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The Starting Line – Downtown Tourism Showdown: Today’s Council Hearing is the Start of the Dump Filner Campaign

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Nothing will be decided at today’s hearing before the San Diego City Council (2pm) about the Tourism Marketing District funding. And that’s somehow appropriate; given that the whole battle over Mayor Bob Filner’s refusal to sign off on authorization of a 39 year deal is really nothing more than a proxy battle for a much bigger conflict.

At the bottom of all this is the inability of the city’s ‘downtown crowd’ to live with last fall’s election of Filner, who’s proven true to his word thus far about not continuing to do business as usual in San Diego.

INSIDE: Today’s Battle at City Hall, Majority of Hoteliers Voted Against 2% Fee, Right Wing Heads Explode as Michelle Obama Appears on Oscars   [Read more…]

Why Mayor Filner is Right to Stand Up to the Real Bullies

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What Filner is doing here is important and historic: he is standing up to the entitled private interests who have run San Diego for its entire history.

As Doug Porter reported here at the San Diego Free Press last week, Mayor Bob Filner is now engaged in an intense struggle with City Attorney Jan Goldsmith, big hoteliers, and the UT-San Diego because he has refused to sign off on the sweetheart deal negotiated by his predecessor whose legacy is quickly evaporating as you read this.  Specifically, Filner wants legal protections for the city if the dubious deal goes to court, a shorter tourism marketing agreement, a cut of hotel fees for city services, and a living wage for hotel employees.

Other than their questionable notion that the 2% tourist surcharge is not a tax, the real agenda behind the attack on Filner is San Diego’s elites’ desire to maintain their privilege and the advantages that have come to them from decades of shadow government.   [Read more…]

Walmart’s Off to a Terrible 2013: Is Ravage-Capitalism Reaching a Point of Diminishing Returns?

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By Joshua Holland / Alternet

In a consumer-driven economy, you can only squeeze ordinary working people so far before they’re no longer able to buy the goods and services required to keep the ship afloat.

Walmart may be learning that simple truth the hard way. On Friday, Bloomberg reported a series of emails between company executives freaking out over the super-store’s dismal start to the new year. “Well, we just had one of those weeks here at Walmart U.S.,” wrote Cameron Geiger, senior vice president of Walmart U.S. Replenishment. “Where are all the customers? And where’s their money?” Another exec, Jerry Murray, Walmart’s vice president of finance and logistics, described the latest sales figures as, “the worst start to a month I have seen in my ~7 years with the company.”   [Read more…]

Monsanto Likely to Score Supreme Court Win with Far-Reaching Benefits for Corporate Farming

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Jill Richardson / Alternet

On Feb. 19, 2013, the Supreme Court heard yet another Monsanto case. (And yet again, Justice Clarence Thomas, former lawyer for Monsanto, did not recuse himself.) This time around, it was Monsanto vs. Vernon Hugh Bowman, an Indiana soybean and wheat farmer.

The issue in question is a familiar one for those who follow the issue of genetically engineered seeds. Each buyer of Monsanto’s patented seeds must sign a “Technology Agreement” and pay a technology fee. In the case of soybeans, soybeans themselves are seeds. A farmer who plants Monsanto’s patented soybean seeds will grow a crop of soybeans, which are themselves also seeds. The Technology Agreement prohibits the farmer from saving and replanting those seeds. It also forbids the buyer from doing research on Monsanto’s patented seeds.

In some cases, Monsanto licenses its genetically engineered seeds to other seed companies, like Pioneer (owned by DuPont). When a farmer buys Pioneer seeds with Monsanto patented genes in them, he pays one price for the seeds themselves – and that money goes to Pioneer – and a second fee, the Technology Fee, to Monsanto. The technology fee pays for Monsanto’s patented genes.   [Read more…]

Hypocrites! Taxpayer Association Rallies Supporters to Support Corporate Welfare (UPDATED)

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Showdown Set for 2pm Monday City Council Meeting

The San Diego County Taxpayers Association has found a tax they like.

