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Closing Time at Fresh & Easy

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by Daniel Paredes/Frying Pan News

After spending more than $1.6 billion, Tesco, the world’s third- largest food retailer, has finally thrown in the towel and announced the closure of its Fresh & Easy stores. This move brings closure to the British company’s effort to establish a foothold in California’s highly competitive grocery industry. Many analysts believe this decision has been a long time coming, with Fresh & Easy stores never seeing the kind of market penetration that the U.K.-based giant expected from the chain. Investors cheered the December 5 announcement, but U.S. workers have reason to celebrate too — this marks the end of a five-year struggle with Tesco.

Like most new entrants into the grocery market field, Tesco planned to operate non-union. Indeed, a Tesco employee-relations director described the primary responsibilities of that job in an advertisement as “maintaining non-union status” and “union avoidance activities.” The United Food and Commercial Workers union (UFCW) sought to organize the company, called a boycott and Tesco resisted.   [Read more…]

California Gas Prices: A Rigged Game Where Consumers Lose Big

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by Liza Tucker/California Progress Report

Who would want two companies, Tesoro and Chevron, to control more than half of California’s gasoline market? Only people, like oil company executives, who think paying five dollars a gallon should be the new normal.

That could happen, though, if a deal goes through for Tesoro to buy BP’s refinery in Carson and its low-cost Arco brand. In California, the ninth largest economy in the world, gasoline refineries have shrunk from 32 in the mid-1980s to just 14, owned by only a handful of companies. The more consolidated a market, the more tempting it is to make more money by producing and selling less gasoline. California’s gasoline market is so consolidated that it is now geared to shortages and scarcity, which is why a few refinery outages and some scheduled refinery maintenance can cause a price spike of the sort you should only see in the wake of a real disaster.   [Read more…]

California Gasoline Prices go Haywire, May Have Been Subject to Collusion

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Data suggests that price spikes in May and October may have been the result of market manipulation and not supply shortages.

Back in 2000-2001, California—and San Diego in particular—fell victim to the price fixing schemes of a virtually unregulated electricity market. Back then the state became the center of the nation’s attention when the state’s electricity markets went absolutely kablooey (that’s a technical term). Electricity providers SDG&E, PG&E, and Southern California Edison were forced to sell off their production facilities as a part of then governor Pete Wilson’s grand deregulation experiment, in which San Diego was the guinea pig. The new owners of the generating plants smelled opportunity, and they took full advantage of it, creating a market-manipulation free-for-all that spiked prices and created huge profits for the companies who generated electricity.

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SuperStorm Sandy Aftermath: Power Companies Unnecessarily Immiserated Millions

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Weeks after Hurricane Sandy struck, millions of people were still without electricity. At its peak Sandy left 8.5 million without power. A lot of people were angry. Why did it take so long to get the power back on even with crews coming from as far away as San Diego? One power company in New Jersey came in for a lot of criticism – Jersey Central Power and Light (JCP&L)- owned by First Energy based in Ohio.
Although we San Diegans have blessedly been spared from the ravages of hurricanes, tornadoes and other weather disasters, we are still at the mercies of aging utilities much in need of repair and upgrading. In particular, our local power and light company, San Diego Gas and Electric (SDG&E) has been neglecting maintenance and upgrading similar to what JCP&L did prior to the devastation of Hurricane Sandy.   [Read more…]

Macy’s CEO to American People: Drop Dead

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By Lynn Stuart Parramore / AlterNet / Nov. 21, 2012

Macy’s is a powerful symbol of Thanksgiving, with its festive parade and freakishly large floats. But Macy’s CEO Terry Lundgren is part of a group of greedy, unpatriotic CEOs who would like to seize this moment of American hardship and tear the rug out from under hard-working families. Moms, dads, grandparents, kids—he’d like to take a little something from each of you. Especially if you’re poor: he’d really like to get into your purses.   [Read more…]

Riding the Rails in the West – The State of Amtrak

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Part 1: Are We There Yet?

By JEC / Special to the San Diego Free Press

Its 6am – still dark with a morning fog when we board the Pacific Surfliner in San Diego. While there is a train leaving at 6:35 am, Amtrak urges passengers booked on the Coast Starlight to take the first train out at 6 am, likely based on experience with frequent delays. But today’s train leaves on time with a few dozen blurry eyed passengers. We were bound for Chicago via Oakland.

Days before we departed, I had mentioned to my doctor I was about to leave on a train trip, from San Diego to Chicago via Oakland. He looked up, surprised, “what, you can do that, take a train from here to Chicago?”

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Readers Write: San Diego Community and Workers Stand Up and Speak Out Against Walmart

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This article was submitted to us via our Facebook Page.

