By Carl Franzen
(Note: Last January Donald Cohen wrote here of the conservative political animus against new, green lighting technologies – namely, compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs). The following repost of a May 12 Talking Points Memo feature looks at the evolution of another alternative to wasteful incandescent lighting – illumination by light-emitting diodes (LEDs).
Battle lines were drawn in Las Vegas, Nevada this week at the 23rd annual Lightfair International trade show, an exposition of the latest in artificial lighting technology.
Spurred in part by the controversial, misunderstood, national phase-out of energy inefficient incandescent bulbs that began in January, companies are racing to develop light-emitting diode (LED) bulbs that meet the new energy standards, and yet will provide the same lighting quality that consumers are used to getting from the old, inefficient incandescents.
Until recently the Internet, along with the devices that brought it to us and the platforms that have expanded its usefulness, held a certain cool, selfless allure. The Web was mostly the idea of young, rule-breaking rebels, and their insurgent mystique made them hero geeks. Browsing a favorite blog on our laptops, a cup of red-eye coffee nearby, we felt a part of the New. Then money began doing what it always does to young, rule-breaking rebels – it turned them into our parents, our landlords and our loan officers.
It began in earnest, I suppose, with last year’s tiff between Amazon.com and the state of California over Sacramento’s insistence that the online retail behemoth start collecting state taxes on its sales. Amazon eventually struck “compromises” with California and other states that mostly favored Amazon. Many of us in California smiled – we got an extra year of purchasing on the site without paying taxes.
» Read more about: How Our Internet Heroes Lost Their Cool »
New York City’s Public Advocate, Bill de Blasio, and the Coalition for Accountability in Political Spending (CAPS) have put together a nifty online chart called 6 Degrees of Walmart. It’s actually more than a chart – think of it as a kind of star finder that allows the user to locate eight constellations of alleged corporate malfeasance and consumer abuse committed by the retail giant. Click on its Gun icon and you’ll find out how Walmart, through its support of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), backs Stand Your Ground laws. Click the Dollar sign and you’ll learn how Walmart colludes with the Business Roundtable and others to protect corporate tax subsidies.
(Please note: The above image is not interactive; to interact, go to the 6 Degrees of Walmart site.)
There’s also an explanation of how Walmart tries to burnish its environmental and corporate responsibility cred through its “sustainability program”
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Cassidy Noblett[/caption]
(The following action alert comes from ClimatePlan.org; news of the alert first appeared at Housing California, which lists 18 Los Angeles County projects that could be affected by the transfer of housing construction funds.)
Senate President pro Tem Darrell Steinberg is considering using unencumbered housing funds from former redevelopment agencies to balance the 2012-13 state budget. Such a sweep would impact at least 175 pipeline developments poised to create 23,455 construction-phase jobs in the next two years.
In recent comments to the Sacramento Bee, Steinberg raised the possibility of abandoning his SB 654, which would preserve the low-mod balances for their original intended use. A survey indicates this move would threaten construction of at least 10,215 homes that were counting on the availability of redevelopment funding to move forward.
Key Assembly members recognize the value of the jobs and taxes generated by home construction,
» Read more about: State Housing Construction Funds in Jeopardy »
This week the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor sent letters to every elected official in L.A. County (including Congress members), urging them to return all campaign contributions they may have received from Walmart – and to refuse future donations from the retail giant. The letter, which is signed by a broad spectrum of union leaders, juxtaposes Walmart’s alleged bribery scheme in Mexico with L.A. City Hall’s quick approval of the corporation’s permits for a new store in Chinatown. (The letter’s text appears below.)
“It doesn’t take campaign finance reform,” the signatories say, “to prevent Walmart from wrapping its tentacles around our political system in L.A. County.”
» Read more about: Labor to Electeds: Return Walmart Money! »
(The following post first appeared May 1 on Truthdig.)
By Bill Boyarsky
By chance, the revelation of how Apple evades millions of dollars in taxes broke three days before May Day, when workers of the world traditionally protest such injustice.
Although the Apple practices aren’t illegal, the dodging of taxes on revenue generated, to a large extent, by low-wage Chinese workers, was a perfect introduction to this year’s May 1 observance, highlighted by the Occupy movement’s call for strikes and demonstrations around the country. The goal: Protest corporate domination of an economy being pulled downward by growing income inequality and intractable unemployment.
The New York Times reported that the technology company has used loopholes to reduce its tax bills in 21 states and overseas by billions of dollars annually by creating subsidiaries in places with low-tax or no-tax policies.
» Read more about: Organizing for Change: Different Drummers, Common Cause »
The SEC is dragging its feet implementing a section of the Dodd-Frank reform that would require publicly traded companies to calculate the ratio between the CEO’s pay and that of the firm’s median pay package. The New York Times editorial board urges them to push forward.
Corporate lobbyists say it’s too complicated to figure out the math. They figured out how to create uber-complex financial products that untangled the global economy, but aren’t able to divide the CEO’s earnings (they must know) by the median employee pay?
Of course, the real reason they oppose the law is that they don’t want to add fire to the public debate about excessive CEO salaries – certainly while the rest of America struggles to pay bills, put kids through college and afford mortgage payments. Obscurity, not transparency, benefits the privileged.
Their opposition to useful information for investors and consumers is a replay of earlier legislative battles.
» Read more about: Why Can’t CEOs Do the Math on Their Pay? »
“About 100 Occupy protesters,” reports the Pasadena Star News, “seeking to reverse an eviction gathered Tuesday outside the Pasadena house of a Bank of America executive in the San Rafael neighborhood.” The newspaper said the home belonged to Raul Anaya, a B of A executive. The following LA Progressive post, by Occupy Fights Foreclosures member Cheryl Aichele, was written just prior to the action, which was designed to bring attention to the dire predicament of Dirma Rodriguez and other foreclosed homeowners.
By Cheryl Aichele
On Friday, David Redy — a partner at Redy & Smith— called Dirma Rodriguez, a widowed mother with a severely disabled daughter and four sons, who says she was fraudulently foreclosed upon by Bank of America. Allegedly during the conversation, Redy — who represents the bank— threatened Carlos Marroquin,
» Read more about: Bank of America Foreclosure Backlash in Pasadena »
I am just a girl who can’t say “no.” In my youth this was actually a fun quality, but now it means that I spend a lot of time manning concession booths, volunteering in Sunday school classrooms, and doing whatever else the local Uber Mom has tasked me with. But make no mistake, I am not the Uber Mom. The Uber Mom is the mom who is always in charge. She knows everyone, runs every volunteer effort, and cooks absolutely everything from scratch.
One thing I have noticed about these moms, whose astounding accomplishments are both impressive and deeply annoying (homemade marshmallows? really?), is that they are not dispersed evenly through society. This became particularly apparent to me when my own children moved from a private and rather expensive pre-school to a public school in LAUSD. Overnight we went (as my husband likes to point out) from being young,