We Americans don’t like to think of our country as corrupt – or at least as corrupt as Japan, whose yakuza crime syndicates have taken over much of the legitimate business sector, including providing materials for the Fukushima nuclear reactor and scooping up homeless people to work as cleanup crews there. Of course we’re not like India, where things only get done with a bribe. And hopefully we’re not as bad as Russia, where this year’s Winter Games have been called “the most corrupt in Olympic history.”
Still, corruption sure feels pervasive here. Last year the people who run the banks, insurance companies and stock brokerages contributed $10 million to the legislators who sit on the House Financial Services Committee. That body makes the rules for the finance industry. Known as a “juice committee” because membership is so lucrative, House leaders added 61 more positions to the panel,
Last week’s testimony in the Vergara v. California trial raised many an eyebrow when Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) Superintendent John E. Deasy testified on behalf of plaintiffs in a lawsuit whose defendants had originally included LAUSD.
Despite its supporters’ protests to the contrary, Vergara is widely seen as a frontal attack against statutory guarantees of due process and seniority rights for state teachers. The suit is the brainchild of Students Matter, a Bay Area nonprofit created by wealthy Silicon Valley entrepreneur David Welch and partly financed by L.A. billionaire Eli Broad.
Under friendly direct examination by plaintiff attorney Marcellus McRae, the superintendent offered testimony that supported the suit’s contentions that the way in which teachers are fired, laid off and granted tenure has an adverse impact on the overall quality of the teacher workforce and illegally discriminates against low-income and minority students.
» Read more about: Deasy v. Deasy: The Two Faces of L.A.’s School Superintendent »
Randy Shaw does not fit the rabble-rouser profile. An upper-middle-class native of West Los Angeles, he came to San Francisco in 1979 to enroll in the city’s prestigious Hastings Law School, whose downtown campus is part of the University of California, Berkeley. There, however, he discovered that his school had for years been expanding by swallowing up residential hotels catering to low-income residents in the adjacent Tenderloin district.
“It used to be,” Shaw remembers, “that if you wanted to evict someone in the Tenderloin you’d throw them down a flight of stairs. Then it became more civilized: You’d just threaten to throw them down a flight of stairs.” In 1980 he co-founded the Tenderloin Housing Clinic as a legal aid resource for neighborhood residents. But it soon grew into an aggressive grassroots organization battling developers who wanted to replace much of the Tenderloin with luxury tourist hotels.
The Partnership for Working Families Summit kicked off Tuesday in Los Angeles as activists from around the country convened at the Biltmore Hotel for three days of workshops and talks focused on creating good jobs, sustainable industries and strong unions.
The Partnership includes such groups as the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE), Puget Sound Sage and the Alliance for a Greater New York (ALIGN). While attendees came from a range of organizations and campaigns, the idea that cities can be platforms for change provided a common thread. As Leslie Moody, the Partnership’s outgoing executive director, put it in her opening remarks, “Cities matter.”
Moody pointed to the new set of progressive mayors taking office across the U.S., but added that elected leaders do not act alone. She cited the way communities have pushed new civic officials to follow through with constructive policies.
“We’re not going to wait for federal change,” Moody said,
Every year for Black History Month, the TV networks and premium movie channels roll out the same programming: Malcolm X, Mississippi Burning, The Color Purple…. It’s not that these films aren’t great; they are. It’s just that every year for as long as they have been around, they’re all that come on during February. I can quote The Color Purple line for line. The history of black folks is larger and more diverse than the civil rights movement and slavery. Let’s give some other films a shot, shall we?
Let the Fire Burn
In the spring of 1985 a bomb was dropped on a row house in Philadelphia. A fire spread quickly and burned down 61 houses, eventually killing 11 people, including five children, and injuring numerous others. The fire and police departments stood by and did nothing to stop the blaze.
Every January, our state celebrates the work and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a hero who sacrificed his life in the fight to end discrimination and poverty in America. In this respect, it seems appropriate that January is also the month when our Governor releases his budget proposal. The State Budget is more than numbers; it reflects our collective priorities and funds what is most important. Sadly, this budget proposal fails to honor Dr. King and his fight for justice. Within the Governor’s proposal are further cuts to critical social service programs. There is no clearer or more tragic example of this disinvestment than our state’s willingness to cut access to state-sponsored child care for low income families. In the name of justice and equality, we ask the Governor to fully fund child care to ensure universal access to all and quality work conditions for providers.
Currently we have more than 300,000 children languishing on waiting lists,
was a time I would eat anything
torn from my body, as a city
recycles its bricks after trauma.
so I would eat the bitter black things,
those brittle wound stones. was a time, torn,
I’d eat anything from my body,
those yellowed bark ridges. a city
recycles gypsum after trauma.
I’d eat anything, pale crescents torn,
those Moor-less swords. after, a city
recycles. green things from my body,
those rotting gems. those sour gray things—
wasted clay. city, after trauma,
recycles its iron, those bones torn
from a city as though—a body:
those swords and bones, gypsum, gems, trauma:
a torn time recycled. a body
as a city, torn into a thing.
Source: The Black Automaton (2009), published by Fence Books.
An award-winning poet, performer and librettist,
Ted Mitchell, the former Occidental College president nominated by the White House to become Under Secretary of Education, is the founder and CEO of NewSchools Venture Fund, a nonprofit whose goal, according to its tax records, is “to transform public education through powerful ideas and passionate entrepreneurs so that all children – especially those in underserved communities – have the opportunity to succeed.”
Judging by a look at the group’s website, another part of its agenda may be to gut the seniority rights and other job protections currently enjoyed by California’s public school teachers.
This week the site began prominently featuring news about the Vergara v. California trial now unfolding in Los Angeles Superior Court. When called for comment, a NewSchools spokesman said Mitchell’s group was taking no position on the case.
“We believe it’s an important case with broad implications for education,” the spokesman said.
» Read more about: Why Is Ted Mitchell’s Nonprofit Pushing Vergara v. California? »
There was something tantalizing about Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech last night. When was the last time an American president talked about the simple human cruelty of our Dickensian sick leave and maternity policies? Or told CEOs to just do the right thing and raise wages for their workers?
What made Obama’s speech compelling is that he did more than just issue platitudes — he announced his decision to use executive authority to increase the pay of workers employed by companies that contract with the federal government. That will mean a nearly $3 an hour raise for hundreds of thousands of people. In an era of Tea Party-engineered partisan gridlock over pretty much everything, that’s nothing less than a seismic shift.
So why didn’t the State of the Union address leave me popping the champagne and toasting to an impending economic realignment that would reverse the nation’s slide back to the same levels of inequality we faced before the Depression?
» Read more about: Obama’s Speech: So Close and Yet So Far »
Lara Bergthold remembers the afternoon she and Norman Lear arrived at Pete Seeger’s rustic home overlooking the Hudson River, a house Seeger and his wife Toshi had built themselves years before. Bergthold, a prominent political and communications strategist and former executive director of the Lear Family Foundation, was the associate producer of Pete Seeger: The Power of Song, a 2007 documentary about the famed folksinger and social activist, and had recently brought Lear into the project. The two had been chauffeured from Manhattan in a Mercedes sedan and were eager to discuss ideas to improve the film that had so far been shot by director Jim Brown.
“When we pulled up to his house,” says Bergthold, “Norman and I get out of the back, and Pete walked around us and to the driver and shook his hand and invited him to come in for salad. He considered the driver to be the person he should greet first and it didn’t matter that the driver was a nameless person.
» Read more about: Pete Seeger Remembered: A Conversation With Lara Bergthold »