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Beyond the “Conservative Entertainment Complex”

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In the weeks following the election, David Frum made waves by explaining the shock in conservative circles over Romney’s loss with a bit of interesting media criticism: “Republicans have been fleeced and exploited and lied to by a conservative entertainment complex.”

Of course, those of us with a historical memory longer than five minutes found it amusing to hear this from Frum, the author of George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech. Indeed, Frum was one of the central ideologues promulgating lies aboutIraqand demonizing dissent as unpatriotic. I guess it takes one to know one.

Still, despite the bitter irony of Frum playing the role of truth-teller, he is on to something.   [Read more…]

Christmas on Earth? Try Buying Nothing

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Here we go again: the day after Black Friday was filled with the now all-too-familiar news of shopping mayhem.

There was the man who threatened to stab his fellow shoppers for pushing his kids outside a Sacramento K-mart, the melee of frenzied Georgia shoppers mauling each other to get at a stack of cell phones in a Walmart, the trampling that followed after a man brandished a gun in a line outside a Sears in Texas, the gang fight in a Michigan mall, arrests of hysterical consumers in Florida, the vicious brawling over lingerie, etc. etc.

This ritual has come to define us as much or more than Thanksgiving.   [Read more…]

Giving Thanks in San Diego

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It’s Thanksgiving week and lots of progressives are still feeling giddy about the near clean sweep in the recent election. But, I’m going to take a break from politics this time and focus on what we have to be grateful for here in San Diego other than our new political landscape. Despite the historically problematic origins of the Thanksgiving holiday, it never hurts to take stock. So here’s a random list of some cherished things ranging from the profligate to the profound…   [Read more…]

End Shadow Government in San Diego and California: Elect Bob Filner and Frustrate Charles Munger and Company

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If you can get past the multi-million dollar glut of garbage that Carl DeMaio and his sleazy allies are throwing at Bob Filner in the closing days of the election, the choice San Diegans face is a simple one: do you want the same old moneyed interests running San Diego or do you want to take a step toward a more democratic city government that listens to the voices of ordinary citizens more than to the pleas of the plutocrats?

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Hey Obama Democrats, Don’t Get Fooled Again: DeMaio and His Big Money Friends Are Out to Screw San Diego and Ruin California

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 “We have a conservative movement that has learned, over the decades, to mimic many of the characteristics of its enemies.”  ~ Thomas Frank

During the run-up to the June primary Carl DeMaio used a quote from one of my OB Rag columns in a mailer attacking Nathan Fletcher that implied the Rag’s support for his candidacy.  My response was a column, “Carl DeMaio is a Dangerous, Mean-Spirited Liar and Other Tales of Fear and Loathing in San Diego” where I observed:

As Frank Gormlie noted in an OB Rag piece last Saturday, Carl DeMaio used a pull quote from one of my OB Rag columns describing Nathan Fletcher as a “Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing” . . . What is not at all surprising here is that DeMaio uses my piece and the OB Rag logo out of context, without permission, implying our endorsement of him.  That kind of sleazy, unethical behavior is his raison d’etre.  .

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Connecting More Dots Between Propositions 30, 32, and 38

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The Munger Muddle, Democrats for Education Reform, Obama, and the Koch Brothers et al Weave a Tangled Web that Might Just Kill Our Children’s Future (if we let it)

In a recent column, I outlined the connections between the advocates and funders of Proposition 32 and opponents of Proposition 30, noting the central role of Proposition 38 backer Molly Munger’s brother, Charles Munger, who has donated over $20 million of his own money to a campaign fund to gut unions and defund education.  Charles’s main allies in this effort, as I pointed out in that column, are also big supporters of the privatization of education and other forms of profiteering at the expense of public schools.

It is clear that the incestuous political relationship between the Mungers is mutually beneficial in the short term and that Molly had hoped to kill Prop 30 with negative ads while passing her own initiative, and perhaps she just doesn’t mind if the political voice of teachers’ unions is silenced as collateral damage.

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Note to Obama: Ditch Simpson-Bowles for FDR

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In the aftermath of the spectacular shellacking that Mitt Romney gave the President in the first debate, there was much handwringing in liberal circles. Critics on the left side of the spectrum couldn’t believe how Mr. Obama let Romney prevaricate so boldly and wildly as he hammered away at the President’s record while simultaneously and stunningly repackaging himself as a centrist unrecognizable to those of us who were paying attention to Mitt’s rightward tilt during the primary season and the obvious implications of his plutocratic agenda.

