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“The biggest scam of the last 100 years is global warming!” thundered Stephen Moore to ALEC’s plenary breakfast club this morning. “It’s no surprise that when you give these professors $10 billion, they’re going to find a problem.” Moore then singled out North Dakota for its regulatory-free attitudes toward the fracking industry: “I just have one message for you — drill, baby, drill!”
See more of our coverage of the ALEC Annual Meeting
The annual meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council began wrapping up business in San Diego Friday on this defiant note from Moore, a former Wall Street Journal writer. This newly hired Heritage Foundation economist is an apostle of completely eliminating state income taxes and has been in a running feud with liberal economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, over Moore’s casual regard for accurate reporting.
Moore’s speaking partner today was fellow supply-sider Arthur Laffer,
» Read more about: ALEC Confidential: Tales from the Supply-Side »
Scott Walker couldn’t have asked for more.
When the Wisconsin governor took the dais Thursday at the American Legislative Exchange Council’s annual conference in San Diego, his audience was ravenous for any vision that included destroying unions and cracking down on America’s criminal underclass.
See more of our coverage of the ALEC Annual Meeting
The venue was the plenary croissants-and-eggs breakfast, but it would be hard to imagine an audience hungrier for the red meat Governor Walker threw out to it.
Every key bill Walker has been associated with, since his get-tough-on-crime heyday as a state assemblyman in the 1990s, has been a plagiarism of an ALEC model bill. Such as laws that eliminated parole (and ballooned state prison populations) or that imposed a voter ID law, gutted public education and teacher protections, and made Wisconsin the 25th right-to-work state.
Walker himself isn’t an actual member of the secretive corporate lobbying network (ALEC only admits legislators,
» Read more about: ALEC Confidential: Scott Walker Talks the Walk »
For several tense hours yesterday San Diego’s plush Manchester Grand Hyatt hotel, located in the city’s Embarcadero district, felt more like Athens’ besieged Parliament than a resort on California’s laid-back shoreline.
Around 2 p.m. the hotel, which is playing host to this year’s annual meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), sealed off all entrances except its main lobby in what became a virtual lockdown.
See more of our coverage of the ALEC Annual Meeting
For the 1,300 state legislators and corporate lobbyists gathered inside, the perceived security threat turned out to be from those who stand the most to lose from ALEC attacks on workplace rights, minimum wage laws and state health and environmental standards — California workers.
An estimated 2,500 protestors, carrying placards declaring California to be an “ALEC-Free Zone,” gathered around 1 p.m. in Embarcadero Marina Park to hear a series of speakers lambasting the secretive,
» Read more about: Labor Rally Sends ALEC Conference Into Lockdown Mode »
The 42nd Annual Meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) got underway in earnest Wednesday at San Diego’s Manchester Grand Hyatt resort hotel. The mood was convivial and the attire corporate casual: Brooks Brothers suits without ties, Dockers and sports shirts.
Although this year’s star attractions — a GOP presidential frontrunner, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, and a returning presidential contender, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee — weren’t scheduled to speak until Thursday, conference delegates had plenty to do yesterday.
The packed opening luncheon featured Iowa’s virulently anti-immigrant Congressman, Steve King.
ALEC, a secretive rightwing bill mill that gets its funding from the Koch Brothers and global multibillion dollar corporations, has been described as a legislative dating service that arranges hookups between mostly Republican state lawmakers and corporate lobbyists.
See more of our coverage of the ALEC Annual Meeting
The actual “dates” occur at meetings like those unfolding in San Diego — a council spokesperson said 1,300 conferees were in attendance — and take place behind locked doors,
» Read more about: ALEC Confidential: Inside the San Diego Conference »
Texas law enforcement officials may or may not have murdered Sandra Bland in her jail cell earlier this month, three days after her arrest during a routine traffic stop. At a Monday press conference, Waller County District Attorney Elton Mathis – who is charged with investigating Ms. Bland’s death – implicitly blamed the victim: “Sandra Bland was very combative. It was not a model traffic stop. It was not a model person that was stopped.”
