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In How Enterprise Zones Are Killing the California Dream, Frying Pan investigative reporter Gary Cohn looked at the impact of the controversial program, including workers who lost their jobs while their former employers received tax breaks for hiring lower-paid replacements. He also reported on two strip clubs revealed to have benefited from the secretive program. The governor and legislators have now put forward proposals to reform the program or replace it with other economic development programs. This post originally appeared in Labor’s Edge.
You’ve probably seen the stories by now: Enterprise zone tax breaks, which are supposed to provide incentives for good jobs, are instead going to strip clubs and low-wage mega corporations like Walmart.
The current enterprise zone program is shrouded in secrecy, with virtually no accountability or transparency. Study after study shows the program is a massive failure,
» Read more about: End the Enterprise Zone Abuse: Gov. Brown’s Good Jobs Proposal »
after the long day’s hustle, Papa returned
home waving fistfuls of Tootsie Rolls, wolfed down
his supper, changed from his suit into his long-sleeved
gray coveralls or blue cotton smock and slid out of
silky stockings and Italian leather loafers into white
cotton socks and well-scuffed All-American work shoes
for his night shift scrubbing and waxing corporation floors
we missed his loud full laughter
around the television and what company we had
wasn’t as interesting as the visitors
who came through when he hung around home
but we trusted Papa was doing his best
to become “healthy, wealthy and wise”
without shame over shameful wages—enough
indian head nickels to finance a scheme
(the men he worked graveyard with
always became buddies
and no matter whose car broke down,
America’s economy will suddenly grow by $400 billion — roughly three percent –on July 31, when the Bureau of Economic Analysis begins to include in its GDP calculations the value of investments in such intellectual property products as songs, books and movies. The new numbers will reveal that Stephen Sondheim, Stephen King, Steven Spielberg and Ray “Even Stevens” Stevens have been far more important to the nation’s financial well-being than government stats have previously indicated.
This news feels as uplifting as a double dose of premium-grade placebo. But there’s more than feel-good bookkeeping at stake here. Plays, stories, films and music generate wealth – wealth government stats are supposed to measure.
The nation has always struggled with who owns that wealth. In the Wild West frontier of the internet, music, films and news were easily pirated. Now, there’s a newer, quite possibly wilder West,
» Read more about: Digital Fabrication: More Than the Stuff of Dreams »
There are many similarities between the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s and the union movement that preceded it in the early decades of the 20th century. Both met with hostility, opposition, and violence. Yet today we look back on the former with gratitude and admiration, while the latter is either forgotten or distorted in our collective memory.
Hard-fought union gains have become part of the fabric of our society: the eight-hour day, elimination of child labor, and safer conditions are but a few of the benefits that unions have secured for all of us. Yet unions have been broadly demonized, and the gains they have won are slipping away.
I’ll be the first to admit that unions have their issues. Nevertheless, I am grateful that my husband and I have been loyal union members all of our adult lives (I am a teacher; he is a Teamster).
We all know that working for Walmart is no picnic. They pay low wages, they slash hours, they offer little or no job security, they exploit and intimidate workers and they use sweatshop labor. That’s why Walmart workers are on strike this week, to protest the corporation’s greedy behavior and shady business practices. Learn more about the strike here.
Many of these striking workers earn so little that they’re eligible for public assistance, like food stamps and Medicaid. And that’s no accident; it’s exactly the way Walmart likes it. We as taxpayers foot the bill for their workers, and the corporate head honchos get even richer.
According to a new report released today by the California Works Foundation:
[Walmart] workers use 40% more public health care assistance than the retail average. The company’s use of public assistance costs California $86 million per year,
This week, Frying Pan News has been following stories as Walmart workers joined caravans coming from across the country, converging at the company’s annual shareholders meeting in Bentonville, Arkansas. This post originally appeared on MakingChangeAtWalmart.org. Video of the action is here.
What a week! After an action-packed journey, the six Ride for Respect caravans all arrived safely in Bentonville, Arkansas over the weekend. But the buses of #Walmartstrikers were not about to sit around until Friday, when Walmart’s annual shareholders meeting will take place–that’s for sure!
[Mon] morning, a group of 200 OUR Walmart members and supporters marched through the misty dawn to Walmart’s Home Office, and arrived just as the employees at the headquarters were filing into work. Quietly, the throngs of green shirts spread out in front of Home Office–many in the crowd had tape-covered mouths with “ULP strike” written across, » Read more about: Action at Walmart’s Home Office as Caravans Arrive in Bentonville! »
For several years, Walmart’s annual shareholders meeting has been the staging ground for high-profile protests against the retail giant’s treatment of its employees. As Walmart workers from across the country — many of whom are on strike — once again converge this week on the corporation’s headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, one startling fact stands out: none of them, or any of the retail giant’s 1.4 million workers, are represented by a union.
Walmart’s success in keeping its American workforce entirely nonunion is, of course, well documented — so much so that observers of the company’s chronic labor strife almost take it for granted. But even in the context of a long national decline in union membership among American workers, it is staggering that the country’s largest employer, and one of its stingiest, has remained union free.
