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Tell Mayor Cantrell: Don’t Use Slave Prison Labor to Clean Storm Drains!

Hire more workers, raise the wages

In a recent address to the corporate think tank Bureau of Governmental Research, Mayor Cantrell proposed using prisoners from the Parish jail to clean storm drains. All workers should be angry and opposed to using enslaved labor. The priority of the city should be to increase the size of the work force for the Department of Public Works, raise their wages and institute better safety measures. These are demands that overburdened and underpaid workers have been demanding.

Instead of proposing wage increases for city workers, Mayor Cantrell wants free labor. Why not hire prisoner workers for a regular wage and a guaranteed job. This will help them and their families get a new start in life.

Free labor, or subminimum labor of any kind, brings down the wages of all workers and puts more pressure for lower wages for city workers.

With the billions pouring into the city from the labor of the workers from the tourist economy alone there should be enough to create a real jobs program at $15 an hour with benefits for the many men, women, and youth who need these jobs.

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Why is Cable/Internet So Damn High?!

By Enigma E

My grandmother is on a fixed income and her Cox bill recently shot up from $100 a month to $190 once her one year promo package ended. That was for the second slowest internet and the basic cable channel package. I have to play the same charade with Cox every time the bill goes up. I call them with intentions to cancel because the bill is so expensive, then they send me to the non-retention department where they then “magically” find a way to lower the bill. This is a sinister business practice, where they take advantage of folks who don’t have the time/patience or the negotiating skills to reach a compromise with the money hungry company.

We have where the City Council is supposed to regulate these companies via the “Utility, Cable, Telecommunications and Technology Committee”, yet they allow them to be a monopoly ripping us off. They don’t really regulate anything; if they did, we would have a higher quality of service at a much lower cost. Much like many other politicians, the utility committee works on behalf of big business instead of the working class people of New Orleans.

Cox offers the slowest internet service for low-income students at a reduced rate. This is merely a tease for the working class families that receive this service because the tier of internet service does not accomplish all that you need in an efficient manner, such as viewing videos for homework help, being able to live chat with someone when dealing with a billing issue, job training or health care assistance.

This problem isn’t unique to just New Orleans either. A Center for Public Integrity analysis of internet prices in five US cities and five comparable French cities found that prices in the US were as much as 3.5 times higher than those in France for similar service. The analysis shows that consumers in France have a choice between a far greater number of providers — seven on average — than those in the US, where most residents can get service from no more than two companies.

So, we as the working class people in this city, state and country must demand that the utility commission boards tell Cox they will lose their franchise unless they roll back the cost. Public pressure can force laws that favor the vast majority of the people and not the greedy pockets of a select few. #AllPowerToThePeople

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Indian Tea Farmers Strike for Living Wage

Starting on Tuesday, August 7, Indian tea farmers went on strike in the Himalayan foothills of West Bengal state. Workers demanded an increase in daily wages. The unions planned the strike to coincide with monsoon season, which is peak production time. This is in order to exert maximum pressure on the tea estate owners and the government.

Aloke Chakraborty, president of the central committee of the United Union of Plantation Workers stated: “More than 400,000 workers from around 370 tea gardens are participating in the three-day strike. The minimum daily wage for a worker at the plantation is 169 rupees ($2.46). We have demanded a 20% raise to 203 rupees ($2.96).”

The tea plantation system in India is a holdover from the colonial era. Since the time of British rule, tea has remained a major Indian export, generating great wealth for the big tea companies and landowners at the expense of the farmers. These plantations are frequently in the news because of low wages and other abuses. Tea farmers are often from the ranks of India’s most oppressed ethnic minorities and face an uphill battle just to survive. Nevertheless, they have increasingly commanded national attention in recent years as they have organized for access to clean water and other basic rights. The recent strike could indicate an upturn in the movement in West Bengal.

