California Free Press

'A Watershed Moment': California Sues Big Oil Over Decades of Climate Destruction

A man runs past a fallen tree amid Tropical Storm Hilary on August 21, 2023 in San Diego, California. (Photo: Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images)

"California's move is an unmistakable sign that the wave of climate lawsuits against Big Oil will keep growing and that these polluters' days of escaping accountability for their lies are numbered."

 

by Jake Johnson, September 16, 2023, from Common Dreams

"California's move is an unmistakable sign that the wave of climate lawsuits against Big Oil will keep growing and that these polluters' days of escaping accountability for their lies are numbered."

The state of California on Friday filed suit against ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, and Chevron, accusing the five oil and gas giants of a decadeslong campaign to mislead the public about the threat fossil fuels pose to the climate.

The lawsuit makes California the largest economy on the planet to take legal action against fossil fuel companies over their efforts to deceive the world about their destructive—and immensely profitable—business model. California is also a major producer of oil and gas.

"This has been a multi-decade, ongoing campaign to seek endless profits at the expense of our planet, our people, and the greedy corporations and individuals need to be held accountable," California Attorney General Rob Bonta toldThe New York Times in an interview on Friday. "That's where we come in."

With its new civil lawsuit, filed in a San Francisco court, California joins Rhode Island, Minnesota, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, and other states that have sued the fossil fuel industry over its role in massive climate damages. Dozens of municipalities, including several in California, have also filed lawsuits against oil giants.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. has experienced a record-breaking 23 billion-dollar extreme weather disasters this year, from deadly flooding in California to the catastrophic wildfire that killed nearly 100 people in Maui, Hawaii—which is also suing Big Oil.

Cities and states representing 25% of the U.S. population are currently taking part in some kind of climate-related legal action against the fossil fuel industry, according to Fossil Free Media, and the Biden Justice Department is facing growing pressure to join the fight.

In an effort to improve their chances of winning the mounting legal battles, fossil fuel giants have tried to move climate liability lawsuits from state to federal court—but the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear their appeals earlier this year.

"Just like tobacco and opioid companies, the oil and gas industry will have to face the evidence of its deception in court."

Richard Wiles, the president of the Center for Climate Integrity, said in a statement Saturday that "California's decision to take Big Oil companies to court is a watershed moment in the rapidly expanding legal fight to hold major polluters accountable for decades of climate lies."

"Whether it's fires, droughts, extreme heat, or sea-level rise, Californians have been living in a climate emergency caused by the fossil fuel industry, and now the state is taking decisive action to make those polluters pay," said Wiles. "As similar cases proceed toward trial, California's move is an unmistakable sign that the wave of climate lawsuits against Big Oil will keep growing and that these polluters' days of escaping accountability for their lies are numbered. Just like tobacco and opioid companies, the oil and gas industry will have to face the evidence of its deception in court."

California's lawsuit, which also names the American Petroleum Institute as a defendant, comes days after The Wall Street Journalpublished a front-page story based on previously unreported documents that detail Exxon's behind-closed-doors effort to cast doubt on climate science after 2006, when the company publicly acknowledged the link between fossil fuels and climate change for the first time.

Exxon and other oil companies have been aware of the connection since the 1970s.

"For more than 50 years, Big Oil has been lying to us—covering up the fact that they've long known how dangerous the fossil fuels they produce are for our planet," California Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement. "It has been decades of damage and deception."

"Wildfires wiping out entire communities, toxic smoke clogging our air, deadly heatwaves, record-breaking droughts parching our wells," Newsom continued. "California taxpayers shouldn't have to foot the bill. California is taking action to hold big polluters accountable."

The Times noted Friday that California's lawsuit aims to establish "a fund that would be used to pay for recovery from extreme weather events and mitigation and adaptation efforts across the state."

"The lawsuit claims that California has already spent tens of billions of dollars paying for climate disasters, and expects costs to rise significantly in the years ahead," the Times added.

Jamie Henn, the director of Fossil Free Media, said Saturday that with its lawsuit, "California just kicked open the door for every city and state in America to sue the fossil fuel industry for climate damages."

"After this summer of brutal heat waves and climate disasters, I think the public is hungry for a way to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for the damage they've done," said Henn. "Big Oil knew, they lied, and now it's time to make them pay."

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

 

 

Jake Johnson

Jake Johnson is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.

Full Bio >

Off the Top of My Head

It's Not Biden's Job to Reduce Inflation. That's Jerome Powell's Job.

by John Lawrence

Republicans are so stupid. They blame Joe Biden for not doing something that's not his job to do. Furthermore, the way Powell is going about his job requires him to create more unemployment, to reduce economic activity. That's the traditional way to reduce inflation. So getting rid of inflation requires more economic pain not less. Then if there is a recession, they'll blame Joe Biden, not Jerome Powell, for that. As far as house prices being out of sight for more and more people, how about blaming the hedge funds and other entities that are bidding up asset prices. Eventually houses will be unaffordable for the masses of people which will turn the American people into renters and basically debtors. Is that Joe Biden's fault or the fault of hedge finds and other cash flush investors who are entering this market? In fact they are in the process of cornering this market. Higher interest rates are also hurting would be home owners and car buyers. Is that Joe Biden's fault or Jerome Powell's fault for raising interest rates? Joe Biden has no control over interest rates. The American consumer is all about me, me, me not what is best for the country as a whole.

Biden has done more than any President since Lyndon Johnson to improve the economy with the Chips Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, the American Rescue Plan and more. Nearly 11 million jobs have been created since President Biden took office – including 750,000 manufacturing jobs. It's the first time the US government has had an industrial policy. He kept the economy afloat during the COVID lock down. The US economy has been left to free enterprise for too long. With deregulation this has allowed corporate entities to pollute, to create dangerous products, to do nothing about carbon dioxide emissions.The government was just supposed to be hands off and let corporations run wild, all in the name of maximizing GDP. Well there are more important things than maximizing GDP like saving the planet from global warming. It is all ready too late to do that. It's only a question at this time of how bad it will get before some of the measures that are being taken today will kick in and save the planet, hopefully, from complete destruction. Each year heat waves and floods are getting more severe. Each year is hotter than the previous year. How important is it to maximize GDP under these conditions?

During World War II, the government made sure that the economy was completely focused on the war effort. Consumer consumption was kept low in order to support the war effort. Today with an even larger danger looming, the economy is going on its merry way with so many elements of it not focused on climate change. In fact I call it the Taylor Swiftization of the economy. Entertainment including professional athletics are very large components of GDP. Nero fiddling while Rome burned is nothing compared to what is happening today. Perhaps the energy going into these frivolous sectors should be refocused on climate change. But the American people don't even all agree that climate change is even a serious situation. They want more fossil fuels, more drilling, more pipelines, more gas production. Fortunately, some states like California are doing more like outlawing gas powered cars by 2035. However, 2035 is too late. Too little, too late is the story of the world's response to climate change. So major disasters will continue with the government's fiscal budget increasingly committed to bailing out these disasters. FEMA, by the way, is bankrupt, and insurance companies no longer want to insure.

U.S. Truckmakers Reach Deal to Phase Out Polluting Diesel Big Rigs

California Pact Could Speed Transition to Electric Commercial Trucks in 2030s to Reduce Particulates and Other Pollution

By Timothy Puko

Washington Post, July 6, 2023

 

A truck engine is tested for pollution that leaves its exhaust pipe in California near the Mexican border in 2013. (Mike Blake/Reuters)

 

Some of the largest manufacturers of heavy trucks and engines in the country have agreed to accept a California plan to ban sales of new diesel big rigs by 2036 under a deal aimed in part at thwarting potential litigation and maintaining a single national standard for truck pollution rules.

The deal averts a costly court battle with the biggest industry players and eases the transition to clean electric commercial trucks in California, the largest market in the country, and potentially other states. The agreement covers manufacturers including industry giants such as Ford, General Motors, Daimler and Cummins, as well as the Truck and Engine Manufacturers Association, an industry group. All are agreeing to implement the California plan regardless of how it may fare in the courts.

The coalition, known as the Clean Truck Partnership, was born out of more than three months of negotiations between the industry and the California Air Resources Board, which has been pushing new rules to lead the country on cleaning up heavy trucks. California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) heralded the deal as a major step toward reducing air pollution and emissions that warm the planet.

“California has shown the world what real climate action looks like, and we are raising the bar yet again,” Newsom said in a statement. “Today, truck manufacturers join our urgent efforts to slash air pollution, showing the rest of the country that we can both cut dangerous pollution and build the economy of the future.”

Diesel-powered commercial trucks are a major source of air pollution nationwide, in particular affecting people living near ports, warehouses and other facilities involved in intensive shipments of goods. In California, heavy-duty trucks account for nearly a third of nitrogen oxide pollution and more than a quarter of fine particle pollution in the state, according to the California Air Resources Board.

Both of these pollutants are linked to asthma, other respiratory illnesses and premature death. Black and Latino people constitute a notable proportion of California residents living near the state’s ports — which are among the busiest in the country — and are vulnerable, state officials said. The deal could have broader implications. Several other states often follow the clean air rules of California, and because of its size, automakers often produce cars for sale nationwide to meet California standards. That has helped make California a trendsetter in reducing the air pollution emitted by cars and trucks for decades.

Eight states have adopted a precursor to the California plan, accounting for about 25 percent of the American truck market. The states that regularly adopt California regulations were briefed on the new deal at the end of the negotiations. The manufacturers said they are committed to switching to big rigs that produce no emissions, and they touted provisions to harmonize California rules with a recent proposal by the Environmental Protection Agency to limit nitrogen oxide emissions.

The industry for years has tried to make the rules set in Washington and Sacramento as near-identical as possible. That includes a 2019 deal the California Air Resources Board struck with several makers of passenger cars to meet stricter state rules, undercutting a Trump administration plan to relax federal gas-mileage standards.

 

As Californians Age, They Are Being Priced Out of Housing

An man who declined to be identified brings snacks and toiletries back to his tent on First Street near Los Angeles City Hall.

(Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)

By Ryan Fonseca  Staff Writer

from the Los Angeles Times

Study traces ‘causes and consequences’ of California homelessness — and challenges myths

Good morning, and welcome to the Essential California newsletter. It’s Wednesday, June 21.

The lives of California’s unhoused population are as complex and nuanced as those of anyone else. That doesn’t sound like a radical statement, but in conversations about homelessness, it can be.

A newly released study from UC San Francisco’s Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative aims to explore that truth with a comprehensive account of “the causes and consequences of homelessness in California,” according to its authors.

Researchers surveyed nearly 3,200 people experiencing homelessness across eight counties in the state, using their answers to create representative statewide estimates. They also conducted in-depth interviews with 365 of those participants.

The study found that nearly half (47%) of all unhoused adults in the state are 50 or older, with Black and Native American residents “dramatically overrepresented.” Notably, 41% of that share became homeless for the first time at 50 or older.

For Times columnist Anita Chabria, the report demonstrates that California’s income inequality has reached a point where “if you are older and unable to work, homelessness is a real threat throughout the Golden State.”

“As much as we want to see the average homeless person as a drug tourist dropping into too-progressive cities for the good fentanyl and lax laws ... or someone whose mental illness makes it impossible for them to live unaided, the truth is simpler — and much more devastating,” she wrote this week. “As Californians age, they are being priced out of housing.”

The study breaks down the many factors that people pointed to as contributing to their homelessness. The top reason cited was a loss or reduction of income. Researchers also broke down the primary reasons cited by both leaseholders and non-leaseholders — participants who didn’t have their name on a lease or mortgage before their most recent episode of homelessness. Non-leaseholders were more likely to report social reasons — such as conflicts with other residents or discrimination — while leaseholders pointed to economic reasons. Fleeing domestic violence was one common reason for both groups.

The authors also pointed to a few misconceptions about homelessness, including “myths of homeless migration.”

According to researchers, “90% of participants lost their last housing in California and 75% of participants live in the same county as where they were last housed.”

The research highlights the complex trajectories that lead to homelessness, but also presents compelling evidence of something advocates for the unhoused have long been saying: Poverty is in many cases the original sin. Traumatic experiences can intensify a person’s mental health and substance use — which affect an array of people regardless of their housing status. But add the stress and trauma of living on the edge of financial ruin and a vicious spiral begins to take shape.

The authors also highlighted several solutions in the form of government policy, namely confronting the lack of affordable housing for Californians living in extreme poverty.

“In 2023, California had only 24 units of housing available and affordable for every 100 extremely low-income households,” the study states.

Recommendations include:

·     Mitigating the often-sudden housing loss people experience by investing in more rent subsidies and mediation to avoid evictions

·     Responding more swiftly when people lose housing to connect them with vital services and lessen their time on the streets

·     Increasing access to substance use treatments and harm reduction service outreach

You can explore the full report here.

Column: Desmond missed something big in criticizing hotel purchases to house homeless people

County Supervisor Jim Desmond speaks to members of the media after a Board of Supervisors meeting on April 11, 2023.

(Adriana Heldiz/The San Diego Union-Tribune)

San Diego County is a partner in the projects and would provide social services, including assistance for mental health, substance abuse

By Michael Smolens Columnist 

May 7, 2023 5 AM PT from the San Diego Union

San Diego County Supervisor Jim Desmond had tough words about the planned purchase of three extended-stay hotels to house homeless people, contending they were too expensive and didn’t address what he said is the main cause of homelessness.

“We just keep throwing more and more dollars at this problem without really getting to the root cause of mental health or alcohol abuse or drug abuse,” he said April 28 on “Fox & Friends.”

Desmond considered the proposal to spend about $157.8 million — which amounts to more than $383,000 per unit — not just too much, but counterproductive. That cost, along with the price of other housing for homeless people, has come under considerable scrutiny.

“Spending all this $157 million on more rooms, doing the same thing, causing the same problem, is fruitless,” he said.

There’s a lot to unpack here.

For one thing, that housing will include services to help people with the very kind of behavioral issues Desmond was talking about.

The specifics of this situation aside, Desmond, a Republican, is expressing widespread, bipartisan frustration at the lack of progress on reducing homelessness at the state and local levels.

Billions of dollars have been aimed at the problem in California, yet the homeless population keeps growing.

He also touched on concerns that people in all walks of life, including many who are homeless, have mental illness and substance abuse problems and need help.

But his attack on the plan by the San Diego Housing Commission, which was reprised in the New York Post, misses a few important things.

The county, which Desmond helps oversee, has agreed to provide social services for residents of these hotels when they are turned into apartments. That includes getting people assistance for various problems, including mental illness and substance abuse.

The county is a partner with the commission and the city of San Diego on the hotel conversions and was involved in negotiations over their selection from a longer list of properties.

Desmond didn’t mention that on Fox, or perhaps he didn’t know. His spokesperson said the supervisor would be unavailable to comment.

“Services specifically target the people he is talking about,” Ryan Clumpner, vice chair of the housing commission, said in an interview. “The county piece of this is what he’s criticizing.”

The root cause of homelessness, as plenty of research has shown, is the lack of housing or the high cost of housing. During his appearance on Fox, Desmond didn’t talk about the need for more housing or shelter space for people living on the street.

Further, growing efforts by Democrats and Republicans to pursue rules prohibiting public camping are hampered if there is no shelter space available. The law in many cases prohibits authorities from citing or arresting homeless people unless there are beds open.

This is not to say mental illness and substance abuse don’t contribute to homelessness, along with poverty and other economic factors.

“That’s what people really need to get into, is treatment, not just the hotel room where they can continue to use and continue in the bad habit that got them homeless in the first place,” Desmond said.

The county, which Desmond helps oversee, has agreed to provide social services for residents of these hotels when they are turned into apartments. That includes getting people assistance for various problems, including mental illness and substance abuse.

The county is a partner with the commission and the city of San Diego on the hotel conversions and was involved in negotiations over their selection from a longer list of properties.

Desmond didn’t mention that on Fox, or perhaps he didn’t know. His spokesperson said the supervisor would be unavailable to comment.

“Services specifically target the people he is talking about,” Ryan Clumpner, vice chair of the housing commission, said in an interview. “The county piece of this is what he’s criticizing.”

The root cause of homelessness, as plenty of research has shown, is the lack of housing or the high cost of housing. During his appearance on Fox, Desmond didn’t talk about the need for more housing or shelter space for people living on the street.

Further, growing efforts by Democrats and Republicans to pursue rules prohibiting public camping are hampered if there is no shelter space available. The law in many cases prohibits authorities from citing or arresting homeless people unless there are beds open.

This is not to say mental illness and substance abuse don’t contribute to homelessness, along with poverty and other economic factors.

“That’s what people really need to get into, is treatment, not just the hotel room where they can continue to use and continue in the bad habit that got them homeless in the first place,” Desmond said.

That’s an inaccurate description of what this housing is designed to do, which is provide more than just a room.

Regardless, Desmond made a troubling broad statement, suggesting mental illness is the direct result of a “bad habit.” Maybe he was thinking more about substance abuse, which can stem from personal decisions. But often there’s more to it than that.

In talking about the need to get people treatment, Desmond didn’t point out there’s an acute shortage of facilities, programs and qualified people to run them. He also could have mentioned the county is trying to do something about that, for which he and other supervisors can take credit.

The county has increased spending on behavioral health treatment by tens of millions of dollars in recent years. Looking ahead, the supervisors on Tuesday unanimously approved a groundbreaking, long-range program to train new mental health professionals and retain existing ones, according to Paul Sisson of The San Diego Union-Tribune.

Desmond bemoaned the inability of authorities to put troubled individuals into treatment if they don’t want to go.

“We have to force people, or involuntarily get them into the programs they need,” he said on Fox.

He’s not the only one who thinks that way. Last year, the Democratic-controlled Legislature passed Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to create CARE Courts aimed at compelling people to get treatment.

Amid considerable opposition, lawmakers also are trying to change the state conservatorship law to make it easier to put people into programs when they are unable to care for themselves or may be a threat to themselves and others. San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria has been a leading advocate for those changes.

There appears to be consensus that new approaches toward homelessness are needed, because what has been done isn’t working. Beyond that, there’s no broad agreement about what direction to go in.

There are arguments for permanent housing and less expensive big tent shelters, safe tent campsites, trailers and tiny houses. The housing commission has, among other things, pursued converting extended-stay hotels, where units have kitchenettes and more apartment-like layouts.

Those buildings also tend to meet regulations by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for this type of housing. Importantly, they can be turnkey projects converted quickly. The three San Diego hotels, which are near public transportation and grocery stores, could be occupied by the end of the year, according to the housing commission.

Building from scratch could take years to put together financing, gain approvals and complete construction. And that costs more than converting hotels, according to Clumpner.

“These homes are 30-40 percent cheaper than new & include social services,” he said on Twitter. “They’re coming from housing tourists to housing San Diegans with special needs.”

Gary Warth of the Union-Tribune reported that the $383,000 per-unit cost of the three hotels is greater than the cost of the two hotels purchased in 2020 and similar projects, but less than newly constructed affordable housing projects.

One of the more expensive projects is the 96-unit Amanecer Apartments in Linda Vista, which opened at a cost of $51.1 million, or $538,000 a unit.

The county participated in that one as well.

Off the Top of My Head

San Diego Finally Gets It Right for the Homeless Situation

by John Lawrence

San Diego identifies two areas which can be devoted to safe sleeping places for the homeless. They will provide 500 spots for homeless to have tents. Also rest rooms, meals, security and other services will be provided. At the same time the City will pass an ordinance which prevents people from sleeping on the public streets. I have been advocating for this for some time here, here and here. In an article in the San Diego Union Tribune we find this: San Diego to open homeless camp sites at two parking lots near Balboa Park. In addition to these newly identified areas, the City is also buying motels to provide single room shelters. These along with the existing shelter beds should go a long way to providing accommodations for the approximately 2000 homeless people on the streets of San Diego. It will also be a huge sigh of relief for pedestrians and business owners who would like the streets to be clean and safe for customers and dog walkers. According to the article:

Hundreds of homeless people in San Diego will have a legal place to live outdoors in tents on city-owned parking lots adjacent to Balboa Park later this year, Mayor Todd Gloria announced Monday.

One site will be in Parking Lot O near the Naval Medical Center and just east of Nursery Road, which could accommodate up to 400 tents.

The second site could accommodate 136 tents and is in the parking lot of a city maintenance yard at 20th and B streets. That site was temporarily used as a campground with individual tents in 2017 as the city tried to quickly get homeless people off the street during a hepatitis A outbreak.

The safe sleeping sites, as they are known, will be the first of their kind in the county and have individual tents provided by the city. Homeless people often decline offers to move into congregate shelters, and safe sleeping sites are seen as alternatives that people may be more willing to accept.

Monday’s announcement came at a time when the number of homeless people in downtown San Diego has reached a record high.

The mayor also said the new safe sleeping site is in tandem with an ordinance that would prohibit camping on sidewalks when shelter beds are available, which is expected to go before the City Council early next month.

“When the taxpayers of this city are spending tens of millions of dollars on homelessness services to get people off the street and into care, we should expect those on the street to avail themselves of those opportunities,” he said.

Councilmember Stephen Whitburn proposed the ordinance and also has been pushing for the creation of a safe sleeping site for months. Whitburn’s district includes downtown San Diego, where the number of homeless people living in sidewalk encampments has surged in recent months.

Speaking at Monday’s announcement, Whitburn said the new safe sleeping sites will benefit homeless people, who will be offered a place to camp that will include security, toilets, meals and access to services, while also benefiting downtown residents and businesses.

“I have spoken with a number of people who are tired of living in squalor on the sidewalk and want to be in a better place but do not want to go into an enclosed shelter,” he said. “They have told me they would happily move to a safe sleeping site with bathrooms, with security, with meals and services.”

The homeless crowding the downtown city streets put somewhat of a damper on the extensive tourist and conference business that is a big part of the city's economy. Besides in such a beautiful city, homelessness creates a huge eyesore right in its midst. The safe camping sites represent at least a partial solution to the homeless problem and will alleviate the complaints I receive about the city as an Uber driver. Tourists and conference goers notice the homeless problem and it doesn't sit well with them, let alone the residents of expensive high rise condos who, when they descend to street level have to wade through filth in order to get where they're going.

From the point of view of the homeless they will at least have some services plus sanitation plus meals plus social worker access to help them get back on their feet if they should choose to do so. Let's not underestimate security as well. They had none of this on the public streets. Since a lot of them don't want to go to shelters for various reasons, such as they can't take their pets with them, they should be relieved at this solution. It should not be a problem for them to access other services since they will be centrally located. Many have bikes and there are bus stops near by. Now what the City needs to do is to identify other safe sleeping areas that the City could make available for future use. Hopefully they won't be needed, but it would be good to have them available if they are.

Congratulations to San Diego's mayor and city council for finally coming up with a promising solution which by the way will cost the city hardly anything compared to the recent motel purchases. See the article: San Diego to pursue buying three hotels to house homeless people — at a cost of $383,000 per room.Total: $150 million. Compare this with the $5 million the City is spending on the safe sleeping campsites. Such a deal!

Off the Top of My Head

Why Not Go State by State for Stricter Gun Laws?

by John Lawrence

Recently, with the overturning of Roe v Wade, red states are going one by one in enacting tougher abortion laws. Why not go the same route in blue states with regard to stricter gun laws? Forget the national Congress. They're dysfunctional and next to useless as long as Republicans control the House. But states in which Democrats control the state legislature and the Governorship should be able to implement assault weapon bans as well as many other severe gun control restrictions. States such as California and Michigan, in which this is the case, should go ahead with this legislation. Make it illegal to own an AR-15. Confiscate existing AR-15s. CNN reported: "A study published in January by a leading non-profit organization that focuses on gun violence prevention found that there is a direct correlation in states with weaker gun laws and higher rates of gun deaths, including homicides, suicides and accidental killings. The study by Everytown for Gun Safety determined that California had the strongest gun laws in the country. Hawaii topped the list with the lowest rate of gun deaths in the country while Mississippi led the country with both the weakest gun laws and highest rate of gun deaths. “What this project does, is show what we’ve been saying for years: Gun laws save lives,” said Nick Suplina, senior vice president of law and policy at Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund. “We think this is going to be a really important tool for lawmakers, reporters and advocates that have been looking for the kind of visual tool that can make that case clearly.”

