California family vexed by fired nanny who refuses to leave

By AnneClaire Stapleton, CNN

June 27, 2014

Source: CNN

(CNN) -- Ralph and Marcella Bracamonte's California home has become their personal hell.

They fired their live-in nanny this month, but the woman -- Diane Stretton -- has refused to move out, and the couple has little legal recourse to evict her.

"I fired her June 6 and she refused to leave, saying she had rights and I needed to evict her," Marcella Bracamonte told CNN on Friday. "She quit working about a month before I ever fired her -- she would just stay in her room."

How bad did it get?

"She threatened to sue me after I didn't turn the air conditioner on," Bracamonte said, adding that Stretton "wrote me this long letter with all her terms and what she wanted -- she wanted my family out of our home for certain hours everyday -- it was crazy."

CNN has left repeated messages at the cell phone number that Bracamonte provided for Stretton but received no reply so far.

According to the Bracamontes, Stretton started out fine when they hired her March 4 after running a background check. In exchange for room and board, Stretton was expected to help out with household chores and child care at their home in Upland, about 35 miles east of Los Angeles.

But once she gained the family's trust, they said, Stretton stopped working and stayed in her room.

They sought help from law enforcement and were told that Stretton was legally permitted to stay in the home.

Sgt. Don Dodt with the Upland Police Department told CNN that in general, once someone has established a residency in a home, the landlord or owner of the property must go to court to get the person evicted.

Typically, the police department can only take a keep-the-peace type of role in such a case because it is a civil dispute. The sheriff's department would carry out a forceful eviction if ordered by the court.

The family is working its way through the legal eviction process, but why not change the locks and refuse to allow Stretton in the home in the meantime? The nanny threatened to sue, and California tenant laws are in her favor so she would likely win.

Bracamonte tells CNN her family has too much to lose.

While their case moves through the courts, the family has turned to the media for help.

"Don't worry -- I will ruin her publicly! But she will NOT take a dime from us!" Marcella Bracamonte wrote on her Facebook page.

She accused Stretton of filing frivolous lawsuits before. CNN confirmed that Stretton is on the California Courts' Vexatious Litigant List, a list of people who continually bring legal action, regardless of merit, against others with the sole intention of harassment. CNN found dozens of lawsuits filed by Stretton in California over the years.

The family has been interviewed on TV and Bracamonte says she wants a constant barrage of family and friends at the house to pressure Stretton to vacate.

"I need help! I need A TON OF FRIENDS TO COME STAY AND HANG WITH ME AT MY HOUSE! Sleep in the living room all spread out to annoy her!" Bracamonte wrote on Facebook.

Perhaps it's working. Friday, Bracamonte said Stretton "hasn't come back to the home since yesterday morning around 5 a.m."

San Diego Supervisors give themselves two million each to personally spend on "Neighborhood Reinvestment Program"

The Return of the County’s Controversial Grant Program

By: Ari Bloomekatz

Voice of San Diego

June 11, 2014 

Photo by Sam Hodgson

Wednesday’s County Board of Supervisors meeting was a public hearing, but there was no public testimony and the audience was packed mostly with county employees.

A county program that was slashed in half under intense scrutiny may be on its way back to full strength.
Four years ago, under sustained criticism, the San Diego County Board of Supervisors cut in half a controversial community grants program that gave $2 million a year in taxpayer money to each of the five county supervisors to dole out to local nonprofits.
Starting in the 2011 fiscal year, instead of $2 million, each office would have just $1 million to award, and the cash came with some new strings that reined in how it could be used and how it was reported.
Now the supervisors want the other $1 million apiece back.
Supervisor Dave Roberts introduced a motion Wednesday to “restore the Neighborhood Reinvestment Program funding” to the earlier level. It was quickly approved.
Wednesday’s meeting was a public budget hearing, but there was no public testimony and the audience was packed with county employees (it was unclear where the public, if they were to actually come en masse, would sit).
Roberts’ motion, as well as the entire county budget, must still be approved and deliberations are continuing.
“When the economy went down, that budget was reduced,” Roberts said of the original cuts to the Neighborhood Reinvestment Program. “This change brings it back to $10 million,” $2 million for each of the five supervisors, and will fund things like health centers and outdoor classrooms at parks. He said the pot of money is dedicated for “bricks and mortar” type improvements.
But one reason the program, formerly known as the Community Projects Program, was unpopular was because of a nagging impression that supervisors were doling out money with their own interests in mind, not those of county taxpayers.
Some have called it a slush fund. Others say it gives sitting supervisors a $2 million re-election fund.
And a slew of allegations of misuse and conflicts of interest didn’t do much to bolster its reputation.
Former Supervisor Pam Slater-Price traveled to Europe in 2006 courtesy of a nonprofit that she had helped fund to the tune of $180,000 over several years. And Supervisor Ron Roberts, after directing money to the San Diego World Trade Center, went on six Asian trade missions on their dime. The practice of nonprofits paying to send elected officials on international trips has since been deemed illegal by the state Fair Political Practices Commission.
The reinvestment program started in the 1998 fiscal year with a total budget of $5 million. The budget was increased to $10 million the next fiscal year and stayed there through the 2010 fiscal year.
Dave Roberts said he hopes increasing the budget will allow him to do more for his district without squabbling with fellow supervisors over funding priorities.
“Every year we can pick and choose what are the priorities in our district,” Dave Roberts said. “My contention is, who can better make recommendations on their districts than the representative for that district?”
The grant program is important for the county “as long as it’s done in an open, transparent and fair way,” Dave Roberts said. The Board of Supervisors is scheduled to vote on the budget June 24.

900,000-year-old human footprints found in Britain

A Sunken Kingdom Re-emerges

By KATRIN BENNHOLD

New York Times

JUNE 23, 2014

Prehistoric tree stumps on a beach in Borth, Wales, from a forest first flooded about 5,000 years ago, after the last ice age. Credit Luke Wolagiewicz for The New York Times

BORTH, WALES — There is a poem children in Wales learn about the sunken kingdom of Cantre’r Gwaelod, swallowed by the sea and drowned forever after. On a quiet night, legend has it, one can hear the kingdom’s church bells ringing.

When the sea swallowed part of Britain’s western coastline this year and then spat it out again, leaving homes and livelihoods destroyed but also a dense forest of prehistoric tree stumps more exposed than ever, it was as if one had caught a faint glimpse of that Welsh Atlantis.

The submerged forest of Borth is not new. First flooded some 5,000 years ago by rising sea levels after the last ice age, it has been there as long as locals remember, coming and going with the tides and occasionally disappearing under the sand for years on end. But the floods and storms that battered Britain earlier this year radically changed the way archaeologists interpret the landscape: A quarter-mile-long saltwater channel cutting through the trees, revealed by erosion for the first time, provided a trove of clues to where human life may have been concentrated and where its traces may yet be found.

“We used to think of this as just as an impenetrable forest — actually this was a complex human environment,” said Martin Bates, a geoarchaeologist at the University of Wales Trinity St. David, who oversees the excavation work in Borth on a beach he played on as a toddler. “The floods have opened our eyes as to what’s really out there.”

Scanning the army of ghostly spikes protruding from the sand here one recent morning, Dr. Bates said it was as if nature were making a point: The recent torrential rains, linked by a growing number of climatologists to human-induced climate change, have provided an ancient laboratory to study how humans coped with catastrophic climate change in the past.

Indeed, across Britain, two consecutive years of exceptional winter weather have left in their wake some equally exceptional discoveries: from unexploded wartime bombs and Victorian shipwrecks to archaeological finds that are nearly a million years old. Scientists have barely kept up. Last winter was the wettest on record, according to the Met Office, the national weather service.

Dog walkers and amateur archaeologists are being sought in ever-greater numbers to help record new sites. In some areas hit especially hard by erosion, locals are equipped with cameras that log digital images with geocoordinates so the artifacts they find on beach walks can be added to national databases.

“Archaeologists can’t be everywhere, but locals can,” said Erin Kavanagh, Dr. Bates’s partner and a fellow archaeologist.

Nicholas Ashton, the curator of Paleolithic and Mesolithic collections at the British Museum, has been organizing “fossil road shows” in which he invites civilians to bring in any potential archaeological finds and have them identified. (One man recently showed up with a six-inch-long hippo tusk and a well-preserved ax, both found locally and both more than half a million years old.)