While Walmart contends that its employees have no use for union representation,
» Read more about: Walmart’s War Against Unions — and the U.S. Laws That Make It Possible »
Former Obama official Cass Sunstein explains in a recent article what a “wing nut” is: anyone, right or left, with “a dogmatic commitment to an extreme political view” that is “false and at least a bit crazy.” Wing-nuts, he says, “impugn” the “motivations” or the “good faith” of people with whom they disagree, rather than confront their actual arguments.
Sure, you may say, that’s fair: an equal- opportunity definition of “wing nut.” Who wouldn’t want to join Sunstein in occupying the moderate middle and calling out the intolerant and the uninformed at both ends of the political spectrum, the people, as he says, who call Barack Obama a socialist or George W. Bush a fascist?
The question, though, is how does Sunstein use this even-handed rhetorical stand against “wing nuts”?
To know, we don’t have to look any further than Sunstein’s third example of a wing nut: someone who believes “that big banks run the Department of the Treasury.” Now,
» Read more about: The Moderate Middle’s Dirty Little Secret »
Eric Garcetti has enormous potential to be one of L.A.’s great mayors. He is young (just 42), full of energy, experienced in politics and government, passionate about L.A., brimming with policy ideas, compassionate toward the disadvantaged and a great communicator and explainer. I saw many of these traits up-close when I co-taught a course with him at Occidental College in 2000, and have watched him blossom as he joined the City Council and served as its president.
Now he faces the daunting challenges of running America’s second-biggest, and most diverse, city.
No mayor can succeed unless he or she attends to the routine civic housekeeping tasks that residents expect from municipal governments – fix the potholes, keep traffic flowing, maintain public safety, keep the parks and playgrounds clean and in good repair.
But Garcetti didn’t run for mayor just to be a caretaker. He promised more.
This post originally appeared on Dog Park Media.
The East, just out this weekend, is a movie ostensibly about radical anarcho-environmentalists that has little to say about radicalism, anarchism, or environmentalism. It’s not a bad movie; as a suspenseful drama it’s entertaining. But that’s part of the problem. The entertainment comes first, and second, and third, and the politics last. This is one of those “I want to entertain my audience, but also make them think” movies in which politics ends up providing little more than a cardboard backdrop to what is finally a conventional thriller.
Fair warning: this will include every imaginable spoiler.
The first strategy The East uses to push politics to the background is to make the radicals’ targets as uncomplicated as imaginable. “The East” (the name of the radicals’ semi-revolutionary cell) first goes after a drug company marketing a product that is not only dangerous but reliably so;
Two State Senators held a press conference this morning outside Déjà Vu Showgirls, one of two Sacramento-area strip clubs that the Frying Pan News documented as benefitting from a controversial tax credit program. State Sens. Jerry Hill, D-San Mateo, and Anthony Cannella, R-Ceres, urged fellow legislators to join them in reforming California’s enterprise zone program.
Criticism of the enterprise zone program, which our Gary Cohn recently investigated, seems to be gathering attention. Documents received last week by Frying Pan News showed that Déjà Vu Showgirls and Gold Club Centerfolds received a combined two dozen vouchers for tax credits of up to $37,000 per employee, despite paying most of them around $9 per hour. The program also requires no evidence of job creation. In his piece “How Enterprise Zones Are Killing the California Dream,” Cohn quotes two Californians who had been laid off while their former employers received credits for their lower-paid replacements.
» Read more about: Heat Grows on “California Dream Killer” Tax Program »
Vivian Rothstein was one of four recipients of a “Giant of Justice” award from Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice Los Angeles (CLUE-LA) last week. She’s a longtime friend and mentor of mine, and was introduced at the breakfast by a longtime friend and mentor of hers, Rev. Jim Lawson. In his intro, Lawson invoked the concept of the “beloved community,” a well-worn phrase whose meaning is often either trivialized or simply lost. So much a part of the civil rights movement from which Vivian’s activism sprung, the idea of a beloved community is what Vivian has imparted to so many of us – that organizing must be rooted in a basic decency and love, and in being so rooted, is transformative well beyond whatever immediate victories, however substantial, may be achieved. We’ve reprinted her speech because it is a such a remarkably well-told story. Not captured here is how it ended,
This article originally appeared in The Nation.
In The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement (Spiegel & Grau, 2013), David Graeber’s engaging new book on Occupy Wall Street, the author writes of the dismal culture in Washington during the summer of 2011, a few months before the occupation of Zucotti Park:
Republicans were threatening to cause the US government to default in order to force massive cuts in social services intended to head off a largely imaginary debt crisis…President Obama, in turn, had decided the way to appear reasonable in comparison and thus seem as his advisors liked to put it ‘the only adult in the room’ was not to point out that the entire debate was founded on false economic premises, but to prepare a milder, ‘compromise’ version of the exact same program—as if the best way to expose a lunatic is to pretend that 50 percent of his delusions are actually true….
» Read more about: The Anarchy Project: David Graeber’s Occupy Wall Street »
The political leadership of Los Angeles is changing hands in a month – bringing tremendous challenge and opportunity.
