Rocky For San Diego Mayor

Renters Union Director Drops Out: Supports Filner

2011-07-03T13:18:00.000-07:00

By Helen Villines

“Why run for a political office, when you don’t even intend to vote for yourself,” Rocky Neptun asked a recent gathering of the San Diego Renters Union. In announcing his withdrawal from the race for mayor of San Diego next year, he told the tenant group that “we have the first opportunity in many decades to elect a progressive candidate in Congressman Bob Filner, who will take back our city from the special interests and their wealth based politics.”

Meeting in City Heights last Saturday, June 25, 90 city residents heard Neptun blast his fellow LGBT candidate District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis as representing what is “broken and dishonest” about the present political system. “Her arrogance, her prosecution abuse against political opponents and non-cooperative judges, her shady associations with wealthy developers, her jihad against medical patients and their medicine, her power based politics; all represent an ominous and precarious future for all of us middle-class and working folks” he said. Neptun’s book, 1st City of Empire, to be published in October, devotes an entire chapter to Dumanis and what he calls “her betrayal of the LGBT movement and its civil libertarian values.”

“Many friends and fellow tenants have urged me to stay in the race, to raise the issues which will not be mentioned by the candidates or the corporate media – like the need to implement a tough global warming mitigation agenda for our children’s future, sustainable power and water on a local level, the closing of the San Onofre nuclear power plant, the need for rent control and free public transportation to make San Diego affordable,” Neptun asserted, “but I believe that Bob Filner, as a national leader, not mired in the myopic interests of local politics, not controlled by developer lobbyists, affluent lawyers and heavy-handed corporate interests, all sipping at the public trough, will not allow himself to be drawn into the smokescreen squabbles over pension reform and create a grand vision which will force the wealthy and powerful contractors to pay their fair share of taxes and fees to fund city improvements and services.”

“The corporate media will gnaw, chew and spit out personal rubbish about Filner, (temperament, thin skinned, pure junk, tabloid reporting) like they have with any outside challenger to the system – from Peter Navarro to Steve Francis to Donna Fry – and as they will with Carl DiMiao, who’s politics are all wrong but who is at least honest and has the people of this city at heart; yet, Bob must run a progressive campaign to fight the selling off of our city’s services and assets to the highest bidder, oppose the campaign to replace city employees with low-wage workers from Tijuana and protect the interests of all of us average citizens from the lobbyists and political opportunists who now dominate city government,” Neptun told the gathering.

“Like Monty Hall, in his “Let’s Make a Deal” days; Dumanis is offering every local Democrat of any stature, who can gain media coverage, possible city employment and municipal contracts for their associates, if they jump ship and abandon their party,” Neptun announced. “My LGBT friends in the DA’s office have told me that she has made a special high level city appointment overture to State Senator Christine Kehoe, who is being termed out of office, to run against her and split the Democratic vote.”

Neptun, who is openly Gay and a member of the LGBT community’s San Diego Democratic Club (soon to be the Stonewall Democratic Club) as is Kehoe, urged her not to run for mayor and support Bob Filner. “Besides,” he said, “if Kehoe runs and I run, with LGBT members Dumanis, Carl DeMaio and Nathan Fletcher all running, each debate forum will be more like a traveling gay pride event than a reflection of the real diversity in our city.”

“No one should vote for or against a person simply because they are Gay,” Neptun said. “But what we have here, in the 2012 election for mayor, is the downtown power establishment, the city’s wealthy oligarchy of developers, anointing Dumanis as the heir apparent to the lackluster Jerry Sanders – who was more a corporate water boy than a leader.”

“They - the city’s elite - would run Shamu the whale if they thought he would continue their domination of municipal government and never bat an eye over Shamu’s sexual orientation,” he said. “Only Bob Filner as a real outsider can clean up the mess at city hall, un-beholden to the fat cats and political supplicants who routinely elect a string of Republican mayors who have, in turn, run our great city into bankruptcy and disrespect, while making the bureaucrats and politicians very rich. Dumanis herself will retire with a quarter of a million dollar pension.”

He reminded the gathered tenants that both Christine Kehoe and Scott Peters, another potential Democratic ally of Dumanis, are both former city council members who voted for “the lies and cover-up” of the city’s financial disaster in the making. They both draw huge city pensions, while librarians, life-guards and other hard-working city employees are attacked for their meager benefits.”

Neptun, who is director of the San Diego Renters Union, told the renters’ gathering that the $30,000 raised by the group for his campaign could possibly be used to finance a local ballot initiative for rent control and/or free public transportation in San Diego. He also announced that the renters union board had agreed to go ahead with a campaign to close down “the aging and unsafe” San Onofre nuclear power plant.

