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AMTRAK HIRING – PASS IT ON!!!

EXCELLENT OPPORTUNITY THAT DOES NOT REQUIRE A DEGREE!   PASS-ON TO SOMEONE WHO CAN USE THIS! Great jobs for young men who aren’t in college and strong young women also! This is Obama money for “infrastructure” the jobs are located all over, paid training in Atlanta. This is an awesome opportunity, please pass this on. These jobs pay good wages.
Training: You will attend two or three weeks of training at the Railroad Education & Development Institute in Atlanta , GA. CSX will pay for travel, lodging and meals as required by collective bargaining agreement.

Track Worker-030702 Job Summary: Work as a member of a crew to install new railroad track, maintain existing track and right-of-way. Replace or repair track switches with specific components. Slide and align tie plates. Drill holes through rails for insertion of bolts and tighten or loosen bolts at joints that hold ends or rails together. Correct deviations in track surface, alignment and gauge
Cut rails to specific lengths etc.

Pay Rate Entry Rate $19.36/hour Full Rate $21.52/hour Promotional/ Advancement Opportunities:
Under Maintenance of Way Collective Bargaining Agreement, Track Workers may be considered for advancement or promotion to other positions within the Engineering Department if qualified.

Machine Operator $23.25 – $24.81/hour
Welder Helper $21.93/hour
Bridge Tender $21.93/hour
Bridge Mechanic $22.65/hour
Foreman $22.71 – $25.53/hour
Track Inspector $23.98 – $25.14/hour

Qualifications: High School diploma/GED; 18 years of age or older; Valid Driver’s License

At CSX, two of the company’s core values are People Make The Difference and Safety Is A Way of Life. We are committed to offering our team members the most competitive compensation and benefits package available, unlimited opportunities for development and growth throughout an exciting and rewarding career, and the safest work environment possible.
 

CSX is an Equal Opportunity / Affirmative Action Employer that supports diversity in the workplace.

Apply online to this and other positions: http://www.csx.com/?fuseaction=careers.main

From BoldProgressives.org

BREAKING: The New York Times just reported that Comcast will block Netflix unless a new fee is paid to Comcast — so Netflix’s price goes up and people use Comcast’s video service instead.

This outrageous abuse of power by Comcast comes on the very week that President Obama’s FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski will announce whether he’ll fulfill Obama’s promise to protect the open Internet and Net Neutrality — which would prevent this type of corporate abuse.

The FCC needs to hear from us now, before the chairman’s big announcement this week.

Sign our message to the FCC: “Don’t let Comcast block Netflix or other online innovators for their own profit! Support the strongest Net Neutrality protections possible — and keep Obama’s promise.” Click here.

Then, please tell your friends. We’ll deliver thousands of messages to the FCC this week. Sign here.

What else could Comcast do if the FCC doesn’t protect Net Neutrality?

Internet providers like Comcast can drive their financial competitors (or political opponents) out of business by charging them more, for no good reason — exactly what’s happening right now.

For instance, Comcast could block or degrade iTunes, which competes with Comcast’s own online music store.

Worse, the FCC will soon decide whether to allow Comcast to buy NBC! Can you imagine what Comcast will do to block customers from getting video from ABC, CBS, and other media outlets? This is way more serious than just movies — the FCC’s decision impacts pretty much everything.

Tell the FCC to stop Comcast’s abuse of power and protect the open Internet. Click here — then pass it on.

Thanks for being a bold progressive,

Jason Rosenbaum, Adam Green, Stephanie Taylor, Forrest Brown, and the PCCC team

P.S. You can read excerpts from the New York Times story on the petition page.

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Demand That Governor Granholm Declare a State Of Economic Emergency In Michigan To Stop Foreclosures, Evictions & Utility Shut-offs For The Unemployed

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 2, 12 NOON

STATE OF MICHIGAN BUILDING, 3054 W. GRAND BLVD, DETROIT (formerly the GM building in the New Center)

According to a November 22, 2010 Michigan Unemployment Insurance Agency statement, 162,000 people in Michigan have already exhausted their jobless benefits this year from January through November 2010.  181,500 more will exhaust their unemployment benefits from December 2010 through April 2011 if Congress doesn’t approve an extension of federal benefits this week. 

The loss of unemployment benefits has already led to massive foreclosures, evictions and utility shut-offs.  While the state has received $500 million in federal funds for the Helping Hardest Hit Homeowners Program to keep the unemployed in their homes, the major banks have refused to participate, and the state has failed to develop a plan for implementation despite announcing the program last July.  Less than 200 unemployed workers have received the aid they were promised.  With the federal cut-off of unemployment benefits, tens of thousands more unemployed workers will become ineligible for assistance. 

