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The San Diego Public Market – A Force for Good (Food) Rising in Barrio Logan

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It’s a project that many would say, for a city of San Diego’s size and agricultural abundance, is one long overdue.

By John P Anderson

UDATE: 10:15AM- The San Diego Public Market has surpassed its fundraising goal.

The Barrio Logan neighborhood, just on the south side of Downtown San Diego, has a history similar to Little Italy, just on the north side of downtown. Both communities were severely damaged by the construction of Interstate 5 in the early 1970s. In the case of Barrio Logan, the Interstate construction lead to the creation of Chicano Park as a protest response to the development of the highway and damage done to the community as a result.   [Read more…]

A Restaurant Review: “Jiggle Jiggle” Korean Grill in the Midway

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“Jiggle Jiggle” Korean Grill
3146 Midway Drive
San Diego, CA 92110

Several days ago a request was made by one of our readers to do a review of  Jiggle Jiggle. She said the food was good; inexpensive; and the “mom/pop” running the restaurant are from Korea. It should be noted that this is not a Korean BBQ. There are no hot pots or woks on the table for you to do your own cooking. Rather, it is all done for you in a most delicious way.

I have a Korean student living with me to learn English – Monica – and some of you have already read about her problem with Wells-Fargo. Monica has been with me for almost 9 months. I also have a Japanese student – Yuko – who has only been in the United States 2 weeks, and when my two students get together they spend a great deal of time in a “giggle” mode. It truly is a kick to be around them, and you find yourself smiling with them most of the evening.  Tonight was no exception.   [Read more…]

Trying to Rent a Car From Lemon Grove Enterprise Without a Credit Card

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As an attorney, I occasionally must attend court hearings in Imperial County, and when I travel that far east in this heat, I want a car with a good-working air conditioner. My ten year old PT Cruiser doesn’t pass that muster so, I decided that since I had a hearing at 1pm on August 14th, I had to ride to El Centro with a car with good coolant. I mean, my god, El Centro in mid-August!

First, I called Enterprise rental cars in La Mesa – thinking naively that my home town of Lemon Grove was too small to have its own rental car office. But was I wrong. I spoke to the guy at La Mesa Enterprise and told him I needed a compact car with good a.c. and that I did not have a credit card, but I did have a debit card. No problem, he said, all I needed to bring with my debit card was a utility bill with my name and address on it.

Well, I responded, I live with my partner in Lemon Grove, it’s her house and the utility bills come to our house with her name. Oh, the guy says, if you live in Lemon Grove, he advised, call Lemon Grove Enterprise and they won’t require the utility bill. Great, I thought, how convenient.
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New Weight-Loss Drugs Could Well Be America’s Next Health Care Disaster

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San Diego Company’s Belviq Drug Ok’d After ‘Concerned Citizen’ Petitions FDA to Override Advisory Committee Concerns

By now, most people are aware of the obesity statistics. Thirty-four percent of US adults are obese, 34 percent are overweight and more than a third of children are either obese or overweight. The average American man weighs 194 and the average woman, 165. (This trend brings to mind an old New Yorker cartoon in which a doctor tells an overweight patient, “According to this chart you should be seven feet and two inches tall.”)

Not everyone agrees on the reasons for the ballooning American physique. Is it inactivity? Overeating? The wrong foods? Environmental factors? The Centers for Disease Control report that excess weight is linked to coronary heart disease, stroke, Type 2 diabetes, cancer, high blood pressure, liver and gallbladder disease and osteoarthritis. One statistical report says obesity is actually more harmful than smoking, drinking or poverty. And that’s assuming the overweight aren’t afflicted with those conditions, too.
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A Quick Trip to Costco (Morena) to Buy Gas

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A member of my widow support group, Irene, came over this morning because we were both feeling lonely, and I was making breakfast – “Dutch Babies” for my students and thought she’d like to join us. After eating, we decided to go up to Ft. Rosecrans and “see” our husband’s and tell them what they missed. They were waiting for us in their little “niche” and we bawled them out for leaving us when they did. (Interestingly enough we did not know Irene and Johnny; Irene and I met in our support group, but the “wall” that Bob and Johnny are in are very close to each other and we presume that they “meet” often and discuss the dirty trick they played on us, their wives.

