From Occupy Wall Street :
According to the Organization United for Respect at Walmart, 1,000 protests occurred at Walmart stores across 46 states, with hundreds of workers walking off the job in an unprecedented decentralized, open-source strike at the retail giant.
David Tovar, the Vice President for Communications, spoke with Carol Costello from CNN on Tuesday, November 20, before the Black Friday actions took place across the nation.
Members of Stop Stop & Frisk, #OWS, and students at Columbia present NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly with the 2011 Bull Connor Award, for excellence in cracking down on people of color. At Columbia University's SIPA, Matthew Swaye thanks the world's top cop for the privileges his administration affords heterosexual white men.
Bull Connor was the Commissioner of Public Safety for the city of Birmingham, Alabama, during the American Civil Rights Movement. He took covert actions to enforce racial segregation and deny civil rights to African American citizens
Nobel Peace Prize winners Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Northern Irish activist Mairead Maguire, and Argentine artists Adolfo Pérez Esquivel have authored a statement to be published in an upcoming issue of The Nation that condemns the United States’ persecution of the 24-year-old Army private and implores the rest of America to question the country’s secretive torture of a soldier that the prize winners say defended democracy.
“As people who have worked for decades against the increased militarization of societies and for international cooperation to end war, we are deeply dismayed by the treatment of Pfc Bradley Manning,” the laureates write.
Left unaddressed by the Nobel laureates was why supposedly progressive, LGBT politicians, such as Christine Quinn, are questionably silent about the persecution of PFC Manning.
Read more : Nobel laureates slam the US over Bradley Manning case
A Russian court rejected a $10 million lawsuit against Madonna on Thursday by a group of anti-gay activists who accused her hurting their feelings by promoting homosexuality at a St. Petersburg concert. Judge Vitaly Barkovsky did not explain his decision but also ruled the activists should compensate legal expenses to companies which organized Madonna's concert. The activists said they will appeal the court ruling. Homosexuality, punished with jail terms in the Soviet Union, was decriminalized in Russia in 1993, but much of the gay community remains underground as prejudice runs deep. (Reuters)
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On the busy day before Thanksgiving, activists demonstrated for union rights at Golden Farm grocery store in Brooklyn.
The owner of a YouTube channel called Matt H. posted this video yesterday of a direct action demonstration in support of employees, who want to unionise at the Golden Farm grocery store in Brooklyn.
On November 21, I stopped by a picket being held outside the Golden Farm grocery store on Church Ave and 4th St. The group was picketing in support of workers rights and union benefits. Their demands were : fair pay and compensation for when they made below minimum wage ; holidays off ; and personal days off. The majority of the time was spent with a picket outside the store. About 12 Minutes were spent inside the store doing what was called a "line clog." It was hilarious...
Among the activists, who took part in this demonstration, were members of OccuEvolve.
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What measurable, real, and tangible actions have openly lesbian City Council Speaker Christine Quinn taken in respect of LGBT civil rights ?
Let's examine the following examples of LGBT civil rights violations, to which City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, a high-profile openly lesbian politician, has been spineless in her response :
With an LGBT record like this, LGBTQS New Yorkers would do good to question Speaker Quinn's integrity and commitment to LGBT civil rights.
Make a pledge today to support Roots of Betrayal : The Ethics of Christine Quinn on Kickstarter.
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(Revised : Thursday 22 Nov 2012 1:15 p.m. EDT) The Rolling Jubilee has now raised over $400,000, which is approximately enough money to abolish over $8,000,000 in notional debt !
Thomas Gokey, an artist who is one of the co-founders of the Rolling Jubilee movement, an Occupy Wall Street off-shoot that raises money to buy debt and then “forgive” what people owe rather than collecting on the bills. (Current TV)
New York City doctors and nurses are sounding a public health alarm on the stressed hospital network after Sandy.
Healthcare activists held a rally on the steps of New York's City Hall to demand that Mayor Michael Bloomberg do more to improve healthcare for survivors of Hurricane Sandy.
Sandy's floodwaters severely damaged NYU Medical Center, Bellevue Hospital, Coney Island Hospital, and Manhattan's VA Medical Center. Patients who would have sought care at those facilities are now turning to other hospitals that remain open. (WNBC)
Emergency room doctor Marisa Fernandez, who has been volunteering in the badly damaged Rockaways neighborhood, said, "We're having to recreate an entire healthcare infrastructure from scratch—everything ranging from assessment and triage of newly housebound individuals, to mobile clinics." (Zimbio)
Despite what some hospital administrators have claimed, Sandy turned out to be exactly what weather forecasters were predicting, so while the Manhattan VA and NY Downtown were evacuated before the storm hit, Bellevue, Coney Island and NYU Langone waited until after. We can't say for sure why--but certainly the loss of revenue may have been a factor in that decision. Even public hospitals depend on reimbursements from patient visits to stay financially viable. (Socialist Worker)
Meet at City Hall this Friday, 11/16, at 12:00 p.m. to tell Mayor Bloomberg that there are urgent unmet healthcare needs caused by Hurricane Sandy !
2012-11-16 Mike Bloomberg City Hall - Hurricane Sandy Relief Rally FlyerDate : Friday, November 16, 2012
Time : 12:00 Noon
Place : City Hall
After Peninsula Hospital closed, St. John's became the only full-service hospital in Far Rockaway. It is now operating at 100% capacity, meaning, it has no more room to take in patients. This condition is compounded by the fact that patients have nowhere to be discharged to, and by the fact that many of the employees have become homeless as a result of Hurricane Sandy.
Nearby nursing homes and adult homes have been evacuated and are not yet re-opened. Electricity continues to be a problem throughout the area and patients with special needs may have lost homes or cannot go back to homes without electricity or heat. Staff, many of them without homes or who have been evacuated, also need places to stay so they can continue to work. Homeless staff are given vouchers for hot meals.
St. John's has set up two funds for donations. To donate to St. John's Episcopal Hospital to continue its efforts to serve the community, please make a check out to St. John's Episcopal Hospital and mail it to St. John's Episcopal Hospital, 327 Beach 19th Street, Far Rockaway, NY 11691. To donate to the Hurricane Sandy Staff Relief Fund, please make the check out to St. John's Episcopal Hospital, and write in the memo "Hurricane Sandy Staff Relief Fund" and mail to the above-mentioned address. To pay by Paypal or Credit Card go to www.ehs.org.
Separately, WCBS 2 News did a piece about how the people in the Upper East Side are now beginning to complain about all the people from Lower Manhattan swarming their hospitals.
Maybe it is going to take complaints by UES residents to ring alarm bells about the uneven distribution of hospital beds in Lower Manhattan ?
Why is it acceptable for us to allow hospitals go through such desperate attempts to equally and adequately fund the healthcare needs of patients ? Look at the consequences of the blackouts of New York City hospitals in Lower Manhattan.
The issue before us is whether the rebuilding of our hospitals will continue to favour wealthy institutions, which primarily serve the well-insured, or will we use this opportunity to examine and fix the unequal distribution of healthcare in New York created by the Berger Commission ?
As it is, we are on a path that will continue to force us to accept less and less. Look at how nursing homes were instructed by health officials not to evacuate, and then they are criticised by the Department of Health for unacceptable conditions compounded precisely because they were instructed not to evacuate. Is this acceptable ?
If we believe in the dignity and equality of all people, then our healthcare system must be reformed to provide patient care-centered healthcare, to equally meet the needs of all patients. Please support a truly universal, single-payer healthcare system.
