Home Health Workers Are an Invisible Force in the ‘Fight for $15’ Movement

Posted on April 16, 2015 by The Soul Brother

By Nigel Roberts

(photo credit: Washington Times)

(photo credit: Washington Times)

Labor forces are planning the largest rally in decades—their latest effort in an uprising against low wages. On April 15 these workers will join their voices to demand a $15-per-hour living wage from rich industries that they say are pinching pennies on salaries.

The Fight for $15 movement burst onto the scene in late 2012 with several hundred fast-food workers. Three years later, the 2-million-member Service Employees International Union is spearheading the movement, according to the Associated Press.

With SEIU’s involvement, the movement has drawn a range of other low-wage workers, including child care providers, retail employees and home health care providers.

“I felt like I didn’t have a voice,” said Kimberly Thomas, a 50-year-old home health worker in Raleigh, N.C. “But then I saw the movement develop and asked, why can’t we do this? Wow, I have a voice now.”

For 15 years, Thomas has provided one-on-one care to elderly patients in their homes, from morning to night, at least 16 hours a day. She’s highly trained to handle health care emergencies, follow through on physicians’ orders and even provide basic physical therapy. Yet she earns just $10 per hour, without overtime and no health care.

“I feel like I don’t have a choice,” she lamented. “I can’t afford not to work. If you want to work in this field, you have to accept this.”

Read More Home Health Workers Are an Invisible Force in the ‘Fight for $15’ Movement – The Root.

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Why We Must Fight for 15 and a Union

Posted on April 16, 2015 by The Soul Brother

By Angel Rivera

My name is Angel Rivera. Like the Fight for 15 workers who are protesting across the country today, I know what it’s like to work hard, but be unable to get by because of poverty wages and an employer that doesn’t respect your rights. But, thanks be to God, I also know that hard work can be rewarded when you win a union and better wages.

I moved from Puerto Rico to Boston for better work and a better future for my children. For the last two years I have been working as a cleaner at Logan International Airport. Two years, two jobs, the same airport, but worlds apart.

Low pay, abuse and disrespect were common currency when I worked as a cabin cleaner for my previous employer. I earned $8 an hour, working nights and as many extra hours as I could in order to support my family.

But this meant that I couldn’t spend time with my four children, and no matter how much I worked, I couldn’t pay all my bills. I needed government help to cover my heating costs, health care, and childcare. It got so bad for a time that my children and girlfriend lived in a homeless shelter while I stayed with friends.

I wasn’t the only one going through this. For me and my co-workers, not being able to pay bills, relying on government assistance, and even being separated from our families were all too common.

Then, when I talked with my coworkers about forming a union in order to change our work conditions, I was fired.

Luckily, I found another job. This time cleaning at Logan with a union company. The union changed my life.

Read More Why We Must Fight for 15 and a Union – Talk Poverty.

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Khalil Muhammad: To Stop Police Killings, Transform the Political Culture That Threatens Black Lives

Posted on April 16, 2015 by The Soul Brother

Protests were held from coast to coast on Tuesday in a day of action against police violence and racial profiling. The protests came as the sheriff’s reserve deputy, who fatally shot Eric Harris in Oklahoma, turned himself in to authorities. Robert Bates said he thought he was using his Taser instead of his gun when he killed Harris earlier this month. Bates is a wealthy insurance executive and heavy donor to the Tulsa Police Department, who gets to volunteer on the force as a reserve. Meanwhile, the South Carolina police officer charged with murder for fatally shooting Walter Scott will probably not face the death penalty if he is convicted. Prosecutors say Michael Slager would still be eligible for a sentence of life in prison. We are joined by Khalil Muhammad, author of “The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America,” and director of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: On Tuesday, protests were held from coast to coast in the United States in a day of action against police violence and racial profiling. The protests came as the sheriff’s reserve deputy who fatally shot Eric Harris in Tulsa, Oklahoma, turned himself in to authorities. Robert Bates said he thought he was using his Taser instead of his gun when he killed Harris earlier this month. Video of the incident was released over the weekend. Major Shannon Clark of the Tulsa County Sheriff’s office said the shooting was a mistake.

MAJ. SHANNON CLARK: Mr. Harris fled. He disobeyed the orders of law enforcement. He attempted to flee from capture. And when he was attempting to be subdued and still in a ground combat with deputies, this Deputy Bates approached, and he attempted to use a less lethal device. Inadvertently, he used his handgun instead.

AMY GOODMAN: Robert Bates has been charged with second-degree manslaughter. He was released on $25,000 bond. If convicted, he faces a maximum of four years in prison, a fine of $1,000. On Tuesday, Andre Harris, questioned the police version of his brother Eric’s death.

Read More Khalil Muhammad: To Stop Police Killings, Transform the Political Culture That Threatens Black Lives | Democracy Now!.

