The Buck Stops With Governor Brown
Last week, I touched on a number of wins in the Legislature and several remaining priorities for the Chamber. Among the 789 bills sitting on Gov. Brown’s desk to sign or veto, there are many items that would impact the business community. We are continuing to weigh in on these bills before the Sept. 30 […]
Handy-Dandy Guide to California’s Crazy 17 Ballot Propositions, Part 1
With folks filling out absentee ballots, now’s a good time to tee up all the ballot propositions. This is Part 1. Voters are burdened with 17 propositions this year thanks to a 2011 law signed by Gov. Jerry Brown that dumped all initiatives circulated by mere citizens on November ballots. Legislators, being our Platonic guardians, […]
Prop 57 Contains a Loophole for Violent Criminals
With violent crime increasing in California, it seems reasonable to grant early release to inmates convicted of nonviolent offenses to make room in the prison system for truly dangerous felons. Most of us would be happy to trade an accountant guilty of bilking his employer for a serial rapist. One is a far greater threat […]
Small Businesses Call Governor Brown To Act On Six Bills
Although there are many legislators celebrating what has widely been regarded as a ‘very successful year for progressive legislative priorities,’ small business owners have little to celebrate as the 2015-2016 legislative session officially comes to a close. And while small business may not have been invited to the negotiation table on minimum wage, family leave, […]
Bilingualism vs. “Bilingual Education”
When I’m driving, my car radio is invariably tuned to KOIT, the leading “easy listening” station in the San Francisco Bay area. My tastes are humdrum and unsophisticated, so the songs merely provide some pleasant background music, occasionally punctuated by commercial ads, mostly annoying but occasionally amusing. One of the better ones began running only […]
Proposition 55: A Lesson in Not-So-Temporary Temporary Taxes
Coming out of the Great Recession that ravaged the state budget, Governor Jerry Brown and the state’s teachers’ unions joined forces to successfully push Proposition 30, a 2012 ballot initiative labeled, “Temporary Taxes to Fund Education.” Yet, despite a General Fund that grew 42 percent since Governor Brown became governor and Proposition 98 education spending that increased […]
Case Study: How Politicians Motivate Companies to Leave California
Manufacturing is the number one industry in California to pack up and move to states considered to be friendly to business. Since such losses are happening more frequently, let’s take a look at the record of a politician from a district that will soon lose a major employer. In this case, it’s Senator Connie Leyva […]
Edmund D. Edelman: Great Man Passing
Toward the end of the film “To Kill A Mockingbird,” Alabama lawyer Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck) has just lost his case defending a black man, Tom Robinson, who had been unjustly accused of raping a white girl. Dejected, and bearing the heavy moral burden of having failed the local black community, he walks down the […]
Loretta Sanchez, Negotiator
It’s rare that a political candidate shows herself to be not up to the job in a debate negotiation. But Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez demonstrated just that in the back-and-forth over debates in her race for U.S. Senate against Attorney General Kamala Harris. Sanchez badly trails Harris, so she needed as many debates as she could […]