Dave Johnson, Speak Out California.

So many of us have a hard time living up to our own values.  Here is a story of one example.

The Sisters of St. Joseph have a proud history of fighting for human rights and human dignity and improvement of conditions for working people.  But like so many progressives — and people in general — the Sisters of St. Joseph appear to be having trouble living up to these values when they apply to themselves.

A few days ago Julia Rosen wrote a Calitics post titled, Sisters of St. Josephs it’s time to make peace with your workers.  I urge readers here to go read that post.  Julia writes,

It is a dirty little secret, but often times the more virulently anti-union employers are religious orders that run health systems.  Such is the situation with the Sisters of St. Joseph who run the St. Joseph Health System.  They have been resisting the efforts of their service employees to join SEIU-UHW for the past three years.

And at Huffington Post Delores Huertes has a post titled, Together We Marched in Solidarity.  I also urge readers to click through and read it.  She begins,

This week I’m joining St. Joseph Health System workers, Attorney General Jerry Brown, Father Eugene Boyle, actor Ed Begley Jr, and community and religious leaders to call upon the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange to make peace with their workers.

next she makes the important point,

For decades, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange have fought for justice for California’s workers. In the summer of 1973, they marched in solidarity with Cesar Chavez and farm workers during the brutal Grape Strike. I witnessed the Sisters putting their personal safety at risk. They walked picket lines and even went to jail with more than 3500 striking farm workers. I was inspired by the Sisters’ commitment to stand with the farm workers, even in the face of violent provocation.

Yes, it appears that the Sisters of St. Joseph are ready to stand by workers, walk pickets lines, and fight for the rights of workers.  But this time they are holding back when it involves their own workers.  Huertes continues,

Over the last three years, workers in the St. Joseph Health System (SJHS) who care for the sick and vulnerable in our community, have been working to form a union with S.E.I.U. — United Healthcare Workers West (UHW) so they can have a real say in the decisions that affect their patients, their families and themselves.

But the Sisters, who founded and hold majority control of the Board of SJHS, a $3.5 billion system of hospitals and clinics, sadly are using heavy-handed tactics similar to those used by other major corporations to deny workers a free choice about whether to form a union. SJHS workers have told me directly, that the SJHS management is fighting their efforts and violating federal labor law by threatening union supporters with arrest and job loss – and denying them free speech. Public records show that SJHS has hired some of the most notorious union-busting firms to fight their employees. Meanwhile, government officials have cited SJHS for violating its employees’ basic labor rights, including illegally firing, spying on, and intimidating workers who want to form a union. These heavy-handed tactics leave workers feeling threatened, intimidated and disregarded.

While looking into this I came across a December, 2007 article at the Catholic News Agency, Catholic health workers’ effort to unionize could crowd out Catholics. Please read to article to learn about the subtexts of this unionization battle.  From the story,

A political activist in Sacramento [. . .] said the UHW takeover would be a “done deal” if the employees’ demand for a fair election agreement were met.

If you read the story it is clear that the activist mentioned is very much against unionization and supports the Sisters’ efforts to keep the workers from having a unionization vote.  But if allowing a vote for a union means that a union is “a done deal” then it means the workers want a union.  

Any way you look at it, it is a shame that the Sisters are trying to keep their workers from voting on whether to have a union.  The Sisters need to understand that they are role models for their community.  They were positive role models standing up for their values when they supported the farmworkers.  They can again be positive role models by showing that even when it affects their own interests they are willing to stand by their values and support worker rights and human rights.  

It is time that the Sisters of Saint Joseph allow their workers to vote on whether they want a union.

Click through to Speak Out California.

Dave Johnson, Speak Out California.

The other day I brought up immigration, asking the practical question of how we would identify people who are here without documentation.

Suppose — just suppose — the people who advocate harsh treatment of non-citizens are successful in their efforts, and our government starts an effort to locate and deport them. How do we identify who is here without authorization? This is a practical question.

Americans are not required to “carry papers.” We do not have checkpoints, and inside of the country we do not have to prove that we are traveling with proper authorization. We certainly do not have to prove that we are citizens. Many of us could never even locate the documentation necessary to prove citizenship if we were, in fact, required to prove it.

