Houston Declares War on the Working Poor

[Jon8503]

The Houston janitors continue to get attacked viciously, this time through legal means, for standing up for their economic welfare. At first they were trampled by horses, then they were arrested and mistreated in jail, and now bail is set at a ridiculous level so the 44 people arrested can't pay it.

In an unprecedented transparent attempt to severely limit the right to peaceful protest and freedom of speech of low-wage Houston janitors and their supporters, a Harris County District Attorney has set an extraordinarily high bond of $888,888 cash for each of the 44 peaceful protestors arrested last night. Houston janitors and their supporters, many of them janitors from other cities, were participating in an act of non-violent civil disobedience, protesting in the intersection of Travis at Capitol when they were arrested in downtown Houston Thursday night. They were challenging Houston's real estate industry to settle the janitors' strike and agree on a contract that provides the 5,300 janitors in Houston with higher wages and affordable health insurance.

The combined $39.1 million bond for the workers and their supporters is far and above the normal amount of bail set for people accused of even violent crimes in Harris County. While each of the non-violent protestors is being held on $888,888 bail ...

* For a woman charged with beating her granddaughter to death with a
sledgehammer, bail was set at $100,000;

* For a woman accused of disconnecting her quadriplegic mother's breathing
machine, bail was set at $30,000;

* For a man charged with murder for stabbing another man to death in a bar
brawl, bail was set at $30,000;

* For janitors and protesters charged with Class B misdemeanors for past
non-violent protests, standard bail has been set at $500 each.

More than 5,300 Houston janitors are paid $20 a day with no health insurance, among the lowest wages and benefits of any workers in America.

Representatives Sheila Jackson Lee, Henry Waxman, John Lewis, Al Green, Senator Ted Kennedy, Reverend James Lawson, Texas State Senator Rodney Ellis, Texas State House Representative Garnet Coleman, Houston City Council Member Ada Edwards, Reverend James Orange, and Reverend William Lawson have all spoken out.

If I were Chevron, Exxon, and Shell Oil - all of whom make billions and any of whom could end the strike - I would be nervous that Henry Waxman is asking you to intervene. A few million dollars in extra salary and health care benefits for the people cleaning your offices is a really small price to pay to prevent Waxman from really scrutinizing your business practices. He plays hardball, he dislikes corruption, and he's pushing global warming legislation.

http://mydd.com/

[MannyGoldstein]

1. Where's Mrs. Clinton? Chuckie Schumer? John Forbes Kerry?

I believe that you're missing a few of the Fightin' Congressional Dems in your list of outspoken folks. I'm sure that they must have weighed in on this.

Not.

[acmejack]

3. Oh please.

These are janitors, not big campaign contributors. These are not the people on the front pages of the Newspapers or on the nightly newscasts. They don't give a damned about these people, any more than they care about you or I. They posture once every few years when they want your vote, then they ignore your wishes until the next time when they briefly would like you to help them.

Remember your place.

[Jon8503]

4. Exactly, agree ---

Shows why Carville is attacking Howard Dean as Carville supports Clinton and the establishment where Dean supports the grassroots part of the organization and populist candidates. The Clintons and Carvilles of the party want Dean out. He would be on the list of the dems supporting the janitors.

[Greyhound]

2. Where's SEIU? Where are the busloads of imported supporters

from around the country to give support to their brothers and sisters? Where are the sympathy strikes from all of the other service workers? Why haven't they shut the city down?
:wtf:

[Virginia Dare]

6. Here is a link...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=385x5930

[Greyhound]

8. Where's SEIU? Where are the busloads of imported supporters?

The video was taken down BTW.

[Virginia Dare]

11. They were there...

if you read the Washington Post story that is referenced in the thread. People came from as far away as Germany.

[PDittie]

12. New link for video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpOn_77yixY

[no_hypocrisy]

5. Can't their counsel go to the court to get the bail lowered,

allowing them release?

[PDittie]

13. It was lowered

to $1,000 by a magistrate judge earlier today.

[nealmhughes]

7. Harris County DA can't set bail, only recommend it. The arraignment judge would have set it.

Of course, if she/he recommended that much it is ridiculous. The bond ought to be reasonable. It says so in the Constitution! $5000 would have been "reasonable," as the family/friends only have to pop up 10% for a bondsman, and if enough people chipped in they could cough up 5K collectively and get every cent of it back after the trial.

[mrreowwr_kittty]

21. That's what I thought, too. n/t

[Greyhound]

9. K & R

:kick:

[hfojvt]

10. $20 a day is only about 3.5 hours at minimum wage

How can they be paid so little?

[jgraz]

17. Maybe they count the trash they pick up as "tips"

It is Texas, after all...

[Nikki Stone1]

14. IS this the place Bush sent the Katrina victims? The ones Babs said were "lucky"

to be going to Houston since, after all, they were poor before the storm anyway?

[Doctor_J]

15. I am hoping that ASAP everything from TX to FL,

including LA, MS, AL, TN, GA, and SC, secede. They can't cut the paperwork too quickly for my test. Let let the Bush family use that to set up their empire instead of the US.

[jgraz]

18. I wouldn't worry -- they'll all be under water soon.

[PDittie]

16. Read this account from one of those arrested:

We sat down in the intersection and the horses came immediately. It was really violent. They arrested us, and when we got to jail, we were pretty beat up. Not all of us got the medical attention we needed. The worst was a protester named Julia, who is severely diabetic. We kept telling the guards about her condition but they only gave her a piece of candy. During roll call, she started to complain about light-headedness. Finally she just collapsed unconscious on the floor. It was like she just dropped dead. The guard saw it but just kept going through the roll. Susan ran over there and took her pulse while the other inmates were yelling for help, saying we need to call somebody. The medical team strolled over, taking their own sweet time. She was unconscious for like 4 or 5 minutes.

They really tried to break us down. The first night they put the temperature so high that a woman—one of the other inmates—had a seizure. The second night they made it freezing and took away many of our blankets. We didn’t have access to the cots so we had to sleep on a concrete floor. When we would finally fall asleep the guards would come and yell ‘Are you Anna Denise Solís? Are you so and so?’ One of the protesters had a fractured wrist from the horses. She had a cast on and when she would fall asleep the guard would kick the cast to wake her up. She was in a lot of pain.

The guards would tell us: ‘This is what you get for protesting.’ One of them said, ‘Who gives a shit about janitors making 5 dollars an hour? Lots of people make that much.’ The other inmates—there were a lot of prostitutes in there—said that they had never seen the jail this bad. The guards told them: ‘We’re trying to teach the protesters a lesson.’ Nobody was getting out of jail because the processing was so slow. They would tell the prostitutes that everything is the protesters’ fault. They were trying to turn everybody against each other.

I felt like I was in some Third World jail, not in America. One of the guards called us ‘whores’ and if we talked back, we didn’t get any lunch. We didn’t even have the basic necessities. It felt like a police state, like marshal law, nobody had rights. Some of us had been arrested in other cities, and it was never this bad before.

More here:

http://www.houstonjanitors.org/anna-denise-solis/

[tbyg52]

20. This is disgusting

and what's really disgusting is that this is not making the local news. (Yes, I'm just outside of Houston--we're not *all* bozos here....)

[malaise]

19. This will only ignite more workers

across the US. They will learn the hard way as usual.