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A Blue Wave is Not Enough: Progressives Need to Win the Long War for Democracy

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Recently I had the pleasure of speaking to the La Mesa-Foothills Democratic Club about the Lincoln Club and the history of the American Right. In that presentation, I noted how the ultimate aim of the Right was to dishonestly promote deeply unpopular policies through stealth politics that take advantage of the general public’s naiveté about their agenda.  

Locally, groups like the Lincoln Club do their best to intervene in Democratic primaries and shift the landscape in their favor so they can win elections and promote policies that further enrich the elite. As I have written in this space, that’s how San Diego’s “shadow government” has rolled for decades.

At the national level, the Lincoln Club was a key player in bringing us the Citizens United case which helped further stack the deck of national politics in favor of the rich and corporate interests.   To really understand the big picture, however (as I told the audience), you need to understand the entire history of the Right’s long war to, as historian Nancy MacLean puts it, “save capitalism from democracy permanently.”        [Read more…]

America’s Finest Tourist Plantation Workers Struggle to Make It … But Nobody’s at the Barricades

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Anger Beneath the Postcard?

It should come as no surprise to anyone who ventures outside San Diego’s hermetically sealed and relentlessly marketed image of itself as a carefree paradise by the sea that the reality of our city is quite different than the happy fantasy.  A recent study by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) confirmed this recently when it released a report that noted of America’s Finest City, “45% of San Diegans fall into an auspicious category: people who work full time and still struggle with poverty.

The local news coverage of this report understandably focused on the poverty numbers and how here and elsewhere in California, people are losing faith in the American Dream.   Digging deeper into the report, we also learn that working Californians suffer great housing insecurity, feel disposable as employees, have negative workplace experiences, and aren’t sure they’ll ever be able to retire.  While these are all noteworthy and grim details, several other things, buried toward the end of the study, give some signs of hope but also present a central challenge.   [Read more…]

Lessons for Labor Day 2018: Solidarity Works!

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It has been the worst of times and the best of times for the American Labor Movement in 2018.  

Economic inequality has continued to spiral out of control as policy coming out of Washington, DC designed to tilt the scales in favor of the rich and corporations weakened the rights of working Americans at every turn. At the Supreme Court level, anti-labor justices joined the assault against labor and undermined public sector unions’ rights to collect dues.  This, combined with a tax bill that radically redistributed wealth upward and paved the way for new austerity measures aimed at gutting Social Security and Medicare, had some pundits sounding the death knell for unions and the legacy of the New Deal.

But in the midst of all this dire news, a funny thing happened: workers fought back in the unlikeliest of places.  West Virginia, Arizona, and Oklahoma were hit by massive teacher strikes and huge protests demanding higher pay for educators, better conditions for students, and an end to the underfunding of public education.  

They shocked the world and won.     [Read more…]

The Wages of Inequality Keep Growing: Only Working People’s Power Can Save Our Democracy

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It shouldn’t be news to readers of the SD Free Press that life here under the perfect sun isn’t always so easy, particularly for working people.  Indeed, as a Bloomberg report outlined last May, “The gap between the have and have-nots in San Diego was the ninth-highest out of 100 cities between 2011 to 2016.”  

As usual, this report received not much more than a shrug in the place where happy happens as we were too busy spectacularly failing to address our shameful homelessness crisis yet again while the supply of high-end condos downtown and elsewhere continues to grow.  So it goes.

It’s the same old story over and over again here–and everywhere else.  

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Trump Tweets While California and the World Burns

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The world just keeps getting hotter, and California burns ever-more-furiously as one epic blaze after another strain not just our resources, but our ability to cognitively adjust to the fact that this is the new normal.  As I wrote in response to the huge fires in Los Angeles last December, “Reality is exceeding the capacity of our dystopian imaginations.”  

Temperatures broke records worldwide this summer prompting the Washington Post to run a startling headline about our “red-hot planet”, while the New York Times observed how “Scorching Summer in Europe Signals Long-Term Climate Changes.”  Here in California, Governor Jerry Brown visited the devastation in the wake of the Redding fire and bluntly commented that the problem behind these horrifying disasters was that, “We’re fighting nature with the amount of material that we’re putting in the environment, and that material traps heat.”  

That fire was then followed by the largest blaze in state history in Northern California and another big fire in Orange County, both coinciding with the huge inferno shutting down Yosemite, and others still.  Earlier in the summer, San Diego suffered through the Alpine fire and its own series of heat waves and freakishly warm, record-setting ocean temperatures in early August.  

The list goes on and on.     [Read more…]

Summer Chronicles 2018 #9: The Music of the Street

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There is music in the street.  It’s easy to be enthralled by the sounds of the natural world, but urban noise frequently distresses us, disrupts our head space or intervenes into the sounds we are plugged into at the moment.  But sometimes, the city bustle has its charms. So much of the urban noise that we think of as a distraction from some other narrative that has captured our attention or an intrusion into our sealed-off domestic space is seen as ugly.  

But perhaps we just need to learn to listen.  Is it the sounds themselves that are the issue or our reactions to them?  Maybe instead of sonic garbage, the clatter and hum is part of the chorus of life.  As I get older and crankier, I try to remember to leave that door in myself open so instead of pushing things out, I can let them come and go.     [Read more…]

Summer Chronicles 2018 #8: “Already Dead”: A Lunch Poem for Golden Hill

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On the back cover of Frank O’Hara’s classic City Lights Books collection, Lunch Poems, he defines his efforts succinctly:

Often this poet, strolling through the noisy splintered glare of a Manhattan noontide, has paused at a sample Olivetti to type up thirty or forty lines of ruminations, or pondering more deeply has withdrawn to a darkened ware- or firehouse to limn his computed misunderstandings of the eternal questions of life, coexistence, and depth, while never forgetting to eat lunch his favorite meal…. 

