As discussions about reparations for Black Americans gain some ground, the first state with a task force on the issue is hearing that it needs to think bigger. African Americans in California have been telling the state’s reparations task force that a one-time payout would mean little if they don’t have equal access to education, employment, health care or housing. A payment, they said…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
“Guns, pick up your guns, pick up your guns, and put the pigs on the run, pick up your guns,” sang a group of Black youths, their voices ringing clearly through the pixelated footage of my pirated copy of The Black Power Mixtape. The youth in the documentary clip were students at an Oakland Black Panther Party School, where the only use for a gun was in community self-defense. From the video…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
It was January 1983 and raining in San Francisco.
The summer before, I’d moved here from Portland, Oregon, a city known for its perpetual gray drizzles and, on the 60-odd days a year when the sun deigns to shine, dazzling displays of greenery. My girlfriend had spent a year convincing me that San Francisco had much more to offer me than Portland did for her.
Every few months, I’d scrape the bottom of my bank account to travel to San Francisco and taste its charms. Once, I even hitched a ride on a private plane. (Those were the days!) In a week’s visit, she’d take me to multiple women’s music concerts — events you’d wait a year for in Portland. We’d visit feminist and leftist bookstores, eat real Mexican food, and walk through Golden Gate Park in brilliant sunshine. The sky would be clear, the city would be sparkling, and she convinced me that San Francisco would indeed be paradise. Or at least drier than Portland.
So, I moved, but I wuz robbed! I knew it that first winter when, from December through March, the rain seemed to come down in rivers — atmospheric rivers, in fact — though none of us knew the term back then. That would be my initial encounter with, as a Mexican-American friend used to call it, “el pinche niño.” El Niño is the term meteorologists give to one-half of an oscillating cyclical weather phenomenon originating in the Pacific Ocean. El Niño usually brings drought to the southern parts of North America, as well as Central America, while deluging northern California and the Pacific Northwest. La Niña is the other half of that cycle, its effects roughly flipping those of El Niño geographically. (As for the meaning of “pinche,” go ahead and Google it.)
San Francisco sits in the sweet spot where, at least until the end of the last century, we would get winter rains at both ends of the cycle. And boy, did it rain that winter! I soon began to wonder whether any amount of love or any number of concerts could make up for the cold and mud. Eventually, I realized that I couldn’t really blame the girlfriend. The only other time I’d lived in San Francisco was during the then-unusual drought year of 1976. Of course, I came to believe then that it never rained here. So, really, if there was a bait-and-switch going on, I had pulled it on myself.
Still, looking back, as much as the rain annoyed me, I couldn’t have imagined how much I’d miss it two decades into the twenty-first century.
But Is It Climate Change? And Would That Actually Be So Bad?
Along with the rest of the western United States, my city has now been in the grip of a two-decade-long megadrought that has persisted through a number of El Niño/La Niña cycles. Scientists tell us that it’s the worst for the West and Southwest in at least the last 1,200 years. Since 2005, I’ve biked or walked the three miles from my house to the university where I teach. In all those years, there have probably been fewer than 10 days when rain forced me to drive or take the bus. Periodic droughts are not unknown in this part of the country. But climate scientists are convinced that this extended, deadly drought has been caused by climate change.
It wasn’t always that way. Twenty years ago, those of us who even knew about global warming, from laypeople to experts, were wary of attributing any particular weather event to it. Climate-change deniers and believers alike made a point of distinguishing between severe weather events and the long-term effects of changes in the climate. For the deniers, however, as the years went on, it seemed that no accumulation of symptoms — floods, droughts, heat waves, fires, or tornadoes — could legitimately be added together to yield a diagnosis of climate change. Or if climate change was the reason, then human activity didn’t cause it and it was probably a good thing anyway.
Not that long ago, it wasn’t even unusual to encounter “climate-change-is-good-for-you” articles in reasonably mainstream outlets. For example, the conservative British magazine The Spectator ran a Matt Ridley piece in 2013 that began: “Climate change has done more good than harm so far and is likely to continue doing so for most of this century. This is not some barmy, right-wing fantasy; it is the consensus of expert opinion.” It turned out that Ridley’s “consensus of expert opinion” derived from a single economist’s (and not a climate scientist’s) paper summarizing 14 other economists on the subject.
“The chief benefits of global warming,” Ridley wrote then, “include: fewer winter deaths; lower energy costs; better agricultural yields; probably fewer droughts; maybe richer biodiversity.” He added that, were the world’s economy to continue to grow by 3% annually, “the average person will be about nine times as rich in 2080 as she is today. So low-lying Bangladesh will be able to afford the same kind of flood defenses that the Dutch have today.”
There was so much wrong with those last two sentences (beginning with what “average” means), but I’ll content myself with pointing out that, in October 2022, historic floods covered one-third of Pakistan (next door to Bangladesh), including prime farmland the size of the state of Virginia. Thirty-three million people were affected by those floods that, according to the New York Times, “were caused by heavier-than-usual monsoon rains and glacial melt.” And what led to such unusual rain and melt? As the Times reported:
“Scientists say that global warming caused by greenhouse-gas emissions is sharply increasing the likelihood of extreme rain in South Asia, home to a quarter of humanity. And they say there is little doubt that it made this year’s monsoon season more destructive.”
It seems unlikely those floods will lead to “better agricultural yields.” (If only Pakistan had thought to build dikes, like the Dutch!)
Maybe it’s easy to take potshots at what someone like Ridley wrote almost a decade ago, knowing what we do now. Back then, views like his were not uncommon on the right and, all too sadly, they’re not rare even today. (Ridley is still at it, having recently written a piece twitting the British Conservative Party for supporting something as outré as wind power.) And of course, those climate change denials were supported (then and now) by the companies that stood to lose the most from confronting the dangers of greenhouse gases, not only the fossil-fuel industry (whose scientists knew with stunning accuracy exactly what was already happening on this planet as early as the 1970s), but electric companies as well.
Back in 2000, an ExxonMobile “advertorial” in the New York Times hit the trifecta: climate change isn’t real; or if it is, humans (and especially fossil-fuel companies!) aren’t responsible; and anyway it might be a good thing. Titled “Unsettled Science,” the piece falsely argued that scientists could not agree on whether climate change was happening. (By that time, 90% of climate scientists, including ExxonMobile’s, had reached a consensus that climate change is real.) After all, the ad insisted, there had been other extended periods of unusual weather like the “little ice age” of the medieval era and, in any case, greenhouse gas concentrations vary naturally “for reasons having nothing to do with human activity.”
We shouldn’t be surprised that Exxon-Mobile tried to keep climate change controversial in the public mind. They had a lot to lose in a transition away from fossil fuels. It’s less common knowledge, however, that the company has long bankrolled climate denial “grassroots” organizations. In fact, its scientists knew about climate change as early as the 1950s and, in a 1977 internal memo, they summarized their research on the subject by predicting a one- to three-degree Celsius average temperature rise by 2050, pretty much the future we’re now staring at.
Water, Water, Anywhere?
California has been “lucky” this fall and winter. We’ve seen a (probably temporary) break in the endless drought. A series of atmospheric rivers have brought desperately needed rain to our valleys and an abundance of snow to the mountains. But not everyone has been celebrating, as floods have swept away homes, cars, and people up and down the state. They’ve shut down highways and rail lines, while forcing thousands to evacuate. After years of thirst, for a few weeks the state has been drowning; and, as is so often the case with natural disasters, the poorest people have been among those hardest hit.
I’ve always enjoyed the delicious smugness of lying in a warm bed listening to wind and water banging at my windows. These days it’s a guilty pleasure, though, because I know how many thousands of unhoused people have suffered in and even died during the recent storms. In Sacramento, rain marooned one tent encampment, as the spit of land it occupied became an island. In the city of Ontario, near Los Angeles, flash floods washed away people’s tents and may have drowned as many as 10 of their inhabitants.
My own city responded to the rains with police sweeps of unhoused people hours before a “bomb cyclone” hit on January 4th. In such a “sweep,” police and sometimes other officials descend suddenly to enforce city ordinances that make it illegal to sit or lie on the sidewalk. They make people “move along,” confiscating any belongings they can’t carry off. Worse yet, shelters in the city were already full. There was nowhere inside for the unhoused to go and many lost the tents that had been their only covering.
The same climate change that’s prolonged the drought has exacerbated the deadly effects of those rainstorms. Over the last few years, record wildfires have consumed entire communities. Twenty years of endless dry days have turned our forests and meadows into tinderboxes, just waiting for a spark. Now, when rain bangs down in such amounts on already burnt, drought-hardened land, houses slide down hills, trees are pulled from the earth, and sinkholes open in roads and highways.
There is one genuine piece of luck here, though. Along with the rain, more than twice as much snow as would accumulate in an average year has covered the Sierra mountains of northern California. This is significant because many cities in the region get their water from the Sierra runoff. San Francisco is typical. Its municipal water supply comes from the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, near Yosemite National Park, fed from that runoff. For now, it looks as if a number of cities could, for the first time in a while, have extra water available this year. But there’s always the chance that warm weather early in the spring will turn snow to rain, melting away the snowpack and our hopes.
Much of northern California’s water comes from the Sierra mountains, but it’s a different story in the south. The 9.8 million residents of Los Angeles County, along with most of southern California, get their water from the Colorado River. A century-old arrangement governs water use by the seven states through which the Colorado runs, along with 30 tribal nations and parts of northern Mexico — about 40 million people in all. Historically, the “northern basin” states, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico, have been allocated 7.5 million acre-feet of water a year. Nevada, California, and Arizona have received 8.5 million and Mexico has treaty rights to 1.5 million. Dams on the two lakes — Mead in Nevada and Powell in Utah — provide hydroelectric power to many people in those same states.
The megadrought has drastically reduced the levels of these two artificial lakes that serve as reservoirs for those seven states. The original agreement assumed that 17.5 million acre-feet of water would be available annually (each acre-foot being about what two households might use in a year). For the last three years, however, the flow has fallen below 10 million acre-feet. This year, the states have been unable to agree on how to parcel out those allocations, so the Biden administration may have to step in and impose a settlement.
Both lakes are at their lowest historic levels since they were first filled. Several times, while working on a midterm election campaign in Reno, Nevada last year, I noticed stories in the local press about human remains being uncovered as Lake Mead’s shoreline recedes, some of them apparently victims of mob hits in decades past.
Less water in those giant lakes means less water for agriculture and residential consumption. But the falling water levels threaten a further problem: the potential failure of their dams to provide electric power crucial to millions. Last summer, Lake Mead dropped to within 90 feet of the depth at which its dam can no longer generate power. Some estimates suggest that Lake Powell’s Glen Canyon dam may stop producing electricity as soon as July.
