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What A New Supreme Court Means for Unions, Education Funding, and the Future of California

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With the death of Antonin Scalia on February 13th, public sector unions in America were given a reprieve from what was sure to be a bad ruling in the Friedrichs v CTA case before the Supreme Court. As Michael Hiltzik explained in the Los Angeles Times:

The target of the Friedrichs lawsuit, and several others just like it, is the “agency” or “fair share” fee. Under the law and according to a 1977 Supreme Court decision known as the Abood case, unionized public employees can be assessed nonmember fees to cover solely the cost of negotiations and contract enforcement, without being compelled to join the union and support its political activities by paying full union dues. That’s the arrangement in California.   [Read more…]

Pragmatic Realism Inc: Who Wants the Era of Big-Program Liberalism Over?

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Last week, in a New York Times editorial, Mark Schmitt joined the chorus of clear-eyed “realists” chiming in against Bernie Sanders’ bold agenda in “Is the Era of Big-Program Liberalism Over?”

While acknowledging the political appeal and strategic advantages of universal programs, Schmitt argued that, given the presumably inevitable constraints of the present, the future belongs to an incrementalism that is “most interesting and novel for the absence of big, universal programs that require legislative action.”

This approach to policy forgoes the need for tax increases on the rich and corporations and instead “test[s] the limits of what government can do by rearranging the pieces of existing programs, using regulations, incentives to states, tax credits and ‘nudges’ informed by behavioral economics in place of direct spending.”   [Read more…]

San Diego Quality Of Life Coalition Presents Vision Statement to SANDAG for Ballot Measure

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In a recent interview, Naomi Klein discussed the reality facing anyone interested in promoting meaningful climate action. The “structural problem” we face, according to Klein, is that people can “simultaneously understand the medium to long term risks of climate change” and still believe it is in their “short term economic [or political] interest” to continue business as usual. This is precisely the situation concerned San Diegans face when dealing with the San Diego Association of Governments’ (SANDAG) limited vision when it comes to taking the actions needed to address the pressing threat of climate change at the local level.

As Doug Porter has pointed out here in the San Diego Free Press, given SANDAG’s history, it’s easy to be cynical about our regional planning efforts. Nonetheless, our future hopes depend on us not giving up. We must continue to push for a just, sustainable future.

Last Friday, the San Diego Quality of Life Coalition, a group of labor, environmental, social justice, affordable housing, and transit organizations representing over 150,000 San Diego County residents submitted a vision statement to SANDAG’s Transportation and Regional Planning Committee meetings for consideration as the basis for the sales tax ballot measure currently under discussion at SANDAG.   [Read more…]

Clinton Democrats in 2016: Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here

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Whatever happens in today’s Iowa caucuses, one thing is abundantly clear—when confronted with a credible challenge from the left in the form of the Bernie Sanders, the response of much of the leadership of the Democratic Party and their allies in the corporate media has been to defend the status quo with great zeal even if it meant borrowing tropes from the right.

Whether it was red-baiting from Thomas Freidman or condescension mixed with an appeal to “realism” from Paul Krugman, the drumbeat was loud and consistent: Sanders’ agenda, with it’s direct ties to the legacies of Martin Luther King Jr. and FDR was simply an unrealistic option in the neoliberal era.

It didn’t matter if it was Clinton proxies stirring fears about taxes, terrorism, and government health care or commentators on CNN and MSNBC bloviating about how Sanders’ views were the progressive past to Clinton’s pragmatic future, the fix was in. After the last few months of the Democratic presidential campaign, it has never been more clear that Noam Chomsky’s critique of America’s political system being dominated by the “two wings of the business party” working in concert with a corporate propaganda machine is spot on.   [Read more…]

Whither 2016 Ballot Measures?: The Oracle Jerry Brown Weighs In

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As I noted in my New Year’s column, many in California’s labor and progressive circles had high hopes for ballot measures extending Proposition 30’s taxes on the rich to fully fund education and for raising the state’s minimum wage to $15 an hour. But it did not take long for Governor Jerry Brown to rain on his presumed allies’ parade.

With regard to the Proposition 30 extension, the fear had been that competing measures being pushed by warring camps in SEIU and their allies in labor and the health care industry might both make the ballot and sink each other. Then a compromise measure was proposed that would continue the Prop. 30 taxes on the rich while letting the sales taxes expire with the new revenue funding education and health care for the poor AND keeping the measure temporary—through 2030 in this case.   [Read more…]

Don’t Celebrate This MLK Day: American Oligarchy is Killing the Dream

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Don’t celebrate this Martin Luther King Jr. Day. And please don’t clap for anyone talking about how far we’ve come.