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Louisiana Children Go Hungry

Children throughout Louisiana’s rural communities go hungry during the Summer. Over half of the children in our state rely on free or reduced-price breakfast and lunches during the school year. But even though they’re eligible because of poverty, only 6.8% of these kids are fed by programs intended to feed them during Summer. This makes Louisiana the 49th worst state for participation in Summer-meal programs. The most affected are children in rural communities where there are no nearby groceries or sites where food can be distributed. Even though the oil and fishing corporations make millions off of these communities, capitalism has turned our state into an underdeveloped wasteland where hundreds of thousands of children lack access to basic necessities.

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Honor Molly Tibbetts by Sharing Her Family’s Words: “You Do Not Get to Usurp Mollie…for Your Racist, False Narrative.”

Recently Molly Tibbetts, a young Iowan, was brutally killed. This is a terrible tragedy. Because the alleged killer is an immigrant, politicians and the media seized upon this to vilify all immigrants and justify their racist demonization, led by the white supremacist Trump administration.

But Molly’s family refused to allow this to happen, saying this is not what Molly stood for. This is what they said:

“The Hispanic community are Iowans,” he said during his eulogy this past Sunday, revealing that they “had embraced him as he searched for his daughter in recent weeks,” the Des Moines Register reported. “They have the same values as Iowans. As far as I’m concerned, they’re Iowans with better food.”

The paper reported that during the several weeks Tibbetts was in Iowa searching for his daughter, “he ate at a number of Mexican restaurants, where employees were sensitive and kind. They knew when he needed space or when he needed to joke.” He continued: “Today, we need to turn the page. We’re at the end of a long ordeal. But we need to turn toward life—Mollie’s life—because Mollie’s nobody’s victim. Mollie’s my hero.” He hasn’t been the only member of Tibbetts’s family to reject the false narrative pushed onto her by anti-immigrant figures.

“No,” wrote her cousin Sandi Tibbetts Murphy in a Facebook post. “Especially for those of you who did not know her in life, you do not get to usurp Mollie and her legacy for your racist, false narrative now that she is no longer with us. We hereby reclaim our Mollie.” There’s still uncertainty regarding her alleged killer’s immigration status, but that doesn’t matter to the people doing the fearmongering anyway, because “immigrants-are-criminals” has always been their fall-back narrative despite the fact that immigrants are less likely than U.S.-born Americans to commit crime. Enough, said Tibbetts’s cousin. “You do not have permission to callously use this tragedy to demonize an entire population for the acts of one man. No. We reclaim our Mollie.”

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Hollywood Works for the Pentagon

According to released government documents obtained by investigative journalists Tom Secker and Matthew Alford, the US military has controlled the production of over 800 American movies and 1,000 TV shows. They oversaw popular films like Top Gun, Transformers, and Tomorrow Never Dies, but their hand also extends into other genres, like horror, documentary, sci-fi, and even talk shows and culinary series (even Oprah and Top Chef are on the list!).

This is just one part of a broader pattern of the US military taking over every aspect of civilian life. Factories become weapon producers, universities become military science labs, energy research makes bombs, oil companies fuel fighter jets, and Hollywood turns into a war propaganda machine.

On the silver screen the Navy SEAL is a fearless freedom fighter, the CIA agent is an unsung hero. But in reality, the US military slaughters millions worldwide and the CIA sells guns to death squads that kidnap children and murder families.

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The Bourgeois Media Spin Cycle

By Enigma E

The Bourgeois media is blood thirsty and totally one sided. “If it leads it bleeds” is the motto they subscribe to. They barely come to Black neighborhoods to report on the positive things happening, they only show up after somebody got shot, then deem our neighborhoods as “troubled”.

They use menacing mug shots when it’s black folks accused of a crime, but whenever it’s a white terrorist that has shot up a bunch of innocent people, his mug shot is nowhere to be found and/or he is deemed a victim of mental health problems.

