Nurses took to the strike lines at Barton Memorial Hospital in chilly South Lake Tahoe !
“Nurses who work together for many years are able to provide the highest quality of care. Experienced nurses have an important role in providing training and mentorship to newer nurses. However, due to Barton’s short staffing and inadequate benefits, nurses leave at an alarming rate.” – Kelli Teteak, RN, Intensive Care Unit
By James Patrick Jordan
Back in 2015, I went with leaders of the Fensuagro agricultural workers federation for a series of consultations in the coffee growing areas of the Department of Tolima. These consultations were to ask rural communities about what their hopes were for the pending Peace Accord, and what kinds of benefits and developments they looked forward to via the agreement. A major component of the accord, which would be finalized in November 2016, was a commitment by the state for rural development to create alternatives to the cultivation of crops with illicit uses, open up new markets, and build decent roads to get those crops to those markets.
I was very surprised by the main content of the consultations. Yes, the farmers talked about their expectations for peace. Yes, they talked about the relief they longed to experience cultivating crops without fear of war and political violence. But what they talked even more about had to do with their concerns around climate change. In every community we visited, we heard about how the farmers were being impacted by new weather patterns that were shrinking the zones where coffee could be grown. They also talked about new infestations of pests that were plaguing their fields as a result of warming temperatures. The issue of substitution was no longer just one of converting illicit cultivation to licit. They were discussing substituting new crops for coffee because the ecosystem had been irreversibly altered.
Since the Peace Accord was implemented, virtually none of the commitments of the state for rural development have been honored. The administration of US President Donald Trump has advocated repeatedly against those commitments and called for forced eradication of coca and marijuana fields with no development in return. The White House has demanded a return to the spraying of entire communities with the carcinogen glyphosate (developed by Monsanto as RoundUp), that defoliates not only illegal crops, but also natural vegetation as well as alternative and legal agricultural production. The puppet administration of Colombia’s President Ivan Duque has been all too willing to comply with Trump’s demands.
This has coincided with the highest levels of political violence against popular movements and rural communities in many years. An oft repeated statistic is that every 30 hours a social movement leader or human rights defender is murdered in Colombia. Most these can also be described as environmental activists and land and water protectors. As many as 75% of the victims are from rural communities.
Colombia’s rural, indigenous, and Afro-Colombian communities are truly on the front line when it comes to combating the effects of climate change and other attacks on the environment. Earth defenders are killed, and families are forcibly displaced because the territories they inhabit are coveted by oil companies, mining companies, hydroelectric companies, big agribusinesses wanting to impose vast fields of monoculture crops, and narco-traffickers. One example is the village of Las Vegas in the municipality of Dolores, Tolima, where coffee growers were being forced off their land because the area had been found to contain oil reserves.
I have also traveled extensively in Colombia’s far north, where the Department of La Guajira is found. In that department, every year 600 to 700 Wayuú indigenous children die because of a drought exacerbated by coal mining developments. There and in the next-door Department of César, big coal mining projects like Cerrejón and the Drummond mines are diverting water resources and contaminating the water that remains. The region’s rivers and streams are the lifeblood of local agriculture. The theft and contamination of these water sources has worsened the effects of the drought, pushing hunger, and malnutrition to epic proportions.
It is no secret how oil and coal mine development contribute to global warming. However, what is less understood by many is the intimate link between the struggle for climate justice and ecological sustainability, and the struggle for liberation from Empire and the spread of global capitalism. The diffusion of transnational and private access to resources is backed up by the military might of the United States and its allies.
When we investigate what propels global warming, threat number one is the US/NATO/Transnational Corporate Empire. It follows, then, that the best way to save the Earth is to dismantle that Empire. The Empire has invested more than $12 billion in Colombia to militarize that nation. Whether repressing its own popular movements within or providing a launching pad for aggressions against Venezuela and other independent voices in the region, the Empire is using Colombia to silence and subdue those that stand in the way of privatization….
