Last week more than 800 people signed an ethics complaint charging Mayor Chuck Reed and other top City officials with misrepresenting the City’s financial condition. The ethics complaint went to the Elections Commission, but the Elections Commission’s lawyer says it does not have jurisdiction, prompting the Mercury News to publish an article titled “Ethics Panel Lawyer: Mayor Is In the Clear”.

The Mercury was awfully quick to come to the Mayor’s defense. It would be one thing if he had used exaggerated numbers once or twice, but the Mayor and his administration have demonstrated a pattern of misrepresenting the City’s financial problems in order to justify a ballot measure which the Mayor considers to be his legacy. This pattern of misrepresentation should give the Mercury and San Jose voters pause.

The Mayor campaigned on an ethics reform platform. One of his so called “Reed Reforms” requires the Mayor and Council members to disclose material facts before the Council takes action. Based on the Mayor’s misrepresentations, the Council approved a ballot measure that legal experts – the Attorney General, California Legislative Council, city attorneys, and others – agree is unconstitutional. If this isn’t a violation of the Reed Reforms, it’s hard to tell what is.

Contrary to the Mercury, the Elections Commission lawyer did not clear Mayor Reed. He just said that the Elections Commission lacks jurisdiction to hear the ethics complaint. Let’s acknowledge the obvious: with hundreds of people making such a serious complaint about conduct that so profoundly affects the future of the City, the complaint demands a fair hearing. If they don’t get one, the Mayor’s ethics reforms will be little more than an empty campaign promise.

By Matt Taibbi
Originally published in
Rolling Stone Magazine

I have a confession to make. At first, I misunderstood Occupy Wall Street.

The first few times I went down to Zuccotti Park, I came away with mixed feelings. I loved the energy and was amazed by the obvious organic appeal of the movement, the way it was growing on its own. But my initial impression was that it would not be taken very seriously by the Citibanks and Goldman Sachs of the world. You could put 50,000 angry protesters on Wall Street, 100,000 even, and Lloyd Blankfein is probably not going to break a sweat. He knows he’s not going to wake up tomorrow and see Cornel West or Richard Trumka running the Federal Reserve. He knows modern finance is a giant mechanical parasite that only an expert surgeon can remove. Yell and scream all you want, but he and his fellow financial Frankensteins are the only ones who know how to turn the machine off.

That’s what I was thinking during the first few weeks of the protests. But I’m beginning to see another angle. Occupy Wall Street was always about something much bigger than a movement against big banks and modern finance. It’s about providing a forum for people to show how tired they are not just of Wall Street, but everything. This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become. If there is such a thing as going on strike from one’s own culture, this is it. And by being so broad in scope and so elemental in its motivation, it’s flown over the heads of many on both the right and the left.
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By Ben Field
Chief of Staff
South Bay ALF-CIO Labor Council

City officials in San Jose have been cooking the books. But instead of exaggerating the City’s financial health in order to justify better services for residents, they are doing just the opposite.

A couple months ago it came to light that the city was overestimating pension costs for the coming fiscal year by more than $50 million. Last week a report by City Manager Debra Figone revealed that the reserve set aside for next year’s budget shortfall had grown to $22 million, which reduces the deficit to just $3 million, but she and Mayor Chuck Reed continue to represent the shortfall as $25 million. Then on Wednesday, NBC Bay Area investigative reporters showed that the Mayor and others had overstated the City’s projected pension costs by $250 million.

Why are the Mayor and others bent on exaggerating the City’s financial problems? It is hard for casual observers of City Hall to understand why the Mayor would risk the City’s good credit and undermine his own ability to restore basic City services, but to insiders the answer is clear. The Mayor and his allies want to increase the political power of his office at the expense of the city’s workers.

At its heart the debate about San Jose’s pension and budget problems is not about money; it is about power. City workers have offered pension reform and other concessions worth so much that the City could start restoring services now. The Mayor has rejected those concessions. His so called pension reform ballot measure is a power grab that will decimate the city workforce and hamstring their ability to bargain with the City in the future.

The policy of San Jose is not austerity for the sake of recovery, but austerity for the sake of a political agenda. What’s so bad about that? Aside from the unfairness to cops, firefighters, librarians, and other dedicated city workers, the Mayor’s political agenda is already damaging the City’s ability to deliver essential services. In addition, the lawsuit that will result if his ballot measure passes could cost the City hundreds of millions of dollars. Ironically, there is no financial threat to the City greater than the Mayor’s ballot measure.