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Walter Scott, Thomas Slager, and the Myth of Police Reform

Posted on April 16, 2015 by The Soul Brother

leadBy Ta-Nehisi Coates

There is a tendency, when examining police shootings, to focus on tactics at the expense of strategy. One interrogates the actions of the officer in the moment trying to discern their mind-state. We ask ourselves, “Were they justified in shooting?” But, in this time of heightened concern around the policing, a more essential question might be, “Were we justified in sending them?” At some point, Americans decided that the best answer to every social ill lay in the power of the criminal-justice system. Vexing social problems—homelessness, drug use, the inability to support one’s children, mental illness—are presently solved by sending in men and women who specialize in inspiring fear and ensuring compliance. Fear and compliance have their place, but it can’t be every place.

When Walter Scott fled from the North Charleston police, he was not merely fleeing Thomas Slager, he was attempting to flee incarceration. He was doing this because we have decided that the criminal-justice system is the best tool for dealing with men who can’t, or won’t, support their children at a level that we deem satisfactory. Peel back the layers of most of the recent police shootings that have captured attention and you will find a broad societal problem that we have looked at, thrown our hands up, and said to the criminal-justice system, “You deal with this.”

Last week I was in Madison, Wisconsin, where I was informed of the killing of Tony Robinson by a police officer. Robinson was high on mushrooms. The police were summoned after he chased a car. The police killed him. A month earlier, I’d been thinking a lot about Anthony Hill, who was mentally ill. One day last month, Hill stripped off his clothes and started jumping off of his balcony. The police were called. They killed him. I can’t see the image of Tamir Rice aimlessly kicking snow outside the Cleveland projects and think of how little we invest in occupying the minds of children. A bored Tamir Rice decided to occupy his time with a airsoft gun. He was killed.

Read More Walter Scott, Thomas Slager, and the Myth of Police Reform — The Atlantic.

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Driving While Black Has Actually Gotten More Dangerous in the Last 15 Years

Posted on April 16, 2015 by The Soul Brother

By Jaeah Lee

Walter Scott’s death in South Carolina, at the hands of now-fired North Charleston police officer Michael Slager, is one of several instances from the past year when a black man was killed after being pulled over while driving. No one knows exactly how often traffic stops turn deadly, but studies in Arizona, Missouri, Texas, Washington have consistently shown that cops stop and search black drivers at a higher rate than white drivers. Last week, a team of researchers in North Carolina found that traffic stops in Charlotte, the state’s largest city, showed a similar racial disparity—and that the gap has been widening over time.

The researchers at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill analyzed more than 1.3 million traffic stops and searches by Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officers for a 12-year period beginning in 2002, when the state began requiring police to collect such statistics. In their analysis of the data, collected and made public by the state’s Department of Justice, the researchers found that black drivers, despite making up less than one-third of the city’s driving population, were twice as likely to be subject to traffic stops and searches as whites. Young black men in Charlotte were three times as likely to get pulled over and searched than the city-wide average. Here’s a chart from the Charlotte Observer’s report detailing the findings:

Read More Driving While Black Has Actually Gotten More Dangerous in the Last 15 Years | Mother Jones.

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Chelsea’s Invisible Hand

Posted on April 15, 2015 by The Soul Brother

By Kenneth P. Vogel

IMG_20150412_141539As her mother prepared to launch her second campaign for the presidency, Chelsea Clinton’s staff was compiling an email chronicling the former first daughter’s growing public profile and influence within the family’s sprawling global philanthropy.

Sent last month to family insiders from an address in her private domain—@chelseaoffice.com—the email, which was the latest in a series of quarterly Chelsea updates, included links to more than a dozen articles and video clips detailing the charitable efforts of “Chelsea and her family” and “Chelsea and her mom.” It never mentioned her parents, Bill and Hillary Clinton, by name. One article compared Chelsea Clinton’s stage presence to her father’s while in a separate video interview she declared that her peripatetic 20s left her “more able to make a difference now.”

Then, on the weekend of Hillary Clinton’s announcement of her presidential campaign, her 35-year-old daughter showed up on the cover of ELLE magazine, in a $1,500 Gucci dress and $7,000 Cartier bracelet. A preview of the interview inside featured Chelsea talking about her husband and seven-month-old daughter (who she called “the most remarkable little bubbly, perfect, chunky monkey creature ever”) as well as the gender imbalance in American politics, which she called “a fundamental challenge” that “having our first woman president—whenever that is—will help resolve.”

Read More Chelsea’s Invisible Hand – Kenneth P. Vogel – POLITICO Magazine.

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Will Jay-Z lead artists into a powerful new digital era?

Posted on April 14, 2015 by The Soul Brother

By Ashahed M. Muhammad

Jay-Z rarely uses social media so when he used his Twitter account to communicate with his 3.1 million followers, people kind of knew something was brewing.

It was seen as a major move when the Hip Hop artist turned mogul stood on stage March 30 with music industry heavyweights to announce the formation of the majority artist-owned global streaming music service Tidal.

“This is the beginning of a whole new era,” said  Alicia Keys, the Grammy Award-winning artist, who is also one of Tidal’s co-owners. Each of  Tidal’s 16 superstar co-owners reportedly received 3 percent of the company as a gift from Jay Z, according to Billboard Magazine.

