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My complaint is that my ‘vacation’ is over and back to the cubicle I go :(. I know in the grand scheme of things worldwide it does not rank very high up there as far as complaints go, but alas… its still no fun.

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Bernie Sanders Lends Support to U. Chicago Grad Students’ Unionization Effort

Sen. Bernie Sanders has lent his support to the unionization efforts of graduate students at the University of Chicago, as labor activists at his alma mater say the administration has been throwing up roadblocks ahead of a vote on the issue.

Sanders wrote in a letter to Graduate Students United “it is not my intention to tell you how to vote” in the union elections, scheduled to take place over Tuesday and Wednesday, before going on to voice his support for labor advocates who face off with employers who want to make “all the decisions unilaterally.”

“What forming a union means is that you and your co-workers will have the opportunity to sit down as legal equals with management to negotiate a legally binding contract covering all aspects of your wages, benefits, and working conditions,” wrote Sanders.

The Vermont senator and former Democratic presidential candidate wrote, “Nationally, unionized workers make wages that are on average 27 percent more than non-union workers, with significantly better benefits and working conditions.”

“I respect the critical work you do every day, and wish you the very best in your efforts to create a democratic workplace where your voice can really be heard,” he added.

For Abandoning Climate Accord, Pope Swipes Trump on World Food Day

Pope Francis seemed to take a jab at the United States and President Donald Trump on Monday, while speaking at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s Rome headquarters for World Food Day.

The pope called on the global community to work together to solve the related issues of hunger, climate change, and the refugee crisis.

“We see consequences of climate change every day,” he said. “Thanks to scientific knowledge, we know how we have to confront the problem and the international community has also worked out the legal methods, such as the Paris Accord, which sadly, some have abandoned,” he added, with an apparent reference to the Trump administration’s commitment to withdrawing from the 2015 agreement.

“We are called to propose a change in lifestyle and the use of resources,” he said. “We can’t be satisfied by saying ‘someone else will do it.'”

Pope Francis condemned “negligence toward the delicate equilibriums of the ecosystems, the presumption of manipulating and controlling the limited resources of the planet, and the greed for profit.”

“The yoke of poverty caused by the often tragic movement of migrants can be removed by prevention,” he declared, “consisting of development projects that create jobs and offer the capacity to respond to climactic and environmental changes.”

Why can’t Bernie headline a women’s march?

Identity politics strikes again. This time, the battlefield is the Detroit Women’s March scheduled for late October, which will feature an opening night address from — horror of horrors — Bernard Sanders. For many Democrats, this is apparently a cause for crisis. MSNBC host Joy Ann Reid, for instance, took to Twitter on Thursday to object that Sanders is a “white man” who believes “uteruses are just much less important than jailing the bankers and free college for the Rust Belt.” Like many centrist Democrats, her angst was visceral. “Literally nothing matters anymore,” she said.

After all, it’s not like women weren’t invited. A Women’s March representative clarified to Bustle that prominent female politicians like Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Kristen Gillibrand were all invited, but declined to attend. Sixty other women will be given a platform, however, including crowd favorite Maxine Waters, who will be delivering the convention’s keynote address, and a number of prominent leftists, like Nina Turner and Nomiki Konst. In light of the unavailability of the prominent women who were asked to attend, the appeal of featuring the most popular politician in America strikes me as obvious.

And yet the criticism persisted.

SBCC’s Trustee David Panbehchi inspired by Bernie Sanders

The Associated Student Senate Room in the Campus Center is quiet and peaceful, with a long desk at its center and an office on the side where one can hear the Academic Senate President and Vice President working in the background. Relative to the energy and tension during some Senate meetings, the atmosphere feels like a brief respite, a calm before the storm.

This is where David Panbehchi often does his work. Panbehchi served as the Commissioner of Events in the Associated Student Senate last year and is serving as the Student Trustee on the Board of Trustees this year.

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His primary catalyst for becoming politically active was through hearing Bernie Sanders’ speeches during last year’s election cycle. In particular, a short video called “Bernie Sanders Then and Now” — which illustrates Sanders’ political career since 1985 with segments of his speeches throughout that time period — convinced him that he was fighting for working people, marginalized people and the oppressed.

