Minimum wage protesters demand $15 an hour at McDonald’s headquarters

By Tanja Babich

Protestors dispersed before 10 a.m. Thursday after a peaceful, but loud rally outside McDonald’s corporate headquarters in Oak Brook, Ill.

Douglas Hunter, who works at a McDonald’s in Austin, has pumped up the crowd at dozens of Fight for Fifteen protests. He says he does it for more than higher wages.

“I’m impassioned about this because it directly affects my community and communities all over this country. These low wages. There’s a lot of violence. There’s a lot of anger,” he said.

Antione Heron said young men and women can’t build themselves up when low wages bring them down. He worked for a McDonald’s in Washington, D.C., while attending Howard University. He said he didn’t earn enough to cover tuition, so he dropped out to come home and attend community college.

“My whole life, my dream was set on going to college and finishing my degree and starting my career in teaching. But, because I wasn’t able to afford it due to lack of financial resources, I’m pushed back,” Heron said.

More than a thousand demonstrators, many of whom were McDonald’s employees, participated.

“This isn’t just a McDonald’s thing. I was just talking to someone from churches. People are here from Popeye’s, Walmart, nurses, health care workers, even some part-time professors at the universities are a part of this,” Dan Fein, Walmart employee, said.

Read More Minimum wage protesters demand $15 an hour at McDonald’s headquarters | abc7chicago.com.

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Freddie Gray among many suspects who do not get medical care from Baltimore police

By Mark Puente and Meredith Cohn

Baltimore Police transfer van pulls into Baltimore Central Booking and Intake Center.  (Karl Merton Ferron / Baltimore Sun)

Baltimore Police transfer van pulls into Baltimore Central Booking and Intake Center. (Karl Merton Ferron / Baltimore Sun)

When Baltimore State’s Attorney Maryliyn Mosby charged six police officers in the death of Freddie Gray, she said they had ignored Gray’s pleas for medical care during his arrest and a 45-minute transport van ride.

Records obtained by The Baltimore Sun show that city police often disregard or are oblivious to injuries and illnesses among people they apprehend — in fact, such cases occur by the thousands.

From June 2012 through April 2015, correctional officers at the Baltimore City Detention Center have refused to admit nearly 2,600 detainees who were in police custody, according to state records obtained through a Maryland Public Information Act request.

In those records, intake officers in Central Booking noted a wide variety of injuries, including fractured bones, facial trauma and hypertension. Of the detainees denied entry, 123 had visible head injuries, the third most common medical problem cited by jail officials, records show.

The jail records redacted the names of detainees, but a Sun investigation found similar problems among Baltimore residents and others who have made allegations of police brutality.

Salahudeen Abdul-Aziz, who was awarded $170,000 by a jury in 2011, testified that he was arrested and transported to the Western District after being beaten by police and left with a broken nose, facial fracture and other injuries. Hours later, he went to Central Booking and then to Bon Secours Hospital, according to court records.

Abdul-Aziz said last week that jailers at Central Booking “wouldn’t let me in the door as soon as they saw my face. … I thought I was gonna die that day. Freddie Gray wasn’t so lucky.”

Some critics say the data from the state-run jail show that city officers don’t care about the condition of detainees.

“It goes to demonstrate the callous indifference the officers show when they are involved with the public,” said attorney A. Dwight Pettit, who has sued dozens of city officers in the past 40 years. “Why would they render medical care when they rendered many of the injuries on the people?”

Criminologists and law enforcement experts say Gray’s death shows that police lack adequate training to detect injuries. Many suspects fake injuries in an effort to avoid a jail cell, they add.

Read More Freddie Gray among many suspects who do not get medical care from Baltimore police – Baltimore Sun.

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Stuck In The School-To-Prison Pipeline

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Heart Risk Factors May Affect Black Women More Than White Women

By Nancy Shute

African-American women can be at risk of heart disease even if they don’t have metabolic syndrome, a study finds.

