The Internet’s Own Boy —the title says it all. Writer-director Brian Knappenberger‘s weak and propagandistic hagiography is as infantilizing to its audience as it is to its subject, and adds no luster to the memory of pioneering programmer and information activist Aaron Swartz, who was 26 when he took his own life in January 2013.
At the time of his suicide, the federal government was prosecuting Swartz on computer crime charges in connection with downloading (but never distributing) nearly five million academic journal articles from the online repository JSTOR, which he had accessed via a computer in a supply closet at MIT. The indictment was patently ludicrous; JSTOR itself had declined to press charges against Swartz. But the Justice Department was determined to make an example of him anyway, as it has repeatedly done with other hackers whom it has harassed and even jailed. That Swartz was gravely wronged by prosecutors Carmen Ortiz and Stephen Heymann is as plain as day.
You can mail a letter anywhere in the domestic United States for just 49 cents. Think about that for a second. Your letter literally can travel thousands of miles – over mountains, across great lakes and through the desert – for less than the cost of a bag of M&M’s.
But some want to outsource the postal services and its workers to giant retail stores such as Staples, which would destroy what is perhaps the greatest bargain still available in America. A recent piece by David Morris in the Huffington Post explains why this is a bad idea.
There is something we can do about it. The American Postal Workers Union has launched a campaign, Stop Staples: The U.S. Mail is Not for Sale, which is garnering strong support from millions of Americans, including teachers. And as a huge seller of notebooks, pens and other school supplies,
Truck drivers in California’s ports have been fighting for decades for rights most workers take for granted: The right to a minimum wage, the right to proper employee classification, and especially the right to form a union. In the wake of the deregulatory wave of the 1980s, downward pressure on trucking companies led to destructive competition, which led first to union-busting, and then to the widespread misclassification of truck drivers as independent contractors. This, despite the fact that legal and factual analyses have shown – theoretically in 2010 and based on a wave of then-recent rulings in 2014 – that these truck drivers are subject to the control and direction of the trucking companies they haul for. (Full disclosure: I was a co-author of the 2014 report.) Under any legal test, these are employee drivers being deprived of their employee rights; their condition has been compared to that of sharecropping and involuntary servitude.
» Read more about: Recent Court Rulings Aid Port Truck Drivers »
This is the first in an occasional series of interviews with California business leaders.
When it comes to shaping the conversation about business in Southern California, few people wield as much influence as Charles Crumpley. As editor of the Los Angeles Business Journal, Crumpley oversees one of the more impressive news operations in the region, garnering numerous awards for the publication during his eight-year tenure. And while the Business Journal is very much a tribune for conventional ideas about business and the economy, Crumpley has been remarkably open-minded about printing other perspectives, including those of activists with a sharp critique of corporate America.
Capital & Main sat down with Crumpley, whose 30-year journalism career has included stints in Kansas City and New Orleans, in the Business Journal‘s Miracle Mile offices to discuss economic inequality,
» Read more about: A Talk With the L.A. Business Journal’s Charles Crumpley »
The charges against several McDonald’s franchises were as familiar as items on a Happy Meals menu: “illegally firing, threatening or otherwise penalizing workers for their pro-labor activities,” to quote the New York Times. What was novel about them was the news, first reported Tuesday by Associated Press, that the National Labor Relations Board’s general counsel had found that the fast-food giant is responsible for these crimes when they are committed by the chain’s individual franchise owners. (Of 181 cases that came before the NLRB, 43 were found to have merit, 64 are still pending investigation and the rest were dismissed.)
This is big – very big. If there is any doubt, look no further than the Wall Street Journal’s headline for the story: McDonald’s Ruling Sets Ominous Tone for Franchisers. The reason for this “ominous” forecast is the knowledge that the NLRB’s findings could establish the principle that the corporation and the chain’s franchise owners are “joint employers,” sharing equal responsibility for their employees’ welfare – and equal blame when workers’ rights are trampled on.