“When I saw that video, I found new direction, not only in life, but in my education. I realized that, as Bernie said, ‘we are living in a nation and a world which worships, not love of brothers and sisters, not love of the poor and the sick, but love for the acquisition of money,” Panbehchi said.

“At the end of the day, we are judged on how we treat the most vulnerable people. In my view, politics is the way I believe we can achieve the goals of justice, morality, and equality for all people.”

In an extreme world, Democrats need to move left

It’s been that long since a Democratic state legislator rose during the Q&A after a speech and asked me a deceptively simple thing: What should Democrats do now? What should their message be?

I had no idea how to answer that, nor even any confidence that I was the one to do it. It seemed to me it was a question not for a professional kvetcher uninterested in the nuts and bolts of political machinery, but, rather, for some high-powered operative like Donna Brazile or James Carville.

But then, it is high-powered operatives who’ve led the party into its present cul de sac.

Indeed, as internecine fighting loudly fractures the GOP, Democrats quietly struggle with a civil war of their own. Largely shut out of power at the state and federal levels, the party is torn between pragmatists who want to chase Donald Trump’s voters with a centrist economic agenda and insurrectionists a la Bernie Sanders who want to move hard to the left. What should Democrats do?

As I said, I’ve been wrestling with that. And I finally have an answer.

The Democrats need to move left.

Trump Revives Notorious GOP Dog Whistle in Call for ‘Welfare Reform’

Rehashing a notorious Republican Party trope that accuses some Americans of cheating safety net programs, President Donald Trump on Monday said his administration is looking “very, very strongly” at “welfare reform.”

“People are taking advantage of the system and then other people aren’t receiving what they really need to live and we think it is very unfair to them,” Trump said during a meeting with cabinet officials. “Some people are really taking advantage of our system from that standpoint.”

The welfare system was last “reformed” during the administration of former President Bill Clinton, and the results were devastating.

According to research by sociologists Kathryn Edin and Luke Shaefer, extreme poverty more than doubled in the two decades following the passage in 1996 of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which imposed draconian work requirements on welfare recipients and converted federal welfare funds into block grants.

Now, Trump appears to be preparing to shred what is left of the social safety net. And as Clio Chang of Splinter News points out, Trump is deploying the same rhetorical formula as his welfare-slashing predecessors.

Attorneys for Trump Accuser Subpoena All Materials Related to Sexual Assault Allegations

The Trump administration has issued a number of statements regarding the mounting allegations against Hollywood executive Harvey Weinstein, who has been accused of sexual assault and harrassment by dozens of women. But new revelations about a court case involving one of President Donald Trump’s own accusers has put the predatory behavior Trump freely admitted to, back in the news.

In her defamation lawsuit against the president, the legal team of former Apprentice contestant Summer Zervos has subpoenaed “all documents concerning any accusations that were made during Donald J. Trump’s election campaign for president, that he subjected any woman to unwanted sexual touching and/or sexually inappropriate behavior.”

Zervos was one of ten women who accused the president of sexual misconduct last October, after the release of an audio recording in which Trump bragged about assaulting women.

Trump swiftly dismissed the allegations, calling them “lies” and tweeting a blanket denial less than a month before the election. After he won the presidency last November, Zervos mounted her lawsuit against Trump.

The Trump campaign has said that the lawsuit “has no legal merit” because Trump’s statements about Zervos “were made during a national political campaign that involved heated political debate in political forums.”

http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2017/10/16/cyrus-vance-fundraising/

It looked like it was just another day outside the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office on Hogan Place — except it wasn’t.

District Attorney Cyrus Vance had just done something quite unusual for someone seeking re-election. He ordered a halt to his campaign fundraising in the face of embarrassing questions about some of the people who have ponied up to keep him in office.

“Over the past few days, I’ve learned that it’s not enough for me to have confidence in my independence from donors. The people of New York have to be confident about it as well,” he said in an op-ed piece announcing an independent review of his fundraising apparatus.

