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(Art Sweatman is a City of Los Angeles tree surgeon. His post is a response to Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez’s April 24 article, “Time for public employee unions to pick up the tab.” The post first appeared on SEIU Local 721’s site and is republished here with permission.)
Dear Steve:
I sat down with you a couple of years ago and discussed the impact that “givebacks” would have on our SEIU 721 members who work for the City of Los Angeles.
You seemed to care then, and city workers eventually agreed to help L.A. save money. One year later we also agreed to contribute more towards our pension benefits, so we could keep our spouses on our benefits after we retire.
Your commentary is short-sighted. You acknowledge but ignore the fact that the politicians keep lying about the city’s deficit.
» Read more about: Union Worker to Steve Lopez: We’ve Picked Up the Tab! »
Two local Thursday events will mark preparations for the annual Workers’ Memorial Day that will be observed nationally on Sunday. Today’s morning activities center on the unveiling of a work-in-progress mural depicting the contributions of immigrant workers and the release of the annual “Dying at Work in California” report. The survey tallies the cost of job-related deaths, injuries and illnesses and tells the stories of the 196 Los Angeles workers killed on the job last year. These stories include:
» Read more about: Workers’ Memorial Day: Not One More Death or Injury! »
Most of us accept that the earth goes around the sun. This is impressive, since we can look up in the sky and see the sun going around the earth. We believe the opposite because we have been told about the research of astronomers over the centuries showing that what we can see with our own two eyes is wrong. Instead, we accept that the motion of the stars and planets can be much better explained by the earth going around the sun.
Suppose for a moment that astronomers and people who write on astronomy did not agree on earth or solar orbits. Imagine that a substantial group of these people, including many of the most prominent astronomers, insisted that the sun goes around the earth, as anyone can plainly see. In that case, there would likely be huge numbers of people who refused to accept that the earth goes around the sun.
» Read more about: Mickey Mouse Economics: Austerity Bible Debunked »
Cherri Senders wasn’t always looking for the union label. Back in the late 1980s the Washington, D.C. native was writing for the L.A. Weekly, an alternative newspaper that was generous with editorial pleas for social justice but miserly when paying its own workers.
“I saw how exploited writers were,” Senders tells Frying Pan News. “We joined the National Writers Union and were able to go from five cents a word to seven. That’s how I found out about the labor movement.”
About 15 years later a friend of Senders, who by then had started her own communications company, wanted to learn how to purchase union-made baby products, but couldn’t find a way to track down which ones bore a union label.
There had always been Buy Union lists – often out of date and pinned to the bulletin boards of union halls or, more recently,
» Read more about: Looking for the Union Label in All the Right Places »
Guilt — in the psychoanalytic tradition — is both a form of self-punishment and a key obstacle to therapeutic improvement. In The Ego and the Id, Freud wrote that the patient finds “satisfaction in the illness and refuses to give up the punishment of suffering.” In a paradoxical way, obsessive guilt becomes a masochistic attempt at an unreliable cure.
The Company You Keep, starring and directed by Robert Redford, is a film awash in guilt. Redford’s character, Jim Grant, an ex-radical still “hiding” in plain sight, feels guilt about his past and about the secrets he has to withhold from his daughter. A reporter, played by Shia LaBeouf, eventually feels guilty about the impact his bulldog reporting might have on the people he’s writing about. A tenured radical professor feels guilty about not keeping up “the struggle,” unable to inspire his students beyond a round of applause at the end of his stories.
» Read more about: The Sixties: What a Long, Strange Guilt Trip It’s Been »
(As the May 21 mayoral runoff election approaches, Frying Pan News is asking voters what they believe the next mayor’s priorities should be — as well as what he or she should avoid doing once in office. This week reporter Marc Haefele interviews three San Fernando Valley voters near the corner of Van Nuys and Burbank boulevards; all three women are Van Nuys residents.)
