by Juliet Blalack

Workers thrown out in the cold before Xmas Union workers and sympathizers protest firing at the federal building on 7th Street (photo by Marvin J. Ramirez)

In the latest push to get the first janitors who worked at the new federal building their jobs back, about 35 people protested in front the building on Dec. 13th.­

Many of the janitors have been picketing the new federal building at Mission and Seventh streets for the past two months, read a press release.  They lost their jobs on Sept. 28th.

­”It will affect my whole family’s economy,” said Luis Alvarez, speaking in Spanish.  Alvarez said he worked for federal buildings for 18 years before he was fired with only a day’s notice.

General Services Administration (GSA), a company that manages government buildings, told a group of about 20 janitors to reapply for their jobs when their contracts ended, according to a press release.

Instead, GSA hired the non-union company Exemplar Enterprises to oversee custodial work.

“The new company doesn’t want to negotiate with the union,” said Deresa Navarro, also one of the janitors.  Navarro said the new company has less benefits, pays less money, and hires fewer people.

Gene Gibson, a spokeswoman from GSA, said that the contract with the original janitors, members of the Service Employees International Union Local 87, only lasted until Sept. 28.

GSA was obligated by federal law to select the company with the best price and not give priority to union companies, she said.  Although GSA did not select a union company for this contract, the company does have other contracts with unions, she said.

“All these purchases are done above the board and according to law,” said Gibson.

Organizers from Poor Magazine said Martha Lutt might be employed by GSA while owning Exemplar, which would be a conflict of interest.

Gibson said Exemplar hired a former employee of GSA, but only after GSA signed the contract with Exemplar.  She said she did not know if the employee described was Lutt or someone else.

Supervisors Chris Daly, Geraldo Sandoval, Tom Ammiano, and Ross Mirkarimi presented a resolution urging Exemplar and GSA to hire the union janitors at the building and requesting Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to also put pressure on Exemplar and GSA to do so.

The board passed the resolution on December 11th, and the mayor signed it on Dec. 18th, according to board clerk Sunny Wong.

Since the federal government oversees the building, this resolution by local government is not legally compelling.

by the El Reportero news services

Fidel Castro

The ailing Cuban leader, Fidel Castro, gave further hints on 17 December that he may not run for a seat in congress in January. If Fidel really decides not to run, he will be stepping down as Cuban leader.

What is clear now is that the transition of power from Fidel to his brother, Raúl, has been almost flawlessly managed by the ruling party. The first phase was Fidel’s surrendering of power.

The second phase is now underway and involves Raúl taking power. Raúl is now clearly in charge and setting the policy agenda. Fidel, not seen in public for the past 16 months, has already become just a figure-head.

Nicaragua told to free Nashville man

Court overturns his murder conviction Joy gave way to worry hours after the Eric Volz  family heard the 28-year-old had been freed from a Nicaraguan prison but remained in the country, where radio broadcasters called for vigilante justice against the American accused of killing his former girlfriend.

A Nicaraguan appeals court on Monday overturned Volz’s conviction and 30-year prison sentence and ordered his release.

The Associated Press reported that Volz, of Nashville, had been freed from prison in the town of Granada, some 25 miles east of Managua, but the news service said his whereabouts were unknown.

By the end of the day, the Volz family was reeling again, worried about what would happen to him while his life remained in the ­hands of the Nicaraguan justice system. A family spokeswoman and an offi cial in Washington said Volz had not been released.

The trial court did not sign release papers for Volz, who is currently in a prison hospital, where he’s been for nearly two months, the e-mail said. The family is getting information from a lawyer in Nicaragua. (At press time, his freedom was in process).

In Colombia, hostage’s letter hits home

BOGOTA, Colombia – It was a godsend, the 12-page letter that Ingrid Betancourt sent her mother. It confi rmed that the best-known hostage in Colombia, one of hundreds, was alive, deep in a guerrilla encampment.

But the letter rang with such profound pain and despair that Betancourt’s mother, Yolanda Pulecio, has still not stopped crying. In meticulous prose, Betancourt told her mother that she was “tired, tired of suffering” and that she sometimes thinks death would be a “sweet option.”

