It might surprise many to learn that business people all over America have joined the fight against economic inequality. Here are 10 notable, wealthy individuals who have advocated for ending tax cuts on the rich and increasing programs for the poor:
Morris Pearl A managing director of the multibillion dollar, multinational investment management corporation BlackRock, Inc., Pearl is a member of Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength. The group petitioned President Obama to allow the Bush-era tax cuts on incomes greater than $1 million to expire “for the economic well-being of regular Americans.”
Stephen M. Silberstein This former U.C.» Read more about: 10 Business Leaders Who Just Say No to Economic Inequality »
A Ventura County judge Monday issued a setback to anti-pension zealots who have been working to roll back public employee benefits. The judge’s tentative ruling found fundamental flaws in a ballot measure to cut county employee pensions and concluded that putting it before voters would amount to nothing more than a waste of public tax dollars – a rebuke that must smart among groups who identify themselves as taxpayer advocates.
One of their central tactics has been to stir up resentment among the public, most of whom have seen their own benefits shrivel up over the years, then place measures on the ballot to slash public employee pensions. As Capital & Main’s Gary Cohn reported, anti-tax activists saw this particular Ventura measure as a template for what would be a wave of pension rollback measures.
“I guarantee you that when this passes, in 2016 every ’37 Act county will have this on their ballot,” Ventura County Supervisor Peter Foy said at the time.
» Read more about: Illegal Ballot Measure a Setback for Anti-Pension Activists »
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Alone and Afraid from Capital & Main on Vimeo.
The clock is ticking for six refugee children from El Salvador and Guatemala who are plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit that seeks to compel the Obama administration to ensure access to legal representation for tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors facing deportation proceedings.
The plaintiffs are among the more than 50,000 Central American children who have illegally crossed the border into the Southwestern United States in recent months, fleeing threats of violence by transnational street gangs that arguably exert more effective control over the daily lives of residents in large swathes of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras than those countries’ national governments.
Over a period extending from this month to early next year, the six plaintiffs are scheduled to appear for their own deportation hearings.
» Read more about: Refugee Children Seek Representation in Courts »
The Internet’s Own Boy —the title says it all. Writer-director Brian Knappenberger‘s weak and propagandistic hagiography is as infantilizing to its audience as it is to its subject, and adds no luster to the memory of pioneering programmer and information activist Aaron Swartz, who was 26 when he took his own life in January 2013.
At the time of his suicide, the federal government was prosecuting Swartz on computer crime charges in connection with downloading (but never distributing) nearly five million academic journal articles from the online repository JSTOR, which he had accessed via a computer in a supply closet at MIT. The indictment was patently ludicrous; JSTOR itself had declined to press charges against Swartz. But the Justice Department was determined to make an example of him anyway, as it has repeatedly done with other hackers whom it has harassed and even jailed. That Swartz was gravely wronged by prosecutors Carmen Ortiz and Stephen Heymann is as plain as day.
You can mail a letter anywhere in the domestic United States for just 49 cents. Think about that for a second. Your letter literally can travel thousands of miles – over mountains, across great lakes and through the desert – for less than the cost of a bag of M&M’s.
But some want to outsource the postal services and its workers to giant retail stores such as Staples, which would destroy what is perhaps the greatest bargain still available in America. A recent piece by David Morris in the Huffington Post explains why this is a bad idea.
There is something we can do about it. The American Postal Workers Union has launched a campaign, Stop Staples: The U.S. Mail is Not for Sale, which is garnering strong support from millions of Americans, including teachers. And as a huge seller of notebooks, pens and other school supplies,
Truck drivers in California’s ports have been fighting for decades for rights most workers take for granted: The right to a minimum wage, the right to proper employee classification, and especially the right to form a union. In the wake of the deregulatory wave of the 1980s, downward pressure on trucking companies led to destructive competition, which led first to union-busting, and then to the widespread misclassification of truck drivers as independent contractors. This, despite the fact that legal and factual analyses have shown – theoretically in 2010 and based on a wave of then-recent rulings in 2014 – that these truck drivers are subject to the control and direction of the trucking companies they haul for. (Full disclosure: I was a co-author of the 2014 report.) Under any legal test, these are employee drivers being deprived of their employee rights; their condition has been compared to that of sharecropping and involuntary servitude.