“We must never lose sight of the most important focus of our exploratory campaign,” he urged the assembly of tenants, “to create a holistic approach to government – to make our city more fair and equitable rather than a playground for the corporate elite and to challenge local citizens to be part of the global movement for sustainability and a safe environment, to actually put our children’s future jobs and health above corporate profit."

"Let us challenge and help Congressman Bob Filner as Mayor of San Diego to create a vision for all of us who struggle to continue to live and work in this little corner of Earth’s splendor,” Neptun urged.

Helen Villines

It’s Time to Support Our Employees

2011-02-27T13:45:00.000-08:00

By Rocky Neptun

The greatest threat of the 21st Century is not terrorism or religious fanaticism or nationalism….. it is concentrated power – both political and economic – within the corporate state. That very power, concentrated in an elite, an oligarchy, whether national or local, is an interlocking system of wealth, politics, media, and corporations whose major purpose is to destroy the ability of individual citizens to organize together for the common good through the mechanism of government.

Their goal is unregulated greed, poverty wages, the right to pollute, the ability to sell dangerous drugs and unsafe products, the isolation and powerlessness of each citizen to vote or bargain or even plead in the media for a better life for their children. Theirs is a feudal world, where the rich and CEO’s are the new Barons and Earls, and people are trapped in stratified classes, almost castes, without access to education or economic opportunity.

They seek hierarchy, where they and their children will always be on top of the pyramid. A return to the social tyranny of Dickens’ day, when to be poor was a moral sin, a personal failure and a crime against society. They pretend to favor a “market” system, knowing full-well there is no more competition in monopoly capitalism, where large corporations have bought off most politicians and judges and, like Wal-Mart, have the power to overrule city councils.

God bless the rich, is their motto; and their creed is no one should have enough to eat, a warm place to sleep, medical aid, a good education, unless they have the money to pay for it! They see virtue in selfishness, weakness in sharing. They would fight social responsibility, whether it’s feeding a child or saving our human species from extinction because of global warming.

From Washington, D.C to Madison, Wisconsin to San Diego, the goal of the corporate state is to destroy community government and its regulatory power for the common good. Martin Luther King, Jr. is long gone, the Civil Rights movement tamed, the national unions defanged and almost irrelevant with over 40 years of corporate bought anti-union legislation and managerial intimidation, the Democratic Party, on a national level, run by opportunists has drummed its left-wing into submission or flight, people of faith who once fought systemic injustice, what St. Paul called “social sin” as opposed to individual sin, now hide, writing an occasional check for charity and what was once the “liberal class,” as Chris Hedges calls it, has become a useless hodge-podge of designer causes, identity ghouls and mouse warriors fighting injustice in their underwear with e-mails.

The last bulwark against the corporate state, the last vestige of an organized group of people of conscience, who see value in the public commons – whether it is libraries, free recreational facilities, public schools, health clinics, public transportation, unadulterated food, safe working conditions, clean air and water, or a safe haven for those to fragile, mentally or physically, to survive in dog-eat-dog corporatism – are the public employee unions. That is why they are under attack in Madison and San Diego.

The newly elected Governor of Wisconsin taking a playbook from the oligarchy in San Diego has blamed that state’s budget deficit on public employee unions. Unlike our city, where the unions were tamed at the turn of the Twentieth Century, as Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World) were murdered by police, tarred and feathered by vigilantes and run out of town by the hysteria of the wealth based media, both the city of Madison and the state of Wisconsin have a grand history of struggling for workers. Most of the rights we enjoy today as employees were first secured in Wisconsin.

For the right-wing governor to propose that public employee unions lose the right of collective bargaining guts the whole purpose of a union - an alliance of employees to secure safe and just working conditions by uniting for a common purpose. This very notion of individuals alone, isolated, powerless in the workplace is what the corporate state has in store for us all – it is their fundamental neo-liberal dogma. To organize for the common good, whether employees for decent wages or citizens fighting pollution in a nearby stream, is bad for business and the mechanism which allows for a social consciousness must be crushed. The very thought of communal responsibility or action for anything that threatens the corporate state, whether it is safe medicine or protection for our neighborhood mom and pop stores, must be made to seem not only impossible, but radical and outside the parameters of the personal capability of any individual.

San Diego’s Attack on Unions

San Diego’s oligarchic assault on its public employee unions was by stealth. The Republican game plan, helped by a few self-serving Democratic city council members, was to slowly squeeze every dime into corporate welfare over the years, subsidizing ball parks, hotels, golf courses, infrastructure projects for hundreds of corporations and call it “redevelopment” while under-funding their legal, contractual obligations to pay into the pension accounts of their employees and then, when the whole bait and switch game was discovered blame it on “greedy” city employees.

It was a win-win situation for the radical right. Bankrupt the city with corporate welfare; then, proclaim the only solution is to turn the services and assets of the city over to the very snake oil salesman and corporate crooks who benefited from the shell game (privatization or outsourcing, they call it) and crush the public employee unions under an Orwellian campaign of media lies and distortions.

