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Closing the Deal for David Alvarez: Your Vote Will Make a Difference

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Perhaps out of the summer of scandal and the fall of discord, new hope can be born

By Jim Miller

With less than 24 hours to go until the polls open, San Diego’s special election for mayor has turned into a contest to see who will face Republican Kevin Faulconer in the run-off. A Datamar automated poll last Wednesday showed Faulconer at 44% with Alvarez pulling in at 25.3%, way ahead of Fletcher’s 15.9%. This was followed by yesterday’s UT poll that showed Faulconer ahead as well but with Fletcher up by two over Alvarez, 24% to 22%, a statistical dead heat.

The American Federation of Teachers’ (AFT) final internal polling has the race to make the run-off at 20% for Alvarez and 14.3% for Fletcher with a big pool of undecided voters still waiting to make their call at the last minute. Thus, taking all of this into account, it’s mostly likely a dead heat leaning Alvarez heading into Tuesday. Alvarez can make the primary and win, but his voters have to show up for that to happen.

Bottom line: your vote matters a lot this time. We’ll either have a race between plutocracy and plutocracy-lite or we’ll have an opportunity to keep a bold progressive agenda alive in San Diego. It’s your choice.   [Read more…]

Fletcher Floundering, Alvarez Ascending, and Other Tales of Fear and Loathing from the Campaign Trail

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By Jim Miller

This just in: it appears that Nathan Fletcher’s claims of inevitability have evaporated as the race to meet Kevin Faulconer in the run off is a dead heat leaning Alvarez heading into the last week. The internal polling in all three camps shows Faulconer having consolidated the Republican vote as Fletcher’s early name ID-fueled lead has collapsed, and Alvarez has continued to steadily trend upwards.

More specifically, the most recent numbers from the AFT tracking poll over the weekend have Faulconer at 37.2%, Alvarez at 21.7%, and Fletcher trailing but still barely within the margin of error at 16.3%. Mike Aguirre has 2.5% and a big 20.5 % are still undecided. Hence the trend we are seeing is one of Alvarez slowly tracking up and Fletcher sinking like a lead weight.

Those who follow politics closely know that the trend line is what matters most at this point in a campaign and this bodes well for Alvarez.   [Read more…]

You’ve Got Mail: Mayoral Shapeshifter Sweepstakes Rolls On

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By Jim Miller

Everywhere you look, there is a different Nathan Fletcher. The magic never stops. You can see it in a recent mailer from the Municipal Employees Association (MEA) that touts the man with an 18% lifetime score on labor issues and a 36% Sierra Club score on environmental issues as someone with “a consistent progressive record we can trust.” The MEA magic comes by taking a handful of votes that Fletcher made while re-positioning himself for his mayoral run and giving them the tag line, “Show Us the Facts.”

Well, brothers and sisters, if you think that Fletcher is a progressive, with both a labor and an environmental record that actually comes in behind Republican Kevin Faulconer’s, you just don’t care about the facts. Particularly when you know that David Alvarez’s record on these issues is far superior to both of them.   [Read more…]

Nathan Fletcher, The Magic Environmentalist: A Case Study in Machine Versus Movement Politics

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By Jim Miller

If the environment matters to you and you had to choose between a candidate with a 48% lifetime voting record on environmental issues from the California League of Conservation Voters and a 38% lifetime voting record from the Sierra Club or a candidate with an 88% voting record on environmental issues, you’d think the choice would be clear.

That is, of course, unless this choice involves Nathan Fletcher, the magic environmentalist, whose husky whispers of promise and inside game voodoo can make uncomfortable facts disappear like dust in the wind.

Last week San Diego Politico posted an interesting piece on how the San Diego League of Conservation Voters’ endorsement process fell prey to the Fletcher fairy dust as they handed him their endorsement despite the horrible lifetime voting record of 48% he has earned from their own organization.   [Read more…]

Project Censored 2012-13: The Human Costs of Corporate Propaganda

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By Jim Miller

Projected Censored recently released their list of the “Top 25 Most Censored Stories of 2012-13.” As I noted in a column about last year’s list, Project Censored’s definition of censorship is a nuanced one:

We define Modern Censorship as the subtle yet constant and sophisticated manipulation of reality in our mass media outlets. On a daily basis, censorship refers to the intentional non-inclusion of a news story – or piece of a news story – based on anything other than a desire to tell the truth. Such manipulation can take the form of political pressure (from government officials and powerful individuals), economic pressure (from advertisers and funders), and legal pressure (the threat of lawsuits from deep-pocket individuals, corporations, and institutions).

In sum, the folks at Project Censored argue, along with Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, that all the information we consume in our market-driven system has to go through a series of “filters” before a story makes it (or doesn’t make it) to our eyes and ears.  This is not a definition that implies a conspiracy; it is a structural analysis of how our media system works in the real world with all the economic, political, and legal pressures that shape the process of delivering the infotainment we call news.   [Read more…]

Is San Diego in a New York State of Mind? De Blasio and Alvarez Give Us Hope

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By Jim Miller

After my last column on the perils of Carl Luna’s characterization of progressives supporting David Alvarez as the “Tea Party of the Left” I got a response from Luna when the article was reposted at the OB Rag where he stood by his analogy “that those in the Democratic camp who hold that there are ‘true’ progressives (aka those they agree with) and DINOS are in danger of going down the Tea Party rabbit hole—like the Occupy Wall Street people run wild. (Except that Tea Party has 90 seats in Congress—OWS zero).”

