Last Call For California Schemin'

California Democrats passed the FAST Recovery Act into law last year, which was designed to put wages for the state's hundreds of thousands of fast food workers before a council selected by Gov. Gavin Newsom that would determine fair wages for employees. But restaurant groups and fast food franchisees immediately challenged the law in January and now say they have enough signatures to send the law to voters in November 2024, almost three years after the law was supposed to take effect.

A restaurant business coalition announced on Monday that it has gathered enough signatures to challenge a new California law that would create a state-backed labor council to set pay and working conditions for the fast-food industry.

Save Local Restaurants, a coalition opposing the law, it filed more than 1 million signatures to postpone the law and place a referendum on the November 2024 ballot.

Counties will now have eight business days to provide a count to the secretary of state’s office. Opponents need roughly 623,000 valid signatures.

If the statewide total reaches the required amount, counties will have 30 business days to verify signatures through random sampling.

Sufficient valid voter signatures would place a question on the 2024 ballot asking voters whether the law should take effect.

It could also lead to a costly battle between organized labor and the fast food industry, with spending reaching hundreds of millions of dollars. Save Local Restaurants raised more than $13.7 million between last January and September.

The law, known as the FAST Recovery Act, would create a first-in-the-nation labor council to set wages and working standards for fast food workers. The council’s regulations would apply to any chain restaurant with at least 100 locations in the United States and could set minimum wages at $22 an hour for fast workers by next year.

The law was set to take effect Jan. 1 after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the legislation last September. But one day later, opponents filed a referendum to halt the formation of the council.

They argue the law would result in higher food prices and new regulatory burdens for franchise owners. “The FAST Act would have an enormous impact on Californians, and clearly voters want a say in whether it should stand...it is no surprise that over one million Californians have voiced their concerns with the legislation,” the coalition said in a statement. ”


Supporters say the law would give workers a voice in regulating a sector of the state economy that employs more than a half-million people.

Service Employees International Union, which has been supporting the fast-food workers, said companies are “trying to silence voices of half a million Black and Latino workers to increase their billion-dollar profits.”

“It is abhorrent that these corporations have already spent millions of dollars in an attempt to deliberately mislead California voters and stamp out the progress fast-food workers have won, said SEIU President Mary Kay Henry in a statement. “California’s referendum process has been completely taken over by corporations who think they can buy the right to overturn laws they don’t like and exempt themselves from accountability.”

 

Henry is right about this. Sending legislation to a ballot referendum is exactly how Uber and Lyft beat California's law turning rideshare drivers into full-time employees, meaning they would be eligible for benefits. The rideshare giants spent billions convincing Latino voters in the state they they would be fired first unless the law was defeated, and it worked.

Expect much of the same to follow in the years ahead.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

As the federal tax fraud case against the Trump Organization goes to jury today, Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg's case against Trump over the hush money payments to Stormy Daniels is heating up.

 

The Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, is hiring a former senior Justice Department official with a history of taking on Donald J. Trump and his family business as the office seeks to ramp up its investigation into the former president.

The official, Matthew Colangelo, who before acting as third in command at the Justice Department, led the New York attorney general’s civil inquiry into Mr. Trump, is likely to become one of the leaders of the district attorney’s criminal inquiry into the former president.

The hire marks the latest turn in a long-running investigation that has proceeded in fits and starts in recent years. When Mr. Bragg took office in January, his predecessor, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., had directed prosecutors to begin presenting evidence about Mr. Trump’s inflation of his assets to a grand jury.

But Mr. Bragg grew concerned about the strength of the case. In February, when he told the two senior prosecutors leading the investigation, Mark F. Pomerantz and Carey Dunne, that he was not prepared to authorize charges, they resigned, clouding the future of the inquiry.

Mr. Bragg insisted that it was continuing, and in recent months, his prosecutors, led by the office’s head of investigations, Susan Hoffinger, have renewed their focus on a hush-money payment to a porn star who said she had an affair with Mr. Trump.

