I VOTE for Women

"The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs" How One Artist Is Pushing Apple to Change

"The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs" How One Artist Is Pushing Apple to Change: "Mike Daisey's one-man show has galvanized public opinion against the electronic giant's labor practices.

If you would seek proof of that famous Margaret Mead adage: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has,” look at what’s happening as more and more people protest Apple Inc.’s labor practices in China.

Take it one step further: if you should ever doubt the impact a solitary artist can have against injustice, meet Mike Daisey...."

Corporations Are People

Apple's Foreign Suppliers Demonstrate Widespread Scamming and Horrific Abuse of Employees

Apple's Foreign Suppliers Demonstrate Widespread Scamming and Horrific Abuse of Employees: "Apple's bombshell report on its suppliers shows anti-employee practices as common as iPods. White collar criminologist William K. Black investigates.

Apple has released a report on working conditions in its suppliers’ factories, highlighting a form of control fraud (fraud in which the head of a company subverts it for personal gain) that criminology has identified but rarely discussed. I write overwhelmingly about accounting control fraud because it drives our recurrent, intensifying financial crises. The primary intended victims of accounting control frauds are the shareholders and the creditors. Other private sector control frauds target customers (e.g., George Akerlof’s 1970 article on “lemons”), and the public (e.g., the unlawful disposal of toxic waste, illegal logging, and tax fraud)....."

Legal Fiction

Suicide Threats and Strike Attempts at Apple Manufacturer: China's Workers Fighting for Rights at Work

Suicide Threats and Strike Attempts at Apple Manufacturer: China's Workers Fighting for Rights at Work: "Foxconn, a factory that makes iPhones and Xboxes among other gadgets, is seeing strikes by workers over low wages, long hours, and terrible conditions.

Last Friday, a riot erupted outside an Apple store in Beijing. It was widely reported that the rioters were hopeful shoppers who, having waited for hours in the freezing cold for the latest iPhone, were so furious when the launch was delayed that they threw eggs at the shop and clashed with the police. It turns out that many were actually migrant workers, hired by "scalpers" who intended to sell the gadget, a status symbol, for a higher price on the black market.

Meanwhile, a protest of another kind was just ending in Wuhan, in central China's Hubei province, thanks to the intervention of its mayor. Up to 200 workers from the Microsoft Xbox production line of Foxconn Technology, also a major supplier of Apple, had staged a strike. They were not demanding sleek new gadgets, but simply decent pay in return for making them, and proper compensation if being transferred. To drive their point home, they had threatened to kill themselves by jumping off a building...."

Fear Factory

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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Occupy The Dream - Martin Luther King #J15

It Only Takes a Girl

"The poorest and most backward societies are always those that put women down."
~Isabel Allende

Government Crackdown on Free Speech: Are They Firing Employees for Exercising Their Rights?

Government Crackdown on Free Speech: Are They Firing Employees for Exercising Their Rights?: "A lawsuit being heard this month will likely define the free speech rights of federal employees and so determine the quality of people who will make up our government.

Here’s the First Amendment, in full: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Those beautiful words, almost haiku-like, are the sparse poetry of the American democratic experiment. The Founders purposely wrote the First Amendment to read broadly, and not like a snippet of tax code, in order to emphasize that it should encompass everything from shouted religious rantings to eloquent political criticism. Go ahead, reread it aloud at this moment when the government seems to be carving out an exception to it large enough to drive a tank through...."

We Have a First Amendment Right to Protest -- So Why All These Arrests Around Occupy Wall Street?

We Have a First Amendment Right to Protest -- So Why All These Arrests Around Occupy Wall Street?: "Many of those detained won't face charges, but the arrests take them off the streets.

On Saturday night, 175 members of Occupy Chicago were arrested after refusing to comply with a curfew the city had imposed on Grant Park. According to In These Times editor Joe Macaré, the arrests took place “one by one, and by all accounts as peacefully as possible.”

It wasn't such an orderly process in New York. Allison Kilkenny reported for the Nation that “what unfolded [on Saturday] was a dramatic confrontation between the NYPD and protesters in which individuals were almost mowed down by police motorcycles, nearly trampled by horses, and ultimately ninety-two activists were arrested.”..."

GOP Senator Pushes Radical Bill To Restrict Discussion Of Abortion Over The Internet

GOP Senator Pushes Radical Bill To Restrict Discussion Of Abortion Over The Internet: "Instead of focusing on job creation, congressional Republicans have spent their time passing socially conservative legislation like the “Let Women Die” bill that would allow hospitals that receive federal funds to deny women life-saving abortion procedures.