In San Jose “transparency” is the motto, but things often are not as they seem. What looks like a money issue is really a power issue, and what looks like fiscal conservatism is really financially reckless.

By Ben Field
Chief of Staff
South Bay Labor Council

In a city where bad ideas and phony numbers have the power of conventional wisdom, the IBM report commissioned by San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed is conspicuously foolish. Take for instance the statement in the report that “more policing does not reduce crime.” Not only is the assertion untrue, but it is so ridiculous that it casts doubt on the credibility of the whole report and the judgment of the people who back it.

If more policing does not reduce crime, then the City Council could slash the Police Department by 40%, as the IBM report proposes, and the residents would not notice a difference. It’s a dangerous fantasy. The report advises the city to focus police patrols on “hot spots” where computers –presumably IBM computers – predict a lot of crime will occur. Large areas of the City would have almost no police presence.

Equally dangerous is the recommendation that the Fire Department should partially or entirely stop providing emergency medical services. If you have a medical emergency in San Jose, good luck, but go find yourself a “private provider.”

A few months ago, the Mayor and others argued that the City had a “service level state of emergency.” Now the Mayor is considering cutting those service levels drastically. In a word, it’s bizarre. The only reasonable response to the IBM report is repudiation. At a time when the City is too short-staffed to work on good policy ideas, there is no excuse for failing to kill the IBM report right now.

By Fred Hirsch

Raul Zapata, a carpenter, was killed in Milpitas on Saturday, January 28, the victim of a collapsed, un-shored trench. He was not a union member, but he was our brother. We construction workers think he fell victim to something more than a crumbling wall of soil.

Speaking for, the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal/OSHA}, Erika Monterroza, said the case will be turned over to the District Attorney If state investigators uncover any evidence of a crime or criminal neglect.

If this case is not prosecuted as a crime, that in itself, would be criminal. We think the perpetrators are company and management people who were notified to stop work on the project and neither stopped the job nor informed Raul Zapata and his co-workers of the stop work order.

This kind of crime arises inevitably out of a system that fails to guarantee workers safety on the job and fails to equally enforce workers rights under the law. Such tragic crimes are predictable.

We can be sure that cutbacks and short staff prevent city and state agencies from applying regulations fully. With that, we can be sure that, as always, greedy exploiters will crawl through every loophole and cut every corner to make a buck.

We union construction workers are part of organizations of our peers that train us in safety issues and back us up so we can work safely and, when necessary, refuse to work in unsafe conditions without discrimination and job loss. We also can negotiate fair wages and benefits commensurate with our skills and the values we produce. This provides a culture of safety.
Thus, when an “accident” happens it is much more likely to be really an accident and not a crime.

The larger crime in the tragic death of Raul Zapata lies in the failure to provide Cal/OSHA with the staff and resources to do its job and fulfill its responsibility. Similarly, municipal inspection departments are inadequately funded. Thus, companies, like Raul Zapata’s employer, can reasonably expect that labor and safety laws and enforcement often won’t really apply on the job. Rather than allow employees the rights, wages, and freedom to organize that we earn and deserve, unscrupulous bosses who get caught usually just pony up a relatively small fine.

Currently Cal/OSHA has 196 inspectors, California has one of the lowest per capita staffing levels in the nation. At this level, it would take about
175 years to complete safety inspections in the 1,335,000 workplaces in the state. Why shouldn’t unethical companies that care not a damn for workers, expect to keep getting away with violations, despite the resultant “accidental” injuries and fatalities?

WorkSafe, an organization that focuses on safety issues says, “We simply don’t know who dies on the job each year in California or what causes their death.” Only a handful of workplace deaths get reported in the media. Even the Cal/OSHA Reporter covered just 103 of the more than 300 such deaths, identifying only 18 persons by name. When we die at work we often become a no-name statistic. Nationwide, we suffer some 15 job related deaths daily, that’s 5,475 yearly. 6500 California workers die each year from job-related disease.

Raul Zapata’s wife and three children are in Mexico. Millions of Mexicans have been forced by poverty to seek work on this side of the border.
Mexico’s economy was crippled by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Workers in Mexican industry and agriculture confronted U.S.
corporations subsidized by taxpayer dollars. They lost. Loss of jobs makes migration a matter of survival. Once here, our immigration laws deny them equality as workers. Complaints about wages and working conditions or efforts to organize make them expendable. That drives them into the underground economy where vulture employers exploit them to the human limit.
Brother Zapata’s employer went beyond that limit. A criminal tragedy resulted.

