Daily Archives: February 1, 2017

 

Five years ago the Post Office began a series of moves aimed at the step-by-step privatization of the U.S. Postal Service, the country’s largest unionized employer. One such move was a 2013 program to farm out postal window services to so-called “postal counters” at 500-plus Staples office supply stores. The American Postal Workers Union confidently swung into action, with an ambitious campaign to beat back the Staples challenge.

In 1971 President Nixon declared war on cancer. Clearly, we have lost that war, because cancer is fast overtaking heart disease as the number one cause of death in America. Hopefully, we are finally coming to understand that to successfully respond to cancer requires changing the environment in our body so that millions of misbehaving cancer cells cannot thrive. Our emphasis should be on safe and reliable things we all can do to make our body a place where cancer is not welcome.

I want to tell on my own behalf what’s going on behind these walls of GDOC (Georgia Department of Corrections). If possible, can somebody come and visit this prison and take a step into one of these cells? It’s sad. GDOC have the outside world thinking we’re just being punished, but the world doesn’t know that we’re being tortured and treated as stray dogs. If you look at the first “Planet of the Apes,” that’s exactly how we’re being treated. All I ask if that we get treated fairly.

In California, childcare for infants costs as much as tuition in the University of California (UC) system, according to new data from the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children’s Health. In 2014, parents of infants in California spent an average of more than $13,300 on childcare. That year, UC tuition and fees were just over $13,200. At the national level, all eyes are on college affordability. But the lack of affordable early childhood options has even more dire long-term consequences.

The Coalition to Restore Public Trust and the Contra Costa Coalition for Racial Justice call for the immediate resignation of District Attorney Mark Peterson. Elected in 2010, DA Peterson has violated the public trust. According to charges pending before the California Fair Political Practices Commission, over a five-year period, DA Peterson used more than $66,000 of campaign contribution money for his personal expenses.