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US Represents Cautionary Tale about Media System Dominated by Market Values

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Until corporate libertarianism is dismantled, it is difficult to achieve an effective “media democracy” which protects collective rights held by publics, audiences, and communities over the individual rights of corporations.

By Victor Pickard / CommonDreams

Taken as a whole, the American media system is atypical. It is a largely commercial system that is offset by weak public alternatives, it’s lightly regulated by public interest protections, and in many sectors it’s dominated by a few corporations. Other countries’ media systems may face one or two of these structural problems, but rarely all three. This “American exceptionalism” was not inevitable or natural; it was vigorously contested.

The system that Americans have inherited resulted from specific policy battles, with commercial interests and values triumphing over others. Much of this system crystallised during a period of fierce red-baiting in the United States, when even light regulations were attacked for being “socialistic.” Keeping this power arrangement intact today is a “corporate libertarian” ideology, in which the rights of media corporations are privileged over those of everyone else.   [Read more…]

San Bernadino Shooting Kicks Off Holiday Gun Sales

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A man and his wife shot up a San Bernadino county employee holiday party yesterday, killing 14 people and wounding 21 more. Police caught up with them a few hours later driving a black SUV. A gunfight ensued. Both the shooters were killed. A police officer suffered a non-life-threatening injury. CNN is reporting this morning the perpetrators may have been ‘radicalized.’

Another day, another mass shooting, defined as four or more victims wounded or killed by gunfire. Earlier in the day, four people were shot in Georgia, one of whom died. In the past week, there have been six mass shootings. There have been twenty days so far in 2015 with four or more mass shootings. The U.S. has seen 355 mass shootings so far in 2015. Like I said, just another day.

Meanwhile, gun sales are going up, according to NBC News. There were more gun background checks on this year’s Black Friday than any other single day on record: 185,345, according to the FBI. That’s up five percent from Black Friday last year, when there were 175,754 background checks. If past shooting events are any indicator, December will be a very profitable month for the arms industry.   [Read more…]

Dead, White, and Blue: The Great Die-Off of America’s Blue Collar Whites

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By Barbara Ehrenreich /TomDispatch

The white working class, which usually inspires liberal concern only for its paradoxical, Republican-leaning voting habits, has recently become newsworthy for something else: according to economist Anne Case and Angus Deaton, the winner of the latest Nobel Prize in economics, its members in the 45- to 54-year-old age group are dying at an immoderate rate.

While the lifespan of affluent whites continues to lengthen, the lifespan of poor whites has been shrinking. As a result, in just the last four years, the gap between poor white men and wealthier ones has widened by up to four years. The New York Times summed up the Deaton and Case study with this headline: “Income Gap, Meet the Longevity Gap.”

This was not supposed to happen. For almost a century, the comforting American narrative was that better nutrition and medical care would guarantee longer lives for all.   [Read more…]

The Clear Broth of Actual Reform in San Diego

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Union-Tribune columnist Logan Jenkins has produced an essay warning about the Citizens’ Plan for the Responsible Management of Major Tourism and Entertainment Resources, a proposed June 2016 ballot measure currently in the signature-gathering stage. It’s complicated, he says, begging for a re-write by Ernest Hemmingway

Initiatives, we’re taught as an axiom, are supposed to be clear broth. This one is a bouillabaisse stocked with personal hobbyhorses.

The funny thing is, I don’t remember being taught that axiom. It certainly wasn’t in play when the city’s establishment lined up to back Carl DeMaio’s “solution” to San Diego’s pension problems.   [Read more…]

Energy Democracy: Inside Californians’ Game-Changing Plan for Community-Owned Power

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Large utility companies control about 75 percent of the electricity market in California. A hybrid between a public agency and private utility, the new Community Choice program is a model for communities that want greener, cheaper energy.

By Al Weinrub / Yes!

On September 21, Pa Dwe, a 16-year-old student at Oakland’s Street Academy, spoke out against the export of coal through the Port of Oakland to City Council members: “I’m opposed to this coal export because it will make my community in West Oakland sick. I support jobs, but not the kind of jobs that make us sick. There are clean job alternatives, like Community Choice energy, and this will be good for the health of my community. This is my generation; I want to have a healthy life.”
  [Read more…]

Climate Artists Commit ‘Brandalism’ to Expose Corporate Hijacking of COP21

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‘The multinationals responsible for climate change can keep green-washing their destructive business models, but the communities directly impacted by them are silenced.’

