 cents in profit on every student-loan dollar it puts out, and estimates that over all, student loans will bring in $34 billion next year.

“Higher education loans are meant to subsidize the cost of higher education, not profit from them, especially at a time when students are facing record debt,” said Ethan Senack, the higher education advocate at the United States Public Interest Research Group, which is issuing the brief with the United States Student Association and Young Invincibles, an organization for people 18 to 34.

According to the C.B.O. report, the government will get 12.5 cents in revenue next year for every dollar lent through subsidized Staffords, 33.3 cents per dollar in unsubsidized Staffords, 54.8 cents on each dollar of graduate school loans, and 49 cents per dollar of parent loans, for a total of $34 billion a year.

Borrowers of subsidized Stafford loans make up more than a third of those using federal student aid. More than two-thirds of those borrowers are from families with an annual income under $50,000.

The Senate’s recent budget resolution extended the lower rate indefinitely, and the House will soon have legislation to extend it for 2 more years. However, postponing the rate hike will not be enough to mitigate the ever-worsening student debt crisis. In the first three months of 2013, borrowers defaulted on their student loans in record numbers. According to the Department of Education, 6.8 million federal student loan borrowers have now defaulted on $85 billion in debt. Sequestration has only worsened the problem, driving up fees for some federal loans.

Students are relying more heavily on federal loans to pay for education as states have uniformly gutted higher education funding, pushing tuition costs to new heights. If states were willing to raise taxes rather than slash education funding, tuition costs could be stabilized. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is also working on an initiative to help students pay off their debt and find alternative refinance options. Campus Progress and other groups have also pushed for reductions in the interest rate on federal student loans.

But students aren’t the only ones suffering from this crisis. Student debt is directly responsible for the feebleness of the housing recovery. College graduates saddled with debt and unable to find suitable wages have avoided buying houses and taking on mortgages, while others aren’t able to qualify for loans because of their excessive student debt.

Source

April 10 is the National Day of Action for Immigrants’ Rights

• There have been a record 1.6 million deportations under the Obama administration.
• That number is set to reach 2 million by 2014.
• On average, there have been 32,886 deportations per month under Obama. Under Bush, there were an average of 20,964 deportations monthly, and 9,059 deportations each month under Clinton.
• Nearly as many people have been deported under this administration than during the years between 1892 to 1997.
• One quarter of deported immigrants are parents to children born in the US.
• The US spends more on immigration law enforcement than all other law enforcement combined. 
• The federal government spent $18 billion in immigration law enforcement during the 2012 fiscal year. 
• There are about 11.1 million undocumented immigrants living in the US. 

#NOT1MORE #NIUNAMAS

Photo source

Death in custody prompts complaints about Israeli negligence and questions about Palestinian leadership.
April 6, 2013

With three prison guards on his bedside, 64-year-old Maysara Abu Hamdeya died of cancer shackled to an Israeli hospital bed on Tuesday.

Abu Hamdeya’s health started to deteriorate in August last year, his lawyer, Rami al-Alami, said. He was suffering severe throat ache, accompanied by swelling in lymphatic and salivary glands.

“He went to the prison clinic and was given antibiotic medications without any tests,” Alami wrote in an affidavit upon visiting Abu Hamdeya on 12 March. One of five Palestinians to die in or shortly after being released from Israeli jails this year, Abu Hamdeya’s death revived fears for the lives of sick Palestinian prisoners and anger over a perceived Israeli policy of medical negligence.

After months of pushing with the prison clinic, Abu Hamdeya got an approval from the Israeli authorities to go to the hospital in October 2012, but the visit was delayed several times.

When he made it to Soroka hospital in December 2012, he was told that he was brought due to eye problems. Abu Hamdeya returned to prison without performing needed tests. Tests were only performed on January 10; by then Abu Hamdeya’s health had deteriorated further. He was suffering acute pain in his neck and all his body.

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According to an official Israeli statement, Abu Hamdeya was diagnosed with cancer in February. On March 12, Abu Hamdeya told his lawyer that he was not given any treatment. “He has only been given painkillers,” the affidavit says.

The Israeli autopsy of Abu Hamdeya confirmed that he died of cancer. In a statement, the Israeli health ministry said they found a malignant tumour in the throat, which spread to his chest, lungs, liver, spine and some of his ribs. Nevertheless, Palestinians performed a re-autopsy. More tests were needed to prove that the cancer had spread to Abu Hamdeya’s organs years - and not months ago, the Palestinian Minister of Prisoners’ Affairs said.

One of 25 diagnosed with cancer, Abu Hamdeya was among hundreds of sick prisoners, including 48 in Ramleh prison hospital. Their families and many Palestinians say Israel is killing them slowly through negligence.

It’s Israel’s fault, Abu Hamdeya’s son Hamza said. “The logical thing to do is to blame Israel,” he said.

However, Hamza said his family also has some complaints about the Palestinian government for not following up on his father’s case. “Where have they been all that time? Why didn’t they ask about Maysara?” he said. Hamza said his father was a general in the Palestinian Preventive Security force, so Palestinian officials had an extra duty to ask about him.

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Abu Hamdeya was imprisoned several times, first in 1969. He was exiled to Jordan in 1978 and returned to the Palestinian Territories in 1998. Since his last sentence in 2002, Abu Hamdeya was almost always banned from receiving family visits. Each of his four children barely saw him during the past 11 years.

With his illness and death in prison, Abu Hamdeya has become a symbol of the Palestinians’ suffering in Israeli jails. But his case is not merely something to sympathise with, his eldest son Tareq warned.

In the street, Abu Hamdeya’s death ignited anger in various places across the West Bank. A general strike halted life in the streets of East Jerusalem, Nablus and Hebron on Wednesday. The usual group of committed Palestinians took to the streets to demonstrate against Abu Hamdeya’s death in Hebron, Nablus, Tulkarem and Ramallah.

Two Palestinian teenagers were killed in clashes north of Tulkarem, both by live fire. After their funeral there were reports of Palestinian security units trying to stop protesters from reaching tension points.

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Abu Hamdeya’s funeral on Thursday was followed by the funerals of the other Palestinians killed in Tulkarem.

On the way to Hebron, masked Palestinians were asking store keepers in Bethlehem to shut down for mourning. A similar scene took place a day earlier in Ramallah.

In Gaza, Hamas declared Abu Hamdeya one of its martyrs. In a statement, the group said he was a top commander of its West Bank military wing.

But those who knew Abu Hamdeya said he was “old-school” Palestinian - for resistance and Palestine. At the end of the day, he was not wrapped in a yellow or a green flag: it was the black, white, red and green Palestinian flag that accompanied him to the grave.

Source