We mourn along with Raul Zapata’s family for the tragic death of their husband and father. This man shouldn’t become just another statistic. He was a carpenter victimized on the crossed combination of employer greed and inadequate application of labor and safety laws. We’ve got to put that right.

Fred Hirsch is an Executive Board Member, Plumbers & Fitters Local 393, Delegate to the Santa Clara and San Benito Building and Construction Trades Council and South Bay AFL-CIO Labor Council)

(From AFL-CIO Now Blog )

Over the weekend, all eyes were on the Super Bowl in Indianapolis, where tens of thousands traveled to see the event and hundreds of thousands more watched it on television. But while the spotlight was on the game, workers across the city took to the streets to protest the outrages happening to working people.

In one such event, we rallied at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Indianapolis, where hardworking hotel housekeepers are fighting to keep their jobs and boost their poverty-level pay at a hotel where rates can be more than $1,000 a night for a Super Bowl week room. Twenty longtime hotel workers may be out of jobs in a few days when the hotel ends a subcontract with Hospitality Staffing Solutions.

The hotel workers are not in this fight alone. In the midst of what is undoubtedly the busiest few days for football players, DeMaurice Smith, executive director of the NFL Players Association (NFLPA), and NFL players joined Hyatt housekeepers at the rally to demand Hyatt end its abuse of subcontracted workers and hire outsourced workers directly. Smith said NFL players would continue a year-old boycott of Hyatt over its treatment of workers and told the crowd:

I love people who stand together to fight for what’s right.

Just blocks from the Super Bowl, these football players, together with construction workers, office staff and steelworkers, stood side by side with hotel housekeepers, joined in common cause by the struggles that unite all working people—all of the 99 percent in this country who are fighting against corporate greed and challenging politicians who seek to take away our rights as citizens of this great country.

Days ago, some of those politicians right here in Indiana pushed through the state legislature legislation that is a massive assault on the wages of the state’s working people. The “right to work” for less bill was hustled through the legislative process in a series of dirty tricks in outright contempt for democracy.

What’s happening in Indiana is just one part of the massive assault on working families across the country. Yet over the past year, we saw again and again the strength of collective action, of public protest in state after state as the rights of workers came under attack. We re-learned that we are not alone, and we have seen that when we stand together with those who share our values, victory is ours.

Hours after Gov. Mitch Daniels (R) signed Indiana’s contemptuous bill, tens of thousands of Hoosier workers came together in solidarity to march from the statehouse to Super Bowl village. Construction workers and teachers, grocery clerks and truck drivers chanted “Remember November,” vowing to take back the state door by door, neighborhood by neighborhood.

This year, as in Indiana, we will stand together for jobs and for economic freedom across the nation. We’ll congregate in the public square. And on Election Day, we’ll march to the ballot box to cast our votes for economic, social and political justice.

AFL-CIO Field Communications staffer Cathy Sherwin sends us this from the Indiana statehouse.

Far from conceding defeat after the passage of a so-called right to work (RTW) bill, tens of thousands of Hoosier workers came together in solidarity to march from the statehouse to Super Bowl village in Indianapolis. From the steps of the statehouse, Indiana AFL-CIO President Nancy Guyott said today would mark a new start to taking back the state, starting with “the biggest march Indiana has ever seen!”

Construction workers and teachers, grocery clerks and truck drivers cheered on the workers and elected officials with chants of “Remember November,” vowing to take back the state door by door, neighborhood by neighborhood. WISH-TV has some great aerial footage here.

The overreach and extreme politics that led to today’s vote—including actions by RTW supporters that included shutting the doors to the statehouse, cutting off debate and an ad campaign bankrolled by secret special interests have given the voting public a window into the Indiana Capitol. In poll after poll, Hoosier voters say they don’t approve of these strong-arm tactics by GOP leaders.

By using his final months in office to push this divisive attack, Gov. Mitch Daniels has tarnished his legacy, an outcome that he predicted only a few years ago when he said “right to work” would cause a “civil war.”‘ At today’s rally and march after the vote, that quote was turned on its head by Guyott. She called out the governor but said that today’s vote was the opposite of a civil war, “brother against brother,” because in Indiana,

By Ben Field
Chief of Staff
South Bay AFL-CIO Labor Council

Is it time for a great coming together of the movement for racial justice and the movement for economic justice? During the Civil Rights era the political agenda of the Left began to divide. Young, liberal activists and people of color gravitated toward a racial justice agenda while more traditional Democrats clung to a New Deal agenda focused on economic justice. As the racial justice agenda became dominant, the economic justice agenda lost support. We may now be at a historical turning point because of growing concern about economic inequality.