Over and over, like an unattended car alarm, loud, viciously intrusive, blare, repeat the lie. The talking heads parroting the politicians parroting the lobbyists parroting the journalists parroting the accountants parroting the attorneys and back again. An endless chain of articles, sound bites at 10, political speeches, official pronouncements, all designed to inculcate the citizen, like a drill sergeant, to penetrate our very psyche: then, in military cadence, repeat the chant …."sound off…who’s at fault..1-2-3….sound off…the unions…1-2-3….” until it reverberates through the consciousness rhythmically and ceaselessly.

The real problem with our city, unlike Wisconsin, is that there is no real solidarity between people who work, unionized employees and the struggle against pitiful wages in the San Diego labor market – the worst cost of living to wages ratio of any major city in the nation. Where has the AFL-CIO Labor Council been all these years as the average San Diegan’s wages have stagnated and lost ground due to inflationary pressures? Jerry Burkiewicz, head of the Council for many years, can take a flush job with Sempra Corporation, which exploits its monopoly energy position, lies to government regulators and bribes Mexican politicians so the company can pollute without penalty, but he has never called for a mandated living wage for everyone who works in San Diego.

The problem with trade unions in San Diego is that unlike the Wobblies, who say an injury to one employee is an injury to all employees, most of them follow the corporate model of bottom line economics and “what’s in it for me” advocacy. First, the union officials take care of themselves, then their members, and then their political allies. And the rest of us who work for a living; well, we’re on our own, isolated, without any bargaining power – just like the governor of Wisconsin wants for his employees.

But in spite of the limitations and often myopic view taken by leaders, the rank and file members of the public employee unions are our teachers, librarians, nurses, trash collectors, lifeguards and hundreds of other taskers whose collective responsibility is to build our common capital, the life blood of society which cannot be commodified. It is neighborhood spirit, history, culture, attitude, a shared narrative of belonging and apportionment as members of a community, compassion and empathy, fairness and justice, and, ultimately, a sense of subjective purpose, personhood which cannot be bought and sold in a corporate state.

Public employees work for us, not Wal-Mart. As their employers, we should follow the Golden Rule, not the corporate rule, and treat them as we would want to be treated. In San Diego, we have been silent far too long in defense of these wonderful, vital community members.
*****

Rocky Neptun is director of the San Diego Renters Union. Rocky, who often says he would rather be published in the Catholic Worker than the New York Times has gotten his wish - the Catholic Worker will publish this article next edition.
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Rent Control in San Diego is Possible!

2011-02-27T13:43:00.000-08:00

• I propose the City of San Diego implement a rent stabilization program to cover all residential units which are rented or leased based on successful programs in Los Angeles, Santa Monica and several Bay Area cities. This would allow for only one increase per year, fluctuating between 2.8 percent (San Francisco’s limit) and 4% - depending on the cost of living index for San Diego.

• Under the auspices of an elected San Diego Housing Commission, I also propose a San Diego Rent Control Board, which would develop parameters on yearly increases, much like the utility boards and commissions regulate water and electricity rates.

In 2003, I sat in the San Diego City Council Chambers, watching Councilman George Stevens put on a political charade, as he dramatically introduced a proposal for the Land Use and Housing Committee to study a possible rent stabilization program for San Diego.

The proposal was quickly voted down by the full Council a few weeks later, after the San Diego Apartment Owners Association raised hundreds of thousands of dollars by asking each member to donate $5 for each unit they owned or managed to an emergency campaign fund to defeat this whisper of rent fairness. Through their lobbyists at City Hall, trolling the hallways, they used a carrot and stick approach to defeat the proposal. Dollars now for those who voted against the plan, dollars for opponents in future elections if they didn’t; the message was clear.
I asked Councilman Stevens immediately after the vote whether he would pursue rent stabilization through other means, like a city referendum or organizing tenants. He stumbled around the Council seats, with a low wailing, throwing his arms in the air, like a preacher who had just lost a convert, saying “its over, its over” several times. I was going to ask him another question, when he turned toward where the apartment owner’s association executives were sitting and smiled.

His nod, or was it a wink, capped the day’s travesty. He was going to run for the state legislature and wanted to tell voters he had “fought” for his district’s tenants. Meanwhile San Diego landlords, mostly distant corporations, and their hired property managers, sighed, marveled at how well the system worked – the best which money can buy – and went back to gouging hard-working San Diegans for even more of their take home pay.

Forty-eight percent of all who live in San Diego pay rent or lease. Eighty percent of all single income renters in San Diego pay more than 30 percent of their income for rent. Thirty percent of income is what the United States Department of Housing and Urban Affairs (HUD) considers affordable, thus fair. Now, granted, some folks want to pay more for amenities and ambiance, and that is their right. However, there are literally tens of thousands of our residents who are going without meals, sacrificing their health and future, just to pay the rent. Family structures are crumbling as families “double-up,” fifty seniors a month hit city streets homeless, while there are more than 2,000 evictions a month because of outrageous rent hikes. More than 40 nations around the world have rent control and another 30 have some form of rent stabilization programs.