State government trifecta is a term to describe single-party government, when one political party holds the governorship and majorities in both chambers of the state legislature. One political party holds the governorship, a majority in the state senate, and a majority in the state house in a state's government. As of March 30, 2023, there are 17 Democratic trifectas,The following states represent Democratic trifectas: California, Oregon, Washington, New Mexico, Colorado, Minnesota, Illinois, Michigan, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Maine. These states should get together or go singly one by one to pass stricter gun laws just as red states have passed stricter abortion laws. Then anyone who wants a gun can move to a red state and anyone who wants an abortion can move to a blue state. Ha! As ridiculous as that sounds, it's emblematic of the reality that we are not, contrary to Obama's statement, really one United States of America.

California is the state with the strictest gun laws, and it also has the seventh-lowest rate of deaths by gun violence. In addition to regulation on who can purchase a gun and what kinds of firearms may be legally obtained, California gun laws allow for funding to community programs that have reduced gun-related violence. Other states with strict gun laws include Illinois, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Hawaii, Maryland, and Massachusetts. Some of these states require background checks and a waiting period before someone is allowed to purchase a gun; some require that they undergo training first. New York recently passed more restrictive gun laws:

"Governor Kathy Hochul today signed a landmark legislative package to immediately strengthen the state's gun laws, close critical loopholes exposed by shooters in Buffalo and Uvalde and protect New Yorkers from the scourge of gun violence that continues to infect our nation and endanger our communities. Governor Hochul signed the bills at the Northeast Bronx YMCA flanked by Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, Speaker Carl Heastie, partners in the legislature, Attorney General Letitia James and victims and survivors of gun violence.  

"Gun violence is an epidemic that is tearing our country apart. Thoughts and prayers won't fix this, but taking strong action will," Governor Hochul said. "In New York, we're taking bold steps to protect the people of our state. I am proud to sign a comprehensive bill package that prohibits the sale of semiautomatic weapons to people under 21, bans body armor sales outside of people in select professions, closes critical gun law loopholes and strengthens our Red Flag Law to keep guns away from dangerous people—new measures that I believe will save lives."

Time magazine reported on March 12, 2023:

"Michigan lawmakers are aiming to pass an 11-bill gun safety package across the state this week, considering provisions that would require background checks on gun purchases, create safe storage laws, and establish extreme risk protection orders—also known as red flag laws. Democrats, who have control of the state government for the first time in some 40 years, hope to deliver on the promise of advancing gun safety following a Michigan State University mass shooting last month that left three dead and five wounded."

In Colorado:

State of play: Five major gun control measures are under consideration as the Democratic-dominated Legislature hits the halfway mark this week in the 120-day session.

Details: Three measures advanced through a Senate committee Wednesday after a day-long hearing and party-line vote. The legislation would:

• Expand the state's "red flag" law to allow psychologists, teachers and others to ask a judge to temporarily seize a person's firearms if they pose a threat.
• Repeal current limits to allow civil lawsuits — including from the attorney general — seeking damages against firearm makers and sellers.
• Increase the minimum age to purchase a firearm in certain cases to age 21, up from 18.

Meanwhile, earlier this week, a House panel approved a measure to require a three-day waiting period for firearm purchases.

In Illinois:

"State lawmakers in January passed and Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed into law a measure that would ban assault-style rifles and high-capacity magazines. Those who already own such rifles would face limitations on their sale and transfer, and would have to register them with the Illinois State Police by 2024. But that law – which came about six months after the Highland Park shooting – faced immediate lawsuits in state and federal court, arguing it violated the Illinois and US constitutions. A Macon County judge found earlier this month that exemptions to the law, including for law enforcement officers and armed guards at federally supervised nuclear sites, violated the equal protection clause of the state’s constitution. The Illinois Supreme Court agreed to fast-track the state’s appeal, slating oral arguments for May."

So fight these bastards all the way to whatever Supreme Court has jurisdiction. Keep on fighting them. Pass very creative laws. Tie them up in court. Do whatever it takes to get AR-15s off the streets. Gun violence is ruining this country. Nowhere else in the world do people have to put up with this type of situation.

Off the Top of My Head

Cities Spend a Ton of Money on Homelessness Without Solving the Problem

by John Lawrence

Recently Governor Newsom held up state homeless funds because cities were not getting the job done. Here's a solution: provide campgrounds and safe parking areas in addition to shelters and affordable housing units. In other words to all of the above present so-called solutions add safe campgrounds and parking areas. The beauty of this plan is that it would add minimum cost to all the other solutions. So while they are pursuing the more costly solutions, it would at least get the homeless off the public streets where they are interfering with pedestrian thoroughfares and businesses in general, and would provide them with an an enhanced version of their present living accommodations which are mainly in tents. It would also be more safe and sanitary. They would still be mainly in tents until more robust and expensive solutions can be found but at least they could be provided with portable toilets, showers and dumpster facilities as well as security. In addition social services could be more readily provided than the present solution of finding them on the public streets to offer them. What is wrong with these politicians? They could solve the homeless "problem" tomorrow at little or no expense as far as getting the homeless off public streets which is at least half the problem. The city owns a lot of vacant lots suitable for rural campsites and safe parking areas for those with vehicles. Portable rest room facilities could make the lot of the homeless and ordinary citizens immeasurably better if they would only use them.

Here's what I wrote before:

In an article by Scott Lewis he finally sheds some light on what should have been obvious to most observers of the homeless situation. Fact: Homeless people would rather live in a tent on the street than in a shelter. It's not hard to figure out why. They want privacy, pets, their own space, consumption of beverages of their own choice. He writes, "It turns out, unhoused residents are a lot like people who have homes. They want privacy. They want, though, to be close to community. They like pets. They like being together with loved ones. And yes, some of them like to do drugs or drink. All of these things, however, can be restricted or difficult in a congregate setting." Make sense? I have long advocated that local governments set aside city owned land so that homeless people could set up their tents and have some basic social service like portable toilets, showers and storage. In addition social workers could provide them with their services like the city so often says they want to do. So why don't they do it especially if they are in one or more centralized location off the streets and somewhere that can be made into a more sanitary setting. Did I mention dumpsters? By the way the city actually did that temporarily during the hepatitis crisis in 2017.

I wrote previously:

So here is my solution, and then I'll tell you why it will never be implemented. Set aside land for free campgrounds just as a city sets aside land for parks. These should be open to all people not just the "homeless" at some snapshot in time. The financial savings from not building lumber and concrete housing would be immense. These campgrounds should have basic services like rest room facilities and showers. Also trash collection and security. The homeless can provide their own tents as they already have which are strewn all over public sidewalks. This solution accomplishes two very important goals: 1) it provides a marginally better lifestyle for the homeless with much better sanitary conditions and 2) it gets the homeless off the streets and sidewalks letting the general public feel safe in using them again. The money saved in police and hospital resources would probably more than pay for the minimal services provided. In addition social worker services in terms of mental health, drug counseling and job search might be provided as they say they want to provide today.

So this solution would make both the general public, who could reclaim the streets and sidewalks, and the homeless, who would have a marginally better and more sanitary life, better off and the whole scenario could be implemented on a very cost effective basis. Why would it never be implemented in America? Here's why. It heightens the fear among politicians and especially conservatives that the homeless population would continue to grow unabated as more and more people would choose to live in a campground than to pay exorbitant rent. Landlords would lobby politicians because they would fear losing their tenants. People on the lowest rungs of the financial ladder would lose their fear of becoming homeless as a free or almost free solution to housing in lumber and concrete becomes available. Most of the homeless already have rudimentary transportation ^i.e. bicycles. This gives them access to bus routes which can get them around the city. Most have some income which they use for food at fast food places which, while not nutritious, at least keeps them from starving. So my solution would not necessarily include food services or transportation services but it could.

Off the Top of My Head

Mega Drought Means No More Fruits and Nuts in Califonia

by John Lawrence

California's Central Valley produces 25% of the nation's food, including 40% of the nation's fruits, nuts, and other table foods. In 2010 Bill McKibben wrote, "The federal government says that thirty-six states face water shortages in the next five years, which is bad news for farming, since 70% of the water we use goes for irrigation, and irrigated fields supply as much as 40% of the world's food. ... In California in the spring of 2009, groups of farm workers, many wearing surgical masks against the blowing dust, marched for 4 days to demand the federal government somehow supply them with more water - the year's drought had already cost the state 23,700 jobs and $477 million in revenue. Farmers are already letting orchard trees die for lack of water to keep them alive; in the Central Valley unemployment grew 9.4% in a year through July 2009. "There's no water, so there's not much work," Kiki Torres told a reporter." That was 13 years ago and since then things have only gotten worse. The problem is not only in California but around the world. Since planet earth is warming, not enough snow is falling in the Sierra Nevada mountains which forms most of California's water supply. If precipitation falls as rain, it runs off. When it falls as snow, it forms a snowpack which acts as a reservoir, that gently releases its water in the spring as the snow pack melts. This is as true in the Himalayas and the Andes as it is in the Sierra Nevada. That is why agriculture is under threat world wide, and planet earth is facing a disastrous situation when it comes to the human race being able to feed itself.

Nobel laureate Steven Chu, after being named secretary of energy, told an audience in California, "I don't think the American public has gripped in its gut what could happen. If we don't dramatically slow global warming, the rapid melt of the Sierra snowpack means we're looking at a scenario where there's no more agriculture in California." Since that speech, not only have we not dramatically slowed global warming, we have accelerated it. In an article, "Megadrought in southwestern North America is region’s driest in at least 1,200 years," Anna Novoselov reported:

"Existing climate models have shown that the current drought would have been dry even without climate change, but not to the same extent. Human-caused climate change is responsible for about 42% of the soil moisture deficit since 2000, the paper found.

"One of the primary reasons climate change is causing more severe droughts is that warmer temperatures are increasing evaporation, which dries out soil and vegetation. From 2000 to 2021, temperatures in the region were 0.91 degrees Celsius (about 1.64 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than the average from 1950 to 1999.

“Without climate change, the past 22 years would have probably still been the driest period in 300 years,” Williams said. “But it wouldn’t be holding a candle to the megadroughts of the 1500s, 1200s or 1100s.”

"As of Feb. 10 [2022], according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, 95% of the Western U.S. was experiencing drought conditions. And in summer 2021, according to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, two of the largest reservoirs in North America — Lake Mead and Lake Powell, both on the Colorado River — reached their lowest recorded levels."

The dire predictions of Bill McKibben's 2010 book Eaarth, have only gotten worse since the human race has failed in its responsibility to protect the planet mainly due to a lust for profits. It's the modern day equivalent of the Noah's Ark scenario, only this time the human sins are a reluctance to set the profit motive aside and do what's necessary to make sure that the planet remains a habitable environment. Instead of flooding, the worst effects more likely will be drought and a dwindling food supply. Parched earth cannot produce food. Earth's food supply is dependent on snowpacks in the Sierra Nevada and glaciers in the Himalayas. The warming planet is producing more precipitation but in the form of rain which runs off causing floods in many instances. What we need now is the equivalent of a mega rain barrel to catch the rain, since water is not going to be stored much longer in the form of ice. Snowpacks and glaciers are going the way of the dodo bird which, in case you haven't heard, has gone extinct. In addition to that the parched earth is causing more and larger forest fires which are spewing even more greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. But not to worry. In a capitalist economy only the poor will suffer. What little food remains will be bought up by the rich.

The parched earth is also causing more forest fires releasing even more greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. Forests act as a carbon sink. Forest fires release that carbon. Trees withdraw carbon from the atmosphere and store it. The less trees on earth, the less is the ability of the planet to withdraw greenhouse gasses with the result that global warming is sped up. The Washington Post reported in an article, Massive wildfires helped fuel global forest losses in 2021:

"Unprecedented wildfires raged across Russia in 2021, burning vast swaths of forest, sending smoke as far as the North Pole and unleashing astounding amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

"Logging operations continued. Insect infestations wreaked havoc. The relentless expansion of agriculture, meanwhile, fueled the disappearance of critical tropical forests in Brazil and elsewhere at a rate of 10 soccer fields a minute.

"Around the globe, 2021 brought more devastating losses for the world’s forests, according to a satellite-based survey by the University of Maryland and Global Forest Watch. Earth saw more than 97,500 square miles of tree cover vanish last year, an area roughly the size of Oregon."

It's a feedback loop: less water, more parched earth, more forest fires, more greenhouse gasses released into the atmosphere, more global warming, less water. The human race has not proved itself to be that concerned about future generations which might cause it to deny itself whatever pleasures are available to the current generation. Self sacrifice is not the norm. The result is that we are sacrificing future generations and condemning them to a hellish earth.

'Entire Western US on Fire' as Region Faces Deadly Flames Compounded by Heatwave, Blackouts, and Coronavirus

Published on Wednesday, September 09, 2020

by Common Dreams

Seventy wildfires raged across California, Oregon, Washington, and other western states on Wednesday. 

by Julia Conley, staff writer

 

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A law enforcement officer watches flames launch into the air as fire continues to spread at the Bear fire in Oroville, California on September 9, 2020. (Photo: Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images)

A record-shattering heatwave, continuing wildfires, power blackouts, and the coronavirus pandemic in California have combined to put the health and safety of residents across the state in danger this week, as other western states face dozens of blazes as well.

More than 720,000 people in California were told Tuesday to prepare for power shutoffs by Pacific Gas & Electric and other utilities—part of what has been called the "new normal" to minimize wildfire damage as two dozen major fires rage throughout the state.

"Yesterday, 330,000 acres burned in WA. That's more than 12 of the last 18 entire fire seasons.
—Gov. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.)

As Common Dreams reported Tuesday, this year's first round of preventative shutoffs began Monday, affecting 172,000 households. 

Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas and Electric were also considering shutting off power for more than 71,000 homes combined on Tuesday. 

The shutoffs are being planned as the state faces historic heatwaves; officials in Los Angeles County recorded a record high of 121º Fahrenheit over the weekend, while the temperature in San Francisco rose to 100º on Sunday. 

The National Weather Service issued a warning as temperatures dropped that the widespread power shutoffs could create health risks for vulnerable Californians, as many may need to use their air conditioners to stay cool. 

Gov. Gavin Newsom said Tuesday that the state had financially prepared for preventative power shutoffs after PG&E was criticized for its handling of the protocols last year, facing accusations that the utility didn't give customers enough warning as it initiated a widespread planned power outage for the first time as the state dealt with wildfires. 

The state has put in place "protocols and partnerships with the counties on making sure those that are impacted have support" and is "making sure [community resource] centers are up and operational to protect those most vulnerable," Newsom told the press. 

The centers will retain power so residents can use them—but as The Guardian reported, "some residents may avoid them because of coronavirus infection risks," as people have been advised not to gather in large groups.

Officials also released an air quality advisory, warning that smoke buildup across huge swaths of the state is making the air "unhealthy for sensitive groups"—many of whom are already at heightened risk for complications if they contract Covid-19. 

Maps of the American West showed that California is far from alone in facing dozens of wildfires, even as the region is just now entering the time of year when fires are typically a concern.

More than 70 wildfires were recorded in western states including Washington and Oregon on Wednesday. Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, a vocal proponent of far-reaching climate action legislation and a transition away from the burning of fossil fuels to renewable energy, tweeted that a record-breaking 330,000 acres of land were burned in a single day in his state.

"That's more than 12 of the last 18 entire fire seasons," Inslee wrote. 

The Oregon Climate Office reported that for the first time, the National Weather Service placed parts of the state under an extreme fire advisory. On social media, viral images of the city of Stayton, located 16 miles from Salem, Oregon, showed a bright red sky over the downtown area in the middle of the day Tuesday.

Malden, Washington—a town of about 200 people not far from Spokane—faced the destruction of its post office, city hall, and about 80% of its homes.

"The scale of this disaster really can't be expressed in words," Whitman County Sheriff Brett Myers told CBS News. "The fire will be extinguished, but a community has been changed for a lifetime."

Beth Doglio, a progressive candidate running to represent Washington's 10th district, reiterated her campaign message pushing for a "clean energy future" and a rapid transition away from planet-heating fossil fuel extraction. 

"We are experiencing the effects of climate change now as Western Washington faces multiple burning fires and poor air quality," Doglio tweeted. "We have to transition away [from] burning fossil fuels. We need climate leadership in Congress."

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Virus Wreaks Havoc on Workers’ Financial Health

from Capital and Main, April 15, 2020

By Sasha Abramsky

More than 2 million Californians have recently lost their jobs and many are now without health coverage.

International Longshore and Warehouse Union workers at the normally packed Wilmington, CA dispatch hall. (Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images)

Since cities and states began issuing stay-at-home orders in early March to counter the spread of COVID-19, a mind-boggling 16 million-plus jobs have been lost, at least temporarily, representing the speediest and deepest economic collapse since the Great Depression. Many of those unemployed men and women also lost their employer-provided health insurance coverage at a moment when a pandemic is raging — and when containment strategies rely on early identification and isolation of carriers. The perverse structure of the American health insurance system means that huge numbers of people, if they don’t have a family member whose insurance will cover them, are having the continuity of their health care disrupted. To worsen matters, the largest private insurance companies are poised to introduce steep premium increases.

Historically the jobs that are most vulnerable to being lost at the start of a recession are those that are low paid, physically demanding and involve long hours. Many workers in such jobs already have precarious health situations.

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Larger companies participating in California’s insurance exchange could be forced to increase premiums by as much as 40 percent.

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“People whose incomes are below the median, or the 25th percentile, tend to be less healthy,” says Marianne Page, professor of economics at the University of California, Davis, and director of the campus’s Center for Poverty Research. They are, in consequence of their poorer general health, particularly at risk of succumbing to COVID-19. And yet it is the members of this very group that that are the most likely to now be losing their health coverage.

In California alone, the Economic Policy Institute estimated that by April 4 more than 2 million people had recently filed for unemployment insurance — and many of these had likely lost insurance coverage as a result. Since then, the job losses have only increased, along with the numbers of people losing their insurance.

Assuming the companies that fired them still exist, these individuals can sign on for COBRA, allowing them to pay out of pocket, for up to 36 months, for the health insurance that their employers previously paid for; but COBRA can run to thousands of dollars per year per family member, a sum that many — probably most — of the newly unemployed simply cannot access at the moment.

“It’s a staggering number of people,” acknowledges Anthony Wright, executive director of the Sacramento-based Health Access California advocacy organization. Worsening the situation is that some employers have cut back their employees’ hours and, once they are no longer deemed full-time, stopped paying their health care benefits.

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At the very least, the pandemic is a huge test of California’s financial and moral mettle.

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As a result, in the middle of a pandemic a tsunami of uninsured are now signing up for Medi-Cal, or using the reopened enrollment period for the state’s insurance exchange to shop around for new, subsidized, insurance coverage for themselves and their families. Many insurance companies worry that, unless Congress releases federal funds to help provide treatment for COVID-19 sufferers, their bills for covering those who get sick during the pandemic will be so high over the coming months that they could force smaller insurance companies on the exchange into bankruptcy and larger companies to increase premiums by as much as 40 percent, according to an estimate from Covered California, the agency that manages California’s Affordable Care Act (ACA) health insurance exchange.

California has created the country’s most user-friendly insurance exchange, under the ACA, and has made enormous strides in recent years in expanding Medicaid coverage to the near-poor – an expansion that is largely, although not entirely, paid for by the federal government — and, at the state’s expense, to young undocumented immigrants. Nevertheless, it is an enormous logistical and financial challenge to get California’s newly uninsured re-covered with decent insurance at speed.

“We’ve aggressively expanded coverage through the ACA,” notes Chris Hoene, executive director of the California Budget and Policy Center. Over the past decade, California’s pool of uninsured residents has dropped from nearly one in five people to only seven percent of a population of nearly 40 million. But, he asks, “Will California have the resources” to continue driving down that number by expanding coverage to those, especially the undocumented, who are left out of the federal eligibility criteria?

* * *

At the very least, the pandemic is a huge test of California’s financial and moral mettle. The state’s Department of Finance, and the chairs of legislative budget committees, recently warned all California government agencies of extraordinarily tough budget conditions as a result of the state’s burgeoning pandemic-related bills and the loss of tax revenue as jobs disappear and capital gains on the stock market evaporate. And while Senate President pro tem Toni Atkins has told journalists that continuing to expand health care coverage remains a legislative priority, California is going to have to navigate uncharted financial waters in coming years as the economic fallout from the pandemic cuts deeply into state revenues.

Add into the mix the fact that many legal immigrants have been pushed out of the safety net system by President Trump’s regulatory changes and that undocumented immigrants never had safety net protections to begin with. California, with 27 percent of its population foreign-born, faces a particular challenge in keeping access to medical care open for its 10 million-plus immigrants. “The impact is on their health and on the economy,” argues Sarah Dar, director of health and public benefits policy at the California Immigrant Policy Center. “Because of people getting sick and not being able to work. This moment highlights the stark downside of this system of leaving people uninsured.”

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Garment Worker: “I’ve never been homeless, but if there’s no way to work I’ll have to sleep in my car.”

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 While many documented immigrants have recently lost jobs that came with health insurance, and like their citizen neighbors are now scrambling to find new insurance options, most undocumented adults in the state work low-income jobs lacking any kind of security of employment, and which never came with health insurance to begin with. They have never had easy access to doctors and medicines.

Given the sheer numbers of undocumented in the state – roughly two and a half million — the possibility of containing COVID-19 through comprehensive testing, treatment and quarantining of carriers becomes ever more daunting. The community health centers on which many undocumented residents rely for basic health care needs, did receive $1.3 billion, to be distributed to CHCs around the country, when Congress passed the CARES Act. But given the scale of need, that’s simply a drop in the bucket. On a daily basis the CHCs remain overwhelmed with patients, understaffed and chronically under-resourced.

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“I don’t have access to unemployment or any benefits. It’ll be a really big struggle,” says Pablo, a 38-year-old undocumented worker in Los Angeles’ garment district, who, until his factory closed down in mid-March, was working for piece rates that came out to far below hourly minimum wage. “I’ve never been homeless, but if there’s no way to work I’ll have to sleep in my car. I’ve been limiting food, rationing the food I have.”

In addition to all the usual stresses that come with being undocumented and ineligible for public benefits, these days Pablo worries that he might get sick with COVID-19 and have no access to treatment, other than via the emergency room, and no way to pay for that treatment should he prove to be infected. “Any time I feel ill I start thinking whether I could get it. I recently found out someone I know died of the coronavirus here in Los Angeles. I’ve had a lot of anxiety and stress. I’m afraid to go to the doctor.”

California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration has made health care coverage a priority, and has been aware from the get-go that the more people are covered the better public health outcomes will be for all.

Even before the pandemic, Newsom was looking for ways to fund an expansion of Medi-Cal to cover low-income undocumented seniors. His budgets have generously funded the Covered California insurance exchange, and early on in the pandemic the exchange re-opened the enrollment period so that Californians who found themselves without insurance could quickly access affordable plans.

In addition, the legislature recently waived the requirement that Medi-Cal recipients produce documentary proof, every 60 days, of financial eligibility to remain covered by the program – meaning that coverage for those Californians enrolled in Medicaid will remain untouched at least through the duration of the pandemic. And early on in the response, Newsom’s administration requested a waiver from the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to allow Medi-Cal providers to do telemedicine visits with patients, and to streamline the process for doctors to get reimbursed for treating patients covered by Medi-Cal.

