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Escondido Charter Proposal Offers Few Benefits, Many Hazards

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By Rick Moore /Escondido Democratic Club

City charters offer few benefits and many hazards, according to Kyle Krahel-Frolander, who spoke to Escondido Democrats at their March 2014 meeting. Krahel-Frolander is a Community Outreach Coordinator for Smart Cities Prevail, a California non-profit that provides information, research and education on how prevailing wage standards on public construction projects benefit taxpayers, local governments and working families.

Krahel-Frolander, who hails from Oceanside and worked as an aide to Council member Esther Sanchez when that city changed to charter status, monitors charter city proposals in Southern California.

Most California cities are created under state law and are known as “general law” cities. About one-third of California cities, including most larger cities, switched to charter city status in the past, when there were significant differences between the powers granted to charter cities.   [Read more…]

Overcoming Environmental Discrimination in San Diego’s Barrio Logan

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Video by Journey to Planet Earth
Intro by Brent E. Beltrán

With the battle looming over the future of Barrio Logan, due to Maritime Industry’s refusal to accept the Barrio Logan Community Plan update, I feel it is necessary to give voters of the city of San Diego a little history of Barrio Logan and highlight the issues residents face. In June, eligible San Diego voters will go to the polls to vote on wether to approve the community plan or reject it.

Over the next few weeks I will post a video on Sundays that highlights the community of Barrio Logan and the beauty within San Diego’s most historic barrio.

This week’s video, Future Conditional: Overcoming Environmental Discrimination in San Diego’s Barrio Logan, is narrated by actor Matt Damon and documents the challenges Barrio Logan residents face when trying to overcome environmental discrimination in their community.   [Read more…]

Balboa Park 2015 – What Went Wrong?

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By David Lundin

Plans for the Balboa Park Centennial in 2015 are non-existent. The Official Centennial management entity, Balboa Park Celebration, Inc. [“BPCI”], is closing its doors and transferring all its powers and obligations to the City.

More than three million dollars in public funds and donations have been spent on inflated salaries, consultant’s fees, payments to Board member’s friends, and other expenses having little if any salvage value. Time, credibility and opportunity have all been irrevocably lost.

What went wrong ? How could this major debacle for the City and Balboa Park have been prevented ? The story for most total failures begins at the beginning. This is no exception. In a perfect world, or at least one better than San Diego, what should have happened ?   [Read more…]

Spinning the San Diego Convention Center’s Future Business

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By Doug Porter

San Diego’s tourism moguls have been playing with numbers again and that’s always a scary prospect.

Last year we heard all about how the local economy was headed for doom and devastation unless the anointed magnates of the trade were allowed to spend a big pile of money collected via a fee-that-was-not-a-tax facing significant legal challenges. The ex-Mayor-who-cannot-be-named thought it might be reasonable to ask some protection for taxpayers should hoteliers lose their case.

Now we’re hearing about “hotel-ageddon” because of legal challenges connected with the expansion of the San Diego Convention Center. City Council members sitting on the Economic Development and Intergovernmental Relations Committee heard the bad news yesterday. One convention booked for 2016 is reconsidering, we’re told, another “might be”, and -gasp-even though they haven’t said anything, the almighty lords of ComicCon are concerned.   [Read more…]

Femanifesto: Confessions of a Sexist Feminist

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By Lauree Benton

Women annoy me. There, I said it.

To be fair, a lot of men annoy me too. But it’s women who tend to really get under my skin.

I’ve always been somewhat of a tomboy. Not that I don’t wear dresses, or do my hair. (I grew into those things in college.) I just don’t enjoy a lot of feminine past times, like “girls nights.” I don’t understand feminine beauty standards. Make up? Are you serious? And I despise when my emotions run the show. Logic all the way. I’m aggressive. I’m competitive. And I do not do pink.

All of my close girlfriends and women like me. Women who think other women are insane. Women who reject classic feminine traits and apologize profusely when our inner “woman” comes out.   [Read more…]

Why I like the Big Red-Head (Bill Walton)

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By Ernie McCray

I remember one time, long ago, back in the day, hearing a guy say, about Bill Walton, “Aw, man, that dude can’t play no ball.” Hey, I don’t know what his definition of “playing ball” was but I had just, a few moments before, seen basketball played at a level or two above what you’d ordinarily see a teenage red-head high school kid do on a basketball court.

First of all he gangster slapped the notion of “white guys can’t jump.” I mean he blocked shots like he was in a badminton game, tapping a couple to himself and then he whipped outlet passes for the fast-break like the ball was on a laser beam; he drove the defense absolutely insane, pulling up for jump-shots, dropping floating hook-shots, setting screens and playing off screens, setting his teammates up for easy shots, and driving his big red-head self down the lane. I had never seen such dominance in a basketball game – and I could play the game.   [Read more…]

For California Women Who Dream of Political Leadership and Power: Some Rules of the Road

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By Rebecca Sive

As we begin Women’s History Month, and celebrate International Women’s Day (Saturday, March 8th), I’ve been reflecting on the lessons today’s women office-holders, and those who aspire to political office, can learn from those who’ve already traveled this path.

