http://www.aflcio.org/Blog/Other-News/Prince-Was-a-Champion-for-Working-People

The world lost a musical icon yesterday. You’ll read about his impact as a musician and an entertainer elsewhere, but let’s take a second to look at Prince’s career-spanning fights on behalf of working people.

For more than 40 years, Prince was a union member, a long-standing member of both the Twin Cities Musicians Local 30-73 of the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) and SAG-AFTRA. Beginning with “Ronnie Talk to Russia” in 1981 on through hits like “Sign o’ the Times” and later works like “We March” and “Baltimore,” Prince’s music often reflected the dreams, struggles, fears and hopes of working people. (And he wasn’t limited to words, his Baltimore concert in the wake of Freddie Gray’s death raised funds to help the city recover. I got to sit on the right side of the stage, high in the rafters, to watch joyously.) Few of America’s artists have so well captured the plight of working Americans as Prince, putting him in the line of artists like Woody Guthrie and Bruce Springsteen as working-class heroes.

Ray Hair, president of AFM, spoke of Prince’s importance: “We are devastated about the loss of Prince, a member of our union for over 40 years. Prince was not only a talented and innovative musician, but also a true champion of musicians’ rights. Musicians—and fans throughout the world—will miss him. Our thoughts are with his family, friends and fans grieving right now.”

And this is a key part of his legacy. Prince was deeply talented and could have easily made his success without much help from others. And yet he was a massive supporter of other artists, from writing and producing songs for artists as diverse as Chaka Khan, the Bangles, Sinéad O’Connor, Vanity, Morris Day and the Time and Tevin Campbell (among many others) to his mentoring and elevating of women in music, to the time where he put his own career on the line in defense of the rights of artists. And every musician that came after owes him a debt of gratitude.

The music industry has a deeply troubled past, with stories of corporations exploiting musicians, especially African American musicians, being plentiful enough to fill libraries. At the height of his popularity, Prince decided that he would fight back. He was set, financially and career-wise, and had nothing to gain from taking on the onerous contracts that artists were saddled with when they were young, inexperienced and hungry. If he lost everything by taking on the industry, he still had money and fame to rely on. But he knew this wasn’t true for many other musicians, and Prince was always a fan of music, and he knew that taking on this battle would help others. So he took on the recording industry on behalf of music. On behalf of the industry’s working people—the musicians themselves.

And it cost him his name and his fame.

In the ensuing battle, Prince famously renounced his birth name and began performing under an unpronouncable symbol instead of a name. He fought the company at every turn, even writing the word “slave” on his face in protest of the conditions he worked under. He said: “People think I’m a crazy fool for writing ‘slave’ on my face. But if I can’t do what I want to do, what am I?” For the rest of his career, which never recovered to his early heights, he continually fought to change the way that record companies treated artists, explored new ways to distribute music to fans and battled to give artists more control and more revenue for the art they create. In a still-changing musical landscape, Prince was one of a handful of artists who helped shape a future where musicians, working people, get the fruits of their labor.

In honor of Prince’s passing, check out his performance, an all-time great, at the country’s largest annual event brought to you by union workers, the Super Bowl.

Sponsored by the Marquette University Department of History and Office of International Education
and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies

PRESS ADVISORY

April 22, 2016

CONTACT:  Pam Africa – 267-760-7344; Joe Piette – 610-931-2615; Dr. Suzanne Ross – 917-584-2135

COMMUNITY DEMANDS HEPATITIS C MEDICINE FOR

MUMIA ABU-JAMAL AND THOUSANDS OF OTHER PRISONERS
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ISSUES OPEN LETTER TO GOV WOLF OVER HIS REFUSAL TO MEET

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PLANS UPCOMING WEEKEND OF HEP C & MUMIA EVENTS

Governor Wolf is refusing to meet with community representatives over the issue of the human right of 7,000-10,000 Pennsylvania prisoners to be given medicine that would cure their hepatitis C.  In response, a coalition of organizations from as far away as France and Germany has made public an April 21 letter to the Governor.

The letter signed by fourteen organizations lists petitions and previous requests to meet with the governor, including one by a member of the European Parliament – all of which were ignored or just now turned down by the Governor’s Office.

The letter challenges the Governor’s excuse for delaying his response to activists. Wolf claims community contacts failed to heed his Office’s website instructions that require 6 to 8 weeks advance notice for requests. The community’s letter counters that those instructions apply only to requests concerning ceremonial events, and should not apply to requests for a meeting over such an urgent government policy and human rights issue as hep C treatment in Pennsylvania prisons.