The city cannot seize living facilities and charge a decent rent but it can manipulate the market and reward those landlords whose rent increases are fair and in line with the annual cost of living increase to wages ratio. The city cannot implement official rent control because the California Apartment Owners Association bribed enough state legislators to pass the Costa-Hawkins Law in the late 90’s, which restricts the ability of local jurisdictions to implement strict rent control per se. Since that un-constitutional bill was passed (it has yet to be challenged in Federal Court) rents in some cities, including San Diego, have increased well over 50% and evictions have skyrocketed.

Each year the City of San Diego has officially declared an “affordable housing emergency” for the past 7 years and then done very little to meet that emergency. We are proposing a fee for the opportunity to continue to obtain a yearly license during an “emergency” situation. Fees would be waved for landlords who voluntarily participated in the rent stabilization program. Now, some would argue that this is a tax but according to legal experts taxes differ from fees in that paying them isn’t a matter of choice.

The Coalition for Fair Rent, which includes sympathetic homeowners and business persons, as well as religious and non-profits, is proposing the following rent stabilization program for the City of San Diego:
• An Affordable Housing Mitigation Fee of $120 per year per unit on the roughly 235,000 rental and leased units in the city, until the day there are enough units in the city to create a competitive market environment and affordable rent is at 30% of income. The fees would be earmarked for the affordable housing crisis only and used on such market leverage projects as land trusts and cooperative housing programs.
• The fees would be wavered for any landlord who voluntarily decided to meet the city’s Board of Rent Stabilization’s annual report on affordability – measuring cost of living increases to wage increases in the city, then, determining each year’s allowable percentage increase in rent charges.
• The Board of Rent Stabilization would also monitor and approve any additional charges above the rental or lease contract amount, such as parking fees, waste removal, pet deposits, etc. to avoid hidden increases in actual rent.
• Certain amounts of the funds from the fee would be set aside to create land trusts – property removed from the market and held by the Housing Commission – for the sole purpose of affordable housing projects and to create a public mortgage guarantee branch of the Housing Commission to encourage, help facilitate and finance the purchase of apartment buildings by tenants when the facility goes up for sale.

There are tens of thousands of laws, codes, ordinances, administrative decisions, tax codes, tax loopholes, rebates, deductions, and other protections for those who own property and that is as it should be…often times these are hard-earned investments.

But in all fairness, the 52 percent of San Diego families pay rent or lease and must be protected from exploitation or larceny if our society is to have any moral value or justification. “Whatever the market will bear” is a catchword for greed and sometimes outright theft – look at our electric costs during the de-regulation crisis as few years back, look at your health care premiums or insurance bill each month, watch the gas pump become a one armed bandit for foreign sheiks or wealthy speculators at British Petroleum (BP) owner of Arco Gas here in the U.S.

Those of us who own property must help our neighbors who pay rent or lease. We owe it to our children and grand-children to create a fair system, based on cooperation and our mutual needs for a more just and peaceful neighborhood.

Artifice at the Theatre: Mayor Sanders’ State of the City Speech

2011-01-31T08:11:00.001-08:00

By Rocky Neptun
Director, San Diego Renters Union

Like a bogus Thespian, Jerry Sanders took to the stage of the Balboa Theater in mid-January, using every ounce of verbal ruse and sleight of mouth he possessed to attempt a bravado performance heralding his dreary and monotonous six years as Mayor of San Diego.

Sanders' speech, like his devious administration of city government as water boy for the corporate state, reflects a continuing tale of two cities. One city, AIG-by-the-sea, a metropolis of wealth, for wealth, where corporate welfare has driven the city to the brink of bankruptcy; then, in a cruel Orwellian scheme, from politicians to media and back again, like a spinning wheel, the city’s dire straights are said to the be the cause of hard-working city employees, who want and were promised a decent retirement, rather than the fault of the wealthy and huge corporations who don’t pay their fair share of taxes and fees.

The other city, the San Diego which Sander’s ignores, is the little guys and gals, like you and I, who were not represented in the lackluster address, mostly a trade and industry homily. We, people who work hard and expect honesty and integrity in our city officials; we, the ones who don’t fund campaigns or hire million dollar law firms as lobbyists to write initiatives to make our friends rich.

Tragically, almost perversely, there was nothing in the speech for those of us who look off into the distance, across our beloved beaches, and know – like Sarah Conner in Terminator 1 – that the storm is coming. Sanders appallingly aid’s the impending catastrophe of global warming by his silence. The tipping points are near, irreversible destruction to our Mother Earth, our children and their children’s very survival are at stake, and Sanders worries about a football stadium for downtown.

