Author: Jim Miller

By Jim Miller

Projected Censored recently released their list of the “Top 25 Most Censored Stories of 2012-13.” As I noted in a column about last year’s list, Project Censored’s definition of censorship is a nuanced one:

We define Modern Censorship as the subtle yet constant and sophisticated manipulation of reality in our mass media outlets. On a daily basis, censorship refers to the intentional non-inclusion of a news story – or piece of a news story – based on anything other than a desire to tell the truth. …

By Jim Miller

After my last column on the perils of Carl Luna’s characterization of progressives supporting Democratic mayoral candidate David Alvarez as the “Tea Party of the Left” I got a response from Luna.

In his comment to my article posted at the OB Rag, he stood by his analogy “that those in the Democratic camp who hold that there are ‘true’ progressives (aka those they agree with) and DINOS are in danger of going down the Tea Party rabbit hole—like the Occupy Wall Street people run wild. (Except that Tea Party has 90 seats in Congress—OWS zero).”

This was prefaced by a reminder that, “the point of elections is to win.”

By Jim Miller

To the surprise of many over the last couple of weeks, San Diego’s Labor Council, the San Diego Democratic Party, San Diego Democrats for Equality, Progressive San Diego, the Environmental Health and Justice Campaign, and a host of other local progressives have all lined up to endorse David Alvarez for Mayor.

Wednesday, October 2nd at 7pm at DG Wills Book Store
By Jim Miller

San Diego City Works Press is proud to announce the publication of The Encyclopedia of Rebels by local author and UCSD writing teacher, Mel Freilicher. The book plays with the intersections between history, fiction, memoir, fantasy, and mystery. As Pulitzer Prize winning poet Rae Armantrout puts it, “You could call this both an outrageous comedy and a credible look at the world we live in.”

Mel Freilicher will read from his new book this Wednesday, October 2nd, at 7 PM at D.G. Wills Book Store at 7461 Girard Ave in La Jolla as part of the San Diego City College International Book Fair.

by Jim Miller

This last week marked the two-year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, a political happening that finally put the issue of economic inequality in the spotlight and started a national discussion about money, class, and political corruption. That movement was largely brought to us by young people, Millennials mostly, whose view of mainstream politics is justifiably jaded.

As Peter Beinart recently pointed out, “Compared to their Reagan-Clinton generation elders, Millennials are entering adulthood in an America where government provides much less economic security. And their economic experience in this newly deregulated America has been horrendous.”

And this experience has been made worse by bankrupt politics that pits what Beinart rightly characterizes as “a procapitalist, anti-bureaucratic Reaganized liberalism” that is “inclined toward market solutions” to everything against a radicalized “right wing populism”:

By Jim Miller

Finally, there was a measure of good news for schools in California with Proposition 30 creating a budget surplus that had plugged some of the gaping holes that years of budget cuts had made in our state’s public education system.

But it didn’t take long for Governor Brown to betray us. Indeed, the Courage Campaign has done a great job in recent weeks taking the Governor to task for seeking to raid the Proposition 30 surplus to fund prison expansion.

That’s right, you heard it: prison expansion.

By Jim Miller

Last Friday evening, after five grueling hours of candidate interviews and spirited debate, the San Diego-Imperial Counties Labor Council overwhelmingly endorsed David Alvarez for mayor.

This decision came after weeks of intense lobbying on the part of former labor leader Lorena Gonzalez, who, along with other powerful Democratic power brokers and money people were seeking to clear the field of genuinely progressive candidates in order to anoint Nathan Fletcher as the “only choice.”

Indeed, while Democratic money bundler Christine Forrester was writing to her well-heeled contacts praising Fletcher as “an astute business leader, worthy of representing and evolving Qualcomm’s business interests” and someone “well-suited to find common denominators between left and right” in order to create a “bipartisan platform from which San Diego can soar,” Gonzalez was repackaging him as a working class hero about whom she said to her list of labor folks, “the more he learned about economic justice issues, the better champion he became.”

By Jim Miller

Today is Labor Day, but how many of us have any idea where the holiday came from or what it celebrates?

The first Labor Day was celebrated on Tuesday, September 5th, 1882 in New York City and was proposed by the Central Labor Union (CLU) at a time when American workers were struggling for basic rights such as the eight-hour day. The CLU moved the “workingman’s holiday” to the first Monday in September in 1883 and urged other unions to celebrate the date as well.

The movement grew throughout the 1880s, along with the American labor movement itself with 23 states passing legislation recognizing Labor Day as a holiday. By 1894 Congress followed suit and Labor Day became a national holiday.

By Jim Miller

In the aftermath of the Filner resignation, a group of Democratic Party insiders and money people are continuing to run around with their hair on fire trying to anoint Nathan Fletcher as our savior and discourage other truly progressive candidates from entering the field.

Of course this includes folks like Christine Forrester, who runs a marketing consulting firm that connects businesses with hedge fund money, and former Labor Council leader Lorena Gonzalez, who has long been championing her personal friend, the former Assemblyman with an 18% labor voting record over the vociferous objections of many in labor.

By Jim Miller

Last week I outlined the plight of the City College of San Francisco (CCSF) noting that CCSF had become the “Chicago of Higher Education” as the college and their community allies were engaged in a struggle to stop the loss of its accreditation at the hands of a corrupt commission that was driven by a misguided corporate education reform agenda.

By Jim Miller

This summer few people outside of the Bay Area probably noted what was one of the most important stories about higher education in America: City College of San Francisco (CCSF) is losing its accreditation.

After years of wrangling, the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC), one of the seven regional accreditors in the western United States whose job it is to ensure the quality of higher education programs announced that CCSF was losing its accreditation in July of 2014.

Why should you care? Because ACCJC’s decision had very little to do with the quality of instruction and much more to do with imposing a new business model on community colleges that narrows their mission and opens the door to more privatization in American higher education. And San Francisco is being used as an example to intimidate other colleges to fall in line with ACCJC’s questionable “reform” agenda. Thus, what happened in San Francisco could happen in San Diego.

The reaction to this extreme punishment for CCSF, an institution that serves 90,000 students, many of them working class, immigrant, or in adult education, and had never been sanctioned before last year, was outrage.

By Jim Miller

Last week President Obama sought to turn the nation’s attention toward the fact that the income gap is fraying the U.S. social fabric.

In an interview with the New York Times he noted that “the idea is to promote those things in service of the lives of ordinary Americans getting better” and told reporters that he keeps a framed program from the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in his office to remind him that there was a “massive economic component to that” as well as a civil rights focus.

Sadly, however, while Obama discussed the need to move away from the austerity policies of the Republicans and how fiscal policy might be used to help American workers he didn’t even mention the notion that we could empower workers themselves in their fight for a better life.