Google furnishes more food for Atkins ample pig trough

Merry, merry payoffs

Chris Cate, San Diego’s only Republican city council member, got $5000 for his well-publicized annual Christmas Tree giveaway from city vendor CGI Technologies and Solutions, Inc. On November 3, CGI issued a news release saying it had recieved an “$84 million, 4-year contract, with additional option years for a potential 10-year contract term, under which it will provide long-term IT support to meet the evolving requirements of key business applications operated by the City, including a growing portfolio of digitized services.”

Per a so-called behesting disclosure filed by Cate with the City Clerk dated December 9, CGI made its Christmas tree payment to the Cate-backed Rosie Network on November 30. “San Diego City Councilman Chris Cate teamed up with The Rosie Network to give away 100 free Christmas trees to active duty military and veteran families Saturday,” said a KGTV-TV account on December 11, with no mention of CGI’s financial role in the event...

San Diego’s gift to the California state Senate, Pro Tem Toni Atkins, finished 2021 with a torrent of end-of-year cash raised from special interests, including search giant Google, LLC. On December 28, the Mountain View behemoth gave the Atkins for Lieutenant Governor fund $9400 via the company’s vice president of governmental affairs, Mark Isakowitz. As reported by Bloomberg in a December 2 dispatch, he’s leading the company’s battle against antitrust bills introduced in the House of Representatives to curtail the company’s might. Congress should “carefully consider the unintended consequences for Americans and small businesses of breaking a range of popular products that people use every day,” Isakowitz warned. The same day Democrat Atkins picked up Google’s cash, the Dentists Insurance Company of Sacramento kicked in $16,200.

Holiday bailout

Amid acrimony regarding the abrupt cancellation of the Holiday Bowl due to UCLA’s covid-caused pullout, well-paid executives of the San Diego non-profit that runs the game remain to contemplate a bleak bottom line. The high-rolling San Diego Bowl Game Association paid chief executive officer Mark Neville an annual $301,100, along with $43,869 in “other compensation” for a total of $344,969. (Those salary numbers are from the non-profit’s 2019 IRS 990 disclosure report — the most recent available — covering March 1, 2019 to February 29, 2020, filed November 11, 2020.) According to his LinkedIn profile, Neville has worked for the group for more than 30 years. Chief revenue officer Jeffrey Craig Nichols got $225,386 during the period, and chief financial officer Cheryl Tishue received $185,440.

But even before the Covid-19 onslaught of 2020, the association’s year-to-year revenue totals had dropped from $16,392,322 to $10,021,713. Total salaries and compensation fell far less, from $1,098,162 to $1,028,042. “This has been the most difficult decision our Board has ever had to make since our bowl game started in 1978,” Neville said in an October 2020 statement after that year’s cancellation. “While it’s not the decision we wanted to make, it’s the right decision for our non-profit association and the community for the long term.”

With the 2021 game abruptly terminated by UCLA’s pullout, the fate of the payments promised by the Holiday Bowl Association to UCLA and North Carolina State, which furnished the teams, remains unknown. According to the association’s 2020 IRS filing covering the 2019 game, the group paid $6,856,834 for “Team Participation.” That contest featured the University of Southern California Trojans versus the Iowa Hawkeyes, and income from sponsorships was $1,196,843. As was also the case in 2021, the San Diego County Credit Union purchased naming rights to the 2019 game.

TJ’s medical maquilas

The San Francisco Chronicle is pointing to Tijuana as the latest to profit big time from the war against covid-19 via its status as one of the world’s busiest medical device makers. “The future of the medical device industry is with biotech,” Carlos Jaramillo, chairman of Tijuana’s Economic Development Corp., told the paper. “Despite Mexico’s medical device shortages and devastating covid outbreak, which has infected more than 3.9 million people and killed 297,000 (a statistic widely considered to be low), Mexican hospitals and patients do not have access to maquiladora-fabricated critical supplies,“ observes the December 26 dispatch. Added Margarita Avalos — identified by the Chronicle as director of Ollin Calli, “a collective in Tijuana that focuses on women’s labor rights” — “Tijuana is profiling itself to be the global capital of medical products, the way it was at one point the capital of the televisions, and it’s going to be at the expense of the workers,”

— Matt Potter (@sdmattpotter)

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