[Update: Looks like we lost this battle.  The recall was defeated.  Wal-Mart spent over $200K on this race.  Still a fight WELL worth picking. Rosemead residents sent a clear message just for having launched this campaign, and they’ll have another chance to replace these Wal-Mart stooges in the regular election next March.]

The results are not yet in, but polls just closed in Rosemead, California, where two city council members face a recall election as a consequence of their roles in inviting Wal-Mart to town.

Rosemead is a suburb just outside of Los Angeles.  Wal-Mart set its sights on the town after being denied entry into nearby San Gabriel in the 1990s, and after being routed in a 2004 referendum in the South L.A. working class community of Inglewood.  Though over twice as many Rosemead residents signed a petition in opposition to the superstore as signed a Wal-Mart-commissioned store-friendly one, the company assiduously courted council members’ favor and managed to pull together a consensus in favor of construction.  (This is the inverse of the tactic Wal-Mart failed to execute in Inglewood, where the company tried to bypass a hostile City Council by going straight to the voters with a referendum that was defeated by a 3-2 margin.)

Wal-Mart is much like a notoriously bad drunk who tries to crash his way into every party in town.  Now that everyone knows how obnoxious he is, nobody will let him through the door.  His only salvation is that he’s as rich as he is unpopular, and there’s always a couple bouncers somewhere he can bribe his way past.

Two such bouncers, Council Members Gary Taylor and Jay Imperial, faced the music today: a recall election, and a challenge from anti-Wal-Mart candidates Polly Low and Victor Ruiz.  Today’s recall election is Round 2 of Throwing the Bums Out in Rosemead.  In an earlier election, two of three pro-Wal-Mart incumbents were given the toss.  If Taylor and Imperial are defeated at the polls, only one of the original Wal-Mart Council will remain in office.

It is a measure of Wal-Mart’s international disrepute that a small, low-turnout, local election has garnered quite a bit of press attention (front of the California section of today’s L.A. Times).  As if to add to the melodrama, the election was overseen by federal election monitors: The anti-Wal-Mart petition that brought the recall into being was printed only in English, and was challenged in federal court by Taylor and Imperial as a violation of the Voting Rights Act (Rosemead has large populations of Chinese, Vietnamese and Spanish-speaking residents).  The election was scheduled for February, injoined, cancelled, dis-injoined, reinstated, and scheduled for today with election observers.

However this election turns out, the message from Rosemead to city officials all over the country is clear: Wal-Mart is politically toxic.  Jump into bed with it and risk finding yourself out of a job and asking for an application at the wage slave-driving superstore whose groundbreaking ribbon you just cut.

Invariably these days, Labor Day is occasion for progressive intellectuals all over the country to show up on community radio talk shows, academic symposia, and newspaper op-ed pages to ponder the question: Whither labor?

With union density what it is (13% overall, less in the private sector), it’s a discussion worth having, and having often.  Happily however, here in California, we have as muscular a labor movement as ever (or maybe not ever, but in living memory).  If I could post pictures here, I would put up a nice one from this morning’s L.A. Labor Fed breakfast at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Angels, where just about every Southern California Democratic officeholder above dog catcher showed up to honor the organizations that fight for what we now apparently refer to as the “middle class,” and that we once knew better as the working class.  With that kind of political juice, breakfasters were safe to table the discussion of Labor’s Future in favor of that of what unions need to get done between now and November to get a new governor in Sacramento.

The big news of the night: the California Teachers Association has worked out an agreement allowing it to affiliate with the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor.

That may sound less than earth-shattering to those who have other interests than the political machinations of union bureaucrats, but it is actually quite significant.  The 335,000-member CTA is an unaffiliated union, meaning that it does not belong to the California Federation of Labor, the state’s governing body of the AFL-CIO, and by extension, nor to the L.A. Fed, the county’s AFL-CIO governing body.  Yet the teachers union is, arguably, the single most powerful campaigning and lobbying organization in the state.  And the L.A. County Labor Fed is not just another Central Labor Council — it is a legendarily capable labor council.  It has helped launch the careers of many California political stars, including Antonio Villaraigosa.  Fabian Nunez was the L.A. Fed’s political director before winning his seat in Sacramento.  The combination of these two formidable outfits is promising indeed.

So, some good news for Labor Day in California, an occasion usually devoted in progressive circles only to nostalgia and hand-wringing.

For three out of four of them, the answer is “no.”

Seventy-five percent of California hospitals — 335 in all — have at least one building in danger of collapse in a major quake.  You can find if your local hospital is on the list at:

http://www.seiucal.o…

Twelve years after Northridge, 17 years after Loma Prieta, and a full 34 years after more than 50 people were killed in the collapse of buildings at Olive View Hospital in Sylmar and the VA Hospital in San Fernando as a result of the San Fernando earthquake, and California is about as prepared for the Big One as New Orleans was for Hurricane Katrina.

So why isn’t seismic retrofitting of hospitals included in the $38 billion in infrastructure bond measures proposed for the November ballot?  And why does the California Hospital Association want to eliminate the 2008 deadline for making “collapse hazard” hospital buildings safe?

The infrastructure bond package on the November ballot will include money for roads, schools, and, in the wake of Katrina, levees.  Yet while every Californian knows what the number one threat is to our public safety (and it ain’t terrorism), the amount set aside to prepare our frontline emergency facilities for a major earthquake is zero dollars and zero cents.

The issue is too basic even to qualify for meaningful political debate.  It’s a simple question of cause and effect: if we don’t prepare for the disaster we all know is coming, we’ll be unprepared when it happens.  Yet still, the short-term financial interests of the hospital industry somehow continue to prevail over the governor and the legislature.

It’s like watching the dysfunctional political process that ushered in the failed Katrina response unfold all over again.