San Diego Free Press

Grassroots News & Progressive Views

You are here: Home / Archives for Columns / Editor's Picks

I Love the Smell of Baseball in the Morning – Protesting the Padres TV Blackout

by

Matthew Hall, reporter turned columnist for UT-San Diego, had an idea that tapped into a deep well of frustration for baseball fans in San Diego. In a July 14th column Hall called upon Padres fans to step up to the plate and do something about a situation that is as unfair as it is indicative of the avarice surrounding virtually all things having to do with professional sports in this day and age. Half the population of our fair city can’t watch Padres baseball on TV, due to a dispute between Fox Sports San Diego and a couple of local cable providers. Needless to say, since the Padres are pulling down a cool $800 million for the broadcast rights, fans feel like they ought to be able to watch games from home.

So the deal was that fans were going to meet up outside the Padres Petco Park at10amon a Sunday morning in the middle of July to make a little noise, maybe make those corporate suits notice that their little game was a big deal for a lot of little people. I wasn’t sure just how much response Hall was going to get. There’s a wide chasm between ranting and raving from the safety of one’s Facebook page, and actually showing up to physically do something.   [Read more…]

Field of View: San Diego’s Gay Pride Parade 2012

by

Tens of thousands gathered in Hillcrest on Saturday as this year’s gay pride parade traveled along University and Sixth avenues and beyond. The two-hour parade showcased more than 200 floats, and is currently the largest in nation.

This year marks the first that active duty military have participated, while the anti-gay group―standing stone-faced and dressed in black on the sidelines at one minute section of the parade line―continues to shrink in size.   [Read more…]

Lemon Grove Is Booming

by

Combination of Public and Private Funds Fueling Construction Boom in East County City

You can’t go from one end of Lemon Grove to another without seeing the telltale signs of a virtual construction boom. There are so many construction projects going on right now in this East County city of 25,000, just 10 miles east of downtown San Diego, that you’d think the recession was over and things were … well, rosier than they are.

Yet in Lemon Grove, there are half a dozen construction projects in process, exhibiting the fact that both public and private money are at work here. And on top of that, city officials broke ground yesterday at a ceremony welcoming yet another project – the promenade and park centered around the city’s primary trolley station, just next to Main Street and Broadway.

Let’s take a quick look at all these projects.

Another Pharmacy

At the southwest corner of the very busy Massachusetts and Broadway intersection, Walgreen Pharmacy is financing a new facility. I spoke briefly to superintendent Andy Dipalma of Savant Construction while inside his trailer. Being somewhat distrusting of strangers wandering through his site, Andy told me that the new pharmacy should be completed in September of this year. He estimated that the project employed about 45 people – bringing jobs to this sector of the economy.   [Read more…]

The GOP: The Party that Doesn’t Care

by

Republicans profess an unmatched love of country, but what they have is an unmatched disdain for the people who inhabit it.

Maybe Republicans do love America. Or at least hey love the property they own. They love the money they can make. They love the power they can accumulate. They love the rules they can flaunt. What they so clearly hate, as Bening’s character said so succinctly, are Americans. As in the American people.

Think about it in terms of the policies they support. Prime example: Health care. The Affordable Care Act that was recently upheld by the Supreme Court provides for a dramatic expansion of Medicaid that will expand coverage to millions of Americans who earn up to 133% of the poverty level. Until the health law kicks in, Medicaid is only available to the extremely poor with families or the disabled. Now it will be available to anyone who otherwise would have no access to basic health care. The kicker? The federal government will pay for 100% of said expansion for the first four years, tapering down to 90% of all costs by 2020.   [Read more…]

Still Only a Halfpipe Dream – Skate Parks for City Heights

by

“I am here to reiterate to you the importance of investing in our youth, who are our future. Youth in the Mid-City area face many challenges of public safety, broken infrastructure, and inadequate services. They should not have to deal with cars, pedestrians, and cyclists when they are out skateboarding. They should be provided with a skate park to be active freely and safely. This is a commitment to them as individuals and citizens of our fair city. Recreation facilities and services need to be a priority and skate parks need to be made a reality for our communities…” Mark Tran, Mid-City CAN Youth Council, addressing the City City Council budget meeting 5/14/12

Mark Tran and the other speakers from Mid-City CAN left an impression on the council members. They also left an impression on those of us in the audience from all over the city who were advocating for the restoration of meaningful public services that have been cut over the past six years. The issue of a skate park immediately went onto my “worth fighting for and doable list.”   [Read more…]

How Wall Street and London Bank Scandal Are Bankrupting California Cities

by

Wall Street got bailed out. Cities got sold out. Federal policies keeping interest rates low are resulting in extracting wealth from cities and transferring it to Wall Street.

