Reform

Chaos Erupts In Paris As Riot Police Unleash On 50,000-Strong Labor Protest

June 15, 2016 Lauren McCauley, www.commondreams.org Resist! Labor, Paris, Protests, Reform

By Lauren McCauley for Common Dreams - French police unleashed tear gas and water cannons on demonstrators Tuesday as tens of thousands packed the streets of Paris in an outpouring of opposition to the government's anti-labor agenda. The CGT labor union, which helped organized the march, hoped Tuesday's mobilization would be the largest since protests launched over new labor standards, which allow employers to more easily fire workers and create precarious, lower paid positions in place of permanent contracts. "I’ve been to all the demos since March because I want to live in dignity, not just survive," Aurelien Boukelmoune, a 26-year-old technician, told AFP in Paris. "I want the reforms to be withdrawn, pure and simple. Only then will it stop. For the government's sake, they should withdraw the law, otherwise we'll block the economy."

These States Are Stepping Up To Reform Money In Politics In 2016

May 25, 2016 Paul Blumenthal, www.huffingtonpost.com Create! Money in Politics, Reform

By Paul Blumenthal for The Huffington Post - WASHINGTON — The next front in the battle for campaign finance and lobbying reforms will likely be on the ballot in Washington state and South Dakota in November. Activists there have either succeeded or are well on their way to securing ballot positions for omnibus reform initiatives to change the states’ campaign finance, lobbying and ethics laws. The two ballot initiatives mark the continuation of a strategy pursued by national reform groups like Represent.Us

Doctors Call For Single-Payer Health Reform

May 6, 2016 Mark Almberg, www.pnhp.org Create! Health Care, Reform, Single-Payer

By Mark Almberg for PNHP - In a dramatic show of physician support for deeper health reform – and for making a decisive break with the private insurance model of financing medical care – 2,231 physicians called today [Thursday, May 5] for the creation of a publicly financed, single-payer national health program that would cover all Americans for all medically necessary care. Single-payer health reform, often called “Medicare for All,” has been a hotly debated topic in the presidential primaries, thanks in part to it being a prominent plank in the platform of Sen. Bernie Sanders.

What Federal Reserve Would Look Like If Progressives Had Their Way

April 13, 2016 Daniel Marans, www.huffingtonpost.com Create! 2016 Elections, Federal Reserve, Reform

By Daniel Marans for The Huffington Post - The progressive Fed Up coalition released an ambitious Federal Reserve reform plan on Monday designed to increase discussion of Fed policy in the presidential campaign. The reforms, which would require the passage of new legislation, would turn the Federal Reserve into a public entity akin to other federal agencies, with the goal of dramatically increasing the accountability of the world’s most powerful financial body.

Phony School Reform Wilts, A New Education Story Takes Root

February 29, 2016 Jeff Bryant, www.progressive.org Create! Education, Reform

By Jeff Bryant for The Progressive - For years, our public schools have been burdened by a “reform” narrative that education is “failing,” and that only a regime of standardized testing and charter schools will make administrators and teachers more “accountable.” Politicians and pundits across the political spectrum have adopted this doctrine and now easily slip into the rhetoric that supports it without hesitation. But recently, the pillars of the “reform” agenda have begun to crumble. The whole notion of a top-down mandate for reform coming from state capitals and Washington, D.C. is being regarded with a new degree of skepticism.

Last Chance For Justice

February 10, 2016 Phil Angelides, www.huffingtonpost.com Organize! Banking and Finance, Crisis, Reform, Regulation

By Phil Angelides for The Huffington Post - Five years ago at this time, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) presented the President and Congress with its final report on what caused the 2008 financial meltdown that devastated our economy and millions of American families. The report concluded that the financial crisis was avoidable and was caused by widespread failures of regulation, reckless risk taking on Wall Street, and a systematic breakdown in ethics and accountability.