We’ve heard this before, especially in response to police killings of African Americans. Michael Brown, killed by Ferguson police, was “no angel.” Freddie Gray, killed in Baltimore, was “no saint.” Former altar boy Patrick Dorismond, killed by the NYPD, was “no altar boy.” Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin and countless others have been similarly described, as though this is a mitigating – or worse,
» Read more about: Sandra Bland and Toeing the Thin Blue Line »
The line of people standing outside the event in downtown Los Angeles snaked out the door and down to a sidewalk—but there were no velvet ropes and it wasn’t at Nokia Center or L.A. LIVE. The venue was the Kenneth Hahn County Hall of Administration.
The hundreds who waited Tuesday morning in muggy heat had come to weigh in on a measure before the Board of Supervisors to increase the minimum wage in L.A. County’s unincorporated areas.
Perla Lagunas and her kids traveled from North Hills in the San Fernando Valley to show support. “I represent a low-income community,” she said. Her mother was a garment worker who struggled with bills and groceries. “My mom worked with people who wouldn’t pay her a good wage. We grew up so poor– sometimes we didn’t have food. We want to let the community know—wake up!”
Representatives from the National Council of Jewish Women stood in line to enter the hearing.
Steven Luftman did not have much to feel good about last Tuesday as he stood in the TSA line before catching a flight from Sacramento to Los Angeles. After all, he was in the process of being evicted from his Fairfax District rental under the state’s Ellis Act, a law that speculators often use to kick out longterm renters from their homes in order to redevelop a property for higher profits. But then Luftman realized who he was standing behind: Matthew Jacobs, the man responsible for his eviction.
Hours before, the two had squared off during the July 14 meeting of the California Housing Finance Agency (CalHFA) in which Jacobs, an agency chairman who had been facing mounting criticism for his efforts to evict dozens of tenants who live in complexes in Los Angeles’ Beverly Grove and Fairfax neighborhoods, announced he was quitting the agency.
“He was right in front of me —
» Read more about: Demolition Man: Developer Matthew Jacobs Quits Housing Agency »
The town of Coatesville, Pennsylvania, outside of Philadelphia, is a former steel mill town full of struggling residents. With a per capita income of $14,079, Coatesville is situated in wealthy Chester County, but it has struggled amid a declining population and lack of job opportunities. Missoula, Montana, on the other hand, was once a thriving lumber town. Its per capita income of $17,166 means it’s slightly wealthier than Coatesville, and the University of Montana and two hospitals are major employers for the city.
Two thousand, three hundred miles separate Coatesville from Missoula, but the two towns have more in common than you might think. One important similarity? Their ongoing struggles with private, for-profit water companies, like too many cities around the U.S.
Coatesville officials sold the public water utility in 2001, hoping to use the one-time cash infusion to spark an urban renaissance while the privately-run PAWC promised to invest in desperately needed modernization and maintenance.
When Democratic former San Jose mayor Chuck Reed and Republican ex-San Diego councilmember Carl DeMaio finally unveiled the language for a promised attempt at getting a statewide public pension cutting measure to 2016 voters, the expectation was that Reed II would be a reined-in and more realistically-framed version of Reed I – last year’s failed attempt at undermining the public pension system.
That try for the 2014 ballot was aborted after Attorney General Kamala Harris slapped it with a candid, albeit politically untenable summary that frankly described the proposed constitutional amendment as targeting longstanding legal rights—rights that protect the pensions and retirement health care of the 1.64 million Californians enrolled in the state’s public pension systems.
But even veterans of the state’s public-sector retirement wars were unprepared for the sheer scale of what awaited them this time around.
» Read more about: Measure of Deception: CA Initiative Would Gut Retirement Benefits for Millions »
Edward Navales realized a career in large tech firms wasn’t for him, and in 2008 he decided to open his own business. Armed with a University of Texas MBA and guided by a desire to do something meaningful, he decided to start a firm in the health care sector. As he surveyed his options, it seemed like a franchise agreement would be the quickest and surest way to success.
