March 18, 2019

Has the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 400 come out with any demands...

that would protect their members from a repeat of the harassment that was prevalent in the last campaign?

March 16, 2019

Did Trump's Team Collude With Russians? Key Clues From Mueller's Probe

Special Counsel Robert Mueller is expected to deliver his report soon to Attorney General William Barr on Russian influence in the 2016 election, wrapping up an investigation he began in May 2017. He is looking into potential coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia. But Mueller was given broad latitude to pursue other matters that arose from the investigation.

While Mueller’s report may remain secret, at least for a while, his actions have revealed compelling plotlines. The special counsel’s office has obtained indictments or guilty pleas from at least 34 people, 26 of them Russians. Several of the others were accused of lying about their contacts with Russians or about business dealings in Russia.

Mueller has handed off some matters uncovered by his investigators to other sections of the Justice Department. Federal prosecutors in New York, for instance, built a case against former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen that resulted in his guilty plea for tax fraud, false statements to banks and campaign finance violations.

New York prosecutors are also investigating Trump’s company and inaugural committee. Democrats who control the House of Representatives are pursuing their own inquiries into Trump’s world.

Bloomberg

March 15, 2019

Beto has thrown me for a bit of a loop.

The older I’ve gotten the more progressive I’ve become on economic issues. Beto has historically been more of an economic conservative(please note I’m only referencing that in terms of the Democratic Party). The economic side of the equation is extremely important to me and my vote. It’s the reason I couldn’t vote for a Biden or a Sanders in the primary. Biden is historically one of our more fiscally conservative members and in far too many areas Sanders refuses to even acknowledge systemic oppression in his policies, going for a lift all boats approach. Pure foolishness.

So why am I excited about Beto? I’m really looking forward to seeing his campaign move forward. To me it’s about moving economic policy in the right direction. I’m not talking pragmatic v purist. I’m talking about a possible Presidential candidate who is transformative. Someone who will brazenly call on us for our best and do it by leading the way. Someone who will talk about economic injustice with such passion that people from all walks will be awakened. A person without fear of the perception of impossibility leading a party and setting the standard. Someone who will stand on a stage and forcefully echo the Obama/Biden moonshot of curing cancer.

As I said, I’m further to the left in ideology than Beto. But I wasn’t born yesterday. Personality and how one conducts themselves matters. Being an inspirational leader matters greatly. Being an unashamed and bold salesman matters. I do see how things could swing more dramatically in a direction I would like even if the person hasn’t been historically ideologically aligned with me.

I’m excited to see how he campaigns. I can see him getting my vote if he seems to be transformative.

1) He must be damn near flawless on women’s issues. I don’t back down from the fact that I have a major gender bias when it comes to my vote. I’m not big on my primary vote going to a male. People can say what they want about that.

2) I want to see him speak passionately about the environment.

3) I want to hear him highlight all forms of economic disparity in a way that moves hearts and minds.

4) If he is transformative, he can go forward without attacking his competitors. It’s a different thought process to running.

5) His style is perfectly suited to lead the charge to make changes to our justice system. I want to hear it.

There is more but I really want to see him rise to the challenge. If he is who I think he has the potential of becoming he doesn’t even have to get into detailed plans. He needs to prove he can change the landscape by way of personality.

I know he has done some of the things I mentioned above. He is now on a bigger stage.

A final note because of something I said above. I love Biden. I included the part about him as it was directly in-line with building my thoughts about my Beto conundrum. Biden is someone I greatly appreciate.

March 14, 2019

With all of the Kennedy talk, lets take a look at Amy Hoover Sanders.

Amy Hoover Sanders is the wife of the U.S Congressman Beto O’Rourke. Amy was born into an influential family in Texas and grew up in a charged, political atmosphere. Armed with a degree in Psychology, Amy was passionate about teaching from a young age. However, she became a recognized name in the media after she married Beto O’Rourke, whom she met through a blind date. Their unbinding love and support for each other is always highlighted, and Amy is always seen alongside her husband across his campaigns in the country. She is also an accomplished entrepreneur and has set her passion of teaching into a philanthropical journey by co-founding the La Fe Preparatory School. Currently, Amy works as the Director of Education Development for La Fe Community Development Corporation and remains an influential educator in El Paso.

