Belly-whopping off the deep end

I know, I know, we're only human.  We all make mistakes.  Everyone's been known to lie or cheat or steal (only for a good reason, of course).  At times we're devious or lazy.  Sometimes greedy.  Vindictive, too. 

Given our shortcomings, I ask  you this: is it fair to demand higher standards from our elected officials than we might impose on regular folk like you and me?  Here's my answer: it's more than fair; it's self-evident common sense to hold out for brain-power and high ethical standards from politically-inspired individuals who climb into the public arena and vie for the prize of holding the public welfare in the palm of their hands.  

You look for professional standards and expertise from a dentist, don't you? from your trainer at the gym? the butcher at Vons?  Does it make sense to accept anything less from your elected politicians who have the power to shape, improve, or make a mess of your daily lives and surroundings?

You'd prefer them to be hard-working, conscientious, open-minded, practical, and honest, right?  To honor their responsibilities as public servants, no?  To surround themselves with trustworthy and intelligent advisors who respect the welfare of the public, true?  To be a cut above the least among us, yes?

So how come we countenance moronic decisions that purport to be in the best interests of San Diego’s 1.3 million residents but, in reality, stick a thumb in the public eye?

Keys to the Kingdom

For the first time ever, the San Diego public has been awarded the Keys to the Kingdom.  The grantor of this unique gift to the people of San Diego is former council member Donna Frye and her Open Government project, developed during her three-month stint in the office of Mayor Bob Filner.

Finally, regular citizens and ordinary folk (you and I) have ready access to just about everything we wish to know about the ins-and-outs of City Hall.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to how you can get formerly-hidden public information, including ingress to the services and attention you expect and deserve from your city government.  Okay now, time to follow the bouncing ball.

•  First, go to the city’s website at www.sandiego.gov.  Once there you’ll find the downtown skyline and Mayor Filner’s engaging smile -- amidst a cluttered hodgepodge of disparate offerings.  Ignore them all and let your gaze wander to an oasis in the middle of the screen that says Open Government.

•  Then click your heels together three times.  An additional click of your mouse on the Open Government box will transport you instantaneously to a serene page where you can calmly pick the path you want to pursue. 

•  Could be that the only thing you wish for is to be able to watch the City Council in action.  Or replay reality to check on how your council member voted a few months ago.  Let’s say you’re wondering what your neighborhood planning group is arguing about (presumably on your behalf).  Perchance you want to know what the city's 50 or so appointed Boards and Commissions are up to.  It’s all there at your fingertips -- click where it says Meeting Agendas and Minutes to begin your journey toward enlightenment.

•  Information about the California Public Records Act?  The ‘open government’ Brown Act?  Easy as pie -- click on the Outside Resources link. 

• Not everyone wants to know the size of San Diego retirees' pensions... but if you do, read on.

Spare us from our good boys

You’ve already read my take on bad boys. Now it’s time to flip the coin and ponder San Diego’s good boys. 

Lately, good boys have been coming out of the woodwork.  You can spot them a mile away by their gee-whiz grins and GQ grooming.  Their toothy, soulful smiles can break your heart.  Of course they’re super-civil and never raise their voices in public.  You wouldn’t hesitate to bring these dewy-eyed boys home to meet your momma. 

Don’t do it!  What you see is NOT what you get from these two-dimensional paper dolls… Stepford wives in drag.  Who are these people, you ask?  

Let’s start with the godfather of them all:

Is it heartburn or the stirrings of true love?

What you always wanted to know...

One time or another we've all experienced that unsettled, mid-gut sensation.  Strangely, it always feels the same -- whether the cause is dread, pleasurable anticipation, or a pesty upset stomach. 

This affliction has gone viral ever since San Diego elected a mayor who happens to possess the following attributes: 

• the habit of straight-talk (Bob Filner says it aloud whenever the emperor has no clothes) 
• common sense (he deals with obvious, ordinary facts and cuts through subterfuge)
• an agenda oriented toward the broad public welfare (good jobs, neighborhood benefits, local representation, face-to--face interaction)
• independence (no kowtowing to the established and influential downtown elite)
• a sense of humor (sometimes going for the jugular)
• an openly-admitted tendency toward intolerance (specifically targeting local corporate welfare schemes and generous financial giveaways, as well as noxious air, water, and neighborhood pollution)
• ambitious ideas to create a healthy, vibrant, diversified economy and cultural environment in San Diego (maritime/port development, top-notch understanding of the benefits of binational coordination, going 'green,' reinvigorating community planning and regeneration, stringent standards for city contracts, endorsement of  'the arts')

Yes, Bob Filner is giving a lot of San Diego greybeards a bad case of heartburn.  How?