Rather than engaging in the usual empty gestures accompanied by vanilla rhetoric that turns Dr. King into a saint, we should be railing against the fact that last week, by indicating that they are prepared to cripple public sector unions, the Supreme Court of the United States took another huge step in moving the country further and further away from the America that King fought for and eventually gave his life to make a reality.   [Read more…]

American Media in 2016: Those Afflicting the Comfortable Need Not Apply

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Just before the New Year I highlighted Project Censored’s pick for the most underreported story of 2015—the fact that 2016 will be when the top 1% will control half of the world’s wealth). In that same column I focused on two other largely ignored stories that broke subsequent to Project Censored’s annual report that also underline the perils of domestic and international economic inequality.

The first addresses the end of the American middle class’s majority status and the second examines the disproportionately negative effect that the global elite’s consumption has on greenhouse gas production.

These crucially important news stories should be shaping our national discourse but, unfortunately, they never make it through a sufficient number of what Noam Chomsky calls the corporate news “filters” to make a significant impact.   [Read more…]

Top 10 Political Hopes for 2016

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It’s a new year and a big one for politics. As grim as 2015 was in many respects, this time of year begs for hope, and while I have a soft spot for the utopian, there are a few things that very well could happen that would bring some real tangible good to peoples’ lives and the planet. So here is my pragmatic political wish list for 2016:

1) That Donald Trump actually wins the Republican Presidential nomination and brings the entire Republican Party down when the sizable majority of Americans who hate his ideas vote out the party up and down the ticket….   [Read more…]

Censored 2015: The Most Underreported Story of the Year

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As I wrote back in mid-October, Project Censored recently released their list of the most underreported stories of 2015. The number one story on their list features the news that 2016 will be the year when half of the world’s wealth will be controlled by the top 1%. More specifically, they document how:

According to the Oxfam report, the proportion of global wealth owned by the 1 percent has increased from 44 percent in 2009 to 48 percent in 2014 and is projected to reach 50 percent in 2016. In October 2014, a prior Oxfam report, “Even It Up: Time to End Extreme Poverty,” revealed that the number of billionaires worldwide had more than doubled since the 2009 financial crisis, showing that, although those at the top have recovered quickly, the vast majority of the world’s population are far from reaping the benefits of any recent economic recovery.

Even more staggering, the world’s richest eighty-five people now hold the same amount of wealth as half the world’s poorest population. “Failure to tackle inequality will leave hundreds of millions trapped in poverty unnecessarily,” the report’s authors warned.   [Read more…]

Three Progressive Literary Stocking Stuffers for 2015

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It’s Christmas week and as we do every year, the grown-ups in my family are keeping up the tradition of buying nothing for each other.

But for those of you who must endure the fear and loathing of the consumer frenzy, here is my annual list of books that might serve as good stocking stuffers for the alienated progressives or other likely suspects on your list (with a special focus on some of the best work that received less attention than it deserved)   [Read more…]

Donald Trump: The Pure Product of American Politics

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There’s been a lot of moral indignation recently in light of Donald Trump’s repugnant call to halt Muslim immigration and his fond remembrance of the American internment camps of the WWII era. Indeed, some folks have even started using the “F” word, rightly noting the fascist tendencies that the Donald’s inflamed rhetoric appeals to and accurately comparing his calls to ban refugees to the shameful exclusion of Jews fleeing the Nazis.

But as righteous as it is to call out Trump’s ugly racism and xenophobia, there is something suspect about the assertion heard in many quarters that somehow now this outlier has “gone too far.” Indeed, the frequent portrayal of Trump as an aberrant figure who has stepped outside the boundaries of mainstream American political discourse simply protests too much.

Donald Trump is not some “out of nowhere” demagogue who caught us unsuspecting; he is the pure product of the last thirty years of ugly American politics where “the center” has increasingly moved to the right.   [Read more…]

March and Rally for Climate Justice, This Saturday!

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Balboa Park March and Rally Saturday December 12

Last week as the big climate talks kicked off in Paris it was my pleasure to co-host with Masada Disenhouse of SanDiego350 a community screening of Naomi Klein’s new film This Changes Everything. We used this screening to help facilitate a discussion among folks from the local labor and environmental movements along with representatives from various community and student groups that was focused on the intersection between the climate crisis and the fight against economic inequality. Many folks expressed spirited opinions on how we might join the interests of the poor and workers with those fighting to save the planet.  

The film poses an important question: how can we come to see the corner that the climate crisis puts us in not as a reason for despair but as an opportunity to challenge the stale hegemony of market fundamentalism and create a better more humane world?    

While there is not a single easy answer, it’s never been more clear that the intersection of our historic level of economic inequality and the bankruptcy of the old story we have told ourselves about our unexamined dominion over the earth and its resources is leading us down what Klein calls “the suicide path.”  
  [Read more…]

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