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Wells Fargo: An Indictment of the American Banking System

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Three weeks after the fact, the banking giant fixes its own error.

On June 28th a call came to Monica from the Supervisor of Security at the Wells Fargo headquarters in San Francisco. Her name was Sheila. She originally would not talk to me, even though Monica had given them permission to do so. I had to wait until Monica came home from school. Putting Sheila on speaker phone, Monica iterated that I had permission to speak for her, and the conversation began.

We were informed that the transaction for the $300 had been found and she wanted Monica to go to the bank the next day and see if the security tape was, in fact, that of Monica. I asked Sheila if the person making the transaction was a woman. She answered “yes.” I asked if she was of Asian descent. She again answered “yes.” I asked if she was tall. The answer was “yes.” I asked if she were very slim. The answer was “yes.” I asked if she had long hair. Again the answer was “yes.” I then asked a very telling question. I said, “was it the same woman that made the $400 withdrawal?” I was incredulous when the answer was given to me….   [Read more…]

The Supreme Court Upheld Corporate Health Care Reform – Universal Health Care Still Elusive

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Not allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good, progressives should be happy that the Supreme Court dealt the Neanderthal right a huge blow by upholding the constitutionality of health care reform. Now 30 million more Americans will have access to health care, parents will be allowed to keep their adult children on their policies longer, and those with pre-existing conditions can no longer be excluded from coverage among other good results. This is a real, tangible win for scores of Americans, but not all of us.

On the political front, years of insane ranting about death panels, the end of American liberty, and creeping socialism got slam dunked by a conservative judge who joined the liberals in affirming the lion’s share of the provisions of the Affordable Care Act. This will not stop the bullshit machine at Fox News and elsewhere from cranking out more lies, but it will most likely help more than hurt Obama’s campaign for a second term. With no alternative to offer, all the right has, as Paul Krugman wrote last week, is prevarication and cruelty. Not an attractive combination even when being presented by the ever-so-suave Mitt Romney.
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The Starting Line – Reps Filner, Davis Call for Transparency in (TPP) Trade Negotiations; Big Tobacco in San Diego for the ‘Free Trade’ Confab

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July 2, 2012—Two Members of San Diego’s Congressional delegation are among 130 Representatives who have signed a letter calling for an end to the secrecy surrounding negotiations for the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) Free Trade Agreement. Delegates from nine pacific rim nations are meeting in San Diego this week for the 13th round of negotiations on the pact. The letter cites “reports [that] indicate the agreement is likely to repeat, rather than improve upon, the existing trade template—including the weakening of Buy America provisions, providing extraordinary investor-state privileges, and restricting access to lifesaving medicines in developing nations, to name a few.” The trade pact meetings at San Diego’s Bayfront Hilton, which begin today, are expected to be the target of protests throughout the week,

Big Tobacco to join the negotiations… According to a report in the San Diego Reader, lobbyists from Phillip Morris and other big tobacco firms will be in attendance at the (TPP) negotiations, hoping to encourage trade rules to circumvent or overturn public health measures designed to reduce smoking. Activists from the Center for Policy Analysis on Trade and Health released a statement saying: “Big Tobacco is coming to San Diego, one of the most anti-smoking cities in the U.S., to push their ‘Merchants of Death’ agenda through the Trans Pacific Partnership.”   [Read more…]

Monday, July 2nd,12pm– Fair Trade Not Free Trade Rally!

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Labor and the STOP TPP Coalition Sponsor a Kick-Off Press Conference / Protest Rally / Street Theater

Today begins a week of protests and teach-ins aimed at raising public awareness about the negotiations taking place at San Diego’s Hilton Bayfront Convention Center concerning a the 13th round of negotiations on a proposed trade pact called The Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP).  The nations involved are the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Brunei, Chile and Peru. Japan, Mexico and Canada have indicated a desire to join. The economic power of this group is more than 40% larger than the 27-nation European Union. While the claimed purpose of TPP is to promote development and create jobs, protesters say this meeting is one of the final conclaves to secretly negotiate the economic structural adjustments necessary to appease the world’s largest multinational banks and multi-unit corporations.

