California NOW

Help Us Continue Fighting for Women!

We're proud that our work is moving California closer towards achieving women's equality and empowerment, even if our leaders continue to kick and scream along the way.

When the governor proposed eliminating the Commission on the Status of Women, we not only held a fundraiser to keep the Commission going, we made it our business to ensure the Commission and gender equity continued to be part of state government.  When the Governor eliminated the office of Women’s Health and tried to implement Health in All Policies without women, we were there to ensure all women were counted by the state in eliminating health disparities.

Right now we’re fighting to ensure women’s employment and women workers are part of California’s Strategic Plan for Economic Development & Jobs and we’re fighting to ensure domestic violence and rape law enforcement mandates remain and are finally paid for by all levels of government.

We’re also working with the Attorney General’s office to ensure that women across the state have access to full reproductive healthcare and that end of life directives are respected as Catholic healthcare corporations seek to expand their market share.  You can count on us to ensure that women and men will have the information they need to be an informed healthcare consumer.

The reason we can fight for all of these important issues is because we aren't financially dependent upon any of the special interest groups that run Sacramento.

Unfortunately, the down economy has hit our supporters hard which, in turn, has hit us hard. Even though we work on a shoestring budget, we're finding it more difficult to get by each month.

That's why we're holding a fundraiser. We know the ticket price is high and may be cost prohibitive for some of you but if you can afford to attend, we assure you that your TAX-DEDUCTIBLE donation will be spent wisely. And please forward this to anyone you know in the LA area. If you cannot attend the event but would like to make a tax-deductible donation NOW, click here.

No other organization works on as many issues impacting women and girls as we do. And no other organization is as independent as we are. We hope you'll support our work by attending this fundraiser. It's a good tax deduction and a great investment in our daughters' future.

Action Alert!

Tomorrow, the Senate Health Committee will meet to decide whether two important bills move forward.

Assembly Bill 154 (Atkins) will address the current shortage of health care professionals able to provide early abortion care in California. It will authorize trained Nurse Practitioners (NPs), Certified Nurse Midwives (CNMs) and Physician Assistants (PAs) to provide comprehensive first trimester abortion care, which is within the scope of their licenses. Early abortion access is a critical public health issue. An estimated one in three women will decide to terminate a pregnancy by age 45, yet many women do not have sufficient access to early abortions because of the limited number of physicians providing the services in their communities. Almost half of the counties in California have no accessible abortion provider, requiring women to travel significant distances to terminate a pregnancy or wait for an appointment for services.

Assembly Bill 980 (Pan) will ease outdated building standards that have been uniquely applied to abortion clinics. Abortion clinics currently must adhere to higher building standards than primary care clinics - even though the risk of infection from taking a pill for a cold is no different from taking one to induce an abortion. Similarly, there is no difference in the possibility of infection between an aspiration abortion and other procedures that are regularly done in primary care clinics, such as insertion of an intrauterine device or endometrial biopsy.

The religious right has had no problem getting their supporters to inundate the Capitol with calls opposing both of these bills so it's imperative that committee members hear from us as well.

Please call the committee members NOW urging them to support both of these important bills.

Senator Hernandez (Chair) 916.651.4024
Senator Beall 916.651.4015
Senator de Leon  916.651.4022
Senator DeSaulnier 916.651.4007
Senator Monning 916.651.4017
Senator Pavley  916.651.4027
Senator Wolk 916.651.4003

And if you're in the Sacramento area, we could really use your support at the hearing to make sure committee members see a huge number of women standing in support of these bills.

The meeting will take place on Wednesday (July 3rd) at 1:30 PM at the Capitol in Room 4203.

We'll be there standing up for women and I hope to see many of you as well.

Governor Brown Attempts to Change Penal Code for Domestic Violence

 The California Chapter of the National Organization for Women (California NOW) announced today that they will be waging a very public campaign to call on Governor Brown to remove the provision in the budget bill that eliminates domestic violence enforcement mandates from police officers and departments.

Current law requires mandatory response to domestic abuse calls, mandatory recording of those calls to emergency personnel, mandatory maintenance records of protection orders and mandatory incident reports. Governor Brown obviously believes domestic violence isn’t important enough to warrant mandates to ensure enforcement of those laws. That’s why, in the middle of night, he changed all of those acts from mandatory to optional, by changing the word in the penal code from “shall” to “may.”

California NOW President, Patricia Bellasalma stated, “California NOW has been fighting the governor’s office for more than two years and it’s getting old. We’ve been told repeatedly that he doesn’t like waiting, that democratic processes which are open and transparent are a waste of time and that he admires the autocratic Chinese government because they “get shit done.” Well what the Governor seems incapable of understanding is when there is no process, “shit” is exactly what gets done.”

Bellasalma continued, “This isn’t the first time we’ve had issues with the governor trying to change laws impacting women in this state through the use of rushed legislation. During the last budget cycle, a trailer bill sought to eliminate sex/gender from outcome measures tied to health inequities. That’s right - he didn’t care about unequal health outcomes for women, but we fought back and won.”

This latest attempt to destroy police mandates demonstrates a fundamental lack of a moral compass that no amount of philosophical reading can cure.  California NOW has been calling for transparency and accountability in state government for exactly this reason.  Governor Brown cannot be trusted to protect women’s health and safety.  The Legislature and Governor Brown must do more than just restore the Domestic Violence statutes; they must prove they deserve women’s trust by - at a minimum - enacting a three day delay before a vote statute that includes the budget.”