While some states have made it cumbersome and time-consuming to enroll in ACA-mandated subsidized insurance, California’s process is quick, and coverage begins at the start of the month following enrollment. And for those who qualify for Medi-Cal, coverage is retroactive, so that if someone enrolls midmonth, their medical expenses going back to the first day of that month are paid for.

But all that still might not be enough to get the undocumented into treatment centers. Or to convince those who have insurance, but who, after losing their jobs, have had to buy lower-standard plans that come with higher deductibles and co-pays, to risk the inflated medical bills that will come with prolonged treatment. Without federal intervention to cover the cost of COVID-19 treatment, “We’ll have a bunch of people making decisions not to be treated,” Chris Hoene worries. “And that’s a public health risk to them and to the community at large.”

Anthony Wright agrees. “We’re not going to be able to control the virus unless we get everyone covered and able to get tested and access the treatment they need,” says the advocate, who has long been a leading voice in campaigns to universalize health care access in the state. “While the Affordable Care Act provided a lot of patches, it’s still patchwork, and the system leaves a lot of gaps that people will fall through. And we need quick action to contain the virus.”

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Copyright 2020 Capital & Main

Off the Top of My Head

Some Good News From the Pandemic: California Finally Housing the Homeless

by John Lawrence, April 4, 2020

It took the coronavirus to finally get state officials off their butts to do something about housing the homeless, and they did it with the greatest possible alacrity. If it takes a pandemic to solve the homeless problem, then maybe the pandemic is a good thing. At least it has had some good outcomes. Governor Newsom said that what they are doing now for the homeless will have permanent ramifications. In addition to possibly solving homelessness, many areas of the world have seen decreased air pollution so that global warming has slowed down as well. California has secured 7000 hotel and motel rooms for the homeless. The temporary housing program will be supported by a first-in-the nation Federal Emergency Management Agency framework created for the crisis. So now FEMA is getting involved? Funny, they were never concerned about the homeless before.

So finally, when there is a health threat that might spread from the homeless population to the rest of us, the solution is readily in hand. Up to now state and government officials have dilly dallied for years and years when they could have implemented this solution decades ago. Instead they were content to "study the problem" ad infinitum. Newsom directed $100 million last month in emergency state funding to several local governments and agencies to get new beds up and running immediately with supportive services like meals and medical care. In addition travel trailers and RVs have been set aside for the homeless. Many of them are elderly with all kinds of underlying conditions, but it took a threat to the community at large in order to get the community to do something of a humanitarian nature.

The new program is aimed at ultimately giving counties and cities the ability to continue homeless services at these hotels and motels. The occupancy agreements include the ability to extend leases, as well as purchase options, Newsom said. Amazing how fast this whole transformation took place without a vote or a lot of fooling around. San Diego's Measure C which was voted on recently would have provided money for homeless services, but it was required to pass with a two thirds majority. Instead it failed by a couple of percentage points. The pandemic provided the motivation to get something done post haste without a lot of hand waving and blather and NIMBYism.

“We’re not just thinking in the short-term, we’re also beginning to process long-term support so we can get people off the streets in a permanent way,” Newsom said. Namara Mercer, executive director of the San Diego County Hotel-Motel Association, said the calls for rooms from the state and county began in mid-March. She couldn’t say how many San Diego hotels have provided rooms since then. “It kind of all happened pretty darn quick,” Mercer said. San Diego County reported that 95 of the 116 people staying in the motel rooms it oversees are homeless San Diegans, though officials have said that people who cannot easily isolate themselves – those who live with a large numbers of other people, for example – were also eligible.

Voice of San Diego reported:

As of late Monday, Cox said nonprofit Interfaith Community Services had mostly filled Escondido and Carlsbad motels it has agreed to manage.

Another 54 families who had previously stayed in Father Joe’s Villages’ shelter on the second floor of Golden Hall in the City Hall complex have been placed in two downtown motels.

Cox said the Downtown San Diego Partnership, a business group that conducts homeless outreach in the area, is also moving homeless San Diegans it has identified as vulnerable into another downtown motel.

And Cox said the remaining 225 rooms the county has promised will likely need to accommodate 327 homeless San Diegans now staying in the city’s bridge shelters who are seniors or have underlying health conditions.

The task force expects to assess the need for additional motel rooms after the Convention Center begins taking in homeless San Diegans on Wednesday. Officials believe the Convention Center could dramatically increase capacity for homeless San Diegans who are currently unable to practice social distancing on the streets.

So there is a mad scramble to do right by the homeless now that a pandemic is sweeping the country. Maybe we should thank the pandemic for finally making us able to do the right thing by the homeless, something we should have been doing all along. All of a sudden there is money available, but in reality there has been money available all along. People just didn't have the will or just didn't care until they realized that a raging pandemic among the homeless could actually affect them, but then we're finally all in this together, right? Whereas we never were before. If this pandemic makes us realize that we are our brothers' keeper and that we really are all in this together even after the pandemic ameliorates, then maybe it will have been a good thing all along.

Off the Top of My Head

President Trump: "We're All in This Together"

by John Lawrence, March 17, 2020

Does that include the homeless, Mr. Trump? Are the homeless over 65 being asked to shelter in place? Does that mean that they keep their same place on the sidewalk? Does it mean that they social distance 6 feet from the next homeless person? Or does it mean that gatherings of 10 or more in homeless shelters need to disperse? Does it mean we should close down the homeless shelters? Does it mean that NIMBYS who don't want parking lots open to homeless people living in their vehicles need to shut their mouths? We want to know, Mr. President. Youth wants to know.

There are 500,000 homeless Americans living on the streets. Are they being asked to shelter in place? It's ridiculous. Rather than have a crash program to put them into single room occupancy units (SROs), they are not even mentioned, not even considered in the President's speech, nor of those of his "team." The coronavirus should sound a clarion call to do something about the homneless situation. Where do you think a pandemic would spread? Probably among the dense crowding of homeless people in San Diego, Los Angeles and Seattle. Especially places where it has been raining a lot. I saw a policeman stop his squad car in the middle of traffic the other day, turn on his patrol lights and deliver a sandwich to a woman who was sitting alone on the sidewalk in the pouring rain. God bless him! My rider told me that his family were all police and they did that a lot. If so, good on them. I know the police are dealing with the homeless a large part of their time which costs money. Also the emergency rooms. Probably bbetween the police and the emergency rooms more money is spent on the homeless than it would cost to put them in SROs.

A few short years ago there was an outbreak  of hepatitus A among the homeless in San Diego and elsewhere. The Washington Post reported:

The hepatitis A outbreak in Los Angeles, Santa Cruz and San Diego, long considered a model of savvy urban redevelopment, is the extreme result of a booming state economy, now driving up home prices after years of government decisions that made low-cost housing more difficult to build.

Unlike in some other large U.S. cities, the homeless population in San Diego has been rising sharply, outstripping the local government's ability to manage its scope. State lawmakers passed more than a dozen measures in the recent legislative session to address the state's lack of affordable housing, none of which will help resolve the crisis in the short term.

Nowhere is the need more urgent than in this prospering city, where the number of people living on the streets rose 14 percent in the past year, tracing a hepatitis A outbreak that thrives in unsanitary conditions. Health officials believe an epidemic that has infected more than 500 people statewide since March began in San Diego County, where 19 people have died as a result of the disease, nearly all of them homeless.

So the hepatitis A outbreak was an epidemic, a few short steps from a pandemic. Washing stations were provided then, and washing stations are being provided now, but so far nothing much has been done about the homeless situation in San Diego and elsewhere. Measure C on the ballot recently, which would have provided $25 million a year to address various issues dealing with the homeless population, failed because it didn't quite achieve a two thirds majority. It garnered about 64% of the vote while it needed 67% to become law. So close but no cigar. So now what? More hand washing stations evidently.

Governor Newsom has moved hundreds of homeless people into hotel rooms “to get people out of these encampments.”. This was after a homeless person died from the coronavirus. The Mercury News reported:

Officials have also said they plan to distribute trailers around the state where homeless people can shelter or be quarantined. And on Monday Newsom said shelters were working to create distance between beds to help stop the spread of the virus.

California has more than 100,000 residents who sleep on the streets on any given night, including thousands of people in the Bay Area.

“We will overwhelm ourselves if we don’t move with real urgency in this space,” he said.

Newsom said his team had identified more than 900 hotels that could be suitable for housing the homeless. His team, he said, was in the process of negotiating to convert some of them into temporary living quarters for the homeless.

Now that there is some urgency in dealing with the homeless situation, you'd think that the state would move to a more permanent solution or are they waiting for the coronavirus to subside so they can just let the homeless go back to living on the street. By the way, "Officials also said that homeless people would be exempt from a Bay Area-wide order to shelter in place. But they urged homeless people to seek shelter and said local governments should work to make shelter available as soon as possible." Really??

UPDATE:

From Voice of San Diego:

Supervisor Nathan Fletcher also noted the county is working to secure at least 2,000 motel rooms for vulnerable San Diegans – whether they are homeless, nursing home residents or simply don’t have a safe place to stay – who may be awaiting a test result or showing symptoms of coronavirus but not require hospitalization.

As of Monday, Fletcher said, the county had secured 227 rooms and the Regional Task Force on the Homeless is working to obtain more motel rooms for homeless San Diegans who are at risk of coronavirus who have not been referred by a healthcare provider.

Off the Top of My Head

A Place to Be

by John Lawrence, January 22, 2020

One of the most pressing problems for the homeless population is that there are no places that they can just be without being threatened by the police to move on. They have to settle into little vestiges of public property under freeway bridges or on public sidewalks or little strips of public grass. They need a place they can relax without the threat of constantly having to "move on." That's why the movement to turn parking lots into places where they can pitch a tent or sleep in a vehicle is a radical plan which is giving them some security from the police and illegitimacy of place. Vox reports:

The housing affordability crisis — most acute in the Bay Area, but stretching up and down the West Coast — has helped exacerbate a homelessness crisis in states like California, Oregon, and Washington. Many people who are no longer able to afford or find stable housing are now forced to spend their nights sleeping in the one major asset they have left: their cars.

California has about a quarter of the country’s homeless population, with almost 130,000 people experiencing homelessness, according to estimates from one night in January (known as a “point in time” count) from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. The state’s neighbor Washington has just over 22,000 people experiencing homelessness, and Oregon has almost 14,500. Nearly half of all unsheltered people are in California, according to HUD statistics from 2018. In Los Angeles County alone, there are some 16,500 people living in vehicles. (Note that New York State has about 92,000 people experiencing homelessness, which is 17 percent of the national total).

“These folks by and large have not made any choice to experience homelessness,” said Cassie Roach, the program coordinator and senior case manager at New Beginnings Counseling Center in Santa Barbara. “They haven’t chosen to do drugs or make poor financial choices, and they’re not all alcoholics or any of those biased and ignorant assumptions people make. It tends to be folks that are dealt a really difficult hand; they’re making the best of a bad situation.”

In Los Angeles County, for example, 71 percent of people who are first experiencing homelessness cite economic reasons, according to Gary Dean Painter, the director of the Homelessness Policy Research Institute and a professor at the University of Southern California. About a third of people in the county pay half their income in rent, making them vulnerable to losing their homes when they have a negative shock to their finances. “I point a finger at the economy and housing market,” Painter said.

People who live in their cars are more likely to have been recently living in permanent housing and have some kind of income, making them a unique population that may not require or be able to use the same types of services other people experiencing homelessness do.

“This is a population we should think strategically about,” Painter said. “They’re not a high cost population to serve, they don’t have an accumulation of challenges, [but] they’re experiencing something they’ve never experienced before in their lives, they likely don’t know any of the services available to them.”

Asset prices like real estate and the stock market have soared in price due to the Federal Reserve's policy of low interest rates and quantitative easing. This means that money, which is available only to the rich, is flooding into the markets. That money is used to by stocks and to bid up the price of houses and apartments. The result is that rents have become unaffordable for the average person. It takes two pretty hefty incomes in order to be housed in any kind of housing these days especially in California.

Jewish Family Services is sponsoring a Safe Parking Program in San Diego. This is from their website:

Every night, JFS operates a Safe Parking Program for unsheltered San Diegans living out of their vehicles, many of whom are experiencing homelessness for the first time. As these individuals and families work to lift themselves up out of a difficult situation, many are making a nightly choice between buying food or purchasing gas to get to work and school. Creating further barriers to stability are the isolation and lack of social support that so often accompany homelessness.

The Safe Parking Program provides a welcoming environment, meaningful resources and tools, and dignified support to help families stabilize and transition back into permanent housing. With holistic services focused on basic needs assistance, employment, family wellness, school success, financial education, credit repair, and housing, our goal is to create a pathway out of homelessness while being a support to people where they are now.

The program operates seven nights per week at three secured lots on Balboa Avenue, Aero Drive, and Mission Village Drive.

While government dithers, religious institutions are stepping up to the challenge. Government response to homelessness is to fund a study to see what to do about it. When I was a duly elected member of the CCAC (Center City Advisory Commission), the City of San Diego paid somebody $100,000. to study the homeless problem and come up with a report. That was 20 years ago. They've been writing reports periodically ever since. They refuse to come up with practical solutions like I've suggested many times. My solution would be a glorified Safe Parking Program which would be basically a campground cum parking lot with amenities. That way tents could be pitched as well as cars parked. Of course sanitation facilities would be provided.

I wrote previously:

Why is it so difficult to come to the same conclusion about homeless camping in America? They wouldn't have to sleep on public sidewalks in LA, San Diego or San Francisco if they had designated areas (parks) where they could rest in peace and security and with sanitation facilities. Part of the angst of the homeless is that they have no place to be, let alone call home, that is legally sanctioned and where they are not subject to being told to move by police and where they can rest assured that their belongings won't be put in a truck and hauled away to the city dump.

Government officials don't want to create a permanent underclass of homeless people. I've got news for them. That has already been created. The question now is what to do about it. Until public or subsidized housing becomes a reality, providing safe parking lots and campgrounds is the best way to go at the cheapest price for society in general. It's a solution that can be implemented immediately.

The Political Economy of Homelessness

from Counterpunch

NOVEMBER 1, 2019

by LOUIS PROYECT

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Photograph Source: Laurie Avocado – CC BY 2.0

In 2009, Hollywood tried to get us to care about the nearly 50,000 homeless people in Los Angeles by releasing a film titled “The Soloist”. It starred Jamie Foxx as the real-life, trained classical musician Nathaniel Ayers who ended up on the streets as a result of schizophrenia. This chronic illness makes such people especially vulnerable when tax-starved municipal governments can no longer fund support networks. It was up to LA Times reporter Steve Lopez to tell his story, after happening upon him on the streets playing a cello (in the film, it was a violin). Ayers barely got by from the small donations he received playing on the streets. It was left to Lopez to rescue him from the hell of LA’s streets. You can see Ayers playing the violin here:

This year there’s hope for the salvation of another lost soul from the mean streets of LA. Like Ayers, Emily Zamourka studied in a conservatory. When a homeless man stole the violin that provided a livelihood, the landlord evicted her. She ended up on the streets singing opera, another of her skills. When a cop made a video of her singing in the subway, it soon went viral and led to articles just like the one Lopez wrote for Ayers. As an indication that she might have psychological problems that helped to land her on the streets, she just lost the recording contract because of not showing up for paying gigs.

For most Los Angelenos, the homeless are hardly worth noticing, if not a total infringement on their quality of life. In an October 22^nd NY Times article titled “Backlash Against the Homeless As a Crisis Builds in California”, you get the picture of what solid citizens have to put up with:

For many, that breaking point was the worsening squalor in the streets of cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco, where open-air drug dealing is rampant in some spots and where human feces and scattered needles and syringes have been found lying about. Those scenes have also proved a potent symbol for Republicans like President Trump to showcase what they call the failures of liberal urban enclaves.

This year an appeals court ruled that Boise, Idaho did not have the right to make sleeping in public illegal. Dave Bieter, Boise’s Mayor, has now taken the case to the Supreme Court, where the rightwing majority will likely side with him and Trump, even if Boise can hardly be described as a liberal enclave. Oh, did I mention that Bieter is a Democrat and an early supporter of Obama for President in 2008?

Notwithstanding a film like “The Soloist”, the real need is for a documentary that shows what the homeless condition is like in LA and how people of good will are acting on their behalf. That film has arrived. Distributed by Cinema Libre Studios, a long-standing source of socially aware films, “The Advocates” will be available as VOD and DVD on December 11^th. (Check their website around that time.)

The documentary focuses on caregiving individuals and nonprofits that do not make playing the violin or singing Puccini a litmus test. Indeed, its strength is in showing the dedication of social workers and volunteers in attending to society’s outcasts. It demonstrates that even if terrible things are being done in Christianity’s name, especially by Trump’s bible-thumping supporters, these are still people who take the story of Jesus cleansing a leper to heart.

We meet Rudy Salinas of Housing Works, who has the patience of a saint. His job mostly consists of trying to find apartments for homeless people provided by Housing Works and making sure that they don’t fall through cracks in the system. (We also hear from the LA writer Steve Lopez of “The Soloist” fame.) Salinas picks them up and drives them to medical appointments or government agencies that provide the meager funds they need for clothing, food and medicine. Each of the homeless people we meet on his daily rounds suffer from alcoholism, mental illness, or the bad habits accumulated over decades of living on the streets. Keeping his spirits alive in the face of a nearly Sisyphean task is a testament to the persistence of human solidarity that is under siege from both the White House and its “adversaries” like Dave Bieter.

In the press notes director Rémi Kessler explains why he decided to make this film:

People often ask why I decided to make this film. It all started about three years ago when I was having a coffee with a friend in Silver Lake, Los Angeles. We were sitting at an outdoor restaurant and were approached by someone asking for money. I brushed him off, but my friend took out his wallet, peeled off a $1 bill from a stack of singles and handed it to the man, wishing him a good day. On each of the dollar bills, my friend had written, “Feed the homeless and love them.”

LA’s homeless and those of other major cities are ground zero of the nation’s housing crisis. If you want to understand why this is happening, it is best not to dwell on the psychological flaws that undermined its victims in a dog-eat-dog world. Instead, it makes much more sense to understand the economic and political factors that impact not only them but just about everybody else who is making less than a million dollars a year or so.

In Los Angeles, the homelessness crisis can be traced back to the Reagan presidency when 70,000 manufacturing jobs disappeared, only to be replaced by low-paying jobs in the services such as dishwashing, security guards, parking attendants, hamburger flippers and the like. NY went through the same sea change. From the 1950s to the 1990s, it lost 750,000 manufacturing jobs while its land value went from $20 billion to $400 billion. For those trying to keep afloat in the service industries, it is difficult enough to survive in any city. However, when the rents began to skyrocket during the long neoliberal turn backed by both capitalist parties, it was all the more easy to become homeless.

The film depicts people at the very bottom, but the changing face of real estate has taken a toll on everybody except the super-rich. Young people who have just graduated college are often forced to live with their parents since their degree will not cover the rent in a place like LA or NY. Those who have begun to earn a decent salary can often no longer raise a family within a reasonable distance from work. More than 150,000 people in LA County spend three hours traveling to-and-from work. To compound the problem, many of them in LA (or the Bay Area) end up buying houses close to the forest and threatened by the epidemic of wild fires.

For the past half-century, the urban-suburban divide has taken on a new configuration. Many middle-class professionals decide to implant themselves inside the city rather than the countryside. They are more intent on being able to go to museums or trendy restaurants than they are on joining a country club and playing tennis. With a limited amount of land on the market, real estate developers are always looking for places to gentrify, including the neighborhood where I live. It was once called Germantown, a reference to the blue-collar workers who lived in four and five-story tenements no different than those on the Lower East Side. The real estate developer who built my complex took advantage of a tax abatement program provided by the Mitchell-Lama bill. Its sponsors hoped to create middle-class housing in NY in the days before FIRE (finance, insurance and real estate) became king. Despite the original intent, the net result was to pave the way for luxury condominiums. That included my complex that exited the Mitchell-Lama program after it expired. My rent for a one-bedroom is $2,800 per month, a price out of reach for most young people entering the work-force.

For them, the answer is Williamsburg (or at least it was until it became gentrified) or other neighborhoods in the outer boroughs that our Sandinista Mayor Bill De Blasio has made available at bargain-basement prices to real estate barons. Under his rezoning bills, web developers will move in while elevator operators and hospital orderlies move out. As this pressure continues to exert itself, it will finally reach those who were in the most precarious conditions of all. Many working people are recreational drug users or alcoholics since this is what capitalist alienation breeds. Once they become unemployed, the next step is living on a relative’s sofa, in a car on the street, or on the street itself.

For a profoundly knowledgeable take on this process, I recommend Samuel Stein’s “Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State.” It makes the case that when it comes to such matters, there’s not much difference between Trump and those who want to impeach him. For those who expect the housing crisis to be relieved under a Bernie Sanders presidency, keep in mind that his socialism is nothing more than a repeat of the New Deal, as he assured us himself. Stein reminds us that one of the New Deal’s landmark legislation set the pattern for the ills we face today:

Even before bulldozers cleared the way for cranes, bankers and planners had set out on a stealthier form of urban neighborhood clearance, which established the preconditions for gentrification. In 1934 New Deal legislation established the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) to standardize, regulate and insure home mortgages. Not everyone, however, could access these loans. Along with the FHA, the federal government empowered bankers and developers to lead the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC). HOLC was tasked with quantifying the risk bankers would take in giving loans to particular people in particular places. This would allow the federal government and the banks to agree on rates for FHA loan insurance. To make these decisions, HOLC sent surveyors out to every residential block in just about every city in the country; those surveyors would look at a neighborhood and grade it on a scale from A (very safe) to D (very unsafe).

There were three main criteria HOLC used to determine risk: 1) the age of the building stock; 2) the density of housing; and, by far most determinately, 3) the racial composition of residents. Jews were considered communistic and likely to go on rent strike. Italians were characterized as dangerous gangsters. African Americans were written off entirely, and virtually any block with any Black people was given a low grade. Following real estate industry “best practices,” the FHA made segregation and suburbanization the United States’ de facto housing policy. Over time, as property owners in Black, immigrant and racially mixed neighborhoods were shut out of the finance system, many of their buildings declined, rents fell and some landlords resorted to abandonment.

The weight of real estate in the capitalist system staggers the imagination. Global real estate is now worth $217 trillion, thirty-six times the value of all the gold ever mined. It makes up sixty percent of the world’s assets. Within those assets, about 75 percent is in housing.

With so much wealth sloshing around, it should not come as a surprise that Blackstone is the largest landlord in the world. Run by Stephen Schwarzman, who spent close to $20 million on his 70^th birthday party and is a good pal of fellow real estate magnate Donald Trump, it is the driving force behind gentrification everywhere. There is a dotted line between Schwarzman and the poorest sectors of the working class, some of whom eventually land on the street. To keep track of Schwarzman’s vulturistic practices, I recommend the Greedy Stephen Schwarzman website that mentions his role in prolonging California’s housing crisis:

Faced with worsening housing affordability and homeless crises, Californians sought to repeal statewide rent control restrictions in 2018. Schwarzman wouldn’t have it.

Blackstone and its subsidiary, Invitation Homes, shelled out $7.4 million to trick and confuse voters, stopping a grassroots effort that included labor unions, social justice groups, and tenants rights organizations.

Although behind a paywall in the 2020 Socialist Register, Karl Beitel’s “The Affordable Housing Crisis: Its Capitalist Roots and the Socialist Alternative” is about the best attempt I’ve seen to ground the housing crisis in Marxist theory. My advice is to find a friend (ahem) with a university account if you want a copy.

