It is illegal to dance in America

Via Avedon at Sideshow:

Unbelievable. I hope those cops get hit with a civil suit the size of West Virginia.

Honduran dictatorship, day 510

Amy Goodman:

When President Zelaya walks off the plane, he kneels down and kisses the ground. After greeting family and friends, many of whom he hadn’t seen for years, his motorcade slowly made its way through massive crowds to the rally to thank his supporters. It was held at the memorial to the young man killed by Honduran security when Zelaya had attempted to land in Honduras a week after the coup. President Zelaya addressed the crowd. Zelaya then went to the presidential palace and had a ceremonial banquet with the delegation that accompanied him on the flight, as well as the current Honduran president, Porfirio Lobo, and OAS Secretary General Insulza. President Zelaya then went home for the first time in 23 months. Friends and family gathered throughout the house, including his bedroom, singing songs and greeting each other.

Xiomara Hortensia (Pichu) Zelaya described the kidnapping here.

And from the interview with Zelaya:

AMY GOODMAN: Why were you brought to the U.S. military base? It is not that far to fly from Tegucigalpa airport to Costa Rica. Why would you be brought to the U.S. military base? And they must have had the U.S. military’s permission.

MANUEL ZELAYA: [translated] The U.S. State Department has always denied, and they continue to deny, any ties with the coup d’état. Nevertheless, all of the proof incriminates the U.S. government. And all of the actions that were taken by the de facto regime, or the golpista regime, which are those who carried out the coup, and it is to make favor of the industrial policies and the military policies and the financial policies of the United States in Honduras.
…
AMY GOODMAN: You say that the coup was a conspiracy. And you talked about the right wing in the United States. Explain exactly what you understand. Who fomented this coup against you?

MANUEL ZELAYA: [translated] The conspiracy began when I started to join what is ALBA, the Latin American nations with Bolivarian Alternative. So, a dirty war at the psychological level was carried out against me. Otto Reich started this. The ex-Under Secretary of State Roger Noriega, Robert Carmona, and the Arcadia Foundation, created by the CIA, they associated themselves with the right wing, with military groups, and they formed a conspiracy.
…
MANUEL ZELAYA: [translated] Hugo Llorens cooperated in order to avoid the coup d’état. He knew everything that was happening in Honduras. And I am a witness to the effort that he made to stop the coup. But when he perceived that he could no longer stop it, then he withdrew. I don’t know if he had orders to withdraw, but he allowed everything to happen. He did help my family a great deal after the coup. And I am grateful to him now. He showed me that he is someone who believes in democracy and not in the coups d’état. But a great part of the Pentagon does not believe this, nor does the Southern Command.

AMY GOODMAN: What does the Southern Command have to do with this?

MANUEL ZELAYA: [translated] The link that Ambassador Ford, who was the ambassador from the United States before Llorens, he said that I could not have a friendship with Hugo Chávez. He wanted me to give political [asylum] to Posada Carriles.
…
MANUEL ZELAYA: [translated]… Ford, left this letter as a profile of the president, and when you read it, you can tell that it is the precursor of the coup itself. WikiLeaks published this document. They published the profile that Ambassador Ford made of me to give to Hugo Llorens, saying that the United States needs to make decisions about what it will do the following year in order to detain me, because I am tied to narcotrafficking and to terrorism and to many, many other things. So, he prepared the ambiance, situation. And he was transferred from the embassy to the Southern Command. And that is the tie. And if you ask today, where is this Ambassador Ford? He is in the Southern Command. And so, he left here in order to prepare the coup d’état.