On Friday, November 23, 2012, the day after Thanksgiving, the biggest shopping day of the year, community members and workers protested outside of several Wal-Mart locations throughout the country.

In San Diego the community focused on ten locations including one located in the College Grove shopping center.  As shoppers came into the store community members greeted them with stickers for shoppers to wear inside the store that read “We Support Wal-Mart Workers”.  Many of the community were very supportive and one shopper said “she would wear the sticker proudly and ask management why they retaliated against it’s own employees”.   [Read more…]

The Starting Line – San Diego Congressmen Get Campaign Contributions for Domestic Drone Support

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Chances are you’ve never heard of the “drone caucus” in the US House of Representatives, officially known as the House Unmanned Systems Caucus.  Yet they are considered among the most powerful groups on the Hill. And participating in the caucus is a sure way for Congressmen to enrich their campaign coffers.   [Read more…]

Christmas on Earth? Try Buying Nothing

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Here we go again: the day after Black Friday was filled with the now all-too-familiar news of shopping mayhem.

There was the man who threatened to stab his fellow shoppers for pushing his kids outside a Sacramento K-mart, the melee of frenzied Georgia shoppers mauling each other to get at a stack of cell phones in a Walmart, the trampling that followed after a man brandished a gun in a line outside a Sears in Texas, the gang fight in a Michigan mall, arrests of hysterical consumers in Florida, the vicious brawling over lingerie, etc. etc.

This ritual has come to define us as much or more than Thanksgiving.   [Read more…]

Twinkies’ Twisted Tale: Junk Food Devoured By Junk Bonds

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All the late night talk shows laughed it up over the supposed demise of Twinkies, Ho Hos, Ding Dongs, Wonder Bread etc as the news came out that Hostess Brands was going bankrupt. But delve beneath the surface and you will find something more akin to a Shakespearean tragedy than talk show banter. It’s a tale involving two unions, one private equity fund, two hedge funds and a whole cast of former CEOs. There is sacrifice, greed and betrayal. 18,000 workers will be losing their jobs while some vulture capitalists will be walking away with millions. Another vulture capitalist will itself have been devoured in the process.   [Read more…]

Walmart Retaliates Against Black Friday Activists

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By Adele M. Stan / Alternet / Nov. 22, 2012

As Black Friday approached, the honchos at Walmart, the largest employer in the United States, found themselves at a loss to respond to a nationwide rebellion within the ranks of their near-captive workers — people who work for an average wage of $8.81 per hour, according to The National Memo, often in areas where Walmart is the only game in town for a job if you don’t have a college degree (or even if you do). And so it seems they started making stuff up, and pulling strings — in at least two locations — to get local police to do their bidding.   [Read more…]

Border Economy to see Greater Emphasis under Filner Administration

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Also, is the UT-San Diego editorial bias leeching into the newsroom?

Mayor-Elect Bob Filner announced last Friday that he was going to open an office just south of the border in Tijuana. Some people scratched their heads and asked “why?” Some people undoubtedly were infuriated because they thought it was just another stupid move by an ultra-liberal politician to kowtow to the illegal immigrant population and cede more of our own nation’s authority to foreign entities. After all, we’re ‘Mericans, and we don’t take a back seat to nobody, and all these stinkin’ liberals can go to hell if they don’t believe in the superiority of ‘Merica!

Still, there were others who no doubt thought, “Now why didn’t we do this sooner?” And that’s a very good question. The City of Tijuana, apparently, has an office right here in Downtown San Diego. We are two major cities, each with a population of roughly 1.3 million people, and separated only by a demarcation line on a map (and a very large fence). Look to the south from Mar Vista High School in Imperial Beach and you’re staring not at other parts of San Diego, but at the hills of Tijuana.

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We all know about the editorial bent of the UT-San Diego; how rabidly right wing they are. As in the craziest of the crazy Tea Party right wing. This is the editorial board that predicted that Mitt Romney would win the presidency “in a landslide,” over Barack Obama (Obama won in a landslide). This is also the editorial page that presented us with an apocalyptic view of post-election America entitled “A Eulogy For America,” lamenting that “there are dark days ahead for the country,” and that “this country has been remolded by socialists and communists who have wormed their way into our government, news media, and our education system. “

This is the kind of irrational, far right wing, Tea Party lunacy that has absolutely zero foundation in reality that we’ve come to expect from the UT-San Diego opinion pages since “Lynchester” (apologies to Doug Porter, but I’ve grown fond of said moniker instead of “The Dougchester) purchased the paper. I mean, Fox News and the World Net Daily ain’t got nothin’ on Lynchester’s publication. But we don’t expect this kind of thing from the newsroom.   [Read more…]

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