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It should serve as more than mere cold comfort that Charles and David Koch – the oil billionaires with a desire to remake America according to their own Dickensian vision of society – are about to be fined $1 million by California’s Fair Political Practices Commission. Today’s Los Angeles Times reports that a pair of the brothers’ political money funnels, Americans for Responsible Leadership and the Center to Protect Patient Rights, unlawfully directed $11 million to a campaign account set up to defeat Proposition 30 and promote Proposition 32 in 2012.
The first proposition, which aimed to raise tax dollars for public education, passed; the latter measure, intended to cripple the ability of public employee unions to participate in politics, didn’t.
Frying Pan News readers will remember how writers Matthew Fleischer and Bill Raden exposed the role of the out-of-state Brothers Koch and their moneyed front groups in the 2012 campaign.
» Read more about: Koch Brother Groups Fined for 2012 Campaign Violations »
It should serve as more than mere cold comfort that Charles and David Koch – the oil billionaires with a desire to remake America according to their own Dickensian vision of society – are about to be fined $1 million by California’s Fair Political Practices Commission. Today’s Los Angeles Times reports that a pair of the brothers’ political money funnels, Americans for Responsible Leadership and the Center to Protect Patient Rights, unlawfully directed $11 million to a campaign account set up to defeat Proposition 30 and promote Proposition 32 in 2012.
The first proposition, which aimed to raise tax dollars for public education, passed; the latter measure, intended to cripple the ability of public employee unions to participate in politics, didn’t.
Frying Pan News readers will remember how writers Matthew Fleischer and Bill Raden exposed the role of the out-of-state Brothers Koch and their moneyed front groups in the 2012 campaign.
» Read more about: Koch Brother Groups Fined for 2012 Campaign Violations »
“If only they would run government like a business,” goes a familiar conservative lament, the gist of which equates “business” with the kind of furious efficiency that rewards honest, hard work in both industry and the animal kingdom. But now a new study shows what actually happens when elected officials hand over the keys to the private sector and ask it to run the services that society depends on.
Suddenly, according to Creating Scandals Instead of Jobs, the book of Ayn Rand fairy tales is shut and a dangerous reality asserts itself. The study, conducted by Good Jobs First, discovered an especially dizzying level of corruption in those enterprise and commerce agencies charged with expanding state economies and creating jobs. (Californians will remember how, until it was recently changed, their own Enterprise Zone program helped wreck the middle class by rewarding businesses for downsizing their work forces and lowering wages.)
Among Scandals/Jobs’ findings about so-called PPPs (public-private partnerships):
» Read more about: Public-Private Partnerships: Schools for Scandal »
We stood,
as women before us have stood,
looking back at our burning cities,
watching the smoke
rise from our empty homes.
It was quiet then. And cold.
We heard their cries, the caged birds
clawing at their perches, our daughters
naked in the hungry mob.
Such death. The smell of justice
drifting on the burnt wind.
We saw it all,
saw the fire fall like rain,
saw our tears
track stiff, white veins
down our bodies,
saw the brine crawl
through salt-cracked skin.
Now, turning in the restless night,
we dream we stand there still,
alone on the hill’s black belly.
We, the forgotten,
whose names were swallowed by God.
———————————————————————
This poem first appeared in Ploughshares,
As our country’s economy has limped along from one crisis to another over the past several years, the impact of state and federal austerity measures on communities has exposed our troubling national priorities. A new report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities showed that despite the Great Recession technically ending in 2009, schools have yet to return to pre-recession spending levels, and in some states the cuts reach up to 20 percent per pupil. These drastic cuts have become the norm as communities in states that have resorted to austerity to put out short-term fires must now cope with the fallout from such measures.
And then the government shut down.
So on top of underfunded schools, we had Head Start agencies on the chopping block,long-term WIC funding up in the air, furloughed workers flooding unemployment offices and the nation on the brink of defaulting on our debt yet again.
» Read more about: California’s Bold Alternative to Education Cuts »
As classical music piped through the audio system at the McDonald’s in downtown Seattle on a recent day, customers devoured hamburgers while sitting in maroon-colored seats and at tables bathed in warm colors.
Customers lined up at registers, exchanging cash and credit cards for an assortment of hamburgers, fries and drinks.
These days, many fast-food employees at large restaurants are hoping that more than just hamburgers, tacos, fried chicken and sandwiches will be exchanged across restaurant counters.
They are hoping that higher hourly wages will come their way so they won’t have to apply for nearly $7 billion in U.S. taxpayer assistance each year to offset what they say are wages too low to support themselves and their families.
See infographic, below right, in Just the Facts.
Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley announced last week that the median national wage for front-line fast-food workers is $8.69 per hour and that the $7 billion in taxpayer support amounts to a subsidy for a $200 billion industry.
The war isn’t over. It’s only a cease-fire.
Republicans have agreed to fund the federal government through January 15 and extend the government’s ability to borrow (raise the debt ceiling) through February 7. The two sides have committed themselves to negotiate a long-term budget plan by mid-December.
