New York is in crying out for help. But our federal government is failing us. We have socially distanced. We have stayed home--or risked our health to do essential work. We have lost income, put our lives on hold, shuttered businesses. We are homeschooling our kids, checking on our neighbors, and begging our parents to stay in. We are masking up. We are doing what we can. But the government is leaving us to die. This moment urgently calls us to exercise our collective power in spite of physical distance. Our communities, already ravaged by years of extraction and exploitation, now face a once in a 100 year crisis — the economic and political fallout of which will leave many of our people jobless, homeless, hungry or, even worse, dead. We need #Recovery4All, including immigrants! And in every crisis, the human spirit of solidarity, community and support also lives. We are asking you to open your window and bang on pots and pans at 2pm on Friday for 10 minutes to demand government action. We will do this in NYC every Friday until May Day. Then we will do it EVERYWHERE. We will keep banging until we are heard. In this moment, we can move beyond Zoom meetings and tele-town halls and elevate our struggles by directly confronting corporations, Wall Street, landlords, and the carceral state. May Day provides the perfect opportunity to link our struggles, lift our stories, confront those choosing to profit from our community's pain, and advance our urgent and long-term needs. We need a #Recovery4All On FRIDAY, APRIL 17TH FROM 2:00, let's take to our windows, our fire escapes, our roofs, our doors and our stoops, and make a racket loud enough to be heard in Washington. Let’s make noise and cry out for our state and federal elected officials to cancel rent, to house the homeless, to get a recovery for all people including the undocumented and hard hit Black and Brown communities, to get PPE to all healthcare and essential workers, to free our people from dangerous prisons and detention centers. We need a #Recovery4All! We need a #PeoplesBailout! We know that this is #TrumpsCOVIDFail We Demand: #CancelRent — Cancel rent and mortgage payments, establish a housing emergency fund, Freeze evictions, foreclosures, and utility shut-offs in all housing, Declare a moratorium on all work requirements for housing, house the houseless, $100 billion in rent assistance. #ReleaseThemAll - Decarcerate — Immigration and Justice Transformation. Release everyone currently in immigration detention, release particularly vulnerable populations from prisons and jails to relieve concentration of risk to coronavirus, close immigration courts and cancel check-ins and other immigration interviews, hold telephonic bond hearings, divest resources from wall construction and border enforcement to provide medical care and create cash-based disaster relief to out-of-work households regardless of status. CASA, MRPA, MRNJ, TOP, #EssentalWorker — UBI, UI, Green New Deal, Medicare For All, Childcare for All, Paid Sick, Hazard Pay, PPE, Paycheck guarantee #AmazonStrikes — Paid Leave, Hazard Pay, care subsidies, shutdown and clean facilities with workers paid, personal protective equipment, no discipline or raising safety concerns, end work practices such as production quotas. #ClimateStrike — The 50th anniversary of Earth Day is 4/22, which was planned as a day of mass action. #MedicareforAllCOVID Here's how it works: Wear something red, because it’s an emergency. Make a sign or banner saying something the government needs to do to protect us. Hold it or hang it out your window or off your roof. At 2 PM, make a racket for 10 minutes. Whistle, shout, sing, pray, bang on a pot, hoot, holler, drum, blast music and dance--it’s up to you. Just do it loud enough to wake up our leaders--and remind each other that our country is better, and stronger, than this. (Don't forget to follow social distancing.) Take pictures or videos and post with #PeoplesBailout #Recovery4All Send those photos to [email protected] Do it again next Friday Tell all of your friends to do it on MAY 1st!!! Huge national day of action Please sign this petition to pledge to participate if 1,000 other people commit as well. Then spread the word. [UPDATE 4.10. Good news!! Momentum is building. Several big NYC grassroots groups have decided to join, and asked to move the date back to give them time to spread the word. We have updated this to reflect the new date. Please keep sharing!] [UPDATE 4.16 - The date has been moved to Friday 4.17 AND the next two Fridays, building up to a huge push on May 1. Make The Road NY, the Working Families Party, NY Communities for Change, Center for Popular Democracy, and the Met Council on Housing are driving this — they represent the neighborhoods and communities that are being crushed by this crisis and they are demanding #Recovery4All and a #PeoplesBailout — please support their call.]

