Try to wrap your mind around the actions of the legislators and the Governor when it comes to education, and you’ll discover they are not bi-partisan, they are bi-polar.  

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We had our first People’s Assembly at the Indiana Statehouse on January 26th, highlighting low wage workers’ struggles with people from all over the state. Various people from different backgrounds spoke out in support of raising the minimum wage. We learned about how low wages affect our lives in various ways – from limiting healthcare access to widening the gender wage gap to economic insecurity prolonging domestic violence. We learned that there is no county in Indiana where a single adult can survive on $7.25. We know when these workers get a raise, they will spend it right back in our communities and help grow our economy. 

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Indiana Moral Mondays applauds the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act that Governor Pence announced yesterday morning.  Something close to half of the uninsured in Indiana will be able to get coverage under the HIP 2.0 program. Lives will be saved, bankruptcies will be prevented, but most importantly many more Hoosiers will have the peace of mind that they have some sort of health insurance coverage.

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This post was written by Lucia George, a home healthcare worker in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Lucia will be sharing more of her story at the People's Assembly on January 26 at the Indiana Statehouse. Visit our event page to RSVP.

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This post originally appeared on the Indiana Institute for Working Families blog on January 14, 2015. With the permission of the author, Derek Thomas, we are reposting here. To see the original post, please visit their website.

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Dr. King arrived in Memphis on March 18, 1968 to support the sanitation workers of that city who had been on strike for five weeks. These workers had many grievances that forced them to protest. Garbage workers had no access to bathroom or shower facilities. They were not issued any protective clothing for their job. There were no eating areas separate from garbage. Also sanitation workers had no pension or retirement program and no entitlement to workers compensation. Their wages were very low. Shortly before the strike began two workers died on the job and the families of the deceased received only $500 in compensation from the city. Finally, after Black workers were sent home for the day because of bad weather and received only two hours pay they walked off the job.

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The people and faith communities of the Indiana Moral Mondays Movement are working to promote a just society in which every person is valued. We believe that no government can exist in peace when such laws are framed and held inviolate of others because of their sexual orientation. We believe everyone should be treated with respect and dignity; we seek to embrace the moral values and the enduring qualities of love found in the secular and spiritual communities from which come.

Indiana Moral Mondays is true to: EQUAL JUSTICE: Equal Protection Under the Law --- Justice Without Regard to Race, Religious Beliefs, Class, Gender, Sexual Orientation,  Immigration Status or Physical Disability. Therefore, Indiana Moral Monday does not support of the "Religious Freedom Bill," authored by Sen. Scott Schneider (R-Indianapolis), as it goes against our principles of Equality for All.

Over the last several years many of the criminal justice systems at federal, state, and local levels have threatened the basic rights of citizens, particularly people of color and youth. These violations of equal treatment under the law have included:

 -a “national epidemic” of police and vigilante killings of young African American men, for example Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis in Florida, Eric Garner in New York, Oscar Grant in Oakland, California, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, John Crawford III in Dayton, Ohio, Vonderrit Myers Jr. in St. Louis, and Ezell Ford in Los Angeles

-the mass incarceration of people of color such that, as Michelle Alexander has reported in her recent book, The New Jim Crow, more African Americans are in jail or under the supervision of the criminal justice system today than were in slavery in 1850;

-the institutionalization of laws increasing surveillance;

-and the passage of so-called Stand Your Ground laws, justifying gun violence against people perceived as a threat.

On August 9, 2014 unarmed nineteen-year-old African-American Michael Brown was shot multiple times by a Ferguson, Missouri policeman. In response to the collective expression of community outrage that followed, the local police initiated a multi-day barrage of tear gas, strong-arm arrests, and the threatening of street protestors with military vehicles and loaded rifles. The images on television screens nationwide were of a people under assault. The fear that young African American males in Ferguson have historically felt every time they stepped into the streets of their city was heightened by the killing of Michael Brown.

Significant events since the police murder have been protests, the visit to the Ferguson community by Attorney General Eric Holder, and national mobilizations in Ferguson and around the country. Subsequent to that police killing, many more African American men have been killed by police officers across the nation.  “Testimony” leaked from the grand jury investigating the police officers responsibility for killing Michael Brown provided a narrative that the police officer who murdered Brown was acting in self-defense. As in most Grand Jury investigations of police violence, the officer who killed Michael Brown was absolved of manslaughter for the young man’s death.

Along with police killings other police abuse occurs regularly. In Hammond, Indiana, on September 24, 2014, an African American women, who was the driver of a car and mother of two children in the back seat, and an adult male friend in the front passenger seat, was pulled over by a police officer for a seat belt violation. Fortunately nobody died, but the policeman drew his weapon and shattered the automobile’s front side window. The policeman had ordered the male to roll down the window, tasered and then arrested him while the seven year old daughter of the driver cried in the back seat. Subsequently Hammond authorities have defended the conduct of the police officer.

