San Diego Free Press

Grassroots News & Progressive Views

California Legislature Passes Historic Minimum Wage Increase

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By Steve Smith/California Labor Federation

California made history last night. With the support of California’s unions, the Legislature voted to raise the state’s minimum wage to $10, the highest minimum wage in the country. The wage will be implemented in two steps: an increase to $9 per hour in July of next year, followed by another one-dollar increase to $10 in January of 2016. Gov. Brown has agreed to sign the bill, AB 10, authored by Assemblymember Luis Alejo.

The wage increase will affect more than 2.3 million California workers, according the Economic Policy Institute. It means that single moms will have a little extra to support their families. It means seniors who’ve been forced to re-enter the workforce will have a little more to help pay for prescription drugs. And it means that all low-wage workers have received validation that their work is worthy of dignity and respect.   [Read more…]

Traffic Impact May Get Some Reform Under Smaller CEQA Bill

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By Robert Cruickshank/California High Speed Rail Blog

One of the dramas at the end of the legislative session last week involved the fate of reform to the California Environmental Quality Act. Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg substituted a new bill, SB 743, for his original CEQA reform bill, SB 731. SB 743 is designed to speed approval and construction of a new arena for the Sacramento Kings basketball team, but it does open the door to a badly-needed reform of one of the worst aspects of CEQA – the rules requiring projects to be evaluated for their impact on the “level of service” (LOS) of roads. This rule has been called “the single greatest promoter of sprawl” in California and has long been a target of sustainability advocates.

As Damien Newton explains, SB 743 begins the process of removing LOS from CEQA, but doesn’t go as far as many advocates had hoped.

It’s a good start, but more will be needed.   [Read more…]

Support the Barrio Logan Community Plan Update Alternative 1!

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San Diego’s Maritime Industry Doesn’t Care About Barrio Logan

By Brent E. Beltrán

I come before you today not as a paid employee of Continental Marine or of the other ubiquitous polluting industries that mar the streetscape of Barrio Logan. Nor do I come as a high paid lobbyist or lawyer of these same businesses. Neither am I a CEO or manager of said industry.

I come before you today as a relatively new resident of Barrio Logan. I’ve lived in Logan Heights for two years and am now finishing my first year as an apartment dweller in the new Estrella del Mercado complex. Though for the past 20 years I have participated in various ways in the life and activities of Barrio Logan.

For decades my community has struggled with neglect by the political players, power brokers and industries that have never cared about the residents of this barrio.   [Read more…]

Peters: ObamaCare Will Work if We Let It

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Extremist elements in Congress are preventing reasonable solutions to real problems.

By Andy Cohen

The Affordable Care Act—pejoratively known as “ObamaCare” until its namesake took ownership of it—is happening, despite the best efforts of the law’s opponents to stop it. On October 1, the heath care exchanges set up either by the individual states or by the federal government will begin selling health insurance policies, and there doesn’t seem to be anything that the opposition can do to stop it.

The law is hardly a perfect one, much like Social Security and Medicare before it—social safety net programs that were likewise met with open hostility yet have become a part of the bedrock of American society—nor is it the ideal solution that many Americans would like to have seen enacted. But, as many would argue, and reasonably so, it was the best we could do under the circumstances, and there is always room for improvement. Start with a foundation and make it better as we go along, just like with Social Security and Medicare.

The basic premise of ObamaCare is a simple one: Provide health coverage to the nearly 40 million Americans currently without it; make healthcare something more akin to a right rather than a privilege reserved for those who can pay for it. But while the law falls short of that goal, it does expand coverage to a projected 30 million people. it does this in two ways…..   [Read more…]

Accusations Mount of San Diego Police Department Favoritism

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A culture of favoritism within the San Diego Police Department has recently been described in a number of civil suits against the Department by plaintiffs who allege the misconduct.

The U-T San Diego picked up the story yesterday, with a report by Jeff McDonald and Greg Moran, on how the case of former officer Anthony Arevalos – who is currently in prison for 8 years – has produced over a dozen law suits against the city for his conduct. Eleven of the 14 suits have been settled – to the tune of $1.55 million – and 3 are pending.

The U-T article described the culture of favoritism:

Two of the remaining cases portray a department that fails to discipline wayward officers, with a command staff that provides special protections to certain employees and their families and to other law enforcement professionals. The allegations are contained in testimony from officers drummed out amid corruption allegations themselves.

The article goes on to state, that during a deposition taken last July of former officer Arthur Perea for one of those cases, Perea testified that based on his 18 years with the SDPD, “police officials routinely hide officer misdeeds from the public”, and that “commanders favor officers who are ‘in the club’ over others who are not.”

Perea had quit the force 2 years ago amidst complaints about his own sexual misconduct, none of which resulted in him being charged.   [Read more…]

Plastic Bag Ban Sparks Dialogue Between Left and Right : San Diego Rostra Responds to SDFP Satire

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Editor: We are crossposting an article from the conservative San Diego Rostra by Brian Brady – who has been in a dialogue with our own Bob Dorn of late – and who now outlines where he and progressives agree and disagree.

