Duke Cunningham Can't Have Gun
Don Bauder 9:47 p.m., May 25
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Stories by Don Bauder
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Did Sempra Bribe Mexicans?
Did Sempra Energy pass bribes to officials in Mexico to grease construction projects there? Then, when a whistle-blower complaint was filed, did the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Bureau of Investigation permit Sempra ...
Will Wall Street Cool on Bridgepoint?
Bridgepoint Education stock drops. The San Diego company’s relationship with Wall Street becomes more apparent.
Build a Stadium and Team Will Stay? Nope
The lengths NFL teams go to in order to get their taxpayer-built stadiums.
Timothy Alan Simon: Commissioner with a Past
A California Public Utilities commissioner has his unimpressive/brow-raising track record laid out.
U-T Saw Ryan Leaf as a Savior
There was a time when the San Diego Union-Tribune prophesized that an NFL player would fill this city with super sports boosters. Didn’t happen.
UCAN's Best Con
The truism goes back centuries: “Hee that lies with the dogs, riseth with fleas.” But ten years ago, Utility Consumers’ Action Network (UCAN), the watchdog nonprofit attempting to dissolve while it is being investigated by ...
San Diego Gas & Electric: Fat Profits, Fat Pay
Sempra Energy, the San Diego–based utility, is wealthy by comparison with other utilities. It is obsessed with handing out its riches to its shareholders (particularly its own top executives) at the expense of its customers. ...
Redevelopment Pigs Want Back at the Trough
Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat fearful of losing a cushy job or a real estate kingpin fearful of losing a fat government subsidy. Therefore, the move to bring back redevelopment in some form ...
Little Things Add Up to Almost Nothing
Paul Kolen is a San Diego State University professor of electrical and computer engineering known for patents and scholarly papers in the field of miniaturization. But unbeknownst to him, a self-professed financial advisor who was ...
The Battle over Chewing Tobacco
When baseball icon Tony Gwynn revealed in 2010 that he had salivary gland cancer and blamed it on decades of using chewing tobacco, he set off firestorms: prominent Major League players and managers proclaimed they ...
You Want This Again?
Having been hornswoggled by both the Chargers and the Padres, and knowing the City is wobbling financially, San Diego voters are unlikely to approve a fat subsidy for a new Chargers stadium. But downtown overlords ...
Fat Claims, Fat Chance
A web of interrelated North County enterprises — known for high-pressure TV ads — professes its products will help you peel off body fat. But to conceal what it is doing, this group of purported ...
San Diego Gas & Electric Wants You to Pay for Its Negligence
Your pocket is being picked in an alleged conspiracy between San Diego Gas & Electric and the California Public Utilities Commission, which is supposed to regulate utilities but actually mollycoddles them. This chicanery, spelled out ...
Fed H-1B Visa Probes May Help American Engineers
American computer professionals who complain that they lose jobs or get lower pay because of imported tech workers may have reason to smile. Government regulators are cracking down on alleged fraud in worker visa programs. ...
Buyouts Didn’t Help U-T and Petco
Go, Newt! In your donnybrook with Mitt, please keep informing the citizenry about the rapacity of private equity groups (essentially leveraged buyout firms). I’m neutral on the nomination but feel strongly about private equity groups: ...
Gambling Addicts Aren't Necessarily Smoking Addicts
In a gambling casino, you can lose your shirt — and worse, your health. That’s why several groups are working on California’s Indian casinos to go smoke-free. Many such casinos, particularly in San Diego County, ...
Even Lobbyists’ Loot May Not Rescue Redevelopment
"The good news is the bad news — that the state is desperate for money,” says Richard Rider. If the state’s books were in good shape, the corporate welfare lobby would probably succeed in getting ...
Muddling Through — but Watch Europe
The United States and San Diego economies should muddle through in 2012 — growing very slowly — unless an economic civil war of sorts erupts in Europe. It’s already rumbling and could cause a global ...
Snug and Smug at the Hotel Del
Gary Aguirre heads a San Diego law firm that since February has specialized in representing whistle-blowers, those who blow the whistle on financial fraud — often inside the companies they work for — and government ...
The Stock Market Roller Coaster
The stock market is like Pavlov’s dogs. It starts to salivate at the thought of a juicy meal, long before it gets one. (About a century ago, Russian scientist Ivan Petrovich Pavlov found that if ...
The Convention Center Liars
"Even in the face of the current economic downturn, the San Diego Convention Center continues to deliver significant benefits to the greater San Diego region,” boasted the center in its 2010 annual report. Do not ...
Head Case
San Diego needs counseling. If you could bring back a great name from the past to give advice, who would it be? Real estate wizards Alonzo Horton or John Spreckels? Civic activist George Marston, who ...
Escondido: Tighten Your Rules
Early next year, the California Supreme Court will decide whether the state can abolish or weaken redevelopment agencies. If the City of Escondido is lucky, the high court’s decision will thwart the City’s dubious plan ...
U-T Probably Went Cheap Again
The market for metropolitan daily newspapers is stone cold. Experts are convinced that daily newspapers, even those with a promising online presence, are becoming obsolete. That suggests that the Union-Tribune, which was sold to hotelier ...
Who Pockets Your Retirement Money?
Forget Occupy Wall Street. Forget Occupy Oakland and Occupy San Diego. The next protest movement should be OccupyTowers Watson. Or Occupy Mercer. Or Occupy International Business Machines or San Diego’s Sempra Energy. Towers Watson and ...
