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Breaking News: Poll Shows California Pension Ballot Measures Already in Trouble

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By Dan Braun & Bill Raden / Capital & Main

A pair of potential ballot initiatives written to overhaul California’s public pensions could face a rough road, according to a new poll.

The results from a Capital & Main-David Binder Research poll of 500 likely voters shows that if the election were held today, the numbers of those voting for the measures and those against them appear to be dead even. Those numbers are not what pension-reduction advocates had hoped for going into the 2016 election cycle.   [Read more…]

Working Until It’s Time for Your Grave

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Like many Americans, my mom has no retirement savings

By Tiffany Williams / OtherWords

“My plan is just to work until I die.” That’s how my mom sums up her retirement prospects.

She’s worked more than 40 hours a week as a legal secretary in north Florida for as long as I can remember. When my brother and I were kids, we went to her office every Saturday and entertained ourselves by sliding across the floor in fancy law firm chairs while our single mom worked overtime in her cubicle.   [Read more…]

Excerpt From Sunshine/Noir II: San Ysidro Blues — 30 Years After the Massacre

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By Francisco J. Bustos

I remember playing on the kitchen floor when the shots started firing.
I remember my cousin and I running outside the apartment, like many others did.
The sound of bullets instantly changed everybody’s eyes and nobody could
explain it.
We lived on Sunset Lane, just a couple blocks, de aquel Mac Donals, 30 years ago.
We jumped outside at the sound of more bullets,
if we could make it to the corner, we could catch a glimpse of our San Ysidro
Boulevard.

I don’t know why we tried running to that corner. Something pushed us. With every step that we took, more shots sliced the air,
and more shots and more shots, again and again and again.   [Read more…]

Pinyon-Juniper Forests: The Oldest Refugee Crisis

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My thoughts race with yesterday. My friend Max Wilbert and I left Park City, Utah in the pre-dawn bitter cold crossing the Wasatch Mountains that form the eastern edge of the Great Basin. The drive west from Salt Lake City on I-80 is disorienting. We began the journey with the radio on. We both became too frustrated by news of another politician refusing to accept refugees, so we turned the radio off to watch the land as we traveled.

Interstate 80 took us past the sites of some of the West’s most destructive extraction industries including Kennecott Copper’s Bingham Canyon Mine. The Oquirrh Mountains stand tall on the Salt Lake Valley’s west side, each peak a majestic testament to the forces of beauty who formed the Great Basin.

Each peak, save one.   [Read more…]

Class as Part of the American Freedom Struggle

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By Erik Loomis / Lawyers, Guns & Money

When we tell stories of the American road to freedom, which is how we do frame a lot of our historical narratives in popular memory, we talk about white male democracy as a sort of baseline, and then women’s suffrage, immigrants from Europe, the Civil Rights Movement, Cesar Chavez, etc.

Today we are finding room in this narrative for the gay rights movement. It’s possible that we sometimes include the union struggles of the 1930s in this narrative, although I think that’s more of an explicitly left telling of that narrative as opposed to the stories that spark Americans’ belief in themselves as a great nation getting better all the time.

There is really very little room in this popular narrative for class, as the way we tell these stories to each other precludes a slowly expanding circle of Americanness that is ultimately fairly frictionless process where there are bad guys but they’re unreasonable and the good thinking people can look down upon them.   [Read more…]

Restraining Order Offers Glimpse into Escondido School Board Follies

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Sometimes big headlines result from big spin. Take Escondido, for instance. Politicians in that north county bastion of reaction have mastered the fine art of drama when it comes to politics.

Whether it’s banning immigrants from renting homes, terminating a social service agency’s contract in retaliation for its speech, and enforcing a restrictive ordinance that stifled rallies and demonstrations, the yokels in America’s 11th most conservative city know how to stand the truth on its head to advance their cause.

From the mindset that imagined refugees from Central America were here to sell drugs, spread disease, and rape their daughters, comes the story of poor hard working Republican school board members being bullied by a mean old Latino Democrat.   [Read more…]

The Number 1 Thing Rich People Get Dead Wrong About Poor People

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Debunking one of the biggest myths about poverty

By Paul Buchheit / AlterNet

Many wealthy white conservative males believe they deserve their good fortunes, and that the poor are taking handouts. But on average little of the money of the wealthiest Americans is spent on productive job-creating ventures. Potential young entrepreneurs, in contrast, are too often mired in debt and deprived of opportunities to prosper.   [Read more…]

It’s Time for Quantitative Easing for People Instead of Banks

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Income Inequality is Getting Worse

Income and wealth inequality is only getting worse. It’s not hard to understand why. Certain corporations have a lock on economic activity throughout the world. Mom and Pop operations have been forced out of business or have merged with the Big Guys. Artificial intelligence, automation, robots and computers have taken over many menial but used-to-be-better-than-minimum-wage jobs like check-out clerks, bank tellers and customer service operators. Other jobs have been off shored to cheaper labor jurisdictions.