Karen Rontowski
We do need a better distribution of wealth in our city. At the same time, we need more funding for both teachers and police. Of course I’d like to see more jobs, but how much can the mayor alone do to accomplish something like that? Maybe we can only work with that problem on the national level. There was a lot of flash to Antonio Villaraigosa and yet not too much substance.
» Read more about: L.A. Mayor’s Race: The View from the Valley »
For five years a chorus of voices has been predicting bankruptcy for Los Angeles, while often calling for deeper cuts to city employee pensions. Today, however, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa proposed a budget for Fiscal Year 2013-2014 that includes a one-time surplus of $119 million. While some of that surplus would rely on additional pay and benefit reductions for city workers, even without such cuts the city would have a projected surplus of close to $100 million.
“It’s better than seeing the light at the end of the tunnel – we’re almost out of the tunnel!” Matt Szabo, Mayor Villaraigosa’s deputy chief of staff, told Frying Pan News in an interview last week. Szabo discussed the city’s financial picture and said that dire financial warnings have been largely overblown.
“One of the issues that’s highly irritating is the ease with which some people have thrown around the bankruptcy term,” Szabo said.
» Read more about: Budget Shocker: L.A. Shows $119 Million Surplus »
After several years of swimming in red ink, the city of Los Angeles is now projecting a $119 million surplus for Fiscal Year 2013-2014, according to city documents presented at a news conference today presided over by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. (See Page 3 of the mayor’s Budget Presentation.)
City Administrative Officer Miguel Santana and other officials also attended the media event at City Hall.
The surplus is dependent on the city receiving certain one-time revenues, much of them due from the state and federal governments.
Nevertheless, this disclosure dramatically rebuffs a steady stream of predictions, made by an array of officials, mayoral candidates and commentators, that L.A. faces the possibility of bankruptcy. Such predictions have invariably been accompanied by calls to reduce the pension benefits of city employees.
Later this morning Frying Pan News will post investigative reporter Gary Cohn’s analysis of what has produced the surplus – and of the motivations behind predictions of the city’s insolvency.
» Read more about: Bulletin: New L.A. Budget Shows $119 Million Surplus »
With jails straining to absorb thousands of prison inmates, jailhouse guard-on-inmate beatings grabbing headlines, and public concern rising about possible spikes in crime rates, public safety issues—especially around the massive Los Angeles County jail and probation systems—have Angelenos of all stripes scrambling for answers.
The just-concluded three-part, “Smart Justice: Rethinking Public Safety in California” discussion at the University of Southern California, capped off with a fourth session at the Pat Brown Institute, brought together key leaders—from top L.A. County public safety managers to heads of organizations charged with monitoring those systems—to identify often well-known problems, but also to propose potential solutions, cures that generally involve replacing “punishment” with “rehabilitation” in corrections thinking.
A Combustible Environment
“Los Angeles County has the largest probation department in the nation, the largest sheriff’s department, and the third largest police force in the L.A. Police Department,” said Alex Johnson from the Office of County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas.
» Read more about: Facing Los Angeles’ Incarceration Dilemma »
Weeks after a political stalemate set in motion $85 billion in federal spending cuts for fiscal year 2013, sequestration has shifted from a political debate in the halls of Congress to a looming reality in neighborhood streets – especially in some of the poorest areas of the country.
In Georgia, the drop in federal dollars is taking an 11 percent bite out of extended unemployment benefits that more than 61,000 Georgians depend on for food, utilities and housing, according to the Rome News-Tribune.
In Mississippi, 2,300 children under the age of three will likely lose the care and early education they receive in federally-supported Early Head Start programs.
And in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, sequester will mean cuts in legal aid services and housing vouchers for low-income families and reductions in job-search services for the unemployed.
Many community organizations that serve low-income families are already feeling the money pinch.
