OB Rag

Some of the country’s best-known multi­national corporations closely guard a number they don’t want anyone to know: the breakdown between their jobs here and abroad.

So secretive are these companies that they hand the figure over to government statisticians on the condition that officials will release only an aggregate number. The latest data show that multinationals cut 2.9 million jobs in the United States and added 2.4 million overseas between 2000 and 2009.

Vista rally time has been corrected! See inside.

RNs to sponsor soup kitchens, food pantries, speak outs on the need for jobs, healthcare, education, housing – and outline the RN plan on how to pay for it.

Local actions planned for San Diego include a freeway overpass flash mob and soup line.

From Maine to California, nurses, joined by others fed up with the ongoing economic crisis, will call on Congress members in their local district offices Sept. 1 to support a tax on Wall Street financial speculation, a revenue source fast becoming an international norm, to pay for healing the nation.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt / Excuse Me, I’m Writing / August 28, 2011

Friday, August 26, was Women’s Equality Day. Sadly, it’s a bit of a misnomer. Besides, how many people actually know what it is that the day celebrates? It surely is not equality. Women don’t have equality. Even I don’t have equality, and I am no pantywaist — but the same rights, responsibilities and opportunities as men? Oh my goodness, no. Women, as a class, have not yet achieved any of that.

Information Overload and the “Post Idea Age”

In a recent New York Times opinion piece, “The Elusive Big Idea,” Neal Gabler makes the case that we are living in a “post-idea” age where mundane observations have taken the place of big ideas. We have left behind the Einsteins for entrepreneurs. As he puts it:

If our ideas seem smaller nowadays, it’s not because we are dumber than our forebears but because we just don’t care as much about ideas as they did. In effect, we are living in an increasingly post-idea world — a world in which big, thought-provoking ideas that can’t instantly be monetized are of so little intrinsic value that fewer people are generating them and fewer outlets are disseminating them, the Internet notwithstanding. Bold ideas are almost passé.

It’s that time of year again, time to honor a San Diego community tradition going to back to the age of grunge, bungy jumping and line-dancing: it’s time for the annual Paddle for Clean Water at the Ocean Beach Pier, celebrating its 20th anniversary on Sunday, September 18th from 9:00 am to 12 noon!

Since I try not to drive at night and since I am on a very “fixed income”, I like to try new restaurants – at least new to me – that are relatively close to my home in Ocean Beach and not terribly expensive. Last week I read an article in the newspaper that is thrown in my driveway on Thursdays, re: a restaurant in Old Town called “BERGIE’S”. It sounded interesting, and since I don’t always have the time to stand in line AND eat at Hodad’s, a friend and I decided to try it out.

Over three hundred community and labor activists met yesterday, Saturday, August 27th, for an all-day economic summit and began the process of building a movement to change San Diego.

Under the title of “A Better San Diego”, yesterday’s event at Horace Mann Middle School was the culmination of months of meetings and discussions initiated by San Diego’s Labor Council. Back in the late Spring the Labor Council, headed up by Lorena Gonzalez, had called for allies from the community to join with them to build a community-labor coalition.

By time the Summit rolled around yesterday, you could see the hard work achieved by these activists. The diversity of the crowd rivaled any political grouping of San Diegans in recent history.

The County of San Diego has just released a video to warn all of us of the “Eight Signs of Terrorism”, in preparation for the tenth anniversary of the Sept 11 attacks, as part of their “See something, say something” campaign. We would like to add to this watch our additional Eight Signs of Republican Extremism.

To report suspicious activity, email the OB Rag at obragblog@gmail.com.

People who do the following might be plotting Republican extremist acts:

* Under the guise and rhetoric of “small government”, order all welfare and other poor people who receive public assistance to submit to monthly drug tests, as clearly the poor use illegal drugs much more than the rest of us….

By Mike Lee/SignOnSanDiego.com

A garbage truck on Tuesday morning picked up food scraps from seven grocery stores around San Diego and chugged to Miramar Landfill in what normally would have been an unremarkable moment.

But instead of turning into the zone for dumping trash, it delivered the mash of fruit, pastries and similar items to the composting yard and launched what many around the region hope is a new era of waste-reduction.

Editor: Here’s a timely article from the LA Times about how the State Lands Commission has grossly mismanaged millions of acres of public land, costing Californians tens of millions of dollars and benefiting large corporations, all the while the State is cutting teachers and aid to the poor. Oh, by the way, you fledgling investigative reporters, what public lands in San Diego County are being mismanaged by the State?

By Patrick McGreevy / Los Angeles Times / August 24, 2011

Businesses and dozens of other large corporations have benefited from officials’ mismanagement of more than 4 million acres of public land, according to a state audit released Tuesday. The cost to taxpayers could easily be in the tens of millions of dollars, the auditors say, at a time when the state has been forcing teacher layoffs and cutting aid to the poor.

Our City Councilman, Kevin Faulconer, is hosting a community “Coffee with Kevin” meet-up Thursday morning, August 25th, at Shades Oceanfront Bistro.

Mr. Faulconer will be at Shades between 9 and 11 am. Shades is located at 5083 Santa Monica Ave, Ocean Beach, at the corner of Abbott and Santa Monica, right across from the main Lifeguard station.

This is an excellent opportunity for OBceans to dialogue with Kevin on the issues that affect our community – such as:

• gentrification,
• no charges being filed for the stolen memorial benches,
• the lack of public restrooms,

….

Downtown San Diego – By 12:30 this afternoon more than two hundred people gathered to leaflet and rally in support of Southern California Grocery Workers who are prepared to strike after voting overwhelmingly against the latest offer from Ralphs, Vons and Albertsons, that would have a devastating effect on their health care.

More photos and video inside…