Continue reading the main story

Having those extra eyes on the ground can make all the difference in coastal areas, Dr. Ashton said, for what the sea reveals, it tends to reclaim almost as soon. He learned this lesson firsthand.

In May 2013, shortly after the first set of storms, Dr. Ashton commissioned Dr. Bates, an old university friend, to work on Britain’s east coast in Norfolk. The beach near Happisburgh (pronounced hays-boro), a longstanding archaeological site, had suffered severe erosion. Dr. Ashton, an expert in early humans, wanted a geophysical survey to map any channels or rivers that might lie beneath about 30 feet of sediment. Some of these channels, he reckoned, might contain evidence of early humans because sources of freshwater would have been natural gathering spots.

It was on their second visit, on May 10, that Dr. Bates noticed some indentions on the otherwise flat horizons of the laminated silts recently laid bare on the beach. The humps and bumps looked familiar. He told Dr. Ashton: “They’re just like the human footprints in Borth.”

Footprints of humans and animals in Borth had been dated to about 6,000 years ago. The site in Happisburgh was 900,000 years old, a time when mammoths and hippos still roamed in these parts. No human bones or prints that old had ever been found in Britain.

Could this be possible?

A frantic race against time began. Every day, the shape of the prints would blur a little more as the coming tide eroded the contours of heels, toes and arches. A team led by Sarah Duffy from the University of York arrived to apply a technique called multi-image photogrammetry, taking about 150 digital photographs of the surface area containing the prints and feeding it into a program that created a three-dimensional model. By the time another team had come to do some laser scanning, it was too late: The prints were barely visible.

Panicked, scientists lifted from the site a 130-pound block of sediment with one faint print on top, to have it analyzed at the National Oceanography Center. It is the only remaining physical evidence of the footprints: Before the month was out, all traces of them had vanished. It was a powerful reminder of both the resilience and the fragility of human life.

“What had been preserved for nearly one million years was taken back by the sea in the space of 10 days,” Dr. Ashton said.

Initially skeptical, he said he knew the footprints were real when Dr. Duffy’s computer images landed in his inbox sometime last June. “I thought, bloody hell, we are dealing with something quite extraordinary here,” he said.

The footprints, the oldest known outside Africa, probably belonged to a family group of Homo antecessor, a cousin of Homo erectus that possibly became extinct when Homo heidelbergensis from Africa settled in Britain about 500,000 years ago, he said. Using foot-length-to-stature ratios, scientists estimate that the male was perhaps 5 feet 9 inches tall, and the smallest child a little less than 37 inches.

Little is known about this early human species. Fossil skeletons in Atapuerca, Spain, from around the same time suggest that they walked upright and looked much like modern humans, though their brains were smaller. If they had language, it was primitive. Living at the tail end of an interglacial era, as winters were growing colder, they may have had functional body hair. So far, there is no evidence that they used clothes, shelter, fire or tools more complex than simple stone flakes...

We are not as frightened as our ancestors were

We are not as frightened as our ancestors were. (At least most of us aren't.)

This RadioLab program is amazing!   http://www.radiolab.org/story/91696-new-nice/

It seems humans have actually domesticated ourselves.

Apparently this involves having less active adrenal glands--making us less prone to fear.

As a result, we are less prone to the violence that accompanies fear in wild animals. 

One expert notes that if you filled an airplane with chimpanzees on a trans-Atlantic flight, only a handful would be alive at the end of the flight.  But human beings can sit together quite happily for hours and hours without coming to blows--partly because we don't fear each other as much as wild animals do.

New Nice

RadioLab

•  

  (Matt Knoth/flickr)

Brian Hare tells us the story of Dmitri Belyaev, a geneticist and clandestine Darwinian who lived in Stalinist Russia and studied the domestication of the silver fox. Through generations of selectively breeding a captive population, Belyaev noticed not only increased docility, but also unexpected physical changes. Why did these gentler foxes necessarily look different than their wild ancestors? Tecumseh Fitch has a hypothesis, something about trailblazing cells and embryonic development. And Richard Wrangham takes it a step further, suggesting us humans may have domesticated ourselves.

The Rush to Demonize Sgt. Bergdahl

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

New York Times

 JUNE 5, 2014

Four months ago, Senator John McCain said he would support the exchange of five hard-core Taliban leaders for the release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.  

“I would support,” he told CNN. “Obviously I’d have to know the details, but I would support ways of bringing him home and if exchange was one of them I think that would be something I think we should seriously consider.”

But the instant the Obama administration actually made that trade, Mr. McCain, as he has so often in the past, switched positions for maximum political advantage. “I would not have made this deal,” he said a few days ago. Suddenly the prisoner exchange is “troubling” and “poses a great threat” to service members. Hearings must be held, he said, and sharp questions asked.

This hypocrisy now pervades the Republican Party and the conservative movement, and has even infected several fearful Democrats. When they could use Sergeant Bergdahl’s captivity as a cudgel against the administration, they eagerly did so, loudly and in great numbers. And the moment they could use his release to make President Obama look weak on terrorism or simply incompetent, they reversed direction without a moment’s hesitation to jump aboard the new bandwagon.

The last few days have made clearer than ever that there is no action the Obama administration can take — not even the release of a possibly troubled American soldier from captivity — that cannot be used for political purposes by his opponents.

Though we criticized the administration for ignoring the law in not informing Congress of the transfer of the Taliban detainees 30 days in advance, leave it to Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and other hyperventilators to claim that continued release of prisoners from Guantánamo without prior notice is now considered an impeachable offense, a ludicrous leap.

Gov. Rick Perry of Texas says the whole exchange was cooked up to distract the public from the Veterans Affairs scandals, and the talk-show crowd has piled on Sergeant Bergdahl’s father for his suspiciously long beard.

Cowering politicians now even seem to regret their initial burst of joy that a prisoner was coming home. “A grateful nation welcomes him home,” said Representative Lee Terry, Republican of Nebraska, in a Twitter message on Sunday. The statement on his website was deleted a short time later. “Warmest regards to his family with gratitude for his/their service and sacrifice,” wrote Representative Stephen Lynch, Democrat of Massachusetts, in another quickly deleted tweet.

This duck-and-cover response is the result of the outrageous demonization of Sergeant Bergdahl in the absence of actual facts. Republican operatives have arranged for soldiers in his unit to tell reporters that he was a deserter who cost the lives of several soldiers searching for him. In fact, a review of casualty reports by Charlie Savage and Andrew Lehren of The Times showed there is no clear link between any military deaths and the search.

And a classified military report shows that Sergeant Bergdahl had walked away from assigned areas at least twice before and had returned, according to a report in The Times on Thursday. It describes him as a free-spirited young man who asked many questions but gave no indication of being a deserter, let alone the turncoat that Mr. Obama’s opponents are now trying to create.

If anything, the report suggests that the army unit’s lack of security and discipline was as much to blame for the disappearance, given the sergeant’s history.

Thousands of soldiers desert during every war, including 50,000 American soldiers during World War II. As many as 4,000 a year were absent without leave for extended periods during the Iraq war. They leave for a variety of reasons, including psychological trauma, but whatever their mental state, it is the military’s duty to get them back if they are taken prisoner. That’s what the Obama administration did in this case, and there was a particular sense of urgency because a video showed that Sergeant Bergdahl’s life might be in danger.

But the critics seeking political advantage don’t care about the life or mental state of a particular soldier, or of a principle of loyalty that should provide comfort to any soldier in danger of capture. They live only for the attack.

UCSD gives consent for sharing medical records without patient approval

I got an interesting letter from UCSD three days ago. It told me that I had consented to share my electronic medical records.

The trouble is--I had NOT given my consent. I never signed a consent form. I never clicked a box on the Internet agreeing to share my records.

And the letter from UCSD did NOT arrive in my home mailbox or even in my email. It was purely by chance that I found it on MyUCSDChart—NOT among the MyChart emails. If it had been among the MyChart emails, I would have received an alert about it in my regular email.

UCSD was definitely NOT trying to make sure that I found out about my “consent”.

Today, each time I have clicked on the link about sharing electronic medical records on MyUCSDChart, I found myself unceremoniously thrown back to the sign-in page. Automatically signed out. They really don't like it when I click on the link!

UCSD seems to be remarkably fond of both signing me in and signing me out--without my involvement--whenever it feels like it.

I found this page on the UCSD site about sharing electronic records. It seems that I am now part of two databases: The San Diego Beacon Health Information Exchange, and something called Care Everywhere.

