Low-Wage Workers On Federal Contracts Keep Up Pressure With 3rd Strike

Posted on July 18, 2013 by The Soul Brother
Union Station

Union Station (Photo credit: Carlos López Molina)

By Alan Pyke

Service workers at Washington D.C.’s Union Station are walking off the job Thursday morning to protest the federal government’s failure to ensure the companies it contracts with pay a livable wage. The strike is the third in eight weeks for low-wage federally-contracted workers in the nation’s capital, as part of a campaign called Good Jobs Nation that is pressuring the government to stop paying poverty wages through its private-sector partners. Previous strikes at other government buildings have sparked investigations into wage theft and other abuses.

Courtney Shackleford, a 20-year-old full-time student at Trinity Washington University, works at the Ben & Jerry’s shop at Union Station. She told ThinkProgress that her schedule fluctuates, and at $8.25 an hour she struggles to pay her bills even while living at home. “It’s hard because I want to be able to get my own place and still pay off school, but I can’t,” Shackleford said. “Depending on my hours, I might make $700 in a month, but living in D.C. rent alone is $700 or $800.” She does not receive health insurance.

Neither does Lynette Justin, who is also paying her way through school with her job at Pret A Manger. Justin, 24, said the medications she needs as a liver transplant recipient can often eat up two whole paychecks. “I shouldn’t have trouble living on my own at my age,” said Justin, 24. “I don’t want to burden my family, but I can’t afford to live anywhere else so I have to live with my family.”

22-year-old Justin New used to attend culinary school and dreamed of opening his own business, but now works at the FYE store at Union Station for $8.50 an hour. “I get about 20-25 hours in a week. Transportation alone can run about $50 a week, and I also have my student loans which is $300 a month,” New said. He will have been in the job for a year in August, and said he’s looking for a second job to make ends meet. “We’re all just trying to reach the American Dream,” Shackleford said, “but we can’t right now.”

At a press conference following the walkout, experts from the National Employment Law Project will lay out some grim statistics about how these workers live. Roughly 75 percent earn less than $10 an hour, and almost four in 10 rely on public assistance programs to survive despite working full-time, according to NELP’s new report. There are more than 2 million workers like New, Justin, and Shackleford, making under $12 an hour and hovering near the poverty line in jobs created by federal contracts. That makes the government a larger low-wage employer than McDonald’s and Walmart combined, and helps explain why D.C. has become a focal point in low-wage worker activism that’s reached New York City, Seattle, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Detroit, and Chicago.

Read More Low-Wage Workers On Federal Contracts Keep Up Pressure With 3rd Strike.

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Happy Birthday, Tata Madiba

Posted on July 18, 2013 by The Soul Brother
English: Nelson Mandela in Johannesburg, Gaute...

English: Nelson Mandela in Johannesburg, Gauteng, on 13 May 1998 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Birthday wishes were pouring in for former president Nelson Mandela as he turned 95 on Thursday, with a tangible sense of celebration in the country as millions of pupils sang “Happy Birthday Madiba” and South Africans from all walks of life geared up to pay tribute to their national treasure.

In 2010, the United Nations General Assembly declared July 18 as Nelson Mandela International Day, in honour of Mandela’s lifelong commitment to human rights, conflict resolution and reconciliation.

South Africans and people around the world have been called on to observe the day by giving at least 67 minutes of their time to help create a better tomorrow for all.

Family with Madiba in hospital

Mandela was expected to spend his birthday with his family at the Medi-Clinic Heart Hospital in Pretoria, where he was admitted on 8 June for a recurring lung infection.

Members of the public have been visiting the hospital daily to drop off cards, flowers and decorations wishing the former statesmen well.

Read More allAfrica.com: South Africa: Happy Birthday, Tata Madiba (Page 1 of 2).

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Is it possible to have morality in a free market?

Posted on July 18, 2013 by The Soul Brother
Ali Velshi

Ali Velshi (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Ali Velshi

This speech was delivered yesterday at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, NY.

Are the markets moral? Should we expect them to be? Moral according to whom? And if they’re not moral, are they immoral? Amoral? Or value-neutral?

The bigger the questions, the more likely we are to be heading into some abstract—albeit very interesting—realms. But I work in cable TV and, as you know, we have a propensity for reality, so lets stick with that.

