A few weeks ago I went to a conference in Miami on infrastructure private-public partnerships, or “P3s.” We’ve written plenty about the pitfalls of P3s that don’t have strong public protections. I learned at the conference that Miami has big plans. We’re paying close attention and helping local advocates ensure that these plans to rebuild Miami serve taxpayers, workers and families, not just private investors.
Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez spoke at the conference and made it clear that his vision includes privatizing essential public goods. “It used to be Miami-Dade County wanted to operate everything,” Gimenez said. “I don’t want to operate anything.” He talked about tapping the private sector to finance, build and operate a new transit line and courthouse. A P3 for a new water treatment plant is already underway.
Miami is growing fast and has real infrastructure needs.
» Read more about: Miami: Public Interests or Privatized Development? »
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker may have dropped out of the presidential race, but his influence is still haunting public workers, as evidenced by a bill that now sits on the desk of California Governor Jerry Brown. That legislation, SB 331 or the Civic Reporting Openness in Negotiations Efficiency Act (CRONEY), is the latest flashpoint in an ongoing war that Walker helped trigger when he moved to roll back the rights of public employee unions in early 2011.
While Walker was met with a huge backlash that drew protesters from across the country, in Orange County, local officials saw a green light to advance their own agenda against organized labor. Just a week after Walker signed Act 10, eviscerating collective bargaining rights for government workers in Wisconsin, the city of Costa Mesa issued layoff notices to nearly half its employees, paving the way for the outsourcing of hundreds of union jobs.
» Read more about: The Ghost of Scott Walker Visits Jerry Brown »
If there were still any doubt about Eli Broad’s desire to gut traditional public education, it has been erased by his much-discussed “Great Public Schools Now” initiative, a draft of which LA Times reporter Howard Blume obtained last month.
Broad’s 44-page proposal outlines plans to replace half of LAUSD’s existing public schools with charter schools. “Such an effort will gather resources, help high-quality charters access facilities, develop a reliable pipeline of leadership and teaching talent, and replicate their success,” states the document. “If executed with fidelity, this plan will ensure that no Los Angeles student remains trapped in a low-performing school.”
According to the proposal, Broad wants to create 260 new “high-quality charter schools, generate 130,000 high-quality charter seats and reach 50 percent charter market share.”
(Actually, LAUSD has 151,000 kids in charters now: 281,000 out of 633,000 LAUSD students is 43 percent. This isn’t the only imprecision in the proposal.)
The estimated cost of this LAUSD transformation would be nearly half-a-billion dollars.
» Read more about: Eli Broad and the End of Public Education as We Know It »
In his speech to Congress, Pope Francis praised Dorothy Day — along with Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., and Thomas Merton — as one of four “representatives of the American people” whom he admired.
Pope Francis was probably the first pope to mention Day’s name in public. It is unlikely that anyone else who addressed Congress in the past had uttered her name.
No doubt most members of Congress — and most Americans watching the speech on television or listening on the radio — had never heard of her. Many of them would have had to Google her on their iPhones and tablets. Some of them — like House Speaker John Boehner, the arch-conservative who invited Pope Francis to speak to Congress — might not have been pleased with what they discovered.
Day (1897-1980) founded the Catholic Worker movement on the principles of militant pacifism,
It’s that time of year when I look for my name on the list of MacArthur Fellows, and not finding it once again resolve to keep working and wait until next time. But truly, perusing such a list is as humbling as it is inspiring.
From puppeteers and choreographers to novelists, set designers, economists, chemists, sociologists, journalists, educators, environmentalists and community leaders, the MacArthurs each year offer a who’s who of the best and the brightest, making us feel optimistic about the capabilities of the human mind and spirit.
“These 24 delightfully diverse MacArthur Fellows,” as MacArthur President Julia Stasch states, “are shedding light and making progress on critical issues, pushing the boundaries of their fields, and improving our world in imaginative, unexpected ways.”