It's not that I want to keep my records secret. In fact, I think sharing electronic records is basically a good idea. It's just that I've had problems with health providers hiding my own test results from me, so I'm sensitive about doctors violating the law regarding medical records.

Apparently the VA is also part of this system, but the VA has a more transparent consent process.

I've heard of falsified medical records, but this is the first time I heard of a falsified consent for release of medical records.



I found some interesting stuff about UCSD's informed consent process for patients in research projects:

iDASH Integrating Data for Analysis, Anonymization and SHaring

Informed Consent

Paper Consent versus Electronic Consent

Traditionally, paper-based consent has been the medium through which researchers and physicians conducted the informed consent process. The paper-based process consists of giving a hard copy consent form to a patient for him or her to review. Then a care provider answers any questions from the patient and in some cases assists the patient in reviewing the paper consent forms. The issues surrounding this procedure are that the paper-based consent form tends to be long and monotonous, and the retrieval of paper forms are often time consuming.

The new electronic consent forms use tablets or computers as the medium for communicating information and seeking consent from the patient...The iDASH team is also currently working on two systems, iCONS and iCONCUR, which are intended for such open source use in the future.

iDASH electronic informed consent management system

iCONS is a system currently being tested in a clinical trials environment at Moores Cancer Center Biorepository. The system supports informed consent electronically by enhancing the consent process for patients and researchers by acting as a consent broker and by adding multimedia aspects to the process. This consent process is opt-in, meaning no patient information is shared with researchers until the patient specifies what specific information he or she would like to share with researchers. The iCONS system creates a permission ontology to model the consent choices of the patient to assist in the process of releasing data and specimens to researchers for their consented uses.

iCONCUR is a pilot study within the University of California - San Diego Health System. This system transforms the sharing of electronic records from the opt-out system that is currently in place, meaning a patient’s record is automatically entered into the system unless the patient specifically requests to have their records taken out, to an opt-in system. The tool presents the patient with a taxonomy of his or her medical record allowing the patient to dictate what parts of the medical record to share and with whom it may be shared with.

HOSPITAL FAXED MEDICAL RECORDS TO PATIENT'S WORKPLACE

Tufts Medical Center sued for faxing patient records without consent
July 15, 2011
By Karen Cheung-Larivee
FierceHealthcare

Tufts Medical Center in Boston faces a lawsuit after a patient said the hospital faxed her medical records to her workplace without her consent, causing her embarrassment, reports The Boston Globe yesterday.

"I feel like I might have walked in (the office) naked," said patient Kimberly White.

White requested Tufts to send a form for a disability claim, but instead the hospital allegedly sent four pages of medical records about her hysterectomy to a shared fax machine at her workplace.

White filed a complaint in Plymouth County Superior Court. The hospital denies any wrongdoing, according to the article.

Tufts spokeswoman Julie Jette said, "In this matter, we complied with a patient's request to share information. We firmly believe we responded to the patient's request appropriately."

"I can't go back there," White said. "I am so embarrassed. ... I couldn't live with knowing what these people knew about me."

Earlier this year, another Boston hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital, faced accusations that an employee lost records of 192 patients on the subway. The hospital in February settled the federal case for $1 million, according to the article.

UCLA HIPAA VIOLATIONS

UCLA Health System pays $865G to settle HIPAA violation charges
July 8, 2011
FierceHealthIT
By Ken Terry

UCLA Health System has agreed to pay a fine of $865,000 and to develop a correction action plan to settle potential HIPAA privacy violations involving improper disclosures of medical records at its three hospitals, the federal Office of Civil Rights (OCR) reports.

OCR launched the investigation in 2009, following complaints by two unnamed celebrities that their medical records had been compromised. The government probe revealed that from 2005 to 2008, "unauthorized employees repeatedly looked at the electronic protected health information of numerous other UCLAHS patients," according to an OCR press release.

The Los Angeles Times reports that violations allegedly occurred at all three UCLAHS hospitals: Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, Santa Monica UCLA Medical Center, and Orthopaedic Hospital and Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital, which are regarded as a single unit.

The hospital had disclosed in April 2008 that it had discovered that several employees had snooped into the patient records of dozens of celebrities, including Britney Spears, Tom Cruise and Maria Shriver.

When the alleged violations came to light in 2008, the California legislature passed a law that imposed escalating fines on hospitals for patient privacy breaches. The state fined UCLAHS $95,000 in 2009, reportedly in connection with the medical records of the late Michael Jackson.

The UCLAHS settlement with OCR is much smaller than previous HIPAA settlements, including those involving CVS Caremark ($2.25 million) and Rite Aid ($1 million).

As part of its settlement, UCLAHS agreed to institute new security and privacy policies, improve employee training, take action against employees who violate privacy rules, and designate an independent monitor to oversee compliance.

In a statement, UCLAHS said, "The UCLA Health System considers patient confidentiality a critical part of our mission of patient care, teaching and research. Over the past three years, we have worked diligently to strengthen our staff training, implement enhanced data security systems and increase our auditing capabilities."


MEDICAL ETHICS--RESEARCH ON MEDICAL RECORDS WITHOUT INFORMED CONSENT

J Law Med Ethics. 2008 Fall;36(3):560-6. doi: 10.1111/j.1748-720X.2008.304.x.
Research on medical records without informed consent.
Miller FG.

Observational research involving access to personally identifiable data in medical records has often been conducted without informed consent, owing to practical barriers to soliciting consent and concerns about selection bias. Nevertheless, medical records research without informed consent appears to conflict with basic ethical norms relating to clinical research and personal privacy. This article analyzes the scope of these norms and provides an ethical justification for research using personally identifiable medical information without consent.

PMID: 18840249 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

'The GM nod,' 'The GM salute' and a clash of cultures

Safety, cost-containment and impenetrable decision-making

"We cannot conclude," the Valukas report reads, "that the atmosphere of cost-cutting had no impact on the failure of GM to resolve these issues earlier."

Mike Colias 
Automotive News
June 5, 2014

 

DETROIT -- Page 248 of Anton Valukas' report on what went wrong with General Motors' deadly ignition switch defect outlines how GM's safety efforts run smack into its cost-conscious culture.
Under the heading "Tone at the Top," the report tries to peg how much GM's culture -- in full-blown cost-cutting mode at the time the bad switches were installed in Chevrolet Cobalts and other small cars -- had to do with its handling of the defect.
The report, which relied in part on interviews of 230 employees, describes a troubling mixed message subtly conveyed by senior leadership: that safety is paramount, yet so is keeping a lid on costs.
"Repeated throughout the interview process we heard from GM personnel two somewhat different directives," the report reads. "When safety is an issue, cost is irrelevant" and "cost is everything."
The report provides a harsh rebuke of GM's infamous committee culture, too, one that on the ignition-switch issue rendered "determining the identity of an actual decision maker … impenetrable."
Some GM employees told investigators that they didn't take any notes during "critical safety meetings" because they didn't think lawyers wanted them to.
Investigators never found evidence of an edict banning note-taking. But "the no-notes direction … reached the status of an urban myth that was followed, an instruction passed from GM employee to GM employee over the years," the report reads.
One of the most colorful descriptions of the cultural morass came from CEO Mary Barra herself. She described for investigators a phenomenon known as the "GM nod."
"The GM nod, Barra described, is when everyone nods in agreement to a proposed plan of action, but then leaves the room with no intention of follow through," the report reads. "It is an idiomatic recognition of a culture that does not move issues forward quickly, as the story of the Cobalt demonstrates."
There was also the "GM salute," described by another interviewee as "a crossing of the arms and pointing outward toward others, indicating that the responsibility belongs to someone else, not me."
Ultimately, Valukas' report says it uncovered no evidence of any employee making "an explicit trade-off between safety and cost" related to the ignition switch. It notes that, because engineers early on failed to grasp a link between the ignition switch slipping out of the "run" position and airbags not deploying, the problem was treated as a customer-satisfaction issue, not a safety problem.
Still, "we cannot conclude," the report reads, "that the atmosphere of cost-cutting had no impact on the failure of GM to resolve these issues earlier."

Loophole in California law allows car dealers to sell used cars without repairing safety recalls first

Close loophole in California law that allows car dealers to sell used cars without repairing safety recalls first
Courage Campaign

Last October, David Clayton was driving 65 miles-an-hour down a highway in Fresno near his home. His newly purchased "certified" 2009 Dodge Ram was driving just fine, but all of a sudden, everything changed.