The Famous People

Who is Amy Hoover Sanders, Beto O’Rourke’s Wife? Parents, Family

The name Beto O’Rourke won’t sound strange to anyone who follows events in America’s political circle, most especially as it concerns the 2018 Texas Senate Race. Throughout the campaign trail, wherever you see Beto, you will most likely see Amy Hoover Sanders beside him, but yet not much is known about this woman who has been identified as the politician’s wife.

Well, Amy is no ordinary American woman who was fortunate enough to get married to a popular Congressman. In her own right, as well as being from an influential Texas family, Mrs. O’Rourke commands a lot of influence as she also has a good career going for her. Find out more below.

Amy Hoover Sanders is a Texas woman who was born to Louann and William Sanders, sometime in 1983, in El Paso, Texas where they raised her. There are no records yet of what high school she attended but we have it as a concrete fact that Amy enrolled and graduated from Williams College in Massachusetts with a degree in psychology.

Reports have it that Sanders had always had a passion for teaching and following her college graduation, she decided to pursue her passion as a teacher. She started off in Guatemala by teaching kindergarten pupils for a year at Colegio Americano de Guatemala before returning to El Paso in 2004 where she began teaching first and second-grade pupils.

Heightline

There is a considerable amount of redundant information between the links.

They seem to come as a team. I really like what I see and read about both of them. I have no interest in voting for Beto in the primary. I have my reasons for that and don't want to get negative here. I will say that this might be a duo that can take over the political landscape for the next decade. His energy and image alone might be able to move the political spectrum more than anyone else we are looking at. Only time will tell.

March 11, 2019

JPMorgan Chase Is Done With Private Prisons

“We will no longer bank the private-prison industry” —JPMorgan Chase representative

After years of targeted actions by everyday activists and concerned shareholders, JPMorgan Chase announced early this morning that they will stop financing GEO Group and CoreCivic — the largest operators of private prisons and immigrant detention centers in the U.S. This is a big win for the world of corporate accountability; one that many believe wouldn’t have been possible without hundreds of thousands of people nationally demanding change in the wake of growing concern over family detention. It also calls into question the financial viability of the private prison industry, which has come under fire both by activists and financial analysts.

As explored in “What Do Big Banks Have to Do With Private Prisons,” GEO Group and CoreCivic have a long history of profiting from mass incarceration: they make money when beds are filled, justly or unjustly, which is why they've spent $25M on lobbying over the past three decades to push for harsher criminal justice and immigration laws. Interestingly, while only 10% of prisons and jails nationwide are for-profit, a third of all immigrant detention centers are privately owned… receiving over $1B a year in contracts from ICE (almost $5.5M a day of taxpayer money).

Since news of family separation at the southern border began shedding more light on the abuses inside such private facilities, activists across the country have been paying careful attention to who actually enables private prison companies in their day to day operations. In other words, they’ve been meticulously following the money story behind the story — and found that brand-name banks like Chase, Wells Fargo and Bank of America have provided billions in financing to private prisons over the past decade.

Over the past few years, there’s been a steady drumbeat of actions from civil society addressing this relationship. In May of 2017, Make the Road New York, the Center for Popular Democracy, and allies began their #BackersOfHate campaign with civil disobedience at Chase’s Manhattan headquarters, followed by rallies outside of shareholder meetings in Texas and Delaware to call out the abuses immigrants face in private prisons and detention centers. Then in 2018, united under the hashtag #FamiliesBelongTogether, 80+ organizations — from immigrant rights nonprofits to social investing firms — came together to form a corporate accountability committee targeting big banks through both insider conversations and consumer-facing strategies (in full disclosure, the author’s firm, Candide Group, and its project Real Money Moves, are members of this committee).

Forbes

March 11, 2019

U.S. Women's Soccer Team Sues U.S. Soccer for Gender Discrimination

Twenty-eight members of the world champion United States women’s soccer team significantly escalated their long-running fight with the country’s soccer federation over pay equity and working conditions, filing a gender discrimination lawsuit on Friday.

The suit, in United States District Court in Los Angeles, comes only three months before the team will begin defense of its Women’s World Cup title at this summer’s tournament in France. In their filing and a statement released by the team, the 28 players described “institutionalized gender discrimination” that they say has existed for years.