Earthquakes, Drought, and Disaster
The woman I moved to San Francisco for (whom I’ve known since I was a young teen in the 1960s) spent her college years at the University of California, Berkeley. I remember her telling me, in the summer of 1969, that she and a number of friends had spent the previous spring semester celebrating the coming end of the world as they knew it. Apparently, some scientists had then predicted that a giant earthquake would cause the San Francisco Bay Area to collapse into the Pacific Ocean. Facing such a possible catastrophe, a lot of young folks decided that they might as well have a good party. There was smoking and drinking and dancing to welcome the approaching apocalypse. (When a Big One did hit 20 years later, the city didn’t exactly fall into the ocean, but a big chunk of the San Francisco Bay Bridge did go down.)
Over the last months, we Californians have experienced both historic drought and historic rainfall. The world as we knew it really is ending faster than some of us ever expected. Now that we’re facing an imminent catastrophe, one already killing people around the globe and even in my state, it’s hard to know how to respond. Somehow, I don’t feel like partying though. I think it’s time to fight.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
Malik Miah asks what this latest cop killing says about policing and why abolition is the only answer.
Workers in California who grow and pick the majority of fruits and nuts in the United States are experiencing an acute crisis of un- and under-employment, and ensuing food insecurity, following the procession of atmospheric rivers that drenched the state in January. In a mere matter of days, many locations across the Golden State absorbed upwards of half the precipitation that tends to fall over…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
An anecdote told by California Gov. Gavin Newsom at a press conference on the mass shooting in Half Moon Bay—the second such appearance he made in two days, following another deadly shooting in Monterey Park—encapsulated the United States’ twin crises of economic injustice and rampant gun violence, said advocates on Monday.
The Democratic governor told the press that while visiting a man who’d been injured in the shooting at two farms in the Bay Area city, the victim said he was hoping to leave the hospital quickly to avoid high medical bills.
“He said, ‘Hey, Governor, thanks for being here but when am I gonna get the hell out of here?’” Newsom said. “His leg was shattered by the gunfire. He goes, ‘I can’t afford to spend any more time here, I don’t have the money.”
“How many people are shot and then face massive medical debt? How much revenue and profit do hospitals generate via shootings? Perversity through and through.”
The man’s mother and son later arrived and told Newsom they were “worried he’s going to lose his job at a warehouse the next day unless he can go back to work.”
Politico reporter Lara Korte relayed the governor’s comments on social media, eliciting numerous responses in which critics—including advocates for Medicare for All and strict gun control—said the post represented “the United States of America in one tweet.”
\u201cThe United States of America in one tweet: Get shot in a mass shooting, go to hospital, try and leave early because the debt would kill you instead. Complete and utter perversity.\u201d— Christian Christensen (@Christian Christensen) 1674659567
“This is the most American tweet of all time,” added progressive commentator Kyle Kulinski.
The shooting in Half Moon Bay was one of dozens of shootings since 2023 began just over three weeks ago. Along with the shooting in Monterey Park last Saturday and the shooting of a family in Enoch, Utah on January 4, it was one of the deadliest attacks so far.
Dr. Adam Gaffney, an intensive care unit doctor and former president of Physicians for a National Health Program, called Newsom’s story “a gut-wrenching indictment of our healthcare system.”
Dania Palanker, an assistant research professor at the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, noted that the costs associated with being one of the millions of Americans who will survive gun violence in their lifetime are an often-overlooked consequence of the Republican Party’s obstruction as the vast majority of Americans call for stricter gun control.
\u201cI can go on and on about various services or goods that aren\u2019t typically covered by insurance as well as those that are often inadequately covered (like mental health care & wheelchairs).\nhttps://t.co/sKrpOFto9v\u201d— Dania Palanker (@Dania Palanker) 1674611579
As CNN reported in December, one insured survivor of the mass shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs received a bill for $130,000, while another person who was among the 27.5 million Americans who lack health insurance was billed $20,000 for spending a night in the emergency room where doctors stitched a bullet wound in his leg.
The Journal of the American Medical Association published a study last May showing that the average initial hospital charge for mass shooting survivors between 2012 and 2019 was nearly $65,000 per person.
“How many people are shot and then face massive medical debt?” asked physician and anthropologist Eric Reinhart. “How much revenue and profit do hospitals generate via shootings? Perversity through and through.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
It took a mass civil rights movement to end legal racial segregation in the United States, writes Malik Miah. The same must happen to abolish policing and the corrupt criminal “justice” system.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
In a win for workplace democracy, employees at a Peet’s Coffee & Tea located in Davis, California formed the chain’s first unionized shop in the United States on Friday.
Workers at the café voted 14-1 to join Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 1021.
“We will not be the last,” tweeted Peet’s Workers United (PWU), which organized the winning unionization campaign. PWU is the counterpart to Starbucks Workers United (SBWU), the outfit behind dozens of successful union drives nationwide.
“Solidarity, from coffee shop to coffee shop,” SBWU wrote on social media ahead of Friday’s vote at Peet’s. After PWU won, their Starbucks allies gave them a warm “welcome to the labor movement.”
SBWU organizer Tyler Keeling from Lakewood, California played an instrumental role in PWU’s efforts, as detailed last week in Jacobin.
PWU expressed gratitude to Keeling before and after the union vote.
\u201cWe’ve been lucky to have Tyler by our side from the beginning! I don’t know if we would have gotten this far without him!\u201d— Peets United (@Peets United) 1674078218
\u201cThank you for all the help you’ve given us from day 1. Beyond appreciative of you. Together we are strong.\u201d— Peets United (@Peets United) 1674342867
In November, Peet’s workers at two locations in Davis filed for union elections with the National Labor Relations Board.
In a petition asking for community support, PWU wrote: “We are overworked, understaffed, and underpaid. Barista’s raises are less than a tenth of inflation, there are pay discrepancies that do not align with seniority, skill, or any kind of logic, and we have been forced to shut down multiple times in the past month due to understaffing. We’ve had no viable recourse for removing toxic managers other than waiting for the problem to resolve itself.”
“Meanwhile, our managers have been using union-busting tactics like Starbucks to divide and confuse us,” organizers continued. “They’ve called in corporate higher-ups to have conversations about unionizing with employees, they’ve reinstated punitive scheduling and dress code measures, and posted misleading informational fliers in break rooms.”
“We are fighting for fair wages, decent schedules, and corporate transparency, but two stores against a multimillion-dollar corporation is a lonely battle,” they added. “Peet’s has always taken pride in its loyal customers and loving community, and we need that now more than ever.”
In a statement issued after workers voted overwhelmingly in favor of union representation, the company said that “while we had hoped for another outcome, we respect the right of our Davis employees to choose.”
“As we follow the legally required next steps with the union at North Davis, we will continue to work for and with our employees companywide. That is the Peet’s way,” the company added.
According to PWU, Peet’s executives went out of their way in the lead-up to the representation vote to dissuade workers from joining SEIU, including by holding anti-union captive audience meetings.
The corporation “paid a store manager from Chicago to fly to Davis to give his ‘unbiased’ opinion on unions,” organizers said. “The president of the company came in and essentially begged people to give him another chance and to put all our faith in him.”
The second Davis location that had also filed to hold a unionization vote withdrew its request last week. According to PWU, that happened because “corporate gave the entire staff… a $500 bonus for pulling their petition and for ‘giving Peet’s a chance.’”
Since December 2021, workers at more than 270 Starbucks locations across the United States have voted to unionize. Organizers have won more than 80% of their campaigns despite the corporation’s unlawful intimidation and retaliation tactics.
Keeling of SBWU said Saturday that he is “so happy to have more coffee shops unionizing.”
“The future looks bright,” Keeling declared. “The new wave of unionization will save the world.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
Across seven states on Thursday, lawmakers will be introducing bills aimed at taxing the wealth of the richest Americans as Congress has repeatedly failed to raise taxes on the rich or target wealthy tax-dodgers. The bills will be introduced in states with a higher concentration of wealthy people, like California and New York. While the bills vary in their language — several of them are inspired…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta on Thursday sued the six major companies that dominate the U.S. insulin market, ratcheting up the state’s assault on a profitable industry for artificially jacking up prices and making the indispensable drug less accessible for diabetes patients. The 47-page civil complaint alleges three pharmaceutical companies that control the insulin market — Eli Lilly and…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
In California, at least 19 people have died as storms continue to batter the region, leading to widespread flooding, mudslides and power outages. The National Weather Service says large portions of Central California have received over half their annual normal precipitation in just the past two weeks — and more rain is coming. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says 34 million…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Minority rule is a major obstacle to ensuring abortion rights.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
A new analysis out Tuesday shows how a just transition towards a green economy in California—one in which workers in the state’s fossil fuel industry would be able to find new employment and receive assistance if they’re displaced from their jobs—will be “both affordable and achievable,” contrary to claims from oil and gas giants and anti-climate lawmakers.
The study published by the Gender Equity Policy Institute (GEPI) notes that a majority of workers in the oil and gas sectors will have numerous new job opportunities as California pushes to become carbon neutral by 2045 with a vow to construct a 100% clean electricity grid and massively reduce oil consumption and production.
“The state will need to modernize its electrical grid and build storage capacity to meet increased demand for electricity,” reads the report. “Carbon management techniques, plugging orphan wells, and the development of new energy sources such as geothermal will all come into play, providing economic opportunities to workers and businesses alike.”
GEPI analyzed the most recent public labor data, showing that the oil and gas industries in California employed approximately 59,200 people as of 2021 across jobs in production, sales, transportation, legal, and executive departments, among others.
The group examined potential job opportunities for fossil fuel workers “in all growing occupations, not solely in clean energy or green jobs,” and found that about two-thirds of employees are likely to find promising opportunities outside of fossil fuel-related work.
“Our findings show that a sizable majority (56%) of current oil and gas workers are highly likely to find jobs in California in another industry in their current occupation, given demand in the broader California economy for workers with their existing skills,” the report says.
Roughly a quarter of oil and gas workers are employed in jobs that are projected to decline over the next decade, while 18% work in production and extraction, sectors which will contract as the state begins to move away from fossil fuel extraction.
“For all declining occupations in oil and gas industries, there are available jobs in similar occupations in California that would allow workers to transition without the need for retraining,” GEPI reported.
About 16,100 people who will be at risk of displacement into lower-paying jobs over the next two decades will be able to benefit from income subsidies and relocation assistance, which GEPI estimated would cost the state $68.9 million or less annually—far less than a 2021 estimate by the Department of Economics and Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, which said aid for displaced oil and gas workers would cost up to $830 million per year. Importantly, PERI’s estimate included pension guarantees and income-level guarantees while GEPI’s factored in only financial aid for people who face pay cuts.