That’s a problem, because the current thinking is that metabolic syndrome — defined as high triglycerides, bad cholesterol, abdominal fat, high blood pressure and impaired glucose metabolism — is the big risk factor for heart attacks and strokes.

The picture with women appears to be a lot more complicated, especially when you compare women in different racial or ethnic groups.

This study, published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Heart Association, found that having just having two metabolic abnormalities raised heart disease risk in African-American women. Being overweight or obese with two or three metabolic factors almost doubled their heart disease risk.

That wasn’t true for white women. For them, being overweight or obese didn’t boost their risk unless they had full-on metabolic syndrome, too.

“The metabolic health concept has has only been investigated in the white population,” says Dr. Michelle Schmiegelow of Copenhagen University Hospital Gentofte in Denmark. She led the research while at Stanford University. “We found that it cannot be directly applied to black individuals.”

Read More Heart Risk Factors May Affect Black Women More Than White Women : Shots – Health News : NPR.

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Young Black Boys Committing Suicide at Rates Higher Than Ever

By Kali Holloway

suicideResearchers have found that between 1993 and 2012, the suicide rate for very young black children, between the ages of 5 and 11, nearly doubled. The increase was driven almost entirely by the suicides of young black boys, who took their own lives in numbers that rose steeply over the nearly two-decade study period. Suicides among young black girls remained essentially level, while the rate of suicide among white children of the same age dropped.

According to researchers, the suicide rate among black boys rose from about 1.8 to nearly 3.5 per one million children. That increase was enough to raise the overall rate of suicide deaths of black children aged 5 to 11 from 1.36 to 2.54 per one million. According to the New York Times, researchers were so stunned by the findings they were concerned about a data error, and delayed the release of their statistics by a year while they double-checked the numbers. The figures held up under scrutiny.

Contrast those findings with the suicides of white children aged 5 to 11, which declined significantly in the study period. Between the years 1993 and 2012, the number of suicides of white children in the aforementiond age cohort fell from 1.14 per million to 0.77. More specifically, the suicide rate among white boys fell from 2 to approximately 1.3 suicides per one million children.

Read More Young Black Boys Committing Suicide at Rates Higher Than Ever | Alternet.

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Kansas has found the ultimate way to punish the poor

By Max Ehrenfeund

A dollar bill is a special kind of thing. You can keep it as long as you like. You can pay for things with it. No one will ever charge you a fee. No one will ask any questions about your credit history. And other people won’t try to tell you that they know how to spend that dollar better than you do.

For these reasons, cash is one of the most valuable resources a poor person in the United States can possess. Yet legislators in Kansas, not trusting the poor to use their money wisely, have voted to limit how much cash that welfare beneficiaries can receive, effectively reducing their overall benefits, as well.

The legislature placed a daily cap of $25 on cash withdrawals beginning July 1, which will force beneficiaries to make more frequent trips to the ATM to withdraw money from the debit cards used to pay public assistance benefits.

Since there’s a fee for every withdrawal, the limit means that some families will get substantially less money.

It’s hard to overstate the significance of this action. Many households without enough money to maintain a minimum balance in a conventional checking account will pay their rent and their utility bills in cash. A single mother with two children seeking to withdraw just $200 in cash could incur $30 or more in fees, which is a big chunk of the roughly $400 such a family would receive under the program in Kansas.

“The complexity of functioning in that cash economy as a very poor family is just not a reality that most of us experience day to day,” said Shannon Cotsoradis, the president of Kansas Action for Children in Topeka. “I pay my bills online.”

Since most banking machines are stocked only with $20 bills, the $25 limit is effectively a $20 limit. A family seeking to withdraw even $200 in cash would have to visit an ATM 10 times a month, a real burden for a parent who might not have a car and might not live in a neighborhood where ATMs are easy to find.

Read More Kansas has found the ultimate way to punish the poor – The Washington Post.

