June 18,2012—SDG&E’s trojan horse…Michael Hiltzer in the LA Times reported Sunday on a scheme proposed by SDG&E that would give its 1.2 million customers the option of prepaying their electric bills. While the plan may sound appealing to those mostly working class consumers who favor prepaid cell phones and the like, there are significant disadvantages for consumers built into the proposal. Sign up for the prepaid program and you’re signing away virtually all the consumer protections governing disconnections. Run out of money on the prepaid deal and your power will be cut off, no notice required. Regular customers get a two week notice prior to disconnection and the option of extending any back bills over a three month period when they run into financial difficulty. [Read more…]
Trans-Pacific Partnership – Leaked Trade Document Reveals Corporations Favored Over Public Interest
A leak today of one of the most controversial chapters of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) reveals that extreme provisions have been agreed to by U.S. officials, providing a stark warning about the dangers of “trade” negotiations occurring under conditions of extreme secrecy without press, public or policymaker oversight, Public Citizen said.
“The outrageous stuff in this leaked text may well be why U.S. trade officials have been so extremely secretive about these past two years of TPP negotiations,” said Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. “Via closed-door negotiations, U.S. officials are rewriting swaths of U.S. law that have nothing to do with trade and in a move that will infuriate left and right alike have agreed to submit the U.S. government to the jurisdiction of foreign tribunals that can order unlimited payments of our tax dollars to foreign corporations that don’t want to comply with the same laws our domestic firms do.” [Read more…]
How Wall Street Hustles America’s Cities and States Out of Billions
We all know that America’s cities and towns are in the throes of a deep financial crisis. And are told, over and over, what’s supposedly behind it: unreasonable demands by grasping state and municipal workers for pay and pensions. The diagnosis is a grotesque cartoon. Many of the biggest budget busters are on Wall Street, not Main Street.
In a country as big and locally diverse as the U.S., any number of wacky pay and pension schemes are likely to flourish, though some of the most outrageous turn out to cover not workers, but legislators. But overall state and local pay has not been growing faster than in the private sector for equivalent work for many years now.
What has driven cities and towns to the brink is not demands from their workforce but the collapse of national income and the ensuing fall in tax collections. Or, in other words, the Great Recession itself, for which Wall Street and the financial sector are principally to blame. But many powerful interests have jumped at the opportunity to use the crisis to eviscerate what’s left of the welfare state, roll back unionization to pre-New Deal levels, and keep cutting taxes on the wealthy. The litany of horror stories that now fills the media is ideal for their purposes. [Read more…]
The Starting Line-UT San Diego Gets the Evil NY Times Eye
June 11, 2012—New York Times media reporter/columnist David Carr has penned a largely critical review of “Papa Doug” Manchester’s media machinations since his purchase last year of the Union-Trib. The article starts out talking about the “growing worry” that the sickly state of dead tree journalism could create circumstances that would allow moneyed interests to take over newspapers and use their perceived integrity to “prosecute a political and commercial agenda.”
Carr goes on to assert that San Diego is Exhibit A for that fear since last year when Manchester purchased the paper, saying that nowadays the UT-SD “often seems like a brochure for his various interests.” He goes on to cite several examples where the Daily Fishwrap has transcended reportage and ridden roughshod over miscreants perceived to have gotten in the way of Papa Doug’s agenda. Chief executive John Lynch is quoted as saying “we make no apologies” for the paper’s activities and asserting that there is a “clear line of demarcation between our editorials and our news”. [Read more…]
Is Wells Fargo Stealing From its Customers?
Banking giant can’t explain money mysteriously missing from student’s account.
On Wednesday Monica called me in tears from Wells-Fargo. It appears that she made a $400 withdrawal from her account on May 30 to cover the cost of tuition for school on June 4th. She did not make any withdrawals after that time, and knew that she had $300+ in her account for books and other things. She was horrified when she went to withdraw $20 from her account and was told that she only had a balance of $7. I asked her if she had tried to make the withdrawal from the savings account, thinking that if there had been any overdrafts the original $100 moved to that account would be depleted. She answered that she had checked that account too but the $300 was missing. I told her to talk to the bank manager and call me from his office so I could help her out. She did. The bank manager told me that on the same day there was a $300 withdrawal after the $400. I asked what time it was done but he said he’d have to check. I asked who made the withdrawal, and he told me he would have to check it out. I asked how soon he would have an answer. He told me he didn’t know. I asked for a ballpark figure and he said 24 hours. He said he was sure it was a “computer glitch” and would be straightened out in no time. A computer glitch? What kind of glitch does a computer make where-in $300 goes missing from a customer’s account? [Read more…]
The Starting Line—San Diego Teachers to Talk Contract Concessions
Tuesdays’ election results continue to reverberate around the country. Here in San Diego city attorney Jan Goldsmith is asking the courts to help the City sidestep long term litigation over the legality of Proposition B by combining five lawsuits already filed over the initiative in advance of a court decision on the legality of the measure. At issue is the question of whether the city violated a state law that requires negotiations with labor unions in advance of requesting any initiative that would impact employee pay and benefits. The city has maintained that Proposition B was initiated by private citizens and is exempt from the provisions of the law.
