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San Diego’s Climate Action Plan: Too Little, Too Late? Too Much, Too Soon?

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Plans to address the issues surrounding climate change are getting top billing in the news this week.

San Diego’s City Council is poised to approve a climate action plan full of ambitious goals and may be short on actual means to achieve those goals. Representatives from around the planet are meeting in Paris over the coming days, hoping to gain consensus on a strategy to steer the world’s economies away from fossil fuel dependence.

Today I’ll report and comment on the latest developments on San Diego’s Action Plan and the challenges it faces, even as almost the entire local political establishment pays it lip service.   [Read more…]

America Has Changed its Name to The Homeland

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Most of us good liberals and progressives think Hitler when we hear the words “fascism” and “fascist”.  But if we want to use those words we’d do better to think about Italy, which, after all, gave those words to history.

Mussolini comes to mind.  That muscular and oversized skull atop his shoulders, looking pretty much like a pit bull’s, and the strutting swagger that suggested he could rip out your liver and eat it… well, you know.  It’s not good.

So how’d he get the land of amore y vino to march off to kill Ethiopians as they searched for The New Rome?  He got lots of help from an aesthetic movement in Italy called Futurism.     [Read more…]

A Centuries Old Sunni-Shiite Conflict is at Heart of Middle East Problems

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American politicians, including George W Bush and Barack Obama, have failed to deal with the fact of Sunnis and Shiites hating each other and have been fighting for 1383 years. Their lack of knowledge and/or acceptance of that fact has led to their bungling and botching of Middle East policy. There are effectively two religions: Sunni Islam and Shiite Islam.

Understanding the religious composition of countries in the Middle East goes a long way toward explaining why certain countries are fighting other countries or are standing by doing nothing in the fight against terrorism. For instance, why won’t Saudi Arabia fight ISIS? The answer is simple. They are both Sunnis. For the most part Sunnis won’t fight Sunnis and Shiites won’t fight Shiites. But they sure as hell will fight each other. Americans and the western world in general have just been snookered into getting involved in this mess, which has been going on for over 1000 years, starting with George W Bush’s ill-conceived and immoral invasion of Iraq.   [Read more…]

Pinyon-Juniper Forests: An Ancient Vision Disturbed

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Standing in a pinyon-juniper forest on a high slope above Cave Valley not far from Ely, Nevada, I am lost in an ancient vision. It is a vision born under sublime skies stretching above wide, flat valleys bounded by the dramatic mountains of the Great Basin. The vision grows with the rising flames of morning in the east. The night was cold, but clear, and the sun brings a welcome warmth. When the sun crests the mountains, red and orange clouds stream across the sky while shadows pull back from the valley floor to reveal pronghorn antelope dancing through the sage brush. A few ridge lines away, the clatter of talus accompanies the movement of bighorn sheep. The slap and crack of bighorn rams clashing their heads together echoes through the valley.   [Read more…]

Black Lives Matter on Black Friday

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Two elements of the ugly side of our society and economy are coming together this week.

Black Lives Matter groups and their supporters in cities around the country, including San Diego, are staging Friday protests and urging people not to shop. Events in Alabama, Washington state, Chicago and Minneapolis have served to bolster their case about the pervasiveness of racism.

Black Friday sales events stand as reminders of the false prosperity of the consumer economy. Retail workers and supporters will be ending a fifteen day fast as they picket outside WalMart heiress Alice Walton’s apartment in New York City and various locations around the country.   [Read more…]

Why SeaWorld Can’t Build a Hotel at its Location on Mission Bay

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Coming off a trouncing over the last 2 years because of the Orca circuses, SeaWorld has announced that it now plans on building a hotel and resort at its location on the southern rim of Mission Bay.  Its hope is that declining attendances and revenues will be halted with a branded hotel right there on its site with its aquatic theme.

Yet, there is trouble afoot for these plans. SeaWorld needs to re-appraise the project, for the last time a major hotel was planned for that area of Mission Bay – it ended in disaster. In the early 1980s, Ramada wanted to build a resort – and the city had given the go-ahead.

But when it came time to begin construction, it was uncovered that a toxic landfill sat beneath all that sand. The old Mission Bay Landfill.   [Read more…]

Why Aren’t Seniors Getting a Raise This Year?

