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Why Occupy Wall Street Protesters – And Their Message – Are Key to Bernie's Campaign

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<h2>Why Occupy Wall Street Protesters – And Their Message – Are Key to Bernie's Campaign</h2>
<span>Why Occupy Wall Street Protesters – And Their Message – Are Key to Bernie's Campaign</span>
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<div>This article originally appeared on <span><a href="http://www.guardiannews.com/" rel="nofollow">The Guardian</a></span></div>
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<a href="http://www.occupy.com/sites/default/files/medialibrary/150305120314-bernie-sanders-gallery-story-tablet.jpg?itok=xQkl-rR2" rel="nofollow"><img src="http://www.occupy.com/sites/default/files/styles/slide_narrow/public/medialibrary/150305120314-bernie-sanders-gallery-story-tablet.jpg?itok=xQkl-rR2" /></a>
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<p>On Sept. 17, 2011 a group of protesters occupied Wall Street. Their unpolished campaign sought to draw attention to financial inequality. To healthcare issues. And to the problem of student debt.</p>
<p>If that sounds familiar, it is because four years on, Bernie Sanders’s own campaign has highlighted many of the same grievances. It is no coincidence. In 2015 many of the protesters who cut their teeth in the Occupy encampments are now campaigning for the Democratic candidate.</p>
<p>“There’s 50 million people who are impoverished here in America,” said Stan Williams, an Occupy Wall Street stalwart who is now co-organiser of African Americans for Bernie.</p>
<p>“He talks about the 99%. He talks about the 1%. So a lot of the things he talks about resonate with me.”</p>
<p>Occupy Wall Street sparked a nationwide movement in the US. Thousands of people camped in parks, outside capitol buildings and elsewhere while tens of thousands more took part in marches. A central theme was the perceived feather-handed treatment of banks and bankers who had contributed to the financial crisis, while conditions remained the same or worsened for regular citizens.</p>
<p>In New York, hundreds of people camped out in Zuccotti Park, a block away from Wall Street, and thousands took part in a series of marches throughout the city. Police across the US were frequently criticised for their attempts to control protesters. Videos emerged of peaceful demonstrators being teargassed in Seattle, Oakland, at UC Davis in California and in New York City – where one march saw more than 700 people arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge.</p>
<p>The Occupy movement quickly spread to countries across the globe including the UK, Brazil, Hong Kong and Australia, although the majority of the camps shut down towards the end of 2011.</p>
<p>At the time, Occupy protesters were criticised by some sections of the media for their lack of specific demands. But four years later protesters say the movement’s unorthodox style of campaigning has laid the groundwork for Sanders’s success, while Occupy’s network of activists are proving a major boon to what is a relatively impoverished campaign.</p>
<p>“He doesn’t have a big staff. He can’t afford to have the staff Hillary Clinton has,” Williams said. Williams was living in Alabama in September 2011 and moved to New York to be part of the movement. Williams now uses some of the skills he learned as an occupier to reach out to ethnic minority communities in a bid to spread Sanders’s message.</p>
<p>“The grassroots groups have far surpassed what he and his campaign could ever do. And since people who are involved in Occupy are leading the biggest group for Bernie Sanders, our fingers are all over this.”</p>
<p>Sanders announced his run for the Democratic nomination in May. A relative unknown then, the self-described democratic socialist has seen some of the most enthusiastic support of either Democratic or Republican candidates. More than 15,000 people turned up to a rally in Los Angeles in August, while a Portland event attracted 19,000.</p>
<p>The 73-year-old took the lead over Hillary Clinton in an Iowa poll for the first time in early September and leads the former secretary of state in New Hampshire.</p>
<p>But that success could not have happened were it not for the Occupy movement, said Charles Lenchner. He was involved in “TechOps” – a group of web-savvy occupiers who created websites and managed other technical aspects that helped give the movement its wide reach.</p>
<p>“Sanders’s rise in this election season is inconceivable without Occupy Wall Street having elevated the conversation around inequality and the way that the 1% are ravaging this country. You just can’t imagine one without the other.”</p>
<p>Lenchner co-founded People for Bernie Sanders, a group which supports the Vermont senator but that is unconnected to his campaign.</p>
<p>Another member of that group is Brett Banditelli, who serves as national digital organiser. Banditelli co-founded Occupy Harrisburg, a group that stayed camped outside Pennsylvania’s capitol building for more than a year before retiring in November 2012. He said Sanders’s support was boosted by the network of activist groups Occupy helped to establish across the country.</p>