Adrienne explains in NACLA why she thinks the situation is not tenable, and Dana Frank, writing in The Progressive, agrees. From their descriptions, most of the leftist countries of Latin America are falling into line with recognizing Honduras. Only Rafael Correa points out, correctly, that if no one is punished, then the most basic condition for reconciliation– the admission of wrong–has not been fulfilled, so impunity reigns. Grassroots organizations, while greeting Zelaya enthusiastically, may also not be in line. In an epic series of posts, RAJ and RNS at Honduras Culture and Politics expand on this theme:
1. A translation and analysis of the Cartagena accord. In this post, RNS notes a division in the Resistance between those who want to form a political party (thus fatally splitting the Liberal Party) and those who want to remain a movement independent of political parties. I think this is not as bad as it sounds, since the rump would be Micheletti and his cronies, leaving them unable to use the Liberal Party as a mask for their reactionary activities. RNS seems to think that the Cartagena Accord was negotiated outside of US influence, calling State “decidedly unhelpful in pursuing mediation,” but since the larger objective of glossing over the coup has been accomplished, I doubt State is too worried.
2. An analysis of how the Resistance is reacting by RAJ. The Resistance seems to be indicating that it does not accept the unacceptable human rights situation, is creating some distance of separation between the Resistance and Zelaya, and does not wish to become a political party.
3. A former leader of the neoliberal/reactionary UCD objects to the accords.
4. RAJ reviews the statement by Artists in Resistance that Adrienne translated in part.

[To be continued here]

Wrestlers, Paperkids, Grocery Workers: Why the CTUL Fight is Important

US Representative Keith Ellison (in red CTUL shirt) and Minnesota Representative Jim Davnie join CTUL hunger strikers on the picket line, Sunday, May 29, 2011. Courtesy CTUL.net

When I was growing up in the ’70s, I shared a paper route with my brother. He did the mornings, I helped him in the evenings, and our parents sometimes helped us on the weekends — if nothing else by making sure we got out of bed on time.

The paper we delivered was the St. Paul Pioneer Press in the morning and the St. Paul Dispatch in the afternoon; the two papers were once separate entities, but were both bought by the Ridder company in 1927, and ever since then were essentially the same paper. In 1990, as TV news continued to eat into print media’s market share, the Dispatch was shut down and the PiPress has been a morning-only paper ever after.

The Pioneer Press was and is a “union” newspaper, in that its reporters belong to a union, the Minnesota Newspaper Guild. Most major newspapers have a unionized reporting staff; this has been the case for decades. The people who deliver the paper to your front door, however, are not unionized employees of that paper. In fact, they’re technically not even employees of the paper, but “independent contractors”, which in essence means they get paid a pittance (and in our case the pay depended on going door-to-door each month to collect the subscription fees, which we didn’t mind doing as at least that way we could get tips or even Christmas bonuses, which didn’t happen when subscribers opted for automatic renewal by mail or credit card).

The “independent contractor” concept shows up in other fields, too. Did you know that Vince McMahon’s wrestlers aren’t actually employees of the WWE, but “independent contractors”? That means that Vince doesn’t have to do diddly in terms of providing benefits, sensible work hours, or job security. That means that he can overwork them as much as he wants without letting them have time to rest and recover — and that means that alcohol and drug use and abuse is rampant, as it’s hard to take such a punishing schedule unless you’re sloshed or doped to the gills, and often not even then. (Jesse Ventura’s first brush with politicking was when he attempted to form a union in the 1980s back when he worked for Vince McMahon — oh, pardon me, I meant was “an independent contractor whose paychecks just happened to come from Vince McMahon”.)

This brings me to discussing the persons that clean the stores belonging to local grocery chains such as Cub Foods. While other grocery-store workers, both at Cub and at stores like Rainbow and Byerlys, are unionized employees, the cleaning people are all too often “independent contractors”, which in their case means they work for an agency that farms them out to various stores and pays them a pittance, thus allowing the grocery-store chain to avoid paying them a living wage, much less provide benefits or acceptable working conditions:

All night long, Jose Garcia performs his job while surrounded by food — a painful bit of irony, he says.

The 52-year-old Mexican immigrant works the overnight shift cleaning floors inside a Cub Foods store in Minneapolis, Minn., a job he’s mostly appreciated for the nine years he’s held it down. But lately, waxing aisle after aisle filled with groceries has simply reminded him of how little he has.

Despite his long tenure with the same cleaning company, Garcia says he earns a wage of $9 an hour — more or less the same rate he was making when he started cleaning floors back in 2002. Taking inflation into account, his salary has effectively gone down since he started working on the cleaning crew.

There are times when he can’t afford as much food as he’d like. He says it pains him to see workers at the store throw out unsold perishables like roasted chicken at the end of the night.

These are jobs that once were good union jobs held by unionized employees. Not any more. They’re all contracted out to third-party companies, who sometimes subcontract to other companies, all in the quest to keep wages low even as the workload grows.