GEPI’s study showed that “California can achieve a just and equitable transition away from fossil fuels for oil and gas workers,” said the Los Angeles-based advocacy group Climate Resolve.
\u201cIn this new, groundbreaking report, @TheGepi’s findings illustrate that California can achieve a just and equitable transition away from fossil fuels for oil and gas workers. https://t.co/uZnAnpDhTp\u201d— Climate Resolve (@Climate Resolve) 1672766518
“As the carbon neutral economy advances, supporting workers at risk of displacement from jobs in oil and gas industries is one important component of creating an equitable and sustainable future for all the people of California,” reads GEPI’s report. “These men and women are expected to be able to transition with ease to other industries without retraining or a period of unemployment.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
One of Borey “Peejay” Ai’s earliest memories is the sound of gunfire. “My mom would put us under the table,” he recalled. Ai was too young to understand what was happening, but he remembered being afraid like his mother. “Because I felt her fear, I felt fear too,” he said. Ai was born in a refugee camp in Thailand after his mother fled Cambodia to escape the Khmer Rouge genocide. As a small child…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
There’s going to be one less prison in California. On September 8, visiting Lassen County Judge Robert F. Moody dismissed a lawsuit by the town of Susanville that intended to force the continued operation of the California Correctional Center (CCC), a 60-year-old state prison requiring $503 million in repairs. Judge Moody’s ruling marks the end of the town’s year-long fight to stop CCC from…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Janine Jackson interviewed UC Santa Barbara’s Nelson Lichtenstein about the University of California strike for the December 2, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: When it comes to corporate news media coverage of labor actions, there are unfortunately a few tropes to look out for, even in 2022.
First, while strikes in other countries may be presented as signs of freedom, in the US they will often be presented in terms of the disruption they cause.
New York Times (11/14/22)
The New York Times’ November 14 report on the strike by some 48,000 University of California teaching assistants, researchers and others gave skimming readers the shorthand “highlight” that these people “walked off the job Monday, forcing some classes to be canceled.”
“Classes were disrupted, research slowed and office hours canceled,” the paper noted, “only a few weeks away from final examinations.”
Whatever an article goes on to say, the “harmful disruption” presentation encourages readers to understand that the status quo before the action was not harmful and did not disrupt, and that worker actions are therefore willful, selfish and possibly malignant.
Elite media’s other big idea in these circumstances is to present the idea that, as CNN had it in their very brief mention, UC workers are “demanding higher pay”—”workers demand/owners offer” being among the hardiest perennial media narrative frames. It implies a context of scarcity in which we are to imagine that the money needed to allow academic employees to make their rent would have to be swiped from the pockets of small children or something.
Of course, the major weapon big media have is the spotlight, which they can shine or shutter as they choose.
So here to help us see what’s happening and what’s at stake in the largest strike in the history of American higher education is Nelson Lichtenstein. He’s professor of history at the University of California/Santa Barbara, where he directs the Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy.
He’s also author or editor of a number of books, including Beyond the New Deal Order: US Politics From the Great Depression to the Great Recession, and A Fabulous Failure: The Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism, which is forthcoming in 2023.
He joins us now by phone from Santa Barbara. Welcome to CounterSpin, Nelson Lichtenstein.
Nelson Lichtenstein: Glad to be here.
Truthout (6/10/19)
JJ: Pay is absolutely a key part of this labor action at the University of California, but it’s not as though these are people who are really well-off and looking for still more. The folks teaching at these elite institutions, some of them are living in their cars, but many of them, enough of them, are seriously struggling, as I understand it, to keep a roof over their heads.
So when we say it’s about money, it’s about the money it takes to live a life, right?
NL: Right. I mean, this strike has been developing for several years, and the one spur to it has been the enormous increase in housing costs and rents.
And that’s partly pandemic-induced. That is, lots of people who used to work in downtown LA or New York, they want to, “Let’s get a house on the California coast, or something, and Zoom in to work.” Well, that’s jacked up, generally, housing costs in California. And so that’s one spur to it.
I think everyone in California, from the left to the right to the governor on down, knows that housing is just an enormous crisis. And here, of course, teaching assistants and other graduate students, they’ve seen their rents go way, way up. And there’s been an erosion in their pay, small as it was, over the last decade or so. And in the last two years, the inflationary spike has done that.
Now, it used to be that there was an implicit kind of ivory tower bargain: OK, you go to the university, you work for five or six years at low pay as a kind of apprentice, and then you end up with a good job, a high-prestige job, a tenure job, etc.
Dissent (11/22/22)
Well, that bargain has been broken for decades. And the UC’s (I think admirable) recruitment of working-class people and working-class people of color into the university has exacerbated that, because they aren’t ivory tower types, they aren’t Ivy League types. They’re working Americans.
And so this pressure for a recalibration of the wages and working conditions of thousands and thousands of the people who really stand at the heart of the university—the tenure track professors, they just become a minority, a small minority.
And it takes these academic researchers, postdocs, mainly in the sciences, and then of course the teaching assistants, to really make the university go. And we can no longer have this contingent labor model that people accept because there’s some reward at the other end. That’s not the case.
This is their life. And if you’re in your 20s, you have the right to get married, to have kids if you want to. We don’t live in a kind of Victorian Era anymore.
So this strike is quite large. It has support. Your introductory comments were on target, but this strike actually has support from an enormous range of people.
The Los Angeles Times endorsed the aims of the strike. And I think it has the potential to really transform, not just higher education, but really well beyond that.
JJ: And the strike does have support, which I think is so key, in part because that support is in the face of, if we just talk about big media, a kind of, “Oh, this doesn’t work. This is a problem.”
The wave of labor actions that we’ve seen in the last couple of years have been such a heartening sign of people, not just standing up for their rights, but also talking back in the face of a narrative that’s been pushed on us for a long time.
And part of that has been, as with Uber drivers and others, and certainly with journalists, we’ve seen a lot of “they aren’t even workers,” and the workers themselves saying, “Well, we’re not workers, we’re individuals; it’s not like we’re building cars.”
And there’s kind of a push against organizing among so-called culture workers or intellectual workers.
NL: Right. Glad you brought that up, because I think one of the many sins of former President Trump was to recreate an imagery of what a worker was, a very retrograde image: you know, a white male coal miner or steel worker or something like that. Those are the only people who are really workers.
And of course, that’s so antiquated and out of date. American culture and political culture has to come to terms with the fact that, today, the heart of the working class in the United States are people who are in the service sector, who do everything from retail work, but also to hospitals, to the media, the universities, etc.
I mean, the biggest unions in the country today are the teachers unions—mainly secondary, but also higher education.
So, yes, this is very important. Just to get your head around a sense of “who is a worker?” And take them seriously as a person who works for a living.
My spouse, Eileen Boris, who teaches feminist studies, did a wonderful little kind of performative act at a rally where faculty were urged to wear their academic regalia, which really comes out of the medieval time.
So we’re all wearing our gown and our hats, and my spouse, she said, “OK, yes, I’m a distinguished professor, with a chair and everything.”
And then she took off her gown, and there was a union T-shirt. “But really, I’m a worker.”
And I think that’s what has to happen in the whole cultural world, that whether you’re museum curators or in the university or any other area of cultural production, that, really, we are in fact workers.
Prosaic demands for wages and better working conditions are important.
By the way, the interesting thing about this strike is that the people who are actually on strike are very variegated, cultural, political, racial, gendered, very hip kind of people. But what is their demand? The demand is extraordinarily conventional. It is for higher wages. Nothing could be more conventional than that in terms of labor.
But that’s essential to their dignity and their capacity, actually, to do their jobs. To write, for example, a dissertation, you have to have time to do it. You can’t be bussing dishes at a restaurant in addition to your job as teaching assistant. You have to have time to write.
So this is what they’re really demanding.
JJ: And then in terms of broader implications, I read an article that said, “Campus-area housing has long been a policy concern, vexing state lawmakers and inciting town/gown legal battles.”
Now, I’m not saying that that’s inaccurate, but it does make it sound like a fight that I don’t necessarily have a dog in, you know?
But there are broader implications of this strike that go beyond the workers, extending, minimally, to all of their students and their potential students.
One source says, “I can’t in good conscience tell anyone to come here for their PhD,” because “the cost of living is unsustainable.”
Nelson Lichtenstein: “This is the way issues get put on the agenda, on the state and the national agenda, by making social disruptions.”
NL: Yes, right, yeah. The housing crisis is really a labor question in California. I mean, people commuting from the Central Valley to work in Silicon Valley, that’s a two-hour commute. Well, why are they doing that? Because they can’t afford the housing in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Obviously that’s also true in the university. We have people, both staff and academic people, who are commuting 40, 50 miles to work at the university.
This is all because of housing. Everyone recognizes in California this gigantic crisis. It’s this great state with tremendous industries and a really liberal political culture. But the Achilles heel of this state is housing, the housing crisis. And the students here at UC, grad students and others, are really putting this on the agenda, as “you have to do something about it.”
Now, one way is, you pay us more, you know? OK. And if you don’t want to do that, then you have to figure out some way to reduce the cost of housing. Housing’s at least 40% of the inflationary spike, probably more in California. So something has to be done.
And I think this is the way issues get put on the agenda, on the state and the national agenda, by making social disruptions.
And that’s what’s been happening for the last three weeks here at UC.
JJ: I wanted to point out one article, a New York Times piece by Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura, and it was not about UC; it was about adjunct strikes at the New School (where I got my graduate degree).
And it was unusual, because it introduced the topic of administrator salaries, and it quoted someone who had looked at compensation data, saying, “The administrators seem to view themselves as essential and everyone else as inessential.”
New York Times (1/16/22)
Without that kind of context, reports on the strike, and “these workers want more pay,” it’s kind of like giving the ball score, “Red Sox six,” you know. You’re missing the context in which more money is being called for.
And it makes it sound like they’re asking for money to be created out of thin air, when we’re talking about power.
NL: That’s true. Administrators proliferated. But I would make this point: Some on the left who are supportive of the strike, and supportive of the grad students, would say, “Oh, the money is there. Let’s just take it out of this bloated administrative overhead.”
And that’s true. You can get some of it. But that’s not going to solve the problem.
What will solve the problem is we’ve had 40 years of austerity from state legislatures, and the national government as well, in terms of funding higher education.
What we need to do is to go to the legislatures and have progressive taxation. We have Elon Musk here in California. We have the Facebook people, etc.