<p>“There were hundreds of digital assets and small groups before Bernie even made his speech on the Vermont lake,” Banditelli said. “That was because a lot of occupiers and a lot of community activists across the country came out.”</p>
<p>If Sanders’s popularity could not have happened without Occupy, his platform also appears to have given occupiers a sense of purpose. He has also succeeded in drawing a notoriously disaffected group that had turned its back on traditional politics into participating in the political process.</p>
<p>“When we were in Occupy there was a lot of time arguing over should we vote or not. Now, that debate’s over. People realise that there’s a diversity of tactics, and voting is a part of that.”</p>
<p><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/sep/17/occupy-wall-street-protesters-bernie-sanders" rel="nofollow">Originally published by The Guardian</a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.occupy.com/sites/default/files/medialibrary/ap_827314530876.jpg" rel="nofollow"><img alt="Occupy Wall Street, Occupy organizers, Bernie Sanders" src="http://www.occupy.com/sites/default/files/medialibrary/ap_827314530876.jpg" title="Occupy Wall Street, Occupy organizers, Bernie Sanders" /></a></p>
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<p>Sanders’s rise in this election season is inconceivable without Occupy Wall Street having elevated the conversation around inequality.</p>
</div>
</div>
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<p>A new federal lawsuit centers on more than 200 arrests made on the first anniversary of Occupy Wall Street in September of 2012, when the NYPD arrested and harassed protesters for no reason other than that they were protesting.</p>
</div>
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<p>The city's teachers prevailed this week because they made their strike is part of a greater struggle over the future of America’s cities and whether they will become semi-privatized playgrounds for the elites.</p>
</div>
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<p>Margaret Flowers is speaking up loudly, saying it's high time we got activists in the halls of the mighty and powerful – time to move from occupying the streets to occupying Congress.</p>
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<p>The financial transaction tax would limit the large-scale trades that economists say are now occurring far too quickly and creating the volatility that's again on display with the recent market plunge.</p>
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<div><span><em>3 days 14 min</em> ago</span></div>
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<p>Unions are spreading like wildfire through the tech capital's low-wage workforce.</p>
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<p>Legal experts are very concerned that a new law in the state allowing law enforcement drones to be armed with so-called less-than-lethal weapons – including stun guns, beanbag rounds and tasers – could pose great risks.</p>
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<div><span><em>2 days 23 hours</em> ago</span></div>
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<p>This is not merely a crisis of Greece, or a crisis of debt — it's a crisis in the structure of the eurozone itself, where national governments can't implement monetary policy to support their fiscal policies.</p>
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<div><span><em>4 days 34 min</em> ago</span></div>
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<p>An indigenous community called the Ka'apor in northern Brazil is fighting to achieve what the government has long failed to do: halt illegal logging in their corner of the Amazon.</p>
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<p>The financial transaction tax would limit the large-scale trades that economists say are now occurring far too quickly and creating the volatility that's again on display with the recent market plunge.</p>
</div>
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<div>
<div>
<p>Set to deliver record-breaking global temperatures in 2015 and 2016, the world’s climate has reached a major turning point according to a new report from the U.K. Met Office.</p>
</div>
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<p>Known as HB 40, the rule pushed by oil and gas companies declares the state of Texas can preempt any health or safety regulations written by local governments if the industry doesn't deem them “commercially reasonable.”</p>
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<p>It just got a lot harder to pretend the suffering in Ferguson, Michael Brown’s death and the explosive reaction after his shooting weren’t all about race now.</p>
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armageddon news revolution Why Occupy Wall Street Protesters – And Their Message – Are Key to Bernie's Campaign