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How Mitt Romney Drove Companies Bankrupt, Raided Pension Funds and Paid Himself Handsomely

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Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital was very good at making money for Mitt Romney. At the same time it loaded companies Bain bought with debt, borrowed even more money to pay dividends to Mitt Romney and destroyed or outsourced lots of jobs. It even raided pension funds. Then Romney turns around and holds himself up as a “successful businessman.” Sure he was successful in terms of making money for himself. But this was at the expense of those workers at previously successful companies who lost their jobs when those companies went bankrupt thanks to the debt loaded on them due to money borrowed from banks that went directly into Romney’s pocket.

Here’s how a private equity fund such as Bain Capital works. It picks a successful company and then takes it over with a leveraged buyout (LBO). The money borrowed from a bank to pay off the owner or stockholders does not become the debt of Bain Capital. It becomes the debt of the company that was taken over. You might ask, “Why would a bank even loan money to place a company in debt for the purposes of being taken over by Bain Capital which does not even assume the debt?” Well, it’s for the same reason that so many subprime loans were available. The bank does not continue to hold the debt. It offloads it to investors such as pension funds so the bank doesn’t really care. They have no skin in the game. Why not loan Mitt Romney money to take over companies? There’s good money in those commissions.   [Read more…]

“Tobacco Can Cure Smoking” And Other Highlights Of ALEC’s Annual Meeting in Salt Lake

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by Brendan Fischer and Mary Bottari / PR Watch

“Can Tobacco Cure Smoking?” is the title of a workshop this morning led by the tobacco industry-backed Dr. Brad Rodu, who is trained as a dentist but has the title “Chair of Tobacco Harm Reduction Research” at the University of Louisville, a program primarily funded by U.S. Smokeless Tobacco Co., an ALEC member and manufacturer of smokeless tobacco brands like Copenhagen and Skoal. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Heartland Institute, the Illinois-based think tank thatattracted attention earlier this year for making billboards that likened those who believe in man-made climate change to mass murderers and terrorists.

Rodu’s research supports the idea that smokers should replace cigarettes with smokeless chewing tobacco or “snus” moist tobacco packets — a “free market” solution to reducing smoking that would allow tobacco companies to continue profiting off of addiction.
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Dark Money Political Groups Target Voters Based on Their Internet Habits

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by Lois Beckett / ProPublica

Lauren Berns was browsing Talking Points Memo when he saw an ad with President Obama’s face. “Stop the Reckless Spending,” the ad read, and in smaller print, Paid for by Crossroads GPS.    Berns was surprised. Why was Crossroads GPS, a group that powerful Republican strategist Karl Rove helped found,advertising on a liberal-leaning political website? Looking closely at the ad, Berns saw a small blue triangle in the upper-left hand corner. He knew what that meant: this ad wasn’t being shown to every person who read that page. It was being targeted to him in particular. Tax-exempt groups like Crossroads GPS have become among the biggest players in this year’s election.  They’re often called “dark money” groups, because they can raise accept unlimited amounts of money and never have to disclose their donors.

These groups are spending massively on television spots attacking different candidates. These ads are often highly publicized and get plenty of media attention.

But these same dark money groups are also quietly expanding their online advertising efforts, using sophisticated targeting tactics to send their ads to specific kinds of people.

Who they’re targeting, and what data they’re using, is secret.   [Read more…]

Will Carlbad’s Controversial Desalination Plant Get Off the Ground?

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Southern’s California Recent Desal Plant Faces its Last Hurdle

By David Rosenfeld / AlterNet / Originally published July 17, 2012

The private equity firm proposing to finance the project has one last hurdle to overcome: It needs someone to agree to buy the water. And that is proving tricky.