He invested savings, took out a Small Business Administration loan and entered into an agreement with Bright Star Healthcare, a small but fast-growing home health care company. Bright Star promised its franchisees support and flexibility. According to Navales, the reality was something else entirely.
“What I found was inadequate support, unrealistic and predatory minimum sales targets and costly vendor requirements,” Navales said. “I soon learned my fellow franchisees were experiencing the same challenges.” Bright Star, claimed Navales, wasn’t responsive to their requests and complaints,
» Read more about: Step Back, Big Mac: California Franchisees Score Major Victory »
As rental prices skyrocket in Los Angeles, landlords are increasingly kicking out long-term tenants to clear the way for more affluent residents. Lovell Estell III’s story last May about the bittersweet end of Catherine Green’s 30-year tenancy at the Boulevard Villa apartment complex profiled one such case. When she was a child, Green and her family left Jim Crow Texas for the freedom Los Angeles offered. She became a successful businesswoman and homeowner, but this year, at the age of 90, she received an eviction notice. Forced, along with all her fellow tenants, to leave her Crenshaw Boulevard home, and unable to rent in an increasingly expensive Los Angeles, Green returned to the South.
» Read more about: Video: Skyrocketing Rents Driving Long-Time Residents Out of L.A. »
By now, you have probably heard about the riot at the for-profit Kingman Prison in Arizona. Days of unrest at the prison, run by the privately-held Management Training Corporation, left 15 wounded and forced nearly 1,000 incarcerated people to be transferred to other facilities. The same facility also suffered from a major riot in 2010. Similarly, people detained at an MTC-run camp in Texas names Willacy rioted earlier this year, forcing that facility to close completely.
The Kingman riots are focusing renewed attention on the Arizona legislature’s long, cozy relationship with the private prison industry. The repeated failings of for-profit prison operators have led Arizonans and the editorial board for the state’s largest paper to ask some big questions:
» Read more about: Questions Surround Private Prisons After AZ Riot »
Hopes were high among environmentalists when a bill designed to protect California’s drinking water was introduced in the state Assembly earlier this year. After all, California has passed some of the most far-reaching environmental laws and regulations in the nation, and the state legislature is dominated by the Democratic Party, whose members are generally inclined to vote for tougher environmental standards. Moreover, California is in the midst of a massive drought, which gave the bill more urgency. And besides, clean water isn’t a threatened desert flower or endangered minnow – it’s something everyone depends on for existence.
It never had a chance.
The measure, Assembly Bill 356 (Das Williams, D-Carpinteria), was intended to protect underground sources of drinking water from oil and gas wastewater disposal and enhanced oil recovery treatments, and called for monitoring near certain injection wells. That immediately put it in the crosshairs of the most powerful oil interests in California,
» Read more about: How Democrats Mixed Oil and Water, Killing Environmental Bill »
Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich has hired a corporate-sponsored lobby group and PR firm to conduct a so-called “study” of the minimum wage.
Under Antonovich’s orders, the County is going to pay $55,000 to the Washington, D.C.-based Employment Policies Institute (EPI) to help him undermine a plan to create a countywide minimum wage that would reach $15 an hour by 2020, similar to the one recently passed by the City of Los Angeles. The policy would cover about a million employees in the unincorporated areas of the nation’s largest county.
Any one of the supervisors can authorize the county’s CEO to commission an analysis of a policy being considered without a vote from the other four members. That’s what Antonovich — who chairs the board meetings and prefers to be called the county’s “mayor” — did at the end of June.
Antonovich asked EPI to do extensive research on for-profit and nonprofit employers in the county’s unincorporated areas –
» Read more about: Meet Mike Antonovich's Minimum Wage Hitman »
Since the invention of the movie camera in the late 19th century, filmmaking has seen only a smattering of seminal technical developments. Only the advent of sound and color spawned sea changes in the medium. But in this century, the digital revolution has made it exponentially easier for filmmakers to tell stories. It was only a matter of time, then, before people started filming features using arguably the most ubiquitous technological device of our time.
