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A Bad Climate?: The State of Social Justice Efforts in the Labor and Environmental Movements

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Among the stories that you may have missed during the stretch run of the primary season was some significantly bad news out of labor on the national front when several large unions in the building trades came out against a plan by some of the biggest public sector unions to join forces with environmentalist Tom Steyer in order to fund a major anti-Trump get out the vote operation in the fall. The New York Times noted that:

Two of the Democratic Party’s most loyal constituencies, labor and environmentalists, are clashing over an effort to raise tens of millions of dollars for an ambitious voter turnout operation aimed at defeating Donald J. Trump in the November election.

The rift developed after some in the labor movement, whose cash flow has dwindled and whose political clout has been increasingly imperiled, announced a partnership last week with a wealthy environmentalist, Tom Steyer, to help bankroll a new fund dedicated to electing Democrats.

  [Read more…]

One Thing Trump is Good At: Not Paying People

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I don’t why it’s taken so long to get around to hearing about this, but opposition files on presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump are finally making their way into media. This is just basic research, done by every campaign.

Sixteen Republican presidential contenders lost out to The Donald and not one of them squawked about the more than three thousand, five hundred lawsuits filed against the New York billionaire. I guess these court actions were considered inconsequential by the GOP types because so many of the had to do with small business and workers not getting paid.

Also: Week Calendar of Progressive Events   [Read more…]

Obama Administration Approves Resumption of CA Offshore Fracking

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By Dan Bacher

Claiming that fracking poses “no significant impact” to the environment, Obama administration officials on May 27 finalized their plans to allow oil companies to resume offshore fracking and acidizing in California’s Santa Barbara Channel.

The announcement from the two agencies responsible for oil drilling, the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Management (BOEM) and the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE), ended a court-ordered settlement placing a moratorium on offshore fracking and acidizing for oil in the fish and wildlife-rich federal waters off California.

The two agencies reported they have completed a comprehensive environmental analysis evaluating the potential impacts from the use of “well stimulation treatments” – acidizing and fracking operations — on the 23 oil and gas platforms currently in operation on the Outer Continental Shelf offshore California.   [Read more…]

Big Oil Has Spent $25 Million Lobbying in 2015-16 CA Legislative Session

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Oil industry has captured California’s regulatory apparatus

By Dan Bacher / Indy Bay Media

Underneath California’s veneer as a “green leader” is a dark and oily reality — the state is the third largest petroleum producer in the nation and the oil industry is California’s largest and most powerful political lobby.

In fact, last year’s oil industry “gusher” of lobbying expenses ensured that no environmental bill opposed by Big Oil was able to make it out of the Legislature unless it was amended, as in the case of SB 350, the green energy bill. The oil lobby broke its prior spending record, spending $22 million over the past year.   [Read more…]

Public Pays for Hedge Funds’ Profits

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By Donald Cohen / Capital & Main

What do 82 public libraries, a Texas beef-processing company and a string of Pizza Huts across Tennessee and Florida have in common?

They’re all managed by the same private equity firm.

Fifteen of those libraries are in Jackson County, Oregon, where public officials are starting to raise concerns over the firm’s ownership of the private contractor that manages them. Facing budget issues in 2007, the county contracted with Library Systems and Services (LS&S), the country’s largest library outsourcing company, to try to save money—but LS&S is owned by Argosy Private Equity, whose mission is to “generate outstanding returns” and “substantially grow revenues and profits” for the businesses it owns.   [Read more…]

Uncommon Victories for the Common Good

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By Donald Cohen / Capital & Main

One thing I’ve learned from decades of fighting for the public good is that winning comes in different forms. Let me share some good news about recent victories.

Sometimes winning is a unanimous decision. Last week, officials in Gary, Indiana, voted unanimously against allowing the private prison company GEO Group to build a for-profit immigration detention center in the city. The decision follows months of organizing by a diverse coalition of faith leaders and residents against the publicly traded corporation, which profited $139 million in taxpayer dollars nationwide in 2015.

Sometimes winning is the end of a contract. New York City officials have announced that they will not renew a multimillion dollar contract with Veolia, a private French conglomerate, to manage the city’s waste­water treatment plants.   [Read more…]

Bank of North Dakota Soars Despite Oil Bust: A Blueprint for California?

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Despite North Dakota’s collapsing oil market, its state-owned bank continues to report record profits. This article looks at what California, with fifty times North Dakota’s population, could do following that state’s lead.

