Michael Mills Buys Complex of Studios on Voltaire – Notifies Tenants of 20% Rent Raise
The largest landowner – landlord in Ocean Beach, Michael Mills, just purchased a complex of 10 studios on Voltaire Street – and immediately notified the tenants of a rent raise.
Mills can now add this property to his OB empire – an empire that the OB Rag has been chronicling – which we calculate at 241 units within Ocean Beach – not including this most recent purchase. [Read more…]
By Mark Sumner / Daily Kos
Oil and natural gas aren’t just a part of Russia’s economy, they are the economy. Up until 2014, oil accounted for 50 percent of revenue going into the budget. As long as oil and gas prices were high, Putin was able to float along, using oil profits to prop up the Russian economy and his own popularity. But as oil and gas fell, so did Putin’s ability to pretend that his policies were bringing improvement. Since 2014, the value of the ruble has plunged to a third of its former value against the dollar.
The reason is the same as the reason the coal industry is going under: fracking. Fracking for oil and natural gas has filled the US market to overflowing. It’s the reason that gas is $2 at the pump, the reason that the largest coal companies in the world are bankrupt, and the reason that over 160 oil companies have also gone bankrupt this year. Prices are so low, companies and countries that depend on fossil fuels for revenue are feeling a huge squeeze. [Read more…]
By Mic Porte
I wanna be a 501(c)3
I have a worthy cause and I wanna be
The CEO of my favorite charity
A big fat salary with vague accountability
Endorsed by all my friends with their administrative abilities [Read more…]
By Lawrence A. Herzog
One of the disturbing trends in this turbulent season of national electoral politics was the explosion of uncertainty about information and truth in reporting. The talking points and tweets often wandered so far from actual facts, they left behind an exhausted citizenry. We are still recovering.
This “post-fact” world has brought the nation to an odd juncture. Fake news stories, Internet hacking, and websites that pump out false information remain a point of contention.
Has this “post-fact” epidemic trickled down to our local elections? [Read more…]
By Linda Hutchison / head wind journal
A few years ago, in between jobs, I started hanging out at nearby Mission Bay during the day when I needed a break from my computer. I’d take a beach chair or blanket, a sandwich, a notepad and pen and sit under a tree for an hour or two. Peaceful, balmy, fewer distractions than at the oceanfront beach (also nearby). If people came along, they kept a respectful distance, cycling or strolling by on the path, arranging a lunch picnic at one of the many tables. Kayakers glided by on the glistening water.
I began to notice that several large RVs ringed the outer edges of the parking lot. How cool, I thought. What a great idea. Roll on down for the day. Bring kids or grandkids and your own kitchen. Play ball, fix whatever you want to eat whenever. Memories of my in-laws parking their RV at Disneyland so we could duck in out of the heat and then head back into the maddening crowds.
Around that same time, I also began to notice an old green and rusty orange van parked on my street. Specifically, I noticed the owner, craggily dark and handsome, in a seedy-around-the -edges way. The exact type that made my heart leap 20 years earlier. What caught my eye one day was him dragging clothing and bedding from a neighboring house to his van. (Since I was out of work I had more time to look out my window.) [Read more…]
By Mikey Knab, Meza Family Restaurant Group
On National Boss Day each October 17, some employees show up to the office with an extra coffee, or flowers, or maybe a “#1 Boss” mug, hoping to build a little extra good will with management. Others simply avoid the marking on the calendar and hope nobody notices. It’s difficult to deny that National Boss Day can be a holiday that’s observed out of obligation.
As Director of Operations at Meza Family Restaurant Group, you may expect that I’m hoping for a little extra appreciation from my staff at Ponce’s Mexican Restaurant and Rocio’s. But that’s not how I’m celebrating. This year, I’m turning the holiday upside down and marking Monday, October 17, as the day to honor bosses in San Diego who truly live up to the “#1 Boss” name. [Read more…]
By Donald Cohen / Capital & Main
Last Wednesday was a big day for In the Public Interest. We released one of our longest and most wide-ranging reports, How Privatization Is Increasing Inequality.
The report describes how the privatization of public goods and services disproportionately impacts poor individuals and families, and people of color. It pulls together issues that at a glance appear unrelated—like private prisons, charter schools and privatized water—to show that handing control of such things as education and infrastructure to the private sector is fueling an increasingly unequal society.
We found five dynamics that are exacerbating America’s historic inequality: [Read more…]
Many OBceans struggle long and hard to earn the financial resources to purchase their one house, condo or apartment. Many never obtain enough to make the plunge into buying property in Ocean Beach. It is so expensive to buy a home here at the coast, that it’s prohibitive for most.
Not Michael Mills, the notorious slumlord of Ocean Beach. Mills has a virtual empire in OB. He and his trusts own 241 homes, condos and apartments in the Ocean Beach area.
Imagine that. Two-hundred and forty-one units. And many of these units are within multi-unit apartments. [Read more…]
By Frank Henry-Reyes and James Anderson
Watching Senator Elizabeth Warren grill the chief executive of Wells Fargo, John Stumpf, as he testified before the Senate Banking Committee last week was a little satisfying, sure, but it hardly suffices in terms of addressing what is really at issue.
As has been well documented, Wells Fargo agreed to a $185 million settlement with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in early September when it came to light that the bank’s employees had for several years created fake bank accounts to pad sales numbers, which resulted in customers nationwide paying overdraft and late fees on credit cards and accounts they did not even know they had. [Read more…]
This is Part 2 of Buddhist Economics: Economics As If People Mattered.
The Buddhist approach is that consumption is merely a means to human well-being. The aim should be to attain a maximum of well-being with a minimum of consumption. It would also be considered salutary to produce much of what is needed for human well-being by one’s own hands rather than being a total participant in the cash economy. This is anathema to capitalist economists and bankers who thrive on interest from bank loans in order that consumers can purchase more stuff on borrowed money and go into more debt.
Without debt based economics, Wall Street would be out of business and GDP would be lowered because GDP only measures cash transactions not self-subsistent production. Consumption represents 70% of US GDP. Western economics considers consumption to be the end all of economic activity. Buddhist economics considers economic activity to be that which is necessary for liberation of the spirit and for the provision of the right amount of goods and services without gorging on them. [Read more…]
In Buddhist economics there is the concept of “right livelihood.” Work is considered an essential component of human life just as play and leisure. Work of a craftsmanlike nature, work which is satisfying–not work that is stultifying, of an assembly-line nature. Work that nourishes the soul; this kind of work results in right livelihood.
By the same token, there is “right consumption.” This is as contrasted with the unlimited consumption advanced Western societies and pushed on their citizens through advertising and other means in order to have economic “growth” and to increase GDP. [Read more…]
Last year my Labor Day column, “Happy Labor Day?: The Jury is Out,” began by starkly pondering the potentially devastating effects a bad Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association ruling at the Supreme Court might have had not just on public sector unions but on the labor movement as a whole. Later, in the same column, I looked more hopefully at the potential for organizing contingent workers, like those involved in the Fight for $15 movement.
The twelve months that followed that column brought good news for labor on multiple fronts. First, with the long, strange journey of the Friedrichs case that came to the Supreme Court with a good chance of passing before everything was turned upside down by Justice Scalia’s death, a 4-4 split decision that was a victory for unions, and finally the Court’s refusal to rehear the case. [Read more…]