Reitel dismisses the neoliberal arguments why rents are “so damned high”. Markets will not bring them down, nor will ending regulations that keep a ceiling on them. What drives inflationary rents and mortgages is the particular role played by the real estate industry within the sphere of capitalist production overall. I cannot begin to recapitulate Beitel’s analysis, but it revolves around the question of land prices that are not subject to increased supply (especially on an island like Manhattan) or cheapening of per unit production costs. Another thing to keep in mind is the big difference between building high-rises and cars. GM can always move a factory to Mexico that not only replaces workers with robotics but pays them much less than if they were in Michigan or Ohio.

However, to put up a high-rise in LA or NY requires skilled labor that cannot be replaced by machines. Perhaps Donald Trump dreams of having a robot walking across a girder to tighten some bolts, but in real life that will never happen. When the trade union movement was much stronger in the USA, the construction workers commanded top wages because they enjoyed a closed shop benefiting white ethnics who maintained a job trust. Now the building trades are weaker and unable to prevent many buildings from operating as open shops. Yet the wages are still higher than average for those who have only a high school degree in many cases. The bottom line is that rents and mortgages in the most desirable neighborhoods will continue to go up short of a revolution.

These problems have been with the working class for well over a century. In 1872, Frederick Engels began publishing a series of articles collected in an edition titled “The Housing Question”. While much of it is polemics against Proudhon, an anarchist whose ideas had a very brief shelf-life, the most important observation made by Engels is an expansion on one of the demands raised in the Communist Manifesto:

On its own admission, therefore, the bourgeois solution of the housing question has come to grief—it has come to grief owing to the antithesis of town and country. And with this we have arrived at the kernel of the problem. The housing question can only be solved when society has been sufficiently transformed for a start to be made towards abolishing the antithesis between town and country, which has been brought to an extreme point by present-day capitalist society. Far from being able to abolish this antithesis, capitalist society on the contrary is compelled to intensify it day by day.

Cities such as New York, London and Paris arose during the industrial revolution. Newer metropolises such as Beijing, Jakarta, Istanbul and Mexico City replicate their features but under circumstances far more inimical to their well-being than when Engels wrote his articles. There are assaults on the environment that are the outcome of farms being distant from the mouths they are intended to feed and only possible through industrial farming. There is also downward pressure on wages that make housing increasingly impossible to afford. That is the outcome of the need for profits at the heart of capitalist production. All these problems have always existed but from now until the end of the twenty-first century they will reach a critical mass. At that point, workers will wake up from their slumber and act to abolish the class system in its totality, including the precariousness that makes every wage earner a candidate for homelessness given an economic system that has long outlived its usefulness. That system, rather than those it victimizes, should be without a home.

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Where Does California’s Homeless Population Come From?

from the New York Times ([email protected]), November 6, 2019

A homeless man camps next to the high-speed rail project in downtown Fresno.Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Today, we have a dispatch from our colleague Marie Tae McDermott, who tackled the latest installment of our series answering readers’ questions about inequality in California:

Christine Kroger, a reader from Stockton, wrote: “Where are the homeless people from? If they are transplants, when did they come to California, what brought them here, and how did they end up in their current circumstances?”

Another reader, Jim, from Santa Cruz, wrote that he believed “many, if not most” of the homeless people he saw were not native Californians. He asked: “Why is California bearing the brunt of this national crisis?”

Elizabeth Erickson, a reader in Seattle, echoed his sentiments, saying: “Do many homeless or near-homeless move to politically liberal areas, making the assumption that they will receive more assistance?”

As the data shows us, most of the homeless people you pass on the streets every day are in fact Californians. Some may have rented an apartment or once owned a home in your neighborhood. Now they sleep in an encampment near the freeway you take to work each morning.

“This is a local crisis and a homegrown problem,” said Peter Lynn, the executive director of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, the agency that conducts the largest homeless census count in the country.

Several years ago, L.A.H.S.A. added a question to its homeless survey that captured how long a person had been in Los Angeles and where they became homeless. The resulting data dispelled the idea that the homeless population was largely made up of people from out of state.

“The vast majority fell into homelessness in L.A. County,” Mr. Lynn said.

L.A.H.S.A.’s 2019 homeless count found that 64 percent of the 58,936 Los Angeles County residents experiencing homelessness had lived in the city for more than 10 years. Less than a fifth (18 percent) said they had lived out of state before becoming homeless.

In San Francisco, 43 percent of the homeless said they had lived in the city for more than 10 years.

The path to becoming homeless can start with a large medical bill that causes someone to fall behind on their rent payments, which leads to eventual eviction. More than half of the people surveyed in Los Angeles cited economic hardship as the primary reason that they fell into homelessness. In San Francisco, 26 percent of the homeless surveyed cited the loss of a job as the primary cause.

The survey also found that nearly a quarter (23 percent) of unsheltered adults lost their housing in 2018 and were experiencing homelessness for the first time. In Los Angeles, a renter earning minimum wage ($13.25 an hour) would need to work 79 hours per week to afford a one-bedroom apartment.

Data about migration to California from other states among the housed population showed that the largest group of transplants to the state were actually college-educated professionals, ranging from 20 to 29, from Illinois, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania. Over the past five years, California has gained 162,000 more college graduates from other states than it has lost.

“I hear a lot of people complain that the homeless people are all from ‘somewhere else,’” wrote Ms. Kroger of Stockton, a lifelong Californian. “I think it might raise empathy and compassion if it turns out that the majority of the people who have been displaced are from the very communities in which they are now trying to survive on the streets.”

As Climate Crisis-Fueled Fires Rage, Fears Grow of an 'Uninhabitable' California

Published on

Wednesday, October 30, 2019

by

Common Dreams

As activist Bill McKibben put it, "We've simply got to slow down the climate crisis."

by

Jon Queally, staff writer, Jessica Corbett, staff writer

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Fire is seen near Getty Center in Los Angeles, the United States, Oct. 28, 2019. Thousands of residents were forced to evacuate their homes after a fast-moving wildfire erupted early Monday morning near the famous Getty Center in Los Angeles in the western U.S. state of California. (Photo: Qian Weizhong/Xinhua via Getty)

With wildfires raging across California on Wednesday—and with portions of the state living under an unprecedented "Extreme Red Flag Warning" issued by the National Weather Service due to the severe conditions—some climate experts are openly wondering if this kind of harrowing "new normal" brought on by the climate crisis could make vast regions of the country entirely unihabitable.

Lack of rain coupled with powerful Santa Ana winds in the state, some gusting with hurricane-level force, have left officials warning residents in many communities that the worst is yet to come even as firefighters already report being stretched to the max.

In an ominous new warning, the National Weather Service issued a rare “extreme red flag warning” for Southern California through Thursday evening, saying winds could top 80 mph and be the strongest in more than a decade https://t.co/LQt1VjzQdE

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) October 29, 2019

Reflecting on the current and recent devastating fires in California, climate activist Bill McKibben wrote in an op-ed for The Guardian Tuesday that what the state has been experiencing "starts to feel like the new, and impossible, normal" for both residents and victims as well as those witnessing the destruction from afar.

Citing an article in the San Francisco Chronicle published Tuesday—which described how the fires had "intensified fears that parts of California had become almost too dangerous to inhabit"—McKibben wrote: "Read that again: the local paper is on record stating that part of the state is now so risky that its citizens might have to leave."

Writing for The Atlantic, journalist Annie Lowery detailed the dynamics leading increasing numbers of people to believe the state has become "unlivable":

Wildfires and lack of affordable housing—these are two of the most visible and urgent crises facing California, raising the question of whether the country’s dreamiest, most optimistic state is fast becoming unlivable. Climate change is turning it into a tinderbox; the soaring cost of living is forcing even wealthy families into financial precarity. And, in some ways, the two crises are one: The housing crunch in urban centers has pushed construction to cheaper, more peripheral areas, where wildfire risk is greater.

The state's "housing crisis has exacerbated its wildfire crisis, and its wildfire crisis has exacerbated its housing crisis," explained Lowery, and that "vicious cycle is nowhere near ending."

 

For many critics, the state's largest utility PG&E remains a chief corporate culprit in the mess. As Common Dreams has reported, the company's failure to adequately respond to the increased fire dangers—choosing to reward investors and seek profits instead of making the kind of changes and safety investments that communities and experts have demanded.

Meanwhile, as the following Now This video details, the scenes created by the California wildfires in recent weeks depict a hellscape fueled by the climate crisis—the scale and destruction of which fulfill some of the dire warnings scientists have been making for years:

The devastating California wildfires are exactly what climate scientists warned us about pic.twitter.com/NZqWSRydbC

— NowThis (@nowthisnews) October 30, 2019

In response to the video, climate activist group Friends of the Earth declared: "Thanks to the climate crisis, this is the new normal in California. To save lives, communities and wildlife, we must #ActOnClimate."

After a new fire broke out in Simi Valley on Wednesday, fire crews spent the day protecting—among other homes and structures—the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.

"The progress is so extraordinary. This is why they called it an extreme fire danger."

.@mattgutmanABC reports on the California wildfires near the Reagan Presidential Library and is forced to flee the scene as conditions worsen. https://t.co/BN4CDfQHyD pic.twitter.com/tHSl20ANuo

— ABC News Live (@ABCNewsLive) October 30, 2019

Speaking to Democracy Now! on Tuesday, Leah Stokes, assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara criticized the corporate media for ignoring the role of the climate crisis in the fires and explained that the scientific research about what's happening in California is crystal clear.

"There is research that says that fires have gotten 500% more risky as a result of climate change and that two times more area has burned because of climate change," Stokes explained. "We know that the drought that California has recently come out of was also caused by climate change. And yet some of these deeper stories about what is happening in California, what is happening across the United States with climate change, are not told by the media."

In California, the threat to residents and wildlife as well as the loss of property has been devastating. As The New York Times reported Tuesday:

California's catastrophic wildfires have not discriminated between rich and poor. In recent years tens of thousands of people lost their homes, from trailer parks to mansions. But the aftermath of the fires has produced a spectrum of misery and recovery, ranging from the wealthy, who with insurance money rebuilt houses sometimes worth more than the ones that burned, to those who lost everything and years later still have nothing.

Like access to quality education and clean water, natural disasters are another prism through which California's vast income inequalities can be viewed.

A lawyerly knowledge of the peculiarities of the insurance industry, a pool of savings to fall back on, and the time and grit to deal with the state's labyrinthine regulations have helped some in California bounce back from the infernos. Others have not been so lucky.

For example,  44-year-old Gina Wheeler, "lost her uninsured trailer that she rented on family land" in the Camp Fire that devastated Paradise, California and the surrounding area late last year.

"Every place I've ever set foot in has been touched by fire," Wheeler told the Times. "I don't think anybody that's not gone through this will ever, ever understand what it's like to lose your entire community."

"I can't even describe the empty feeling that we have," she said. "I talk friends and family members out of suicide, and they talk me out of it."

Jenn Wilcox, who worked at residential care facility in Paradise and lost the uninsured cabin where she lived, has also struggled in the year since the fire. "I'm a refugee," she said. "I'm broke."

This week, PBS aired its one-hour documentary, titled "Fire in Paradise," which details what happened on November 8 of last year as the flames ripped through the California town. While the community was not unfamiliar with the threat of wildfires—and having done more than most, local officials claimed, to prepare for such an emergency—the episode details just how quickly the strength of the fire overwhelmed detailed evacuation plans and made fighting the flames an impossible task.

Watch the trailer:

At the conclusion of the film, Capt. Matt McKenzie, a member of California Fire Station 36, offers an ominous warning in the context of what the people of Paradise suffered that day and what scientists say are conditions across the country that will make wildfires more frequent and more ferocious in the decades ahead.

"Everything was perfect that day for a massive, destructive incident to do what it did and it's in place everywhere—everywhere in California, Arizona, Nevada, Washington Oregon," McKenzie says. "And you don't even wanna think about what's next. Can it be worse than that? And the answer is: Yes."

In his his op-ed, McKibben said the idea that California may one day be a place where fewer and fewer people can live should come "as no real surprise" to anyone who has been paying attention to global trends and the warnings of scientists.

"My most recent book, Falter, centered on the notion that the climate crisis was making large swaths of the world increasingly off-limits to humans," McKibben wrote. "Cities in Asia and the Middle East where the temperature now reaches the upper 120s—levels so high that the human body can't really cool itself; island nations (and Florida beaches) where each high tide washes through the living room or the streets; Arctic villages relocating because, with sea ice vanished, the ocean erodes the shore."

Speaking with USA Today, Beth Fulton, a resident of Sebastopol who was evacuated this week from her town as the Kincade Fire approached, said more and more people are decided to leave the area and never come back.

"People are naturally resilient, but to deal with this year after year can be traumatizing," Fulton said. She explained that several people who lost their homes in previous fires moved off to New Mexico and Oregon.

"This seems like it'll be a yearly thing," she said, "and some people say, 'I've had enough.'"

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Off the Top of My Head

California Paves the Way for Public Banks!

by John Lawrence, October 4, 2019

While the rest of the nation dithers and wrings their collective hands over Trump, California is moving forward passing a bill on rent control, gig workers and now PUBLIC BANKING. Thanks to Ellen Brown's pioneering work, California will now become the second state in the nation (after North Dakota) to have a public bank. This means that billions of dollars won't be sent to Wall Street any more but will stay in the state. More money will be available for affordable housing, student loans at affordable rates, infrastructure and tax relief. Just possibly savers may finally get a reasonable rate of interest on savings accounts. And when the next financial crisis comes, California will weather the storm in much better shape than the rest of the nation just as North Dakota did in 2018.

This was hailed as a “stunning rebuke to the predatory Wall Street megabanks that crashed the global economy in 2007-08.” “Today’s signing sends a strong message that California is putting people before Wall Street profits,” said Assemblyman David Chiu (D-San Francisco), who co-authored the bill (AB 857) with Assemblyman Miguel Santiago (D-Los Angeles). “We finally have the option of reinvesting our public tax dollars in our communities instead of rewarding Wall Street’s bad behavior,” he said. “This new law prioritizes communities and neighborhoods by empowering localities to use public dollars for their own public good: from investing in affordable housing projects and building new schools and parks, to accessible loans for students and businesses,” Santiago, the bill’s co-author, said in a statement.

At first the law limits to 10 the number of public banks that can be actualized. That means that probably only California's largest cities will create them. Certainly Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego should be among the first to go through the rigorous process of forming a public bank. The LA Times reported:

The law provides a path for cities and counties to pursue a public-bank license that has several “checks and balances built in, with layers of oversight and accountability” said Sushil Jacob, a senior attorney with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area. The committee is part of the California Public Banking Alliance, which pushed for the new law.

For example, the city or county would have to establish a separate corporation with an independent board of directors, and it would have to obtain approval from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to obtain deposit insurance, Jacob said.

The new public bank and its business plan also would need approval from the state Department of Business Oversight, and “the public has to be given the opportunity to weigh in on the [bank’s] viability study before a local agency can approve it,” he said.

“There also are startup costs involved, such as hiring consultants and developing a business plan,” and it’s expected that the state’s largest cities and counties, such as Los Angeles and San Francisco, would be among the first jurisdictions to apply, Jacob said.

The process likely would take one to two years, he added.

If this process works well for cities and counties, the next step would be the establishment of a public bank for California as a state and not just allow them in cities and counties. There is a lot more money involved at the state level than at the local level like the CalPERS pension fund and state tax revenues. The California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS) is an agency in the California executive branch that "manages pension and health benefits for more than 1.6 million California public employees, retirees, and their families". In fiscal year 2012–13, CalPERS paid over $12.7 billion in retirement benefits, and in fiscal year 2013 it is estimated that CalPERS will pay over $7.5 billion in health benefits. As of June 30, 2014, CalPERS managed the largest public pension fund in the United States, with $300.3 billion in assets. As of 2018, the agency had $360 billion in assets.

Next City reports:

Today in the U.S., state and local governments hold $502 billion in bank deposits (not to mention $4.3 trillion in state and local public pensions). Progress on public banks in California will be closely watched in other states and cities where organizers and public officials have been pushing for public banks — including Washington State, New Mexico, Michigan, New Jersey, the District of Columbia, New York City, Philadelphia, Chicago, the Twin Cities, Portland, Seattle, and elsewhere.

Ellen Brown's latest book is "The Making of a Democratic Economy." She has also written "Banking on the People - Democratizing Money in the Digital Age," "The Public Bank Solution," and "Web of Debt." She is largely responsible for the public banking movement. Other articles on public banking have appeared in the San Diego Free Press: Public Banking: How a Public Bank Could Benefit San Diego – Part 4.

The bugaboo in this whole thing could be the need for Federal Deposit Insurance. Trump could get his hands in there and put the kabosh on the whole thing. However, the need for a marijuana bank is an incentive to follow through on the creation of public banks as well as a distaste for Wells Fargo and all the illegal behavior they have been involved in. Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein are not amused.

'Stunning Rebuke to Predatory Wall Street Megabanks' as California Gov. Signs Law Allowing Creation of Public Banks

Published on Thursday, October 03, 2019

by Common Dreams

"The people of California just went up against the most powerful corporate lobby in the country—and won."

by Jake Johnson, staff writer

 

19 Comments

Members of the San Francisco Public Bank Coalition rally at San Francisco City Hall to demand the creation of a public bank. (Photo: Kurtis Wu)

California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday signed into law historic legislation that would allow the state's cities and counties to establish public banks as an alternative to private financial institutions, a move advocates hailed as a "stunning rebuke to the predatory Wall Street megabanks that crashed the global economy in 2007-08."

"Now is our moment in history to lead the nation by re-envisioning finance and recapturing our money to benefit our local communities by building a new system that works for the greater good."
—Trinity Tran, Public Bank LA

Trinity Tran, co-founder of Public Bank LA, said Newsom's decision to sign the Public Banking Act (A.B. 857) despite fervent opposition from the state's business lobby "is a testament to the power of grassroots organizing.

"Now is our moment in history to lead the nation by re-envisioning finance and recapturing our money to benefit our local communities by building a new system that works for the greater good."
—Trinity Tran, Public Bank LA

Trinity Tran, co-founder of Public Bank LA, said Newsom's decision to sign the Public Banking Act (A.B. 857) despite fervent opposition from the state's business lobby "is a testament to the power of grassroots organizing."

"The people of California just went up against the most powerful corporate lobby in the country—and won," Tran said in a statement. "Now is our moment in history to lead the nation by re-envisioning finance and recapturing our money to benefit our local communities by building a new system that works for the greater good."

The Public Banking Act—which was backed by a diverse coalition of labor unions, climate justice groups, and civil rights organizations—makes California the second state in the U.S. after North Dakota to allow the creation of public banks.

BREAKING: PUBLIC BANKS SIGNED INTO LAW!! On behalf of Californians & advocates nationwide, thank you @GavinNewsom for your leadership on #AB857! CA has enabled its cities to determine how tax revenues are invested to empower our communities. Leading the nation is what we do. pic.twitter.com/ZvFN065tIn

— California Public Banking Alliance (@calpba) October 2, 2019

As the Los Angeles Times reported:

Public banks are intended to use public funds to let local jurisdictions provide capital at interest rates below those charged by commercial banks. The loans could be used for businesses, affordable housing, infrastructure, and municipal projects, among other things.

Proponents say public banks can pursue those projects and support local communities' needs while being free of the pressure to obtain higher profits and shareholder returns faced by commercial banks. Support for public banks also has grown since the financial crisis a decade ago and since Wells Fargo & Co. was embroiled in a slew of customer-abuse scandals in recent years.

The new law sets into motion a pilot program allowing 10 public bank charters in the state over seven years. "These banks can invest in local projects like affordable housing, small businesses, resilient infrastructure, and clean energy, giving communities a voice in their own economic futures," said the California Public Banking Alliance.

Sushil Jacob, senior economic justice attorney with the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, said the law represents the "first step toward repairing communities that were immensely harmed by the 2008 recession, especially communities of color."

"Today, California's communities of color remain disproportionately harmed by Wall Street's predatory practices," said Jacob. "Public banks can make all of our communities whole with equitable lending and non-extractive investing."

In a column for Common Dreams earlier this year, Ellen Brown, founder of the Public Banking Institute, applauded states like California and Washington for pursuing legislation to create state-level public banking systems and said their passage could prove a game-changer for the nation's economy.

"The implications are huge," Brown wrote at the time. "A century after the very successful Bank of North Dakota proved the model, the time has finally come to apply it across the country."

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Off the Top of My Head

Boofin' and Spoofin'

by John Lawrence, September27, 2019

In the never ending saga of the media's never discussing anything of real importance, but instead talking only about Trump and his transgressions, we are treated to the latest travesty by a sitting President - that of asking a foreign President for dirt on his political opponent. So when are we going to discuss Trump's war on California? Trump said California has the "worst air quality in the United States". So what is his solution? To make California's air quality even worse by revoking California’s right to set stricter pollution limits on cars and light trucks than the Federal government requires.

Why does the President of the US even have the right to unilaterally do this without the consent of Congress? Because the Congress is gridlocked and dysfunctional and Trump is making a bid to create the Imperial Presidency ... in other words Fascism. Just last week, the EPA joined the Transportation Department in revoking California’s right to set stricter pollution limits on cars and light trucks. This could put billions of dollars in federal highway funding at stake. Federal officials have the right to halt that money if they determine that a state is not taking sufficient steps to show how it aims to cut air pollution such as soot or smog-forming ozone. But that is precisely what California is leading the nation in doing.

The Washington Post reported:

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) said in a statement Tuesday that he and other state officials “won’t be intimidated by this brazen political stunt.”

[EPA administrator Andrew] Wheeler’s letter, Newsom said, “is a threat of pure retaliation.” “While the White House tries to bully us and concoct new ways to make our air dirtier, California is defending our state’s clean air laws from President Trump’s attacks. We won’t go back to the days when our air was the color of mud. We won’t relive entire summers when spending time outside amounted to a public health risk.”​​

Former EPA officials said the letter was an unusual step for the agency to take. “I’ve never seen a letter like this before,” said Janet McCabe, who served as acting assistant administrator for the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation under President Barack Obama. “It’s ironic that EPA is taking California to task for not solving the air quality problem when for decades the state has been moving forward with the most aggressive clear air rules and programs in the nation.”

So let's get this straight. California leads the nation on stricter standards of pollution control than the Federal government requires. Yet Trump is threatening to take away billions of dollars in highway funding if California doesn't reduce its standards to the less stringent Federal levels? This is through the rabbit hole illogic worthy of Alice in Blunderland. Trump has a vendetta against California so the way he is taking out his spite is to demand that California pollute more. Otherwise, they won't get billions of dollars in Federal highway funding. Does this make any sense at all? Well, it might make cars and trucks somewhat cheaper if they don't have to comply with California's standards. Many states follow California, not the Federal government, and car manufacturers just manufacture to California's standards since the majority of the nation's cars and trucks are purchased here.

The Los Angeles area and other parts of the mountainous state have long struggled with smog. Trapped by mountains on three sides, the car-clogged Southern California region forms a basin in which dirty air pools. Smog levels rose so high there in the 1950s and ′60s that Congress gave California a special status under the Clean Air Act to set its own pollution standards. ... Bill Becker, president of Becker Environmental Consulting, said in a phone interview that it did not make sense for the administration to punish California for not addressing air pollution in the state when it was simultaneously blocking its efforts to cut down on vehicle emissions.

Trump's solution to every environmental problem is to pollute more, reduce environmental standards. You want clean water. Heck no, let's reduce clean water standards. Trumps administration could be called "Pollution R Us." How dare California have stricter standards than the rest of the nation! The California Air Resources Board (CARB) has been leading the world in reducing pollution from automobiles and trucks. Of course, Trump wants to throw a monkey wrench in California's progress. In the 50s and 60s, LA was totally inundated with smog and pollution. Today you can actually see the sun and blue skies.

The California Air Resources Board (CARB or ARB) is the "clean air agency" in the government of California. Established in 1967 when then-governor Ronald Reagan signed the Mulford-Carrell Act, combining the Bureau of Air Sanitation and the Motor Vehicle Pollution Control Board, CARB is a department within the cabinet-level California Environmental Protection Agency.

