Sunday, February 28, 2016

Abuse of H-1B Visas by Corporations

The H-1B visa program is supposed to have safeguards against abuse, including rules designed to ensure that guest workers are not a significantly cheaper option for companies looking to save a buck. But Costa says 83 percent of the H-1B recipients are paid wages below the average for that occupation, because of flaws in the system.
Sarah Jaffe
February 22, 2016
Stuart Zwicke lasted eight years in the information technology department at Molina Healthcare of New Mexico, in Albuquerque, where he watched everyone on his original team let go.
“I did not apply to Molina,” he says. “They reached out to me because of my job skills and technical skills. They brought me in to design and build their data center, the heartbeat of the entire company here in New Mexico.”
The data center was miles from the company’s main headquarters in Long Beach, California, and Zwicke and two others were the only ones working there. Instead of bringing in permanent help, he said, the company would rotate in groups of workers for a week or so at a time, to be trained at the center.
“I would tell my senior management, ‘We have a really big problem here,’ ” Zwicke says. “At the time I was a senior administrator, and these guys didn’t have the basic 101 skill set. We did everything we could, we were doing eighty-, ninety-hour weeks and trying to groom them as we went along.”
The workers, Zwicke learned, were brought in by a contractor, Cognizant, on H-1B guest worker visas, supposedly issued for workers with specialized skills. But Zwicke says that, in fact, the new workers made his job harder. He’d ask to see the résumés for workers he was training, to gauge their skill levels, but says all he received were assurances that the workers were qualified.
Back in Long Beach, in 2010, eighteen workers in the company’s information technology department were laid off. According to attorney James Otto, who filed suit on behalf of those eighteen workers, the company turned around and brought in forty new workers via Cognizant. The employees who’d been let go had made an average of $75,000 a year; the guest workers would be paid much less, and receive no benefits.
“They’d say this is cost-effective, this is the way it is, get with the program or else,” says Zwicke, a combat veteran who, in August, after his second heart attack, was also let go. (Otto has filed a discrimination complaint on Zwicke’s behalf.)
To Otto, who also represents workers at Disney who were laid off and then required to train their replacements, the process of replacing American workers with H-1B temporary hires through companies like Cognizant is part of the further commodification of labor. 
“Disney just doesn’t care about people, that’s the bottom line, which is funny for Disney because that’s the business they’re in,” Otto says. “Everybody they replaced was highly skilled, highly productive, and highly regarded because each one of them had performance evaluations for several years running that said they were exceptional.”
Otto has also filed a lawsuit on behalf of Yelena Kutepova, who worked in the information technology department at the Screen Actors Guild Producers Pension and Health Plans since 1998. As she recalls, “My reviews were excellent, I was very professional.” But she was surrounded by guest workers, some of whom would go back home after their visa ended, only to return again and again.
In 2012, Kutepova was diagnosed with breast cancer. At first, she says, she scheduled her medical treatments during her lunch hour so she could still work. When her boss complained about her being late returning from the doctor, she stopped going to treatments. Nevertheless, last summer she was let go. The written reason for her layoff was “to reduce the number of [SAG] employees in the IT Department.”
At the same time, a group of her colleagues were also let go. “All of us were over age fifty,” she says. Kutepova was two years from retirement. Last she heard, her job was being filled by more guest workers. “After you put in seventeen years, you feel like the place is your family,” she says. “I think, ‘Why did this happen to me? I didn’t do anything wrong.’ ”
“When they bring in these foreign workers, they don’t believe they have rights...what they want, what they demand, is subservience.”
The H-1B visa has its origins in the 1990 Immigration Act and was intended, according to Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research at the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute, to bring in workers with specialized skills to complement, not replace, workers already in the United States.
The program has been capped at 65,000 visas per year (the visas normally, though not always, are good for three years), with an additional 20,000 available for workers who’ve attained advanced degrees at U.S. institutions. But there has been a push in recent years to raise that cap, as technology companies have put together a massive PR and lobbying blitz arguing that there are not enough Americans with the requisite skills in so-called STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields.