» Read more about: NLRB: McDonald’s Is Responsible for Franchises’ Behavior »
For Oneil Cannon, breaking the color line of L.A.’s lily-white printers’ union didn’t simply mean facing a night of scalding verbal abuse during his first union hall meeting – moments before it began he’d been refused service at knifepoint at a nearby restaurant. Jackie Goldberg says her activist’s DNA was shaped less by Berkeley’s celebrated Free Speech Movement than by a little-noticed women’s conference held the year before the U.C. campus erupted. Peter Douglas’ journey from the frozen roads of war-torn Poland to Redondo Beach’s balmy Esplanade led the father of California’s Coastal Act to become a “radical pagan heretic.”
These and more than 40 other reminiscences by Southern California social activists have been recorded by Julie Thompson and her husband, Brogan de Paor, as part of an ambitious yet shoestring-funded project called the Activist Video Archive. So far the couple’s subjects have also included Haskell Wexler, Cheri Gaulke,
» Read more about: Setting the Record Straight: L.A.’s Activist Video Archive »
Whenever I hear something that sounds a little fishy, I always follow my mom’s advice to consider the source. So when two professors from Temple University touted a study praising the quality and cost effectiveness of private prisons, advocates wanted to know who funded it. Not surprisingly, it turned out that the private prison industry paid for the study, a fact conveniently missing from the professors’ early draft and media appearances.
In the Public Interest’s friend and colleague Alex Friedmann, managing editor of the monthly Prison Legal News and associate director of the Human Rights Defense Center, filed an ethics complaint with Temple University. In addition, ITPI and 15 other organizations demanded that Temple conduct an ethics review.
In response, Temple University has disassociated itself from the study. In addition, the methodology behind the study has also been called out for being misleading and its conclusions for being inaccurate.
I have a friend who is intelligent, thoughtful and holds a responsible position in a major firm. From time to time we exchange ideas about the condition of American society, particularly how the economy shapes our democracy these days. We often agree about the dimensions of the problem, but disagree about what should be done about it. When it comes to the inheritance tax, we stand at opposite poles.
He thinks that what a person has accumulated in their lives is theirs to do with as they please, period. If they want to hide it offshore in the Virgin Islands, fine. If they want to give it all away, fine. And if they want to just pass it along to their children, no problem. As far as he is concerned the 400 who own as much as half the American population can do whatever they want – it’s their money.
America’s education system is unequal and unfair. Students who live in wealthy communities have huge advantages that rig the system in their favor. They have more experienced teachers and a much lower student-teacher ratio. They have more modern facilities, more up-to-date computer and science equipment and more up-to-date textbooks. They have more elective courses, more music and art offerings and more extracurricular programs. They have better libraries, more guidance counselors and superior athletic facilities.
Not surprisingly, affluent students in well-off school districts have higher rates of high school graduation, college attendance and entry to the more selective colleges. This has little to do with intelligence or ability. For example, 82 percent of affluent students who had SAT scores over 1200 graduate from college. In contrast, only 44 percent of low-income students with the same high SAT scores graduate from college. This wide gap can’t be explained by differences in motivation or smarts.
» Read more about: California’s Public Schools: Separate and Definitely Unequal »
Some of us, who as kids read Edward Everett Hale’s short story, “The Man Without a Country,” might wonder if its cautionary lesson about the dangers of renouncing citizenship could be applied to American corporations. They, after all, have been declared “people” by the Supreme Court – and so if companies, like the Army officer in Hale’s story, turn their backs on their country, do they lose their right to ever set foot on its soil again?
The question begs an answer as the new corporate fad of “inversion” takes off. This is the practice of an American corporation purchasing a smaller foreign one that makes the same products in order to claim the national “citizenship” of the purchased company. By doing so, the U.S. company dodges a tax bill from Uncle Sam without its CEO having to learn a single word of the language of his or her company’s adopted country.
» Read more about: Corporations Avoid Taxes With Inversion Scam »