ICAN leaders demonstrated leadership in shutting down the Wells Fargo Shareholders Meeting

The next step on our campaign to take on the big banks pay and win relief for homeowners is to disrupt business as usual at shareholder meetings across the country. The goal of these actions is to build off the fall mobilizations and the Occupations to keep up the street heat holding the 1% (the bank executives) accountable for, in this case, the continued foreclosure on families across the country.

The Alliance played a leadership role in this action to shut down business as usual at Wells Fargo’s annual shareholders meeting on April 24th. The setup started in the weeks leading up to the shareholders meeting, when groups created a drum beat with local actions. For example, ICAN members in Lewiston mobilized Wells for their negative tax rate, despite making record profits.

Idaho Community Action Network joined other Alliance for a Just Society organizations including Make the Road NY and Washington CAN who sent leaders to San Francisco holding proxies to disrupt the circus. Wells Fargo executives take an annual ceremonious walk from their world headquarters across the street to the Mercantile Exchange where to their annual shareholders meeting. The presence of 1500 protesters stopped this self congratulatory dog and pony show which typically exhibits fancy suited businessmen patting each other on the back for another year of record profits.

Leni Juca (MRNY) & Diana Corcrran (ICAN) were selected to link arms with our brothers and sisters from across the country and lead the crowd of 1,500 people through the streets of San Francisco to the Mercantile Exchange Building.

ICAN leaders stepped up to lead an affinity group highlighting Wells investment in the payday lending industry. These groups of proxy holders were poised to raise issues inside the Shareholders meeting.
All of AJS staff and leaders and another 200 protesters held proxy shares and ready to attend the shareholder meeting and raise our demands from the inside. Not surprisingly, John Stumpf (Wells Fargo CEO) and his board of directors hid behind the SF police who barricaded every entrance to the building. Wells Fargo played a cat and mouse game shuffling shareholders from entrance to entrance in the end denying them their legal right to participate. Twenty-five of our allies managed to make it upstairs and shut down the meeting.

ICAN leaders ended the day excited to kickoff the season of shareholder meetings confronting corporate power raising issues including: CEO compensation, corporate money in the coming elections, investments in the prison industrial complex, fair mortgages and principle write down. This action set a high standard for a season of our communities confronting corporate power.

ICAN leaders convened after the activities and penned letters to the editor.

Miguel and Adriana practice Voter Registration

This power will only grow with time as age eligibility and naturalization rates increase for Latinos in Idaho. For instance, in 2008, there were 60,000 Latinos eligible to vote in Idaho, representing 6% of all eligible voters in Idaho. (Only half of them voted during the general elections in 2008 elections.) In 2010, 33.9% of immigrants (or 29,550 people) in Idaho were naturalized U.S. citizens – meaning that they are eligible to vote today.

What these statistics tell us is that the real power of Latinos and new voters is growing and could have definitive impact in the general elections this year.

In order to make this power real, the Idaho Community Action Network – with support of the Community Council of Idaho - launched a campaign to register 2,500 Latinos and new immigrants in the state. Their campaign started on March 31st when high school students, college students, and community members commemorated the legacy of Cesar Chavez by learning about the history and struggle of voting rights in the US, the eligibility rules to vote, and how to do voter registration:

Participants role-play voter registration

Maggie and Ciclinde practice Voter Registration

Part of ICAN’s campaign will include doing voter registrations at the Citizenship Ceremonies in Boise every month and at local events such as Cinco de Mayo. They will also do public education and voter mobilization during the two weeks leading to Election Day, November 6th.

This campaign will not be successful without your participation! Here’s what you can do to make the power of Latino communities stronger:

• Register your family members, friends, co-workers, and classmates – we need to register 2,500 voters this year!
• Strengthen your recruitment skills by helping us recruit 5 volunteers to do voter registration.
• Develop your leadership skills by becoming a team captain/trainer. With a growing volunteer team, more leaders are needed to join our effort

For more information you can contact Fernando at fernando@idahocan.org.