The stated goals of CARB include attaining and maintaining healthy air quality; protecting the public from exposure to toxic air contaminants; and providing innovative approaches for complying with air pollution rules and regulations. CARB has also been instrumental in driving innovation throughout the global automotive industry through programs such as its ZEV [zero emission vehicle][ mandate.

One of CARB's responsibilities is to define vehicle emissions standards. California is the only state permitted to issue emissions standards under the federal Clean Air Act, subject to a waiver from the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Other states may choose to follow CARB or federal standards but may not set their own.

Well now, according to Trump's mandate, California can no longer set emission standards, but must pollute more. Whether it's clean air or clean water, Trump is against it. Screw the environment. Let's have more smoke stacks and take those catalytic converters off of cars so they can freely pollute. Why pay more for a catalytic converter? Trump's mumbo jumbo and bizarre thought process might actually appeal to his base which doesn't believe in climate change or clean energy. Their motto is "Burn more coal and drill, baby drill"

Off the Top of My Head

California Legislature Passes Public Banking Law

by John Lawrence, September 17, 2019

The law now sits on Governor Newsom's desk waiting to be signed.  Instead of sending California's pension funds and tax receipts to Wall Street where they would siphon off a goodly percentage of it, the new law would keep the money in California where it would bolster the state budget, create funds for badly needed public housing, help to establish renewable energy production, fund student loans at low interest rates and do a lot of good in general. The model for this is the public Bank of North Dakota (BND) founded in 1919 for similar reasons. They didn't want Wall Street speculating with their money. The BND was the only bank that weathered the Great Recession with no difficulty.

The public banking movement is largely due to the advocacy of Ellen Brown whose books, "The Web of Debt", "The Public Bank Solution", and her latest, "The Making of a Democratic Economy" have spurred the movement toward public banking. Of course the example of the BND makes it that much more of a realistic possibility. If they can do it and prosper, why not California. Instead of enriching Jamie Diamond and Lloyd Blankfein, a California public bank will enrich the people of California instead. Public banks can be established at any level including at the city and county levels and also at other jurisdictional levels such as hospitals and other public entities.

I wrote in the San Diego Free Press in March 2017:

While those and other cities have been drained by the Wall Street banking crisis which resulted in increased borrowing costs and loss of revenues, BND and North Dakota have churned along quite nicely, thank you very much. They have provided low-cost affordable loans to small businesses and students, thus totally averting the worst effects that most cities and states which rely on Wall Street have suffered.

BND provides back-up for local private banks by offering check clearing services and liquidity support. They invest in North Dakota municipal bonds to provide economic development. In the last ten years, the BND has returned more than a third of a billion dollars to the state’s general fund. North Dakota is one of the few states to consistently post a budget surplus.

Also in 2013 a 4 part article advocating a public bank for the City of San Diego:

In this fourth part of our series on Public Banking (check out Parts 1 – 3 here, here and here), we explore how a Public Bank could benefit the taxpayers and citizens of the City of San Diego.

To recapitulate, the Public Bank of San Diego (BSD) would be owned by the City of San Diego and would provide functions similar to the Bank of North Dakota which is the nation’s only public bank as of this date. All BSD deposits would be guaranteed by the full faith and credit of the City of San Diego.

The primary deposit base would be the City of San Diego itself. All city revenues and funds such as the pension fund as well as funds of city institutions would be deposited with the BSD, as would be required by law. The BSD would also accept deposits from other sources including residents, local corporations and businesses and other San Diego County government entities.

Wall Street's main activity these days, other than charging huge amounts of charges and fees to store California's money, is speculating with our money. It needn't be this way. If and when Wall Street and the global financial institutions it dominates comes another cropper like the Great Recession of 2008, California will be sitting pretty with a public bank if Governor Newsom signs the bill which he is evidently inclined to do. Let's keep our fingers crossed.

California Passes Public Banking Law

The Public Banking Act Passes the California State Legislature! California just one signature away from boldest economic policy since the New Deal Today the California State Legislature passed the Public Banking Act (AB 857) in a historic victory for economic democracy over Wall Street lobbyists. The bill now heads to Governor Newsom, who has previously expressed support for a California state bank, for his signature. The vote positions California to become the first state in the nation to empower city and regional-level public banks as a safe and accountable alternative to the predatory Wall Street megabanks that crashed the global economy in 2007-08. The bill launches a pilot program allowing 10 public bank charters to be issued over a seven-year trial period. It also guarantees four layers of regulatory oversight, including the Department of Business Oversight, FDIC, Federal Reserve, and local bank boards of directors. These banks would be empowered to invest in affordable housing, small businesses, clean energy, and other local projects, giving municipalities a voice in determining the future of economic development in our communities. Read our press release.

The only hurdle left is Governor Newsom’s signature. Everyone reading this message, please support public banks by retweeting this message @GavinNewsom: https://twitter.com/calpba/status/1172641829881184256 And share on Facebook. Every post, every tweet, every mention helps strengthens the movement and ensures that California will move forward with public banking! This could not have been done without the tireless work of dozens of organizers working with the California Public Banking Alliance: people power brought this bill to where it is. Our thank-you list is almost as long as our endorsers list: The volunteer organizers who kept the engine running for months The volunteer attorneys who wrote the bill and managed the amendments The lobby teams who visited legislators’ offices in person The activists who came to the California Democratic Party convention to get delegate endorsements (resulting in the state party endorsement, 11 Democratic Central Committees endorsements, and 550 individual delegate endorsements) The members of state and local organizations who helped bring their (over 180!) endorsing organizations to the table, including labor, environmental organizations, and more The folks at home who wrote emails and made phone calls to legislators, and who supported the bill online The advocates who encouraged their (17!) cities and counties to pass endorsement statements The journalists who wrote positive articles And, OF COURSE, our indomitable co-authors, Assemblymembers David Chiu and Miguel Santiago, and their excellent, responsive staff members, plus the 19 co-authors who helped see this bill through to the finish line. ONWARD TO LOCAL PUBLIC BANKS IN CALIFORNIA! #AB857 californiapublicbankingalliance.org

Off the Top of My Head

The California Coast is Disappearing

by John Lawrence, July 10, 2019

Woe be to the people who built million dollar houses right on the shore line. The LA Times reported:

"Elsewhere, Miami has been drowning, Louisiana shrinking, North Carolina’s beaches disappearing like a time lapse with no ending. While other regions grappled with destructive waves and rising seas, the West Coast for decades was spared by a rare confluence of favorable winds and cooler water. This “sea level rise suppression,” as scientists call it, went largely undetected. Blinded from the consequences of a warming planet, Californians kept building right to the water’s edge.

But lines in the sand are meant to shift. In the last 100 years, the sea rose less than 9 inches in California. By the end of this century, the surge could be greater than 9 feet."

So some of the priciest real estate on the planet is doomed to fall into the sea. Gone will be the beach communities of Ocean Beach, Mission Beach and Pacific Beach. Gone will be the controversy about how fast birds should scooter on the boardwalk because there will be no boardwalk. Those fortunate enough to live inland will have no problem unless the next big earthquake disrupts the water lines coming from northern California.

The article continues:

Wildfire and drought dominate the climate change debates in the state. Yet this less-talked-about reality has California cornered. The coastline is eroding with every tide and storm, but everything built before we knew better — Pacific Coast Highway, multimillion-dollar homes in Malibu, the rail line to San Diego — is fixed in place with nowhere to go.

But the world is getting hotter, the great ice sheets still melting, the rising ocean a slow-moving disaster that has already swept past California’s front door. Seaside cliffs are crumbling in Pacifica, bringing down entire buildings. Balboa Island, barely above sea level, is spending $1.8 million to raise the wall that separates it from the ocean.Winter storms pummeled a Capistrano Beach boardwalk, turning the idyllic shoreline into a construction zone as bulldozers rushed to stack boulders into a barricade. From San Diego to Humboldt counties, homeowners scramble to fend off increasing erosion and storm surges, pleading with officials for bigger seawalls that can hold back the even bigger ocean.

Mother Nature will win here. The California coast will be reconfigured. The beach will recreate itself several miles inland and people will build luxury estates on the new beach front property. The port of San Diego and the Embarcadero will likely be spared since the inlet to the harbor could be controlled with a sea wall if necessary. It's narrow enough. Coronado Island, however, will not likely be spared. That very expensive real estate could sink under the sea since it's basically at sea level today.

The Homegrown Crisis California Refuses to Own

by Robert Scheer, from truthdig, July 5, 2019

Anyone who has spent even a short period of time in California’s cities will immediately notice the homelessness crisis that has grown to stunning proportions in recent years. The “explanation” that’s often thrown around is that people who become homeless travel to the Golden State, where, presumably, the mild weather blunts some of the difficulties of living without a roof over one’s head. But this, like most justifications for inhumane problems, is just that: a justification to make Californians feel slightly less terrible every time they come across a person in need on the streets of some of the wealthiest, most progressive cities in the world.

As Tommy Newman, a lawyer and a senior director at the nonprofit United Way, points out in the latest installment of the “Scheer Intelligence” podcast, a quarter of the nation’s homeless live in California, earning it the shameful moniker of “Homeless Capital of America.”

That’s not the only staggering number related to the issue. “About 70% of the people who are living outside [in Los Angeles County] last lived indoors in L.A. County, and of that subset, 50% lived here for more than a decade indoors,” Newman tells Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer on the podcast. The numbers, which clearly debunk the common rationalization about homelessness, should lead us all to the crucial conclusion Newman has drawn from the statistics.

“This is a homegrown challenge,” he says. “Some people will come here, but if your whole life falls apart and you’re in Iowa, you’re not going to say, ‘All right, well, I’ve lost everything, and now I’m going to California’—you’re stuck.”

Jerry Brown, the state’s four-term governor, considered the crisis so dire that, as Newman points out, he thought that climate change would be solved sooner than homelessness. Newman, however, isn’t willing to give up on the pressing issue, and thanks to his work and that of his colleagues, big changes in both policy and popular opinion have already begun to materialize. Two Los Angeles ballot measures—Proposition HHH and Measure H—aimed at creating affordable housing for thousands—passed in the miraculous span of four months. The efforts to pass these measures were documented in the 2018 film “The Advocates,” in which Newman appears, and which is available for viewing on streaming services. While the progress springing from these policies will take time, Newman warns, it will take place.

One of the main difficulties faced by United Way and others who advocate for helping homeless people is how Californians feel about housing, especially one specific group that is stuck on a suburban Nimbyism and rejects zoning for more affordable multifamily housing.

“It’s white people who are primarily the challenge on this housing question,” Newman tells Scheer. “White people support more multifamily housing, more apartments—whether they’re affordable or not, more apartments—to the tune of about 40%. And people who are not white support apartments to the tune of about 60%. So it is white people who own homes who are the cause of the homelessness crisis, and will need to be a part of the solution in some way, unless we can build a larger coalition around them and create that pressure.”

Scheer, who has lived in California most of his adult life, sees the question of how we approach homelessness amid blatant affluence as one that gets to the core of our humanity.

“The fact of the matter is, we’re kind of in this Dickens world of London,” Scheer says. “We have extreme wealth in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and points in between. And yet we have the most abject misery.

“I do want to encourage people to realize that we are actually talking about a notion of what is civilization,” he adds. “I think that you can’t be a city of the future, which is what L.A. advertises as, [unless you are] welcoming to people who all look different ways, come from different backgrounds, have different skill sets, different employment opportunities.”

Listen to the full discussion between Scheer and Newman about the political, social and economic factors contributing to the Golden State’s most shameful failures to date. You can also read a transcript of the interview below the media player and find past episodes of “Scheer Intelligence” here.

—Introduction by Natasha Hakimi Zapata

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Robert Scheer, editor in chief of Truthdig, has built a reputation for strong social and political writing over his 30 years as a journalist. His columns appear in newspapers across the country, and his in-depth interviews have made headlines. He conducted the famous Playboy magazine interview in which Jimmy Carter confessed to the lust in his heart and he went on to do many interviews for the Los Angeles Times with Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and many other prominent political and cultural figures.

Between 1964 and 1969 he was Vietnam correspondent, managing editor and editor in chief of Ramparts magazine. From 1976 to 1993 he served as a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, writing on diverse topics such as the Soviet Union, arms control, national politics and the military. In 1993 he launched a nationally syndicated column based at the Los Angeles Times, where he was named a contributing editor. That column ran weekly for the next 12 years and is now based at Truthdig.

Scheer was raised in the Bronx, where he attended public schools and graduated from City College of New York. He studied as a Maxwell Fellow at Syracuse University and was a fellow at the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, where he did graduate work in economics. Scheer is a contributing editor for The Nation as well as a Nation Fellow. He has also been a Poynter Fellow at Yale, and was a fellow in arms control at Stanford.

Scheer received the 2010 Distinguished Work in New Media Award from the Society of Professional Journalists' Greater Los Angeles Chapter, and in 2011 Ithaca College awarded him the Izzy Award for outstanding achievement in independent media.

California Cities Declare Independence From Wall Street!

 

CA bill AB 857 clears another state Senate committee

PUBLIC BANKING INSTITUTE NEWS: JULY 4, 2019 California public banking bill clears another state Senate committee as momentum generates a swell of press coverage Yesterday, California's Public Banking Act, AB 857, passed the Senate Governance & Finance Committee 4 Aye's to 3 No's. In the extended hearing, Assemblymember David Chiu, the bill's co-author, emphasized, “Something is truly broken with the present financial system.” The bill has one more committee — Senate Appropriations — before the Senate floor vote.  Watch the hearing video here (bill discussion starts at 1:25).  Meanwhile, publications in San Jose, Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, North Bay, Marin County, San Francisco, Sacramento, Los Angeles, and Monterey Bay each published robust articles recently detailing what a public bank could mean to their local communities. The journalistic push indicates a high-water mark for interest in public banking, and provides advocates around the country with excellent talking points to share. An article by Jennifer Wadsworth in Santa Cruz’s Good Times, for example, describes one important benefit of a public bank mandated to serve the public interest:  “[T]he broader decline of small banks across the Greater Bay Area reflects a broader trend. … But the rural Midwestern state [of North Dakota] boasts six times the number of locally owned financial institutions than the rest of the country. Its secret? A public entity that supports small private lenders by helping with capitalization and liquidity and allowing them to take on larger loans that would otherwise go to out-of-state megabanks.” [read more] Thomas Marois shows how Costa Rica models a democratic public bank, and why public banks have far greater capacity than we think Public banking is a way to “democratize” our money, but how can we ensure that the bank is run democratically? Costa Rica has shown the way with its broadly democratic, worker-owned Banco Popular, described in a recent article in Open Democracy by University of London public bank scholar Thomas Marois. Designated Bank of the Year 2018 in Costa Rica by LatinFinance, Banco Popular is governed by a 290-member Workers’ Assembly comprised of representatives from across ten social and economic sectors, 50 percent of whom are women. The bank just announced the availability of 140 billion colones ($240 million) in lower-interest loans for micro, small and medium companies and for housing for families who do not have access to credit from traditional commercial banks. Marois’ new research also demonstrates that there are nearly 700 public banks around the world that have combined assets nearing $38 trillion — about 48 percent of global GDP. That means 20 percent of all bank assets are publicly owned and controlled — much greater financial capacity than commonly believed. His research contradicts the standard neoliberal narrative that there is no alternative to using private finance for climate finance and other community needs.   [read more] Ralph Nader Radio Hour interviews Walt McRee on public banking and Ellen Brown’s new book Former PBI Chair Walt McRee discusses with Ralph Nader why public banks should be the future of banking on the most recent episode of the Ralph Nader Radio Hour.  They also discussed Ellen Brown’s new book Banking on the People, which Nader included in his list of Highly Recommended Books for 2019 Summer Reading. Nader comments:  “[W]hat we have here is out of control corporate bank socialism. Namely, they reap the profits using other people’s money. They enrich themselves at the top of the company. They make money from money, which isn’t a very productive enterprise. And then they send the bill to Washington when their whole edifice collapses.” [listen to the show] Ellen Brown: Facebook may be more dangerous than Wall Street In her most recent article in Truthdig, PBI Chair Ellen Brown stresses the dangers of Facebook’s new corporate-controlled Libra cryptocurrency, evidently intended to be a private global currency bypassing governments. She describes the needed alternative:  “A currency intended for trade on a national — let alone international — scale needs to be not only centralized but democratized, responding to the will of the people and their elected leaders, [r]ather than bypassing the existing central banking structure as Facebook plans to do.” [read more] Video spotlight: Watch the CA Senate Governance & Finance Committee hearing  The CA state Senate committee meeting yesterday is an excellent example of a public bank hearing, which advocates can use to inspire and inform their own work. Assemblymembers David Chiu and Miguel Santiago, co-authors of the bill, are both articulate and passionate supporters of AB 857 and press their case to the Senators by focusing on the core issues they predict are the chief concerns of this committee. The Senators ask pointed questions and state their objections or support to which the co-authors respond. Lobbyists for the banking industry state their objections. Many members of the public as well as representatives of CA cities speak in support. Then there's the vote. Much of the work takes place prior to this hearing to enroll support from individual Senators.  [watch the video bill discussion starts at 1:25] Together, we can make 2019 the year public banks win! Thank you again for your determination and support. Your financial support will help fund our 2019 Campaign for Public Banks to create the BIG PUSH we need now to get public banks established. You can sign on to support and contribute below. DONATE TO SHARE Share this newsletter To share this newsletter, paste this link into your social media post: https://mailchi.mp/publicbankinginstitute/ca-cities-declare-independence-from-wall-street PBI video: Public Banking Made Easy Our latest animated video is helping thousands of people understand the basic concepts of public banking. Please help us make public banking common knowledge by sharing it with your friends and groups. Thank you for all your help! COMING PUBLIC BANKING EVENTS   Send your events to us: [email protected]  We list as many events as we can.  SOCIAL MEDIA Public Banking Coalition monthly conference calls Next call: Sept 13 *Please note: We are taking a break from these calls for the summer.* Once a month, PBI hosts an hour-long Public Banking Coalition conference call in which we introduce the concept of Public Banks, discuss current issues, and give updates on the advances being made for Public Banks all across the country. Calls take place at 12:00pm ET / 9:00am PT on the second Friday of each month.  REGISTER Copyright © 2019 Public Banking Institute, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you opted in via our website. Our mailing address is: Public Banking Institute 19197 Golden Valley Rd # 903 Santa Clarita, CA 91387-1428 Add us to your address book

Off the Top of My Head

Despite Best Efforts, Homelessness Increases in LA

by John Lawrence, June 12, 2019

Here's the skinny in a nutshell:

In a hard reality check for Los Angeles County's multibillion-dollar hope of ending homelessness, officials reported Tuesday that the number of people living on the streets, in vehicles and in shelters increased by about 12% over last year.

The annual point-in-time count, delivered to the Board of Supervisors, put the number of homeless people just shy of 59,000 countywide. Within the city of Los Angeles, the number soared to more than 36,000, a 16% increase.

The homeless problem gets more entrenched with every passing day. Concomitant problems are trash piling up in public places and public urination and defecation. San Diego has turned parking lots into place where people can sleep in their vehicles overnight. San Diego now has 3 parking lots open where additional services are also provided. These facilities are overseen by Jewish Family Services.

The basic problem is a lack of affordable housing. Rents are seriously, extremely high and getting higher as real estate is bid up by corporate players and hedge funds. Single Room Occupancy Units (SROs) are being demolished and replaced by high rise condos and luxury apartments. San Diego is becoming a place that only the rich can afford to live in or be grandfathered in by virtue of having bought cheap real estate 50 years or more ago.

Homelessness breeds hopelessness and drug use to relieve the misery. It is a downward cycle with little hope of a positive outcome at the end of the tunnel unless social services intervene to help people get back on the right track. There are some people that can be helped if the right resources are available, those who are motivated to have a better lifestyle for themselves and their children. Others are chronically homeless and seemingly beyond help. They have adapted to the homeless lifestyle.

This growing phenomenon is not without cost for the rest of the population who must foot the bill for increased police and medical services with their tax money. Businesses find their walk in trade diminished if homeless are sleeping on the sidewalks blocking their entrances. Calls to police for removal of bodies have been increasing. Police are tied up just dealing with requests from business owners to get the homeless away from their businesses.

Funds from the 2017 Measure H sales tax reached full strength last year and expanded homeless services got more people off the street than ever before — a little more than 20,000 into some form of housing, according to the county. Yet the number of people becoming homeless outpaced those historic gains.

"Last year's count, we felt we were trimming in a way that would suggest we were getting our arms around this," Ridley-Thomas said. "And yet this year we are pretty well stunned by this data."

As people are being helped by social services in record numbers, record numbers more of homeless are showing up needing help. Comprehensive solutions are lacking although there is no lack of efforting. Only the building and maintaining of public housing in huge amounts will solve this problem as the forces of capitalism drive rents higher and higher. Public housing has alleviated housing needs for the extremely poor in many places and times. Unfortunately, it has also created problems if other social services have not been provided as well. Homelessness needs to be addressed on the level that 1) many people cannot cope with modern social circumstances in this advanced capitalistic world and 2) society has to devote major resources to shoring up peoples' lives who have basically been left behind and are not needed by society. They can be left to die on the streets or they can behelped by a humane society. The question is: is the US a humane society?

New York City has the largest homeless population in the United States with 77,000 homeless people. However, they are addressing this crisis head on. The De Blasio administration is tackling the issue by closing hundreds of low-quality shelter sites and building 90 new ones, including an innovative Bronx facility that combines a 200-bed shelter with more than 100 units of affordable housing. As a result no one is left out in the cold on a dark, rainy night in NYC. It is this type of commitment that needs to be undertaken by California and other west coast cities like Seattle.

The homeless problem is not going away without considerable resources, both in terms of real estate and human social services, being disposed to deal with it. It is a problem that needs to be dealt with before the US can become a nation that values quality of life for all its people more than it values its war machine and other frivolous expenditures.

Off the Top of My Head

California's Homeless Situation at Crisis Level

by John Lawrence, June 10, 2019

Los Angeles is not alone in its homeless situation, but mountains of rat infested trash have been piling up on city sidewalks there and out into the streets. The trash contains human feces and urine and is located in areas where food service  trucks enter and exit. The homeless situation is getting worse despite the fact that record numbers of homeless are being moved into permanent housing. Problem is that even higher numbers are hitting the streets because there is no affordable housing. Experts have calculated that a person needs to make three times the minimum wage to afford an apartment in LA. That won't be happening any time soon. But it's not just in LA. San Diego and San Francisco have problems similar if not worse. Disease ran rampant last year when Hepartitis A was discovered in the homeless population in San Diego. For what it costs in trash pickup, police services and medical services alone for the homeless population, affordable housing could be provided. It's just that there's no money for that. But there's money for numerous trash pickups per day, numerous calls to police about homeless, numerous trips to emergency rooms by the homeless. This society has produced a class of super poverty people. And to think just a few years ago it was all about poverty in Appalachia. They even had leaky rooves over their heads.

The LA Times reported:

Elena Stern, spokeswoman for the city Department of Public Works, said the backlog on service calls for trash pickup around homeless encampments sits at just under 8,400 currently. On average, the city gets six calls per site.

“If it’s a homeless encampment, it’s a lengthier process because humans are involved and we have to meet certain protocols,” she said, including a survey of who’s there, an inventory of personal property and notice of a cleanup. ...

I spent a few hours one morning on trash patrol with Jesse Ramirez, operations manager for Lopez’s maintenance and safety crew. He told me the 17-person team picks up four tons of trash each day, but the recent numbers have been even higher. One two-person crew walks up and down San Pedro all day between 4th and 7th streets.

