#Michigan

[catfindr]

#petfinder #catfinder #cat #kitten #kitty #food mention #buttercake! #buttercake #cream tabby #mi #michigan

[welldigger62]

Happy Earth Day

I can’t think of a better day to go out and do some vegetable garden preparation.

#earth day #michigan #dirt #garden #nature #photographers on tumblr #original photography

[blowery]

#michigan #lake superior

[zegalba]

Weiner dog wearing armor at the Michigan Renaissance Festival (2002)

#armor #chainmail #dog #animals #michigan #Renaissance Festival #silver #medevial #corecore #2002

[sayruq]

The goal of the #uncommitted campaign was just 10,000 votes to send a message

#yemen #jerusalem #tel aviv #current events #palestine #free palestine #gaza #free gaza #news on gaza #palestine news #news update #war news #war on gaza #michigan #genocide joe #gaza genocide #genocide #uncommitted

[twinsfawn]

photos from one of my dad’s old hunting books that i used to flip through as a kid

#midwest gothic #michigan #hunting

[i-am-aprl]

More than 101,000 votes—or 13.3% of all voters in Michigan’s Democratic primary—were cast for “uncommitted,” an option that organizers had chosen as their avenue to register outrage toward Biden for his unconditional support of Israel.

That a ballot protest targeting the race’s incumbent would clear the six-figure mark, especially when its goal was just 10,000 votes, is historically significant: Michigan was decided by roughly 150,000 votes when Biden won it in 2020—and around 10,000 in 2016, when it went for Trump.

#joe biden #biden #michigan #palestine #usa #free palestine #gaza #ceasefire #ceasefire now #jerusalem #فلسطين #free gaza #israeli war crimes #israel #i stand with palestine #israel is a terrorist state

[vanityplatesofmi]

#michigan #200+ #1000+ #10000+

[satakentia]

Lake Huron Sunrise (x,x) August 13, 2022, Michigan, USA

by Marie Barns Green

#landscape #sunrise #curators on tumblr #michigan #colorful #vibrant #photoset #usa #north america #cl #lake huron #great lakes #1k #5k

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Prison-tech company bribed jails to ban in-person visits

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in BOSTON with Randall "XKCD" Munroe (Apr 11), then PROVIDENCE (Apr 12), and beyond!

Beware of geeks bearing gifts. When prison-tech companies started offering "free" tablets to America's vast army of prisoners, it set off alarm-bells for prison reform advocates – but not for the law-enforcement agencies that manage the great American carceral enterprise.

The pitch from these prison-tech companies was that they could cut the costs of locking people up while making jails and prisons safer. Hell, they'd even make life better for prisoners. And they'd do it for free!

These prison tablets would give every prisoner their own phone and their own video-conferencing terminal. They'd supply email, of course, and all the world's books, music, movies and games. Prisoners could maintain connections with the outside world, from family to continuing education. Sounds too good to be true, huh?

Here's the catch: all of these services are blisteringly expensive. Prisoners are accustomed to being gouged on phone calls – for years, prisons have done deals with private telcos that charge a fortune for prisoners' calls and split the take with prison administrators – but even by those standards, the calls you make on a tablet are still a ripoff.

Sure, there are some prisoners for whom money is no object – wealthy people who screwed up so bad they can't get bail and are stewing in a county lockup, along with the odd rich murderer or scammer serving a long bid. But most prisoners are poor. They start poor – the cops are more likely to arrest poor people than rich people, even for the same crime, and the poorer you are, the more likely you are to get convicted or be suckered into a plea bargain with a long sentence. State legislatures are easy to whip up into a froth about minimum sentences for shoplifters who steal $7 deodorant sticks, but they are wildly indifferent to the store owner's rampant wage-theft. Wage theft is by far the most costly form of property crime in America and it is almost entirely ignored:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/15/wage-theft-us-workers-employees

So America's prisons are heaving with its poorest citizens, and they're certainly not getting any richer while they're inside. While many prisoners hold jobs – prisoners produce $2b/year in goods and $9b/year in services – the average prison wage is $0.52/hour:

https://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2024/0324bowman.html

(In six states, prisoners get nothing; North Carolina law bans paying prisoners more than $1/day, the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution explicitly permits slavery – forced labor without pay – for prisoners.)

Likewise, prisoners' families are poor. They start poor – being poor is a strong correlate of being an American prisoner – and then one of their breadwinners is put behind bars, taking their income with them. The family savings go to paying a lawyer.

Prison-tech is a bet that these poor people, locked up and paid $1/day or less; or their families, deprived of an earner and in debt to a lawyer; will somehow come up with cash to pay $13 for a 20-minute phone call, $3 for an MP3, or double the Kindle price for an ebook.

How do you convince a prisoner earning $0.52/hour to spend $13 on a phone-call?

Well, for Securus and Viapath (AKA Global Tellink) – a pair of private equity backed prison monopolists who have swallowed nearly all their competitors – the answer was simple: they bribed prison officials to get rid of the prison phones.