Read › Why Occupy Wall Street Protesters – And Their Message – Are Key to Bernie's Campaign Why Occupy Wall Street Protesters...

Occupy Lawsuit Accuses N.Y.P.D. Of Repressing Free Speech During Mass Arrests

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<li><a href="http://www.occupy.com/read" name="qtip-read" rel="nofollow" id="qtip-read">Read</a> ›</li>
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<h2>Occupy Lawsuit Accuses N.Y.P.D. Of Repressing Free Speech During Mass Arrests</h2>
<span>Occupy Lawsuit Accuses N.Y.P.D. Of Repressing Free Speech During Mass Arrests</span>
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<div>This article originally appeared on <span><a href="http://gothamist.com/" rel="nofollow">Gothamist</a></span></div>
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<p>Sanders’s rise in this election season is inconceivable without Occupy Wall Street having elevated the conversation around inequality.</p>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<div>
<p>A new federal lawsuit centers on more than 200 arrests made on the first anniversary of Occupy Wall Street in September of 2012, when the NYPD arrested and harassed protesters for no reason other than that they were protesting.</p>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<div>
<p>The city's teachers prevailed this week because they made their strike is part of a greater struggle over the future of America’s cities and whether they will become semi-privatized playgrounds for the elites.</p>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<div>
<p>Margaret Flowers is speaking up loudly, saying it's high time we got activists in the halls of the mighty and powerful – time to move from occupying the streets to occupying Congress.</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<div>
<div>
<div>
<p>The financial transaction tax would limit the large-scale trades that economists say are now occurring far too quickly and creating the volatility that's again on display with the recent market plunge.</p>
</div>
<div><span><em>3 days 14 min</em> ago</span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div>
<p>Unions are spreading like wildfire through the tech capital's low-wage workforce.</p>
</div>
<div><span><em>4 days 19 min</em> ago</span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div>
<p>Legal experts are very concerned that a new law in the state allowing law enforcement drones to be armed with so-called less-than-lethal weapons – including stun guns, beanbag rounds and tasers – could pose great risks.</p>
</div>
<div><span><em>2 days 23 hours</em> ago</span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div>
<p>This is not merely a crisis of Greece, or a crisis of debt — it's a crisis in the structure of the eurozone itself, where national governments can't implement monetary policy to support their fiscal policies.</p>
</div>
<div><span><em>4 days 33 min</em> ago</span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div>
<p>An indigenous community called the Ka'apor in northern Brazil is fighting to achieve what the government has long failed to do: halt illegal logging in their corner of the Amazon.</p>
</div>
<div><span><em>4 days 22 min</em> ago</span></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<div>
<div>
<p>It just got a lot harder to pretend the suffering in Ferguson, Michael Brown’s death and the explosive reaction after his shooting weren’t all about race now.</p>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<div>
<p>The financial transaction tax would limit the large-scale trades that economists say are now occurring far too quickly and creating the volatility that's again on display with the recent market plunge.</p>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<div>
<p>Set to deliver record-breaking global temperatures in 2015 and 2016, the world’s climate has reached a major turning point according to a new report from the U.K. Met Office.</p>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<div>
<p>Known as HB 40, the rule pushed by oil and gas companies declares the state of Texas can preempt any health or safety regulations written by local governments if the industry doesn't deem them “commercially reasonable.”</p>
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armageddon news revolution Occupy Lawsuit Accuses N.Y.P.D. Of Repressing Free Speech During Mass Arrests

Read › Occupy Lawsuit Accuses N.Y.P.D. Of Repressing Free Speech During Mass Arrests Occupy Lawsuit Accuses N.Y.P.D. Of Repressin...

