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SOLIDARITY with SERVERS — PLEASE CIRCULATE!
From Clifford Conner
Dear friends and relatives
Every day the scoundrels who have latched onto Trump to push through their rightwing soak-the-poor agenda inflict a new indignity on the human race. Today they are conspiring to steal the tips we give servers in restaurants. The New York Times editorial appended below explains what they're trying to get away with now.
People like you and me cannot compete with the Koch brothers' donors network when it comes to money power. But at least we can try to avoid putting our pittance directly into their hands. Here is a modest proposal: Whenever you are in a restaurant where servers depend on tips for their livelihoods, let's try to make sure they get what we give them.
Instead of doing the easy thing and adding the tip into your credit card payment, GIVE CASH TIPS and HAND THEM DIRECTLY TO YOUR SERVER. If you want to add a creative flourish such as including a preprinted note that explains why you are doing this, by all means do so. You could reproduce the editorial below for their edification.
If you want to do this, be sure to check your wallet before entering a restaurant to make sure you have cash in appropriate denominations.
This is a small act of solidarity with some of the most exploited members of the workforce in America. Perhaps its symbolic value could outweigh its material impact. But to paraphrase the familiar song: What the world needs now is solidarity, sweet solidarity.
If this idea should catch on, be prepared for news stories about restaurant owners demanding that servers empty their pockets before leaving the premises at the end of their shifts. The fight never ends!
Yours in struggle and solidarity,
Cliff
The Trump Administration to Restaurants: Take the Tips!
The New York Times editorial board, December 21, 2017
Most Americans assume that when they leave a tip for waiters and bartenders, those workers pocket the money. That could become wishful thinking under a Trump administration proposal that would give restaurants and other businesses complete control over the tips earned by their employees.
The Department of Labor recently proposed allowing employers to pool tips and use them as they see fit as long as all of their workers are paid at least the minimum wage, which is $7.25 an hour nationally and higher in some states and cities. Officials argue that this will free restaurants to use some of the tip money to reward lowly dishwashers, line cooks and other workers who toil in the less glamorous quarters and presumably make less than servers who get tips. Using tips to compensate all employees sounds like a worthy cause, but a simple reading of the government's proposal makes clear that business owners would have no obligation to use the money in this way. They would be free to pocket some or all of that cash, spend it to spiff up the dining room or use it to underwrite $2 margaritas at happy hour. And that's what makes this proposal so disturbing.
The 3.2 million Americans who work as waiters, waitresses and bartenders include some of the lowest-compensated working people in the country. The median hourly wage for waiters and waitresses was $9.61 an hour last year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Further, there is a sordid history of restaurant owners who steal tips, and of settlements in which they have agreed to repay workers millions of dollars.
Not to worry, says the Labor Department, which argues, oddly and unconvincingly, that workers will be better off no matter how owners spend the money. Enlarging dining rooms, reducing menu prices or offering paid time off should be seen as "potential benefits to employees and the economy over all." The department also assures us that owners will funnel tip money to employees because workers would quit otherwise.
t is hard to know how much time President Trump's appointees have spent with single mothers raising two children on a salary from a workaday restaurant in suburban America, seeing how hard it is to make ends meet without tips. What we do know is that the administration has produced no empirical cost-benefit analysis to support its proposal, which is customary when the government seeks to make an important change to federal regulations.
The Trump administration appears to be rushing this rule through — it has offered the public just 30 days to comment on it — in part to pre-empt the Supreme Court from ruling on a 2011 Obama-era tipping rule. The department's new proposal would do away with the 2011 rule. The restaurant industry has filed several legal challenges to that regulation, which prohibits businesses from pooling tips and sharing them with dishwashers and other back-of-the-house workers. Different federal circuit appeals courts have issued contradictory rulings on those cases, so the industry has asked the Supreme Court to resolve those differences; the top court has not decided whether to take that case.
Mr. Trump, of course, owns restaurants as part of his hospitality empire and stands to benefit from this rule change, as do many of his friends and campaign donors. But what the restaurant business might not fully appreciate is that their stealth attempt to gain control over tips could alienate and antagonize customers. Diners who are no longer certain that their tips will end up in the hands of the server they intended to reward might leave no tip whatsoever. Others might seek to covertly slip cash to their server. More high-minded restaurateurs would be tempted to follow the lead of the New York restaurateur Danny Meyer and get rid of tipping by raising prices and bumping up salaries.