We need to have a revision of the tax code which returns us to the world of 1955, which was a much more progressive era when it came to taxes. And that’s where the money is. That’s where the really big money is. That’s where the billions and billions are.
And stop this starving of higher education; decade by decade, a smaller portion of the actual operating funds of all the state universities have come from the general tax revenues. We need to reverse that. And a strike like this puts that issue on the agenda, and I think that’s where the money’s going to come from.
JJ: Let me just ask you, finally, and you’ve just hinted towards it: Do you have thoughts about what truly responsible, thoughtful news media coverage would look like, things it would include, and maybe some things it would leave out?
NL: Well, yes, actually you indicated that the obstacle to this settlement of the strike is the administration, the people who run it, who want to maintain and continue this untenable model of a kind of impoverished, precarious, large group of grad students in a kind of limbo, they want to continue that, and think that’s tenable. It’s not tenable.
We need a breakthrough which is going to transform the meaning of what it means to be an academic worker. The status quo is untenable. And I think the facts of this crisis needs to be up front in terms of media coverage of this strike, and many others of that sort.
We’ve come to a period of increasing inequality and increasing stress at work, and the pandemic demonstrated that, but it’s there. It’s untenable for the future.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Nelson Lichtenstein. His article, “The Largest Strike in the History of American Higher Ed,” can be found at DissentMagazine.org. Nelson Lichtenstein, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
NL: You’re welcome, Janine.
The post ‘We Need to Transform What It Means to Be an Academic Worker; the Status Quo Is Untenable’ appeared first on FAIR.
This post was originally published on FAIR.
The United States House of Representatives passed legislation on November 30 to block a national rail strike planned for December 9, reports Malik Miah.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. – The state of California announced Monday $25 million to underwrite the first state-funded guaranteed income pilot programs, which could set a standard for the entire nation.
The grant money will fund seven pilot programs around the state to provide checks to support 1,975 Californians, including former foster youth and pregnant women, with their basic needs.
“A guaranteed income is meant to sit alongside wages and to just help make ends meet,” said Natalie Foster of the Economic Security Project.
The recipients will get from $600 to $1,200 a month for a period of 12 to 18 months.
For pregnant women who are low income the guaranteed income will provide critical financial and emotional stress relief.
“Pregnant women have a lot of doctor’s appointments and health concerns as well as work that they juggle and having a guaranteed income, meaning checks that come in the door with no strings attached, that can be spent on whatever comes up that month are incredibly important,” said Foster.
iFoster, a child advocacy, educational and resources organization, will receive $4,760,000 to provide 300 former foster youth with $750 per month for 18 months in rural and urban communities statewide.
“We go from caring for them to shoving them out the door and expecting them to be fully independent and financially stable the second they leave foster care,” executive director Serita Cox.
Experience with so called “aged-out” foster children proves they need a financial off ramp, not a cliff.
“Fifty percent of them will be unemployed. Fifty percent of them will have had periods of homelessness within 4 years of aging out,” said Cox.
Foster children might not get as much financial help from their families.
Cox said under the program “gives them a little bit of income, so they can achieve self-sufficiency.”
Berkeley’s Urban Institute will evaluate the programs to build on previous experiments, especially the one in Stockton.
“So, having California’s leadership is really important to making sure someday, there’s a Federal Guaranteed Income,” said Foster.
Over the course of 18 months, the San Francisco Human Services Agency will disburse $3.3 million to 150 former foster youth. They youth will be given $1,200 per month.
This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.
A trolley load of books, chapters and treatises have been written on the subject of sovereignty. Usually, the concept entails control and power, the latter a corollary of the former. In international law, sovereignty finds some form of expression in the Montevideo Convention of 1933 but can hardly be seen as exhaustive. In truth, the concept is a fruit-salad and medley, an “organized hypocrisy”, as Stephen D. Krasner describes it.
All of this leaves some room for the pantomime element sovereignty might allow: the eccentric who declares his own principality; the refusenik determined to avoid the taxing authorities; the clerical error that might spawn a new creation. That such entities are permitted to exist, however, lies in an enduring conceit. No army in modern times – barring, exception – is going to expend its resources against daft declarations of sovereignty over randomly picked stretches of land. The problem lies, however, in the risks, or lack of them, such declarations pose to the central authorities.
An exceedingly colourful personality, streaked with lunacy, is probably key to this. Take Louis Marinelli, a figure long associated with efforts to make California secede from the United States. Following the 2016 US election, Marinelli decided to open a foreign embassy in Moscow to represent the Independent Republic of California. The embassy shares the same office building with the Russian Anti-Globalization movement, which has also thrown in a measure of support.
In creating the centre, Marinelli acknowledged its limitations. It did serve no “diplomatic function” at the time and Russians wishing to travel to California had to go through the US Embassy. But he dared dream of independence. “That notion is embedded in the very question we intend to put before the voters: ‘Should California become a free, sovereign, and independent country.’” This remains, to put it mildly, a work in progress.
Marinelli’s efforts are hardly fleeting, nor remotely odd. The micronation experiment flutters and snaps in the wind, a persistent phenomenon. One need only recall the efforts of the Segway inventor Dean Kamen, self-proclaimed ruler of the Kingdom of Dumpling off the coast of Connecticut, to convince President George H.W. Bush to sign a faux non-aggression pact.
Sociologist Judy Lattas could only wonder in 2005 why there was “no significant study in the scholarly press on the micronationalism that is the contemporary phenomenon of ordinary people (however quirky), in long-established democracies, getting the idea to create their own countries”.
Of all the countries on planet Earth most addicted to the concept of micronations, Australia is exceptional, a truly idiosyncratic wonder. Size, a blood-soaked frontier history and an addled penal past may account for why a third of them have found a home there, giving Australia the title of being “Micronation Central“. Matt Siegel, writing for The Atlantic, suggested that such a micronation obsession might have arisen from that tired description of larrikinism supposedly inherent in the Australian character.
In 1970, perhaps the most famous of these colourful upstarts, the Principality of Hutt River, was founded by Leonard Casley. A 76-square-kilometre property in Western Australia’s mid west became the subject of interest for Casley, who had bickered over wheat production quotas in 1970.
That year, in letters addressed to Australia’s Governor General, the West Australian Premier, and the Governor of Western Australia, Casley claimed to be formally seceding and called upon all parties to “resolve co-operatively and mutually successfully this problem”. In time, his curious entity secured some 13,000 citizens worldwide, even though never having more than a population of 30 or so. Hutt River currency was issued, along with entrance visas to curious visitors. Residents were exempted from income tax, though this proved unenforceable.
In December 1977, Prince Leonard even made a declaration of war via telegram to the Governor-General of Australia, hoping that the gesture would grant his principality serious standing. The true inspiration for that was his perennial bugbear, the Australian Tax Office. The declaration was ignored in Canberra and withdrawn a few days later without a single shot fired.
In 2020, the Royal Hutt River Legion Major Richard Ananda Barton announced that his principality would rejoin the Commonwealth of Australia. “His Highness, Prince Graeme, has informed me that the Government of the Principality of Hutt River has decided to dissolve the Principality, which will, once again, become part of the Commonwealth of Australia.”
Two legal academics, Harry Hobbs and George Williams, recently considered this curious subject and concluded that Australia, in contrast to many states, “largely ignores micronations (and Indigenous nations) provided they comply with taxation and other laws.” They advance three reasons why this might be so: that Australia has a culture appreciative of those who thumb “their nose at authority”; that the country’s sense of sovereignty is secure and stable; and a combination of factors relating to demography and geography.
The implications of the last two factors should be clear enough. Australia remains one of the most urbanised countries on the planet, with 89% of individuals concentrated in urban centres. And given that there are 25 million or so individuals spread across a continent spanning 7.6 million square kilometres, the room for threatening and meaningful declarations of independence seems rather small.
This is not, however, to say that overt threats to secede have not ruffled a few feathers. Western Australia’s effort in the 1930s, spurred on by the Dominion League and the Great Depression, was considered serious enough to require obstruction by both the Australian Commonwealth and Britain. The 1933 state referendum result was overwhelmingly in favour of secession, emboldening a state delegation to journey to the British Parliament to make their case of becoming a self-governing Dominion within the British Empire.
Westminster’s response was fairly typical: the establishment of a Joint Select Committee that concluded that the delegation’s petition could not be legally entertained. The 1931 Statute of Westminster had granted Australia dominion authority, thereby making Canberra the arbiter as to whether WA could secede.
In the end, the only reason why such micronations are tolerated must lie in their unthreatening, idiosyncratic nature. Their ineffectualness is what saves them from destruction and prevents their official recognition. President Abraham Lincoln showed the Confederate States how a threatening effort backed by force of arms to separate from the United States could play out. The Civil War that followed cost 620,000 lives and entrenched the holy mystery of the compact that is the Union.
From Turkey to China, secessionist movements are targeted as genuine threats to the national unit, its advocates to be put down, incarcerated and crushed. But in the absence of guns, a coherent ideology, and the presence of maddening humour, the micronations of the world can only multiply.
The post Micronations: Eccentric and Unthreatening first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Every election year a handful of statewide ballot initiatives carry high stakes for the environment. In 2020 there were four major ones, including Colorado’s Proposition 114 requiring a plan for the reintroduction of gray wolves. There were even more in 2018, including battles in Nevada and Arizona over how much renewable energy to require from utilities, while Florida debated an offshore-drilling ban.
This year the biggest story about environmental ballot initiatives is that there are only two.
Cost could be one reason.
“Typically initiatives are brought to the people because a policy can’t make it through the legislature,” says Nick Abraham, state communications director of the League of Conservation Voters. “But it’s extremely expensive and difficult to run a ballot initiative campaign, to not only get the signatures necessary but also to win at the ballot.”
Recent state wins on environmental issues and more action in Congress may have played a role, too.
“There’s much more work to do, to be sure, but I think often initiatives come out of frustration with the process,” says Abraham. “As more progress is made with lawmakers, people need initiatives less and less.”
This year just New York and California voters will take up environmental issues with ballot initiatives — but both could pack a big punch.
In New York, legislators hope their ballot initiative will put a lot of money on the line.
The Clean Water, Clean Air, and Green Jobs Environmental Bond Act of 2022 would allow the state to sell bonds to fund $4.2 billion for environmental improvements that, according to the proposal, would “preserve, enhance, and restore New York’s natural resources and reduce the impact of climate change.”
That includes $1.5 billion for climate change mitigation, $1.1 billion for restoration and flood risk reduction, $650 million for open space conservation and recreation, and $650 million for water quality in resiliency infrastructure. More than one-third would also be earmarked to support disadvantaged communities.