By Sarah Lazare / CommonDreams

As the French state cracks down on public protests, a group of artists has devised a creative—and clandestine—way to illustrate public outrage at what they call the “corporate takeover” of the ongoing COP21 United Nations climate talks in Paris.

Naming their campaign “Brandalism,” over 80 artists from 19 countries have plastered the French capital with 600 unauthorized pieces of art taking the form of spoof advertisements to critique the role of multinationals, from AirFrance to Dow Chemical, in the summit.   [Read more…]

San Diego’s Climate Action Plan: Too Little, Too Late? Too Much, Too Soon?

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Plans to address the issues surrounding climate change are getting top billing in the news this week.

San Diego’s City Council is poised to approve a climate action plan full of ambitious goals and may be short on actual means to achieve those goals. Representatives from around the planet are meeting in Paris over the coming days, hoping to gain consensus on a strategy to steer the world’s economies away from fossil fuel dependence.

Today I’ll report and comment on the latest developments on San Diego’s Action Plan and the challenges it faces, even as almost the entire local political establishment pays it lip service.   [Read more…]

America Has Changed its Name to The Homeland

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Most of us good liberals and progressives think Hitler when we hear the words “fascism” and “fascist”.  But if we want to use those words we’d do better to think about Italy, which, after all, gave those words to history.

Mussolini comes to mind.  That muscular and oversized skull atop his shoulders, looking pretty much like a pit bull’s, and the strutting swagger that suggested he could rip out your liver and eat it… well, you know.  It’s not good.

So how’d he get the land of amore y vino to march off to kill Ethiopians as they searched for The New Rome?  He got lots of help from an aesthetic movement in Italy called Futurism.     [Read more…]

A Higher Calling for Downtown San Diego’s East Village

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By Bill Adams / UrbDeZine

I read an op-ed in the San Diego Union-Tribune that made me want to stand on top of a downtown high-rise and scream . . . YES!!!

The opinion piece was entitled “A higher and better use for downtown,” and was written by Wayne Raffesberger and co-authored by Rob Quigley, Jack Carpenter, Pete Garcia and David Malmuth – individuals who have exceptional knowledge of downtown San Diego’s East Village neighborhood and a promising vision for its future.*

I was compelled to write a lengthy comment to the piece and perhaps I should have just stopped there (in any case, I have regurgitated some of it in writing this piece). But this topic has been an issue that has been sticking in my craw for several years.   [Read more…]

Excerpt From Sunshine/Noir II: From the Border to the Fields

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By Juanita Lopez

It is the year of 2014 and both of my grandparents are very old but alive, though suffering from dementia. I decided to pay them a visit to interview them. Believe it or not, they still live in the same one-bedroom apartment in San Ysidro where they established their U.S. residency in the late 1970s. From their yard, I am able to look at the thousands of tiny houses in Tijuana, where they once lived, dreaming of crossing over for a better opportunity. I look at my dark-skinned grandmother and admire her toothless smile. Her eyes light up every time she sees me. She normally asks me how my brother is doing, and I tell her he’s okay, working like always since he has a baby to take care of now. She smiles and two minutes later asks me the same question. I go over to her kitchen and wash some strawberries that were in her refrigerator. I offer her some after I cut them and sprinkle some sugar on top—my grandmother smiles again and starts telling me about her life, a not-so-sweet story about the times she labored as a farm worker picking strawberries and cutting flowers.   [Read more…]

Stop Shopping, Start Living

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By Jim Hightower / OtherWords

Imagine if retailers held a nationwide super-spectacular sales day — and no one came.

I don’t mean customers. Picture sales staff, cashiers, and even managers not showing up to open the doors for the usual frenzy of mass, crass, crazy consumerism.

Maybe it’s silly — some would say even un-American — to think that stores wouldn’t open to cash in on a hugely promoted retail bonanza.

Yet here it is: REI, the national purveyor of outdoor gear and sporting goods, says it will no longer participate in the shopping spectacle known as “Black Friday.” This ritual of non-stop door-buster sales now overwhelms Thanksgiving.   [Read more…]

Black Lives Matter on Black Friday

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Two elements of the ugly side of our society and economy are coming together this week.

Black Lives Matter groups and their supporters in cities around the country, including San Diego, are staging Friday protests and urging people not to shop. Events in Alabama, Washington state, Chicago and Minneapolis have served to bolster their case about the pervasiveness of racism.

Black Friday sales events stand as reminders of the false prosperity of the consumer economy. Retail workers and supporters will be ending a fifteen day fast as they picket outside WalMart heiress Alice Walton’s apartment in New York City and various locations around the country.   [Read more…]

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