“These almost six years of captivity have shown me that I’m not as resistant, nor as brave, nor as intelligent, nor as strong as I had thought,” Betancourt, a prominent French-Colombian politician, wrote. “I have fought many battles, I have tried to escape on several opportunities, I have tried to maintain hope, as one does keeping head above water. But mamita, I have been defeated.”

by Adolfo Flores

The Southern Poverty Law Center, a national civil rights organization founded in 1971, has branded the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a national organization that supports immigration reduction, as a hate group for alleged connections with white supremacist and hate groups.

The Center claimed in a teleconference and in its quarterly “Intelligence Report’’ on Dec. 11 that FAIR 5has accepted $1.2 million between 1985 and 1994 from the Pioneer Fund, a foundation which has supported ­and funded studies that attempt to prove a connection between race and IQ.

“What we are hoping very much to accomplish is to marginalize FAIR,” said Mark Potok, the Center’s director of the intelligence project. “We don’t think they should be a part of the mainstream media.”

In 2006 SPLC counted 844 hate groups in the United States.

Clarissa Martínez, campaign manager for the Coalition for Comprehensive Immigration Reform, told Weekly Report, “It is unacceptable for members of Congress and the media to legitimize a hate group bent on manipulating Americans’ concerns over our broken immigration system to advance its own goals and derail real solutions to this issue.”

Since 2000 FAIR officials have been asked to testify on immigration by Congress 30 times. This year, FAIR has been quoted in mainstream media nearly 500 times and been on CN N’s “Lou Dobbs Tonight” at least 12 times in the same period.

“I think (the SPLC’s) statements are fraudulent and misleading,” said FAIR President Dan Stein’ who has been working for the organization as its executive director since 1988. “I think they owe us an apology.”

Stein told Weekly Report that at the moment they were not planning any legal action, but were expecting a retraction.

FAIR, claims the SPLC, was grounded on racism since its beginnings in 1979. Its founder’ John Tanton, runs The Social Contract Press’ another group listed by the center as racist for white supremacist end anti-Latino writings. Tanton is currently a member of FAIR’s board.

The article, “The Teflon Nativist,” also claims that several key FAIR members have ties to white supremacist groups’ like Western field representative Joseph Turner’ who created Save Our State’ a nativist hate group, according to the SPLC. It was in one of the Save Our State electronic forums that Turner wrote, “l can make the argument that just because one believes in white separatism that that does not make them a racist.”

According to the SPLC, Turner’s predecesson Rick Oltman, was part of the hate group Council of Conservative Citizens, a direct descendent from the segregationist White Citizens Council.

“Nobody working for FAIR has ever been a member of the CCC that I’m aware of end they certainly haven’t been people in key positions,” claimed Stein.

FAIR’s Eastern regional coordinator, Jim Stadenraus participated in an anti-immigrant conference in September 2002 with Jared Taylor, a CCC member and founder of American Renaissance, a racist eugenics publication, the article claims.

“Our charitable mission is education. We go where we’re invited,” Stein said.

“Does that mean you can impute to the FAIR staffers an agreement with all the principles of the organization we’re on a panel of?”

The report claims Stein held a meeting with members of Vlaams Belang, a Belgian political party’ to “seek advice” in February.

The group was renamed after it was banned as a racist political body by the Belgium Supreme Court.

Stein denied he met with the group, stating he had never heard of it.

“(The SPLC’s) assertions about a meeting with Belgium activists are fraudulent, their assertions about the staff are fraudulent’ their assertions about ­virtually everything else are fraudulent,” Stein said.

However FAIR’s Director of Special Projects’ John Martin, said he himself met with the group, but that it was Vleams Belang that was seeking advice because of the current “civil war” in Belgium due to immigration. Martin said he regularly briefs foreign visitors.

“They insisted when I asked specifically about that’ they did not have a racist policy~~ Martin said.

Having been e member of an organization that is attacked as being racist, which I know isn’t true’ I’m willing to believe people when they say that is not true in their case “Potok wrote in a blog that identifying FAIR as a hate group is important because more than any other group it has contributed to the nasty turn the immigration debate has taken.

“(FAIR) is en organization that clearly has an agenda’” said Cristina López, deputy executive director of the Center for Community Change. “There’s no difference between putting a member of FAIR on TV to talk about immigration and putting a member of the Ku Klux Klan to talk about race relations.”