Let’s rather discuss the interaction of markets and society, and how that interaction both supports and offends our sense of morality. Once we understand the way markets and morality influence one another, we can try to develop strategies to help the markets promote the values we hold dear, and change practices that are inconsistent with our beliefs.

Now the first pitfall here is defining morality. Philosophers tell us “morality” describes the codes of conduct put forward by a society. More broadly, it can refer to a system of conduct to which all rational persons, regardless of culture, would subscribe.

So, when we talk about morality, we’re generally referring to the ethical glue that holds society together. Morality deals with our sense of fairness and our sense of responsibility to others. Implicit in morality is the idea that there are right ways—and, by contrast, wrong ways—to act.

Now when I talk about markets, I’m not referring to stock markets, although they do fall within my definition. I’m referring to the myriad institutional structures human beings have established to facilitate commerce. For purposes of this discussion, a market is any structure under which commerce takes place: the purchase of land, stocks, airline tickets, vegetables, sporting events, whatever it may be. In my view, these structures begin as neither moral nor immoral. They are as indifferent as water. Markets are meant simply to be vehicles for finding the most efficient way to balance supply and demand.

The freer the market, the less encumbered by regulation, and the more efficient it should be. But from a social standpoint, unfettered markets can lead to situations most of us would consider immoral: vast populations of have-nots, a ruined environment, plutocracies and other dystopian scenarios.

Read More Is it possible to have morality in a free market? – Quartz.

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Part-Time Workers Say Schedules Are Getting More Erratic

Posted on July 18, 2013 by The Soul Brother
help wanted

help wanted (Photo credit: kandyjaxx)

By Marilyn Geewax

In the 1980s, a popular fast-food commercial touted chicken-breast sandwiches — and mocked chicken nuggets sold by competitors.

In the ad, a competitor’s doofus clerk explains nuggets. “All the parts are crammed into one big part,” he said. “And parts is parts.”

Today, clerks may believe that catchphrase could apply to them as regular full-time schedules disappear. For many workers, hours are not only short, but increasingly erratic as managers scramble to cover shifts without the steadying influence of experienced full-time employees.

“It’s ridiculous,” says Amere Graham, an 18-year-old high school graduate who works at a McDonald’s in Milwaukee. “My schedule is all over the place. It’s completely unpredictable.”

Government data support Graham’s impressions of workplace conditions. The ranks of people working part time because they can’t find full-time jobs have roughly doubled since the summer of 2007, from about 4.3 million to 8.2 million.

“There has been a surge in part-time work,” says Aparna Mathur, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute.

The change reflects business owners’ reluctance to hire full-time workers while they still have so many worries about the strength of the recovery and the cost of the Affordable Care Act, Mathur says. “You want to maintain flexibility so you can respond to the economy” without having to carry the costs of hiring and firing full-time employees, she says.

In a study of retail working conditions, conducted in the fall of 2011 in New York, only 17 percent of retail workers said they have a set schedule.

Read More Part-Time Workers Say Schedules Are Getting More Erratic : NPR.

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The Zimmerman Acquittal: America’s Racist God

Posted on July 18, 2013 by The Soul Brother

By Anthea Butler

Anthea Butler

Anthea Butler (Photo credit: weaverphoto)

The not guilty verdict in the George Zimmerman case has me thinking a lot about a book I first encountered in seminary, Is God a White Racist?, by the Rev. Dr. Bill Jones. As a budding seminary student, it took me by surprise. Now, as a wiser, older professor looking at the needless death of Trayvon Martin, I have to say: I get it.

God ain’t good all of the time. In fact, sometimes, God is not for us. As a black woman in a nation that has taken too many pains to remind me that I am not a white man, and am not capable of taking care of my reproductive rights, or my voting rights, I know that this American god ain’t my god. As a matter of fact, I think he’s a white racist god with a problem. More importantly, he is carrying a gun and stalking young black men.

When George Zimmerman told Sean Hannity that it was God’s will that he shot and killed Trayvon Martin, he was diving right into what most good conservative Christians in America think right now. Whatever makes them protected, safe, and secure, is worth it at the expense of the black and brown people they fear.

Their god is the god that wants to erase race, make everyone act “properly” and respect, as the president said, “a nation of laws”; laws that they made to crush those they consider inferior.

