“Give and it shall be given unto you is still the truth about life.”
D.H. Lawrence said that almost a century ago. Now we can read scientific evidence that this statement is true. How much we have or how much we earn does not make us happy. How we spend what we have is what makes us happy and the more that spending connects us to other human beings, the happier we are. Giving – to another person or through a charitable organization – is the deepest connection we can make.
While the conclusions of Happy Money, a book by research academics Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton, demonstrate that happiness and giving are closely connected, they also indicate that giving boosts our odds of living longer and healthier. Furthermore, the authors say, when a man in an experimental situation gave more to someone needy,
Last week Los Angeles County Children’s Social Workers went on strike after contract talks with the county broke down. At the heart of the conflict are claims made by the CSWs that the Department of Public Social Services and the L.A. County Board of Supervisors have refused to include in a new labor agreement a binding commitment to reduce the number of employee caseloads. The CSWs, represented by the Service Employees International Union Local 721, say the caseload numbers “greatly exceed acceptable industry standards.”
This morning at 11 a.m., union members, along with community and faith leaders, will take their complaints to field offices of the five supervisors: Gloria Molina, Zev Yaroslavsky, Don Knabe, Mark Ridley-Thomas and Mike Antonovich. The chief focus of Monday’s strike rallies will be Molina’s El Monte office, at 3400 Aerojet Avenue.
Local 721 claims the support of U.S. Congresswomen Janice Hahn and Judy Chu,
November, 2013 was not a good month to be a Walmart corporate executive.
The headaches for the nation’s largest employer of low-wage workers began November 18, when the National Labor Relations Board found that Walmart illegally threatened, disciplined and fired employees over last year’s Black Friday strikes and protests. The finding was the first step in an NLRB complaint asserting that the retail giant violated workers’ rights.
The Black Friday protests have been a driving force behind the core demand by Walmart employees that the company raise the annual earnings for sales associates above the federal poverty line.
That NLRB bombshell soon snowballed into a public relations disaster when, on the same day, news broke that a Canton, Ohio Walmart store had instituted a Thanksgiving food drive on behalf of store employees unable to afford a holiday meal. The Canton story was subsequently credited with reigniting the congressional fight for the first increase in the national $7.25-per-hour minimum wage since 2007.
Thursday’s one-day strike by fast-food workers may have received relatively little media coverage, but the doubling of strike sites to 100 cities over the previous nationwide actions showed the movement for higher wages and union recognition is growing.
The largest actions were held in New York City and Chicago, where, according to the Guardian UK, “hundreds of protesters gathered outside a McDonald’s at 6:15 a.m. as a large ‘Christmas Grinch’ ambled about in freezing temperatures.”
According to the Seattle Times, about 150 demonstrators rallied at City Hall following an all-day march in icy weather from neighboring SeaTac. In Los Angeles, rallies were held at dawn in South Los Angeles at a Manchester Boulevard McDonald’s, as well as a Sunset Boulevard McDonald’s in Silver Lake, at noon. The movement for fast-food employee rights has the twin goals of raising starting salaries to $15 an hour (at present they typically begin at $7.25) and to win the right to organize workers into unions.
» Read more about: Fast-Food Workers Movement Pushes Ahead »
The California Chamber of Commerce represents more than 13,000 businesses, from companies such as Microsoft and Walt Disney, to local companies with small numbers of employees. From its K Street headquarters in Sacramento, the “Cal Chamber,” as it’s colloquially known, analyzes some 3,000 pieces of legislation every year. In the past 10 years, 341 of 353 — nearly 97 percent — of the bills opposed by the California Chamber of Commerce failed to become law. The vast majority of these were never passed by the Legislature and sent to the Governor. Instead, they were killed in committee or voted down by the Legislature or amended to take out provisions opposed by the chamber.
The chamber’s weapon of choice is its highly publicized “Job Killers List,” a roll call of bills the chamber claims threaten the interests of business, though its press releases tend to stress the bills’ menace to California’s economy and its workers’ jobs.
