MAPJ News, Spring, 2015 - p. 1
NEWSLETTER
The Manhattan Alliance For Peace and Justice
educating and organizing for peace and justice
at home and abroad.
Visit us online at: http://www.mapj.org
Annual Meeting: Program & Potluck
The Fight for $15 and a Union: from KC to the National Movement
Speakers: Terrence Wise and Michael M. Enriques
In November of 2012, 200 fast food
union. He is a local and national leader, whom
workers in New York City came together and
the New York Times has called, “a strong
went on strike for the first
national voice in the
time in American history.
Fight for $15.” Terrence
Saturday, March 28, 2015
Workers demanded $15
UUFM Building, 481 Zeandale Rd. has organized his coper hour and the right to
workers, spoken to
5:30:
Beer,
Wine,
Socializing
form a union without
world’s largest media
retaliation, and called on
outlets, and helped grow
6:00: Potluck Dinner
other workers to join
the campaign from a
7:00: Business Meeting
them. Terrence Wise, a
handful of cities to a full7:30:
Speakers
Burger King worker in
blown movement.
Kansas City, heard New
Michael M. Enriquez
York’s call to action. He
is the Executive Director
joined workers across Kansas City as they
of the Workers Organizing Committee of KC,
became the sixth city to strike in July of 2013.
the citywide organization of fast food and lowFast food corporations generate great
wage workers, and their Stand Up KC
wealth, and great racial and economic
campaign. He and Wise will speak about the
inequality. The industry reports $200 billion in
struggles of workers fighting to feed their
profit, pays CEOs at the top brands (like
families and win a union against some of the
McDonald’s) $9,200 an hour, but consigns
world’s largest corporations, and give insight
workers to poverty wages and no benefits.
into the character and scope of the nation’s
This forces workers to rely on safety-net
first movement of working people to challenge
programs (like Medicaid and food assistance)
the Great Age of Inequality in America. They
and tax payers to subsidize corporate profits.
will also discuss the upcoming national 4/15
Contrary to a myth perpetuated by the industry, mobilizations and the growth of the Fight for
today’s fast food workers are not teens. The
$15 to new industries including dollar store
average fast food worker is 28 years old.
workers and adjunct professors in Kansas City.
Terrence will speak about his 17 years in the
industry and why he’s fighting for $15 and
MAPJ News, Spring, 2015 - p. 2
We are Worth More: Terrence Wise, the Face
of Fight for 15 in Kansas City
Taken from S. Greenhouse: Strong Voice in Fight for 15 Fast-Food Wage Campaign, The New
York Times, December 4, 2014, http://nyti.ms/11Zltyf.
Fight for 15 campaign for fast-food wage
increase is not an anonymous struggle,
taking place on the east and west coasts; it
has spread to Kansas City and it has found a
face and voice in Terrence Wise. The Fight
for 15 campaign has become the largest
“…the amount of income needed for a family
to meet its basic needs without using public
assistance.” The study, The Missouri SelfSufficiency Standard: Necessary Wages for
Essential Needs, provides standards for
every county in Missouri. It uses costs of
labor protest in the country in years.
Wise, a 30-something family man, often
works two jobs and 16-hour days, averaging
less than $8.50 an hour, to support his
family. It’s not enough. Wise has worked in
fast-food jobs since he turned 16 and his
story is representative of fast-food workers
nationwide.
In 2000, a study by the Department of
Economic Development (DED) Research
and Planning unit for the Missouri Women’s
Council defined economic self-sufficiency as
basic survival needs (like housing and food)
and takes into account family size,
composition, and location. The living wage
calculator for Kansas City, Jackson County,
Missouri defines a living wage as “…the
hourly rate that an individual must earn to
support their family, if they are the sole
provider and are working full-time (2080
hours per year).” Note that the state
minimum wage is the same for all
individuals, regardless of how many
dependents they may have.
