Today In the Public Interest released a report titled Criminal: How Lockup Quotas and “Low-Crime Taxes” Guarantee Profits for Private Prison Corporations.
The study documents the shocking prevalence of contract language between private prison companies and state and local governments that guarantee prison occupancy rates, which can accurately be described as “lockup quotas.”
If the quota is not met due to lower crime rates and a falling prison population, taxpayers are forced to pay for empty beds in what essentially amounts to a “low-crime tax” on communities.
Lockup quotas can have broad negative implications beyond obvious financial concerns and should be prohibited in any private prison contract. See report infographic below and the report here.
The more people are aware of lockup quotas the more we as a community are empowered to prevent this type of predatory language from existing in private prison contracts —
» Read more about: Stop Prison Inc. from Pushing Lockup Quotas »
The Democratic Party’s romance with Wall Street may finally be breaking up. In the past 10 days, a diverse group of Democratic senators scuttled Larry Summers’s candidacy for Federal Reserve chair and New York Democrats voted for the mayoral candidate whose campaign was an attack on Michael Bloomberg’s care and feeding of the super-rich at the expense of the rest of the city. Former commerce secretary (and JP Morgan Chase executive) William Daley’s surprise withdrawal from the Illinois Democratic gubernatorial primary is one more indication of Wall Street’s diminished sway.
Democrats have reached a watershed. After two decades in which the party has moved leftward on social issues but has largely accepted the financial sector’s economic preferences — for smaller government; a greater role for markets; and reduced regulation, particularly of finance — the abject failures of the market economy are pushing the party leftward.
» Read more about: Summers of Our Discontent: Wall Street’s Luster Fades »
In 2004, after a long string of Republican governors and the shockingly narrow defeat of Prop. 72—which would have ushered in the most progressive health care reform ever implemented in the United States—California labor leaders got mad. And then they got organized.
“We said, we’re never going to lose that bad again—what do we have to do to change?” said California Labor Federation Executive Secretary-Treasurer Art Pulaski, who moderated [last] Wednesday’s AFL-CIO 2013 Convention panel discussion “Winning and Building Over Time: Winning in California and You Can, Too.”
The federation decided to do an extensive poll of all of their unions and labor council affiliates, asking members how they voted, who they voted for and what kinds of actions they took, and then conducting an analysis. They discovered that some unions and locals were vastly out-performing others, and that if each affiliate had carried their own weight,
Retail giant Walmart suffered a setback in Los Angeles Superior Court Wednesday when Judge Allan J. Goodman ruled that Burbank’s city government improperly greenlighted Walmart’s plans to put a store in the sprawling Empire Center shopping complex.
Goodman, according to the Burbank Leader, “citing street improvements more than a dozen years overdue and a flawed environmental impact report, [said] that the city of Burbank must rescind building permits it issued to Walmart.”
Walmart had planned to open an outlet (which would include a grocery store) in an old Great Indoors space next year, but three Burbank residents filed a suit to block that plan. (The Empire Center, which sits on former Lockheed property, already includes a Target and Lowe’s, and a Costco is located adjacent to the center.)
City News Service reported that the plaintiffs contended “that having a Walmart at the site would violate a zoning law banning grocery stores in the center.
Benjamin Gamboa doesn’t know John Arnold, but they are linked by a shared concern over the fate of public-employee pensions in California.
“I’m proud to have a pension,” the 30-year-old Gamboa says. “I believe every American should have a pension.”
The two men live in very different worlds. Gamboa is a research analyst at Crafton Hills College in Yucaipa, California. Arnold is a hedge-fund billionaire from Houston, Texas.
There’s another difference between them: Arnold recently had a representative present at a secret “pension summit” held at a Sacramento hotel, where strategies to limit public employee retirement benefits were discussed; Gamboa, a union member, did not – representatives of labor were specifically not invited.
“Pension reform” has become the latest battle cry in a seemingly endless war that has ostensibly been declared against tax-dollar waste, but whose single-minded purpose has been to slash the job protections and benefits enjoyed by California’s working middle class.
» Read more about: Slash and Burn: The War Against California Pensions »
A few days ago I had breakfast with a man who had been one of my mentors in college, who participated in the struggle for civil rights in the 1960s and has devoted much of the rest of his life in pursuit of equal opportunity for minorities, the poor, women, gays, immigrants — and also for average hard-working people who have been beaten down by the economy. Now in his mid-80s, he’s still active.
I asked him if he thought America would ever achieve true equality of opportunity.
“Not without a fight,” he said. “Those who have wealth and power and privilege don’t want equal opportunity. It’s too threatening to them. They’ll pretend equal opportunity already exists, and that anyone who doesn’t make it in America must be lazy or stupid or otherwise undeserving.”
“You’ve been fighting for social justice for over half a century. Are you discouraged?”
“Not at all!” he said.
President Obama recently signed a bipartisan bill that ties student loan interest rates to the financial markets, which allows this year’s undergraduates to borrow at 3.9 percent interest — nearly half of what they would have paid if Congress had failed to act. As a recent college graduate, I, like many of my peers, was very excited to learn of this decision. However, while the federal government has done great work to help those students who are already enrolled in college, it is effectively failing those students who come from families at or below the poverty line.
