(The following announcement has previously appeared on other Web sites, including LA Progressive.)
Practically everyone has an opinion about Obama’s health care, but few understand it, according to the latest Associated Press poll. The future of the president’s Affordable Care Act lies in the hands of the Supreme Court, which is expected to make a decision on the Act’s constitutionality in June. Meanwhile 40 million people are without health insurance.
A free public conference – Health Care: Where Are We Now? — will address the health-care debate:
Saturday, May 12, from 9 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
at Pasadena City College, Harbeson Hall
1570 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena
A coalition of community based organizations in Southern California led by the League of Women Voters Pasadena and Health Care for All – San Gabriel Valley is sponsoring the conference.
Other organizations include Physicians for a National Health Program,
» Read more about: Health Care Debate: A Free Public Conference »
There they go again. The Heartland Institute, which The New York Times rather generously describes as a “libertarian organization,” recently felt compelled to yank a line of billboards comparing believers in climate change to mass murderers and dictators. “I Still Believe in Global Warming. Do You?” asked one billboard featuring a picture of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. More boards had been planned for Chicago, in a run-up to the institute’s Seventh International Conference on Climate Change, a kind of Coachella for climate-change deniers. Those ads showed photos of Charles Manson, Fidel Castro and Osama bin Laden.
Apparently even some of Heartland’s fellow climate-change deniers began feeling a little queasy over the campaign and so the Windy City-based group killed its plan. Not with any remorse, however. Institute president Joseph Bast released this statement:
“We know that our billboard angered and disappointed many of Heartland’s friends and supporters .
» Read more about: Climate-Change Denier Group Is Feeling the Heat »
By Rebecca Band
(This post first appeared May 7 on the Labor’s Edge blog site.)
One BILLION Dollars. That’s how much California gives away every year to big corporations, thanks to a wasteful tax loophole that actually incentivizes companies to close up shop in California and move those jobs elsewhere.
According to L.A. Times columnist George Skelton:
You might think a tax law that rewards companies for killing California jobs and resurrecting them in another state would be dumped. Very quickly. Especially if it also rewards them for selling off property here and rebuilding elsewhere. Or, put another way, if the law provides a tax incentive not to hire or invest in California in the first place. You’d repeal it. A no-brainer.
Makes no sense, except for the companies using the loophole while profiting from selling their products here in the nation’s largest consumer market.
» Read more about: State's Corporate Tax Breaks: Loopholes or Black Holes? »
First the Beverly Hills Unified School District ended its tradition of allowing B.H.-adjacent kids to attend that posh city’s schools. Now the local PTA is fighting tooth and French nail to keep subway trains from traveling under Beverly Hills High School via the proposed Westside Subway Extension. The subway has been planned to run through a nine-mile tunnel connecting the current Wilshire and Western terminus of the Purple Line to downtown Santa Monica.
The PTA, according to a Los Angeles Times piece, has released a scare video that predicts “a doomsday scenario” in which students could be incinerated in the event a train somehow ignites a plume of subterranean methane gas left over from the oil wells the school was built on. But if the school is sitting on such a potential box of dynamite, why isn’t it shut down immediately – with or without a subway?
» Read more about: WebHot: Beverly Hills Says, “Not Under My Back Yard!” »
(Editor’s Note: This post first appeared May 3 on Huffington Post.)
Today is Pete Seeger’s 93rd birthday.
What’s an appropriate gift for the most influential folk artist of the 20th century? A few years ago some of Pete’s fans launched a campaign to nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize. It is time to resurrect that effort.
No one can get a crowd singing like he can. The songs he has written, including the antiwar tunes “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?,” “If I Had a Hammer,” and “Turn, Turn, Turn” (whose text is drawn from Ecclesiastes), and those he has popularized, including “This Land Is Your Land,” “Guantanamera,” “Wimoweh,” and “We Shall Overcome,” have been recorded by hundreds of artists in many languages and have become global anthems for people fighting for freedom. His songs are sung by people in cities and villages around the world,
The California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS) has filed a lawsuit against current and former members of Walmart’s board of directors, and other company officers, charging them with gross violation of fiduciary duty in connection with the company’s Mexican bribery scandal. That scandal, extensively examined by a recent New York Times feature, revealed a corporation so eager to expand its Mexican operations that it ignored findings by its own investigators sent to look into the allegations.
CalSTRS’ move takes the form of a derivative-action suit – a suit nominally brought on behalf of Walmart against individuals whose actions damage the retail giant and potentially, investors such as CalSTRS.
CalSTRS is the second largest public pension fund in the United States and holds more than 5.3 million shares of Wal-Mart, valued at $313.5 million, accounting for 0.41 percent of CalSTRS global equities portfolio.
» Read more about: Teachers’ Fund Lawyers-Up Against Walmart Brass »
I received no less than 25 emails celebrating the passage of the 2035 SCAG RTP within the past few weeks. This stands for the Southern California Association of Governments’ Regional Transportation Plan and Sustainable Communities Strategy. Environmentalists, low-income groups and housing groups all cheered the vast improvements to the way regional planning organizations look at future development. This new, more comprehensive view ideally would address the twin goals of creating more economically vibrant communities and improving our environment.
ClimatePlan, the California Pan-Ethnic Health Network and MOVE LA, among other groups, have praised the projected greenhouse gas, “vehicle miles traveled (VMT)” and traffic congestion reductions, as well as the forward-looking goals of increasing non-motorized transportation use, such as bicycles and walking.
Yet while there is much to take heart in, I started to ask myself: Could the SCAG plan have aimed even higher?
I salute the planners and community activists who brought a progressive vision and spent many long hours working on shaping the plan into what it is.
» Read more about: Could Transportation Plan Have Dreamt Bigger? »
(Editor’s Note: Tomorrow is the deadline to collect signatures for the Long Beach hotel workers living-wage ballot initiative. In this post, activist Christine Petit shares her perspective on this historic effort. Her feature first appeared on the California Work & Family Coalition Web site.)
In 2008, I chose to make Long Beach, California, my home. I love Long Beach because it’s a diverse city and there are always interesting events and festivals going on. Many people are attracted to Long Beach for these reasons, if only for a weekend. In fact, Long Beach has made great strides to attract tourists, investing approximately $750 million into revamping downtown toward these ends over the last three decades.
Meanwhile, the hotel workers who take care of Long Beach’s tourists are struggling to provide for their families. The median annual income for full-time hotel and food-service workers in Long Beach was $23,538 in 2009,
» Read more about: Living Wage Law Could Go to Long Beach Voters »
» Read more about: Riot Acts: Lalo Alcaraz on LA’s “Progress” »
Republican legislators in Michigan have a new target, the Michigan Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC). Apparently at the behest of industry lobbyists, GOP Representative Joe Haveman proposed limiting the funding of public universities that allow their students to get internship credits for working with ROC.
The cause is rather specific: a few interns participated in a picket line outside Andiamo, an Italian restaurant in Dearborn, near Detroit. Workers had sought 
to get paid overtime and get the owner to stop making them pay for their uniforms, among other demands. The company’s response (alleged surveillance and intimidation) led to several NLRB charges and a AFL-CIO sponsored boycott. The good news is, the dispute was settled back in May, 2011. The protests in question occurred back in 2009 and 2010.
As this blog post shows, restaurant industry folks weren’t too pleased, and thus the proposed new rule. The governor’s not in favor,