 Join us to demand that Governor Granholm declare a State of Economic Emergency for the Unemployed in Michigan, and use her executive authority under the law to place an immediate moratorium to halt foreclosures, evictions and utility shut-offs for the unemployed, while the government figures out how to insure the survival of hundreds of thousands of Michiganders.

Demand that Congress immediately pass the federal extension of unemployment benefits, and not link this program to provide minimal relief to the unemployed to providing tax breaks for the richest Americans.

MORATORIUM NOW!

COALITION TO STOP  FORECLOSURES, EVICTIONS, & UTILITY SHUT-OFFS

313-887-4344  www.moratorium-mi.org

No to Bobb/Durhal bills, demand debt moratorium

Breaking news: request  from DPS activists to attend Dec. 1 Lansing house committe meeting,

The House Education Committee is scheduled to convene on Wednesday, December 1 at 9 am.  The notice says the purpose is for whatever business may be brought before it, does not specify any bill, which is the normal routine. 

Our concern is that the Bobb/Flanagan takeover bills HB 6576-6579 will be introduced before the committee to be forwarded to the full House for a vote.

Rep. David Nathan is the only Detroit legislator on the House Education Committee. Based on a call from a trustworthy person that Nathan was supporting the bills, Russ talked to him this morning, He said that he does not support the bills in their current form but he will be meeting with Bobb later this morning to see if changes can be made to the bill. 

While this bill offers DPS up to $219 million for debt elimination using tobacco money, it still leaves the $108 million in Bobb’s debt from the last fiscal year. That amount grows daily in this fiscal year. DPS will still be kept in debt bondage to the State of Michigan (which created most of the debt) for years under this bill, with new powers to the state to control our district. This bill does not appear to be a compromise tradeoff to relieve our debt, but using debt as a means to permanently takeover DPS, while giving Bobb and Flanagan more pots of money to spend. 

We must be there to let Lansing know that we are alert to this latest attempt to undermine accountability to the voters, impose state control and that we are determined to fight it. Please respond to aurora917@gmail.com if you can go. Based on the responses, a transportation plan will be developed. Please indicate if you need transportation. Also indicate if you want your name added to a list supporting the call to lobby against this takeover legislation. 

FYI, a critique of the bill sent out earlier, with a short addition, is attached at Bobb-HB6576 arguments.  Please send out as widely as possible.

Helen Moore, Chris White, Debra Taylor, Ernest Johnson, Aurora Harris, Sandra Hines, Russ Bellant

By Diane Bukowski

DETROIT – A proposal by Detroit Public Schools (DPS) Czar Robert Bobb, embodied in four “Renaissance School District” bills sponsored by State Rep. Fred Durhal (D-Detroit), hardly constitutes “debt forgiveness” for DPS and 41 other Michigan districts with budget deficits, as these officials allege.  (See list of districts at end of article.*) 

 The plan would actually funnel $400 million from the state’s tobacco settlement funds, meant to provide for health care and other human needs, into the coffers of multinational banks to partially pay down the districts’ huge debts. Of that, $219 million would go to DPS.

 The Bank of New York Mellon and the Michigan Finance Authority already mandate that DPS set aside 87 percent of its state per-pupil aid, over $512 million, to pay off its ever-ballooning debt during this school year alone. (See chart at end of story, derived from DPS statistics.**)

 Since the tobacco funds would not completely pay off DPS debt, Detroit and other districts that opt for the plan would continue in “Renaissance School” status indefinitely.

The same banks are already bloated by multi-billion dollar bail-outs from federal tax dollars.

 Who will pay the price for this new windfall to the banks?  According to Durhal’s bills, “Renaissance” districts would have to agree to draconian concessions, including loss of local control, unilateral revisions of union contract provisions, and ramping up of massive privatization and regionalization schemes.

 “I just feel like Bobb and Durhal are looking at possibly another 1967 uprising,” said Wayne County Community College student Antonio Williams during a picket outside Durhal’s Detroit office Nov. 22. “The people of Detroit and the state are certainly not going to continue to take these cuts, and we are certainly going to win.”

 Williams was a student at Northern High School in 2007 when he was tortured by DPS and Detroit police during a protest against massive school closings outside his school. As they held him down on the hood of a police car, they aimed pepper spray directly into his face, and later would not let him wash it off. Numerous others at the protest were similarly brutalized.

The Detroit Federation of Teachers called the Nov. 22 picket after a membership meeting vote, teacher Heather Miller said.