The New Battle In Seattle: How, Why and What the Teachers Won

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<h2>The New Battle In Seattle: How, Why and What the Teachers Won</h2>
<span>The New Battle In Seattle: How, Why and What the Teachers Won</span>
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<div>This article originally appeared on <span>Al Jazeera America</span></div>
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<a href="http://www.occupy.com/sites/default/files/field/image/seattle_teacher_strike_wide_crowd_0.jpg?itok=gBk5m79l" rel="nofollow"><img src="http://www.occupy.com/sites/default/files/styles/slide_narrow/public/field/image/seattle_teacher_strike_wide_crowd_0.jpg?itok=gBk5m79l" /></a>
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<p>By most accounts, the weeklong strike by 5,000 teachers, librarians and other public-school employees in Seattle that ended Sept. 17 was about wages. The Seattle School Board said the union was asking for $172 million in increased funding, nearly three times what it could afford. The employees’ union, the Seattle Education Association, wanted a significant wage increase to recruit and retain quality educators; members have gone six years without a cost-of-living adjustment. A new teacher earning $44,372 annually in Seattle would spend nearly two-thirds of his or her take-home pay on the median rent of $1,858 in the city.</p>
<p>The union settled for smaller wage increases — about 10 percent over three years — than it initially sought, but it claimed victory because the school board agreed to nearly every other demand. The Seattle teachers prevailed because they made the strike about much more than wages. It is part of a greater struggle over the future of America’s cities: whether they become semiprivatized playgrounds for elite professionals or can thrive on different communities, classes and ideas democratically co-existing.</p>
<p>The battle over who controls Seattle is intimately linked to who controls public education. In 2012, what Valerie Strauss in The Washington Post called a “who’s who of billionaires” — including members of the Walton family (heirs to the Walmart fortune) and Seattle titans Bill Gates of Microsoft, Jeff Bezos of Amazon and venture capitalist and liberal darling Nick Hanauer — funded a measure to open 40 taxpayer-funded charter schools in Washington. Days before the teachers went on strike, the state Supreme Court ruled the charter schools violated the state constitution by funneling public money to a privately run enterprise.</p>
<p>The court slapped the legislature with a $100,000-a-day fine because in 2012 it found that lawmakers were shirking their constitutional duty to close a chronic funding gap between wealthy and poor school districts. (Some suggested that the Walton and Gates families, with a combined net worth of $235 billion, could fund the charter schools with their pocket change.)</p>
<p>This assault on public education in Seattle and nationwide is the context for the strike. In May teachers throughout Washington state staged one-day walkouts to protest the legislature’s dithering over school funding. The Seattle teachers’ union knew it needed public support to launch a strike against powerful political and economic elites, so it linked workplace issues — workloads, fair evaluations and pay — to community issues such as funding and stronger student education and well-being. It is a strategy known as social justice unionism and takes a page from the playbook of successful teacher organizing in Chicago and Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon.</p>
<p>Demands include fewer standardized tests and new social equity teams to address biases, such as suspension rates for black children in Seattle schools four times as high as for white kids. Teachers also want at least 30 minutes for recess, since schools in poorer areas have reduced playtime to as little as 15 minutes. And they’re asking for more counselors and psychologists to reduce caseloads as high as 400 students per employee.</p>
<p>The Seattle School Board eventually agreed to all these demands, after rejecting them before the strike, but it isn’t the one calling the shots. Power rests with money — Bill Gates, the Waltons and billionaire Eli Broad, who have spent billions of dollars trying to demolish public education and teachers’ unions nationwide. They have done this through foundations and the charter school movement and have received help from many politicians, pundits and the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization of conservative legislators and private-sector representatives that pushes legislation at the state and local level.</p>
<p>This privatization scheme adheres to basic capitalist logic. The plutocrats have shaped the winner-take-all economy in Seattle, where a few grab most of the income and remaining residents scramble for trickle-down benefits, even as the flood of money swamps them with rising living costs. Seattle is one of the wealthiest metropolitan areas in the world with 88,000 millionaires among 3.6 million people. Elected officials leave no corporation behind, whether it’s giving $8.7 billion in tax incentives to Boeing or allowing Amazon to transform Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood into a hip amenity-rich enclave for thousands of its “brogrammers.”</p>
<p>For everyone else in Seattle, life gets harder and harder. Even Mayor Ed Murray described it as “economic apartheid.” Since 2010, rents have shot up 70 percent, leaving half of renters rent stressed and threatening to erase the move toward a $15-an-hour minimum wage in the city. With no state income tax, Washington has the most regressive tax structure in the nation, with the poorest 20 percent shelling out seven times as much of their income, by percentage, in state and local taxes as the top 1 percent. In 2010, Microsoft and Amazon helped defeat a state income tax on the 1 percent, the same group that gobbled up 59 percent of income growth from 1979 to 2007.</p>
