Dear friends,
Clarence fucking Thomas. The stench of corruption around the court and around Thomas in particular has thickened with the revelations that Leonard Leo directed a large payment to the Judicial Education Project to Ginni Thomas.
Thomas appears to be serving on the court as a paid mouthpiece of wealthy conservatives. The payments by Leonard Leo come on the heels of the news that conservative money-bags Harlan Crow paid for Thomas’s great-nephew to attend boarding school.
Thomas’s votes on Citizens United v. FEC and Shelby County v. Holder have undermined the voice of citizens. You may recall that Citizens United — in which Thomas cast one of the 5 majority votes — opened the door to massive amounts of dark money in politics.
In Shelby, for which he wrote an opinion more extreme than the decision to strike down section 4b of the Voting Rights Act, Thomas was again in the 5-4 majority. Thomas’s continued service is an affront to democracy.
Call on the Department of Justice to open an investigation of “Justice” Thomas. I made it easy!
Among other important matters, the Supreme Court will rule this spring on student debt cancelation.
Tell Senators to defend debt cancelation! This quick action is from the Student Debt Crisis Center.
Here’s a great summary of what’s in the NYS budget and what’s not, from the independent nonprofit newsroom, New York Focus.
Sarahana Shrestha, Assemblymember from Ulster County, explained why she had to vote no on a budget that did not include modest tax increases on corporations and wealthy New Yorkers.
Those increases would have generated tens of millions of dollars of revenue to pay for increased wages for home care workers, among other things. Instead, home care wages remain poverty wages.
an added $1 million to create a police intelligence hub dedicated to the New York City area, a proposal of Hochul’s.
And this brings us to public safety, a justice issue at every level of government. NYC is also negotiating its budget, and the mayor is harping on the idea of fiscal responsibility without taking responsibility for the impact of proposed cuts.
The budget cuts will hurt services like food stamps, right after pandemic-related federal assistance ended. The result is, as one New York Times headline put it, a “catastrophe.” The Human Resources Agency is supposed to process food assistance applications within a thirty-day window. In fiscal year 2021, under Mayor Bill de Blasio, the Mayor’s Management Report reported an on-time rate of 92 percent. In December 2022, the on-time rate was 22.4 percent. Those eligible for housing vouchers face similarly long delays, resulting in some being evicted from their homes as they wait.
Meanwhile, Mayor Adams just announced a contract giving the city’s largest police union $5.5 billion in raises. This means that a cop with five and a half years of service could earn $131,500 a year. (By contrast, teachers with five years on the job and a master’s degree earn $72,076 a year.)
New Yorkers want the city to invest in social services. I did some canvassing this weekend with the good folks at JFREJ. Everyone was out in the gorgeous weather and I was surprised at how willingly people let me engage them in conversation about the budget while they were out with their families.
One man asked for a pile of postcards so that he could canvas in his apartment building. One woman was so outraged about the proposed cuts to schools that she said, “Gimme that card right now” so that she could use the QR code to take action.
Lots of people talked about Jordan Neely, and what a mean city this is if we can’t feed and house and care for people.
Here’s an updated action to let Mayor Adams know that we want our tax dollars invested in the services people need. I made it easy.
Demand Care-Not-Cuts from the City Council. This quick action is from the Working Families Party and others.
The plan to close Rikers Island has been mired in politics in spite of the appalling conditions in the jails. Reducing jail populations is a pre-condition for putting the plan to close Rikers into effect.
Here’s an opportunity to educate ourselves on alternatives to incarceration:
Attend a panel discussion this Thursday on Supportive Housing. The event is organized by Congregation Beth Elohim.
Those of us who support this legislation understand that people who have served time need employment in order to reintegrate themselves successfully, and they can’t do it if their records disqualify them from participating in the labor force.
Assemblymember Catalina Cruz, the Democratic sponsor of the measure, boiled it down:
"If we land in a place where we can seal their record in a way that allows them to work, we’re looking at an increase in the workforce by the millions and it could change our economy over night," Cruz said. "Who can argue against giving someone a second chance when they’ve paid their dues and then some to society?"
Use this easy tool from Clean Slate NY to call, email, or tweet at your legislators!
Last week, I linked to an action but failed to put the action into the document. Sorry about that! You can backtrack to my last post for the context.
Call on the President to direct the Department of Labor to enforce federal child labor protections.
with love,
L
just a small detail, but an important one for us grammarian sticklers: I believe "fucking" is capitalized in "Clarence Fucking Thomas ."