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David Brooks, the usually buttoned-down columnist for the New York Times, succumbed recently to a peculiar eruption of Id. Like many of his fellow conservatives, he’s in a snit about The Life of Julia, an Obama campaign slideshow that portrays the title character benefiting from federal programs like Head Start and Social Security. (See my previous article here.) Brooks casts Julia as a “vision of government as national Sugar Daddy, delivering free money and goodies up and down the life cycle.” My attention was riveted by that term, “Sugar Daddy,” which doesn’t just refer, say, to a rich uncle, but to an older man who showers gifts on a young woman, often, by implication, in return for sexual favors. It’s difficult to imagine Brooks taking a detour into so dark a recess of the imagination if it had been The Life of James.
(The following news announcement was issued by the Harvard Business School.)
Research published today in Science sheds light on a hot-button political issue: the role and effectiveness of government regulation. Does it kill jobs or protect the public?
The new study, co-authored by Harvard Business School Professor Michael Toffel, Professor David Levine of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, and Boston University doctoral student Matthew Johnson, examines workplace safety inspections conducted by California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal/OSHA). The authors carried out the first evaluation of a “clinical trial” of the state’s mandated randomized inspections to discern their effect on both worker safety and companies’ bottom lines.
The results overturn conventional wisdom: Workplace inspections do reduce on-the-job injuries and their associated costs, and the researchers could not detect any harm to companies’
Economic development in Arizona is now by corporations for corporations and the public is left to in the dark as to how its tax dollars are spent. Last year the state’s Department of Commerce was replaced by the public-private Arizona Commerce Authority (ACA), steered by a board of mostly corporate representatives. The ACA’s website picture shows the board of directors as Governor Jan Brewer with 18 corporate titans. The bottom of the page mentions a smaller number of “ex-officio” public officials associated with the board who aren’t named or pictured.
Though not listed on the website, the ACA also depends on corporate donations for its office space, its corporate-sized CEO salary, and much of its operating budget. The arrangement would pose unsettling conflict-of-interest problems for any authority that performs a public function.
But this isn’t just any agency. Its task is to try boosting the state economy by handing out taxpayer-financed subsidies to individual companies of its choosing.
» Read more about: Arizona’s Taxes Help Corporations Subsidize Themselves »
(The following post appeared yesterday on California Progress Report; a slightly shorter version was first posted on the Consumer Federation of California‘s Web site.)
By Richard Holober
Californians are exposed to dangerous levels of toxic chemicals in our homes, thanks to a 37 year old state furniture regulation. While the regulation never served its intended goal of reducing fires in our homes, its legacy of toxic harm lives on.
Click here to ask the Governor to take toxics out of our furniture.
In May 2012, a remarkable investigative series in the Chicago Tribune exposed decades of lies, coercion and influence peddling by flame retardant manufacturers. The report describes how a chemical industry front group paid a medical school professor to travel to Sacramento to testify on two separate occasions before the state legislature.
» Read more about: Getting the Poison Out of Our Furniture »
Solid waste company American Reclamation, Inc. which for months has come under heavy fire over alleged safety violations and poor treatment of its employees, was cited by Cal/OSHA this week following an investigation by the agency into conditions at its Atwater recycling facility.
Cal/OSHA issued 36 citations to the company, its recycling subsidiary, South Coast Fibers, Inc. and their staffing agency totaling nearly $40,000 in penalties.
The investigation stemmed from complaints filed by Karla Campos, a 25-year-old Glendale resident and former American Reclamation worker. “American Reclamation treats us worse than the trash we sort,” said Campos, who has charged that she was fired by the company after falling on trash and breaking her tailbone.
The citations come as the L.A. City Council considers adopting a new exclusive franchise system for commercial and multifamily waste. The system would mitigate many of the problems found in the current system —
» Read more about: Cal/OSHA Cites American Reclamation for Unsafe Conditions »
It’s hard to know where to begin. A co-worker walked onto the restaurant floor after her break. She was shaking her head. She’d been on the computer downstairs.
“It’s official,” she said. “Obama was born in Kenya. He wasn’t born in America.”
I took a deep breath. The kind normally reserved for hearing alien abduction stories. The kind of deep breath I have to take before telling my nephews that there is no monster living in their closet. The kind of deep breath I take before watching Fox News.
What I find fascinating, appalling and comical about “Birther” conspiracy theories is that it doesn’t matter how many times Obama himself shows his birth certificate. They all derive from the notion that President Obama is not being honest with us. That he is lying.
A recent post by the right-leaning Breitbart.com might even explain the origin of the Obama birthplace rumors.
» Read more about: Birther Smackdown: Obama and Shakespeare »
We all know the wealthy and well-connected are accustomed to playing by their own set of rules. Their high-powered lawyers and lobbyists write special exemptions for them the rest of us would never be able to get.
