When Wahid Rashad, 65, sees young people in Chicago chugging bottles of sugary drinks and chomping on fluorescent-orange snacks, he thinks: “That’s garbage. It doesn’t enhance the brain and energy level.”
Rashad sells apples, mangoes, papayas and peppers from a produce cart in the city’s Uptown neighborhood. Among the comments he hears from customers since he started selling in the neighborhood, especially from the younger ones: “Hey, Juicy Fruit, where were you? I was looking for you.”
“I look at myself as an educator,” said Rashad, a vendor in the Neighbor Carts program. “It’s like water: Drip, drip, drip. It builds a relationship.”
Throughout the country, grassroots community programs, such as Neighbor Carts, are fueling a block-by-block movement to provide fresh fruit and vegetables in “food deserts,” urban neighborhoods and rural areas where people don’t have ready access to fresh produce.
From Chicago to Georgia to Los Angeles,
One of California’s best-kept secrets is that May is Labor History Month. Signed into law as AB 2269 (Swanson) in 2012 by Governor Jerry Brown, its purpose is to encourage schools to commemorate this month with appropriate educational exercises that make pupils aware of the role the labor movement has played in shaping California and the United States.
That role is the making and defense of the middle class. Unions have been, and remain, by far the most important engine in creating the American Dream, homeownership for the millions, and a better life for each generation. Most of the middle class arrived in that economic neighborhood when working people got together, formed unions, and wrested a fair share of what they produced from their employers. In other words, it was by acting like a working class that most of our families became middle class.
The economic advancement of workers relies on the escalator of collective struggle.
On January 16, 2013, just after 5 a.m., 12 sheriff’s deputies and 10 Portland police officers forcefully evicted the original Portland foreclosure fighters – Debbie and Ron Austin – from their NE Portland home. The eviction was at the demand of the government sponsored and funded mortgage finance vehicle, Fannie Mae.
The family was evicted, but their home is not empty. A force of armed private security guards from McRoberts Security was immediately installed in Debbie Austin’s home. The guards have been on 24-hour duty in the home ever since.
Typical cost for private security indicates that Fannie Mae is spending $480-$600 a day, or $15,000 a month on 24-hour armed guards. Since the Austins’ January eviction, Fannie Mae has spent nearly $50,000 of essentially public money to keep one home empty.
“It was horrifying. I was standing on the sidewalk at 6 a.m. in my pajamas watching the sheriff change the locks and seeing armed security forces enter my home,”
Bestselling novelist Lisa See’s Los Angeles roots go back five generations – the Chinese branch of her biracial family has been involved in 100 years of Chinatown’s history. See, the author of Dreams of Joy and Shanghai Girls, will be the keynote speaker at the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy’s annual Women for a New Los Angeles Luncheon on May 10. She spoke to Frying Pan News about women writers, Walmart and changes in L.A.
Frying Pan News: Your family’s been here longer than most.
Lisa See: We are part of a continuum of women and men who came here and continue to come here. And it’s not only men who come to a place, as pioneers or for a new job. A great-great aunt came here in 1915 from Colorado, opened a millinery shop and caught TB. My great-great grandmother and her husband came West to Waterville,
Barack Obama’s nomination of Penny Pritzker as Commerce Secretary was a poke in the eye of the American labor movement. The niece of the founder of the Hyatt Hotel chain and current member of the company’s board, Pritzker is a key player in what UNITE HERE calls “the worst hotel employer in America.”
Go to the union’s Hyatt Hurts website for info on its global boycott and then click to UNITE HERE’s clever and diplomatic call for Pritzker to leave the board and be replaced by a hotel worker.
But even if this appointment can be turned into a tactical advantage for the union campaign, the Pritzker family brand as notorious union busters has many progressives irritated or worse by Obama’s choice. (Recently workers at two Hyatts in Long Beach California won union representation after a tough three-year battle which included the passage of Proposition N,
Pete Seeger, arguably the person most responsible for the revival and popularity of folk music in the United States, turns 94 on May 3. Seeger’s unparalleled life led him to engage in nearly all of the leading social movements of the 20th century, including the labor sit-ins in the 1930s, the economic justice campaigns of the 1940s, fighting the blacklist and promoting peace in the 1950s, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s and the environmental movement that began in the 1970s. Fortunately, Seeger’s extensive writings are now available in a new book, Pete Seeger: In His Own Words, selected and edited by Rob Rosenthal and Sam Rosenthal. The book offers unusual insight into Seeger’s motivations, and for his relentless optimism in the face of adversity. Seeger has spoken the truth for nearly 100 years, and his writings offer inspiration to all those working for peace, justice and for a better world.
The American public knows it’s downwardly mobile. What it doesn’t know is what it can do to arrest, much less reverse, that trend.The public’s awareness of its plight was evident in the Allstate/National Journal poll released last Thursday. Half of the respondents – 49 percent – said that only the upper class could realistically expect to be able to pay for their children’s college education. Another 46 percent said that only the upper class could realistically anticipate having enough money to cope with a health emergency or job loss, while 45 percent said that only the upper class should expect to be able to save enough to retire comfortably. Fully 59 percent said they were concerned about falling out of their current economic class over the next few years.
Clearly, the expectations of economic security and mobility that were widely shared by Americans in the decades after World War II have vanished,
At a time when there are so few programs that create good career-path jobs, it’s exciting to see one that is doing just that. RePower LA worked with IBEW Local 18 and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power to support the creation of the Utility Pre-Craft Training (UPCT) program. Launched in 2011, this is a program that creates real jobs and has a real impact on the lives of real everyday people.
Recently, I was asked to attend a training session at a labor-management joint-training institute. I was excited to talk one-on-one with the men and women who have been accepted into this unique on-the-job training program that prepares workers for careers in the utility.
There were two things that struck me immediately when I met this group of trainees. First was the incredible diversity of the group: old and young,
On Wednesday, community activists and homeowner groups got some good news from Washington. President Obama announced that he was removing Ed DeMarco, the Bush-appointed acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA). FHFA regulates Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the bailed-out mortgage financiers that together own or guarantee 60 percent of the nation’s mortgages.
For more than a year, activists have waged a “Dump DeMarco” campaign because of his stubborn refusal to help troubled homeowners avoid foreclosure by requiring banks to modify “underwater” mortgages that are higher than the market value of the homes. Under orders from DeMarco, both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have refused to permit banks to write down mortgage principal for underwater homeowners. He called such write-downs a “free lunch” that would discourage homeowners from paying their mortgages.
But Obama’s Treasury Department countered that write-downs would save money by reducing the chances homeowners would default on their loans.
» Read more about: Will Senate Keep Sacked “Random Idiot” at FHFA? »
The horrific collapse of a Bangladeshi garment factory has sparked appropriate global outrage, with advocates, pundits and politicians calling for tougher laws to protect exploited workers in Third World countries. Yet this tragedy, like many before it, seems far removed from the reality of the American workplace.
It isn’t nearly as remote as we might think — a fact eerily underscored by the deadly fertilizer plant fire in Texas that preceded the Bangladeshi catastrophe.
While the surreal quality of the Texas disaster was somewhat unique, the deaths and injuries caused by it were not. Every year thousands of American workers die on the job, and hundreds of thousands are injured.
The reason? Lax worker safety laws, and weak enforcement of those that do exist. Another way of putting it is that we are letting men and women die simply by failing to afford them basic protections.