None of the main news stations was around when the Black owned businesses “Jazz Daiquiris” and “Chicken & Watermelon” on S. Claiborne gave out bikes, school supplies, Christmas gifts, health care screenings, a summer youth program, all for free for the kids and families in the neighborhood. But those same news stations were all over those Black-owned businesses once there was a tragic violent shooting. It goes to show just what they think about the Black community. It’s either they are covering crimes that’s happening or politicians talking about how they’re going to solve the crime problem. Black life doesn’t matter to the elitist press, their purpose is to oppress and control narratives.

To quote Doughboy from Boyz-N-Da-Hood, “Either they don’t know, don’t show or don’t care about what’s going on in the hood”.

This is by design. The television and radio stations spew the talking points of the two monopoly political parties in this country, that’s all funded by the ruling class. It’s troubling because most oppressed people in New Orleans just go along with the programmed talking points.

The problem of perception comes into play, because of the fact that other groups that never interact with economically poor neighborhoods deem us as unworthy of a good quality of life. That misconception occurs because the elitist media attacks poor communities and sell-out politicians enact laws or cut programs that cause an even deeper oppression in the community.

We as the working class need to keep communicating with one another, actually speaking and spending time in community, not just on the internet. This is the way we kill off the false narratives the media spews as an attempt to keep the people from uniting. As Brother Malcolm once said, “If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” Not this newspaper though. We say All Power to the people and continue to Educate! Agitate! and Organize!

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It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way: Pitting Young Against Old Won’t Work

By Gregory Williams

For several years, the Buzzfeed articles, memes, and all manner of sensational news reports have hammered it into our heads that young workers and retired workers are fundamentally opposed to one another. Every time a retail giant closes, for example, we see a slate of articles saying that youths caused it to tank. “Millennials don’t buy diamonds” – fair enough, young workers are not paid enough to afford rent.

From the other perspective, we see commentary to the effect that older workers ruined the economy or have trashed the environment, leaving future generations to deal with the emerging catastrophes. Nevermind the fact that – even if some of them are of that age, – the top dogs in Washington and on Wall Street are a tiny fraction of the population. The people who have any real impact in shaping the economy, or destroying the planet, are the capitalist elites and their lackeys, regardless of when they were born.

Some of us have probably laughed at a meme poking fun at generational differences. But, as I always ask in this column, does it have to be this way? Must we really have this inter-generational animosity, even if it’s mostly just a bunch of online jokes?

The Need for Inter-Generational Solidarity

I’m not raising this question idly. There is an urgent need for young and older working class people to band together. The fact is, young workers as well as older workers are getting massively screwed, and to think of millennials or baby boomers as opposed groups is to miss the point. We can only avert disaster if we work together.

We know that young people are saddled with debt and low-paying jobs. But let’s take a moment to consider the situation of older workers in this country. One telling measure is the number of seniors filing for bankruptcy.

The Consumer Bankruptcy Project recently analyzed the data from bankruptcy court records and written questionnaires, taken from all over the U.S. They found that bankruptcy among seniors has risen fivefold since 1991. And that’s not just because there are more seniors. The percentage of seniors filing for bankruptcy has radically increased. Now, 12.2% of bankruptcy filings come from households headed by seniors.

It’s not hard to understand why seniors are filing for bankruptcy: There are far more seniors in poverty than there were in decades past. This is especially true for older women.The retirement age keeps going up. More and more older people are in debt just like their younger counterparts. Medical costs keep going up. Very few workers in this country nowadays have real pensions.

None of this is accidental. The capitalist class, represented by both the Republicans and the Democrats, have systematically destroyed the social safety net and most of the protections that workers and oppressed people won through struggle. On an almost unimaginable scale, they have stolen the wealth generated by the society and hoarded it for themselves. And just as they don’t care about the brutality of putting a child in a cage, they don’t blink an eye at the thought of elderly people on the street.

One day young workers will need Social Security. The carefully crafted attack blaming selfish seniors for the falsely reported bankruptcy of the the social security fund, is to cover the grab of this pot of money to hand over to the bankers, Pentagon and super-rich.