Regardless of what happens in the upcoming budget negotiations, it seems doubtful House Republicans will try to prevent the debt ceiling from being raised next February. Saner heads in the GOP will be able to point to the debacle Tea Partiers created this time around – the public’s anger, directed mostly at Republicans; upset among business leaders and Wall Street executives, who bankroll much of the GOP; and the sharply negative reaction of stock and bond markets, where the American middle class parks whatever savings it has.
The saner Republicans will also be able to point out that President Obama means it when he says he won’t ever negotiate over the debt ceiling.
» Read more about: After the Cease-Fire: What to Expect from the GOP »
Sandy Hellebrand was concerned. She needed to find a school that could educate her son Gabriel, who has autism and was about to enter high school.
Hellebrand thought she had found the perfect solution: She would enroll Gabriel and her two younger children in Sky Mountain Charter School, one of a rapidly-growing number of virtual schools in California and across the country.
After all, she reasoned, the school would provide excellent online instructional materials and instructors to guide Gabriel’s individual needs. Since Sky Mountain is a publicly funded school – although not a traditional brick-and-mortar one – the state of California would pay for her children’s education. And Hellebrand and her husband Rob, a public high school teacher, would receive about $1,800 a year for each of their children to help defray their costs of educating them at home.
“The idea is fantastic,” she says in an interview with Frying Pan News.
Chi-Town, the Windy City, Chicagoland – whatever you want to call it, the city just made a bold move to encourage good American jobs. On October 18, the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) for the first time asked companies vying for a $2 billion contract to manufacture 854 rapid transit cars to disclose their plans to create American jobs and opportunities for American workers. CTA’s addendum to its Invitation for Bids encourages companies to develop comprehensive American jobs plans and follow through to create them if awarded the contract – a move that could create as many as 20,000 good American manufacturing and related jobs, according to University of Massachusetts, Amherst economists.
Jorge Ramirez, President of the Chicago Federation of Labor celebrated the decision, saying, “We applaud Mayor Emanuel and the CTA for taking a lead role in bolstering Chicago’s economy and creating jobs. We urge manufacturers to work in partnership with the CTA to create quality manufacturing jobs here in Chicago and around the U.S.”
CTA’s adoption of the Jobs to Move America framework demonstrates the growing muscle of the coalition of community,
» Read more about: Chicago Gets Rolling Toward Good American Jobs »
A tentative agreement between striking Bay Area Rapid Transit workers and BART management has ended the employees’ four-day strike. The new contract must be approved and ratified by members of SEIU 1021 and ATU 1555, the rail system’s two largest unions.
Last night, in a statement released by Local 1021, John Arantes, BART Chapter President of that local announced:
“Tonight the hard working men and women who keep the Bay Area moving, can go back to work making BART the most efficient and successful system in the country.”
Added Des Patten, President of SEIU 1021’s BART Professional Chapter:
“Let us be clear that our commitment to improving the safety at BART doesn’t end with these negotiations. With this agreement, we expect that General Manager Grace Crunican will continue the dialogue with its unions on working conditions and health and safety at BART.”
According to SFGate,
After months of negotiating in bad faith, Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) management Thursday night left BART workers no other option but to go on strike. What a shame. It didn’t have to come to this.
With all the misinformation swirling about on the BART strike, there are a few things to clear up.
Here are the three things you need to know about the BART strike (h/t to Pete Castelli of SEIU 1021):
1) The strike is NOT about wages or benefits. BART workers made concession after concession on the economic proposals with the goal of averting a strike. BART workers and management agreed to a deal yesterday on wages, health care and pensions.
2) BART management pulled the rug out from under workers at the last minute by insisting on new workplace rules that infringed on the rights of workers.
» Read more about: Three Important Facts About the BART Strike »
(Labor 411, the group dedicated to promoting products and services that carry the union label, offers a couple of spooky recipes for Halloween treats that are reposted below.)
According to a recent survey, more Americans than ever will be getting in the Halloween spirit this year. Halloween has now become one of the fastest growing and most widely loved holidays in America. We here at Labor 411 love Halloween because it’s all about the candy — and so much of it is union made! You can get a complete list of union-made candy by clicking here.
Sometimes buying union candy can be confusing, mostly to do with what we call “bridge companies,” which can make some of their products both in the U.S. and out of the country. So if a company is listed in our directory but you’ve heard they make candy out of the country,
Poulinna Po had just walked into the Long Beach offices of Khmer Girls in Action when she got the news: Governor Jerry Brown had vetoed Assembly Bill 1263, which promised to expand the number of state medical translators. The measure had seemed to offer a straightforward solution to the dilemmas faced by California’s estimated three million Medi-Cal beneficiaries who speak little or no English when they talk to Anglophone doctors or medical staff.
One tragic example of this kind of patient-doctor miscommunication occurred in 2008 at Los Angeles County General hospital, when a pregnant Maria Guevara, who only spoke Spanish, was prescribed an abortion-inducing drug — which she then took, believing it to be part of her prenatal care. She lost her baby.
“That lack of communication between the doctor and me has changed my life forever, ” Guevara would later bitterly recount.
When the town of Sandy Springs, Georgia, spun-off from Fulton County and established a brand new government, it didn’t sign a Declaration of Independence; it signed a contract.
