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Archives for July 2012

“Save KLSD:” The Corporate Consolidation of America’s Airwaves

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San Diego’s last progressive talk radio station a victim of the loosening of media ownership laws

Talk radio has become big business in the last decade and a half, particularly conservative talk radio, which has seen an explosion in popularity and influence. Progressive talk radio? Not so much.

San Diegans have become accustomed to the conservative stylings of locally owned 760 KFMB and the not so locally owned KOGO 600. When you’re looking for news in this city, there are no other choices. You’re stuck with the nonsensical, anti-government, sensationalist, and sometimes maniacal ramblings of Rush Limbaugh and Roger Hedgecock. But that wasn’t always the case. For a brief while, San Diego did have a progressive talk radio station to call its own: 1360 KLSD (for “Liberal San Diego,” as we are informed by radio and television news personality Bree Walker).

KLSD at one point was the home of San Diego personalities like Stacy Taylor and Jon Elliott. It was also San Diego’s home to Air America Radio, the national syndication outfit that brought voices such as Ed Schultz, Rachel Maddow, Randi Rhodes, and Al Franken, now a United States Senator from Minnesota, to the airwaves.   [Read more…]

California to Mortgage Lenders: The Party’s Over!

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California became the first state in the country yesterday to enact tough consumer protection legislation holding home mortgage lenders to a higher standard that will help financially troubled borrowers stay in their homes. The legislation, SB 900 and AB 278, will make California the first state to prohibit lenders from “dual tracking,” the practice of negotiating with clients to modify a mortgage while concurrently pursuing foreclosure, outlaw “robosigning”, allow state agencies and private citizens to sue financial companies if lenders willfully or recklessly violate the law, and simplify dealings between homeowners and banks by requiring a single customer representative for consumers to work with. The bill requires all lenders to abide by a number of provisions of the national mortgage settlement negotiated by state attorneys general earlier this year to rein in foreclosure abuses.

The Assembly approved the legislation on a 53-25 vote, and the Senate voted 25-13.   [Read more…]

One HELL of a Sunday (Thoughts About Religion)

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Early on in my life, as a child, as far as religion goes, HELL plagued me like a recurring nightmarish dream. The first time I heard of that infernal place my heart sank in fear. “You burn forever?” I asked, followed by “forever forever?” And since the answer was always in the affirmative, HELL weighed heavily in the farthest corners and deepest canyons of my imagination, fueling my apprehensions pretty much on a daily basis and one Sunday morning, a few days before my 9th birthday, I became “saved” – somewhat in the manner of a soldier with bombs dropping all around him waving a white flag.

I can still see myself sitting in the pews, waiting like I did every Sunday for Reverend Kendricks to entertain with the cadence and rituals of Black Baptist Ministers, the play with words, the rhythmic prancing, the blotting of handkerchiefs against a sweaty brow.   [Read more…]

The Starting Line – Wingnuttia on Parade; Vignettes from the Fringe

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July 3, 2012 – The politics of the absurd… No matter what the issue, from health care to immigration, conspiracy theories email chain letters, and lies direct from the mouths of politicians abound. We’ve been saving up little snippets from these alternative realties for a while now, and today seems as good as any to air them out. After all, we’ll be celebrating the birthday of this great nation tomorrow and what better way to do it than to take a walk on the wild side of free speech. Remember, just because it’s free, doesn’t mean it’s true.