Our nation is in crisis on several fronts, foreign and domestic, economic and military, social and governmental. This is important for voters to be able to compare their stances in issues, their proposals for policy, and their attitudes and judgment that will affect the nation if one becomes President. Voters have heard little of these two in previous debates where many other voices were heard, limiting the responses from these two leading candidates.

Once the worst of the pandemic is over and it is considered safe to travel, there will be a tremendous backlog of people applying for passports and renewals. This will hurt the travel industry even more than it is hurting right now, not only here, but all over the world. Also, many people have to travel on business. Many of them can't work remotely.

Since President Thomas Jefferson founded the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1802, the federal government has expanded and improved the education of military leaders. Two centuries later, however, the national declaration that "all men are created equal" remains unfulfilled. Naming academy buildings, roads, and other infrastructure for Confederate leaders at West Point and Annapolis perpetuates American inequality. At West Point, a barracks constructed in 1962--the height of the civil rights movement--was named for Robert E. Lee. At the Naval Academy, an engineering building and the superintendent's house were named for Confederate naval leaders in 1907 and 1976, respectively. Both academies also have roads and other infrastructure named for Confederate leaders. I recently urged West Point Superintendent LTG Darryl A. Williams, a fellow West Point graduate, to rename Lee Barracks and other infrastructure to "serve the nation’s paramount quest for a more equitable and just society under law." He wrote that "the Academy -- as a subordinate command of the Army -- will not act independently on this issue," "Confederate memorialization is an Army issue," and West Point recognizes "individuals who are a part of our history as an institution and a nation, not as representatives of a cause." The Confederacy and its leaders, however, will always stand principally for disunity, racism, and white supremacy. Honoring Confederate leaders at military academies reveres those values over equality and liberty. It is time for the nation's self-described premier leadership development institutions to replace Confederate names so they more fully express and honor Americans' highest values. Those values are clearly expressed through countless state and local officials who have removed Confederate statues and other divisive symbols from public spaces since the violent racist attacks in Charleston, SC in 2015 and Charlottesville, VA in 2017. State and local officials are fulfilling citizens' interests and leading an important democratic change movement where the federal government is failing. Sign this petition to: - tell the Defense Department and Congress to align the academies' values with your values; - support legislation that will require and fund the removal of Confederate honors at the military academies; - give your children better environments to learn leadership and selfless public service.

This is important because the mayor allows and even encourages the doe to be run by mountebanks and grifters who have corrupted public education under the guise of learning and caring, all while destabilizing, demeaning and damaging the children and the workforce of the NYC public school system.

It is vital to track how COVID is affecting people differently depending on race in order to address racial disparities now and in the future. The numbers of people who are dying and infected in NY, Milwaukee and Chicago are disproportionately people of color, and Black people in particular. the CDC is not keeping track of race nationally for the pandemic, although it should, because not doing so makes it seem like this is an equal opportunity illness, and it is not. generational and historical wealth and injustice are not abstract moral issues, they are the difference between life and death generational and historical injustice translate into the unequal distribution of resources like hospital beds, trained staff, infrastructure and healthcare facilities, and availability of medications generational and historical injustice affects the quality of living spaces, pre-existing conditions like diabetes, high blood pressure and other chronic illnesses, and the ability to quarantine COVID is not the great equalizer. Viruses may not discriminate, but the ways in which the pandemic is panning out is clearly surfacing the inequalities that we desperately need to address. Tracking race is paramount to understand how racial inequality factors in COVID-related deaths and illnesses.

If lawmakers don’t act quickly, Wisconsin will move ahead with its primary elections this Tuesday -- despite a statewide shelter-in-place order and the growing threat of the COVID-19 crisis. This would potentially suppress hundreds of thousands of voters -- and expose those that do show up at the polls to unnecessary health risks. Wisconsin is the only one of the 11 states originally scheduled to hold contests in April that has not postponed or dramatically altered voting amid the COVID-19 pandemic. If we let things move forward like this, far too many voters will be disenfranchised or choose to stay home. Already, poll worker shortages have forced many polling places to close (from 180 down to just 5 for the entire city of Milwaukee) -- placing major strains on the locations that plan to remain open. And here’s the appalling part: Republican lawmakers stand accused of dragging their feet on this issue in order to suppress voter turnout -- and help an incumbent right-wing state Supreme Court justice who’s up for re-election. [1] This shouldn't be a partisan issue. Protecting voters’ rights and safety right now should be every party’s top priority. Gov. Tony Evers has just called a special legislative session to fix this -- urging lawmakers to adopt a proposal to expand absentee voting until May 19th... provide every registered voter with a ballot... and create safe in-person voting opportunities for voters with disabilities and others who are unable to vote by mail. But lawmakers will only do the right thing if they feel massive public pressure -- so we urgently need you to add your voice right now. Tell Wisconsin lawmakers to delay in-person voting and make sure every voter can cast their ballot safely. 1) https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/wisconsin-goes-it-alone-holding-elections-next-week-amid-fears-of-infection-and-voting-chaos/2020/03/31/8bd801ae-735f-11ea-a9bd-9f8b593300d0_story.html