They have issued a “Call to Action” for their supporters to show up at City Hall on Monday for a scheduled hearing of the City Council where the 2% tax-that’s-not-a-tax being collected by local hotels is going to be discussed. The Center for Policy Initiatives (CPI) is rallying their people to support the Mayor’s decision not to sign off on the tax.

Reading their flyer, you’d almost think the Taxpayers Association had somehow morphed into a Union. Now this tax is all about jobs, jobs, and jobs.   [Read more…]

Frank Thomas: ‘Do We Have Time to Save Mother Earth?’

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Editor: One of the San Diego Free Press’ most active writers on climate change is Frank Thomas, who often collaborates with John Lawrence. Readers appreciate Thomas so much that a group of them invited him to speak at their “pro-science” club meetings. Problem is, Thomas lives in the Netherlands. Here is his gracious decline along with more expositions on his part, ‘do we have time to save Mother Earth’.

By Frank Thomas

Thank you for trying to reach me through the San Diego Free Press and John Lawrence.

I would much enjoy meeting with members of your pro-science club. But, unfortunately I live in the Netherlands where I’m actively engaged as a free-lance trainer/lecturer and writer. For some time now, I’ve have been researching and writing about macro-micro comparative U.S. and European economic, social, environmental issues. High on my and John Lawrence’s list has been the U.S. and world dependence on environmentally finite and polluting fossil fuel greenhouse gas emissions.

One respected researcher on climate change and Arctic greenhouse gas conditions is University of Utah Professor of Physics, Timothy J. Garrett. If you contact him, he may know colleagues in California who are well-informed on this carbon dioxide-methane intensive region. Prof. Garrett sees climate change as a fight between human beings and physics … where the physics of climate change becomes irreversibly deadly unless something is done IMMEDIATELY to drastically reduce GHG emissions worldwide.   [Read more…]

Sex in San Diego: Sugar Daddies Site Boasts California Colleges Among ‘Fastest Growing Sugar Baby Schools’ Thanks to Tuition Hikes

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By Amanda Marcotte / Alternet

Soaring tuition rates are causing a number of reactions from the public: concern for young people saddled with ever-growing debt, anger at governments for cutting back on education instead of taxing the rich appropriately, calls for system-wide reform to help restore America’s global competitiveness. But some see it as an opportunity to market sexual services to men who find the idea of college women in dire economic straights to be arousing.

The leading company in this market recently sent out a glowing press release — heavy with sexist, outdated terms like “coed” — applauding the explosion of desperate college students and letting its customers know that the pool of available sex workers had grown tremendously. It particularly recommended universities in California as a place where the market is flooded with young women who are willing to pretend to like having sex with you in exchange for the kind of financial relief that used to be the government’s responsibility.

For example, UC Berkley experienced a 67% growth and UC Davis experienced a 220% growth, earning them spots among the “Fastest Growing Sugar Baby Schools of 2012.”

  [Read more…]

Why Democrats and Republicans Are Both Wrong About the Economy

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The unemployment rate is 7.8%. Both parties agree that this is too high, but they propose totally different solutions to create more jobs. The Republican solution is to give more tax breaks and other advantages to the rich and to corporations because they are the job creators.

Really? Then why haven’t they created more jobs in the last 30 years. This historical experiment of “trickle down” economics has been tried since the time of Ronald Reagan and it has proven to be an abject failure. Yet Republicans are still pushing it as the solution to all our problems.

Esteemed Nobel laureate and Princeton professor Paul Krugman wants to take the traditional Keynesian approach and do deficit spending to improve the economy. He says there’s no reason to worry about the deficit since the US can borrow money at extremely low rates. Not to worry. He sides with Dick Cheney who famously said, “Deficits don’t matter.”

Cheney and Bush then went on to add trillions to the national debt by fighting two unpaid for wars, tax breaks for the rich and an unpaid for prescription drug benefit for seniors that was in reality a giveaway to the pharmaceutical companies. But now that a Democratic President is in office, Republicans are all worried about deficits. They should have been worried when George W Bush was doing the profligate spending.