Wish I could have written this

 Here's an article I wish I could have written.  Thanks go to Jim Miller and the San Diego Free Press.  Click here for the full story.
 
...Mayor Bob Filner is now engaged in an intense struggle with City Attorney Jan Goldsmith, big hoteliers, and the UT-San Diego because he has refused to sign off on the sweetheart deal negotiated by his predecessor whose legacy is quickly evaporating as you read this.  Specifically, Filner wants legal protections for the city if the dubious deal goes to court, a shorter tourism marketing agreement, a cut of hotel fees for city services, and a living wage for hotel employees.

Other than their questionable notion that the 2% tourist surcharge is not a tax, the real agenda behind the attack on Filner is San Diego’s elites’ desire to maintain their privilege and the advantages that have come to them from decades of shadow government.

As Mike Davis, Kelly Mayhew, and I wrote in the introduction to Under the Perfect Sun, “San Diego has too frequently been a town wide open to greed but closed to social justice. Like its Sunbelt siblings—Orange County, Phoenix, and Dallas—it has a long history of weak and venal city halls dominated by powerful groups of capitalist insiders.  ‘Private Government’ has long overshadowed public politics.”

More recently in Paradise Plundered: Fiscal Crisis and Governance Failure in San Diego, Steve Erie, Vladimir Kogan, and Scott MacKenzie similarly illustrate how San Diego’s political and business elite have done a fantastic job of “using public resources to maximize private profit” with little to no oversight from our “shadow governments.”

What Filner is doing here is important and historic: he is standing up to the entitled private interests who have run San Diego for its entire history.  He is saying no to shadow government, plain and simple.  For this, he deserves to be praised.

In essence, the war against our new mayor is a class war.  Filner has upset the apple cart of San Diego politics and threatens to end the reign of private government that enriches powerful interests by using public resources as a piggy bank for the affluent.  They rigged the game, made the rules, and now they think it’s outrageous that anyone has the temerity to challenge them–even if he is the democratically elected strong mayor of the city.

The argument driven by the UT-San Diego and echoed in much of the San Diego media that Filner is the problem because he is uncivil is a pathetic joke.  You should take it as an insult to your intelligence. What is truly offensive here is the level of entitlement that many of the city’s moneyed interests and Doug Manchester’s mouthpiece have and how readily much of the rest of the local media serves as an echo chamber when they cry foul just because they have to deal with a mayor who is more interested in the public interest than private profit.

Sanders and the long legacy of weak to criminal mayors that he belongs to was the embarrassment, not Filner.  They brought us government by and for the 1%.  But perhaps the hue and cry emanating from San Diego’s corporate crew needs to be put into context.  So, before you get all hot and bothered at the terrible prospect of the tourism industry being forced to be accountable, pay living wages, and give something back to the city, let’s review the current state of affairs nationally and locally and see who has really been getting away with economic murder...

...And, importantly, despite our city’s relentless boosterism, “The tourism industry had the lowest median earnings in 2011, $24,422 for a year of full-time work.”   That’s just a bit above the poverty level for a family of four, hardly the stuff that dreams are made of in “the world’s greatest country and America’s finest city.”  Low wages such as that sound a lot more like what keeps our local economy running for the benefit of the city’s elite while the rest of us struggle.

Thus Mayor Filner’s insistence that the tourism industry should be obliged to pay living wages is a righteous argument.  His belief that industries that get public subsidies give back is also a just and eminently reasonable position.  And his concern that any deal that benefits the tourism industry also needs to be clearly good for the city legally and economically is both correct and a breath of fresh air.  If he is successful we’ll get a deal that will help create better jobs and lift all of us up at the same time.

