San Diego Free Press

Grassroots News & Progressive Views

Issa for Vice President? (One Way to Get Rid of Him)

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Legislative Choices on the Primary Ballot: Seats in Sacramento and Washingon, Representing San Diego

Congressman Darrell Issa is getting some attention for something besides hyperbolic press releases this week. In an op-ed in The Hill on Tuesday, he urged lawmakers to rally fellow Republicans against a common enemy: Clinton. This morning’s California Playbook from Politico quotes a tweet from GOP strategist (and former Issa mini-me) Kurt Bardella promoting the 49th district Congressman as a Vice Presidential pick for Donald Trump.

The mud-wrestling match likely to follow the affirmation of presumptive nominees Trump and Clinton does seem like a perfect fit for Issa, whose actions as the GOP’s chief inquisitor sparked many of the modern-day Hillary conspiracy theories making the rounds.

The only good news about a successful Trump/Issa general election campaign would be the ensuing vacancy in the House of Representatives.

With that bit of silliness out of the way, let’s take a look at the 73 people vying for the 14 opportunities to represent San Diego in Washington and Sacramento. Fortunately for voters, their ballots will present choices for a maximum of four legislative positions: US Senate, House of Representatives, California State Senate, and the California Assembly.   [Read more…]

Our Lady of Kibeho at the Moxie Theatre

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By Mukul Khurana

Whenever we get the feeling that the world is a bad place and our times are really bad, it is worth remembering that we have been down that road before. The early 90s (otherwise known as the “good Clinton years”) were not so good in other parts of the world—Bosnia and Rwanda being such places. Whereas we got entangled to some degree in Bosnia, Rwanda was a totally different story. We did as little as possible.

Both saw horrific acts of violence on a massive scale. Neighbor turned against neighbor. Atrocities that cannot be described were perpetrated. What happened in the early to mid-90s in Bosnia, happened in 1994 in Rwanda in a more concentrated manner. An estimated 800,000 Rwandans were killed between the months of April and July of that year. This genocide was aimed at the Tutsi population and it was carried out by the Hutus (two different ethnic groups that had sort-of coexisted in the “Switzerland of Africa,” as Rwandans liked to speak of their country).   [Read more…]

The Great Eastern Expansion: Where Is The Plaza?

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By Barbara Zaragoza

City staff and developers envision a city that will include professors, engineers, highly trained athletes and international tourists. There will be new boutique shops, gourmet restaurants and a transit system to bring even more people to visit this bustling downtown. An explosion of binational trade is anticipated, since the border is only 2 miles away and executives will be able to go across the Tijuana bridge directly in and out of the Tijuana International Airport.

While talking to city officials and developers, I have found their excitement to be authentic. The hotels are certainly something community members in eastern Chula Vista have been waiting for, along with abundant local jobs and public transportation. But I’m a writer, not a marketer, and I have to ask myself: is there something wrong with this picture?   [Read more…]

Warning for the World: Five Pacific Islands Officially Lost to Rising Seas

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The event is the first official confirmation of what the future could be under climate change, researchers say

By Nadia Prupis / Common Dreams

Five Pacific Islands have been swallowed by rising seas and coastal erosion, in what Australian researchers say is the first confirmation of what climate change will bring.

The submerged region, which was part of the Solomon Islands archipelago and was above water as recently as 2014, was not inhabited by humans.

However, a further six islands are also experiencing “severe shoreline recession,” which is forcing the populations in those settlements—some of which have existed since at least 1935—to flee, according to a study published last week in Environmental Research Letters.   [Read more…]

Compared to Rest of World Americans Are Delusional, Prudish, Selfish Religious Nuts: Study

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We have some fairly odd opinions

By Kali Holloway / AlterNet

Cultural differences exist across borders, and because monoliths are mostly fantasies, often within them, too. That said, America, in particular, is culturally perplexing, and even confounding, to a lot of the rest of the world. I am not, as Americans are wont to do, laboring under the delusion that people in other places spend all that much time thinking about us. We are all, as a species, just trying to get through this thing called life. The conservative American notion that people with far better healthcare, civil rights laws and gun control “hate our freedom” is a wishful imperialist delusion. Worse, it’s not fooling anybody at this point.

That said, if all the world’s a stage, America is a prime player: a rich, loud, attention-seeking celebrity not fully deserving of its starring role, often putting in a critically reviled performance and tending toward histrionics that threaten to ruin the show for everybody else. (Also, embarrassingly, possibly the last to know that its career as top biller is in rapid decline.) To the outside onlooker, American culture—I’m consolidating an infinitely layered thing to save time and space—is contradictory and bizarre, hypocritical and self-congratulatory. Its national character is a textbook study in narcissistic tendencies coupled with crushing insecurity issues.   [Read more…]

Republicans Look to San Diego for the Best City Government Money Can Buy

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Mayoral and City Council Races Swamped with Cash

Donors to Republican candidates facing Democrats in Mayoral and Council races in San Diego have ponied up nearly $2.7 million in direct and indirect support for the upcoming primary election. Democrats are lagging far behind, with $510,263 collected in those contests.

