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Have you ever felt paralyzed by the apocalyptic projections of global warming? Have you walked away from a presentation, article or news report feeling despair about the heating of our planet? You’re not alone. Amongst young Americans polled, global warming is a major worry.
The fear is good and warranted; the despair and paralysis are not. According to Jonathan Parfrey of the L.A.-based nonprofit, Climate Resolve, climate change needs to be seen as a local issue that people can address and do something about. And he has many ideas about how that can be done.
“L.A. has a spectacular climate,” says Parfrey, “we all love it. That’s why we’re here.” But global warming can hurt our city by impacting the things we care most about — including our health, food and water supply, property values, air quality and fire safety.
What’s called the “urban heat island effect” —
On Tuesday San Francisco voters approved by a 77 to 23 percent margin Proposition J, which will increase the city’s minimum wage from the current $10.74 per hour to $12.25 per hour by May 1, 2015. The city’s minimum wage would climb to $13 per hour by July 2016; to $14 per hour by July 2017 and $15 per hour by July 2018.
“Prop. J will provide a much needed raise to $15 per hour for 140,000 of the lowest paid workers in our city,” Gordon Mar, executive director of Jobs with Justice, San Francisco, told Capital & Main. “Prop. J will also raise the bar nationally for minimum wage policies.”
The “Fight for $15” to gain a higher minimum wage for workers began in Seattle, Washington. Voters there, with Socialist Alternative city council member Kshama Sawant spearheading a grassroots movement,
» Read more about: Big Bay Area Victories for Living Wages »
“A lot of people want to make changes but they don’t know where to go,” said Tiesha Speights on the afternoon of Election Day. So Tiesha went to the people, knocking on doors in Long Beach on behalf of Proposition 47, the California ballot initiative written to reduce the penalties for low-level crimes that involve less than $950, from felony levels to misdemeanors. Speights had been hustling block-by-block for the “Yes on 47” campaign for three weeks. Her work and the canvassing efforts of countless others paid off – Prop. 47 would pass handily Tuesday by a 58.5 percent to 41.5 percent margin.
Speights deeply connected with the measure, which permits re-sentencing for those currently serving a prison term for any of the offenses that the initiative reduces to misdemeanors, including forgery, theft, minor drug offenses and shoplifting. Some 10,000 inmates would be eligible to have their sentences reconsidered.
» Read more about: Proposition 47: Winning One Door at a Time »
Juanita Evers and Hank Dixon walked into the Mercado La Paloma on Grand at a little past one in the afternoon. The main building had been a garment factory but was now turned into an open space of mom and pop shops. There was one featuring Oaxacan handmade curios, a sports gear seller and various ethnic-style eateries. The place had been developed by a nonprofit.
“How about over there?” Juanita said, pointing to a stall offering Thai food tucked back in a corner of the expanse.
“Okay by me,” Dixon replied. “I could stand some spicy chow.”
They ordered and sat at a nearby table. He said, “You really think the congresswoman can help us?”
“She’s very interested in what the university does and wants it to do right by her constituents.” Juanita was a field deputy for Congresswoman Karen Nelson, whose district included the Eden Arms where Dixon lived.
» Read more about: The Dixon Family Chronicles: “You Gonna Step Up?” »
There they go again.
Last Saturday, three days before the election, the Los Angeles Times ran a somewhat bewildering piece about Proposition 47, the California state ballot initiative that seeks to de-felonize certain nonviolent crimes that are currently counted toward a convict’s three-strike tally.
“Prop. 47 puts state at center of a national push for sentencing reform,” ran the feature’s headline on the Times’ website. (“Ground Zero for Penal Reform,” was the print version’s more succinct headline.) And, sure enough, for the first 300 words the piece is pretty much a description of Prop. 47, while noting its major funders are philanthropist George Soros and several liberal foundations. Then, however, in the seventh paragraph (a jump page in the print edition), we get what the Times really wants to say:
The coordination by a few wealthy foundations to change public policy represents a legitimate but worrying form of political influence,
» Read more about: L.A. Times’ “Even-Handed” Approach to Prop. 47 »
Halloween is the time of year dedicated to scary stories, and in In the Public Interest report, “Out of Control,” there are 26 frightening and factual tales of how the push for government outsourcing is hurting taxpayers around the country.