The rest of us, college graduates included, have been reduced to being expendable appendages of the large corporate machines to be sucked in and spit out at their pleasure. When our skill sets are outmoded, we will be laid off and fresh talent will be acquired. The job pool is shrinking because the number of necessary jobs is shrinking. Today, there are approximately 1.2 million fewer jobs in mid-and higher-wage industries than there were prior to the 2008 recession, while there are 2.3 million more jobs in lower-wage industries. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics most jobs in the next decade won’t even require a college education. They are jobs that can’t be done by robots: care givers, nurses, house cleaners, gardeners, retail.

Another reason for income and wealth inequality is that the US Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing policy screws savers who get zero interest on their life savings while injecting money into the largest Wall Street banks. This money is siphoned off by wealthy investors and hedge funds. It never enters the real economy. It only encourages the average Joes and Janes to take on more debt. Ninty percent of the money supply is created by private banks who loan money into the economy through their policy of fractional reserve banking. As the money supply increases, so does debt.   [Read more…]

What to Do About Disloyal Corporations

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By Robert Reich / RobertReich.Org

Just like that, Pfizer has decided it’s no longer American. It plans to link up with Ireland’s Allergan and move its corporate headquarters from New York to Ireland.

That way it will pay less tax. Ireland’s tax rate is less than half that of United States. Ian Read, Pfizer’s chief executive, told the Wall Street Journal the higher tax rate in the United States caused Pfizer to compete “with one hand tied behind our back.”

Read said he’d tried to lobby Congress to reduce the corporate tax rate (now 35 percent) but failed, so Pfizer is leaving.
  [Read more…]

Excerpt From Sunshine/Noir II: Livin’ La Vida Logan

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Barrio Logan is one of the oldest neighborhoods in San Diego. It used to be one whole community called Logan Heights, named after congressman John A. Logan, but the creation of the Interstate 5 freeway that bisected the neighborhood changed that. Then the building of the San Diego–Coronado Bridge changed it again. Thousands were displaced from building the freeway and the bridge. Now Barrio Logan encompasses a relatively small patch of land sandwiched between the San Diego Bay and the I-5 freeway and north of National City and south of San Diego’s East Village.

Fewer than 5,000 people inhabit my barrio. Thousands more come during the day to work here in the shipyards, the Port of San Diego and the other companies that line the bay side of Barrio Logan. Of those 5,000 barrio denizens about 85% of them are non-white, most of which are of Mexican descent. But things are changing.   [Read more…]

Nailing Monsanto

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At the tail end of CBS This Morning this Wednesday, was a brief interview with Monsanto’s CEO, Hugh Grant (not the movie star), on the debate over GMO labeling. He tried to come off as a soft-spoken, reasonable man, describing his company as “…an agricultural company. We sell seeds to farmers and those farmers make harvests and those harvest end up on plates around the world.”

Cool. The man running the company that is poisoning our planet and our population is just so damn nice, what with putting all that poison (err food) on our plates!

What if we don’t want his poison? Nice Mr. Grant wants to cram it down your throat. His nice agricultural company spent over $4 million killing a GMO labeling initiative in Colorado. They spent $6 million stopping a similar effort in Oregon.   [Read more…]

Dead, White, and Blue: The Great Die-Off of America’s Blue Collar Whites

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By Barbara Ehrenreich /TomDispatch

The white working class, which usually inspires liberal concern only for its paradoxical, Republican-leaning voting habits, has recently become newsworthy for something else: according to economist Anne Case and Angus Deaton, the winner of the latest Nobel Prize in economics, its members in the 45- to 54-year-old age group are dying at an immoderate rate.

While the lifespan of affluent whites continues to lengthen, the lifespan of poor whites has been shrinking. As a result, in just the last four years, the gap between poor white men and wealthier ones has widened by up to four years. The New York Times summed up the Deaton and Case study with this headline: “Income Gap, Meet the Longevity Gap.”

This was not supposed to happen. For almost a century, the comforting American narrative was that better nutrition and medical care would guarantee longer lives for all.   [Read more…]

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