For instance, G.E. made $14.2 billion in profits yet paid no taxes to the federal government – in fact, they got a refund. Despite crashing our economy and getting a massive bailout from taxpayers, the big banks somehow evade meaningful financial industry regulations. Corporate CEOs are slashing the jobs, wages and retirement of rank-and-file workers, but still giving themselves record bonuses and golden parachutes.
It’s not that there aren’t rules that we should all live by to make this a more fair and equitable society. It’s just that the very wealthy know how to get around those rules by creating a maze of exemptions that allow them to gain even more power at our expense.
» Read more about: “Stop Special Interest Money Now Act” Isn’t What It Seems »
The president’s re-election campaign recently unveiled an Internet slideshow demonstrating to women some possible consequences of their votes this fall. The Life of Julia, a mini-biography in 11 episodes, has an imaginary toddler, Julia, enrolling in a Head Start program, a 27-year-old Web-designer Julia benefiting from mandated preventive health care coverage, and a retiree Julia living “comfortably” on Social Security. And it contrasts the fate of these programs under Obama and Romney policies. Visually engaging but hardly dramatic, well-pitched but far from edgy as campaign advertising, The Life of Julia, I am tempted to say, is not all that interesting in itself.
Not so the conservative response to Julia. Paul Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman, pronounced the slideshow “creepy” and “demeaning.” Julia’s life is “banal and hackneyed,” wrote William Bennett, in a more literary frame of mind. Ross Douthat perceived liberal “condescension” at every turn of Julia’s fictional life.
We all want safe roads and bridges—free of debris, potholes and cracks. How do we intend to pay for this? (Insert the sound of crickets here.)
Our roads and bridges don’t actually pay for themselves. Currently, the state and the federal government collect $.357 (set to increase to $.360 on July 1) and $.182, respectively, from every gallon of gas we purchase to pay for road maintenance, modernization and new facilities. However, the pot of money that goes towards building and maintaining our roads and bridges has gotten smaller and smaller over the last three decades for several reasons:
1. Cars have become more fuel efficient
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has continued to set higher standards for auto manufacturers to improve the fuel efficiency of cars. Over the last decade, in part due to CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards, auto manufacturers have unveiled more attractive hybrid and alternative-fuel vehicles,
» Read more about: The Elephant in the Room — Raising the Gas Tax »
Today 1,000 new millionaires (and a few billionaires) are walking the planet, thanks to Facebook’s new IPO. Facebook has fundamentally changed the way people connect to each other and presents an unprecedented opportunity for advertisers to reach highly targeted markets. That explains its over-the-top, $104 billion valuation. What is not being talked about in the business sections is the technology that made Facebook possible. If you go to the “developer’s section” at the bottom of a Facebook page you will find this statement under “Open Source:”
“Facebook has been developed from the ground up using open source software. Developers building with Platform scale their own applications using many of the same infrastructure technologies that power Facebook.”
“Developed from the ground up” — i.e., by the open-source communities that allow people to freely use, distribute and modify source code in unending cycles of improvement. If Ben Mezrich’s Facebook history,
» Read more about: How Mark Zuckerberg Became a Billionaire »
A few weeks back I stood at the corner of 65th and Normandie, in South Los Angeles, remembering what used to be there. An old church, maybe from the 1930s — Spanish Revival with white-washed plaster and enough curved red tile on the roof to make you think it might be real. The congregation members had long since moved away or died, and now the building itself was gone, replaced by sparkling new apartments with units exclusively designed for emancipated youth. Each year in Los Angeles County 1,500 kids get cut loose from the foster-parent system. They are 18 years old with no family, no job, no place to live, no skills and no support to learn any, which is why a majority will end up on the streets or in jail.
And this is why this building, the Epworth Apartments, means so much. Over the years, it could save the lives of scores of young adults.
» Read more about: South LA Story: A Garden and a Place Called Home »
By Carl Franzen
(Note: Last January Donald Cohen wrote here of the conservative political animus against new, green lighting technologies – namely, compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs). The following repost of a May 12 Talking Points Memo feature looks at the evolution of another alternative to wasteful incandescent lighting – illumination by light-emitting diodes (LEDs).
Battle lines were drawn in Las Vegas, Nevada this week at the 23rd annual Lightfair International trade show, an exposition of the latest in artificial lighting technology.
Spurred in part by the controversial, misunderstood, national phase-out of energy inefficient incandescent bulbs that began in January, companies are racing to develop light-emitting diode (LED) bulbs that meet the new energy standards, and yet will provide the same lighting quality that consumers are used to getting from the old, inefficient incandescents.
