The laws were supported and pushed by activists from the 99 Percent Movement and religious groups who have led campaigns to move money from the nation’s largest banks. The ordinances give preference for city contracts to banks that make the most substantial investments in the local community through small business loans, home loans, foreclosure prevention, and other programs, according to the PICO National Network, a coalition of religious organizations that pushed for the Los Angeles ordinance:

The New York City ordinance would require banks to provide information on reinvestment activities, including foreclosure and loan modification information, that would be used to evaluate the banks that want to hold city deposits. The Los Angeles ordinance will gather data on banks’ participation in foreclosure prevention and home loan principal reduction programs, as well as other community reinvestment information.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is likely to veto his city’s ordinance, another poke at 99 Percent Movement activists who have butted heads with him over the last eight months. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is expected to sign his city’s version into law.

Cleveland became the first major city to adopt a responsible banking ordinance in 1991, and they have spread quickly since the 99 Percent Movement ignited last fall. Pittsburgh and San Diego recently passed similar ordinances, and city councils in Seattle, Boston, and San Francisco are all considering laws now.

In today’s New york Times, Bill Keller profiles the four New York Republican senators who bucked their party and voted in favor of marriage equality, providing the bill with the support it needed to become law. All four seem are vulnerable re-election but as Keller concluded, “if they lose, it is likely to be in spite of their marriage vote, not because of it.”

The three senators who spoke with the former executive editor — Roy J. McDonald, Jim Alesi, Mark Grisanti — all stood by their votes, which have aroused only limited ire from the Conservative Party (a powerful third-party in state politics whose endorsement can make or break a Republican candidacy) and constituents. “I did what I thought was right,” McDonald said, predicting that voters “understand that,” and are looking to focus on “jobs and foreclosures, not marriage.” He boldly announced that “if doing the right thing costs him his seat, ‘They can take the job and shove it.’” Alesi and Grisanti were no less direct. Grisanti framed marriage as an issue of equal civil rights — “I swore with my hand on the Bible to uphold the Constitution, I didn’t swear with my hand on the Constitution to uphold the Bible” — and Alesi reflected that “wherever I end up, we’ll have marriage equality in New York State.” “There isn’t anything you can point to in a political career, if you’re just looking over the years you served, that you can say was as big as this,” he added.

Indeed, in a sign of the growing acceptance of marriage equality, even the Conservative Party has rebranded the marriage vote as a question of “integrity,” not policy, arguing that “it wasn’t so much that Grisanti had voted for marriage….It’s that when he changed his mind he should have announced that to voters and then submitted himself to another election before casting such an important vote.” Conservatives sought to find “nonmarriage reasons” to dump both Grisanti and Alesi:

When I met with [Alesi], his mood verged on fatalism. The club his enemies would use to pummel him, he surmised, would not be gay marriage but a loopy episode known in his district as “the lawsuit.” Back in 2008, Alesi was exploring houses for sale in a new development called Trolley Brook Estates. Finding one house locked, he went in the basement door. The house was still under construction, so he climbed up a ladder being used as a makeshift stairway, fell and injured his leg. It turned out this house had already been sold, but the owners agreed not to press trespassing charges. Then last year, a day before the statute of limitations was set to expire, Alesi sued the homeowners, a retired couple, for his injuries. [...]

After Mass I drove around Alesi’s district and was struck by two things: first, most people I spoke to knew the name of their state senator, which — trust me — is nowhere close to normal. And second, the prevailing popular view was admiration and shared pride that a politician had not followed the path of least resistance. I found people who disagreed with his vote, and a few who said they might hold it against him in November.

With support for New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the same-sex marriage running high, most state politicos dismiss the influence of anti-gay groups like the National Organization for Marriage, which has promised to spend $2 million to defeat the four Republican senators. “I think they’re full of smoke,” Thomas D. Cook, chairman of the Monroe County party organization said, suggesting that their anti-gay message is resonating with few voters.

DOLAN: We got burned last year when we were told the redefinition of marriage didn’t have much of a chance — and of course it did. Our Senate leaders, we highly appreciated them being with us all along. When they kind of assured us it didn’t have much of a chance — not that we let up, but we probably would have been much more vigorous and even more  physically present if we knew there was a chance. We got a little stung, and it could be as much our fault as anyone else’s.

This is an incredibly smug attitude for Dolan to have, but it reflects the amount of influence the Catholic Church hierarchy expects to have over political discourse. Even though a majority of New York Catholics supported the marriage equality bill months before it came to a vote and continued to afterward, Dolan believes that the bishops could still have changed the outcome if they’d just applied more pressure. But this is a blatant rewriting of history, because Dolan admitted after the law passed that he saw it coming and was “not surprised” that it was successful. Considering the number of anti-gay screeds he published while the legislature was still debating the bill, one wonders what more he would have done had he been “much more vigorous.”

Fortunately, the New York legislature chose to represent all constituents when it decided to expand LGBT equality instead of catering to a select group of Church leaders who refuse to exist in the same universe as married same-sex couples.

