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CORRUPTION UPDATES 66 May 2007: Draft Posting: Stay Tuned for More! The CORRUPTION UPDATES posts corruption news stories from California, the Nation and the World, and gives you the straight story. |
CORRUPTION UPDATES 66
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1) THE ABSTRACT PRINTED BELOW WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE:
Donations can't fail to catch Nuñez's eye
Groups with bills before the Assembly give $1.68 million to fund speaker's bid to adjust term limits.
By Nancy Vogel
Times Staff Writer
June 4, 2007
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-nunez4jun04,0,7947301,print.story?coll=la-home-center
SACRAMENTO — The law bars them from donating more than $7,200 directly to Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez (D-Los Angeles). But nothing has prevented teachers, doctors, gambling enterprises, insurers and others from giving much, much more to a cause close to Nuñez's heart.
Those interest groups wrote checks for as much as $250,000 to help bankroll a ballot measure that would tweak California's term limits to give Nuñez another six years in the Legislature. Seventeen unions, corporations, utilities and professional associations have donated a combined $1.68 million for a signature-gathering effort to put the measure before voters next February.
The contributions, all made within the last two months, come as lawmakers led by Nuñez are deciding on hundreds of bills of concern to the donors. The groups had already spent a combined $3.5 million in the first three months of this year trying to influence the Legislature, governor's office and state agencies, state records show.
PG&E gave $50,000 to the campaign for the term limits measure.
The California Teachers Assn. gave $250,000 to the term limits effort, as did the Los Angeles Casinos political action committee. Insurance and entertainment companies, builders and several labor unions are among the other donors of more than $25,000.
. Hospitals face the possibility of a 4% levy on their revenues under a proposal by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to extend health insurance coverage. Nuñez included no such assessment in his own pending plan for covering millions of uninsured Californians.
The political arm of the California Hospitals Assn. gave $100,000 to the Committee for Term Limits & Legislative Reform on May 4.
Donors of $25,000 or more to date include:
• Zenith Insurance Co.
• Anschutz Entertainment Group and its related L.A. Arena Co., which operate Staples Center
• American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees
• CaliforniaBuilding Industry Assn.
• Southern CaliforniaEdison
• California Dental Assn.
• California Optometric Assn.
• A political action committee of Los AngelesCounty card clubs
• Service Employees International Union Local 1000
• California Teachers Assn.
• California School Employees Assn. and the group California Attorneys, Administrative Law Judges and Hearing Officers in State Employment
• California Correctional Peace Officers Assn.
• The political arm of the California Hospitals Assn.
• California State Council of Service Employees
• Pacific Gas & Electric Co.
Source: Times reporting
THE COMMITTEE SAYS:
Nunez and Corporate Bribers, Special Intersts Craft Pact of Greed on Term Limit Attack
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2) THE ABSTRACT PRINTED BELOW WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE :
Putin warns Europe in missile row
BBC June 3, 07
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/world/
europe/6717119.stm
Moscow may target weapons at Europe if the US builds planned missile defence facilities in the region, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said.
Russia has not pointed missiles towards Europe since the end of the Cold War.
"If the American nuclear potential grows in European territory, we have to give ourselves new targets in Europe"
President Vladimir Putin
He repeated warnings that the US defence shield could lead to a new arms race but said it would the fault of the Americans if this happened.
He said the US had "altered the strategic balance" by unilaterally pulling out of the anti-ballistic missile (ABM) treaty in 2002.
"It is up to our military to define these targets, in addition to defining the choice between ballistic and cruise missiles."
THE COMMITTEE SAYS:
Arms Race Ensues From Bush's Global Military Aggression
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3) THE ABSTRACT PRINTED BELOW WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE :
Gorbachev criticises US 'empire'
BBC June 3, 07
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/world/europe/6717037.stm
The former Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, has blamed the US for the current state of relations between Russia and the West.
In a BBC interview, Mr Gorbachev said that the Russians were ready to be constructive, but America was trying to squeeze them out of global diplomacy.
He added that the Iraq War had undermined Tony Blair's credibility.
Mr Gorbachev accused America of "empire-building", which he said the UK should have warned it away from.
"I don't understand why you, the British, did not tell them, 'Don't think about empire'"
Mikhail Gorbachev
In an interview with Radio Four's The World This Weekend, Mr Gorbachev said relations between Russia and the West were in a bad state.
"Well, it's worse than I expected," he said through a translator.
"We lost 15 years after the end of the Cold War, but the West I think and particularly the United States, our American friends, were dizzy with their success, with the success of their game that they were playing, a new empire.