A recent Brookings Institute and Princeton University study notes that the federal government is spending around $1 billion per year on programs to help low-income students. Despite this funding, the four major college prep programs, Upward Bound, Upward Bound Math-Science, Student Support Services and Talent Search (known collectively as TRIO), have had “no major effects on college enrollment or completion.” The study shows that students from low-income backgrounds who earn college degrees are 80 percent less likely to be poor.
» Read more about: Paper Chases: College and Low-Income Students »
Last Saturday’s commemoration of the 1963 March on Washington spotlighted the power of grassroots activism. But it was no exercise in nostalgia. Activists are pushing for social change across the nation, and I discuss dozens of these campaigns in my new book, The Activist’s Handbook, Second Edition: Winning Social Change in the 21st Century, officially released today by UC Press. The book thoroughly revises and updates the 1996 edition, which the late Howard Zinn praised as “enormously valuable for anyone interested in social change.” The new edition adds my analysis of the strategies used by social movements around immigration reform, gay and lesbian rights, the Keystone XL Pipeline, school “reform” and other campaigns that really took off in the past decade.
While some believe the past 15 years have weakened the power of grassroots activism against big moneyed interests, I disagree. In fact, in writing the new book I realized that activism has increased since the original edition,
What would the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. march for if he were alive today?
America has made progress on many fronts in the half-century since King electrified a crowd of 200,000 people, and millions of Americans watching on television, with his “I Have a Dream” address at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. But there is still much to do to achieve his vision of equality.
Fortunately, many Americans are involved in grass-roots movements that follow in his footsteps. King began his activism as a crusader against racial segregation, but he soon recognized that his battle was part of a much broader fight for a more humane society. Today, at age 84, King would no doubt still be on the front lines, lending his voice and his energy to major battles for justice.
Voting rights: Along with other civil rights leaders, King fought hard to dismantle Jim Crow laws that kept blacks from voting.
» Read more about: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Spirit Is Still Marching »
The Citizens Trade Campaign is coordinating efforts with labor, environmental organizations, health organizations and others to help persuade Congressional representatives of the need to opposed fast track authority for the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, which would cover 40 percent of the global economy between 12 nations, and is currently being negotiated in virtual secrecy.
Since negotiations began in 2008, none of the negotiating documents have been officially released for public review. However, approximately 600 corporate lobbyists have been named as official advisors which entitle them to access to both the negotiating texts and the negotiators.
And now the Administration wants to invoke a Nixon-era procedural tactic known as “Fast Track” that allows for only an up or down vote on the agreement. “Fast Track” allows the Trans Pacific Partnership and other trade agreements to be signed before the public sees any proposed texts and then rushed through Congress,
» Read more about: Will Congress Fast-Track a “NAFTA on Steroids?” »
Maria Guevara had been trying to get pregnant for three years when she saw a doctor at Los Angeles County General hospital in 2008. She was understandably thrilled, then, to learn she was indeed three months pregnant at the time of her visit. As Guevara later recalled, when the doctor asked her in English if she wanted to keep the baby, “without hesitation I replied ‘yes’ to his question. Before leaving the hospital, the doctor prescribed me medication that I thought was prenatal care. That lack of communication between the doctor and me has changed my life forever.”
Guevara took the prescribed medication, and experienced violent pain and bleeding. She returned to the hospital, where another doctor told her the bleeding was the result of a miscarriage.
“My baby was dead. The medication the initial doctor prescribed to me was not prenatal care but medication to induce an abortion,” she told a press conference in April at the University of California Davis Medical Center in Sacramento.
» Read more about: Interpreter Bill Would Help Save Lives Lost in Translation »
Readers who have fought for social justice while waging a home-front war with parents who hold views diametrically opposed to theirs will take heart in Madeline Janis’ op-ed in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times.
The opinion piece, “Dad, Rush Limbaugh and Me,” is a wry meditation on family and political beliefs that was prompted by the recent death of the author’s father. However, the story specifically springs from an incident that occurred when Janis, who is the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy’s national policy director, helped move her father to an assisted living facility several months ago. She writes:
On the day we were packing, with both of us understandably on edge, I came across a stash of Rush Limbaugh caps, maybe half a dozen of them, each with a different year printed on the front. I couldn’t let it pass.
The future of immigration reform could well to be decided in the next three weeks. And this will occur not in the halls of Congress but in Congressional Town Hall meetings across the nation. Anti-immigrant activists are hoping for a replay of the Tea Party’s successful August 2009 attacks on health care reform; by triggering loud public confrontations with Congressmembers in normally placid Town Hall meetings, conservative activists led the media to wrongly conclude that reform lacked public support. But in 2013, progressives are prepared. Immigrant rights activists believe they can use the Town Halls to expose the strength of their support and propel immigration reform to passage. Considering that both sides are prepared and the key element of surprise is lacking, whose activist strategies will prevail?