A drought-stricken Spring in La Guajira, where coal mining companies have worsened the climate crisis resulting in thousands of children dying from hunger and thirst.
With almost 700 delegates from the five continents, from this 19th until September the 22nd, the First International Congress of Women for Peace and Solidarity among Peoples is held in Caracas, reported the second vice president of the National Constituent Assembly ( ANC), Gladys Requena.
The activity will be attended by 314 women from different countries of the world and 250 Venezuelan compatriots, and is part of the agreements reached during the Sao Paulo Forum held in the country last July, in which more than 120 social movements and political parties agreed to develop international events by areas, Requena said.
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The constituent stressed that, during the conference, the installation of six working tables is planned in which topics such as the impact of neoliberal capitalism on women, and their struggle for a new model of coexistence will be discussed; decolonization as a process and the fight against patriarchy, capitalism and racism; peace, social justice and the preeminence of human rights; the interference of US imperialism against territories and peoples; unilateral coercive measures, financial economic blockade and military plans in our America, among other aspects of general interest.
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“This Saturday we will make a joint declaration of solidarity with the Bolivarian Revolution, which rejects the criminal blockade that impacts the life of the Venezuelan people,” said Requena.
The congress will also take place in the external spaces of the Teresa Carreño Theater, where galleries with achievements of women in the revolution and Venezuelan heroines are exhibited until Saturday.
Translated by JRE/EF
Madison September 20, 2019 / Photos: WI BOPM
More Photos & Videos:
Wisconsin Bail Out The People Movement
For more information and future actions: https://www.ycatwi.org/
Madison September 20, 2019 / Photos: WI BOPM
More Photos & Videos:
Wisconsin Bail Out The People Movement
For more information and future actions: https://www.ycatwi.org/
September 20, 2019
Law360 (September 20, 2019, 8:49 AM EDT) — The National Labor Relations Board on Friday released a proposed rule that would block college teaching and research assistants from forming unions by declaring they don’t qualify as employees under federal labor law.
The board in a notice of proposed rulemaking said such student workers are not employees under the act because their roles are educational rather than economic, even though they are compensated. The National Labor Relations Act empowers workers to form unions and take concerted action against their employers, but conditions these protections on employee status.
“In the past 19 years, the board has changed its stance on this issue three times,” Chairman John Ring said in a statement on the rule. “This rulemaking is intended to obtain maximum input on this issue from the public, and then to bring stability to this important area of federal labor law.”
Republicans Ring, Marvin Kaplan and Bill Emanuel approved the notice. Democrat Lauren McFerran dissented.
The proposed rule marks the latest in a series of flip-flops by the board as to whether students who pull double duty as teachers or researchers are employees under the NLRA. The board typically interprets the NLRA through case law, which can be changed far more easily than formal regulations when the board changes political hands.
Most recently, a Democratic board majority appointed by former President Barack Obama in 2016 said student assistants at Columbia University are employees because “they perform work, at the direction of the university, for which they are compensated.” That ruling overturned a 2004 decision by former president George W. Bush board appointees saying Brown University student assistants weren’t employees because their relationship to the school was “primarily educational.” The Brown ruling in turn reversed a Clinton-era decision letting New York University student assistants form a union.
Graduate students at several colleges sought to form unions in the wake of the board’s most recent decision, but their colleges have largely opposed these efforts, with the expectation that President Donald Trump’s appointees to the labor board would reverse the Columbia decision..
Rather than ask the NLRB to make their colleges come to the bargaining table, which would give the board a chance to reverse the decision, the students have pressured them outside the board process. But by opting to regulate, the board does not need an on-point case to shift its read of student assistants’ rights. And a rule will be harder for a future Democratic administration to reverse than a ruling, because regulation can generally only be undone by regulation, which takes months or years to develop.
This rule is one of a handful the NLRB has proposed or will soon issue with the aim of making a more permanent mark on federal labor law. This is a shift for the board, which rarely proposed rules under past administrations.
–Additional reporting by Matthew Bultman and Vin Gurrieri. Editing by Rebecca Flanagan.-
