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Many of you soon-to-be college graduates are determined to make the world a better place. Some of you are choosing careers in public service or joining nonprofits or volunteering in your communities.
But many of you are cynical about politics. You see the system as inherently corrupt. You doubt real progress is possible.
“What chance do we have against the Koch brothers and the other billionaires?” you’ve asked me. “How can we fight against Monsanto, Boeing, JP Morgan and Bank of America? They buy elections. They run America.”
Let me remind you: Cynicism is a self-fulfilling prophesy. You have no chance if you assume you have no chance.
“But it was different when you graduated,” you say. “The Sixties were a time of social progress.”
You don’t know your history.
When I graduated in 1968, the Vietnam War was raging. Over half a million American troops were already there.
» Read more about: College Graduates: Cynicism Is a Self-Fulfilling Prophesy »
The L.A. Times has not exactly been falling all over itself lately to curry favor with the city’s labor movement, with a seemingly endless stream of news stories, columns and editorials portraying unions in a less than sympathetic light. So the last thing one might have expected to see was a rally of workers and labor leaders coming to the defense of L.A.’s paper of record.
But desperate times call for desperate measures – and with the Koch brothers potentially poised to take over Spring Street, the present moment certainly meets the test.
In case you have tuned out the Times and every other source of local news, Charles and David Koch – patron saints of the Tea Party, best friends to climate change deniers and bankrollers of an endless parade of far-right causes – have set their sights on the Tribune Company’s empire. After emerging from a bankruptcy brought on by the rapacious practices of former owner Sam Zell,
» Read more about: Desperate “Times” at Anti-Koch Brothers Rally »
[Frying Pan News Note: A New York Times piece posted last night by Steven Greenhouse — and referenced below — revealed that “newly found documents indicate that apparel had been produced for Walmart at one of the operations in the factory building that collapsed last month.”]
The most dangerous job in the world, outside war zones, isn’t that of an undercover police officer or a firefighter or a bullfighter or aerialist. It’s sewing garments — particularly in Bangladesh.
The death toll in the April 24 collapse of Rana Plaza has topped 1,100 and continues to rise. But Rana Plaza is merely the most deadly of an unbroken string of preventable disasters that have plagued garment manufacturing in Bangladesh, the world’s second-largest exporter of clothing, behind only China. It’s not even the most recent preventable disaster: Since the cataclysmic building collapse,
» Read more about: Harold Meyerson: Walmart and Bangladesh’s Death Traps »
Driven by disgust for the way our democracy seems to be for sale to the highest bidder, several dozen activists from Los Angeles gathered in Mount Washington this past Saturday to rally support for Proposition C, a symbolic measure on the May 21 ballot that urges area legislators to push for renewed limits on political campaign spending.
In late February, the Los Angeles City Council voted 10 to 1 to put the following question on the ballot, introduced by Councilmember Richard Alarcon, who represents the northeast San Fernando Valley and who attended the Mount Washington gathering:
“Shall the voters adopt a resolution that there should be limits on political campaign spending and that corporations should not have the constitutional rights of human beings and instruct Los Angeles elected officials and area legislative representatives to promote that policy through amendments to the United States Constitution?”
By itself,
» Read more about: Making a “C” Change in Campaign Spending »
Yesterday members of Warehouse Workers United and their supporters confronted Scot Rank, the CEO of scandal-plagued Walmart de Mexico, at UCLA’s Anderson School of Business. The warehouse employees are fighting for improved working conditions at warehouse facilities operated by Walmart contractors. This raw video captures the protest.
» Read more about: Walmart de Mexico CEO Confronted at UCLA »
Some 53 percent of Americans say that the second Iraq war was a mistake. A recent Los Angeles Times article asked if the war brought change for the better. But no one asks what that war cost this country. The first trillion dollars we spent on it was only a down payment on what experts have estimated to be probably two trillion or more that we will spend over the next few decades to take care of America’s wounded and maimed. Our taxes provide care for those veterans, but both parties regularly propose cutting the Department of Veterans Affairs as a quick fix to balance the federal budget.
Covering the interest on the debt from this and other wars is a part of the budget Congress can’t cut, and it’s not cheap either. Every year taxpayers shell out an amount equal to six percent of the national spending plan just for interest on the national debt.
Within about a month of the debut of Fwd.us, Mark Zuckerberg’s new DC lobby outfit aimed at promoting immigration reform, the group is already falling apart. If this week is any indication, the meltdown will be as spectacular and ignoble as every other ill-conceived, overfunded start-up in the Valley.
Fwd.us’ political problems began the way they usually do: with a cynical, too-cute-by-half strategy adopted by his Beltway proxies. Fwd.us’ approach amounted to this: Buy the votes of key lawmakers by dumping money into ads in their home states on issues that are useful to them but that Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t care about.