Voting Rights Group Pushes Automatic Registration

July 7, 2015 Samantha Lachman, www.huffingtonpost.com Create! Democracy, Elections, Reform, Voting

By Samantha Lachman by Huffington Post - Automatic voter registration has become a zeitgeisty election reform for Democrats, since Oregon Gov. Kate Brown (D) signed the state's first-in-the-nation measure into law and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clintonadvocated for the method. Now, a voting rights group is making the proposal the centerpiece of its 2016 effort. The group, called iVote, will announce Monday that it will focus its efforts on creating campaigns to enact automatic voter registration laws in multiple states across the country, including swing states crucial to next year's presidential election. The group plans to spend six to seven figures on the campaign.

85% Of Americans Favor Systemic Changes In US Elections

June 3, 2015 Nicholas Confessore and Megan Thee-Brenan, www.nytimes.com Resist! Campaign Finance, Capitalism, Reform

By Nicholas Confessore and Megan Thee-Brenan in New York Times - Americans of both parties fundamentally reject the regime of untrammeled money in elections made possible by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling and other court decisions and now favor a sweeping overhaul of how political campaigns are financed, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll. The findings reveal deep support among Republicans and Democrats alike for new measures to restrict the influence of wealthy givers, including limiting the amount of money that can be spent by “super PACs” and forcing more public disclosure on organizations now permitted to intervene in elections without disclosing the names of their donors. And by a significant margin, they reject the argument that underpins close to four decades of Supreme Court jurisprudence on campaign finance: that political money is a form of speech protected by the First Amendment.

USA Freedom Act Passes: Celebrate, Mourn, & Moving Forward

June 3, 2015 Cindy Cohn and Mark Jaycox, www.eff.org Resist! Internet, Law, Privacy, Reform, Surveillance

By Cindy Cohn and Mark Jaycox from EFF - The Senate passed the USA Freedom Act today by 67-32, marking the first time in over thirty years that both houses of Congress have approved a bill placing real restrictions and oversighton the National Security Agency’s surveillance powers. The weakening amendments to the legislation proposed by NSA defender Senate Majority Mitch McConnell were defeated, and we have every reason to believe that President Obama will sign USA Freedom into law. Technology users everywhere should celebrate, knowing that the NSA will be a little more hampered in its surveillance overreach, and both the NSA and the FISA court will be more transparent and accountable than it was before the USA Freedom Act.

Students At The Barricades

September 1, 2014 Christy Thornton, www.jacobinmag.com Organize! Graduate School, Labor Unions, Reform, Students

Last December, NYU graduate student employees won recognition for our union, GSOC-UAW, from the university administration. With an overwhelming 98.4% of votes cast in favor of the union, NYU became — for the second time — the first private university in the country to recognize the rights of its graduate student employees to collective representation. After more than fifteen years of organizing, NYU’s graduate student workers had won a major victory, and the voluntary recognition of the union by the administration had the potential to set a new kind of precedent for other graduate student organizing campaigns around the country. But recognition was the start of a new round of struggle: one around what kind of a contract we could win, and what kind of union GSOC would be. In July, a group of bargaining committee members — graduate students elected by their peers to represent us in our negotiations with the NYU administration — released a statement highlighting the “concessionary strategy, demobilization of our membership, and opacity of the bargaining process” on the part of UAW staff that they had witnessed over the course of the previous semester. That statement, which charged union leadership with failing to adequately communicate with the membership and with the marginalization of activist members who sought to create an campaign to support the bargaining process, called for a new strategy to win a strong contract: one based on transparency, accountability, and building democratic structures within our unit.