By changing the fundamental underpinnings of tipping, the government might well end up destroying this practice. But in doing so it would hurt many working-class Americans, including people who believed that Mr. Trump would fight for them.
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SOLIDARITY with SERVERS — PLEASE CIRCULATE!
From Clifford Conner
Dear friends and relatives
Every day the scoundrels who have latched onto Trump to push through their rightwing soak-the-poor agenda inflict a new indignity on the human race. Today they are conspiring to steal the tips we give servers in restaurants. The New York Times editorial appended below explains what they're trying to get away with now.
People like you and me cannot compete with the Koch brothers' donors network when it comes to money power. But at least we can try to avoid putting our pittance directly into their hands. Here is a modest proposal: Whenever you are in a restaurant where servers depend on tips for their livelihoods, let's try to make sure they get what we give them.
Instead of doing the easy thing and adding the tip into your credit card payment, GIVE CASH TIPS and HAND THEM DIRECTLY TO YOUR SERVER. If you want to add a creative flourish such as including a preprinted note that explains why you are doing this, by all means do so. You could reproduce the editorial below for their edification.
If you want to do this, be sure to check your wallet before entering a restaurant to make sure you have cash in appropriate denominations.
This is a small act of solidarity with some of the most exploited members of the workforce in America. Perhaps its symbolic value could outweigh its material impact. But to paraphrase the familiar song: What the world needs now is solidarity, sweet solidarity.
If this idea should catch on, be prepared for news stories about restaurant owners demanding that servers empty their pockets before leaving the premises at the end of their shifts. The fight never ends!
Yours in struggle and solidarity,
Cliff
The Trump Administration to Restaurants: Take the Tips!
The New York Times editorial board, December 21, 2017
Most Americans assume that when they leave a tip for waiters and bartenders, those workers pocket the money. That could become wishful thinking under a Trump administration proposal that would give restaurants and other businesses complete control over the tips earned by their employees.
The Department of Labor recently proposed allowing employers to pool tips and use them as they see fit as long as all of their workers are paid at least the minimum wage, which is $7.25 an hour nationally and higher in some states and cities. Officials argue that this will free restaurants to use some of the tip money to reward lowly dishwashers, line cooks and other workers who toil in the less glamorous quarters and presumably make less than servers who get tips. Using tips to compensate all employees sounds like a worthy cause, but a simple reading of the government's proposal makes clear that business owners would have no obligation to use the money in this way. They would be free to pocket some or all of that cash, spend it to spiff up the dining room or use it to underwrite $2 margaritas at happy hour. And that's what makes this proposal so disturbing.
The 3.2 million Americans who work as waiters, waitresses and bartenders include some of the lowest-compensated working people in the country. The median hourly wage for waiters and waitresses was $9.61 an hour last year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Further, there is a sordid history of restaurant owners who steal tips, and of settlements in which they have agreed to repay workers millions of dollars.
Not to worry, says the Labor Department, which argues, oddly and unconvincingly, that workers will be better off no matter how owners spend the money. Enlarging dining rooms, reducing menu prices or offering paid time off should be seen as "potential benefits to employees and the economy over all." The department also assures us that owners will funnel tip money to employees because workers would quit otherwise.
t is hard to know how much time President Trump's appointees have spent with single mothers raising two children on a salary from a workaday restaurant in suburban America, seeing how hard it is to make ends meet without tips. What we do know is that the administration has produced no empirical cost-benefit analysis to support its proposal, which is customary when the government seeks to make an important change to federal regulations.
The Trump administration appears to be rushing this rule through — it has offered the public just 30 days to comment on it — in part to pre-empt the Supreme Court from ruling on a 2011 Obama-era tipping rule. The department's new proposal would do away with the 2011 rule. The restaurant industry has filed several legal challenges to that regulation, which prohibits businesses from pooling tips and sharing them with dishwashers and other back-of-the-house workers. Different federal circuit appeals courts have issued contradictory rulings on those cases, so the industry has asked the Supreme Court to resolve those differences; the top court has not decided whether to take that case.
Mr. Trump, of course, owns restaurants as part of his hospitality empire and stands to benefit from this rule change, as do many of his friends and campaign donors. But what the restaurant business might not fully appreciate is that their stealth attempt to gain control over tips could alienate and antagonize customers. Diners who are no longer certain that their tips will end up in the hands of the server they intended to reward might leave no tip whatsoever. Others might seek to covertly slip cash to their server. More high-minded restaurateurs would be tempted to follow the lead of the New York restaurateur Danny Meyer and get rid of tipping by raising prices and bumping up salaries.