Small businesses are the engine of our economy. In many communities small businesses are the largest employer and the lifeblood of the community. We create meaningful jobs and opportunities for entrepreneurs to thrive. By unilaterally requiring that your small business clients have pre-existing lending relationships with Bank of America you are putting up unnecessary roadblocks to saving jobs and saving communities from devastation. Worse, this practice may even be discriminatory, as it may impact black, Latino, Asian, and Native American business owners disproportionately, who are more likely to have been denied access loans due to historic and current red-lining practices and institutional racism. The Paycheck Protection Program was designed to provide forgivable loans to Small Businesses to keep people employed during this time of emergency. In determining clients of Bank of America's eligibility for these lifeline loans, you have instituted an unnecessary pre-existing lending client requirement that is preventing many desperate smaller businesses and nonprofits from even applying for PPP. We all need to come together at times like this, not put up barriers to resources. You have the power to eliminate this arbitrary requirement and we ask you to step in and address this issue with the urgency the present emergency demands.

Like most kinds of porn, inspiration porn is exploitative, unrealistic and harmful for disabled people. Imagery of individuals "overcoming" the disabled body serves only to de-value those of us who cannot for the enjoyment of those who never had to. This is particularly gross given that this imagery is being used to increase shareholder profits for Hyundai, a global corporation that did $91 billion in sales last year. In the time of COVID-19 this also means a very real chance of disabled people being denied life-saving treatment because of the mere perception that their lives are less valuable than a “healthier” person.

Although, it is a great initiative to do distant learning, parents and/or students are not fully equipped, mentally, emotionally to successfully provide or acquire the education that is provided by an official educator. This initiative will also keep the educators and households sane as we survive and readjust because of this pandemic. It will also provide a more realistic grade point average for schools and students not to lose their academic status.

President's Trump's treatment of PBS correspondent Yamiche Alcindor as she fulfills her professional obligations during a national crisis is unacceptable. Recently, during COVID-19 conferences, he told her, “Be nice. Don’t be threatening,” and called her questions “nasty.” Consider the messages he is sending the world about Black women and girls. Trump has a long history of mistreating people of color, women and the press. His aggressive attitude toward Alcindor is a culmination of these biased, undemocratic and dangerous behaviors. As the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) and Journalism & Women Symposium (JAWS) recently pointed out in a joint statement: “As far back as November 2018, Trump leveled verbal abuse at Alcindor along with fellow Black women journalists Abby Phillip of CNN and April Ryan of American Urban Radio Networks… Both groups have noted the president’s pattern of using demeaning language toward women journalists of color and other journalists.” Sources: NABJ and JAWS statement: https://jaws.org/2020/03/31/jaws-and-nabj-stand-against-unacceptable-treatment-of-yamiche-alcindor/ Examples of Trump’s racism: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/donald-trump-racist-examples_n_56d47177e4b03260bf777e83 Trump attacks the press: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/17/business/trump-calls-the-news-media-the-enemy-of-the-people.html Women who accuse Trump of sexual assault: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/a-running-list-of-the-women-whove-accused-donald-trump-of-sexual-misconduct_n_57ffae1fe4b0162c043a7212

No one needs to be in ICE detention as they await their case to work through the courts. Forcing people to remain there during the coronavirus pandemic is cruel and inhumane. Along with ICE’s already horrific record of medical neglect and denying basic necessities for maintaining health and sanitation, people locked up in immigration detention are extremely vulnerable to the spread of infectious disease because they are unable to take the necessary precautions to protect themselves like social distancing and sanitizing regularly. There have already been 10 reported deaths in ICE custody in the last six months alone, and multiple ICE officers and people detained have tested positive for COVID-19. Acting Director of ICE Matthew Albence must act now, before it is too late and the virus spreads like wildfire through detention centers. The answer is clear: release people now.