Kindergarten crime wave…Let’s start up in the great state of New Hampshire, where Representative Bob Kingsbury reported that, after careful study, he had concluded that kindergarten attendance contributes to higher crime rates, among other things. Kingsley told his colleagues in the state legislature last week that he’s been working on a theory since 1996, when he analyzed local crime rates and compared them to a list of communities that offered public kindergarten. “We’re taking children away from their mothers too soon,” Kingsbury concluded.  Kingsbury also associated the rise of crime to the decline of gun ownership and the fact that boxing is no longer taught in school or offered as a sport. Perhaps that’s why kids who attend kindergarten earn an extra $39,100 over a lifetime–they steal it.   [Read more…]

Blythe Masters: Inventor of the Financial Weapon of Mass Destruction

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As a young twenty something ingenue at JP Morgan Chase, Blythe Masters was the inventor of the Credit Default Swap (CDS), the financial instrument responsible for almost destroying the global financial system in 2008. Warren Buffett called CDSs “financial weapons of mass destruction.” But exactly what are CDSs and how did they function to almost bring down the entire global banking system? CDSs came about from JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and other large banks’ desire to offload risk and thereby strengthen their balance sheets. They would then be in a position to do more deals due to the fact that they would not have to keep so much collateral on their books to back up their deals. If a loan or bet went south, someone else would be responsible for paying off on the insurance policy, not them. Thus they could increase their profits by doing more and more trades without having to worry about paying off on any of them if anything went awry. That would be some other institution’s responsibility. A CDS was an insurance policy. Furthermore, you wouldn’t even have to be directly involved as a party or counterparty. You could purchase a “naked” CDS. This is like betting on a horse that you don’t own and have no financial stake in or responsibility for.   [Read more…]

Summer Reading – Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion

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Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion by Alain de Botton, Pantheon Books (Random House), New York, 2012

Hey, all you enlightened people– for summer reading, check out this author, Alain de Botton, and his latest book, Religion for Atheists. Funny, provocative, insightful, engaging, even “cool,” de Botton is everything you could want in a rising new-age philosopher from London via Oxford and Switzerland.

Euro-intello, yes, but he probably wishes he were a surfer dude. Who doesn’t? Don’t worry about stumbling over some of the vocabulary; it’s just for fun (but go ahead and look up that word, you’ll learn something) or you can just read the pictures, pictures on every page.   [Read more…]

“No more Fukushimas” Rally in Tokyo Draws 200,000

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The following is a report from Doro-Chiba Quake Report about a huge anti-nuke protest rally in Toyko on Friday, the 29th of June.  “No more Fukushimas” was their rally cry.

On Friday, June 29, 200 thousand people inundated the streets around the Prime Minister’s Office and Residence, the Parliament Building and other facilities.

Around 5:40 PM, the “protest on the sidewalk” spilled over to the streets. Around 6:50 PM, all the six traffic lanes of the street from the crossing in front of the Prime Minister’s Office through the Ministry of Finance were completely occupied by workers and people, young and old, who held makeshift placards. Other streets nearby were also full of protesters. It was a Tahrir Squar in Tokyo.

The huge crowd of people began to move toward the PM’s Office, chanting “Saikado hantai” (“Stop Restart”). The panic-stricken police moved dozens of armored police vehicles and built a wall with them and stopped the march of protesters at the last minute.   [Read more…]

Photos From The San Diego Stop TPP Rally

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I went down to the Bayfront Hilton on Monday and snapped a few pictures. There were a couple of hundred people there and plenty of press. Speakers included Lorena Gonzalez, Congressman Bob Filner, the Citizens Trade Campaign, the Machinists Union, the Longshoremen, United and Friends of the Earth addressed the crowd. Meanwhile, the six hundred lobbyists and their friends were inside the hotel plotting in secret to create a Pacific Rim Trade Agreement.   [Read more…]

Wells Fargo: An Indictment of the American Banking System

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Three weeks after the fact, the banking giant fixes its own error.

On June 28th a call came to Monica from the Supervisor of Security at the Wells Fargo headquarters in San Francisco. Her name was Sheila. She originally would not talk to me, even though Monica had given them permission to do so. I had to wait until Monica came home from school. Putting Sheila on speaker phone, Monica iterated that I had permission to speak for her, and the conversation began.