 “They clearly want to divide our schools into sections that are wealthy and white, which get to have quality education, and sections that are poor and predominantly Black, which will not have qualified teachers, class size guarantees, and work rules for the teachers which actually are protection for our children.”

Bridgette Williams said she was fired from DPS after 30 years due to her activity in protesting the dismantling of the district.

 “A lot of people are afraid of retaliation and won’t come out now,” Williams said. “DPS is nothing but a cash cow for these corporations to get rich off privatization, and off of moving the district into charter schools. Proposal S is a catalyst for charter schools.  That $500 million bond is being used to renovate what they call ‘priority’ schools and if those schools don’t make AYP [Average Yearly Progress scores under the No Child Left Behind act”), they will become charters.”

 Bobb put Proposal S on the ballot, and it was allegedly passed in November, 2009.

 State Rep. Fred Durhal said that Bobb came to him with proposals for the bills he introduced Nov. 17, H. B. 6576 through 6579. He contended that the districts involved are in imminent danger of bankruptcy, and that his bills present a better alternative. He also urged their passage before Republican Governor-to-be Rick Snider takes office.

Asked however whether the best solution would instead be to declare a moratorium on the districts’ debt to the banks, he did not disagree.

 Such a moratorium was declared by Detroit Mayor Frank Murphy during the Depression years of the 1930’s, in order to take care of the people’s needs, and was later brought to the U.S. Congress by a Detroit Representative.

 “When the debate over direct Federal loans began in 1933 municipalities facing default were also having trouble refinancing their debts,” said Richard Flanagan, writing in Polity in 1999. “Influenced by Mayor Frank Murphy, Congressman Clarence McLeod, a Democrat from Detroit, proposed that cities with populations over 50,000 be allowed to petition the Federal courts to declare a debt moratorium for up to ten years.”

 Unions and other organizations across Europe and Asia are currently engaging in massive national strikes and other militant uprisings targeting the multinational banks which are demanding austerity measures. These protests are causing Wall Street to shake in its boots, with daily stock averages wobbling up and down.

However, Durhal maintained that he is nonetheless moving forward with the bills, which have been referred to the House Education Committee.

 The bills are an embodiment of Bobb’s “Plan A,” published in July as his “preferred” Deficit Elimination Plan (DEP).

 In that DEP, Bobb used Plan B as a hammer to enforce implementation of Plan A. Plan B would involve the closure of more than 100 schools, leaving only 52 schools left in a district that has already lost over 100 neighborhood schools as a wave of charter schools has taken over. Included in the closures would be the districts’ five career and technical education centers. Continue reading →

— Report and photo by Alan Pollock

Hateful bigots from Fred Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan., were met by protests on Nov. 18 when they visited several Michigan cities. The group is rabidly anti-gay/lesbian/bi/trans/queer and infamous wherever they travel throughout the U.S. with their message of hate. They often target the funerals of rank-and-file U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq or Afghanistan, blaming their deaths on LGBTQ people.

In Detroit about 50 counterprotesters gathered near Wayne State University. At a high school in East Lansing, Mich., some 600 overwhelmed the handful of bigots 100 to 1. The counterprotesters divided into two camps. While 450 held a church-sponsored picket several blocks away, a counterinsurgency of 150 strong rushed the WBC front line and overwhelmed the Phelps group with louder voices and strength in numbers.

The bigots were visibly shaken by the militant crowd. A threatened protest by the WBC at a GI’s funeral later that day in Marine City, Mich., did not materialize. 

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Locking Up Children Without Possibility For Release Is Unconstitutional, Says ACLU

ACLU Release Nov. 17, 2010 

DETROIT, MI – The American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Michigan today filed a lawsuit on behalf of nine Michigan citizens who were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for crimes committed when they were minors. The lawsuit charges that a Michigan sentencing scheme that denies the now-adult plaintiffs an opportunity for parole and a fair hearing to demonstrate their growth, maturity and rehabilitation constitutes cruel and unusual punishment and violates their constitutional rights.

“These life without parole sentences ignore the very real differences between children and adults, abandoning the concepts of redemption and second chances,” said Deborah Labelle, attorney for the ACLU of Michigan’s Juvenile Life Without Parole Initiative. “As a society, we believe children do not have the capacity to handle adult responsibilities, so we don’t allow them to use alcohol, join the Army, serve on a jury or vote – yet we sentence them to the harshest punishment we have in this state – to die in adult prisons.”

Michigan law requires that children as young as 14 who are charged with certain felonies be tried as adults and, if convicted, sentenced without judicial discretion to life without parole. Judges and juries are not allowed to take into account the fact that children bear less responsibility for their actions and have a greater capacity for change, growth and rehabilitation than adults.

