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Economic Justice

Except For Rich, Americans’ Incomes Fell Last Year

April 6, 2015 AFP, www.news.yahoo.com ,
Most Americans' incomes continued to fall last year, but the richest 20 percent saw theirs rise, a new Labor Department report showed Thursday. In fresh data that adds fire to a growing debate over income inequality, the department said that Americans on average saw income decline for the second straight year in the 12 months to June 2014. The average pre-tax income fell 0.9 percent from the same period a year earlier, to $64,432. But broken down into quintiles, those in the top 20 percent of incomes saw their money stream grow by 0.9 percent to $166,048 on average. Every other group lost ground, with the bottom 20 percent losing the most: their average income dropped 3.5 percent to $9,818.

Selma: Experienced As A Child, Remembered As An Adult

March 6, 2015 Sophia Bracy Harris, www.equalvoiceforfamilies.org , , ,
It was New Year’s Day, January 1, 1966. My older sister, several of my younger siblings, a cousin and I had attended the annual Elmore County Emancipation Proclamation Celebration (the observance of Abraham Lincoln’s signing the proclamation freeing Blacks from slavery). The guest speaker for this occasion was a Birmingham civil rights preacher, Rev. Jesse Douglas, whose powerful message and melodious voice singing, “I told Jesus that it would be all right, if he changed my name,” had the audience on its feet for most of his sermon. Little did I know that he was preparing us for the most traumatic experience of our lives, which would take place in less than four hours. We went home, excitedly sharing with our parents the experience of the evening with this wonderful civil rights preacher.

Why A Mass Movement Is ‘Payment’ For Progress

March 6, 2015 Rev. Rodney Williams, www.equalvoiceforfamilies.org , , ,
The wages of the laborers who run your stores, who feed your customers who make you rich so that you can send your sons and daughters to private schools. The ones whose wages you have stolen, are crying out and their cries have been heard. They have reached the ears of our lord, our God. Although you live in the lap of luxury, God is about to flip the script. I’m here this evening as a result of a moral issue which is concerning the income gap between the rich corporate executives and the everyday laborers that make them rich. Today, everything is like it was in the days of James. Much of the wealth of this nation is still the result of exploitation and unfair compensation of the workers, especially in the fast-food industry.

An Exciting Democracy Movement Arises In Chicago

February 21, 2015 Jim Hightower, www.alternet.org , ,
Chicago! City of broad shoulders. Plutocratic hog butcher. Toolmaker for progressive change. Stacker of the wheat of grassroots power, wheat separated from the chaff of corporate politicians. Stormy, husky, brawling. Planning, building, breaking, rebuilding. Under its wrist is the pulse, and under its ribs is the heart of the people. Laughing! Proud to be hog butcher, toolmaker, stacker of wheat. Apologies to Carl Sandburg for my butchering of his 1914 poetic paean to the rise of this colossus of a working-class city -- but I see a promising new movement of broad-shouldered populist change for all of America arising today from the heart of Chicago's workaday people. Under the banner of "Reclaim Chicago," a dynamic, politically savvy progressive coalition has emerged, engaging thousands of grassroots Chicagoans in a people-led democratic movement to reclaim their city from the cabal of corporate elites and corrupt politicians now reigning over them.

Workers Finding New Ways To Advocate In The Workplace

February 17, 2015 Sarita Gupta, www.prospect.org , , ,
At the heart of this struggle is the reality that we’re no longer working in traditional, family-sustaining careers. As the way we work continues to change in this country, isn’t it time that the rules and standards governing our workplaces do too? If we’re going to rewrite those rules, we need to give everyone a seat at the table. When the powerful few get to decide which wages, benefits, and workplace standards the rest of us deserve, the economic picture goes wildly off-kilter. But what if we all had a stronger voice at work? What if we all had the ability to share our ideas, negotiate on behalf of the collective good, and stand up for issues that really matter? Isn’t that voice a critical piece of helping us restore the good, family-supporting jobs that seem to keep disappearing?

Walmart: Stop Racist Threats Of Violence Against Workers

February 4, 2015 Kristin Oliver, www.iam.colorofchange.org , , ,
Markeith Washington was working on the overnight remodeling crew at the Richmond, CA Walmart Store which was supervised by Art Van Riper. Van Riper was notorious among associates for screaming insults, calling the crew "a bunch of lazy ass workers." During one night of work in September of 2012 while Markeith was tying a rope around his own waist to aid in moving a heavy counter, Van Riper said to him, "if it was up to me, I'd put that rope around your neck." Shocked at this hateful comment, Markeith simply responded, "That's not right." Markeith and his fellow remodel crew associates were understandably outraged by Van Riper's threat. They bravely joined together to demand discipline for Van Riper and respect on the job by taking actions including talking to management, sending a letter to Walmart and even participating in a work stoppage strike.

Becoming And Being An Activist

January 21, 2015 Sam Smith, www.samsmitharchives.wordpress.com , , ,
I knew a civil rights leader named Julius Hobson. He used to say that he could start a revolution with six men and telephone booth. He seldom had more than ten at one of his demonstrations. Once in a church with about 30 parishioners, he commented, “If I had that many people behind me, I’d be president.” But between 1960 and 1964, Julius Hobson ran more than 80 picket lines on approximately 120 retail stores in downtown DC, resulting in employment for some 5,000 blacks. He initiated a campaign that resulted in the first hiring of black bus drivers by DC Transit. Hobson forced the hiring of the first black auto salesmen and dairy employees and started a campaign to combat job discrimination by the public utilities.