What that has meant in practice is running commercials supporting South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham for his bold opposition to Obamacare and his support of the Keystone XL Pipeline, and applauding Alaska Senator Mark Begich for his support for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
» Read more about: Mark Zuckerberg’s Fwd.us Fail No Surprise »
From time to time we may gripe about individual stories or columns that appear in the Los Angeles Times, but it remains our city’s paper of record and a powerful source of investigative journalism – at a time when such journalism has rapidly given way to rumor-sourced blogs written by dilettantes or pundits. That the Los Angeles Times may become the private toy of America’s most partisan conservative interests is not just a bad dream — right-wing billionaires Charles and David Koch may actually soon be running the paper, and it’s up to all of us to stop them.
It’s difficult to overstate how damaging it would be if the Koch brothers succeed in buying one of the country’s most influential newspapers. The Koch brothers would almost certainly use the Times to promote their ultra-conservative agenda. That would mean the end of fair,
» Read more about: Stop the Koch Brothers’ L.A. Times Takeover »
On the most recent Moyers and Company, Bill Moyers turned his attention to the ways underdog communities have organized themselves to win economic victories – in often hostile political environments. Moyers first spoke with Marshall Ganz, the veteran civil rights and United Farm Workers organizer; he then interviewed Madeline Janis, co-founder of the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, and affordable-housing activist Rachel LaForest.
Ganz, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, based his organizing techniques on the moral teachings of his father, who was a rabbi, and on the need to transfer personal narratives onto organizing campaigns. Janis and LaForest have combined traditional organizing techniques with the practical need to adapt to fluid local situations.
As Janis told Moyers:
“You have a struggling housekeeper in a hotel who cleans 25 rooms in a day and barely puts food on the table. The idea of her being able to fight for better working conditions — a union in her hotel,
» Read more about: LAANE’s Madeline Janis Appears on “Moyers & Company” »
L.A. Superior Court judges are doing the wrong thing. They decided to deal with a $53 million budget deficit by arbitrarily closing eight courthouses around L.A. County, which will send justice into chaos, inconvenience people and cause transportation and other problems.
The courthouses scheduled to close as of June 28 or sooner are: Huntington Park, Whittier, Pomona North, Malibu, West Los Angeles, San Pedro, Beacon Street and the Kenyon Juvenile Justice Center, located in South L.A.
The Judges Didn’t Ask Us
Did the judges who came up with this plan consult the communities that will be impacted? No. Did they talk to the citizens, the small business people, or anyone else this might affect? No.
As a result, some case types will be heard in only certain courthouses. For example, if you are threatened with eviction or your landlord wants to kick you out of your place and you want to fight it,
» Read more about: Don’t Close the Courts of First Resort! »
What do big banks and L.A. port trucking companies have in common? Fine print in contracts that traps victims into signing bad deals.
We’ve all signed our share of contracts. Rental agreements, cell phone contracts, car loans. You don’t need to be a legal scholar to understand the basic concept: Two parties enter into an agreement that lasts until a fixed date. And as frustrated as you may get with, say, your landlord, you know that at the very least what you’ve signed off on can’t change upon a whim. Even if you don’t like the terms, contracts are fundamentally about guaranteeing stability.
We take this for granted – but not everyone can. A case in point is drivers at Green Fleet Systems, a trucking company serving the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.
In order to work as an “independent contractor” for the company,
The West, Texas chemical and fertilizer plant where at least 15 were killed and more than 200 injured a few weeks ago hadn’t been fully inspected by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration since 1985. (A partial inspection in 2011 had resulted in $5,250 in fines.)
OSHA and its state partners have a total of 2,200 inspectors charged with ensuring the safety of more than eight million workplaces employing 130 million workers. That comes to about one inspector for every 59,000 American workers.
There’s no way it can do its job with so few resources, but OSHA has been systematically hollowed out for years under Republican administrations and congresses that have despised the agency since its inception.
In effect, much of our nation’s worker safety laws and rules have been quietly repealed because there aren’t enough inspectors to enforce them.
That’s been the Republican strategy in general: When they can’t directly repeal laws they don’t like,
National Small Business Week is coming up in June, offering a good opportunity to contemplate what role small businesses play in both our cities and economy.
While most small businesses have a small workforce, cumulatively they provide a large percentage of the nation’s jobs. Many of the workers they hire are harder to employ, particularly in disadvantaged and immigrant communities. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, “More than half of Americans either own or work for a small business, [which] create about two out of every three new jobs in the U.S. each year.” They also contribute to our local economies more than national or multinational corporations by keeping revenues in their local areas.
Companies like Walmart, Amazon and Target have come to dominate our commercial landscape, on the ground and virtually. These one-stop retailers can destroy their competition – mainly a wide variety of small businesses but also high-road large retailers – by taking a heavy-handed,
As you’ve probably heard, the Senate is now selling a new brand of immigration reform bill called the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013. Senators — both Democrat and Republican — have stirred together a complex and massive proposal that has potential to become law, driven by a strong showing of immigrant voters in the November election.