One answer that comes up frequently is to deal with the immigration question through employment.  The reason people come here is to try to have a better life, which means employment.  So this opens up a two-pronged approach.  One, attack the undocumented resident problem through the employers, and the other is to help the countries south of us to improve their economies so people are not desperately trying to come here so they can feed their families.  (And opening up markets of people who can afford to buy things we make here, by the way.)  Meanwhile, employers here are taking advantage of desperate people for their own gain.

So to approach this problem though employment we ask employers here to check for documentation when hiring.    This is a natural time to do this, because people already need to show they are who they say they are when applying for jobs.  An employer who hires an undocumented worker is the one committing the crime.

But what happens to families and lives if we cause people working now to be fired?  What happens to neighborhoods, businesses, already-eroding housing prices, local tax bases, and all the other things that can be affected if hundreds of thousands — maybe even millions — of people are suddenly without jobs and forced to move?  Perhaps part of the answer to the problem is to freeze any new hiring of people who are not citizens or have resident status, so the problem at least stops getting worse and ever harder to solve.  But it is not a good idea for human and economic reason to punish people who are already living and working here.

The current discussion of immigration is so focused on the word “illegal” and that word helps turn human beings into a faceless, criminal “them.”  But it really is human beings, with families and lives just like everyone else.

Please discuss.

Ckick through to Speak Out California to join our discussion there.

Dave Johnson, Speak Out California.

I have been looking at the issue of computerized voting machine security for several years, and want to write about it today.

Many people have pointed out that there are a number of problems with the new touch-screen voting machines.  They fear that these machines can be used to rig an election. Others feel more confident about the machines because they are “hi-tech” and computerized and make voting easier.

Computer experts warn that the machines cannot be trusted.  Meanwhile, I have a relative who believes that computers can’t make mistakes, so these machines will guarantee accurate vote counting.

I can give you my position on these machines in just a few words:  “Prove it.”  Here is what I mean:  The standard for trusting the results of an election should be based on what an average citizen can believe about the election results.  If the election system that you set up is able to prove to an average citizen that the election results are accurate, then you have the right system in place.   Elections are about average citizens making decisions and trusting the results, not about being told by people in positions of authority what has been decided and who our leaders will be. The whole “trust me” thing hasn’t worked out so well in the past so people came up with “prove it” systems so everyone could see for themselves how the elections turned out.

Yes, I have an election system in mind that meets the “prove it” requirement.  It’s simple.  I say that it simply doesn’t matter what kind of machine (or no machine at all) is used in the voting booth or to count the votes later, as long as the voter can put a printed ballot in a ballot box.  (The voter, of course, is expected to look over the printed ballot to be sure it has the right candidates and ballot measures marked.  Just like with the old pen or punch card systems.)

Everyone understands printed ballots with marks on them, and putting the ballot into a ballot box.  Time-honored methods for holding secure “prove it” elections with ballots have been worked out.  At the start of the election day you check the ballot box to be sure it is empty.  Each voter gets one ballot, marks it, and puts it in the box.  At the end of the day the ballots are counted and the total is reported.  Etc.  I work in elections and I know the system well.  It can be trusted.

If we use touch-screen computers as input devices to help the voter mark the ballot, all the better.  This helps prevent mistakes like those in Florida in 2000.   When the voter is ready the machine prints out a ballot with clear markings of the voter’s choices.  After the machine prints that ballot it doesn’t matter if the machine has been hacked or is just making mistakes because you look at the ballot before putting it into the ballot box.  And it doesn’t matter how the count is reported because once you have a printed record of each voter’s intentions, you can count them by hand if necessary.  The voters or a trusted representative can watch the counting.  

There is one safeguard that I think is very important.  You must randomly test the reported vote counts against the paper ballots they are said to represent.  And I am very strict about this part.  If the count is off by even a single vote it means something is wrong with the counting system and the entire election needs to be counted by hand!