The U.S. is the only country in the world that sentences youth to life without parole, and Michigan incarcerates the second highest number of people serving life sentences without parole for crimes committed when they were 17 years old or younger. Currently, there are 350 individuals serving such mandatory life sentences in Michigan. This includes more than 100 individuals who were sentenced to life without parole who were present or committed a felony when a homicide was committed by someone else. Continue reading →

 

The American Tribune 

When I served time on a chain-gang ^[1]in the Old South (1963-65), snitching was practically unheard of.  The one snitch that I recall in general pop where I was at was punked out.  He gave handjobs to all comers for candy bars, and blowjobs for smokes. 

Today’s a different story.  Over 90% of convicts have either “accepted responsibility” and pled guilty for a deal, and/or “cooperated” by snitching out others (even when they had nothing; police and prosecutors would provide) for an even better deal.   

Certainly there are rational and responsible reasons for taking a plea—assuming you do so on yourself.  But snitching when you’re a player in the game?  You’re a punk.  

These realities don’t exist in a vacuum.  The prison system is a reflection of the people who create and run them.  From the top-down.      

Most cops, guards, wardens, prosecutors, judges, legislators—all the way up to the president (Obama excepted…maybe), are more or less self-selected shills for the dog-eat-dog, I-got-mine-fuck-you mental-midgets running this economy and its increasingly privatized prison gulag.      

We need to get back to some old-time principles, if in fact they ever existed.  I thought they did.     

An example of this reality is a new movie out, “Fair Game,” starring Sean Penn and Naomi Watts.  I’m not in a position to see it myself, but I urge you to check it out.  Should be worth the story alone.  

Coming out of the headlines, it’s about the real-life role ^[3]of Valerie Plame and her ambassador husband, Joe Wilson.  Turns out they were a real thorn to conservative, institutional bureaucrats; the kind of civil service employees who actually hold some ideals about the jobs and public they serve. 

But I gather that the movie is really about the snitch mentality that pervaded George Bush and his gang of conservative crackpots.  

In a nutshell, the ex-drunk frat-boy had Ambassador Wilson sent to Niger (Who the hell named that country?  Nathan Bedford Forrest ^[5]?) to follow up on some bogus intel that Saddam was trying to obtain nuclear material.  (The Brits had already dismissed the report as fraudulent.)  

 This was all prelude to the Bush-Cheney heist of Iraq’s oil, the war, which they thought would be walkover.  They were using the 9/11 World Trade Ctr massacre as an excuse.  Continue reading →

From Diverse Blog

Cultural Currents

Dr. Pamela D. Reed navigates the often treacherous white waters of America’s ever-changing cultural landscape. Come what may, she keeps it moving-the dialogue, that is.

Mississippi Goddam: Free the Scott Sisters

by Dr. Pamela D. Reed, November 14, 2010

Nina Simone called it in 1964 with her civil rights anthem. Apparently, not much has changed since. Today, Jamie and Gladys Scott sit in a Mississippi prison, sentenced to double consecutive life sentences for a crime they have denied committing.  Neither had a previous criminal record. 

And what was the alleged crime? Robbery. Was it a violent offense? No. How much was taken?  Eleven dollars. When and where did this happen?  In 1993, outside Forest, Miss.  

On what basis were they convicted?  Two of the three teenagers who committed the robbery testified that the sisters were involved in the robbery, claiming that they lured the two men to the scene, where they were robbed, after which the women left with the robbery victims.  The two teens, who the Scotts knew beforehand, copped a plea — implicating the Scotts — and were released after two years in prison.  

The two sisters, 21 and 19 at the time of the incident, have been in the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility for 16 years.  In addition to losing her vision, 38 year-old Jamie has suffered renal failure and receives dialysis three times weekly. All requests to have her moved to a private hospital for life-sparing treatment have allegedly been denied.  Reportedly, the state’s Department of Corrections will not allow for compatibility testing for a kidney transplant, without which Jamie Scott will die.

This case has attracted national attention.  Blogs and Facebook pages have sprung up lobbying for their release. New York Times columnist Bob Herbert has written two columns on the case.  

The NAACP made a formal appeal to Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour for a pardon or commutation. As well, the civil rights organization has launched a petition urging Barbour to act swiftly and judiciously. The petition also points out the sentencing judge’s history of racial impartiality.

“The presiding judge in their trial, Judge Marcus Gordon, has a history of racially biased rulings, including granting bail to the KKK murderer of the three civil rights workers: Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner,” states the petition. Continue reading →