How They Played the Accounting Game
The accounting profession has stark similarities with the world’s oldest profession. Both attempt to operate below the radar, asking few probing questions of their clients. This has been going on a long time, as the ...
Income Chasm Widens Here
The income gap between San Diego’s very richest and everybody else is widening, but still, inequality here remains less scary than it is in the nation as a whole. That may partially explain why Occupy ...
Graybeards, Beware
Beware nontraded real estate investment trusts. That advice was issued early this month by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, the nongovernmental regulator of securities firms. Real estate investment trusts (REITs) pool money from many investors, ...
Uncle Sam May Be No Help
Late last month, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke said long-term unemployment is a “national crisis.” And it’s urgent that government give more help to the ailing housing industry. San Diego’s unemployment and housing problems are ...
Fickle Finger of Blame
Fumbling European banks may drag the whole world into another slough, but a couple of them have done the right things responding to adversity. A trader at UBS (once known as Union Bank of Switzerland) ...
Work Is Wonderful. Really?
Two San Diego authors have recently written books. One tsk-tsks risk-taking and the other celebrates it. Yet you can agree with both premises. La Jolla’s Alfred Rappaport, professor emeritus at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, ...
Transaction Tax: You Can’t Tax Greed
On September 1, two hundred labor union members assembled at the Vista office of Congressman Darrell Issa to promote the idea of a transaction tax — a tiny assessment on sales of stocks, bonds, currencies, ...
Conventions, Football Don’t Mix
Southern California has balmy weather and, seemingly, balmy leadership. For one thing, both Los Angeles and San Diego want to expand convention centers in the teeth of a grossly overbuilt market and slumping convention attendance. ...
Reward the Few, Screw the Many
Abe Lincoln championed government for the people and said you can only fool some of the people all of the time. In San Diego, government gives succor to a handful of the most affluent people ...
Stealth China-Bashing Movie
"Once more into the breach!” shouts steelmaker Nucor, as it rallies troops to fight China’s trade abuses. But in its zeal, Nucor has been criticized for another kind of breach: of ethics. Now the big ...
New Reality Means No Stadium
When the economy weakens, resolve stiffens. Glum consumers do fewer giddy things. It’s becoming apparent that lack of buying by debt-sated consumers could push us into another recession, or close to one, and the pain ...
The Swiss Connection to BBG Communications
People using overseas pay phones are shelling out $54 and $55 for one-minute calls when using their credit cards, and they say that phone instructions give them no warning of such staggering charges. Understandably, the ...
Will Southern Cal Newspapers Combine?
Platinum Equity, financial swingers from Beverly Hills, bought the Union-Tribune in March of 2009 for a song. Now San Diegans wonder if that song is “A Cottage for Sale.” On July 11 of this year, ...
Who Watches the UCAN Watchdog?
The website of local watchdog Utility Consumers’ Action Network (UCAN) has a photo of executive director Michael Shames. Underneath, it says that Shames “serves as an expert witness and attorney on behalf of UCAN.” (Italics ...
Wall Street Thrives on Main Street Pain
Over the past two years, the economy and stocks have generally gone in opposite directions. In the economy, we have suffered the steepest downturn and the weakest recovery since the Great Depression, but since early ...
What? No War?
Once again, Americans are beginning to talk about guns versus butter. Do we want to remain a military superpower, or do we want our social safety net and our corporate welfare programs? In San Diego, ...
Borrego: Flipsville Seeks a Savior
For decades, financial carpetbaggers have pulled the wool over the eyes of the citizens of Borrego Springs, the unincorporated desert town of 2600 full-time residents in northeast San Diego County. Now Borregans hope that a ...
Kerry Steigerwalt's Broke Law Firm Trying to Make Deals
On March 24, San Diegan Laura Perry received a letter from Kerry Steigerwalt’s Pacific Law Center, once San Diego’s best known, most notorious, and most aggressively advertised law firm. Perry, 73, had paid $2000 to ...
San Diego Economy: Not Much to Brag About
We may not suffer an economic double dip, but we’re in for double trouble, and it could last several more years. Both in the nation and San Diego, recent signs of weakness portend more years ...
Hard Money Lender's 17 Percent Return Didn't Last
"Speed is the name of the game,” boasted Jeffrey Lubin, head of a real estate lending operation, Scripps Investments & Loans, in a San Diego Magazine advertisement in September 2004. “We try to give real ...
Incest: The SEC and Wall Street
On May 11, the oft-bashed bureaucrats who supposedly regulate the securities industry finally could smile: the Justice Department convicted billionaire hedge fund operator Raj Rajaratnam of criminal insider trading. The Securities and Exchange Commission, which ...
Over $1 Million Per Subsidized Job
When subsidizing businesses to move to an area, paying $100,000 per job is generally considered quite high. But in wooing biotech-research facilities and companies, Florida has been paying much more than $1 million — repeat, ...
How Michael Pines Defies the Law
On April 28, Carlsbad’s Michael T. Pines filed a lawsuit in bankruptcy court boasting that “Michael T. Pines is considered one of the few and earliest experts in the legal issues involved in the foreclosure ...
Hometown Bias
"Root, root, root for the home team.” It’s a tuneful ditty to sing during the seventh inning stretch, but it won’t help Padres fans. They should really sing, “Pray, pray, pray for the umpires to ...
The Federal Reserve's Money Orgy
Back in the Old West, watering of livestock was standard business practice. A cow would be bloated with water so it could be sold at a stiff price. Pretty soon, Wall Street learned how to ...
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