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Basketball’s Bill Walton and Qualcomm’s Irwin Jacobs Cast as Labor Bullies by Faulconer’s Anti-Minimum Wage Strategist

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By Doug Porter

I’ve been saying it for months now–the minimum wage battle in San Diego will bring out the Really Big Lies and the Really Bad Guys. Today we’ll give you a little taste of what they’re saying and what they really believe.

On Monday City Council President Todd Gloria has called for a special session of the City Council to override Mayor Kevin Faulconer’s veto of a minimum wage increase and paid sick days for San Diego workers.

Gloria is quoted in this morning’s UT, saying, “The City Council should stand up for the 38 percent of San Diegans who are counting on this raise to help them better make ends meet, and I hope they will override the mayor’s veto”

On Tuesday, The “San Diego Small Business Coalition,” created by big businesses, will roll out a small army of signature gatherers armed with a spiel designed to fool voters into thinking they’re signing a reasonable petition.

We got a little taste of how ‘reasonable’ these folks are yesterday with GOP consultant Jason Roe, who crashed an early morning press conference held by Raise Up San Diego.   [Read more…]

Who Runs San Diego? Papa Doug the Kingmaker

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By Eva Posner / Democratic Woman’s Club

Last week we provided an overview of Doug Manchester, the U-T, and the influence this combination has on the electorate of San Diego County.

This week, the goal is to delve a bit deeper, using a recent issue to illustrate the intensity of collusion with the publisher of the region’s largest paper and other powers that be.   [Read more…]

Faux News, Environmental Views At Issue in 52nd District Congressional Race

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By Doug Porter

Representative Scott Peters’ fight to keep his seat in the 52nd Congressional District continues to make the news. The National Journal and other media outlets ran stories yesterday about fake news sites being funded by the National Republican Congressional Committee; a quick search confirmed Peters was among their targets.

Climate Progress ran an article touting both Peters and opponent Carl DeMaio as unusual because both candidates agree that climate change is real- except that they couldn’t find a environmental activist willing to endorse DeMaio’s record.

Finally, former assemblyman Nathan Fletcher came out of his self-imposed political exile this morning to endorse Peters, Jack Harkin (former chair of the local United Veterans Council) and other veterans at a press conference in Balboa Park.

  [Read more…]

Naomi Klein: ‘Our Economic Model Is at War with Life on Earth’

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New video trailer previews thesis of anticipated new book by Canadian writer and activist

By Jon Queally / Common Dreams

The book’s title is not elusive: ‘This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate

Due for release in September, the anticipated new work by Canadian journalist, activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein has now been previewed in a video trailer that appears to lay out its main themes and central argument.

“In December of 2012, a complex systems scientists walked up to the podium at the American Geophysics Union to present a paper,” the narrator of the video—Klein herself—says as footage begins of urban high rise developments and burnt out croplands.   [Read more…]

Mayor Faulconer’s First 100 Days: Veto Minimum-Wage Ordinance and Stalling on City’s Environmental Policies

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By Frank Gormlie / OB Rag

Mayor Kevin Faulconer has been in office now just a little over one hundred days. And if this start to his administration is an indicator, the remainder of his term as mayor may be cause for some very rough going for San Diego environmentalists and minimum-wage supporters.

Faulconer’s actions – or, rather, inactions, around environmental policies have made eco-advocates furious.

To the more immediate news, Friday, the 8th day of August, Faulconer formally vetoed the minimum-wage and sick-day ordinance passed by the City Council on July 28th.  The measure would if enacted increase the hourly minimum wage to $9.75 on Jan. 1, $10.50 in January 2016 and $11.50 in January 2017, plus it provided access to five earned sick days.

The Council, with a 6 to 3 current ratio of Dems to Repubs, is expected to over-ride the Mayor’s veto, and the measure will become law. But then, in turn, this is expected to set the stage for an extremely divisive referendum effort by businesses and the Chamber of Commerce seeking to overturn the ordinance – which will be placed on hold until the referendum issue is settled.   [Read more…]

Video Pick: “So Long Mom, I’m Off to Drop the Bomb…”

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“Remember, Mommy, I’m off to get a commie…”

By Staff

So long, Mom,
I’m off to drop the bomb,
So don’t wait up for me.
But while you swelter
Down there in your shelter,
You can see me
On your TV.

While we’re attacking frontally,
Watch Brinkally and Huntally,
Describing contrapuntally
The cities we have lost.
No need for you to miss a minute
Of the agonizing holocaust. (Yeah!) …   [Read more…]

The Real Battle Begins: Faulconer Vetoes Minimum Wage Hike

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By Doug Porter

Republican Mayor Kevin Faulconer has vetoed an ordinance increasing minimum wages and allowing for earned sick days for San Diegans.