This proposal is a huge deal for everyone who eats, and therefore matters for those working for healthy, fair and sustainable food systems and food sovereignty. Food sovereignty is the right of people to determine their own food and agriculture policies — it’s the democratization of food and agriculture. This democratization includes food chain workers having a voice in their workplace, in their communities and in government.
Unjust free trade agreements and international trade policies have forced family farmers off their land and decimated domestic industries in other countries. Many people then face few choices other than migrating from their home countries in search of work,
Today, millions of Americans who contribute to the wealth and prosperity of our country don’t get the credit they deserve. One of the closest things to economic democracy we have in this country, Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs), is something that President Barack Obama cut from his 2014 budget.
An ESOP is a type of employee retirement or savings plan, similar to stock bonuses, but with the ability to borrow money. ESOPs are typically created to buy out an owner’s interest in a company, or reward workers with the bonus of stock ownership. The stock is held in a trust fund, and employees can cash in their shares when they leave or retire.
ESOPs encourage and expand retirement savings by offering workers equity in the companies where they work. They can be a handy fix when a business needs a bailout. And studies show that they tend to increase productivity,
» Read more about: Where Credit Is Due: Employee Stock Ownership Plans »
When Wahid Rashad, 65, sees young people in Chicago chugging bottles of sugary drinks and chomping on fluorescent-orange snacks, he thinks: “That’s garbage. It doesn’t enhance the brain and energy level.”
Rashad sells apples, mangoes, papayas and peppers from a produce cart in the city’s Uptown neighborhood. Among the comments he hears from customers since he started selling in the neighborhood, especially from the younger ones: “Hey, Juicy Fruit, where were you? I was looking for you.”
“I look at myself as an educator,” said Rashad, a vendor in the Neighbor Carts program. “It’s like water: Drip, drip, drip. It builds a relationship.”
Throughout the country, grassroots community programs, such as Neighbor Carts, are fueling a block-by-block movement to provide fresh fruit and vegetables in “food deserts,” urban neighborhoods and rural areas where people don’t have ready access to fresh produce.
From Chicago to Georgia to Los Angeles,
One of California’s best-kept secrets is that May is Labor History Month. Signed into law as AB 2269 (Swanson) in 2012 by Governor Jerry Brown, its purpose is to encourage schools to commemorate this month with appropriate educational exercises that make pupils aware of the role the labor movement has played in shaping California and the United States.
That role is the making and defense of the middle class. Unions have been, and remain, by far the most important engine in creating the American Dream, homeownership for the millions, and a better life for each generation. Most of the middle class arrived in that economic neighborhood when working people got together, formed unions, and wrested a fair share of what they produced from their employers. In other words, it was by acting like a working class that most of our families became middle class.
The economic advancement of workers relies on the escalator of collective struggle.
On January 16, 2013, just after 5 a.m., 12 sheriff’s deputies and 10 Portland police officers forcefully evicted the original Portland foreclosure fighters – Debbie and Ron Austin – from their NE Portland home. The eviction was at the demand of the government sponsored and funded mortgage finance vehicle, Fannie Mae.
The family was evicted, but their home is not empty. A force of armed private security guards from McRoberts Security was immediately installed in Debbie Austin’s home. The guards have been on 24-hour duty in the home ever since.
Typical cost for private security indicates that Fannie Mae is spending $480-$600 a day, or $15,000 a month on 24-hour armed guards. Since the Austins’ January eviction, Fannie Mae has spent nearly $50,000 of essentially public money to keep one home empty.
“It was horrifying. I was standing on the sidewalk at 6 a.m. in my pajamas watching the sheriff change the locks and seeing armed security forces enter my home,”
Bestselling novelist Lisa See’s Los Angeles roots go back five generations – the Chinese branch of her biracial family has been involved in 100 years of Chinatown’s history. See, the author of Dreams of Joy and Shanghai Girls, will be the keynote speaker at the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy’s annual Women for a New Los Angeles Luncheon on May 10. She spoke to Frying Pan News about women writers, Walmart and changes in L.A.
Frying Pan News: Your family’s been here longer than most.
Lisa See: We are part of a continuum of women and men who came here and continue to come here. And it’s not only men who come to a place, as pioneers or for a new job. A great-great aunt came here in 1915 from Colorado, opened a millinery shop and caught TB. My great-great grandmother and her husband came West to Waterville,
Barack Obama’s nomination of Penny Pritzker as Commerce Secretary was a poke in the eye of the American labor movement. The niece of the founder of the Hyatt Hotel chain and current member of the company’s board, Pritzker is a key player in what UNITE HERE calls “the worst hotel employer in America.”
Go to the union’s Hyatt Hurts website for info on its global boycott and then click to UNITE HERE’s clever and diplomatic call for Pritzker to leave the board and be replaced by a hotel worker.
But even if this appointment can be turned into a tactical advantage for the union campaign, the Pritzker family brand as notorious union busters has many progressives irritated or worse by Obama’s choice. (Recently workers at two Hyatts in Long Beach California won union representation after a tough three-year battle which included the passage of Proposition N,