Bill to change statute of limitations for polluters stalls out

by Brian Leubitz

When people complain about the Legislature, it is precisely because of things like this story from the always interesting California Watch.

Under pressure from construction, architect and other industry groups, state legislators killed a bill that would have closed a loophole used by businesses to evade pollution lawsuits.

Sponsored by Assemblyman Warren Furutani, D-Long Beach, AB 1207 arose out of a lawsuit in Carson, where residents discovered in 2009 that for nearly five decades, their families have been exposed to dangerous levels of cancer-causing toxins emanating from their properties. There is no state law that explicitly puts time limits on pollution cases, which often are discovered decades after the toxic dumping occurs.

However, Shell Oil Co. and a local developer were able to initially get the resident lawsuit thrown out by claiming the state’s 10-year time limit on “construction defect” claims had expired.

It is never hard to kill a bill that can be even tangentially tied to the evil “trial lawyers”. However, in this situation, and many others, lawsuits are the only ramification for Californians who have been well and royally screwed by big companies. This time it was a developer and Shell Oil, but you can trace these same general circumstances to many other cases.

The buyers and renters of homes in Carson simply had no way to know that they were moving into property that was on top of a toxic waste dump. But Shell knew, and at some level, the developers should have known if they did their due diligence. But money comes first, and that didn’t happen because any answers would be inconvenient.

And so a generation later, people in Carson are stuck with toxic property. And somehow there is a statue of limitations for an event that they could have no way of knowing? It is a perversion of the concept of statute of limitations, which is intended to force people to act on situations of which they are aware.

Best of luck to Asm. Furutani and any other legislators who take up this bill. This shouldn’t happen to other Californians. But what this really speaks of is the sheer power of lobbyists and industry in Sacramento. I try to imagine the situation where a majority of Californians prefers this outcome, and I just can’t imagine such a world. No, this was all about moneyed interests against a diffuse sense of right and wrong.

I suppose it shouldn’t surprise much that the money won.

America needs to make things again.

Why? Because the kinds of jobs that send kids to college and provide a secure retirement are not minimum-wage jobs. Creating high-wage jobs, middle-class jobs and steady year-round jobs will take revitalizing the American manufacturing economy.

The average wage for manufacturing work in America is 20 percent higher than the overall average wage – a premium that reflects the tremendous value added to our economy from the manufacturing sector. Each manufacturing job produces up to four other jobs and, according to a recent report, each $1 spent in manufacturing creates $1.43 in other sectors. That’s a “multiplier effect” nearly twice that of other parts of our economy.

When we make things, we keep vital skills in this country. We keep our balance of trade healthy – so we have control of our economic future. We keep the high-wage manufacturing industries that fund research and development, so our economy doesn’t fall behind.

And manufacturing isn’t just big factories anymore. The “buy local” and “maker” movements have shown the tremendous economic and creative energies released, and the environmental benefits gained, when we stay local.

Manufacturing is also one of the few sources of steady and secure jobs for those who do not graduate from four-year colleges – and that helps build a just economy that creates opportunity for everyone.

Of course, we are not going to bring every manufacturing job back. And we might not want to invest our national efforts in the very lowest wage manufacturing jobs. But we can target the kinds of jobs that will help create a path for American families to the middle class.

That’s exactly the path my own family followed. When I was young, we lived in a trailer in a logging town on the coast of Washington State. I watched my dad start a small trucking business with a single truck he drove himself. Through his hard work, I was able to go on to college, earn a degree in chemical engineering and then an advanced degree – and use my education to start a company that created technology to help U.S. manufacturers compete in the global market place.

Later, I co-founded the Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology at UC Berkeley – and today, I teach bright young engineers and entrepreneurs the skills they need to maintain America’s lead in technology.

All of my experience creating jobs and sparking innovation has led me to one simple conclusion. We can’t outsource our way to prosperity. We need to do more than just design, and then consume, products. We need to make things again.

As tough as the American economy is right now, there is reason for hope when it comes to Making More in America again. Over the past two years, the economy has added 334,000 manufacturing jobs – the strongest two‐year period of manufacturing job growth since the late 1990s. Manufacturing production grew 5.7 percent on an annualized basis since its low in June of 2009, the fastest pace of growth of production in a decade. But we still have a long way to go to recover from the more than two million manufacturing jobs lost in the recession.

Consider this math: if we could return to the level of the late 1970s when about 20 percent of jobs were in the manufacturing sector – we would create 12 million new jobs directly and spur another 30 million new jobs in downstream support services. Why is that number so important? Because that’s just about the number of jobs we need to restore and create over the next ten years to get back to full employment in the U.S.

To get there, we need more than promises.

That’s why I’ve published a detailed plan at www.StaceyLawson.com designed to restore the manufacturing jobs that sustain the middle class – manufacturing employment. It’s called “Making More in America,” and it lays out seven major priorities to get us there.

Restoring our manufacturing economy won’t be easy, and it isn’t the only thing we need to do – it is just a start. But if we care about restoring the middle class and creating the kinds of jobs that pay decent living wages – wages that help buy houses, pay college tuitions, fund decent retirements – this is exactly where we should start. So let’s get going.

Stacey Lawson is a Congressional candidate in California’s newly drawn Second District.  She is an educator and small business owner living in San Rafael, CA.