At 9 a.m. Thursday, we had been out for not quite two hours, and already several pickup trucks had been filled with trash. There had also been six service calls to the BID from merchants — four to pick up human waste and two to clear storefronts blocked by encampments.

Joey Joseph, who owns a seafood distribution center on Gladys Avenue near 4th, called to report urine and feces on the sidewalk where vendors pull in to load their vehicles. Joseph told me he also calls police and City Hall, along with the BID, so I asked how often.

So so you think your seafood might be getting contaminated by the urine and feces deposited on the sidewalk on a daily basis because sanitation facilities for the homeless are inadequate? And contractors are piling on figuring that, if homeless can deposit their trash on the street, well then so can they. But still the response by LA and other cities up and down the west coast from Seattle to San Diego is meager compared to the size of the problem. Will the US finally do something about the poorest of the poor? They can spend a trillion dollars on the military budget but have inadequate funding available not only to provide housing for the homeless, but even to provide sanitary conditions for the average person walking up and down the street as well as businesses that have to conduct business in the midst of a pile of rat infested trash.

Off the Top of My Head

California Carrying America's Economy

by John Lawrence, May 13, 2019

It it weren't for California, the rest of the US would be in recession. But California's economy is larger than most other national economies. California's economy is the fifth largest in the world, larger than the UK's. Figures released recently by the US Department of Commerce put California's effective GDP from 2017 at around $2.747 trillion. It said the state's economy grew by 3.4% in the past year. Most of this economic growth has to do with intellectual property like software, movies and R&D. Britain has 66 million people; California, 40 million. Obviously, California's economy is concentrated in the tech and entertainment sectors which means that only a relatively few people are reaping the rewards thereof. The economic benefits are not widely shared. California's economy is also larger than those of France, Italy and Russia.

So when you see the headlines that the US economy is doing great, it's really because California's economy is doing great. Separate California from the US and the US economy is not looking so good. Bloomberg reported:

California has one-eighth of the U.S. population of 327.7 million. It’s a third the size of Japan, half of Germany and not quite two-thirds of the U.K. But its economic strength looms larger than any of them.

Just about every measure of growth shows that the Golden State is peerless among developed economies for increasing population, expanding gross domestic product, improved joblessness, rising personal income, investment in innovation, and wealth created by its stocks and bonds.

Few of the 34 nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development come close to California’s 3 percent average annual growth rate for the most recent five-year period — more than 2.2 percent for the 50 states and the 2.4-percent average for the 19 countries sharing the euro currency.

So take that, Texas. Even though California has higher taxes than Texas, its economy is doing much, much better. California's economy is 60% larger than Texas'. California's companies turned $100 worth of sales into $57 of gross profits, a fantastic profit margin. In the US overall $100 worth of sales only returned $49 of profit. None of the Group of Seven highly industrialized nations could beat California’s annual 3 percent growth rate in the most recent period for which such statistics are comparable, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Even though California is carrying the rest of the nation economically, despite high taxes and regulations, most of this wealth generated is not in what you might call bread and butter industries. So what if the movie, The Avengers, grossed a billion dollars. It could be argued that that billion dollars might have been better spent by consumers who wasted their money on it. Instead they could have paid on their mortgage or student loan debts. All that money and profit margins that are being generated are going mostly to Silicon Valley - Facebook, Apple, Qualcomm, Lyft and Uber. Most of the jobs being created are for low level barista, waitress and bartender jobs. Still you can't argue with California's success.

 

Off the Top of My Head

Medicare for All: It's Time Has Come

by John Lawrence, February 14, 2019

California Governor Gavin Newsom is moving California towards a Medicare for All, single payer health care system at least for residents of the state. Many other politicians such as Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Elzabeth Warren and others are calling for the same thing at the Federal level. Of course, the reactionary Trump administration is dead set against it. They want "freedom" for pharmaceutical corporations to keep gouging their customers. They don't want "socialism" when every other industrialized and most non-industrialized countries already have a single payer system. They say it would cost too much. Well how do other countries do it for half the price of the American system and twice as good outcomes? Thirty-two of the thirty-three developed nations have universal health care, with the United States being the lone exception.

The LA Times reported:

Gavin Newsom backed an assortment of ambitious and expensive programs as he campaigned for governor, none more so than the idea of converting the state to a single-payer healthcare system. On his first day in office Monday, Newsom reaffirmed that goal, but set the state on a more measured — and far more achievable — path toward insuring all Californians.

The most dramatic step Newsom took was also the one least likely to bear fruit: He signed a letter asking the federal government’s permission to mingle federal dollars (such as funding for Medicare, Medicaid and veterans health benefits) and state funds into a single-payer system, replacing the various public and private insurance programs with one run by Sacramento. The chances of the Trump administration signing on to such a plan seem more remote than the most distant star in the Milky Way.

Many other state Governors are working their way toward a single payer system. As usual local and state politicians are leading the way while the sclerotic, antiquated Federal government can do nothing but fund a trillion dollar defense establishment and be at the mercy of corporate lobbyists. People are finding out that the vaunted Trump tax cuts caused their taxes to go up in many cases because it took away the deduction for state and local taxes. They're also finding out that it was mainly a giveaway to the rich while running the country into even more debt.

Politico reports:

Gov. Gavin Newsom wants California to be the first state to offer Medicaid to undocumented adults. Gov. Jared Polis wants Colorado to pioneer a multi-state single-payer system. And in Minnesota, Gov. Tim Walz wants residents to be able to buy into Medicaid.

These radical moves by newly elected liberal governors reveal a new movement among Democrats on health care in advance of the 2020 presidential campaign to see just how far the party will go in pushing universal health care. ...

New Mexico legislators plan to introduce a Medicaid buy-in bill soon after their new session begins next week. Colorado, Connecticut, Nevada, Illinois and Minnesota are all expected to debate versions of a the idea, which would use state money to subsidize a Medicaid-like plan for those who cannot afford health insurance. Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, a prospective 2020 presidential candidate, announced plans for a public option that could lower premiums on the state's Obamacare exchange.

Newsom, who’s also thought to have eventual national aspirations, said he also wants an individual mandate with revenues used to expand Obamacare subsidies, a step that a few other Democratic-led states have taken. And in New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced he’d devote at least $100 million to increase access to public hospitals and primary care clinics.

Things are happening, folks. Mainstream politicians are getting aboard the Medicare for All express. Woo Hoo! Let's prepare the trash can to accept the antiquated, addlepated, superannuated, moribund, obsolete, debilitated Republican party along with its red state base of adoring Trumpster fans and get on with the Green New Deal, a plan for a revitalized America in the 21st century. Meanwhile, I count myself lucky to be a Californian.

Off the Top of My Head

California's Goal to Get Gas Guzzlers Off Roads Conflicts With Consumer Tastes

by John Lawrence, January 26, 2019

California has set tailpipe emissions standards higher than required by the Federal government. In general the EPA sets uniform standards that all states are required to meet. California's standards are stricter, however, and up till now, Congress has granted California a waiver to depart from the uniform EPA standards required of all states. Several other states have followed California's lead voluntarily. This is what the Trump administration is trying to do away with - California's stricter standards. Since California's market is so large, many auto and light truck manufacturers have only produced cars and light trucks that meet California standards.

Meanwhile GM is discontinuing many sedan models as consumer tastes gravitate to pickup trucks and large SUVs which can't by their very nature get as good gas mileage as sedans. They have even discontinued the Volt, a plug in hybrid model that gets 53 mpg. It's also discontinuing the Cruze, the Impala, the Buick LaCrosse and the Cadillac CT6. So while consumer tastes are running towards fuel inefficient gas guzzlers which emit more greenhouse gasses (GHGs), California is requiring more fuel efficient non-gas guzzlers to be sold.

In 1990, the Clean Air Act was amended to define federal emissions standards that took full effect in model-year 1996. These were known as Tier 1 standards. Today Tier 2 standards are in effect. Tier 2 slashes allowable emissions to much lower levels than Tier 1, but more significantly it requires that vans, pickups and large SUVs be subject to the same emissions regulations as passenger cars. California's Air Resources Board (CARB) is even more stringent than Tier 2. However, the fly in the ointment here, in addition to Trump's wanting to not let California have more stringent regulations than the Federal government, is that other states can sell SUVs and pickup trucks that don't meet California's standards. Those vehicles can be bought in other states and driven to California. In this way California could end up with as many high polluting vehicles on the road as any other state.

In order to combat global warming the Federal government needs to set stricter standards for car and truck sales in every state, effectively adopting California standards at the national level. This will not happen under a Republican administration that doesn't even believe in global warming. However, if the Democrats are successful in 2020 in getting a Democratic President and Senate in addition to the House, a Green New Deal could be ushered in so that an EPA director could be appointed who would carry out the stricter standards. For our grandchildren's sake, let's hope so.

Off the Top of My Head

Trump Tries to Tell California What to Do

by John Lawrence, January 14, 2019

The oceans are getting hotter than we thought. This has dire consequences for extreme weather as warmer oceans mean more violent hurricanes and typhoons. The ocean has absorbed a lot of the excess heat in the atmosphere caused by greenhouse gasses, but it can only do so much before it reaches its limit. Warmer oceans also mean faster melting of the arctic and antarctic ice sheets, and that means more sea level rise. New York City, Miami, London and Tokyo could be underwater in a few years. They already have huge flooding problems when tides are high or from storm surges.

The New York Times reported:

A new analysis, published Thursday in the journal Science, found that the oceans are heating up 40 percent faster on average than a United Nations panel estimated five years ago. The researchers also concluded that ocean temperatures have broken records for several straight years.

“2018 is going to be the warmest year on record for the Earth’s oceans,” said Zeke Hausfather, an energy systems analyst at the independent climate research group Berkeley Earth and an author of the study. “As 2017 was the warmest year, and 2016 was the warmest year.”

As the planet has warmed, the oceans have provided a critical buffer. They have slowed the effects of climate change by absorbing 93 percent of the heat trapped by the greenhouse gases humans pump into the atmosphere.

“If the ocean wasn’t absorbing as much heat, the surface of the land would heat up much faster than it is right now,” said Malin L. Pinsky, an associate professor in the department of ecology, evolution and natural resources at Rutgers University. “In fact, the ocean is saving us from massive warming right now.”

But the surging water temperatures are already killing off marine ecosystems, raising sea levels and making hurricanes more destructive.

The US as a nation has ceded leadership on this issue to California which is doing its best to curb climate change despite the Trump administration's doing its best to stand in its way. California has set a goal to reduce the state's greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 and to 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. The Air Resources Board is responsible for implementing the California Global Warming Solutions Act (AB32) in order to meet the 2020 emission reduction goal. California wants to drastically reduce tailpipe emissions from cars and trucks, and the Trump administration is fighting them to not do that. California has sued the Trump administration over its efforts to limit California's ability to set tailpipe emission standards for cars within its own state. State's rights, anyone?

The Sacramento Bee reported:

The Trump plan is also a direct assault of sorts on California’s unique ability to set stricter-than-the-nation guidelines on air pollution, as spelled out in the 1973 federal Clean Air Act. The Trump administration has said it wants to revoke California’s authority.

The Trump plan is also a direct assault of sorts on California’s unique ability to set stricter-than-the-nation guidelines on air pollution, as spelled out in the 1973 federal Clean Air Act. The Trump administration has said it wants to revoke California’s authority.

It also wants to thwart California’s “advanced clean car” regulations, which will require automakers to dramatically increase sales of electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids in the state, from about 420,000 on the road today to 1 million in 2025.

California officials said they’re ready to defend the state’s authority to impose strict limitations on carbon emissions.

As things stand now, the plan would reduce tailpipe emissions by one third over the next seven years. That would also increase average fuel economy from 35 miles per gallon to more than 54 mpg; as a practical matter, building lighter cars with better gas mileage is the most effective way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

But in August, the Trump administration said it would freeze those standards at 37 mpg. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says the relaxed rules will save new-car buyers an average of $1,850 per vehicle. But California Attorney General Xavier Becerra said the stricter rules would more than pay for themselves through improved fuel mileage; he argued that purchasers would save $1,620 over the life of their vehicle.

Makes sense, right? If you get 50 mpg instead of 20 mpg, wouldn't you be willing to pay a little more for a new car up front? I did. I got a 2018 Toyota Camry hybrid that gets about 50 mpg which saves me a lot on gas. Trump doesn't care about consumers or the environment. He just cares about the quarterly profits of the fossil fuel industry.

 

California wildfires: Camp fire becomes state's deadliest with 42 people killed

 From the Guardian:

 

As more than 8,000 fire crews battle the Camp and Woolsey fires and hotels fill in Chico, residents find refuge in unofficial shelters

Play Video

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 California wildfires: rescuers search for victims as winds fuel flames – video

 The Camp fire has become the most destructive wildfire in California history, incinerating the town of Paradise in the northern part of the state. It is also among the deadliest, with at least 29 killed, and it has displaced more than 50,000 people.

The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said on Monday the fire had grown by three sq miles to 177 sq miles and was 25% contained.

Two people have also died in the Woolsey fire, a major blaze around Los Angeles, bringing total deaths in the state to 31. On Monday officials said that fire had burned 91,572 acres and destroyed 370 structures. It was 20% contained. On Sunday evening, some neighborhoods allowed evacuees back in and the US 101 highway west of LA was reopened.

Statewide, 150,000 people have been displaced and more than 8,000 fire crews are deployed. Authorities have said 228 people are unaccounted for. High winds and dry conditions threaten more areas through the rest of the week, fire officials warned.

Around Paradise, about 1,300 people have found refuge at evacuation shelters, according to a Cal Fire spokesman, Steve Kaufman, a total which includes several shelters in Butte county and some in Sutter, Glenn and Plumas counties. But that’s only a fraction of the total displaced from Paradise, Magalia, Concow and other towns in the Sierra foothills.

Many converged on Chico, a city of about 90,000 just 20 minutes from Paradise. Hotels in Chico are at capacity with fire evacuees and some, but not all, shelters are full. Others stayed with friends and family or even in their cars, eager to remain close enough to return home at a moment’s notice, even though that could be months away.

A Walmart in Chico has become an unofficial refugee camp for those displaced by the blaze. On Sunday, more than a dozen tents lined an empty field next to the store, while the parking lot was filled day and night with trailers and cars stuffed with belongings – toys, pillows and family photos.

Though without some of the comforts of a traditional shelter, the fire refugees in the parking lot were not forgotten. Local food truck owners were there to provide free food and church groups from around the state cooked and distributed meals. Chico residents provided clothes, toys and gear, free of charge.

Evacuees said they couldn’t find space at a nearby shelter, didn’t want to part from their animals or didn’t feel comfortable at a shelter.

At this unofficial evacuation center, tales of generosity by those most affected emerged. Tammy Mezera and her friend Daryl Merritt spent three nights sleeping in a tent outside the store after the fire forced them to run for their lives. When they found out a neighbor, Matthew Flanagan, had slept under a taco truck, they gave him the extra space in their tent.

“It’s like an instant family,” Mezera said, petting her dog. “We’re all taking care of each other.”

The three made friends with strangers like Andrew Duran, who sleeps just outside their tent in a sleeping bag. And despite the darkness and loss, they showed endless generosity toward one another. Eating breakfast together on Sunday morning, they shared a few laughs, dancing to Bill Withers’ Lean on Me.

It’s the kind of coming together the community will need, Mezera said, after more than 6,400 homes were lost.

Meanwhile, as firefighters and law enforcement seek to protect the town and its citizens from the deadly blaze, they faced the loss of their own homes. The fire destroyed the homes of 17 Paradise police officers, Chief Eric Reinbold said. None of the officers missed a day of work since the fire began, he added.

At least 38 firefighters battling the blaze lost their homes, said Tim Aboudara, the International Association of Fire Fighters state service representative. That number was expected to grow.

The association was working with the CDF Firefighters Benevolent Foundation and the California Professional Firefighters and to assist those firefighters and their families. Several had already been placed into temporary housing, Aboudara said.

Along with the loss of their own homes, many firefighters are devastated they were unable to stop the rapid spread of the fire before it overtook the town of Paradise, Aboudara said.

“Our job is to put the fire out and we couldn’t stop that,” Aboudara said. “There was nothing we could do.”

No long-term plans to house evacuees, who may not be allowed to return home for months, have been announced, but Congressman Doug LaMalfa said on Sunday he expects a federal disaster declaration from the White House within the coming days, the subject of appeals by the governor, Jerry Brown.

“This is truly a tragedy that all Californians can understand and respond to,” Brown told reporters on Sunday. “It’s a time to pull together and work through these tragedies.”

Once federal aid is approved, Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) will come to the area to begin working with local residents and business owners on recovery.

Climate conference shows divide among Democrats over how to counter global warming

From the Washington Post-The Energy 202:

Climate conference shows divide among Democrats over how to counter global warming

BY DINO GRANDONI

THE LIGHTBULB

Members of the group 1000 Grandmothers protest outside the Moscone Center in San Francisco where the Global Climate Action Summit is being held, on Thursday, Sept. 13, 2018. The group, which says it is made up of elder women activists working to address the climate crisis, chanted "Listen to your Grandma, no more fracking!" (AP Photo/Juliet Williams)

SAN FRANCISCO — The organizers of a climate-change conference here in California wanted their three-day summit to be a repudiation of President Trump. And during many speeches, and commitments from cities and companies to reduce their impact on the environment, it was. 

But at other times both in and outside the convention center in San Francisco, activists protested against the current Democratic approach. The clash marked a high-profile schism between the middle- and far-left segments of the Democratic coalition about how forcefully to address climate change. 

The event was set up to show how the private sector and local governments are pressing ahead to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions even as the president promises to pull the United States out of the landmark Paris climate agreement.

The Global Climate Action Summit was organized by the state's Democratic governor, Jerry Brown, who just days earlier signed a bill committing California to getting 100 percent of its electricity from carbon-free sources by 2045. He followed that up with an even more ambitious mandate, outlined in an executive order, to decarbonize California's entire economy by that year too. And then on Thursday, he signed a bevy of 16 bills attempting to reduce the carbon footprint of California's many automobiles by putting more electric cars on the road.

The climate summit saw a scattershot of plans and commitments by other states, cities and companies eager to push ahead on problems they believe Trump has turned his back on. Groups and companies announced plans on everything from rain forests to electric car charging stations.

Twelve cities, including Tokyo and Seoul, joined an initiative to slash emissions in city centers, making room on the roads for electric car fleets. And New York City announced it will invest $4 billion in pension funds for climate change initiatives in the next three years, doubling current investments. On the industry side, LeasePlan, a Dutch company that is one of the biggest fleet providers in world with 1.8 million vehicles, will step up purchases of electric vehicles. So will the French electricity giant EDF Energy, which has about 30,000 vehicles, organizers said.

Many other consumer-facing brands outside of heavy industries like oil and autos made their own moves. Starbucks said it plans to build 10,000 “greener stories” by 2025, attempting to save $50 million in utility costs over the next decade. Food-and-drink giant Unilever said it will certify 150,000 acres of palm oil plantations in Malaysia as sustainable.

California Gov. Jerry Brown walks to the bow of the high-tech battery-operated San Francisco Bay sightseeing boat, Enhydra, for a cruise of San Francisco Bay, where he signed 16 new laws aimed at easing global warming on Thursday in San Francisco. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

It remains to be seem whether that constellation of commitments from cities and companies, none of which are legally binding, turns out to be just a wish list. But many of the more well-traveled attendees of climate conferences were encouraged.

"I've been to a lot of gatherings and conferences related to the climate crisis for many years now, and this is really top-notch," former vice president Al Gore said in an interview. "The nature of the commitments being announced is extremely heartening."

At times, the summit felt like a reunion of officials who served in the Barack Obama and Bill Clinton administrations. (Obama made an appearance, though only via prerecorded video.) 

Yet it was Brown, more than anyone, who cemented his place as one of Trump's chief foes on climate issues by hosting the summit and signing the carbon-free electricity bill. The California governor seemed to relish the role. When asked during a press conference how Trump will be remembered, Brown responded: "Liar, criminal, fool. Pick your choice." 

However, for the hundreds of activists outside George R. Moscone Convention Center, Brown was the antagonist. Waving signs addressed to Brown saying "Climate Leaders Don't Drill," many of the protestors wanted the governor to stop the expansion of oil production in California, which last year was the fourth largest producer of crude among U.S. states.

"You need keep-it-in-the-ground commitments," Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International, said in an interview. "People don't know how big oil and gas development is in California."

Broadly, the progressive climate wing wants to see end to the cozy relationship many of elected Democrats have with corporations.

That message made its way on stage when protesters interrupted a speech by former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg by yelling “our air is not for sale."

Back in front of the microphone, Bloomberg quipped in reply: "Only in America could you have environmentalists protesting an environmental conference."

Steven Mufson contributed to this report.

Warning of More 'Extreme Wildfires' and Coastal Floods, New Report Details 'Apocalyptic Threat' Climate Crisis Poses to California

Published on Tuesday, August 28, 2018 by Common Dreams

"Changes are happening fast, and they're not good changes... We need to rise to the challenge."

by Jessica Corbett, staff writer

 

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A California resident watched a wildfire from a roof. (Photo: David McNew/Getty Images)

Ahead of the Global Climate Action Summit that California Gov. Jerry Brown will host in San Francisco in September, the state has released a comprehensive climate report that warns of—as the Democratic governor put it on Twitter—"the apocalyptic threat of irreversible climate change."

In California, facts and science still matter. These findings are profoundly serious and will continue to guide us as we confront the apocalyptic threat of irreversible climate change. https://t.co/a8XjR4V6sC

— Jerry Brown (@JerryBrownGov) August 27, 2018

California's Fourth Climate Change Assessment (pdf) was developed by state agencies and researchers to guide "effective and integrated action to safeguard California" from the mounting threats posed by the global crisis. It draws from more that 40 peer-reviewed studies to outline expected economic and public health impacts—billions of dollars in damage as well as "earlier death and worsening illnesses" among residents—based on climate projections, which include:

• temperature increases coupled with more dangerous heat waves and droughts, which most dramatically affect "low-income households, people of color, and communities already burdened with environmental pollution";
• more intense rain events and sea-level rise, causing costly inland and coastal flooding that could wipe out many of the state's beaches and waterfront properties;
• less snow that melts more quickly, which will impact water supply; and
• more "extreme wildfires" that destroy greater swaths of land.

The state is currently battling increasingly devastating wildfires that scientists have said are exacerbated by the global climate crisis. One model highlighted in the report warns that if high greenhouse gas emissions continue, California could see a 77 percent increase in the area destroyed by wildfires by the end of this century. Although President Donald Trump announced last year that he was bailing on the Paris agreement, Brown has committed to working toward reaching the global accord's emissions reduction goals.

"The basic message is that changes are happening fast, and they're not good changes. We need to rise to the challenge."
—Robert Weisenmiller, California Energy Commission

 

While the report forecasts a frightening future for California—the world's fifth-largest economy—it also includes proposed actions that elected officials can take to manage the growing dangers of the changing climate.

As California Energy Commission Chairman Robert Weisenmiller told the Guardian: "The good news is that it's not 'here's the dire impact,' but 'here's some ways to mitigate the dire impacts.' It should give people some hope."

"The basic message is that changes are happening fast, and they're not good changes," he concluded in remarks to the San Francisco Chornicle. "We need to rise to the challenge."

State lawmakers are currently considering the "100 Percent Clean Energy Act," or Senate Bill 100, which would force utilities to fully shift to all renewable energy by 2045. Danny Cullenward, policy director at climate advocacy group Near Zero and a researcher with the Carnegie Institution for Science, told InsideClimate News, "If that passes, it would be the single most transformative climate policy in the history of North America."

Despite positioning himself as a climate leader—especially compared with the fossil fuel-friendly agenda of Trump—Brown has been criticized by many for a set of energy policies that ultimately do not match his lofty rhetoric.

