Despite the conventional wisdom that Southern California only has one season, some wag suggested it does indeed have four: Fires, floods, earthquakes and riots. So far this year we’ve had none of those, for which I am grateful, and I hope our luck holds.
I say luck because Los Angeles County leads the state in fire risk. Of the million homes in California in high-risk fire areas, half are in our county. Seven of the 10 most expensive fires in the U.S. since 1990 have been in California, and insurers paid some $5 billion in wildfire claims in 2003, 2007 and 2008.
Meanwhile, wildfires across the country have set new records. Nine million acres of forest were destroyed this year in 45,000 wildfires. An area larger than Massachusetts was burned over in five western states, including ours. That’s 13,000 square miles blackened, wild life killed, trees and brush scorched and burned.
Domestic workers, such as caregivers and nannies, make all forms of other work possible and play an increasingly significant role in the U.S. economy. However, a new national study found, on average, domestic workers earn little more than minimum wage and few receive benefits like Social Security, health insurance or paid sick days.
Conducted by the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) and the Center for Urban Economic Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the study offers a startling and provocative look into the often-invisible world of domestic workers. Based on interviews with 2,086 workers across the country, researchers found domestic workers face serious financial hardships and have little control over their working conditions.
As a critical part of the U.S. labor force, domestic workers help thousands of working families by enabling them to focus on their jobs. Yet, they are often paid well below the level needed to adequately support their own family.
» Read more about: Study: Domestic Workers' Treatment Is a Disgrace »
Few figures in the music industry have had as colorful or as influential a career as Danny Goldberg. The one-time manager of superstars Nirvana, Sonic Youth and Bonnie Raitt, Goldberg parlayed his knowledge of rock and roll into positions of power, serving as CEO of Warner Bros. Records and president of Atlantic Records.
Goldberg’s accomplishments in the entertainment industry are only a part of the story. He has been a forceful voice within progressive politics for more than three decades, beginning with No Nukes, the 1980 documentary featuring Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne and other legends that he co-produced and co-directed. As chair of the ACLU in Southern California, Goldberg was a very visible national defender of civil liberties, clashing with Tipper Gore over attempts to censor rock lyrics. He is a prolific writer, with hundreds of articles and several books to his credit (including his acclaimed industry memoir,
» Read more about: Danny Goldberg on Labor’s Message Gap and the Art of Politics »
So far the HOT Lanes (High Occupancy Toll Lanes) experiment is going well. On the program’s first business day, Los Angeles County’s transportation agency, Metro, reported that “traffic was flowing smoothly in the heart of the morning rush hour,” and despite some grumblings from the media, all was well on the I-110. As commuters adjust to the new system, there are a few questions that we need to ask to understand the future of HOT Lanes. And despite my lack of clairvoyance, I’d like to submit my educated guesses on the future success of tolls in Los Angeles.
First, does the system work? At its most basic level, we will need to see if the technology works, if the Metro bureaucracy is a barrier for commuters and if the CHP can adequately enforce the rules. The answer to these questions will take time, but since the program has been successfully implemented in several places across California,
So the day of action at Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, has passed at least for the time being. And it turned out to be much larger than the company’s executives in Bentonville had predicted or care to admit.
Thousands of Walmart workers and their allies protested for better wages, affordable healthcare benefits, full-time jobs and an end to management retaliation for speaking out in at least 100 cities, including in Dallas and Lancaster, Texas, Miami and Kenosha, Wisconsin, and several other locations not know for their activism. Although the final tally will not be clear for some time, “open-source” actions of some kind took place at Walmart stores in 46 different states across the nation, with major demonstrations in California, Washington, New York and Massachusetts.
Before Black Friday, the company’s management insisted that the “so called protests” involved a handful of associates at a handful of stores, supplemented by non-Walmart employees,
Tom Hayden will be speaking at Occidental College this Thursday on the topic, “From the 1960s to Barack Obama: What Now?” The talk starts 7 p.m. in Weingart Hall, Room 117, on the Oxy campus. (Directions to Oxy and a campus map are linked here).
Hayden is one of the most important public figures and influential organizers in American history. A founder of Students for a Democratic Society and author of its seminal manifesto “The Port Huron Statement,” he has also been a Freedom Rider in the civil rights movement, a community organizer in Newark, the founder of California’s Campaign for Economic Democracy, an elected member of the California legislature for 18 years, and a leader of the movements opposing wars in Vietnam, Central America, Iraq and Afghanistan, and the author of 20 books. Here is Hayden’s website and complete bio: tomhayden.com
Tom is an inspiring speaker and prolific writer.
Few American economists want anything to do with social movements. Then there’s Robert Pollin, who has embraced his role as a progressive with a prolific output of books, studies and articles that make the economic case for greater equality.
Pollin, who will be honored at the L.A. Alliance for a New Economy’s (LAANE) City of Justice Awards Dinner next month, rose to prominence in the late 1990s as the most ardent academic defender of living wage laws. In recent years he has advanced the case for a new green economy based on good jobs and environmentally sensible policies.
Pollin, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute, may be left of center but he is no business-bashing liberal. To the contrary, he learned from his father – the late Abe Pollin,
» Read more about: Progressive Economist Robert Pollin Gets Down to Business »
Strippers in California were handed a major victory earlier this month by the same judge who ruled “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” unconstitutional. The case ruled that dancers were wrongfully classified as independent contractors, and awarded $13 million in back pay and fees to strippers at the massive Spearmint Rhino Chain.
The settlement does away with “house fees” that require dancers to pay a set fee to the club for each shift at California locations, and also requires the chain to reclassify workers [to] employee status within six months. Dancers were previously considered “independent contractors” but subject to strict policies that belied this status.
The Ventura County Star reports on the basis of the lawsuit:
Two women who danced at the Spearmint Rhino in Oxnard launched the suit: Christeen Rivera and Tracy Dawn Trauth. They claimed they were wrongly treated as independent contractors rather than employees entitled to benefits.
» Read more about: Judge: Strippers Are Not Independent Contractors »
“If you’re not a liberal at 20 you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative at 40 you have no brain.” Winston Churchill is believed to have once said that and there are various forms of this sentence that get repeated over and over. Perhaps it’s because deep down a lot of people believe it. Supposedly something happens right around the time progressives turn 30, during which time they take serious account of their lives and question what they believe and why they believe it. In some cases, they “burn out” on activism and decide not to pursue a life in social justice. After all, what’s the point? The world has gone crazy and it’s only getting worse, despite our best efforts…Or so the thinking goes.
I’ve never liked the term “burn out.” “Burn out” implies a fire that goes out and won’t return. After all, anyone who has camped knows how difficult it is to get a fire started again after it’s gone out the first time.
» Read more about: For the Long Run: Hitting the Wall and Getting Over It »
