PERSPECTIVE--In a recent news release, State Treasurer John Chiang said:  “…the Governor and I are partnering on a fiscally prudent plan to buy down our pension debt using what Albert Einstein once called ‘the eighth wonder of the world,’ compound interest. ” 

It’s not Albert Einstein he should be crediting, but Bernie Madoff.

HIGHJACKING DEMOCRACY IN LA-Once Nick Melvoin joins the Los Angeles Unified School District board, he’s going to require all high school civics teachers to add a new lesson plan to their curriculum: “How To Buy An Election.” 

That’s what happened on Tuesday. Melvoin and his billionaire backers dramatically outspent school board president Steve Zimmer’s campaign, making the District 4 race the most expensive in LAUSD history. 

Political pundits will spend the next few days and weeks analyzing the Los Angeles school board election, examining exit polls, spilling lots of ink over how different demographic groups -- income, race, religious, union membership, gender, party affiliation, and others -- voted on Tuesday. 

But the real winner in the race was not Nick Melvoin, but Big Money. And the real loser was not Steve Zimmer, but democracy – and LA’s children. 

Melvoin’s backers -- particularly billionaires and multi-millionaires who donated directly to his campaign and to several front groups, especially the California Charter School Association (CCSA) -- outspent Zimmer’s campaign by $6.6 million to $2.7 million. Melvoin got 30,696 votes to Zimmer’s 22,766. In other words, Melvoin spent 71% of the money to get 57% of the vote. 

Here’s another way of looking at the election results: Melvoin spent $215 for each vote he received, while Zimmer spent only $121 per vote. 

There’s no doubt that if the Zimmer campaign had the same war-chest that Melvoin had, he would have been able to mount an even more formidable grassroots get-out-the-vote campaign and put more money into the TV and radio air war. Under those circumstances, it is likely that Zimmer would have prevailed. 

Billionaires, many of whom live far from Los Angeles, bought this election for Melvoin. Their money paid for non-stop TV and radio ads, as well as phone calls, mailers and newspaper ads (including a huge wrap-around ad on the front of Sunday’s LA Times.) Melvoin’s billionaire backers paid for 44 mailers and at least $1 million on negative TV ads against Zimmer.  

The so-called “Independent” campaign for Melvoin was funded by big oil, big tobacco, Walmart, Enron, and other out-of-town corporations and billionaires. They paid for Melvoin’s ugly, deceptive, and false attack ads against Zimmer, a former teacher and current school board president. Melvoin is so devoted to the corporate agenda for our schools that during the campaign he said that the school district needed a “hostile takeover.” 

Among the big donors behind Melvoin and the CCSA were members of the Walton family (Alice Walton, Jim Walton, and Carrie Walton Penner) ― heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune from Arkansas. Alice Walton (net worth: $36.9 billion), who lives in Texas, was one of the biggest funders behind Melvoin’s campaign. Other Melvoin and CCSA backers included Michael Bloomberg (net worth: $48.5 billion), the former New York City mayor; Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix (net worth: $1.9 billion), who lives in Santa Cruz;  Doris Fisher (net worth: $2.7 billion), co-founder of The Gap, who lives in San Francisco; Texas resident John Arnold (net worth: $2.9 billion), who made a fortune at Enron before the company collapsed, leaving its employees and stockholders in the lurch, then made another fortune as a hedge fund manager; Jeff Yass, who lives in the Philadelphia suburbs, and runs the Susquehanna group, a hedge fund; and Frank Baxter, former CEO of the global investment bank Jefferies and Company that specialized in “junk” bonds. 

What do the corporate moguls and billionaires want? And what did Steve Zimmer do to make them so upset? 

They want is to turn public schools into educational Wal-Marts run on the same corporate model. They want to expand charter schools that compete with each other and with public schools in an educational “market place.” (LA already has more charter schools than any other district in the country.) 

They want to evaluate teachers and students like they evaluate new products -- in this case, using the bottom-line of standardized test scores. Most teachers will tell you that over-emphasis on standardized testing turns the classroom into an assembly line, where teachers are pressured to “teach to the test,” and students are taught, robot-like, to define success as answering multiple-choice questions on tests. 

