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The Pope Makes the Case for Climate Change and Helping the Poor

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By John Lawrence

The Pope is visiting the US this week to make the case that we should take climate change seriously and start doing something about it. He is really making the case that we should change our paradigm from one of individual self-fulfillment to one of “we’re all in this together,” from individual salvation to collective salvation of our earthly home. This has far-reaching implications. We need to be concerned about what’s happening to the earth as a whole, to humanity as a whole, and not just to our own family, town, state, country.

The Pope doesn’t mince words. Far from being the conservative head of a 2000 year old bureaucracy, he is using his moral megaphone and authority to speak out on the major problems of our day – global warming and capitalism – and the two are interrelated. You can’t have the entire sum of people on the planet involved with saving the planet from runaway climate change without getting involved with the collective plight of all those people in their daily lives. The Pope is putting the emphasis and focus on the plight of the poor, which is really what Jesus was all about. Finally.   [Read more…]

GOP Debate: More Whoppers Than Burger King

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By Doug Porter

When there’s a stage full of candidates from a party with a tenuous connection to reality, there’s bound to be soooo many ‘misstatements’ to chose from. I’ve winnowed it down to what I thought were the two biggest: Carly Fiorina’s Planned Parenthood utterances and The Donald’s validation of an anti-vaxxer talking point… 

I originally thought about doing a running fact check on Wednesday’s CNN debate featuring their top 10 (plus 1) Republican candidates. But with two hours and forty-five minutes to digest, I realized it would be a fool’s errand.  Then it occurred to me that the act of watching CNN for anything longer than a minute or two was, in itself, a fool’s errand. Especially on a day when the weather was actually nice.

So I resolved to get up extra early to do my due diligence on the debate. This wrap-up took a while to write because I felt like I needed a shower afterwards. And I just skipped the Junior Varsity debate. I hear Trump won that one, too, despite not being on the stage.   [Read more…]

GOP Candidate Proposes Abolishing the National Labor Relations Board

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By Doug Porter

Republican Scott Walker’s idea for turning around his diminishing poll numbers is to go big with his anti-union cred.

At a speech in Los Vegas, the Wisconsin Governor proposed scrapping the National Labor Relations Board, making right-to-work the default national standard for workplaces, eliminating public employee unions, restricting automatic withdrawal of dues, and forbidding union organizers to access employees personal information.  

In other words, he’s declared war. In the perfect world of Scott Walker, the US economy as far as employees are concerned would completely revert to the 1880’s. Yes, indeedy, get your beggars cups ready to catch whatever crumbs fall off the corporate tables.   [Read more…]

With Victories From Coast to Coast, Fight for $15 Has Always Been About More Than a Paycheck

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By Doug Porter

I went downtown on Thursday for a media event inspired by the Fight for Fifteen movement. Representatives from unions, community and faith groups gathered outside City Hall to hail recent victories and rededicate themselves to continue the campaign.

In recent weeks the country’s largest county government (Los Angeles County) and one of the biggest public university systems in the U.S. (University of California) raised the minimum wage to $15 an hour. As fast food workers in New York were celebrating a win, Gov. Andrew Cuomo stood beside Vice President Joe Biden proposing $15 an hour legislation including an additional 3 million workers in other industries.  

This news is bittersweet for San Diego activists. They held aloft signs with quotes from mayors of other cities around California who’ve supported successful drives to increase the minimum wage, along with a sign quoting Mayor Kevin Faulconer’s excuse for opposing a much more modest increase.   [Read more…]

Escondido Can’t Afford the Safari Highlands Ranch Development

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By Don Greene / Escondido Democrats

In 2012, after a number of years in planning and design, the residents of Escondido approved an update to our city’s General Plan. The General Plan is the guide to how the community wants to see our city grow. Included within the General Plan are different “elements” which address a variety of different yet related aspects of how we will grow our city. One of these elements governs land use. 

The Land Use Element of the General Plan addresses allowable land uses and the specific zonings. It also addresses a number of areas within the city that either will or could be developed for commercial, residential and multi-purpose use. Included in the Land Use Element are also “Land Use and Community Form Goals and Policies.” These set the tone and feel for all the future development within the city.    [Read more…]

Back to Homeless and Hopeless in San Diego

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By Jeeni Criscenzo

A week ago, I was sitting in the Denny’s across the street from Howard Johnsons in Chula Vista, waiting for Tracy (name changed), an Army veteran Amikas had been assisting for almost a year. The good news was that Amikas, a non-profit that I started five years ago to help homeless women and children, was going to cover the next five days at the hotel for Tracy and her three children. But I wasn’t looking forward to this conversation – where this family would go after those five days was anybody’s guess.