You will be horrified by the real-life examples of Americans tricked by privatization, from a nun fighting cancer who was wrongly dumped from food stamps and Medicaid to foster children placed in severely abusive homes. Privatization is something to be feared when our elected officials aren’t carefully protecting the public’s interest.
We work every day to prevent future privatization horror stories from creeping and crawling their way into our democracy. Because just like Chicago, which leased its parking meters for 75 years to a Morgan Stanley-led private consortium, a bad privatization deal can haunt a community for generations.
Show off your Halloween spirit and share this terrifying report on twitter using the hashtag #PrivatizationHorror.
» Read more about: Privatization’s Trick-or-Trick Halloween »
The chefs over at Labor 411 have come up with a host of Halloween recipes from union-made ingredients. Treats include Mummy Dogs, No-Bake Marshmallow Witches, Rummy Worms, and our favorite, Graveyard Rice Krispies Treats. We’ve included the easy-to-follow recipe below.
And if you still haven’t purchased treats for tonight’s trick-or-treaters, check out Labor 411’s list of union-made candy!
Graveyard Rice Krispies Treats
Ingredients (purchase from your local unionized grocery store):
4 cups Kraft miniature marshmallows
¼ cup Land O Lakes butter, cubed
6 cups Kellogg’s Rice Krispies cereal
12 Oreos
1 tube white decorating gel frosting
1 can Betty Crocker chocolate frosting
Halloween sprinkles
Instructions:
1. In a large saucepan, combine and stir marshmallows and butter over medium-low heat until melted.
Today Christopher Klein, a U.S. bankruptcy judge, approved the city of Stockton’s plans to exit bankruptcy – ensuring that the pensions of Stockton’s retired public workers will not be subject to a tug of war among the city’s creditors.
“Judge Klein’s decision reinforces the confidence we had in our plan from the beginning,” Stockton City Councilmember Elbert Holman told Capital & Main by phone. Holman, along with Paul Canepa and Kathy Miller, voted to file for Chapter 9 bankruptcy; all three remain in office.
The judge’s Thursday decision had not been a foregone conclusion. On October 1, Klein had ruled that the federal bankruptcy code could trump the state’s retirement law that protects public employees’ defined-benefit pensions – and thus expose these retirement plans for “impairment,” or cuts. This prompted the Sacramento Bee’s political columnist, Dan Walters, to cite a Wall Street source’s favorable response: “Moody’s Investors Service underscored that effect by declaring that Klein’s ruling is ‘welcome news for investors’ in municipal debt.”
Stockton’s experience with bankruptcy – and the shadowy role of Wall Street credit-rating firms —
» Read more about: Judge Keeps Pensions Out of Stockton Bankruptcy Deals »
A 40-foot fall isn’t necessarily fatal for the average adult. But for California’s public employees whose jobs require them to routinely work on ladders or mechanical devices at heights more than 40 feet, it was deemed enough of a threat to life and limb to offer them a modest premium in their monthly pay packet.
In the case of firefighters, it also seemed sensible to kick in a little more for the tiller operators that control the 100-foot aerial ladders from which their brothers occasionally rescue a taxpayer from a burning building.
In fact, 99 such hazard premiums and professionalizing workforce incentives that have historically been considered pensionable compensation for public workers were deemed to be such no-brainers that they passed the scrutiny of the legislature and the governor when Jerry Brown signed into law 2012’s Public Employee Pension Reform Act (PEPRA). Today the average public pension in California is $2,945 per month.
» Read more about: Pension Envy: What the L.A. Times’ CalPERS Story Got Wrong »
María Elena Durazo announced today that she will leave the LA County Federation of Labor, which she has led for more than eight years.