<p>Seattle has a serious racism problem. Its police are under a Justice Department consent decree for unconstitutional use of force as well as “serious concerns” about discriminatory policing. In 2012 voters in King County, which encompasses Seattle, approved $210 million for a 144-bed prison for its juvenile system, in which black youths account for 42 percent of incarcerated minors — five times African-Americans’ percentage of the city’s population. The city is 70 percent white and getting whiter, thanks to the tech boom. But its public school enrollment is majority minority, with 35 percent of white children going to private schools. The reliance on irregular funding mechanisms like bonds and levies has left Seattle with inadequate mass transit, which poorer and browner households increasingly depend on as they get pushed out to the margins.</p>
<p>Schools pay the highest price for this state of affairs. Since 1975 Washington’s Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly that state “funding is not ample, it is not stable, and it is not dependable,” as constitutionally required. In 2006 it was found that student transportation was underfunded by at least $93 million a year. The reliance on special levies, unsurprisingly, has little effect on wealthier school districts while starving poorer ones of minimum funding. There are an estimated 2,100 homeless children in Seattle’s school system, and the real number may be significantly higher.</p>
<p>It took the courts 40 years to get to this point, and the billionaires are plotting their next moves, possibly including a special legislative session to rescue the charter schools. Except now there is an invigorated teachers’ union and an angry public standing in their way, showing there are alternatives to cities turning into theme parks for the rich.</p>
<p><a href="http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/9/the-new-battle-in-seattle.html" rel="nofollow">Originally published by Al Jazeera America</a></p>
</div>
</div>
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<div>
<div>
<div>
<div>
<div>
<div>
<p>Sanders’s rise in this election season is inconceivable without Occupy Wall Street having elevated the conversation around inequality.</p>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<div>
<p>A new federal lawsuit centers on more than 200 arrests made on the first anniversary of Occupy Wall Street in September of 2012, when the NYPD arrested and harassed protesters for no reason other than that they were protesting.</p>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<div>
<p>The city's teachers prevailed this week because they made their strike is part of a greater struggle over the future of America’s cities and whether they will become semi-privatized playgrounds for the elites.</p>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<div>
<p>Margaret Flowers is speaking up loudly, saying it's high time we got activists in the halls of the mighty and powerful – time to move from occupying the streets to occupying Congress.</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<div>
<div>
<div>
<p>The financial transaction tax would limit the large-scale trades that economists say are now occurring far too quickly and creating the volatility that's again on display with the recent market plunge.</p>
</div>
<div><span><em>3 days 18 min</em> ago</span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div>
<p>Unions are spreading like wildfire through the tech capital's low-wage workforce.</p>
</div>
<div><span><em>4 days 23 min</em> ago</span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div>
<p>Legal experts are very concerned that a new law in the state allowing law enforcement drones to be armed with so-called less-than-lethal weapons – including stun guns, beanbag rounds and tasers – could pose great risks.</p>
</div>
<div><span><em>2 days 23 hours</em> ago</span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div>
<p>This is not merely a crisis of Greece, or a crisis of debt — it's a crisis in the structure of the eurozone itself, where national governments can't implement monetary policy to support their fiscal policies.</p>
</div>
<div><span><em>4 days 37 min</em> ago</span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div>
<p>An indigenous community called the Ka'apor in northern Brazil is fighting to achieve what the government has long failed to do: halt illegal logging in their corner of the Amazon.</p>
</div>
<div><span><em>4 days 26 min</em> ago</span></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<div>
<div>
<p>This is not merely a crisis of Greece, or a crisis of debt — it's a crisis in the structure of the eurozone itself, where national governments can't implement monetary policy to support their fiscal policies.</p>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<div>
<p>It just got a lot harder to pretend the suffering in Ferguson, Michael Brown’s death and the explosive reaction after his shooting weren’t all about race now.</p>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<div>
<p>Legal experts are very concerned that a new law in the state allowing law enforcement drones to be armed with so-called less-than-lethal weapons – including stun guns, beanbag rounds and tasers – could pose great risks.</p>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<div>
<p>Set to deliver record-breaking global temperatures in 2015 and 2016, the world’s climate has reached a major turning point according to a new report from the U.K. Met Office.</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div>
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armageddon news revolution The New Battle In Seattle: How, Why and What the Teachers Won

