Former L.A. Mayor Richard Riordan has been in the news lately, arguing that city leaders need to take drastic steps to make Los Angeles more business friendly and get the city functioning again. He has blamed public sector unions for every woe facing the region, including the current financial crisis and potholes on his street in Brentwood.
Mayor Riordan is not just crying in the wilderness. His threat to put a draconian pension-cutting initiative on the ballot played a major part in prompting the City Council last month to hastily adopt its own pension-cutting plan – a plan that almost certainly will be thrown out by the courts as a violation of existing collective bargaining agreements.
Riordan’s resurrection as a major political force begs a fundamental question: How successful was he at bringing business and jobs to L.A. and overseeing scarce public resources when he was running the city?
» Read more about: Richard Riordan’s Wrong Ideas Don't Deserve a Second Chance »
(The following post first appeared on Dog Park Media and is republished with permission. It describes events that occurred earlier today at a Regents meeting held at the University of California’s Mission Bay campus. A news update can be found here.)
About 500 students are currently blockading entrances to the University of California Board of Regents meeting at UC San Francisco this morning, where the Regents are scheduled to vote on a budget that presumes a 24 percent across-the-board increase on UC tuitions over four years. Picketing students have pledged to shut the meeting down.
According to Charlie Eaton, one of the organizers of the protest and co-author of a report released this week that charged the Regents with employing exotic financial instruments that doubled the UC system’s debt load over three and a half years, as of 8:45 a.m.
» Read more about: Students Protest UC Regents Meeting on Frisco Campus »
(On November 6, Long Beach became one of three cities in the country to pass minimum wage ballot measures, and the only one to guarantee paid sick leave to workers. This story is the first in a weeklong series of reflections on that important victory.)
Since the times of Supervisor Harvey Milk in San Francisco, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) communities have worked with labor organizations to improve the lives of people simply trying to stay afloat in the world. Through the Coors beer boycott of the 1970s, Milk not only laid the foundation for a solid partnership between seemingly disparate communities, he created something much larger: a space for individuals, organizers and union representatives to grow, expand and converse. He created the opportunity for bonds to form and for hearts and minds to open and understand how difficult it was in the 1970s — both for working people and LGBTQ people to be afforded respect,
» Read more about: Why LGBTQs Backed Long Beach's Hotel Worker Living Wage »
The best measure of progress is often the desperation of its opponents. So if there were any doubt about the significance of Wednesday’s L.A. City Council vote to transform the city’s multi-family and commercial waste and recycling system, the shrillness of those in the minority offered final proof.
“This is the day justice and democracy died,” declared one detractor. He was outdone, however, by a fellow naysayer, who, invoking the ghosts of Stalinist Russia, bellowed, “Vote straight communist – the life you save will be your own. That’s what’s happening here today.”
Aside from the minions of big business interests following in lockstep with the Chamber of Commerce, there were few traces of authoritarian rule at City Hall yesterday when the Council made its decision to jettison a system that has failed almost everybody. Indeed, democracy seemed alive and well, with an overflow crowd both participating in and witnessing an epic exercise in self-government.
» Read more about: L.A.'s Failed Waste System Sent to the Trash Bin of History »
Millions of dollars in new tax revenue earmarked for the University of California system as part of the state’s recently passed Proposition 30 will instead be routed to major financial firms, because of bad bets made by a Wall Street-influenced UC Board of Regents.
Over the last decade, tuition and fees for undergraduates in the UC system have tripled, adding enormous debt burdens to UC graduates and pushing lower-income students into the already overburdened state college and community college systems, or out of higher education altogether. Members of the UC Board of Regents, which governs the system and which approved the tuition hikes, have blamed the increases on the bad economy and on politicians.
However, according to a new report written by five doctoral students at UC Berkeley, in the years preceding the 2008 financial collapse, members of the Board of Regents themselves had overseen “a qualitative shift in the financial practices of the University of California” by employing the same kinds of exotic financial instruments that precipitated the meltdown on Wall Street — primarily,
» Read more about: Proposition 30 Millions Already Headed to Wall Street »
The would-be gravediggers of the New Deal and Obamacare have just begun their furious finger-pointing exercises as they try to figure out who to blame for the results of last week’s election. For progressive activists, however, November 6 was only a milestone, not the terminus, of a long journey to increase participatory democracy and build a more equitable America. Thursday, November 15, a number of them will gather at USC to lay out the nuts and bolts of their recently concluded campaigns, as well as to articulate their next moves.
