Author: Jim Miller

In last week’s column, I noted that Arizona lawmakers, with help from a right-wing think tank, were pushing union busting legislation more severe than Wisconsin’s. Not surprisingly, as John Nichols reported in The Nation, Arizona Republicans got a little pep talk from Governor Scott Walker himself:

Two days after Ohio voters overwhelmingly rejected Governor John Kasich’s anti-labor agenda by a sixty-one to thirty-nine margin in a statewide referendum, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker jetted to Arizona to launch the next front in the national campaign to attack union rights. After meeting with former Vice President Dan Quayle, Walker was whisked over to the Phoenician Resort in Scottsdale, where he briefed a thousand Arizona conservatives on how they could attack “the big-government union bosses.”

“We need to make big, fundamental, permanent structural changes. It’s why we did what we did in Wisconsin,” declared Walker, who at the annual dinner of the right-wing Goldwater Institute said that compromising with unions was “bogus.” Comparing governors who have been attacking the collective-bargaining rights of public employees with the founders of the American experiment—“just like that group that gathered in Philadelphia”—

In response to last Wednesday’s kick-off press conference for the Millionaires Tax Initiative here in San Diego, Channels 6 and 10 were careful to give well over half of the time in their stories to local right-wing libertarian anti-tax nut Richard Rider.

Rider, the chairman of the San Diego Tax Fighters, opined that:

“If people think that rich people are greedy, why would they think that they wouldn’t move out of state if the taxes got too high? . . . It’s a very interesting conflict in their reasoning.”

Other than mischaracterizing a call for the top 1% to pay their fair share to help support education and vital public services as an ad hominem attack on the greedy rich and making the evidence-free claim that an extra 3% in taxes will force Hollywood stars and CEO’s to strap their hot-tubs on their Mercedes and head for Arizona, he was spot on.

For those who are wondering, there is zero evidence to support the claim that higher individual or corporate tax rates in the past hurts job creation or forced a mass migration of afflicted plutocrats. Indeed as Warren Buffet has pointed out, there was actually more job creation when taxes were higher on the rich than they are now.

The response to the small Occupy/anti-National Defense Authorization Act protest at the Democratic convention was indicative of where we are politically in many ways. Some delegates fearfully scurried away from the protesters, others angrily told them they were protesting the wrong party (although Obama did sign it), and others, still, stopped and expressed solidarity with Occupy.

As one activist who was there holding a Millionaires Tax banner outside the hall reported:

“It was like a Rorschach test. You could tell where folks were on the political spectrum by how they reacted. The thing that stood out to me was how the slickest suits in the crowd just walked by like we didn’t exist.”

Sitting at the Millionaires Tax table inside the hall at the Hilton (ironic no?), I overheard voices ridiculing Occupy, expressing dismay at being protested, or saying they were headed over to check out and/or join the action. As activists there to promote the Millionaires Tax initiative I/we were both inside and outside the event.

Commemoration on Wednesday at 6pm at 5th and E Streets – the Original Soapbox Site

This year, we commemorate the 100-year anniversary of a city ordinance that banned public speaking and assembly in the area around 5th and E Streets in downtown San Diego and the subsequent battle that followed. During the course of this struggle, many people were arrested, beaten and even killed for asserting their rights to simply stand on a soapbox and speak. Today, anyone who enjoys the right to assemble, protest, and speak in public in San Diego has the Free Speech League of the Progressive Era to thank for fighting to maintain basic rights for all San Diegans

The 100-year anniversary of the San Diego Free Speech Fight is a celebration of the legacy of local labor and civil rights activism and a reminder that if we are not vigilant in the protection of our rights, we can certainly lose them.

Governor Jerry Brown has been getting a lot of media coverage lately for his efforts to promote his ballot measure which he is selling as a way to stop further cuts to education in the coming years and help solve California’s seemingly eternal budget crisis. While the mainstream media has showered much attention on Brown, whose initiative would temporarily raise taxes on those earning over $250,000 and raise the sales tax on all Californians, very little notice has gone to the Millionaires Tax, which is vastly superior to the governor’s measure for many reasons.

While I have written about the Millionaires Tax in a previous column for the OB Rag and for Labor Notes , it is worth reviewing the central arguments why California voters should support the Millionaires Tax rather than the Governor’s initiative. What are the top ten reasons to support the Millionaires Tax?

1. The Millionaires Tax is a permanent tax increase on millionaires while the Governor’s initiative is a temporary 4-year measure that will not bring in enough revenue to restore the cuts that have been made to education, infrastructure, and vital public services—not here in San Diego or anywhere else in the state.

Missed the opening of the San Diego Free Speech Centennial Exhibition in the Centro Cultural de la Raza on January 6th?