The 100,000-person town entered into a five-year contract with the for-profit management company CH2M Hill to operate almost all of the town’s services: running trash collection, and street cleaning, and wastewater management, and even security and administration for the courthouse. A for-profit company, rather than public officials and public employees, would be in charge of providing all “public” services except for fire and police departments. CH2M Hill employees, wearing Sandy Spring uniforms and driving trucks with Sandy Spring logos, even enforced municipal ordinances like grass-cutting and parking regulations.
Sandy Springs, an affluent suburb of Atlanta — home to Herman Cain, professional sports players, and the woman who voiced iPhone’s Siri — had been fighting for years to spin-off from Fulton County,
» Read more about: How CH2M Hill Is Outsourcing the Future »
In times of national crises, thoughtful journalists often hit the history books to find precedents and analogies.
Here’s a tip from a retired newspaper scribe turned history teacher: Look no farther than late 1860 and early 1861 to find historical parallels to our current crisis.
One hundred and fifty three autumns ago, our nation elected our first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln. Last fall, we re-elected our first African American president, Democrat Barack Obama.
The white, mostly Democratic, slave state South had an almost pathological hatred for Lincoln and his anti-slavery party.
Before the voters went to the polls on November 6, 1860, Southern politicians and newspaper editors warned that the slave states would secede if Lincoln won. (Eleven of 15 did; Kentucky, my home state, and Lincoln’s, did not.)
Today, many, if not most, House Republicans, and more than a few GOP senators, hate Obama to the point that they are willing to push the country into default and risk wrecking the economy over the Affordable Care Act,
(Note: Ari Berman’s post first appeared on The Nation and is republished with permission.)
In its 2013 decision in Arizona v. The Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that Arizona’s proof of citizenship law for voter registration violated the 1993 National Voter Registration Act (NVRA).
In 2004, Arizona voters approved Proposition 200, a stringent anti-immigration law that included provisions requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote and government-issued photo ID to cast a ballot. Last year, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit blocked the proof of citizenship requirement, which it said violated the NVRA. Under the 1993 act, which drastically expanded voter access by allowing registration at public facilities like the DMV, those using a federal form to register to vote must affirm,
Now is the time to lance the boil of Republican extremism once and for all. Since Barack Obama became president, the extremists who have taken over the Republican Party have escalated their demands every time he’s caved, using the entire government of the United States as their bargaining chit.
In 2010 he agreed to extend all of the Bush tax cuts through the end of 2012. Were they satisfied? Of course not.
In the summer of 2011, goaded by an influx of Tea Partiers, they demanded huge spending cuts in return for raising the debt ceiling. In response, the President offered an overly-generous $4 trillion “Grand Bargain,” including cuts in Social Security and Medicare and whopping cuts in domestic spending (bringing it to its lowest level as a share of gross domestic product in over half a century).
Were Republicans content? No. When they demanded more,
It’s easy to be pessimistic about the future these days. Tea Party extremists are threatening to push our federal government into default. Federal immigration reform is on the back burner until the shutdown and debt ceiling messes are sorted out. In a host of states, anti-worker governors are hell-bent on gutting workers’ rights while giving more power to corporate special interests.
But in California, a decidedly different story is playing out. The end of the legislative session here brought huge gains to workers and their families that boost our state’s economy and bolster the middle class.
With the federal minimum wage stuck at $7.25, Governor Brown signed AB 10, taking California’s minimum wage to $10 per hour by January of 2016, a 25 percent wage increase for low-wage workers in the state. While immigration reform is stalled in D.C., Governor Brown signed a slew of bills to protect immigrants and ensure greater inclusion.
» Read more about: It Was a Very Good Year: California Labor Looks Back »
The latest chapter in the efforts to dismantle California’s public-sector retirement system was officially opened Tuesday when San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed submitted paperwork that begins the process of qualifying his latest pension initiative for next year’s statewide ballot.
The filing brings to a climax weeks of speculation about the timing of the proposed law after Frying Pan News first confirmed rumors of its existence when Gary Cohn published a leaked draft version last month and when we reported Reed’s remarks, delivered before a Hoover Institution conference on pensions, that indicated he was uncertain whether he would file for the 2014 or 2016 ballot. Now Reed is certain: It’s 2014 or never.
Called the Pension Reform Act of 2014, the measure seeks to rewrite California’s constitution in order to bypass its current guarantees of public pension rights. If passed by voters,
» Read more about: There Will Be Blood: Chuck Reed Files Pension-Cutting Ballot Initiative »
A spirited group of community, religious and labor activists gathered outside a Western Avenue McDonald’s today to connect their efforts to raise fast-food workers’ earnings with a new study disclosing how dependent such low-income employees are on public assistance.
Among the facts of low-income life that were dug up by the University of California, Berkeley Labor Center report:
“We’ve seen McDonald’s clown the workers and we’ve seen Ronald McDonald – did you like that?” the Reverend Lewis Logan asked at the top of the rally.
» Read more about: McDonald’s Rally Echoes UC Berkeley Fast-Food Study »