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The Face of Homelessness in San Diego

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I met a homeless woman at a coffee shop in downtown San Diego. She had emailed me to correct a few points in a previous article I had written about the homeless. Her name is Jingles, not her real name, of course. That’s the name she goes by downtown. She’s tough, savvy, intelligent, resourceful, wise to the ways of the street. She is 55 years old with several health related problems and three small dogs. One of them is 20 years old and won’t be with her much longer. The three dogs prevent her from being taken in by a shelter, but she won’t give them up, and I don’t blame her. They are the best friends she has.

Her cell phone is her lifeline to the outside world and is what lets her know what’s going on out there. That’s how she was able to read the San Diego Free Press and then email me. It’s also a lifeline to 911 in case of a heart attack or other severe medical problems. Several of her cell phones have been stolen; then she has to start all over again spending money she doesn’t have.

She suffers from a variety of ailments including fibromyalgia, arthritis, manic depression, COPD, anxiety disorders and PTSD from living on the streets. She had a heart attack three years ago. She gets General Relief (GR). She has three GR workers who deal with various aspects of her case.   [Read more…]

Ten Reasons to Vote “No on A” in Carlsbad’s Special Election

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The Riehl Voters Guide

A guy carrying a clipboard appeared at our front door June 25th last year. He said he was a member of a citizens group on a mission to save the strawberry fields. After he promised there would be a vote on the initiative, I signed it. A few days later, discovering I’d been duped, I was driven by anger and guilt to launch my own mission: to write about a lying developer’s attempt to bypass, not only state and local reviews of his project, but Carlsbad voters.

What follows is a list of reasons I voted no on Measure A, with links to the articles I posted on my blog, The Riehl World, over the last eight months. They tell the story of how a billionaire L.A. developer persuaded elected officials to agree to put our city’s quality of life at risk. On February 23 we’ll find out if he succeeded.   [Read more…]

Clinton Democrats in 2016: Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here

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Whatever happens in today’s Iowa caucuses, one thing is abundantly clear—when confronted with a credible challenge from the left in the form of the Bernie Sanders, the response of much of the leadership of the Democratic Party and their allies in the corporate media has been to defend the status quo with great zeal even if it meant borrowing tropes from the right.

Whether it was red-baiting from Thomas Freidman or condescension mixed with an appeal to “realism” from Paul Krugman, the drumbeat was loud and consistent: Sanders’ agenda, with it’s direct ties to the legacies of Martin Luther King Jr. and FDR was simply an unrealistic option in the neoliberal era.

It didn’t matter if it was Clinton proxies stirring fears about taxes, terrorism, and government health care or commentators on CNN and MSNBC bloviating about how Sanders’ views were the progressive past to Clinton’s pragmatic future, the fix was in. After the last few months of the Democratic presidential campaign, it has never been more clear that Noam Chomsky’s critique of America’s political system being dominated by the “two wings of the business party” working in concert with a corporate propaganda machine is spot on.   [Read more…]

Pinyon-Juniper Forests: BLM is a Ranching Industry Tool

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By Will Falk

Public lands ranching is destroying the Western United States. It has pushed native plant species to the brink of extinction. It causes soil to erode so quickly the land cannot keep up. Livestock are poisoning and depleting water supplies, killing perennial stream flows, and are making it increasingly difficult for surface water to accumulate. Stockmen and the animals they raise have devastated populations of iconic American animals like bison, elk, pronghorn, and sage-grouse. Ranchers, ever jealous of the trees their stock cannot eat, encourage the clear-cutting of forests.

I cannot decide whether writing this essay in the wake of Ammon Bundy’s arrest and Lavoy Finicum’s death at the hands of the FBI and Oregon State Police after their occupation of Northern Paiute land at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge is good or bad. It could be good because this story has finally forced public lands ranching, or “welfare ranching,” and the policies of federal agencies like the Bureau of Land Management and US Forest Service into the public’s consciousness.

On the other hand, there is the risk that while Bundy and his angry white men waved their rifles in the faces of law enforcement complaining about federal agencies like BLM and the Forest Service, the public developed too much sympathy for those Bundy threatened. These agencies might look like the good guys against Big Bad Bundy while the agencies’ own atrocities go over-looked.   [Read more…]

The Lessons of Porter Ranch

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By Nicola Peill-Moelter, Ph.D. / SanDiego 350.org

The massive leak at the Southern California Gas Company (SoCalGas) Aliso Canyon natural gas storage facility is a stark example of why natural gas is a significant health and safety risk and not a bridge fuel to our clean energy future. The facility, the second largest in the U.S., stores vast amounts of natural gas at high pressure in underground wells once used for oil extraction more than fifty years ago.

On or about October 23rd a rupture in a 60-year old injection well pipe a thousand feet underground initiated the leak. At its peak the leak had an estimated rate of one-hundred twenty-five thousand pounds of methane per hour. To date, the cumulative emissions from this single source is equivalent to 25% of the state’s annual methane emissions from major sources like agriculture and landfills, equivalent to the annual climate pollution of almost half a million cars.

  [Read more…]

The Oregon Stand Off: Mainstream Media Looked the Other Way

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Odd that the Bundy story didn’t preoccupy the press as much as a Trump sneeze

Mainstream media largely failed to come up with breaking news of the arrest of the Bundys and a significant number of their cohort this week.

