San Diego Free Press

Grassroots News & Progressive Views

You are here: Home / Archives for Business

Pictorial: Sunday at the Hillcrest Farmers Market

by

In our house we much of the grocery shopping on the weekends, and this includes regular trips to the Hillcrest Farmers Market. It’s always a thrill to come down the hill from Washington Street to the point where you can see the magnificence of the market spread out along Normal Street. Typically there are more than 140 vendors, selling everything from raspberries to falafel to hand puppets. Much of the produce is locally grown and virtually everything is sold with the kind of pride that only comes from having a personal connection with your product.  There are Farmers Markets throughout San Diego County every day of the week and even a magazine (Edible San Diego) that keeps up with all the seasonal events associated with locavorism. Here’s a handy list of those markets and their days/hours of operation.

This year marks the fifteenth anniversary of the Hillcrest Market. Besides being one of the larger markets in town, they have a robust web site, complete with a list of all their sellers and even a blog that shares impressions of the weekly event.  I took a boatload of photos last Sunday that I’d like to share with you here. Bon appetit!   [Read more…]

Romney’s 2002 testimony contradicts financial disclosure documents and Bain claims by campaign staff

by

by Jed Lewison / Daily Kos

On his financial disclosure documents, Mitt Romney claims he retired from Bain Capital after he started work on the Salt Lake Winter Olympics. “Since February 11, 1999,” the document states, “Mr. Romney has not had any active role with any Bain Capital entity and has not been involved in the operations of any Bain Capital entity in any way.”

As we’ve learned over the past couple of weeks, Romney actually remained the sole owner and top corporate officer for Bain Capital until 2002, when he signed a retroactive severance agreement—one that continues to pay him $20 million annually, to this very day. His campaign’sexplanation?

This is nothing more than a quirk in the law. When Governor Romney took over the Olympics, he was not involved in the operations of any Bain Capital entity in any way. He was too busy working to make the Olympic Games among the most successful ever held.

Well, if you call owning the firm and remaining its top corporate officer “a quirk in the law,” then I guess it’s a quirk, all right. But it’s the kind of quirk that completely undermines the campaign’s and the candidate’s claim to have been completely severed from Bain as of Feb. 11, 1999.

And now there’s more.
  [Read more…]

The Starting Line — Internet Freedom Under Attack Again; Congressman Seeks to Avoid Public Scrutiny

by

July 12, 2012- Congressman Lamar Smith, who hails from the west hills of Texas, is trying to push yet another bill through the House that will ‘tame the internet’.  Smith is trying to pass it without any substantive debate or scrutiny, just as he tried with the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), the bill that died on the vine earlier this year after 100,000 webs sites went dark for a day in protest.

The Intellectual Property Attache Act, will create the position of Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property who will see to it that all US trade negotiations and discussions advance SOPA-like provisions in foreign law. This clever maneuver is one way that he and his Hollywood masters can get past the fact that SOPA like measures are unpopular by getting other countries to impose them as part of trade agreements and then agree to “harmonize” these provisions by making the part of U.S. law.   [Read more…]

The Starting Line: Will Bridgepoint’s House of Cards Collapse? And Will San Diego Be Left Holding the Bag?

by

July 11, 2012- One of San Diego’s largest employers is headed for financial and legal  troubles that could have a serious impact on the region. Bridgepoint Education took a bath in the stock market Monday, losing one third of its value and continuing downward on Tuesday. Over the past year the company’s stock price has dropped by more than 50%. This week’s sharp drop in value at the stock exchange happened after its flagship school, Ashford University, was denied accreditation by the Western Association of Schools. The upshot of this ruling is that the company will need to relocate hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of employees out of the San Diego region.

