California to Become an (Almost) Sanctuary State

By Duane Campbell

 California Governor Jerry Brown signed into law SB 54 on Thursday Oct 5, the "California Values Act", which built upon the landmark Trust Act to help protect California immigrant residents from deportations. It is commonly known as the “Sanctuary State” act.

Immigrant communities around the state led the fight for the bill, which is considered a "foundation" for additional legislation. The bill was amended to include criticisms and restrictions insisted upon by Governor Brown.  This sanctuary state act contributes to building community and state-level resistance to the White House attacks against the growing "sanctuary" movement among communities, institutions and local and state governments in California.  

As signed, the bill does away with several local deportation practices, such as local police arrests for "civil immigrant warrants", and it helps to ensure that spaces like schools, health facilities, courthouses and other spaces are safe and accessible to all. 

State Senate President Kevin de Leon, the lead author of the bill said, “With today’s signing of SB 54 into law, one of the most important parts of that legal wall of protections is now in place. Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions will not be able to use California’s own law enforcement officials in an effort to round up and deport our fellow Californians.”

The law will go into effect January 1, 2018. Elements of the bill are already in place in numerous cities throughout the state.

Lets Talk Taxes

by Duane E. Campbell

California, like most states, needs additional revenue to fund schools and to invest in the future.  Our  public schools are in crisis - and they are getting worse. Their decline  is a direct result of massive budget cuts imposed by the legislature and the governor in the last four years.  Total expenditure is down by over $1,000 per student. The result is  massive class size increases.  Students are often in classes too large for quality learning.  Supplementary services such as tutoring and art have been eliminated.  Over 14,000 teachers have  already been dismissed  and thousands more face lay offs .

California schools are now 47th in the nation in per pupil expenditure and 49th in class size.  Our low achievement scores on national tests reflect this severe underfunding.

Of course the economic crisis of 2007 to the present caused by bankers and  their  lobbyists  made matters worse.  The state took in some $30 billion less in taxes due to the collapse  and thus had less to send to the schools.  School budgets have been cut by some $10 billion. 

The question for the anti tax advocates  and the Chamber of Commerce,  and ultimately for California voters this fall, is can the economy prosper with a poorly educated work force. California grew and prospered from 1970- 1994 based upon a well educated work force.   The wealth that funds our current highways, parks, universities, community colleges   and jobs is based upon  past public investments.  Then, in the period between 1994-2008 over $10 billion in corporate tax cuts  were passed  making the current  economic crisis much worse. 

UFW march on Sacramento - Labor Day Weekend

     Over 3000  UFW farm workers and their supporters marched on the California Capitol in Sacramento on Sept. 4 insisting on Fair Treatment for Farm workers Now.   The march began August 23 in Madera. The march was organized by the United Farm Workers to reach Sacramento on Labor Day weekend.  Marchers  are pushing for the enactment of the Fair Treatment for Farm Workers Act and the right to be paid overtime after eight hours. 

    As the farm workers reached the capitol an apparent agreement was reached among legislators  to pass improvements of the existing Agricultural Labor Relations Act.  Gov. Jerry Brown and pro farm worker legislators  have struck a deal to give state regulators new powers that could help agriculture workers unionize.

The new  measures, introduced in the Legislature on Friday, would allow the state's Agriculture Labor Relations Board to certify a union if it finds that a grower has acted illegally to affect the outcome of a labor election. Currently the ALRB makes 5-10 decisions per year and few of the decisions  result in elections. The legislation would also accelerate the mediation process for workers in disputes with their employers.

   The Governor would not agree to the Fair Treatment for Farm Workers legislation already passed by the legislature  which would have permitted card check verification to hold a union election.  Governor Brown  and Republicans argue that the ALRB, passed in 1976, needs more time to be developed before changing a fundamental issue such as elections.

Brown's budget:

By Peter Schrag

Unless everything we know about Jerry Brown is wrong, and everything that he said even before his election was misleading, what we’re going to get today (1/10) is a bare bones budget – austerity in its most Draconian form – coupled with a challenge that if the legislature and the voters want anything more, they’ll have to provide the funds to pay for it.

If he were to be totally clear he’d say that California can’t dig its way out of its fiscal crisis without both major cuts and major increases in revenues.

Brown’s cuts will include significant reductions in the budgets for the University of California and the California State University, the elimination, as already announced, of the state’s redevelopment agencies, and a sharp reduction in the prison budget. It’s also likely that Brown will call for cuts in community college funding.

Indications are that Brown will propose no further cuts in the K-12 budget in this round, but issue a warning that if the legislature and voters don’t approve additional revenues in May or June – among them extensions of the income and sales tax and the vehicle license fees due to expire this year – then the schools will feel the ax as well.

Jerry Brown appoints Honig

Honig Appointed to State Board of Education: More Support for Excessive Phonics Teaching?   by Stephen Krashen 

Reports of Governor Brown's appointment of Bill Honig to the State Board of Education have focused on Honig's previous legal problems.  More serious is Honig's stance on educational issues  ("Brown names top advisers," 1/6). 

