In a landmark announcement Tuesday, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg declared that all 100 city agencies that serve the general public are now required to translate key documents and provide interpretation for the city’s millions of immigrant residents in the top six languages spoken by New Yorkers.

The new policy, outlined in Executive Order 120, reflects the linguistic diversity of New York, where half of city residents speak a language other than English at home. Now communicating to residents in Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Korean, Italian, and French Creole will be given the same priority as English. The new citywide policy is expected to assist the nearly 1 in 4 New Yorkers who have a limited ability to read, write or speak English with accessing city services.

What’s more, the announcement of Executive Order 120 spins the government requirements as a matter of customer service and government accountability. The new policy mandates the creation of a new Customer Service Group, housed within the Mayor’s Office of Operations, to help city agencies figure out how to make sure their services and programs are reaching immigrant New Yorkers.  read more »

Cross posted from DailyKos.

The U.S. has a long history of using its forces and laws to put down Labor. In the late 1800s Pinkerton agents, paid by the DOJ, became famous for infiltrating the Molly Maguires. In the early 1900s, state militias and local police were used to break strikes by breaking heads.

Today, the criminal immigrant isn't an Irish miner; it's a Mexican warehouse worker, meatpacker or hotel maid. And today's Pinkertons are ICE agents working outside their own rules and the rule of law to coddle exploiters and criminalize the exploited.

The latest incident is occurring in Long Island City, Queens, where the Teamsters of Local 805 are working to organize nearly 900 warehouse workers at a FreshDirect warehouse.

TAKE ACTION: Tell Fresh Direct to stop threatening its workers.  read more »

My friend Elizabeth Upton teaches English as a Second Language at LaGuardia Community College. I went to her class to talk to them about what new things people are trying to do with technology to foster a more participatory democracy.

I have a longer post on my field trip, I just wanted to give you the students clips first.

Here's Susana (Colombia) with a question about terrorism:

Olga (Uzbekistan) on the future of the middle class:

And Miguel Ángel (Mexico) on drug trafficking:
 read more »