The for profit education company depends on the status of the Ashford campus to give it credibility with its on-line students, who make up 99% of its enrollment, and the financial organizations that loan them money for tuition. Standing in the way of certification is Bridgepoint’s drop out rate; of the nearly quarter million students enrolled over the past four years (2007-2011), 127,879 withdrew from the school. Also troubling for the Western Association was the fact that the school spends 31% of its operating costs on recruitment, well above the amount it spends on actual instruction or student services like job counseling. Just 22% of Ashford students graduate; the actual campus in Iowa has a mere 1,000 students taking classes, 85,000 are studying online.   [Read more…]

Billionaire Philanthropist Gets His Way!

by

By John P. Falchi
It was good to have spent Monday downtown on one of the hottest issues of our time, the preservation of the historic integrity ofBalboaPark. For some time now the behind the scenes machinations of our local power elite have been working their way toward this day of decision on the part of our S.D. City Council Members. Many members of fine organizations like dan Soderberg’s Neighborhood Coalition to saveBalboaPark, Bruce Coon’s organization,SOHO, and Jeanne Brown’s League of Women Voters, have been fighting the good fight, and were there with members of their groups, yesterday. I was also impressed by the turnout of young people, many from the Occupy Together Movement, locally, who came to lend their support to those who chose to speak against the Jacobs-Sanders Campaign to fundamentally changeBalboaPark.   [Read more…]

The Balboa Park Controversy: Cats, birds, and bridges

by

By Norma Damashek / NumbersRunner

I don’t know how the City Council hearing on the Balboa Park/Jacobs bypass bridge, scheduled for Monday afternoon, will end up.

I don’t know how many people will show up to support the Jacobs plan and how many will be there to condemn it.

I don’t know what the final vote will be if, indeed, there is a final vote.

But this I do know. We’re getting exactly what we should expect to get when private business is brought in to solve a public problem.

Irwin Jacobs has been at the receiving end of criticism, potshots, and denunciation since he stepped in to take care of traffic and parking problems at theLaurel Streetentrance toBalboaPark. But it’s misplaced fury.

It reminds me of the first time the cat deposited a dead bird on my kitchen floor. The kids yelled at poor pussy, berated her, told her she was bad.   [Read more…]

NAFTA on Steroids

by

San Diego In World Spotlight Due to Trans-Pacific Partnership Negotiations

By Lori Wallach / The Nation (Article appeared in the July 16-23, 2012 edition)

While the Occupy movement has forced a public discussion of extreme corporate influence on every aspect of our lives, behind closed doors corporate America is implementing a stealth strategy to formalize its rule in a truly horrifying manner. The mechanism is the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Negotiations have been conducted in extreme secrecy, so you are in good company if you have never heard of it. But the thirteenth round of negotiations between the United States and eight Pacific Rim nations will be held in San Diego in early July.

The TPP has been cleverly misbranded as a trade agreement (yawn) by its corporate boosters. As a result, since George W. Bush initiated negotiations in 2008, it has cruised along under the radar. The Obama administration initially paused the talks, ostensibly to develop a new approach compatible with candidate Obama’s pledges to replace the old NAFTA-based trade model. But by late 2009, talks restarted just where Bush had left off.   [Read more…]

The Starting Line — UT- San Diego Recycles Two Week Old Story on Front Page

by

July 5, 2012- The story on the front page of today’s daily newspaper looked familiar. So familiar, in fact, that I initially thought the paper had lifted it—at least in part—from some other local source, possibly the Reader or KPBS. The article told the tale of an ascendant duo of mystery writers, Michele Scott and Andrew E. Kaufman, who recently discovered quite by accident that they lived within a quarter mile of each other in Jamul and have now decided to collaborate on a book. The lede to the story was so memorable (“Fresh from the freaky-but-true files:…) that I went ahead and searched the web, thinking surely there must be some kind of plagiarism going on. But that turned out not to be the case. What I discovered was that the story was originally published in the UT-SD on June 19th.  In other words, the paper was re-cycling the news. That’s one way to save money, I guess. UPDATE The UT has told Poynter.org that the story was only published online June 19th. That still doesn’t explain away recycling a two plus week old story and putting it on the front page of your print edition. It’s called a NEWSpaper, not a recycling bin for online features.   [Read more…]

Bitch Session

by

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt /  Excuse Me, I’m Writing

Warning for the faint of heart: Adult language ahead.