Read › The New Battle In Seattle: How, Why and What the Teachers Won The New Battle In Seattle: How, Why and What the Teachers Wo...

How Do We 'Change Everything' Without Pitting Workers Against the Planet?

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<h2>How Do We 'Change Everything' Without Pitting Workers Against the Planet?</h2>
<span>How Do We 'Change Everything' Without Pitting Workers Against the Planet?</span>
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<div>This article originally appeared on <span><a href="http://labornotes.org" rel="nofollow">Labor Notes</a></span></div>
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<a href="http://www.occupy.com/sites/default/files/field/image/hireslagreenjobsnowimg_2213.jpg?itok=W-3HXG0U" rel="nofollow"><img src="http://www.occupy.com/sites/default/files/styles/slide_narrow/public/field/image/hireslagreenjobsnowimg_2213.jpg?itok=W-3HXG0U" /></a>
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<p>As fights erupted in the Pacific Northwest this summer over fuel export terminals and Arctic drilling, the idea of a just transition has been on my mind.</p>
<p>The late Tony Mazzocchi of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers (now part of the Steelworkers) coined the term. A “just transition” away from fossil fuels wouldn’t pit workers against the planet. Those displaced should be able to count on decent new green jobs and retraining.</p>
<p>“There’s a Superfund for dirt,” Mazzocchi <a href="http://www.labornotes.org/2007/12/book-review-tony-mazzocchi-man-who-never-sold-out" rel="nofollow">used to say</a>. “There ought to be one for workers.”</p>
<p><strong>Shell No?</strong></p>
<p>As Shell Oil’s drilling rig and ice cutter churned toward the Arctic, activists in Seattle and Portland, paddling kayaks and dangling from cables, tried to block them. Some unions backed the protests, but not the usually progressive Longshore Workers (ILWU).</p>
<p>Servicing Shell’s fleet will provide “an awful lot of family-wage jobs,” said Justin Hirsch, an ILWU Local 19 executive board member—at a time when condo developers are eyeing the waterfront and longshore jobs are squeezed by shipping industry consolidation.</p>
<p>Don’t get him wrong. Hirsch also says “climate change is a massive issue, and it’s going to have to be dealt with by labor.”</p>
<p>But he’s worried the shift to a green economy offers employers an opportunity to destroy the pay, benefits, and workplace control it took generations of struggle to achieve. Will green jobs be lower-waged and nonunion?</p>
<p><strong>Right Side of History</strong></p>
<p>“You’re either at the table or you’re on the menu,” says Steve Garey, recently retired from the Tesoro oil refinery in Anacortes, Washington, and the presidency of Steelworkers Local 12-591. He wants a voice for fossil fuel workers—separate from their employers—in the changes to come.</p>
<p>“Like any other conversation, it’s going to start with ‘What’s in it for me?’ and ‘What’s harmful for me?’” Garey says. “And at some point I think you have to get beyond the ‘me’ part, beyond the end of your own nose, and consider what’s the greatest good for the greatest number of working people.”</p>
<p><a href="http://commonsenseeconomics.net/" rel="nofollow">He points out</a> even biofuels will need refining. A few years ago Tesoro looked into making jet fuel from a flax-like plant, camelina.</p>
<p>Though it never panned out, “our members in Anacortes got quite excited,” Garey said. “It generated quite a bit of discussion. I think they really liked the idea of being on the right side of history.”</p>
<p>Such conversations are the order of the day—both inside unions, and between labor and other movements, as in a series of conferences bringing together rail workers and environmentalists. (<a href="http://www.railroadconference.org/" rel="nofollow">The next one is in Chicago</a>, September 19.)</p>
<p>“You can’t fix climate change by yourself,” Garey says. “It’s not like the work we traditionally do in our unions where we protect someone’s job or get them a raise. It forces you to work with other progressive-minded people.”</p>
<p><strong>Prisons and HMOs</strong></p>
<p>Mazzocchi applied the “just transition” principle to other social changes, too.</p>
<p>A single-payer health care advocate, he acknowledged that <a href="http://www.laborstandard.org/Election/Mazzocchi_Speech_at_Green_Convention.htm" rel="nofollow">shutting down private insurance</a> would mean lost jobs—the flip side of the cost savings that makes universal care viable. He backed a salary and paid college tuition for those displaced.</p>
<p>The same principle could apply to mass incarceration, an issue the AFL-CIO has begun highlighting. In member trainings it points out that the U.S. is <a href="http://commonsenseeconomics.net/" rel="nofollow">the world’s biggest jailer</a>, and that there’s a stark racial divide in who gets locked up.</p>
<p>Labor wouldn’t have to fear prison closings that included a just transition for corrections workers, who often live in hard-hit areas where union jobs are desperately needed.</p>
<p>As Mazzocchi once put it, the transformation to a better society “cannot be rhetorical. It’s got to be practical,” he said. “It’s got to be tangible and understandable and coherent, and we’ve got to hammer out that program together.”</p>
<p><a href="http://labornotes.org/blogs/2015/09/how-do-we-change-everything-without-pitting-workers-against-planet" rel="nofollow">Originally published by Labor Notes</a></p>
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<p>Sanders’s rise in this election season is inconceivable without Occupy Wall Street having elevated the conversation around inequality.</p>
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<p>A new federal lawsuit centers on more than 200 arrests made on the first anniversary of Occupy Wall Street in September of 2012, when the NYPD arrested and harassed protesters for no reason other than that they were protesting.</p>
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<p>The city's teachers prevailed this week because they made their strike is part of a greater struggle over the future of America’s cities and whether they will become semi-privatized playgrounds for the elites.</p>
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<p>Margaret Flowers is speaking up loudly, saying it's high time we got activists in the halls of the mighty and powerful – time to move from occupying the streets to occupying Congress.</p>
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<p>The financial transaction tax would limit the large-scale trades that economists say are now occurring far too quickly and creating the volatility that's again on display with the recent market plunge.</p>
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<div><span><em>3 days 32 min</em> ago</span></div>
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<p>Unions are spreading like wildfire through the tech capital's low-wage workforce.</p>
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<div><span><em>4 days 37 min</em> ago</span></div>
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<p>Legal experts are very concerned that a new law in the state allowing law enforcement drones to be armed with so-called less-than-lethal weapons – including stun guns, beanbag rounds and tasers – could pose great risks.</p>
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<div><span><em>2 days 23 hours</em> ago</span></div>
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<p>This is not merely a crisis of Greece, or a crisis of debt — it's a crisis in the structure of the eurozone itself, where national governments can't implement monetary policy to support their fiscal policies.</p>
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<div><span><em>4 days 51 min</em> ago</span></div>
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<p>An indigenous community called the Ka'apor in northern Brazil is fighting to achieve what the government has long failed to do: halt illegal logging in their corner of the Amazon.</p>
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<div><span><em>4 days 40 min</em> ago</span></div>
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<p>This week, Margaret Flowers thinks it's about fucking time we got some more activists into the halls of the mighty – from occupying the streets to occupying Congress.</p>
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<p>It just got a lot harder to pretend the suffering in Ferguson, Michael Brown’s death and the explosive reaction after his shooting weren’t all about race now.</p>
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<p>Creative policies and innovative financing are helping cities overcome barriers to climate action – with huge returns on low-carbon investments already evident from Johannesburg to Copenhagen to Singapore.</p>
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<p>Legal experts are very concerned that a new law in the state allowing law enforcement drones to be armed with so-called less-than-lethal weapons – including stun guns, beanbag rounds and tasers – could pose great risks.</p>
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armageddon news revolution How Do We 'Change Everything' Without Pitting Workers Against the Planet?

