Occupy Birmingham held a candle light vigil on Saturday, Jan. 7 at the Ward’s home in Center Point and about 50 people turned out (see video above). The city of Center Point is now reeling from the devastating affects of an F3 tornado that hit on the morning of Monday, Jan. 23, but the Ward home, just a couple of hundred feet from where the storm hit, was spared. Shortly after the vigil, Bank of America agreed to change the foreclosure sale date from the Jan. 26 to the March 29 and to consider a proposal for the Ward’s to obtain a new mortgage, according to Occupy Birmingham. If you want to help, you can sign an online petition here.
A federal appeals court has balked at deciding a controversial legal case pitting the Alabama Education Association and its ability to raise membership dues against the new Republican administration dead set on weakening public employee unions and suppressing votes for Democrats.
According to a court filing that just popped up online from the Eleventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, the federal appeals court panel tossed the state’s appeal in the case back to the all Republican Alabama Supreme Court. The professional organization for teachers won a victory in a lower court and obtained a preliminary injunction against the enforcement of a law passed by the new so-called “Super Majority” of Republicans in the state Legislature, a law written to prohibit payroll deductions to groups that use some of the money for “political activity.”
The appeals court panel indicated it would be “constitutional” for the Legislature to block the payroll deduction if the organization is guilty of “electioneering.”
Earlier Monday nearly 20 protesters were arrested in the atrium of the World Financial Centre following a protest against Goldman Sachs. This video shows a credentialed photographer attempting to photograph the arrests of protesters, being pushed back with a baton by one NYPD officer. Another officer continues to block his line of sight.
Free-lance photographer Robert Stolarik, who was working for the New York Times, was one of the few media able to remain in Zuccotti Park during the November 14 raid. His photos of Monday’s action appear with the article.
“A Question of Integrity” examines growing concerns about ethically questionable and overtly political behavior by some Supreme Court justices, and explores the need the need to apply the same ethical standards that govern every other judge in the federal court system to the nation’s highest court. Viewers are called to action in support of reforms essential to preserve the integrity of our most important legal institution.
Editor’s note: The following is the foreword to Corporations Are Not People: Why They Have More Rights Than You Do and What You Can Do About It, by Jeffrey Clements, a new book from Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
Rarely have so few imposed such damage on so many. When five conservative members of the Supreme Court handed for-profit corporations the right to secretly flood political campaigns with tidal waves of cash on the eve of an election, they moved America closer to outright plutocracy, where political power derived from wealth is devoted to the protection of wealth.
It is now official: Just as they have adorned our athletic stadiums and multiple places of public assembly with their logos, corporations can officially put their brand on the government of the United States as well as the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the fifty states.
The decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission giving “artificial entities” the same rights of “free speech” as living, breathing human beings will likely prove as infamous as the Dred Scott ruling of 1857 that opened the unsettled territories of the United States to slavery whether future inhabitants wanted it or not. It took a civil war and another hundred years of enforced segregation and deprivation before the effects of that ruling were finally exorcised from our laws.
God spare us civil strife over the pernicious consequences of Citizens United, but unless citizens stand their ground, America will divide even more swiftly into winners and losers with little pity for the latter.
Well, it’s official. Now that they think they have run all the Mexicans out of Alabama, the tea party Republicans are going to try to bring back the convict-lease system of slave labor to the state. The national and local backlash over the state’s draconian immigration law was apparently not enough.
Conservative Senator Arthur Orr, a Republican from Decatur, has prefiled a bill for the next session of the Alabama Legislature in February that would make it legal for private companies to hire prisoners to work on farms and chicken processing plants and even in manufacturing industries.
“There was probably no issue in the 20th century that has left a more negative, lasting impression of Alabama than the convict-lease system,” Historian and author Dr. Wayne Flynt said in an exclusive interview. “If Orr and Scott Beason decided that they had not done enough damage to the state already with the anti-immigration law, and they wanted to ratchet up the damage, to extend it and expand it and make Alabama even more the laughing stock of the nation, creating a convict-lease system in Alabama would just be a great idea.”
Under existing law, the employment of prisoners within the Department of Corrections facilities by private industry is not authorized, according to language in the bill. The proposed law would specifically authorize the Department of Corrections to enter into contract agreements with private industry “to establish work-oriented rehabilitation programs.”
Concerned citizens are being asked to join with Occupy Birmingham and other civic and religious organizations Dec. 3 to stand up for civil and economic rights of Alabama and protest the state’s new repressive immigration law and its participation in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention and deportation program.
Participants will gather in Gadsden at 12 p.m. and march to the Etowah County Detention Center, a privatized prison which houses a quota-based average of 325 undocumented immigrants on any given day. The Federal ICE program falls under Homeland Security and was billed as a way of detaining undocumented criminals, yet studies show that in some states 80 percent of those deported have committed no major crimes. In addition Alabama’s state law, H.B.56, encourages racial profiling, restricts employment, the use of public utilities and puts unnecessary strain on law enforcement resources.
“The economic cost to Alabama is only beginning to be estimated,” organizers said in a press release announcing the protest. “In taxes alone undocumented immigrants bring the state $130 million a year.”
During the Bush years, we specialized in covering the politicization of the U.S. justice system as much as any news organization. Our archives are about the most comprehensive for anyone researching the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, and the original case against Richard Scrushy, which Glynn Wilson covered for The New York Times.