But hey, it worked! Now the Rombot is neck and neck with the face of hope in the polls and progressives have been forced to ponder the real possibility of a Romney/Ryan victory, a horror that had seemed to be getting less and less likely until Obama showed up and played the listless corporate Democratic technocrat with low T to Romney’s perky plutocrat on a crazy Viagra binge. The result: perky plutocracy won and now it’s nervous time even after Joe Biden’s frantic full court press attack on Paul Ryan in the Vice Presidential debate.

While there is certainly much to be worried about, it has less to do with style and more to do with Obama’s core vision. On this note, the most important and insightful analysis came before the first debate not after it. Paul Krugman in “The Real Referendum” presciently noted that the President and other prominent Democrats like Bill Clinton have become smitten with referencing their fondness for the timeless wisdom of the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction plan.   [Read more…]

Connecting the Dots Between Props 30 and 32: What’s the Union Busters’ Real Agenda for Education?

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Last week in the New York Times Adam Nagourney noted in his article on Proposition 32, “California Is Latest Stage in the Battle Over Unions,” that:

By design or not — and some union officials said they believed it was by design — the fight has forced unions to divert money from what had been their top priority: winning approval of an initiative by Gov. Jerry Brown to pass temporary tax increases to head off nearly $6 billion in new cuts in state spending.

“Labor has to stop everything it is doing to defend against this,” said Peter Dreier, the director of the Urban and Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College. “It’s pretty effective in forcing the unions to spend a lot of their resources to stop this from passing.”   [Read more…]

DeMaio & Manchester: San Diego’s Tourist Plantation Lords?

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As Doug Porter noted here last week, the Center on Policy Initiatives (CPI) released a new report on poverty, earnings, and income in San Diego County that revealed the sad fact that  “more than a third of San Diego County’s population” lives “in economic hardship.”  Nearly one out of five children in our city live in poverty with 16% of women, 21% of Latinos and 23% of African Americans joining them—and we are losing ground “as the quality of jobs created by major industries in the region failed to keep pace with the cost of living.”

Median income is falling and the household income for all races and ethnicities decreased here in San Diego.  About 17% of us don’t have health insurance, three out of five renters are paying more than they can afford, the middle class is getting leaner, and poverty and income inequality have been on the rise over the last five years.   [Read more…]

The Chicago Teachers Union Versus the New Democrats, the Same Old Republicans, and the Corporate Media

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 After nearly twenty years of ‘reform’, the schools of Chicago remain among the lowest performing in the nation.

A funny thing happened on the way to labor’s extinction: the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) staged one of the most daring and important strikes in recent memory. As Chris Hedges put it during his Democracy Now interview last week  “the teachers’ strike in Chicago is arguably one of the most important labor actions in probably decades.”  And in the midst of this struggle, most of the corporate media around the country have decried the horrible greedy teachers from their editorial pages and assured readers that they were on the side of the children rather than the teachers.

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Slouching Toward San Diego to Be Born: Carl DeMaio, Spawn of the Wrecking Crew

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It’s the week after Labor Day and the Carl DeMaio attack machine is in full force, with SuperPac-funded ads in the works designed to keep pounding away at Bob Filner while DeMaio furiously tries to repackage himself as someone palatable to moderate Democrats and Independents.  This will involve things like lying to San Diegans about his environmental record, spending big money to woo Latino voters, and hoping that some local Democrats are terminally stupid enough to buy his “independent” populist reformer act.   While I have written extensively about DeMaio’s right wing think tank pedigree, it never hurts to revive the historical record, particularly when we can count on the local news to fail on all counts in this regard.

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No More ‘Wisconsin’ in the West: Why We Must Defeat Proposition 32

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 It’s Citizens United on Steroids, a Bill of Rights for Billionaires

Last week, I addressed how the Governor’s tax measure was needed to stop the cuts to education and vital public services.  The passage of Proposition 30 would indeed help California begin to turn the corner and finally stop the hemorrhaging of our education system.  But where the passage of Proposition 30 would bring hope, the passage of Proposition 32, on the other hand, would kill it.

Proposition 32, the Special Exemptions Act, is a corporate power grab that would totally eliminate unions’ ability to take part in politics while leaving the rich, corporate special interests, and Super PACs untouched.  It is Citizens United on Steroids, a Bill of Rights for Billionaires that would permanently eliminate working peoples’ voices from California politics.  At present, corporate interests already outspend unions by nearly 15-1.  What Proposition 32 would do is transform the political contest in California, where the privileged are already playing with a stacked deck, into a hopelessly rigged game.   [Read more…]

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