San Diego Free Press

Grassroots News & Progressive Views

You are here: Home / Archives for Columns

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…]

The Starting Line – Sparked by Highway Deaths, Bike Riders Gathering in Balboa Park to Press City on Safety Issues

by

July 17, 2012 – In the wake of seven cycling deaths during the past week in Southern California, including two San Diegans, local bikers are gathering on July 25th in Balboa Park to call attention to local conditions that make biking hazardous. Cyclists Theodore Jones and Angel Bojorquez, who were killed in collisions with vehicles in La Jolla and Rancho Santa Fe respectively, will be remembered at the 4pm gathering by the Balboa Park fountain. Cyclists will chalk outlines of bodies on adjacent sidewalks until 4:30 p.m. and then ride to City Hall.

This protest comes after an earlier event back in April, triggered by the deaths of cyclists David Ortiz and Chuck Gilbreth. Organizers want the city to answer and be held accountable for what they say are flawed roadway design and high speed limits. A Facebook page announcing the protest says the message is: “The people who are dying on our streets are not inexperienced or reckless bicyclists, they are careful, experienced riders who are dying from no fault of their own and we demand immediate action toward to goal of safer roads for all users”.  Cyclists are being encouraged to bring bells & whistles “so the City knows we are there”.
  [Read more…]

You Can’t Outsource the Real Work – Living Simply

by

Recently, I had the great pleasure of visiting a Buddhist monastery to do a walking meditation on a luminous summer morning. It was a beautiful experience but what struck me afterward was how quickly even many of those bent on being here now reached for their cell phones to check their text messages or play Angry Birds. As charmingly ironic as this is, it is also a perfect manifestation of what most ails us. We just can’t stop working/amusing ourselves to death.

Not too long after my encounter with the texting Buddhists, I came upon an illustrative article in the Travel section of the New York Times entitled “Call Waiting: ‘It’s Me, Vacation’: Can’t Let Go? Eight Rules for Getting the Most Out of Your Time Off” by Matt Richtel. Richtel’s article starts with the story of a failed vacation that left him “exhausted, defeated, and irritable” rather than refreshed and at peace. He then turns to the wisdom of neuroscientists, behavior experts, and business executives to learn that “letting go” is something you have to “practice on a daily basis.”   [Read more…]

The Starting Line – Food Fight! Farm Bill Leaves People Hungry, Animals Hurting

by

July 16, 2012 –The House Agriculture Committee approved legislation late last week that will cut $35 billion from the federal food and nutrition budget, about $16.5 billion of which come from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — more commonly known as SNAP or food stamps. The cuts work by eliminating “categorical eligibility,” which provides assistance to families whose assets or income put them slightly above the technical line for SNAP eligibility. Repealing categorical eligibility means that between two and three million Americans will lose access to food stamps and roughly 280,000 children will drop out of their automatic enrollment in the free lunch program at school. SNAP assistance saved five million American from poverty in 2010 and halved the number of children in poverty in 2011.

Bowing to pressure from agribusiness combines, the House Agriculture Committee also approved an amendment that will deny states the ability to regulate any farm product, overturning animal welfare, food safety and environmental laws related to any farm product in all 50 states. The midnight vote, at the end of a marathon debate on the five year agriculture measure, would block California’s ban on the sale and production of foie gras, and a voter approved measure requiring that caged veal calves, breeding sows and laying chickens should be able to stand up, lie down, turn around and freely extend their limbs. Also gone will be state laws that limit pesticide use on fruits and vegetables.   [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…]

The Starting Line – UT-San Diego Derides Balboa Park Plan Opposition as “Idiotic”; LAPD Bust Up Occupy Artwalk Artists

by

The dark lords of Mission Valley know what’s best for us…. Our daily newspaper says that opponents of the Jacobs/Saunders plan for Balboa Park are being “idiotic”.  The paper featured an editorial yesterday entitled “Idiotic, Let Us Count the Ways”.  The Editorial Board pasted that label on Councilwoman Sherri Lightner and Congressman/Mayoral candidate Bob Filner, D-San Diego, among others, for their opposition to the current arrangement. Questions about the process involved in approving the plan, its legality and its shaky financial assumptions, apparently weren’t worth considering by the UT’s opinion makers in Mission Valley as they pursued an agenda that is, at its core, anti-democratic and plutocratic in nature.