The drive train linking the engine with the rear axle literally broke off. The back wheels locked up, and the truck started bouncing -- yes, bouncing -- down the freeway. He somehow was able to wrestle the truck to the side of the highway without colliding with another vehicle. He soon learned his “certified” used truck was actually a ticking time bomb.

Chrysler had recalled it because it would literally fall apart without warning. But because of a loophole in California law, car dealers are allowed to sell used cars without repairing safety recalls first.

Fight to get killer used cars repaired before dealers can sell them to consumers. Send an email to your California Assemblymember to support Senate Bill 686 by Senator Hannah-Beth Jackson.(1)

Shockingly, millions of us are driving cars with open safety recalls. An analysis by CarFax shows that 36 million cars on the road right now -- or roughly one in seven -- are subject to a safety-related recall but have never been repaired.(2) Good Morning America and other news organizations have gone undercover to investigate, catching car dealers telling consumers that used cars are "safe" and passed rigorous inspections, when they're actually ticking time bombs.(3)

It's obvious that the law needs to change, but David can't win this fight alone. The car dealers are lobbying furiously because they don't want to bother repairing the cars before they make another sale. The next victim could be you, or someone you love, even if you don't buy a recalled used car. You share the road with these cars every day.

SIGN THE PETITION and tell your representative in Sacramento to support SB 686 to require dealers to repair used cars that are under a federal safety before they can sell them to consumers! As an added bonus, passing the law will create at least 1,000 new jobs in California for auto technicians who perform safety recall repairs.

The only way we are going to be able to change this, is if we have the support of courageous Californians like you to push this law forward NOW. Polling shows that 88% of California voters support closing this auto safety loophole(4), but the car dealers are one of the most powerful lobbying groups in Sacramento and managed to stall the bill a year ago.

Help keep Californians and their families safe from killer recalled cars, by telling our state leaders to support SB 686.

Study: American Households Hit 43-Year Low In Net Worth

Study: American Households Hit 43-Year Low In Net Worth
CBS
November 30, 2012

WASHINGTON (CBS DC) – The median net worth of American households has dropped to a 43-year low as the lower and middle classes appear poorer and less stable than they have been since 1969.

According to a recent study by New York University economics professor Edward N. Wolff, median net worth is at the decades-low figure of $57,000 (in 2010 dollars). And as the numbers in his study reflect, the situation only appears worse when all the statistics are taken as a whole.

[Chart of changes between 1983 and 2010:]


According to Wolff, between 1983 and 2010, the percentage of households with less than $10,000 in assets (using constant 1995 dollars) rose from 29.7 percent to 37.1 percent. The “less than $10,000″ figure includes the numerous households that have no assets at all, or “negative assets,” which is otherwise known as “debt.”

Over that same period of time, the wealthiest 1 percent of American households increased their average wealth by 71 percent.

As noted by Daily Finance, from 1983 to 2010 the share of total wealth held by the richest 10 percent of American households increased from 68.2 percent to 76.7 percent. Meanwhile, all the rest of Americans lost financial ground.

An August Pew Research Center study found that many in the middle-class are divided on how they believe his gap widened.

Fully 85 percent of self-described middle-class adults say it is more difficult now than it was a decade ago for middle-class people to maintain their standard of living. Of those who feel this way, 62 percent say “a lot” of the blame lies with Congress, while 54 percent say the same about banks and financial institutions, 47 percent about large corporations, 44 percent about the Bush administration, 39 percent about foreign competition and 34 percent about the Obama administration.

Just 8 percent put “a lot” of blame on the middle class itself.

“This downbeat take on their economic situation comes at the end of a decade in which, for the first time since the end of World War II, mean family incomes declined for Americans in all income tiers,” the Pew Report stated. “But the middle-income tier—defined in this Pew Research analysis as all adults whose annual household income is two-thirds to double the national median —is the only one that also shrunk in size, a trend that has continued over the past four decades.”

Wolff’s focus on total wealth not only measures how much money a household brings in, but also the amount it accumulates. This latter number is very significant — economically secure households are generally more comfortable spending their disposable income, and are less likely to become a drag on the social safety net.

Stark Infographic of Too-Big-to-Fail Banks Represents 1% Consolidation in America
David Harris-Gershon (The Troubadour)
Daily Kos
Fri May 30, 2014

The four banks listed in the infographic below – CitiGroup, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo – have received nearly $93 billion in taxpayer funds ($92,849,517,353 to be exact) since the bailouts began in 2008.

While they make up a small percentage of the 940 bailout recipients which have, to date, received $611 billion dollars from American taxpayers, they represent a significant chunk of those funds. More importantly, their acquisition trajectories represent the consolidation of major banking institutions in America which have made them "too-big-to-fail," or so we've been told.


Click on the infographic above to enlarge.

The graphic above is not a statistical representation, as it does not display the relative sizes of those banks acquired, nor does it indicate which banks disappeared as a result of forced acquisitions. However, it does visually represent how banking institutions in this country are capable of not just dictating regulatory practices with their undeniable influence and size, but are able to get away with holding the country hostage after those criminal and unethical activities which brought our nation's economy to its knees and is serving to widen growing inequalities in America.

Regarding that latter point, income inequality is higher than its been since 1928, which is partly responsible for a crushing wealth gap in which the bottom 60 percent of Americans own only 3.5 percent of the country's wealth. We have a shrinking middle class with disappearing disposable incomes and an increasing number of Americans with no disposable incomes to speak of. Over 46 million Americans are below the poverty line, many of whom are employed but finding that "hard work is just not enough" anymore.

This is at a time in which behemoth financial institutions are getting larger, consolidating more and more wealth, and being not just financially protected by that consolidation – vacuuming up taxpayer funds from a drowning citizenry – but being legally protected as well.

In 2013, Eric Holder admitted that global financial institutions in the U.S. and abroad have become so large as to be above the law. This truth came into stark focus when the British bank HSBC, which does significant business in America, was neither shut down in the U.S. nor pursued with criminal charges after it admitted to laundering billions of dollars for Mexican drug cartels.

This and other criminal activities by those in the banking industry and on Wall Street prompted Elizabeth Warren to say two days ago:

A kid gets caught with a few ounces of pot and goes to jail, but a big bank breaks the law ... and no one even gets arrested.

Yes, they are shielded from the law. However, they have also been responsible for writing (or underwriting) our regulatory and financial laws which have propped up banks such as BoA, which has illegally defrauded its customers, and whose subprime lender, Countrywide, engaged in widespread mortgage fraud with BoA's knowledge.

Which brings us back to the beginning. The richest in our country continue to consolidate and grow their wealth as an increasing number of Americans slide into poverty or out of the middle class. And the consolidation of financial institutions into behemoth entities don't just symbolize what is happening, they are organically at the root of the problem.

If America has truly become an oligarchy, then the infographic above could be considered one of its banners. It is a banner which will continue to wave, I fear, until we hit a breaking point.

Where that point is, I do not know, nor do I know what the popular response will be when it is reached. However, one thing is certain: our current course will not be able to sustain itself without this country falling apart.

Perhaps that's what it will take.

--§--

David Harris-Gershon is author of the memoir What Do You Buy the Children of the Terrorist Who Tried to Kill Your Wife?, just out from Oneworld Publications.

David Koch frightened PBS into reneging on deal for movie "Citizen Koch"; an angry public then funded the film

The Documentary ‘Citizen Koch’ Regains Money
By BRIAN STELTER
New York Times
August 12, 2013

One year ago, the filmmakers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal thought they had hit the public television jackpot. ITVS, an arm of public television that finances independent documentaries, had signaled interest in subsidizing and broadcasting a film about the influence of big-dollar donors on elections. At the time, Ms. Lessin and Mr. Deal were calling their documentary “Citizen Corp,” and they were expecting $150,000 from ITVS to help them finish producing it.

Then a few things happened. Last fall, the film was renamed “Citizen Koch,” a reference to Charles G. Koch and David H. Koch, the billionaire industrialists who are major supporters of conservative causes. Around the same time, ITVS (through its “Independent Lens” series) gave the premiere of a film called “Park Avenue: Money, Power & the American Dream,” which was critical of David Koch and other rich New Yorkers. That film caused heartburn at WNET, the powerhouse PBS station in New York, where Mr. Koch was a benefactor and board member. By April, a few months after “Citizen Koch” had its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, the $150,000 expected from ITVS had evaporated.

