By the numbers.
What do I think of Brown’s Wall Street-backed pension proposal to make young people pay more?
#OccupyTheCapitol www.refundcalifornia.org/march5
Brown’s pension proposal is nothing more than a Wall Street play to make young people pay more for corporate profits. The Sacramento Bee has a story on labor opposition to the pension plan.
But I think students and young people need to step up our opposition to this pension plan. The plan would make young people pay the most by eliminating pensions for every new state and local public employee hired after July 1st, 2013. Young people would then be forced to pay for 401k’s. In effect, this makes impossible for young people to ever earn a pension plan to retire with, because pensions have already been more-or-less eliminated for new workers in the private sector.
What’s the alternative? One alternative would be to tax millionaires and Wall Street speculation to invest in pensions for the next generation of workers. Maybe we should add that to our list of demands when we Occupy the Capitol on March 5th.
If you haven’t already, sign up for a seat on the bus and to join us on March 5th:
This is shameful and we need to stop it.
9 of 10 U.S. cities with highest unemployment rates have a history of factory farming
According to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data published in U.S. News and World Report, 9 of the 10 U.S. cities with the highest unemployment rates have a history of factory farming. I’m working on an academic paper about how the political and economic institutions that formed in regions around factory farming decades ago or more can persist even after the area becomes urban. These institutions tend to favor ruling elites in political and economic struggles. As a result, urban areas in regions with a history of factory farming tend to have high poverty rates. I hope to submit the article to a sociology journal by the end of this spring. I’ll keep you posted.
Klein has one of the few interesting analyses of Obama’s State of the Union speech. Federal financing of a massive write-down of mortgage debt and the Buffet rule could be a big deal if they are real. We’ll see. How about the top 5 policies missing from Obama’s State of the Union? What would yours be? Here’s one crack at it:
1. A global tax on Wall Street speculative transactions.
2. A new Works Progress Administration to employ millions to build schools and social infrastructure.
3. Increasing the minimum wage to a living wage and indexing it to inflation.
4. Repealing the Taft-Hartley restrictions on union rights.
5. A requirement for all employers to provide paid family, sick, and vacation leave for employees.
- On November 16, 2011, SDSU Teaching Associate and UAW 4123 Member Ashley Wardle joined hundreds of other CSU students at the Chancellor’s Office in Long Beach to protest proposed tuition increases. UAW 2865 members and UC student-workers also joined the protest to demand that Chancellor Reed and the CSU Trustees join a campaign to make banks and millionaires pay to fully fund high quality, public higher education.
- Ashley, along with three other students, was arrested on 11/16 and released the same day on her own recognizance. No charges have ever been brought against Ashley. But SDSU is now threatening to suspend Ashley for 2 years!
Statewide UAW 2865 mtg, 12pm @ #UCSB:
Agenda includes #occupy, making banks pay, smaller class sizes, student researcher union rights!
Check out UAW2865.org for more info.
After students peacefully stood their ground Thursday, we can gather ourselves to again up the pressure on banks, millionaires, the CSU Trustees, and the UC Regents on March 1st — on campuses and in communities around the state. On March 5th, tens of thousands are planning to converge in Sacramento to occupy the capitol and ask politicians, whose side are you on? Do you stand with students, teachers, parents, and workers? Or do you stand with the 1%? See you in the streets!
The Daily Kos has a good compilation of video and photos of police firing projectiles at student activists protesting at the Regents meeting at UC Riverside. The students called for the corporate elite on the UC Board to support a more bottom-up university and concrete measures for Wall St. and millionaires to refund public education, jobs, and essential services.