The contracting agencies depend on exploiting the labor of people like Mr. Garcia, immigrants who may not be aware of what rights they may have as workers in America — and may find themselves trapped in untenable situations as a result.

This is why Jose Garcia and his fellow cleaning-crew workers are saying: Enough!

At the Lake Street Cub Foods, CTUL (Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en Lucha), began an open-ended hunger strike to change the unfair wages and working conditions of workers who clean Cub Foods and other Twin Cities stores.

For over a year cleaning workers have asked Cub Foods to negotiate a Code of Conduct ensuring fair wages and working conditions for the workers who clean their stores. Ten years ago, many workers who clean Cub Foods made up to $10-$11 an hour. Now, most workers make as little as $7.50 an hour and the workload has doubled. The workers’ requests for dialogue with Cub have been ignored and in one incident peaceful protesters and bystanders were pepper-sprayed by Cub security.

“Every night we work in grocery stores and are surrounded by food, yet often many of us cannot even afford to feed our families. I am hunger striking to bring to light the injustices workers face every day cleaning Cub Foods and to call on Cub Foods to meet with us,” said Mario Colloly Torres, a former cleaner at Cub Foods and who was fired from his job after the protests against Cub began.

One thing that the wrestlers, paperkids, and cleaning crews here have in common is that society has been encouraged to think of them and their concerns as trivial. This is especially true in the case of the cleaning crews, where because so many of the cleaners happen to possess darker skins and non-Midwestern accents, the specter of bigotry plays an unsavory role.

It will be interesting to see who sides with whom in this fight. Members of the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1189 union, which has endorsed the campaign, are appearing at the CTUL protests in solidarity on the picket line with the CTUL hunger strikers. Sadly, some persons one would expect to be sympathetic to CTUL’s cause are in fact very friendly with Cub Foods management, and may well want to keep on the good side of Mike Erlandson, the former DFL party chair who now works for Cub’s parent chain, SuperValu.

Time will tell.

(Crossposted to MyFDL and Renaissance Post.)

In memory…

In memory of all veterans, who go to fight for promises unredeemed and return to a nation unrepentant.

May all humankind come to know: there is no good war.
____________________

I visited the graveyard today. There’s a new plot this year. Not a vet. Just a guy who worked the oil rigs, played a mean guitar for more celebrations than anyone can remember, drank way too much, and lived longer than any of us expected.

And a family vet is headed back into the carnage for his third tour. Lord, watch over him. He has a one-year old who needs him.

Minnesota Republicans Frantically Rewriting Their Long History with Bradlee Dean

Even as the same conservatives who cheered on Neal Boortz for saying that then-congresswoman Cynthia McKinney “looks like a ghetto slut”, “an explosion at a Brillo pad factory”, and “like Tina Turner peeing on an electric fence” have now suddenly and loudly rediscovered their moral compass by having Laura Ingraham, who Ed Schultz called a “right-wing slut”, complain about Schultz on FOX to accused sexual harasser Bill “Falafel” O’Reilly, we find the local conservatives and Republican operatives who have for years gladly and frequently associated with rabid anti-gay bigot preacher Bradlee Dean are now practicing saying “Bradlee Who?” with a straight face.

Thanks to the efforts of Ken Avidor, who has been documenting Bradlee Dean, his good friend Michele Bachmann, and several other local far-right looney tunes for the better part of a decade, I can now treat you to the varying ways in which local right-wing blogger and radio personality Mitch Berg has described Bradlee Dean over the years.

As noted in the screen shot above of a recent Tweet by Mr. Berg, who you may remember from an earlier posting, he’s been one of the many prominent Republicans practicing their “Bradlee Who?” routine lately. Yet Mr. Avidor was kind enough to point me in the direction of Mitch Berg’s postings over the years concerning Bradlee Dean at Berg’s “Shot in the Dark” blog, postings that belie this posture. Follow me over the hump for visual and textual documentation:

Help Vermont Get Single-Payer Health Care

Thanks to a new state law, the fine people of Vermont could soon be enjoying a health care system that is better, cheaper, and faster than is the norm in the United States today — but they’re going to need a bit of help first:

The goal of the Vermont law is to integrate all the pieces of America’s byzantine health insurance system into one system overseen by the state, and to achieve the benefits of single payer. This universal, publicly financed system will be called Green Mountain Care.