But, first, a bit of context: this ruminating comes on the eve of my visit to San Diego as the special guest of close the gap CA’s Stop the Slide tour. This slide would be the slide (downwards) in the number of women in the California legislature: while there were a record 37 serving in the legislature in 2006, there are only 32 in 2014. (Sadly, California now ranks 19th in the nation for the number of women serving in its state legislature, down from sixth in 2003, according to Rutgers’ Center for American Women and Politics. That’s 26% of the legislature versus 31%.)

The Stop the Slide tour, whose purpose is to raise awareness of this problem and recruit women to work to solve it — by becoming candidates themselves — begins in San Diego Sunday, when we will gather at the Women’s Museum of California, at an event hosted by Run Women Run, a nonpartisan group that recruits and trains women candidates for office in the San Diego area.   [Read more…]

Remembering the UC San Diego Cookout, the Noose, and their Aftermath

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An Open Letter, Four Years After the “Winter of our Discontent”

Jorge Mariscal / UCSD Professor of Literature
Fnann Keflezighi / UCSD ‘11
Patrick Velásquez /San Diego Chicano/Latino Concilio

Four years ago, the fragile tranquility of the La Jolla campus was shattered by a series of events now known as the “Compton Cookout.” Cutting-edge scholarship on campus climate emphasizes the need for universities to continually revisit their ‘historical legacy’ as a benchmark for progress. Therefore, as much as administrators would like to erase the “Cookout” and its aftermath, it is crucial that we remember the events of February 2010.

We view calls to “move beyond” the past and erase any memory of the events that transpired as nothing more than an attempt to release newly installed administrators from their responsibilities. It is time to hold accountable everyone involved in the “strategic planning” that will determine the future of UCSD and impact the lived experiences of future generations of students.   [Read more…]

Femanifesto: There is No Right Way to be a Woman

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By Lauree Benton

If you dress too conservatively, you are a prude. But if you try to dress for your body, you are a slut. And there’s a good chance, either way you will be molested or raped.

If you are a stay at home mom, you are lazy. If you are a career woman with no kids, you are selfish. If you have both a career and a family, you are short changing everyone involved.

If you breast feed, you are disgusting! Keep those things to yourself. Never mind that your child needs to eat. But if you don’t, you are filling your child with poison. Why would you use formula? You must be a horrible mother. Everyone knows “breast is best.”   [Read more…]

What’s Left: Surrender or Resurgence?

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By Jim Miller

Just when you thought the Obama administration’s education policy couldn’t get any worse, it did.

Last week Obama nominated founder and CEO of New Schools, Ted Mitchell, to the second highest post at the Department of Education. Mitchell and his organization have been at the forefront of the education privatization movement and this confirms the bad news that rather than rethinking some of its unsuccessful, wrong-headed education policies, the administration has doubled down and is now completely in the tank with the corporate education reformers.

As Capitol and Main reported, this signals continued “corporate influence at the Department of Education”:

“He represents the quintessence of the privatization movement,” Diane Ravitch, an education historian and former Assistant Secretary of Education under President George H.W. Bush, tells Capital & Main. “This is a signal the Obama administration is committed to moving forward aggressively with transferring public funds to private hands.”

  [Read more…]

Algorithms and Future Crimes: Welcome to the Racial Profiling of the Future

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More and more police departments are turning to “predictive policing,” which has proven unmistakably racist.

By Aaron Cantú / Alternet

Across the country, large police departments have been developing their ability to track where crime will happen next using predictive software. Known as “predictive policing,” the practice has made waves in the media over the last few years, capturing the imagination of futurists and tough-on-crime zealots, while offending the sensibilities of basically everyone else.

Proponents describe the program in techno-pragmatist terms, arguing that it uses data to make smart inferences about the future in much the same way meterologists do. Opponents compare the idea to hellishly dystopian stories like The Minority Report, where innocent people are rounded up because a computer said there was a chance they would break the law in the future.

There is one major feature of predictive policing that the libertarian critique often glosses over: it’s unmistakably racist.   [Read more…]

Venezuela Beyond the Protests

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The Revolution is Here to Stay

By Eva Golinger / Postcards from the Revolution

For those of you unfamiliar with Venezuelan issues, don’t let the title of this article fool you. The revolution referred to is not what most media outlets are showing taking place today in Caracas, with protestors calling for the ouster of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. The revolution that is here to stay is the Bolivarian Revolution, which began in 1998 when Hugo Chavez was first elected president and has subsequently transformed the mega oil producing nation into a socially-focused, progressive country with a grassroots government. Demonstrations taking place over the past few days in Venezuela are attempts to undermine and destroy that transformation in order to return power to the hands of the elite who ruled the nation previously for over 40 years.

Those protesting do not represent Venezuela’s vast working class majority that struggled to overcome the oppressive exclusion they were subjected to during administrations before Chavez. The youth taking to the streets today in Caracas and other cities throughout the country, hiding their faces behind masks and balaclavas, destroying public buildings, vehicles, burning garbage, violently blocking transit and throwing rocks and molotov cocktails at security forces are being driven by extremist right-wing interests from Venezuela’s wealthiest sector. Led by hardline neoconservatives, Leopoldo Lopez, Henrique Capriles and Maria Corina Machado – who come from three of the wealthiest families in Venezuela, the 1% of the 1% – the protesters seek not to revindicate their basic fundamental rights, or gain access to free healthcare or education, all of which are guaranteed by the state, thanks to Chavez, but rather are attempting to spiral the country into a state of ungovernability that would justify an international intervention leading to regime change.   [Read more…]

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