For the past three decades, Washington politicians and their benefactors have broken their promises of jobs and economic relief to struggling working families. Instead, they have turned the “American Dream” of health, education and success into an American Nightmare of poverty, foreclosures and a loss of stability and dignity.

Now, they’re coming for our Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, all to pay for more tax cuts for the rich and sweetheart deals for big corporations. The upper one percent of Americans currently control over one third of the private wealth in America, and instead of paying their fair share, they now want to take the programs that we have spent our entire lives working to build. It’s our money and we’re not going to sit back and watch them take it!

Joining our staff, coalition partners, and concerned supporters were President Franklin Delanor Roosevelt and his wife Elanor Roosevelt, who oversaw the implementation of The New Deal, an economic overhaul in the 1930s that stimulated the recovery of the economy after the Great Depression and provided jobs and stability to thousands of working families. Arriving in a stately Studebaker, the elegant couple added an air of prestige and elegance to our caravan.

The Caravan commenced at Kleinhans Music Hall, a world-class venue that was made possible by Roosevelt’s New Deal. It was a fitting location to start off the procession and a testament to the ability of government to provide jobs and security instead of preying upon vulnerable working families.

Many citizens spoke about the need to restore the American Promise. Speakers included elderly people that rely upon essential services in order to pay for medication, disabled parents that rely upon the safety net in order to provide for their children, and concerned adults that have to care for their parents, among many others.

Meeting at 11 different locations across New York State, our Caravan garnered thousands of demonstrators, a myriad of press coverage (click here to read a list of articles) and supporters from different political parties (including Republicans!). America’s true majority came out to express their disbelief at the immense greed required to strip America’s social safety net.

At a press conference in the Legislative Office Building in Albany, AQE Executive Director Billy Easton spoke adamantly about the negative effects of Governor Cuomo’s budget cuts to education that are now being identified across the state as local school budgets pass. Last year, 10,000 school employees lost their jobs, including teachers, administrators, secretaries, aides, librarians, and other indiduals. Class sizes have increased, many essential in-school and after-school programs have been cut, and schools have been permanently closed. This year, 16,000 more school employees will also lose their jobs. It is important to note that the people losing their jobs are not just statistics — they are hard-working people with jobs and families that are being put out of work. Every school employee has a direct and tangible effect on a student’s life. Be it a teacher, aide, hall monitor, librarian, or secretary,  these people are employed to enhance a student’s experience and to contribute to his or her well being.

All of this, while millionaires and billionaires are getting a huge tax break.

Developing our kids’ minds from a young age is of the utmost priority. Early childhood education is increasingly being cited as one of the most important factors in a child’s future success. 75% of a child’s brain development and 85% of intellect, personality, and social skills are developed by age five. And, several studies, most notably the High Scope Perry Preschool Project, estimate that every dollar invested in early childhood education returns over seven dollars by the time a child turns 19. Governor Cuomo’s cuts are directly affecting our kids’ opportunities for success!

And, contrary to popular belief, the millionaires’ tax doesn’t expire until the end of the year. There is still time for us to tell Governor Cuomo that it’s simply not right to put the interests of millionaires and billionaires before the needs of our kids.

You can help! Tweet your message with the hashtag #KidsNotMillionaires to help fight for our teachers, aides, and other school staff. Let Cuomo know that our children need quality education and that we cant afford to cut their future.

In the news:

Advocacy Groups suggest reinstating “Millionaires’ Tax”

Groups Urge Lawmakers, Governor to extend Millionaires’ Tax

The Public School Boycot

Cuts to Schools: “Devastating” – Education Advocates

Most School Budgets Pass

Organizations participating include Alliance for Quality Education, Citizen Action of New York, New York City Coalition for Educational Justice, Long Island Progressive Coalition, Make the Road New York, New York Communities for Change, VOCAL, Push-Buffalo, Right to the City New York, Real Rent Reform New York, Community Voices Heard and also New Deal for New York , The Save Our SUNY Coalition, Strong Economy for All and Growing Together NY.

We’ll be covering the event live, using the stream below. If you can’t make it to Albany, come back here on 3/30 between 2pm and midnight for full, live coverage of the events at the Capitol.

Justice Works: A Conference for Progressive New York – is a new event like none other in New York.