One of the greatest opportunities, for our Mayor-elect and the biggest batch of new City Council members we’ve had in over a decade, is finishing the transformation of our archaic commercial waste and recycling system into a highly effective national model. I say finish because we’re almost there.
Why is this important?
Well, for starters, we’re running out of space to deal with our waste. For decades, as a city and region, we’ve relied on a constellation of toxic landfills, many of which have closed. The largest of those, Puente Hills, is set to close next year, which is going to create a genuine problem for the region, particularly cities like Los Angeles that throw the most away.
Now,
» Read more about: Don’t Waste This Opportunity, Los Angeles »
There are no Walmart stores in San Francisco. And yet, four members of the company’s board of directors are influential Bay Area residents. On May 29, a group of Walmart workers assembled outside the residence of Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer, a Walmart director, who has a 38th floor penthouse apartment above the Four Seasons on Market Street in San Francisco.
Donning bright green T-shirts and chanting, “Stand up, live better,” the workers were gearing up to join roughly 100 members of OUR Walmart, a nationwide organization of Walmart associates, in going on strike and caravanning to Bentonville, AR, where the retailer will hold its annual shareholder meeting June 7.
OUR Walmart’s stated concerns include things like giving employees the option of working full-time, and providing a level of wages and benefits that ensures employees aren’t forced to rely on government assistance to get by.
Dominic Ware,
» Read more about: Walmart Workers Strike, Rally Outside Marissa Mayer’s SF Penthouse »
A friendly and regular reader of this blog wrote me that she recently spent a week sitting in on the trial of a teenaged girl in Compton who was tried for murder and will likely spend the rest of her life in prison. She regularly responds to my essays and often asks me to explain exactly what we can do to change the circumstances of injustice that I write about. Such situations seem – like that of the young girl whose trial she watched – impossible to affect, much less fix.
Still, my reader’s question remains a fair one, and I have given it a lot of thought. I know what I do, and it ranges on a continuum from action at a distance to action up close. On that first end of the scale, I make it a practice to sign every petition that crosses my path. Stop the Keystone XL Pipeline,
» Read more about: Living in a World Without Justice: What We Can Do »
The success of Measure R, passed by voters in 2008, the “30-10” plan to accelerate implementation of our transit revolution, and the 66 percent “yes” vote on Measure J each demonstrates that Los Angeles voters are ready to invest in a transportation transformation. There is an opportunity now and a coalition partnership available that’s too good to waste. Together with Mayor Eric Garcetti we must continue cultivating this voter trust and this partnership of labor, business, environmental, community groups and elected officials who share a common vision — of a Los Angeles with a clean public transportation system that is both robust and financially sound, and that has a vigorous economy with prosperity that is widely shared.
As Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has demonstrated so clearly, we can think big about solutions to our challenges as a region — and we can expect to succeed.
» Read more about: Transportation and the New Mayor: The Path Forward »
(Note to Our Readers: About a month ago, a multi-year struggle by food service workers at Pomona College finally culminated in victory. The college had resisted their efforts mightily, even firing many workers under the pretext of their immigration statuses. On May 22, Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice Los Angeles, whose members did much to help win this campaign, honored those workers and their struggle by giving a “Giant of Justice” award to Christian Torres, one of those workers fired by the college. Former UNITE HERE President John Wilhelm gave Christian an absolutely fantastic introduction, and then Christian went and blew John out of the water — as he’d be the first to proudly admit. Christian’s story is a compelling one, both of a struggle to win a union, but also of the struggle of immigrants everywhere. Rather than try and tell it ourselves, we thought best to share his version with you.)
Thank you so much for this;
Now that the L.A. mayoral race is over, its winner, Eric Garcetti, has much to do to help advance an environmental agenda for Los Angeles. He has a strong record of environmental protection and I’m confident that as mayor he can lead the City to a big and bold vision of environmental sustainability. There are several major issues L.A. will need to address during the next four years. A comprehensive report prepared by UCLA serves as a more in depth analysis than this blog can undertake, but here are some of the major issues that Mayor Garcetti should undertake.
Waste
This next year is going to be critical to advancing a future that relies less on landfills and more on reducing, reusing and recycling. Of immediate priority, Eric Garcetti needs to push hard with the City Council to vote on the single-use plastic bag ban ordinance,
» Read more about: The Next Four Years: A Time to Work on the Environment »
California’s controversial $700 million enterprise zone program has long been shrouded in secrecy. But now Frying Pan News has obtained documents showing that the Rancho Cordova strip club Gold Club Centerfolds has been approved for enterprise zone tax credits. The documents show that the gentlemen’s club has received credits worth up to $37,440 apiece for nine employees — sales associates, door hosts and security officers — who are paid from $8 to $9.25 an hour.
See Gold Club Centerfolds’ tax credit documents here.
The documents reflect only a portion of all approvals for Gold Club Centerfolds. The approvals were granted by Sacramento’s enterprise zone manager and came in 2011. The documents were obtained by the California Labor Federation under a public records request. The labor federation also requested records to see if another Rancho Cordova strip club, Déjà Vu Showgirls, has similarly been approved for tax credits,
» Read more about: In Black and White: Strip Club Approved for Tax Credits »