Early morning reports on Twitter indicate that the San Diego Educational Association (teacher’s union) membership has voted to talk about contract concessions aimed at negating already announced layoffs for some 1534 teachers. The issue of concessions has divided the union, with more militant members being purged from the SDEA leadership in recent weeks. And yesterday 1000 students at Point Loma High School walked out to protest teacher layoffs. [Read more…]
The Starting Line—Are We Ready for an Alien Invasion?
June 7, 2012—In keeping with my perceived reality that most of us are in overload mode with regard to election coverage, The Starting Line will talk about defense, science and technology issues today. We’ll get back into the muck tomorrow, I promise.
Does the Pentagon have the right weapons to fight off an alien invasion? No, but they’re working on it, says Foreign Policy magazine, in a short but sweet review of some of DARPA’s (Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency ) more sci-fi kind of projects. These projects include lots of ideas that are not ready for prime time, but show promise for future use by the military.
Perhaps the closest to realization are weapons-grade lasers. The stumbling block with this project thus far is that they can work but are too big to be of use in an actual fight. If the aliens have super fast flying saucers, DARPA’s Falcon HTV-2 might be able to keep up with them. It is an unmanned, rocket-launched, maneuverable aircraft that glides through the Earth’s atmosphere at incredibly fast speeds, as fast as Mach 20 (approximately 13,000 miles per hour). It’s actual been tested, but not successfully. [Read more…]
The Starting Line: DeMaio on the Front Page, UT Talking Heads Debut Panned
June 4, 2012—For the second time in this election cycle “Papa Doug” Manchester’s Union-Tribune has splashed it’s editorial endorsement of a mayoral candidate on the front page. Monday morning readers of the local daily newspaper were treated to “Editorial: The Case for Carl DeMaio” even before they could turn the page today. Blogger George J. Janczyn (@GrokSurf) pretty much summed it up when he tweeted: “Once again the U-T headlines DeMaio for mayor–and this time on the REAL front page, not on a wrap-around. U-T’s the Fox News of newspapers.”
U-T San Diego launches on-line TV station to terrible reviews… Hoping to extend his reach beyond print with “original local news, talk and lifestyle programming on cable and the Web”, publisher Doug Manchester launched UT San Diego TV this week to terrible reader reviews. [Read more…]
The Starting Line: Mayoral Candidate Filner’s Missing Transcripts Found
I read the Daily Fishwrap(s) so you don’t have to… Filner’s Kenyan connection?… Absent a potential birth certificate scandal, reporter/columnist Matt Hall has decided to make the Mayoral candidates cough up their college transcripts in hopes that something, anything will make for a story. And at least one of the SDUT’s reliably right wing commenters is having […]
Controversy Surrounds Wrong Guy Named to San Diego Oversight Board
The Public Should Be Eying Mark Nelson – Not Michael Zucchet
A mild controversy swirled around Michael Zucchet from Point Loma the other day because he was one of two people appointed to the San Diego Oversight Board.
Those who still are not convinced of Zucchet’s innocence in San Diego’s “stripper-gate” scandal of 2003 to 2005, and those who are bothered because he is currently the general manager of the the City’s largest public-employee union, the San Diego Municipal Employees Association, opposed his nomination and selection by Mayor Sanders and the City Council.
Yet, the real controversy should have swirled around the other appointee, Mark Nelson, but more on that in a moment.
Zucchet and Nelson were both nominated by our “strong” mayor, Jerry Sanders to serve on the San Diego Oversight Board, which will oversee and supervise the deconstruction of San Diego’s fourteen redevelopment projects, as mandated by State law.
[Read more…]
How Carl DeMaio helped hide the San Diego hotelier’s tax vote
By Dirty DeMaio / April 9, 2012
There’s been considerable attention paid recently to the secrecy around the hotelier vote to impose a new tax on the public. Those looking for the origin of the secret hotelier vote that apparently can’t be shared with the public can look back to October 10th last year, when the city council voted to make it secret. Thanks to a motion by Carl DeMaio, the city’s municipal code was altered specifically for this purpose:
61.2710(e) Since the Landowner-voters are entitled to a secret ballot, and since ballots are required to contain the names of each Landowner and the number of votes each Landowner is entitled to cast, and since the number of votes assigned to each Hotel may be considered to contain proprietary commercial information, the City Clerk shall protect the confidentiality of the ballots. No persons, other than the staff and consultants of the City who require access for the purposes of counting and canvassing the ballots, may have access to the ballots at any time unless by order of a court of competent jurisdiction.
So of course the public doesn’t get to know. [Read more…]
Who gets the gold for avoiding the most taxes in 2011?
Which American Corporations Didn’t Pay Taxes
By Paul Buchheit / NationofChange / April 9, 2012
This is tax time, or in the case of many big businesses, just another time without taxes. These companies deserve to be recognized. With the help of SEC data and the results of several excellent research studies, PayUpNow.org has selected the ‘winners’ of the 2011 Tax Avoidance Awards.
Last Year’s Results
First a review of last year’s results. The top spot went to General Electric, which made pre-tax profits of $44 billion from 2008 to 2010 but received almost $5 billion in refunds. A GE spokesperson added, “We are committed to acting with integrity in relation to our tax obligations.”
A close second was Exxon, notable for having the nation’s highest pre-tax earnings three years in a row, a 2% federal income tax payment rate, and hubris comparable to that of GE: “Any claim we don’t pay taxes is absurd…ExxonMobil is a leading U.S. taxpayer.”
[Read more…]