Freeped Today and Feeling Fabulous

by Brian Brady / San Diego Rostra / Monday, September 16, 2013

I was the subject of a satirical post on San Diego Free Press. Bob Dorn had some fun today, using some garden-variety stereotypes about liberals and conservatives, because I dared to confront a premise, proffered by OBRag’s Frank Gormlie, supporting a single-use plastic bag ban.

I don’t think that Bob Dorn likes that I comment on the progressive’s little paradise. He’s discounting something, though–I AGREE with the Freeps on a number of issues.   [Read more…]

Last Year Was the Best Year for the Very Wealthy Since 1928

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Why 2012 Was the One Percent’s Favorite Year Since 1928

by Mike Konczal / Frying Pan News / September 17, 2013

Are our rich content? It’s a question that bounces back and forth in the blogosphere. Are elites, economic and otherwise, happy with the pace of the weak recovery? Are they indifferent? Or are they actively worse off than they would be if unemployment were lower?

This question comes up when Emmanuel Saez updates his data on the incomes of the top one percent. Most of the coverage has focused on the rate of change for incomes of the top one percent, particularly the fact that the top one percent have enjoyed 95 percent of all income growth from 2009 to 2012. But I want to focus on levels. I’m going to modify one of Saez’s charts to show something I don’t think has been pointed out:

This is the percentage of all income, excluding capital gains, that goes to the top one percent.   [Read more…]

A Restaurant Review: Kono’s Surf Club in Pacific Beach

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Konos jc frontKono’s Surf Club
704 Garnet Ave.
Pacific Beach, CA 92109
858-483-1669

It isn’t often that I leave Ocean Beach to try a restaurant in Pacific Beach, but today was an exception. We ended up at Kono’s Surf Club in PB.

Before we left the house, I had done some minor research on Kono’s and suggested we try having breakfast there. (It was 2:15pm). Ro checked her “Iphone” and found they were open until 4:00pm – so away we went.

I was afraid that since it was a Saturday they would be packed, but it turned out we had no trouble getting a table and placed our order with Martin – the most helpful order taker we had met in a long time.   [Read more…]

Joy Arises, Rules Fall Apart – Thoughts for the Second Anniversary of Occupy Wall Street

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By Rebecca Solnit / TomDispatch.com

I would have liked to know what the drummer hoped and what she expected. We’ll never know why she decided to take a drum to the central markets of Paris on October 5, 1789, and why, that day, the tinder was so ready to catch fire and a drumbeat was one of the sparks.

To the beat of that drum, the working women of the marketplace marched all the way to the Palace of Versailles, a dozen miles away, occupied the seat of French royal power, forced the king back to Paris, and got the French Revolution rolling. Far more than with the storming of the Bastille almost three months earlier, it was then that the revolution was really launched — though both were mysterious moments when citizens felt impelled to act and acted together, becoming in the process that mystical body, civil society, the colossus who writes history with her feet and crumples governments with her bare hands.

She strode out of the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City during which parts of the central city collapsed, and so did the credibility and power of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, the PRI that had ruled Mexico for 70 years. She woke up almost three years ago in North Africa, in what was called the Arab Spring, and became a succession of revolutions and revolts still unfolding across the region.
  [Read more…]

Surviving an Active Shooter Event: Run-Hide-Fight is the New Duck and Cover

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Because we take public safety seriously

By Anna Daniels

Americans have apparently decided that events like those happening today in DC are acts of God like the Colorado floods or hurricanes in the Atlantic. There’s nothing we can do to prevent it. Mass shootings are the American Way. Digby Hullabaloo

Homeland Security provided funds for this Texas Public Service Announcement so that citizens are better prepared to deal with an unhinged shooter in their school, workplace, church/mosque/temple, movie theater or any of the other myriad public places in which they erroneously assume that they should be able to gather without the fear of being murdered.   [Read more…]

County Supervisors Key to Rural Development

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By Rick Moore Escondido Democratic Club

San Diego County’s new General Plan is “light years more progressive” than its predecessor, said County Planning Commissioner Michael Beck in remarks before the September 14 meeting of Escondido Democrats. The good news is that there are far more restraints on semi-rural and rural development than before. The bad news is that aggressive developers have chosen the political route to work around those restraints, and the Board of Supervisors is being asked to grant exceptions for dozens of projects.

Beck said 47 such exceptions, known as “amendments,” have been grouped together and are being brought before the board. First, however, he said taxpayers will have to pay for a lengthy review process “that will take us through the next election.”
  [Read more…]

It’s MY Plastic Bag, and I Do What It Wants Me To.

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By Bob Dorn

I love my plastic bag.

No one’s going to take it from me; not some foolish enviro nut-hazard with her meds in her pocketbook, or some Japanese squeeky clean wearing a mask in the subway, or a Filner Freak-o who spends his money on Mexican marijuana that probably already has some STD buried between its cracks, or Obama, the Holy, who solved Syria all by himself (ask the cruise missiles who solved Syria!!!).

No one’s taking my plastic bags.   [Read more…]

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