Opposition in the community was deep and widespread, with comments about the project running as high as 25 to 1 against.  Are all those people idiots? There was considerable frustration and anger sparked by the perception that opponents were simply being ignored at every step of the way. It’s not surprising that everyday people started to feel like this scenario was simply a show designed to legitimize the City’s special relationship with a Very Wealthy Individual. Passions ran high, and as our reporter Andy Cohen tried to point out, some individuals –on both sides of this issue– may have crossed the line in terms of expressing their disagreement in polite terms.  The fact is that hardly anybody disagrees with the kernel of truth at the center of this debate—that cars need to be removed from the core of Balboa Park. The question was (and is), how do we get there?

The UT-San Diego editorial made it perfectly clear that citizen input will be derided and disparaged in these sorts of instances. Good luck to anybody who dares oppose their grand visions for a shiny new stadium downtown or publisher Doug Manchester’s plans for mega development along the San Diego river—if they called people idiotic for speaking out against the Balboa Park plan, lord only knows what words they’ll come up with for opponents of their own pet projects.   [Read more…]

Field of View: Building the Second San Salvador

by

There’s more than airport construction happening along Harbor Drive. The San Diego Maritime Museum, together with the Port and City of San Diego, are building a replica of the San Salvador—the flagship vessel of Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo as he explored the west coast. The full-sized ship, which will be fully functional and historically accurate, is slated for completion by November 2013. It is an all-volunteer project.   [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…]

The Starting Line — Internet Freedom Under Attack Again; Congressman Seeks to Avoid Public Scrutiny

by

July 12, 2012- Congressman Lamar Smith, who hails from the west hills of Texas, is trying to push yet another bill through the House that will ‘tame the internet’.  Smith is trying to pass it without any substantive debate or scrutiny, just as he tried with the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), the bill that died on the vine earlier this year after 100,000 webs sites went dark for a day in protest.

The Intellectual Property Attache Act, will create the position of Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property who will see to it that all US trade negotiations and discussions advance SOPA-like provisions in foreign law. This clever maneuver is one way that he and his Hollywood masters can get past the fact that SOPA like measures are unpopular by getting other countries to impose them as part of trade agreements and then agree to “harmonize” these provisions by making the part of U.S. law.   [Read more…]

“Lucy in the Sky” by Another John

by

I recently took a writing workshop at the Ink Spot called “How to be Funny Even if You’re Not” led by John Vorhaus, a man who is pretty funny which I think helps if you want to show somebody how to be funny.

And he’s been funny a long time, working in the television industry both here and abroad. He once recruited and trained writers for Bulgaria’s adaptation of Married… with Children which to me, for some reason, is funny in and of itself – as I try to picture a family as dysfunctional as the Bundys speaking and doing pratfalls with a Slavic flavor.

John’s got a book out that I haven’t bought yet but I’m about to amazon it. He’s actually got several books out but this one, “Lucy in the Sky,” intrigues me, particularly, since I was in an evolutionary state of being when Sir Paul and John gave us Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.

Reading a few words John sent me about his book, I picture myself in a boat on a river, with tangerine trees and marmalade skies. Somebody calls me, I answer quite slowly, a girl with kaleidoscope eyes and I can visualize John’s coming-of-age tale set in Milwaukee, in 1969, when I was thirty-one getting out of a marriage that was way over and done, so glad that I hadn’t murdered that woman whom I once thought of as The One.   [Read more…]

The Starting Line: Will Bridgepoint’s House of Cards Collapse? And Will San Diego Be Left Holding the Bag?

by

July 11, 2012- One of San Diego’s largest employers is headed for financial and legal  troubles that could have a serious impact on the region. Bridgepoint Education took a bath in the stock market Monday, losing one third of its value and continuing downward on Tuesday. Over the past year the company’s stock price has dropped by more than 50%. This week’s sharp drop in value at the stock exchange happened after its flagship school, Ashford University, was denied accreditation by the Western Association of Schools. The upshot of this ruling is that the company will need to relocate hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of employees out of the San Diego region.

The for profit education company depends on the status of the Ashford campus to give it credibility with its on-line students, who make up 99% of its enrollment, and the financial organizations that loan them money for tuition. Standing in the way of certification is Bridgepoint’s drop out rate; of the nearly quarter million students enrolled over the past four years (2007-2011), 127,879 withdrew from the school. Also troubling for the Western Association was the fact that the school spends 31% of its operating costs on recruitment, well above the amount it spends on actual instruction or student services like job counseling. Just 22% of Ashford students graduate; the actual campus in Iowa has a mere 1,000 students taking classes, 85,000 are studying online.   [Read more…]

©2010-2017 SanDiegoFreePress.org

Code is Poetry