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Why SeaWorld Can’t Build a Hotel at its Location on Mission Bay

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Coming off a trouncing over the last 2 years because of the Orca circuses, SeaWorld has announced that it now plans on building a hotel and resort at its location on the southern rim of Mission Bay.  Its hope is that declining attendances and revenues will be halted with a branded hotel right there on its site with its aquatic theme.

Yet, there is trouble afoot for these plans. SeaWorld needs to re-appraise the project, for the last time a major hotel was planned for that area of Mission Bay – it ended in disaster. In the early 1980s, Ramada wanted to build a resort – and the city had given the go-ahead.

But when it came time to begin construction, it was uncovered that a toxic landfill sat beneath all that sand. The old Mission Bay Landfill.   [Read more…]

Sen Bernie Sanders on Democratic Socialism: Let Us Finish What FDR and MLK Started

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The following are the prepared remarks for a speech given by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) at Georgetown University on Thursday, November 19th, 2015.

In his inaugural remarks in January 1937, in the midst of the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt looked out at the nation and this is what he saw.

He saw tens of millions of its citizens denied the basic necessities of life.

He saw millions of families trying to live on incomes so meager that the pall of family disaster hung over them day by day.

He saw millions denied education, recreation, and the opportunity to better their lot and the lot of their children.

He saw millions lacking the means to buy the products they needed and by their poverty and lack of disposable income denying employment to many other millions.

He saw one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.

And he acted.   [Read more…]

Why Aren’t Seniors Getting a Raise This Year?

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CEOs Got a Pay Increase Last Year But No COLA for Social Security Recipients

The Social Security Administration announced that senior citizens would get no increase in their monthly checks because there wasn’t any inflation last year as measured by the increase in paychecks for urban and clerical workers. Yes, those workers didn’t make any more money, but CEOs certainly did. Why don’t they gear their index to the increase in paychecks for CEOs? That was a whopping 3.9%. Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren (the only Senators who stand up for We the People) are introducing legislation that would give seniors the same increase that CEOs got last year. It has a snowball’s chance in Hell of passing, but they get A for effort.   [Read more…]

The Citizens’ Plan Offers San Diegans a Say in Tourism

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Oh, what a tangled web we weave in San Diego. Tourism tax dollars go into private coffers. Hotel owners snap their fingers and elected officials bow down before them. Our local politicians say and the media convey our most pressing needs as a meeting hall and a place to play football. The mayor fills potholes for TV cameras to make citizens feel better about it all.

The spoilers in all this have been lawsuits. The biggest one of them all is likely coming  to trial shortly after the first of the year. San Diego’s hoteliers have spent millions of tourism tax dollars defending the indefensible. Their attempts to shoot the messenger, both in the courts and in the media seem doomed to fail.

It may sound a little complicated, but there is a way to straighten this mess out.  A proposed initiative that would change the current system rolls out today, endorsed by the League of Conservation Voters, and a host of others to be made public at an upcoming press conference.   [Read more…]

With ‘Off-Planet’ Mining Bill, US Congress Seeks to Privatize Outer Space

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Extraterrestrial ‘Finders Keepers’ law allows US citizens and companies to legally claim ‘abiotic’ natural resources including water and minerals

By Deidre Fulton / CommonDreams

In a bipartisan bid to encourage commercial exploitation of outer space, the U.S. Senate this week unanimously passed the Space Act of 2015, which grants U.S. citizens or corporations the right to legally claim non-living natural resources—including water and minerals—mined in the final frontier.

The legislation—described by IGN’s Jenna Pitcher as “a celestial ‘Finders Keepers’ law”—could be a direct affront to an international treaty that bars nations from owning property in space. The bill will now be sent back to the House of Representatives, which is expected to approve the changes, and then on to President Barack Obama for his anticipated signature.   [Read more…]

The Rise of the Little People

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A Carlsbad Fairy Tale

Once upon a time, in the land of pink-tiled roofs, the clueless King Hallmat of the Village-by-the-Sea was troubled as he sat on his throne. The Little People were at the castle gates, carrying torches and pitchforks, chanting, “Down with the king! Down with the king!” His subjects were angry because he brought to the village the slippery Sir Caresnot, the black knight of Tinsel Gridloc, the largest kingdom in the land, 1,000 furlongs to the north.

A stonemason by trade, the black knight was known for despoiling one-of-a-kind villages with identical temple squares honoring Plutus, the god of wealth. His grandest, The Grovel at Tinsel Gridloc, brought streams of carriage traffic from beyond what the eye could see.   [Read more…]

Fighting for Climate Justice Means Looking After Our Neighbors

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Indigenous communities that oppose extractive and fossil fuel corporations are being met with repression and plunder across the globe. The Lumad people need our support.

By Fr. Edwin Gariguez / CommonDreams

As I write this, more than 700 people from the Philippines’ Lumad indigenous communities in Mindanao reache the city of Manila to make their plight known.