That push made the H-1B question a huge—and hugely contentious—part of the 2013 immigration reform negotiations in Congress; the top ten H-1B donors spent $8.2 million on candidates in the prior election cycle. Tech companies, including Microsoft, Facebook, and Google, pushed hard for a hike in the cap, and, Costa says, “basically got almost everything they wanted,” though the bill ultimately failed to pass.
The H-1B visa program is supposed to have safeguards against abuse, including rules designed to ensure that guest workers are not a significantly cheaper option for companies looking to save a buck. But Costa says 83 percent of the H-1B recipients are paid wages below the average for that occupation, because of flaws in the system.
“The usual argument from proponents of H-1B expansion is these are the best and brightest workers,” Costa says. “Either that’s true and they’re just being paid really low wages, or they really are entry-level workers whose skills are new and cheap.”
Shannon Lederer, director of immigration policy at the AFL-CIO, notes that while the guest worker system is structured into narrow slivers, with different visa qualifications, it’s instructive to look at the system as a whole.
“It really does reveal a lot when you see how consistent the patterns of abuse are across wage and skill distinctions,” Lederer says. “The abuses that guest workers face really aren’t due to the fact that they don’t speak English well or aren’t well educated; they’re baked into the power asymmetries that the work visa programs institutionalize.”
Workers who dare to make demands on their employers are often told: If you don’t like it, find another job. But guest workers literally cannot do so. Like other guest workers, H-1B workers are tied to the employer who brings them in, and have an added incentive to behave on the job since an H-1B employer can sponsor them for an eventual green card. Their choice is to stay at the job or get on a plane home.
“When they bring in these foreign workers, they don’t believe they have rights,” says Otto. “Every employer who imports these foreign workers, what they want, what they demand, is subservience.”
Jim Roepp, deputy legal director of the Immigrant Justice Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, notes that this works to the disadvantage of other workers as well. “It’s awfully hard for a U.S. worker to compete with somebody who has to work at that employer regardless of what the conditions might be,” he says.
Even when H-1B workers aren’t much cheaper than U.S. workers, the program still creates conditions ripe for abuse and suffers from inadequate oversight, according to Lederer.  “There is no one whose job it is to look across all the visa programs,” she says. “Nobody wants to reveal what the total is, because when you add it up it amounts to hundreds of thousands of new, vulnerable workers every year without adequate rights and protections.”
The top employers of H-1B workers are all companies like Cognizant, which Otto refers to as “body shops.” Like temporary staffing agencies in the United States, these companies do all the work of hiring—including procuring visas—and are the guest workers’ legal employer. That way, companies like Disney and Molina can maintain they haven’t hired any guest workers; they’re just “leasing” them from the staffing agency.
Like the in-country staffing agencies, Lederer says, companies that hire H-1B workers seek a more flexible, disposable workforce. Stuart Zwicke and Yelena Kutepova each suffered serious health problems and asked their employers to allow them time to get healthy; a brand-new young H-1B worker would not seek such accommodation.
Companies can also directly hire H-1B workers, or independent recruiters can help place them, but Lederer says research she’s read “shows that the staffing agency model holds the greatest potential for exploitation.” In Atlanta, for example, when H-1B public school teachers were hired through a staffing agency, the public contract showed how much the district was paying the agency but, Lederer says, “there was no due diligence by the district to know how much the agency was paying teachers—that’s how the distancing obscures responsibility.”
Many staffing companies are also outsourcing companies, which bring in workers for what they call “knowledge transfer”—think the Disney workers, training their own replacements—and then send the jobs back overseas with the guest workers, offshoring them permanently.
As with wages, there are rules meant to prevent the kind of displacement charged at Disney and Molina. But Costa says companies that are “H-1B dependent” can get around those rules by hiring H-1B workers with master’s degrees, or by paying them more than $60,000. That may sound like a decent wage, but Costa notes it’s often at least $20,000 less than the average wage in the technology sector—giving these companies a substantial saving on labor costs.
Companies using H-1B workers have been accused of skirting even the minimal wage requirements. In 2013, the staffing agency Tata agreed to a $29 million settlement in a suit alleging it forced its Indian guest workers to hand over their tax refunds to the company. Recruiters, too, make their money from the workers, in many cases charging fees to link workers with jobs in the United States.