This was prefaced by a reminder that, “the point of elections is to win.”

My response to this was to observe that, “The problem with the Tea Party argument is false equivalency. To equate the Tea Party (a movement based on factually challenged assumptions across the board combined with a good dose of racism funded by the Koch brothers) with progressives worried about the growing influence of the rich and corporations inside the Democratic Party is sloppy thinking at best. It implies a kind of moral equivalency, which is frankly offensive.   [Read more…]

For Fletcher, History is the Narrative that Hurts

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By Jim Miller

To the surprise of many over the last couple of weeks, San Diego’s Labor Council, the San Diego Democratic Party, San Diego Democrats for Equality, Progressive San Diego, the Environmental Health and Justice Campaign, and a host of other local progressives have all lined up to endorse David Alvarez for Mayor. Even as the Gonzalez/Forrester/Jacobs/et al camp has pulled out all the stops in their effort to force-feed Fletcher to local progressives, Nathan just hasn’t gone down that well.

As one person who was being courted by Fletcher before the Democratic Central Committee’s endorsement vote reported, an exasperated Fletcher complained to them about having to work so hard to line up votes. I guess his friends on the inside said it was going to be easy.

Unfortunately for Fletcher, he has had to work hard but it hasn’t paid off. And all this has some folks in the “everybody knows” crowd a bit rattled.   [Read more…]

Mel Freilicher Reads from “Encyclopedia of Rebels”

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Wednesday, October 2nd at 7pm at DG Wills Book Store

By Jim Miller

San Diego City Works Press is proud to announce the publication of The Encyclopedia of Rebels by local author and UCSD writing teacher, Mel Freilicher. The book plays with the intersections between history, fiction, memoir, fantasy, and mystery. As Pulitzer Prize winning poet Rae Armantrout puts it, “You could call this both an outrageous comedy and a credible look at the world we live in.”

Mel Freilicher will read from his new book this Wednesday, at 7 PM at D.G. Wills Book Store at 7461 Girard Ave in La Jolla on WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 2nd at 7 pm as part of the San Diego City College International Book Fair.   [Read more…]

Fletcher Versus Alvarez: The Battle for the Soul of San Diego’s Democratic Party

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by Jim Miller

This last week marked the two-year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, a political happening that finally put the issue of economic inequality in the spotlight and started a national discussion about money, class, and political corruption. That movement was largely brought to us by young people, Millennials mostly, whose view of mainstream politics is justifiably jaded.

As Peter Beinart recently pointed out, “Compared to their Reagan-Clinton generation elders, Millennials are entering adulthood in an America where government provides much less economic security. And their economic experience in this newly deregulated America has been horrendous.”

And this experience has been made worse by bankrupt politics that pits what Beinart rightly characterizes as “a procapitalist, anti-bureaucratic Reaganized liberalism” that is “inclined toward market solutions” to everything against a radicalized “right wing populism”:   [Read more…]

Brown’s Betrayal of Schools for Prisons

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By Jim Miller

Finally, there was a measure of good news for schools in California with Proposition 30 creating a budget surplus that had plugged some of the gaping holes that years of budget cuts had made in our state’s public education system. But it didn’t take long for Governor Brown to betray us. Indeed, the Courage Campaign has done a great job in recent weeks taking the Governor to task for seeking to raid the Proposition 30 surplus to fund prison expansion.

That’s right, you heard it: prison expansion. As the Courage Campaign puts it:

Gov. Brown claims that his hands are tied. He claims a court order mandating him to reduce prison size by 10,000 has forced him to spend billions more in taxpayer dollars over the next 5 years. Don’t believe the spin. The Los Angeles Times and Sacramento Bee editorial boards don’t; they’ve ripped apart the Governor’s approach.   [Read more…]

The Labor Council’s Choice: David Alvarez

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By Jim Miller

Last Friday evening, after five grueling hours of candidate interviews and spirited debate, the San Diego-Imperial Counties Labor Council overwhelmingly endorsed David Alvarez for mayor.

This decision came after weeks of intense lobbying on the part of former labor leader Lorena Gonzalez, who, along with other powerful Democratic power brokers and money people were seeking to clear the field of genuinely progressive candidates in order to anoint Nathan Fletcher as the “only choice.”   [Read more…]

Happy Labor Day, Now More than Ever

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By Jim Miller

Today is Labor Day, but how many of us have any idea where the holiday came from or what it celebrates?

The first Labor Day was celebrated on Tuesday, September 5th, 1882 in New York City and was proposed by the Central Labor Union (CLU) at a time when American workers were struggling for basic rights such as the eight-hour day. The CLU moved the “workingman’s holiday” to the first Monday in September in 1883 and urged other unions to celebrate the date as well.

The movement grew throughout the 1880s, along with the American labor movement itself with 23 states passing legislation recognizing Labor Day as a holiday. By 1894 Congress followed suit and Labor Day became a national holiday.

On that date, in 1894, most American workers still did not have an eight-hour day, the right to organize, social security, health care, or even a living wage. Child labor was common and there were no health and safety laws. Indeed, just being a unionist could get you fired or even killed in some quarters.   [Read more…]

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