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The Death Gap

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The richest Americans now live 10-15 years longer than the poorest.

By Sam Pizzigati / OtherWords

Rich people live longer than poor people. No big news there — we’ve known that health tracks wealth for quite some time now.

But here’s what we haven’t known: The life-expectancy gap between rich and poor in the United States is actually accelerating.

Since 2001, American men among the nation’s most affluent 5 percent have seen their lifespans increase by more than two years. American women in that bracket have registered an almost three-year extension to their life expectancy.

Meanwhile, the poorest five percent of Americans have seen essentially no gains at all.   [Read more…]

County Board of Supervisors Extends Moratorium on Medical Marijuana Projects

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By Terrie Best / San Diego ASA

The County Board of Supervisors met Wednesday to vote on staff recommendations to extend a moratorium against new medical marijuana activity in San Diego County. The 45 day moratorium was put in place on March 16 and was largely a knee-jerk reaction to a group of community members from Julian and Ramona. At the March meeting the Board instructed staff to come back with options including a ban on medical cannabis; enhanced enforcement and more zoning restrictions among other things. Instead, staff returned with a request for more time which was ultimately granted.   [Read more…]

May Day: The Forgotten Celebration of America’s Labor Struggles

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By Brett Warnke

On the books, May 1st is officially Law Day, whose origins (like the holy portions of the Pledge of Allegiance and “In God We Trust”) came out of the Eisenhower Administration’s rhetorical battle against the Soviet Union. Of course, the silent smear was that radical workers lacked respect for a nation of laws. But for those with a sense of history May 1 is and shall be a day of observance for workers mourned after the bloody Haymarket Affair in 1886 which later became memorialized when strikers pushed for an eight-hour work day.

Is it so hard to imagine an era of endless work? Of plutocrats and bought government? Of a used, dispirited and duped population?   [Read more…]

A Re-Visit to Liberty Public Market

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“Could I Have Been that Wrong?”

Holy Moly! I’ve been lambasted for reviews I have done before, but none like my first review of the Liberty Public Market in Point Loma. I call it like I see it, but with all the positive comments – forgetting the negative ones for a moment – that the Liberty Public Market has received on my comments, I decided it was time to go back and revisit it. If I made a mistake, I am certainly willing to admit it. (And I do that – look at an old article entitled “If you have to eat crow how do you cook it?”) I gathered a few women from my widow support group and we headed over to the market.   [Read more…]

The Great Eastern Expansion Into Chula Vista

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Chula Vista Is Set To Have An Influx Of 60,000 Residents

By Barbara Zaragoza

For decades community groups such as Crossroads II have noted that the City of Chula Vista is nothing more than a bedroom community. They explain that developers came into the region, created a mass of housing, but didn’t provide residents with essential amenities, such as jobs, adequate big box stores such as Walmart, smaller retail shops, restaurants, parks or hotels. In Crossroads II’s 2016 Annual Report, they wrote, “Because of the lack of commercial development, Chula Vista is second from the bottom in terms of sales-tax revenues per resident in San Diego County.”

The Chula Vista City Council has attempted to change this bedroom community into a bustling city where local and international tourists come to shop, eat and play. They’ve done it by attracting developers to the open stretch of land located in eastern Chula Vista known as Otay Ranch. Now, within the next twenty years or so, Chula Vista anticipates more than 60,000 new residents will flood into the area, including university students, Olympic quality athletes and Google-type executives. Their goal is to transition eastern Chula Vista into becoming a dense urban environment that is state-of-the-art in technology and also environmentally sustainable.

Excited? Convinced?   [Read more…]

Rancho Santa Fe School District Threatens to Expel Children of Teachers as Negotiations Drag On

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By A Concerned Teacher

What began a decade ago as an effective collaboration between a school board and its teachers has become a divisive tool enabling the Rancho Santa Fe superintendent to use the threat of expelling the children of teachers in their district if they will not agree to settle their contract.

By using a sunset clause in current contract language, Rancho Santa Fe administration simply stalls negotiations to run out the clock and stipulates that if there is no settlement, Board policy 4111 will be void and teachers will be forced to remove their children from the Rancho Santa Fe School District.   [Read more…]

Mayor Faulconer’s Republican Unicorns: Jobs! And the Minimum Wage Veto

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The Committee for Slave Wages and Free Puppies for Everybody Lives On

Have you seen the Falconer for Mayor ads in social media yet? San Diego’s incumbent mayor is claiming credit –sort of– for a 34% drop in local unemployment since he was elected. If you buy into this claim, you’ll love the expected follow-up ads claiming credit for the sun rising, the sun setting, and better-than-usual surf in Ocean Beach.