And what’s especially unique about the MacArthur Genius grant, as stated on the foundation’s website, is that “the fellowship is not a reward for past accomplishment,
» Read more about: Geniuses Among Us – the MacArthur Foundation Class of 2015 »
Last week, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) released striking data about the rapid turnover of charter schools. CMD’s state-by-state list of closed charters shows that, since 2000, these schools have failed at a much higher rate than traditional public schools. And over this time, millions of federal dollars went to groups planning to start charter schools that never even opened.
Instead of giving children the ‘disruption’ of a school closure, we should do everything we can to give every child access to a great school.
Earlier this month, teachers and school staff in Seattle did just that. After a five-day strike, they won a better education for students at traditional public schools across the city. Elementary school students now have guaranteed daily recess, which many parents had wanted, and special education teachers will teach smaller, more individualized classes.
“How do you spell your name?” asked the beltway woman staring at her laptop in the lobby of a lavish Southern California resort. Was she Googling me? I tried not to panic. Instead, playing up the jetlag, I quipped that I really did know my name by heart and gave her one of my business cards that said I was a consultant. Then I realized she was typing my name to put on my badge. Casually she handed me my lanyard, schedule and swag bag.
I was in!
Why are reporters barred from attending the Community Financial Services Association of America (CFSA) annual conference? Why all the secrecy? The organization says full disclosure and transparency are part of their best practices – but no media or streaming are allowed at its annual shindig. This is a $46 billion dollar industry based on subprime (they now call it nonprime) customers —
» Read more about: Payday Lenders: 'We're Not Bottom Feeders!' »
There now is a flow of fresh cultural monuments in Los Angeles that runs from the High School of the Arts over to Disney Hall. This includes, of course, the 36-year-old Museum of Contemporary Art, with which billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad was once deeply involved, and which Broad’s new art museum now competes with. All of a 30-year sudden, we have a cultural downtown center, complete with a hinterland of new bars, stores, costly restos and so on.
Little is left of the downtown of 40 years ago – or of its scruffy arts bohemia. But that is the way of these things: Yupster egg joints are replacing the old Grand Central Market stalls that sold fruit for 20 cents a pound, new buildings arise on former parking lots where dead people sometimes turned up in the cars of those who worked overnight nearby.
The Broad museum (it’s officially called “The Broad”) looks like a mammoth white-enameled Claes Oldenburg version of a Sur La Table cheese grater.
Sometimes religious people tend to be slower to adapt to changes coursing through the culture, especially with concerns about human-caused climate change. Even though polling shows Catholics, for example, to be slightly ahead of the national curve of global warming awareness, further inspection reveals that only 53 percent of white Catholics think climate change is a critical or major problem, although 73 percent of Hispanic Catholics do. These figures were measured a year ago, but there are signs that most church members aren’t even aware of the Pope’s environmental Encyclical, released this past June.
Those figures still fall short of the nation as a whole. Some 91 percent of Democrats, 78 percent of independents and even 51 percent of Republicans think the government should be doing more about climate change. One would think that’s too awesome a majority for a deadlocked Congress to ignore.
Two court orders and the most expensive wrongful death settlement in California history should be enough. But not for Corizon, a corrections health care company owned by a private equity firm.
For seven months earlier this year, Mario Martinez, a prisoner in Corizon’s care at the Dublin, California Santa Rita Jail, suffered from asthma that kept getting worse. A judge issued two court orders requiring the company to provide Mario urgently needed surgery, but they didn’t operate. While Mario suffered, Corizon even settled a lawsuit for $8.3 million with the family of a prisoner who, five years earlier at the same jail, had died in the company’s care.
In July, Mario suffered an asthma attack, collapsed in his cell and died.
Mario’s mother, Tanti Martinez, had hoped to bring her son’s story to Pope Francis, who on Sunday visited a Philadelphia jail that also contracts with Corizon.
» Read more about: Cruel and Unusual Punishment: Private Correctional Health Care »