By Jim Miller
Things haven’t been going too well for the corporate education reform forces lately. In Chicago there is great controversy surrounding and parent resistance to school closings as a result of the efforts of over zealous reformers. This shameful turn of events puts yet another black mark on former Obama Administration chief of staff and current Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel’s heavy-handed reign of error over his city’s schools.
Prop 30 passed, the truth is that the poor still pay a heftier share of their income in taxes than the wealthy. Last week, the California Budget Project (CBP) released their annual report “Who Pays Taxes on California?”, and it appears that the post Proposition 30 landscape is far from apocalyptic for the top 1%.
By the broadest measure of revenue collection, “Taxafornia,” despite its largely progressive tax system, ranks 15th in the country in total “own source” revenue, and the poorest among us pay the highest share of their family income in taxes.
Indeed, as the CBP report outlines, “California’s lowest-income families pay the most in taxes, when measured as a share of family income. This is true even after accounting for Proposition 30’s temporary personal income tax increases for very wealthy Californians, which took effect in 2012. [Read more…]
The San Diego Nine picked the perfect week for a hunger strike. They may not have known it, but the ghosts of Memphis were haunting the Mission Valley Hilton. What’s the connection?
Last week was the 45th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who was murdered in Memphis where he had gone to support striking sanitation workers. As I noted in my column for Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday in January, the real MLK is frequently neglected in favor of a distorted picture of a vanilla saint who just wanted us all to get along. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Indeed, King was a provocateur who wanted to disturb us about America’s hypocritical racial inequality AND its shameful class divide. King died fighting for the rights of poor workers of color because he thought nothing was a better example of what he wanted the Poor People’s Campaign to be than the sanitation workers’ strike. Their fight was a call not just for legal civil rights for black people, but a cry for economic justice for all. [Read more…]
After having purchased and transformed the San Diego Union Tribune into America’s greatest newspaper in the Finest City in the World’s Best Darn Country, Doug Manchester is at it again. This time he has set his sights on the nation’s pastime and is aiming to put it back on the map for good by bringing an even more super American brand of baseball to the place where happy happens.
Change of course, is not just what will be left in your pocket after the Socialist in Chief leaves the White House, it’s the order of the day at Manchester Park, home of the San Diego Robber Barons. Swap out the statue of Tony Gwyn for one of the Lord Manchester himself and toss the swinging friar down the memory hole and replace him with that plucky little Carl DeMaio who will rove the stands passing out complementary reports on the inefficiency of local government and the scourge of pubic sector unionism. [Read more…]
Tomorrow is Election Day in District 4, and it matters. While this City Council race has garnered very little attention in San Diego as a whole and will certainly be a low turnout affair, the stakes are actually quite high. Indeed, the direction of the city is on the line.
As Doug Porter noted last week, outside money has been pouring into District 4 attacking Myrtle Cole. Why? Because Cole is the only candidate who will stand firmly behind Bob Filner’s agenda and buck the powerful moneyed interests that are bent on subverting the mayor.
Who’s behind the attacks? San Diego County Voters for Progress and Reform, a shadowy group that has been funded by the usual suspects: developers, downtown business groups, and the Lincoln Club. Those same folks are backing Cole’s opponent, Barry Pollard, and even fellow progressive Dwayne Crenshaw has taken money from Robert Gleason of Atlas Hotels (and a key figure in the TMD struggle against Filner) as well as Rural/Metro Corporation whose contract with San Diego for paramedic services will soon come up for renewal. In addition to this, sources close to the campaign tell me that Cole is the only candidate that has not met with the Lincoln Club, which should tell you all you need to know. [Read more…]
Last week State Senator Darrell Steinberg proposed what he thinks of as a bold new way to reshape higher education in California and to deal with the bottleneck of students who have trouble getting into “gateway” classes in our community colleges and universities. What is Steinberg’s answer to our access ills? Sadly, it is outsourcing higher education to the corporate interests who have long been aggressively lobbying to get a piece of the publically funded pie that is California’s public education system. [Read more…]
Well after all the bluster coming from the Democratic camp about President Obama’s “upper hand” leading into the sequester showdown, it turns out he had no game at all. The result: score another one for the Tea Party who got to take a hatchet to government spending and hold the line on taxes. As I wrote after the “Fiscal Cliff” showdown:
Grover Norquist is happy. After the fiscal cliff deal was passed in the House, he pointed out that Obama blinked on his $250,000 line in the sand on taxes and that, by locking in the Bush tax cuts for 98% of Americans, the Democrats’ ability to defend the legacy of the New Deal has been greatly diminished. He’s right.
