Author: Source

By Lorena Gonzalez / San Diego Labor Council

Nick is a skilled sheet metal worker from Spring Valley. Despite being extremely well-trained in his craft and having plenty of experience as a journeyman, he has been without a job since August 2009. That’s more than two years of putting food on the table for his four children without a steady paycheck.

Unfortunately, Nick is not unique. Twenty-five million people in America who want to work can’t find the full-time jobs they need.

There’s a simple explanation for why every national, state and local poll lists the economy at the top of our concerns. America wants to work, America is looking for work and America can’t find enough work.

Editor: We have received a number of comments to our post about former principal Jill Green of Explorer Elementary charter school travails. Here is Jill Green’s original statement, made sometime around the time of her dismissal last Spring.

By Jill Green / August 2011

As the founding principal of Explorer Elementary Charter School, my devotion to the children, families and teachers at the school was the high point of my professional career. The pride I had in locating a space for the school to allow it to open in 2000, as well as

Editor: The following is an edited “executive summary” of Peter Philip’s case study – published June 10, 2011 – on SEMPRA’s plan to outsource an estimated 15,000 jobs to Mexico by building a cross-border 1250 megawatt energy transmission line to their energy facility in Mexico. The full report can be found here.

Should Green Jobs Be Outsourced? A Case Study of Lost Jobs and Lost Opportunities

By Peter Philips, PhD

The proposed Sempra 1250 megawatt (MW) tieline connecting the California grid to envisioned new wind-farms in Mexico is not just about electricity. It is also about foregone opportunities, lost human capital investment, lost worklives, lost tax revenues, and diminished economic development prospects; and also, it is about which regulatory authority, California or Mexico, should oversee the environmental impacts of building green generation capacity for the California grid.

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It is not supposed to happen in America where we value free speech and proudly revel in our history of men and women standing up and speaking to their elected representatives. But…once again, just last night (August 22, 2011), as they did in June, Congressman Steve Chabot, his staff and security team made sure that there could be no genuine human interaction or spoken question from the audience or any recorded documentation of what was said. And this occurred in a public meeting, in a public place, conducted by a public official, who while speaking to the public refused over 100 people who disagreed with him the opportunity to speak. And he had the police there to physically enforce his own private rules for public discourse.

Last week, Rep. Steven Chabot (R-OH) banned ordinary citizens from bringing cameras into a town hall meeting — even having police confiscate cameras from citizens who dared to violate this rule . Bizarrely, Chabot still allowed reporters to bring in cameras and record the event.

Coincidentally, just four days after Chabot took this extraordinary measure to prevent embarrassing clips of him from appearing on YouTube, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit handed down an opinion saying citizens have a right to film police engaged in their official duties.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt / Excuse Me, I’m Writing / September 4, 2011

U.S. Representative Michele Bachmann (R–Minn.) might not be able to sustain her Tea Party-fueled lead among the perfidy of presidential wannabes, but while she remains in the race, admit it: She makes for good entertainment — in a morbidly fascinating sort of way.

Newsweek magazine’s blatantly sexist cover image of Bachmann, declaring her the “Queen of Rage,” actually elicited a complaint from National Organization for Women (NOW). Yowza, what a coupling! If Bachmann’s campaign lasts, NOW will surely do all it can to otherwise denounce her for her homophobia, anti-women’s and civil rights positions, and bent toward theocracy. But in the meantime, fun, fun, fun!

by Jeanne Mirer and Marjorie Cohn / CommonDreams.org

The debate about the debt ceiling should have been a conversation about how to create jobs. It is time for progressives to remind the government that it has a legal duty to create jobs, and must act immediately – if not through Congress, then through the Federal Reserve.

With official unemployment reaching over 9%, the unofficial rate in double digits, and the unemployment rate for people of color more than double that of whites, it is nerve wracking to hear right wing political pundits say the government cannot create jobs.

By Bill McKibben / 350.org / September 3, 2011

Dear Friends—

I’m writing this from the lawn in front of the White House.

In front of me there’s a sprawling rally underway, with speakers ranging from indigenous elders to the great Canadian writer Naomi Klein. In back of me, another 243 courageous people are being hauled away to jail — it’s the last day of Phase 1 of the tar sands campaign, and 1,252 North Americans have been arrested, the biggest civil disobedience action this century on this continent.

By Mike Copass

September 1, San Diego – Joining similar actions across 21 states, San Diego nurses stood with community residents in urban San Diego to bring their message of jobs, living wages, health care, education and housing, in what the California Nurses Association calls a “Main Street Contract,” an economic recovery program for America with a new funding mechanism: a simple financial transactions tax on Wall Street.

By Robert Reich / Robert Reich’s Blog / Sept 3, 2011

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports today no jobs were created in August. Zero. Nada.

Well, not quite. The strike at Verizon reduced the labor force by 45,000. Minnesota government employees returned to work, adding 22,000. So in reality, America added 23,000 jobs. Almost zero.

Too much yelling, not enough listening.

Facing organized, often raucous confrontations at political events, some members of Congress this summer abandoned the long-time tradition of open meetings with the folks back home.

It was goodbye to one of the few remaining opportunities for voters and lawmakers to talk face to face.

Some cited security in the aftermath of the shooting that severely wounded Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords at a meet-and-greet event in January. Others blamed grass-roots groups for commandeering the town halls. Still others opted for smaller, sometimes private or paid events.

In potentially gamechanging news, the New York Times broke the story Thursday night [Sept 1] that the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the federal overseer for mortgage lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, is filing a pretty big lawsuit against more than a dozen big banks, alleging that they “misrepresented” the quality of the mortgage-backed securities they sold during the height of the housing bubble–the same securities that were made up of predatory subprime loans rolled in with regular mortgages and sold to investors as AAA bonds.

Banks named in the suits include Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Deustche Bank, and our old friends Bank of America.