» Read more about: DOA: Behind the Chamber of Commerce’s “Job Killers” List »
the age of the innerview dawns and the need
to be first is muted by a
multitude of passings/desire honed so sharp
the edges bleed, lips and hands
assume a silent patience/at rest as a savage
brilliance is reborn in this ancient ravaged griot
who am i? what am i? are no longer important questions.
knowing that i am is finally enough
like discovering dessert is delicious following a disastrous
meal, a sweetness that reawakens
the palate, or finding that one’s chalice is unexpectedly
filled with elixir of euphoria
and i stumble happily into the cornucopia, arms
outstretched, upturned, drunk
my heart athrum, bones full samba. the night
blesses me with his constellations
baptizes me with his deathless autumnal chill
and i invade the moody indigo
full-throated and singing
Over the past week, since Wanda Coleman’s untimely death at 67, admirers have been remembering her formidable body of work, her electrifying readings – and her identification with the city she called her home. Growing up in Watts in the 1950s, she experienced not only discrimination but also taunts by other black children because of her dark skin and untamable hair—which she describes in Bathwater Wine as “threads within coils within knots within twists.”
As a child, she took refuge in books, although not necessarily in libraries. (One poem describes a white librarian policing her through the stacks.) Her love of language sustained Coleman through her struggles to earn a living as a single mother, to cope with the death of a son and her own ill health. She did not choose an easy path. Furthermore, the West Coast is a hard place for any poet to make her name.
But Los Angeles gave Coleman a vocabulary and a landscape that she in turn made her own.
» Read more about: can’t let go of it: Appreciating Wanda Coleman »
1. “Buy American” Law. AB 1543, introduced by Luis A. Alejo (D-Salinas), would have created a billion-dollar market for goods manufactured in California by requiring that, starting in 2014, at least 70 percent of state and local agency procurement be spent on manufactured goods made in the United States. Failed 04/27/12 deadline to move to fiscal committee.
2. Minimum Wage COLA Law. AB 10, introduced by Luis A. Alejo (D-Watsonville), would have automatically indexed state minimum wage increases to inflation. Held in Assembly Appropriations 5/27/11; failed deadline. (Subsequently, AB 10, raising minimum wage to $10 by 2016, was signed by Governor Jerry Brown earlier this year.)
3. Wage Theft Lien Law. AB 2517, or the California Wage Lien Bill, introduced by Mike Eng (D-Monterey Park), would have expanded the Mechanics Lien Law to allow workers from all industries to file a lien without an attorney for unpaid labor against the property where the work was done.
» Read more about: Capitol Punishment: Nine Good Bills the Cal Chamber Wanted Killed »
Driving past Echo Park the other day I saw a cat convulsing in the road. It had plainly been hit by a car and was, hopefully, near death. I considered backing up and driving over the poor thing to end its misery, but I didn’t have the strength.
Francis Underwood, played by Kevin Spacey, finds himself in a similar situation in the opening scene of the Netflix series, House of Cards. He strangles a wounded creature (a dog) as he tells us there are two kinds of pain—that which makes you stronger and that which has no purpose and is thus just suffering.
Read Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru’s League of Denial and I promise you’ll be convinced there’s a third, perhaps more complicated category—suffering whose purpose is collective pleasure, incriminating participant and observer simultaneously.
The risks of repeated blows to the head are obvious and have been known for some time.
While growing up an American Catholic, I learned to tune out the Vatican, which had the air of Old World irrelevancy. The pope, I thought, was just the Catholic Church’s version of Queen Elizabeth, some doddering old monarch with no real power. The uncharismatic Pope Paul VI was a case in point, a kind of Millard Fillmore of the papacy. But instead of some dude with a bad 19th century haircut embroiled in states’ rights debates, this was an old Italian guy in a white dress. Same difference. But what did it have to do with my world?
Well, plenty as it turned out, for my boyhood coincided with the implementation of Pope John XXIII’s Vatican II reforms, which did in fact alter my world—in important ways. For a 9-year-old those important changes included permission to wear sneakers and T-shirts into church, the folk mass, no Latin classes — and an interesting lesson in architecture as the new circular churches that began to appear were more like theater in the round vs.
» Read more about: Pope Francis: Is God Actually in the House? »