Until recently the Internet, along with the devices that brought it to us and the platforms that have expanded its usefulness, held a certain cool, selfless allure. The Web was mostly the idea of young, rule-breaking rebels, and their insurgent mystique made them hero geeks. Browsing a favorite blog on our laptops, a cup of red-eye coffee nearby, we felt a part of the New. Then money began doing what it always does to young, rule-breaking rebels – it turned them into our parents, our landlords and our loan officers.
It began in earnest, I suppose, with last year’s tiff between Amazon.com and the state of California over Sacramento’s insistence that the online retail behemoth start collecting state taxes on its sales. Amazon eventually struck “compromises” with California and other states that mostly favored Amazon. Many of us in California smiled – we got an extra year of purchasing on the site without paying taxes.
» Read more about: How Our Internet Heroes Lost Their Cool »
New York City’s Public Advocate, Bill de Blasio, and the Coalition for Accountability in Political Spending (CAPS) have put together a nifty online chart called 6 Degrees of Walmart. It’s actually more than a chart – think of it as a kind of star finder that allows the user to locate eight constellations of alleged corporate malfeasance and consumer abuse committed by the retail giant. Click on its Gun icon and you’ll find out how Walmart, through its support of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), backs Stand Your Ground laws. Click the Dollar sign and you’ll learn how Walmart colludes with the Business Roundtable and others to protect corporate tax subsidies.
(Please note: The above image is not interactive; to interact, go to the 6 Degrees of Walmart site.)
There’s also an explanation of how Walmart tries to burnish its environmental and corporate responsibility cred through its “sustainability program”
[caption id="attachment_8972" align="aligncenter" width="432"]
Cassidy Noblett[/caption]
(The following action alert comes from ClimatePlan.org; news of the alert first appeared at Housing California, which lists 18 Los Angeles County projects that could be affected by the transfer of housing construction funds.)
Senate President pro Tem Darrell Steinberg is considering using unencumbered housing funds from former redevelopment agencies to balance the 2012-13 state budget. Such a sweep would impact at least 175 pipeline developments poised to create 23,455 construction-phase jobs in the next two years.
In recent comments to the Sacramento Bee, Steinberg raised the possibility of abandoning his SB 654, which would preserve the low-mod balances for their original intended use. A survey indicates this move would threaten construction of at least 10,215 homes that were counting on the availability of redevelopment funding to move forward.
Key Assembly members recognize the value of the jobs and taxes generated by home construction,
» Read more about: State Housing Construction Funds in Jeopardy »
This week the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor sent letters to every elected official in L.A. County (including Congress members), urging them to return all campaign contributions they may have received from Walmart – and to refuse future donations from the retail giant. The letter, which is signed by a broad spectrum of union leaders, juxtaposes Walmart’s alleged bribery scheme in Mexico with L.A. City Hall’s quick approval of the corporation’s permits for a new store in Chinatown. (The letter’s text appears below.)
“It doesn’t take campaign finance reform,” the signatories say, “to prevent Walmart from wrapping its tentacles around our political system in L.A. County.”
» Read more about: Labor to Electeds: Return Walmart Money! »
(The following post first appeared May 1 on Truthdig.)
By Bill Boyarsky
By chance, the revelation of how Apple evades millions of dollars in taxes broke three days before May Day, when workers of the world traditionally protest such injustice.
Although the Apple practices aren’t illegal, the dodging of taxes on revenue generated, to a large extent, by low-wage Chinese workers, was a perfect introduction to this year’s May 1 observance, highlighted by the Occupy movement’s call for strikes and demonstrations around the country. The goal: Protest corporate domination of an economy being pulled downward by growing income inequality and intractable unemployment.
The New York Times reported that the technology company has used loopholes to reduce its tax bills in 21 states and overseas by billions of dollars annually by creating subsidiaries in places with low-tax or no-tax policies.
» Read more about: Organizing for Change: Different Drummers, Common Cause »
The SEC is dragging its feet implementing a section of the Dodd-Frank reform that would require publicly traded companies to calculate the ratio between the CEO’s pay and that of the firm’s median pay package. The New York Times editorial board urges them to push forward.
Corporate lobbyists say it’s too complicated to figure out the math. They figured out how to create uber-complex financial products that untangled the global economy, but aren’t able to divide the CEO’s earnings (they must know) by the median employee pay?
Of course, the real reason they oppose the law is that they don’t want to add fire to the public debate about excessive CEO salaries – certainly while the rest of America struggles to pay bills, put kids through college and afford mortgage payments. Obscurity, not transparency, benefits the privileged.
Their opposition to useful information for investors and consumers is a replay of earlier legislative battles.
» Read more about: Why Can’t CEOs Do the Math on Their Pay? »