While the law puts Vermont on the path to achieving this goal, there are still some major hurdles. By 2013 the state will need to decide on revenue sources to pay for some parts of it. An integral part of addressing the funding issue will be the need for multiple waivers from several federal laws that will allow the state to fold the administration and funding of federal insurance programs into Green Mountain Care.

[…]

While waivers from many of the provisions of the ACA need congressional approval, others are at the discretion of the Department of Health and Human Services.  HHS has been granting waivers freely to corporations like McDonalds that want to offer worse coverage to their employees than the ACA mandates.  They’ve also been granting waivers to states seeking lower medical loss ratios, which basically allows them to offer junk insurance on the exchanges.

[…]

Getting waivers from HHS is going to be an important part of any state plan to implement their own system.  And President Obama has already expressed his support for allowing states to begin receiving waivers from the ACA in 2014 rather than waiting until 2017.   That’s why FDL is joining with PNHP to ask HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to commit to granting Vermont the waivers it needs to make Green Mountain Care the best program it can possibly be for the people of Vermont.

Sign the petition here: Universal Health Care for Vermont If McDonalds can get waivers, why not Vermont?

(Crossposted to Renaissance Post.)

Friday Cat Blogging

Bradlee Dean’s Bigotry’s Running Out of Safe Havens

In light of Thalweg’s post yesterday over at RenPost about the Triumph of the Bigots in Tennessee, I thought I’d present some happier news about how the revenue stream of a local set of very similar bigots just got negatively impacted.

Remember how I told you the other day about how one of anti-gay nutjob and self-styled preacher man Bradlee Dean’s people was so ticked off at Sally Jo Sorensen’s attempting to interview him at his table set up outside the Hutchinson Walmart that he actually tried to call the cops on her?

Well, guess what — he won’t be setting up shop in front of Walmart any more.

Turns out that in order to get permission to have tables in front of Walmarts, Bradlee Dean’s “You Can Run But You Can’t Hide Ministries” tried to hide the truth about its virulently bigoted mission from the Walmart executives in Arkansas — and once the Walmart executives found out the truth, they banned Dean’s outfit from setting up shop in front of any Walmart.

(Crossposted to Renaissance Post.)

In Treatment of Joplin, Eric Cantor Reveals GOP’s Sick Attitude

How sick inside do you have to be to be capable of stiffing disaster victims in your own country just so the rich guys who pay your campaign bills never have to pay meaningful amounts in taxes?

You have to be Eric-Cantor-level sick, that’s how sick. Per examiner.com, via David Dayen of FDL:

As the Washington Times reports, Cantor said any aid would need to be offset by other spending cuts, “If there is support for a supplemental, it would be accompanied by support for having pay-fors to that supplemental.” The term “pay-fors” means either spending cuts or tax increases, and the Republicans have firmly stated that they would not pass any tax increases this year. The Washington Times also points out that six years ago, then-House Majority Leader Tom Delay approved Hurricane Katrina aid without offsetting spending cuts. At the time Delay said it was acceptable to just add the Katrina aid on to the deficit.

That’s right, folks: Eric Cantor makes Tom DeLay look good in comparison. Think about how bad you have to be for that to be possible.

The people of Joplin, Missouri are finding out at first hand.

(Crossposted to Renaissance Post.)

Arrest That Woman! She’s A Journalist!

Courtesy of Bluestem Prairie.

Even as Kurt Zellers and the rest of the Minnesota Republican Party caucus at the Capitol were trying to scrub the record and remove all official evidence that they invited arch-nutjob Bradlee Dean to give the opening convocation on the day an anti-marriage-equality bill — henceforth known as “The Bradlee Dean Bill” — was supposed to be passed, one of Dean’s minions had a folding table set up in front of the Wal-Mart Supercenter in Hutchinson, looking to raise money for Dean’s “You Can Run But You Can’t Hide” ministry.

Bluestem Prairie’s Sally Jo Sorensen tried to interview the kid running the table, but was rebuffed — and you’ve got to watch the video at her site to see what happens next. Suffice to say that he, like Scott Walker, seems to have confused local law enforcement officials with his own palace guard.

(Crossposted to Renaissance Post.)