Hi friends,
Well, we’re having a wild time now, aren’t we?
The folks at Protect the Results have asked us to be prepared. Clearly, the president has no plans to go quietly and democracy is threatened by the plans of the Sedition Caucus to overturn the election results. You have permission not to read this Guide to Counting Electoral College Votes, and you are forgiven if you are having trouble keeping your eyes on the horizon.
Sign up to Protect the Results in case things do not go smoothly tomorrow.
The good folks at The Frontline, Movement for Black Lives, The Working Families Party, and United We Dream are holding an online town hall tomorrow night with updates and analysis from movement leaders about the election (today’s and November’s). Their town halls incorporate political education and action.
Register for the tele-townhall of Election Defenders tomorrow at 8 PM!
If you are lifting your eyes past January 20th, you can turn your attention to our city. In 2021, we will be choosing a new mayor, comptroller, public advocate, new City Council reps, borough presidents, and Brooklyn and Manhattan District Attorneys.
Criminal justice has been a recurring theme for us, since there is no justice until we are all treated fairly under the law. To demand a reform Prosecutor who embraces fairer, safer, more effective approaches to criminal justice, the folks at Citizen Action are hosting a forum for the candidates for Manhattan District Attorney: Tahanie Aboushi, Alvin Bragg, Liz Crotty, Tali Farhadian Weinstein, Diana Florence, Lucy Lang, Eliza Orlins, and Dan Quart. The bold text is from the original:
Candidates will be questioned on the most pressing criminal justice issues facing New Yorkers. We will also discuss our platform for Manhattan DA candidates, which asks the next DA to cut the office’s $169 million budget, enact robust decline-to-prosecute policies on a range of cases, and seek shorter prison sentences. The event will include a candidate Q&A.
Prosecutors wield more power than almost every other actor in the criminal justice system — and we have the power to elect them. We need prosecutors who will respond fairly to our community’s calls for justice.
Register for the Manhattan DA Candidates Forum on January 6 at 7 PM.
Here are a few morsels of good news you may have missed, because we surely could use some:
The Covid relief bill that passed a week ago contained over $35 billion for energy initiatives including “photovoltaics, new transportation technologies and energy-efficiency technologies.” Large sums of money sometimes fail to make an impression on me, but according to policy analyst Dr. Leah Stokes,
this is probably the biggest energy bill we’ve seen in a decade.
On January 1, an amendment to the NYS Paid Family Leave law took effect, expanding paid family leave to 12 weeks for new parents, those caring for family members with serious health conditions (including COVID-19), and those standing in as caregivers while other family members are on active military duty.
Around Thanksgiving, the city's Department of Small Business Services initiated a loan program for storefront businesses. The zero-interest loans are available for amounts up to $100,000, but the the businesses must be located in a low-to moderate-income zip code. A little swatch of Chinatown near Columbus Park that shares a zip code with Tribeca is ineligible, even though that census tract (#29) has a median household income under $30,000. This loan program should be good news, but it clearly needs a tweak. Note that when you write to SBS, they require that you include the name of your business; please feel free to use Work from Home for Justice.
Contact Small Business Services and ask them for an explanation. Urge them to include low-to-moderate income areas of 10013 in the storefront loan program. This is a ready-made action!
And finally, Lena and their colleagues from Corporate Accountability have dropped a new episode of their podcast, Subvert. The topic is climate liability and there’s a marvelous guest activist named Tetet who explains why this topic is so important to people living in frontline communities.
with love,
L