Last week, signaling to the upcoming summit and Brown's stated commitment to tackling the climate crisis, Reps. Ro Khanna and Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) sent the governor a letter urging him to end permitting for all new fossil fuel projects and establish a "just transition" to renewable energy—requests that were made by hundreds of groups that sent the governor a similar letter in April as part of the Brown's Last Chance campaign.

Following the federal lawmakers' letter, a pair of Bay Area leaders—Benicia Mayor Elizabeth Patterson and Richmond Vice Mayor Melvin Willis—echoed that call in a open letter published by the Chronicle, emphasizing that both of their communities "face the toxic consequences of California's complicity in one of the most toxic, polluting, dangerous industries on Earth and the primary driver of climate change: the oil and gas industry."

As Andy Rowell, writing for Oil Change International, argued on Tuesday, Brown "cannot warn of an apocalyptic threat of climate change and be a force for carbonization at the same time by carrying on drilling. He is running out of time to be a true climate leader. This really is Brown's last chance."

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What Global Warming Portends for California

Heat waves will grow more severe and persistent, shortening the lives of thousands of Californians. Wildfires will burn more of the state’s forests. The ocean will rise higher and faster, exposing California to billions in damage along the coast. These are some of the threats California will face from climate change in coming decades, according to a new statewide assessment. The projections come as Californians contend with destructive wildfires, brutal heat spells and record ocean temperatures that scientists say have the fingerprints of global warming. Los Angeles Times

— California’s coastal water temperatures are breaking records as well. And that might be the cause of a massive fish die-off in Malibu. Warming water temperatures can alter the marine food chain in various ways — bringing about toxic algae that make crabs, for example, dangerous to eat. Researchers are also seeing more warm-water animals, like jellyfish and stingrays, off the coast. Los Angeles Times

Off the Top of My Head

The Gotterdammerung of Climate Change

by John Lawrence, August 6, 2018

It's clear that the effects of climate change are happening now and not far off in some distant future. When the whole month of July sees temperatures over 100 degrees F in Fresno and unquenchable forest fires, something's happening now that's different from what's been happening in the past. Yet where is the concerted action to ameliorate the situation? It doesn't exist. In fact the world is pumping more greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere than ever before despite paltry efforts at renewable energy and solarization. Then there are those who would just as soon bring human civilization crashing down around our heads if they can't have their gas guzzlers and NASCAR. They are similar to the attitude of Adolf Hitler when he realized that all was lost: Gotterdammerung which is defined as a collapse (as of a society or regime) marked by catastrophic violence and disorder.

Human civilization is indeed collapsing not just in one country, not just in one hemisphere, but all over the world. We are seeing 1000 year event after 1000 year event until it is clear that these are not 1000 year events but yearly ones. Torrential rain, catastrophic flooding, hurricanes, tornadoes, tornadoes of fire in which the wind speed of the flames exceeds 140 mph. Yet some people including the President of the US do everything in their power not to stop this cascade of events but to exacerbate them. People go on living as if this situation was not a call to action but just another thing to adjust to. Many seek a cooler clime near the ocean when the summer gets really hot inland. They used to call Canadians snowbirds when they went south in the winter. What should we call Arizonans who come to San Diego to escape the 100 degree heat in Phoenix: sunbirds?

What's clear is that this brutal summer is not the end of it. Summers from now on will only get worse. Once temperatures climb above 120 or 130 on a sustained basis, parts of the world will become unbearable. Electric grids will fail as they've already been doing from excessive demand for air conditioning. Tires will melt on the road. The only livable parts of planet earth will be narrow strips along the oceans and regions near the North and South poles or in the mountains. Get ready people. Climate change is already here, and it will only get worse in terms of extreme weather.

 

California's Destructive Summer Brings Blunt Talk About Climate Change

From the LA Times:

by RONG-GONG LIN II and JAVIER PANZAR, AUG 05, 2018

Facing temperatures in the 90s, Guillermo Salazar of Reseda takes a break from mountain biking at San Vicente Mountain Park in Los Angeles last month. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

At Scripps Pier in San Diego, the surface water reached the highest temperature in 102 years of records, 78.8 degrees.

Palm Springs had its warmest July on record, with an average of 97.4 degrees. Death Valley experienced its hottest month on record, with the average temperature hitting 108.1. Park rangers said the heat was too much for some typically hardy birds that died in the broiling conditions.

Across California, the nighttime brought little relief, recording the highest minimum temperature statewide of any month since 1895, rising to 64.9.

California has been getting hotter for some time, but July was in a league of its own. The intense heat fueled fires across the state, from San Diego County to Redding, that have burned more than 1,000 homes and killed eight. It brought heat waves that overwhelmed electrical systems, leaving swaths of Los Angeles without power for days.

Moreover, the extreme conditions — capping years of trends heading in this direction — have caused scientists and policymakers to speak more openly and emphatically about what is causing this dramatic shift.

A decade ago, some scientists would warn against making broad conclusions linking an extraordinary heat wave to global warming. But the pace of heat records being broken in California in recent years is leading more scientists here to assertively link climate change to unrelenting heat that is only expected to worsen as humans continue putting greenhouse gases in the air.

“In the past, it would just be kind of once in a while — the odd year where you be really warm,” state climatologist Michael Anderson said.

But the last five years have been among the hottest in 124 years of record keeping, Anderson said.

“That’s definitely an indication that the world is warming, and things are starting to change,” said Anderson, who manages the California Department of Water Resources’ state climate program. “We’re starting to see things where it’s different. It’s setting the narrative of climate change.”

Off the Top of My Head

Trump Wants to Deny California the Right to Set its Own Tailpipe Emission Standards

by John Lawrence, August 4, 2018

Trump wants more pollution for gas guzzling cars. The Federal government is lowering tailpipe emission standards for the whole nation. At the same time they are in the process of denying California the right to have higher standards than the rest of the nation. Governor Jerry Brown has vowed to fight. What right does the Federal government have to tell California that it must have more pollution. California has set the standard for lowering pollution and fighting global warming as well it should. The state is burning up from causes related to global warming.

It's all about states' rights. California has the right to join the rest of the civilized world and try and do something about global warming which is caused to a great extent by the pollutants emanating from your car's tailpipe. The carbon dioxide coming out of there is a greenhouse gas. The earth is becoming a greenhouse trapping huge amounts of heat in its atmosphere. The heat is causing massive wildfires in California and elsewhere.  But Trump wants to deny the science and say "full steam ahead with pollution."

Fortune magazine reported:

The tit-for-tat continues between President Trump and the state of California.

On Thursday, the administration proposed freezing vehicle fuel economy requirements at the 2020 level and revoking California’s authority under the Clean Air Act to set more stringent tailpipe emissions rules in the state.

But California, a state that has long prioritized lowering its emissions—even going so far as beating its 2020 emissions target four years early, will not take these changes lying down. California governor Jerry Brown vowed Thursday to “fight this stupidity in every conceivable way possible.”

“For Trump to now destroy a law first enacted at the request of Ronald Reagan five decades ago is a betrayal and an assault on the health of Americans everywhere,” Brown said. “Under his reckless scheme, motorists will pay more at the pump, get worse gas mileage, and breathe dirtier air.”

Since such a huge number of cars are sold in California, car manufacturers have to gear their production to California standards. They could make cheaper, dirtier cars for the rest of the nation, but it is not worth it. That's why Trump wants to insist on California lowering its standards so car manufacturers can lower them for everybody. They then can sell a cheaper, dirtier car.

The article continues:

California has previously sued the Trump administration over its auto policies, and the state announced plans for a new lawsuit following Thursday’s announcement. California attorney general Xavier Becerra announced that he would lead 19 attorneys general in a new lawsuit, saying that “California is about progress and 21st century innovation and technology. We’re not about backsliding.”

“The earth is not flat and climate change is real. Can someone please inform the folks at the White House?” he added.

A number of California lawmakers demonstrated their own intention to combat the administration’s proposal, with Senators Kamala Harris and Dianne Feinstein introducing a resolution in the Senate that would allow California to remain autonomous in its clean air policies. A similar measure was also introduced in the House.

Former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, also condemned the administration’s policy, noting that it was Reagan who had first requested California’s waiver. On Thursday, he tweeted that “this is a stupid policy and no one asked for this,” adding that “if the president thinks he can win this fight, he’s out of his mind.”

So we have a head-in-the-sand stupenagel for a President, and he has brought in other stupenagels to be members of his administration. He's put them at the head of every department. He's hell bent on making America not Great Again, but on the contrary the Laughing Stock of the world. But to some extent we get what we deserve. This is supposedly a democracy after all. If the Democrats ever get control of the government again, let this be a lesson to them. They will have to undo everything Trump has done just like he is endeavoring to undo everything Obama did.

California Fires Directly Linked to Climate Change

From the LA Times:

Where There’s Heat, There’s Fire
In the past, scientists have been reluctant to cite climate change as a major factor in California’s worsening wildfires. Not anymore. Experts in the field say the connection between rising temperatures in California and tinder-dry vegetation is becoming impossible to ignore. “The temperatures have just been almost inexorably warmer all the time,” says UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain, and fires “burn more intensely if the fuels are extremely dry.” The death and destruction this month has only added to California’s worst wildfire year on record, which has left dozens dead since October and more than 10,000 structures lost. Here is the latest.

 

Off the Top of My Head

Lyft and Uber Taking Business Away from Parking Lots and Valet Services

by John Lawrence

First taxis saw their business decrease do to ride sharing services. Now parking lots are empty. Why pay for parking when you can Uber or Lyft to the restaurant or event. Parking in cities has become a nightmare and you pay through the nose. For the same money or less you can have someone drive you there. The San Diego Union-Tribune reported that Ace Parking, the San Diego-based parking giant, has seen a 50% drop in nightclub valet traffic and a 25% drop in restaurant valet traffic. These parking lot owners have made a fortune in the past. Now they're only too willing to sell out their asphalt lots to condo developers that will at least replace all the black top with something more commercially viable. That's why you see high rises sprouting from every parking lot in San Diego with more on the way.

The LA Times reports:

Proper Parking, based in Woodland Hills, has seen a 70% drop in nightclub valet traffic since it started six years ago, said Brandon Helfer, the company’s president. In addition, it has seen a 30% drop in restaurant traffic and a 25% drop at weddings.

“At some nightclubs, we used to park 60 or 70 cars per night,” Helfer said. “It got to the point where we were parking 10 to 20.”

Nightclubs and restaurants, once pillars of the industry, are no longer reliable sources of revenue, Helfer said. In the industry’s heyday, valet companies used to turn such a profit off the gigs, they would pay the venue owners for the right to operate there.

Now the roles have reversed. Those same venues often have to pay the parking companies if they want a valet presence out front.

Helfer’s company is far from the only one affected. Parking expert Casey Wagner, who hosts a National Parking Assn. webinar on the rise of the sharing economy, said the numbers point to ride-hailing services taking a big bite out of the parking, car rental and taxi industries.

Proper Parking — founded in 2012, the year Uber rolled out its services in Los Angeles — was born into a world already familiar with ride-hailing services. It’s openly confronting the change in the industry, finding new ways to profit off its parking services and changing the ones that fail.

So technology is changing the world very rapidly. The interesting thing is that no one has to have a college education to be an Uber or Lyft driver. Now in San Diego there is a third ride sharing service: Bounce. It remains to be seen whether they can compete with the other two. One thing is sure. Nobody need be picked up for drunk driving these days. Even if they drive their own car to the wedding or bar, they can always leave it parked there and Uber or Lyft home, coming back the next day to pick it up. Id they had ride shared in the first place, it wouild have saved them a trip!

 

California Dreaming: Cannabis Cash, Public Banks—and the State’s Own Mini-Fed?

by Ellen Brown, July 3, 2018

from truthdig

A medical marijuana shop at Venice Beach in Los Angeles, Calif. (Adam Jones / CC BY-SA 2.0)

Spurred by the heavily cash-reliant cannabis industry, Los Angeles residents will be the first in the country to vote on a public banking mandate, after the City Council agreed on June 29 to put a measure on the November ballot that would allow the city to form its own bank.

The charter for the nation’s second-largest city currently prohibits the creation of industrial or commercial enterprises by the city without voter approval. The measure, introduced by City Council President Herb Wesson, would allow the city to create a public bank, though federal and state legal hurdles would remain to be cleared.

The bank is also expected to save the city millions, if not billions, of dollars in Wall Street fees and interest paid to bondholders, while injecting new money into the local economy, generating jobs and expanding the tax base. It could respond to the needs of its residents and reinvest in low-income housing, critical infrastructure projects and clean energy.

The push for such a bank comes amid ongoing concerns involving the massive amounts of cash generated by the cannabis business, which was legalized by California’s Proposition 64 in 2016. Wesson has said cannabis has “kind of percolated to the top” of the public bank push, “but it’s not what’s driving” it, citing affordable housing and other key issues. He added the concept of a public bank should be pursued regardless of the cannabis issue.

However, the prospect of millions of dollars in tax revenue is an obvious draw. Los Angeles is the largest cannabis market in the state, with Mayor Eric Garcetti estimating it would bring in $30 million in taxes for the city.

State Board of Equalization member Fiona Ma, who is running for state treasurer, says California’s $8 billion to $20 billion cannabis industry is still operating mostly in cash almost two years after state legalization. She adds that the majority of businesses are operating on the black market without paying taxes. This is in large part because federal law denies them access to the banking system, forcing them to deal only in cash and causing logistical nightmares when paying taxes and transferring money.

Cannabis is still a forbidden Schedule 1 drug under federal law, and the Federal Reserve has refused to give a master account to banks taking cannabis cash. Without a master account, they cannot access Fedwire transfer services, essentially shutting them out of the banking business.

In a surprise move in early June, President Trump announced he “probably will end up supporting” legislation to let states set their own cannabis policy. But Ma says that while that is good news, California cannot wait on the federal government. She and state Sen. Bob Hertzberg, D-Los Angeles, have introduced Senate Bill 930, which would allow state-chartered banks and financial institutions to apply for a special cannabis banking license to accept clients after a rigorous process that follows regulations from the U.S. Treasury Department. The bill cleared a major legislative hurdle when it was approved by the state Senate on May 30.

SB 930 focuses on California state-chartered banks, which can operate under a closed-loop system with private deposit insurance, unlike federally chartered banks. As Ma explained in a May 17 article in the Sacramento Bee:

There are two types of banks—those with federal charters, and banks with California charters. Because cannabis is still considered a Schedule 1 narcotic, we cannot touch federal banking wires. We want state-chartered banks that are protected, regulated and certified under California law, and not required to be under the FDIC.

State income taxes, sales taxes, unemployment, workers’ compensation and property taxes could all be paid through a closed-loop system that takes in revenue from the cannabis industry, but is apart from the federal banking system. … Cannabis businesses could be part of a cashless system similar to Apple Pay, and their money would be insured by a state-licensed institution.

That is a pretty revolutionary idea—a closed-loop California banking system that is independent of the Federal Reserve and the federal system. The provisions of SB 930 would allow only cannabis cash to bypass the federal system, and the bill strictly limits what the checks issued by pot banks can be. But the prospects it opens up are interesting. California is now the fifth-largest economy in the world, with 39 million people. It has the resources for its own cashless “CalPay” or “CalCoin” system that could bypass the federal system altogether.

The Bank of North Dakota, currently the nation’s only state-owned depository bank, has been called a “mini-Fed” for that state. California, with more than 50 times North Dakota’s population, merits its own mini-Fed as well. The Bank of North Dakota partners with local banks to make below-market loans for community purposes, including 2 percent loans for local infrastructure, while at the same time turning a tidy profit for the state. In 2017, it recorded its 14th consecutive year of record profits, with $145.3 million in net earnings and a return on the state’s investment of 17 percent.

It is significant that the proposal for a closed-loop California system is coming from players that have political clout. Ma won the June primary election for state treasurer by a landslide, and the current state treasurer, John Chiang, has been exploring for over a year the possibility of a public bank that could take cannabis cash. Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, the front-runner for governor, also has called for the creation of a public bank. These are not armchair academics but the people who make political decisions for the state, and they have substantial popular support.

Public bank advocacy groups from cities across California have joined to form the California Public Banking Alliance, a coalition to advance legislation that would make it easier to establish municipal banks statewide under a special state charter.

A press release by Public Bank Los Angeles, one of its founding advocacy groups, notes that 15 pieces of legislation for public banks are being explored in the U.S. through municipal committees and state legislators, and more than three dozen public banking movements are growing across the country. San Francisco has created a 16-person Municipal Bank Feasibility Task Force; Seattle and Washington, D.C., have approved $100,000 each for public banking feasibility studies; and Washington state legislators have added nearly $500,000 to their budget to produce a business plan for a public depository bank. New Jersey state legislators, with the backing of Gov. Phil Murphy, have introduced a bill to form a state-owned bank, and GOP and Democratic lawmakers in Michigan have filed a bipartisan bill to create one in that state.

Cities and states are seeking ways to better leverage taxpayer dollars and reinvest them in the needs of local communities. Public banking serves that purpose, providing local determination and the opportunity for socially and environmentally responsible lending and investments. The City Council of Los Angeles is now taking it to the voters, and where California goes, the nation may well follow.

Ellen Brown

Ellen Brown is an attorney, chairman of the Public Banking Institute, and author of twelve books including "Web of Debt" and "The Public Bank Solution."

IN THIS ARTICLE:

ballot measure banking bob hertzberg california cannabis eric garcetti fdicfederal banking regulations federal reserve financial fiona ma gavin newsomherb wesson john chiang los angeles los angeles city council marijuana potpublic banks wall street

Off the Top of My Head

Last Year California Spent $75,560 on Each Prisoner

by John Lawrence, June 16, 2018

The prison industry complex is big business. It costs as much per year per prisoner as it costs for a year of grad school at Stanford or Harvard. These corporations that run prisons are very profitable. But they need a continual flow of gist for the mill. That's where black people come in. A goodly percentage of the prisoners are black. They are guilty of such crimes as driving while black, walking while black and existing while black. It doesn't help that some of them have a chip on their shoulder in the first place and are defiant rather than compliant when approached by the police.

The LA Times reported:

The price for each inmate has doubled since 2005, even as court orders related to overcrowding have reduced the population by about one-quarter. Salaries and benefits for prison guards and medical providers drove much of the increase.

The result is a per-inmate cost that is the nation’s highest — and $2,000 above tuition, fees, room and board, and other expenses to attend Harvard.

Since 2015, California’s per-inmate costs have surged nearly $10,000, or about 13%. New York is a distant second in overall costs at about $69,000.

The prison system has one well paid employee for every two inmates. Really? Is that necessary? While spending that much per prisoner California spends next to nothing on the homeless - poor people that have not committed a crime. California does have a plan to spend $2 billion to build housing for the homeless, but that bill is tied up in court.

The LA Times reports:

Nearly two years after California lawmakers approved a $2-billion bond to help finance new housing for the state's homeless, not a penny has been spent, and it's unclear when any of the money will be available.

The dollars are tied up in court as a Sacramento attorney challenges the state's plan to pay off that debt with money California voters approved in 2004 for mental health services. The funding, the attorney contends, should not be diverted from treatment programs, even if the mentally ill benefit from the housing. State housing officials said they don't know how long the litigation will take to resolve.

So taxpayers don't mind spending $75,000 a year per prisoner, but balk at spending $2 billion to build housing for the homeless. What did they do to deserve free housing? The prisoners did something to deserve theirs. They committed a crime. We will spend unlimited amounts on criminals, but hardly anything to house the homeless. What's wrong with this picture? Do the homeless have to commit crimes in order to get housing, medical care and 3 squares a day?

How California Could Get Its Money Out of Wall Street

by Ellen Brown, June 6, 2018 from Yes Magazine

The world’s fifth largest economy could keep the money in a state-owned bank to fund local infrastructure.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ellen Brown posted Jun 06, 2018

California needs to spend more than $700 billion on infrastructure over the next decade. Where will this money come from? The $1.5 trillion infrastructure initiative unveiled by President Trump in February includes only $200 billion in federal funding for infrastructure projects across the U.S., and less than that after factoring in the billions in tax cuts in infrastructure-related projects.

The rest is to come from cities, states, private investors, and public-private partnerships. And since city and state coffers are depleted, that chiefly means private investors and PPPs, which have a shady history at best.

At the same time, California has over $700 billion parked in private banks earning minimal interest, private equity funds that contributed to the affordable housing crisis, and “shadow banks”—unregulated financial institutions of the sort that caused the banking collapse of 2008. If California had a public infrastructure bank chartered to take deposits, some of these funds could be used to generate credit for the state while remaining safely on deposit in the bank.

California’s $700 billion is in funds of various sorts tucked around the state, including $500 billion in CalPERS and CalSTRS, the state’s massive public pension funds. These pools of money are restricted in how they can be spent and are either sitting in banks drawing a modest interest or invested with Wall Street asset managers and private equity funds. Those funds are not obligated to invest the money in California, and are vulnerable to losses from Wall Street’s tendency to overextend itself into risky investments. In 2009, for example, CalPERS and CalSTRS reported almost $100 billion in losses from investments gone awry.

 

In 2017, CalSTRS allocated $6.1 billion to private equity funds, real estate managers, and co-investments, including $400 million to a real estate fund managed by Blackstone Group, the world’s largest private equity firm, notorious for buying up distressed properties after the 2008 housing market collapse. Another $200 million was given to BlackRock, the world’s largest shadow bank.

CalPERS is now in talks with BlackRock over management of its $26 billion private equity fund, with discretion to invest that money as it sees fit. But that decision would cost the state substantial sums in fees (management fees for CalPERS made up 14 percent of private equity profits in 2016), and there are risks. In 2009, BlackRock defaulted on a New York real estate project that left CalPERS $500 million in the hole. There are also potential conflicts of interest, as BlackRock or its managers have controlling interests in companies that could be steered into deals with the state.

In 2015, the company was fined $12 million by the SEC for that sort of conflict; and in 2015, it was fined $3.5 million for providing flawed data to German regulators. BlackRock also invests clients’ money in companies like oil company Exxon and food and beverage company Nestle, which have been criticized for not serving California’s interests and exploiting state resources.

California public entities also have $2.8 billion invested in CalTRUST, a money market fund managed by BlackRock. Money market funds remain unregulated, although it was a run on money market funds that triggered the 2008 credit crisis.

The infrastructure bank option

There is another alternative. California’s pools of idle funds can’t be spent because they must be saved for a “rainy day” or for future pension fund payouts; but they could be deposited or invested in a publicly owned bank, where they could form the deposit base for infrastructure loans. California is now the fifth largest economy in the world, trailing only Germany, Japan, China, and the United States. Germany, China, and other Asian countries are addressing their infrastructure challenges through public infrastructure banks that leverage pools of funds into loans for needed construction.

China not only has its own China Infrastructure Bank, but also has established the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, whose members include many Asian and Middle Eastern countries, including Australia, New Zealand, and Saudi Arabia. Both banks are helping to fund China’s trillion-dollar “One Belt One Road” infrastructure initiative.

Germany has an infrastructure bank called KfW which is larger than the World Bank and had assets of $600 billion in 2016. Along with the public Sparkassen banks, KfW has funded Germany’s green energy revolution. Renewables generated 41 percent of the country’s electricity in 2017, up from 6 percent in 2000, earning the country the title “the world’s first major green energy economy.” Public banks provided over 72 percent of the financing for this transition.

The IBank could be expanded to address California’s infrastructure needs.

As for California, it already has an infrastructure bank: the California Infrastructure and Development Bank, also known as IBank. But the IBank is a “bank” in name only. It cannot take deposits or leverage capital into loans. What IBank does have is the ability to save the state a lot of money. Financing infrastructure through the municipal bond market accounts for half the cost of infrastructuredue to the debt load involved.

