Category: Power to the People

North Carolina’s real patriots

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

http://youtu.be/n86zK9wLzvs

I am so proud of these people:

RALEIGH “Jennifer Ferrell stopped so her husband could take her picture. Then she waved goodbye to her 3-year-old twins and marched into the Legislative Building to get handcuffed.

“I’m excited. I’m not nervous,” the 34-year-old Raleigh resident said as she walked in a line of demonstrators. “I’m passionate. I’m not crazy.”

For weeks now, Ferrell heard about protesters getting arrested at the statehouse to demonstrate against the Republican majority’s legislative agenda. And like many Monday, she felt compelled to add her voice to the chants and her wrists to the handcuffs. “I knew it was time to stop watching and do it myself,” she said.

Authorities arrested 151 people in the rotunda between the legislative chambers during the latest “Moral Monday” protest – the largest mass arrest since the N.C. NAACP began organizing the weekly civil disobedience events in late April.

The number is nearly the equivalent to the arrests at the four prior protests combined and brings the total above 300 this session.

The crowd of spectators also exploded, with hundreds rallying on the mall outside the legislative building, listening to speakers condemn Republican legislative leaders. “That’s extreme,” shouted the Rev. William Barber, the N.C. NAACP president, into a loud speaker as he listed legislation Republicans have approved this year. “That’s immoral, and we must stand up and wake up right here, right now.”

Police estimated the crowd at 1,000 – about five times more than the last protest – but organizers counted 1,600.

Thanks to Price Benowitz LLP, Maryland.

Blue America chat

~ susie

http://youtu.be/U7c411e-jhU

Please click over to our new site at 11:00AM PDT, 2:00PM EDT for a Blue America chat with Daylin Leach from Pennsylvania.

He’s running for Allyson Schwartz’s old congressional seat and this guy’s the real deal:

Pennsylvania’s 13th congressional district, Northeast Philadelphia and Montgomery County– is one of the most liberal districts in the state. Obama beat McCain 65.4-33.7% in 2008 and did even better last year– 66.2-32.9%. The current congressmember, Allyson Schwartz, is giving up the seat to run for governor. She was reelected in November with 69% of the vote. She’s always been extremely cautious to not get out ahead on any contentious issues and tends to vote very conservatively for a Democrat in a safe seat, especially on issues of economic justice. This is the perfect time to replace her with a real leader and a courageous fighting progressive. State Senator Daylin Leach fits the bill perfectly. Take a look at the video up top. You have to admire a politician who brags about an “F” from the NRA and who launches a congressional campaign talking about introducing the first same sex marriage bill in the Pennsylvania legislature.

With his record of achievement, Daylin is a natural for Blue America. He’s been taking on tough issues that most politicians are afraid to get anywhere near– from legalizing marijuana to labeling genetically engineered food. He’s been a major opponent in the state legislature of Republican efforts to privatize and voucherize public education and has been one of the leading voices against GOP efforts at voter suppression. He supports the Grayson Takano No Cuts approach to dealing with Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. “At a time when corporate profits, executive compensation, the stock market and wealth disparity are at near record highs, it is obscene to even consider balancing our budget on the backs of seniors and veterans,” he told us. “I fully supported President Obama’s election, but I can’t support any drift towards corporatism to appease tea-party extremists… Republicans are, on a daily basis, showing their complete indifference to the poor, kids, the elderly and public safety as they not only perpetuate sequestration, but gloat about it. The clock ticks as America waits for some actual human beings with a soul to emerge from the Republican caucus.”

The next Elizabeth Warren

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

Is trying to get around the telecom industry:

Telecom regulators don’t usually have public followings, except perhaps among other telecom regulators. But as soon as rumors began circulating that Julius Genachowski planned to resign as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), petitions appeared on sites like BoingBoing, Reddit, and Daily Kos calling on President Barack Obama to appoint a 50-year-old law professor and former administration official named Susan Crawford as Genachowski’s successor. It’s not hard to see why she has acquired an enthusiastic fan base in these precincts of the Internet. With an appealing blend of earnestness and feistiness, Crawford is set on turning the sorry state of broadband and wireless services in the United States into the biggest populist outrage since Elizabeth Warren went after the banks.