» Read more about: Sequester Taking a Toll on America’s Needy »
The reason President Obama’s proposal to cut Social Security benefits is tragic is that it is simply not necessary. His plan is to use a different method to compute how much benefits are raised to offset inflation. But Social Security will add very little to federal spending over the next 30 to 40 years. As a proportion of national income (GDP), It will rise from five percent to six percent. At the same time, retirees are set to get much less money from their pensions because so many were forced to depend on 401(k)s and defined contribution plans rather than traditional pensions with defined benefits.
But a new report from Goldman Sachs economists puts the Obama decision in an even harsher light. The federal deficit is coming down rapidly on its own. In a piece entitled, “The Rapidly Shrinking Federal Deficit,” Goldman notes that the deficit averaged 4.5 percent of GDP in the first calendar quarter,
» Read more about: The U.S. Deficit Is Down — So Why Cut Social Security? »
Hundreds of workers descended on the Capitol yesterday as part of the California Labor Federation’s legislative conference lobby day with a simple message for both Democrats and Republicans in office: “End the Corporate Gravy Train.” They were referring to the state’s wasteful enterprise zone program, which takes money away from schools, infrastructure and other valuable services to line the pockets of corporate CEOs at Walmart and other large, profitable corporations.
At a lunchtime rally, workers, labor leaders and elected officials railed against this massive giveaway and urged support for SB 434, a reform bill authored by State Sen. Jerry Hill. The event coincided with the launch of a new website, www.EndTheCorporateGravyTrain.com, which details the wasteful program and exposes some of the massive companies that are riding the gravy train.
California Labor Federation Executive Secretary-Treasurer Art Pulaski:
“Taxpayers are sending $700 million per year straight into the pockets of corporate executives without seeing good jobs created in return.
» Read more about: Capitol Rally: Derail This Corporate Gravy Train! »
Pastor Nestor Gerente welcomed the overflow audience of nearly 350 Long Beach activists at last week’s People’s State of the City gathering and said, “This is a great crowd. Where are you on Sunday mornings?”
The 23 organizations sponsoring the event, under the tent of the Long Beach Coalition for Good Jobs and a Healthy Community, are still buoyant from victory in last November’s election. That’s when Measure N, the Hotel Workers’ Minimum Wage Law, passed by 64 percent of the voters, raised wages to $13 an hour for some of the lowest paid hotel workers in L.A. County. The stunning triumph was made possible by a grassroots mobilization and door-to-door campaign of union and community members.
Grace United Methodist Church’s beautiful sanctuary was filled with people of every racial and ethnic background now living in California’s seventh largest city. Long Beach has nearly half a million residents —
» Read more about: Long Beach Activists Look Beyond Measure N »
The biggest economic debate is between Keynesians (who want more government spending and lower interest rates in order to fuel demand) and supply-side “austerics” (who want lower taxes on the wealthy and on corporations to boost incentives to hire and invest, and who see government deficits crowding out private investment).
But both approaches have problems.
George W. Bush tried supply-side tax cuts but nothing trickled down. Jobs and wages declined. And austerity economics has been a disaster for Europe.
Unfortunately the U.S. is now adopting supply-side austerics by making the Bush tax cuts permanent for 98 percent of taxpayers, hiking Social Security taxes back up, and implementing the sequester.
I’m on the Keynesian side. Yet the biggest weakness of modern Keynesian economics is it doesn’t have a clear answer for how much spending is necessary in an economy, like ours, in which wages keep dropping and government debt keeps growing.
» Read more about: America’s Worst Recovery on Record — And Why »
There’s a growing impatience amongst those committed to pushing L.A. to meet its ambitious Zero Waste goals. For years, the Don’t Waste LA Coalition, which includes Sierra Club, Coalition for Clean Air, Sustain L.A. and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), has been pushing to address the large portion of trash that goes to landfills from businesses and large apartment buildings. Addressing this sector will be a game changer for L.A. And after an arduous process with a multitude of hearings, workshops, and meetings, we’re ready to move forward.
Right now, the open permit system that handles waste from businesses and large apartment buildings has failed us. Its bottom barrel competition has left us with a measly 19 percent diversion rate for businesses in L.A. And, despite the best effort from business lobbyists to defend this type of program, we’ve seen a lack of effort to live up to the environmental stewardship demanded in a city like Los Angeles.
