By David Brooks on February 2, 2017
Photo: Bill Hackwell
Trade union and taxi-drivers strikes, new lawsuits and daily marches and demonstrations against the policies of the Government of Donald Trump are continuing from coast to coast.
Among these, Yemeni owners of more than a thousand grocery stores in the city of New York declared last Thursday a “strike” of 8 hours, closing their shops and gathering in downtown Brooklyn in repudiation of the anti-Islamic Trump executive orders.
After days of denunciations and pressure from taxi drivers and immigrant organizations because he did not criticize the anti-migrant and refugees order of Trump, the Chief Executive of Uber, Travis Kalanick, decided to step down from his Business Council position that allegedly is advising the Government of Trump.
Uber had been accused of playing the role of scab during an unprecedented temporary strike action by taxi drivers who are mostly immigrant in New York. The strike took place on Saturday in solidarity with the protests against Trump’s Executive Order which prohibited the entry of immigrants from 7 Muslim countries. Convened by the Taxi Workers Alliance of New York, which represents more than 19 thousand drivers, taxi drivers refused to provide service for a few hours to Kennedy airport among others actions.
Lyft, Uber’s competitor respected the strike and issued a statement stating its opposition to Trump’s measures and the impact on their workers and families and announced a contribution of a million dollars for 4 years to the American Civil Liberty Union (the ACLU has headed the legal battle against the orders and in defense of the victims of the ban in the airports, including the case that led to the temporary ruling against the deportation of those affected by the ban) “to defend our Constitution”.
Meanwhile, the Attorney General of Minnesota, Lori Swanson, announced that she joined the lawsuits in courts of other three States to halt Trump’s anti-immigrant executive orders calling them “unconstitutional”.
On Wednesday night, a federal judge in Los Angeles issued a ruling requiring the Government of Trump to allow the entry of people with immigrant visas from 7 Muslim countries in the Executive Order in response to a lawsuit filed on behalf of 28 immigrants from Yemen.
In Miami, protests and demonstrations broke out after the Mayor, Carlos Giménez of Cuban descent, decided to abide by Trump’s executive order that forces cooperation of local authorities with federal immigration agents. Opponents stated that the Mayor betrayed a metropolitan area which is considered the city with the second largest immigrant population in the country and is a sanctuary city. The Mayor argued that it did not want to risk the loss of federal funds, an explicit threat of Trump to any sanctuary city.
Some 76 activists were arrested at Standing Rock in North Dakota after the Government of Trump indicated its intention to approve the construction of the pipeline which resulted in the largest indigenous resistance in years that forced the Government of Barack Obama to suspend the work (Trump was an investor in the companies in charge of the project).
Meanwhile, another literary work besides the book 1984 by George Orwell (rose to number 1 on Amazon last week) is enjoying of an unexpected success: The Origins of the Totalitarianism, written by Hannah Arendt and published in 1951.
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2017/02/03/mundo/030n1mun
Source: La Jornada, translated by Resumen Latinoamericano, North American Bureau