By Ellen Brown

In November 2014, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Bank of North Dakota (BND), the nation’s only state-owned depository bank, was more profitable even than J.P. Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs. The author attributed this remarkable performance to the state’s oil boom, but the boom has now become an oil bust, yet the BND’s profits continue to climb. Its 2015 Annual Report, published on April 20th, boasted its most profitable year ever.

The BND has had record profits for the last 12 years, each year outperforming the last. In 2015, it reported $130.7 million in earnings, total assets of $7.4 billion, capital of $749 million, and a return on investment of a whopping 18.1 percent. Its lending portfolio grew by $486 million, a 12.7 percent increase, with growth in all four of its areas of concentration: agriculture, business, residential, and student loans.
  [Read more…]

A Twofer: Carbon Tax Solves Both Climate Change and Plastic Ocean Pollution

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For more than half a century, cheaply-priced fossil fuels have come to define the American dream. We travel freely in gasoline powered vehicles and rely on coal, oil and natural gas for heating, cooling and operating electrical devices.

In addition, everything possible is now fashioned from plastic polymers derived from petroleum or natural gas. We’ve abandoned the “reuse and repair it” mindset of the pre-WWII era and embraced instead a “throw away” plastic consumer culture.

The most urgent environmental crises today are undeniably global climate change and the buildup of plastic waste in the world’s oceans. Both are harmful externalities of the fossil fuel industry: impacts, like pollution, not reflected in the cost of the products but paid for instead by some third party.

In this case, the third party is the global public that suffers the health and monetary consequences of both climate change and ocean plastic pollution.   [Read more…]

Is Affordable Housing in the City of San Diego an Oxymoron? Part 3

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The City Needs to Build and Own More Affordable Units

According to a recent Zillow report: “Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, and San Diego are unaffordable for both renters and buyers. … Looking forward, the picture doesn’t look bright for renters. Rents will likely keep rising at roughly their current pace for at least the next few years, which will lead to a continued affordability crunch unless wage growth significantly improves.”

Enter the San Diego Housing Commission (SDHC) whose job is to redress the balance of unaffordable rents to make it possible for San Diego to be inhabited by other than rich folks.

The San Diego Housing Commission (SDHC) does a variety of projects to assist low and moderate income folks. From their website, it would seem that they are doing a lot, but is it merely tokenism or are they using all available resources to build affordable housing as quickly as possible? After all, there is a declared emergency in terms of the increasing numbers of the homeless population that aren’t being taken care of.   [Read more…]

The Millenia Project: San Diego County’s New Downtown

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By Barbara Zaragoza

Last week, I spent a lot of time explaining the vast expansion taking place in eastern Chula Vista. Eleven villages total mean about 60,000 new residents will move into the area within the next twenty years. So far, villages 1, 5 and 7 are built out. Village 2 is underway. That leaves villages 3, 4, 8, 9 and 10 still under development.

According to the Otay Ranch General Development Plan, the idea of the village was to “provide a sense of community and social cohesion in a “small town” way, and reduce dependence on the automobile for local trips.” (pg. 10)

Today, I want to go over the heart of the development called “Millenia.” This will become the center piece of Otay Ranch plan, a new downtown with an office & retail district.   [Read more…]

Papa Doug Donation Rocks D3 City Council Contest (There’s More!)

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The narrative about the contest for the Third District City Council seat, namely that leading candidates Chris Ward and Anthony Bernal weren’t all that different, ended yesterday.

Voice of San Diego’s Andy Keatts wrote about a growing controversy stemming from donations to the Bernal campaign by former UT-San Diego publisher ‘Papa Doug’ Manchester and wife.

Support from a major contributor to the campaign against same-sex marriage in California is likely to be toxic in a council district whose politics have been dominated by LGBTQ activists in recent decades.   [Read more…]

Puerto Rico is the Next Greece

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It‘s the Same Old MO: Entice With Money, Then Foreclose

It’s deja vu all over again as Yogi Berra would say. Another country that went down the road of debt accumulation just to pay for essential public services. Since Puerto Ricans are born American citizens, you’d think that Puerto Rico could just declare bankruptcy as Detroit, Birmingham and San Bernardino did. But no, US law forbids that.

On May 2, a bond payment of $422 million was missed, and a $2 billion payment comes due in July. There’s no way Puerto Rico can pay. Puerto Rico is begging Congress for debt relief. But no debt relief is in sight.

Here are the facts: Puerto Rico is $70 billion in debt. 45% of the people live in poverty. The unemployment rate is over 12%.   [Read more…]

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