New York State Sen. Daniel Squadron

Yet while Citizens United hamstrung many longstanding efforts to keep the very wealthy from dominating elections, it did not render lawmakers completely impotent. Later today, the New York Senate’s State Senate Corporations Committee is expected to vote on bill sponsored by state Sen. Daniel Squadron (D) that will invoke many of the few remaining tools left to elected officials concerned about big money’s impact on democracy:

“As we all look on in horror at the effect of Citizen’s United on the political process, here in New York, we have a chance to do something about it. This bill would reign in unchecked corporate influence in a way that the Supreme Court still allows,” Mr. Squadron told The Politicker. “It would require shareholders of corporations to approve political spending, it would require disclosure of political spending and it would require corporations to justify the corporate purpose of that spending. Too often people are using corporations to grind their own political axe. It’s not good for shareholders and it’s not good for the political system.”

The Corporate Political Accountability to Shareholders Act would require “that corporate contributions to a political candidate or party committee or in support or opposition to a candidate or ballot referendum be approved by a majority of shareholders.” Mr. Squadron believes his legislation could be a model for other states to address the growing controversy over corporate influence on the political process.

Requiring corporations to disclose their political spending is a common goal of post-Citizens United campaign finance proposals in light of the fact that the Supreme Court expressly held that disclosure laws are still allowed. The most intriguing part of Squadron’s bill, however, is the requirement that a corporation’s shareholders approve its political spending before the corporation is allowed to attempt to influence an election.

Despite the Supreme Court’s naive claim that corporate spending is necessary to preserve the First Amendment’s guarantee that all speakers be allowed to participate in the marketplace of ideas, the reality is that Citizens United forces millions of Americans to spend their own money on corporate speech they disapprove of. When a publicly-traded corporation lends its vast wealth to elect candidate X, it does so even though a majority of its shareholders could prefer candidate Y. Squadron’s bill would go a long way toward ensuring that shareholders do not have their investment dollars spent to elect candidates they despise.

To be sure, Squadron’s bill is only a modest step in this direction — a stronger bill could forbid corporations from attempting to buy an election absent the unanimous consent of their shareholders, or require shareholders to approve each and every ad a corporation wants to lend financial support to before it may run. Nevertheless, his focus on shareholder democracy is an important step towards mitigating the harm caused by Citizens United. Lawmakers in the other 49 states and in Congress would do well to follow Squadron’s example and introduce similar bills.

Happy Valentine’s Day from ThinkProgress LGBT! (HT: Joe.My.God.)

The new eco-friendly buses have electric motors, and don’t use fuel of any kind, meaning they don’t produce emissions. Instead they are powered by a network of rechargeable batteries.

The buses cost $100,000, about the same as traditional buses, but they are quieter, cleaner, and cheaper to maintain.

“It doesn’t have a transmission. It has very few moving parts, and the vehicle is charged up overnight when the electric grid is being used the least so it’s off-peak,” said Bart Marksohn of WE Transport Inc.

The district is starting out with a one-bust test run over the next 60 days. If approved, the first electric buses will be on the roads in September 2012. The decision to go green was simple for district officials. As one put it, “In implementing this we’re only echoing what the students are learning — to care about their environment. So we’re just building upon what’s being taught in the classroom on a daily basis.”

Andrew Cuomo

The industry is pushing for the drilling process, also known as fracking, to take place not far from the Syracuse and New York City watersheds. This has caused some concern since fracking can harm the surrounding environment, poison nearby water sources, and even cause earthquakes. But the New York Daily News reports that drillers and utilities really want this to get started:

In pushing for state approval of hydrofracking, the natural gas industry has pumped $1.34 million into the coffers of New York politicians and their parties, a new study revealed. The donations were sprinkled around over the last four years as lawmakers and state officials debated whether to allow the controversial drilling process, formally known as hydraulic fracturing, in the gas-rich Marcellus Shale formation upstate, Common Cause New York said in its report.[...]

Common Cause’s study included not only gas drillers and producers, but some public utilities — including Con Edison and National Grid — that have stakes in gas distribution networks, Lerner said. The bulk of gas industry donations — some 75% — went to candidates for state legislature, including $448,359 given to Republican state Senate candidates and their campaign organizations. Another $217,901 was spent on Democratic candidates for state Senate and their campaign organizations. Gov. Cuomo’s campaign committee took in $153,816 from the gas industry, according to Common Cause.

The top ten recipients combined took in $231,557 in industry cash from January 2007 to October 2011, including $38,532 to the George Maziarz (R-Buffalo-Rochester), chair of the Senate’s Energy Committee, and $26,800 to Kevin Cahill (D-Ulster County), the chair of the Assembly’s Energy Committee.

The industry says it is only making these contributions to combat a well-funded effort on the other side. But as the donations show, they are also having to deal with a hesitant legislature which is discussing the extension of a fracking moratorium, not to mention some public pressure against the procedure.

The deadline for public comments on proposed fracking plans was Wednesday, January 11th. Environmental and pro-drilling groups submitted thousands of comments to the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation. A report is expected from the agency some time this year.

– Zachary Bernstein