Workers at the 88 E. Broad St. Starbucks store will be striking Thursday, November 17 from 5 am until 5 pm in solidarity with their fellow workers across the country.

They join a total of over 100 stores taking part in the Red Cup Rebellion, a nationwide Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) strike demanding Starbucks fully staff all union stores and begin bargaining in good faith.

According to LaborNotes.org, a ULP strike is different than an economic strike, which seeks higher wages, because a “union hits the bricks to protest an employer violation of the National Labor Relations Act.” And under National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) law, a ULP offers greater protections than an economic strike because “an employer can never permanently replace workers striking to protest an unfair labor practice.”

Our GREEGREE zoom #117 welcomes RAY MCCLENDON of the Georgia NAACP, JOHN BRAKEY of Arizona’s election protection “scanned ballot image” movement, and democracy journalist STEVE ROSENFELD.

Together they outline the hard realities of the struggle—in many ways successful—to protect our democracy as seen in the outcome of the 2021 “Georgia Miracle” and the 2022 mid-terms.  

As a pillar of grassroots/relational campaigning, McClendon has played a key role in promoting the Get Out the Vote movements that made the difference in twin Senate victories in 2021, and that may hold the key to the “Manchin Runoff” in 2022.

Working with Andrea Miller of the Center for Common Ground, McClendon has been at the core of shifting progressive campaign donations away from mainstream Democratic Party media buys and into the machinery of on-the-ground organizing.

Based in Arizona, Brakey has pioneered the use of digital scanning in tandem with mailed-out hand-marked paper ballots.  Making a mockery of the 2020 Cyber-Ninja recount fiasco, Brakey has made Arizona into a living laboratory for reliable vote casting and counting.

Wednesday, November 16, 6pm, this on-line event requires advance registration

Join us for our monthly huddle for all Fair Districts volunteers. Catch up on Fair Districts news, current actions, what’s next for our #fairmaps advocacy.

Joining us at this month’s Huddle will be Freda Levenson, Legal Director of ACLU Ohio, who will talk about the redistricting litigation currently before the Ohio Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court. We’ll also have time to talk about the election.

RSVP for this event by using this link.

Hosted by Common Cause Ohio.

Facebook Event

Owing to my voyage aboard the cargo/cruiser Aranui from Tahiti to Pitcairn Island, I missed most presentations of Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels’ Omar, but am very glad I was able to catch its last performance. Because – like LA Opera’s season opener, an updated version of Gaetano Donizetti’s 835 opera Lucia di Lammermoor – Omar is a highly innovative work that expands the operatic medium, in terms of theme, idiom and mode of expression.

This almost three-hour work, which world premiered earlier this year at the Spoleto Festival, located – appropriately enough – in Charleston, South Carolina, is based on the true story of Omar ibn Said, who was born 1770 in the imamate (theocratic state) of Futa Toro in what is now the West African nation of Senegal. Like Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave, Said also wrote a narrative account of his life, and his 1831 autobiography, which I believe he originally wrote in Arabic, forms the basis for the story that librettist and co-composer Rhiannon Giddens adapt and relate in Omar.