THE COMMITTEE SAYS:
Old Pal Gorby Condems US: "Empire Building"
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4) THE ABSTRACT PRINTED BELOW WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE :
Cheney's Mystery Visitors
By Michael A. Fletcher
Monday, June 4, 2007; A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/03/AR2007060300965_pf.html
A Sept. 13, 2006, letter from Cheney's counsel, Shannen W. Coffin, to the Secret Service that surfaced last week made clear that Cheney intends to exercise "exclusive control" of the logs showing who is visiting him or his staff at the White House compound or at the vice presidential residence at the Naval Observatory.
. Other administrations have relinquished the records in the face of congressional investigations.
But the Bush administration's policy puts the visitor records out of reach of the Freedom of Information Act and off-limits to reporters and interest groups trying to determine who is meeting with the vice president or his staff.
The logs instead are classified as presidential records and would be available only to researchers once the administration has receded into history. The private group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) has filed suit seeking the logs to determine the influence of religious conservatives.
THE COMMITTEE SAYS:
Cheney's Secret Government Expands its Ring of Darkness
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5) THE ABSTRACT PRINTED BELOW WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE :
Our diploma-less students: Editorial
Sunday, May 27, 2007
AFTER DECADES of educational reforms in California, it is profoundly disappointing that on the most basic indicator of educational success -- the number of students who graduate from high school -- the state is failing miserably.
The state's official graduation rate shows that only 67 percent of students who start out in the ninth-grade end up graduating four years later. That's the lowest rate in a decade.Reducing the dropout rate may be one of the most challenging public-policy issues facing the state. We're now learning, for example, that at least one reform -- the California High School Exit Exam -- may be contributing to the dropout problem. A UCLA study suggests that 50,000 fewer students graduated last year because they flunked the exit exam.
(State is throwing 305 million in patchwork )
(steinberg d-sacto, bills SB210: includes dropout rates of 8-9grades in Aca perform index)
(SB344: identify at risk students )
(SB406: limits work of poor performing students )
THE COMMITTEE SAYS:
Times Identifies Failures, But Fails to Call for Real Reforms or Substantive Changes
The Times fails to recognize that establishing rudimentary standards for a high school diploma is an excellent first step towards reform, even if it lowered graduation rates.
The problem is not "reducing the dropout rate," as the Times puts it.
The problem is that the vast majority of those who now receive high school diplomas barely perform at eigth grade level. Those who fail the exit exam cannot perform at the eight grade level.
A high school diploma from a California is almost worthless, with or without an exit exam.
Clearly, the problem in California's schools, that they have academically failed, cannot be solved by eliminating the exit exam. If that was true, we could end the whole problem by merely issuing diplomas to every kid who does 12 years of school.
If all of Steinberg's bills are passed, and wildly successful, they will not fix the failure of our school system. There is only one thing that will fix the Schools.
Money. The 50 billion dollar annual school budget requires another 25 billion dollars a year to reach the minimal levels of service required to even give the kids a chance at an educated future.
Neither Steinberg nor the Times have the courage to tell it like it is. But they are not alone. Arnie and Nunez's response to the Stanford study's assesments was indifference and refusal to either pay up, or make our failed schools a political issue.
Until the next election, when they will trumpet their support for education, and educational reform.
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6) THE ABSTRACT PRINTED BELOW WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE :
Court to consider capping prisons
Inmates' lawyers suggest a figure that could mean early releases for 35,000.
By Andy Furillo - Bee Capitol Bureau
Published 12:00 am PDTMonday, May 28, 2007
http://www.sacbee.com/111/v-print/story/196176.html
With federal judges lining up to consider a population cap for California prisons, inmate rights lawyers have thrown out a number for the courts to take under consideration: 137,764.
According to the attorneys' citations in a legal filing last week, that figure is the "maximum safe and reasonable capacity" for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
With the system stuffed with 172,719 inmates as of May 16, the "maximum safe and reasonable" number in the existing 33 prisons is suggesting a prisoner release order totaling close to 35,000.
The attorneys got the figure from the "Reforming Corrections" report of July 2004 that was written by the Corrections Independent Review Panel, put together by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and chaired by a law-and-order-minded former governor, George Deukmejian.
No matter where the figure came from, the Schwarzenegger administration isn't giving it serious consideration.
. In legal motions, the inmate rights attorneys are asking the courts to establish three-judge panels under the terms of the 1995 Prison Litigation Reform Act that would consider prison population limits, possibly leading to early release orders.
In papers filed Thursday, Bien (inmate attorney) wrote that the only way the state can comply with the settlement in the so-called Coleman mental health case is "through an order limiting the overall prison population."
"Only by limiting the population can the state remedy the constitutional violations by recruiting and obtaining sufficient clinical staff to address the needs of the class," the plaintiffs' court papers said. "Without population limits, defendants can never catch up."
The plaintiffs characterized the state's recently enacted prison plan as "yet another prison building boom" that won't provide any new housing space until 2009 at the earliest.
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