In New York ballot initiatives need to be advanced by the state legislature before they can go to voters. This effort initially began with then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo in 2020 as a $3 billion bond, which was supported by the legislature. But it was withdrawn from the ballot that year because of economic concerns during the pandemic.
In April 2021 the legislature again passed the measure, but incoming Gov. Kathy Hochul asked legislators to add an additional $1 billion. In April 2022 the legislature cleared the way for $4.2 billion in the budget for the bond, which will now go before voters.
“It’s been a generation since we’ve done an environmental bond act,” says Julie Tighe, president of New York League of Conservation Voters, which has been advocating for the effort. If passed, it would represent “the largest investment the state of New York has ever made in the environment in a single tranche.” It would help fund electric school buses, the removal of lead pipes from communities, and addressing water contaminants, like PFAS and 1,4 dioxane, which can cause cancer risks.
The initiative is estimated to generate 100,000 jobs and an additional $4 billion in economic activity as both federal and local revenue will be leveraged for projects, too, she says.
“We’re really excited about helping to jumpstart this transition to protect our communities and make sure our infrastructure is in good shape,” Tighe adds.
On the other side of the country, California voters will decide the fate of Proposition 30, the Tax on Income Above $2 Million for Zero-Emissions Vehicles and Wildfire Prevention Initiative, on the ballot following a push by a coalition of businesses and environmental groups.
That initiative, which unlike New York’s doesn’t need prior legislative support, would apply increased tax revenues from high-income earners toward funding zero-emissions vehicles, charging stations and related infrastructure, as well as training and hiring wildlife firefighters.
It’s needed to help combat climate change and its direct effects, says Oscar Garcia, the ballot initiative coordinator of California Environmental Voters, one of the groups supporting the proposition. It’s also needed, he says, to equitably meet the state’s new directive to ban the sale of new gas-powered cars and light trucks by 2035. That’s because half of the funds designated for vehicle and infrastructure investments in the ballot initiative will aid disadvantaged communities.
The initiative has been heavily financed by the rideshare company Lyft, which has tossed in $25 million in hopes of its passage.
In a break with his party, Gov. Gavin Newsom has come out against Prop 30, saying that rideshare companies like Lyft are using public tax money to help meet their own state mandate to have 90% of their miles driven in electric cars by 2030. He called it “one company’s cynical scheme to grab a huge taxpayer-funded subsidy.”
Rideshare companies don’t own passenger fleets themselves and won’t directly benefit from the proposition, says Garcia.
“We need a dedicated revenue source like Prop 30 to make headway in an equitable and fair way,” he says. “And this initiative goes toward combating catastrophic wildfires, bringing charging infrastructure into low-income communities, and to people who need vehicle rebates and subsidies to afford the transition to zero-emissions vehicles.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Amazon workers at a warehouse in Moreno Valley, California, have filed to join Amazon Labor Union (ALU), the independent union behind the first ever successful unionization at an Amazon warehouse earlier this year.
Workers had announced their union drive last month, writing in a GoFundMe appeal earlier this year that workers at the facility are “overlooked, overworked and underpaid.” If successful, they will be the second or third Amazon warehouse to unionize. They are also the first Amazon workers in California to seek a union election.
The bargaining unit for the warehouse, known as ONT8, would cover about 800 workers, according to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). It’s unclear how many workers have signed union cards; at least 30 percent of eligible workers need to sign in order to qualify for a union election.
ALU president Chris Smalls celebrated the news on Tuesday. “BIG NEWS,” he wrote on Twitter. “[C]ongratulations to the courageous worker leaders to put in that work daily on the ground.”
Union organizers have said that unionization will provide workers the opportunity to have more say over their working conditions and compensation. “We’re just trying to do right by our workers,” Nannette Plascencia, a leader in the union movement at ONT8, told the Los Angeles Times.
Smalls has likened the spread of ALU’s union movement to that of Starbucks workers, who have now unionized over 230 stores in just about a year after launching their union movement.
“Today, we’re bicoastal,” Smalls said when the California workers announced their union effort last month. “This is something that’s really going to continue to grow, just like Starbucks.”
The Amazon workers also join a growing union movement in the U.S. in general. Union filings grew by 53 percent in Fiscal Year 2022 over the previous year, according to data released by the NLRB last week. This data confirms, as labor advocates have observed, the staggering growth of the union movement over the last year, which has seen union filings and wins from workers at nationally known companies like Apple, Trader Joe’s and Home Depot.
Amazon has maintained that it prefers workers not to unionize. The company has spent millions of dollars on its anti-union efforts, firing union organizers and calling the police on union organizers handing out union literature outside company warehouses.
Yes @Amazon my Handle stands correct you forgot to mention the part that is created when I was wrongfully fired for speaking out against your failed Covid-19 response in 2020 has nothing to do with a Strike. Also ALU is the workers so they will decide how to fight thanks
pic.twitter.com/nn53dwoeVw
— Christian Smalls (@Shut_downAmazon) October 11, 2022
The filing comes as workers in Albany, New York, are beginning to vote in their union election on Wednesday, seeking to join the ALU. The unit would cover about 400 workers in the warehouse.
Albany workers had filed to unionize in August, citing low wages and safety concerns – the latter of which became an especially pronounced issue last week, when three Amazon warehouses, including the unionizing Albany warehouse and the unionized warehouse in Staten Island, caught fire.
Workers staged a work stoppage in Staten Island when a trash compactor caught fire and refused to return to work while they could still smell smoke in the warehouse. In response, the company suspended dozens of workers who had participated in the stoppage.
ALU denounced the company’s response to the work stoppage. “Amazon’s response to our genuine concerns has been despicable and full of lies,” the union wrote. “At this time, management is circulating that as many as 80 workers who were involved in the work stoppage were suspended. That is not, as their PR team claims, a ‘handful.’”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The European far right are seeking to capitalise on the crises resulting from Russia’s war on Ukraine to mobilise support, argue Malik Miah and Barry Sheppard.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom called Friday for a windfall profits tax on oil companies that would go directly back to California residents.
While crude oil prices are down nationally, big oil companies have increased gas prices in California by a record 84 cents per gallon in just the last 10 days.
“Crude oil prices are down but oil and gas companies have jacked up prices at the pump in California. This doesn’t add up,” said Newsom. “I’m calling for a windfall tax to ensure excess oil profits go back to help millions of Californians who are getting ripped off.”
YES! California, the 5th largest economy in the world, is calling for a Big Oil windfall profits tax. This is a clear signal to Biden and Democrats to make this a national priority. Let’s get this done. https://t.co/j6HrN9RdB7
— Jamie Henn (@jamieclimate) September 30, 2022
California lawmakers are not due back in session until January 2023, which would be the earliest Californians could see any movement on this.
Governor @GavinNewsom is right: greedy oil companies are fleecing Californians. While families struggle to pay at the pump, Big Oil is reaping record profits. My bill to hold these corporations accountable passed the House, but the Senate won't act. I'm proud California will. https://t.co/nPV0ZtJJ7c
— Katie Porter (@katieporteroc) September 30, 2022
Calls for windfall profits taxes have increased globally in recent weeks.
On Friday, the European Union agreed to impose a new windfall profits tax on fossil fuel companies reaping massive profits from the high price of oil and natural gas.
And on September 20th, in his opening remarks to the UN General Assembly, UN Secretary-General António Guterres called on “all developed economies” to tax fossil fuel companies to help those suffering from the climate and cost-of-living crises.
Guterres’ windfall tax proposal would direct those funds: “to countries suffering loss and damage caused by the climate crisis; and to people struggling with rising food and energy prices.”
Guterres accused oil and gas giants of “feasting on a whole bunch of billions of {dollars} in subsidies and windfall profits whereas family budgets shrink and our planet burns.”
Also last week, a report authored by world-renowned economists and advocates called on governments to enact windfall profit taxes and other “emergency” measures to avert a global recession.
The United Kingdom, meanwhile, approved a 25% windfall tax on oil and gas firms in May — but new right-wing Prime Minister Liz Truss has made clear she opposes windfall taxes and won’t support any new ones.
UK isolated as EU agrees €140 billion windfall tax on energy firms to reduce bills & ease the cost of living crisis
Meanwhile Liz Truss is letting UK energy companies make staggering profits to reward bosses & shareholders at the expense of consumers! https://t.co/f36GOm9Gkp
— Peter Tatchell (@PeterTatchell) October 1, 2022
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Two congressional staffers discuss the push to unionize Capitol Hill.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
After vetoing similar legislation last year and threatening to do so again last month, California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday signed Assembly Bill 2183 into law, making it easier for farmworkers in the state to participate in union elections.
The Democratic governor’s about-face on the measure represents a major victory for labor leaders. It follows a monthslong push by United Farm Workers of America (UFW) and the California Labor Federation (CLF) and comes in the wake of pressure from President Joe Biden and two high-ranking national Democrats with California ties — Vice President Kamala Harris and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
“This is an incredible victory,” said UFW president Teresa Romero. “Starting next year, farmworkers can participate in elections free from intimidation and deportations. ¡Sí se puede!”
A.B. 2183, which the CLF called “the most consequential private sector organizing bill in our state’s history,” gives farmworkers a streamlined way to unionize without having to cast a ballot at a polling place on or near growers’ property following a monthslong anti-union campaign.
BREAKING: Gov. @GavinNewsom stops by the @UFWupdates vigil, signs AB2183 into law. The legislation will allow farmworkers to vote remotely in union elections. pic.twitter.com/UN3eBU1kWS
— Eytan Wallace (@EytanWallace) September 28, 2022
Proponents say the newly enacted law, which contains several provisions aimed at preventing union-busting and was opposed by dozens of agriculture industry groups, will make it harder for bosses to subdue and retaliate against the workers who provide most of the nation’s fruits and vegetables, many of whom are undocumented and fearful of being deported.
When California’s Democratic-led Legislature approved the bill last month, Newsom’s office expressed opposition. The governor only signed it after his administration, the CLF, and UFW “reached a ‘supplemental agreement’ on provisions that will be introduced in the next legislative session,” the New York Times reported Wednesday.
According to the Associated Press: “The agreement includes a cap on the number of unionization petitions over the next five years and will allow state regulators to better protect worker confidentiality and safety, Newsom’s office said. It would do away with an option for workers to unionize through mail-in voting that is contained in the current language, but keeps a ‘card check’ election process.”
Under the revised law, farmworkers will still have the opportunity to “vote from home or anywhere else they feel comfortable,” reducing the likelihood of employer intimidation, UFW legislative and political director Giev Kashkooli told the news outlet.