It would be easy to prematurely dismiss Tangerine as a gimmick. After all, with all the tools of the trade available to film a movie, picking a 4.87-by-2.3-inch iPhone 5s seems not only ambitious but possibly a filmmaker’s folly. Luckily, for writer-director Sean Baker, the phone is a smart choice indeed.
‘Tangerine’ is ‘After Hours’ in heels, made on a dime.
It is the afternoon of Christmas Eve.
If it becomes law, a reform bill now in the state legislature will mark a milestone in the two-year effort to rein in the secretive but powerful private organization responsible for accrediting California’s 112 public community colleges. The target of Assembly Bill 1397 is the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC), which was recently thwarted from terminating the accreditation of the City College of San Francisco (CCSF), mostly for issues stemming from the academically high-rated school’s Great Recession-battered finances.
The political firestorm sparked by the unelected commission’s effort to effectively close CCSF turned a spotlight of publicity on the darker policy corners of the commission, revealing an almost comically rogue culture of nepotism, free-market radicalism and mandarin indifference to the lives of students and teachers. But now the commission finds itself caught in that light once more,
» Read more about: Teaching Moment: Will Sacramento School College Accreditors? »
Every year, every quarter, every month, the conventional economists either praise the increase in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or anxiously wring their hands because the economy has not expanded enough. Expansion requires two key elements: a constant search for the lowest possible wages and an unending supply of raw materials – particularly fossil fuels, but also fertile soil and fresh water, and sometimes, creatures who live on the earth and in the seas.
While there are still places on the planet where people will take any job they can get, the ability to extract more energy resources gets riskier, and the environment’s capacity to absorb more waste is fast approaching zero. Reaching the outer limits of expansion threatens all of life on the planet. That reality is why many people are now calling for an “ecological civilization” as an alternative to more exploitation and extraction, one that offers another pathway for human civilization to take.
The nurses who showed up at state Senator Richard Pan’s Capitol office in May were furious. They had been assured by Pan, a Democrat from Sacramento, that he would be on their side when it came time to vote on Senate Bill 346, a charity care measure aimed at providing transparency to the state’s currently murky rules governing tax-exempt status for nonprofit hospitals.
But Pan, a physician who has risen to prominence this year as the sponsor of a mandatory school vaccination bill, abstained when the bill came up for a vote in the Senate’s health committee, effectively killing it when it fell one vote short of passing in that committee on April 29. The nurses alleged that the bill died because Pan withdrew his promised support after heavy, last-minute lobbying by the California Hospital Association (CHA). Pan’s spokesperson, Shannan Martinez, later issued a denial,
» Read more about: The Persuaders: California Hospital Association »
Here’s something you probably didn’t know happened in California in the last few years, and maybe it’s something you never imagined could happen: In 2011, two high-ranking state regulators were fired from their posts for pissing off the oil industry. No one really disputes the veracity of that statement; not even Governor Jerry Brown. “They were blocking oil exploration in Kern County,” the Sacramento Bee reported Brown announcing at an event six months later. “I fired them, and oil permits for drilling went up 18 percent.”
Catherine Reheis-Boyd, president of the Western States Petroleum Association, also celebrated without restraint, unconcerned that the people of California might detect her hand guiding the Governor’s pink-slip pen. After the firings, Reheis-Boyd boasted to the Los Angeles Times that her industry once again had a “clear pathway for people to get permits and proceed with drilling in this state.
» Read more about: The Persuaders: Western States Petroleum Association »
“Something always seems to be starting in California,” Angelo Amador, an attorney and vice president for the National Restaurant Association, told Bloomberg News.
It was 2012 and his remark was prompted by a California state Supreme Court decision favoring an employee’s right to have defined meal-break times. The association—dubbed “the other NRA” for its lobbying muscle, with annual revenues of $71 million in 2013–had vigorously opposed policy that required employers to ensure that workers take rest and meal breaks rather than leaving it to the employees to push back against managers to enforce break provisions.
Amador’s NRA is perhaps the largest trade group that you have never heard of, and supports an “institute” run by a PR firm that churns out opinions and papers to shape policy debates.[divider]
Also read these stories in our “Persuaders”
» Read more about: The Persuaders: California Restaurant Association »