While I have always loved O’Hara’s work and sought in my own writing to emulate his temporal discipline and culinary wisdom, what I find most useful about the form he invents is how it can present the most ordinary of moments in a way that captures the extraordinary.     [Read more…]

Summer Chronicles 2018 #7: When the Padres Still Played Baseball in Yuma

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It’s the dog days of summer but it’s Spring Training all year round in San Diego as the Padres sort through their stock of minor leaguers to see who might still be around in a few years when they hope to be competitive.  That means losing a lot. Watching a good amount of losing baseball requires a different lens and an appreciation for the small things inside and outside the game.

Recent efforts to increase the speed of the game are a reflection of the fear that America’s historic pastime is too slow for our constantly-plugged-in culture.  We are always running, and it is not. Still, baseball is the perfect summer game because, at base, it’s timeless, lazy. There are lots of empty spaces, best felt at the lower tech, minor league parks, but still there everywhere else if you can tear your eyes away from the big screen.  

Having some sense of the fact that watching baseball means occupying a seat in a larger tradition or history also helps—knowing what came before, the role the game has played in our culture. What has been lost and where the ghosts of baseball past still haunt us—the remains of old parks in Catalina, Hana, and other out of the way places where the big leaguers used to train or play.     [Read more…]

Summer Chronicles 2018 #6: Thinking of Bukowski at Del Mar

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Every year, opening day at Del Mar brings out the beautiful people.  Handsome, well-heeled (or at least trying to look that way) young men and women get dressed to the nines and parade around the track, seeing and being seen.  It is a classic San Diego moment: shiny happy people in an elegant place on a perfect summer day.

Not a trouble in the world.  

Until they start betting and losing and betting and losing.  And, eventually, if you look away from the glamorous women in their fabulous hats, you’ll start to notice them–the old-time track denizens in not chic shabby clothes.  Their rolled-up papers and grim expressions, their studied disdain for the loud crowd of novice gamblers.

A dying breed to be sure.     [Read more…]

Summer Chronicles 2018 #5: Gentrifying Dystopia in Bombay Beach

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There’s something compelling about desolation, about lost places filled with traces of forgotten histories both personal and collective.  That’s why I’ve always had a penchant for little towns around the Salton Sea, the vast, dying body of water I describe in my first novel, Drift:

It was a mistake, the product of a vulgar utopia gone awry.  At the turn of the century, they dreamed of transforming the desert into a garden by bleeding nature of more than she readily offered.  When they sought to divert the waters of the Colorado, they flooded downhill and formed the Salton Sea. In the wake of this disaster, they dreamed of turning the floodwaters into their own depraved version of Eden, a haven for real estate boosters, businessmen, and all the hungry failures who had lost out on the golden dream in Los Angeles and San Diego.  But everything went wrong, and all the detritus of the dying dream flooded into the sea—all the pesticides, toxics, organic compounds, and salt, salt, salt mixed together to form an ocean of poison that is killing even the harder corvina, who survived, like those who transplanted them, by eating all the smaller fish. Now the fish lie rotting by the shore, easy prey for the birds that scoop them up hungrily and die in large numbers.

And when you drive through places like Salton City or Bombay Beach it feels like the end of the world.  As the main character of Drift muses, “This is where you go when you stop wanting . . . Occupy the wreckage of a dead dream.  If the world pushes you too hard, just stop pushing back.”
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Summer Chronicles 2018 # 4: Getting Inside the Inexhaustibility

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“A desire to be inside the inexhaustibility.”
–Karl Ove Knausgaard My Struggle

In Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, he writes eloquently about how writing is what helps one escape the prison of our “purely fabricated world” that gives us the feeling that “the world is small, tightly enclosed around itself, without openings to anywhere else.”  This bubble world that the construct of modern civilization has locked us into is only exacerbated by the closed feedback loop of our cell phones and social media which pretend to expand our known worlds while, in reality, deeply limiting our consciousness to a simulacrum of screens.  

What does writing do? Well, as Knausgaard observes, it speaks to our desire for more, “The longing I always felt, which some days was so great it could hardly be controlled, had its source here.  It was partially to relieve this feeling that I wrote, I wanted to open the world by writing.” And despite people’s dismissal of his romanticism, he insists on the reality of “sudden states of clear-sightedness that everyone must know, where for a few seconds you catch sight of another world from the one you were in only a moment earlier, where the world seems to step forward and show itself for a brief glimpse before reverting and leaving everything as before.”     [Read more…]

What to the Working Class is the Fourth of July?

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On this day when we celebrate the Declaration of Independence, it’s important to remember Jefferson himself believed that each new generation needed to make the American creed their own. And everyone from slaves to women to working people did just that as we see in Frederick Douglass’s great speech “What to the Slave is the 4th of July?”, the early feminist manifesto “Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions, Seneca Falls,” and the much lesser known “Working Men’s Declaration of Independence.”

This last is centrally important to remember because while Americans are largely aware that the battle for inclusion involved long and heroic abolition, civil rights, and women’s movements, struggles around issues of class have all-too-frequently been relinquished to the dustbin of history. Such is the case with the early Working Men’s Party that was railing about what Bernie Sanders calls “the billionaire class” well before the time when many historians mark the beginning rustlings of the American labor movement.

Indeed, what the early Working Men’s Party history shows is class rebellion is as American as apple pie and was seen as a fulfillment of the Jeffersonian project. How so?   [Read more…]

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