As the CLF explains:
Majority sign-up, or “card check,” allows workers who want to join a union to sign a card authorizing the union to represent them in collective bargaining. If a majority of workers sign cards, the cards are submitted to the National Labor Relations Board (private sector) or the Public Employment Relations Board (public sector). If the Board finds that the majority of workers want a union, the union is entitled to recognition. In California, public sector employees already have the right to majority sign-up; all workers should be able to organize under this fair and democratic system.
In a video, Romero told those who led and supported the fight for free and fair union elections that “this is your victory.”
“Every one of you who struggled and donated your time and your energy to get this done,” said Romero. “Farmworkers organized and sacrificed to make their voices heard and to pass A.B. 2183.”
The governor has just signed #AB2183. This is your victory.
– @ufwpresident Teresa Romero pic.twitter.com/twvyRMdWNS— United Farm Workers (@UFWupdates) September 28, 2022
Starting on August 3, as KCRA reported Wednesday, UFW members embarked on “a 24-day, 335-mile journey from Kern County, near Bakersfield, to the state capitol, a march that civil rights activist César Chávez first led in 1966.”
Although Newsom disappointed farmworkers by announcing near the end of their march that he “cannot support an untested mail-in election process,” labor organizers around the state — with an assist from Biden and other top Democrats — continued to hold rallies and eventually won important reforms.
On social media, the CLF wrote: “This victory belongs to every farmworker who marched and sacrificed. It is shared with the whole California labor movement, who mobilized and stood in historic solidarity with the United Farm Workers. The fight of farmworkers is the fight for all of labor.”
That message was echoed by Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, who said that “this is what happens when we organize with urgency. Together, we can win.”
This is what happens when we organize with urgency. Together, we can win. Si se puede! #AB2183 Hooray @UFWupdates! https://t.co/gwcc2kZ8hr
— Sara Nelson (@FlyingWithSara) September 28, 2022
The effort to secure free and fair union elections follows “years of dwindling union membership among California farmworkers,” the Times noted. “There are more than 400,000 agricultural workers in the state,” but the percentage who are unionized is “statistically zero,” according to recent estimates based on data from a 2020 Bureau of Labor Statistics survey.
Organizing agricultural workers was made more difficult last year when the U.S. Supreme Court’s far-right majority ruled that a California regulation granting union representatives access to farms amounted to an uncompensated government taking of farm owners’ private property.
“In this historic time when workers want a union more than ever before, everything we do — including legislatively — must be focused on organizing,” CLF chief officer Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher told the Times on Wednesday. “It’s natural that in California, our farmworkers will be leading the way.”
Also on Wednesday, Newsom signed A.B. 2530, which protects the healthcare benefits of striking workers. As Unite Here put it, the newly enacted law allows workers to “exercise their right to strike for better jobs without jeopardizing their families’ access to care.”
In a statement, Gonzalez Fletcher said, “Workers have the right to stand up to their boss and go on strike to improve wages, working conditions, and for a better life.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
With Gov. Gavin Newsom set to sign a slate of bills boosting California’s fight against climate change, regulators are also finalizing a far-reaching plan to cut the state’s emissions. But the oil and gas industry is exerting pressure on regulators to shape the plan in ways that could delay the state’s progress, say critics.
A draft of the plan by the California Air Resources Board (CARB), released in May, reflects the interests of oil and gas refiners and agrochemical companies involved in the production of biofuels, while relying on ineffective methods for cutting emissions, say climate policy experts and environmental justice groups. The plan is supposed to be a roadmap for achieving “carbon neutrality,” where the state effectively emits no greenhouse gases by 2045, while making deep cuts by 2030.
Industry goals such as a build-out of engineered carbon capture technology (in which CO2 is captured and stored rather than released into the atmosphere), and an expanded role for liquid biofuels to displace fossil fuels in planes and trucks, have resulted in a model that enables more refineries to remain in operation, perpetuating risks for people living near them. Additionally, the plan sidesteps concerns about California’s cap and trade program while anticipating it will result in millions of tons of reductions — which critics worry won’t actually happen except on paper — over the next seven years.
Among the industry’s lobbyists pushing these measures are at least three former California Air Resources Board regulators, who reached out to their former colleagues at the agency on behalf of fossil fuel, business groups and agrochemical clients, according to interviews and emails obtained by Capital & Main.
Revolving door practices — in which government officials give up public service for lobbying in the private sector — have a long history in California, says Liza Tucker, a researcher at Consumer Watchdog who has investigated revolving door influence in other environmental agencies.
“It’s a real problem, and it is entrenched,” Tucker said. For example, she added, the plan focuses on reducing demand for oil and gas in the state but says comparatively little about reducing supply for export — even though climate damage in California is caused by emissions from anywhere, as greenhouse gases in the atmosphere trap heat and influence extreme weather events like droughts, heatwaves and floods.
A spokesperson for CARB did not acknowledge questions about influence from lobbyists but said regulators “heard from stakeholders in public workshops and webinars, at formal board meetings, and when requested, in meetings with staff or board members” while putting the plan together. The plan aims to drastically reduce emissions from the industrial, energy and transportation sectors. A final version will be released in the coming months, as CARB refines it based on ongoing feedback.
California’s plan to cut emissions will be implemented in part through the Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) program, which CARB says has helped the state reduce oil consumption by 2.7 billion gallons since 2011.
It’s done that by propping up biofuels made from vegetable oils and animal fats, and by encouraging companies to lower the “carbon intensity” of their fossil fuels by means such as adding ethanol to their gasoline products and using renewable power to pump oil from the ground. Companies earn credits and can trade or use them to offset their pollution.
Jon Costantino was part of the first generation of air regulators to design the LCFS back in the late aughts. He later took a job helping businesses navigate the regulations he put together, and now runs his own firm representing oil and gas clients and a supplier of clean car infrastructure.
CARB says the program has been a success, pointing to declining emissions from transportation fuel. Email records indicate that Costantino has regularly been in contact with top regulators about the LCFS. In a public hearing, he urged regulators not to make big changes to the program because companies were complying with obligations.
“This thing is working. Keep up the policy signal and you’ll keep getting the investment,” Costantino explained to Capital & Main. One of his clients, Phillips 66, recently announced that it was transitioning its petroleum refinery in the Bay Area to processing biofuels exclusively. Costantino’s firm has taken $295,200 from Phillips 66 since 2017, almost half of it this year alone.
CARB’s plan forecasts an expanded use of biofuels through 2045. Industry watchers have raised concerns about the environmental impacts of fuels such as ethanol, biodiesel and sustainable aviation fuels, which have historically been produced from crops that induce changes to farmland in ways that increase emissions. Fuel producers counter that they will start using “sustainable waste,” such as agricultural residue, as feedstocks to reduce emissions.
The LCFS is funded by a tax on gasoline, reflecting outdated ideas for addressing climate change, says Michael Wara, director of the climate and energy policy program at Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment. In the current form, the program rewards companies for actions that won’t help the state decarbonize fast enough.
“Does it make sense to use costs collected from people at the gas pump to subsidize low carbon liquid fuels?” he said. “Every year that goes by the argument gets less convincing.”
CARB’s plan also assumes that lowering oil and gas production and demand in California, plus more refining of biofuels, will lead to less petroleum refining in the state. But years of data shows oil exports from California have increased despite Californians’ declining oil consumption, according to a technical report submitted by the California Environmental Justice Alliance.
“There’s literally no limit to how much oil California refineries are allowed to import in order to export refined fuels,” said Greg Karras, an environmental justice consultant who wrote the report.
In a meeting on Sept. 1, CARB committed to forming a task force to study oil exports, said sources who were present.
Former Regulator ‘Free From Shackles’
In another example of a prominent former regulator now advocating for high-powered clients, records show a lobbyist named Virgil Welch emailed Jamie Callahan, the agency’s chief of staff and policy adviser, with a letter from agrochemical companies involved in the production of corn, a primary ingredient in U.S. ethanol.
“Wondering if you and the boss lady might do a sit down with this group [of agrochemical companies] to talk about ag/climate,” Welch wrote to Callahan. “I can fill you in more for context at your convenience if helpful, now that I am free from the shackles the kept from away [sic] from CARB!”
Welch is now a partner at Caliber Strategies but previously worked as chief adviser and special counsel to former CARB chairperson Mary Nichols, developing clean air rules for medium- and heavy-duty trucks, cap and trade and the LCFS, according to his LinkedIn page. Officials who leave for the private sector must wait a year to lobby their former employer.
The companies Welch represents, such as BASF, CF Industries and Novozymes, manufacture pesticides and fertilizers, including some they say are less carbon intensive than synthetic versions.
Ethanol is blended with gasoline in California, but the draft plan barely mentions it. Historically it is the largest biofuel incentivized by the LCFS by volume. Growing evidence indicates ethanol’s carbon emissions are on par with or worse than those of gasoline.
Welch didn’t return a request for comment.
The plan says little about the cap and trade program, which CARB anticipates will shave 44 million metric tons of emissions by 2030 — the equivalent of 9,480,646 cars driven for one year.
Experts worry the plan will allow polluters to use credits for complying with emissions law rather than cutting pollution, and point to examples of groups that sell stakes in forests for carbon offset credits, gaming the program.
In an email last year, Costantino reached out to Chanell Fletcher, CARB’s deputy executive officer of environmental justice, to promote offset credits. Costantino is a lobbyist for the Verified Emission Reduction Association, which certifies the credits.
“Offsets haven’t been very popular with Environmental Justice stakeholders, but VERA believes there can be some common ground,” Costantino wrote to Fletcher. “I am requesting a meeting to introduce you to the group and answer any questions you may have about offsets prior to the next Scoping Plan process.”
The meeting was “more a meet-and-greet introduction,” Costantino told Capital & Main. He defends cap and trade for having generated billions for other climate investments through a fee on emissions. Fletcher did not return a request for comment.
Catherine Garoupa White, a member of CARB’s Environmental Justice Advisory Committee who opposes offsets, said regulators should have invited a committee member to the discussion with Costantino. When she brought up concerns about cap and trade, she said, regulators refused to discuss it because they feared it would disrupt the market for credits.
“It’s incredibly obvious that carbon capture and cap and trade, those are really two things [CARB] is relying on to make up the [emissions] shortfall.”
A group of state legislators submitted a letter to CARB with similar concerns, writing that the current plan calls for only 63% of reductions coming from direct cuts to pollution — lower than the states of New York and Washington.
Both Welch and Costantino are lobbying for greater deployment of point source capture, in which CO2 is captured at the source rather than released into the atmosphere.
The industry and trade unions have lobbied for point source capture for the last two years, and in August the Legislature sent a bill to Gov. Newsom that directs CARB to establish a carbon capture, removal, utilization and storage program. It was one of the governor’s climate priorities.
