Category: California

By Miriam Raftery / East County Magazine / December 27, 2011

Starting January 1, new California laws take effect. Some give new protections to the public. Buying a used car? You now have a right to know its history. The government can’t snoop into your online reading habits. Your employer can’t peek at your credit report, in most cases. New laws also benefit pregnant employees, organ donors, renters, domestic partners, and bullied gay students.

Other laws impose restrictions. Want to buy popular cough syrups? You’ll need a prescription. If you order items online, you’ll be charged state sales tax. Shark fin soup and beer spiked with caffeine are banned. Employers have new requirements for notifying employees about pay and more. Kids must ride in a booster seat until age 8. Openly carrying a handgun is illegal, even if it isn’t loaded.

By Steven Cuevas / KPCC /Dec. 16, 2011

Occupy protests have spread to nearly 150 locations equally distributed between Northern and Southern California. Researchers at UC Riverside used social media sites like Facebook to track the movement’s growth from large urban centers to remote mountain towns.

Sociology professor Christopher Chase-Dunn and graduate student Michaela Curran-Strange manned the study, which has traced the Occupy movement to some far-flung locations.

By Dave Rice / The San Diego Reader / Dec. 17, 2011

Southern California Gas Company employees rallied across the state yesterday to protest a proposed labor agreement brought forth by the company’s parent, San Diego-based Sempra Energy. Picketing took place at Sempra facilities in Los Angeles, Anaheim, Compton, Visalia and Redlands.

Sempra employees with the Utility Workers Union of America and the International Chemical Workers Union have been without a contract since the previous agreement expired on November 1. Members say they have rejected the “last, best and final offer” made by the utility, according to the San Gabriel Valley Tribune.

A lot is going on with Occupy San Diego.

Occupiers Plans To “Re-Occupy” Freedom Plaza Starting Saturday December 17th

First, a group of the occupiers are planning to re-occupy “Freedom Plaza” – the name given to the Civic Center Plaza by demonstrators – on Saturday, December 17th. They believe they have a right to sleep in public space, and declare:

“Therefore we’re lawfully re-occupying Freedom Plaza.”

Murrieta House Occupied to Foreclose Foreclosure

By Mirna Alfonso / Murrieta Patch / Dec. 15, 2011

A disabled and bedridden schoolteacher Lesliane Bouchard, is in danger of being evicted. She vowed not to leave her home at 40734 Mountain Pride Drive in Murrieta.

By Alison St John / KPBS / December 13, 2011

One of many questions raised at the Energy Commission hearing was whether the power generated by the new air-cooled plant would even be used in San Diego. NRG owns the decades-old Encina power plant with the tall chimney on Carlsbad’s coastline. The company wants to build an air cooled plant next to it on the lagoon. But it has no agreement to provide that energy to SDG &E, making people wonder if the power is for LA.

By Aaron Bady / guardian.co.uk /December 13, 2011

On my way to the Occupy the port action this morning, I stopped by Oscar Grant Plaza, the tiny patch of lawn in front of Oakland’s city hall where – until the city evicted them for the second time on 14 November – Occupy Oakland’s tents, kitchen, library, and meeting place had stood. Now it’s little more than a muddy swamp. The city’s sprinklers run overtime to keep the soil saturated with water, so that no more tents can be put up. It’s cheaper than paying police to evict the occupiers. Easier just to leave the water on all night and turn the space into a mud pit.

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 12, 2011 — We are the front-line workers who haul container rigs full of imported and exported goods to and from the docks and warehouses every day.

We have been elected by committees of our co-workers at the Ports of Los Angeles, Long Beach, Oakland, Seattle and Tacoma to tell our collective story. We have accepted the honor to speak up for our brothers and sisters about our working conditions despite the risk of retaliation we face. One of us is a mother, the rest of us fathers. Between the four of us we have six children and one more baby on the way. We have a combined 31 years of experience driving cargo from our shores for America’s stores.

UPDATES 5:44 PM – Big Ed Schultz of msnbc mentions the West Coast ports shut down, while highlighting east coast…

San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee’s minions attacked Occupy SF on the 70th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Just a coincidence?

In the wee hours of this December 7 just past, over 100 SFPD riot cops invaded Occupy SF, gave the sleeping campers 5 minutes to clear out, arrested 70, supervised the destruction of their belongings in trash crusher trucks, and supervised the obliteration of the suddenly most offensive structures ever to grace the grounds of San Francisco: Tents.

Was it just a coincidence that this happened on the 70th anniversary …

My Occupy LA Arrest

by Patrick Meighan / blogspot / December 6, 2011

My name is Patrick Meighan, and I’m a husband, a father, a writer on the Fox animated sitcom “Family Guy”, and a member of the Unitarian Universalist Community Church of Santa Monica.

I was arrested at about 1 a.m. Wednesday morning with 291 other people at Occupy LA. I was sitting in City Hall Park with a pillow, a blanket, and a copy of Thich Nhat Hanh’s “Being Peace” when 1,400 heavily-armed LAPD officers in paramilitary SWAT gear streamed in. I was in a group of about 50 peaceful protestors who sat Indian-style, arms interlocked, around a tent (the symbolic image of the Occupy movement). The LAPD officers encircled us, weapons drawn, while we chanted “We Are Peaceful” and “We Are Nonviolent” and “Join Us.”

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt / Excuse Me, I’m Writing / Dec. 5, 2011

We are so frequently exposed to violence in the United States, most of us probably figure that, like pornography, we know violence when we see it. Enemies go to war, and we watch the carnage live on TV’s 24-hour news cycle. People physically harm each other on our streets and in our homes, and we tally their numbers with the rest of the tidy crime statistics. We replicate violent imagery in film and television, in music and video games, and eagerly consume it as entertainment. Yes, violence is pervasive, and most of us probably figure we have it pegged. But we’d be wrong.

By Lucas O’Connor / Two Cathedrals / December 5, 2011

With the state budget poised to dramatically under-deliver and trigger large budget cuts for schools across the state, local media has spent a couple months wading into the looming financial crisis at San Diego Unified for a while now. And while the immediacy of the local challenges makes it crucial to cover well, it isn’t like this is a crisis in a vacuum.

Any discussion of the budgetary straitjacket in Sacramento that’s made this budget crisis inevitable has been strikingly absent, aside from the perfunctory ‘state’s broken’ before getting into mitigating the effects.