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For Fletcher, History is the Narrative that Hurts

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By Jim Miller

To the surprise of many over the last couple of weeks, San Diego’s Labor Council, the San Diego Democratic Party, San Diego Democrats for Equality, Progressive San Diego, the Environmental Health and Justice Campaign, and a host of other local progressives have all lined up to endorse David Alvarez for Mayor. Even as the Gonzalez/Forrester/Jacobs/et al camp has pulled out all the stops in their effort to force-feed Fletcher to local progressives, Nathan just hasn’t gone down that well.

As one person who was being courted by Fletcher before the Democratic Central Committee’s endorsement vote reported, an exasperated Fletcher complained to them about having to work so hard to line up votes. I guess his friends on the inside said it was going to be easy.

Unfortunately for Fletcher, he has had to work hard but it hasn’t paid off. And all this has some folks in the “everybody knows” crowd a bit rattled.   [Read more…]

Mel Freilicher Reads from “Encyclopedia of Rebels”

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Wednesday, October 2nd at 7pm at DG Wills Book Store

By Jim Miller

San Diego City Works Press is proud to announce the publication of The Encyclopedia of Rebels by local author and UCSD writing teacher, Mel Freilicher. The book plays with the intersections between history, fiction, memoir, fantasy, and mystery. As Pulitzer Prize winning poet Rae Armantrout puts it, “You could call this both an outrageous comedy and a credible look at the world we live in.”

Mel Freilicher will read from his new book this Wednesday, at 7 PM at D.G. Wills Book Store at 7461 Girard Ave in La Jolla on WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 2nd at 7 pm as part of the San Diego City College International Book Fair.   [Read more…]

Fletcher Versus Alvarez: The Battle for the Soul of San Diego’s Democratic Party

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by Jim Miller

This last week marked the two-year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, a political happening that finally put the issue of economic inequality in the spotlight and started a national discussion about money, class, and political corruption. That movement was largely brought to us by young people, Millennials mostly, whose view of mainstream politics is justifiably jaded.

As Peter Beinart recently pointed out, “Compared to their Reagan-Clinton generation elders, Millennials are entering adulthood in an America where government provides much less economic security. And their economic experience in this newly deregulated America has been horrendous.”

And this experience has been made worse by bankrupt politics that pits what Beinart rightly characterizes as “a procapitalist, anti-bureaucratic Reaganized liberalism” that is “inclined toward market solutions” to everything against a radicalized “right wing populism”:   [Read more…]

Brown’s Betrayal of Schools for Prisons

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By Jim Miller

Finally, there was a measure of good news for schools in California with Proposition 30 creating a budget surplus that had plugged some of the gaping holes that years of budget cuts had made in our state’s public education system. But it didn’t take long for Governor Brown to betray us. Indeed, the Courage Campaign has done a great job in recent weeks taking the Governor to task for seeking to raid the Proposition 30 surplus to fund prison expansion.

That’s right, you heard it: prison expansion. As the Courage Campaign puts it:

Gov. Brown claims that his hands are tied. He claims a court order mandating him to reduce prison size by 10,000 has forced him to spend billions more in taxpayer dollars over the next 5 years. Don’t believe the spin. The Los Angeles Times and Sacramento Bee editorial boards don’t; they’ve ripped apart the Governor’s approach.   [Read more…]

The Labor Council’s Choice: David Alvarez

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By Jim Miller

Last Friday evening, after five grueling hours of candidate interviews and spirited debate, the San Diego-Imperial Counties Labor Council overwhelmingly endorsed David Alvarez for mayor.

This decision came after weeks of intense lobbying on the part of former labor leader Lorena Gonzalez, who, along with other powerful Democratic power brokers and money people were seeking to clear the field of genuinely progressive candidates in order to anoint Nathan Fletcher as the “only choice.”   [Read more…]

Happy Labor Day, Now More than Ever

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By Jim Miller

Today is Labor Day, but how many of us have any idea where the holiday came from or what it celebrates?

The first Labor Day was celebrated on Tuesday, September 5th, 1882 in New York City and was proposed by the Central Labor Union (CLU) at a time when American workers were struggling for basic rights such as the eight-hour day. The CLU moved the “workingman’s holiday” to the first Monday in September in 1883 and urged other unions to celebrate the date as well.

The movement grew throughout the 1880s, along with the American labor movement itself with 23 states passing legislation recognizing Labor Day as a holiday. By 1894 Congress followed suit and Labor Day became a national holiday.

On that date, in 1894, most American workers still did not have an eight-hour day, the right to organize, social security, health care, or even a living wage. Child labor was common and there were no health and safety laws. Indeed, just being a unionist could get you fired or even killed in some quarters.   [Read more…]

The Collected Works of Our Savior Nathan Fletcher, the Magic Democrat

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By Jim Miller

In the aftermath of the Filner resignation, a group of Democratic Party insiders and money people are continuing to run around with their hair on fire trying to anoint Nathan Fletcher as our savior and discourage other truly progressive candidates from entering the field.

Of course this includes folks like Christine Forrester, who runs a marketing consulting firm that connects businesses with hedge fund money, and former Labor Council leader Lorena Gonzalez, who has long been championing her personal friend, the former Assemblyman with an 18% labor voting record over the vociferous objections of many in labor.