And while the H-1B program was designed to help recruit skilled workers who bring long-term value to companies, the reality, Costa says, is that “these companies are rotating workers in and out. It’s not a bridge to immigration; they’re not trying to keep and retain these workers.”
Ron Hira, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute and associate professor of public policy at Howard University, has calculated that only one in fifty H-1B workers is sponsored for a green card. In fiscal 2013, Cognizant got 5,192 H-1Bs and sponsored 152 green card applications; Tata got 6,163 H-1Bs and sponsored exactly zero.
“There really needs to be solidarity between the U.S. workers and immigrant workers. It’s about raising wages for everybody, it’s about combating corporate exploitation of the immigration system.”
The H-1B program hangs on the myth of the skills gap—the notion that there just aren’t enough people in the United States with the proper skills to do high-tech jobs. Thus, the argument goes, U.S. companies must import skilled labor from elsewhere to compete internationally.
The problem, according to everyone who spoke to me for this story, is that it’s just not true. In the case of Disney and Molina, at which U.S. workers were already in the jobs, getting positive performance reviews, it’s blatantly obvious. In other cases, it might be less so, but once again, the guest worker program’s rules allow employers to take advantage.
“There’s an easy way to find out if there are workers available,” Costa says. “Require them to pay the right wage and advertise.” But a company that wants, say, to hire a programmer in New York doesn’t have to advertise at all; it can just get an H-1B worker.
Meanwhile, as Americans are told over and over to get STEM training, a 2014 survey found that 75 percent of U.S. STEM graduates go to work in other fields. “Americans are spending a lot of money to learn how to do those jobs,” says Otto, even if they don’t land in them.
Roepp argues that reforming the guest worker system would prove once and for all whether there is a skills gap. If there really are no current Americans to do the work, he suggests, then rather than making immigrants come in on short-term visas tied to one employer, bring them in and give them full rights—particularly the right to leave their current job and find another.
“My guess,” he says, “is the employer’s response to that is, ‘Once you do that, they’re going to leave, they’re going to find other work.’ So the problem isn’t a labor shortage. It’s a shortage of people who want to do your job at the wages that you want to pay.” Why, Roepp wonders, should the government “allow you to artificially increase the supply of labor so you don’t have to compete with everybody else in the labor market?”
When talking about guest workers and U.S. jobs, particularly the kinds of tech-skilled jobs that are seen as desirable, it can be tempting to slip into language that pits one group of workers against another. But H-1B visa critics say reforming the program would actually benefit both groups of workers.
“There really needs to be solidarity between the U.S. workers and immigrant workers,” Costa says. “It’s about raising wages for everybody, it’s about combating corporate exploitation of the immigration system.”
The Economic Policy Institute has recommended requiring that guest workers be paid in the seventy-fifth percentile for a particular job and no lower than the national average. It has also called for employers to advertise jobs on a central database for thirty days and hire an equally or better-qualified U.S. worker. A reform proposed by Senators Dick Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, and Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa, would prohibit larger companies from getting H-1B visas if more than 50 percent of their workforce is made up of guest workers.
And Lederer stresses that workers in legal immigration programs should not face the same problems as undocumented workers.
“We want them to be able to assert their rights on the job, to have a path to citizenship, to be able to live securely with their families,” she says. “If you apply any of those big aspirations to the guest worker system, it falls well short of meeting them, even though it is a legal channel. That is why we really need new models.”
Stuart Zwicke lasted eight years in the information technology department at Molina Healthcare of New Mexico, in Albuquerque, where he watched everyone on his original team let go.
"I did not apply to Molina," he says. "They reached out to me because of my job skills and technical skills. They brought me in to design and build their data center, the heartbeat of the entire company here in New Mexico."
The data center was miles from the company's main headquarters in Long Beach, California, and Zwicke and two others were the only ones working there. Instead of bringing in permanent help, he said, the company would rotate in groups of workers for a week or so at a time, to be trained at the center.

