by Lorena Gonzalez
Workers throughout the United States and in San Diego faced unprecedented challenges this year. A full scale attack on middle-class wages and benefits, along with a tough economy, made 2012 seem like a very long year for middle and working class folks. But, when it was all said in done, this year should leave a smile on our faces in San Diego – and these are 10 of the reasons why… [Read more…]
The Washington Post reported on Dec. 27, 2012, that Victory Pharmaceuticals, headquartered in San Diego, was forced to pay $11.4 million to resolve Federal, civil and criminal liabilities related to kickbacks to doctors in return for prescribing their drugs. Victory is a privately held company, founded in 2003, and is focused on acquiring, developing and marketing products to treat pain and related conditions. As it turns out, part of the marketing strategy was to offer kickbacks to doctors in return for prescribing its products.
The kickbacks included tickets to professional and collegiate sporting events, tickets to concerts and plays, spa outings, golf and ski outings, dinners at expensive restaurants, giving a doctor money to help make a house payment, paying for a doctor’s staff’s outing to a strip club, including “lap dances” for the female staff and offering a doctor and his staff an all-expense paid trip to Las Vegas. A former sales representative for Victory, Chad Miller, blew the whistle on them and received $1.7 million for his efforts. [Read more…]
By Les Leopold / Alternet
It was another year of Wall Street treachery. Those who took down our economy still have not been held accountable. Instead, Wall Street successfully lured the political establishment into a phony fiscal cliff/austerity debate. So instead of creating programs to put millions of Americans back to work, Washington is debating how much more to take away from the poor and the middleclass. Let’s take a closer look at the most disastrous economic events from 2012.
Here’s our countdown: [Read more…]
Well the New Year is upon us, and it’s time to take stock and see if I can make any sense out of the goings on of the last year and the interaction of reality with my own mind. This is my crack at it.
1. I believe that gun ownership should be a privilege and not a right. The 2nd Amendment was constucted to be similar to the Swiss model in which citizens formed a militia for national defense. There was no standing army. That was the original intent of the framers of the Constitution for exactly the same reason: there was no standing army. Today that rationale is not relevant. Even Switzerland has moved the guns from homes to depots to prevent what little gun violence takes place there. [Read more…]
Mayor Bob Filner calls out dysfunctional Congress; Starbuck’s embarks on a “Come Together” campaign; Wingnuts decry Sandy Hook as a government conspiracy; Balboa Park Golf Course getting a makover
In an interview yesterday with KPCC, the Los Angeles area public radio station, San Diego Mayor Bob Filner pulled no punches in criticizing Congress and the Congressional leaders he left behind after 20 years to run for Mayor.
The bottom line, the reason he chose to run for mayor instead of returning to Congress for what would have been his 11th term, was the same thing Filner said to SDFP colleague Annie Lane and I when we sat down with the then mayoral candidate back in April for the OB Rag: Congress is a complete, dysfunctional mess.
The mantra of shrinking government down to a size “where you can drown it in a bathtub,” as Grover Norquist likes to say, became the overriding principle in the House in 1994 when Newt Gingrich first became Speaker. Since then—and especially since 2010—it’s only gotten worse.
“I couldn’t believe the kind of people who had come and taken power,” Filner said of the Tea Party wave that took control of the House. “Many of them had never had any government experience. They had no respect as it were for government per se. I mean, I don’t know why you run for government office with the intent to close up government.” [Read more…]
by Dan Aiello/California Progress Report
The Brown administration Tuesday proposed new draft regulations that would require the oil industry to disclose where its California oil extraction operations are using hydraulic fracturing, commonly referred to as “fracking,” in advance of a new movie meant to bring public awareness to the environmental destruction caused by the practice.
Michigan voters are stuck with the electoral choices they’ve made, whether they like it or not.
Last week the Michigan Legislature slammed through a Right-to-Work bill, becoming the 24th state to have such a law on the books. The lame duck legislators passed it with no debate, no discussion. It was a cookie cutter law that almost word-for-word matched a template provided by the extreme right wing group ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council). The very next day, Republican Governor Rick Snyder signed the bill into law.