In his speech, Sanders disregarded that other San Diego, where 51 percent of the population live, renters facing massive rent hikes, with withering wages eaten by inflation or home owners being foreclosed and evicted by his banker friends. City renters assistance runs out the first few weeks of any year, 50,000 families are on a waiting list for subsidized housing, over 300,000 San Diegan area families depend on food hand-outs to feed themselves and their children, 5,000 families are evicted in the city each month because they can’t pay and 50 seniors end up homeless on city streets every other week, but Sanders beats his chest and warns Gov. Brown not to touch CCDC and its huge taxpayers’ handouts to private projects for wealthy developers and speculators.

Like an Emperor with no clothes, his undress-ness disregarded by the media and his blue-blood cronies, the Mayor struts onto the stage pretending that his inspiring answer to the city’s financial crisis is to take the services and functions of government away from one special interest group – the unions – and give it to another special interest group – the corporations. If anyone thinks that city employees are overpaid and their pensions excessive, just take a look at Sempra Corporation, a company, which in addition to gouging the average San Diegan – far more than city government – also lies to the consumer, cheats on reports, pollutes both the air and the land and conspires to control the entire energy future of the region. Yet, Sempra already owns one wing of the mayor’s office and its lobbyists write city ordinances.

Sanders regurgitates the Tea Party’s mantra about privatization, christened outsourcing, like some backwoods, bible-thumping preacher who screams “put a dollar in the hat” and be saved. Yet, all we have to do is look at our auto insurance bills, health care premiums, pharmacy receipts, gasoline costs and other household needs to understand that the corporate state, in the long run, will be far more costly and intrusive in our lives than city government. Sander’s own administration is a prelude to the corporate control of local government, with lawbreakers at Sunroad Corporation and mobsters in Little Italy being protected, while he appoints personal cronies and crooks to the city’s commissions.

His Honor unfortunately is either dense, believes his own deception or has a lousy speech writer. “For five years, my efforts to build consensus on cost controls were held back by the argument [and his re-election efforts]that San Diegans would rather raise taxes than reduce services,” he cooed to the gathered crowd, “that notion got a fair hearing, and now its laid to rest.” What the mayor failed to point out was that Proposition D was a ruse, a deceptive maneuver, to get voters to reject a sales tax, one of the most regressive taxes on the books, which hurts working folks and middle-class families far more than the wealthy. There was no opportunity to even discuss, much less propose, more progressive levies like income tax for those making more than $100,000 or a payroll tax for affluent corporations. And there is absolutely no effort on his administration’s part to raise the pitifully low city development services, building permits and other corporate fees.

Wealth dictates. It does not propose as in a Democracy. And this is what we will lose in a corporate state. We as citizens will no longer even have the appearance, let alone the opportunity, to decide our fate as a collective society. We will be consumers of government, not participants. Individuals, at the mercy of vast, unfeeling, indifferent, market driven-forces, alone, isolated, without the cooperative spirit, communal consensus, or shared effort which community government fosters. Profit will dictate policy, not community needs. Take for example, the Mayor’s report during his speech on billionaire Irwin Jacobs plan to rid the Plaza de Panama of cars. The plan, while much needed, is contingent on defacing the historic bridge that connects the park. While city preservationists and locals oppose this ugly concrete project, Jacobs on a recent KBPS broadcast flatly told a caller it’s either his way or no way. This attitude is a precursor of our future domination in San Diego.

The leadership of the corporate state, from Goldman Sacs to the Chargers’ wealthy Spanos family, the big elites and the little oligarchies here in San Diego, the investment houses and large banks; they all know the game is up. Americans are broke, credit cards maxed, living from paycheck to paycheck, unemployment at record levels and under-employment off the charts. The titans of industry and their CEO’s know that soon there will be no margin for gain, no one left to buy their over-priced products, families cutting back on services, the consumer bottomed out.

So where to find new capital? We have already seen the answer on a massive scale with bailouts and stimulus packages for corporate welfare from the United States Treasury. Now the banks, investment firms and corporations are seeking to take over local government and put taxpayer money into the market driven casino-like irresponsibility of the corporate state – where the only value is monopoly control and profit. Sell the public commons, close down libraries, abandon parks and recreational areas, condemn young people to crime by closing after school at risk programs, hire cheap labor from Mexico so no one get’s health care or retirement – the third worldization of our beloved San Diego.

Mayor Sanders is not the only shrill for the San Diego Oligarchy, from rabid Carl DiMaio, actually Sarah Palin in “drag,” to cool, unflappable corporate minion, Kevin Falconer, illegally elected with Republican shenanigans, there is an inter-locking system of developer groups, building associations, apartment owner federations, real estate consortiums, attorney alliances and a confederacy of blue-bloods, who, sitting in the audience at the Horton Plaza’s theatre want nothing to rock their boat, or challenge the status quo of low wages, high prices and profit. They applaud this mayor without vision. They will finance these councilmen who want nothing more than to go on to higher elected office and get rich. And they will return next year to hear the same plodding voice, the tired old euphemisms about America’s finest city for the wealthy.