Friday, February 26, 2016

The Latino Vote Must Take Down Donald Trump !


Others Will Not Do This
By Duane Campbell,
Mexican American Digital History Project.

Trump’s Racially Divisive Politics Must Be Exposed and Opposed !

The intolerant agitation promoted by Republican Donald Trump and support of its substance by most Republican candidates is a call to the “silent white majority” and a demand that 11 million immigrants be deported.  This campaign is a dangerous and divisive racial message.  It must be vigorously opposed.

We know these campaigns to be dangerous. It is not only the ranting of a fringe right.

If you cannot vote, you can still campaign for candidates and assist opposing campaigns  with literature distribution.  One of the most effective things you can do is to work with campaigns and to talk with your friends, neighbors, and families.

Trump’s popularity among Republican voters has dramatically risen in the polls.    He leads the Republican Party campaign for president and determines the terms of the debate .  Cruz  and Rubio  have  a similar policy on immigration,  Build walls, deport people.  This fear mongering political message has found a very receptive base within our society among xenophobic and angry conservative sectors.

Thursday, February 25, 2016

Socialist Visions- Blog Talk Radio



The struggle to bring any form of socialism requires constant political education, debate, reflection, and good old face-to-face dialogue with people for developing a vision for an alternative political economic system.

Because consciousness building concerning the validity of socialism remains extremely low if not nonexistent on the media radar most people, my friend and comrade, Carl Pinkston and I decided about a year ago to host an online audio podcast titled, Socialist Visions, hosted on BlogTalk Radio.

This podcast grew out of monthly soirées we had with two or three other veteran activists in which we would spend a couple of hours discussing issues related to socialism, current political news, and  our past participation in various political left movements and organizations.

Monday, February 22, 2016

Ted Cruz tells O’Reilly he would round up and deport all 12 million | | Dallas Morning News

Ted Cruz tells O’Reilly he would round up and deport all 12 million | | Dallas Morning News

Who Won the Latino Vote in Nevada ?


Who Won the Nevada Latino Vote?
Latinos Reached a Record Share of Nevada Democratic Caucuses
 
(Los Angeles, Feb 22) After hearing about disputes between the Sanders and Clinton over the Edison Entry Poll Survey results on the Latino vote in the Feb 20 Primary Caucuses WCVI undertook a review of the publicly disclosed data. 
 
WCVI concludes that the survey results are statistically consistent with the margin of victory of Hillary Clinton on Feb 20. The main dispute among pundits and between campaigns has been the assertion that it is statistically impossible for Hillary Clinton to narrowly lose the Latino vote (45% to 53% with Latinos representing 19% of the voters) and narrowly lose Whites (47% to 49% with Whites representing 59% of the voters) and still win the election by 5.3%. 
 
However WCVI concludes the Clinton margin of victory is adequately explained by the large margin of victory Secretary Clinton won among African American voters (77% to 23% with AA's representing 13% of the voters).

Sunday, February 21, 2016

Deportation of Mexicans and Mexican Americans



 Teach  About Unconstitutional Deportation of Mexican and Mexican Americans in the 1930s
 Feb. 28, 2016    11am-2pm

  *   Learn about the unconstitutional deportation of over 1.5 million Mexican and Mexican Americans in the 1930s for teaching your students in elementary, middle school and high school.
  *   Immediately implement lessons about this mass forced expulsion of American born children and their parents as part of the 2016 California State History and Social Studies Framework.
  *   Be a teacher leader incorporating this injustice into your social studies, history and language arts lessons as part of Common Core implementation.
  *   Learn how Bell Gardens Elementary School 5th graders researched this injustice and were moved to lead a successful campaign for inclusion of this topic in our California curriculum (AB 146, 2016)
  *   Take home successful lessons and resources that facilitate implementation of AB 146 “which may include study of the unconstitutional deportation to Mexico during the Great Depression of citizens and lawful permanent residents of the United States…“encourages the incorporation of survivor,  rescuer, liberator, and witness oral testimony into the teaching of human rights, the unconstitutional deportation to Mexico during the Great Depression of citizens and lawful permanent residents of the United States…”
  *    Learn how beginning in 1929, state/local municipalities and private business forcibly expelled over 1.5 million people of Mexican descent from the United States
  *    Meet expelled survivors and family members
  *    Visit the related exhibit and Apology Memorial (SB 670, 2005) at LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes to learn more and plan field trips for your students.
  *    Engage in meaningful conversations and experiences related to the historical immigration, social and racial issues related to this mass expulsion with concrete connections to the present
  *    Receive free related successful lessons and resources

Place: LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes, 501 North Main Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012.

Saturday, February 20, 2016

Latino Voters Delivered in Nevada

Hillary Clinton easily bested Bernie Sanders in the Nevada Democratic caucuses on Saturday. But whether that was thanks to Latino voters -- or in spite of them -- isn't clear. 
That's because of contradictory results from the event. Entrance polls found that 53 percent of Latinos were supporting Sen. Sanders (I-Vt.), compared to 45 percent supporting former Secretary of State Clinton. But Clinton won caucuses in heavily Latino areas, casting doubt on whether the polling presented an accurate picture of how Latinos voted. 
Regardless, the high Latino turnout in the state bodes well for a Democratic nominee come the general election.
Latinos made up 19 percent of the caucus-goers, according to the polls -- an even higher proportion than during the 2008 Democratic caucuses, when they made up about 15 percent.