Point source capture may come in handy for industries where it’s hard to limit emissions, such as cement, clay and glass production. But it has an underwhelming track record, raising serious concerns about plans that rely on the technology to address climate change, according to researchers at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.
In the U.S., 12 operating facilities capture a total of 20 metric tons of emissions a year. California wants to capture 4 million metric tons annually by 2045 and install capturing technology on refineries by 2030, according to CARB’s draft plan.
The plan also cites a study by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on point source capture that was promoted — through layers of front groups — by Michigan utility company DTE Energy, which has biomass power plants in California. The promotion campaign included an educational toolkit on carbon capture for teachers and students in the San Joaquin Valley.
Environmental justice groups submitted a letter to U.S. Department of Energy Inspector General Teri Donaldson asking for an investigation over concerns that Lawrence Livermore staff “used the credibility of the National Lab to promote policies and regulations that could benefit a company that operates power plants” in the San Joaquin Valley.
While he was still working for CARB, Welch coordinated with lab staff to promote the study. He later cited it as a lobbyist.
At a scoping plan meeting in June, Welch introduced himself as a spokesperson for the California Carbon Capture Coalition, which sent Caliber Strategies $182,648.94 for lobbying since last September and shares a registered agent with several oil and gas front groups. Chevron sent $450,000 to the coalition, while the Western States Petroleum Association gave $50,000.
“It’s clear in order to be successful [at cutting emissions], any reasonable scenario is going to require carbon capture technologies,” Welch said at CARB’s meeting about its emissions plan in June.
But the decade-plus lead time for installing point source capture on refineries is out of sync with the state’s compressed timeline for cutting emissions, says Stanford’s Wara.
“Do we really think we’ll want carbon capture at refineries, is that a thing we want to do at scale in 2035?” he told Capital & Main. “I haven’t seen [CARB] articulate an answer to that question that is clear, other than we need gasoline and diesel for a while … but that doesn’t tell you if we should be investing climate dollars in innovation around those fuels.”
Environmental justice committee members sent a letter to CARB in June that said carbon capture and sequestration technology “is a means of delaying meaningful climate action and increasing our investments in fossil fuel and bioenergy infrastructure.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
On September 7, 2022, after many attempted delays from the City of Susanville, California, a Lassen County judge ruled in favor of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to close one of Susanville’s two prisons. The court case and public debate over the prison closure has been almost entirely based on the anticipated loss of 1,000 jobs in the prison, but the closure of this facility marks an enormous shift in the use of prison labor for public work. The California Correctional Center in Susanville is set to be closed by June 2023. It is one of two remaining training hubs for the California Conservation Camp Program, which, before 2019, made up 192 of 208 hand crews working for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (also known as CAL FIRE).
Although popular references to prison labor today often focus on the production of manufactured goods for private companies, public work programs make up significantly more of the total work assignments in prison. In fact, public work assignments are a larger percentage of prison jobs than government and private manufacturing combined.
Public work is a catchall category that refers to many types of manual labor for state governments including doing road work, cleaning up landfills and hazardous spills, moving debris and clearing roads after a hurricane, filling sandbags to mitigate flooding, carrying out forestry work in state-owned forests and firefighting.
Many Western states — like Nevada, Washington, Arizona and Oregon — have “conservation camp” programs where a few hundred incarcerated people are put to work on behalf of natural resource departments on vegetation management, hazardous fuel reduction projects and wildland fire suppression. California’s conservation camp program is the largest of these by far, employing somewhere between 1,500 and 5,000 incarcerated people across the state in an average year to carry out millions of hours of work for CAL FIRE.
A groundbreaking new report on incarcerated workers by the American Civil Liberties Union and the University of Chicago Law Center aggregated all types of prison jobs in state and federal facilities. They broke down the types of prison jobs into four main sectors: maintenance of prison facilities (80 percent), production of goods and services for government agencies (6.5 percent), public work (8 percent) and work for private industries (>1 percent). The report estimates that 63,000 of all incarcerated workers are doing public work (8 percent of prison jobs).
Incarcerated firefighters face much higher rates of injury than professional firefighters, and are largely unable to negotiate the conditions of their work. A TIME investigative report found that incarcerated firefighters were four times more likely to be injured from “object-induced injuries, such as cuts, bruises, dislocations and fractures” than professional firefighters working on the same fire.
These types of programs use incarcerated workers to carry out year-round wildfire management labor, largely because they comprise an incredibly cheap labor pool for the state governments dealing with increasingly devastating fire seasons. However, California’s Conservation Camp Program, also known as “fire camp,” has been using this labor force for close to a century, and Susanville’s embattled prison has been at the heart of this program.
Susanville’s California Correctional Center is closing for two reasons. Firstly, the prison would require half a billion dollars in repairs to be up to code, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office, making it a prime target for closure. Secondly, there are fewer “low-level offenders” eligible for fire camp, so the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has reduced the size of the conservation camp program and is routing all remaining training for the program through the Jamestown Sierra Conservation Center.
The smaller number of Level 1 (or “low level”) incarcerated people is a direct result of the Supreme Court’s 2011 ruling that California must release people from state prisons in order to reduce overcrowding. In tandem with other sentencing reforms and California’s Public Safety Realignment Initiative, federal enforcement of the 2011 ruling has reduced the number of people convicted of so-called nonviolent, nonsexual, nonserious crimes, and these are the people who have historically made up 92 percent of California’s state hand crews.
This year, CAL FIRE reported that there are only 37 hand crews made up of incarcerated people, and only about 75 total hand crews, which is less than 25 percent of the standard 208 hand crews that CAL FIRE had relied upon. To restore the forestry and firefighting capacity of CAL FIRE, it must train and recruit people with livable wages and workplace protections.
The low or unpaid workforce needed for wildfire management in California has long been disciplined by the police and prisons. “Paddywagon raids” carried out by fire wardens and sheriffs targeted “vagrants” who couldn’t prove their employment and thus would be either available to work in the forests or sent to jail if they didn’t. These took place in the early 20th century, as large groups of laborers were necessary for state-mandated projects in wildfire management and timber. The California prisons had auxiliary “road camps” starting in 1913, where incarcerated people built roads and highways throughout the state. The first iteration of “fire camp” was a stop-gap program started by a Los Angeles probation officer during the Great Depression to reduce the costs of incarceration in a crowded city jail.
The Los Angeles model caught on and during World War II, sentenced prisoners were given vacant positions in both manufacturing and forestry. Prison forest camps were established during the war, due to the Board of Forestry’s concerns that the state lacked sufficient labor power to counteract wartime arson attempts from Axis forces, which had occurred on occasion in Oregon. In the same period, the California Department of Corrections was formed as a separate entity from the Federal Bureau of Prisons in 1944 and these prison fire camps became a centerpiece of this new department. “Forest labor camps were the flagship of the department’s new approach,” wrote historian Volker Janssen.
When Gov. Pat Brown took office in 1959, he sought to expand the number of prisoners in camp and the rehabilitation programming in the Conservation Camp System. The focus on creating good workers and well-adjusted citizens out of the prisoners was particularly apparent in the Conservation Camp Program, which took its name after FDR’s insistence on conserving the resources and men of the nation. Brown’s unique contribution to the conservation program was construction of the Conservation Centers, first in Susanville, then in Jamestown and Chino, in order to recruit and train more individuals to join hand crews for forestry, trail maintenance and wildfire management. Brown championed these centers with the combined support of a state senator from Susanville, as well as the director of corrections and director of natural resources.
The Susanville prison, originally named the California Conservation Center, was built on 1,100 acres with open dormitories with 16 people in each, which was meant to replicate the number of people assigned to each hand crew. Programming at the center was meant to replicate military training for physical aptitude, with additional classroom training on firefighting in order to prepare incarcerated people before they were stationed at one of the Northern California fire camps. However, the number of people who were eligible and interested in working in conservation camps began to wane as drug convictions increased in the late 1960s and more placements were demanded in remote Northern areas of the state. Most prisoners had preferred to participate in the program because of the freedom it afforded them to meet with their family, but camp placements were more than 6 to 8 hours north of Los Angeles urban centers at this point.
The California prison system began to balloon in the 1970s, as it transformed into the “golden gulag,” and the Conservation Center held less and less relevance to the mission of the Department of Corrections. However, when the Susanville Center was slated to be closed in April 1973, the town pulled together a “Save Our Center Committee” which argued that the closure of the Susanville prison would spell economic ruination for the town, which had come to depend on the tax revenue of guards to support local education and government programs.
Even more damning, however, was the argument that the town would not be able to make do without the labor of incarcerated people used for wildfire management, fuel reductions and natural hazards mitigation. They reasoned that if the labor of these prisoners was pulled out of the town, not only would Susanville have less revenue from the employment the prison offered, but their town would also have to pay workers to do what incarcerated hand crews had been carrying out for free as a part of the Conservation Center programming.
After a year of rallies and town hall meetings, the “Save Our Center Committee” successfully lobbied the Department of Corrections to convert the Conservation Center into a medium-security facility. It was renamed the California Correctional Center, and was used as a reception center for other prisons instead of primarily as a training ground for the fire camp program. In the following decades, the prison became overcrowded and held 4,400 people, which was nearly four times the original capacity of 1,200. As the number of guards increased to keep up with the incarcerated population, the prison’s payroll skyrocketed from $1.6 million in 1963 to $34 million in 1995.
The Susanville residents lobbying for the protection of their prison won their demand to safeguard prison jobs — for both free and incarcerated people working in them. They recruited the construction of another facility in their town, High Desert State Prison, and they have kept open the Antelope Conservation Camp in their town as well. However, the pressure to reduce the overcrowded state prison system and sentencing reforms have forced the state to reduce the number of Level 1 prisoners, which has limited recruitment of incarcerated people for wildfire management labor.
The budgets from 2020-2022 have successively implemented Newsom’s “right-sizing” and closure of camps and prisons throughout the state, and a mandate to limit public spending on prisons. Newsom successfully closed one prison in Tracy, and has plans to close three more in the next three years. After writing it into the 2020-21 budget, CAL FIRE and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation released a joint statement announcing the closure of eight fire camp locations, bringing the total in operation to 35 throughout the state. Throughout these projected closures, tenuous agreements have been drawn up between the California prison guards’ union (CCPOA) and Newsom about staffing cuts, salary increases and campaign support in the wake of the decreasing total population of California prisons. Only after Newsom promised a bonus and yearly raise to all prison guards did their union write out a check of $1.75 million for Newsom’s recall defense campaign, which was the single largest contribution from a state employee union.