Now the money is back, but from a new source. After ITVS told Ms. Lessin and Mr. Deal that it was not going to finance the film or consider it for “Independent Lens,” spurring accusations of self-censorship, the filmmakers set up a fund-raising drive on Kickstarter. Last week, that drive passed the $150,000 mark, more than twice the original goal, in effect replacing all the money that ITVS had rescinded. Kickstarter said the number of backers — 3,400 — put “Citizen Koch” in the top 1 percent of all the campaigns the Web site has hosted.

But the filmmakers still do not know how the documentary will be distributed, beyond the DVDs they have pledged to send their Kickstarter supporters. They have looked at streaming services like Netflix; there have been conversations about a theatrical release, too. But PBS stations (by virtue of their being beamed over the public airwaves) are among the preferred ways for documentaries to reach audiences, and the best route to the stations — through ITVS — appears blocked.

On Tuesday, a coalition of progressive groups, including New York’s liberal Working Families Party, said they would deliver a petition with more than 300,000 signatures to WNET’s offices, calling on PBS to show the film. PBS, for its part, says it is not involved; any decisions rest with ITVS, which has a board that selects films for “Independent Lens,” which is then carried by stations.

ITVS declined to answer questions about the film. The organization has not responded to a nine-page letter sent six weeks ago by a First Amendment lawyer retained by Ms. Lessin and Mr. Deal. That letter, unpublicized until now, called on the organization to investigate what happened with “Citizen Koch” and to institute reforms.

“Do you think ITVS will reverse itself?” Ms. Lessin said in an interview. “They haven’t given any indication they will.”

Mr. Deal said: “We’re holding out hope. Our door is open.”

In a statement last spring, ITVS characterized what happened as a mundane editorial choice: “ITVS began negotiations to fund the film ‘Citizen Corp’ based on a written proposal. Cuts of the film did not reflect the proposal, however, and ITVS ceased negotiations.”

The filmmakers say that is not true. The film, they assert, was always intended to focus on the 2012 Wisconsin recall election, in which the incumbent Republican governor, Scott Walker, was supported by the Kochs and other wealthy conservatives. “We didn’t insert them in the film — they inserted themselves into the film we were making,” Mr. Deal said.

The filmmakers meticulously documented — and, in May, shared with The New Yorker writer Jane Mayer — their back-and-forth with ITVS officials, which show that in December, weeks after the “Park Avenue” film (by the widely respected documentarian Alex Gibney) was televised, ITVS officials bristled at the addition of the Koch name in the title and demanded that it be changed. (One called the title “extraordinarily problematic,” they say.)

The WNET president, Neal Shapiro, meanwhile, was furious with ITVS for not giving him notice about the content of “Park Avenue” — so much so that, according to The New Yorker, he “threatened not to carry its films in the future.”

There is no straight line from Mr. Koch to ITVS’s change toward “Citizen Koch;” the PBS ombudsman Michael Getler said flatly in May that “there is no evidence that David Koch interfered with or tried to censor these films.” That same month, Mr. Koch resigned from the board of WNET; when asked why on Monday, a spokeswoman for Mr. Koch did not respond to a request for comment.

But “Citizen Koch” has clearly benefited from fears about corporate influence over public television and, in particular, over ITVS, which has historically prided itself on its independence. “Donors’ money shouldn’t be dictating programming or editorial choices,” Ms. Lessin said.

For progressive groups, some of which view outsize political spending by Mr. Koch and his brother as a grave threat to democracy, the issues surrounding the film play into a larger, more distressing plotline involving the family’s media interests. Last month, Charles Koch confirmed speculation that he and David Koch might be interested in buying the Tribune Company’s newspapers, including The Los Angeles Times, in the future.

“The Koch brothers try to purchase cultural respectability on the one hand, even as they advance a hard-right economic agenda,” said Dan Cantor, the executive director of the Working Families Party, which has not previously organized its members around media issues. He said the party was “flabbergasted” by the response to its petition to PBS, which MoveOn, Credo and other advocacy groups also promoted.

Mr. Cantor said he has not seen the film yet. Neither has Mr. Shapiro of WNET, who suggested in a telephone conversation on Monday that invective aimed toward his station is misplaced.

“We have a history of running controversial films; we don’t shy away from them,” he said, also pointing out that programs like “NewsHour” and “Frontline” have repeatedly examined the intersection of money and politics. But WNET does not schedule documentaries on its own; ITVS does.

For now, what the filmmakers have are fresh funds, thanks to the Web. And one more thing that filmmakers everywhere cherish: persuasive evidence, via the fund-raising drive and the petition, that thousands of people want to watch what they have produced.

Balboa Park in San Diego showcases different paths to happiness

This woman charmed a snake. Two snakes, actually.


This woman explained Buddhist thought.

After 2 days, Clear Channel pulls down billboards that reveal that Judge Lisa Schall was convicted of a crime

San Diego 10 News reports that billboards have been taken down by Clear Channel two days after they were put up.

Carla Keehn is challenging Judge Lisa Schall in the June 3, 2014 election for San Diego Superior Court judge. The advertisements correctly stated that Judge Schall has been convicted of a crime.

See newscast video on You Tube.

Judge Schall has been admonished three times by the Commission on Judicial Competence. The offenses were political support for the governor who appointed her, abusing her contempt power, and drunk driving.

See all posts on Carla Keehn and Judge Schall.

To Sarah Palin, Chelsea Clinton's pregnancy is just another excuse to be vile

To Sarah Palin, Chelsea Clinton's pregnancy is just another excuse to be vile
by Laura Clawson
Daily Kos
May 07, 2014
Sarah Palin just had to weigh in on how Hillary Clinton might feel about her daughter's pregnancy, and Palin continues to be disgusting:

“She, just knowing that her daughter Chelsea is pregnant with a baby — it’s a real baby!” Palin said during an interview with “Extra” host Mario Lopez on the set of her Sportsman Channel show. “It’s not some disposable something, and I know that will be controversial. But those who, perhaps, they’re in this position now as a parent or a grandparent, they realize sanctity of life, how innocent, how precious it is. And of all places it should be in the womb that these babies are protected. So maybe even on a social issue like that she’ll open her eyes.”

Psst, Sarah. You do know Hillary Clinton had a child herself, right? That would be Chelsea, the woman whose current pregnancy you're talking about. All the evidence suggests that Chelsea is adored by both her parents, and has been all her life. So I'm pretty sure her mother is up on the whole "where do babies come from" thing and nonetheless believes that women who don't want to be pregnant or have a baby should have the right to choose not to do so.

In fact, it's not uncommon for women to find that having a baby, even particularly having a much-wanted baby born prematurely or in crisis, can make them more, not less, pro-choice. When Natasha Chart's son was born five weeks early and had weeks of health problems, she wrote "this pregnancy has further revealed to me why it’s wrong and inhumane to make light of how difficult it is to 'just have the baby,' as anti-choice extremists say everyone should have to do." Dallas Schubert wrote of the experience of having a severely premature baby that the experience made her more, not less, pro-choice, because "I can’t imagine what it would have been like to have my choice taken from me, or to have endured shame and stigma from society for it. I deserved no more and no less support, understanding, and compassion than any other woman facing the complex and difficult decisions that come with being pregnant." Jessica Valenti, who was forced to give birth prematurely to save her own life, writes that "I am also more pro-choice than before. I know first-hand what it's like to have a pregnancy threaten your life, and how quickly—and without warning—things can go wrong."

These are not women who think of pregnancy as "disposable something," in Palin's vile words. Nor, I'm sure, are Hillary and Chelsea Clinton. They're just women who can see complexity and who think women have the right to make choices about their bodies, their health, their lives.

Apple, Facebook, others defy authorities, notify users of secret data demands

Apple, Facebook, others defy authorities, notify users of secret data demands
By Craig Timberg
Washington Post
May 1, 2014

Major U.S. technology companies have largely ended the practice of quietly complying with investigators’ demands for e-mail records and other online data, saying that users have a right to know in advance when their information is targeted for government seizure.

This increasingly defiant industry stand is giving some of the tens of thousands of Americans whose Internet data gets swept into criminal investigations each year the opportunity to fight in court to prevent disclosures. Prosecutors, however, warn that tech companies may undermine cases by tipping off criminals, giving them time to destroy vital electronic evidence before it can be gathered.

Fueling the shift is the industry’s eagerness to distance itself from the government after last year’s disclosures about National Security Agency surveillance of online services. Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Google all are updating their policies to expand routine notification of users about government data seizures, unless specifically gagged by a judge or other legal authority, officials at all four companies said. Yahoo announced similar changes in July.