>>
MAPJ News, Spring, 2015 - p. 3
Continued from page 2
For the sake of comparison, the poverty
rate is converted to an hourly wage. When
the Fight for 15 campaign expanded to more
than 100 cities across the country, including
day. In November, he oversaw a 50-city
conference call during which workers
approved plans for the Dec. 4 strike against
fast-food restaurants. The Dec. 4 strike was
the eighth in a series of one-day strikes. The
Living Wage Calculation for Kansas City, Jackson County, Missouri (2015)
Hourly'
Wages
1'Adult
1'Adult,'
1'Child
1'Adult,'
1'Adult,'
2'Adults
2'Children 3'Children
2'Adults,'
1'Child
2'Adults,' 2'Adults,'
2'Children 3'Children
Living
Wage
$8.92
$17.91
$22.34
$28.55
$14.32
$17.14
$18.50
$22.08
Minimum'
Wage
$7.25
$7.25
$7.25
$7.25
$7.25
$7.25
$7.25
$7.25
Poverty'
Wage
$5.21
$7.00
$8.80
$10.60
$7.00
$8.80
$10.60
$12.40
Poverty in America: Living Wage calculator, http://livingwage.mit.edu/places/2909538000
Kansas City, MO, Wise joined the protest
and demonstrated outside McDonald’s,
Burger King, and Wendy’s restaurants. He
likens the protests to other civil rights
movements, acknowledging the fight may not
be easy but is one that needs fought.
As a volunteer for the movement, Wise
was initially reluctant to be at the forefront of
the national effort. He eventually agreed,
realizing “We’re going to have to stand up
and fight back.” Wise addressed the
NAACP’s national convention to persuade
them to endorse a higher wage. At the
movement’s July, 2014 convention, Wise led
a crucial segment that garnered support for a
plan to commit civil disobedience. In
September, he led a sit-in outside a
McDonald’s in Kansas City where law
enforcement arrested 52 Kansas City
workers. Nationally, nearly 500 fast-food
workers and supporters were arrested that
Service Employees International Union has
spent more than $10 million to support the
movement, which they see as providing
leverage to raise pay for low-wage workers
nationwide.
The fast food companies play down the
protests, claiming that one-day strikes are
not really strikes and that the efforts have not
affected their operations. Officials of the fastfood industry call the movement a union front
and claim the movement will hurt small and
medium-size restaurant businesses—the
independent pizza guy, the deli on the
corner, the neighborhood bar and grill.
However, Wise cites the Pizza Hut pay policy
that states a maximum raise of 25 cents over
three years.
Wise insists a $15 hourly wage is not an
impossible dream, “We have to build a
movement for all low-wage workers.”
MAPJ Board of Directors:!
John Exdell, Chair; Annemarie Olson, Vice-Chair; Anne Cowan & Tom Manney, Treasurers;
Sabrina Bowker; Barbara Krehbiel Gehring; Ekaterina Rosenberg; Leo Rosenberg; and Ellen Welti
MAPJ News, Spring, 2015 - p. 4
Conserving Catastrophe By Stan Cox
Stan Cox, a scientist at the Land
Institute in Salina, is a long-time member of
MAPJ.
As Naomi Klein points out in her book
This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the
Climate, some of the big business interests
that have long fought the idea of human
climate disruption are now itching to fix the
climate with geoengineering. And the helpful
geoengineer could turn out to be even more
dangerous than the most bitter climate
denier.
Aerosol injection is the most likely choice
for re-engineering of the Earth's climate. A
sulfuric acid mist launched into the
stratosphere would reflect some solar
radiation back into space, leaving less heat
to be trapped in the atmosphere. The idea
has now flourished well beyond the world of
mad scientists, despite almost certain, alltoo-predictable side effects.
Agriculture in already-cold regions would
be crippled. There would be acid rainfall,
increased eutrophication of lakes, drought in
the Amazon basin, and a stirring of tropical
cyclone activity in the Arabian Sea and
South Atlantic. Aerosols could trigger
drought in Africa's Sahel region as they did
in the 1970s. They would neither curb
ocean acidification nor stop the
disintegration of the West Antarctica ice
sheet.
An aerosol curtain would permit or even
encourage business-as-usual carbon
emissions to continue. Any cessation of the
injection program would then mean sudden,
dramatic, and much more catastrophic
warming. Whether or not greenhouse
emissions are reduced, injection would have
to be repeated regularly and perpetually.
Fears that geoengineering could make
things worse, not better, are reinforced by
sad experience. In 1989, years before
aerosol injection would be proposed, the
historian William McNeill even argued that
there exists a “law of conservation of
catastrophe,” dictating that when economies
repeatedly fend off catastrophic events with
technological or financial wizardry, they only
guarantee future disaster.
McNeill first discussed well-known
failures to gain permanent control over the
Mississippi River and China's Yellow River.