Not surprisingly, the billionaires want school employees -- teachers -- to do what they’re told, without having much of a voice in how their workplace functions or what is taught in the classroom. Rather than treat teachers like professionals, they view them as the out-sourced hired help. 

The corporate big-wigs are part of an effort that they and the media misleadingly call “school reform.” What they’re really after is not “reform” (improving our schools for the sake of students) but “privatization” (business control of public education.) They think public schools should be run like corporations, with teachers as compliant workers, students as products, and the school budget as a source of profitable contracts and subsidies for textbook companies, consultants, and others engaged in the big business of education. 

Like most reasonable educators and education analysts, Zimmer has questioned the efficacy of charter schools as a panacea. When the billionaires unveiled their secret plan to put half of LAUSD students into charter schools within eight years, Zimmer led the opposition. In contrast, Melvoin is a big backer of charter schools and a big critic of the teachers union.  

Now the billionaires and their charter school operators will have a majority on the school board. LA will become the epicenter of a major experiment in expanding charter schools – with the school children as the guinea pigs. 

Pundits will have a field day pontificating about the LAUSD election, but in the end it’s about how Big Money hijacked democracy in LA.

(Peter Dreier is professor of politics and chair of the Urban & Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College and an occasional contributor to CityWatch.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

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PERSPECTIVE--Governor Brown is making an appeal to the Trump administration to transfer oversight of environmental reviews of the high-speed rail project from the federal government to the state. 

If this strategy sounds familiar, it is.  The City of Los Angeles allows developers to arrange their own EIRs.

Brown has a vested personal interest in pushing HSR.  It’s his vanity project.  It will probably put the state in a position where it will have to subsidize the system, in direct violation of Proposition 1A, as approved by the voters in 2008.

He and his colleagues, along with other politically connected interest groups who stand to benefit from the most expensive folly in history, are hell-bent to complete the project, regardless of the cost and the diversion of funds from far more critical needs.  Do not think for one moment that the state will take an unbiased approach in evaluating the results of an EIR under its control.

There is no private investor interest in the project.  That is unlikely to change even if an initial segment, constructed over the easiest terrain and serving markets with the least possible need, were to be completed. The risks of tunneling through faults in the San Gabriel Mountains, essential for fulfilling the promise of service between San Francisco and Los Angeles, will be too risky to attract sensible investors unless the state were to offer substantial guarantees and establish reserve funds.  Such a move would put California on the hook for losses. Like a subsidy, that would contradict taxpayer protections in 1A.

CAHSR will collapse under its own weight and from voter frustration with pouring more money in what will be a system which grossly underdelivers for the costs.

There is no scenario where it can be built and operated within the limits of Prop 1A.  The sooner the governor and legislature put aside their personal ambition and admit it will be a fiscal failure, the more likely the state will be able to afford far more pressing capital improvements.

There is much work to do; we do not have endless sources of affordable debt and tax revenue. Choices have to be made, and HSR is near the bottom.

(Paul Hatfield is a CPA and serves as President of the Valley Village Homeowners Association. He blogs at Village to Village and contributes to CityWatch. The views presented are those of Mr. Hatfield and his alone and do not represent the opinions of Valley Village Homeowners Association or CityWatch. He can be reached at: [email protected].)

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EDUCATION P0LITICS-- A runoff election Tuesday in Los Angeles will determine the fate of public education in one of the nation's largest school districts, in a first major test of the influence of the Trump-era charter school industry.

Voters will head to the polls on May 16 to choose between charter school ally Nick Melvoin and current LA school board president Steve Zimmer in a race for District 4, and between charter school teacher Kelly Fitzpatrick-Gonez against public school advocate Imelda Padilla for a seat in District 6.

If the industry-supported candidates win, they will be able to "squash democratic control of public schools," wrote education historian Diane Ravitch on Sunday. That includes diverting public funds to corporate charter chains and entrepreneurs, widening the reach and power of an industry that has no system of public accountability and has been plagued by theft and fraud scandals.

The Los Angeles Times explained Saturday: 

If the charter-backed candidates prevail, charter advocates will win their first governing majority on the seven-member body. If the election goes entirely the other way, unions will strengthen their influence on a board that leans pro-labor. In that scenario, the board would be more likely to limit the growth of charters in the nation's second-largest school system, which has more charters and more charter students than any other school district.