The 1,500-kilometer Lumad caravan culminated October 26, as they arrived in Manila to protest the rise in violent attacks over indigenous communities in the last 4 months. They demand respect for their right to life, land, and justice from the government led by President Benigno Aquino III.

The Philippines’ Department of Energy (DOE) is encouraging investors to submit applications for the exploration and viability assessment of coal reserves in the island of Mindanao. Through violence, paramilitary groups want to make sure that communities consent to the operation of the mining corporations which will profit from the conversion of forests into plantations, and the encroachment of mineral and coal extraction across Lumad ancestral domains.   [Read more…]

‘A Better Option’: Colorado Readies Ballot Battle for Single-Payer Solution

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“It’s time we get the insurance industry out of the driver’s seat and put families in charge of their healthcare.”

By Deidre Fulton / CommonDreams

Will Colorado be the first state in the nation to successfully implement a single-payer healthcare system?

Voters in the Centennial State will decide next year, the secretary of state’s office announced Monday, after confirming that proponents of universal coverage had gathered enough signatures to put the plan—dubbed ‘ColoradoCare’—on the 2016 ballot.   [Read more…]

7 Paths to Development That Bring Neighborhoods Wealth, Not Gentrification

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The plan to build better, more connected, flourishing communities is here—and it won’t require putting a Starbucks on every block.

By Marjorie Kelly & Sarah McKinley / Yes!

In cities across the nation, a few enjoy rising affluence while many struggle to get by.

An August 2015 study by The Century Foundation reported that—after a dramatic decline in concentrated poverty between 1990 and 2000—poverty has since reconcentrated. Nationwide, the number of people living in high-poverty ghettos and slums has nearly doubled since 2000. This situation is created in part by the practices of traditional economic development, which prioritize corporate subsidy after corporate subsidy over the needs of the local economy. Current trends threaten to worsen, unless we can answer the design challenge before us.

Can we create an economic system—beginning at the local level—that builds the wealth and prosperity of everyone?   [Read more…]

Will the City Council Join the Anti-Starbucks Holiday Coffee Cup Crusade?

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The San Diego City Council unanimously approved a resolution on Tuesday opposing the mere thought of a transfer of Guantanamo Bay detainees to the Marine Corps Air Station Miramar.

This was an act of political cowardice based on fear-mongering, led by Councilman Chris Cate, seeking to bolster his conservative cred. Now he’s officially a “manly man,” capable of staring down imagined threats no matter where they are imagined.

The fact of San Diego not being under consideration as a detainee destination wasn’t as important as a four-year-old assessment survey that included a look at local facilities. Sites actually under consideration are in Colorado, Kansas, and South Carolina. In addition, Congress has passed a defense spending measure barring the transfer of prisoners to US soil.   [Read more…]

#MillionStudentMarch and the Soul of Higher Education

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By Andrew J. Mackay

The Million Student March emerges from a long-running crisis. A public good, an educated citizenry, is being misclassified as a private luxury in the name of profit. It emerges from growing mass resistance to what higher education has become- expensive, corporatized, exploitative.

115 marches are planned for this Thursday, November 12. They span the entire country, from the University of Hawai’i at Manoa to Montclair High School in New Jersey. Institutions private and public, small and large, famous and obscure.   [Read more…]

A Greedy Capitalist Gets His Comeuppance

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Price Gouger Martin Shkreli Becomes Known as ‘Most Hated Man in America’

Turing Pharmaceuticals chief Martin Shkreli will face new competition for Daraprim, the drug he recently hiked 5,000 percent in price, after competitor Imprimis Pharmaceuticals said it would market a similar drug for just $1 a tablet. Daraprim is used mainly to treat toxoplasmosis, a parasitic infection that’s common in AIDS and HIV patients, as well as cancer sufferers.

Greedy buttwipe Martin Shkreli, the hedge fund guy that bought the drug Dariprim and then raised the price from $13.50 to $750. a pill will actually lose his ass on this venture. At these prices the estimated  annual cost of treatment for toxoplasmosis, for the pyrimethamine component alone, would be $336,000 for patients who weigh less than 132 pounds, and $634,500 for those who weigh more than that. Daraprim is given for at least six weeks to knock out the infection, and then often for a year or even indefinitely to help the immune-compromised patient keep the parasite at bay.

The problem for Shkreli, that he didn’t take account of in his lust for speedy profits, is that Dariprim is actually a generic. It’s been around for 62 years. That means that anybody can manufacture it. That’s exactly what one San Diego drug company did. Moreover, Imprimis intends to come up with cheap versions of other drugs that some businesses sell for far above their manufacturing costs. The trick for Imprimis was to combine pyrimethamine with another generic drug, leucovorin, thus giving it the right to operate as a compounding pharmacy and to avoid a lengthy approval process by the US Food and Drug Administration.   [Read more…]

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