As even President Obama acknowledges, the passage of immigration reform comes down to whether Speaker John Boehner will allow a House vote. A majority of House members would support the Senate bill if given the chance,
» Read more about: Path to Citizenship Passes Through Town Hall Meetings »
(Editor’s Note: On August 14, hundreds of cars from all corners of the state will travel in caravans to Bakersfield, California, to urge House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy [R-Bakersfield] to support and advocate for a vote on immigration reform with a path to citizenship.)
Greyhound bus drivers took the initiative to share with their employer why comprehensive immigration reform is important for the community and posed a challenge to the company: Greyhound Bus Line could either keep up with the change or stay behind. The company recognized the importance of immigrants to their business and decided to embrace diversity through their full support of immigration reform.
A Greyhound van will be participating in the Citizenship Caravan to Bakersfield, August 14. Bus Drivers Leonard Weaver and Sindy Vasquez – members of the Amalgamated Transit Union, ATU Local 1700 – championed the immigration reform campaign at their workplace and are looking forward to the caravan.
» Read more about: Join the Immigration-Reform Caravan to Bakersfield! »
In 2008, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed SB 375, the first piece of legislation in any state that tied transportation choices to greenhouse gas emissions and global warming. The legislation, authored by Senator Darrell Steinberg, required that planning regions create transportation plans that would reduce Greenhouse Gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.
As more and more regions adopt these plans, an obvious flaw is emerging. Plans are only as good as the money that exists to implement them. With funding scarce, many of these plans will likely gather dust.
Steinberg went back to work. His first piece of legislation to address this shortfall was vetoed by Governor Brown last year. Brown felt that the timing wasn’t right for legislation that gave municipalities the power to create agencies similar to the Community Redevelopment Agencies he had just ordered dismantled. That didn’t stop Steinberg from reintroducing similar legislation,
» Read more about: Will Jerry Brown OK Sustainable Development? »
On [July 30], President Obama gave a great speech on why good jobs are the foundation for his middle-out economic strategy… from a huge Amazon warehouse where the workers do not have good jobs. I’m still stuck on the setting.
There is so much in President Obama’s speech that I’ve been wanting him to say. While the press focused on his announcement of a proposal on corporate taxes, the speech was almost entirely about jobs. After Obama described “what it means to be middle-class in America” as “A good job. A good education. A home to call your own. Affordable health care… A secure retirement,” he pointed out, “It’s hard to get the other stuff if you don’t have a good job.”
He told the Amazon warehouse workers, “we should be doing everything we can as a country to create more good jobs that pay good wages.”
But as The New York Times reported,
In the Appalachian foothills of Georgia, about an hour north of Atlanta, the riverfront city of Rome serves as a regional hub for health care. Near Rome’s tree-lined historic downtown, there are two well-equipped acute care hospitals with a total of more than 530 beds. Two years ago, the Medical College of Georgia opened a satellite campus in the city.
But in Rome, 27 percent of adults under 65 are uninsured, a rate that holds true across the state. Last year, the city’s two hospitals report spending more than $80 million delivering uncompensated care, often in the emergency room, where costs run high. Taxpayers and those with health insurance will end up paying for that care through government subsidies and higher premiums, industry experts say.
Rome’s dilemma is exactly the situation that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as “Obamacare,” was designed to fix — but that fix isn’t coming to Georgia.
» Read more about: Dixie Governors Say No to Expanding Medicaid »
One of the most famous lines not spoken by the man it’s been attributed to is “Have You No Shame?” During the infamous Communist-witch-hunt Hearings of Wisconsin Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954, attorney Joseph Welch supposedly fired these words at McCarthy. What he actually said, however, is “Have You No Sense of Decency?”
Nevertheless, the first wording, mythical as it is, seems the more appropriate one to ask present-day Republicans, especially in the House of Representatives.
The majority of Americans are not always correct. But their consistently low regard for the present Congress, especially the Republican behavior within it, is dead-on. In a late July 2013 NBC/WSJ poll, only 12 percent approved of the job Congress was doing, while 83 percent disapproved. Another question (and the percentage response indicated afterward) was “Do you think Republicans in Congress are too inflexible in dealing with President Obama (56 percent),
Instead of spending August on the beach, corporate lobbyists are readying arguments for when Congress returns in September about why corporate taxes should be lowered.
But they’re lies. You need to know why so you can spread the truth.
Lie #1: U.S. corporate tax rates are higher than the tax rates of other big economies. Wrong. After deductions and tax credits, the average corporate tax rate in the U.S. is lower. According to the Congressional Research Service, the United States has an effective corporate tax rate of 27.1 percent, compared to an average of 27.7 percent in the other large economies of the world.
Lie #2: U.S. corporations need lower taxes in order to make investments in new jobs. Wrong again. Corporations are sitting on almost $2 trillion of cash they don’t know what to do with. The 1,000 largest U.S. corporations alone are hoarding almost $1 trillion.
» Read more about: Corporations to Congress: Cut Our Taxes Now! »