The headline to Daniel Borenstein’s recent Contra Costa Times column didn’t leave much to the imagination: “CalPERS planning to gut a key cost-control provision of new pension law.” Pairing CalPERS – the nation’s largest public employee retirement fund – with pension-reform sabotage promised red meat for conservatives who share the columnist’s disdain for unions. Borenstein didn’t let them down.
“By administrative fiat,” he wrote, “the California Public Employees’ Retirement System has undermined a key anti-spiking provision of the new state pension law that Gov. Jerry Brown signed last summer.” Not true, responded CalPERS, which claims Borenstein’s political biases led him to completely misrepresent its actions.
After sounding the alarm, Borenstein accused the government-run CalPERS of attempting to “fatten” pensions for new public employees while “eroding” the billions in tax dollar savings that the new law, crafted by Brown, was intended to create.
A few California local governments last week took a crucial step, almost unnoticed, to demand that banks pay back tens of millions of dollars which they allegedly conspired to take from the taxpayers. The City of Riverside, San Diego County, San Mateo County and five other government bodies sued almost two dozen multinational banks over the harm they allegedly caused taxpayers in the global “LIBOR” [London Interbank Offered Rate] scandal.
Notably absent from this initiative, however, are our California’s largest local governments: L.A. City and L.A. County. Equally notable is the failure of the news media, apart from specialized, business-oriented news services and blogs, to pay attention to what could be a major game changer in the 99%’s fight to make banks pay for crashing our economy.
Why should we care about something as obscure as the LIBOR financial index?
Because it set the interest rates for trillions of dollars in loans across all sectors of the global economy – ranging from your auto or home equity loan to multi-billion dollar government and corporate borrowings.
» Read more about: SoCal Governments Target Swap-Tainted Banks »
Readers of Monday’s New York Times may be forgiven for thinking an article by James Dao was about a new insult to America’s military veterans. After all, Dao reported that soon all vets separated from active duty within the past year, without dishonorable discharges, might be facing an even harsher existence than military life – as Walmart employees. Study after study has shown the retail behemoth to be a cutthroat employer of last resort, most of whose business innovations seem to involve new ways to save the corporation money by slashing employee hours and benefits.
Somehow, though, that didn’t figure much into the Times story. Instead, we read about a patriotic company with plans to hire 100,000 service men and women – essentially any American vet who needs a job. The recruitment begins Memorial Day, no less. According to the Times:
“Gary Profit,
» Read more about: Vets to Enter Walmart’s Supply Chain of Command »
Source: Warehouse Workers United
» Read more about: Walmart Cambodian Supplier Shuts Plant, Stiffs Workers »
TARP – the infamous Troubled Assets Relief Program that bailed out Wall Street in 2008 – is over. The Treasury Department announced it will be completing the sale of the remaining shares it owns of the banks and of General Motors.
But in reality it’s not over. The biggest Wall Street banks are now far bigger than they were four years ago when they were considered too big to fail. The five largest have almost 44 percent of all US bank deposits.
That’s up from 37 percent in 2007, just before the crash. A decade ago they had just 28 percent.
The biggest banks keep getting bigger because they can borrow more cheaply than smaller banks. That’s because investors believe the government will bail them out if they get into trouble, rather than force them into a form of bankruptcy (as the new Dodd-Frank law makes possible).
» Read more about: It’s Time to Roll Up the Welcome TARP for Big Banks »
The following infographic first appeared with frugaldad.com‘s “College Isn’t Cheap” post and is republished with permission.
In 1996 I began working at the Parent Center of Wilmington Middle School. I quickly learned how students suffer from asthma, respiratory deficiencies, malnourishment, cancer and autism. Many of these poor health conditions are linked to the pollution and poverty of the area.
I decided to join the Coalition for Clean & Safe Ports, hoping to help clean our air and reduce disease in my community. Over the past several years we have made huge progress. I believe these accomplishments were possible because so many of us came together, from residents and community-based organizations to port truck drivers, lawmakers and unions. Although it is a cliché to say there is strength in unity, in this case it was true.
Today we are fighting to change the conditions of port truck drivers – and we are still unified.
We believe that everyone who works should be valued by their employer.
2013 is making it difficult to avoid one of America’s greatest sins—slavery. We’ve just marked the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, and a plethora of films, documentaries and TV specials are scheduled to address slavery.
One blockbuster hit that’s playing in cinemas now, and is likely to walk away with several Golden Globes and Oscars, is Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained.
Django Unchained depicts a slave-turned-bounty hunter (Jamie Foxx) who fearlessly treks across the U.S. to find his wife (Kerry Washington) in order to rescue her from a brutal Mississippi plantation owner (Leonardo DiCaprio).
The film is classic Tarantino; this time a homage to the spaghetti western with romance and revenge narrative. Tarantino set the story in the most unlikely of places— America’s Deep South before the Civil War in 1858.
Tarantino is known as the “King of Carnage,” and his films’ aestheticized depictions of violence (which he calls “movie violence”) is both cruelly disturbing yet undeniably entertaining.
» Read more about: The Peculiar Controversy: Quentin Tarantino’s “Django” »
Expect scuffles between Jerry Brown and legislative Democrats over the governor’s budget blueprint.
California’s social services have certainly been cut to the bone during the recession. But Brown’s proposal for a balanced budget is a remarkable and critically important achievement which sends a message to the rest of the country:
That the bluest of all the big states can get its fiscal house in order. This was enabled, of course, by the modest tax increases in Prop. 30, passed by voters in November. Watch here as a buoyant and frisky Jerry Brown explains – in his own inimitable way – what this means.
California’s balanced budget is a repudiation of claims by conservatives that only Republican-led states can manage their books and grow their economies. Thirty states have Republican governors and all but six of them have legislative majorities, making possible all sorts of right-wing mayhem on worker,