We blogged earlier about how traders from JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs descended on European cities such as Casino, Italy and even nunneries selling them interest rate swaps. Interest rate swaps were also responsible for bankrupting Jefferson County, the county seat of Birmingham, Alabama. Now the same big banks are bankrupting California cities. Stockton, San Bernadino and Mammoth Lakes have already gone down. Oakland is fighting Goldman for its very life.

But what does this have to do with the LIBOR scandal, you say? A lot, it turns out. LIBOR stands for the London Interbank Offered Rate, a benchmark that most other interest rates are tied to including interest rate swaps, the very derivative financial instruments that are now bankrupting California cities. The LIBOR scandal has failed to attract the interest of many Americans because it’s so “over there” in London. What does that have to do with us here in the US? The same interest rate swaps that JP Morgan Chase sold to nunneries in Europe, they’ve sold to Stockton and San Bernadino and Oakland and many other US cities, school districts, hospitals and perhaps even to a few US nunneries.
  [Read more…]

Immigration, Racism, and the Supreme Court

by

By Marjorie Cohn
The issue of immigration has been tossed about like a political football for some time. Democrats argue that migrants who have spent many years in the United States should be permitted to apply for lawful status. Republicans criticize these proposals as “amnesty.” But Congress has been unable to agree on comprehensive immigration reform.

Three and one-half years into his term, President Obama announced on June 15 a policy to halt deportations for many undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children. They must be under age 30, have come to the United States when they were under age 16, have lived in the U.S. for at least five years, be either an honorably discharged veteran or a high school graduate, and have suffered no felony or “significant” misdemeanor convictions.

Ten days after Obama revealed his new program, the Supreme Court issued its long-awaited decision on Arizona’s SB 1070. Arizona had enacted a repressive law aimed at “attrition [of undocumented immigrants] through enforcement.” Five other states followed suit and waited as the high court considered the constitutionality of Arizona’s law.

In a victory for those who support a humane immigration policy, the Court overturned three sections of SB 1070: Arizona cannot criminalize unlawful presence in the United States, or working without papers; and the decision to arrest someone for unlawful presence in the U.S. is solely a federal issue.  The Court made clear that the enforcement of immigration law is reserved to the federal government.   [Read more…]

An Unwelcome Insight

by

As I have been aging, I have spent more time thinking about my Mother and Father. I will not dwell on my mother, because there are not many good things I can say about her. (After you read about my father you will probably say there aren’t many good things to say about him either.) Suffice it to say that my mother was a social butterfly; more concerned with appearances than substance. She was a pianist and she and her sister were Leonard Bernstein’s first music teachers. Her parents were immigrants from Russia and Poland, and my grandfather was one of the nicest people I had ever met. My grandmother had a mean streak – which was inherited by my mother – and not nearly as nice as Grandpa. My mother and father were very wealthy – more about that in a moment – and I had my own governess until I was seven years old.

We lived just on the border of Beverly Hills and Los Angeles; yet I was culturally deprived. I had never been north of the San Fernando Valley; east of East Los Angeles; or south of San Pedro.. I had been sent to Girl Scout camp on Catalina, where I proceeded to get seasick from the time we left San Pedro until the return. I was always left in the care of the governess or the maid. When my mother married my father, an immigrant from Budapest, she became a “decorator to the stars” and it was not unusual to have celebrities in the house daily, nor was it unusual for her to take me on some of her jobs to “show me off.”   [Read more…]

Sex In San Diego: The Night I Quit Vice

by

Our sergeant was laying out the detail for the night. It was the late 70s and gay bars operated on the fringe of the community. In this particular case, it seemed someone from the religious right had complained about a bar called The Hut on University Avenue in North Park. The complaint was not the existence of a gay bar, but that the bar was running an afterhours “private” club with live sex acts as the main feature. Now if you are like me, you are probably wondering how this pillar of the religious community knew about the activities in a private gay club. But when I posed the question to my sergeant, he gave me the exasperated look you give a child who just does not stop asking, “Why?” His response was simple, “It comes down from the Chief’s office.”

The detail was relatively simple. One of us would be “wired” and would go into the bar and observe. If and when any sex show started, he would simply speak into the microphone and the rest of the detail would come in and bust the place. Guess who was assigned the job as observer? At least I was not bait this time.

  [Read more…]

©2010-2017 SanDiegoFreePress.org

Code is Poetry