Now Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), one of the most die-hard anti-choice lawmakers, has jumped on the bandwagon by sneaking a radical anti-abortion amendment onto a completely unrelated piece of legislation. DeMint’s amendment would ban women and their doctors from discussing abortion over the Internet..."

First amendment violation anyone?

A Few Tales of Passion

If you only have time to watch one video today, I suggest it's this one. It's so good I had to watch it twice.

Sen. Brown speaking about new state voting laws

How To Describe Tea Partiers In Less Than 10 Words

Foreign Students in Work Visa Program Stage Walkout at Plant

Foreign Students in Work Visa Program Stage Walkout at Plant: "PALMYRA, Pa. — Hundreds of foreign students, waving their fists and shouting defiantly in many languages, walked off their jobs on Wednesday at a plant here that packs Hershey’s chocolates, saying a summer program that was supposed to be a cultural exchange had instead turned them into underpaid labor.

The students, from countries including China, Nigeria, Romania and Ukraine, came to the United States through a long-established State Department summer visa program that allows them to work for two months and then travel. They said they were expecting to practice their English, make some money and learn what life is like in the United States..."

JUSTICE at HERSHEY'S

A few years ago, I heard a shocking story on This American Life about Indian guest workers in Oklahoma. The John Pickle Company had recruited and hired 52 guest workers from India, many of whom were highly educated, to come to Oklahoma to work in an oil industry parts factory. They were essentially held captive, without passports, and made to work long hours for almost no money and housed in a decrepit “dormitory”, isolated by culture from the locals and by distance from support from family. Eventually, the guest workers made contact with members of a local church, who helped organize their escape and eventual financial restitution.

Shocking that this kind of thing would happen in our country, I thought, but I managed to put that sickening feeling out of mind with the comforting thought that this was a one-off thing, that one ignorant individual might have thought he was helping people from a developing country by essentially enslaving them, but it slid under the radar only because it was a small-time operator with relatively few employees. But then I came across the news today in the New York Times that hundreds of foreign students from countries like China, the Ukraine, and Nigeria had been recruited to come to the United States on a “cultural exchange” program but were steered into backbreaking work at a Hershey’s chocolate packing plant that didn’t even compensate them enough to cover their costs of coming to this country.

Here’s how the program worked. The US State Department offers a J-1 Visa that allows students wanting to experience American culture firsthand to work for two months in the United States and then to travel for a month. It’s actually a fairly good program when it’s not abused – friends of mine have participated and raved about their experiences.

In theory, students can travel to the US and make enough money during their two months to cover the expenses it took for them to come to the States and to see the sights for a month. Then they go back to their home countries and report on how wonderful life is in the United States and how welcoming and friendly the American people are.

But in reality, the student workers in Palmyra, PA paid up to $6,000 in application and processing fees and traveled to a small town in Pennsylvania to work in a Hershey packing plant operated by Exel, a local contractor, where they were forced to perform back-breaking physical labor for low wages. Many of the students are training for highly-skilled careers in fields like medicine in their home countries, but working in the factory left them with strained backs and numb hands. The workers were videotaped and told that if they slowed from a constant rapid pace, they would be fired. If they complained, they would be fired. And if they took their complaints to other authorities, they would be fired. (Sensing a pattern?) They couldn’t leave the job to work somewhere else, because this was the position listed on their visa. And they couldn’t just go home, because they didn’t have any money to change their ticket.

One student, a medical student from Nigeria, complained that his hands are so stiff from work that he can hardly hold a pen nowadays. It’s going to be awfully difficult to progress very far in his studies or career if he can’t hold a pen to write, much less wield a scalpel.

On top of it all, they were forced to live in company housing and charged exorbitant rent by the terms of their contract, paying far more for housing than their neighbors. This last bit was the last straw. Along with utility costs, the high rent was deducted directly from their $8.35 an hour pay, leaving them with almost no money to save up for traveling, much less pay them back for application fees and plane fare. When they compared their rent with neighbors, it became apparent that Exel was doing everything they could to extract as much as possible from a group of people who as guests in our country had very little power to defend themselves.

Obviously, my heart first goes out to the students who went through hell at the packing plant. Instead of participating in a cultural exchange, they’ve been exploited because of their cultural isolation. Their spirits were broken down with their bodies. They’ll go back to their home countries to tell everyone who will listen what horrible and cruel people Americans are, and from their own experiences, they’ll definitely have justification for doing so.

