The Supreme Court Decided Your Silence Can Be Used Against You
A nation continues to wait for final word on the Supreme Court’s Big Four cases, but the justices’ closest call arrived first on Monday, in a ruling that just made your right to remain silent a lot more complicated — just ask Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
Just FYI, the “Supreme Court” has now made it possible for your silence to be used against you unless you first say “I am invoking my fifth amendment rights” prior to being read your miranda rights. I’m sure cops everywhere will be honest about whether or not this is said.
[photo: centered in the photo is a Black woman carrying a child in one arm with her other arm and fist raised. she is in the middle of chanting. there are others around her. a protest sign from the fast food strike in the background reads, “we are worth more. strike for 15. D15”
Fast food strike wave spreads to Detroit, St. Louis
May 10, 2013St. Louis, and last month’s in New York and Chicago, today’s work stoppage is backed by a local coalition including the Service Employees International Union, and the participants are demanding a raise to $15 an hour and the chance to form a union without intimidation.
Organizers say that over a hundred workers joined the St. Louis strike between Wednesday and Thursday. That included a group of Jimmy John’s workers who alleged that management humiliated them by requiring them to hold up signs in public with messages including “I made 3 wrong sandwiches today” and “I was more than 13 seconds in the drive thru.”
“Sometimes I walk for more than an hour just to save my train fare so I can spend it on Ramen noodles,” St. Louis Chipotle worker Patrick Leeper said in an e-mailed statement Thursday. “I can’t even think about groceries.”
A spokesperson for Jimmy John’s declined to comment on Thursday’s strike; McDonald’s and Wendy’s did not respond to inquiries last night.
As I’ve written elsewhere, the fate of the fast food strike wave carries far-reaching implications: Fast food jobs are a growing portion of our economy, and fast food-like conditions are proliferating in other sectors as well. Organizers say the fast food industry now employs twice as many Detroit-area workers as the city’s iconic auto industry. These strikes also come at a moment of existential crisis for the labor movement, a sobering reality that was brought into sharp relief in December when Michigan, arguably the birthplace of modern US private sector unionism, became the country’s latest “Right to Work” state.
Along with a shared significant supporter—SEIU—the campaigns in New York, Chicago, St. Louis and Detroit have apparent strategies in common. Rather than waiting until they’ve built support from a majority of a store’s or company’s workers, they stage actions by a minority of the workforce designed to inspire their co-workers. Rather than publicly identifying the campaign and its organizers with a single international union, these union-funded efforts turn to allied community groups to spearhead organizing. Rather than training all their resources on a single company, they organize against all of the industry’s players at once. And—faced with legal and economic assaults that have weakened the strike weapon—these campaigns mount one-day work stoppages that are carefully tailored to maximize attention and minimize, but not eliminate, the risk that workers will lose their jobs.
Whether these strategies can ever compel a fast food giant to negotiate with its employees remains to be seen.
“After what I would consider well over three decades of wage suppression, workers in this particular industry—and then I think it’ll go to others—are realizing that their only way up the wage ladder is through their own organizations,” CUNY labor studies lecturer Ed Ott said Wednesday. Ott, a board member of the community organizing group that spearheaded the New York fast food strike, added, “The only way these workers are going to be able to advance these jobs is through unionization. And I think that idea has finally gotten traction.”
Update (9:15 AM Friday): According to the campaign, a walkout by twenty workers at Detroit’s 10400 Gratiot Avenue McDonald’s prevented the store from operating. Some workers brought in as strikebreakers to replace those striking workers chose to join the strike instead.
Organizers say that by day’s end, today’s strike could be the largest fast food work stoppage yet, topping last month’s 400-strong strike in New York.
Gagged by Big Ag: How Exposing Abuse Became a Crime
Illustration by Tim O’Brien
Horrific abuse. Rampant contamination. And the crime is…exposing it?by…
Immigrants Reach Beyond a Legal Barrier for a Reunion
These photos are of Dreamers, children of immigrants without documents for this country, who were brought to the United States and never knew they were “illegal,” reuniting with their deported parents through a border wall in Nogales, Arizona.
If you have any reaction to these photos other than empathy, I don’t really want to know.
Nah I’m angry too
Mad as hell
Cause this shouldn’t be happening
In 1991, while in prison awaiting charges for possession of incendiary devices, Barry Horne reestablished the Support Animal Rights Prisoners organization. The SARP newsletters were distributed free of charge and became a popular forum for discussion and prisoner solidarity. TALON is posting the complete set of these newsletters in 3 installments, the first of which is available HERE.
Meet Alex, first ‘Sesame’ Muppet to have a dad in jail
(Photo: TODAY)
Those friendly, fuzzy Muppets from “Sesame Street” have helped kids open up about all sorts of serious subjects, from hunger and divorce to military deployment.
