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Charger Stadium Deal Could Be Key in Block vs Atkins Senate Contest

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By Doug Porter

New polling from the Garin-Hart-Yang Research Group indicates increased voter awareness of Assemblywoman Toni Atkins willingness to ease environmental challenges to a proposed publicly subsidized NFL stadium in San Diego may be her Achilles heel.

The September 24-26 survey of a representative sample of 401 likely 39th Senate district primary voters was, according to a summary issued by Hart Research, fully representative of the district by geography, inclusive of variables such as race and partisanship, and has a margin of error of ±5.0 percentage points.

The summary indicated Atkins name recognition and favorability rating are higher among voters on first blush. When voters were presented with positive, similarly long descriptions of both candidates, incumbent Senator Marty Block gained ground. A shorter comparative description mentioning Atkins’s willingness to ease CEQA challenges to the proposed NFL stadium, voter preferences shifted to give Block a 46-to-35 advantage over Atkins.   [Read more…]

California Here We Go: $15 Minimum Wage Headed for Statewide Ballot

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By Doug Porter

California advocates for a statewide $15 per hour minimum wage are marshaling their forces in support of a November 2016 initiative. The mayors of San Francisco and Oakland, cities which have already passed increases, appeared at a press conference on Tuesday to announce they will be leading the effort. The measure was submitted to the state by the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West.

The Fair Wage Act of 2016 will raise the minimum wage for all California workers by $1 annually, effective January 2017. Once the minimum wage reaches $15, it will automatically go up each year to match the cost of living. The state’s minimum wage is currently $9 an hour and is set to rise to $10 on Jan. 1, 2016. Cities will continue to have the option of setting higher local minimum wages.

San Diego events related to the Fight for $15 movement are already planned as part of the build-up to next year’s election. A regional wage hearing set for October 17th will hear testimony from workers, economists, academics, students, and labor leaders as a prelude to garnering commitments from local political leaders. A Day of Action in November will see protests on college campuses, at fast food restaurants, and in downtown San Diego.   [Read more…]

SANDAG, Water Agencies Faith Based Planning

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By Doug Porter

Two incredulous tales about the agencies entrusted to look out for the public good opting for short-sighted policies grabbed my attention this morning. Apparently climate change is a mere bureaucratic hurdle and the drought is soon to be forgotten. I guess we just gotta have faith, baby.

Our regional transportation planners are set to approve a proposal no better than the one already rejected by the courts for failing to meet state-mandated greenhouse gas reduction goals, according to the group that took them to court in the first place.

Ten local water agencies are, according to a story in Voice of San Diego, questioning state regulators about the need to continue restrictions on water use. They’re banking on a return to normalcy with the advent of El Nino conditions this winter, and are apparently ignorant of long term trends due to climate change.   [Read more…]

Effective Altruism: Is It Up To Rich People To Save the World?

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By John Lawrence

Peter Singer has written a book The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically (Yale University Press, 2015). Singer has been called “the world’s greatest living philosopher” and is currently a Professor at Princeton so we must take his work seriously. Yet I’m bothered by the implications of his work as condensed in an essay: How You Can Do the Most Good: It’s Not as Simple as You Think.

He tells about one of his students who, though caring to extreme about the plight of poor people in the world, nevertheless, chose to go to work on Wall Street when he graduated. His reasoning was that he could help the most poverty stricken by dedicating a large amount of his considerable salary to helping them rather than going to work as a volunteer working directly with them in Africa, for instance.

A huge amount of money contributed to the right charities would alleviate the conditions of more people than would be helped by a person of meager resources who devoted his working efforts to their cause.   [Read more…]

A Defining Issue for the 2016 Elections Will Be the Trans Pacific Pact (TPP)

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By Doug Porter

The United States and 11 other Pacific Rim nations have agreed to the largest regional trade accord in history, one promising to set international commerce standards affecting 40% percent of the world’s economy.

The deal culminates years of negotiations setting up mechanics for a global economy as the basis for future prosperity. These negotiations never involved questioning the premise of neo-liberal policies as the foundation for economic development in the years ahead. In a nutshell, this means “marketplace” will be the final arbiter in the global economy.

The rules of the economic game, as laid out in previous trade-pacts, are seen by the left as driving forces in the widening of economic inequality. This, along with parochial and nationalist concerns on the right, sets up the Trans Pacific Pact (TPP) as a defining political battle as the US heads into an election year.   [Read more…]

As Secret Trade Talks Reveal Cracks, Demonstrators Aim Death Blows at TPP

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Pacific trade deal opponents hope that if Atlanta round fails, pro-corporate TPP could be knocked off track indefinitely

By Deidre Fulton / CommonDreams

As trade ministers from around the world continued meeting in Atlanta on Thursday for final-stretch negotiations on the corporate-friendly Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), civil society groups demonstrated on the streets in a final salvo against a deal they describe as “a wholesale auction of our rights, our freedoms, and our democracy to multinational corporations who put profits over people.”