And that doesn’t count the ‘hidden money’ flowing from GOP interests to committees like the Neighborhood Services Coalition in Support of Anthony Bernal or the  Urban Neighbors United Supporting Ricardo Flores in District 3 and 9 contests where there is no viable Republican opposition.

Republicans in San Diego are clearly worried by the very idea of a yuuuge turnout in the general election and are marshaling their financial resources towards winning as many primary contests as possible.   [Read more…]

Feminism is Alive and Well in San Diego . . . but the Fight is Getting Harder

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On Mother’s Day, a group of about 30 women (and a couple men), some of the women mothers and some not, gathered at the Lyceum Theater to celebrate with champagne and listen to a panel of experts discuss “The (True) History of Feminism in San Diego”. The panel, assembled by the Women’s Museum of California, preceded a viewing of “Rapture, Blister, Burn”, a contemporary Pulitzer nominated play by Gina Gionfriddo – a funny and poignant feminist play running for another week that I highly recommend.

The panel, consisting of a politician, a research psychologist, both a professor and a masters student in women’s studies was moderated by Ashley Gardner, the Executive Director of the Women’s Museum.   [Read more…]

Rent Going Up? Planning to Move? Welcome to the Street

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This article was originally published in the 1969 print edition of the San Diego Free Press. It follows on to our 4 part series on affordable housing in San Diego. So what else is new? Nothing except the price of real estate. [Items in parentheses are my updated comments.] 

The housing situation in San Diego, especially for people with low incomes, bears all the earmarks of a terminal illness. The condition is grave and seems destined to get worse. The City will tell you that 1968 was a year in which San Diego experienced a record boom in housing construction, but their figures are completely misleading. It is true that there were 12,525 units of housing begun in 1968, as compared with 6,100 units in 1967, and that while city building doubled, rural building was up 47% in 1968 over the previous year. Yet most of this activity was in the realm of plush apartments and condominiums which cater to middle and high-income groups, thus leaving people with low incomes at the mercy of soaring prices and a vacancy rate for the entire city of less than one percent.   [Read more…]

Bank of North Dakota Soars Despite Oil Bust: A Blueprint for California?

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Despite North Dakota’s collapsing oil market, its state-owned bank continues to report record profits. This article looks at what California, with fifty times North Dakota’s population, could do following that state’s lead.

By Ellen Brown

In November 2014, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Bank of North Dakota (BND), the nation’s only state-owned depository bank, was more profitable even than J.P. Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs. The author attributed this remarkable performance to the state’s oil boom, but the boom has now become an oil bust, yet the BND’s profits continue to climb. Its 2015 Annual Report, published on April 20th, boasted its most profitable year ever.

The BND has had record profits for the last 12 years, each year outperforming the last. In 2015, it reported $130.7 million in earnings, total assets of $7.4 billion, capital of $749 million, and a return on investment of a whopping 18.1 percent. Its lending portfolio grew by $486 million, a 12.7 percent increase, with growth in all four of its areas of concentration: agriculture, business, residential, and student loans.
  [Read more…]

Don’t Be Bored by Board of Education Races

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Ignore those school board races on your 2016 primary ballot at your own peril. The County Board of Education, with its half-billion-dollar budget and influence over the 42 school districts in San Diego, is the target of Republicans reportedly funded by charter school businesses.

Now I don’t have a problem with the concept of charter schools as an option for parents seeking differing educational approaches. I do have a problem with the charter school industry, which all-too-often has hidden financial malfeasance and an exploitive working environment behind the banners of “choice” and “opportunity.”

Most of all, I believe that a robust public education system is fundamental to democracy. Public education has been the primary battleground for a cultural war going back decades and now it has become fair game for hedge fund operators and profiteering.   [Read more…]

An Old Scumbag’s Take on Bernie and Hillary Unifying Their Party

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For not supporting Hillary Clinton, people like me, including millions of young people, millenials, our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, have been described as naive-unrealistic-shallow-thinking-delusional-idiotic-scumbags – and we’ve been compared to followers of Trump.

I didn’t see it coming, at all, as the insults have come from the kinds of people with whom I’ve been associated politically my entire voting life: 57 years.

I’m talking people who supported JFK, as did I. We waited patiently as he hemmed and hawed and finally got around, before his life was taken, to jotting down a few ideas that gave rise to the Civil Rights Act.

And then we joyously backed LBJ who got the act passed and then down the line we supported politicos who seemed most likely, at the time, to have our backs: Hubert Humphrey; George McGovern; Jimmy Carter; Walter Mondale; Michael Dukakis…   [Read more…]

Oligarchy Rocks at the Desert Trip Festival

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This easy life knows no pity.

Recently Nelson D. Schwartz of the New York Times did an interesting feature on luxury tourism on cruise ships, “In an Era of Privilege, Not Everyone is in the Same Boat,” that described the experience of travelers as “a money based caste system” catering to the rich rather than the unwashed masses. While there is clearly nothing novel about elite travel, the story noted that “What is new is just how far big American companies are now willing to go to pamper the biggest spenders.”

The remarkable thing about this trend is not what it says about cruise ships but what it reveals about where we are currently with regard to economic inequality and the way it has come to shape the way we live, work, and play—separately and unequal.   [Read more…]

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