For those of you who have been to a Citizen Action annual leadership conference in the past: This event is going to be bigger and better than ever before. We will have at least double the number of attendees, nationally renowned speakers, and, most importantly, we’re opening registration and inviting dozens of other organizations to participate. This is no longer an event just for Citizen Action’s top volunteers. It’s an event designed to strengthen and unite New York’s progressive movement.

For those of you who are asking, “what’s a Citizen Action annual leadership conference?” : We’re bringing together hundreds of New York’s progressive population for an intense two-day conference complete will workshops on issues and skills and plenary discussions on big questions facing our communities, our state, and our nation. We’ll also have some top notch keynote speakers to help put it all into perspective.

Justice Works will be held at the beautiful (and unionized) Crowne Plaza Hotel in historic downtown Albany, New York, just two blocks from the Capitol. It’s easily accessible by plane, train, bus, car, and, well, being just two blocks form the Hudson River, boats too. The hotel will offer free shuttle service to and from the airport and train station. With your registration, you’ll also get free covered parking in the hotel garage. There’s a lovely swimming pool, and all the guest rooms have flat panel TVs. But, you’re not going to want to watch TV…

We’ll have workshops on organizing skills, health care, education, green jobs, the economy, the arts as part of progressive change. And there’ll be some great entertainment on Saturday evening.

Now that you know why you have to be there, here’s some details about registration:

1. Early registration is from now until April 1st. We strongly encourage you to take advantage of the cheapest rate by registering today!
2. Scholarships are available. Applications for scholarships are due on March 18th. Get yours in today.
3. Sponsorship is available. If you’re from an organization, and want some good promotion at the progressive meet up of the year, become a sponsor of Justice Works. Details are here.

Once you’re registered, be sure to let your friends know about Justice Works. And be sure to “like” the Justice Works Facebook page to stay up to date on the conference agenda, speaker announcement, and other details.

These events were covered by many press outlets. Here are some of the stories:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/nyregion/15schools.html
http://polhudson.lohudblogs.com/2011/02/14/education-groups-criticize-governor-on-school-funding-equity/
http://www.pressconnects.com/article/20110214/NEWS01/102140361/Broome-school-advocates-protest-proposed-cuts?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE
http://www.wivb.com/dpp/news/niagara/Public-meeting-in-Falls-over-education-cuts
http://www.wbng.com/news/local/Groups-Urge-Lawmakers-To-Say-No-To-Education-Cuts-116191149.html
http://buffalo.ynn.com/content/top_stories/533494/state-legislators-receive-valentines-with-special-message/?ap=1&MP4
http://polhudson.lohudblogs.com/2011/02/14/education-groups-send-hearts-to-lawmakers/
http://www.capitaltonight.com/2011/02/from-lobbyists-with-love/
http://binghamton.ynn.com/content/top_stories/533509/community-urges-lawmakers-to-reject-school-cuts/
http://www.wicz.com/news2005/viewarticle.asp?a=17529
http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wned/news.newsmain/article/1/0/1763096/WNED-AM.970.NEWS/Bake.Sale.Raises.Awareness..Dough.for.Education

And here are some photos from the events:

Shanna Goldman, our Organizing Director, and Chris Scoville, our Capital District Organizer, opened the conference with a dynamic discussion on far reach of economic concerns. Leaders then chose among 3 workshops that were divided into 2 days. Jess Wisneski, our Legislative Director, and Cynthia Ward, Northeast Action Executive Director, moderated the health care workshop. Cleo Oliver, Citizen Action Campaign Coordinator, and Carin Schiewe, Northeast Action Field Director, moderated the civic engagement workshop. Karen Scharff, our Executive Director, managed the education workshop.

Citizen Action staff loved the level of engagement–especially since we all put so many hours into organizing the conference.

The engagement, though, reached into the Internet this year. We live-streamed portions of the conference and actively used Twitter and Facebook. Leaders especially loved the Twitter projection. Be sure to click on the link to see what the buzz was all about.

We ended the conference on a riveting and uplifting note. William McNary, President of USAction – our national affliate-, brought everyone to their feet and some even to tears. Luckily, in yet another example of technological versatility, Charlie Albanetti, our Communications Director, captured this provocative engagement on video.

Here is a collection of photos that highlight our very active weekend:

We’re also embedding the informational binder that each attendee received. The pages highlight our major projects and is chock full of useful summaries. Please take a look!