“They’re getting close, but we can stop them,” reads the Citizens Trade Campaign’s call-to-action. “If we do, and the Atlanta round fails, many believe the TPP could be knocked off track indefinitely.”   [Read more…]

Are Charter School Directors Bending Pension Rules?

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By Rick Mercurio / Alianza North County

Teachers and administrators in California’s public schools earn pensions based on several factors. For some, like Dennis Snyder, the founder of three charter schools in Escondido CA, it adds up to a healthy lifetime benefit, even though his final employer was not a public school district, and even though he found an apparent loophole in the regulations.

Snyder’s situation

Dennis Snyder worked as a teacher and football coach at Escondido High School starting in about 1965. In 1986 the principal fired Snyder as coach, citing the reason that he was not cooperative with the parent booster organization. Snyder appealed the firing to both the superintendent and the school board, and he lost both appeals.

Although he was let go as head football coach, he retained his teaching position. However, in the early ‘90s Snyder switched jobs, becoming executive director of the Escondido Charter High School, which he founded. Heritage K-8 Charter School and Heritage Digital Academy were later founded by Snyder as well.

Snyder’s salary as executive director eventually rose to almost $111,000.   [Read more…]

University Contract Workers Wages –Or Lack Thereof– in the Crosshairs

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By Doug Porter

Today (Oct 1), some contract employees working on University of California facilities will be seeing a pay hike to $13 an hour. The university system is California’s third largest employer and the largest employer in San Diego.

Earlier this year UC President Janet Napolitano announced a plan to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour over a three-year roll-out for all workers, including contract ones, and today’s bump is just the first stage.  

Or maybe they won’t be seeing that raise. The Los Angeles Times reports the Department of Labor has launched an investigation into long-time contractor Performance First Building Services failure to pay overtime to workers cleaning up after sporting events at UC Berkeley.   [Read more…]

Return to Delano: the 50th Anniversary of the Delano Grape Strike

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By Maria E. Garcia

A few weeks ago, when the United Farm Workers (UFW) posted that there would be a celebration commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Delano Grape Strike, I posted a simple sentence on Facebook: ” San Diego is anybody going?” Within a few minutes my friend Gloria Serrano-Medina responded with a simple “vamos” and with that one word a decision to be part of that celebration was made.

This would not be my first trip to the Forty Acres, the parcel of land in Delano, California that in 1966 became the headquarters for the United Farm Workers of America, the first permanent agricultural labor union in the United States.   [Read more…]

Nuclear Shutdown News for September 2015 – the Costs of San Onofre

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Disaster Capitalism and the Shutdown of the San Onofre Nuclear Plant

By Michael Steinberg /Black Rain Press

This story starts with a clandestine dinner in Warsaw, Poland. Present are Michael Peevey, president of the California Public Utility Commission, and Stephen Pickett, a high ranking official with Southern California Edison, a major electrical utility.

It is March 2013, the same month SCE announced the unexpected permanent shutdown of its San Onofre Nuclear Power Station.

No nukers were elated. But their joy later turns to disappointment and then outrage when the CPUC subsequently hands down a decision that leaves us on the hook for billions of dollars in costs supposedly related to the shutdown of San Onofre.

How did this happen, and so relatively quickly?   [Read more…]

Why We Must End Upward Pre-Distribution to the Rich

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By Robert Reich / RobertReich.Org

You often hear inequality has widened because globalization and technological change have made most people less competitive, while making the best educated more competitive.

There’s some truth to this. The tasks most people used to do can now be done more cheaply by lower-paid workers abroad or by computer-driven machines.

But this common explanation overlooks a critically important phenomenon: the increasing concentration of political power in a corporate and financial elite that has been able to influence the rules by which the economy runs.   [Read more…]

Your Weed Killer Might Kill You

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By Jill Richardson / OtherWords

When I began writing about agriculture nearly a decade ago, I learned quickly that people generally believed that Roundup, the best-selling weed killer made by Monsanto, was relatively harmless.

Roundup breaks down quickly, everyone said — and into non-toxic components, they added. If homeowners can buy it at gardening stores, and cities around the United States use it to kill weeds in parks where children play, it must be benign, right?

Wrong. Within the past year, the story has changed.   [Read more…]

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