Dropped calls, patchy Internet, and exorbitant bills are experiences many Americans are already angry about. But to Crawford, the telecom industry is a problem not just because of its dreadful service, but because it is undermining the future of the U.S. economy. Like Warren, she has a knack for making her case against the most powerful companies—she refers to them dismissively as “the incumbents”—in ways the average person can understand. At a public hearing in California, Crawford scoffed at a contention by AT&T and T-Mobile that local wireless markets were competitive: “This is like asserting that my former hometown of Washington, D.C., has several football teams: the Redskins, the Georgetown University team, and the Gonzaga High School team.” Discussing broadband with Bill Moyers, she observed, “The rich are getting gouged, the poor are very often left out, and this means that we’re creating, yet again, two Americas.”

The Warren effect

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

liz

Yes, they did:

In a closed meeting last week, the agencies told Warren and Rep. Elijah Cummings that they could not provide documents Warren and Cummings requested about the specific violations by mortgage servicers, or the results of the reviews, because doing so would violate company “trade secrets” (apparently ripping off your customers and stripping their assets is now a valuable trade secret). Practically any other senator would not get much attention from being denied documents by a federal regulator.

But Warren, with a grass-roots army of enthusiastic supporters and a yen to deliver on her early promise, makes headlines crossing the street. And the foreclosure review debacle represented an excellent test case to expose the corrupt dealing between banks and the regulators who are supposed to curb their excesses, and also to pit Wall Street denizens getting rich off these crimes against ordinary victims who lost their homes. You couldn’t tee up a better issue for Warren, or a better entryway for traditional media to report it.

Last Thursday’s hearing on the reviews, the first congressional hearing on foreclosure fraud in over a year, provided the perfect set piece. Warren, along with Jack Reed, Sherrod Brown and other Senate Democrats, pounded the regulators for protecting the banks and ignoring homeowners suffering from illegal foreclosures. Warren highlighted that nobody will ever learn the precise extent of harm suffered at the hands of banks, and that without a true accounting, adequately compensating homeowners would be impossible. Brown focused on the role of the third-party consultants who operate as shadow regulators, performing work when the agencies lack capacity, but without any independence from the banks.
Continue reading “The Warren effect” →

Occupy Philadelphia acquitted

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

I’m pretty darned happy about this:

A Common Pleas Court jury today acquitted 12 Occupy Philadelphia demonstrators arrested in a 2011 sit-in in a Wells Fargo Bank branch in Center City.

The jury of 10 women and two men deliberated a total of about 13 hours since Friday before it returned, shortly before noon, to announce the verdicts: not guilty of conspiracy and defiant trespass against each of the 12 protesters.

The 12 – one woman and 11 men – were arrested Nov. 18, 2011 when they staged a sit-in inside the Wells Fargo branch at 17th and Market Streets. The protesters said they wanted to call attention to what they called Wells Fargo’s “racist predatory lending” policies that caused a disproportionately large number of home foreclosures in African American neighborhoods.

“If this jury has found us innocent then it must mean that Wells Fargo is guilty,” said an elated 71-year-old Willard R. Johnson, one of the 12 on trial.

Last July, Wells Fargo, the nation’s largest mortgage lender, agreed to pay $175 million to settle allegations by the U.S. Justice Department that independent brokers originating its loans charged higher fees and rates to minority borrowers than they did to white borrowers with similar credit risks.

The arrests occurred during a season of Occupy encampments and demonstrations in Center City but the Wells Fargo protest – a confrontation between free-speech and private property rights – was the first in which Occupy protesters were convicted of a crime.

Last June, Municipal Court President Judge Marsha H. Neifield found all guilty of the trespass charge and fined each $500 plus court costs.

Under Philadelphia court rules, people found guilty in Municipal Court have the right to a new trial in Common Pleas Court.

This time, Judge Nina N. Wright Padilla asked all 12 to approach so she could shake their hands.

“I hope you continue your work in a law-abiding way,” said Padilla. “I must say you are the most affable group of defendants I’ve ever come across.”

The current trial began Feb. 25 with seven lawyers representing the 12 free of charge. The defense argued that the sit-in was protected by the First Amendment’s free-speech guarantee. They also contended the protest served a “greater good” for society that outweighed the trespass charge.