The activists’ letter also places Abu-Jamal’s dire circumstances within the context of former President Bill Clinton’s passage of the 1994 crime bill. His wife’s presidential campaign remains haunted by that bill, which she also supported in numerous speeches before her husband signed it into law. The letter reminds Gov Wolf of this year’s April 7 protest in Philadelphia over Clinton’s crime bill, arguing that the 1994 bill “targeted poor communities of color, set lengthy prison sentences, flooded black neighborhoods with police officers, made many more crimes punishable by death, and allowed courts to try juveniles over the age of 13 as adults.”

The letter then adds another reason why Black voters should question the former president’s legacy.  “Two years after the passage of the crime bill, congress also passed the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (1996), which dramatically eroded the right of prisoners to file writs of habeas corpus and thereby eliminated the possibility that evidence of innocence in the Abu-Jamal case, would be reviewed by higher courts.”

The 1996 act made it possible for courts to ignore widespread police misconduct as a factor in Abu-Jamal’s conviction.  By also forcing appellate judges to accept as ‘fact’ evidence presented in the lower courts by police, the act worked against untold thousands of other innocent prisoners who were prevented from presenting evidence to gain their freedom.

The letter argues that refusal to cure prisoners with hepatitis C amounts to “execution through medical neglect. Failure to respond immediately to this crisis contradicts your public position against the death penalty.”

In making a new round of requests to the Governor this week, the letter reminds Wolf that the 42^nd Pennsylvania Governor, Robert Casey, not only met with Abu-Jamal’s supporters during his own term in office, but that Casey also then refused to sign a death warrant for the well-known political prisoner – this, despite the tough-on-crime frenzy that gripped the nation at that time.

The groups that we hoped would meet with Governor Wolf tomorrow are determined to participate in such a meeting at some point in the near future with either the Governor or his official representative.  All the clergy, union leaders, elected officials, and health professionals who had planned to meet with Governor Wolf on Friday the 22^nd, have instead committed themselves to come to Philadelphia or Harrisburg for a scheduled and serious in-person meeting.

For list (in formation): http://peoplespowerassemblies.org/may-day-2016/

Voces de la Frontera

¡Llame al gobernador Walker al 608-266-1212 para exigirle que vete a SB533, la propuesta de ley anti-inmigrante que bloquearía a los condados de otorgar identificaciones locales a personas indocumentadas y otras comunidades marginalizadas! Si Walker no vete la ley antes de miércoles el 27 de abril, se convierta en ley! ¡¡LLAMA!! ‪#‎TodxsSomosWisconsin‬
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Please call Governor Walker at 608-266-1212 to urge him to veto the anti-immigrant bill SB 533, which would block counties from issuing local identification cards to undocumented people and other marginalized communities! If Walker doesn’t veto the bill before Wednesday, April 27, it becomes law! Call! ‪#‎WeAreAllWisconsin‬

SIGN PETITION: http://bit.ly/212nine

We are on strike because we will do whatever it takes to create a better workplace for ourselves and those that follow.

We’re standing together to make sure the needs of working families are met, instead of standing by as a handful of individuals get richer and richer.

We’re standing together because Verizon has fired, threatened, and intimidated working people at Verizon Wireless who are trying to create a better future for themselves and their families.

We’re standing together because we want to earn a living in our own communities instead of moving away from our homes and our families for months at a time. We want good jobs to stay in the United States, not be sent overseas.

We’re standing together to make sure that working people at Verizon can not just make a good living, but also have a good life.

Add your name to let Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam know that you stand with us.

SIGN PETITION: http://bit.ly/212nine

http://www.rfc.org/ethel

“Our parents, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, were executed on June 19, 1953 during the anti-communist hysteria of the Cold War Era. They had been convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage, in what was called “the crime of the century.” We were six and 10 years old when they were killed.

Our mother was not a spy, and her execution was wrongful. Her conviction was based on perjured testimony and prosecutorial and judicial misconduct. The charges against our mother and the threat of the death penalty were meant to intimidate her and our father into cooperating. The U.S. government wanted Julius to falsely confess to passing “the secret of the atomic bomb” to the Soviet Union, and name others involved.

Their trial took place during a time of widespread panic about communism. The sentencing judge went so far as to blame our parents for the Korean War.[1] In denying clemency, President Eisenhower accused them of causing future nuclear wars.[2] These outrageous statements and our parents’ execution helped fuel a dangerous climate of fear and intolerance in our country which permitted political opportunists like Senator Joseph McCarthy to poison our society. Today, we face a similar climate of hatred which targets immigrants, Muslims, LGBTQI individuals and others.

A formal acknowledgement of the wrong done to our mother and our family will help prevent similar injustices in the future. A healthy democracy requires that the government acknowledge and correct its transgressions. The government cannot return our mother to her loving family. But it can admit this miscarriage of justice.

Please, join us in calling on Attorney General Lynch and President Obama to formally exonerate Ethel Rosenberg before they leave office. More than 60 years after her unjust conviction and execution, now is the time to clear her good name…”