By changing the fundamental underpinnings of tipping, the government might well end up destroying this practice. But in doing so it would hurt many working-class Americans, including people who believed that Mr. Trump would fight for them.
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What They Aren't Telling You About The J20 Trial That Could Change America
Six Trump inauguration protesters currently face DECADES in jail for simply being at a protest where OTHER PEOPLE were violent. This trial is flying under the radar of most corporate media and will set a massive precedent for future protest-related convictions. Whether you're for or against Trump, you should be against the criminalization of dissent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjvKM72p_8g
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Christmas and the Contradictions of Capitalists Who Celebrate It
By Mark P. Francher, December 13, 2017
https://www.blackagendareport.com/christmas-and-contradictions-capitalists-who-celebrate-it
"Oppressed communities around the world need to divorce themselves from empires."
On Christmas morning, many major shareholders and executives of oil companies, weapons manufacturers, mining corporations and other enterprises that are part of the military-industrial complex will rise with their families and spend a day feasting and trading obscenely expensive gifts. It is, of course, possible they will say an obligatory prayer of thanksgiving, but there will be scant mention, let alone in-depth consideration of the life of the individual whose birthday has become the annual excuse for the capitalist system to wage a no-holds-barred campaign to promote among working people and the poor a lust for material excess, waste and mindless consumption.
Corporate big shots will not consider that the little baby born in Bethlehem about 2,050 years ago grew into a man who found himself in the midst of a revolutionary maelstrom. He watched as an overseas empire headquartered in Rome deployed its military troops and enforcers to occupied Palestine where they went house-to-house extorting the meager financial resources of desperately poor people and torturing and killing those who resisted. Modern day capitalists will not think about the guerrilla fighters ("Zealots") who ambushed and killed Roman soldiers. Nor will they contemplate that at least one of these fighters was recruited into Jesus' trusted circle of disciples.
"Jesus walked streets teeming with ragged, disease-ridden, starving people who were made this way by Roman imperialism."
Expensive art collections of today's wealthy families contain Renaissance paintings of a sanitized, idealized First Century Palestine where a delicate, nicely-groomed white Jesus moved easily through idyllic grassy pastures attired in pastel silk robes and sandals. On Christmas morning it will be these Biblical fantasy images that will float through the minds of corporate executives rather than thoughts of the real Palestine that Jesus experienced. Jesus walked streets teeming with ragged, disease-ridden, starving people who were made this way by Roman imperialism. As for Jesus himself, we don't know precisely what he looked like, but we do know he was not the white man in Renaissance paintings. To escape death, the baby Jesus was taken into Africa to hide. It was not a place where a white infant would blend into the local population.
While it is likely capitalists will consider none of these facts about the historical Jesus on Christmas, it is practically certain that as they piously sing Christmas carols about a figure they claim to worship, they will fail to see the parallels between the Roman Empire and 21st Century U.S. imperialism. They will definitely fail to acknowledge the blood on their own hands, and the fact that Jesus would point an accusing finger at them for their role in oppressing and killing the people he loves.
"Today's wealthy families idealize a delicate, nicely-groomed white Jesus who moved easily through idyllic grassy pastures attired in pastel silk robes and sandals."
At the beginning of his ministry, Jesus proclaimed that his mission was to fulfill prophesy and preach the good news to the poor, heal broken hearts, preach deliverance to captives, restore sight to the blind and to set the prisoners free. By contrast, corporate executives practice a religion of greed and materialism that causes hopelessness, despair and frustration among the poor. The U.S. Empire holds captive numerous political prisoners and it leads the world in maintaining a soul-killing, racist, mass incarceration enterprise.
Jesus was not as preoccupied as were his revolutionary comrades with the troubles of this world. From his perspective our journey on this planet was a momentary experience leading to an eternal life in the hereafter. Thus, his first priority was saving souls. But he also had compassion for the people around him and he understood the need for effective resistance to oppressive forces. His approach is one that oppressed people in the current era -- particularly the people of Africa and the African Diaspora -- would do well to emulate. He simply divorced his community from the empire.
"The U.S. Empire leads the world in maintaining a soul-killing, racist, mass incarceration enterprise."
When Jesus' foes attempted to trick him by giving him the Hobson's choice of either telling his followers to pay taxes to Rome or to instead become tax resisters, Jesus recognized the contrived dilemma. Calling on a bitter, angry oppressed community to pay taxes to the empire would destroy his credibility. Urging tax resistance would bring down the heavy hand of the empire prematurely. He brilliantly responded by essentially saying that if Rome wants the coins it minted, give them back. But coins are only objects that represent labor, time, industry, talent, loyalty and energy. Jesus said those things belong only to God, and the empire was not entitled to receive them.