As CBS2 Political Reporter Marcia Kramer explained, it came as the long time prosecutor — running unopposed — found himself in the eye of an ethics storm.

He’s been questioned about not bringing charges against public figures accused of crimes; Harvey Weinstein, Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr, Bill de Blasio, and questioned about contributions from their legal teams or their firms.

Cyrus Vance and the Myth of the Progressive Prosecutor

This month, it was reported that the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr., chose not to prosecute Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr. for fraud when he had the chance in 2012. Similarly, Mr. Vance declined to bring sexual abuse charges against the now-disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein in 2015, even though he had an audiotape of Mr. Weinstein admitting to groping the victim.

Mr. Vance’s willingness to ignore possible wrongdoing by powerful people is a serious issue. But his biggest failures have not been the cases he won’t prosecute, but rather the ones he does.

Mr. Vance is considered one of America’s most progressive prosecutors and has the accolades to prove it. In 2015, he helped create the Institute for Innovation in Prosecution at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Two years earlier, Attorney General Eric Holder gave him an award for having developed a partnership between local youths and law enforcement aimed at reducing violence.

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However, like many prosecutors across the country who get credit for changing the game while continuing draconian practices, Mr. Vance simply isn’t the reformer he paints himself as.

Look at the data. Manhattan holds less than 20 percent of the city’s population, but on an average day, almost 40 percent of Rikers Island inmates are from the borough. This disparity has been attributed in part to his office’s zealous prosecution of misdemeanors. As of 2015, Mr. Vance was more likely to prosecute a misdemeanor charge than any other district attorney in New York City.

And despite lamenting racism in the criminal justice system, Mr. Vance perpetuates worrisome racial disparities. A 2014 Vera Institute of Justice study found that black and Latino defendants prosecuted by Mr. Vance’s office were more likely to be detained at booking, compared with similarly situated white defendants. And last year, 51 percent of marijuana cases involving black defendants in Manhattan ended in conviction, while only 23 percent involving whites did.

Our Revolution Somerville’s Campaign to Separate the Progressives from the Poseurs

Most of Rand Wilson’s knocks went unanswered, but seeds were planted. At one house, a 30-year-old registered Democrat, Caitlin, lit up when he mentioned Bernie Sanders.

“So is this what he meant by the political revolution?” she asks.

She didn’t join Our Revolution Somerville (ORS), but did say she would take a closer look at its slate.

In Somerville, the battle for the future of the Democratic Party is waged street by street. Wilson and other ORS members plan to overthrow the political establishment in a city where Democrats have long controlled the levers of power. It’ll be one step, they hope, toward transforming the party.

Wilson, a union organizer with SEIU Local 888, was one of a dozen ORS members who canvassed that day. The goal is to knock on 3,000 doors by Election Day on November 7, turn out new voters for ORS’ endorsed candidates, sign up new members, and get signatures on a petition to put an initiative for paid family and medical leave on the Massachusetts ballot in 2018.

Murdered Panama Papers journalist’s son attacks Malta’s ‘crooks’

The son of the murdered Maltese investigative journalist and blogger Daphne Caruana Galizia has described running desperately round the blazing car in which she died and hit out bitterly at the island’s “culture of impunity” and the “crooks” in charge.

“My mother was assassinated because she stood between the rule of law and those who sought to violate it, like many strong journalists,” Matthew Caruana Galizia wrote in a moving and at times graphic Facebook post.

“But she was also targeted because she was the only person doing so. This is what happens when the institutions of the state are incapacitated: the last person left standing is often a journalist. Which makes her the first person left dead.”

Daphne Caruana Galizia, who led the Panama Papers investigation into corruption in Malta on which her son, another investigative journalist, also worked, was killed on Monday afternoon when her Peugeot was destroyed by an explosive device so powerful it scattered large pieces of the car around a nearby field.

Several thousand people gathered at an impromptu candlelit vigil in Sliema, near the island’s capital Valletta, on Monday night to mourn the journalist, described as a “one-woman WikiLeaks” whose blogs were as fiercely critical of the island’s politicians as they were of its organised crime gangs.