We were a small group, three women and three men, assembled at a coffeehouse last week to talk about a business venture. We were mostly strangers to each other, but for the meeting’s host. Still, the inevitable quests to establish credibility were civil and benign.

Except that, in the course of our discussion about media targeting females, one of the folks pointed out that it would be very important to prevent our programming from turning into bitch sessions.

Yep, “bitch sessions,” and, alas, others concurred with the advice.

It was a noticeably dicey choice of terms in our particular context, and a perfectly illustrative example of the ingrained prejudice women continue to experience in everything from our public institutions to our conversational English to our graffiti.
  [Read more…]

“Save KLSD:” The Corporate Consolidation of America’s Airwaves

by

San Diego’s last progressive talk radio station a victim of the loosening of media ownership laws

Talk radio has become big business in the last decade and a half, particularly conservative talk radio, which has seen an explosion in popularity and influence. Progressive talk radio? Not so much.

San Diegans have become accustomed to the conservative stylings of locally owned 760 KFMB and the not so locally owned KOGO 600. When you’re looking for news in this city, there are no other choices. You’re stuck with the nonsensical, anti-government, sensationalist, and sometimes maniacal ramblings of Rush Limbaugh and Roger Hedgecock. But that wasn’t always the case. For a brief while, San Diego did have a progressive talk radio station to call its own: 1360 KLSD (for “Liberal San Diego,” as we are informed by radio and television news personality Bree Walker).

KLSD at one point was the home of San Diego personalities like Stacy Taylor and Jon Elliott. It was also San Diego’s home to Air America Radio, the national syndication outfit that brought voices such as Ed Schultz, Rachel Maddow, Randi Rhodes, and Al Franken, now a United States Senator from Minnesota, to the airwaves.   [Read more…]

California to Mortgage Lenders: The Party’s Over!

by

California became the first state in the country yesterday to enact tough consumer protection legislation holding home mortgage lenders to a higher standard that will help financially troubled borrowers stay in their homes. The legislation, SB 900 and AB 278, will make California the first state to prohibit lenders from “dual tracking,” the practice of negotiating with clients to modify a mortgage while concurrently pursuing foreclosure, outlaw “robosigning”, allow state agencies and private citizens to sue financial companies if lenders willfully or recklessly violate the law, and simplify dealings between homeowners and banks by requiring a single customer representative for consumers to work with. The bill requires all lenders to abide by a number of provisions of the national mortgage settlement negotiated by state attorneys general earlier this year to rein in foreclosure abuses.

The Assembly approved the legislation on a 53-25 vote, and the Senate voted 25-13.   [Read more…]

Blythe Masters: Inventor of the Financial Weapon of Mass Destruction

by

As a young twenty something ingenue at JP Morgan Chase, Blythe Masters was the inventor of the Credit Default Swap (CDS), the financial instrument responsible for almost destroying the global financial system in 2008. Warren Buffett called CDSs “financial weapons of mass destruction.” But exactly what are CDSs and how did they function to almost bring down the entire global banking system? CDSs came about from JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and other large banks’ desire to offload risk and thereby strengthen their balance sheets. They would then be in a position to do more deals due to the fact that they would not have to keep so much collateral on their books to back up their deals. If a loan or bet went south, someone else would be responsible for paying off on the insurance policy, not them. Thus they could increase their profits by doing more and more trades without having to worry about paying off on any of them if anything went awry. That would be some other institution’s responsibility. A CDS was an insurance policy. Furthermore, you wouldn’t even have to be directly involved as a party or counterparty. You could purchase a “naked” CDS. This is like betting on a horse that you don’t own and have no financial stake in or responsibility for.   [Read more…]

©2010-2017 SanDiegoFreePress.org

Code is Poetry