The City Council now has 30 days to override the veto. Twenty four hours after that vote happens it’s probable that the Chamber of Commerce–given that they’ve been raising money for it– will begin collecting signatures to overturn the ordinance.

The Committee for Slave Wages and Free Puppies for Everybody–or whatever catchy name they come up with–will have 30 days to collect 34,000 or so signatures. Should they succeed, the ordinance will be suspended until after the June, 2016 vote.   [Read more…]

Helping Young People Who See the World through Frosted Windows

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By Ernie McCray

I just finished watching a Turner Classic Movie, “Scandal at Scourie,” that featured two of my favorite all-time movie actors, Walter Pidgeon and Greer Garson, playing a couple who adopted a foster child. In one scene a bully, a boy, says to the adopted child, a girl, “You have no mother and you have no father. You’re nothing but a…” The last words are lost in a flurry of commotion.

As I watched I thought how timely the movie was for me since my plan for the day was to write about a program my son and others are creating to help empower low-income young adults and former foster youth, ages 18-24, to become more self sufficient. As it is, they spend their young lives pretty much seeing the world as though they’re observing it through a frosted window. All is blurry. Focusing on anything that might be of value to them in the future is often nearly impossible.   [Read more…]

Who Runs San Diego?– Douglas Manchester and U-T San Diego

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By Eva Posner / Democratic Woman’s Club

U-T San Diego, formerly the San Diego Union-Tribune, is the largest daily newspaper in the region. According to the U-T advertising rate book, U-T San Diego reaches 29.9% of the adult population of San Diego during the week, and 41.2% on Sundays. U-T San Diego.com receives 29.5 million page views per month.

The U-T Community Press, which consists of 8 newspapers that formerly brought communities hyper local and independent news but where bought by the U-T’s owner Doug Manchester, has a weekly readership of 221,905. One of those newspapers is the North County Times, which was the U-T’s biggest competitor.

Even assuming these numbers are inflated to sell ads, it is obvious that the management/ownership have incredible influence over the information taken in by a large portion of the population of San Diego County and the surrounding region.   [Read more…]

Video Pick: Archival Footage of Hiroshima-Nagasaki, August 1945

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“At the conclusion of the screening there was utter silence.”

“In 1970, when I was the Manager of the “Center for Mass Communication,” (CMC), at Columbia University, we received an amazing letter from Japan. CMC was the branch at Columbia which produced and distributed educational and documentary films. The letter was from a professor of law at Tokyo University, and informed us that nine Japanese newsreel cameramen went to Hiroshima the day after the atomic bombs had been dropped and took several hours of 35mm film of the devastation.

They did the same after an atomic bomb was dropped over the city of Nagasaki. When General MacArthur and his staff occupied Japan, they screened this footage and felt that the actual shots of the results of the damage of the two cities, and in particular the injuries suffered by the survivors, was so horrible that it should be marked top secret, and withheld from the public indefinitely.

Immediately upon learning of this, we at CMC asked the US Government to allow us to screen this footage, and the government denied that this film ever existed.   [Read more…]

DIY Resistance: Fall in Love

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By Will Falk

Three months ago, I packed up my 80-litre pack with my tent, sleeping bag, four t-shirts, two pairs of pants, two pairs of thermals, five pairs of underwear, my toothbrush, and six collections of poetry (only the essentials) and made the journey from San Diego, CA to the Unist’ot’en Camp on traditional Wet’suwet’en land in so-called British Columbia.

I fell in love with the Unist’ot’en Clan, the Camp, and their work. I decided it was time to dig in to defend the land and I’ve been in Canada working to support the Camp ever since. It took me 27 years, two degrees, two suicide attempts, a failed romantic relationship, and a deserted legal career to finally devote myself to radical resistance.

It is becoming increasingly clear that one of the many reasons the environmental movement is losing so bad is we suffer from a lack of committed individuals determined to resist for as long as it takes. I am committed to saving what’s left of our burning world because I am deeply in love.   [Read more…]

Congressman Darrell Issa’s Cherished Benghazi Crusade Crashes and Burns

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By Doug Porter

The House Intelligence Committee has absolved the Obama administration of deliberate wrongdoing in the 2012 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, according to the San Francisco Chronicle and other news sources.

The attack has been a favored topic of conversation/outrage on the right. Congressman Darrel Issa’s on-camera buffoonery combined with gotta-find-a-smoking gun conservative media coverage resulted in more than 13 hearings, 25,000 pages of documents and 50 briefings.

Four American deaths at the hands of terrorists have been exploited beyond belief. UT-San Diego named the San Diego victims as its ‘persons of the year.’ Operational data on the CIA station in Libya became common knowledge. And millions of dollars have been wasted as GOP opportunists sought to make a scandal out of a tragedy in the hope that both the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton’s presidential ambitions would be tarnished.   [Read more…]

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