Moderated by USC Political Science professor Ange-Marie Hancock, and sponsored by the university’s Program for Environmental and Regional Equity (PERE), “New Organizing for a New America” will explain what went right in 2012 and what strategies fell short, and how to make electoral organizing count for long-term base building. Among the topics to be discussed:
Participants include María Blanco,
Analysis of swing-state voting in last week’s election demonstrates that the massive on-the-ground mobilization of union members and volunteers directly aided Obama and other pro-labor candidates in carrying Ohio, Nevada and Wisconsin. Unions prevailed in beating back anti-labor legislation in California and Wisconsin, and succeeded in three separate living wage campaigns.
On the national level, will labor remain vigilant and hold Obama and other newly elected Democrats accountable to workers? AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka vows that this will be the case.
In an interview with Salon, Trumka is quoted as saying:
“One thing that we’re doing different than we’ve ever done before … is we’re not dismantling our program today.” Instead, he promised, it will move “from electoral politics to advocacy, and from advocacy to accountability.”
As an example of the continuing momentum for labor advocates, Trumka points to Ohio, where “AFL-CIO members are 83 percent white.
» Read more about: Victorious Labor: Celebrations Before the Storm? »
Other than voting for Obamacare, Joe Lieberman has done little good for the nation or the Senate since his petulant run as an Independent six years ago after Connecticut Democrats booted him out of the party.
Now that he is heading out the Senate door – finally – Lieberman is firing a parting “F— You!” shot at the country. It’s a little-noticed piece of legislation he is trying to move through his Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs — a bill that would effectively strip independent regulatory agencies of their power to effectively regulate just about anything.
Without holding a single hearing, Lieberman’s committee wants to pass the “Independent Agency Regulatory Analysis Act of 2012,” which strips the independence from a raft of federal agencies: Everything from the Securities and Exchange Commission to the Nuclear Regulatory Agency and National Labor Relations Board.
Among its many provisions, the law would require each of the agencies that Congress quite deliberately established as independent to submit all proposed rules to the White House for “vetting” before they could be published.
» Read more about: Joe Lieberman Bill Would Hobble Regulatory Agencies »
Over the last couple of years, I’ve blogged about waste reform in the City of Los Angeles. Following is a summary of where we are with the proposed waste reform so folks just tuning in, and those who have followed the twists and turns, have one central place for background as our the city council takes up this important issue in the coming weeks.
Disposal of waste is perhaps one of the most pressing environmental issues the City of Los Angeles faces. Los Angeles sends approximately three million tons of trash per year to landfills. This practice exacts a large environmental toll. The City has already promised to become a zero waste City by 2030. This entails interim goals of achieving 70 percent diversion from landfills by 2013 and 90 percent by 2025.
L.A.’s commercial and multi-family sectors are responsible for approximately 70 percent of the waste the City of Los Angeles send to landfills,
» Read more about: Transforming L.A.'s Trash Collection for the Next 50 Years »
Remember the spring and summer of 2011, when the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE) was mysteriously tracked by MB Public Affairs? Beginning in May, 2011, this right-wing “political ops firm,” led by Karl Rove operative Mark Bogetich, launched a massive investigation into LAANE, requesting thousands of documents from virtually every elected or appointed official in L.A. County. With lots of public support, LAANE fought back and, after several months of press releases, petitions, blog posts and other “reveal thyself” exhortations to MB’s secret funder, the inquiry suddenly stopped. According to City Hall insiders at the time, MB’s requested documents were left uncollected and LAANE activists and supporters were left wondering who would possibly have wanted to spend an estimated $50,000 to find dirt on a nonprofit advocacy group that makes no secret about what it stands for.
Over the past year, the mystery of the secret investigation has continued to puzzle us.
» Read more about: Who Was Behind the Secret Investigation of LAANE? »