Woman Criticizes Honolulu's Government, Has Her Protest Signs Bulldozed

Forbes

Nick Sibilla, Contributor

How people respond to criticism can reveal a lot about their character.  Some might try to debate or reason with those they disagree with.  Others prefer to ignore critics.  City officials in Honolulu take a different approach: They use a bulldozer.
Choon James is a successful real estate broker with over two decades of experience in Hawaii.  But the city of Honolulu is seeking to seize property she’s owned for almost a decade to build what she calls a “super-sized” fire station in rural Hauula.
Since January 2010, she has put up signs to protest Honolulu’s use of eminent domain.  These signs declare “Eminent Domain Abuse: Who’s Next?” and “YouTube Eminent Domain Abuse—Hawaii.”  For more than three years these signs have been up without any incident.
But now the city is showing a callous disregard for Choon’s freedom of speech.  Back in May, Honolulu seized two of her eminent domain protest signs.  Without her consent, city employees went onto the property and seized and impounded her signs before damaging them. Even worse, the city slapped her with a notice for trespassing, for property she is trying to defend in court.
After these signs were torn down, Choon placed three more signs there.  These lasted just a few months before the city once again seized the signs.  This time, Honolulu was much more dramatic.  On October 18, city workers, backed by police officers, squad cars and a bulldozer, came by and literally bulldozed those protest signs.
The city’s actions show a shameful lack of respect for the First and Fourth Amendments.  Citizens have a right to protest government actions.  The First Amendment was enacted precisely to protect citizens who criticize the government from retaliation.  Lawsuits challenging Honolulu’s unreasonable seizures and chilling attacks on free speech are now pending in federal court.
Read More Here

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Protesters steal front loader to break into Govt House in Thailand

Video: Protesters steal front loader to break into Govt House in Thailand

 


   

Published on Dec 2, 2013

56 people have been injured as Thai police used tear gas, water cannons and rubber bullets against anti-government protesters, who are demanding the premier and government step down. The premier says their demands are unconstitutional. READ MORE: http://on.rt.com/ntghx4

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Walmart Workers, Community Supporters Join Nationwide Protests : Walmart collecting food donations to feed employees

Washington DC Area Walmart Workers, Community Supporters Join Nationwide Protests

UFCW400

 

Published on Nov 29, 2013

Walmart workers and community supporters in the Washington, D.C. area today protested against Walmart—the nation's largest retailer—joining 1,500 protests across the nation in one of the largest mobilizations of working families in American history. Workers in the Washington, D.C. area were joined by tens of thousands of Americans in Los Angeles, the Bay Area, Seattle, Sacramento, Miami, Minneapolis and other locations who called on Walmart to end illegal retaliation and publicly commit to improving labor standards, including providing workers with more full-time work and $25,000 a year. At a protest at the Walmart store located on Richmond Highway in Alexandria, Va., nine people, including one Walmart worker, were arrested in an act of civil disobedience calling for an end to the exploitation of Walmart workers by their company.

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Published on Monday, December 2, 2013 by Common Dreams