What Right-to-Work laws are purported to do is give workers the “freedom” to not join a union if they choose not to. Conservatives claim that if a workforce is primarily unionized, but if individual workers decide that they don’t want to pay dues or participate in union activities, they shouldn’t have to. If a union is making contributions to a campaign or a particular political cause, the worker shouldn’t be forced (indirectly) to contribute to those causes via his or her union dues. It’s all about choice, they say. It’s about freedom. [Read more…]
On December 11, 2012 the first major supermarket in San Diego’s Historic Barrio District (Barrio Logan, Logan Heights and Sherman Heights) in almost 40 years opened it’s doors to the public for the first time. For Barrio Logan residents the opening of Mercado Gonzalez Northgate is more than just the opening of a supermarket, it is a deferred dream come to true.
It took 21 years for the city and developers to build this market. Twenty one years of promises. Twenty one years to gain an amenity that most communities have.
Not since the closure in the early 1970’s of Safeway, on the corner of 25th and Imperial, has there been a major supermarket that services these predominantly Mexican-American communities. For over 30 years these communities demanded a supermarket. None of the major supermarkets like Vons, Albertson’s and Ralph’s heeded this demand. Fortunately, after all those years, a Mexican-American grocer family stepped up. [Read more…]
States, counties and cities are in a race to the bottom because they are giving away taxpayer dollars to provide incentives for corporations to locate withing their boundaries. There’s a fierce competition going on and corporations are playing one region off against another. Whichever one comes up with the largest package of cash grants and loans, sales tax breaks, income tax credits and exemptions, free services, and property tax abatements wins.
Corporations hire people whose job it is to get them the best package. Mayors and Governors desperate for jobs for their citizens are giving away the store with the consequence that schools, parks and police and fire services are underfunded. City employees are forced to take pay and pension cuts in order that corporations can report to shareholders that they got the best possible deal. [Read more…]
A report from the Department of Housing and Urban Development documents San County’s homeless population as the third largest and among the fastest growing in the United States.
While the number of homeless fell by nearly 6% nationally, San Diego’s increased by 6.1% over the past year. The report indicated that there were 10,013 homeless people living in our region. Only New York and Los Angeles had more people living on the streets. And LA showed the largest decrease nationally.
Come inside for more of today’s daily news digest… [Read more…]
The news this morning is dominated by stories about a man in Oregon who wandered into a shopping mall dressed in camouflage and starting firing off rounds, killing two shoppers. Eventually, police told the news media, he was ‘neutralized’, which turns out to be policespeak for ‘he killed himself.’
Enough already, I say. There isn’t much we can do about that young man’s mental illness in retrospect, but there is plenty that can be done about the people enabling unfettered access to firearms. I say its time we scare those cockroaches out from under their rocks and take a close look at the damage they’ve wrought on our society.
Mind you, this little rant is not about gun control. That’s a subject that requires a little more nuanced conversation, one that’s impossible as long as people tolerate the pinheads that make up the leadership of the NRA.
I’m talking about the simply outrageous crap that gets passed off in the name of defending our “Second Amendment Rights”. While the tinfoil set has been stockpiling ammunition and sending mass emails to AOL accounts about the Obama administration’s plans to enforce a mythical United Nations mandate that will take everybody’s guns away, the gun lobby has been busy making sure that there are no reasonable (or discussions about) restrictions on firearms. [Read more…]
by Carmen Balber/California Progress Report
Reporters largely missed the point of a Commonwealth Fund study released last week, that looked at consumer savings under Obamacare’s 80-20 rule, the rule making insurance companies spend at least 80% of your premiums on health care, not overhead.
The authors started with a fact we already knew – that health insurance companies had to pay $1.1 billion in rebates for missing the MLR requirement in 2011 – and that big shiny number distracted the news media. But the authors zeroed in on a much more important fact. Insurance companies successfully reduced administrative costs by $1.184 billion in 2011, but they used those savings to increase profits instead of passing them on to consumers.
Clearly the 80-20 rule isn’t working to contain profits and hold down premiums, especially in states that don’t have tough regulation of insurance premiums. [Read more…]