"Think of this as the great Charter War of 2017," said Dan Schnur, former director of the Unruh Institute of Politics at USC. "The stakes are unusually high, substantively but even more symbolically. The outcome of these races will determine control of the largest school district in the western United States."

The election will also serve as a microcosm of the Trump administration's vision for public schools nationwide, with Education Secretary Betsy DeVos having expressed her support for privatization throughout her confirmation hearings and previously compared the controversial issue of school choice to ride-sharing apps. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has also referred to public schools as a "product." 

"Unregulated charter schools and vouchers allow private groups to control taxpayer dollars and—in the worst cases—profit from them," Donald Cohen of the watchdog group In the Public Interest wrote at the Huffington Post last week. "But they also help fulfill a vision of society in which government is run like a business and people—and corporations—are customers."

Billionaire Eli Broad and other wealthy supporters—including Walmart heiress Alice Walton, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings—have poured millions into Melvoin's campaign. Zimmer has been endorsed by Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, teacher and labor unions in LA, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt), and other city officials. But although he received 47.5 of the vote in the primary to Melvoin's 31.2 percent, Zimmer faces a well-funded opposition, and Melvoin has picked up endorsements from major players in the corporate education industry, including former Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

"Why do they want to control it? None of them has a child in the system. They despise public schools and they want to turn Los Angeles into a charter school demonstration district. It is all about power and money," Ravitch, who also endorsed Zimmer, wrote in another recent blog post. "No matter how many scandals [there] are in charter schools in Los Angeles or in California, or how many charter leaders are arrested, or how much money is stolen or misappropriated, the charter school advocates won't give up. They refuse to devote their energy and money to rebuilding the Los Angeles public school system."

(Nadia Prupis writes for Common Dreams … where this report originated.)

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ANIMAL WATCH-"Mexico has made dog fighting a felony with some of the strictest penalties in the world," the Yucatan News announced on May 1, 2017. "All dog fighting in Mexico is now illegal and anyone associated with it will face lengthy imprisonment and huge fines…Until now, most states in Mexico prohibited dog fighting, but now the laws are nationwide and have some big teeth." 

A petition to Ban Dog Fighting in Mexico was initiated by Humane Society International in June 2016, declaring, “There is no place for dog fighting in Mexico.”It also asked for clear enforcement and penalties.  

Over 200,000 people from all over the world signed that petition in support of the nationwide ban, demonstrating agreement with the premise that, "Dog fighting still takes place because no federal law explicitly prohibits it. Federal legislation banning and criminalizing dog fighting would eliminate the loopholes in these state laws and establish strong penalties for anyone associated with this blood competition." 

According to a leading polling agency, 99% of Mexicans condemn dog fights and 85% believe dog fighters should be penalized, the petition states.

In an illustration of the changing attitudes of the new generation and the awareness of animals as sentient beings, David Marcial Pérez, writer for El País, described on November 24, 2016 how over 200 charitable and civil organizations, including coalitions to end human trafficking, presented two initiatives to the Mexican Congress to extend a federal prohibition on dog fighting and include breeding and/or sale of any animal used for the purpose of training dogs for fighting. They also supported changes in penal code sections to include penalties for being a spectator at an event. 

Although dog fighting has been widely considered a cultural tradition, Pérez confirmed that, “a recent study shows that only 1% of people are in favor of these events, while 80% would like to see a ban.”  

Many Mexican states are also looking at imposing severe penalties, activists state. Cruel dog fighting bouts continue unabated in clandestine underground locations, but they also openly take place during municipal celebrations around the country.  

According to activists, an Annual international dog fighting even is held in Aguascalientes in the spring where as many as a dozen dog fighting matches involving pit bulls are on the bill. 

“The dogs can be worth thousands of dollars,” Antón Aguilar, executive director of the Humane Society International in Mexico, told the Mexican News Daily, "and betting at such events can be high. The breed of choice is the pit bull.” He added that the organizers of the fights usually kill dogs that lose. Even those who win the fight often die as a result of injuries or infections they sustained. 

On November 26, 2016, a Mexico News Daily headline read, "Senate approves bill to ban dog fighting," announcing, “The Mexican Senate has passed a dog-fighting bill that would prohibit the organization and staging of dog fighting events at the national level and assure all dogs are treated with dignity.” 

