A public pension crisis of epic proportions is brewing in California. The state’s public pension disaster is the greatest financial challenge California has faced since the Great Depression.

A new book by economist Lawrence McQuillen, exposes the true magnitude of the unfunded liability disaster, and focuses on the critical policy actions that drove California’s public pension debt to these heights. In California Dreaming: Lessons on How to Resolve America’s Public Pension Crisis, McQuillen, Senior Fellow at The Independent Institute, also examines the perverse political incentives of elected lawmakers and pension officials that reward them for not fixing the problem, rather letting it… Read More

Senate Bill 277 by Sen. Richard Pan, D-Sacramento, unleashed a passion and a rage in California voters not seen in for years. The bill angered so many parents, Assembly and Senate recall elections are underway across the state, and a referendum to repeal the mandatory vaccination bill has been launched.

Parents say the new law violates Constitutional rights, as well as their right to choose what’s right for their children. Aren’t Democrats all about the right to choose, or is that only for abortions?

There are three important issues at stake in this… Read More

A bill in the California Legislature is blazing through to mandate the reduction of 50 percent in the use of petroleum-based fuels, 50 percent reduction in energy use by existing buildings and increases the Renewable Portfolio Standard from 33 percent renewables to 50 percent — notably as California is well ontrack to meet the 2020 goal.

SB 350 is authored by Sen. President pro Tem Kevin de Leon. “Do we have the courage to press forward,” asked De Leon, to legislative committee members at Monday’s Assembly Natural Resources Committee hearing on SB 350.

De Leon was long on drama about the “threat of climate change,” but short on verifiable data, and never broached what California can do alone if indeed climate change is the scourge of the entire world.

Radical activists have wormed their way into positions of government authority to implement carbon… Read More

Can California really reduce petroleum-based fuels by 50 percent and still have any sort of economy? Most of California’s businesses and residents rely on oil and gas for day-to-day transportation needs. But a bill currently in the legislative committee process, SB 350, would compromise the availability of transportation fuels.

TheRenewable Portfolio Standard, passed in 2011, called for 33 percent of electricity retail sales be served by renewable energy resources by the year 2020.

However, the President of the California State Senate, Kevin de Leon, no student of economics, is pushing a bill through the… Read More

Nearly every climate change and clean energy expert admits that California will achieve the legislatively mandated policy goals of AB 32, California’s Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, which said the state has to reduce carbon emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2020.

So why is the California Air Resource Board and Legislature seeking to move the target before the deadline?

The Assembly Select Committee on Clean Energy was asked to address how Californians can reduce on-road petroleum use by 50 percent, by 2030. Assemblyman Bill Quirk, D-Hayward, the Committee Chairman,… Read More

State superior court delivers a stunning rebuke to Agricultural Labor Relations Board’sTop Staff Attorney Sylvia Torres Guillén, citing “deficiencies in its investigation” and staff “embroilment” in worker termination.

An employee whistleblower at the California Agricultural Labor Relations Board has exposed wrongdoing by the activist attorneys in the state agency responsible for protecting the rights of farmworkers. The charges, made by an insider who participated in an ALRB investigation of Gerawan Farming, were brought directly to the office of the Board’s chairman, William B. Gould IV. The whistleblower employee alleges that the ALRB General Counsel and staff submitted false or misleading sworn statements to the Board in order to get agency authorization to file enforcement proceedings against Gerawan.

These charges could reveal the extent to which theGeneral Counsel TorresGuillénand staff manipulated evidence in administrative and legal proceedings in order to tip the scales – even perhaps illegally – in favor of the United Farm Workers.

The ALRB General Counsel’s… Read More

Labor unions target many non-union businesses across the country for takeover; some businesses successfully fend off the unions, and others succumb. But in California, the Agricultural Labor Relations Board, a state agency, works in cahoots with the United Farm Workers labor union, intimidating, fear-mongering, threatening, and uses legal actions filed against farming employers to force them into submission to the United Farm Workers labor union.

But recently, the ALRB has been dealt several legal blows to its efforts to malign Gerawan Farming, and force its farm workers into unionization.

The Agricultural Labor Relations Board was created following the signing of the Agriculture Labor Relations Act in 1975 by then-Governor Jerry Brown, a Democrat, to restore peace in the fields. The California Labor Act states:

It is hereby stated to be the policy of the State of California to encourage and protect the right of agricultural employees to full freedom of association, self-organization, and designation of representatives of their own choosing, to negotiate the terms and conditions of their employment, and to be free from the… Read More

Vida Wright and Cheryl Bly-Chester, two minority owned, small business owners, bid a contract with Caltrans to administer the education and mentoring program for the Disadvantaged Business Enterprise program. They complied with the rules of the process, spent hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars preparing their Request For Proposal, and they qualify as a DBE. But they lost the contract by tenths of a point after Caltrans employees changed the documents of the incumbent contractor, as well as the scoring on the incumbent contractor bid, so Caltrans could award it to the incumbent.

… Read More