Marching with The Coalition For Human Rights
In The Dominican Republic

 “What we are seeing today is not a Haitian crisis, it’s not a
Dominican crisis,” City Councilman Mathieu Eugene (D-Brooklyn)
said. “It is a human rights crisis. This is injustice. This is not right.
This is discrimination.”  Councilman Eugene came together with
an expansive coalition to condemn the looming expulsions by the
Dominican Republic (“DR”) of Haitian immigrants, including
those born there as immoral and racist and a human rights crisis. 
The current crisis has its roots in a 2013 court ruling that stripped the citizenship of persons born in the DR whose parents weren’t Dominican citizens.  An estimated 460,000 Haitian migrants live in the Dominican Republic, which shares the Caribbean island of Hispaniola with Haiti.
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Why a New Overtime Proposal is a Win for Working Women
with Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner is an Award-Winning Author, and
Co-Founder and Executive Director/CEO of MomsRising.org, a
National Online and On-The-Ground Grassroots Organization that Promotes Policies Aimed at improving Family Economic Security; Helping Families and Children, and to End Discrimination Against Women and Mothers.

For months we’ve heard that the economy is finally moving in the right direction, except for one hitch: working people’s wages, particularly those of women, are not going up. One big reason: for years, millions of workers have clocked in more and more hours without ever seeing overtime pay. That’s wrong. Too many 
workers, most of whom are women, are watching their finances be stretched to the limit because even though they work overtime, they are not compensated for the work they do.  Working women deserve better. By increasing the salary threshold to $50,444 – meaning if you make less than that, you’re guaranteed protection - 3.2 million more women will be automatically eligible for overtime. This would be a major win for working women.

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Washington Helped Create Puerto Rico’s Staggering Debt Crisis
with
Nelson Denis, writer, film director, and former N.Y.S. Assemblyman. His award-winning films premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and screened throughout the U.S. and Puerto Rico.  His editorials for the NY Daily News and El Diario (over 300 of them) won awards from the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. He is the writer of eight feature-length screenplays, writer/director of the feature film Vote For Me!, & author of the book War Against All Puerto Ricans:   Revolution and Terror in America's Colony.  

While Puerto Rico is oftentimes described as an unincorporated territory of the United States, a more accurate political and legal description is that it is a colony of the United States.  A colony that has 3.5 million US citizen residents, who do not have the right to vote for president or representation in Congress and is making headlines these days because of its inability to pay a 72 billion dollar debt owed to holders of its devalued bonds.  While there have been comparisons between Greece and Puerto Rico the reality is that they are totally distinct situations. Greece has sovereignty, Puerto Rico does not. Puerto Rico is unable to declare bankruptcy, cannot devalue its currency and cannot go to international financial institutions under the present colonial system. In fact one of the solutions offered in the United States to solve the chaotic economic crisis is to place the entire island in receivership. In other words to go back to an even more rigid colonial system so that the bonds market can protect its investment. 

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Ta-Nehisi Coates, Reads from His Block-Buster
Memoir to His Son “Between the World and Me”

Readers of his work in The Atlantic (including his June 2014 feature The Case for Reparations) and elsewhere know Ta-Nehisi Coates for his thoughtful and influential writing on race in America. Written as a series of letters to his teenaged son, his new memoir, Between the World and Me, walks us through the course of his life, from his neighborhood in Baltimore in his youth, to Howard University—which Coates dubs “The Mecca” for its revelatory community of black students and teachers —to the broader Meccas of New York and Paris. Coates describes his observations and the evolution of his thinking on race, from Malcolm X to his conclusion that race itself is a fabrication, elemental to the concept of American (white) exceptionalism. Ferguson, Trayvon Martin, and South Carolina are not bumps on the road of progress and harmony, but the results of a systemized, ubiquitous threat to “black bodies” in the form of slavery, police brutality, and mass incarceration.  

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Strange Fruit: Extra-Legal & Legal Lynching on the 62nd Anniversary of the Execution of Julius & Ethel Rosenberg
with
.  Robert Meeropol, son of Julius & Ethel Rosenberg 
.  Soffiyah Elijah, Ex. Dir. of the Correctional Association

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed for crimes neither of them committed 62 years ago and the impact of the government’s conduct in the Rosenberg trial still affects us today.  Virtually all the criticism of the lack of respect for defendant’s rights in our present conduct of loyalty and national security trials can be traced to the forced absence of the Constitution at the 1951 trial.  Continued research into the Rosenberg trial and dissemination of the documented perjuries and prosecutorial and judicial deceptions contributes to today’s efforts to reintroduce Constitutional trials into every courtroom, regardless of the politics or religion or color of the defendants.  That is why on what is now the centennial of Ethel Rosenberg’s birth date that Building Bridges continues to raise these issues and believe that we must win an official review of the Rosenbergs’ case and subsequently their exoneration.  Although nothing can change the finality of the death penalty, an acknowledgment of government wrongdoing in this historic cause would be a first step in halting the perversions of due process and human rights that continue to undermine the legal system and this country’s proclamation of democracy. Robbie Rosenberg begins his presentation by discussing the song Strange Fruit, which is about the writing of the anti-lynching song written by his adopted parent Abel Meeropool, after the execution of his parents, writing under the name Lewis Allen and its popularization by the great singer Billie Holiday, who along with Ethel Rosenberg was born 100 years earlier.  Robbie draws some creative and fascinating parallels between his birth mother and the life and death of Billie Holiday.  

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