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Energy Democracy: Inside Californians’ Game-Changing Plan for Community-Owned Power

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Large utility companies control about 75 percent of the electricity market in California. A hybrid between a public agency and private utility, the new Community Choice program is a model for communities that want greener, cheaper energy.

By Al Weinrub / Yes!

On September 21, Pa Dwe, a 16-year-old student at Oakland’s Street Academy, spoke out against the export of coal through the Port of Oakland to City Council members: “I’m opposed to this coal export because it will make my community in West Oakland sick. I support jobs, but not the kind of jobs that make us sick. There are clean job alternatives, like Community Choice energy, and this will be good for the health of my community. This is my generation; I want to have a healthy life.”
  [Read more…]

Climate Artists Commit ‘Brandalism’ to Expose Corporate Hijacking of COP21

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‘The multinationals responsible for climate change can keep green-washing their destructive business models, but the communities directly impacted by them are silenced.’

By Sarah Lazare / CommonDreams

As the French state cracks down on public protests, a group of artists has devised a creative—and clandestine—way to illustrate public outrage at what they call the “corporate takeover” of the ongoing COP21 United Nations climate talks in Paris.

Naming their campaign “Brandalism,” over 80 artists from 19 countries have plastered the French capital with 600 unauthorized pieces of art taking the form of spoof advertisements to critique the role of multinationals, from AirFrance to Dow Chemical, in the summit.   [Read more…]

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…]

A Higher Calling for Downtown San Diego’s East Village

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By Bill Adams / UrbDeZine

I read an op-ed in the San Diego Union-Tribune that made me want to stand on top of a downtown high-rise and scream . . . YES!!!

The opinion piece was entitled “A higher and better use for downtown,” and was written by Wayne Raffesberger and co-authored by Rob Quigley, Jack Carpenter, Pete Garcia and David Malmuth – individuals who have exceptional knowledge of downtown San Diego’s East Village neighborhood and a promising vision for its future.*

I was compelled to write a lengthy comment to the piece and perhaps I should have just stopped there (in any case, I have regurgitated some of it in writing this piece). But this topic has been an issue that has been sticking in my craw for several years.   [Read more…]

Excerpt From Sunshine/Noir II: From the Border to the Fields

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By Juanita Lopez

It is the year of 2014 and both of my grandparents are very old but alive, though suffering from dementia. I decided to pay them a visit to interview them. Believe it or not, they still live in the same one-bedroom apartment in San Ysidro where they established their U.S. residency in the late 1970s. From their yard, I am able to look at the thousands of tiny houses in Tijuana, where they once lived, dreaming of crossing over for a better opportunity. I look at my dark-skinned grandmother and admire her toothless smile. Her eyes light up every time she sees me. She normally asks me how my brother is doing, and I tell her he’s okay, working like always since he has a baby to take care of now. She smiles and two minutes later asks me the same question. I go over to her kitchen and wash some strawberries that were in her refrigerator. I offer her some after I cut them and sprinkle some sugar on top—my grandmother smiles again and starts telling me about her life, a not-so-sweet story about the times she labored as a farm worker picking strawberries and cutting flowers.   [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 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…]

North Of The Fence: Water Rates, Dead Dolphins and More Mexicans Leaving U.S.

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Water Rate Hikes

On Tuesday, November 17, members of the San Diegans for Fair Water Rates Coalition rallied at the San Diego Civic Concourse Plaza asking the SD City Council to vote against the recycled water unitary rate proposal. They lost. The City Council approved a five-year, 40 percent increase to the price of city drinking water overall and then also approved the recycled water rate with a vote of 7-2, Alvarez and Kersey voting against it.

Imperial Beach

Vince Farnsworth at the San Diego Reader reported three dead dolphins washed up on the shores of Imperial Beach in the past month. Investigations are underway to determine whether their deaths were due to Navy sonar exercises. According to Earthjustice, there are only 323 bottlenose dolphins known to live in California coastal waters.   [Read more…]

The Citizens’ Plan Offers San Diegans a Say in Tourism

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Oh, what a tangled web we weave in San Diego. Tourism tax dollars go into private coffers. Hotel owners snap their fingers and elected officials bow down before them. Our local politicians say and the media convey our most pressing needs as a meeting hall and a place to play football. The mayor fills potholes for TV cameras to make citizens feel better about it all.

The spoilers in all this have been lawsuits. The biggest one of them all is likely coming  to trial shortly after the first of the year. San Diego’s hoteliers have spent millions of tourism tax dollars defending the indefensible. Their attempts to shoot the messenger, both in the courts and in the media seem doomed to fail.

It may sound a little complicated, but there is a way to straighten this mess out.  A proposed initiative that would change the current system rolls out today, endorsed by the League of Conservation Voters, and a host of others to be made public at an upcoming press conference.   [Read more…]

San Diego’s Hidden Homeless

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Homeless women and children undercounted and underserved.

It looks like the issue of homelessness will be getting some airtime during the 2016 election season in San Diego. That should be good news for anyone who is deeply concerned about homelessness in the region. Problem is that some candidates might use the issue to put forth solutions, without taking the time to understand the problem.

By feeding the electorate with misinformation that plays into their eagerness for a quick and easy fix to the city’s growing homeless situation, they will not only fail to solve the problem, they will exacerbate it.

Take a recent plan offered by San Diego City Attorney candidate, Robert P. Hickey, that he calls his “Community Care Plan”. Why would the City Attorney be making homelessness a cornerstone to his campaign?   [Read more…]

Nuclear Shutdown News – October 2015

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By Michael Steinberg / Black Rain Press

Nuclear Shutdown News chronicles the decline of the nuclear power industry in the US and beyond, and highlights the efforts of those who are working to create a nuclear free future.

This October I returned to the place I come from, southeast Connecticut on Long Island Sound, off the Atlantic Ocean. The region promotes and prides itself as “The Submarine Capital of the World.”

The General Dynamics Electric Boat Company in Groton, CT, has built almost all the nation’s nuclear powered submarines. These include each and every of the Trident subs, which along with nuclear missiles and bombs constitute the US “strategic forces.”

Each Trident carries nuclear missiles, each one consisting of multiple warheads that can be independently targeted.

Thus Tridents are submersible Armageddons.   [Read more…]

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