Author: Source

Monday afternoon Coalition will urge Council to keep Miramar Landfill public

From onlineCPI.org

Community groups will be out in force Monday to tell the San Diego City Council to keep Miramar Landfill under public control.

“It’s becoming clearer all the time that contracting out the landfill is a bad idea,” said Clare Crawford, CPI Executive Director. “There are just too many risks for taxpayers, our environment and the services every household and business relies on.”

The Council is scheduled to vote at 2 p.m. Monday on moving forward with Mayor Sanders’ proposal to put the landfill operations up for bidding by private companies.

Editor: The protests in and around Wall Street in New York City are still going on, and have now entered their eighth day. “Occupy Wall Street” efforts have now been endorsed by three unions. Here is a report by Chaz Valenza who has been monitoring the demonstrations. There have been between 150 and 250 people occupying and sleeping at a park a block from Wall Street, which they have re-named Liberty Park.

Over 30 regional civic, health, labor, environmental, faith and business organizations have joined together to stage San Diego’s response to the 350.org call for an international day of action for climate change on Saturday, September 24, 2011. Hundreds of similar events all over the world will be held that day with the goal of sending a strong message to elected leaders that climate change is real and will dramatically diminish the quality of life, prosperity, and happiness for current and future generations.

By Brittany Bailey / Special to the OB Rag

Since the OB Rag’s article on the Dumanis Fundraiser on Del Monte in Ocean Beach created such controversy, I decided to stakeout the event and report on any protests that may arise. Nothing says ‘political espionage’ more than a college student facebooking in a mini cooper.

If I were the kind of person who stereotypes (and I am), I might say that at a liberal fundraiser, I might expect to find an offering of free abortions, a justice of the peace presiding over same-sex marriages, and guests using the smattering of hors d’ouvres to make sandwiches for the homeless. I wasn’t sure what to expect at a conservative’s fundraiser– maybe a politician accepting monetary donations in exchange for political patronage? Oh, wait….

San Diego: Home of the working poor

From the Center on Policy Initiatives

Poverty grew dramatically in San Diego County in 2010. CPI’s analysis of US Census Bureau poverty and income data shows that more than 1 million people in the county are struggling with economic hardship, including many who have jobs.

By Ken Stone/Patch.com

Author of a dozen books, including the definitive Afoot and Afield local series, had kidney cancer.

Jerry Schad, the prolific hiking writer and former La Mesan, died Thursday at his home in downtown San Diego, The San Diego Union-Tribune reported on its website. He was 61.

According to Cal/EPA, San Diego Unified School District among those implementing textbook

By Susanne Rust/California Watch

Under pressure from the American Chemistry Council, a lobbying group for the plastics industry, school officials in California edited a new environmental curriculum to include positive messages about plastic shopping bags, interviews and documents show.

About 200 Kaiser Permanente employees in San Diego walked off the job Wednesday to protest proposed benefit cuts and what they regard as insufficient staffing levels.

Audiologists, dieticians, health educators, social workers, speech pathologists and mental health therapists began picketing at the Kaiser Hospital in San Diego’s Allied Gardens neighborhood about 6 a.m. Leighton Woodhouse of the National Union of Healthcare Workers said the employees would return to work Friday.

Rand study finds less crime near pot dispensaries. Crimes such as assaults and thefts rose in areas of L.A. where the shops were forced to close last summer, researchers say. The city attorney’s office and a sheriff’s spokesman dispute the report’s conclusions.

Here is a mid-day update on the protests going on currently around Wall Street in New York City. “Occupy Wall Street” actions and a takeover of a local park continue. Tensions between demonstrators and police are mounting, one protester is in critical condition, and it appears that YAHOO was – for a while at least, censoring emails on their accounts that had the words “occupy wall street”. The “problem” appears to be over.

In the Tea Party’s America, families must mortgage their home to pay for their mother’s end-of-life care. Higher education is a luxury reserved almost exclusively to the very rich. Rotten meat ships to supermarkets nationwide without a national agency to inspect it. Fathers compete with their adolescent children for sub-minimum wage jobs. And our national leaders are utterly powerless to do a thing.

Tea party offers a lesson, but progressives don’t get it.

By Rick Janhkow

Below is a recent NYT News Service article that illustrates a point I have tried to make in the past about why progressive activism in this country is so weak and ineffective, and why counter-recruitment and school demilitarization work is an antidote to that weakness.

In general, peace and other progressive movement organizations in the U.S. focus on electoral campaigns, legislative lobbying and street protests that are immediate responses to crises, while they fail to simultaneously pursue long-term strategies that are necessary to make the general public willing to embrace and actively seek progressive social change.