This situation was all the more frustrating because Amikas had helped Tracy to get into permanent supportive housing six months earlier. The system had worked.   [Read more…]

California Lawmakers Seek Local Oversight of Downtown Planning

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Murtaza H. Baxamusa, Ph.D., AICP / San Diego UrbDeZine

“Downtown is for people” wrote legendary urban planner Jane Jacobs in 1958, in response to building-centric redevelopment that was a byproduct of politics and economics seeking to rebuild cities across America. During her lifetime, she advocated for citizens to decide what end results they wanted, pioneering concepts like “social capital,” and advocating for planners to steer the rebuilding machinery to serve the community.

Yet, even today, downtown San Diego is being built as a collection of projects, with an approval process that consistently favors developers. Today, the large-block redevelopment is back in full force. The older, affordable housing stock is being demolished, and replaced with luxury high-rises. Economic development agreements are benefiting projects that do not pay living wages to the workforce. And taxpayers across the city are subsiding the mitigation of environmental impacts of downtown projects.   [Read more…]

Have You No Shame, Mr. Caruso? Carlsbad Residents are Not ‘Corporate Interests’

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The Strawberry Fields Mall marketing campaign heats up

By Richard Riehl / The Riehl World

When my wife and I arrived at Alga Norte Park last week to be among the first to sign the referendum to let us vote on the city Council’s decision to allow a developer to build a shopping center on the Hedionda Lagoon, we found two tables there, the first set up to dissuade those of us headed for the referendum table nearby.

The folks supporting the Caruso development were pleasant enough, inviting us to hear their side of the story. But having already been duped into signing a petition to “save the Strawberry Fields,” only to learn we’d been misled, we headed straight for the referendum table a few yards away.   [Read more…]

Happy Labor Day? The Jury is Out

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By Jim Miller

Toward the end of June, as many liberals were cheering the Supreme Court’s unexpectedly nonpartisan legalization of same-sex marriage and its equally surprising upholding of the Affordable Care Act, they missed the signal of some potentially very bad news to come this fall.

Indeed, while it was fun to see the Republicans being frustrated by a high court of their own making, that very same court reserved the right to bring some serious pain to progressives for the long term by agreeing to hear Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association in its next session.   [Read more…]

Labor Day 2015: Stand Together and Fight Back

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By Senator Bernie Sanders / Daily Kos

Labor Day is a time for honoring the working people of this country. It is also a time to celebrate the accomplishments of the activists and organizers who fought for the 40-hour work week, occupational safety, minimum-wage law, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and affordable housing. These working people, and their unions, resisted the oligarchs of their day, fought for a more responsive democracy, and built the middle class.

Today we can – and we must – follow their example. It’s time to rebuild the crumbling middle class of our country and make certain that every working person in the United States of America has a chance at a decent life.

Against overwhelming odds, the men and women of the labor movement changed society for the better. If you’ve ever enjoyed a paid vacation, a sick day or a pension, they are the people to thank. And if you don’t have those benefits on your job today, they are the people who can help you get them.   [Read more…]

Labor Day 2028

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By Robert Reich / Robert Reich Blog

In 1928, famed British economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that technology would advance so far in a hundred years — by 2028 — that it will replace all work, and no one will need to worry about making money.

“For the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem — how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.”

We still have thirteen years to go before we reach Keynes’ prophetic year, but we’re not exactly on the way to it. Americans are working harder than ever.   [Read more…]

The Economy of the Future-Economic Democracy

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By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / Popular Resistance

This Labor Day weekend rather than looking at the history and current struggles of workers, we look to the future and imagine what will work be like in 2025 or 2050. What will the overall economy look like? What is our vision for an economy that works for the people?

The Future of Work

There are some major trends that indicate we are in the midst of a radical transformation of what work means and how people will have income.

The most significant trend involves robotics, artificial intelligence and software that will do most current jobs. The research firm Gartner predicts that “one in three jobs will be converted to software, robots and smart machines by 2025.”Oxford University researchers estimate that 47 percent of U.S. jobs could be automated by 2033.  Already the official unemployment rate hides the fact only 63% of working-age adults are actually working.   [Read more…]

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