In a recently released study, journalists discovered that between 2010 and 2012 young Black males were shot to death by police 21 times more than young whites. Their data was limited to those two years because earlier information accumulated by the FBI was incomplete. Prior to that time police departments had not filed required reports when police used force.

As Professor Colin Loftin, co-director of the Violence Research Group, University of Alabama, said, “No question, there are all kinds of racial disparities across our criminal justice system.” (Ryan Gabrielson, Ryann Grochowski Jones an Eric Sagara, “Deadly Force, in Black and White,”http://www.propublica.org/article/deadly-force-in-black-and-white, October 10, 2014).

Therefore, a growing body of evidence suggests that the criminal justice system administers justice in an unfair way--from general police/community relations, to trials and incarceration, to the use of violence and deadly force against minority youth. 

For these reasons Indiana Moral Mondays supports the hundreds of thousands of PEACEFUL protestors who have demanded greater research on racism in the criminal justice system, changes in the selection of police officers for service, increased regulation of police application of instrumentalities of force, greater community control of police, and a legislative agenda at state and local levels that works vigorously to end discrimination in the administration of justice. We in IMM particularly applaud the vigor and passion of young people who, like young people a generation ago during the Civil Rights Movement, are demanding justice for all people.

As 2014 draws to a close, Indiana Moral Mondays hopes you keep our 5 resolutions for 2015 in mind as we continue our movement. Thank you to everyone that joined us in moving our state forward together during 2014! We are very proud of all that we have accomplished. Help us get a strong start in 2015, visit our "Volunteer" tab and let us know how you'd like to get involved!

Happy New Year! - IMM 

 

When you need to cut back on your bills at home, what do you do? Make sure you turn off lights, run the dryer less, turn the thermostat down? Using less power is a simple way to lower costs, but another is using your electricity more efficiently.

 

In 2012, Indiana's began its first energy efficiency program. Known as Energizing Indiana, the program offered residential electricity users home energy audits, assessing heating and cooling systems, insulation, installing sink aerators, changing lightbulbs and more. Businesses could apply for rebates for improving or upgrading equipment and systems to use less energy.

 

Through just the first phase of the program, the state saved enough energy to power 78,000 homes according to a study by the Purdue State Utility Forecasting Group and was expected to save 1,800 megawatts of peak demand by 2022.  By charging rate payers just an average of $2 on their power bill, energy efficiency experts could return double to triple the savings. Small changes have big impacts; the savings by 2022 are equal to two entire power plants similar to the coal-fired plant on Harding Street.

 

During the 2014 session, legislators passed a bill (SEA 340) ending this program, with no indication of what steps they would take next. The bill, first introduced by Senate Utilities Chair Jim Merritt (R-Indianapolis), originally just amended  Energizing Indiana to let industries using more than 1 megawatt opt-out of the program, but House member Heath VanNatter (R-Kokomo) expanded it to prohibit the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission (IURC) from extending or entering into new contracts for the program after Dec. 31, 2014. Passing both chambers by a wide margin, this bill made Indiana the first state to end energy efficiency plans.

 

Governor Pence allowed the bill to become law without signing it, saying that he thought the program was "worthwhile," but that he didn't want to raise the rates on any rate payers. This is a confusing stance when the program offered 2:1 savings and 3:1 in many cases, kept almost the same number of Hoosiers employed as the state's coal industry, and kept energy demand within current capacity levels, making the costly-to-ratepayers building of additional power plants unnecessary.

 

The Governor did instruct the legislature to come up with an alternative plan this session and it is expected they will address the issue. The primary concern is that they will allow the utilities to "self regulate" and come up with their own energy efficiency programs for their customers. This is not acceptable. Aside from the conflict of interest in asking companies to limit sales on their revenue-generating product, we know from the past that their programs did not result in the same kind of savings that the independent Energizing Indiana does.

 

Critics of the program suggest that after the low-cost energy audits and upgrades are accomplished that the savings in future years will not be as dramatic. Senator Merritt, who originally applauded the IURC and Governor Daniels' administration when they introduced the program, said that he "found that it was an inexpensive program to start when it was changing light bulbs and wrapping pipes and simple measures such as that to save energy...When you look at the second four years, 2015-2019, those simple measures just aren’t there." That is far too narrow and short sighted of a view, as Indiana has not embraced energy efficiency previously, not only do we have a large job ahead of us, but the technology is constantly improving, new construction is ongoing, making future steps to curtail consumption just as necessary as current ones. Neighboring states are already having these conversations and generating new ideas in how to responsibly use energy beyond changing lightbulbs, meanwhile Indiana is cutting off our progress at the lightbulb step.

 

Saving on our state's power bills isn't just good economic policy, it's essential to keeping our state's air and water clean. Indiana derives 84% of its power from coal which produces a bevy of toxic chemicals on the ground and in the air. Public health   demands we reduce our heavy reliance on coal, our aging power plants place us in the pivotal position of having to make some serious decisions about the future of energy production in Indiana. Reducing our consumption puts us in the right place to move forward on a healthy and sustainable future that all Hoosiers need.