2010 Leadership Conference Binder Docs

Carol Jones, Metro Justice Organizer, registering new voters.

Cross-posted at DragonFlyEye.net

By Jon Greenbaum, Lead Organizer, Metro Justice

(Metro Justice is Citizen Action’s Rochester affiliate)

If you believe that all Americans have the right to vote you are in good company. Although the United States got its start as a nation in which only property-owning white men enjoyed the right to vote, Americans organized at the grassroots to expand voting rights to every citizen. Community groups like Metro Justice continue this tradition by launching extensive voter registration drives. This year Metro Justice registered close to 5,000 Rochester city residents.

But not everybody appreciates these efforts. According to Senator John McCain, ACORN, a group that has registered over a million voters this year, “is on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history” and “may be destroying the fabric of democracy.” The Republicans are calling ACORN a “quasi criminal organization” and the McCain campaign has launched ads about “massive voter fraud.”

There might be very real threats to American democracy, but voter registration drives certainly aren’t a menace and the issue of “voter fraud” is a blatant red herring. At Metro Justice our quality control staff called every person we registered in order to make sure our community outreach workers were complying with the law. Apparently some ACORN employees did violate the law and came back to the office with false registrations. But the quality control system worked- the ACORN staff identified the problem and alerted the local Board of Elections.

This is not “voter fraud.” It would be voter fraud if somebody attempted to vote as a false registrant. Are people actually doing this? Is there real voter fraud occurring in the United States? Viewers of lurid reports by Fox News and CNN might be led to this conclusion. But the reality is that, according to a recent report by the Brennan Center for Justice, this kind of voter fraud is as widespread as “death by lightning.” And after five years of study, after being pushed by the Bush administration to investigate voter fraud, the United States Department of Justice concluded that there was virtually no evidence of any organized effort to skew elections.

If voter fraud doesn’t rate as a “threat to democracy” why have the Republicans cried wolf so loudly? Why did Karl Rove push the Department of Justice to pursue “voter fraud” cases and why did the DOJ fire Attorneys who refused?   (The resultant scandal eventually brought down Attorney General Gonzalez and Karl Rove). And why does it appear that the FBI is now launching an investigation into ACORN?

The answer is that not every American shares your belief that we all have the right to our vote. According to David Iglesias, one of the U.S. attorneys who were vindicated after being fired by President Bush’s DOJ, “Based on what I saw in 2004 and 2006, [voter fraud] is a scare tactic.” The GOP campaign to fill the headlines with allegations of “voter fraud” seems to be part of a strategy to pass restrictive voter ID laws across the country. If Republican operatives can get people to be worried about “hordes of illegal voters” then Republican legislators won’t seem so unreasonable about pursuing restrictive laws requiring a photo ID in order to vote.

In Indiana, where the state has enacted a law requiring photo ID in order to vote, twelve Sisters of the Holy Cross were turned away from the polls this year because their drivers’ licenses had expired.  The Sisters are in good company. One out of ten Indiana citizens doesn’t have the proper ID required to vote. But this law will have a disproportionate impact on African Americans and Latinos who are twice as likely not to have photo ID. In fact the Indiana law will likely strip the vote from an estimated 100,000 black voters in that swing state. The Republican legislators who wrote the law probably weren’t trying to disenfranchise nuns but they might have been thinking about the fact that African Americans are more likely to vote Democratic.

A recent Supreme Court ruling upholding the Indiana law gives the green light for other states to enact these kinds of restrictive photo ID laws. But the photo ID laws are not the only real threats to American democracy. Twenty states have put restrictions on voter registration drives.  After 80 years of registering voters, the League of Women Voters ceased their annual voter registration drive in Florida after the state passed a law which would fine the League $5,000 for every voter registration form that didn’t comply with state law. The restrictive Florida law also has a disproportionate impact on African American and Latinos who are less likely to be registered to vote.

Florida was also ground zero for massive disenfranchisement in 2000. Although the hanging chad controversy got the most media coverage, the biggest threat to democracy that year was the “purging” of tens of thousands of potential voters. Florida Secretary of State Catherine Harris spent millions of dollars creating “felon” lists and then instructed county elections supervisors to “purge and block” these voters due to their status as ex-offenders, even though the move contradicted state law granting the vote to Florida citizens who did their time in other states (many Florida voters just had names that were close to the names on the felon list). Once again the law had a disproportionate impact on African Americans.  The elections supervisor in Hillsborough County found that 54 percent of the targeted voters were African-American in a county where blacks only constitute 11% of the population.  George Bush went on to win Florida and the presidency by 500 votes. In a clear conflict of interest, Catherine Harris had also served as co-chair of the Bush campaign committee in Florida.