Indeed, anyone who has been closely following the inside moves behind the curtain of the Filner scandal knows that the backroom meetings and fundraising efforts designed to put the fix in for Fletcher began simultaneously with the press conferences that kicked off our month-long three ring circus.

Let me be clear, Filner certainly opened the door for them with his bad behavior but they didn’t waste a second rushing in to ensure his quick political demise and Fletcher’s ascendancy. It’s not a conspiracy; it’s just inside game politics and Machiavellian opportunism at its worst by Democratic power brokers and moneyed interests who want to fix the game before any of us get to play.   [Read more…]

Dispatches from the Higher Education Wars: Wins for City College of San Francisco, Outsourcing Opponents, and Adult Education

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By Jim Miller

Last week I outlined the plight of the City College of San Francisco (CCSF) noting that CCSF had become the “Chicago of Higher Education” as the college and their community allies were engaged in a struggle to stop the loss of its accreditation at the hands of a corrupt commission that was driven by a misguided corporate education reform agenda.

The California Federation of Teacher’s (CFT) response to this untenable situation was to file a complaint with the ACCJC noting the commission’s failure to follow state and federal law in a variety of areas while being arbitrarily punitive with their sanctions of CCSF. Predictably, ACCJC dismissed the CFT complaint, which was then sent to the Department of Education (DOE) who oversees the commission.

On August 13th, the DOE responded to CFT’s complaint by concluding that the ACCJC had indeed violated Federal regulations by not adequately representing faculty on their visiting teams, refusing to comply with conflict of interest requirements, failing to clearly indicate the significance of their recommendations with regard to meeting standards, and inconsistently enforcing their “recommendations.” The DOE letter to ACCJC ends by noting that given the fact that ACCJC is itself up for renewal by the DOE, the DOE will conduct a full review of their practices that may include other deficiencies not raised in their preliminary report. Hence, after pulling the accreditation of CCSF the ACCJC itself may now face a similar fate.   [Read more…]

Corporate Education Reform Goes to College: San Francisco is the “Chicago of Higher Education”

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By Jim Miller

This summer few people outside of the Bay Area probably noted what was one of the most important stories about higher education in America: City College of San Francisco (CCSF) is losing its accreditation.

After years of wrangling, the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC), one of the seven regional accreditors in the western United States whose job it is to ensure the quality of higher education programs announced that CCSF was losing its accreditation in July of 2014.

Why should you care? Because ACCJC’s decision had very little to do with the quality of instruction and much more to do with imposing a new business model on community colleges that narrows their mission and opens the door to more privatization in American higher education. And San Francisco is being used as an example to intimidate other colleges to fall in line with ACCJC’s questionable “reform” agenda. Thus, what happened in San Francisco could happen in San Diego.   [Read more…]

Driven to Despair: The Plight of San Diego’s Taxi Drivers and How We Can Help Them in Their Fight for Economic Justice

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By Jim Miller

Last week President Obama sought to turn the nation’s attention toward the fact that the income gap is fraying the U.S. social fabric.  In an interview with the New York Times he noted that “the idea is to promote those things in service of the lives of ordinary Americans getting better” and told reporters that he keeps a framed program from the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in his office to remind him that there was a “massive economic component to that” as well as a civil rights focus.

Sadly, however, while Obama discussed the need to move away from the austerity policies of the Republicans and how fiscal policy might be used to help American workers he didn’t even mention the notion that we could empower workers themselves in their fight for a better life. Indeed, he hasn’t really done much in this regard for his entire presidency, but perhaps we might see a pivot in this direction in the coming weeks.  Surely there’s plenty of work to be done on this front.   [Read more…]

Darkness Drops: Filner’s Political Death Spiral Continues and the Likely Endgame

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The fun never stops in America’s Finest City.

By Jim Miller

Last week, Irene McCormack delivered Filner the political equivalent of a deathblow. As I noted in the wake of the announcement of her case, “In contrast to the first two press conferences which I think did it the wrong way, in the press conference yesterday McCormack and Allred had fewer dramatics and more professionalism and dignity.  I think McCormack deserves to be taken seriously and respected.” And she has been.

Indeed, rather than the “drip, drip, drip” I predicted two weeks ago would “surely force him out or get him recalled”, there has been a deluge.

After McCormack, six other women came out publicly with more accusations of unprofessional and inappropriate if not illegal behavior by the mayor. In the wake of these accusations, the Democratic Party abandoned him, and on Friday he announced that he is going into a treatment program rather than resigning, assuring that this nightmare saga will continue indefinitely.   [Read more…]

The Widening Gyre: The Filner Follies and the Ugly Real Politik

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The “political circus” is in town for a long engagement and it is already clear that we have plenty of clowns lining up to perform in it.

By Jim Miller

Last week, in the wake of the first round of accusations of sexual harassment and Filner’s apology for “not fully respecting” and “intimidating” women I noted that: “Thus, the real winners here are the same old downtown insiders who are busy popping champagne corks and laughing at Filner’s implosion and cheering the welcome help they are getting from unlikely sources.”

Nothing has happened to change this assessment.

Some Filner supporters I have spoken to and who commented on my piece chastised me for being too pessimistic but, sadly, I don’t think I am.   [Read more…]

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