He wrote, "Intelligence and ingenuity in this
and innumerable other cases run a race
with all the nasty eventualities that interfere
with human hopes and purposes . . . Human
history thus becomes an extraordinary,
dynamic equilibrium in which triumph and
disaster recur perpetually on an everincreasing scale as our skills and
knowledge grow."
After drawing comparisons with cycles of
economic growth and collapse, McNeill
concluded, “It certainly seems as though
every gain in precision in the coordination of
human activity and every heightening of
efficiency in production were matched by a
new vulnerability to breakdown. If this really
is the case, then the conservation of
catastrophe may indeed be a law of nature
like the conservation of energy.”
Two ecologically calamitous decades
later, Monthly Review editor John Bellamy
Foster argued that the conservation of
catastrophe had become even more
obvious. However, Foster noted, McNeill's
thesis needed to be understood not as
growing out of universal human tendencies
but rather as a predictable consequence of
capitalism and the wealth accumulation that
keeps it going. He observed, “Just as the
short-term power of humanity over nature
increased along with the scale of the
economy, so did the long-run potential for
ecological (and economic) catastrophe.” >>
MAPJ News, Spring, 2015 - p. 5
Conserving Catastrophe (continued from page 4)
Foster concluded that “what
distinguishes our time from earlier centuries
is not so much the conservation of
catastrophe, which has long been
recognized, but rather the accelerated pace
at which such destruction is now
manifesting itself, i.e., what I am calling the
accumulation of catastrophe.”
In particular, the atmosphere has been
ruined not with the intention of causing
catastrophe but rather because ruining it
was profitable. Likewise, geoengineering
would be deployed not to prevent
catastrophe but simply because it will help
keep the profits churning—for a while
anyway. But fixing the atmosphere means
restraint, not remodeling.
LOCAL ELECTIONS – APRIL 7, 2015
BE SURE TO VOTE!!!
CANDIDATES
USD 383 School
Board - Elect Four
Manhattan City
Commission
Nicholas Dyer
Mike Dodson
Curt Herrman
Jerrod McKee
Darell Edie
Wynn Butler
Leah Fliter
Linda Morse
Dave Colburn
John Ball
!
Kaleb James
Working to Overturn Citizens United
by Debbie Plummer, MAPJ member
Wolf-pac.com is a group of crosspartisans who would like to overturn the
Supreme Court’s decision of Citizens
United, which decided, “corporations are
people and money is speech.” This
Supreme Court decision has led to an
almost billion dollar election process and a
narrowing of opportunities for those who
would like to run for office but aren’t
millionaire/billionaires nor anywhere close
to that economic standard. So, those with
limited financial means are unable to
participate in civic duties whereas those
with huge financial advantages often win
their elections, through dark money/PACs/
SUPERPACs/etc., but then spend 50% 75% of their DC days “dialing-for-cash” for
their next campaign.
I learned about wolf-pac.com through
watching The Young Turks (tyt.com), whom
I had been listening to for 10 years. They
started in an apartment and now have their
own “internet home” where they review/
critique/synthesize the news – international
and national. A documentary on their
history, called “Mad as Hell,” can now be
downloaded on iTunes. Since the dramatic
downfall of our media and its attachment to
the FOX TV model of attraction, I’ve felt the
need to search for alternative news
sources. With the internet, searching for
independent news became easier,
although one has to be careful about
agendas/background/financial backing
sources.
In some ways, “wolf-pac.com” is similar
to one of Larry Lessig’s models of
overturning Citizens United. Lessig has
been working for a long time to take money
out of elections/politics.
>>
MAPJ News, Spring, 2015 - p. 6
Working to Overturn Citizens United (continued from page 5)
He is calling for a limited states
constitutional convention for an amendment
to abolish the effect of the Citizens United
decision. For such a convention to take
place, over 30 state legislatures would need
to pass a resolution in support.
To gain state support we should call/visit
our own Kansas legislators with a prepared
script asking about the resolution and
supporting a limited convention, to add the
28th Amendment that would overturn Citizens
United. The goal is to find state legislators
who support the effort, and then check back
with them as often as needed to offer
support for action. Four states have passed
their resolution – CA, NJ, IL, and VT. At our
Kansas capitol, a few individuals are “kind-of
interested” in supporting the resolution. We
need to work for a limited convention – one
addressing only Citizen’s United.
