In two Thursday rulings the Supreme Court came down on the side of a functioning government that can help improve life prospects for Americans – should the people’s representatives so desire. While Californians wouldn’t have been immediately impacted had the Court undermined legislation on health care and housing discrimination, the implications could have been drastic down the road.
In upholding the Affordable Care Act, the High Court affirmed its role firstly to “say what the law is,” as Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion, citing Marbury v. Madison; and, secondly, to be guided in that endeavor by adhering to the overall plan of the legislation — rather than zeroing in on each textual clause viewed in isolation. In doing so, Roberts’ Court not only saved the landmark health care law at hand, but avoided creating the implication that major legislation could potentially be undone by a stray sentence or errant copyediting.
A recent report found more than $200 million in charter school fraud, waste and self-dealing. Headlines regularly tell the story of money stolen and sudden, midyear charter school closures that leave children without a school and teachers unable to serve their students. Meanwhile, the Walton Family Foundation is spending hundreds of millions to promote the rapid expansion of charter schools, while advocating for deregulation and minimal oversight.
Public school advocates have produced an 11-point accountability agenda that would reduce charter school corruption and stop the weakening of neighborhood public schools. The agenda calls for increased accountability (through open board meetings, publicly available budgets and contracts, and rigorous audits); protecting neighborhood schools (through impact analyses and financial assessments of the effects of local schools); and protecting taxpayer funds (by ensuring the public retains control of public property,
» Read more about: Stop the Walmartization of Public Education »
Tristain Frye’s success in life is important not just to her – it’s important to all of us.
Frye, who recently worked on a new building at Gonzaga University in Spokane, WA, did not have an easy road to becoming a carpenter’s apprentice.
When she was 22, she was sentenced to 12 years in state prison. At that point, the odds were solidly against her.
That is until Tristain was accepted into an innovative pre-apprenticeship program in partnership with the Ironworkers, Laborers and Carpenters unions called TRAC: Trades Related Apprenticeship Coaching at the Washington Corrections Center for Women. Read about her in my article on the AFL-CIO blog, Jobs, Not Prisons: Unions Help Formerly Incarcerated Women Build a New Life.
The 16-week program is open to women in the prison who can prove themselves physically able to do the demanding work required in the construction industry: carry heavy loads of rebar,
» Read more about: Reducing Prison Populations One Job at a Time »
In what is being billed by unions, environmentalists and human rights groups as an endorsement of an unprecedented expansion of corporate power and privilege, the Senate today passed a cloture vote on a motion to concur with a trade promotion authority (TPA) bill passed by the House.
Cloture effectively clears the way for Wednesday’s expected vote on fast track itself, which will only require a majority for passage and is needed to speed through passage of President Obama’s secretive and controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement without filibuster or amendment.
TPP has been widely criticized for effectively granting extraordinary legal rights to corporations and investors that it does not extend to unions, public interest groups and individuals.
Today’s cloture vote was 60-37, the barest minimum needed for passage. Thirteen so-called Corporate Democrat senators voted yes — including California’s Diane Feinstein — one less than lined up behind May’s 62-37 senate approval of a bill that had combined TPA and Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA).
Clocking In is a new online tool from Race Forward, a New York-based group whose self-described goal “is to build awareness, solutions and leadership for racial justice.” Its analysis finds disturbing trends for people of color and women employed in the U.S. service industry. This virtual resource allows service employees to share their real-life job experiences with other workers, consumers, employers and policymakers 24/7.
90% of female tipped workers have experienced sexual harassment in the workplace.
Clocking In sends participants on a virtual journey while offering activist information on a range of workplace issues. Visitors choose one of three employment portals representing the restaurant, retail or domestic industries.
Clicking the restaurant option, for example, brings up a screen that says: “Workers in the restaurant industry face race and gender discrimination daily! Click ‘Start’ to learn from Race Forward and Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC) about how it happens and what YOU can do about it!”
Next is a choice to click a male or female character.
