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Jim DeMint, the President of the Heritage Foundation, must resign immediately and take responsibility for producing a report authored by a white supremacist that perpetuates ugly and false stereotypes about immigrants and their families. Nobody should be surprised that the Heritage Foundation, under former Senator DeMint's watch, released an "economic study" that is as wrong as it is racist. DeMint has made a personal passion out of opposing immigration reform in a way that displays intellectual dishonesty and blatant racial intolerance. The results from The Heritage Foundation’s study would be laughable if the undercurrents of the study weren't so disturbingly anti-immigrant and openly hostile to immigrant families. The study demeans immigrants, portraying them as takers and inferior. The report's author has a history of white supremacy, having written his own dissertation on white intellectual superiority. And the "research" itself is based on the work of an organization designated a white supremacist group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. This kind of racism is disgusting and unacceptable at a time when we are having serious deliberation in Congress in an effort to pass a comprehensive immigration reform bill. If we speak out in large numbers today and denounce this unacceptable report from the Heritage Foundation by demanding DeMint's immediate resignation it will send a clear message to his former colleagues - lawmakers on the hill - that this kind of racism has no place in our national conversation. We will not stand by and allow our country’s ugly history of racism and injustice to repeat itself. Sign my petition today. VIDEO: http://video.msnbc.msn.com/all-in-/51848892#51848953 REFERENCES: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2013/05/07/what-we-learned-about-immigration-reform-yesterday/ http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/05/12/racist-immigration-disaster-as-jim-demint-botches-his-heritage-debut.html http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/05/10/heritage-author-resigns-immigration/2151349/ http://nbclatino.com/2013/05/09/heritage-immigration-study-co-author-latinos-incapable-of-assimilating-like-irish-sicilians-did/

A grave crisis is currently unfolding at the U.S. prison in Guantánamo Bay, where escalating despair has driven most of the imprisoned men to risk their very lives to protest their indefinite detention through a peaceful, large-scale hunger strike that is entering its fourth month. This crisis at Guantánamo cannot be divorced from the fact that the vast majority of the 166 remaining prisoners have been held for more than 11 years without any charge or trial, and with no end to their detention in sight. In the past four years that I have spent learning about the stories of the men detained at Guantánamo, and working with my colleagues at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) to shut down this notorious prison camp, I have never been as anxious. If ever there was a moment for President Obama to act upon the promise that he made four years ago to shutter the prison, it is now. He must act quickly to release the men that he does not intend to try, and charge the rest in a court that meets fair trial standards. Innocent people should not spend a decade in an American jail, only to die alone and far from home. CCR’s client Tariq Ba Odah has said, “Freedom is more precious than any other worldly desire. And we should never give it up regardless of how expensive the price may be.” That price has been tremendous for Tariq—more than a decade of separation from his loved ones, living in solitary confinement with almost no contact with others, and the excruciating daily routine of force-feeding. He has been tube-fed through his nose for over 6 years, half as long as Guantánamo has been open. Tariq maintains that hunger-striking “is the only peaceful way I can show the magnitude of the injustice I suffer.” Tariq was sent to Guantánamo in 2002 when he was about 24 years old, and he has been detained without charge ever since. He now weighs just 90 pounds, and needs urgent, sophisticated medical care. President Obama should release Tariq back home to Yemen on humanitarian grounds. Sign my petition to help secure justice for Tariq and for the rest of the men at Guantánamo. Sign it so this country can better live up to the best of its values. President Obama acknowledged this week that Guantánamo needs to close because in his words it's "inefficient" and hurtful to our "international standing." Words are not enough. He must match his words with actions. It is the responsibility of all people of conscience to urge President Obama to close Guantánamo, now. I hope you will join me to do so. REFERENCES http://ccrjustice.org/get-involved/action/GTMOHungerStrike2013 http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/04/29/obama-s-catastrophic-guantanamo-failure.html http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/04/13/hunger-strike-at-gitmo-we-are-dying-a-slow-death-here/ http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/homeland-security/294843-president-obama-must-act-to-close-guantanamo http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2013/05/01/obama-can-close-guantanamo http://ccrjustice.org/learn-more/faqs/GTMObyTheNumbers

My name is Sumi Abedin. I sewed clothing for American retailers at Tazreen garment factory in Bangladesh for a year and half. On November 24th we were working overtime at 6:30pm, when one worker came back from the restroom and shouted, “there’s a fire in the factory!” We started to smell smoke and we panicked. But when I ran towards the exit stairs, my supervisor told me it was a false alarm and ordered me to go back to work. Five minutes later it became really clear that there was a fire but we couldn’t get out through the main stairs because the supervisor had locked the collapsible metal gate. Eventually, I saw a coworker break a window on the third floor and jump. I jumped right after him. My decision to jump was not so that I could save my life – I doubted that I could survive a jump from a third story window. I jumped to save my body so that my parents could find me; if I had stayed in that factory my body would have been burned to ash. Unlike 112 of my coworkers, I survived. I feel lucky that I survived the fire last November, but my heart hurts for all the victims of the Tazreen fire, the recent Rana Plaza building collapse and for the hundreds of other workers who have been killed in Bangladesh at factories where clothes were being manufactured for Walmart, Sears, JC Penney and other American retailers. Over 380 people have been killed in Bangladesh since last week after the collapse of an eight-story factory building where clothes were being manufactured for American and European consumers. Although workers had their doubts about entering the building since cracks had developed on the facade, managers forced the workers to enter the building and work as usual. The disaster at Rana Plaza is now the deadliest incident in the garment industry in known history. Two of the brands identified in documents found in the rubble are sold at JC Penney. The building collapse is but one in a series of disasters that could have been prevented, had the largest apparel buyers learned from earlier tragedies and adopted the safety measures urged by unions and labor rights groups. In December 2010, 29 workers perished in the That's It Sportswear factory fire, where clothing destined for JC Penney was found. Then, just last fall disaster struck again. The fire at Tazreen, a supplier to Walmart and Sears, took the lives of 112 garment workers. These are only three of the dozens of preventable incidents that have taken garment workers' lives in Bangladesh. This pattern of fires and building collapses will not end unless retailers make real change in their sourcing practices. As noted in a poignant New York Editorial, “the severity and frequency of these disasters are an indictment of global clothing brands and retailers like Walmart, H&M and the Gap, which buy billions of dollars of clothes from Bangladesh but have so far refused to demand and pay for adequate safeguards at the factories that fill their orders.” This is unacceptable. We can't allow US corporations to gain hundreds of millions of dollars in profits while continuing to offer woefully inadequate responses concerning the safety of workers in countries like Bangladesh. We must pressure them today to lean on their suppliers in Bangladesh and lobby the government of Bangladesh to enact and enforce meaningful labor laws and safety standards which on paper should provide basic protections to workers. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wajed’s government in Bangladesh should also make a commitment to allow workers to form unions and ensures their rights to bargain with management on wages and working conditions. It is up to the American companies that produce their clothing in Bangladesh to ensure that Hasina’s government does not ignore these rights despite making repeated promises to do so to international agencies. Enough is enough. We cannot let American companies like Walmart, Sears and JC Penney get away with ignoring the human rights of the workers who sew their clothes. Photo via http://laborrights.org/. REFERENCES: http://www.aljazeera.com/video/asia-pacific/2013/04/2013412231313685455.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/25/world/asia/bangladesh-building-collapse.html?hp&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/26/opinion/another-preventable-tragedy-in-bangladesh.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130426 http://laborrightsblog.typepad.com/international_labor_right/2013/04/building-collapse-today-is-another-wake-up-call-for-walmart-and-other-major-buyers-to-act-immediatel.html