Trump is a train-wreck, I know.

But while the pathetic carnival that is the White House continues to distract and horrify Americans, some hugely important news is getting lost in the din.

Here are a few of the stories that should be getting equal time but have been drowned out by the drama of the Disaster in Chief.   [Read more…]

A couple of weeks ago I saw Dead and Company open their tour in Las Vegas. The trip was filled with a bit of personal nostalgia for the many other times I came see the Grateful Dead play two or three show runs there before Jerry Garcia died. Of course, all of those trips, taken with friends steeped in the larger history of the band, were full of easy, ironic references to Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas where he tells the tale of his own savage journey into the Heart of the American Dream.

Back then, when my friends and I stayed in Circus Circus with 6 of us packed into the cheapest room we could find, sleeping on the floor or in the bathtub, someone would always remember the passage where Thompson writes:

The Circus-Circus is what the whole hep world would be doing on Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war. This is the Sixth Reich. The ground floor is full of gambling tables, like all the other casinos … but the place is about four stories high, in the style of a circus tent, and all manner of strange County-Fair/Polish Carnival madness is going on up in this space. Right above the gambling tables the Forty Flying Carazito Brothers are doing a high-wire trapeze act, along with four muzzled Wolverines and the Six Nymphet Sisters from San Diego.   [Read more…]

This week marks the fifth anniversary of the San Diego Free Press and that’s something to celebrate. I first started writing for the OB Rag and then subsequently became part of the birth of the SD Free Press because I loved the way that those outlets both paid homage to the legacy of San Diego’s countercultural press and continued its legacy into the digital age.

As part a key part of the local New Left and counterculture in the sixties and early seventies, Doug Porter, Frank Gormlie, and others offered a space for radical voices and cultural threads that were not acceptable in the mainstream, commercial media of the time.

In fact, as I document in Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See, “while the San Diego Left and counterculture were both quite small compared to their northern counterparts in Los Angeles and the Bay Area, they inspired the wrath of local elites, the police, and right-wing fanatics with alarming regularity. From 1969 to 1972, at least 35 separate incidents of terrorism were committed against the two alternative papers and/or local radicals or countercultural institutions.”   [Read more…]

South Bay Democrats Show the Way with Resolution in Support of a United Labor Movement

Last week, the first meeting of the newly reorganized San Diego-Imperial Counties Labor Council was a refreshingly upbeat gathering as the local movement recommitted itself to weathering the storm and reinventing the Labor Council as a far more democratic and activist organization that will do everything it can to engage union members and organize the unorganized.  

One of the most encouraging moments of the night came when Doug Moore of the United Domestic Workers spoke about the pressing need to rebuild real, less transactional relationships with our allies in the community.  This is a very good thing.  

So the news out of the Labor Council is that rank and file democracy is on its way back. The organization that still represents 90,000 of the 120,000 union workers in our region has righted the ship despite the failure of the former top leadership and the ill-advised, deeply destructive behavior of a handful of leaders who acted in a unilateral fashion as they unethically planned to form a rival organization even as they were being paid out of the dues money of all union workers in the San Diego-Imperial Counties Labor Council.     [Read more…]

Last week I outlined why the ill-conceived Mickey Kasparian-driven split in San Diego labor was such a bad idea, citing the recent history of the failed attempt of several national unions to form a break-away organization outside of the AFL-CIO called Change to Win (CTW) that eventually fell apart under its own weight accomplishing not much of note in the long run.

As I observed in that column, CTW cited a bold new organizing strategy as its justification but the split was really more about big egos in leadership and ended up dividing the labor movement while not doing anything to increase organizing or unions’ political power. In fact, the long decline of the American Labor Movement continued unabated on both sides of the split in the midst of much ado about nothing.   [Read more…]