Read More The Zimmerman Acquittal: America’s Racist God | Religion Dispatches.

 

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The Enduring Rift

Posted on July 18, 2013 by The Soul Brother

By Joshua DuBois

imagesBy this point, all Americans know the facts. A teenager, Trayvon Martin, was pursued and killed. The shooter, George Zimmerman, was acquitted, his claim of self-defense validated by a jury. We have lined up to state our views about what should happen next: vocal protesters and advocates (I count myself among them) think that the system failed at critical points and should be corrected, from the “stand your ground” law that empowered Zimmerman to the investigation and prosecution of the case itself. Others are assembling to protect gun rights and the right to self-defense.

In service of these goals, we will march. We will tweet. The Justice Department will investigate, talk radio will opine, and some laws and policies will hopefully, needfully, be changed.

But when it is all over—when the political debates have run their course, when the pundits have moved on—we will still be left with something else. Something harder to describe. A set of noxious gut feelings about Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman—and where we all stand on the issue of race.

For black Americans, it will be that sour, aching feeling that someone, in the dark of night—empowered by a weapon, a reason, and relative impunity—can gun us, or our sons, or our husbands, down. It’s that thing my fiancée felt when she looked at me after we watched the verdict, hands held, sitting on the floor of my office. This is an intelligent woman, law-school educated, not overly emotional, and never at a loss for words; but channeling Trayvon’s mother, with a stunned look in her eyes, all she could muster was, “Can they really just kill our kids?”

For many white Americans, it will be a different though related sentiment that will linger. It’s a sentiment that is largely quiet on television and social media—because it would be swiftly condemned—but we must acknowledge that it’s there, that it’s represented in massive numbers across the country, in opinion polls, congressional districts, and, yes, on juries.

It’s a view that has sympathy for the Martin family, but at the end of the day also has sympathy for George Zimmerman: You know, sue me, but a tall, hooded black man that I’ve never seen before in my neighborhood is maybe a little frightening. And I don’t know what happened next between Zimmerman and Trayvon. But if, God forbid, I, or my husband, or my wife, is ever in that situation, I might like the right to … Most would shudder to finish the sentence.

Read More Obama’s Former Spiritual Advisor Joshua DuBois on Understanding Our Inner Trayvons and Inner Zimmermans – Newsweek and The Daily Beast.

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4 Unhinged, Offensive Reactions to the Zimmerman Verdict

Posted on July 18, 2013 by The Soul Brother
Ted Nugent Live

Ted Nugent Live (Photo credit: The Toad)

By Kristen Gwynne

Following a six-person, all-female jury’s acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s klller George Zimmerman this weekend, media and individuals on the both the right and left have responded with a hail storm of insensitivity that amounts to an outright white-supremacist defense of the racial profiling that killed not just one, but countless Black teenagers presumed guilty by racist enforcers of “justice.” While families across America are grieving and worrying about the safety of their Black sons, plenty of other Americans are showing up to make sure they know they damn well should be afraid, because stereotypes about Black criminality are not going anywhere soon.

1. Ted Nugent

Known racist and gun advocate Ted Nugent took some time away from his “Black Power” tour to smear Black America’s reactions to George Zimmerman’s acquittal. Ranting on the right-wing site Rare, Nugent writes that Trayvon Martin was a “dope smoking, racist gangsta wannabe” who deserved the bullet Zimmerman shot into his chest.

Here’s what the bigoted country star wrote in full:

“The race-baiting industry saw an opportunity to further the racist careers of Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, the Black Panthers, President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, et al, who then swept down on the Florida community refusing to admit that the 17-year-old dope smoking, racist gangsta wannabe Trayvon Martin was at all responsible for his bad decisions and standard modus operendi of always taking the violent route.”

Martin had trace amounts of marijuana in his system at the time of his death, which neuroscientist Dr. Carl Hart pointed out could not possibly have contributed to any aggression (not that marijuana use is linked to as much, anyway) the night he was killed. Rather than acknowledge this reality (and that whites use marijuana at much higher rates), Nugent peddles the racism-fueled myth linking drug use to bad behavior in Black people.

Read More 4 Unhinged, Offensive Reactions to the Zimmerman Verdict | Alternet.

