JimDandy
JimDandy's JournalTHANK YOU to ALL the Baltimore Protesters!
And those Protesters around the Country who protested in Solidarity with Baltimore.
You brought attention to the injustice of Freddie Gray's Death, the injustice of police actions in your community, and in the larger sense, the Injustice of Police Actions in thousands of cities across the U.S.A.
Communities mired in Injustice need to Protest EVERY TIME a citizen is killed by the Police; injured by the police, or falsely arrested by the Police.
SIX Cops Being Charged in Freddie Gray's Death!
2nd Degree Depraved Murder
Involuntary Manslaughter
False Imprisonment
Assault
Negligence
Failure to Render Aid
$15,000 Per Course is Fair
Justin Miller April 16, 2015
On campuses across the country, adjunct professors are starting to organize against rock-bottom pay and tenuous job security.
As yesterday’s Fight for $15 protests wound to a close across the country, it’s become clear that this movement is not a fleeting effort—it’s here to stay. The focal point has primarily been on the most visible low-wage workers...However, another employment sector that’s not typically associated with low wages was prominent yesterday as well: the American professoriate.
Higher education institutions in the United States employ more than a million adjunct professors. This new faculty majority, about 70 percent of the faculty workforce, is doing the heavy lifting of academic instruction. These are positions with tenuous job security (often semester-by-semester), sparse instructional resources, limited academic freedom, and meager wages—the average working adjunct makes around $3,000 per three-credit course. An astounding 20 percent of part-time adjunct faculty rely on government assistance, according to a recent report from NBC News.
...While fast food workers called for $15 an hour, adjuncts rallied for a base pay of $15,000 per course—an aspirational standard initiated by SEIU’s new Faculty Forward campaign.
https://prospect.org/article/faculty-join-fast-food-fight-15
The Fight For 15--- $15 Per Hour AND $15,000 Per Course
Federal Contract Workers On Strike
Thursday, 23 April 2015 00:00 By Miya Pontes, Campaign for America's Future
More than 600 federal workers went on strike yesterday, including about three dozen Senate employees, in a protest over low pay by federal contractors.
The strike won support from members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), who joined the US Senate contract workers who were protesting low pay.
...(Sen. Bernie )Sanders spoke on behalf of a new populism that recognizes the harm in the growing wealth gap and is ready to fight it. "The taxpayers of this country want to make sure that when government contracts are made those employers who get those contracts pay their workers a living wage. That they allow workers to form a union, that they provide good benefits to their workers. A great nation will not survive when so few have so much and so many have so little. What we need to do is rebuild the American middle class," Sanders said.
The Progressive Caucus has worked hard to convince President Obama to sign two executive orders to improve working conditions for federal contract workers. The "Good Jobs Executive Order" prevents employers who commit wage theft from receiving government contracts. A previous executive order signed by Obama raised the minimum wage to $10.10 for federal contract workers.
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/30400-government-contract-workers-strike-for-better-pay
$15 PER HOUR...MINIMUM LIVING WAGE...NOW!!!
Voluntary self-policing is never the start
of a fair system...it is the end product of an unjust system.
Voluntary self-policing is the last stand of a corrupt process that, when it has come under intense public criticism, tries to retain power and control in the hopes that, after the public eye has lost focus on it, it can go back to business as usual.
I suggest a 'while the iron is hot tactic": more intense public scrutiny/protests and dissent to force such a conservative legislature to confront and adjust the inequalities in their system.
More bills like Senate Bill 5 should be proposed...they are getting a hearing in MO's republican controlled legislature.
Those are voluntary agreements only and cover only one MO county.
Jackson County, MO is even more egregious and isn't part of this voluntary agreement nor are any of the other 113 Missouri counties.
Missouri residents, especially minority residents, are in need of a uniform state law that limits traffic and court fine revenue streams to a reasonable percentage of each municipality's budget (Currently at 30%. Will be reduced to 10%, if MO Senate Bill 5 becomes law.)
The best defense is not 'to obey laws' it's to generate uniform, fair and just laws, enforce them fairly and protest/dissent when that does not happen.
The next step is to reverse the trend of generating warrants for unpaid traffic and court fines. These fines, like any debt, can be best and fairly handled outside the arrest/debtors prison tract: via collection companies with fair fees that are regulated by law.
No one's life should become as awful as those who have become trapped by this cycle of fines, warrants and escalating fees, simply due to poverty or being born a minority in an unfair and often racially targeted system.
If MO Senate Bill 5 becomes law, then traffic fines
will be limited to 10% of a city's revenue. That bill was proposed this year partly in response to Mayor Gwaltney's (Edmonson, MO) letter and to the scandal of Ferguson's gross reliance on court fines to fund city government.
Currently, Missouri cities are limited by state law to raising 30% of their revenue from traffic fines (hence Ferguson's additional focus on court fines, which are not limited by that law), but the state hasn't been keeping careful watch, so some cities were exceeding that 30%.
Arrest Warrants (and the fines associated with them) for no-shows on traffic fine cases don't count as part of the traffic fine revenue limits, so these cities have had a huge incentive to issue warrants which generate an unstifled revenue stream from municipal court fines.
Bill 5 was heard in early March, but I don't know if it got through. What is needed in addition to that bill is a law limiting city revenue from warrants and other municipal court fines.
What a horrible hoax
perpetrated on the US taxpayers.
I say US and not just NY, because according to gothamist, some of these luxury apartment buildings double and triple dip by also simultaneously getting federal subsidies (two or three subsidies in total) for the same building, without having to set aside twice or three times the number of affordable units. This happens because the building developers/owners are allowed to count and credit the same apartment multiple times as an "affordable" unit under each subsidy!
And it gets worse:
"In fact, developers getting subsidies from another program besides 421-a can double the maximum income level for the below-market apartments, so a $2,500 apartment can still qualify as 'affordable'. (Mayor de Blasio's affordable-housing program plan, announced last year, would require about one third of publicly aided apartments to be below market rate, but most would be designated for families making about $60,000-$130,000.)"
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Member since: Mon Jan 16, 2006, 08:55 PM
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