Labor Veteran Dolores Huerta on What’s at Stake in the 2016 Elections [feedly]

Labor Veteran Dolores Huerta on What's at Stake in the 2016 Elections
https://talkingunion.wordpress.com/2016/09/22/labor-veteran-dolores-huerta-on-whats-at-stake-in-the-2016-elections/

Ally Boguhn, Rewire

Since the founding along with Cesar Chaves and others of the United Farm Workers (UFW) union, through her current work in supporting union democracy, civic engagement and empowerment of women and youth in disadvantaged communities, Huerta's influence has been profound. The creation of the UFW changed the nature of labor organizing in the Southwest and contributed significantly to the growth of Latino politics in the U.S. .

Republican nominee Donald Trump launched his campaign for president in June 2015 with a speech notoriously claiming [1] Mexican immigrants to the United States "are bringing drugs, and bringing crime, and their rapists."
Since then, both Trump's campaign [2] and the Republican Party at large have continued to rely upon anti-immigrant [3] and anti-Latino rhetoric to drum up support. Take for example, this year's Republican National Convention in Cleveland, where Sheriff Joe Arpaio—whose department came under fire [4] earlier this year for racially profiling Latinos—was invited to take the stage to push [5] Trump's proposed 2,000-mile border wall. Arpaio told the Arizona Republic that Trump's campaign had worked with the sheriff to finalize his speech.
This June, just a day shy of the anniversary of Trump's entrance into the presidential race, People for the American Way and CASA in Action hosted an event highlighting what they deemed to be the presumptive Republican nominee's "Year of Hate."
Among the advocates speaking at the event was legendary civil rights leader Dolores Huerta, who worked alongside [6] César Chávez in the farm workers' movement. Speaking by phone the next day with Rewire, Huerta—who has endorsed [7] Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton—detailed the importance of Latinos getting involved in the 2016 election, and what she sees as being at stake for the community.
The Trump campaign is "promoting a culture of violence," Huerta told Rewire, adding that it "is not just limited to the rallies," which have sometimes ended in violent incidents [8], "but when he is attacking Mexicans, and gays, and women, and making fun of disabled people."

Huerta didn't just see this kind of rhetoric as harmful to Latinos. When asked about its effect on the country at large, she suggested it affected not only those who already held racist beliefs, but also people living in the communities of color those people may then target. "For those people who are already racist, it sort of reinforces their racism," she said. "I think people have their own frustrations in their lives and they take it out on immigrants, they take it out on women. And I think that it really endangers so many people of color."

The inflammatory rhetoric toward people of color by presidential candidates has led [9] to "an alarming level of fear and anxiety among children of color and inflaming racial and ethnic tensions in the classroom," according to an April report [10] by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The organization's analysis of the impact of the 2016 presidential election on classrooms across the country found "an increase in bullying, harassment and intimidation of students whose races, religions or nationalities have been the verbal targets of candidates on the campaign trail." Though the SPLC did not name Trump in its questions, its survey of about 2,000 K-12 educators elicited up more than 1,000 comments about the Republican nominee, compared to less than 200 comments mentioning other presidential candidates still in the race at that time.
But the 2016 election presents an opportunity for those affected by that violent rhetoric to make their voices heard, said Huerta. "The Latino vote is going to be the decisive vote in terms of who is going to be elected the president of the United States," she continued, later noting that "we've actually seen a resurgence right now of Latinos registering to vote and Latinos becoming citizens."

Read the entire piece on ReWire. https://rewire.news/article/2016/08/16/latino-votes-suppress-dolores-huerta/

See Huerta's Speech to the Democratic National Committee.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

The Working People Weekly List [feedly]

The Working People Weekly List
http://www.aflcio.org/Blog/Other-News/The-Working-People-Weekly-List29

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Tax Reform For Working Families Could Improve West Virginia’s Chronic Poverty Rate [feedly]

Tax Reform For Working Families Could Improve West Virginia's Chronic Poverty Rate
http://www.wvpolicy.org/tax-reform-for-working-families-could-improve-west-virginias-chronic-poverty-rate/

Too many West Virginians struggled to make ends meet in 2015, and the number of West Virginians living in poverty remained unchanged. One solution? A Working Families Tax Credit that would help people who work for low wages keep more of what they earn.

How could a West Virginia Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) help your community by boosting the economy and helping workers stay on the job? Find out here.

This week's Clarksburg Exponent-Telegram further explains how West Virginia can improve its ranking, currently the 7th highest rate of poverty in the nation.

Lawmakers Urged to Raise Revenues

This week the Charleston Gazette urged legislators to raise revenues to help fill next year's projected budget gap. Suggestions included raising the tobacco tax further, and increasing the tax on soft drinks and alcohol, among other ideas.

If not, we could face more cuts like these:

Comment Period Ending Soon – Have You Signed Yet?

Click here to add your voice to the tens of thousands of people from across the country who are calling for a strong payday lending rule from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. While payday lending is illegal in West Virginia, a weak payday lending rule could erode our protections.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

California labor commissioner fines illegal garment businesses [feedly]

California labor commissioner fines illegal garment businesses
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-garment-wage-theft-20160923-snap-story.html

Eighteen garment companies received fines of more than $682,000 for violating labor laws, state regulators announced. The businesses, all based in Los Angeles, were inspected this month by the California labor commissioner's office. 

