In the Noted section of this week’s The Nation, I have a brief take on a new report on foreclosures:
At a recent meeting with the editorial board of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Republican front-runner Mitt Romney said, “Don’t try and stop the foreclosure process. Let it run its course and hit the bottom.” A new report suggests that even after all the damage wrought by the crisis, the bottom is a long way off.
Subscribers can read the whole thing here.
Passing through the halls one day in September, Martha Reyes stopped to see why a group of her Hyatt co-workers stood laughing in front of a bulletin board. Looking closer, she saw photos of her head, and those of other housekeeping employees, pasted onto bodies in swimsuits. “I got really angry,” says Reyes, seeing her face on a figure that looked “almost naked, and a very different body that wasn’t mine. I felt very humiliated and embarrassed.” Martha’s sister Lorena was also included in the beach-themed display, which Hyatt management had posted over the weekend as part of Housekeeping Appreciation Week. Martha Reyes took down her picture and her sister’s. A month later, alleging they spent too long on their lunch break, the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara fired both of them.
Read it here.
Occupy Weekly, Thanksgiving Edition:
Occupy Wall Street supporters were shocked this week after police pepper-sprayed a line of UC Davis students for peacefully refusing to leave the protest site Sunday. That evening, as school chancellor Linda Katehi walked from a meeting to her car, hundreds of students lined up in silence to condemn the police’s actions. The incident inspired calls for the chancellor’s resignation, a several hundred-strong rally the next day, and a general strike called for next week.
Read it all here.
I’ll be writing a weekly labor piece for In These Times. Here’s the first one, on Starbucks’ “Let Them Eat Wristbands” approach to unemployment:
This month Starbucks launched its Create Jobs for USA initiative, the coffee chain’s official response to America’s unemployment crisis. In a press release, CEO Howard Schultz says the program gives customers the chance to “take meaningful action to help create and sustain American jobs.” “We hope this a galvanizing moment as Americans come together to be catalysts for change,” Schultz continues. The program will no doubt boost Starbucks’ image—and the density of red white and blue wristbands across America. But jobs? Not so much.
This week’s edition of the Occupy Weekly at the Prospect:
This was the week that Occupy Wall Street faced its greatest pushback and pulled off its largest action yet. Sunday’s surprise police raid on Occupy Portland turned out to be one of several around the country, as mayors sent cops to clear occupations in cities including Chapel Hill, Salt Lake City, and New York. Some raids were marked by violence against protesters and press (including reporters from the right-wing New York Post and Daily Caller).
For The Prospect, my reporting (and speculation) on where Occupy Wall Street goes from here:
Early Tuesday morning, surprised by a violent police raid on Zuccotti Park, dozens of Occupy Wall Street activists stayed and accepted arrest, a few chained themselves to a tree (which was cut down by police), and others fled, though not all fast enough to escape tear gas. Later that morning, protesters returned expecting the city would yield to a temporary restraining order allowing their camp, but police ignored the order. Tuesday evening, defeated in court, occupiers returned to Liberty Plaza, filing in one or two at a time past watchful police. There were new signs (“Curfew 10 PM”), new rules (no lying down), and a newly urgent question: What’s next?
Here’s this week’s edition of the “Occupy Weekly” at the Prospect“:
This week, the Occupy Wall Street spokes council—a recently created decision-making body composed of people from the movement’s various working groups—met for the first time; the OWS General Assembly voted to denounce “Jobs for the 99%,” a website backed by the energy industry and unions marshalling OWS language against opponents of the Keystone XL pipeline; and a dozen New York occupiers set out on a 300-mile march to Washington, D.C., planning to reach the capital in time for a Super Committee meeting November 23.
I also round up news from the rest of the country, and highlight five more must-read articles and a Photo of the Week. Check it out.
I contributed another Occupy Philly report to The Nation‘s second slide show of urban occupations:
But Occupy Philly faces a more immediate threat: the City has set a Tuesday deadline for occupiers to vacate their City Hall encampment to make way for construction. Activists filled a Friday hearing on the renovation plans, which they criticize as a misdirection of public resources and an effective privatization of public space. Some occupiers intend to stay and defy the eviction, while others are planning to relocate the occupation to a public plaza outside the Municipal Services Building across the street. There they’ll be under the watchful eye of a statue of Frank Rizzo, the former police commissioner (and ex-mayor) sued by the federal Justice Department over police brutality.
I’m excited to share that I’ll be doing a new weekly project for The Prospect:
Each week, we’ll review the news from Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park and other Occupy movements across the country. For the inaugural edition, we’ve put together the five key pieces that have helped shape our understanding of what OWS is, where it comes from, and where it could be headed.
Check out my first post, and please reach out on twitter or e-mail to suggest articles to promote, or what should be the Photo of the Week.
Here’s my report for Alternet on labor’s push for a Financial Transactions Tax:
NNU co-president and 37-year nursing veteran Karen Higgins says she and her co-workers “see the fallout” of a broken economy on a daily basis at work. “We’ve been watching patients coming in sicker because they can’t afford health insurance, or they have health insurance but they can’t they can’t afford the co-pays, or they can’t afford the test…So what happens is they get sicker, and we see things that could have been preventable that now are not.”
I have a new article up at The Nation on how longshore workers turned a threat to their job security into a crisis for their city:
On September 16, 200 longshore workers and supporters lined up outside the sheriff’s office in Longview, Washington, and announced they were ready to turn themselves in for arrest. For thirty minutes, they stood in the parking lot with their hands behind their backs as sheriff’s deputies photographed them from above. Dozens of longshore workers had already been arrested for trespassing and blocking railroad tracks in defense of their jobs. Deputies declined to arrest any of the workers in the parking lot that morning, but hours later they resumed tracking down and arresting longshore workers throughout the city—at home, at gas stations, outside a church—for repeatedly halting commerce through the Longview port.
For The Nation, I interviewed the filmmakers working on La Tierra de los Adioses (“The Land of Goodbyes”):
How does it affect the town’s culture? When I interviewed Mexican kids about America, I expected them to say, “Oh, it’s awesome I want to go there.” But they said “It sucks. You just work long hours, and you just go from your house to your workplace, and that’s it.” Hearing those answers changed my perspective on the kids. I used to just see them as people who were dreaming of coming to the US. But they don’t really want to come to the US. They want to stay in their town. They want to help their town to progress, they want to be with their families. Yet because of the economic situation and the lack of opportunities, they are forced into thinking that they need to come to the US, and that’s the best thing that could happen to them.
Josh Eidelson 