Wednesday, February 10, 2016

Build the Movement

Join Us.
Political Revolution 101
Workshop:  Feb. 18, 2016.   6 PM.
Alpine  Hall 204. Sac State.

Topics: Why Bernie Sanders ?  Why are socialists supporting Bernie Sanders?
How to work on campus/ community ? Organizations.   Skills.  Tabling, door to door, 
Developing your personal story.  Practicing your personal story.
The Latino vote. The Student vote.  Trump and Immigration.
As a complement to existing trainings in GOTV, basic organizing methods, and communications, this political education training will enable you to better understand, articulate and persuade voters of this political moment.

This is a non partisan event to encourage civic engagement and political participation.   The Sacramento Progressive Alliance has not yet endorsed any candidate for 2016.  Not endorsed, authorized  nor affiliated with any candidate or committee.
Co sponsors DSA,  Sacramento for Bernie , Progressive Alliance. Campus PA, Wellstone Democratic Club. 
For more information.  www.antiracismdsa.blogspot.com





Monday, February 08, 2016

Fixing a Broken Immigration System

Beyond Deportations: Fixing a Broken Immigration System

http://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com/2016/01/beyond-deportation-fixing-broken.htmlThe Reality Check

When President Obama appointed Dollie Gee to the U.S. District Court in 2010, he undoubtedly didn't expect her to mount a frontal challenge to his administration's detention and deportation policies. But five years after her elevation as the first Chinese American woman on the federal bench, Gee ruled last summer that holding Central American women and children in private detention lockups was illegal.
 
Gee didn't mince words. She called the detentions "deplorable." And she denounced as "fear-mongering" the claim by Homeland Security lawyers that the detentions would discourage more people from leaving Central America.
 
Her angry tone shouldn't have come as a surprise. Gee's father was an immigrant engineer and her mother a garment worker in a Los Angeles sweatshop. After law school, as a young lawyer, Gee sued employers for discrimination and then worked for the Teamsters Union, helping workers and immigrants win representation elections. For Chinese Americans, today's detentions contain ugly echoes of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which led to the brutal detention of thousands of Chinese immigrants on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay 128 years ago.
 
Gee ruled that imprisoning families violated the Flores Settlement, an agreement by the federal government in 1997 that it would release children whenever possible, and hold them in the least restrictive conditions when it could find no one to care for them. But the U.S. appealed Gee's ruling, handed down in August of last year, and in December the Obama administration announced that it would begin deporting Central American migrants who had arrived after May 2014, and who had lost their appeals before immigration judges. Agents then picked up 121 people, including women and children, and sent them to detention centers in Texas.
 
Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, defended the action. "Our borders are not open to illegal migration," he said at a press conference. "If you come here illegally, we will send you back consistent with our laws and values."

Friday, February 05, 2016

Building a Moral Movement





The following is an excerpt from the new book The Third Reconstruction by Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II & Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove (Beacon Press, 2016):


America's Third Reconstruction depends on a moral movement, deeply rooted in the South, emerging state by state throughout the nation. No single leader or organization can orchestrate such a movement, but we who have seen the power of fusion organizing in North Carolina in 2014 established an education center, Repairers of the Breach, to share the lessons of Moral Mondays and invest in equipping leaders for other state-based coalitions. In order to move forward together, we’ve outlined fourteen steps to mobilize in the streets, at the polls, and in the courtroom.


1. Engage in indigenously led grassroots organizing across the state.


There is no end run around the relational work of building trust and empowering local people. Crises will bring out crowds and draw attention, but a sustained movement depends on local people who know one another and are committed to working together for the long haul. “Helicopter” leadership by “national leaders” will not sustain a moral movement. Equip and resource small groups of people who will meet regularly in their home communities to talk about the coalition’s concerns.


2. Use moral language to frame and critique public policy, regardless of who is in power.


A moral movement claims higher ground in partisan debate by returning public discourse to our deepest moral and constitutional values. Any moral movement must study Scripture and sacred texts as well as state constitutions. We cannot allow so-called conservatives to hijack the powerful language of faith; neither can we let so-called liberals pretend that moral convictions are not at play in public policy debates. Every budget is a moral document— or it is an immoral one. We must reclaim moral language in the public square.