And now Grover and company are even happier as the Republicans just said no to more taxes and let the ax fall indiscriminately on government spending. The “liberal media” may think badly of them and their national approval rating may be in the toilet but they simply don’t give a rat’s ass because they are winning nonetheless.
But fear not progressives, Obama is desperately courting Republicans outside of the party’s leadership in hopes of doing an end run to get to a “grand bargain” that will give us the manna from heaven that is austerity lite. [Read more…]
As the historic battle between Mayor Filner and San Diego’s big hoteliers over the tourism marketing deal unfolds, it’s clear where the lines are drawn.
On one side, you have a new strong mayor who is committed to ending business as usual in San Diego and on the other, you have folks like Terry Brown, chairman of the San Diego Tourism Marketing Association who, as Matt Potter at The San Diego Reader has pointed out, is a big time Republican funder as are the crew of business lobbyists, real estate developers, and San Diego Taxpayer Association types who have miraculously found they can love a tax after it has transubstantiated into a fee and serves as a giveaway to corporate interests. [Read more…]
As Doug Porter reported here at the San Diego Free Press last week, Mayor Bob Filner is now engaged in an intense struggle with City Attorney Jan Goldsmith, big hoteliers, and the UT-San Diego because he has refused to sign off on the sweetheart deal negotiated by his predecessor whose legacy is quickly evaporating as you read this. Specifically, Filner wants legal protections for the city if the dubious deal goes to court, a shorter tourism marketing agreement, a cut of hotel fees for city services, and a living wage for hotel employees.
Other than their questionable notion that the 2% tourist surcharge is not a tax, the real agenda behind the attack on Filner is San Diego’s elites’ desire to maintain their privilege and the advantages that have come to them from decades of shadow government. [Read more…]
Soon our national political discourse will be dominated by the nightmarish sequester debate with the Republicans’ doomsday austerity strategy being countered by the Democrats’ austerity-lite program that draws from the eternal verity of Simpson-Bowles. God help us.
Standing in stark contrast to the reigning austerity-lite crowd inside the Democratic Party is perhaps the brightest progressive hope in the country, Senator Elizabeth Warren. Rather than playing the populist note to bash Republicans and then retreating to safe, chamber of commerce approved positions that put Social Security and Medicare “on the table” like many of her colleagues in the Democratic Party, Warren is consistently taking it to the 1% whenever she can, and she really means it. [Read more…]
It’s the Monday before Valentine’s Day and merchants across America are happily preparing for our annual romance-driven consumer frenzy. Indeed this schmaltzy commodification of love is worth around $14.7 billion dollars a year with much of it ending in the predictable disappointment that comes when we realize that our frantic, frequently anxious lives just don’t measure up to the prepackaged saccharine dreams we are sold.
Valentine’s Day is the sanctification of an empty, soul-killing romance narrative, a celebration of the notion that the most precious and intangible human emotion can be summoned by the magic of the sexless dollar. In sum, as currently constituted, Valentine’s Day is where real love goes to die.
The roots of what we think of when we think about buying something to signify love are as American as apple pie, and we might trace the origins of the total commercialization of romance to 1913 when Hallmark began to mass market Valentine’s Day cards as we know them. This commercial landmark was preceded by the work of Esther Howland who, in 1850, first started to produce and sell Valentines, starting the move away from exchanging personally crafted cards or even poems to trading commodities made by someone else. [Read more…]
It’s the beginning of the new semester at San Diego City College where I work, so I thought this would be a good time to evaluate some of Jerry Brown’s bold moves on the educational front.
In terms of funding, the passage of Proposition 30 has stopped much of the bleeding in schools and colleges across the state, but it still does not do enough to restore all that has been cut in recent years.
Therefore, despite some very good news, challenges remain ahead.
Come inside to see Gov. Brown’s Report Card… [Read more…]