The controversy about touch-screen voting machines started because they do not use printed ballots that can prove the election’s results to the average person!  The machines come from private companies.  Some of these prohibit anyone – even election officials – from knowing how they count the votes.  There is no way at all to check whether the machines are reporting correct results.  It is a matter of trusting these companies and not of proving to the average voter that the results can be trusted.  We are just supposed to trust that the companies are telling us who won the elections!   Remember what I said about being told by people in positions of authority what has been decided and who our leaders will be?

If these machines make mistakes or just break down, there is no way to figure out who really won the election.  And if someone is able to rig the machines to change the vote counts, there is no way to know that, either.  History tells us that this is a concern.  People have gone to great lengths to rig even local elections.  So with the huge stakes in today’s election — trillions of dollars and wars — we certainly should understand that highly-skilled and well-funded attempts to dictate election results are likely to occur.

There are a number of ideas for making voting machines more reliable and harder to hack into and change results.   One idea is that the public should be able to examine — and experts allowed to repair and improve — the source code for the programs used in the machines.  This is called “open source” and the Open Voting Consortium has done a lot of great work in this area. (Send them some a few $$ to help their effort.)  Open-source systems will help make the machines more reliable and easier to use and will reduce the chances that someone can try to rig an election.  This is a great approach, but in the end it fails the “prove it” test.  The average person doesn’t understand the complicated programming involved.  And there is no way to prove that the open-source code is the code that is actually running in every single voting machine on election day.  

Other ideas involve elaborate security to test and guard the machines.  This again fails the “prove it” test.  Unless average people can see for themselves that the results are accurate, no security is sufficient.

I say that the system I describe above — involving a paper ballot that the voter can check and put in a ballot box — makes the reliability and security of any voting machines themselves less important because you can “prove it” by counting those paper ballots. You can test a sample of ballots against the reported counts, making it useless to try to hack the voting or counting machines themselves.  

California’s Secretary of State Debra Bowen understands these issues and is working hard to make sure that our state’s elections are safe, fair and provable.  Let’s hope that the rest of the states can catch up to California.

Click through to Speak Out California.

Dave Johnson, Speak Out California

One day your website is yours, and the next day it is someone else’s.  Organizations, businesses and regular people are at the mercy of a confusing deregulated system.

A little over a week ago the Speak Out California website suddenly disappeared, and viewers instead saw a website full of advertisements.  

We had no way of even knowing what had happened.  It was just a surprise.  One day typing “speakoutca.org” into a web browser took viewers to our website, the next day it took viewers to an ad site that someone else managed.

Some of us are more sophisticated and internet-savvy than most citizens so we were eventually able to track down some information.  I’m not going into details here, except to say that no one at Speak Out California received any notice that this was going to happen.  It took several days to even track down where the domain name (this is what internet addresses like speakoutca.org are called) had been registered, who had registered it, and contact info for the registrar.  Then it took several more days to restore the domain name to us and get it working again.

Here’s the thing: the only way we were able to get this name back and get the site operating again is because some of us are much more internet-connected than most people.  Most people would have no idea where to even start to look for information and help solving a problem like this.

This is certainly not an uncommon problem.  My wife had a business named Dancing Woman Designs with a website at dancingwomandesigns.com, and then one day she didn’t.  She received no notice, nothing.  It was just there one day and gone the next and if she wanted it back it was going to cost her.  It was going to cost her a lot.  And so she doesn’t have dancingwomandesigns.com anymore and that address takes you to an ad site.  A whole business that took years to get going and build is history now.  It was wiped out in a minute because someone was able to get the web name.

A larger business is more likely to have the resources to hire the necessary experts to fight something like this.  But it can be an expensive proposition and it can take time.

This is the difference between regulation and deregulation.  Regulations protect regular people.  Deregulation enables and protects scammers, schemers, and cons.  The Internet is largely unregulated and is full of scammers, schemers and cons.  Most of the businesses and organizations on the internet are good, honest, credible and legitimate but regular people are also left completely at the mercy of numerous cons, scams, schemes and rip-offs and the burden is on us to find a way to tell the difference.

We got Speak Out California back up and running.  It only took us a week and a little money.  But we are sophisticated, internet-savvy and connected — and lucky.  Hmm … maybe some new legislation is warranted.