3. Demonstrate a commitment to civil disobedience that follows the steps of nonviolent action and is designed to change the public conversation and consciousness.





A moral movement draws power not from its ability to overwhelm opposition but from its willingness to suffer. The Second Reconstruction brought large-scale nonviolent direct action to America through the Montgomery bus boycott. A Third Reconstruction depends upon escalating noncooperation in order to demonstrate our capacity to sacrifice for a better future.


4. Build a stage from which to lift the voices of everyday people impacted by immoral policies.


A moral movement must put human faces on injustice and amplify the voice of the voiceless. We do not speak for those who can speak for themselves. We do not create a platform for politicians to speak for those who can speak for themselves. Directly affected people are the best moral witnesses. Our movement exists to let their voices be heard.


5. Recognize the centrality of race.


America’s First and Second Reconstructions sought to heal the wound of race-based slavery, America’s original sin. Our Third Reconstruction must likewise be decidedly antiracist. Some will ask, Is the real issue today race or is it class? We answer: Yes, it’s race and class. Our class divisions cannot be understood apart from a society built on white supremacy. Our moral movement must be committed to the long-term work of racial equity.


6. Build a broad, diverse coalition including moral and religious leaders of all faiths.


All faith traditions are not the same, but the common ground among faiths is a firm foundation upon which to stand against the divide-and-conquer strategies of extremists. We must be intentional about reaching out to marginalized groups in our states. Though they are a minority in this country, our Muslim sisters and brothers are essential to the Third Reconstruction.


7. Intentionally diversify the movement with the goal of winning unlikely allies.


Often the groups most impacted by injustice have been convinced that they are enemies. Fusion politics is about helping those who have suffered injustice and have been divided by extremism to see what we have in common. We do this by bringing people together across dividing lines and helping them hear one another. We have no permanent enemies, only permanent issues, rooted in our deepest moral and constitutional values.


8. Build transformative, long-term coalition relationships rooted in a clear agenda that doesn’t measure success only by electoral outcomes.


We must be clear: Fusion coalitions are not about simple transactions where I support your issue if you support mine. We must learn how our issues intersect in a comprehensive moral agenda that demands transformation of everyone—not least, of us.


9. Make a serious commitment to academic and empirical analysis of policy.


Nothing is worse than being loud and wrong. Our coalitions must include activist scholars and we must commit ourselves to a serious consideration of data. Moral issues are not impractical. They can be translated into policy that is sustainable and that produces measurable positive outcomes.


10. Coordinate use of all forms of social media: video, text, Twitter, Facebook, and so forth.


Mainstream media outlets are often unable to tell a story that doesn’t fit within the established narrative. We must tell our own story. Social media afford us multiple outlets for the consciousness-raising that movements have always depended upon. Use them all.


11. Engage in voter registration and education.


The political power of fusion coalitions is based upon a diversified electorate that recognizes common interests. Extremists understand this. They have invested heavily in restricting voting rights and dividing potential allies. We must engage voters in each election, educating them about how candidates have voted or committed to vote on issues that are part of our shared moral agenda.


12. Pursue a strong legal strategy.


A moral movement rooted in constitutional values needs a strong legal team and a commitment to mobilizing in the courtroom. The future we imagine and embody in the streets must be established in our statehouses and affirmed by our courts. We cannot neglect this key piece of our common life.


13. Engage the cultural arts.


A moral movement is only as strong as the songs we sing together. Study the history of cultural arts in freedom movements and bring music, the spoken word, storytelling, and visual arts into your organizing. Make sure the images in your art and actions convey the same message you are proclaiming with words. Speak the truth, sing the truth, and use art to help people imagine the future they cannot yet see.


14. Resist the “one moment” mentality; we are building a movement!


No one victory will usher in beloved community; no single setback can stop us. We are building up a new world, moving forward together toward freedom and justice for all.


To learn more about training for moral fusion organizing, visit www.breachrepairers.org.


Excerpted from The Third Reconstruction: Moral Mondays, Fusion Politics, and the Rise of a New Justice Movement by Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove (Beacon Press, 2016). Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press.




Reposted from Portside.