Protestors Launch 135-Foot Blimp Over NSA

June 28, 2014 Andy Greenberg, www.wired.com Resist! NSA, Protest, Reform, Surveillance, Utah

Plenty of nightmare surveillance theories surround the million-square-foot NSA facility opened last year in Bluffdale, Utah. Any locals driving by the gargantuan complex Friday morning saw something that may inspire new ones: A massive blimp hovering over the center, with the letters NSA printed on its side. Activist groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Greenpeace launched the 135-foot thermal airship early Friday morning to protest the agency’s mass surveillance programs and to announce the launch of Stand Against Spying, a website that rates members of Congress on their support or opposition to NSA reform. The full message on the blimp reads “NSA: Illegal Spying Below” along with an arrow pointing downward and the Stand Against Spying URL. “We thought it would be fun to fly an airship around the Utah data center, which in many ways epitomizes the NSA’s collect-it-all strategy,” says Rainey Reitman, an activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “We wanted to have a way to symbolize that our movement is getting quite confrontational with NSA surveillance in a visceral way.”

Education Reform: Lessons From The U.S. On What Not To Do

June 8, 2014 Rachel Brickner, www.rabble.ca Create! Education, Inequality, Privatization, Reform, US

The Minister's Panel on Education has challenged Nova Scotians to "get involved" and help "effect change in the education system." Public schools are among our most important democratic institutions, so the call for public input is a welcome one. If the Minister's panel really wants to effect positive change in Nova Scotia's public schools, it's worth paying serious attention to what is and isn't working in other contexts. Efforts to reform education in the United States provide a number of examples of what not to do. Since the 1980s, policy-makers have looked at U.S. schools, especially those in urban areas, and seen an educational system in crisis. Although this view is contested, a coalition of education "reformers" has spent the past 25 years promoting changes to education policy that emphasize three broad pillars: choice, increased standards and accountability. First, reformers advocate giving parents more choice in where they can send their children to school. School choice policies have led to an expansion of charter schools, which are publicly funded, but privately managed, and voucher programs, which give parents a tax credit toward tuition at a private or religious school. In principle, this competition would improve public education by forcing poorly performing schools to improve or face closure, while rewarding successful schools with more students and funding.

Statement: The Immigration Reform Movement Is A Scam

May 7, 2014 Moratorium On Deportations Campaign, www.whoseimmigrationreform.com Educate! Immigration, Reform

On October 5, Mayor Rahm Emanuel paraded with major NGO’s like Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR) to promote Comprehensive Immigration Reform. On October 12, ICIRR and several other major NGO’s are mobilizing a March for Immigration Reform with Dignity and Respect. Sounds nice, doesn’t it? But these two actions are part of a much broader campaign of manipulation, falsely promising that Immigration Reform legislation will “keep families together”, “legalize 11 Million people” “make our immigration system more just” and “stop deportations”. It is a scam. Living in Chicago has taught us a few hard lessons about “Reform”. We have learned that “Housing Reform” means closing public housing, displacing thousands of poor people in the interests of greedy developers. “Education Reform” means closing the schools in poor, immigrant and Black communities in order to open up the market for privatized schools. “Health Care Reform” means closing mental health clinics serving poor people to make way for gentrification projects, funneling those left without care into the prison system. And “Immigrant Detention Reform” means opening up more detention centers and detaining more people including children, in newly built “family-friendly” prisons. “Reform” is what the domestic war looks like, a war waged against immigrants, the poor, the unemployed, women and others who can be made socially vulnerable and disposable. “Reform” is the nice-sounding way to package racism in a “post-racial” America. Rahm Emanuel is the perfect spokesperson for Reform.

A New Kind Of Corporate Charter For Public Benefit

February 12, 2014 Pooja Bahatia, www.ozy.com Create! Corporatism, Reform

That bedrock principle of corporate law was a turnoff for companies like Etsy, Warby Parker, Seventh Generation and other social enterprises. It all but mandated a trade-off between issuing the public shares often needed to scale, on the one hand, and staying true to mission, on the other. In other words, corporations could be good, or they could grow, but they couldn’t do both. Enter the benefit corporation, whose structure would let corporations have their cake and eat it too. Delaware’s legislation, for instance, protects corporations from suits by profit-mad shareholders. Indeed, shareholders with at least 2 percent of shares can sue the corporation for failing to optimize its social mission. As more companies sign on, the B Corp movement has the potential to subvert an entire century of corporate law.

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