Click through to Speak Out California

Dave Johnson, Speak Out California.

Does your credit card or bank loan agreement have an “arbitration clause?”  More and more consumer-oriented contracts and “agreements” have clauses specifying that disputes must go to arbitration rather than our civil justice system.  The justification for this is that arbitration saves the time and expense of working within our legal system.  But here’s the thing: the corporations choose the arbitrators and every arbitrator knows they will never, ever, ever, ever (ever) get another job if they rule against the corporations.  Never.

And guess what: 98.8% of arbitrations end up in favor of the corporations.  This is not a surprise.

The Progressive States Network’s newsletter has a story about this today, Arbitration: “Set up to squeeze small sums of money out of desperately poor people”,

The headline above is a quote from former West Virginia Supreme Court Justice Richard Neely, describing what his role was as an arbitrator at the National Arbitration Forum (NAF), a for-profit company hired to enforce mandatory arbitration clauses for credit card consumer loans.  “NAF is nothing more than an arm of the collection industry hiding behind a veneer of impartiality,” says Richard Neely.

In a devastating expose by BusinessWeek, Neely and other former arbitrators describe an arbitration system stacked completely against consumers– a system where creditors win 99.8% of all disputes involving companies ranging from Bank of America to Sears to Citgroup. Arbitration clauses buried in the fine print of credit card offers means consumers lose the right to have disputes decided in an independent court and instead are forced into corporation-selected arbitration firms.

The BusinessWeek story mentioned in the Progressive States Network story is titled, Banks vs. Consumers (Guess Who Wins)

This story about credit card companies taking unfair advantage of consumers is one more attack on citizen rights to access our own legal system (one more of so many attacks). Think about what is happening here.  First the big corporations fought against “regulations” which are the rules that We, the People set up requiring safe workplaces or environmental standards, or products that do not injure people, etc.  Then when fewer regulations of course resulted in worker or consumer injuries or toxic spills or other harms the inured parties filed more lawsuits asking the companies to make good.  So in response to these lawsuits the corporate-financed “tort reform” movement came along, working to limit the ability of citizens to be compensated for the results of corporate bad behavior.  The result has been fewer regulations preventing harms and more restrictions on citizen access to courts where we can seek damages after we are harmed.  

I didn’t even bring up the corporate-conservative movement efforts to install their own business-friendly judges in the courts.

But even those erosions of our access to justice has not been enough for the greedy corporations.  Now there is arbitration: clauses that show up in contracts and agreements that remove your ability to take a dispute to the courts at all!  And the judges in these courts are dependent on the corporations for their livelihood!

Deregulation, tort reform and now arbitration that is rigged against the consumer.  Drip, drip, drip.  One after another the big corporations are eroding the rights of citizens.  

Click through to Speak Out California.

Big tobacco is pouring money into the crucial California Senate  District 19 race!  See: Tobacco firm funds county GOP : Local News : Ventura County Star,

The nation’s largest tobacco company has donated $50,000 to the Ventura County Republican Central Committee as the local party gears up to help GOP candidate Tony Strickland in what is expected to be a multimillion-dollar campaign this fall in the 19th Senate District.

[. . .] “There’s an alarming trend of the tobacco industry increasing its influence by ramping up its political contributions,” said Jim Knox, vice president of the American Cancer Society Action Network.

Knox noted the tobacco industry played “a major role in killing healthcare reform in California last year. They don’t issue press releases, they don’t testify at hearings, but they’re hard at work in the halls of the Capitol.”

Senate District 19 is the potential “flip” seat in the senate.  If Hannah-Beth Jackson wins it could mean the vote that lets Democrats finally pass budgets.

So why is tobacco interested in keeping Republican ability to block budgets?  Why did they fight to block health care reform?

Part of the financing of the healthcare plan was to have been a $1.75 per-pack tax increase on cigarettes.

Please go read the rest of the article if you care about health and politics – and the health of politics – in California.

Disclaimer – I do some work for Speak Out California, which was founded by Hannah-Beth Jackson, but this post comes from my own concern over this and is not related to that work.