Author: Jim Miller

Tomorrow is Election Day in District 4, and it matters.  While this City Council race has garnered very little attention in San Diego as a whole and will certainly be a low turnout affair, the stakes are actually quite high.  Indeed, the direction of the city is on the line.

As Doug Porter noted last week, outside money has been pouring into District 4 attacking Myrtle Cole. Why?  Because Cole is the only candidate who will stand firmly behind Bob Filner’s agenda and buck the powerful moneyed interests that are bent on subverting the mayor.

Who’s behind the attacks?  San Diego County Voters for Progress and Reform, a shadowy group that has been funded by the usual suspects: developers, downtown business groups, and the Lincoln Club.  Those same folks are backing Cole’s opponent, Barry Pollard, and even fellow progressive Dwayne Crenshaw has taken money from Robert Gleason of Atlas Hotels (and a key figure in the TMD struggle against Filner) as well as Rural/Metro Corporation whose contract with San Diego for paramedic services will soon come up for renewal.  In addition to this, sources close to the campaign tell me that Cole is the only candidate that has not met with the Lincoln Club, which should tell you all you need to know.

…suggesting we drop existing standards for the wild west of market based online education will do for education what deregulation did for banks and the stock market.

Last week State Senator Darrell Steinberg proposed what he thinks of as a bold new way to reshape higher education in California and to deal with the bottleneck of students who have trouble getting into “gateway” classes in our community colleges and universities. What is Steinberg’s answer to our access ills? Sadly, it is outsourcing higher education to the corporate interests who have long been aggressively lobbying to get a piece of the publically funded pie that is California’s public education system.

Well after all the bluster coming from the Democratic camp about President Obama’s “upper hand” leading into the sequester showdown, it turns out he had no game at all. The result: score another one for the Tea Party who got to take a hatchet to government spending and hold the line on taxes. As I wrote after the “Fiscal Cliff” showdown:

Grover Norquist is happy. After the fiscal cliff deal was passed in the House, he pointed out that Obama blinked on his $250,000 line in the sand on taxes and that, by locking in the Bush tax cuts for 98% of Americans, the Democrats’ ability to defend the legacy of the New Deal has been greatly diminished. He’s right.

And now Grover and company are even happier as the Republicans just said no to more taxes and let the ax fall indiscriminately on government spending. The “liberal media” may think badly of them and their national approval rating may be in the toilet but they simply don’t give a rat’s ass because they are winning nonetheless.

As the historic battle between Mayor Filner and San Diego’s big hoteliers over the tourism marketing deal unfolds, it’s clear where the lines are drawn.

On one side, you have a new strong mayor who is committed to ending business as usual in San Diego and on the other, you have folks like Terry Brown, chairman of the San Diego Tourism Marketing Association who, as Matt Potter at The San Diego Reader has pointed out, is a big time Republican funder as are the crew of business lobbyists, real estate developers, and San Diego Taxpayer Association types who have miraculously found they can love a tax after it has transubstantiated into a fee and serves as a giveaway to corporate interests.

Soon our national political discourse will be dominated by the nightmarish sequester debate with the Republicans’ doomsday austerity strategy being countered by the Democrats’ austerity-lite program that draws from the eternal verity of Simpson-Bowles. God help us.

Standing in stark contrast to the reigning austerity-lite crowd inside the Democratic Party is perhaps the brightest progressive hope in the country, Senator Elizabeth Warren. Rather than playing the populist note to bash Republicans and then retreating to safe, chamber of commerce approved positions that put Social Security and Medicare “on the table” like many of her colleagues in the Democratic Party, Warren is consistently taking it to the 1% whenever she can, and she really means it.

It’s the Monday before Valentine’s Day and merchants across America are happily preparing for our annual romance-driven consumer frenzy. Indeed this schmaltzy commodification of love is worth around $14.7 billion dollars a year with much of it ending in the predictable disappointment that comes when we realize that our frantic, frequently anxious lives just don’t measure up to the prepackaged saccharine dreams we are sold.

Valentine’s Day is the sanctification of an empty, soul-killing romance narrative, a celebration of the notion that the most precious and intangible human emotion can be summoned by the magic of the sexless dollar. In sum, as currently constituted, Valentine’s Day is where real love goes to die.

—— It’s the beginning of the new semester at San Diego City College where I work, so I thought this would be a good time to evaluate some of Jerry Brown’s bold moves on the educational front. In terms of funding, the passage of Proposition 30 has stopped much of the bleeding in schools and colleges across the state, but it still does not do enough to restore all that has been cut in recent years. Therefore, despite some very good news, challenges remain ahead.

In the wake of President Obama’s electoral victory and inauguration much of the political analysis has been about the continued chaos inside the Republican Party. With some establishment conservative figures openly questioning whether it was good for the party to continue to be dominated by the hard right, some in progressive circles have been downright giddy, as they have watched the circular firing squad proceed. While this is surely entertaining sport, the more important battle may be happening inside the Democratic Party.

As we celebrate the rich legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., I am drawn back to my favorite speech of his, “Where Do We Go From Here?”. This was Dr. King’s last address as President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, given toward to end of his life in 1967. It outlines two core principles of King’s unfulfilled legacy that united the questions of racial injustice with those of economic inequality and rampant militarism.

In last week’s column I noted how the tax increases on the 1% included in the “fiscal cliff” deal amounted to little more than the political equivalent of a love tap for the rich because upper income tax rates remain much closer to their historic lows than to their mid-twentieth century highs.

This is disheartening because, as the political narrative shifts toward some form of austerity in the name of deficit reduction, our country’s historically high level of economic inequality remains deeply entrenched and there simply will not be enough revenue to engage in a robust progressive program centered around “nation building at home” as President Obama likes to say.

In sum, the unemployment crisis and other key social and economic needs will take a back seat to deficit reduction and the battles will not be about whether an austerity agenda is the right course for America but rather what form of austerity program we should pursue.

Grover Norquist is happy. After the fiscal cliff deal was passed in the House, he pointed out that Obama blinked on his $250,000 line in the sand on taxes and that, by locking in the Bush tax cuts for 98% of Americans, the Democrats’ ability to defend the legacy of the New Deal has been greatly diminished. He’s right.

As David Horsey recently pointed out:

[T]he mandarin of the anti-tax movement, Grover Norquist, is coming out of this showdown with a big smile on his face, which should make Democrats wonder if their “victory” is a bit of an illusion. Norquist has kept Republicans in line for years by making them take his pledge to never, ever raise taxes.

In some Buddhist traditions people bring in the New Year with contemplation, evaluation, and meditation. One element of this celebration can be a fire ceremony where the karma of the old year is symbolically burned leaving one open to the next moment. Usually, after yet more meditation, at midnight a bell is rung to welcome in the New Year. Or, to put it more accurately, they bring in the happy new instant.

So, before the old moment bleeds into the new one, here are a few things cultural and political to remember and be grateful for about the last calendar year in San Diego as the next one comes into being.