Mayor Sanders should begin outsourcing with his next two “State of the City” addresses. Perhaps, Bill O’Reilly could speak, he’s more honest and far more entertaining, or perhaps they will let Bernard Madoff, the former high priest of profit religion, out of prison to speak about the glories of the corporate state for San Diego.

Bread, Circuses and The Welfare King: Alexander Spanos

2011-01-30T08:07:00.000-08:00

By Rocky Neptun

When I began my property maintenance business a few decades ago, I used 80 percent of my assets and borrowed an amount equivalent to another 50 percent. At that time, or even now, there was never a consideration that you, as a taxpayer, should finance my business venture.

Yet, Alexander Spanos, worth over one and half billion dollars, according to Forbes Magazine, wants you and me to subsidize his new football stadium in the East Village, downtown San Diego. The entire notion of corporate welfare for his project and the millionaire fat assed football players who smash and crash against one another chasing a stupid looking ball, would bring laughs in any enlightened social order. Yet, in our society, where single-mothers, without work or funds, are harangued and fingerprinted, treated like criminals for asking for a helping hand, the Mayor of San Diego, the city’s major newspaper and other bought shrills would have us spend $800 million on an oversized playpen for aging adolescents who just can’t seem to get it up for cable television or internet broadcasts of this tedious brawling, called football.

This titan of sports events would have you believe that his million dollar profit each night will bring jobs and prosperity to the region. Shades of a roman emperor, he would give us bread and circuses. Like any con artist, sovereign or not, with the precise skill of a pickpocket , the secret is to let your victim think that everything is normal, that this is the way things are done. If one’s prey is a large group of people, then, in Orwellian fashion, all the gears and levers of the corporate state, its media, politicians, advertisers, snake oil salesmen, must be put into motion to dupe the citizens into believing the lie. From weapons of mass destruction to the financial benefits of a football stadium, the process of propaganda and untruth is the same; begin with a false premise, repeat it over and over, spend a few million plastering the message on walls and between segments of Oprah Winfrey, narrow the parameters of the debate by a bought media and its cowed journalists.

Right up front, one thing must be made perfectly clear – there has never been a sports stadium which has made money using taxpayer dollars – except Miller Park Stadium in Milwaukee which is not only a multi-use facility of football and baseball, but its Green Bay Packers football team is a community owned franchise, with all profit being returned to the neighborhoods.

Football is all about money, lots of money for owners and the players. Those who cling to this wealth, like barnacles on a whale, or those who feel their macho manhood (and, increasingly, macha womanhood) is tied into a symbiotic relationship with a home team, will try to tell you that stadiums bring jobs and spending to the community. “Wealthy sports moguls have turned bilking taxpayers into an art form,” Doug Bandow, conservative senior fellow at the Cato Institute and former assistant to President Ronald Reagan, reminds us. “Franchise owners typically win taxpayer support only through threats; pay us off, or we will leave they say, give us a new stadium, or we will go someplace else.”

“Government stadiums benefit economic and political elites,” Bandow reports. He cites a study done by two economists, Robert Baade of Lake Forest college and Allen Sanderson of the University of Chicago, who looked at 10 metropolitan areas which built stadiums and found “no net employment increase.” The study pointed out that, except for the initial construction jobs, most of which were specialists brought in from other parts of the country, the remaining jobs were low-wage, mostly part-time and lacked benefits. Also, in terms of stadium advocacy about boosts to the local economy through new revenue “which will offset the taxes used to subsidize the new stadium,” they found that no new out-of-town attendees are attracted by a new stadium with more than 90 percent of ticket buyers local residents and that sports spending primarily substitutes for other outlays “Most people have entertainment budgets, and the $100 they spend taking the family to the ballgame is $100 that they don’t spend on movies or bowling later in the month,” the report said, “but nobody seriously thinks that we should raise taxes or spend millions on bowling alley or movie theatre subsidies.” This is called the substitution effect which smashes the economic multiplier effect claimed by most stadium proponents.

Conservative Bandow blasts socialism for billionaire sports moguls, like Spanos, saying “stadiums don’t constitute a great unmet social need, sports should be a private enterprise, privately funded.” Suggesting a far greater pull for suburban residents, he called for a string of public restaurants or “if the goal is trickle-down consumer spending and business development, why not build a new automobile factory, retail outlet, grocery store or software facility to attract and maintain companies, jobs and economic growth?”