Today’s events include a kickoff protest/press conference at noon in the park across from the Bayfront Hilton and the first of six days of a Better World Conference featuring speakers on Worker’s Rights, Outsourcing, Walmart, and Gentrification at the Logan Heights Branch Library starting at 6:30.   [Read more…]

It’s a Safe Health-Food Wonder, Agricultural Dream and Economic Jackpot: It’s Time to End our Government’s Insane Hemp Prohibition

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The Declaration of Independence was written on hemp, our ships had hemp sails, and pioneers’ covered wagons were covered in — what else? — hemp.

AlterNet / By Jill Richardson

David Bronner was recently arrested for attempting to eat a healthy breakfast. Does that sound stupid? Even once you know the details, it should sound stupid:  Bronner’s food of choice was bread spread with hemp seed oil he pressed himself from industrial hemp plants, which he did in front of the White House under a banner reading: “Dear Mr. President Let U.S. Farmers Grow Hemp.”

Bronner’s company, Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps, spends over $100,000 to buy over 20 tons of hemp seed oil from Canada each year to use in its soaps. Bronner wants to give that money to American farmers instead.

If it’s legal to use in soaps – and even to eat – then why is it illegal to grow here? Because according to the government, hemp is a drug. Specifically, it’s considered identical to its close cousin, marijuana. But Bronner says it is no more a drug than a poppyseed bagel. The plants he gathered seed from to press his oil in front of the White House had been tested to confirm they contained less than 0.3 percent THC, which means it would be “impossible to get a high of any kind” even from smoking extremely large quantities of it. A more likely result from smoking that much industrial hemp would be a bad headache or perhaps a sore throat.   [Read more…]

Sustainability Report Now Available for San Diego International Airport

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Scoop San Diego

The San Diego County Regional Airport Authority, manager and operator of San Diego International Airport, has launched its first comprehensive sustainability report. The report complies with the rigorous international standards of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), and San Diego International Airport is the first airport in the country to issue such a report.   [Read more…]

Corporate Profits at All-Time High; Wages at All-Time Low: Can We Call it Class War Yet?

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The middle class is being hollowed out; increasingly, there are the super-super-rich, and there are the rest of us.

AlterNet / By Sarah Jaffe

June 29, 2012 | This week, David Segal at the New York Times broke the news to America that not only was Apple — the computer and gadget manufacturer formerly seen as a symbol of good old American ingenuity — making its profits on the backs of abused factory workers in China, but also on poorly paid store employees here in the US.

Apple store workers, he wrote, make up a large majority of Apple’s US workforce—30,000 out of 43,000 employees in this country—and they make about $25,000 a year, or about $12 an hour.

Lawrence Mishel at the Economic Policy Institute notes that that’s just a dollar above the federal poverty level. This for a company that paid nine of its top executives a total of $441 million in 2011.

“The discrepancy between Apple’s profits/executive pay and its compensation to its workers is a particularly glaring example of what is occurring in the wider economy,” Mishel writes.   [Read more…]

Power Plant Hearing Draws Strong Opposition from Community and Environmental Groups

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Community and environmental protection groups including the Sierra Club and Save Mission Trails lauded the results of an over-five-hour San Diego Planning Commission hearing held Thursday, June 28. Commissioners were being asked to begin a process to convert land designated as open space near theMissionTrailsRegionalParkto an industrial site for a fossil fuel burning electric power plant.

The power plant applicant Cogentrix, LLC, a subsidiary of the banking giant Goldman Sachs, has already initiated a process with the California Energy Commission to license a 100 MW plant that would require eleven 100 foot tall smokestacks on lands that have been designated as open space for decades in what is known as the East Elliot Community Plan area north of the park.