In mid-March, it was announced that Jay Z through Project Panther Bidco, Ltd. which is controlled by S. Carter Enterprises, LLC, acquired the Norwegian music streaming company Aspiro for a reported $56.2 million. Although his efforts were initially opposed and for a time delayed by some of Aspiro’s shareholders, the huge fanfare announcing the rebranding of the company as Tidal appears to have been very successful and surely in his view, worth the wait. Since news broke, the subject has dominated all music and entertainment news magazines and websites.

According to company representatives, Tidal is “the first high fidelity, lossless music streaming service.” Boasting of 25 million available HiFi tracks and 75,000 HD music videos, the service also promises to provide expert commentary contributed by industry leaders and journalists. It is available across iOS and Android devices, as well as all internet web browsers.

Roc Nation Chief Investment Officer and Tidal Senior Executive Vania Schlogel in her remarks indicated Tidal is a partnership with Sprint, but was light on details. An April 2 statement from Sprint clarified things a bit, but not much.

Read More Will Jay Z lead artists into a powerful new digital era?.

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The Walter Scott outrage nobody is talking about

Posted on April 14, 2015 by The Soul Brother

By Heather Digby Parton

The horrific story of the unarmed Walter Scott’s death at the hands of Officer Michael Slager continues to reverberate. Aside from the incontrovertible evidence on the tape that the accused officer shot him in the back as if he were doing target practice, there has since emerged more tape of the traffic stop itself and audio of the officer speaking with his superiors on the phone raising even more questions about his state of mind at the time of the shooting. But as journalists have gone back and studied the officer’s record and found that he was previously investigated for taser abuse. And on even further investigation it was found that this jurisdiction is known as “Taser town”:

Until the eight shots heard ’round the world, cops in North Charleston, South Carolina, were primarily distinguished by their zesty use of Tasers.

As computed by a local newspaper in 2006, cops there used Tasers 201 times in an 18-month period, averaging once every 40 hours in one six-month stretch and disproportionately upon African Americans.

The Charleston Post & Courier did the tally after the death of a mentally ill man named Kip Black, who was tasered six times on one occasion and nine times on another. Black died immediately after the second jolting, though the coroner set the cause of death as cocaine-fueled “excited delirium syndrome.”

It’s important to note that Taser International has spent large sums convincing local coroners that this syndrome (which primarily seems to kill people in police custody) makes it the victim’s responsibility if they have the bad luck to die from being shot full of electricity with a taser. It’s not just illegal drugs in the system which can allegedly cause it. Adrenaline can as well. So if a person fails to remain calm in face of an arrest and finds the feeling of 50,000 volts going through their system to be stressful they have no one to blame but themselves if they die.

Read More The Walter Scott outrage nobody is talking about – Salon.com.

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Reflecting a racial shift, 78 counties turned majority-minority since 2000

Posted on April 14, 2015 by The Soul Brother

By Jens Manuel Krogstad

black-and-whiteIn the United States as a whole, the white share of the population is declining as Hispanic, Asian and black populations grow. But the shift to a more diverse nation is happening more quickly in some places than in others.

From 2000 to 2013, 78 counties in 19 states, from California to Kansas to North Carolina, flipped from majority white to counties where no single racial or ethnic group is a majority, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of Census Bureau data. (Our analysis includes only counties with a minimum population of 10,000 in 2013.)

Overall, 266 of these 2,440 counties are less than half white. However, many are in urban areas that together account for about one-third (31%) of the nation’s population, despite making up just 11% of U.S. counties with a minimum population of 10,000. These counties are concentrated in California, the South and the East Coast, bypassing much of the country’s middle section.

In 19 of the 25 biggest U.S. counties by population, whites make up less than half of the population. Of these, six that were majority white in 2000 are no longer so: San Diego, Orange, Riverside and Sacramento counties (all in California), plus Clark County, Nev., and Broward County, Fla. In addition, whites could soon become the minority in two more counties – Tarrant in Texas (Fort Worth) and Wayne in Michigan (Detroit), both of which are now 50% white.

Read More Reflecting a racial shift, 78 counties turned majority-minority since 2000 | Pew Research Center.

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The Numbers Are Staggering — The US Is a ‘World Leader’ in Child Poverty

Posted on April 14, 2015 by The Soul Brother

By Paul Buchheit

080604_Americans_hungryAmerica’s wealth grew by 60 percent in the past six years, by over $30 trillion. In approximately the same time, the number of homeless children has also grown by 60 percent.

Financier and CEO Peter Schiff said, “People don’t go hungry in a capitalist economy.” The 16 million kids on food stamps know what it’s like to go hungry. Perhaps, some in Congress would say, those children should be working. “There is no such thing as a free lunch,” insisted Georgia Representative Jack Kingston, even for schoolkids, who should be required to “sweep the floor of the cafeteria” (as theyactually do at a charter school in Texas).

The callousness of U.S. political and business leaders is disturbing, shocking. Hunger is just one of the problems of our children. Teacher Sonya Romero-Smith told about the two little homeless girls she adopted: “Getting rid of bedbugs, that took us a while. Night terrors, that took a little while. Hoarding food..”

Read More The Numbers Are Staggering — The US Is a ‘World Leader’ in Child Poverty | Alternet.

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