State Of The Dream 2015: Underbanked & Overcharged

January 21, 2015 United For A Fair Economy, www.faireconomy.org , , ,
State of the Dream 2015: Underbanked and Overcharged is United for a Fair Economy's twelfth annual look at race, wealth, and inequality. This report finds that over one in five households (mostly Black, Latino, or Native American) are underserved by the banking industry, costing these households an average of $3,029 per year in fees and interest just to access their own money. This "wage theft" takes a total of $103 billion per year out of the communities that need it most. This report makes several recommendations that could expand access to accessible, affordable banking services, including expanding the role of the US Postal Service. By expanding postal banking services in 31,000 locations across the nation, we can increase access to important wealth-building tools in those communities that are currently underserved.

Black Wealth Matters

January 12, 2015 Chuck Collins, www.otherwords.org , ,
The racial wealth gap has persisted for decades. It widened following the Great Recession. According to the Pew Research Center, the median wealth of white households in 2013 was a stunning 13 times greater than the median wealth of black households — up from eight times greater in 2010. White households had 10 times more wealth than Latino households. While people of all races saw their net worth implode during the recession, recovery has come much more quickly to whites. The wealth divide is growing at an alarming rate today, with median wealth tumbling downward for people of color while ticking slightly upward for whites.

The Police Were Created To Control Poor & Working Class People

January 2, 2015 Sam Mitrani, www.counterpunch.org , , ,
Before the nineteenth century, there were no police forces that we would recognize as such anywhere in the world. In the Northern United States, there was a system of elected constables and sheriffs, much more responsible to the population in a very direct way than the police are today. In the South, the closest thing to a police force was the slave patrols. Then, as Northern cities grew and filled with mostly immigrant wage workers who were physically and socially separated from the ruling class, the wealthy elite who ran the various municipal governments hired hundreds and then thousands of armed men to impose order on the new working class neighborhoods.

Everything’s Coming Together While Everything Falls Apart

December 24, 2014 Rebecca Solnit, www.tomdispatch.com , ,
Americans are skilled at that combination of complacency and despair that assumes things cannot change and that we, the people, do not have the power to change them. Yet you have to be abysmally ignorant of history, as well as of current events, not to see that our country and our world have always been changing, are in the midst of great and terrible changes, and are occasionally changed through the power of the popular will and idealistic movements. As it happens, the planet’s changing climate now demands that we summon up the energy to leave behind the Age of Fossil Fuel (and maybe with it some portion of the Age of Capitalism as well).

Building Community Wealth In Jacksonville

December 24, 2014 It's Our Economy, www.itsoureconomy.us , ,
Like many American cities, Jacksonville—the largest city in Florida—faces some serious problems regarding unemployment, disinvestment, and concentrated generational poverty— and, like most cities, has only a limited set of resources available to tackle these problems. Are there strategies and models that can help Jacksonville build community wealth more effectively in the neighborhoods, like Northwest Jacksonville, that need this help most? Connecting civic and community leaders with national best practices, The Democracy Collaborative brought key partners from the five Community Wealth Building Initiatives we’ve helped spearhead—in Cleveland; Amarillo, Texas; Pittsburgh; Atlanta; and Washington, D.C.—to the Roundtable to share the lessons learned in those cities.

Beyond Ferguson And Staten Island, So Much Cause For Outrage

December 22, 2014 J.J. Goldberg, www.forward.com , , ,
Start with this: Poverty kills, too. And like police shootings, it targets the weakest. But unlike police shootings, the number of deaths from poverty isn’t a mystery. There’s considerable research on it, from places like Columbia University, the University of Chicago, the Social Security Administration and the Centers for Disease Control. The most straightforward figure comes from a 2011 Columbia University study: 291,000 a year. You read that right. Two hundred ninety-one thousand. To borrow a phrase from the Ferguson protests, where’s the outrage? By way of comparison, heart disease, America’s top killer, causes some 600,000 deaths yearly, one in four total deaths, according to the CDC. Next comes cancer at 575,000. Respiratory disease is third at 143,000, followed by stroke and accidental injury.

Why We Need To Fix St. Louis County

December 20, 2014 Radley Balko, www.washingtonpost.com , , ,
Occupancy permits are just one of the myriad ways in which these municipalities can sap funds from poor people. Basically, if you live in St. Louis County, you’re required to get one for your residents. It doesn’t matter if you rent or own. The police can then periodically make compliance checks (although generally they conduct these checks after they’ve been called to a residence for another reason, like a noise complaint or domestic dispute). If there are more people in your place than your permit allows, they can fine you and each person in your home. Attorneys I spoke to say the regulation can end up being a way to enforce antiquated local laws against unmarried cohabitation, and judging by comments you sometimes hear in courtrooms or from local officials, a way for police and prosecutors to essentially fine people for having premarital sex.

Rev. Edward Pinkney Imprisoned For Fighting The Whirlpool Corp

December 17, 2014 Victoria Collier and Ben-Zion Ptashnik, www.truth-out.org , , ,
On December 15, Rev. Edward Pinkney, a leader in the struggle for social and economic justice for the residents of Benton Harbor, Michigan, was sentenced to serve up to 10 years in prison, on the basis of thin circumstantial evidence that a few dates had been altered on a recall petition against the city's mayor, James Hightower. The recall was prompted by the mayor's continued support for tax evasion by the Whirlpool Corporation, the Fortune 500 company and $19 billion global appliance manufacturer, headquartered in Benton Harbor. As we wrote last week in depth, the politically motivated prosecution against Pinkney killed the petition to recall Hightower, who many believe would have been ousted due to his ongoing protection of Whirlpool's interests at the expense of impoverished Benton Harbor, which is over 90 percent African-American.
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