» Read more about: L.A.’s Slow Push to Meet Its Zero Waste Target »
My cousin and I have stayed in touch over the years despite the distance — he grew up in a Texas border town and has lived his adult life in Phoenix. Both he and his wife have held well-paid positions in the health field. Like most families, when we visit, we avoid subjects in-laws shouldn’t talk about, including politics and religion. But this time, he brought up the topic of unions, so over the next several days we talked intermittently about unions and why low wage workers need them.
On our final evening together, we sat across from each other in one of those expensive Santa Monica restaurants named after its chef. I said, “So here is the bottom line for me: People who work all day should be able to provide shelter and food for their families, and they ought to have health care.”
“I don’t know that I disagree with that,” he replied.
» Read more about: Building a Better Life: Bottom Lines and Top Priorities »
College student leaders from across California reacted to the President’s budget on April 10, calling on Congress to extend the low interest rate and give students time to weigh in on more comprehensive reform. Last year, Congress temporarily extended the low rate for one year, which saved close to eight million students $1,000 per loan borrowed. California Public Interest Research Group (CALPIRG) leaders, working in coalition with many student advocacy groups and education groups led the charge to make sure that Congress didn’t double our rates last year, with the deadline looming once again, we are calling on these same decision makers to step up again this year.
The President released a budget that included a proposal for preventing the student loan interest rate from doubling this July 1.
“Unfortunately, the President’s proposal lowers interest rates now by charging more from student borrowers down the road,” said Roshni Ashok,
» Read more about: White House Budget Leaves Students in the Lurch »
The Squeezed Middle: The Pressure on Ordinary Workers in America and Britain, a short book edited by Sophia Parker, brings together 16 scholars and activists to diagnose America’s malaise. (Policy Press, 2013.)
You probably don’t need a book to tell you that the United States has fallen into the economic abyss and the United Kingdom is teetering on the edge. Wages have been flat for 40 years; welfare as we knew it is gone and the political system has been corrupted by corporations and greed.
If you’re British, you might think that the United Kingdom isn’t teetering, but has already firmly landed at rock bottom. If that’s what you think, then think again. Things are much more savage on the Tea Party side of the Atlantic Ocean. Mother country, beware.
Inequality has risen dramatically in both the United States and the United Kingdom, but the United Kingdom maintains some vestiges of civilization,
Here’s Public Works‘ singalong video of Irving Berlin’s 1942 song, “I Paid My Taxes Today,” performed by Gene Autry. Lyrics below:
I said to my Uncle Sam
“Old Man Taxes, here I am”
And he was glad to see me.
Mister Small Fry, yes, indeed.
Lower brackets, that’s my speed.
But he was glad to see me.
I paid my income tax today.
I never felt so proud before,
To be right there with the millions more
Who paid their income tax today.
I’m squared up with the USA
See those bombers in the sky,
Rockefeller helped to build ‘em.
So did I.
I PAID MY INCOME TAX TODAY
Walmart might have viewed their plans to open in an existing building in Los Angeles Chinatown as a bullet-proof strategy. The retail giant would open its new store in the Grand Plaza, an existing building, that unlike new construction, would allow the retailer to proceed without a public hearing.
As the company worked on its renovation plans, which started last year, Aiha Nguyen at the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE) and community members dug through reams of city documents.
They realized the retailer and city officials needed something central to the democratic process — a public hearing for neighborhood residents to provide feedback about the store in the Grand Plaza building.
The Grand Plaza had received about $7 million in subsidies years ago, Nguyen said, adding that a hearing and environmental requirements from a city-approved Chinatown Redevelopment Plan still apply to any new tenant.
That requirement is serving as the basis for the April 4 lawsuit that could block Walmart from opening in 30,000 square feet of space in the downtown area.
» Read more about: Community Fights Walmart’s Backdoor Chinatown Strategy »