Prison Vote Doesn’t Fix State’s Problems
The Assembly may have passed its own watered-down version of prison reform Monday, but it leaves the state way short of actually fixing any of the problems swirling around the system.
Nobody’s really saying that in public, of course. Darrell Steinberg, the Democratic leader in the state Senate, called it “a good first step,’’ although he made it clear that more has to be done. Even Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, seldom known for his tact, said through a spokesman that the Assembly bill “contains much-needed reforms.”
Inwardly, both Steinberg and the governor are likely seething.
Despite zero support from its GOP members and heavy lobbying from law enforcement, Senate Democrats came up with the votes to meet a promised $1.2 billion in prison budget cuts and trim some 27,000 inmates from the system.
REVEALED! The Conspiracy Theory Behind the Birther Conspiracy Theory
I’m not one of those media types who dismisses the so-called birthers – those who believe President Obama wasn’t born in this country – out of hand. I take them very, very seriously. Heck, according to some polling, half of Republicans might be birthers.
It just seems impossible to me that such a large group of people would persist in making the same, thoroughly discredited claim over and over if there weren’t something else going on. I mean, every public record, including his birth certificate, show he was born in Hawaii. (And by the way, as a Little League coach, I’ve had to become an expert in birth certificates—the umpires check them all the time these days – and I can tell you the Obama one isn’t a forgery). The birthers have been mocked up and down the dial and across the political spectrum. It’d be crazy to keep going once you’ve been so thoroughly debunked, right?
Competition Swamps L.A. Port
The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are the country’s two busiest. When you consider all the local businesses that depend on the ports – the warehouses and export companies and trucking firms, to name a few – the port complex is among L.A.’s most important economic assets. Maybe the most important.
But the situation is getting perilous.
Consider the long-term threat. The widened Panama Canal is to open in about five years, and suddenly all those container ships from Asia that are now more or less forced to go to the South Bay ports will be free to go elsewhere. Places like Jacksonville, Fla.; Mobile, Ala.; and Houston have built or are expanding their ports to accommodate a surge in traffic.
Consider the short-term threat. Shippers in this economic storm would love to find a port – any port – other than the South Bay complex.
The Fate of the NUMMI Workers
What will be the employment futures of the approximately 4800 workers at the New United Motors Company (NUMMI) in Fremont that is now scheduled to close in March 2010?
The recent history of large scale layoffs in California suggests that these futures may not be as bleak as initial reports are suggesting. Over the past two decades, workers of mass layoffs have taken a variety of paths in new job placement and/or retraining in their region, as well as movement to jobs in other regions of California and other states.
In the early 1990s, the aerospace industry in California went through enormous downsizing, shedding over 200,000 jobs. The conventional wisdom then was that aerospace engineers and production workers would become either the long term unemployed or hourly McDonald’s employees.
In the mid 1990s, a group of researchers at the RAND Corporation decided to test this conventional wisdom. They gathered wage data for 517,148 workers employed in the aerospace industry at the beginning of 1989, and tracked their earnings from 1989 to the third quarter of 1994. As set out in Life After Cutbacks: Tracking California’s Aerospace Workers (1996, RAND Corporation), the researchers found around a quarter of the laid-off workers experienced a significant reduction in wages (15% or more) by the end of the period. However, the remaining three-quarters were employed, and at wages comparable to or higher than their 1989 wages.
The Plain and Simple Truth…It’s About Jobs Stupid!
Just yesterday the San Francisco Chronicle carried an opinion piece by John Sullivan, the head of the Civil Justice Association of California talking about how lawsuits and the personal injury lawyers in California are threatening everyone’s job security.
It should not surprise anyone that the personal injury lawyers are trying to cash in on their agenda at both the national level and here in California. Whether it is in Congress, our own legislature, the courts and through public opinion, the personal injury bar is seeking to overturn any and all reforms that have been made over the past few years.
And it could not come at a more difficult time. California is facing the worst economy in decades and unemployment is at record levels. As Sullivan points out, the personal injury lawyers have given $33 million dollars over the past decade to political campaigns and they are looking to cash in.