After resigning as state superintendent, Honig became a dedicated supporter of intensive systematic phonics, the view that all children need phonics instruction that includes all major rules of phonics, presented in a strict order. 

Some basic phonics instruction is helpful, but evidence refutes the extremist intensive systematic position: Studies show that intensive phonics makes no significant contribution to performance on tests in which children have to understand what they read. 

California Budget crisis

 Feeding the Goose that lays the golden eggs.

It is clear that the California budget is in crisis, and the issues were  clarified in the budget summit sponsored by Governor elect Jerry Brown on Wednesday, December 7. There are no quick nor easy solutions. We can not simply cut our way out of the crisis, budget cuts and lay offs make the recession worse.

School funding reveals the nature of crisis.  In the last two years the k-12 budget “solutions” have cut 4.6 billion dollars from the schools. We have larger classes and fewer teachers.  School reform has stopped- except for the politicians hot air.  School funding makes up a total of 30% of the state budget.  Any crisis in the state budget and any cuts in the state budget will make school budgets worse.

California will need to raise taxes to fund the schools and to repair the social safety net.  Anti tax radicals and Republicans  oppose any tax increases.   The state ‘solutions’ of the last three years depended upon receiving federal stimulus money.  The stimulus monies are almost finished and with the Republican winning control  of Congress there will probably not be more funds.

The California economy , if it were a country, would be the 8^th. largest economy in the world.   The California economy is larger than that of Brazil, Spain, Canada, India, Russia, Australia and most of the rest of the world.  California can and should use Keynesian economic policies to find  our way out of this economic crisis.  We are, of course, a state integrated into a national economy, so the collapse of the U.S. economy will have a direct effect on our ability to use Keynesian stimulus to grow the economy.   For description of Keynesian economics see here.  http://www.newdeal20.org/2009/07/01/keynesian-economics-101-894/

Whitman V. Brown. The California Economy

Reviving California's economy: Meg Whitman versus Jerry Brown

Both have put forth plans to address the state's loss of industrial manufacturing. Neither goes far enough.

Harold Meyerson

For all their differences, Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown agree on one thing: California needs an industrial policy.

For half a century, aerospace was California's dominant economic engine. But then the end of the Cold War led to a radical contraction of the aerospace industry. Since then, the state has subsisted on bubbles, and it has wilted each time they popped. Neither the dot-com industry nor housing — the two chief sources of economic activity in this state for the past 15 years — offered the kind of sustainable and broadly shared prosperity that Californians took for granted in the years between 1940 and 1990. The high-tech companies that have flourished in this state over the past 20 years have created great wealth, but with much of their manufacturing done offshore, that wealth has not been shared with California production workers.

Both Whitman and Brown understand that loss of manufacturing is a key factor in the state's economic decline, and they have put forth economic plans to address it. But neither of their strategies does enough to restore the state to its onetime industrial preeminence.

Whitman seeks to remedy the problem through classic Republican policies: reducing taxes and regulations on businesses. Some of her targeted tax cuts make sense, like increasing the R&D tax credit and creating a tax credit for factory equipment. But the massive cuts she proposes to state services will only further the decline of California's aging infrastructure and harm a public education system that badly needs improvement.

Candidate from Goldman Sachs wins Republican primary in California

 billionaire CEO Meg Whitman won California’s Republican gubernatorial primary “after months of obscene campaign spending,” says Art Pulaski, executive secretary-treasurer of the California Federation of Labor.

In the race for Sacramento against Attorney General Jerry Brown (D), Whitman will now “use her seemingly unlimited fortune to try to stage a hostile takeover of our state.”

She’s made clear that, if elected, she plans to bring a Wall Street agenda to California. What that means for working families is more massive tax giveaways for corporations and the wealthy and wholesale cuts to education, public safety and programs that our state’s most vulnerable rely upon.

Pulaski says the contrast between the candidates “couldn’t be starker.”

Jerry Brown shares the Main Street values that built this state’s economy into a global powerhouse and expanded our middle class. Brown has a spent a lifetime fighting for working families. He presided over the creation of nearly 2 million jobs as governor. He fought the exploitation of workers by large corporations as attorney general.

Read Pulaski’s full statement here.

Boom ! Is it all over for Obama ?

Here are a quick few conclusions I draw from this spectacle:

-- We knew all along that the Democratic victories in 2006 and 2008 owed in great part to rejection of George W. Bush and a bankrupt Republican Party more than it did to a pro-active love for Democrats.

-- The election of Barack Obama did not heal the racial divide in America. He merely and temporarily bridged it because he was, indeed, an inspiring alternative to the crumb-bum Bushies (and that includes a dottering McCain and a wacky Palin).  But as soon as elected and the shine was off, the racial divide widened up again led by those strange creatures known as "independents" ( i.e. basically conservative white folks who look upon politics the way hotel guests view room service).

Read the entire blog at: Marc Cooper.  His blog is at http://marccooper.com/boom-is-it-all-over/ This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 19th, 2010 at 9:27 pm and is filed under Main.