Throughout the 1970s, lawsuits from prisoners alleged that their living conditions were grotesque. Their discontent culminated in a protest against the guards in 1977. Today, incarcerated people say the facility is worse than ever. More than 100 incarcerated people at the California Correctional Center in Susanville filed an amicus brief in May 2022 testifying about the poor conditions of the facility in order to underscore the urgency of the state’s plan to permanently close the facility. They explained that the roofs of the building often leak and leave their cells flooded for days, which contributes to the growth of algae and black mold throughout the facility. As Truthout has previously covered in the case of other California prisons, environmental justice issues and an inordinate exposure to health hazards are a huge issue for incarcerated people at the Susanville prison.
Reducing prison population and program sizes will reduce state expenditures in one way but will require more spending to replace the millions of work hours that Conservation Camp Program hand crews have carried out on controlled fires, trail maintenance, fuel reduction and firefighting.
The decrease in incarcerated people has meant that there are 100 fewer hand crews available to CAL FIRE. The 2021 and 2022 budgets have replaced the Conservation Camp Program hand crews with people from the California Conservation Corps and California Military Department, but so far, they have only been able to scrape together funding for 24 additional crews, meaning that CAL FIRE is still short about 1,000 frontline wildfire and forestry workers.
Brian Kaneda, deputy director of Californians United for a Responsible Budget, one of the state’s largest prison abolitionist organizations, argues that this is exactly the opportunity for a just transition away from carceral facilities supporting town economies, and a need for state investment in careers in wildfire management and conservation to replace prisons. Experts in forestry policy agree with Kaneda, and argue that California’s forest restoration requires coordination with Tribal governments, recruitment of formerly incarcerated firefighters, and improvements in wages and conditions for all forestry and hand crew workers.
The Fire and Forestry Recruitment Program takes this proposal a step further; it trains formerly incarcerated people to become professional firefighters. Many of their program participants were in fire camp themselves and want to join the ranks of CAL FIRE and county fire departments but encounter many difficulties doing so. However, as journalist Adam Mahoney reported in the news site Capital B, Royal Ramey, co-founder of the organization and a former incarcerated firefighter, speaks enthusiastically about the possibilities for careers in firefighting. “We need firefighters, and to be doing a job that is needed by the world makes it more fulfilling,” Ramey told Capital B. “Purpose is something they take from you in prison; this gives it back.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Since the right-wing majority of the Supreme Court held in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that the U.S. Constitution does not protect the right to abortion, many states have restricted or outright banned the procedure. But some states, like California, are endeavoring to enshrine the right to abortion in their constitutions. Although the California Supreme Court has declared that the state constitution’s right to privacy protects abortion, that safeguard remains ephemeral.
In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court established in Roe v. Wade that abortion is a fundamental right and a state could not prohibit it before fetal viability (able to live outside the womb). Just as the U.S. Supreme Court retracted the abortion right when conservatives attained a majority, California’s Supreme Court could likewise rescind the right to abortion if the court’s membership were to shift to the right.
In August, Kansas voters rejected an amendment that would have explicitly excluded the right to abortion from its constitution.
On November 8, voters in California, Michigan and Vermont will decide whether to amend their state constitutions to enshrine the right to abortion. People in Kentucky, on the other hand, will vote on an amendment that specifically excludes the right to abortion from constitutional protection.
The U.S. Constitution does not specifically mention abortion as a protected right. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion and the right to a fair trial are examples of enumerated rights because they are listed in the Constitution. But the rights to travel, vote, use contraception, engage in same-sex sexual conduct and same-sex marriage, although not enumerated in the Constitution, have been held to be implied constitutional rights.
In Roe, the Supreme Court grounded the right to abortion in the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause that protects personal liberty. The Roe court ruled that it prohibits government interference in personal decisions about contraception, marriage, procreation, familial relationships, education and child-rearing.
But in Dobbs, Samuel Alito, joined by Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, wrote that the Constitution contains no reference to abortion and there is no constitutional provision that implicitly guarantees it. In order to be protected by the Due Process Clause, Alito wrote, a right must be “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” and “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.” The majority concluded that there is no liberty interest because the law didn’t protect the right to abortion in the 19th century.
In essence, Dobbs left it up to the states to permit, restrict or outlaw abortion.
At least nine states provide a right to abortion in their state constitutions as interpreted by court rulings. They include Alaska, California, Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana and New Jersey. None contain an explicit constitutional right to abortion but courts have implied the right by construing provisions that protect privacy, liberty and equality.
Abortion is legal in California before fetal viability, and after viability when necessary to protect the life or health of the mother. In 1969, the California Supreme Court ruled in People v. Belous that women have “[constitutional] rights to life and to choose whether to bear children.” The court stated that “the fundamental right of the woman to choose whether to bear children follows from the Supreme Court’s and this court’s repeated acknowledgment of a ‘right of privacy’ or ‘liberty’ in matters related to marriage, family, and sex.”
In 1972, California voters approved Proposition 11, the Constitutional Right to Privacy Amendment, which made privacy an inalienable right in the California Constitution.
In 1981, the California Supreme Court held in Committee to Defend Reproductive Rights v. Myers that “the protection afforded the woman’s right of procreative choice as an aspect of the right of privacy under the explicit provisions of our Constitution is at least as broad as that described in Roe v. Wade. Consequently, we further conclude that the asserted state’s interest in protecting a nonviable fetus is subordinate to the woman’s right of privacy.”
The California State Legislature declared in the 2002 Reproductive Privacy Act that women have a “fundamental right to choose to bear a child or to choose and to obtain an abortion.”
But in spite of judicial and legislative protections, the California Constitution does not explicitly contain the right to abortion. A future California Supreme Court could overrule Myers and hold that the constitutional right to privacy does not extend to abortion.
Thus, California voters will decide whether to amend their state constitution to clearly protect abortion. Proposition 1 says: “The state shall not deny or interfere with an individual’s reproductive freedom in their most intimate decisions, which includes their fundamental right to choose to have an abortion and their fundamental right to choose or refuse contraceptives.” Proposition 1 states that the rights to abortion and contraceptives are specifically grounded in the California Constitution’s right to privacy and right to not be denied equal protection.
Although Alito specified that the Dobbs ruling applies only to abortion, the court’s holding is based on the same precedents as the rights to contraception, same-sex sexual conduct and same-sex marriage. California’s Proposition 1 would also enshrine the right to contraception in the state constitution.
A recent poll showed that 71 percent of registered California voters plan to vote for Proposition 1.
On June 27, California Governor Gavin Newsom issued Executive Order N-12-22, in which he proclaimed that all state agencies are prohibited from providing patient medical records relating to reproductive health care services for any investigation. Newsom’s order also says that his office will not honor arrest warrants from other states for individuals charged with criminal offenses for receipt of or assistance with reproductive health care services.
Michiganders will decide whether to amend their constitution to provide a right to reproductive freedom, which is defined in Proposal 3 as “the right to make and effectuate decisions about all matters relating to pregnancy, including but not limited to prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, contraception, sterilization, abortion care, miscarriage management, and infertility care.” The ballot measure states that Michigan can regulate abortion after fetal viability but cannot prohibit the use of abortion to “protect the life or physical or mental health of the pregnant individual,” as determined by the attending health care professional. Proposition 3 would also prevent the state from prosecuting anyone for having an abortion or miscarriage or from prosecuting an individual who assists a pregnant person in “exercising rights established by this amendment.”
“Michigan is in a uniquely precarious position at this time in history,” prominent Detroit civil rights attorney Julie Hurwitz told Truthout. A 1931 criminal statute prohibiting abortion in Michigan has recently been declared unconstitutional by the Michigan Supreme Court. The court held that abortion is protected under the Michigan Constitution’s due process clause, as an implied right to bodily integrity. But the due process right was only recognized by the Michigan Supreme Court in 2021, in the context of the Flint water crisis.
“These court rulings, however, are subject to further appellate review and to the realities of the intensely political nature of our judicial system,” Hurwitz said. “There is currently a Democratic majority on the court, but this could change at any time, which would open the door to a future Republican majority doing exactly what the U.S. Supreme Court just did with Roe v. Wade, in the infamous Dobbs decision.”
Hurwitz added, “The historic success of the petition drive to get this constitutional amendment on the ballot — over 750,000 petition signatures, despite concerted efforts to block it — presents a unique opportunity to ensure that this fundamental right will no longer be able to be threatened in the State of Michigan.”
A recent poll shows 67 percent of likely voters in Michigan support Proposition 3.
Abortion during all stages of pregnancy is legal in Vermont. In 2019, the Vermont State Legislature enacted a law that says, “The State of Vermont recognizes the fundamental right of every individual who becomes pregnant to choose to carry a pregnancy to term, to give birth to a child, or to have an abortion.”
However, like California and Michigan, the Vermont Constitution doesn’t explicitly guarantee the right to abortion.
Vermont voters will decide whether to amend their state constitution to create a constitutional right to personal reproductive privacy that protects “every person’s right to make their own reproductive decisions.” If adopted, the Reproductive Liberty Amendment would amend Article 22 to provide: “That an individual’s right to personal reproductive autonomy is central to the liberty and dignity to determine one’s own life course and shall not be denied or infringed unless justified by a compelling State interest achieved by the least restrictive means.”
More than 70 percent of Vermonters support the amendment.
Four states — Tennessee, Alabama, West Virginia and Louisiana — have constitutional amendments declaring that their constitutions do not protect the right to abortion. Arkansas has a constitutional amendment that states, “The policy of Arkansas is to protect the life of every unborn child from conception until birth, to the extent permitted by the Federal Constitution.”
On August 2, the Kentucky Court of Appeals reinstated a ban on abortion. On August 18, the Kentucky Supreme Court ordered that the abortion ban would remain in place while it reviews arguments by clinics that perform abortions which are challenging two state laws.
In 2019, the Kentucky State Legislature enacted a law prohibiting all abortions in the state if the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe. It would make performing an abortion a felony carrying five years in prison.
Kentucky voters will now decide whether to adopt Amendment 2, which would amend the Kentucky Constitution to say that it does not “secure or protect a right” to abortion.
Amendment 2 reads: “Are you in favor of amending the Constitution of Kentucky by creating a new Section of the Constitution to be numbered Section 26A to state as follows: To protect human life, nothing in this Constitution shall be construed to secure or protect a right to abortion or require the funding of abortion?”
The only way to ensure the right to abortion is by a state constitutional amendment. We cannot rely on progressive state supreme courts to interpret their constitutions as implicitly protecting abortion. Subsequent courts, legislative enactments and voter initiatives can undo what the state supreme court has done.
“This is why it is so critically important for the right to abortion to be explicitly articulated in the language of our state constitution,” Michigan attorney Hurwitz said.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