Not just the phones, either: a pair of Michigan suits brought by the Civil Rights Corps accuse sheriffs and the state Department of Corrections of ending in-person visits in exchange for kickbacks from the money that prisoners' families would pay once the only way to reach their loved ones was over the "free" tablets:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/03/jails-banned-family-visits-to-make-more-money-on-video-calls-lawsuits-claim/

These two cases are just the tip of the iceberg; Civil Rights Corps says there are hundreds of jails and prisons where Securus and Viapath have struck similar corrupt bargains:

https://civilrightscorps.org/case/port-huron-michigan-right2hug/

And it's not just visits and calls. Prison-tech companies have convinced jails and prisons to eliminate mail and parcels. Letters to prisoners are scanned and delivered their tablets, at a price. Prisoners – and their loved ones – have to buy virtual "postage stamps" and pay one stamp per "page" of email. Scanned letters (say, hand-drawn birthday cards from your kids) cost several stamps:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/14/minnesota-nice/#shitty-technology-adoption-curve

Prisons and jails have also been convinced to eliminate their libraries and continuing education programs, and to get rid of TVs and recreational equipment. That way, prisoners will pay vastly inflated prices for streaming videos and DRM-locked music.

The icing on the cake? If the prison changes providers, all that data is wiped out – a prisoner serving decades of time will lose their music library, their kids' letters, the books they love. They can get some of that back – by working for $1/day – but the personal stuff? It's just gone.

Readers of my novels know all this. A prison-tech scam just like the one described in the Civil Rights Corps suits is at the center of my latest novel The Bezzle:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle

Prison-tech has haunted me for years. At first, it was just the normal horror anyone with a shred of empathy would feel for prisoners and their families, captive customers for sadistic "businesses" that have figured out how to get the poorest, most desperate people in the country to make them billions. In the novel, I call prison-tech "a machine":

a million-­armed robot whose every limb was tipped with a needle that sank itself into a different place on prisoners and their families and drew out a few more cc’s of blood.

But over time, that furious empathy gave way to dread. Prisoners are at the bottom of the shitty technology adoption curve. They endure the technological torments that haven't yet been sanded down on their bodies, normalized enough to impose them on people with a little more privilege and agency. I'm a long way up the curve from prisoners, but while the shitty technology curve may grind slow, it grinds fine:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware

The future isn't here, it's just not evenly distributed. Prisoners are the ultimate early adopters of the technology that the richest, most powerful, most sadistic people in the country's corporate board-rooms would like to force us all to use.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/02/captive-customers/#guillotine-watch

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

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#pluralistic #prison #prison-tech #marty hench #the bezzle #securus #captive audiences #St Clair County #human rights #prisoners rights #viapath #gtl #global tellink #Genesee County #michigan #guillotine watch #carceral state #corruption

[mysharona1987]

#free palestine #michigan #democrats #republicans #politics #israel #daily mail #news #donald trump #woc #poc

[catfindr]

#petfinder #catfinder #cat #kitten #kitty #felony #mi #michigan #1k

[maureen2musings]

aaronburden

#michigan #usa #winter #snowy trees #let it snow #curators on tumblr

[zegalba]

Petoskey Stones

fossilized coral that lived 350 million years ago - the rocks rounded in the surf along the shore of Lake Michigan near Petosky, Michigan.

#Petoskey Stones #stone #nature #fossil #science #grey #michigan

[reasonsforhope]

"For the first time in almost 60 years, a state has formally overturned a so-called “right to work” law, clearing the way for workers to organize new union locals, collectively bargain, and make their voices heard at election time.

This week, Michigan finalized the process of eliminating a decade-old “right to work” law, which began with the shift in control of the state legislature from anti-union Republicans to pro-union Democrats following the 2022 election. “This moment has been decades in the making,” declared Michigan AFL-CIO President Ron Bieber. “By standing up and taking their power back, at the ballot box and in the workplace, workers have made it clear Michigan is and always will be the beating heart of the modern American labor movement.”

[Note: The article doesn't actually explain it, so anyway, "right to work" laws are powerful and deceptively named pieces of anti-union legislation. What right to work laws do is ban "union shops," or companies where every worker that benefits from a union is required to pay dues to the union. Right-to-work laws really undermine the leverage and especially the funding of unions, by letting non-union members receive most of the benefits of a union without helping sustain them. Sources: x, x, x, x]

In addition to formally scrapping the anti-labor law on Tuesday [February 13, 2024], Michigan also restored prevailing-wage protections for construction workers, expanded collective bargaining rights for public school employees, and restored organizing rights for graduate student research assistants at the state’s public colleges and universities. But even amid all of these wins for labor, it was the overturning of the “right to work” law that caught the attention of unions nationwide...

Now, the tide has begun to turn—beginning in a state with a rich labor history. And that’s got the attention of union activists and working-class people nationwide...