After more than a decade spent talking about building a large-scale ocean desalination plant in Carlsbad, California, the private equity firm proposing to finance the project has one last hurdle to overcome: It needs someone to agree to buy the water.

Poseidon Resources has put forth several iterations over the years of its proposed plant in San Diego County, expected to produce up to 50 million gallons of freshwater daily. In one attempt, Poseidon inked agreements with local water agencies claiming it could sell water at no greater cost than imported water supplies.

But investors and members of the San Diego County Water Authority, both of whom Poseidon needs for support, balked at the claim and those agreements were scrapped.   [Read more…]

Lemon Grove Is Booming

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Combination of Public and Private Funds Fueling Construction Boom in East County City

You can’t go from one end of Lemon Grove to another without seeing the telltale signs of a virtual construction boom. There are so many construction projects going on right now in this East County city of 25,000, just 10 miles east of downtown San Diego, that you’d think the recession was over and things were … well, rosier than they are.

Yet in Lemon Grove, there are half a dozen construction projects in process, exhibiting the fact that both public and private money are at work here. And on top of that, city officials broke ground yesterday at a ceremony welcoming yet another project – the promenade and park centered around the city’s primary trolley station, just next to Main Street and Broadway.

Let’s take a quick look at all these projects.

Another Pharmacy

At the southwest corner of the very busy Massachusetts and Broadway intersection, Walgreen Pharmacy is financing a new facility. I spoke briefly to superintendent Andy Dipalma of Savant Construction while inside his trailer. Being somewhat distrusting of strangers wandering through his site, Andy told me that the new pharmacy should be completed in September of this year. He estimated that the project employed about 45 people – bringing jobs to this sector of the economy.   [Read more…]

How Wall Street and London Bank Scandal Are Bankrupting California Cities

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Wall Street got bailed out. Cities got sold out. Federal policies keeping interest rates low are resulting in extracting wealth from cities and transferring it to Wall Street.

We blogged earlier about how traders from JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs descended on European cities such as Casino, Italy and even nunneries selling them interest rate swaps. Interest rate swaps were also responsible for bankrupting Jefferson County, the county seat of Birmingham, Alabama. Now the same big banks are bankrupting California cities. Stockton, San Bernadino and Mammoth Lakes have already gone down. Oakland is fighting Goldman for its very life.

But what does this have to do with the LIBOR scandal, you say? A lot, it turns out. LIBOR stands for the London Interbank Offered Rate, a benchmark that most other interest rates are tied to including interest rate swaps, the very derivative financial instruments that are now bankrupting California cities. The LIBOR scandal has failed to attract the interest of many Americans because it’s so “over there” in London. What does that have to do with us here in the US? The same interest rate swaps that JP Morgan Chase sold to nunneries in Europe, they’ve sold to Stockton and San Bernadino and Oakland and many other US cities, school districts, hospitals and perhaps even to a few US nunneries.
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Deporting the Hand That Feeds Us: How Anti-Immigrant Laws Are Causing a Farm Labor Shortage

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If Americans won’t do the work, and the U.S. successfully keeps undocumented immigrants out of the country, then who will do it?

AlterNet / By Jill Richardson 
While researching her 2012 book The American Way of Eating, journalist Tracie McMillan decided to try her hand at picking grapes, sorting peaches and cutting garlic. The experience resulted in heatstroke, tendonitis and long-term damage to her right arm. In only one job – sorting peaches – was she paid minimum wage. That was also the only job where her employer was aware she was an undercover journalist. She left two jobs rather quickly, but stuck with the garlic job for six weeks until she literally could not use her right arm for anything and she became worried she might permanently damage it.

The harsh conditions and poor pay for farmwork are nothing new in American history. Before Mexicans worked on America’s large farms, the U.S. used a different group of immigrants: slaves from Africa and their descendants.
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