But the other side of it is that we’ve had a jobs crisis in this country for several years now. Instead of giving local Pennsylvanians jobs, Exel went after a steady rotation of exploitable foreign students, who were much easier to cow into submission as virtual indentured servants. I’m sure that at least some of the 7.6% of Pennsylvanians who are currently unemployed would love a job, any job, but then Exel wouldn’t be able to charge them outrageous rents or work them to the bone without pushback from union organizers.

In the end, pushback is what Exel and Hershey got. 200 students who were scheduled to start an afternoon shift yesterday walked out of the plant at 3pm, and other students finishing their early morning shift joined in. Enough workers walked off the job to stop or slow production at the plant. The students marched off the plant grounds chanting “We are the students, the mighty, mighty students!” in English and their own languages, joining local representatives of labor unions at the entrance to the plant. Several were arrested at a sit-in blocking the entrance, including Rick Bloomingdale, president of the Pennsylvania State Federation of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., and Neal Bisno, president of a Pennsylvania branch of the Service Employees International Union.

It’s not clear what’s going to happen with the students, Exel, or Hershey now. In the case of the John Pickle Company, which I mentioned at the beginning of the post, the guest workers were allowed to return home, and the company ended up having to pay them almost $1.5 million in back wages and damages.

But in this case, Hershey claims that it’s an Exel managed plant, and Exel claims that the students were hired by a staffing agency, although I’m not sure what that has to do with their exploitative management practices. And the foundation responsible for managing the J-1 Visa program, the Council for Educational Travel, claims that it’s trying to investigate the allegations, but that while they “would go out of [their] way to help [the students], it seems like someone is stirring them up out there.” That’s a strange way to blame the victim.

As for the students themselves, it’s unclear whether they will be fired, fined, or whether they will receive some sort of restitution for what they’ve been through.

Rebuild the Dream

Missouri School Sued For Allegedly Making Special Ed Student Write Apology Letter To Her Rapist

Missouri School Sued For Allegedly Making Special Ed Student Write Apology Letter To Her Rapist: "In one of the most brazen examples of “blaming the victim” in recent memory, a school in Springfield, Missouri, has, according to a lawsuit, not only dismissed the rape claims of a seventh grade special education student, but also forced the girl to write and hand-deliver an apology letter to her alleged attacker. The lawsuit [...]"

The following info is out of Full Frontal Feminism according to the 2004 National Crime Victimization Survey:

• Almost two-thirds of all rapes are committed by someone the victim knows.
  
• Every two and a half minutes someone is sexually assaulted in the US.
• One in every six women has been the victim of an attempted or complete rape.
• Fewer than half of all rapes and sexual assaults are reported.
• Eighty percent of rape victims are under the age of 30.
• Forty-four percent are under eighteen.

Cell Service Shutdown Raises Free Speech Questions

Cell Service Shutdown Raises Free Speech Questions: "The shutdown of mobile phone service in San Fransisco Bay Area subway stations has constitutional experts hitting the law books.

Authorities for Bay Area Rapid Transit, or BART, blocked wireless signals in certain stations on Thursday in an attempt to prevent protests opposing the July 3 shooting death of Charles Blair Hill by BART police. Police say Hill came at them with a knife.

First Amendment scholars say they can't remember a time when a public agency in the U.S. moved to disrupt wireless traffic in quite that way. Now, they're trying to stretch old First Amendment principles to fit in the context of new technology...."

The Catholic Church And The GOP Define Sexual Intercourse As a Human Being

The Catholic Church And The GOP Define Sexual Intercourse As a Human Being: "Since the rise of Christianity, the Catholic Church has played a leadership role in nearly every part of the civilized world and its influence extended beyond Europe into South America and during the Crusades touched the lives of Muslims in the so-called Holy Land. During the Tudor dynasty under the reign of Henry VIII, the Reformation blunted the Vatican’s reach in England but it has maintained power and influence in Europe and South America. When John F. Kennedy, a Catholic, was running for the presidency, there were unfounded fears that if he was elected the Pope would control American policy but those fears were squashed when a gunman’s bullet entered the young Catholic president’s brain. Fast forward to today, and the Catholic Church is exerting influence in American politics that began in earnest with California’s Proposition 8 that banned same-sex marriage and now, the Church is influencing the United States Congress and nearly half of all 50 states...."

This is just insane.