Anna and Galo do Voter Registration Quiz

You can read the full CNN story here.

ICAN member Maricela (right) was mentioned in a CNN news story about the re-enactment march. Photo credit to The Center for Community Change.

ICAN members Emma, John, Kathy, and Yuliana with the broken heart valentines outside of a payday lending store in Nampa. Photo Credit: Greg Kreller/Idaho Press Tribune (Tuesday, Feb. 14, 2012)

On February 14th this year, members of Alliance affiliate Idaho Community Action Network (ICAN)  had some very specific valentines to deliver to payday lending stores across the valley.  These over-sized valentines with broken hearts of pink and red symbolized a message and a demand: stop breaking our hearts and stop breaking our budgets.

The ICAN Valentine’s Day demand was simple and follows the legislative regulation ICAN wants in Idaho: voluntarily reduce interest rates to a cap of 36% from upwards of 400% and reduce the maximum loan amount from $1,000 to $300.  And so with valentines in hand, we visited many payday stores and allowed our members to share their stories and educate the public. Our members were also interviewed by the press and got to tell their stories and spread our message to an even bigger audience. The member stories spoke of the unfair cycle created by unregulated payday loans which trap community members in debt and thus insure their repeat loan business.

ICAN’s Valentine’s Day action was met with mixed responses, from passionate members to defensive businesses. On a few occasions, we were asked to leave a store, but as we loaded up our giant valentines and drove to the next location, one thing was clear: we will not allow more broken hearts and broken budgets.

To read media coverage of the day, please visit these links:

The Lewiston Tribune:  Protestors Target Lewiston Wells Fargo Office

The Idaho Statesman:  Idaho consumer group targets payday lenders with valentines

The Lewiston Tribune:  Valentine Protestors Have No Love for Payday Lenders

LocalNews8:  ICAN Delivers ‘Broken Heart’ Valentine to Payday Lenders

The Boise Weekly:  ICAN To Deliver Heart-Shaped Activism to Payday Loan Stores

Do-It- Yourself Deportation

ONE of my happiest childhood memories is of my parents at my First Communion. But that’s because most of my memories from that time are of their being absent. They weren’t there for my elementary school graduation, or for parent-teacher conferences.

 From the time I was just a baby in Mexico, I lived with my grandparents while my parents traveled to other Mexican states to find work. I was 6 in 2000 when they left for the United States. And it took five years before they had steady jobs and were able to send for me. We’ve been together in this country ever since, working to build a life. Now I am 17 and a senior in high school in New York City. But my parents have left again, this time to return to Mexico.

Last week, when asked in a debate what America should do about the 11 million undocumented immigrants living here, Mitt Romney said he favored “self-deportation.” He presented the strategy as a kinder alternative to just arresting people. Instead, he said, immigrants will “decide they can do better by going home because they can’t find work here.”

But really this goes along with a larger movement in states like Arizona and Alabama to pass very tough laws against immigrants in an attempt to make their lives so unbearable that they have no choice but to leave. People have called for denying work, education and even medical treatment to immigrants without documentation; many immigrants have grown afraid of even going to the store or to church.

The United States is supposed to be a great country that welcomes all kinds of people. Does Mr. Romney really think that this should be America’s solution for immigration reform?

You could say that my parents have self-deported, and that it was partly a result of their working conditions. It’s not that they couldn’t find work, but that they couldn’t find decent work. My dad collected scrap metal from all over the city, gathering copper and steel from construction sites, garbage dumps and old houses. He earned $90 a day, but there was only enough work for him to do it once or twice a week. My mom worked at a laundromat six days a week, from 6 a.m. until 6 p.m., for $70 a day.

But the main reason they had to leave was personal. I have a brother, 16, a year younger than me, still living in Mexico. He was too little to cross the border with me when I came to the United States, and as the government has cracked down on immigration in the years since, the crossing has become more expensive and much more dangerous. And there was no hope of his getting a green card, as none of us have one either. So he stayed with my grandparents, but last year my grandmother died and two weeks ago my grandfather also died. My parents were confronted with a dilemma: Leave one child alone in New York City, or leave the other alone in Mexico. They decided they had to go back to Mexico.