The real reason that Spanos wants a new football stadium is not community stature or more jobs or an economic benefit for you and me, it’s because he wants more elegant skyboxes than Qualcomm has. These imperial balconies can rent for as much as $250,000 a year and, better yet, for Spanos, unlike entrance fees, he doesn’t have to split skybox income with the National Football League. Also, like Wal-Mart and other low-wage exploiters, who get the public to subsidize the working poor with food stamps, health care and other essential needs, public dollars underwriting stadiums help Spanos absorb the inflated payroll of millionaire football players. The city of San Diego already loses $17 million a year subsidizing Qualcomm Stadium, does anyone really think that will change with a much more expensive location, not only in terms of land costs but in day-to-day traffic delays and police outlays.

Then there are the additional unseen costs of subsidizing a billionaire’s expanding fortune. There is the obvious fact that bond money spent on a new stadium could go for much more vital infrastructure needs which serve the greater citizenry, like aging sewer lines which spew into city streets and the ocean, streets, libraries, parks, or affordable housing. Just one year after Minneapolis’ Minnesota Twins got a new taxpayer funded stadium in 2007, the city’s I-35 bridge collapsed, killing 13 people and injuring over a hundred, because repairs were delayed for lack of funds.

There is also the issue of using tax-exempt bonds to finance private ventures, like stadiums. Not only will San Diego pay a much higher rate on the municipal bond loan because of its structural deficit and bad credit rating, but because of the tax exemption on the bond the state of California and the Federal Government, reeling from the economic downturn, will lose millions in tax revenue from the Spanos family which will have to be made-up by either increased taxes or the loss of essential government services. For every $100 million in tax exempt bonds issued, the Federal government loses $21 million in tax revenue, so, tax payers – you and me – would have to help make up the $100 million or so loss during the life of the bond. So San Diegans will get a double-whammy, while Alexander Spanos sings his way to the bank.

Now for almost a decade the Chargers have said they would build a new stadium without public money, yet recently they have said they cannot do it without corporate welfare. Why the change, especially in the middle of a recession? Could it be that it took that long for their people to be embedded in the redevelopment agency, CCDC, and city staff? Why did Mayor Sanders, who as a campaign promise, said no city money would be used for a stadium, suddenly do an about face and now parrots the notion? Could there be a consulting position in the works? Why has CCDC spent close to $200,000 and the San Diego City Council another $500,000 of public money to study how to finance the construction when Spanos should have paid for these studies? Is this pork project the funding source for Kevin Falconer's victory over Carl DiMaio as our next mayor? Are there bribes, kick-backs and/or campaign contributions in the mix? And how many millions will Spanos spend on distortions and lies in the upcoming referendum over the stadium?

“Corporate welfare is always unsavory business,” Raymond J. Keating, chief economist for the Small Business Survival Committee says, “the politically connected and high profile gain at the expense of small business owners and consumers who work hard day to day but have no friends in high places, decision making is shifted from the private sector, which is guided by price and profit signals to meet and create consumer demand, to the public sector, which is guided by politics and the quest for power, taxes are increased on the many, so that resources can be funneled to a select few – in the case of subsidized ballparks, billionaire team owners and multi-millionaire team players.”

In his book, The Baseball Economist: The Real Game Exposed, J.C.Bradbury documents that there is absolutely no public economic development benefit to new stadiums.” While Michael W. Lynch of the Conservative blog, Reason.com, bluntly tells it like it is, “publicly funded sports stadiums are like crack cocaine to local politicians and business bigwigs,” he writes, “these folks are just like addicts, they deceive everyone around them for the sake of a fix, they resort to public theft to pay for their fix, forcing citizens who couldn’t care less about sports to subsidize teams.”

Rocky Neptun, who has never lasted through a full football or baseball game in his long life, is a soccer fan. He is the volunteer director of the San Diego Renters Union (www.SanDiegoRentersUnion.org)

Artifice at the Theatre: Mayor Sanders’ State of the City Speech

2011-01-17T14:39:00.001-08:00

Privatize! Then, Bury Your Children!

2010-12-08T16:45:00.000-08:00

By: Rocky Neptun

Tijuana, Mexico. Dec. 5: Protesting the scorching deaths of their children for profit, several dozen families brought their heartbreak and anger to the streets of Tijuana last Sunday.

Seeking support in their call for justice for the blaze which consumed 40 children immediately, with eight subsequently succumbing to their burns and another 70 disfigured, anguished mothers and fathers gathered in front of Tijuana’s children’s hospital to plead with every parent within earshot to demand the government take action.

Almost nineteen months after the June, 2009 fire which consumed the ABC day care facility in Hermosillo, in the state of Sonora, agonizing parents with nowhere to turn for assistance traveled the 540 dusty miles to Tijuana, the border region’s largest city, to begin a public awareness and support campaign.

Forty-nine families, mostly workers with a few middle-class kin, were victimized twice. First, in the loss of their children, all under the age of five, and then, in the cover-up which pits them against some of Mexico’s most powerful people.