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CEOs Got a Pay Increase Last Year But No COLA for Social Security Recipients

The Social Security Administration announced that senior citizens would get no increase in their monthly checks because there wasn’t any inflation last year as measured by the increase in paychecks for urban and clerical workers. Yes, those workers didn’t make any more money, but CEOs certainly did. Why don’t they gear their index to the increase in paychecks for CEOs? That was a whopping 3.9%. Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren (the only Senators who stand up for We the People) are introducing legislation that would give seniors the same increase that CEOs got last year. It has a snowball’s chance in Hell of passing, but they get A for effort.   [Read more…]

Clinton and the New Democrats’ Tired Third Way

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Recently I noted how movements like the Fight for $15 and the insurgent Bernie Sanders campaign have revealed a widespread thirst for an overtly left politics that makes the battle against the billionaire class a central rallying cry. Indeed, Sanders has continued to force Hillary Clinton to tack to the left on multiple issues, and he has had a genuinely transformative impact on the national political discourse by unashamedly bringing democratic socialism to the stage.

This is why Harold Meyerson argues that the Sanders’s campaign represents “the largest specifically left mobilization—and by ‘specifically left’ I mean it demands major changes in the distribution of income and wealth and major reforms to U.S. capitalism—that the nation has seen in at least half a century.”

Last week, Sanders himself defined what such a movement should be based on in a speech in which he defined his version of “Democratic Socialism” by linking his political vision to FDR’s Second Bill of Rights and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s proposition that “true freedom does not occur without economic security”   [Read more…]

Jesse Ramirez: The First Executive Director of the Chicano Federation

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As we sat down to do our interview, Jesse Ramirez opened the conversation saying “I am a product of the Great Depression. We had to put food on the table so we did everything we could to make money”. He had many stories and memories of various events in the period between the 1930s and 1940s.

Jesse was born on April 22, 1926, in Houston, Texas and raised there. During the Depression he and his brother did various things to “put food on the table”. They sold newspapers and shined shoes to earn a few pennies. He sold the Houston Chronicle for three cents. He says the big thrill would be if someone gave you a nickel for the three cent newspaper and told you to keep the change. On Saturday nights they would stay up late preparing the Sunday paper for delivery.   [Read more…]

America’s Same Old Sad Story: Why the White Working Class is Killing Itself

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Last week brought us the stark news that America’s middle-aged white working class is.  Princeton economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case released a report documenting that “The mortality rate for whites 45 to 54 years old with no more than a high school education increased by 134 deaths per 100,000 people from 1999 to 2014.” And strikingly, “rising annual death rates among this group are being driven not by the big killers like heart disease and diabetes but by an epidemic of suicides and afflictions stemming from substance abuse: alcoholic liver disease and overdoses of heroin and prescription opioids.”  

Although researchers were somewhat puzzled by the extremity of this epidemic of nihilism, many observers were quick to note that there was “a more pessimistic outlook among whites about their financial futures” along with a corresponding wave of health issues and “difficulty socializing.”     [Read more…]

Excerpt From Sunshine/Noir II: A Revolution In Urban Planning, Part II

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The Story of How a Small Working-Class Coastal Community Within San Diego Spoiled the Establishment’s Plans and in the Process Created a Revolution in Urban Planning.

While it participated deeply in the negotiations during the remainder of 1974 and into the next year, the Community Planning Group had enough depth to juggle its activism and successfully respond to new construction projects—mainly large, bulky apartments—still coming down the development pipeline. Over this period CPG was able to block the construction of eight five-story high-rise apartments, most of them aimed for the fragile edges of Sunset Cliffs.

With the limited consensus reached on certain issues by the Committee of 12/16, in Spring of 1975 the city published a brand new Precise Plan—complete with a colorful cover. This was the formalization of the earlier Draft Revision and carried more weight, and again, it confirmed the city’s rejection of the worst of the original plan; no mini-Miami Beach, no marina, no high-rise along the coast. Yet, still it had major faults, and activists were disappointed that there hadn’t been more progress between the Draft Revision published in January 1974 and the latest version, put out over a year later.   [Read more…]

A Toast to Hall-of-Fame Coach Lute Olson

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The other day I attended “A Toast to Hall-of-Fame Coach Lute Olson” at the Marine Corps Air Station Miramar Officers’ Club.

The event was put on by Tender Loving Canines Assistance Dogs. I didn’t know much about them but went away feeling good about what they do – and what they do is train service dogs to help heal our sons and daughters who come back from the wars tormented with the symptons of post-traumatic stress disorder. PTSD.

Lute Olson, the retired legendary basketball coach at Arizona, one of my heroes, is a big supporter of what this organization does to transform lives.

And, when it comes to transforming, they honored the right man, because he’s a master transformer.   [Read more…]

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