At a time when the labor movement is showing renewed vigor—and notching a string of high-profile victories, including last year’s successful strike by the United Auto Workers union against the Big Three carmakers, the historic UPS contract victory by the Teamsters, the SAG-AFTRA strike win in a struggle over abuses of AI technology in particular and the future of work in general, and the explosion of grassroots union organizing at workplaces across the country—the overturning of Michigan’s “right to work” law and the implementation of a sweeping pro-union agenda provides tangible evidence of how much has changed in recent years for workers and their unions...

By the mid-2010s, 27 states had “right to work” laws on the books.

But then, as a new generation of workers embraced “Fight for 15” organizing to raise wages, and campaigns to sign up workers at Starbucks and Amazon began to take off, the corporate-sponsored crusade to enact “right to work” measures stalled. New Hampshire’s legislature blocked a proposed “right to work” law in 2017 (and again in 2021), despite the fact that the measure was promoted by Republican Governor Chris Sununu. And in 2018, Missouri voters rejected a “right to work” referendum by a 67-33 margin.

Preventing anti-union legislation from being enacted and implemented is one thing, however. Actually overturning an existing law is something else altogether.

But that’s what happened in Michigan after 2022 voting saw the reelection of Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a labor ally, and—thanks to the overturning of gerrymandered legislative district maps that had favored the GOP—the election of Democratic majorities in the state House and state Senate. For the first time in four decades, the Democrats controlled all the major levers of power in Michigan, and they used them to implement a sweeping pro-labor agenda. That was a significant shift for Michigan, to be sure. But it was also an indication of what could be done in other states across the Great Lakes region, and nationwide.

“Michigan Democrats took full control of the state government for the first time in 40 years. They used that power to repeal the state’s ‘right to work’ law,” explained a delighted former US secretary of labor Robert Reich, who added, “This is why we have to show up for our state and local elections.”"

-via The Nation, February 16, 2024

#michigan #united states #us politics #labor #labor rights #labor unions #capitalism #unions #unionize #gretchen whitmer #democrats #voting matters #right to work #pro union #workers #workers rights #good news #hope

[phoenixyfriend]

Michigan just gave us the rhetorical weapon that could push Biden and the DNC to turn their backs on Israel.

Okay so this is amazing news. Michigan was going to be a key state in the push to get Biden, and the DNC as a whole, to start pressuring Israel, and they have just proven that they have that power.

Background: Michigan is a swing state, and it has 16 votes in the electoral college. Winning Michigan was a major factor in Biden's win back in 2020, and much of that rested on the Arab-American vote. It was also a major factor in Hillary Clinton's loss to Donald Trump in 2016. She lost the state by ten thousand, seven hundred votes.

Praxis: For obvious reasons, Arab-Americans are incredibly upset with Biden's support for Israel, and support in that demographic has gone from 59% in the 2020 election to less than 17% now. As a form of protest, Arab-Americans in Michigan started a campaign to get voters to check "uncommitted" in the Democratic primary. This is an actual box that can be checked, though some less-organized pushes also suggested writing in 'ceasefire' like New Hampshire primary voters did.

The goal was to get at least 10,000 'uncommitted' votes, as that is how many Hillary lost by.

As Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud, the first Arab mayor of this majority-Arab city, said:

"We're not sizable enough to make a candidate win, but we're sizable enough to make a candidate lose."

(Source: NPR, 2/25/24)

Result:

As of 10:49 PM EST, 2/27, there are thirty-nine thousand uncommitted votes, according to CNN, which is doing live coverage.

NPR was reporting 30k at 10:14.

As a caveat, New York Times is saying that each of the last three Michigan Dem Primaries had about 20k uncommitted votes, so the 35k isn't all the push for pro-Palestine stances in Congress, but that's still a jump of almost 20k, which is way, way more than the goal.

And they aren't done counting the votes yet. Barely 30% of votes are in. The goal has been blown out of the water.

Other states are reaching out for advice on how to replicate the results.

This is big news.

So can we relax?

Fuck no.

Do what Michigan did. Vote in the Dem primary, and vote uncommitted or write in "ceasefire."

But on a more daily basis, if you have a Democratic candidate, lean on this.

Tell them it will be repeated elsewhere.

This could very well lose the election for Biden and more. The Democrats can't afford another four years of Trump, and they know it. The loss of Michigan can and will tank this election for them, especially since other states that helped Biden win, like Georgia, were also won on demographics that are growing increasingly upset by the situation in Gaza.

Go to the Michigan section of this post and use that in your calls and emails.

But remember. Call your reps. Call your senators. Call your governor, if you'd like. And if they're a Democrat, you bring this up. Be polite, the staffer isn't making these decisions. They might just be an intern. But bring it up and tell them that we are going to lose the presidency if we do not sanction Israel and actually pressure them into not only pulling out of Gaza and the West Bank, but paying reparations.

#michigan #united states #michigan primary #primary voting #democratic primary #current events #phoenix politics #voting #praxis #politics #pro palestine #gaza #palestine #israel #2024 election