You can download a copy of Stacey Lawson’s “Making More in America” jobs plan here: http://staceylawson.com/making-more-in-america-jobs-plan/

Court strikes down Prop 8 on narrow equal protection grounds

by Brian Leubitz

It probably isn’t the decision that we would like, but it is sure better than the alternative.  In a narrow decision, Judge Reinhardt held Prop 8 unconstitutional as denying equal protection under the law.  However, this decision does not issue a blanked declaration that marriage bans are inherently unconstitutional in their own right.  You can read the full decision over the flip or at this link.

That being said, the 2-1 decision was mostly positive.  Judge Walker’s findings of fact, which you can read on a footnote on Page 18 of the decision, were not disputed.  The standard for changing these findings of fact is substantially higher than for the legal conclusions, but the maintenance of those facts is nonetheless important and notable.  And of course, there is the fact that the 9th Circuit ruled that Prop 8 was unconstitutional, which is pretty great.  However, I am guessing that AFER and Boies/Olson would have preferred an answer on the broader question of legality of same-sex marriage bans.  But that was not to be today:

Whether under the Constitution same-sex couples may ever be denied the right to marry, a right that has long been enjoyed by opposite-sex couples, is an important and highly controversial question. We need not and do not answer the broader question in this case.

And so, citizens of other states must wait in line for the time being. Metaphorically, I suppose, because the 9th Circuit also put a stay on the decision, so no marriages will proceed right away.  But the Supreme Court can review this decision in any way they would like to. They could address that broader question if they so decide. Perhaps they’d prefer to rip the band-aid off in one grand gesture, or maybe we’ll wait for that.  The Supreme Court won’t make its decision on whether to hear the case for a few months, so Court watchers will be left guessing.

All that being said, you can’t help but smile when you realize that an appellate court sees the real injustice in this inequality. Check out page 37 and the subsequent pages for a rather heartfelt statement of the importance of marriage in our community.

The designation is important because ‘marriage’ is the name that society gives to the relationship that matters most between two adults. A rose by any other name may smell as sweet, but to the couple designing to enter into a committed lifelong relationship, a marriage by the name of ‘registered domestic partnership’ does not.

Furthmore, when Reinhardt gets to his conclusion, it is stark and simple:

Proposition 8 serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior to those of opposite-sex couples.

Reinhardt ultimately wrote the opinion for an audience of 9.  By limiting his opinion, it has a stronger chance of standing up, and possibly even inspiring Justice Kennedy to end marriage discrimination forever.

9th Cir Prop 8 decision

9th Circuit Announces Decision at 10AM tomorrow

by Brian Leubitz

The 9th Circuit has just announced that they will be releasing their opinion in Perry v Brown, otherwise known as the Prop 8 case, tomorrow. The opinion will be posted on their website.  Given that the 9th Circuit will likely be overwhelmed by traffic, we’ll get links up to alternate sites as soon as we have them.

LGBT leaders will be gathering at the court in San Francisco tomorrow at 10AM for the decision, and then heading over to City Hall where clergy will be standing by to bless couples. (There will likely be a stay if Prop 8 is again ruled unconstitutional, so no real marriages.)

The team behind the lawsuit will, AFER, be llivestreaming their press conference with David Boies and Ted Olson.

As Conservatives play games with the former President’s legacy, what would Ronald Reagan do in today’s California?

I probably wouldn’t have known it was “Reagan Day” but for the helpful tweets of @GeorgeRunner. The former legislator and current member of the Board of Equalization isn’t really much of a tweeter, but on occasion he gives us such helpful words as “Happy Reagan Day!” after a few weeks of silence other than an announcement of his “e-newsletter.” (By the way, if you call it an “e-newsletter,” you are doing it wrong.)

Anyway, I thought I would take a moment to remind Mr. Runner and his #tcot friends about a few facts of the Gipper’s tenure here in California. In a blog post, Bruce Bartlett, a Reagan domestic policy adviser, points out some of the false tax mythology:

Reagan’s record on raising taxes began almost the moment he entered politics. Elected governor of California in 1966, he inherited a large budget deficit from his predecessor, Pat Brown. Although a conservative, dedicated to shrinking government, Reagan nevertheless found the magnitude of spending cuts that would have been necessary in 1967 to be beyond reach. This led him to endorse a $1 billion per year tax increase, equivalent to a $17 billion tax increase today – an enormous sum equal to a third of state revenues at that time. Journalist Lou Cannon recounts the circumstances:

“No amount of budget reductions, even if they had been politically palatable, could have balanced California’s budget in 1967. The cornerstone of Governor Reagan’s economic program was not the ballyhooed budget reductions but a sweeping tax package four times larger than the previous record California tax increase obtained by Governor Brown in 1959. Reagan’s proposal had the distinction of being the largest tax hike ever proposed by any governor in the history of the United States.”1] ([CG&G Feb 2011)

Let’s stop with all the beatification and think about what really happened 45 years ago, and what is happening now.  Like Reagan, Gov. Brown inherited a big deficit from his predecessor. Schwarzenegger’s mish-mash of policies left the state without direction and with a huge deficit to show for it. Brown the Younger in his third time has a similarly daunting challenge as he did in 1978 after Prop 13 and as Reagan did in 1978. And like Reagan, he understands the impracticality of a cuts-only budget solution.  And the tax increases that Brown is proposing today is less than half of the Reagan 1967 tax increases.

Runner and his fellow Republicans need to really take a deep look about their presidential saint and how he was able to objectively look at a situation and be more than ideologically dogmatic.  Perhaps then we could really govern the state, and the GOP could return to relevance.

If you’d like to see more debunking of the religion rapidly building around Reagan, read the entire post. Think Progress also has a great post about Reagan’s real legacy last year for his centennial.  Let’s