What We Learn About Liability Caps from the BP Oil Catastrophe
By J.G. PrestonProtect Consumer Justice
One of the main topics in the aftermath of the oil catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico has been the extent of BP’s liability to compensate those who have been harmed. The tone of that discussion changed Wednesday, when the company agreed to create a $20 billion fund to pay damage claims for Gulf Coast residents. Until then, BP’s liability could have been limited, because under federal law covering the oil industry, the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, the “total of liability . . . with respect to each incident shall not exceed for an offshore facility except a deepwater port, the total of all removal costs plus $75,000,000.”
University of Chicago law professor Richard A. Epstein said BP likely would have had to pay more than $75 million anyway:
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First Steps Toward the Federal High Risk Pool
By Elizabeth AbbottHealth Access
Many advocates and industry representatives attended the public board meeting of the Managed Risk Medical Insurance Board yesterday as they debated and discussed what one important new feature of the federal health care reform legislation would look like. And we have tentative details, some of which were reported in the Sacramento Bee by Carrie Peyton Dahlberg.
Although California has had a high risk pool for many years, it has not provided much of an alternative for people who could not purchase health insurance. That is because the California pool was expensive to enroll in, would only permit enrollment of 7,100 Californians (out of estimates of California's "uninsurable" population of as many as 300,000 people), and had annual limit of $75,000 that could be paid for benefits per enrollee per year.
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The California Super-Majority Stays Home
By Peter SchragThe most trenchant analysis of this month’s primary election results didn’t come from California’s certified media punditry and its blather about angry voters, but from my friend and former colleague Mark Paul of the New America Foundation, who offered a much more disturbing read.
On the morning after the election, he wrote in his blog, the papers were “full of stories telling us what the voters said on Tuesday. To which I have to ask, what voters?
“The real story of the Tuesday elections is that voters have given up on believing in democracy under California’s current electoral system.”
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California Considering Approval of Neurotoxic Pesticide for Strawberry Farming
By Traci SheehanPlanning and Conservation League
Need an ironclad reason to buy organic strawberries? California has one for you: methyl iodide. The chemical is a drift-prone fumigant that the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) approved in 2007, primarily to replace methyl bromide, which is being phased out under the Montreal Protocol because of its ozone depleting properties and its toxicity. The California Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) plans to approve the use of methyl iodide to sterilize soil for strawberry crops as the alternative to methyl bromide.
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Brownley, De La Torre: California Jobs Budget Keeps
By Assemblymembers Julia Brownley and Hector De La Torre
SACRAMENTO – In this Democratic weekly address, Assemblymember Julia Brownley (D-Santa Monica), Chair of the Assembly Committee on Education, and Assemblymember Hector De La Torre (D-South Gate) discuss how the jobs of over 25,000 teachers and 10,000 school aides, counselors and support staff would be saved through the Assembly Democrats’ California Jobs Budget proposal. They discuss why education is important to the health of California’s economy and why the California Jobs Budget proposal makes saving and creating hundreds of thousands of California jobs a priority.
Click onto the following link for the English language MP3 file. The running time is 2:23.
http://democrats.assembly.ca.gov/Newsline/Audio/20100618EnglishRadioAddr...
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