So of course those very elite and the local politicians and media that have buttered their bread for time immemorial are howling with outrage because San Diego’s new mayor is holding them accountable.  Much like the perpetually enraged Republicans at the national level they just can’t master the fact that they lost the election.  And even some of the weak Democrats on the City Council just can’t seem to understand that they shouldn’t keep operating by the old rules.

Sorry guys, you’re not running America’s Finest Tourist Plantation anymore.  If you are going to get $30 million in public funds to promote your industry, you need to give back and pay a living wage to your workers.  Period.

Shame on all of them for whining, but shame on all of us too if we allow the tabloid ready, petty, personality-based news coverage in the local media to bring down the mayor as he stands up to the real bullies in town who are determined to keep profiting at all our expense whether we are their underpaid workers or taxpayers made to fund the promotion of private greed.

The truth is that, warts and all, Mayor Filner represents a new day in San Diego.  If you believe that our government needs to be open and accountable and that the interests of social justice are more important than Manchester and company’s bottom line, then you should support him.

Top dog

I suppose there are women who would do battle to become the queen bee (Lorena Gonzalez flies to mind) but they're the exception, not the rule.  On the other hand, the lineup of San Diego males practicing back-stabbing techniques to become emperor… potentate… sultan…snakes the entire length of I-805 and back again.  

Our local warriors come in different shapes and modes -- from the programmed-android Carl DeMaio... to the sybarite Doug Manchester... to the changeling-striver Nathan Fletcher... to the overweening Jan Goldsmith... to the Brutus-clone Todd Gloria (why he'd identify with James Mason instead of Marlon Brando is beyond me).  They're panting hard at the prospect of unseating the obstinate Bob Filner, on whose head the crown currently rests.

It's not even springtime past the 2012 November election but the word is trickling out that 2014 (just around the corner) is the year of choice for a pitched battle to recall Mayor Filner

Getting away with murder (part II)

Some of my friends think I pick on San Diego unfairly.  They ask me, Don't all cities have a similar quotient of greed, corruption, mediocrity, deceit, and political blowhards as we have in San Diego?

I won't equivocate.  The answer is...yes. 

So why single out our city? Because San Diego is unique in one peculiar respect: we practice an overweening reverence for gentility.  We lionize propriety.  We relish an identity as America's finest, nicest city.  Some guys might even stretch the description and say we're pussy-whipped.  But the more orthodox label for our singular compliance is civility.

San Diego is obsessed with civility.

Getting away with murder

New series: What you always wanted to know…

Dear NumbersRunnner,
This question has been on my mind for a long time but it's one I've been afraid to ask: How come so many San Diegans get away with murder?    Yours truly, TQ (Timid Questioner)
 

 Dear TQ: Murder is a serious allegation.  If you'll settle for the lesser charge of white-collar crime (the FBI says it means "lying, cheating, and stealing…the full range of frauds committed by business and government professionals…"), you need only take a look at some of Don Bauder's investigative stories about our hometown white-collar crooks. 

But yes, when it comes to San Diego miscreants of a political persuasion these guys really DO get away with murder – both the metaphorical and bloody types. 

Consider the case histories of two recently-departed politicians -- ex-mayor Jerry Sanders and ex-councilmember Tony Young.  Both are now sheltered in the cushy bosom of our city's witness protection program, aka the San Diego Chamber of Commerce and the Red Cross, with annual salaries of over $300,000 and $200,000, respectively.

Mayor Jerry Sanders was delivered into the plump arms

Devouring Bob Filner

Predictions of doomsday have officially fizzled.  This past November voters elected the liberal Democrat Bob Filner as mayor of the city of San Diego and -- happy to report -- the world (as we know it) remains intact. 

In fact, our city seems pretty much the same as ever.  For example: 

• Our downtown heavyweights still scurry around in perpetual motion, determined to infiltrate and control the mayorhood
• Our elected officials still get that faraway look in their eyes as they prime their pumps for higher office or a lucrative move to the private sector
• Our local news media (daily newspaper, weeklies, online deliverers) still cling to their fixation on one-upping the new mayor with snarky, sneaky, snippy, snaky, sneering, snarly, and snide political coverage – unable to set aside overblown egos and get down to delivering responsible, informed, mature journalism
• Our failed mayoral candidate Carl DeMaio still pursues his obsessive compulsion to privatize government functions in the city of San Diego -- a dry run for his dream of privatizing state and federal government