Over 150 opponents of the proposed power plant including energy engineer Bill Powers, Santee Councilmember John Minto, health professionals and parents provided testimony as to why the power plant is not necessary to meet San Diego’s energy needs, how it increases greenhouse gas emissions and is a highly inappropriate use for the proposed site.   [Read more…]

July 2 – 7: Week of Protest of Trans-Pacific Partnership Talks Being Held in San Diego

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No to NAFTA on Steroids

Coalition to STOP TPP Announces Week of Protest

and an International Community-Based Conference

From June 30 to July 8, the secret, super-treaty negotiations known as the 13th Round of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Negotiations are being held here in San Diego at the Hilton Bayfront Hotel. The Coalition to STOP TPP hereby announces a week with rallies, a march, various other protests, and a week-long international community-based People’s Conference: A Better World Is Possible!

The 11 nations involved in the talks are the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Brunei, Chile, Peru, Mexico, and Canada. Japan has indicated a desire to join. The economic power of this group is more than 40% larger than the 27-nation European Union. The claimed purpose of TPP is to promote development and create jobs. But their reality is different. Though the contents of these negotiations are secret, what is not a secret is that the impacts of the TPP on these Pacific Rim nations, on peasants, on farmers, on workers, on their natural resources, on the environment, will be devastating. Some people describe the TPP as “NAFTA on Steroids.”
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How Mitt Romney Followed Me Around the Internet

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by Lois Beckett / ProPublica, June 27, 2012, 4:27 p.m.

Last month, I was searching for a peppy Glee song on the music site Grooveshark, and up popped two ads for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign. One invited me to “Learn More.” The other suggested that I “Donate.”

Had Romney’s campaign decided that swing voters might frequent an Internet music site with copyright issues? Are Glee fans now a key demographic?

But it turns out the campaign wasn’t advertising to Grooveshark listeners or a capella fans.

They were targeting me.   [Read more…]

The Starting Line: Pension Proposition Proponents Required to Pay Legal Fees; Filner Scores on MSNBC

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June 27, 2012- You can’t have it both ways… The San Diego City Council yesterday refused to fund legal representation for city employees who may be called to testify in lawsuits challenging the recently approved Proposition B, a measure that seeks to fundamentally restructure the city’s pension system. This decision means that Mayor Jerry Sanders, Councilman Kevin Falconer and Councilman Carl DeMaio, who campaigned for and contended that their support of the Pension Proposition was as private citizens, will have to pay their own legal fees. A handful of other city employees were also affected by the decision.

San Diego is facing lawsuits from its unions and the state Public Employment Relations Board, who claim officials violated the Meyers-Milias-Brown Act by failing to negotiate terms of the initiative with labor prior to placing it on the ballot. Since the mayor and these councilmen were among the primary boosters of the measure, the unions contend that their actions amounted to city sponsorship.

Filner’s on fire… Congressman (and mayoral candidate) Bob Filner appeared on Rachel Maddow’s NSNBC program last night to talk about veterans’ issues.  He didn’t mince words in his criticisms of the Veterans Administration, saying that their health care system is ‘so bad,’ vets are dying or even committing suicide while waiting for adjudication of claims.   [Read more…]

A Hard Look At San Diego: The Kafkaesque Process of Trying to Save a Home from Foreclosure

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by J. G. Robinson
In my last column I began the story of someone I call Jose, and what led to his financial crisis. In this column I look at the Kafkaesque process he went through in his failed attempt to save his home from foreclosure. The experiences I describe here are neither rare nor random. The difficulties Jose and his family encountered in trying to get their bank to re-evaluate their loan were all too representative of the random sample of people I interviewed. The tragic fact is that the delays that Jose’s family encountered were not the result of inefficiency, but rather a deliberate policy to protect banks. Banks do NOT want foreclosures rapidly resolved because that would bring these properties down to market value, reflecting badly on their bottom lines. Thus families like Jose’s are the deliberate casualties of a war of attrition that banks have waged on the public to protect their economic interests.

Jose’s original mortgage was through the Bank of America. The home was a modest condominium in a somewhat marginal area of El Cajon. Marginal, but not horrible—the schools in the area were decent, and that was the main attraction for Jose and his family.   [Read more…]

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