The chasm between rich and poor has surpassed race and immigration as the most important source of societal tension. According to a new survey by the Pew Research Center, two thirds of Americans believe there are “strong conflicts” between the rich and poor. That number has increased 50 percent since the 2009 survey.

Race remains an important issue. Although only 38% of Americans believe there is a conflict between blacks and whites, large percentages of African Americans see both race and class as sources of societal strain. Many people of color experience economic inequality every day. What’s new is that whites are starting to catch on.
Concern about income stagnation, the decline of the middle class, and the wealth of the richest 1 percent has reached a tipping point. It is time to come together around an economic justice agenda. Every election year politicians say we are at the crossroads. This time we really are. As a nation we can consciously move toward a society that embraces economic disparity or we can consciously move toward shared prosperity.

By Tula Connell
AFL-CIO Managing Editor

President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address made clear that he hears the people who aren’t being heard by the 1 percent, says AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka. Obama’s speech showed he “listened to the single mom working two jobs to get by, to the out-of-work construction worker, to the retired factory worker, to the student serving coffee to help pay for college.”

By laying out a vision of an America that can create jobs and prosperity for all instead of wealth for the few, Trumka said the president “voiced the aspirations and concerns of those who are too often ignored.”

Obama also made clear that the era of the 1 percent getting rich by looting the economy, rather than creating jobs, is over.

“Now it’s time for Congress to stop standing in the way of rebuilding our country and act,” Trumka said.

President Obama presented Congress a choice, Trumka said, between Obama’s vision of the need to invest to achieve stable, long-term prosperity for all and the vision of presidential candidates squabbling over how much further to cut the taxes of the 1 percent.

Obama “spoke to the confidence of working people that if we are determined and committed, we can revitalize ‘Made in the USA.’ That commitment to American manufacturing, made possible in part by enhanced enforcement of trade laws being violated by China , is welcome news to the too many productive, hard working Americans sitting idle unnecessarily.”

Trumka praised the President’s powerful insistence “on a more humble Wall Street subject to a thorough investigation of the misconduct in the mortgage markets that wrecked our economy,” and applauded the creation of a new mortgage crisis unit to be co-chaired by New York’s Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman.

Obama also sent a message of hope to America’s young people, “with his words of support for DREAM students, immigrants brought to this country by their parents and committed to the quintessentially American vision of hard work at school or in military service,” Trumka said.

The bottom line, of course, is job creation. The nation is still short 10 million jobs from losses in 2008 and 2009. The addition of 200,000 jobs in December was strong and welcome growth, but the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) points out that even at that rate, the United States will not return to full employment until 2019.

Since Labor Day, Obama has been speaking out forcefully against the same staggering increase in inequality that inspired the Occupy Wall Street movement. His State of the Union speech demonstrates a focus on job creation that Republican House and
Senate leaders should follow.

Reprinted from Labor’s Edge
by Pedro Morillas, CALPIRG

With the second anniversary approaching of the Supreme Court’s decision in the Citizens United case – which opened the floodgates to corporate spending on elections – it’s worth a look at whether playing in politics actually pays off for corporate interests. As it so happens, it does.
Between 2008 and 2010 at least thirty US corporations spent more to lobby congress than they paid in federal taxes over the same time period. Clearly, when it comes to politics, corporations really do spend money to make money.
In addition to the “Dirty Thirty”, 280 consistently profitable Fortune 500 companies paid about half the statutory corporate tax rate while spending $2 billion to lobby Congress on tax policy and other issues. Twenty-nine of these corporations actually received a net tax rebate simply by exploiting special provisions and loopholes in the tax code.
All told, the “Dirty Thirty” companies made $163.7 billion in profits while paying zero dollars in federal income taxes and collecting a total of $10.6 billion in various tax rebates. Meanwhile, they collectively spent $475.7 million in lobbying expenses for the three year period. Mattel, a California based company, spent $800,000 on lobbyists and was rewarded with $366 million in subsidies.
One of the most egregious ways these corporations skirt their taxes is by shifting profits legitimately earned in America to offshore tax havens, where they are subject to little, if any taxes. At least 22 of the thirty companies studied had subsidiaries in tax haven countries. Wells Fargo, another California based company, has 58 tax haven subsidiaries.
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