It was a failure that may have been intended. For weeks after January 2nd—when the cowboy sons of Nevada’s Cliven Bundy took over the Malheur bird refuge in Paiute Indian territory—the major outlets of television and traditional press just seemed to look the other way.
  [Read more…]

Little Landers, the Utopian Agricultural Commune, Washed Out By 1916 Flood

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Editor’s Note: On this day, January 27, 1916 at 5:05pm, the Lower Otay Dam broke, sending torrents of water into Otay, Sweetwater and the Tijuana river valleys. The flood caused the largest devastation in San Diego history.

By Patricia Maxwell / This is Part III of a Series

Little Landers was an idealistic, cooperative farming community built in the Otay river valley by a couple of visionaries who advocated that anyone could sustain himself on a “little land.” The flood of January 27, 1916 swept the land into San Diego bay.

“The raging waters, spreading widely over the flat lands of the valley in the night, rendered twenty-five families homeless and most of them lost everything. Two women were drowned. Boats and improvised rafts were necessary to bring marooned people to safety. Some few of these attempted to resume operations, either where they had been or on higher ground. Most of them simply quit and moved away.   [Read more…]

Lack of Diversity Among San Diego County Commissioners

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Over 200 vacant positions. Zero Latinos on the “Citizen’s Review Board On Police Practices”

By Barbara Zaragoza

On Thursday, January 21st the Center on Policy Initiatives (CPI) held a Boards and Commissions Launch Event at MAAC’s Chula Vista Community Room in hopes of encouraging more citizens to actively participate in their local government.

Clare Crawford, President and Executive Director of CPI, opened the event saying, “A few years back we began to do some research into leadership in the county. A couple of things that we found were, number one: the demographics of the county had obviously changed dramatically over the last several decades. But the demographics of our elected leadership and our appointed leadership had not changed to match the folks that were living here. That’s a problem. The other thing we found was that there wasn’t a real intentional pipeline that was bringing community advocates from all parts of the county into leadership roles.”   [Read more…]

 Consultants Agree on Inflated Lagoon Mall Benefits – Part 2

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Retail Demand and Revenue Overstated

By Ricard Riehl / The Riehl World 

The Westfield Corporation donated $75,000 to the opponents of Carlsbad’s Measure A, which, if passed, would enable an L.A. developer to build a mall near the city’s pristine Agua Hedionda Lagoon.

The developer, Rick Caruso, has spent $7 million for paid signature gatherers in a misleading initiative campaign, out-of-town marketing consultants to develop a flood of glossy mailers and TV ads, staffing of an information center at the lagoon, and transporting local residents to behold the splendor of his L.A. mall.

The group opposing the billionaire’s plan, Citizens for North County, has relied on an army of volunteers to gather referendum signatures, canvass neighborhoods, organize pop-up tents information meetings, use social media, put up handmade signs, and host fundraisers to pay for two mass mailings.   [Read more…]

Emergency Shelter in San Diego: Getting Beyond the Game of ‘Mother May I’

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Back when I was a kid, about a billion years ago, all the kids in the neighborhood would hang out after school until it got dark, or we got hungry, playing games like tag and Hide-and-Seek with the entire neighborhood for our playground. We didn’t get in trouble or kidnapped … (well there was the time 5-year-old Johnny Pappa disappeared and everyone in the neighborhood was out looking for him well past bed-time, until his brother found him sleeping UNDER his bed).

One game we played was “Mother, May I?”. The kid who was the “Mother” stood at one end of the yard and everyone else stood some distance away facing her. The Mother would tell each kid what kind of step they could take towards her or away from her. The goal was to get close enough to tag the Mother and then you would become the Mother. The catch was that if you didn’t ask, “Mother May I?” before taking the step, you missed your turn.   [Read more…]

Preserving the San Diego Commons: Public Land, Policy and Process

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Who decides and who gets to participate in decisions to sell City properties

The previous article in the San Diego Commons at the Crossroads series keyed on the Mayor’s State of City promise to break ground on “50 new or upgraded parks during the next five years” counterpoised against examples of designated open space and other city-owned lands that are in jeopardy of being sold by the City as “surplus properties”.

The proposal to sell one of the now controversial properties labeled “Truax House” adjacent to the Maple Canyon Open Space system has been continued to the February 10 Smart Growth &Land Use (SG&LU) City Council Committee along with some additional properties, not all as yet specified.

And therein lies one serious problem. If you are glued to the City Council website each and every working day of every week you might find out about meeting agenda items related to property sales when they are posted as actions for sale or authorization for sale.   [Read more…]

Teleconference: Roland S. Martin Explains Why Black Media Matters

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Gwen Pierce / The Chocolate Voice

Roland S. Martin, host and managing editor of News One Now held a teleconference on January 8, 2016, with “The Chocolate Voice” and a select group of other Black media outlets. Martin shared his insight and analysis on covering stories that are largely ignored by mainstream media.

The award winning journalist was at the top of his game in covering the most impactful stories from 2015, and is looking ahead to being at the forefront of covering hot stories in 2016.   [Read more…]

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