More Americans believe in angels than in climate change. Still, a poll released earlier this year indicated that more Americans than ever now think that climate change is happening, that it is caused by human activity and that world leaders have a moral obligation to do something about it.
So why are we getting so little action? If a large majority of people actually thinks our only home, the Earth, suffers from human behavior, then shouldn’t our personal and public actions reflect that reality? Oh, sure, lots of people drive electric cars, but lots more drive SUVs. I know that California has implemented a “cap-and-trade” program that will limit the future growth of carbon in the air, but the state has not banned fracking, which wastes water and hurts our air quality. And I know that the federal government has been setting higher goals for vehicle mileage —
» Read more about: A Change in the Climate of Climate Change? »
The 467,000 Californians who receive assistance from the state’s In-Home Supportive Services are breathing a little better, if not easier, now that a new budget has restored care cuts to the agency. The program typically assists elderly, blind and disabled people on low incomes with housework, meal preparation, personal hygiene and other services; by paying individuals through the state to perform these tasks, the care recipients are able to remain in their homes and avoid being institutionalized – which also saves taxpayers millions of dollars.
Also Read: Will Sacramento Restore Home Care Cuts to Seniors & the Disabled?
A few years ago IHSS suffered a seven-percent funding cut that Governor Jerry Brown pledged in January to restore – but without providing a specific funding stream to do so. Brown suggested that revenue for the restoration could come from either a new tax on certain health care plans or from the state’s General Fund.
» Read more about: In-Home Care Recipients Cautiously Applaud New Budget »
Several years ago I produced a documentary film about young men who had been in gangs and in prison, men who had had their lives turned around when they were accepted into building trades unions. They all came from tough and economically deprived backgrounds. In addition to their social environments, what was similar about all of the young men who had gotten in serious trouble was the absence of a father in their lives.
Most of them explained to me that while they respected their mothers’ feelings while in the home, when outside of the house they gravitated towards other male figures. Arturo Peña, who was part of a gang in Los Angeles’ Ramona Gardens housing project, reflected on his experience as a young man. “We didn’t have fathers growing up so we looked up to these older gang members who dominated and controlled the streets.”
The lucky ones from so-called “broken families” —
» Read more about: Fathers and Sons and Daughters: Father’s Day at the Wilshire Grand »
Former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger once termed it the “stuff [I] used to blow up in the movies.” But America’s vital infrastructure—highways, railways, bridges and thruways—now face a doom worse than the Terminator ever imagined. That’s the destruction from the rust, decay and corrosion of trillions of dollars worth of elderly tracks, canals, ports, structures and causeways that carry our trade and traffic all over the United States.
Sixty-one thousand bridges, located mostly in local jurisdictions, are potentially dangerous. That U.S. rail systems are about $60 billion behind on maintenance (as of five years ago) was tragically illustrated by the recent fatal Pennsylvania Amtrak disaster, blamed on the delayed installation of a new control system. Last month’s burst oil pipeline in Santa Barbara County also underscored the deterioration of even private infrastructure. Both tragedies demonstrated that continued neglect comes with a fast rising cost in both money and lives.
When Jared Bernstein recently sat down with Capital & Main, he had just been chosen as chair of the National Employment Law Project’s board of directors, while continuing his roles as a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and as a frequent commentator on MSNBC and CNBC. Picked in 2009 by Joe Biden to be the Vice President’s top economic advisor, Bernstein had already distinguished himself as a passionate critic of inequality during his long tenure at the Economic Policy Institute, one of the country’s leading think tanks. His views on economic issues were well to the left of Obama’s and the rest of the President’s team, ensuring that progressive ideas would get a hearing inside the White House as the administration wrestled with the worst downturn since the Great Depression.
While Obama and his advisors succeeded in reversing the Great Recession’s massive job losses and saving the bacon of the financial industry,
» Read more about: Watch Now: Jared Bernstein on Inequality & Lip-Syncing Republicans »