Members of the First Century Christian community divorced themselves from the Roman Empire and totally committed themselves to their own community. Whatever resources they possessed, financial and otherwise, were placed in a communal treasury. Likewise as individuals had material needs, they withdrew from the treasury the resources that they needed. In this way they eliminated poverty. This simple, but effective method of organizing an economy was not lost, and was expressed many years later in the familiar axiom: "From each according to his abilities and to each according to his needs."
Oppressed communities around the world need to divorce themselves from empires. While imperialism controls many of their natural and financial resources, whatever other financial resources these communities possess, as well as political commitment, skills, talent, time, and energy must be held in common and shared for revolutionary purposes. If the revolutionary vision is of a society that shares, then the practice of sharing must be part of even the earliest stages of a revolutionary process.
Mark P. Fancher is an attorney who writes frequently for Black Agenda Report. He is the author of: I Ain't Got Tired Yet: The Spiritual Battles of Enslaved African Christians and their Descendants. He can be contacted at mfancher(at)Comcast.net.
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Charity for the Wealthy!
GOP Tax Plan Would Give 15 of America's Largest Corporations a $236B Tax Cut: Report
By Jake Johnson, December 18, 2017
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2017/12/18/gop-tax-plan-would-give-15-americas-largest-corporations-236b-tax-cut-report
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 UNAC STATEMENT ON JERUSALEM
The decision of the Trump administration to declare that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel and that the US will move its embassy to Jerusalem is a violation of the rights of the Palestinian people, of international law and a number of United Nations resolutions. It is a bipartisan action which is supported by most Democrats and Republicans in Congress and by past presidents from both parties. It once again affirms Washington's support for the brutal Zionist regime in Israel and its genocidal policies towards the Palestinian people.
The 1947 UN resolution on Palestine took away half of the land of the Palestinian people and gave it to Zionist leaders for a Jewish state. It proclaimed Jerusalem would have a special international administration, recognizing the fact that it held a special standing for the various religions of the people in the region and around the world. These policies were a direct violation of the rights of the Palestinian people. But this was not enough for the Zionist regime. They wanted all of the land of the Palestinian people and so, through a series of military actions and discriminatory policies, much of the Palestinian population was driven from the land and multi-generations today live as refugees in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and other countries of the Palestinian diaspora. The land that was left for the Palestinian people within Palestine has been continually encroached upon, with illegal Jewish-only settlements, destruction and seizure of Palestinian property and land, and the setting up of walls and Jewish-only roads and check points for Palestinians, restricting their movement in their own country. Gaza has become an open-air prison, with the densely packed population refused the right to freely leave Gaza while the Israeli government controls how much food, drinkable water, building materials, electricity and other necessities will be allowed for the beleaguered people to minimally survive.
This most recent move of the Trump administration, knowingly provoking a backlash wreaking more violence and oppression on the Palestinian people, fully exposes Washington's unqualified backing for Israel's apartheid regime. This latest outrage must be opposed throughout the United States and the world. We urge all to join these protests or to build actions in your communities.
 Return Jerusalem to the Palestinian people!
Free Gaza!
Support Self-Determination and the Right of Return for all Palestinians!
Solidarity with Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against the Zionist State of Israel!
End all US aid to Israel!
Visit the UNAC Blog:
https://unac.papillonweb.net/
Please contribute to UNAC: https://www.unacpeace.org/donate.html
If your organization would like to join the UNAC coalition, please click here: https://www.unacpeace.org/join.html
To unsubscribe from this list, please send an email to UNAC-unsubscribe@lists.riseup.net
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Addicted to War:
And this does not include "…spending $1.25 trillion dollars to modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal, and $566 billion to build the Navy a 308-ship fleet…"
https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/18/funding-for-war-vs-natural-disasters/
Dear Comrades, attached is some new art, where Xinachtli really outdid himself some.
Kaepernick sports new T-shirt:
Love this guy!
And this does not include "…spending $1.25 trillion dollars to modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal, and $566 billion to build the Navy a 308-ship fleet…"
https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/18/funding-for-war-vs-natural-disasters/
Dear Comrades, attached is some new art, where Xinachtli really outdid himself some.
Kaepernick sports new T-shirt:
Love this guy!