We were informed that the transaction for the $300 had been found and she wanted Monica to go to the bank the next day and see if the security tape was, in fact, that of Monica. I asked Sheila if the person making the transaction was a woman. She answered “yes.” I asked if she was of Asian descent. She again answered “yes.” I asked if she was tall. The answer was “yes.” I asked if she were very slim. The answer was “yes.” I asked if she had long hair. Again the answer was “yes.” I then asked a very telling question. I said, “was it the same woman that made the $400 withdrawal?” I was incredulous when the answer was given to me….   [Read more…]

The Supreme Court Upheld Corporate Health Care Reform – Universal Health Care Still Elusive

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Not allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good, progressives should be happy that the Supreme Court dealt the Neanderthal right a huge blow by upholding the constitutionality of health care reform. Now 30 million more Americans will have access to health care, parents will be allowed to keep their adult children on their policies longer, and those with pre-existing conditions can no longer be excluded from coverage among other good results. This is a real, tangible win for scores of Americans, but not all of us.

On the political front, years of insane ranting about death panels, the end of American liberty, and creeping socialism got slam dunked by a conservative judge who joined the liberals in affirming the lion’s share of the provisions of the Affordable Care Act. This will not stop the bullshit machine at Fox News and elsewhere from cranking out more lies, but it will most likely help more than hurt Obama’s campaign for a second term. With no alternative to offer, all the right has, as Paul Krugman wrote last week, is prevarication and cruelty. Not an attractive combination even when being presented by the ever-so-suave Mitt Romney.
  [Read more…]

The Starting Line – Reps Filner, Davis Call for Transparency in (TPP) Trade Negotiations; Big Tobacco in San Diego for the ‘Free Trade’ Confab

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July 2, 2012—Two Members of San Diego’s Congressional delegation are among 130 Representatives who have signed a letter calling for an end to the secrecy surrounding negotiations for the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) Free Trade Agreement. Delegates from nine pacific rim nations are meeting in San Diego this week for the 13th round of negotiations on the pact. The letter cites “reports [that] indicate the agreement is likely to repeat, rather than improve upon, the existing trade template—including the weakening of Buy America provisions, providing extraordinary investor-state privileges, and restricting access to lifesaving medicines in developing nations, to name a few.” The trade pact meetings at San Diego’s Bayfront Hilton, which begin today, are expected to be the target of protests throughout the week,

Big Tobacco to join the negotiations… According to a report in the San Diego Reader, lobbyists from Phillip Morris and other big tobacco firms will be in attendance at the (TPP) negotiations, hoping to encourage trade rules to circumvent or overturn public health measures designed to reduce smoking. Activists from the Center for Policy Analysis on Trade and Health released a statement saying: “Big Tobacco is coming to San Diego, one of the most anti-smoking cities in the U.S., to push their ‘Merchants of Death’ agenda through the Trans Pacific Partnership.”   [Read more…]

Monday, July 2nd,12pm– Fair Trade Not Free Trade Rally!

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Labor and the STOP TPP Coalition Sponsor a Kick-Off Press Conference / Protest Rally / Street Theater

Today begins a week of protests and teach-ins aimed at raising public awareness about the negotiations taking place at San Diego’s Hilton Bayfront Convention Center concerning a the 13th round of negotiations on a proposed trade pact called The Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP).  The nations involved are the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Brunei, Chile and Peru. Japan, Mexico and Canada have indicated a desire to join. The economic power of this group is more than 40% larger than the 27-nation European Union. While the claimed purpose of TPP is to promote development and create jobs, protesters say this meeting is one of the final conclaves to secretly negotiate the economic structural adjustments necessary to appease the world’s largest multinational banks and multi-unit corporations.

Today’s events include a kickoff protest/press conference at noon in the park across from the Bayfront Hilton and the first of six days of a Better World Conference featuring speakers on Worker’s Rights, Outsourcing, Walmart, and Gentrification at the Logan Heights Branch Library starting at 6:30.   [Read more…]

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