Violence Against Donald Trump Will Help Him to Win the Election

by Duane Campbell

Although well meaning, the violent protests against Trump this weekend  for his racism will help him to get elected. We know.  They served to help elect Ronald Reagan and to re-elect Governor Pete Wilson.

We need to recognize that  bold racism can win elections in California, as it did

in 1994 ( Proposition 187), 1996 ( Proposition 209) and 1998 ( Prop 227).  They even re-elected a weak, inarticulate Governor Wilson in 1994, how much more dangerous are they in 2016 with a flamboyant, energetic, pseudo populist like Trump.

We need to recognize the potential advantage  for Republican candidates of racist scapegoating as revealed in the Wilson-promoted Proposition 187 initiative passed by 2/3 of California voters in 1994. The campaign produced a large turnout of right wing voters.  It banned over 600,000 immigrants from receiving needed food stamps, medical care.  

Components of Prop. 187 became national law in 1996 as a part of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation act of 1996, and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996. They are Public Law 104-208.

Stop with the Clinton campaign message that Bernie should end this campaign.

I would like my friends who are campaigning for Hillary to stop telling us all that Bernie should withdraw from the race.  Your whining  serves no useful purpose.

Bernie’s campaign is about building a left opposition in the U.S. Great progress has been made in this effort.  Some 40% of Democrats now consider themselves socialist, some mean social democrats.

Do you think that this campaign is like a basketball game or something ? Someone wins, someone loses, you cheer and you go home ?  It is far more important than a game. This campaign is about taking our economy back from the super rich and creating a positive future for our country.

We still have much to do, particularly the election in California.  We are not going home.  We are building an opposition movement.  I read the generational divide.   You haven’t convinced the millennial generation that he should drop out.  You don’t seem to get it.  Your advice has not been taken, so you give more advice.

And your campaign message that Bernie is getting too divisive is hollow.  You are obviously only listening to the Clinton campaign.  If you follow both campaigns, or progressive media, you will find that the Clinton campaign has been at least as divisive and taunting.

We need to build an opposition movement to defeat Trump.

Think About Immigration Like a Nurse

THINK ABOUT IMMIGRATION LIKE A NURSE
By David Bacon
Presentation given at the House of Delegates Meeting of the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals
http://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com/2016/04/think-about-immigration-like-nurse.html
April 18, 2016



Congratulations on your victories at Delaware County Memorial, Hahnemann University and St. Christopher Hospital for Children, and at Einstein Medical Center.  Almost 3000 nurses and hospital workers have joined the union in just a few months.

I was a union organizer for over 20 years, including a brief time with CNA in California.  I know how important and how hard-fought these victories are.  How you can change the lives of nurses, and give people real power where they work, and where they live.  When nurses win a contract and a strong union our whole community benefits.

Safe staffing levels mean patients get better care.  Power at work means we can advocate more effectively for the things we need in our communities.  Single payer healthcare, with healthcare treated as a right, not a privilege.  Better schools with teachers who are respected.  Safety in our streets, including safety from the police who are supposed to protect us, but who often are the biggest threat we have to worry about for our children.  Equality, where we all have rights, and discrimination is treated as a crime, whether it's because of our race or our sexual identity, or the country where we were born and the language we speak.

And I know from my own experience, and I'm sure it's true for you too, that the biggest thing we have on our side when we organize and begin to confront the people we work for is our unity.  If we unite everyone where we work and where we live, and we stay together, there's no limit to the changes we can make.

Love Trumps Hate | Bernie Sanders

Supreme Court Hears Arguments on DACA

U.S. Supreme Court Hears Oral Arguments on President Obama's Executive Actions on Immigration


WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments regarding President Obama’s executive actions on immigration, the Deferred Action for Parental Accountability (DAPA) and the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). The implementation of these programs was initially blocked by a federal judge in Texas and later a federal appeals court upheld the preliminary injunction.

As a result, millions of undocumented immigrants who qualified under DAPA or expanded DACA have been denied the opportunity to receive temporary relief from deportation and to apply for work authorization.


“Today, we urge the Supreme Court to put partisan politics aside and follow previous court precedent by reaffirming the President’s executive authority to determine the Federal government’s immigration enforcement priorities,” said LULAC National Executive Director Brent Wilkes. “There is no question that the proper legal ruling in this case is to lift the lower court’s stay and allow as many as 5 million immigrants to apply for work permits and temporary reprieves from deportation through the DAPA and expanded DACA executive orders issued by the President in 2014. At stake today is the livelihood and dignity of immigrants across this country.”

The Browning of America : Trump and the Twilight of White Supremacy

by Jimmy Franco Sr.