Think of this employment claim as like a candidate standing next to a cardboard cutout of somebody famous, hoping for the perceived endorsement. In Faulconer’s case, this cutout could be anybody but a member of his own political party since it would be hard to find a living Republican with a positive economic record. And hasn’t he heard the proclamations from his fellow Republicans about how jobs are fleeing the People’s Republic of California?

Independent mayoral candidate Lori Saldaña called Falconer out this claim this week, pointing to the reality that San Diegans are working more for less money, thanks to his veto of a minimum wage increase in 2014.   [Read more…]

Listen Liberal: What’s the Matter with the Democratic Party?

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Thomas Frank has written the most important political book of 2016, and one that should disturb and hopefully influence progressives for years to come. If you have ever found yourself not just horrified by the lunatic right but also frustrated by the hapless and compromised “left,” Frank is your man. If you want to feel good about “your side” but are still troubled by the fact that economic inequality remains at historically high levels despite the last eight years of Democratic Presidential rule, Frank has some uncomfortable truths for you to ponder.

And it’s not just about those damn Republicans.

In his new book, Listen Liberal: What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?, Frank does his usual stellar job of research and analysis where he painstakingly makes his case by using the words of his subjects to illustrate his argument.   [Read more…]

Working Without a Net

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By Tom Sullivan / Digby’s Hullabaloo

David Dayen shares scenes from his life in the “gig” economy, or what he calls “the 1099 Economy.” They are tales a lot of freelance writers can relate to, I imagine, as well as anyone working for themselves and receiving no benefits. Perhaps the most startling bit of data from research by Princeton’s Alan Krueger and Harvard’s Lawrence Katz is that the growth in those sorts of jobs accounts for pretty much the entire growth in the job market over the last decade. It is one key reason, Dayen argues, why voters are angry:   [Read more…]

City Council Races Beg the Question: When is a Democrat Not a Democrat?

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Are there candidates running for City Council in Districts 3 and 9 supported by interests with a history of backing Republicans really Democrats? Do campaign donations define a public official?

Is Bernie Sanders a Democrat? Is Hillary Clinton just a Republican in drag? How about Congressman Scott Peters after his votes on refugees and trade? Are people who used to be Republicans ever to be trusted? Where do you draw the line?

Today I’ll explore these questions as they impact a couple of local contests…   [Read more…]

The San Diego Chargers Convadium – Part 1: 110 Pages of Gobbledygook

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On Saturday, April 2, the Chargers published a whole section of the San Diego Union-Tribune devoted to their proposal to build a football stadium for the Chargers combined with a non-contiguous expansion of the Convention Center. The title of this section was “Notice of Intent to Circulate Petition.” Right off the bat I found several things wrong with this proposal. But before I go into that I want to discuss the MAJOR thing wrong with this proposal.

You see the Chargers think combining a Convention Center Expansion with a new stadium will make it more palatable to San Diego voters especially if the tax that will be raised to pay for it will be a tax on visitors not on locals. This will make it possible to wring money out of hotel tax increases to pay for a third of their stadium. But not only that, the $1.15 billion in bonds that the City (actually a subsidiary of the City – a Stadium Authority) will issue will pay the entire cost of the convention center annex. I don’t think a better combination of a football stadium with $600 million of affordable housing ever even crossed their minds.   [Read more…]

Here’s to the Folks Who Demanded the Impossible and Brought Us the $15 an Hour Minimum Wage: The Labor Movement

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Time to give credit where credit is due. It was not the noblesse oblige of individual politicians or the Democratic Party that brought us the $15 dollar an hour minimum wage, it was the labor movement. Surely, the governors of New York and California and their fellow Democrats in those statehouses deserve credit for listening to the cry for economic justice and having the good sense to do the right thing, but the historic victory of the Fight for $15 that we have just celebrated would never have come to pass without the bold vision and prolonged struggle of working people standing together and demanding what many called impossible.

As Steven Greenhouse rightly noted in the New York Times, back in 2012 when the Fight for $15 began “many scoffed at their demand for $15 an hour as pie in the sky.” Nonetheless the labor movement led by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) pushed long and hard, starting at the local level.   [Read more…]

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