EBR Metro Council approves first industrial tax break since adopting ITEP-related guidelines.  Advocate story here.
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"THIS IS A HISTORIC DAY FOR STATE EMPLOYEES AND ALL NEVADANS, AS COLLECTIVE BARGAINING RIGHTS WILL MEAN A VOICE ON THE JOB TO MAKE MEANINGFUL CHANGES." ​

​Common Dreams story by Jake Johnson  here.

Angry seniors today raise hell against a mayor who a year ago made them a promise to build $500 million in new affordable senior housing, then turned his back and flew to Iowa to sell his brand of progressivism on the national market.

​We echo the frustration of the men and women of East Brooklyn Congregations and Metro Industrial Areas Foundation as today, at the end of their ropes, they call for Mayor de Blasio to “step up or step down."

NY Daily News Editorial
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Volkswagen was wooed to Chattanooga in 2008 with a $554 million subsidy package from the state and local governments.
It was the largest taxpayer handout ever given to a foreign-owned automaker up to that moment, and remains the largest subsidy deal in Tennessee history. The deal came free of any job or investment requirements.
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“The only commitment that was made to the state was to keep the plant nonunion. It wasn’t to be safe or pay well or provide a great work environment,” said maintenance worker Gary Swafford. “It’s flabbergasting.”

Full story in Labor Notes here.
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"Franklin D. Roosevelt is reported to have said about the need for a specific policy initiative, "Okay, you've convinced me. Now go out there and organize and create a constituency to make me do it." I fear that too many progressives are still caught up in the "convincing," when what we need now is the constituency-and people who are willing to think hard about how to create, sustain, and energize that constituency."   More from still timely piece in Boston Review.
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Together Louisiana just beat back an attempt at legislative subterfuge to undermine local control over industrial tax exemptions.

Senator Bodi White tried to use the conference committee process to throw out the ENTIRE CONTENT of a resolution he sponsored, replacing it, whole cloth, with the language of a bill to undermine local control over industrial tax exemptions that had been defeated 5 TIMES this session already.

The trickery passed the Senate unanimously, with no one, it seems, catching what was going on. It was set for a House floor vote Thursday afternoon.
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Rep. Ted James caught the dirty trick and alerted Together Louisiana.
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TLA sent out an action alert at 2:37pm. And here's what happened next:

Miracle Workers

"The grand challenge that Arendt gave herself was the retrieval of the words most associated with politics—and therefore the words most ravaged through centuries of overuse and distortion."

Read the smart, timely piece here.

Over the course of my organizing career with IAF that spanned forty years I can’t recall a strategic idea worth pursuing or a tactic worth implementing that didn’t derive from relational meetings.  My recollections in many cases include the exact moment when the spark occurred:  The ashen face of a parent in Las Vegas describing the pimping of her child for sex; the tight jaw of a woman despondent over the number of children running loose after school in her neighborhood; the depression of a man whose year of government funded “job training” ended with no job in sight; an immigrant describing his ordeal crossing the border.
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“Power before program” is one of IAF Co-Director Ernie Cortes’ signature organizing mantras.  Implicit in his exhortation is adoption of IAF’s methodological innovations - first and foremost relational meetings, one to one, that are practices for building power.  Strategic, tactical and methodological innovations circle back on one another in a virtuous circle.  Where the power of IAF citizen organizations is successfully exercised, business as usual is disrupted as public space opens for more citizen leaders to impact public life with fresh initiatives, energy and action.  Troubled democracies everywhere need more of this. Their survival may depend on it.

PRESS CONFERENCE
Who: Delta Interfaith with Together Louisiana
When: Thursday, May 30, 2pm
Where: State Capitol in Baton Rouge (foot of the front steps of the Capitol building)
Topic: Expose and seek action on illegal activity costing East Carroll Parish $6.2 million in tax revenue
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Dear friends,
They say Lake Providence and East Carroll Parish, where I live and work, is the "poorest place in America." 
Something shocking has taken place in that place.

​More than $6 million in local tax revenue -- funds that would have gone to our public schools, roads and essential services -- has been taken from East Carroll Parish due to illegal actions by both governmental and corporate entities.

​Sister Bernie Barrett
Delta Interfaith (part of Together Louisiana)