To sum up, we need to start thinking about the total situation we’re facing in this rotten, every-worsening society. I don’t care if I repeat myself everywhere we go. We have to organize a fight back, and it needs to be inter-generational.

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Activists Expose Convention Center for Stealing Tax Dollars

On Wednesday, August 24th, a delegation of militant activists went to a meeting of the Exhibition Hall Authority (the bureaucrats and wealthy capitalists running the Convention Center) to publicly criticize the Ernst E. Morial Convention Center for trying to steal $329.5 million in tax dollars from the city budget. The Convention Center wants this money to build a hotel for its own profit, even though $329.5 million is more than enough to provide health insurance to every uninsured worker in New Orleans and house every homeless person in the city.

Alec Arceneaux and James Ponder of the New Orleans Hospitality Workers Committee attacked the hotel project for being a “grand larseny.” In their joint statement, they said: “We demand an end to this robbery. Return the people’s stolen tax dollars back to the general budget, and use it to SERVE THE PEOPLE.”

Gavrielle Gemma of the People’s Assembly: “We’re not here to appeal to your morals, because we know you have none,” she said. “We’re only here to warn you that there will be an eruption in this city.”

Dylan Borne of the New Orleans Workers Group: “The NOPD is terrorizing and locking up black and brown youth every day. Yet the biggest gangsters and criminals in the city still aren’t behind bars, they’re sitting right here in front of me.”

Belden “Noonie Man” Batiste, Congressional candidate, exclaimed that the whole board should be arrested. He also shamed Robert “Tiger” Hammond, so-called union leader of the AFL-CIO, for selling out to the board instead of representing the working class.

Kim Ford called the Exhibition Hall Authority the worst board she’s ever seen and criticized its members for living like Kings while the workers who showed up to the meeting spend “our last dollar trying to park outside.”

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Take ‘Em Down Takes the Streets

By Antranette Scott

On the 4th Thursday of every month Take Em Down Nola, takes to the street to continue the struggle to bring down ALL monuments and symbols of white supremacy from the landscape of New Orleans. In this current phase of the work, TEDN is focusing on 5 monuments in and around the French Quarter.

On August 23, the protest began with a rally at Lafayette Square where there are two especially egregious shrines to racism, Henry Clay and John McDonough. The community gathered and were educated by speeches from organizers. Lea Thompson from Mississippi Rising gave a passionate talk about the work that is happening in Ocean Springs, Mississippi against the racist flag of the state of Mississippi. Lea spoke on the commitment of the organizers, particularly the youth of the city to making sure the flag, embedded with the Confederate emblem, is not risen in public space.

The crowd then got into formation, and took to the streets. Chants of “White Supremacy Got To Go!” rang through the French Quarter. Protesters were joined by passersby, and raised fists of solidarity came from many hospitality workers in various shops and restaurants. The next stop was in front of the Louisiana Supreme Court building where stands a monument to E.D. White, known member of the white supremacist Crescent City White League and Supreme Court justice of the racist “Separate but Equal” Plessy v. Ferguson verdict that sanctioned segregation and ushered in Jim Crow area violence for decades to come. Spoken word artist, Chuck Perkins gave a moving piece following an informative speech. Next up was Jackson Square where those dedicated to the end of white supremacy gathered to listen to Sonny Patterson speak truth to power at sunset after an indigenous activist spoke on the multitude of atrocities that slave owner and architect of the Trail of Tears Andrew Jackson committed against the Indigenous Peoples of this land.

The final stop was on Decatur St where a statue glorifies colonization and mass death at the hands of Jean Baptists Le Moyne de Bienville. After a closing affirmation, protesters marched down Canal St loudly and proudly declaring that the fight against white supremacy is not over. The citizens of New Orleans will not be satisfied with a job partially done. Next month join Take Em Down NOLA in demanding that Mayor Cantrell FINISH THE JOB!!! REMOVE ALL MONUMENTS TO WHITE SUPREMACY FROM THE LANDSCAPE OF NEW ORLEANS!!!!