At Wolf-pac.com we are provided with
scripts, history, documentaries, PBS shows,
articles, etc. to share with the
representatives and information to support
our goal, which is to develop a 28th
Amendment that would contain these
elements:
"Corporations are not people. They
have none of the Constitutional rights of
human beings. Corporations are not
allowed to give money to any politician,
directly or indirectly. No politician can
raise over $100 from any person or entity.
All elections must be publicly financed."
MAPJ is looking for a person to manage the MAPJ Website content. We will hire someone for five hours a week at $12 per hour. We require three references and experience with websites. If you are interested, send your resume to Tom Manney at [email protected]
To become a MAPJ member, send a donation or volunteer time for a
project. We urgently need your support for our 2015 programming.
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Send to: MAPJ, PO Box 1561, Manhattan, KS 66505
MAPJ News, Spring, 2015 - p. 7
Civil Rights Attorney Describes Being in the
Movement in Mississippi in 1960s
by Ekatrina Rosenberg
On Wednesday, February 25, 2015,
Manhattan’s community gathered at the
Leadership Studies Town Hall at K-State.
Over 100 people attended Eric Seitz’s
powerful and inspirational talk on civil rights.
Eric started his speech by going back to
the 1960s, when he and his Oberlin College
classmates felt compelled to join the southern
civil rights movement. In December, 1964,
they went to Mississippi to rebuild a church
that had been bombed by segregationists for
taking part in civil right activities. Young and
fearless, they entered an unsafe zone.
Protected from attackers at night by
sandbags, they defended their core beliefs
and rebuilt the church. The church, a symbol
of civil rights and liberty, still proudly stands in
Mississippi.
Martin Luther King Jr. had presented an
influential speech at Eric’s graduation, and
Eric shared a recording of this speech: Do
not sleep through the revolution was Dr.
King’s message. In this country, we are
always battling for our right to be treated as
equal citizens. The most basic needs —
access to education, housing, and healthcare
— should be considered core civil liberties.
African Americans, and now the fast growing
population of immigrants who have become
integrated into our community need equal
access to these essentials. Absence of equal
access is detrimental to our society.
For instance, many minorities’ future
success depends on the environment in
which they grew up. However, as schools are
often financed by local districts, there is a
visible shortage of adequate schooling in
poor neighborhoods, which, from the very
start, sets up underprivileged communities for
failure. Eric observed that corporations are
not going to voluntarily give up their powers
and allow equal redistribution of funds among
our society. Their main focus is to keep their
shareholders happy and not to prioritize
public good.
Eric added that there will need to be a
revolution, but he does not foresee it
happening in his lifetime because people are
sleeping through social injustice. He called on
us to keep our eyes open as we continue to
fight for civil liberties and against injustices.
On a daily basis, it is important to take an
active role in the civil rights movement in
order to generate an actual change in this
world.
MAPJ News, Spring, 2015 - p. 8
Chair: John Exdell ([email protected])
Contact Information
Vice-Chair: Annemarie Olson ([email protected])
Treasurers: Tom Manney & Anne Cowan ([email protected])
Coordinator: Brenda Mayberry ([email protected])
Campus Organizer: Tyrone S. Williams II ([email protected])
Webmasters: Leo Rosenberg & Nicholas Domoney ([email protected])
Newsletter Editor/Layout: Tom Manney ([email protected])
Committees: To become more involved, e-mail [email protected] to join one of the
following committees: El Salvador Sister City; Programming; Legislative
Action; Newsletter; Nominating; Website.
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MARCH 14 – St. Patrick’s Day in Aggieville 16-‐20 – KSU Spring Break 18 – Begin advance voting for City/school elections 19 – MAPJ Board Meeting: 7 pm, UFM, 1221 Thurston St. All members welcome 22 – Voice for Justice Meeting: 2 pm, First United Methodist Church: Working to assist undocumented residents of Manhattan. If questions, contact Anne Cowan at [email protected] 24 – Lecture by Erin Khue Ninh, Annual Cultural Studies Symposium: 4 pm, Room 13 Leasure Hall (Contact: [email protected]) 28 – MAPJ Annual Meeting at UUFM, 481 Zeandale Rd. Potluck/business meeting/
speakers. See Front page of newsletter APRIL 5 – Easter 7 – City/School elections 19 – Voice for Justice Meeting: Presentation from Jessica Piedra, Immigration lawyer. 1:30 pm, location to be announced 23 – MAPJ Board Meeting: 7 pm, UFM. All
members welcome MAY
!8 – K-State Spring Term ends
15-‐16 — K-State Graduation Ceremonies