However, I disagree with both Cheney and Krugman. Deficits do matter and here’s why:   [Read more…]

An Invitation to Rick Perry to Come Back to California

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by Angie Wei/California Labor Federation

You have to feel a little bad for Texas Gov. Rick Perry. He came all the way to California this week to “poach jobs” and left empty-handed. Maybe Perry hasn’t read the studies that show very few jobs move from California to other states. Or maybe he wasn’t aware that California is on the rebound in a big way, now leading the nation in job creation. At the end of the day, Perry’s trip really was all hat, no cattle.

Over the last week, there’s been a lot of silly media coverage comparing Texas to California. It’s almost like a sports rivalry at this point. Perry says his low-regulation, low-government service, low-wage economic model is the way to go.

As a native Texan, I know better. I still remember going to the beach in Galveston and having to use turpentine to clean my feet before I left because of the oil. And I know being a worker in Texas is no joy, either. Workers have few rights. Collective bargaining is rare. If you’re injured on the job, tough luck. Texas is dead last in workers’ compensation coverage. Health insurance is hard to come by. Wages are low, and as a result, poverty is high. The Rick Perry fairy tale of Texas being an oasis is nothing more than a Texas-sized lie.

But we think Rick Perry ought to come back. Yep, you read that correctly. We should invite Perry back to California with open arms.   [Read more…]

Tunnels Under San Diego’s 30 Foot Height Limit in the Coastal Zone – Part 2

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At the risk of encouraging the critics of the height limit by continuing the discussion of the effects and value of the 1972 citizens’ initiative, this is meant then to demonstrate to those same critics the tunnels that have already been dug in and around and under the 30 foot standard, as well as informing the fairly new generations of citizenry and those uninitiated observers of San Diego development.

Height limit MB monsterIn Part One, I discussed how some of these tunnels have been dug underneath the height limit on San Diego’s coastal areas over the decades, outlining several serious breaches of the seemingly sacrosanct restrictions on building heights. Feeling that the ongoing online discussion on the issue with Voice of San Diego (see part 1) wasn’t complete without some kind of acknowledgement of how tunnels have already been dug under the 30 foot limit.
  [Read more…]

Is Big Oil Too Big to Tax in California?

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Soon our national political discourse will be dominated by the nightmarish sequester debate with the Republicans’ doomsday austerity strategy being countered by the Democrats’ austerity-lite program that draws from the eternal verity of Simpson-Bowles. God help us.

Standing in stark contrast to the reigning austerity-lite crowd inside the Democratic Party is perhaps the brightest progressive hope in the country, Senator Elizabeth Warren. Rather than playing the populist note to bash Republicans and then retreating to safe, chamber of commerce approved positions that put Social Security and Medicare “on the table” like many of her colleagues in the Democratic Party, Warren is consistently taking it to the 1% whenever she can, and she really means it.   [Read more…]

Rick Perry Shows His Love For Corporate Welfare Queens

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Editor’s Note: Since it seems like our local daily newspaper can’t find enough good things to say about Texas Governor Rick Perry, we thought we’d present the point of view of a Texan who’s living through his reign… 

by Libby Shaw /Daily Kos

 

I did not want my tombstone to read, ‘She kept a really clean house.’ I think I’d like them to remember me by saying, ‘She opened government to everyone.’ Ann Richards.

Ann Richards served as Governor of Texas 1990-1994.  This was a great place to live until Governors Bush and Perry ruined it.

Now that we know the Governor’s political appointees have turned the state’s taxpayer funded cancer prevention institute (CPRIT) into a cash cow for themselves and their cronies in the medical and pharmaceutical fields, state legislators want to take a hard look at two of Rick Perry’s pet projects. This is especially necessary now that CPRIT is under criminal investigation.

These funds would be none other than the Texas Enterprise Fund and the Emerging Technology Fund.  These funds were created as a means by which to attract businesses to the state as well as to advance various technologies here.

But both have been shrouded in secrecy with little oversight or accountability.   [Read more…]

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