Read › How Do We 'Change Everything' Without Pitting Workers Against the Planet? How Do We 'Change Everything' Wi...

Act out! Podcast 29 - Occupy the Senate, TPP free zones & our plastic lives

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<li><a href="http://www.occupy.com/listen" name="qtip-listen" rel="nofollow" id="qtip-listen">Listen</a> ›</li>
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<h2>Act out! Podcast 29 - Occupy the Senate, TPP free zones & our plastic lives</h2>
<span>Act out! Podcast 29 - Occupy the Senate, TPP free zones & our plastic lives</span>
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<div>This article originally appeared on <span>Occupy.com</span></div>
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<p>Sanders’s rise in this election season is inconceivable without Occupy Wall Street having elevated the conversation around inequality.</p>
</div>
</div>
<div>
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<p>A new federal lawsuit centers on more than 200 arrests made on the first anniversary of Occupy Wall Street in September of 2012, when the NYPD arrested and harassed protesters for no reason other than that they were protesting.</p>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<div>
<p>The city's teachers prevailed this week because they made their strike is part of a greater struggle over the future of America’s cities and whether they will become semi-privatized playgrounds for the elites.</p>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<div>
<p>Margaret Flowers is speaking up loudly, saying it's high time we got activists in the halls of the mighty and powerful – time to move from occupying the streets to occupying Congress.</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<div>
<div>
<div>
<p>The financial transaction tax would limit the large-scale trades that economists say are now occurring far too quickly and creating the volatility that's again on display with the recent market plunge.</p>
</div>
<div><span><em>3 days 18 min</em> ago</span></div>
</div>
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<div>
<p>Unions are spreading like wildfire through the tech capital's low-wage workforce.</p>
</div>
<div><span><em>4 days 23 min</em> ago</span></div>
</div>
<div>
<div>
<p>Legal experts are very concerned that a new law in the state allowing law enforcement drones to be armed with so-called less-than-lethal weapons – including stun guns, beanbag rounds and tasers – could pose great risks.</p>
</div>
<div><span><em>2 days 23 hours</em> ago</span></div>
</div>
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<p>This is not merely a crisis of Greece, or a crisis of debt — it's a crisis in the structure of the eurozone itself, where national governments can't implement monetary policy to support their fiscal policies.</p>
</div>
<div><span><em>4 days 37 min</em> ago</span></div>
</div>
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<p>An indigenous community called the Ka'apor in northern Brazil is fighting to achieve what the government has long failed to do: halt illegal logging in their corner of the Amazon.</p>
</div>
<div><span><em>4 days 27 min</em> ago</span></div>
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<p>Creative policies and innovative financing are helping cities overcome barriers to climate action – with huge returns on low-carbon investments already evident from Johannesburg to Copenhagen to Singapore.</p>
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<p>Set to deliver record-breaking global temperatures in 2015 and 2016, the world’s climate has reached a major turning point according to a new report from the U.K. Met Office.</p>
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<p>Defense contractors have historically played an outsized role shaping the national security debate through think tank funding – as was the case in the large donations Lockheed Martin gave Heritage, which lobbied intensely for its F-22 fighter jets.</p>
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<p>Uncertainty still remains over whether the governor will ultimately approve the bill.</p>
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armageddon news revolution Act out! Podcast 29 - Occupy the Senate, TPP free zones & our plastic lives

