San Diego Free Press

Grassroots News & Progressive Views

Robert Reich Sees the Future: How the People’s Party Prevailed in 2020

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By Robert Reich / RobertReich.Org

Third parties have rarely taken over from the dominant two in American history. So how did the People’s Party win the U.S. presidency and a majority of both houses of Congress in 2020?

It started four years before, with the election of 2016.

As you remember, Donald Trump didn’t have enough delegates to become the Republican candidate, so the GOP convention that summer was “brokered”—which meant the Party establishment took control, and nominated the Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan.   [Read more…]

Assault on Public Employee Unions Fizzles at the Supreme Court

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Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association Gets Split Decision 

Rebecca Friedrichs, the elementary school teacher honored with a ‘Torch of Freedom Award’ at the San Diego County Republican Party’s annual Lincoln-Reagan dinner last weekend, won’t be celebrating this weekend.

This morning, in a single-sentence order, the Supreme Court announced that the judgment of a lower court rejecting an effort to defund public sector unions “is affirmed by an equally divided court.”. A four-decade-old opinion protecting public sector unions will live to see another day.

Friederichs and nine other teachers served as plaintiffs in a lawsuit brought by the conservative Center for Individual Rights (CIR) and the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation. The claim being made was that the free speech rights of non-union members entitled them to contribute nothing to the costs of representation, even if they’d already opted out of fees supporting unions’ political activities.   [Read more…]

Financial Parasites Have Become Neo-Feudal Landlords

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Classical economics divided income into two types: earned and unearned. Earned income came from productive labor combined with capital investment. Unearned income was considered parasitical and consisted of rent, interest and dividends. It was not considered as adding to GDP but as subtracting from it. It was money made by manipulating money much as feudal landlords made their money in what has been called a rentier economy.

Today, most of the money earned by the 1% driving the income inequality gap is being made in the financialized, rentier economy but is now considered earned income. New methods have been devised to make money not by productive labor and investment but by manipulating financial instruments. One such manipulation consists of stock buybacks.   [Read more…]

FBI to Apple: Nevermind

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‘The FBI’s credibility just hit a new low. They repeatedly lied to the court and the public in pursuit of a dangerous precedent that would have made all of us less safe.’

By Common Dreams

Following a high-profile attempt by the FBI and Department of Justice to force Apple to hack its own security encryption features, the federal government threw in the towel on Monday as it announced that it had successfully accessed information on the iPhone belonging to one of the perpetrators of the mass shooting in San Bernadino, California late last year.   [Read more…]

Secret Service Bails Republicans Out of Their Convention Open Carry Dilemma

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By Laura Clawson / Daily Kos

Republicans hate gun-free zones, so why are they holding their convention in one? A petition pushing to change that has now gathered more than 42,000 signatures:

The petition calls on each Republican presidential contender, the National Rifle Association, the Republican National Committee and Chairman Reince Priebus, convention host site Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, and Ohio Gov. John Kasich to do what they can to allow convention attendees to openly carry firearms. The arena currently bans firearms and other weapons, it says on its website.

“Without the right to protect themselves, those at the Quicken Loans Arena will be sitting ducks, utterly helpless against evil-doers, criminals or others who wish to threaten the American way of life,” the petition’s author argues. Some have speculated that such dramatic language makes it sound as though the whole thing is a ruse intended to put Republicans in a tough political spot.

  [Read more…]

Keep Your Eyes on the Prize, California – The $15 Minimum Wage isn’t a Done Deal

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A quick read through today’s news might lead the casual reader to believe California is all-but-set to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. The Los Angeles Times already has an article featuring interviews with low wage employees and low-margin employers talking about the impact of the proposed increase.

The New York Times, Washington Post and the wire services all have stories about what is really no more than a back-room handshake agreement. Gov. Jerry Brown is set to make an announcement today, and then the sausage-making in the legislature will begin. The promise of more food on the table for as much as 38% of California’s workforce could very easily end up looking like a shit sandwich.

In today’s column, I’ll take a look at what’s been proposed and the forces already at work to derail or water down the deal.   [Read more…]

Meet Sarah Saez: Candidate for San Diego City Council District 9 (Part Three)

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Sarah Saez is best known locally for her work on the heroic United Taxi Workers of San Diego (UTWSD) campaign. And the Taxi Workers’ victory was about more than just their own struggle in that, as I observed at the time, it “provided a good example of precisely how [a] new kind of workers’ movement can succeed.”

Saez continues her work with the UTWSD and is deeply involved in the community in a host of other ways. Most recently, she has decided to run for City Council in District 9 where she lives and works in City Heights.

What follows is the final installment of my interview with Saez.  If you missed the first part it’s here and the second part is here.
  [Read more…]

On Government Abuse, Democracy and Poverty, California Has Work to Do

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ACLU of California-sponsored bills will advance

By Becca Cramer / ACLU San Diego

Every year, the ACLU of California sponsors several bills in the California Legislature. What does it mean to sponsor a bill? In most cases, it means we have collaborated with other advocacy groups and the legislative author in drafting the bill, providing our input on the text. We also may lobby legislators, testify in support of the bill, seek support from other groups, work with opposition to address their concerns, draft fact sheets and sample support letters, and provide communications and media support.

Here are the 10 bills we are sponsoring this year:   [Read more…]

Wee Lives Matter

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“Black Lives Matter”
is heard
from a chorus of voices
in a protest in the street.
“All Lives Matter”
someone screams
from a car rolling by
on the street,
in denial
that Black Lives Matter
wouldn’t have come to be
if All Lives Matter
had ever been a reality   [Read more…]

Red Riding Hood Has A Gun And So Does Everyone Else, So It’s All Good

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By Abby Zimet / Common Dreams

Last week, blood-soaked NRA zombie Wayne LaPierre crawled out of his cave to whine to an audience at Liberty University that, “So many of those elites, they think they’re better than us.” He went on to proclaim, “They think they’re more intellectually evolved somehow than we are…Well, I’ve got news for the elites who look down their noses at all of us and our rights: We gun owners are a heck of a lot smarter than you’ll ever be…Never have there been smarter, freer American citizens than America’s one hundred million gun owners.”

Oddly, he declined to mention the disheartening torrent of gun fail stories in which almost 17,000 American citizens are unintentionally shot or killed each year – today, the Alabama four-year-old who shot himself in the head while his mom went shopping – and the fact that many contradict the good-guy-with-a-gun fairy tales they regularly propagate, but still.   [Read more…]

Geo-Poetic Spaces : Double Edged

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If a severed leaf
can dance in machete wind
both blades wield edges   [Read more…]

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