But they’re now tackling a much more unexpected issue: incarceration.
Just to let you know how bad the incarceration rate has gotten, it’s now a sesame street issue.
I posted about this a few days ago, and was surprised how many people messaged me to say that they grew up with a father or mother who had done time.
I know that we all have our blind spots, the little things we don’t so much ignore as fail to see because our own experience has yet to open our eyes. Very few people in the United States think about Incarceration, and if they do, they generally put it right back out of their minds by dismissing those inside as being deserving of their fate. As silly as it sounds, I hope that the media attention on this Sesame Street character leads to a new generation that understands the humanity of those behind bars, the impact of incarceration on families and our broader society, and how casually and callously this imperialist power that seeks to govern us will take away a person’s freedom. Remember, we live in a country where people are doing time for defending themselves from rapists, for smoking pot, for feeding themselves after capitalism stole their other means to do so, and for fighting back against animal abusers, earth destroyers, corporate rule, and police brutality. Before you ignore the plight of the incarcerated and their families, consider that with incarceration (and poverty) rates rapidly increasing, it may not be long before you no longer have the privilege of turning a blind eye.
(Source: TODAY.com)
The riots also offered a glimpse into how photographs can be used out of context:
‘Sir: In last week’s article about the poll-tax riot in Trafalgar Square (‘THE MOB’S BRIEF RULE’, 7 April) there is a large photograph labelled ‘A West End shopper argues with a protester’. The woman in the photograph is me, and I thought you might like to know the true story behind the picture.
I was on my way to the theatre, with my husband. As we walked down Regent Street at about 6.30pm, the windows were intact and there was a large, cheerful, noisy group of poll-tax protesters walking up from Piccadilly Circus. We saw ordinary uniformed police walking alongside, on the pavement, keeping a low profile. The atmosphere was changed dramatically in moments when a fast-walking, threatening group of riot-squad police appeared.
We walked on to the top of Haymarket, where the atmosphere was more tense and more protesters were streaming up Haymarket from the Trafalgar Square end. Suddenly a group of mounted police charged at full gallop into the rear of the group of protesters, scattering them, passers-by and us and creating panic. People screamed and some fell. Next to me and my husband another group of riot-squad appeared, in a most intimidating manner.
The next thing that happened is what horrified me most. Four of the riot-squad police grabbed a young girl of 18 or 19 for no reason and forced her in a brutal manner on to the crowd-control railings, with her throat across the top of the railings. Her young male companion was frantically trying to reach her and was being held back by one riot-squad policeman. In your photograph I was urging the boy to calm down or he might be arrested; he was telling me that the person being held down across the railings was his girlfriend.
My husband remonstrated with the riot-squad policeman holding the boy, and I shouted at the four riot-squad men to let the girl go as they were obviously hurting her. To my surprise, they did let her go – it was almost as if they did not know what they were doing.
The riot-squad policemen involved in this incident were not wearing any form of identification. Their epaulettes were unbuttoned and flapping loose; I lifted them on two men and neither had any numbers on. There was a sergeant with them, who was numbered and my husband asked why his men wore no identifying numbers. The sergeant replied that it did not matter as he knew who the men were. We are a middle-aged suburban couple who now feel more intimidated by the Metropolitan police than by a mob. If we feel so angry, how on earth did the young hot-heads at the rally feel?’
Mrs R.A. Sare, Northwood, Middlessex Source
Guardian front page, 17 June 2013
Foreign politicians and officials who took part in two G20 summit meetings in London in 2009 had their computers monitored and their phone calls intercepted on the instructions of their British government hosts, according to documents seen by the Guardian.
Well, holy shit.
Joanne Little was acquitted of murder charges for the killing of a white jailer (August 14, 1974). The defense said she stabbed the jailer with an ice pick after he made sexual advances. Ms. Little was the first woman in United States history to be acquitted using the defense (she used deadly force to resist sexual assault). Her case also has become classic in legal circles as a pioneering instance of the application of scientific jury selection.
Gay parole officers, yay pride, whee yay #itsthe90s
When your liberation means you can join your former oppressor…
Just a reminder that 166 Guantanamo Bay detainees have been on hunger strike for more than three months now, & 43 are being force-fed in what doctors have just called “a medical ethics-free zone.”
GITMO cartoon by Matt Bors
That lying, fake-ass liberal has no intention of shutting down Guantanamo or doing anything else that his corporate sponsors haven’t approved of. Every so often he sheds some crocodile tears to reassure those gullible souls who still believe he’s here for Hope and Change, and then the program of the rich and wealthy continues on without any interference from him whatsoever.