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Jailing People Costs Billions More Than You Think It Does

By Carimah Townes

prison_barsThe U.S. Department of Justice estimates that local communities spent $22.2 billion to jail suspects and offenders in 2011. A new report from the Vera Institute, however, shows that this figure underestimates the true cost of jails — potentially by massive amounts. According to the report, DOJ excludes expenses that aren’t covered by jail budgets or otherwise marked for this purpose in the state’s bookkeeping. New York City, for example funneled $2.4 billion into local jails in 2014, but the city’s Department of Corrections only covered $1.1 billion of this cost. The remaining $1.3 billion covered expenses such as “jail employee benefits, health care and education programs for incarcerated people, and administration,” but it was not captured by DOJ’s estimate.

According to Vera, which surveyed 35 jail jurisdictions across the country representing every region and facility size, government agencies allocated money to every single one. For the purposes of the report, incurred jail costs were broken down into six categories: employee benefits, inmate health care, capital costs, administrative costs, legal actions, and inmate programming. Eight jurisdictions reported the government pays at least 20 percent of jail costs, whereas 14 jurisdictions said the government pays less than 10 percent. In 32 jurisdictions, 85 percent of total costs were covered by county general funds.

Out of all 35 jurisdictions mentioned in the report, New York City had the largest jail population by far, with 8,405,837 behind bars in 2014. The government covered 54 percent of costs outside of the jail budget last year, shelling out $1,275,676,550. Government money was funneled into every cost category. For instance, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene covered all medical expenses.

Read More Jailing People Costs Billions More Than You Think It Does | ThinkProgress.

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The SoulBrother’s (Lez’s) Spring Mix

what-do-you-know-about-hip-hop-7Enjoy these tunes as you drive, work out, ride the subway, clean the house, etc. This mix features new music from Rihanna, Monica, Jeremih, my homie Zo The Jerk, A$AP Rocky, Snoop Dogg, and many more. Check out their albums on Spotify, I-Tunes, etc. today!!!

 

 

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Michael Brown Is Getting A Permanent Memorial In Ferguson

By Mariah Stewart

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Dozens of teddy bears that memorialized Michael Brown were removed from a site on Canfield Drive in Ferguson, Missouri, on Wednesday afternoon. The memorial will be replaced by a permanent plaque honoring Brown, who was fatally shot by a police officer in August 2014.

Michael Brown Sr., the slain teen’s father, appeared with Mayor James Knowles in the Ferguson Community Center to unveil the plaque. Brown Sr. acknowledged that the current memorial site has become a safety concern and that he is content with a new, permanent replacement.

The announcement came on what would have been Brown’s 19th birthday, and followed a press conference announcing that Canfield Drive, the street where Brown was shot, would be repaved within the week.

Read More Michael Brown Is Getting A Permanent Memorial In Ferguson.

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Jay Z and Beyoncé bailed out protesters in Baltimore and Ferguson, activist says

beyonce-and-jay-z.pngAn activist and film-maker who has worked with Jay Z claims that the hip-hop star contributed “tens of thousands” of dollars to free protesters who could not pay their bail following anti-police brutality demonstrations in Baltimore and Ferguson, Missouri. The activist, Dream Hampton, later deleted her tweets and called them “error-ridden”, but confirmed to the Guardian that Jay Z helped bail protesters out.

Hampton’s original tweets claimed Jay Z (given name Shawn Carter) and his wife Beyoncé helped supply bail money for protesters, and discussed the difficulties of organizing when protesters are thrown in jail.

They were later deleted, but were screengrabbed by the hip-hop magazine Complex.

“I’m going to tweet this and I don’t care if Jay gets mad,” wrote Hampton, at 8.38am on Sunday. “When we needed money for bail for Baltimore protesters, I asked hit Jay up [sic], as I had for Ferguson, wired tens of thousands in mins.”

Another tweet read: “When [Black Lives Matter] needed infrastructure money for the many chapters that we’re growing like beautiful dandelions, Carters wrote a huge check.”

She continued: “… and more stuff, too much to list actually, that they always insist folk%

Read More Jay Z and Beyoncé bailed out protesters in Baltimore and Ferguson, activist says | Music | The Guardian.

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