Mr. Colangelo’s work in the New York attorney general’s office may also be relevant in his new job: Manhattan prosecutors have also scrutinized whether the former president illegally inflated the value of his assets, and the New York attorney general, Letitia James, looked at the same practices. In September, she filed a lawsuit accusing the former president of overvaluing his assets by billions of dollars.

By then, Mr. Colangelo was working at the Department of Justice, having been appointed as acting associate attorney general when President Biden took office. In that job, the third highest-ranking at the department, Mr. Colangelo helped oversee the Civil, Civil Rights, Antitrust and Tax divisions, among others.

He stepped aside when a permanent associate attorney general, Vanita Gupta, was appointed but continued working as her deputy and supervised lawyers in those divisions.

Mr. Colangelo, 48, who also worked in the Obama administration as a senior Labor Department official, will join the district attorney’s office as senior counsel. In addition to helping with its “most sensitive and high-profile white-collar investigations,” he is expected to focus on housing and tenant protection and labor and worker protection, priorities for Mr. Bragg.

“Matthew Colangelo brings a wealth of economic justice experience combined with complex white-collar investigations, and he has the sound judgment and integrity needed to pursue justice against powerful people and institutions when they abuse their power,” Mr. Bragg said in a statement confirming the hire.

The U.S. attorney general, Merrick B. Garland, said in a statement that he had relied on Mr. Colangelo’s “wise counsel and excellent judgment” since his first day in the office.

 

So now that Bragg is staffing up, I can think of six cases Trump now has to deal with off the top of my head:

 

1. Jack Smith's special counsel investigation at the federal level
2. The Trump Organization tax fraud case
3. The Manhattan DA's investigation into Stormy Daniels hush money
   
4. Fani Willis's investigation into Georgia election fraud by Trump and the Georgia GOP
5. Tish James and the NY State investigation into Trump
6. E. Jean Carroll's sexual assault case against Trump.

 

At least one of these has to put Trump in prison somehow., right?

 

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Local Edition

Here in Kentucky, the city of Bowling Green canceled its annual Christmas parade and outdoor market over the weekend because of specific white supremacist terrorist threats.

 

Bowling Green, Kentucky, has canceled its annual Christmas parade scheduled for Saturday due to threats against protests related to the notorious lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955.

The city announced the cancellation in tweet. In a video posted on Facebook, Police Chief Michael Delaney said at least three groups planned to protest at noon on Saturday at two locations.

Warren County Sheriff Brett Hightower said his office learned of threats late Friday evening “to shoot anyone who is protesting” or assisting protesters, Hightower said.

“At this moment, we have not been able to determine the validity of the threat; however, we believe it’s important to alert our citizens,” the sheriff said.

The protesters want a Mississippi court to order the arrest of Carolyn Bryant Donham, the White woman now in her late 80s who accused Till of whistling at her in 1955 in Mississippi, according to CNN affiliate WBKO. He was abducted, tortured, and lynched, in a case that drew national attention and helped galvanize attention on the civil rights movement.

According to WKBO, Donham’s last known address is believed to be an apartment in Bowling Green.

Donham was never arrested in connection with Till’s death, but a warrant for her arrest was found earlier this year in a Mississippi courthouse basement. A grand jury in Mississippi declined to indict Donham in August.

 

So yeah, a bit to unpack here. Carolyn Brady Donham was the woman who accused Emmett Till of whistling at her almost 70 years ago. Till was lynched and dragged behind a car to his death as a result. Donham lives in Bowling Green, and when word of a possible protest on Donham at the Christmas parade of Mississippi once again refusing to serve justice got around, that protest became the direct target of white supremacist terrorist violence, so much so that the city and county cancelled the parade.

Remember, this is 2022. We're still having the same conversation about racial justice in this country as we did 70 years ago. A lot has changed.

A lot is still the same.