Fast Food Giants Starve Workers' Wages, Gorge on Taxpayers: Report

- Jacob Chamberlain, staff writer

Demonstration outside McDonald's in Times Square in support of employees on strike New York November 29, 2012. (Reuters/Andrew Kelly)As the nation's largest fast food giants continue to push back against the ongoing fight for better wages by fast food workers across the country, a report released Monday reveals a world in which those companies are "pocketing massive taxpayer subsidies" as they feed their CEOs' growing paychecks.
According to the report, Fast Food CEOs Rake in Taxpayer-Subsidized Pay, published by the Institute for Policy Studies, current tax code allows corporations such as Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut, and McDonald's "to deduct unlimited amounts from their income taxes for the cost of stock options, certain stock grants, and other forms of so-called 'performance pay' for top executives," meaning that the more corporations pay their top earners, the less they pay in federal taxes.
As IPS reports, over the past two years, CEOs of the top six publicly held fast food chains brought home over $183 million in deductible "performance pay," which in turn reduced their companies' taxes by an estimated $64 million.
As Sarah Anderson from IPS points out in an op-ed Monday, $64 million is enough to cover the average cost of food stamps for 40,000 American families for a year.
Fast food profits, in this way, come at the taxpayer's expense from two sides: while CEOs' paychecks expand and corporations pay less in taxes, those companies have simultaneously worked "to keep low-level workers' wages so low that many must rely on public assistance."
As another report from UC Berkeley recently showed, low-wage fast-food jobs currently cost the American public nearly $7 billion a year, as 52% of fast food workers, including those who work full-time, are payed so little they must rely on safety net programs including Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the Children's Health Insurance Program, as well as Earned Income Tax Credit payments.
"What makes all this even more galling is that these fast food giants are pocketing massive taxpayer subsidies for their CEO pay while fighting to keep their workers’ wages at rock bottom," writes Anderson.
"All of the big fast food corporations are members of the National Restaurant Association," Anderson writes, "which is aggressively working to block a raise in the federal minimum wage to a level that would let millions of fast food workers make ends meet without public support."
Meanwhile, across the country workers are fed up with low wages and have embarked on a series of local and national strikes against their fast food employers over the course of the past year.
On Thursday, fast food workers organized by groups Fast Food Forward and Fight for 15, with backing from unions such as the Service Employees International Union, will strike in one hundred cities across the U.S. at McDonald’s, Wendy’s and other fast-food restaurant locations, demanding a $15-an-hour wage.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

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Respect WALMART Workers - San Diego Light Brigade 11-27-13

tocha shona


 

     

Published on Nov 28, 2013

Walmart is facing protests on Friday 11/29 at 1,500 locations across the country. Employees and activists will be pushing for higher wages, more full-time jobs and an end to employer retaliation. Please Stand With Walmart Workers and join a BLACK FRIDAY PROTEST near you!

To learn more please visit: http://forrespect.org/

71% of Wallmart Workers will be working on Thanksgiving! Don't you think they deserve a holiday too? And Christmas off too?
http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ss...

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A volunteer loads food at the Capital Area Food Bank, Nov. 14, 2013 in Washington, DC.

Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images

Walmart collecting food donations to feed employees

11/18/13 04:45 PM Updated 11/19/13 08:15 AM

By Ned Resnikoff

Organized labor, protesting workers and other activist groups have been saying for years that low-wage Walmart employees can’t afford to meet basic needs like food. Now, one Cleveland, Ohio, location is doing something about it: soliciting food donations from other workers.
In an employees-only section of the store, management has placed two bins underneath a sign reading, “Please donate food items here so Associates in Need can enjoy Thanksgiving Dinner,” local paperThe Plain Dealer reported on Monday. Walmart spokesperson Kory Lundberg told the newspaper that it is for employees “who have had some hardships come up.”
“This is part of the company’s culture to rally around associates and take care of them when they face extreme hardships,” said Lundberg.
The majority of Walmart employees reportedly make less than $25,000 annually, and many of them rely on food stamps. A case study compiled by the Democratic staff of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce found that employees in one Walmart location received between $96,007 and $219,528 in food stamps over the course of a single year.

Read More Here
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Fracking Profits: Oil lobby pushes for bill to deregulate shale industry

 

Published on Nov 23, 2013

Protesting could soon become a thing of luxury at any drill site in the United States - courtesy of new laws co-crafted by the oil lobby. Aside from forcing demonstrators to shell out 5 thousand dollars for a rally permit... the bill would also excuse the federal government from regulating the fracking industry. Gayane Chichakyan reports.

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Beyond Keystone XL: Why One Maine Town Is On The Front Lines Of The Battle Against Tar Sands

By Michael Conathan, Guest Blogger on November 4, 2013 at 10:24 am

A tanker offloads oil into the Portland-Montreal Pipeline alongside South Portland, Maine’s Bug Light Park.