As this position becomes uniform across the industry, U.S. tech companies will ignore the instructions stamped on the fronts of subpoenas urging them not to alert subjects about data requests, industry lawyers say. Companies that already routinely notify users have found that investigators often drop data demands to avoid having suspects learn of inquiries.

“It serves to chill the unbridled, cost-free collection of data,” said Albert Gidari Jr., a partner at Perkins Coie who represents several technology companies. “And I think that’s a good thing.”

The Justice Department disagrees, saying in a statement that new industry policies threaten investigations and put potential crime victims in greater peril.

“These risks of endangering life, risking destruction of evidence, or allowing suspects to flee or intimidate witnesses are not merely hypothetical, but unfortunately routine,” department spokesman Peter Carr said, citing a case in which early disclosure put at risk a cooperative witness in a case. He declined to offer details because the case was under seal.

The changing tech company policies do not affect data requests approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which are automatically kept secret by law. National security letters, which are administrative subpoenas issued by the FBI for national security investigations, also carry binding gag orders.

The government traditionally has notified people directly affected by searches and seizures — though often not immediately — when investigators entered a home or tapped a phone line. But that practice has not survived the transition into the digital world. Cellular carriers such as AT&T and Verizon typically do not tell customers when investigators collect their call data.

Many tech companies once followed a similar model of quietly cooperating with law enforcement. Courts, meanwhile, ruled that it was sufficient for the government to notify the providers of Internet services of data requests, rather than the affected customers.

Twitter, founded in 2006, became perhaps the first major tech company to routinely notify users when investigators collected data, yet few others followed at first. When the Electronic Frontier Foundation began issuing its influential “Who Has Your Back?” report in 2011 — rating companies on their privacy and transparency policies — Twitter was the only company to get a star under the category “Tell users about data demands.” Google, the next mostly highly rated, got half a star from the civil liberties group.

The following year, four other companies got full stars. The preparation of this year’s report, due in mid-May, has prompted a new flurry of activity in the legal offices of tech companies eager to gain a coveted star.

Google already routinely notified users of government data requests but adopted an updated policy this week detailing the few situations in which notification is withheld, such as when there is imminent risk of physical harm to a potential crime victim. “We notify users about legal demands when appropriate, unless prohibited by law or court order,” the company said in a statement.

Lawyers at Apple, Facebook and Microsoft are working on their own revisions, company officials said, although the details have not been released. All are moving toward more routinely notifying users, said the companies, which had not previously disclosed these changes.

“Later this month, Apple will update its policies so that in most cases when law enforcement requests personal information about a customer, the customer will receive a notification from Apple,” company spokeswoman Kristin Huguet said.

The trend toward greater user notification gained new urgency amid the government surveillance revelations made by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Although the bulk data collection he disclosed was for national security purposes, not routine criminal investigations, companies grew determined to show that they prized their relationships with customers more than those with authorities — a particularly sensitive issue overseas, where the American tech industry has been lambasted as too cozy with the U.S. government.

“Post-Snowden, there is a greater desire to compete on privacy,” said Marc Zwillinger, founder of ZwillGen, a Washington-based law firm that has major tech companies as clients. “Companies have had notice policies and cared about these issues for years. It’s only now that it’s being discussed at the CEO level.”

The changing legal standards of technology companies most directly affect federal, state and local criminal investigators, who have found that companies increasingly balk at data requests once considered routine. Most now refuse to disclose the contents of e-mails or social media posts when presented with subpoenas, insisting that the government instead seek search warrants, which are issued only by judges and require the stricter legal standard of probable cause.

Subpoenas, by contrast, can be issued by a broader range of authorities and require only that the information sought be deemed “relevant” to an investigation. A 2010 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit backed the industry’s contention that search warrants should be required for digital content, a standard now widely accepted.

For data other than content — such as records showing the senders and recipients of e-mails, the phone numbers registered with accounts or identifying information about the computers used to access services — companies have continued accepting subpoenas but warn investigators that users will be notified before disclosure occurs.

“That was one of the purposeful burdens that was supposed to limit government surveillance,” said Marc Rotenberg, a Georgetown University law professor and executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “As a historic matter, the intent always was that a person would be notified.”

The shifting industry practices force investigators to make difficult choices: withdraw data requests, allow notification to happen or go to magistrate judges to seek either gag orders or search warrants, which typically are issued under seal for a fixed period of time, delaying notification. Such choices were made even more difficult by the rising skepticism of magistrate judges, many of whom in recent years have scrutinized such requests more carefully or rejected them altogether, legal experts say.

“It’s sort of a double whammy that makes law enforcement’s job harder,” said Jason M. Weinstein, former deputy assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s criminal division, now a partner at Steptoe & Johnson. “It has the potential to significantly impair investigations.”

Ronald T. Hosko, a former FBI special agent who until his recent retirement oversaw the criminal division at the Washington field office, said the development of cases has been hurt by the threat of user notification, especially during early phases when investigators try to work discreetly, before a suspect potentially can destroy evidence. He said the shift among tech companies has been driven mainly by concern about their public images, at the expense of public safety — an issue he said was particularly acute when it came to cases involving child predators or terrorists.

“My fear is that we will be less secure in our country, in our houses, because of political decisions, because of the politics of the day, rather than what will keep us safe,” Hosko said. “I’m concerned that that gets people killed, that that gets people hurt.”

Companies that have policies to notify users of government data collection say they make exceptions for cases of imminent danger to potential victims, especially if the safety of a child is at risk. In the vast majority of situations, however, users deserve to know who is collecting their data and why, the companies say. The exceptions, they say, should be decided by a judge — not by a company lawyer, and not by an investigator.

“The intent is to make sure it’s not a rubber stamp,” said Dane Jasper, chief executive of Sonic.net, an Internet and phone provider in California whose notification policy has won a star from EFF. “That way we’re not releasing customer information without due process.”

Ann E. Marimow contributed to this report.

Secrecy at Chicano Federation San Diego County Child Nutrtion Program?

Update August 29, 2014:

The California Department of Education (CDE) is in charge of direct oversight of Chicano Federation. 

Sandip Kaur, appointed by Tom Torlakson as Director of Nutrition Services of the California Department of Education in 2012, seems to have some strange ideas about exactly how "oversight" should be conducted.

When I sent Sandip Kaur a copy of a letter from Chicano Federation that threatened me with legal action for complaining to the CDE, I got no response from CDE to my complaint.  Tom Torlakson and Sandip Kaur seem to agree with Chicano Federation that a citizen should not be allowed to complain about how USDA funds are handled!

Original post:

My conversation with Raymond Uzeta:

"Maura Larkins: You get federal money so you should be revealing information."
Raymond Uzeta: "I don't thing this conversation is going to go anywhere. I have someone waiting at the door...Bye."
(See more of the conversation below.)

ANNUAL REVENUE & EXPENSES

Fiscal Year Starting: Jul 01, 2011
Fiscal Year Ending: Jun 30, 2012

Revenue Total Revenue $18,935,564


My conversation at noon April 29, 2014 with Chicano Federation CEO Raymond Uzeta

(Mr. Uzeta returned my call to Pam Portillo.)

I asked a question about the Child Nutrition Program.

"We don't provide that information. What else can I help you with?"

"Do you feel that you helped me with that question?"

"Is that the only question you have?"

"Not by a long shot...I have concerns about the professionalism of your Child Nutrition Program."

"Where did you get those concerns? You need facts."

"That's why I'm calling. I'm trying to get facts."

"Where did you get your suspicions? Did you just wake up one day and feel suspicious?"

"I am not going to reveal my sources. You get federal money so you should be revealing information."

"I don't thing this conversation is going to go anywhere. I have someone waiting at the door...Bye." He hung up.

Chicano Federation Leadership

Raymond Uzeta/ President and CEO

Ray Uzeta – Interim CEO


Pam Portillo, Chief Operating Officer

Pamela Portillo, VP of Housing and Community Development

Pamela got a BA in Environmental Planning from UC Santa Cruz and MA in Urban Planning from UCLA. She is a member of the San Diego Association of Realtors and the San Diego Housing Federation.

Vic Salazar/ Communications and Fundraising

Vic Salazar joined Chicano Federation team in 2009 as a member of the Board of Directors. He became Chairman of the board in 2011.  He served as Interim Executive during a transition period in 2012, apparently after Arnulfo Manriquez left and before Raymond Uzeta came back. Vic has a B.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He started Vic Salazar Communications, a Public Relations company, in 2008.