As Sacramento County District Attorney, Jan Scully, made clear in her statement yesterday regarding this issue, “These amendments undermining domestic violence laws and victims’ rights have been buried in this collection of mismatched laws because these changes would not survive if exposed to the light of public debate.”

California NOW will be calling on women across the state to contact Governor Brown’s office to demand that he veto AB 76 so that he isn’t responsible for taking California back more than two decades in the fight to break the cycle of domestic violence.

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Stopping Walmart's Abuses

Today, our state president, Patricia Bellasalma, spoke at the Capitol in support of AB 880 (D-Gomez) which would force Walmart and other large corporations to stop their current practice of dumping employees onto Medi-Cal where taxpayers end up shouldering the burden of their healthcare costs.

Here's the text of Patty's speech:

"California NOW stands in partnership with Assemblymember Gomez because he stands in partnership with the Women of Labor who are here today working to enact AB 880.

We are all here gather together on the 50th Anniversary of the Federal Equal Pay Act in solidarity over our commitment in working towards a more just and fair society.  Equal Pay for Equal Work - 50 years women have been working for justice – for fairness.  Unfortunately, that day has not yet arrived.  We are still waiting for our work to be equally valued and respected.

We are here because we know women represent nearly two-thirds of all minimum wage workers in this country.  That means millions of women living well below the poverty level. That isn't by accident - it's because of what some in our society have chosen to value and not value.

We are here because we know that true prosperity for everyone will occur when we equally value early education and childcare because doing so breaks the cycle of poverty.

We are here because we know true prosperity for everyone is a living wage that includes universal healthcare and a defined benefit pension.

We are here because we know true prosperity for everyone means an economy that recognizes and values everyone’s economic contributions.

The truth is, we - as a society - make a decision every single day as to what we value. We are here because we know that we still live in a society that values traits and jobs labeled male over traits and jobs labeled female.

When we pay a plumber $100 an hour yet pay the person who cares for our children and our aging parents just $10 an hour, we're making a decision as to what we value. I want you to think about that. Why do we place greater value on the person who fixes our toilet over the person who cares for our children? 

Care work is often called "noble," but only when that work is free or close to it. Women in California provide $47 billion annually in unpaid care work.  It’s time for our work to be economically counted.  It’s time for California to also enact a Domestic Worker Bill of Rights.  It’s time for the Legislature and the Governor to also adopt the Mitchell Plan for Cal-Works.

Here in California, we need and must to do better. Enacting AB 880 is another important step in doing better. We are here because this bill will protect women’s health.  Medi-Cal already has a shortage of doctors.  It is women and other low-income workers who will suffer from lack of access to healthcare if big corporations take advantage of a loophole that will allow them to dump 400,000 workers onto Medi-Cal at taxpayer expense.

It’s bad enough that Walmart and other big corporations pay workers so little that they qualify for government assistance, while also failing to pay their fair share of property and other taxes that pay for that assistance. 

We are here because Walmart and other large corporations are cutting worker hours so they can continue to shift their fair share of responsibility for healthcare onto California taxpayers.

We are here united to protect women’s health - to protect all taxpayers by closing the Walmart loophole. We are here in support of AB 880.”

What are our priorities?

Next week, leaders from across the world will gather at the G8 Summit in Ireland. One of the discussions will be whether to plug a gigantic $1 trillion per year corporate tax loophole - enough money to end poverty, put every child in school, and double green investment!  $1 trillion is more than every country combined spends on their military. It's bigger than the budgets of 176 nations. It's $1,000 for every family on this planet.

$1 trillion is also the amount that our largest corporations and wealthiest individuals evade each year in taxes.

Apple, one of the world's wealthiest companies (headquartered right here in California), paid basically $0 in tax on $78 billion they made in recent years by setting up shell corporations in low-tax countries and posting profits abroad. Ironically, Ireland is one of those countries.

California NOW has been talking about this problem for more than a year. Finally, at the G8 summit next week, world leaders will consider a plan that would make it harder for companies like Apple to evade taxes by hiding their money offshore and in tax shelters. The plan would require countries to share information to expose where the money is hidden and require "fake" companies to reveal who's really behind them.

Seems like a no-brainer, right? So who's the holdout? The United States and Canada. Both countries are considering siding with corruption over this momentous step forward.

We can't let that happen. That's why we're supporting a petition to get 1 million signatures asking President Obama to sign on to this plan. We've already crossed the 500,000 mark - let's get the full million signatures so that the media has to pay attention and spotlight this demand. Click here to sign the petition NOW!

When governments everywhere are cutting spending on vital social priorities (that disproportionately impact women and girls), it's particularly galling that the wealthiest get a free pass from paying their fair share. It's even more disgusting when you consider the fact that the hard times were caused by massive government handouts to bailout banks owned by the same people who continue to evade taxes.

World leaders finally want to get serious about plugging these holes and they want powerful multinationals to pay their fair share in taxes. Unfortunately, President Obama has not signed on to supporting this action. We need him to feel the pressure of a million Americans demanding he stand with us - not with the 1%. Please sign the petition NOW and share it via social media asking everyone you know to sign it.

Together, our million voices are stronger and more powerful than the lobbyists. We just have to use them. Please join me in standing up for the other 99% on this planet.

For Equality & In Solidarity,

Patricia Bellasalma
President, California NOW