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July 3, 2008
BAD, BAD BUDGET
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Quinn and Bloomberg justify their budget as Council looks on |
Last Sunday—LGBT Pride Day in New York City—Mayor Michael Bloomberg and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn shook hands and kissed on a 2009 city budget that included $6 million in heinous cuts to HIV/AIDS programs. Even though there was a budget surplus, the mayor wanted to save for a rainy day—and protect an unnecessary "tourist tax." Bloomberg demanded harsh cuts, pitting poor against poor, while the council spun his demands as a "victory" because in the end education funding was spared at the expense of social services. For a full budget breakdown of the HIV/AIDS reductions click here.
Budget meetings were highly secretive and many councilmembers were cut out of the budget process—so much for Quinn’s vaunted transparency. In the end, funding for services for people with living HIV/AIDS and harm reduction programs were decimated. Money for HIV/AIDS counseling programs and a pilot program set up last year to get HIV-positive people out of shelters and into stable housing was completely eliminated, an inauspicious move in Bloomberg's five-year plan to end homelessness. ...
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PROUD TO STAND AGAINST AIDS
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Obama impersonator stands against AIDS |
On Sunday, rainbows brought rainstorms.
Despite a torrential downpour, more than 100 raucous HIV/AIDS activists from Housing Works and CitiWide Harm Reduction participated in a New York City Gay Pride float dedicated to the upcoming Stand Against AIDS, a multi-arm cross-country road trip to the first presidential debate between Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama in Oxford, MS, on September 26.
The goal of the Stand Against AIDS is to get commitments from both McCain and Obama to create a national AIDS strategy within 100 days of taking office, and the vocal marchers let the crowd know, cheering, “You've got 100 days to Stand Against AIDS!" They wore T-shirts and masks with caricatured images of Obama and McCain, carried banners and handed out Obama/McCain condom packs. ...
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NEW ACTIVISTS IN NEW MEXICO
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Javier Acevedo Baez and Rheingans smile between YAI sessions photo by: Maralis Mercado |
Last week, during advocacy training at the fourth-annual Youth AIDS Institute (YAI), session leader Johnny Guaylupo showed slides of himself getting arrested during civil disobedience actions. Still, not everyone was signing up to lay down in the middle of traffic.
"I'm big on following rules," said Jeremy Turner, of Evansville, Indiana, one of YAI's 15 participants, "We have to follow the rules we set for ourselves. Shouldn't we also be following the government's rules?"
Turner's question provoked exactly the kind of discussion that YAI, held this year on the campus of University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, was designed to elicit. The purpose of YAI is for young AIDS activists, many living with HIV, to benefit from the skills and knowledge of those who have come before them, then take that information back to their home towns and engage in a real-life AIDS advocacy project...
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TESTIFYING TO THE TRANSGENDER EXPERIENCE
From left, Sanchez, Frank and Baldwin photo by: Tom Williams/HRC |
On Thursday, June 26 the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) held a historic hearing on discrimination against transgender people in the workplace. "An Examination of Discrimination Against Transgender Americans in the Workplace" was the first-ever Congressional hearing to focus on transgender discrimination, and was part of an effort to lay the groundwork for a transgender-inclusive Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA).
"The purpose of today's hearing is to educate Congress and the public about the discrimination transgender Americans face particularly in the workplace, absent a comprehensive federal law to protect them," Rep. Rob Andrews (D-NJ), chairman of the HELP subcommittee said during his opening statement. "Workplace discrimination against a particular group of people is morally unacceptable and conflicts with the principles we hold sacred in our society. Furthermore, workplace discrimination, unchecked, harms our economy both domestically and globally." ...
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