Now once again I am missing my parents. I know it was very difficult for them to leave me here, worrying about how I will survive because I’m studying instead of earning money working. I’m living with my uncles, but it is hard for my mother to know that I’m coming home to a table with no dinner on it, where there had been dinner before. And it’s hard for me not having my parents to talk to, not being able to ask for advice that as a teenager you need. Now that they are in Mexico, I wonder who will be at my graduation, my volleyball games or my birthday? With whom will I share my joy or my sad moments?

I know a girl named Guadalupe, whose parents have also decided to return to Mexico, because they can’t find work here and rent in New York City is very expensive. She is very smart and wants to be the first in her family to attend college, and she wants to study psychology. But even though she has lived here for years and finished high school with a 90 percent average, she, like me, does not have immigration papers, and so does not qualify for financial aid and can’t get a scholarship.

People like Guadalupe and me are staying in this country because we have faith that America will live up to its promise as a fair and just country. We hope that there will be comprehensive immigration reform, with a path to citizenship for people who have spent years living and working here. When reform happens, our families may be able to come back, and if not, at least we will be able to visit them without the risk of never being able to return to our lives here. We hope that the Dream Act — which would let undocumented immigrants who came here as children go to college and become citizens and which has stalled in Congress — will pass so that we can get an education and show that even though we are immigrants we can succeed in this country.

If, instead, the political climate gets more and more anti-immigrant, eventually some immigrants will give up hope for America and return to their home countries, like my parents did. But I don’t think this is something that our presidential candidates should encourage or be proud of.

Immigrants have made this country great. We are not looking for a free ride, but instead we are willing to work as hard as we can to show that we deserve to be here and to be treated like first-class citizens. Deportation, and “self-deportation,” will result only in dividing families and driving them into the shadows. In America, teenagers shouldn’t have to go through what I’m going through.

Antonio Alarcón is a high school student and a member of Make the Road New York, an immigrant advocacy group. This essay was translated by Natalia Aristizabal-Betancur from the Spanish.

On Monday morning, the group gathered at the Capitol Building for scheduled meetings with key legislators from the Health and Welfare and Business Committees. Later in the afternoon, ICAN members and supporters participated in an action against payday lenders at the EZ Money Payday Loans located on State St. To start the action, about 20 people occupied their office for a couple of minutes while chanting “Payday Lenders, Criminal Offenders”. After that, a group of around 50 individuals stood outside the building holding signs and making sure drivers and people passing by knew about the bad practices these loan sharks have.

For videos and photos of the action, please visit our Facebook page at: http://www.facebook.com/IdahoCAN

ICAN, The Alliance for a Just Society and CID also unveiled the “Medicaid Matters in Idaho: Real Stories, Real Impacts, Real Communities” storybook. The storybook connects the reader to the real stories of Idahoans who are impacted by these cuts.

For more information about this event and how cuts in Medicaid are impacting Idaho families, please contact Yuliana Nogales at Yuliana@idahocan.org or 208-385-9146.

Under current law, undocumented immigrants have to leave the United States and apply for a waiver to lessen the 3-year to 10-year bar they face before they can re-enter the country. Often, the process to obtain a waiver can take months or even years, meaning families have to endure severe prolonged separations. The rule change would allow spouses and children of U.S. citizens to file their waivers in the United States. The action does not require congressional approval.

“Keeping families together is one of our greatest values in this country, and the Obama administration is moving in a positive direction to ease the difficulties that our families face on a daily basis,” said Alicia Clements, board member of the Idaho Community Action Network. “Families should not be torn apart because of our broken immigration system. This proposal gets rid of unnecessary red tape, and instead it focuses on family unity.”

For more information about immigration trainings and recent updates on federal and state immigration issues, please contact Yuliana Nogales at Yuliana@idahocan.org or 208-385-9146