Driven by disgust for the way our democracy seems to be for sale to the highest bidder, several dozen activists from Los Angeles gathered in Mount Washington this past Saturday to rally support for Proposition C, a symbolic measure on the May 21 ballot that urges area legislators to push for renewed limits on political campaign spending.
In late February, the Los Angeles City Council voted 10 to 1 to put the following question on the ballot, introduced by Councilmember Richard Alarcon, who represents the northeast San Fernando Valley and who attended the Mount Washington gathering:
“Shall the voters adopt a resolution that there should be limits on political campaign spending and that corporations should not have the constitutional rights of human beings and instruct Los Angeles elected officials and area legislative representatives to promote that policy through amendments to the United States Constitution?”
By itself,
» Read more about: Making a “C” Change in Campaign Spending »
Yesterday members of Warehouse Workers United and their supporters confronted Scot Rank, the CEO of scandal-plagued Walmart de Mexico, at UCLA’s Anderson School of Business. The warehouse employees are fighting for improved working conditions at warehouse facilities operated by Walmart contractors. This raw video captures the protest.
» Read more about: Walmart de Mexico CEO Confronted at UCLA »
Some 53 percent of Americans say that the second Iraq war was a mistake. A recent Los Angeles Times article asked if the war brought change for the better. But no one asks what that war cost this country. The first trillion dollars we spent on it was only a down payment on what experts have estimated to be probably two trillion or more that we will spend over the next few decades to take care of America’s wounded and maimed. Our taxes provide care for those veterans, but both parties regularly propose cutting the Department of Veterans Affairs as a quick fix to balance the federal budget.
Covering the interest on the debt from this and other wars is a part of the budget Congress can’t cut, and it’s not cheap either. Every year taxpayers shell out an amount equal to six percent of the national spending plan just for interest on the national debt.
Within about a month of the debut of Fwd.us, Mark Zuckerberg’s new DC lobby outfit aimed at promoting immigration reform, the group is already falling apart. If this week is any indication, the meltdown will be as spectacular and ignoble as every other ill-conceived, overfunded start-up in the Valley.
Fwd.us’ political problems began the way they usually do: with a cynical, too-cute-by-half strategy adopted by his Beltway proxies. Fwd.us’ approach amounted to this: Buy the votes of key lawmakers by dumping money into ads in their home states on issues that are useful to them but that Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t care about.
What that has meant in practice is running commercials supporting South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham for his bold opposition to Obamacare and his support of the Keystone XL Pipeline, and applauding Alaska Senator Mark Begich for his support for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
» Read more about: Mark Zuckerberg’s Fwd.us Fail No Surprise »
From time to time we may gripe about individual stories or columns that appear in the Los Angeles Times, but it remains our city’s paper of record and a powerful source of investigative journalism – at a time when such journalism has rapidly given way to rumor-sourced blogs written by dilettantes or pundits. That the Los Angeles Times may become the private toy of America’s most partisan conservative interests is not just a bad dream — right-wing billionaires Charles and David Koch may actually soon be running the paper, and it’s up to all of us to stop them.
It’s difficult to overstate how damaging it would be if the Koch brothers succeed in buying one of the country’s most influential newspapers. The Koch brothers would almost certainly use the Times to promote their ultra-conservative agenda. That would mean the end of fair,
» Read more about: Stop the Koch Brothers’ L.A. Times Takeover »
On the most recent Moyers and Company, Bill Moyers turned his attention to the ways underdog communities have organized themselves to win economic victories – in often hostile political environments. Moyers first spoke with Marshall Ganz, the veteran civil rights and United Farm Workers organizer; he then interviewed Madeline Janis, co-founder of the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, and affordable-housing activist Rachel LaForest.
Ganz, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, based his organizing techniques on the moral teachings of his father, who was a rabbi, and on the need to transfer personal narratives onto organizing campaigns. Janis and LaForest have combined traditional organizing techniques with the practical need to adapt to fluid local situations.
As Janis told Moyers:
“You have a struggling housekeeper in a hotel who cleans 25 rooms in a day and barely puts food on the table. The idea of her being able to fight for better working conditions — a union in her hotel,
» Read more about: LAANE’s Madeline Janis Appears on “Moyers & Company” »
L.A. Superior Court judges are doing the wrong thing. They decided to deal with a $53 million budget deficit by arbitrarily closing eight courthouses around L.A. County, which will send justice into chaos, inconvenience people and cause transportation and other problems.
The courthouses scheduled to close as of June 28 or sooner are: Huntington Park, Whittier, Pomona North, Malibu, West Los Angeles, San Pedro, Beacon Street and the Kenyon Juvenile Justice Center, located in South L.A.
The Judges Didn’t Ask Us
Did the judges who came up with this plan consult the communities that will be impacted? No. Did they talk to the citizens, the small business people, or anyone else this might affect? No.
As a result, some case types will be heard in only certain courthouses. For example, if you are threatened with eviction or your landlord wants to kick you out of your place and you want to fight it,
» Read more about: Don’t Close the Courts of First Resort! »
What do big banks and L.A. port trucking companies have in common? Fine print in contracts that traps victims into signing bad deals.
We’ve all signed our share of contracts. Rental agreements, cell phone contracts, car loans. You don’t need to be a legal scholar to understand the basic concept: Two parties enter into an agreement that lasts until a fixed date. And as frustrated as you may get with, say, your landlord, you know that at the very least what you’ve signed off on can’t change upon a whim. Even if you don’t like the terms, contracts are fundamentally about guaranteeing stability.
We take this for granted – but not everyone can. A case in point is drivers at Green Fleet Systems, a trucking company serving the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.
In order to work as an “independent contractor” for the company,
The West, Texas chemical and fertilizer plant where at least 15 were killed and more than 200 injured a few weeks ago hadn’t been fully inspected by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration since 1985. (A partial inspection in 2011 had resulted in $5,250 in fines.)
OSHA and its state partners have a total of 2,200 inspectors charged with ensuring the safety of more than eight million workplaces employing 130 million workers. That comes to about one inspector for every 59,000 American workers.
There’s no way it can do its job with so few resources, but OSHA has been systematically hollowed out for years under Republican administrations and congresses that have despised the agency since its inception.
In effect, much of our nation’s worker safety laws and rules have been quietly repealed because there aren’t enough inspectors to enforce them.
That’s been the Republican strategy in general: When they can’t directly repeal laws they don’t like,
National Small Business Week is coming up in June, offering a good opportunity to contemplate what role small businesses play in both our cities and economy.
While most small businesses have a small workforce, cumulatively they provide a large percentage of the nation’s jobs. Many of the workers they hire are harder to employ, particularly in disadvantaged and immigrant communities. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, “More than half of Americans either own or work for a small business, [which] create about two out of every three new jobs in the U.S. each year.” They also contribute to our local economies more than national or multinational corporations by keeping revenues in their local areas.
Companies like Walmart, Amazon and Target have come to dominate our commercial landscape, on the ground and virtually. These one-stop retailers can destroy their competition – mainly a wide variety of small businesses but also high-road large retailers – by taking a heavy-handed,