CREDIT: Michael Conathan

SOUTH PORTLAND, MAINE — On Tuesday, approximately 25,000 residents of South Portland will decide the future of what could soon become America’s next tar sands pipeline. Not Keystone XL; the Portland-Montreal Pipeline.
In 1941, as Germany choked off Canada’s fuel supply during the early stages of World War II, the U.S. opened a pipeline to allow imported crude to flow from Maine to Montreal. Today, that same pipeline has made Portland the second biggest oil port on the eastern seaboard. Tankers steam into Casco Bay almost daily, navigating among lobster buoys and kayakers, and dwarfing the fishing boats that once lined the waterfront of Maine’s largest city.
But as natural gas has begun to replace heating oil in the northeast, and as Canada has moved aggressively to tap the Alberta tar sands, demand for imported oil is declining. And the pipeline’s owners and operators smell a new source of business: reversing the pipeline’s flow to send tar sands to Maine for export.
In June, nearly 4,000 South Portland residents responded to the threat that their hometown could serve as the next spigot for some of the dirtiest fuel on the planet by signing a petition to get a measure known as the Waterfront Protection Ordinance included on this year’s ballot, which would amend the city code to prevent the construction of a tar sands export facility at the end of the pipeline.
Larry Wilson, the pipeline company’s CEO, has repeatedly insisted that there are no current plans to use his infrastructure to move tar sands, but such a move is clearly at least on the drawing board. Wilson has repeatedly asserted that his organization is “aggressively looking for every opportunity — and that could involve a reversal” to ship tar sands south.
Towns along the pipeline’s route from Quebec, through Vermont and New Hampshire, and down into Maine have already made official statements of opposition to the proposal. Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin wrote to Secretary of State John Kerry in June, asking him to block any move to ship tar sands through the pipeline.
Maine’s neighbors fear becoming the next Mayflower, Arkansas or Kalamazoo, Michigan. Both of those towns are still dealing with the aftermath of tar sands spills from pipelines that are wreaking havoc on public health and proving all but impossible to clean up. In the case of Kalamazoo, the process has lasted more than three years and cost over a billion dollars, and the bottom of the Kalamazoo River remains choked with tar sands as thick as molasses.
However, resolutions by the pipeline’s pass-through communities are non-binding on the company. As the terminus and the municipality where oil would be stored, treated, and loaded on tankers, South Portland is uniquely positioned to influence the company’s ability to move tar sands.
Local efforts have the pipeline company circling the wagons. Opponents of the Waterfront Protection Ordinance, united as the Working Waterfront Coalition, have outspent supporters six to one over the course of the campaign, spending $600,000 in cash and in-kind donations which have come exclusively from corporate entities and their affiliates, including the American Petroleum Institute.

Read More Here

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'Remember, Remember': Anonymous marks November 5 with hacks, protests

Published time: November 05, 2012 17:58
Edited time: November 06, 2012 02:33

Reuters/Paul Hanna

A worldwide day of protests and cyber attacks against governments, banks and security firms has been launched by Hacker collective Anonymous to mark Guy Fawkes Day. Hundreds of people marched in London, while another rally hit Washington, DC.
Around 200 Anonymous supporters, according to RT’s London Bureau, assembled in London’s Trafalgar Square for Operation Vendetta, a march to the Houses of Parliament. The group itself claims over 9,000 people joined the action.
The demonstrators were carrying banners reading, “We are Anonymous. We are the legion” or “Stop creating imaginary debt!”  At the Houses of Parliament they were stopped by police.
Minor scuffles broke out outside parliament as a few protestors attempted to push police lines back, but the bulk of OpVendetta remained peaceful.

RT London Bureau’s photo shows police stopping OpVendetta march from entering the House of Parliament on November 5, 2012 (Image from twitter.com)

The “march, strike and protest” in London, as well as a similar event planned outside of the US White House in Washington are meant to pay homage to the 2005 film V for Vendetta.
“On November 5th 2012 WE THE PEOPLE will march on Washington DC peacefully and unarmed to arrest all members of congress, the president, and all supreme court justices where they will be held without bond until a full independent investigation and trial have been completed. We must re-elect our government within 90 days in order to stave of unrest,” organizers behind the march announced.

Image by RT’s Sara Firth OpVendetta march participants gathering at the House of Parliament in London on November 5, 2012 (Image from twitter.com)

A rash of cyber attacks were reported on Monday in line with the the 5th of November "V For Vendetta" inspired hacking spree.
Several Australian government sites were targeted during the global day of protest, while Argentina’s government bank was also reportedly hacked.
An attack on Internet security firm Symantec was originally attributed to the hacktivist collective, but a non-Anonymous affiliated group called @Doxbin later claimed responsibility for taking their site down.

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