The report explains that the bill also amends the General Law of Ecological Balance and Environmental Protection and “…stipulates basic principles regarding the care of dogs, such as the provision of adequate food and water and providing medical attention when needed.” 

Martha Carrasco, a Mexican veterinarian who lives in Los Angeles, is the local representative for APRODA (Association for animal rights and the environment,) based in Guadalajara Jal Mexico, which actively supported and is still involved in this project. 

She explained that the law was approved with 71 votes in favor, three against and three abstentions. It provides a modification to the Federal Penal Code to impose a penalty of up five years in jail and a fine of $15,000 for violation. The law will go into effect as soon as it is published in the federal register, Diario Oficial de la Federación.  

OTHER COUNTRIES THAT RECENTLY BANNED DOG FIGHTING AND OTHER ANIMAL CRUELTY 

Adding to the celebration of Mexico's legislative success is that this reflects a change in ethical thinking about how animals are viewed and treated in society in Latin America. Demands are being made on those in political office to honor the will of the people. 

Guatemala 

"On March 7, 2017, Guatemala took a huge step forward in the battle against animal cruelty," writes Susan Bird, an environmental attorney and freelance writer on animal causes. "The Congress of Guatemala passed first-of-its-kind legislation in February 2017. Now, protection is firmly in place for wildlife, animals used in research and companion animals."

The new law also bans animal testing for cosmetics, using animals in circuses, and dog fighting. "Humans who are spectators at any of these events can be criminally charged under the law as well," she adds. 

Honduras

On November 12, 2015, in Honduras Bans Use Of Animals In Circuses And Dog Fighting, Animalequality.net declared, "Honduras joins countries like Canada, Sweden, Greece, Peru, Paraguay and Costa Rica (among others) in banning the use of all animals in circuses. The Honduran National Congress approved the Animal Welfare Act that regulates use of animals in various types of industries and shows." 

The law also bans dog fighting. It credits passage to several organizations, including the Animal Rights Society of Honduras (Sociedad Animalista de Honduras.)  Penalties of three to six years in prison can be imposed and also high fines for abuse or neglect of animals. 

And a strong message was broadcast to those in other countries who want to bring about change for animals, "We hope that other countries [will] join Honduras…It is vital that protection of animals is included in the political agendas of all governments." 

The challenge will, of course, be enforcement, but that is true in every country. The fact that federal law is being written in multiple countries to change actions -- not just acknowledge theory -- will affect the atmosphere in which children are raised and, thus, the mindset of future generations about how animals must be treated.

(Phyllis M. Daugherty is a former City of LA employee and a contributor to CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

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THIS IS WHAT I KNOW-Since Trump was elected back in November, and even during campaign season, protests and resist actions have become pretty commonplace. In fact, some have said that marches are the new “brunch.” 

Around 9 a.m. Saturday, a group of about 200 activists who refer to themselves as “Indivisible San Pedro” gathered in a public park within Trump National Golf Club in Rancho Palos Verdes. Trump National Golf Club is a public course owned by The Trump Organization. In a well-executed, creative protest, a flash mob formed the word “RESIST!” on the coastal property to call for a special prosecutor to investigate Russian interference in the election, as well as Trump’s administration and for the release of his tax returns. 

In what took about fifteen minutes, the group, dressed in white, created 30-foot tall letters while singing “God Bless America.” Organizers had investigated during the planning and found out they would not need a permit. The space is overseen by the California Coastal Commission, which deals with public access to the ocean and protects the park from encroachment. 

Indivisible San Pedro was organized post-Inauguration to voice concerns about the administration by contacting legislators, attending town halls, and participating in protest marches.

Trump National Golf Club officials and sheriff’s deputies observed from a clubhouse balcony but did not intervene.

Saturday’s flash mob attracted national media coverage and was a peaceful, creative display of resistance. With hope, the continued displays of resistance will result in policy changes and investigations. If there is an upside to the Trump Administration, it’s the increased awareness and participation on the grassroots level that has occurred, whether it be by communicating with legislators via text, phone or emails, marching, or organizing creative displays like this flash mob.

(Beth Cone Kramer is a Los Angeles writer and a columnist for CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.