In Under the Perfect Sun, Mike Davis, Kelly Mayhew and I observe that San Diego is a city that “many conservatives extol as a utopia of patriotism and free enterprise.” Indeed it was Nixon’s “lucky city” but, as we note, “San Diego has too frequently been a town wide open to greed but closed to social justice.

Like its Sunbelt siblings—Orange County, Phoenix, and Dallas—it has a long history of weak and venal city halls dominated by powerful groups of capitalist insiders. ‘Private Government’ has long overshadowed public politics.” More recently in Paradise Plundered: Fiscal Crisis and Governance Failure in San Diego, Steve Erie, Vladimir Kogan, and Scott MacKenzie similarly illustrate how San Diego’s political and business elite have done a fantastic job of “using public resources to maximize private profit” with little to no oversight from our “shadow governments.”   [Read more…]

by Jim Miller

San Diego mayoral candidate Carl DeMaio likes to portray himself in the media and in his political propaganda that he is the populist outsider that will save San Diego from itself, an image that could not possibly be more misleading

DeMaio is not just a garden-variety right winger, he is one of the architects of the movement that has pushed the Republican party into becoming a crew of corporate anarchists whose goal it is to radically remake American society into a privatopia, where the public sector serves little function other than as a conduit for public tax dollars into the hands of the moneyed elite. He is San Diego’s robber barons’ best friend.   [Read more…]