Not to worry. The celebration of the 100-year anniversary of the San Diego Free Speech Fight continues this Thursday, January 26th at the Saville Theatre (where 14th Street meets C in downtown) on the City College campus from 7:00-9:00 PM.

This event will feature music by Gregory Page and the Proles; a reading from my IWW novel Flash; a special Voices of Peoples’ History presentation focused on the free speech fight by City College students; and the premiere of a short documentary on this important piece of local history. Before and after the performances you can view Golden Lands/Working Hands, the California Federation of Teachers’ mobile labor history exhibit. This event is free and open to the public.

For many of us the 1946 classic It’s a Wonderful Life is, for better or worse, inextricably bound to the yuletide season. Growing up I was subject to the annual revisiting of the film and, surreally, it was even running on the hospital TV the Christmas eve that my wife went into labor with our son who finally graced us with his presence on Christmas day, forever transforming the holiday into a celebration of life itself in my family.

Of course, the part of the film that always makes people cry is when George is saved by the incredible generosity of his neighbors in Bedford Falls who flood over to his house bearing cash to keep him from being arrested for bank fraud after his Uncle Billy loses all the money from their building and loan business on the way to deposit it.

As cultural historian George Lipsitz has pointed out, It’s a Wonderful Life, is part of a postwar film wave that began to redefine American freedom as free enterprise: “the freedom to own more commodities, to experience upward mobility, and to form nuclear families built upon male authority and female domesticity.”

As we head toward 2012, there are a number of tax initiatives being proposed for the ballot next year. What separates them? Two of them, being put forth by activist millionaires, are largely regressive in nature aiming to bring in revenue by increasing income, sales, and other taxes on the majority of Californians in order to help fund education and other services. The Governor’s plan is a combination of progressive taxation (starting with earners who make $250,000 and above) and regressive (a sales tax that will hit everyone).

Only the “Millionaires’ Tax to Restore Funding for Education and Essential Services” keeps its aim on the 1% and only the 1% by imposing a 3% tax on all earnings over $1 million and 5% on all earnings over $2 million.

by Jim Miller and Jonathan McLeod / Special to the OB Rag

Last week the California Community College Board of Governors met here in San Diego to address the results of their task force on “student success.” While much ink has been spilled detailing the ongoing efforts to impose corporate style “reforms” on education at the K-12 level (see Diane Ravitch’s fine work , little attention has been paid to the reform efforts in higher education.

There is a kind of creeping academic Taylorism that comes with the movement toward “student learning outcomes” in higher education that can only be understood if one recognizes the long history of American corporate interests seeking to discipline and, in turn, profit from institutions of higher learning, whether it be plutocrats railing against “dangerous” ideas in the academy or business leaders seeking to transform American colleges into narrow job training factories that provide them with skilled workers without the accompanying bother of having to foot the bill for this service in the form of paying their fair share of taxes.

Every year I spend Thanksgiving and the weekend after it with my family and friends in the Anza Borrego Desert. On hikes with my seven-year-old son, we are grateful for our chance encounters with roadrunners, jackrabbits, coyotes, beetles, and the occasional lucky sighting of a big horn sheep. We have a friend who is a birder who can tell us what kinds of birds we are near from the sound of their calls. When we go back to eat, we break bread with another friend who beat cancer and whose presence reminds us that life is short and precious.

More than anything else, it is the beautiful stillness of the desert that brings us there—the way the landscape seems to listen. At night you can still see stars and think about the vastness of the universe in a way that reminds you of your smallness and your connection to the largeness of all that is. It is humbling and enlarging at the same time.

Last week Adbusters, a publication that was important to the birth of the Occupy Wall Street movement, put out the following:

TACTICAL BRIEFING #18
Occupy the High Ground!

Hey you creatives, artists, environmentalists, workers, moms, dads, students, malcontents, do-gooders and aspiring martyrs in the snow:

The last four months have been hard fought, inspiring and delightfully revolutionary. We brought tents, hunkered down, held our assemblies, and lobbed a meme-bomb that continues to explode the world’s imagination. Many of us have never felt so alive. We have fertilized the future with our revolutionary spirit … and a thousand flowers will surely bloom in the coming Spring.

But as winter approaches an ominous mood could set in … hope thwarted is in danger of turning sour, patience exhausted becoming anger, militant nonviolence losing its allure. It isn’t just the mainstream media that says things could get ugly. What shall we do to keep the magic alive?

Last Tuesday citizens of the bellwether state of Ohio handed Republican John Kasich a crushing defeat as they voted overwhelmingly to repeal Senate Bill 5 that would have undermined collective bargaining rights for public sector workers. This and other Republican losses across the country last week has excited many Democrats who are hoping these elections are a signal that the Tea Party wave has crested and the gloomy horizon for President Obama and his party may be brightening.