This past election season, Senator Hillary Clinton proved that a woman can run for president. She astonished thousands of people -- men and women -- who never believed that a woman could get so close to becoming Commander in Chief in their lifetimes.

Although Senator Clinton broke through the glass ceiling, women across the country are still struggling for equality. When you look at the numbers, the inequalities that exist between men and women are staggering. Women earn 80% of what their male counterparts earn right out of school, and in 2007, women were paid 77 cents for every dollar that men were paid. This wage gap costs the average female full-time employee between $700,000 and $2 million over the course of her career. And it's not just wages where women are falling behind -- the numbers on healthcare, education, poverty and reproductive freedom tell the same story.

The facts about sick employees at work are, well, sickening. Three in ten employees say they have contracted the flu virus from a co-worker and average lost productivity to businesses (per employee per year) when employees show up to work despite suffering from a respiratory infection is $133.84. Add that to the fact that the flu virus can stay alive on inanimate surfaces like a door handle or office desk for up to eight hours, and it's not surprising that Americans are getting sick from going to work.

This post was written by Corinne Ramey and cross-posted from the DMIblog.

No matter who you're voting for, you have to admit that Barack Obama has good taste in TV. He told the Las Vegas Sun that his favorite TV show was The Wire, the HBO police drama set in inner-city Baltimore that just completed its fifth and final season. Obama even told the Sun that his favorite character is Omar Little, a "charismatic, sawed-off shotgun toting, Honey Nut Cheerios-eating, gay stickup artist." Some have compared Omar to a modern day Robin Hood because he kills drug dealers and then gives the drugs to the users that have been exploited by the dealers. “That’s not an endorsement. He’s not my favorite person, but he’s a fascinating character,” Obama said.

It’s May and not only Bike Month but the time of the annual fundraiser for the Drum Major Institute , my favorite action-oriented think-tank.*

This year the Drum Major For Justice Awards will be held Tuesday May 20th 2008 6:30-8:30 PM at Cipriani 23rd Street. (at 5th Ave.). More Here

I went last year. It was fun: good food, good booze, -- most important-- good schmooze. I plan to go this time, too. You should consider it. If you do, come say “hi!”

Honorees, this year are

David Simon creator of HBO show “The Wire.”

Melissa Mark-Viverito, East Harlem NYC Council Member (people tell me she’s as smart and focused as my Council Member Rosie Mendez; she’s certainly as progressive) and

Steve Phillips California civil rights lawyer, donor and chair of PowerPAC.org.

Tickets are very expensive, but there are special lower rates for activists and bloggers. If you cannot bargain yourself into a price acceptable to you, you should go back to organizing school for retraining.

*Actually it would be a tie, in my book, between DMI and Demos but DMI wins because it has a great blog.

It’s May and not only Bike Month but the time of the annual fundraiser for the Drum Major Institute , my favorite action-oriented think-tank.*

This year the Drum Major For Justice Awards will be held Tuesday May 20th 2008 6:30-8:30 PM at Cipriani 23rd Street. (at 5th Ave.). More Here

I went last year. It was fun: good food, good booze, -- most important-- good schmooze. I plan to go this time, too. You should consider it. If you do, come say “hi!”

Honorees, this year are

David Simon creator of HBO show “The Wire.”

Melissa Mark-Viverito, East Harlem NYC Council Member (people tell me she’s as smart and focused as my Council Member Rosie Mendez; she’s certainly as progressive) and

Steve Phillips California civil rights lawyer, donor and chair of PowerPAC.org.

Tickets are very expensive, but there are special lower rates for activists and bloggers. If you cannot bargain yourself into a price acceptable to you, you should go back to organizing school for retraining.

*Actually it would be a tie, in my book, between DMI and Demos but DMI wins because it has a great blog.

In one of my favorite TV multi-series, CSI, lab-coated technicians match all sorts of crime-scene trace evidence to suspects – who, confronted with such powerful proof of guilt – confess before the commercial. At a forum on criminal justice issues sponsored not long ago by the Drum Major Institute (my post is here , the DMIBlog's is here) featured speaker Dallas DA Craig Watkins and panelist Barry Scheck spoke forcefully about flawed police and prosecution tactics which produce wrongful convictions. One of the more difficult tricks to defend against is the use of prosecution "experts" who testify about "forensic" procedures which have no scientific basis whatsoever.

Cross posted from the DMI blog.

In 1999, Boston had a housing crisis. The waiting list for public housing units had 15,000 people on it, and rent prices had gone up 47% in the past four years. More than 50,000 Bostonians were spending more than half of their income on housing, and the number of homeless people in Boston was at a record high.

But just four years later, the statistics told a different story. Almost 8,000 new housing units had been created, and 1,000 housing units were made accessible to the homeless. The new units represented about $2 billion in public and private housing investment. The number of abandoned buildings in Boston dropped by 66% -- from 1,044 in 1997 to only 350 in 2005, and by the end of 2003, 1,079 vacant public housing units had been renovated. Suddenly, housing in Boston was on its way to becoming available and affordable.

Cross posted from the DMI blog. 

The Drum Major Institute hosted an event yesterday on preventing wrongful convictions and exonerating the innocent.  Dallas DA Craig Watkins, Barry Scheck from the Innocence Project, New York State Senator Eric Schneiderman, and Westchester DA Janet DiFiore discussed reforms for reducing the incarcerations of innocent people in Dallas and how these policies could work in New York and what it would take to get them implemented here.  Our liveblog and some video clips are posted below.

One of the greater political mysteries to me in NYS has been the degree to which progressive reform of our criminial justice system has been elusive. Other than a very modest improvement in the bizzarre Rockefeller Drug laws (which mandate very long incarceration terms for narcotics offenders) Criminal Justice reform in NYS has been a political non-starter.

I listened, therefore with great interest to the remarks made by Dallas (Texas) District Attornery Craig Watkins, Monday morning. He laid out his progressive law enforcement agenda to a packed Drum Major Institute forum. Those proposals had gotten him elected in red-state Texas over a knee-jerk tough on crime GOP candidate. He advocates and thinks he's making progress on issues like proper evidence gathering and preservation, trials that are fair for defendants, review of past cases to correct wrongful or wrong convictions. (DMI has posted an account of that meeting at their DMI Blog . My post is not a full account of that interesting event. If you want to know more, go there.) If Watkins can do this in Dallas, why are we not doing similar work in NY?

One of the more alarming features of the “sub-prime” lending crisis is that it was widely noticed by grass-roots advocates. For years, from South Brooklyn Legal Services , from The Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project and The Children’s Defense Fund-NY have come warnings of the foreclosure wave now swamping lower income New Yorkers and some speculators in “sub-prime” mortgage securities. Predatory, often utterly fraudulent, lending practices have been draining painfully accumulated economic capital from lower income minority communities. Click here for a story on the NYC foreclosure spike. Cries of alarm and calls for policy shifts in the fall of ’06 (CDF-NY sponsored conference at UFT) and the winter of ’07 (the Alliance For Fairness In Lending campaign of progressives, unions and policy groups) had no political traction whatsoever.

The Drum Major Institute meets on this issue this Thursday, October 11, 8-10AM at Pace University's Downtown Conference Center. Light breakfast, free. Registration hot link and more information after the jump