The inspections revealed that the companies did not have workers'...

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Berenstein: The new rules of the road: a progressive approach to globalization. [feedly]

The new rules of the road: a progressive approach to globalization.

Jared Bernstein

http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/the-new-rules-of-the-road-a-progressive-approach-to-globalization/

For the last few months, Lori Wallach (the director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch) and I have been working on what we think of as new "rules of the road" for global trade. I've highlighted some of these ideas already in these parts, and a recent summary of our agenda just ran in The American Prospect; here's a link to the full white paper.

The intro to the white paper (below) explains our motivation, but it's really very simple. Like everything else, trade and globalization have upsides and downsides. They create winners and losers. They boost the supply chain of goods and services, holding down price growth, but that also shows up as real wage stagnation and job losses for significant groups of workers.

Unfortunately, both the trade debate and trade negotiations have long been co-opted by multinational corporate interests at the expense of workers and consumers both here and abroad. Fortunately, this election season has finally elevated that reality. The days when elites, both here and elsewhere, could ignore those who perceive themselves as hurt (on net) by globalization are hopefully gone, if not for good, than for a number of years.

That leaves a hole. Trump fills it with nostalgia for a period when America was less exposed to global trade, immigrant flows, and non-whites. Such nostalgia may appeal to certain voters, but that America isn't coming back (nor, for the record, would I want it to). What should fill the gap? Read on:

The emergence of trade as a top election issue shows that the economic and social costs imposed by our current trade policy model have reached a tipping point. For purveyors of the status quo, this is a crisis, as the inherent inequities in their approach to trade have finally surfaced. For those of us who have long recognized such inequities, the current moment presents an opportunity to craft a new model, a new set of "rules of the road." Far from trying to set back the clock on globalization, it is only through this new, far more inclusive, non-corporate-centric approach that we can rebuild American support for expanded trade.

This will not occur by continuing to assert that, despite their experiences, those who perceive themselves and their communities as having been hurt by exposure to the forces of globalization are just plain wrong. Or that the next trade agreement will be the one that fixes everything. Or by offering the increasingly large portion of the population who find themselves on the losing side of the current rules some temporary adjustment assistance.

It will only change if we change the content of our trade agreements and, in turn, the process by which we negotiate them. The "new rules of the road" must reflect the economic realities and needs of a much broader group of stakeholders. Crucially, to achieve such rules will require much greater transparency and inclusiveness in the policymaking process, helping to ensure that the resulting substantive rules represent the needs of the majority. This memo focuses on the substantive and procedural changes needed to realize these goals.

Globalization will surely proceed apace. Neither Donald Trump, Brexit voters, nor anyone else can put that toothpaste back in the tube. Nor should they. It is through expanded trade that we seek new markets for U.S. products, expand the supply of goods and services, and provide emerging countries with opportunities to grow by trading with wealthy countries.

But trade and contemporary free trade agreements (FTAs) are far from synonymous. The recent U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) report on the "likely impacts" of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) underscores that these agreements are not mainly about cutting tariffs to expand trade nor about jobs, growth, and incomes here in the United States. Rather, they're about setting expansive rules that determine who wins and who loses.

For years, those advocating for the "winners" that have been able to capture the negotiating process essentially said to those hurt by the resulting agreements: "Don't worry, this will be great for you too. And, hey, if it isn't, we will make it all better with adjustment assistance and some training." The hollowness of these false promises is finally evident to the broad electorate. The rules must be written for all the cars on the road, not just the Lamborghinis.

Our new framework starts from the premise that the current "trade" agreement process has been co-opted by corporate interests whose goal is to establish binding, enforceable global rules that protect their investments and profits. This corporate capture comes at the expense of both peoples' rights to democratically govern their own affairs and the ability of sovereign governments to effectively enforce worker, consumer, and environmental safeguards.

What follows describes a new set of rules of the road, one that puts the economic needs of working families at its core while excising corporate, protectionist influences from the rules. Achieving such inclusive policies will require a new policymaking process to replace the current system of opaque negotiations, a system heavily influenced by hundreds of official corporate trade advisors while the Fast Track process limits Congress' role and the public is largely shut out.

Continue here…

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Links for 08-25-16 [feedly]

----
Links for 08-25-16
// Economist's View

Fed, Eager to Show It's Listening, Welcomes Protesters - NYTimesNitpicking on nominal GDP targeting - John Quiggin Whom Do the Federal Reserve Bank Boards Serve? - FRB Richmond What the Fed Chief's Next Message Should Be - Bloomberg View China's Ever More Mysterious Tourism Numbers - Brad Setser Smoothing economic shocks in the Eurozone - VoxEU Alpha Banks, Beta Banks, and negative rates - Nick Rowe How Much Slack is Left in US Labor Markets? - Tim Taylor The Infrastructure Investment Debate - EconoSpeak Truthful lies - Stumbling and Mumbling Why Corbyn's Brexit campaign matters - mainly macro Balancing bias and variance in behavioral studies - Bank Underground
----

Shared via my feedly newsfeed

Latin America’s Commodity Bust? Not Exactly [feedly]

----
Latin America's Commodity Bust? Not Exactly
// CEPR Feed

David Rosnick
NACLA Report on the Americas, Volume 48, Issue 3, September 19, 2016

Read More ...

----

Shared via my feedly newsfeed