The day care facility, which housed 142 infants, was once state run but had been privatized by a corporation whose owners included the aunt of the President of Mexico’s wife, Margarita Zavala, as well as the uncle of the wife of the Governor of Sonora. Also, in ownership positions of the corporation were the wives of two ministers in the governor’s cabinet and his niece. The ABC Company has also taken over former public day care facilities in the Sonoran cities of Navojoa, Obregon, Nogales and a second in Hermosillo with 210 kids with the aid of federal and state authorities. Mexican President Felipe Calderon lied about knowing his wife’s aunt, even though they attended her 80th birthday in Hermosillo on May 31, 2009.

The media in Sonora is reportedly tightly controlled by Governor Eduardo Bours, who is considering a run for the presidency in 2012, and the parents have been unable to get local media to cover the truth because another owner is a cousin of the next Mayor of Hermosillo, Epifanio Salido. Likewise, President Calderon’s supporters own the national television networks Televisa and TV Azteca.

At the Tijuana gathering, equipped with only a bullhorn, a few signs and the truth, the surviving parents announced they would not cease to raise their voices in protest of both the profit driven tragedy and its cover-up. Only one independent television station’s reporter covered the demonstration.

With tears and bitterness, stricken mothers and fathers took the bullhorn to tell the crowd which gathered about manipulated building codes, overcrowding, insufficient staff and government inspectors pressured by politicians whose wives profited from the skimping on safety for the children.

Only 22 workers supervised the 142 toddlers at the ABC facility. The director of the Sonora office of the National Institute of Social Security (IMSS), Daniel Karam, who had handed over the day care center to the speculators over the concerns and protests of local residents and had refused to make the center comply with IMSS regulations, was paid to resign by the ruling PRI political party immediately after the fire.

Another federal official quietly discharged was the Regional Coordinator of IMSS daycare centers, Yadira Barrerra, who reportedly had allowed the well-connected wives consortium to hire inexperienced teenage personnel, permitted cradles with no wheels and too big to big to fit through the doors. None of the staff were injured leaving the children behind; while one desperate father, Francisco Lopez, drove his Silverado pick-up through the wall of the day care building in a futile attempt to save his daughter.

The converted warehouse where the children perished had only one functional exit with two emergency doors locked from the outside and another cemented over, the windows were too high for rescue efforts, there were no fire alarms or extinguishing system – it took firefighters two hours to snuff out the blaze. Between the exploding propane cooking canisters and the lethal levels of polyurethane fumes, the abandoned infants didn’t have a chance.

One mother rushed through the flames, suffering hideous burns, to successfully save her three- year old daughter, while other parents had to watch their rescued children die in area hospitals from acute kidney failure due to a severe loss of body fluids from the burns or respiratory collapse from smoke inhalation.

At the Tijuana protest, the mother of two-year Maria Magdalena Millan, who had perished as the roof collapsed, told of burying her daughter, and crying out she loved her very much and didn’t want to leave her there in the ground. The father of four-year old Herman Vasquez spoke of the horror of not being able to recognize his son with seventy-five percent of his body charred.

The mothers and fathers of the forty-eight children sacrificed to corporate profit say they refuse to accept the government’s meager response of seven low-level Sonora state finance department officials being detained, then fired; while the owners of the ABC day care conglomerate escape criminal indictments. They also pointed out to those assembled at the Tijuana demonstration their meager financial capabilities to bring civil actions in Mexico’s corrupt judicial system.

Grief stricken parents called on fellow citizens to demand the federal government act to investigate and punish those responsible. As a light rain fell, the gloomy dark clouds seemed to cast a ethereal darkness over this small section of plaza outside the children’s hospital in the Cinco y Diez neighborhood as residents began to learn the truth about this tragedy and its cover-up, their faces in shock as they held their own children tightly.

I asked Guadalupe Duarte, the organizer of the Tijuana protest, what those of us in the United States can do to help. She said the U.S. public needs to be aware of this atrocity “because your newspapers and television have focused on the heart bleeding stories of the children and not on their killers.” Angrily she said, “your Fox News has never once ran a story about those responsible because they have financial interests here with Mexico’s elite and other news organizations don’t want to jeopardize their access to the oligarchy which controls our country.”

She bitterly noted “the corrupt Mexican Supreme Court voted six to five in June of 2010 to clear top officials of any wrongdoing – either for the fire or its cover-up.” She encouraged those who wanted to help to go to the parents’ website www.movimiento5dejunio.org to hear the personal stories and keep up on the struggle for justice for the children “sacrificed for greed.” She noted all mothers and fathers should feel sympathy and should write the U.S. State Department to demand a full accounting of “this profit driven tragedy.” Bristling, she warned “this is what privatization looks like…and it will come to your country soon.”