The discrimination, the athletes said, affects not only their paychecks but also where they play and how often, how they train, the medical treatment and coaching they receive, and even how they travel to matches.

NYT

March 11, 2019

Amy Klobuchar suggests taxing companies making money off user data

Minnesota senator and presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar has floated the idea of taxing tech companies when they exploit user data. Platforms like Facebook “use us, and we’re their commodity, and we’re not getting anything out of it,” Klobuchar said today during a SXSW interview with Recode co-founder Kara Swisher. “When they sell our data to someone else, well, maybe they’re going to have to tell us so we can put some kind of a tax on it.”

Klobuchar acknowledged that she was simply floating an option, not putting forward a detailed policy prescription. And the idea isn’t nearly as mainstream as passing privacy legislation or toughening antitrust policies, two areas Klobuchar also emphasized — saying she wanted to scrutinize whether companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google had suppressed competition. But she said a major problem with the tech landscape was that “we just thought ‘Oh, we can just put our stuff on there and it’s fine,’ and they’re making money off of us.”

The Verge

March 11, 2019

CNN to host Elizabeth Warren at 2020 town hall

Washington (CNN)Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren will answer questions at a town hall moderated by CNN's Jake Tapper in Mississippi next Monday.

The town hall will take place at Jackson State University in Jackson, Mississippi, and air at 9 p.m. ET.

Warren declared over the weekend that she is not a Democratic socialist, differentiating herself from her 2020 opponent, Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders. The senator said she believes "there is an enormous amount to be gained from markets" and that "markets create opportunities."

Warren officially launched her 2020 presidential campaign in February at a rally in Lawrence, Massachusetts — joining a number of her Democratic colleagues in the Senate in the race for the White House. The presidential hopeful issued a call to action against wealthy power brokers who "have been waging class warfare against hardworking people for decades," and kicked off her campaign at Everett Mills, the site of a historic 1912 labor strike led by women and immigrants.

CNN

March 11, 2019

Cory Booker: It's time for the next step in criminal justice reform (WP Opinion piece by Booker)

Edward Douglas woke up on Jan. 10, 2019, in a federal penitentiary in Pekin, Ill., where he had spent every morning of the past 15 years of his life. He was serving a lifetime sentence for selling 140 grams of crack cocaine — an amount about the size of a baseball.

It seemed like any other day until, at 10:30 a.m., a guard came into Douglas’s cell and told him he needed to call his lawyer. A few minutes later, he reached his lawyer, who informed him that, thanks to a new law, he would be a free man in a matter of hours. Douglas started sobbing.

“I don’t know what to say,” Douglas said through tears. “I’ll be glad to see my mom and my kids.”

The new law — the First Step Act — was the most sweeping overhaul of the criminal justice system in a decade, and included a provision making retroactive a 2010 law that reduced the egregious discrepancies between sentences for crack and powder cocaine. These discrepancies imposed such harsh, unbalanced penalties for crack cocaine relative to powder cocaine, that someone caught with an amount of crack the size of a candy bar would get roughly the same sentence as someone caught with a briefcase full of powder.

Washington Post

Well worth the read.

March 7, 2019

Can Bernie Sanders make reparations? His personal reboot on racial justice may not be enough

Bernie Sanders’ presidential reboot features some notable changes from his 2016 run.

This time around, Sanders has elevated a new, more diverse senior campaign staff and has incorporated more of his personal narrative into his policy-driven stump speech. After holding his first official campaign rally of this cycle in front of a diverse crowd of Brooklyn supporters, alongside at least three featured African-American speakers, Sanders traveled Sunday to Selma, Alabama, to take part in commemorations for the anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” the 1965 demonstration on the Edmund Pettus Bridge where civil rights activists were beaten by Alabama state troopers.

He then went to the University of Chicago, where he noted that as a student activist he took part in civil rights protests. But on one particular issue of racial justice, Bernie Sanders’ personalized reboot is still lacking.

Generations of leaders have called for a national conversation on race as necessary for true racial justice and equity in this country. (That didn't start with Barack Obama.) But an unwillingness to discuss reparations -- at least as a general avenue for redress to historic and systemic racism -- is a way to shut down that conversation. Bernie Sanders needs a better answer on reparations for the black descendants of slavery in the United States, and he needs it soon.

Salon