Another threat to American democracy is a little known portion of the Help America Vote Act. The statute requires Secretaries of State to reject first time registrants where officials decide they cannot match their identity to government records. So far the Secretaries of State have appeared to violate the law, incorrectly using bureaucratic means to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters in swing states.

In California, Republican Secretary of State Bruce MacPherson dismissed 42% of new registrations. According to the new Secretary of State, Democrat Debra Bowen, these citizens were predominantly citizens with Latino and Asian surnames.

In 2004, when people arrived to vote on Election Day 3 million Americans were handed provisional ballots. One million of those ballots were thrown away. Once again the move had a disproportionate impact on people of color – about 88% of these lost votes were cast by minorities.  These voters had been “caged” meaning that mail that had been sent to them had been returned, which can trigger partisan challenges.  In Ohio in 2004, the swing state that clinched the presidency for another four years for George Bush, the Ohio Republican Party challenged 35,000 voters using this technique.

There are real threats to American democracy. ACORN’s voter registration drive is not one of those threats.

It appeared that the Administration we worked so hard to elect was backing away from our strongest mandate – true health care reform through a strong public option.

But every cloud has a silver lining!

My group in Buffalo, BuffalObama, that worked so very hard from March of 2007 until election day and after, is re-energized.  And it’s not just Buffalo, across the state the grassroots organizers who have been continuing to meet, open offices, make phone calls and support health care reform initiatives are ready to speak up.  We are not going to lose this fight!

So, if you were involved in the campaign – knocking on doors, making calls, holding signs, sending in money – it’s time to do it again!  Let’s not waste the significant time we put in during the election with inside the beltway politics and insurance company money.  We proved we could overcome all of that during the election – we can do it again!

Call your Citizen Action office right now and ask what you can do – we have LOTS of events happening and each one is important to show that our support for a public option is louder and larger than the voices of the right wing crazies.

Citizen Action of New York/Health Care for America Now organizer in Buffalo, Diana Cihak, was interviewed tonight on Neil Cavuto’s show on the Fox Business Channel.

Diana disagreed with Neil’s prediction that the public option is dead. She made the case that an overwhelming majority of Americans support a public option and support H.R. 3200. In fact, an analysis of polls about the public option shows a range of 62%-83% of approval of the public option.

We’re going to win health care reform – we’re going to win health care that is affordable, with comprehensive coverage.

So, we went to his office to ask him to tell us why he was stalling the bill and what it was that he was looking for in order to fully support HR 3200.  After a good press conference that was attended by many different individuals from the Western New York region we met with his Chief of Staff.  It seems that maybe we are not as far apart as we thought – according to his staff Congressman Massa is just on the fence right now about supporting the bill.  But then again he is not willing, yet, to come out and say he will vote for it when the Congress reconvenes in September.

Massa’s office is being flooded with mail and phone calls against health care reform and HR3200.  That makes it hard for him to enthusiastically support any reform legislation.  Now, we know and his staff implied, that there is a hard line right wing theme to many of the letters and calls against reform.  They realize that the pushback on health reform is a coordinated and well funded effort by the Republicans to make Obama and the Democrats look bad no matter what the cost to the average American.

But still, he needs to hear from his voters that support reform.

So, if you are reading this we need you to call Congressman Massa and ask him to support HR3200.  You can call his Pittsford district office at:  (585) 218-0040;  or his office in DC at:  (202) 225-3161

At the end of the long meeting with his staff there was a light in the darkness when his staffer said “well maybe you should meet with the Congressman yourself”.  So we are doing just that, we are going back to meet with him tomorrow and see if we can’t get him to commit to supporting HR3200.

But in order for us to get him to say yes, he needs to hear from you.  So please call his office right now.

And on Thursday there is a town hall meeting in Honeyoe Falls that Massa is holding about health care reform.  So please try to attend if you live in his district – it starts at 7:30 at the Mendon Community Center.

There is hope – we just have to keep working!

Cheers,

Diana