» Read more about: Recent Court Rulings Aid Port Truck Drivers »
This is the first in an occasional series of interviews with California business leaders.
When it comes to shaping the conversation about business in Southern California, few people wield as much influence as Charles Crumpley. As editor of the Los Angeles Business Journal, Crumpley oversees one of the more impressive news operations in the region, garnering numerous awards for the publication during his eight-year tenure. And while the Business Journal is very much a tribune for conventional ideas about business and the economy, Crumpley has been remarkably open-minded about printing other perspectives, including those of activists with a sharp critique of corporate America.
Capital & Main sat down with Crumpley, whose 30-year journalism career has included stints in Kansas City and New Orleans, in the Business Journal‘s Miracle Mile offices to discuss economic inequality,
» Read more about: A Talk With the L.A. Business Journal’s Charles Crumpley »
The charges against several McDonald’s franchises were as familiar as items on a Happy Meals menu: “illegally firing, threatening or otherwise penalizing workers for their pro-labor activities,” to quote the New York Times. What was novel about them was the news, first reported Tuesday by Associated Press, that the National Labor Relations Board’s general counsel had found that the fast-food giant is responsible for these crimes when they are committed by the chain’s individual franchise owners. (Of 181 cases that came before the NLRB, 43 were found to have merit, 64 are still pending investigation and the rest were dismissed.)
This is big – very big. If there is any doubt, look no further than the Wall Street Journal’s headline for the story: McDonald’s Ruling Sets Ominous Tone for Franchisers. The reason for this “ominous” forecast is the knowledge that the NLRB’s findings could establish the principle that the corporation and the chain’s franchise owners are “joint employers,” sharing equal responsibility for their employees’ welfare – and equal blame when workers’ rights are trampled on.
» Read more about: NLRB: McDonald’s Is Responsible for Franchises’ Behavior »
For Oneil Cannon, breaking the color line of L.A.’s lily-white printers’ union didn’t simply mean facing a night of scalding verbal abuse during his first union hall meeting – moments before it began he’d been refused service at knifepoint at a nearby restaurant. Jackie Goldberg says her activist’s DNA was shaped less by Berkeley’s celebrated Free Speech Movement than by a little-noticed women’s conference held the year before the U.C. campus erupted. Peter Douglas’ journey from the frozen roads of war-torn Poland to Redondo Beach’s balmy Esplanade led the father of California’s Coastal Act to become a “radical pagan heretic.”
These and more than 40 other reminiscences by Southern California social activists have been recorded by Julie Thompson and her husband, Brogan de Paor, as part of an ambitious yet shoestring-funded project called the Activist Video Archive. So far the couple’s subjects have also included Haskell Wexler, Cheri Gaulke,
» Read more about: Setting the Record Straight: L.A.’s Activist Video Archive »
Whenever I hear something that sounds a little fishy, I always follow my mom’s advice to consider the source. So when two professors from Temple University touted a study praising the quality and cost effectiveness of private prisons, advocates wanted to know who funded it. Not surprisingly, it turned out that the private prison industry paid for the study, a fact conveniently missing from the professors’ early draft and media appearances.
In the Public Interest’s friend and colleague Alex Friedmann, managing editor of the monthly Prison Legal News and associate director of the Human Rights Defense Center, filed an ethics complaint with Temple University. In addition, ITPI and 15 other organizations demanded that Temple conduct an ethics review.
In response, Temple University has disassociated itself from the study. In addition, the methodology behind the study has also been called out for being misleading and its conclusions for being inaccurate.