“I feel that the Los Angeles labor movement is very strong, very progressive, very proactive,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “Altogether, we have accomplished a lot. And there is a passion I have always had for immigration and civil rights. So I have the opportunity to do this and completely focus on those issues.”
Durazo will take a new post as international vice-president for immigration, civil rights and diversity at UNITE HERE, whose Los Angeles-based Local 11 she led before joining the County Fed.
A Los Angeles magazine profile last year called Durazo “the leader of what is perhaps the most robust labor movement in the country.” With her lead,
Los Angeles City Council members convened Tuesday for an Economic Development Committee hearing on a motion that would raise the minimum wage for workers in the City of Los Angeles to $13.25 per hour beginning in July 2017, and link future wage hikes to the Consumer Price Index. The motion also calls for an independent study on the economic impact of raising the minimum wage to $15.25 per hour after 2017. Councilmembers further discussed a closely related motion that would focus on the challenge of implementing and enforcing the new wage laws.
Supporters from a variety of local community and labor organizations, each wearing different colored T-shirts, showed up to back the wage increase, including from the Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance (KIWA), Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), L.A. Black Workers Center and Restaurant Opportunities Center Los Angeles (ROC-LA), among others. The hearing, which came just a month after Council members voted to raise the minimum wage to $15.37 for certain hotel workers,
» Read more about: Citywide Wage Hike Gets First Council Hearing »
Night. In this version of the dream, the truck fishtails through the curtain of smoke and flame. Off to the right of her MRAP, the water tanker’s metal skin has split open, sending the liquid treasure everywhere. She watches in stutter shutter clicks as the vehicle’s driver fights to keep that bad boy under control, at the same time zig-zagging past the bombed, burning panel truck.
Corporal Jess Dixon is up top manning the M2 machine gun in the open turret. She swings the weapon about in tight arcs on greased ball bearings, sighting down, wishing for a target as she fires blind. The water tanker hits a slick of burning oil and, brakes screeching, flips, and tons of steel go into a slide. Over her headpiece, not the crackle of her CO, but Whitney Houston singing “It’s Not Right, But It’s Okay.” The armored vehicle clips the tanker, but that ain’t no thing,
» Read more about: The Dixon Family Chronicles: “Early in the Morning” »
If you’re looking for a real fright this Halloween season, there’s no need to find a haunted house or to visit the coffin in your neighbor’s yard. Just take a look at the independent film Plastic Paradise, The Great Pacific Garbage Patch. I saw the film recently with about 200 mostly high school and college students in Santa Monica High School’s Barnum Hall.
It’s hard to know where to start with the grossness of the plastic mass circulating in the world’s ocean gyres (the five swirling oblong currents in the furthest-most reaches of the planet’s oceans). On the Midway Atoll, one of a string of volcanic islands halfway between the U.S. and Japan, tons of old flip-flops, bottles, pacifiers, toys, sippy cups, bottle tops, garbage bags, laundry baskets and every other item of non-destructible plastic origin you can think of, washes up on the formerly pristine,
» Read more about: Film Review: Plastic Paradise, The Great Pacific Garbage Patch »
The long-anticipated trial pitting the City of San Francisco against the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges — and its efforts to shut down the city’s storied City College — began Monday. The opening statements in San Francisco Superior Court revealed the stark difference in the way the two sides view the role of public education in society.
“This case is about fairness,” Deputy City Attorney Yvonne Mere said in her remarks, explaining that the ACCJC had far overstepped its authority by trying to revoke the school’s accreditation – and in the process deny a college education to nearly 80,000 students, many of whom come from low income backgrounds.
For its defense, ACCJC announced it had to destroy CCSF in order to save it from the ruin of pension health-care costs generated by union contracts with the school. This alarm had first been sounded by ACCJC in 2006, although it had since been muted.
» Read more about: Trial to Save City College of San Francisco Begins »
With Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and six city council members proposing an increase in the minimum wage, the issue sits firmly on the front burner of L.A. government. Of course the Chamber of Commerce and its allies wring their hands and predict disaster, and some economists are throwing scary statistics back and forth.
