A former United Farm Workers labor union organizer has testified that UFW leadership instructed him to lie to farmworkers, and instructed him how to coerce farmworkers to lie in written statements submitted to a state board as official evidence.

This latest explosive news in the Gerawan Farming workers’ fight to oust the UFW shines more sunlight on the conspiracy inside the state Agricultural Labor Relations Board, and particularly on its office of general counsel, and the close relationship with the UFW. The ALRB general counsel’s office has been accused of blatant bias in favor of the UFW under its present chief, Sylvia Torres-Guillén.

Lies, Lies and More Lies

The ALRB used lies manufactured by the UFW labor union to put a halt to the Gerawan farm workers’ efforts to de-certify the UFW as their collective bargaining representative. Gerawan Farming is one of California’s largest fruit farms.

The disinformation campaign allegedly was part of the UFW’s efforts to discredit Gerawan Farming, as well as the Gerawan workers leading the de-certification campaign.

The UFW lies and… Read More

Being female, I am reasonably qualified to speak on the subject of feminism and how feminists have been bullying other women for more than 40 years. I was born in the early 1960’s and lived during a time when women were burning their bras, demanding equal pay, and aborting their babies on demand. Young women were told that we had been oppressed by men for too long and women’s rights were our legacy: Men had been manipulating us for years in order to get what they wanted – they always got what they wanted, and we women got nothing. We deserved equality; it was our entitlement.

Sen. Hanna Beth Jackson To The… Read More

Like the Creature of the Walking Dead, a diabolical scientist with an unquenchable thirst for blood, California redevelopment agencies are also back from the dead. Redevelopment was developed in the 1970’s to fight urban blight, but quickly transformed into a corrupt scheme to divert county and state taxes to cities. What could possibly be wrong with “urban-renewal agencies” which float massive debt and routinely misuse eminent domain to seize private property? Ahem. But I digress.

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A scorchingreport from California State Auditor Elaine Howle, found that the Administrative Office of the Courts, now called the Judicial Council, spent $386 million over four years on statewide services that nearly half of California’s 58 trial courts don’t use – including $186 million on contractors and consultants.

Now, the Administrative Office of the Courts is trying take away the authority for decision making of trial court funds from the independent Trial Court Budget Advisory Committee, and give it to the Judicial Council’s Committee on Accountability and Efficiency — the same committee that approved big raises for top AOC officials as its first official action under its then-chair, Justice Cantil-Sakauye.

It’s akin to City Councils voting for their own… Read More

As Gov. Jerry Brown prepares to sign another climate change agreementwith “government leaders from around the world,” as his office announced, remember the recent agreement Brown got into with the scandalized Oregon Gov. Kitzhaber. “In October 2013,California Gov. Jerry Brown, together with the Governors of Oregon and Washington and the British Columbia Premier,signedthePacific Coast Action Plan on Climate and Energy, “to align climate change policies and promote clean energy,’” I wrote in February.

The Pacific Coast Collaborative links with theWest Coast Infrastructure Exchange(WCX), a compact betweenCalifornia, Oregon, Washington and British Columbia, formed in 2013 to promote “the type of new thinking necessary to solve the West Coast’s infrastructure crisis.” And the WCX is linked to… Read More

Thursday, a California Appellate Court struck a blow to autocratic labor, when it struck down California’s Compulsory Contracting Statute as unconstitutional, and set aside the state’s Agricultural Labor Relations Board-ordered contract on Gerawan Farming. The court called the forcing of this unwanted union contract on workers an “unconstitutional abuse of authority.”

And, the Court even awarded repayment to Gerawan of its costs for bringing this appeal.

The ruling is a significant victory for Gerawan Farming and its 5,000 workers. Gerawan’s workers have been fighting a UFW takeover since October 2012, when the United Farm Workers labor union showed up unannounced after abandoning workers for more than 20 years, and ordered workers to pay 3 percent of their… Read More

‘Transparency’ is probably the most overused word in political speech, while at the same time, the most underutilized in practice.In a free society, transparency in government means openness, accountability, and honesty. It is the obligation of government to share information with citizens, yet is increasingly difficult to access – even in California, home to Silicon Valley.

Without transparency, citizens are unable to hold public officials accountable. And that’s the problem –government is responsible for making itself available to be accountable. It’s unnatural. While the true statesman values principle above popularity, today’s era of politics in California doesn’t breed an abundance of statesmen.

However, one of the good guys – a real statesman – former State Sen. Sam Blakeslee, has tackled the problem of transparency in politics. The Institute for Advanced Technology and Public Policy, under the leadership of Blakeslee, officially launched the Digital Democracy Project, to provide a searchable database of all legislative hearings. “This package… Read More

Subtitle: The Fleecing of Sacramento’s Taxpayers

Sacramento’s City Manager John Shirey released the proposed 2015/2016 budget last week. It’s clear that this city manager, the mayor, and the city council members are cavalier with their spending of other people’s money.More is never enough. And the word “austerity” is not in their vocabularies.

The other important issue to note is even with his latest attempt to become a strong mayor squashed (again) by the voters last year, Mayor Kevin Johnson is the driving force anyway behind this… Read More