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Black Journalists and Commentators Rip Limbaugh’s “Nigga” Claims

Posted on July 18, 2013 by The Soul Brother
Rush Limbaugh booking photo from his arrest in...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Joe Strupp

Rush Limbaugh’s claim that it’s acceptable for him to say “nigga” — with the “a” at the end — because some African-Americans have used that derivation of the racial slur drew strong criticism from several black journalists and commentators who called him “harsh” and a “bully.”

“I just think this is not good,” said Juan Williams, a regular Fox News commentator. “Obviously I think this whole level of conversation is pretty base and divisive. It’s so harsh.”

Gregory Lee Jr., president of the National Association of Black Journalists, said Limbaugh should know better.

“We don’t use any other offensive words on the air, why is this okay?” said Lee, who is also South Florida Sun-Sentinel executive sports editor. “As a professional broadcaster, he should have a deeper understanding of why. He knows why, but he knows this will help pump money into his empire by saying things of this sort.”

At issue is a comment Limbaugh made on his syndicated radio show July 16th, in which he reacted to a CNN interview with Rachel Jenteal, a friend of slain Florida teenager Trayvon Martin and witness in the murder trial of George Zimmerman. Jenteal had testified at the trial about her phone conversation with Martin the night he was shot and killed by Zimmerman.

Read More Black Journalists and Commentators Rip Limbaugh’s “Nigga” Claims | Blog | Media Matters for America.

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Our real problem is white rage

Posted on July 18, 2013 by The Soul Brother
Trayvon Martin Rally Sit-In - Sanford

Trayvon Martin Rally Sit-In – Sanford (Photo credit: werthmedia)

By Edward Wyckoff Williams

If there is no justice, there can be no peace. But in the American South it seems white folks suddenly believe that decorum and charm are a proper response to unspeakable acts of violence and unconscionable injustice.

The day before a jury delivered an acquittal in the murder trial of George Zimmerman, Seminole County Sheriff Don Eslinger and Sanford Police Chief Cecil Smith gave a national press conference to appeal for a peaceful reaction to the verdict — regardless of its outcome.

Eslinger, who is white, said, “We will not tolerate anyone who uses this verdict as an excuse to violate the law.”

The veiled threat of an aggressive police response to imaginary civil unrest belies the very logic that led to Trayvon Martin’s death to begin with. For, you see, African-Americans are never protected or served by the law enforcement apparatus — yet they are always subject to its military might.

Sanford police coyly “tolerated” the actual killing of an unarmed black child, but yet refuse to “tolerate” any anger expressed for the acquittal of his murderer.

This is the new Jim Crow realized.

It bears reminding that it was Sanford’s police who first allowed Zimmerman to walk away uncharged — his gun in tote. The story of self-defense seemed logical to them given the brown body lying on the ground. It was their decision not to investigate the case as a crime that led to public outcry, rallies and marches. It is only because of their total failure to do their jobs that the world now knows the name and face of Trayvon Martin.

Read More Our real problem is white rage – Salon.com.

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U.S. reviewing 27 death penalty convictions for FBI forensic testimony errors

Posted on July 18, 2013 by The Soul Brother
Title capital punishment

Title capital punishment (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Spencer S. Hsu

An unprecedented federal review of old criminal cases has uncovered as many as 27 death penalty convictions in which FBI forensic experts may have mistakenly linked defendants to crimes with exaggerated scientific testimony, U.S. officials said.

The review led to an 11th-hour stay of execution in Mississippi in May.

It is not known how many of the cases involve errors, how many led to wrongful convictions or how many mistakes may now jeopardize valid convictions. Those questions will be explored as the review continues.

The discovery of the more than two dozen capital cases promises that the examination could become a factor in the debate over the death penalty. Some opponents have long held that the execution of a person confirmed to be innocent would crystallize doubts about capital punishment. But if DNA or other testing confirms all convictions, it would strengthen proponents’ arguments that the system works.

FBI officials discussed the review’s scope as they prepare to disclose its first results later this summer. The death row cases are among the first 120 convictions identified as potentially problematic among more than 21,700 FBI Laboratory files being examined. The review was announced last July by the FBI and the Justice Department, in consultation with the Innocence Project and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL).

Read More U.S. reviewing 27 death penalty convictions for FBI forensic testimony errors – The Washington Post.

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