Month: September 2011

Join with the San Diego Coalition for Peace and Justice and San Diego Veterans for Peace on Sunday, September 11, 2011, 2-4 pm Park Blvd and President’s Way Balboa Park, San Diego.

On September 12th, 2001, hundreds of us gathered to develop our collective response to the tragedy in New York City. Together we formed the San Diego Coalition for Peace and Justice – and we have met ever since.

On September 11th, 2011 we are calling on 100 organizations and hundreds more of us to gather to mark the day and to learn the lessons resulting from 10 years of war.

The race to pick a GOP candidate continues to heat up and by heat up we mean there’s lots of crazy bastards saying and doing crazy shit. With all that lunacy going on, how are you to know who to pick? We’re here to help!

By Lorena Gonzalez / San Diego Labor Council

Nick is a skilled sheet metal worker from Spring Valley. Despite being extremely well-trained in his craft and having plenty of experience as a journeyman, he has been without a job since August 2009. That’s more than two years of putting food on the table for his four children without a steady paycheck.

Unfortunately, Nick is not unique. Twenty-five million people in America who want to work can’t find the full-time jobs they need.

There’s a simple explanation for why every national, state and local poll lists the economy at the top of our concerns. America wants to work, America is looking for work and America can’t find enough work.

Editor: We have received a number of comments to our post about former principal Jill Green of Explorer Elementary charter school travails. Here is Jill Green’s original statement, made sometime around the time of her dismissal last Spring.

By Jill Green / August 2011

As the founding principal of Explorer Elementary Charter School, my devotion to the children, families and teachers at the school was the high point of my professional career. The pride I had in locating a space for the school to allow it to open in 2000, as well as

Editor: The following is an edited “executive summary” of Peter Philip’s case study – published June 10, 2011 – on SEMPRA’s plan to outsource an estimated 15,000 jobs to Mexico by building a cross-border 1250 megawatt energy transmission line to their energy facility in Mexico. The full report can be found here.

Should Green Jobs Be Outsourced? A Case Study of Lost Jobs and Lost Opportunities

By Peter Philips, PhD

The proposed Sempra 1250 megawatt (MW) tieline connecting the California grid to envisioned new wind-farms in Mexico is not just about electricity. It is also about foregone opportunities, lost human capital investment, lost worklives, lost tax revenues, and diminished economic development prospects; and also, it is about which regulatory authority, California or Mexico, should oversee the environmental impacts of building green generation capacity for the California grid.

Uploaded by ProgressOhio on Aug 23, 2011.
Read the full article to see a larger version of this video.

It is not supposed to happen in America where we value free speech and proudly revel in our history of men and women standing up and speaking to their elected representatives. But…once again, just last night (August 22, 2011), as they did in June, Congressman Steve Chabot, his staff and security team made sure that there could be no genuine human interaction or spoken question from the audience or any recorded documentation of what was said. And this occurred in a public meeting, in a public place, conducted by a public official, who while speaking to the public refused over 100 people who disagreed with him the opportunity to speak. And he had the police there to physically enforce his own private rules for public discourse.

Last week, Rep. Steven Chabot (R-OH) banned ordinary citizens from bringing cameras into a town hall meeting — even having police confiscate cameras from citizens who dared to violate this rule . Bizarrely, Chabot still allowed reporters to bring in cameras and record the event.

Coincidentally, just four days after Chabot took this extraordinary measure to prevent embarrassing clips of him from appearing on YouTube, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit handed down an opinion saying citizens have a right to film police engaged in their official duties.

By Randall Erickson / Special to the OB Rag

PARIS, FRANCE. In my last dispatch, I gave some practical examples of how «socialism» or the welfare state, if you will, functions.

I should add that the price of visiting a doctor is about 30 dollars. Specialists cost a bit more. Doctors can stay in the government system or go independent and charge more, but that extra may or may not be taken up by the mutual.

Under gray skies, over 350 people gathered along Broadway yesterday in downtown San Diego at a Labor Day “Rally for the Jobless.” Organized by MoveOn and Rebuild the American Dream, the noon event was designed to gather unemployed San Diegans and put pressure on the White House and Congress for jobs.

Waving signs, banners and flags the demonstrators dominated that block of downtown for a couple of hours, with chants, horns honking in support, and then with a rally where many local politicians spoke. “Jobs – not cuts!” was a familiar refrain from the crowd.

There I am as happy as I can be, at 58, posing in front of a camera at the 40th reunion of Tucson High’s Class of ’56.

It’s a cliche but time does fly, like a peregrine falcon diving steeply for its prey against the background of the sky, as in a few weeks I will be basking in the midst of an increasingly dwindling number of classmates for our 55th. Boy, they’re getting old – and vice-versa.

We greet this Labor Day with anxiety about the possibility of a double-dip recession, persistently high unemployment that never significantly ebbed after the depths of the 2008 downturn, and austerity budgets at the local, state, and federal levels. While many observers have drawn parallels to the Great Depression, one key difference stands out for American workers: Labor is not on the march.

In a perverse irony, the current economic crisis has been cruel to Labor. Rather than rallying workers to the union cause even though Labor did much to elect him, the Obama Administration has shown tepid support for unions after talking big about the value of Labor in his campaign. Hence the Obama era has been a kind of anti-New Deal period with the administration spending more time attacking teachers’ unions than helping American workers of any stripe in any significant way.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt / Excuse Me, I’m Writing / September 4, 2011

U.S. Representative Michele Bachmann (R–Minn.) might not be able to sustain her Tea Party-fueled lead among the perfidy of presidential wannabes, but while she remains in the race, admit it: She makes for good entertainment — in a morbidly fascinating sort of way.

Newsweek magazine’s blatantly sexist cover image of Bachmann, declaring her the “Queen of Rage,” actually elicited a complaint from National Organization for Women (NOW). Yowza, what a coupling! If Bachmann’s campaign lasts, NOW will surely do all it can to otherwise denounce her for her homophobia, anti-women’s and civil rights positions, and bent toward theocracy. But in the meantime, fun, fun, fun!