Vic was a news anchor at NBC 7 and KGTV10.

Vic likes Cottonwood Golf Club.

Chicano Federation San Diego County Child Nutrtion Program

To apply for the Nutrition Program or if interested in obtaining a State Child Care License contact Rosa Ortiz at (619)285-5600 x 328, or email ortizr@chicanofederation.org. - See more at: http://www.chicanofederation.org/nutrition.aspx#sthash.KyWCYtLS.dpuf

Donald Sterling NAACP award cancelled; girlfriend confirms audio tape of Sterling demanding that she not bring black people to games

Donald Sterling's girlfriend insists tape of Clippers owner 'launching racist rant' at her is authentic but denies she released it to the media Daily Mail April 28, 2014 Photo AP

Compare this story to Cliven Bundy saga.

Exclusive: The Extended Donald Sterling Tape
Kyle Wagner
Dead Spin
April 27, 2014

Deadspin has acquired an extended, 15-minute version of the conversation between Clippers owner Donald Sterling and his then-girlfriend V. Stiviano. If the original nine-minute tape acquired by TMZ left any questions about Sterling's opinions regarding minorities, the audio here should remove all doubt that he's a doddering racist with views not too far removed from the plantation.

You can find the new audio in the above video, which contains the transcript. (This version is also a little crisper than the original and has some extra background activity around the edges, which indicates that this was recorded in a house.) As with the original, we don't know if this has been edited in some way. The NBA is investigating. Thus far, Sterling's team has offered only a tepid response, lightly suggesting the possibility that the original audio had been doctored and pointing out that V. Stiviano had recently been sued by the Sterlings.

v NAACP will not present award to Donald Sterling amid controversy
By USA TODAY Sports staff
April 27, 2014
By Thomas O’Toole

A May 15 banquet for the Los Angeles chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People just became a lot more intriguing. The group is planning to honor Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling with a lifetime achievement award. This is the 100th anniversary of the L.A. chapter.

[UPDATE]: The NAACP has announced on its official Twitter account that Sterling will not receive the award.

But in light of racist comments attributed to Sterling on a recording that surfaced on the TMZ website, the banquet plans might be changing.

L.A. mayor Eric Garcetti is also scheduled to be honored with a Person of the Year Award, as is the Rev. Al Sharpton. But, Yusef Robb, the mayor’s spokesman, told the Los Angeles Times on Saturday, “In light of recent events, we will be discussing the event with the Los Angeles NAACP.”

On the chapter’s website, the list of honorees still included Sterling late Saturday night. An email and phone call from USA TODAY Sports to the office was not immediately returned.

The NBA announced Saturday it was investigating to determine if racist comments heard on the audio were indeed from Sterling. The audio obtained by TMZ has a man telling a female associate “why are you taking pictures with minorities, why?” and telling her not to bring to Lakers Hall of Famer Magic Johnson to Clippers games. The person said it bothers him that she posted photos of herself with black people on her Instagram account. After a recent Clippers game, the woman took a picture with Johnson.

In a statement, Clippers president Andy Roeser, said of the recording that the club does “not know if it is legitimate or it has been altered. … Mr. Sterling is emphatic that what is reflected on that recording is not consistent with, nor does it reflect his views, beliefs or feelings. It is the antithesis of who he is, what he believes and how he has lived his life.”

According to the website Deadspin, this would not be the first time Sterling would be honored by the NAACP at an inopportune time. He received another Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009 around the time of former GM Elgin Baylor’s discrimination lawsuit. Deadspin posted this excerpt from an L.A. Times story:

Clippers owner Donald Sterling, accused of racism and embracing a “vision of a Southern plantation-type structure” in a lawsuit filed in February by Elgin Baylor, will be given a lifetime achievement award next week by the NAACP. . . .

Leon Jenkins, president of the Los Angeles branch of the civil rights organization, says of the much-maligned Sterling, “He has a unique history of giving to the children of L.A.,” revealing that the owner donates anywhere from 2,000 to 3,000 tickets a game to youth groups for nearly every Clippers home game.

Noting that the NAACP had made plans to honor Sterling before Baylor filed suit, Jenkins says, “We can’t speak to the allegations, but what we do know is that for the most part [Sterling] has been very, very kind to the minority youth community.”

On Sunday morning, the NAACP tweeted the following update:

NAACP ✔ @NAACP

#DonaldSterling will not be receiving a lifetime achievement award from the LA Branch of the NAACP. #MTP


Happy Birthday Donald Tokowitz Sterling you Jewish oreo
April 27, 2014
by Jan Tucker

Donald Sterling was born Donald Tokowitz April 26, 1934 in Chicago to Jewish immigrant parents Susan and Mickey Tokowitz...

From Wikipedia:

In August 2006, the U.S. Department of Justice sued Sterling for housing discrimination in using race as a factor in filling some of his apartment buildings. The suit charged that Sterling refused to rent to non-Koreans in the Koreatown neighborhood and to African Americans in Beverly Hills.[13] The suit alleges Sterling once said he did not like to rent to Hispanics because they “smoke, drink and just hang around the building,” and that “Black tenants smell and attract vermin.”[13] In November 2009, ESPN reported that Sterling agreed to pay a fine of $2.73 million to settle claims brought by the Justice Department and Davin Day of Newport Beach that he engaged in discriminatory rental practices against Hispanics, blacks, and families with children.[14] In addition, Sterling was also ordered to pay attorneys’ fees and costs in that action of $4,923,554.75. [Order Granting Motion for Prevailing Party's Attorneys' Fees and Costs, dated November 2, 2005, C.D. Cal. Case No. 2:03-cv-00859-DSF-E Dkt No. 454]. In granting the attorney’s fees and costs Judge Dale S. Fischer noted “Sterling’s’ scorched earth’ litigation tactics, some of which are described by the Plaintiffs’ counsel and some of which were observed by the Court. The Court has no difficulty accepting Plaintiffs’ counsel’s representations that the time required to be spent on this case was increased by defendant’s counsel’s often unacceptable, and sometimes outrageous conduct.”

I’ve seen Judge Dale S. Fischer in action and she is a no-nonsense judge whether I agree or disagree with her rulings (on occasion I’ve been on both sides). Given that Donald Sterling is himself a member of the Bar (California License 31124 issued 1/11/61) and is perfectly capable of supervising attorneys representing him you’d think that maybe, just maybe, the State Bar might consider some kind of disciplinary action against him for his legal behavior...

The sickest thing about Sterling’s sordid record on race relations is that the Los Angeles Chapter of the NAACP was just about to honor him with a second lifetime achievement award on May 15, 2014 (they gave him one in 2009 while he was being sued by Elgin Baylor). As Wikipedia explains the Baylor lawsuit:

In February 2009, Sterling was sued by former longtime Clippers executive Elgin Baylor for employment discrimination on the basis of age and race.[15] The lawsuit alleges Sterling told Baylor that he wanted to fill his team with “poor black boys from the South and a white head coach”.[13] The suit alleges that during negotiations for Danny Manning, Sterling said “I’m offering a lot of money for a poor black kid.”[13][16] The suit noted those comments while alleging “the Caucasian head coach was given a four-year, $22-million contract”, but Baylor’s salary had “been frozen at a comparatively paltry $350,000 since 2003″.

There is a long tradition (not a time honored one but a quietly carried out and usually unspoken of) of shaking down racists by so-called civil rights movement organizational poverty pimps when they get into public trouble for their depraved behavior. I saw the Anti-Defamation League do this when they accepted a huge contribution from Marriott Corporation to give them their organizational seal of approval when an Ethiopian Jew stood up to Host International’s refusal to allow him to wear his Yarmulke at work. ADL accepted Marriott’s word that the guy was delusional without any semblance of a legitimate investigation. So carrying on that sordid tradition, NAACP was prepared to honor Sterling and whitewash his longtime pattern of discriminatory behavior, but apparently with his statements on tape and being made public for once, it’s too embarrassing. These Negroes are not just embarrassed, they’re apparently afraid that honoring him will so discredit them that it will interfere with their further poverty pimping in the name of civil rights, so the estimated $10,000-$15,000 he gave Los Angeles NAACP in the past year alone is no longer enough to buy the organization’s loyalty.

