Mikulan, Steven

By Steven Mikulan
The Frying Pan

The California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS) filed a lawsuit last week against current and former members of Walmart’s board of directors, and other company officers, charging them with gross violation of fiduciary duty in connection with the company’s Mexican bribery scandal. That scandal, extensively examined by a recent New York Times feature, revealed a corporation so eager to expand its Mexican operations that it ignored findings by its own investigators sent to look into the allegations.

By Steven Mikulan
The Frying Pan

Heist, a new film by Frances Causey and Donald Goldmacher, joins the growing list of angry documentaries chronicling the destruction of America’s economy and its middle class by powerful corporate forces. Like Inside Job and just about any title in the Brave New Films catalog, Heist gets our blood boiling with its money-pile graphics and occasional glib comments exhaled by Wall Street fat cats. Call this genre the Cinema of Outrage.

Subtitled Who Stole the American Dream?, the film breaks away from the pack, however, by drilling deep to explain how we came to find ourselves on the verge of where Argentina was a dozen years ago. The film also eschews conspiracist viewpoints and refuses to offer up, say, Alan Greenspan or the Koch brothers as villainous piñatas for us to vicariously bash.

By Steven Mikulan
The Frying Pan

The skirmish of words in El Segundo over its city manager’s proposal to raise local taxes on that city’s largest business, Chevron Oil, has suddenly become a full-fledged legal war, with the official making explosive accusations against both El Segundo’s government and Chevron. The story, which Donald Cohen has been following for Frying Pan News, began with Doug Willmore’s efforts to bring the giant refinery’s taxes in line with the taxes paid by other California oil companies. Willmore was subsequently fired on February 9 by El Segundo’s city council.

By Steven Mikulan
The Frying Pan

It’s not known if the Tea Party will ever be identified by one color, the way our two dominant political parties are. With red and blue already taken, it’s tempting to guess that the Tea Party would embrace – well, white. In any case, it won’t be green. Consider a February 4 New York Times piece, which spells out the tireless campaign waged by the movement against any legislation tilting toward a sustainable environment. Some of the laws vehemently contested include:

• A Virginia “county’s paying $1,200 in dues to a nonprofit that consults on sustainability issues.”

• A Maine public works project designed to ease highway congestion.

• A high-speed train network for Florida.

By Steve Mikulan

As the year winds down to its bang-or-whimper end, here are a few images that linger in the mind’s eye.

Southern California’s Economy was spared a beating when 62,000 grocery employees belonging to the United Food and Commercial Workers union won a fair three-year contract from three major supermarket chains without having to go on strike.

By Steven Mikulan

Even when he loses, Grover Norquist wins. This is one of the unsettling conclusions to be drawn from Peter Dreier and Donald Cohen’s December 20 feature, “Grover Norquist’s Real Game: Shifting Power and Wealth to the 1 Percent,” posted on Truthout.org.

Their richly detailed portrait of the founder of Americans for Tax Reform shows Norquist as not simply a more highly evolved version of Howard Jarvis, the California anti-tax zealot who bequeathed us the nightmare known as Proposition 13. Indeed, as Dreier and Cohen state, Norquist is not really a conservative genuinely interested in smaller government or tax reform, but the hired arsonist of big business. Although highly secretive about who pays his rent, Norquist has flacked or lobbied for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Big Tobacco and the gambling industry, to name a few of his benefactors.