Listen › Act out! Podcast 29 - Occupy the Senate, TPP free zones & our plastic lives Act out! Podcast 29 - Occupy the Senate,...

Muslims Send Message To Evangelical Christians: ‘We Will Kill Anyone Who Leaves Islam And Becomes An Evangelical Christi...

<img alt="Mandatory Credit: Photo by REX USA (2642870a) Hayat Boumeddiene, far right Hayat Boumeddiene 'appears in Islamic State film' - 06 Feb 2015 The latest video released by French-speaking Islamic state (ISIS), fighters may be Hayat Boumeddiene, who is believed to have knowledge about the deadly January 9, 2015 attack on a Paris kosher grocery,The video, titled "Blow Up France 2," was released Tuesday and shows an ISIS fighter praising previous attackers in France and calling for new attacks. The video shows a woman standing next to the speaker, wearing camouflage clothing and holding a weapon. French authorities are investigating the possibility this woman could be Hayat Boumeddiene. Her husband, Amedy Coulibaly, killed four hostages January 9 at a kosher grocery in Paris, authorities said. He was killed by police in a rescue and the remaining hostages fled to safety." class="attachment-large wp-post-image" height="683" src="http://shoebat.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/2642870a-1024x683.jpg" width="1024" />
<p style="float: right; margin: 0 0 10px 15px; width:240px; height: auto;"><img src="http://shoebat.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/2642870a.jpg" style="max-width: 100%; height: auto;" width="240" /></p>
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<p><strong>By Theodore Shoebat</strong></p>
<p>ISIS is sending death threats to Evangelical Christians in Turkey, saying that if they leave Islam and become Evangelical Christians they will be killed. According to <a href="https://www.mnnonline.org/news/isis-death-threats-reach-turkish-christians/" target="_blank">one report:</a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>Turkey (MNN) — As if believers in Turkey didn’t have enough to deal with, evangelical leaders are now receiving death threats from ISIS.</p>
<p>“These threats are against Islamic converts to Christianity,” Rody Rodeheaver of International Needs explains.</p>
<p>“ISIS wants to make an example of them, and are threatening to do just that.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p><a href="https://ffmu.webconnex.com/rescuechristians" target="_blank"><strong>THERE ARE SO MANY CHRISTIAN SUFFERING IN PAKISTAN. HELP US RESCUE CHRISTIANS FROM ISLAMIC PERSECUTION. CLICK HERE TO MAKE A DONATION THAT WILL SAVE CHRISTIAN LIVES FROM MUSLIM TERRORISTS</strong></a></p>
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anonymous armageddon isis islam war Muslims Send Message To Evangelical Christians: ‘We Will Kill Anyone Who Leaves Islam And Becomes An Evangelical Christi...

By Theodore Shoebat ISIS is sending death threats to Evangelical Christians in Turkey, saying that if they leave Islam and become Evange...