ESPN Deportes tells the details of Sterling’s slum-lording at http://m.espn.go.com/wireless/story?storyId=4187729&lang=ES&cc=3888

The article, which came out as a birthday present yesterday for Sterling contains such choice details as:

Jones had repeatedly walked to the apartment manager’s office to plead for assistance, according to sworn testimony given by her daughter Ebony Jones in the Housing Rights Center case. Kandynce Jones’ refrigerator dripped, her dishwasher was broken, and her apartment was always cold. Now it had flooded. Davenport reported what she saw to Sterling, and according to her testimony, he asked: “Is she one of those black people that stink?” When Davenport told Sterling that Jones wanted to be reimbursed for the water damage and compensated for her ruined property, he replied: “I am not going to do that. Just evict the bitch.”

Up And Down In Beverly Hills
Eccentric multimillionaire Donald Sterling has been a flaming success as an L.A. real estate mogul and a dismal failure as the owner of the Clippers
Franz Lidz
Sports Illustrated
April 17, 2000

In the Eerie silence of the empty foyer of Sterling Plaza, you can almost hear the grunts of the Hollywood tycoons who made and broke stars as casually as they lit and crushed out their cigars. MGM cofounder Louis B. Mayer built this Art Deco landmark in Beverly Hills 70 years ago, when the silents were turning to talkies.
v The seven-story edifice, which boasts bronze-plated elevators, marble-lined corridors and formal parlors, could have been created by the set designer of Top Hat.

For more than a decade, the most opulent office space in 90210 has remained virtually unoccupied. The building's sole tenant is its landlord, Donald Sterling, whose billion-dollar real estate empire occupies the sixth and seventh floors. "Some people think I'm eccentric for keeping Sterling Plaza to myself," Sterling says. "I like riding up and down the elevators alone. It's a luxury I've earned."

...Sterling, a spectacularly successful real estate baron who owns the Malibu Yacht Club, the Beverly Comstock Hotel and nearly half the apartments in Beverly Hills, speaks plaintively of his spectacularly unsuccessful team. "How do I handle losing year after year?" he says. "How do I cope with the ridicule? Let me ask you something: How would you cope with the ridicule?" Sterling has a way of lobbing people's questions back at them. He seems to do it not so much because he wants to elude hard questions but because he wants to know other people's answers. "How do I cope?" he repeats. "It's very hard. I've suffered. Oh, how I've suffered. Do you know what it is to truly suffer?" Do you? "Yes, I suppose I do," says the 63-year-old Sterling. "The pain, the torment, the absolute torture! How do the owners of the Chicago Cubs get through it? How does anyone get through a difficult experience? I'll tell you how. You just keep going, keep fighting, keep living. Life goes on, and you hope it will improve." It's fitting that Sterling set up shop in the House That Mayer Built. He seems benign and avuncular, but he has the furtive, feral charm of an old-time movie mogul. "I try to be warm and ingratiating with people and make them feel important," he says. "I never met anyone I didn't like. I'm very open, very honest, very caring." Of course, the moguls of yesteryear were neither open nor caring. They were difficult, and Sterling has a similar reputation. Few Sterling hirelings utter a word—much less a discouraging one—about their boss. Chris Ford, who coached the Clippers from 1998 until he was fired in February, declines to comment on Sterling. Jim Todd, the man who replaced Ford, says only, " Elgin [Baylor] and Mr. Sterling have always been very supportive of me." Baylor, the Clippers' general manager, who has known Sterling for 15 years, limits his remarks to a terse, "He's always treated me great." Even Bill Walton, the team's outspoken TV color man, is mute on the subject of Sterling. About the only Sterling employee willing to go public is Lynn Lewis. "As an employer, he's tremendously loyal, magnanimous and compassionate," says Lewis, a Sterling assistant since 1994. "He's always ready to talk to you, to hear you out, to stand behind you. He treats everyone like family." Lewis ought to know. She is Sterling's kid sister. For all his loyalty and magnanimity, Sterling is as eccentric as the next multimillionaire. (When Sterling moved the Clippers to L.A. in 1984, Alan Rothenberg, then the team president, said about his boss, "You're going to call him the Howard Hughes of the NBA.") In the living room of his Greco-American-South mansion in Beverly Hills, Sterling once conducted a get-acquainted meeting with a top draft pick and his agent Bob Guccione—style, wearing nothing but a bathrobe open to his navel. While entertaining friends at restaurants, he sometimes suggests entrees for others to order but doesn't get anything for himself. "The idea," says Michael Selsman, his former publicist, "is to make his guests share with him." When it comes to pinching pennies, Sterling is an embarrassment of riches. Old NBA hands still talk about how he reportedly tried to cut costs during his first season by asking coach Paul Silas if the players really needed a trainer and if Silas would mind taping them before games. Sterling is also said to have proposed to trim the team budget for his second season by slashing training-camp expenses from more than $50,000 to about $100, scouting from more than $20,000 to about $1,000, advertising from more than $200,000 to less than $9,000 and medical expenses from about $10,000 to $100. (Sterling says he doesn't remember this, but Clippers executive vice president Andy Roeser, who wasn't around at the time, says, "None of these cuts were ever proposed.") Sterling saved money last season by not hiring a new coach until the six-month lockout was over. "Let's put it this way," says Ray Melchiorre, the team trainer from '96 to '99. "Going without a coach didn't make the Clippers any worse." Sterling played his quintessential cheap trick in San Diego in 1981, just after he bought the team. As a goodwill gesture, he invited prominent lawyers and real estate agents to have lunch, meet the players and enter a foul-shooting contest: Win and take home a $1,000 prize. Among the attendees was lawyer Michael Spilger, captain of San Diego State's 1969-70 basketball team. Spilger made nine of 10, only to be told the offer had been rescinded. The new prize was five days and four nights in Puerto Rico. "There was one catch," says Spilger. "The deal didn't include airfare, transportation or food. I'd have to pay my own way." So Spilger told Sterling he'd take the $1,000. He remembers Sterling countering, "How about double or nothing?" "No thanks, I'll take the $1,000." Next, according to Spilger, Sterling asked if he'd settle for two season tickets, and Spilger said, "I already have some." So Sterling promised him that the team's promotions department would work things out. Two weeks later, Spilger got a letter congratulating him for winning the top prize: Three days and two nights in Las Vegas. Unpaid but unbowed, Spilger sued the Clippers for fraud. At the home opener in '82, a team official tracked him down and offered a compromise: a $1,000 donation to his favorite charity. "I'll see you in court," said Spilger. Two days later—and more than a year after he sank his free throws—he got his money. The Clippers' rebuilding program is in its third decade. They are lottery regulars, and Sterling has held at least two lottery parties at his Beverly Hills estate. The galas were the highlight of the Clippers' season. Sterling has often prepped for his parties by placing newspaper ads for "hostesses" interested in meeting "celebrities and sports stars." Prospective hostesses have been interviewed in the owner's office suite. One former Clippers coach recalls dropping in on Sterling during a cattle call. "The whole floor reeked of perfume," he says. "There were about 50 women all dolled up and waiting outside Donald's office, and another 50 waiting outside the building. The chosen few got to dress scantily, mingle with C-list actors and serve wine in plastic cups." Sterling has been the one constant through the years, so it's easy to blame the team's failure on him. "The truth is," says Carl Scheer, the team's general manager from 1984 to '86, "there have been a lot of bad decisions by people who've worked for him, including me." Those decisions have ranged from bad draft picks to bad trades to bad contract negotiations that radiated bad vibes. "Being a Clipper can be real tough," says retired point guard Pooh Richardson, who toughed it out with the Clippers from 1994 to '99. "It's almost a given that you won't win and that the team won't hold on to its best players." Indeed, not one of Sterling's nine lottery picks before 1998 re-signed with the team. Typically, the Clippers draft a promising player, nurture him and then watch him bail as soon as he's a free agent, spreading their lottery legacy throughout the league. "To have a decent team you need to keep a core of players together and let them grow," says Los Angeles Lakers guard Ron Harper, a survivor of five Clippers campaigns. "Sterling doesn't do that. He's not a builder, he's a meddler." Actually, Sterling doesn't so much meddle as delay. He hedges. He vacillates. He agonizes. "Most NBA owners are distant and aloof and give only the pretense of being in control," says player agent Arn Tellem, general counsel of the Clippers from 1983 to '89. "Donald is so angst-ridden and vulnerable, you just want to hug him. He's constantly seeking the advice of others." Read last four pages HERE.