What Is a Green Job, Anyway?

I’m a professional green jobs advocate.   On my way out the door every day, I tell whoever will listen that I’m going to work to stop global warming and create thousands of jobs.  So what are green jobs?

Since it’s a matter that very much concerns the next generation, I asked a young representative that I found sitting on my couch watching pre-season football.

Even with this important distraction, my 11-year-old son managed:  “It’s a job that helps the environment.”

Okay.  But what are some examples?

“I don’t know,” said the rep. “Planting trees?  Maintaining solar panels?”

To Praise Cesar

Last May, at a public meeting the National Park Service held in Oxnard to gather stories about the farmworkers movement, a man in his 50s came up to Martha Crusius. He told her about a rally he’d attended with his parents, migrant workers from Mexico, back in the 1960s.

“He was a little kid back then, and he really didn’t understand it,” Crusius says. “But he remembered that there was this small, soft-spoken Mexican guy leading the rally, and he was someone people really looked up to.” While listening to others testify at the meeting, he realized what he’d witnessed. “That man,” he told Crusius, “was Cesar Chavez.”

The Antisocial Network

Against the Mighty Amazon

I used to love Amazon.com.  After a book group meeting I’d run home and order a used copy of the next book we were reading, sometimes paying only $1.00 (plus shipping) for a “lightly worn” paperback.  I even bought a CD player and cordless phones from the online retailer.  Amazon introduced me to online shopping and I thought I’d never have to enter a mall again in my life.

But this summer Amazon threatened to declare war on the great (and economically struggling) state of California, and I’m pissed off.  By refusing to collect California sales taxes on purchases from our state, Amazon wanted to be a freeloader of local government services while it rakes in millions of dollars from California residents.

Where would Amazon.com be if the state and local governments didn’t maintain the streets and highways that UPS and U.S. Postal Service trucks drive on to deliver those little Amazon cardboard packages? 

Five Signs We’re Going to Hell in a Prius

There Goes the Union

I grew up on the western edge of South Central, near Century Boulevard and Van Ness Avenue. My block was full of local government workers—sanitation, probation, school district. I don’t know if the private-sector folks were unionized, but their wages were competitive enough to allow them to buy houses in the area, a scenario made possible by the standards set by unions that, from my perspective, were becoming mainstream. Part of that standard was hiring blacks as a matter of course.

It hardly needs to be said that today’s focused attack by the Right on unions all over the country is an attack on the working and middle classes. Public employee unions are the big target now because the private sector unions have frankly become too puny over the last generation to pose much of a threat any more to the corporate powers that be, which have expanded as rapidly—more rapidly, actually– as unions have dwindled.

Club for Growth Declares War on the NLRB

Our Wild Wild Waste System

As some folks know, the City of Los Angeles’ Bureau of Sanitation and Board of Public Works have been holding a series of stakeholder meetings about raising the bar for how our city picks up and handles waste  at businesses and apartment complexes.  As of now, we have what’s called a permit system – and, despite the city’s Herculean efforts, it’s a free-for-all.  Basically, private waste hauling companies pick up trash on overlapping truck routes – jumping over one another in every corner of the city for individual accounts.

The results?

In general – whether we’re talking about job standards, air quality standards, or recycling standards – we’ve  got a race to the bottom.  For now, though, let’s talk about truck routes.  We’ve got neighborhood blocks – particularly in communities with a high proportion of renters– with five or six different companies picking up trash at adjacent buildings.  That means emissions,

Old School, New School

Worse Than Smurfs

Valley Cool: Keeping Profitable and Green in Pacoima

The Frying Pan recently visited John Hernandez, the owner of a State Farm Insurance agency in Pacoima, a blue-collar community  located in the North San Fernando Valley. He is also a member of the Pacoima Chamber of Commerce, Arleta Neighborhood Council, Pacoima Neighborhood Council, LAPD Foothill Area Booster Association and a member business of Icon Community Development Corp.

Frying Pan: You opened your insurance office in July 2010 — why open in such tough economic times?

John Hernandez: I guess you could say I have that entrepreneurial spirit — being in the business for over 20 years, I felt the need to open my own. I wanted to come to a community where there was no presence from other major carriers. I felt like there was a need in Pacoima for affordable insurance and a preferred carrier. I have four employees, so I was also focused on bringing some jobs to the community.

Arguing the World Stage

[printme]Richard Montoya got a surprise not too long ago. The playwright-performer of L.A.’s satirical comedy troupe, Culture Clash, discovered that a book of plays his company had performed over the years had been swept up in a contemporary American controversy. Namely, the shutting down of the Mexican-American Studies Program at Tucson Magnet High School. The book was part of the program’s curriculum until Arizona’s Attorney General, Tom Horne, found the  program to be insufficiently patriotic under a new state law.

Horne will be appearing before the Ninth Circuit Federal Court of Appeals in a matter of months. Meanwhile, Montoya’s new play, American Night – a picaresque view of American history through the eyes of a Mexican immigrant – has received good reviews at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, where it is being performed through September. The Tucson brouhaha re-ignites a debate about the purpose of American political theater with a social justice message.