Will raising the minimum wage to a livable income raise prices? Probably a bit in some parts of the economy. Will people lose their jobs? Probably a few in some sectors, for a short time. Will the economy grow as a result of poor people having more income to spend? Again, probably. Will life be better for low-wage working families? Undoubtedly.
Minimum wages should provide enough income for working families to put shelter over their heads, food on their tables and clothes on their backs. Employers should pay working people enough to not require government and taxpayers to supply the basic needs of a family.
Readers of Gary Cohn’s coverage of Proposition 47 and Donald Cohen’s report on the privatizing of America’s jails and prisons will be interested in two events held in sequence this weekend.
Saturday, October 25, 9 a.m.-1 p.m. East Los Angeles College, 1301 Avenida Cesar Chavez, Monterey Park. RSVP here
Introducing for-profit companies into America’s criminal justice system has been a bad deal for governments across the country.
During the past several years, a movement opposed to profit incentives in our criminal justice system has grown. Private prison corporations such as Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group have come under increasing scrutiny and pressure for cutting corners, contracts that include “occupancy guarantees” of 80, 90 and even 100 percent, and unsafe prison conditions.
But it’s not just the prisons that are handed over to CCA or GEO Group. Almost every service delivered inside the prison is being outsourced to for-profit corporations. Outsourced inmate health care, food and commissary services, telephone and financial services like money transfers between families and inmates are all adding to the poor conditions in prisons and burdening inmates and their families with extra costs.
For example, earlier this month, the Palm Beach Post broke the story of the deplorable treatment of prisoners by health care contractors in Florida prisons as contractors seek to maximize profits by cutting costs.
» Read more about: For-Profit Corporations’ Prison Break-in »
Is the Pope a tease? Not really. He’s trying. He challenged the neoliberal economic system just a month into his papacy and brought up one of its difficult byproducts: growing inequality. And last week, at his recently convened synod on the family, he attempted to coax his bishops to expand their definition of the family, acknowledging yet another difficult issue: the rapidly expanding fact of gay marriage. For a brief moment, it appeared the Church was not only poised to liberalize its definition of the family, but it might even be ready to jumpstart Vatican II and go so far as to overturn one of its most cherished catechisms: denial.
It all started with an October 13 press release that included this hopeful language for LGBT Catholics (the draft was credited to a Pope Francis appointee, Monsignor Bruno Forte, a theologian known for his progressivism):
“Homosexuals have gifts and qualities to offer to the Christian community.
The symbolism of last Friday’s press conference by the recently embattled and newly ex-superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, John Deasy, couldn’t have been more explicit. Speaking for the first time as a private citizen, Deasy spoke to reporters on a conference call hosted by Students Matter.
The Silicon Valley-backed, Menlo Park nonprofit has paid the legal bills for the Vergara lawsuit, which challenged teacher job protections in the state earlier this year by successfully suing the California Department of Education and LAUSD. Deasy became a star witness — for the plaintiffs — when he testified against the state and his own district’s teachers.
For a man who had been brought by L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa from the Gates Foundation in 2010 to LAUSD as the top deputy to then-superintendent Ramon C.
» Read more about: Mistakes Were Made: The John Deasy Years »
“Son of a . . . ”
Splitting a knuckle open, Jess Dixon grunted through gritted teeth. Working to get the rusted wheel nut loose, it had come undone too fast as she wrenched on the tire iron. Her hand banged onto the edge of the wheel well.
Ignoring the pain, she hurried and got done removing the slashed tire and put the spare on and secured it in place on the hub. The spare was not in good shape, worn smooth on one side, the steel belt underneath just about exposed. She didn’t dig her job but she couldn’t be losing it either.
She got her car going and drove to work, hoping she wouldn’t have a blowout on the lousy tire. Because she got up early each morning, and knew how to change a tire and a few other car repairs from her Uncle Hank showing her,
» Read more about: The Dixon Family Chronicles: “Time Is Tight” »