Ethnic minorities within the US continue to see their numbers grow as these demographic changes are rapidly transforming the character of our society. This expanding sector is on average much younger than the general population and tends to be situated and expanding primarily within our urban areas. Changing immigration patterns are also reinforcing this demographic trend

A diversified group protests at at an anti-Trump event.
(Photo by Jabin Botsford

as the number of migrants from Europe has declined while those from Latin America and Asia have steadily increased. Moreover, the overall number of the white population is decreasing due to rapid aging, a low birth rate and a decrease in longevity. Such demographic changes are creating new economic and political challenges that require specific answers. This social transformation has also encountered hostility from a certain sector of our society that does not welcome change and wishes to maintain the status quo. What is urgently needed at this time are constructive proposals that address these new changes and issues and arrive at a collective resolution that will improve the lives of these young people as well as the well-being of the country as a whole.

The historical pattern of immigration and demographics has now changed

US history and its dialectical pattern of immigration has now been transformed into its opposite. During the 1700’s and 1800’s, colonial settlers were comprised of primarily poor immigrants who left Europe to improve their lives by seeking land to farm or sources of employment. About the middle of the 19th century, the white European population was still outnumbered in the South by enslaved Africans, by Mexicans within the Southwest and native Hawaiians and indigenous peoples in other parts of the country. Through a combination of accelerated immigration from Europe and officially-sanctioned racial violence inflicted upon these repressed ethnic groups, Euro-Americans eventually became the majority population by the end of the 19th century. During this period, the earlier European immigrants also reacted antagonistically toward the newly arrived Jews. Irish, Italians

Non-European immigration into the US is changing the character of society.

and other East Europeans with an upsurge of ugly racism and nativist campaigns. On the West Coast, Chinese and Japanese immigrants encountered the same type of bigotry. These hostile political campaigns were armed with a pseudo-science that attempted to prove that these new immigrants were biologically and ethnically inferior in contrast to the earlier Anglo-Germanic immigrants from northern Europe. From the latter half of the 20th century to the present, we have witnessed a reversal of this trend and the development of a new pattern of non-European immigration. The out migration from Europe to the US has now decreased while newcomers arriving from Latin-America, Asia and the Middle East have steadily increased in number. Also contributing to this change in demographic factors are a higher birth rate for US minorities and a decrease in longevity for whites. This has created the conditions for rapid economic, political and cultural changes to occur within society and for social conflicts to arise that require urgent solutions.

Berry Pickerts Want a Union and a Raise

http://thinkprogress.org/immigration/2016/04/01/3764433/driscolls-boycott/

r: 

Esther Yu-Hsi Lee

Date of Source: 

Friday, April 1, 2016

Think Progress

Some of the farmworkers who make it possible for U.S. consumers to have berries for breakfast are paid about $6 a day. Those farmworkers include children toiling for 12 hours a day at 85 percent the amount of money that adults get paid. Many farmworkers do not get lunch and rest breaks and are subjected to terrible housing conditions.
Hoping to rectify these issues, farmworkers in the United States and in Mexico have been on a three-year-long fight to get Driscolls — the world’s largest berry distributor — to recognize their unions so that they could have better working and living conditions. And now they’ve taken their complaints on the road in a month-long protest tour along the west coast.
Ramon Torres, a 31-year-old Mexican immigrant, is one of the people leading the fight to unionize. As the president of the independent farmworker union Families United for Justice (FUJ), he has been picking berries since he was 18 years old. His most recent employer was the Washington state-based Sakuma Bros. Farms, which supplies its products through the Driscoll’s label. Through the years, Torres has seen and experienced many hardships, like wage theft, lack of rest breaks, and cramped housing conditions. By law, his employer has to provide housing for migrant farmworkers like Torres. But the cabins often hold three times as many people as they should.
“They give us sheets of plastic to prevent the rain from coming into the cabin, so all we get is a flimsy piece of plastic for the roof,” Torres told ThinkProgress in a phone interview, explaining that there can be upwards of 14 people in each cabin meant for five people. And the mattresses are often torn and dirty [1], with cockroaches and rats running around.

FULL Speech By Rosario Dawson At A New York Bernie Sanders Rally March 3...

California Raises Minimum Wage- Si Se Puede !

In a move that puts California at the forefront of efforts to raise wages for low-income workers across the country, the Legislature approved a sweeping plan Thursday to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour over the next six years, boosting the future paychecks of millions of the state's workers.

The Senate voted 26 to 12 — with loud cheers of “Si se puede” from the gallery above — to give final approval and send the measure to Gov. Jerry Brown's desk less than one week after a legislative compromise. Brown will sign the wage hike into law in Los Angeles on Monday.

“At its core, this proposal is about fairness,” Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León (D-Los Angeles) said just before the vote.

“This is historic, and today I am proud to be a Californian.”

Under the plan, the state's hourly minimum wage would increase from the current $10 to $10.50 on Jan. 1, 2017, then to $11 the following year, and increase by $1 annually until 2022.