Discriminations

well, compliance with the law is actually a pretty bad reason to disagree with the Sweeneys and El-Hassan here. there are a bunch of nasty laws out there, including affirmative action laws, that i think you'd oppose. yet disagreeing with those nasty laws essentially means you support noncompliance therewith -- so you might revise your statement to say: "I think any California 'lag' in sex- or race-based contracting is to be commended, not criticized, if for no other reason . . . than that such non-discrimination complies with laws that i like." as for your parenthetical ("(and there are many other reasons)"), i'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume those reasons are better than that California's "lag" indicates compliance with the law.

i agree that the sweeneys don't resemble the "oppressed" affirmative-action poster child, though i doubt the federal mandate under which her company received the contract makes a distinction between well-off and poor women. and note that if it's a federally funded program, California law likely can't regulate it, which also means that your concluding sentence ("How nice that the state of California is so concerned with 'inclusion' that, if Verne Sweeney is to be believed, his/his wife’s company won the garbage bin contract '[b]ecause she is a woman') is more or less inaccurate since California law had very little to do with this contract. indeed, had california law controlled here, she probably wouldn't have been awarded the contract simply because of her gender.

Chauncey - I'm not as familiar with all of the federal laws and regulations as I should be. So I am stating a real request and not being polemical (or at least not being only polemical) when I say that perhaps you could point me to the federal regs or whatever that require, or for that matter even allow, discrimination on the basis of race or sex. I'm sure there are many of them that require non-discrimination, even "affirmative action" to see that women and minorities are included in the process, etc., but are there any that actually require certain numbers of women/minority contract recipients, i.e., a, if you'll pardon the expression, quota? If not, then what may be the case here -- certainly is the case sometimes -- is a conflict between Calif. law that clearly forbids awarding contracts etc. on the basis of race and sex and federal law/regulations which require "affirmative action," whatever that means.

JSR-

Daily Breeze is from San Pedro, if I remember correctly.

The odd thing about the article is that the author uses a couple who have successfully jobbed the system at least once and probably more, as the poster company for women-owned business AA. They can't be unique and may be the modal state for 'predominantly women owned' businesses.

It would be an interesting study to determine the number (and fraction) of family (husband-wife)-owned businesses in which the woman owns 51% of the nominal shares. Indeed, my minor knowledge of community property law suggests that, given other incentives, the benefits to such a distribution far outweigh any drawbacks for either party.

Congratulations to our enlighten legislators for yet another economically foolish policy.

john -

i was going by what the article said: "The federally funded project has a mandate to steer contracts to minority- and women-owned businesses." now, i don't know whether this "mandate" is a law, regulation, some sort of internal policy memo or something else. in any event, you're right: there seems to be a conflict here between the fed "mandate" and CA law. i think CA law takes a back seat here since the program is administered by the federal government. supremacy clause and all that.

there may be an interstate commerce angle here, i.e., railroads generally are "instrumentalities" of interstate commerce, and are therefore more or less within the exclusive regulatory jurisdiction of the federal government. as a result, most conflicting state laws, like CA's anti-AA law here, have no effect. the issue might not be as simple as that, though, since the light rail system operates practically entirely within los angeles (i think). anyway this is all probably irrelevant. sorry to go off on a tangent; i find this stuff interesting. i'll try to see what else i can find about the "mandate."

I happen to know that Brandy Sweeney was not the original owner of JJK Roll-off. That her husband Verne owned it for years before she came into the picture and this he 'inherited' it from his first wife's parents. So for Brandy to be claiming it's her business is somewhat fraudulant. Her husband runs the radios from his muffler shop in Lomita and their radio at home. The trucks MIGHT be stored in Hawthorne, CA, but before that, they were located on a lot in Torrance on Vermont Ave. As for owning the Sprint Car, that also came about due to her marriage to Verne. It's all about the $$ that come from having a woman's name on the registration papers of vehicles and businesses.