megan's blog

By Robert Cruickshank

The high range of cost estimates to build high speed rail between San Francisco and Anaheim is $98 billion over the next 22 years. There’s no doubt that $98 billion is a pretty big number.

But so is $1.9 trillion.

That’s the estimate for California’s Gross State Product – the state version of Gross Domestic Product, or GDP. That $1.9 trillion sum is about the same as Italy ($2 trillion) and not so much less than the United Kingdom ($2.2 trillion). If it were its own country, California would be the world’s 9th largest national economy.

By Leo Gerard
United Steelworkers

First, Republicans opposed extending the payroll tax cut that put an extra $20 a week in the pockets of 160 million working Americans.

Next, they supported it. If the cost were offset the way they wanted. Even though Republicans previously had said that tax cuts never need be offset.

After that, they opposed a stopgap measure extending the break by two months. Even though the cost was offset.

Ultimately, they approved the 60-day extension.

By Mike Konczal
Roosevelt Institute

Privatizing the government is one of the most active projects of the early 21st century.

Everything we once expected the government to do - from education to regulatory rule-writing to military operations to healthcare services to prison management - it now does less of, preferring to support markets in which these services are done through independent, profit-maximizing agents. Tools such as contracting out, vouchering and the selling-off of state assets have been used to remake the government during our market-worshipping era.

By Ngoc Nguyen
New America Media

As political maneuvering continues over the fate of the controversial proposed Keystone XL pipeline, one of the world's largest energy companies -- BP -- is already signaling the direction it plans to take: it's positioning itself to tap the burgeoning supply of Canadian tar sands oil.

BP announced it will divest from its oil refineries on the Southern West Coast -- in Carson, Calif. -- and Texas City, TX, and expand its operations in the Pacific Northwest and the Midwest -- a move that would halve the company's U.S. refining capacity.

David Hackett of Stillwater Associates, an energy consulting firm based in Irvine, Calif., called the energy giant’s exit from California “a big deal.”

By Richard (RJ) Eskow

There's a new "Medicare" proposal - sorta. It's really the same old bait-and-switch we've seen a dozen times. Still, you gotta hand it to 'em: Republican Sens. Tom Coburn and Richard Burr have taken the usual right-wing think-tank-designed buzzwords, deceptive packaging, and sleights of hand, and have taken them to new heights.

These foundation-forged assaults on the middle class may be old, battered ideas that have been debunked a dozen times, but still they just won't die. Like the old Terminators, they keep coming back with the same mission: Must. Kill. Medicare.

Coburn and Burr don't even pretend to show how their anti-Medicare plan - excuse me, "choice" plan - will save money. They just say this:

We do not yet have a concrete, specific amount of "savings" outlined, but we believe our proposal could save between $200 billion and $500 billion over a decade.

By Alan Kandel

In 1976, the Railroad Revitalization and Regulatory Reform Act passed, as did the Staggers Act of 1980, effectively granting a stay of execution to American railroading. These two pieces of legislation are what enabled railroading in this country to ascend to where it is today, enjoying a near-resounding success – particularly mainline freight railroading.

Despite this achievement and acclaim, one aspect of railroading has recently been prompting intense debate: the nationwide deployment of Positive Train Control, or PTC, to aid in the prevention primarily of train-to-train collisions and overspeed derailments.

The debate centers on a proposed delay to install PTC nationally on approximately 70,000 to 80,000 miles of railroad track. Instead of full implementation occurring by the current federally mandated deadline of December 31, 2015, a five-year extension is being sought whereby full implementation wouldn't be required until year-end 2020.

By Viji Sundaram
New America Media

More than a decade after she was freed from a sex trafficking ring in Berkeley, one survivor still has nightmares about Lakireddy Balireddy.

“Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night after I dream that he is lying next to me, or see someone taking me to him,” said the young woman, now in her late 20s, who agreed to an interview on the condition of anonymity. “I jump out of bed and turn on all the lights to make sure he’s not in the room.”

The media circus that resulted as the sex trafficking case broke in early 2000, with daily outraged headlines about Lakireddy’s “sex slaves,” started a statewide conversation that led directly to the passage in 2005 of Assembly Bill 22, California’s first law setting higher criminal penalties for human trafficking.

This year’s campaign to get tougher anti-trafficking laws on the November ballot as a voter initiative is the latest attempt to deal with what proponents call the unfinished business of legal reform.

By Dan Bacher

The House Natural Resources Committee on Thursday approved H.R. 1837, a bill that would eliminate environmental protections for the Delta and Central Valley rivers, secure more water for corporate agribusiness on the San Joaquin Valley's west side and upend water rights in California.  

Congressional Republicans and agribusiness interests celebrated the Committee's passage of the legislation as a "historic North-South compromise that will protect all users," while Northern California Congressional Democrats, Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer and Delta advocates slammed the bill as a "job killer" and "water grab."   

By Barry Nelson
Natural Resources Defense Council

In his State of the State address, Governor Brown emphasized his commitment to developing a visionary Bay-Delta plan that will restore the estuary and its fish, and ensure a reliable water supply.  Developing this plan will require hard work, but it can be done. The Bay Area has a great deal at stake. The Bay-Delta is the defining feature of our region.  It provides a cornucopia of recreational opportunities and is a major reason why people choose to live here.  But this ecosystem is in trouble, as shown by the plight of Chinook salmon.  

By Paul Kleyman
New America Media

The New York Times front-page article Sunday showing how extensively Americans—including Tea Party supporters—rely on government programs successfully shatters some myths about who accesses the safety net. But despite its fine on-the-ground reporting, the article’s poor framing on policy solutions seems to perpetuate other myths about Medicare and Social Security.

First, the good news: In “Even Critics of Safety Net Depend on It Increasingly,” Binyamin Appelbaum and Robert Gebeloff examine recessionary life in Chisago County, Minnesota, northeast of the Twin Cities and somewhat farther north of Anoka, the real Lake Woebegone where Garrison Keillor grew up.