The San Diego Mayoral Candidates That Didn't Bark (tags)
When A Better San Diego, a coalition made up largely of labor unions and their affiliates, sponsored a debate among the four leading candidates for Mayor of San Diego in next year's election, only two showed up. The no-shows were City Councilmember Carl DeMaio, whose whole campaign is based on targeting city workers as the source of San Diego's economic woes, and District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis, both Republicans. A third Republican, Assemblymember Nathan Fletcher, and Democratic Congressmember Bob Filner attended and differed on city workers' pensions, outsourcing city jobs to private companies and many other issues.
Audio from Manu Chao show: Clandestino! (tags)
Audio of Manu Chao playing Clandestino at LA Sports Arena!
NJ TO MINUTEMEN AND THEIR SUPPORTERS: ¡BASTA YA! (tags)
The United Patriots of America (UPA), a group allied with the Minuteman Project, announced this public recruiting drive in Bridgewater on a radio station whose hosts are pretty sympathetic to their cause. Logic would say that they should have expected the press to show up, but when they did, they turned them away. Logic would also say that they should have expected protests, but they didn't seem prepared for that either considering most of the people that were in their meeting was there to disrupt it! Finally logic would say that if you are going to have a meeting to get support for your group while at the same time try to deflect charges of working with racists and the hate groups they belong to, the last thing you would want to do is have as your keynote speaker a guy who is a member of not one, but two groups that the Southern Poverty Law Center designate as a hate group. Well, all of that happened this weekend, and we got it all down for you. All of the attendees were lily white, except for two people. One was a black dude who was working for Ron Bass, the guy who runs UPA. The other was DLJ - and he was asked to leave because he was taping the meeting! He managed to BS them into allowing him to stay, and he was able to get some good footage prior to them trying to give him trouble. The pics going along with this story come from that video, so some of them are a little fuzzy, but they are still good enough for folks to see what went down. Mad props have to go to Casa Freehold, who alerted everyone to what was happening in our backyard. The summer is getting hotter and hotter.
AFL-CIO Immigrant Workers meeting June 10, 2000 (tags)
Following the historic AFL-CIO policy shift on immigration, more than 10,000 immigrant workers, religious, community, and union leaders attended the union movement's regional forum on Saturday, June 10 at the Sports Arena in downtown Los Angeles.