One example where this is made clear is with Proposition 68, a statewide ballot measure that voters approved in the June 5 primary election which authorizes $4.1 billion in bonds for parks, environmental, and flood protection programs. The true cost of the measure is $200 million per year over 40 years in additional interest, bringing the total to $8 billion. California’s IBank, which funds infrastructure at 3 percent, could finance the same bill over 30 years for $2.1 billion—a nearly 50 percent reduction.

That’s if it were adequately capitalized, but IBank is seriously underfunded because the California Department of Finance returned over half of its allotted funds to the General Fund to repair the state’s budget after the dot-com market collapse in 2001. However, IBank has 20 years’ experience in making prudent infrastructure loans at below municipal bond rates, and its clients are limited to municipal governments and other public entities, making them safe bets underwritten by their local tax bases. The IBank could be expanded to address California’s infrastructure needs, drawing deposits and capital from its many pools of idle funds across the state and reducing costs significantly.

A better use for pension money

In an illuminating 2017 paper for University of California, Berkeley’s Haas Institute titled “Funding Public Pensions,” policy consultant Tom Sgouros showed that the push to put pension fund money into risky high-yield investments comes from a misguided application of accounting rules.

The error results from treating governments like private companies that can be liquidated out of existence. He argues that public pension funds can be safely operated on a pay-as-you-go basis, just as they were for 50 years before the 1980s. Payments to pensioners can be guaranteed by the state, which legally cannot go bankrupt and has a perpetual tax base to draw on.

A public bank can keep the state’s own funds at home working for the state.

That accounting change would take the pressure off the pension boards and free up hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer funds. Some portion of that money could then be deposited in publicly owned banks, which in turn could generate the low-cost credit needed to fund the infrastructure and services that taxpayers expect from their governments.

Note that these deposits would not be spent. Pension funds, rainy day funds, and other pools of government money can provide the liquidity for loans while remaining on deposit in the bank, available for withdrawal on demand by the government depositor.

Even mainstream economists now acknowledge that banks do not lend their deposits but actually create deposits when they make loans. The bank borrows as needed to cover withdrawals, but not all funds are withdrawn at once. And a government bank can borrow its own deposits much more cheaply than local governments can borrow on the bond market. Through their own public bank, government entities can thus effectively borrow at bankers’ rates plus operating costs, cutting out go-betweens.

Unlike borrowing through bonds, which merely recirculate existing funds, borrowing from a bank creates new money, which will stimulate economic growth and come back to the state in the form of new taxes and pension premiums. A working paper published by the San Francisco Federal Reserve in 2012 found that one dollar invested in infrastructure generates at least two dollars in GSP (state GDP), and roughly four times more than average during economic downturns.

A public bank can keep the state’s own funds at home working for the state. By expanding California’s existing infrastructure bank into a chartered bank authorized to take deposits of public money, the state can leverage its existing funds into municipal loans to meet its infrastructure needs while the funds remain safely on deposit in the bank.

This article was originally published on Truthdig.com and has been edited and condensed for YES! Magazine.

Finding a Job in California

With employers expecting to hire 4 percent more graduates from the Class of 2018 than in the previous year, the personal-finance website WalletHub today released its report on 2018’s Best & Worst States for Jobs. To ease the process of finding employment for job seekers, WalletHub compared the 50 states across 29 key indicators of job-market strength, opportunity and economic vitality. The data set ranges from employment growth to median annual income to average commute time.   Finding a Job in California (1=Best; 25=Avg.)  40th – Job Opportunities 16th – Employment Growth 42nd – Monthly Average Starting Salary 38th – Unemployment Rate 46th – Median Annual Income (Adjusted for Cost of Living) 7th – Avg. Length of Work Week (in Hours) 45th – Avg. Commute Time (in Minutes) 12th – Job Satisfaction For the full report, please visit: https://wallethub.com/edu/best-states-for-jobs/35641/

 

Off the Top of My Head

California's Requirement to Solarize New Houses Will Create Need for Advanced Roofing and Siding Materials

by John Lawrence, May 13, 2018

Within two years all California new house construction will be solarized. Instead of solar panels being retrofitted on old houses though, these new houses will have solar built into roofing shingles, tiles and even perhaps in siding. Tesla offers a new roofing material with solar built in. It looks just like a regular roof but without the panels attached to the roof.Tesla warranties the roof tiles for Infinity, or the lifetime of your house, whichever comes first. Their website says, "Solar Roof complements your home’s architecture while turning sunlight into electricity. With an integrated Powerwall battery, energy collected during the day is stored and made available any time, effectively turning your home into a personal utility." Essentially the solar cells are invisible and indestructible. They have the highest ratings for wind, hail and fire.

The roof tiles integrate with a battery to store energy during the day. There are also tax credits which will bring down the cost, and the whole thing can be financed with the mortgage for the house. Why would anyone not install this kind of roofing material on a new house? The new roof will be offered in four designs: Tuscan glass tile, slate glass tile, textured glass tile and smooth glass tile. The house will integrate with the existing power grid but will keep the power on during grid outages.

Energysage reports:

If you’ve found it difficult to stay up to date on the future of Tesla Motors and SolarCity in recent months, you are not alone. Numerous industries (solar, electric vehicles, and ridesharing, to name a few) worldwide are starting to feel the impact of a merger that could significantly alter growth plans for manufacturers and executives across the globe. Now the concept of an integrated solar glass shingle – the Tesla solar tile – is on everyone’s mind. 

We had already heard about Tesla’s plans for total clean energy integration – a one step carbon reduction process that involves pairing solar panels with your Tesla electric vehicle. Now for the latest: with Tesla’s highly anticipated solar roofing product, we’ve seen the future of PV roofing and the future of Tesla. One thing is certain: building-integrated photovoltaics (BIPV) are going to be a big part of Tesla Motors – or should we say Tesla Energy’s – future.

Tesla started accepting deposits to reserve solar roof tiles in May 2017. In January 2018, the company announced that they are ramping up production of the roof product at their Buffalo Gigafactory. Then in mid March, they completed some of the first initial installations for customers at the top of their wait list in the California area approximately six months after their initial estimate.

Elon Musk revealed in August 2017 that he and another Tesla executive have installed the roof on their respective properties already. While the company has stated that they have begun installations for their wait list, it’s unclear when Tesla will be installing the roof at a national, mass market scale. Some estimates suggest large-scale installation won’t start until mid-2018 or later.

To give prospective solar roof customers more information, Tesla launched a calculator that provides estimates for its solar roof. The company has also released basic pricing information: customers can expect to pay around $21.85 per square foot for their solar roof.

That's about four times as much per square foot, but with energy savings and tax deductions and the fact that the whole thing is integrated into the cost of the new construction, it should definitely be worth it. The esthetics of the house will also be greatly enhanced which will be much welcomed by architects.

The article goes on:

Many stakeholders recognize that solar needs to be rebranded as an aesthetic and technical improvement that could be a part of a home renovation rather than a hefty module that is nailed onto your rooftop. That sentiment was emphasized in Elon Musk’s October 2016 launch of Tesla’s new roofing product. The cleantech company aims to bring solar further into the mainstream by removing any sort of visual setback that homeowners may fear. 

“I think there’s quite a radical difference between having solar panels on your roof that actually make your house look better versus ones that do not, I think it’s going to be a night-and-day difference,” said Musk in a statement before the product’s official launch. Two months later he unveiled the solar roof, using a crowded, suburban event in California to demonstrate that his panel design is so seamlessly integrated that an entire audience of press needed to be told the house they were looking at even had solar installed. 

Welcome to the future, California is already the leader for solarized houses in the nation with over a million houses solarized. Other companies besides Tesla are also getting into the business. Costs should come down as research and development proceeds. The new law passed by the state will make the number of solarized houses skyrocket. I predict that architects will incorporate these new roofing products into their designs in innovative ways thus helping to develop this industry in a quick way.

Off the Top of My Head

California to Require All New Homes to be Built with Solar

by John Lawrence, May 11, 2018

California is serious about fighting global warming even if the US under Trump isn't. All new homes will have to be built with solar panels within two years. That is a remarkable achievement and a spit in the face to Trump and his fossil fuel loving boys. While the US Federal government is doing everything it can to sell more gas and oil and pollute the atmosphere even more, California is becoming the leader in the effort to stop global warming. Trump has even threatened to sue California over its strict standards on tailpipe emissions. The car manufacturers don't want to have to build more electric cars. California is demanding that they do just that if they want to sell them in California.

In homes and cars California is leading the way in solarization and electrification. You see more hybrid and plug-in hybrid cars on the road today. It's almost mandatory for taxis, Lyft and Uber drivers to drive hybrids or spend a fortune on gas with conventional gas powered vehicles. There are even a fair number of Teslas on the road which consume no gas and emit no carbon dioxide or other pollutants from their tail pipes. These are very promising developments. They show the rest of the world that, even though the US at the Federal level is going backward and retrogressing, some states within the US are moving forward and are more in sync with progressive forces, goals and ideals in the rest of the world.

The new requirement will add cost to the purchase of a new home, but the home buyers will save enormously on their energy bills. California energy companies such as San Diego Gas and Electric, Pacific Gas and Electric and Southern California Edison are not happy. Their revenues will decline. Revenues for Shell, Exxon and Chevron will also decline, but gas and electric companies will continue to make big bucks in the red states where they glorify the internal combustion engine and would not be caught dead driving a Prius.

The New York Times reported:

The new requirement, to take effect in two years, brings solar power into the mainstream in a way it has never been until now. It will add thousands of dollars to the cost of home when a shortage of affordable housing is one of California’s most pressing issues.

That made the relative ease of its approval — in a unanimous vote by the five-member California Energy Commission before a standing-room crowd, with little debate — all the more remarkable.

“This adoption of these standards represents a quantum leap,” Bob Raymer, senior engineer for the California Building Industry Association, said during the public comments before the vote. “You can bet every state will be watching to see what happens.”

Several California cities have required that some new buildings include solar power, or have made commitments to 100 percent clean energy through various sources. New Jersey, Massachusetts and Washington, D.C., have also considered legislation to require that new buildings be solar-ready, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. And Hawaii is among the states that have mandated other energy-efficiency measures, like solar water heaters.

But California’s move is by far the boldest and most consequential of any.

California law requires at least 50 percent of the state’s electricity to come from noncarbon-producing sources by 2030. Solar power has increasingly become a driver in the growth of the state’s alternative energy production.

And a new rate structure coming next year will charge California customers based on the time of day they use electricity. So homeowners with energy-efficiency features — a battery in particular, allowing energy to be stored for when it is most efficiently used — will avoid higher costs.

“Any additional amount in the mortgage is more than offset,” said Andrew McAllister, an Energy Commission member who led a building-code review that produced the proposal. “It’s good for the customer.”

Three cheers for California, the most progressive state in the union. I'm glad and proud that I'm a resident here. California is not perfect by any means, but we are going in the right direction. God bless California. With all the negative news in the world today, California is a bright light showing that there is still hope for civilization. Now if the US as a nation and especially at the Federal level could get on board with California and get rid of their regressive mentality, there might still be hope for the US as a nation.

 

California in revolt: how the progressive state plans to foil the Trump agenda

From immigration to the environment and recreational cannabis, state leaders and activists are finding paths to circumvent the administration. Will it work?

From the Guardian

 A farm worker in Carlsbad. California, has the country’s most expansive ‘sanctuary’ law, restricting police from questioning people about their citizenship status. Photograph: Sandy Huffaker/Corbis via Getty Images

Sam Levin in San Francisco

 

 

Thu 11 Jan ‘18 05.00 EST

California prides itself on being first with progressive laws on climate change, labor rights and marijuana. In 2018, the Golden State’s “firsts” are defensive – bold proposals and legal maneuvers to protect citizens from Donald Trump.

State leaders have pushed legislation and lawsuits to circumvent and undo Trump’s agenda on immigration, the environment, internet freedom and other liberal causes. One of the most consequential victories came Tuesday when a judge in San Francisco blocked the Trump administration’s plan to end a program that allows 800,000 undocumented people to study and work in the US.

At the same time, activists have also launched grassroots campaigns to shield residents from the White House’s attacks – and to pressure local Democrats to do more to mobilize the largest state against the president.

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 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents outside a 7-Eleven convenience store in Los Angeles, where recent raids were conducted. Photograph: Chris Carlson/AP

Immigration

California lawmakers have adopted the most expansive “sanctuary state” law in the country, restricting police from questioning people about citizenship status and limiting cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice).

The state has also taken the Trump administration to court to challenge his travel ban on Muslim-majority countries and his decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) program.

A US judge in San Francisco sided with California on Tuesday in the Daca battle, ruling that the Obama-era program that protects “Dreamers” – undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children – must remain in place.

The immediate goal is to provide a first line of defense

Maria Sofia Corona-Alamillo, attorney

But Trump – who has a reputation for being vindictiveand has openly expressed disdain for California – is on track to retaliate. Ice already arrested hundreds in targeted raids in sanctuary cities last year, and the agency’s acting director has promised to ramp up deportations in the state this year, even suggestingCalifornia politicians should be prosecuted.

Across California, vast networks of attorneys and volunteer advocates have formed, leading the resistance to Ice on the ground, sometimes saving lives in the process.

Though Obama deported more immigrants than any other president, the need is even greater now with Ice indiscriminately picking up people in raids, according to Maria Sofia Corona-Alamillo, an attorney working with the Los Angeles County Rapid Response Network.

“The immediate goal is to provide a first line of defense for community members that are facing removal from the country and imprisonment in government-run detention centers, which we for many reasons find inhumane.”

Off the Top of My Head

The United States Declares War on California

by John Lawrence

No sooner than California had legalized cannabis, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that he would have the Federal US attorneys come after pot operations. Although pot is legal for medicinal and recreational purposes in several states, it's still illegal at the Federal level. So, while Obama said to cool it as far as Federal prosecutions were concerned, Sessions wants the marijuana industry taken over a barrel with their pants down. Colorado US Attorney Bob Troyer said that he would not do anything differently even though Sessions ended the so-called Cole memorandum, which sharply limited what charges prosecutors could pursue in legal pot states. California's US attorney hasn't weighed in yet. Since US attorneys are political appointees, they can be replaced by the Trump administration with those who support Sessions' views. It doesn't bode well for the fledgling pot industry in California and elsewhere.

Another slap in the face to California is that Trump has now made it OK for the oil industry to start drilling again off its coast. The Obama administration had a moratorium on drilling off US coasts. Now that has changed, and, despite California's leadership on global warming, it must now submit to a take down by the Trump administration. Trump is showing California just who is boss. Of course states' rights don't matter when it comes to blue states' rights. The red states won't let the Federal government tell them what to do, but it remains to be seen how much blowback there will be from California towards the Federal government.

The third thing that California will have to endure which has been imposed on its citizens by Trump is that the tax plan recently passed will probably increase Federal taxes for many Californians. That is because the property and state tax deductions have been reduced to $10,000. They used to be unlimited. Since California real estate is very high priced compared to other states, in particular compared to the Trump supporter states, property taxes are also very high and $10,000 in deductions just won't cut it. Get ready Californians. If you live in even a modest priced house in California, your Federal taxes are going up not down as Trump had promised. This will put pressure on lowering California state and local property taxes which will hamper state and local governments, an outcome much preferred by the Trump administration. However, blue states, which have much lower real estate values will not be affected as much.

 The third thing the Trump administration has done in chastising and reprimanding California is the building of "the wall." He's got the prototypes up right on the border in San Diego for all to see. California is a sanctuary state which means that California and many cities and counties within California do not support Trump's tough anti-immigrant stand. Tough shit says Trump. We'll build the wall there first, and we'll find other ways to punish California for taking a pro-immigrant stand. When we get done with you, you'll be crying for mercy.

Is it time for California to secede from the union? The idea has been floated before. Let's see what Governor Jerry Brown's response is to the aggressive anti-California actions taken by Trump and his henchmen.

Off the Top of My Head

Newsflash: Newly Homeless Have a Connection to Old Homeless

by John Lawrence

How ironic. Mansions in Bel Air burned down because homeless were cooking nearby:

From the LA Times:

Skirball fire’s origins

"The fire that destroyed six homes and damaged a dozen others in Bel-Air last week was caused by a cooking fire at a nearby homeless encampment, Los Angeles fire officials said Tuesday. For a “number of years,” homeless people had been living in a camp along Sepulveda Boulevard where it passes under the 405 Freeway, Los Angeles Fire Department spokesman Peter Sanders said."

So wouldn't it have been better for the rich people living in Bel Air mansions to have paid a little more in taxes to provide a place to live for the homeless rather than have them cooking outside, starting a fire and burning down their mansions? The same kind of reasoning applies to people getting Hepatitus A due to filthy conditions due to homeless living on the streets.

Since society has taken a "hands off" approach to homelessness, society will have to deal with the consequences of homelessness. Society will be impacted by homelessness. It's a situation that is fast becoming out of control. It will ruin tourism. That's one of the consequences. People will prefer to be tourists in Europe where there is no homelessness and a lot more culture to offer and everyone speaks English.

Until the US addresses homelessness in a comprehensive manner, this situation will only get worse with a permanent underclass becoming a part of mainstream America. The Ubermensch will have to put up with the Untermensch unless they are willing to help them achieve a decent standard of living and make that a priority instead of making war a priority. Then maybe the US will be able to lay claim to the title of "A Decent Society." However, now it's the money talks and shit walks society. How pleasant! It's the "devil take the hindermost" society!

America is becoming a Brave New World where "citizens are engineered through artificial wombs and childhood indoctrination programs into predetermined classes (or castes) based on intelligence and labour." Welcome to a Brave New America where the caste system of predetermined classes is coming alive in what used to be a middle class society. Now you have the super rich and the super poor with fewer and fewer leavening or moderating factors coming into play to lessen the divide.

I'm not the only one seeing the irony of Bel-Air mansions going up in smoke due to homeless outdoor cooking fires:

According to the LA Times:

Bel-Air fire is a parable for L.A.'s extremes of wealth and misery. It should also be a call to action

 “Last week, the two worlds intersected when a cooking fire at a homeless encampment destroyed six homes and damaged a dozen others in Bel-Air, where affluent residents complain now and then about the scale of colossal estates that dwarf their own mansions. There has to be meaning in this, or it wouldn’t play so much like a parable,” writes columnist Steve Lopez. He believes these stark facts should also be a call to action.

The Burning Earth Bears Witness in California

DECEMBER 8, 2017

by PAUL STREET

 

From Counterpunch

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Photo by Glenn Beltz | CC by 2.0

Watching the first ten minutes of the “Public” (Petroleum and/or Pentagon?) Broadcasting System (“P”BS)’s NewsHour two nights ago, I was overcome by a sense of the surreal. The first news item was the Insane Clown President’s (ICP) idiotic (if base-pleasing) announcement that the U.S. embassy in Israel will at some point be moved from Tel-Aviv to Jerusalem. NewsHour host and Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) member Judy Woodruff announced a special segment on this story later in the broadcast.

The next story was the coming likely resignation of the centrist corporate-Democratic Party pain-in-the-ass Al Franken from the U.S. Senate in response to cascading allegations of sexual harassment and weirdness.  That too was to receive a special segment, the CFR’s Woodruff assured viewers.

Then came a brief yet hair-raising report showing homes burning and enflamed mountains looming over motorists in southern California, just outside Los Angeles.  The wildfire footage was breathtakingly dystopian.

There was no special segment scheduled for the pre-apocalyptic California wildfires, which were taking down mansions in opulent Bel Air and forcing tens of thousands to evacuate.

How, I wondered, was this not the top story?

A correspondent writes me from Central California today (Thursday morning):

‘Climate apocalypse’ is accurate. I live on California’s central coast. Ojai and Ventura surrounded by fires. Carpenteria being evacuated.  Lompoc and Santa Barbara covered in ash.  White ash floating everywhere in central California.”

In The New York Times today:

Southern California is fighting a renewed onslaught from the wildfires menacing greater Los Angeles, with emergency crews contending with brisk winds, steep terrain and fatigue from days of relentless work. Schools are closed, roadways are shut and nearly 200,000 people have been told to evacuate their homes. Winds were strengthening on Thursday, with warnings that gusts could reach 80 miles per hour. The four largest fires had scorched a combined 116,000 acres in Los Angeles and Ventura Counties by Thursday morning, and none of those fires was close to being contained. ‘I’ve got to be honest, we’re concerned about everything,’ said Armando Hogan, an assistant Los Angeles fire chief. The unfavorable weather conditions have the region on edge, and brush fires broke out Thursday morning in Malibu, Oxnard and Huntington Beach, prompting a quick deployment of emergency crews.

I’m guessing the Los Angeles fires will be a top and full-segment item on the “P”BS NewsHour (where the Times tends to set the agenda most news days), even if one of the network’s top donors is the vanguard fossil fuel baron David Koch.

According to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, an astonishing total of 8,756 fires have burned 1,156,914 acres in rain-starved California this year.

Like the wildfires that charred 20,000 acres, destroyed 3.500 structures, and killed at least 44 people in northern California last October, the southern California infernos are the outcome of excessive heat and drought resulting from the climate disruption caused by humanity’s excessive, capital-driven and United States-led extraction and burning of fossil fuels.

And, for what it’s worth – which may not be much in the homeland and headquarters of petro-capitalist climate denial – there is no bigger story in the world today than anthropogenic (really capitalogenic) global warming.  It’s the biggest issue of our or any time. Nothing in the news today comes close – not the pedophilia and (yet) forthcoming election (to the “upper chamber” of the U.S. Congress) of the Alabama super-freak Roy Moore, not the petulant creepiness of ex-Senator Stuart Smalley, not the twists and turns of Russiagate and the Mueller inquiry, not the arch-plutocratic Trump-GOP tax bill, not the imminent reversal of net neutrality, not even the terrible plights of the Rohingya, Yemen, the Congolese, the South Sudanese (among countless victims of horrific violence and oppression) or the insane game of thermonuclear chicken being played by the ICP in Washington and the Dear Leader in Pyongyang. This is for the simple reason that life itself is slated to become unsustainable on the planet in no short historical order if we do not act quickly and massively to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy sources and to fundamentally change our relationship with Earth’s natural systems and change our position in the global web of life.

Extreme weather is only the tip of the melting iceberg when it comes to what’s at stake.  The climate disruption that homo sapiens has wrought under the command of its capitalist class poses grave and frankly exterminist threats to the species’ ability to maintain access to basic requirements of biological existence: food, water, and cooling.  We are on pace for the “human” melting of the Antarctic, the murder of the planet’s basic life support systems, before the end of the current century – perhaps as soon as 2050 if not earlier. It’s a crime that will make the Nazis, Stalin, and Pol Pot et al. look like small-time criminals by comparison.

We have at most two decades to avert environmental catastrophe and sustain realistic hopes for a decent future. Failure on that score would mean that nothing else we care about and (on the left) fight for – democracy, social justice, peace, artistic expression, equality, and more – would matter all that much.  It’ll be about the best possible arrangement of chairs and drinks on the decks of a sinking ship.  We’ll just be fighting to turn a scorched world upside down – pushing for the more egalitarian slicing out of a poisoned pie.

The startling images of mansions burned and burning in posh Los Angeles suburbs and other aristocratic zip codes is reminder that no special caste or privileged class of humanity is ultimately exempt from the ecocidal and anthrosuicidal logic of contemporary carbon- and accumulation-addicted capitalism.  There’s no capitalist rate of profit (either declining or ascending), no “free market” utopia, no social democracy, no joyous reign of the “associated producers” (Marx’s phrase), no “storming heaven” (Marx’s praise for the Paris Communards) on a dead planet.

There’s no bigger story than the environmental crisis that lay behind this year’s California fires and the extremity of this year’s hurricane season – and so much else almost too terrible to mention.

It’s surreal to pretend otherwise.  The Earth is our witness.

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More articles by:PAUL STREET

Paul Street’s latest book is They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm, 2014)