Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed
Big Screen — Movie commentary
Blurt — Music's inside track
Booze News — San Diego spirits
Classical Music — Immortal beauty
Classifieds — Free and easy
Close to Home — What it’s like on the street where you live
Cover Stories — Front-page features
Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes
Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts
Feast! — Food & drink reviews
Feature Stories — Local news & stories
Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore
From the Archives — Spotlight on the past
Golden Dreams — Talk of the town
The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it
Letters — Our inbox
Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites
Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans
Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists
Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news
News Ticker — News & politics
Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated
Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna
Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated
Poetry — The old and the new
Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers
Reading — The hunt for intellectuals
Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails
San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds
SD on the QT — Almost factual news
Sheep and Goats — Places of worship
Special Issues — The best of
Street Style — San Diego streets have style
Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves
Theater — On stage in San Diego this week
Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative
Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work
Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego
Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads
Your Week — Daily event picks
Be prepared for second recession in Calif.
response to #59. the 'trickle down' theory via Reaganomics results in a 'trickled on' economy ... it unleashed a flurry of merger/acquisition mania leaving bread crumbs behind for the devastated middle class...i hope Geo W is having fun playing golf and his Daddy is having fun jumping out of planes.... so much for "compassionate conservatism" ... what a terrible joke on the Bible Belt that supported these candidates...— July 10, 2010 2:12 p.m.
Be prepared for second recession in Calif.
Don.... is Welsh a bit off re: our nat'l debt....isn't it over $13 trillion? see http://www.usdebtclock.org/ also, could the global peddling of trillions of dollars worth of worthless derivatives have something to do with the global economic downturn? and here's another wild notion....could the Gore film in 2006 and the subsequent revelations about our compromised environment have sped the "get as much for me now" and enhanced greed vehicles on Wall St and elsewhere? ie, if the world is going to hell in a handbasket, i need to hoard as many acorns as soon as possible... that last item might make for an interesting study for a social scientist...pure speculation on my part, but we are seeing a lot of hoarding going on and not much investment thoughts?— July 10, 2010 1:35 p.m.
San Diegan Bill Lerach out of prison, living in luxury
On another note ... Mr Lerach has some alarming news about our devastated pension and retirement funds/plans....apparently Wall St has sunk their mitts into these huge money sources and they are under-funded by $4 trillion .... The waste matter will be hitting the fans soon ... do u have any updates on the this from a national perspective as to what may happen to public and private retirement plans? will the gold watches run out?— June 4, 2010 3:36 p.m.
San Diegan Bill Lerach out of prison, living in luxury
Re: #59. Don, I commend this article I found on 'incentive awards for lead plaintiffs in class action suits.' As you can see, in most of these class action settlements, these payments are perfectly fine with court permission. (I would imagine there are many private agreements between attorneys and clients of which we aren't aware.) Of course, headline writers would call these kickbacks. Google INCENTIVE AWARDS TO CLASS ACTION PLAINTIFFS: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY and see the article by Miller at britannica.com Are there any allegations of shake-downs out there against attorneys or firms who bring mass tort, employment discrimination, consumer credit and other class actions? I suspect that Mr Lerach and his firm put together a Fortune 500 law firm to take on Fortune 500 crime and fraud. The fact is that journalists and class action attorneys bringing shareholder fraud suits are both on the endangered species list. You may chose to distance yourself from Mr Lerach; but I think you are actually comrades in arms fighting major fraud on parallel tracks. You are both for sensible regulation of the finance sector and you are both for holding Wall Street to account. I suggest we look at all the Wall Street de-regulations as a group, not separately. The passage of the "Get Lerach Act" and the Telecommunications Act in 1995 were a key dominoes which emboldened Wall St and the rightwing to further dismantle regulations. Once they could control the mass media and remove checks on corporate officer fraud liability, it was 'so long' Glass-Steagall and futures regs, etc. It was 'hello' to CDOs and trillions in worthless securities. The corporate 'robber barons' of this Gilded Age are global now with our trillion-dollar Pentagon as their security force, paid for by public funds. They have a nice racket going which will probably only be tamed by a massive economic downturn and public outrage. I think the outrage is there, it's now a matter of organizing and channeling the public outrage to bring about corrective policy and action. All the undue influence in the world cannot help if the bums are voted out of office and we elect those more like TR and FDR.— June 1, 2010 10:26 a.m.
Del Mar’s Arthur Lipper III says whistle-blowers should be rewarded
Don ... all good stuff....and how much was paid for all of these de-regs to come into being? Hundred of millions of lobbying dollars. They are bought and paid for. Same as the Pvt Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1996. Same as the electricity de-reg in CA and other stats in the mid-09s. Let's do some research and find out how many billions the oligopolies paid. Which takes us up to BP, Halliburton and how they gamed the system resulting in the tragic oil blowout in the Gulf. And I say the 1995 "Get Lerach Act" came into being, less due to any abuses by Lerach and more due to the rationale and influence above. Why did the Act remove joint and several liability for corporate officers? Why did the Act remove the RICO statutes and criminal liability for accounting fraud? And how many millions did they filter into Capitol Hill? These are the questions that need some exploration.— May 30, 2010 12:50 p.m.
San Diegan Bill Lerach out of prison, living in luxury
Response to above. So you are saying that all these de-regs re: Wall St happened due to Mr. Lerach...and I'm saying if you are going to take on the Fortune 500 for fraud and abuse, you better be smart and tough enough (like TR and FDR) and have a very large operation of your own. The plaintiff bar is never going to win any popularity contests. Medical malpractice awards for pain and suffering were capped long ago, severely curtailing those suits. Was that because there were Lerachs out there, or because the healthcare industry/insurance trust or oligopoly greased the wheels of legislatures. Did the energy de-regulations of the 90s engineered by the Enrons of the world and blessed by VP Cheney's energy task force occur because of the Bill Lerachs of the world? or because of massive corruption of lawmakers? No plaintiffs' attorney who has held the huge corporations and industries to account is going to win any popularity contests. We hear "tort reform" by the rightwing, big money forces all the time. Do you think medical malpractice attorneys are popular with the AMA and healthcare trust? Do you think legal malpractice attorneys are popular with the ABA? Are there any Lerachs or Spitzers out there tough enough, smart enough and with adequate resources whose practices haven't been severely legislatively hamstrung to even take on entities like a BP? I think if we study industry de-regulation across the board from big energy to big pharma/healthcare to big ag, and so on .... this has happened due to wholesale and massive corruption of legislatures by corporate lobbyists. For a huge eye-full on this, see the newly-released documentary on Jack Abramoff titled "Casino Jack and the United States of Money." Granted, he was probably a very tough and formidable opponent. What would be your attitude in taking on the Fortune 500 with cases of enormous complexity and magnitude? You agree that huge oligarchs have been allowed to congeal and I saw they have tilted the playing field way too heavily in their favor...and that includes our legislative machinery and probably our judicial system to a great extent (especially at the appellate level.) (cf. the latest USSC ruling that allows corporations to provide unlimited funds for political campaigns. They just paved the way for more Jack Abramoffs.)— May 30, 2010 9:17 a.m.
San Diegan Bill Lerach out of prison, living in luxury
Regardless of the plaintiffs, I find it hard to believe that the blue chip attorneys of the Fortune 500 corporations allowed themselves to be bullied. Even if there was a hypothetical plaintiff, There was a good of deal of liability in the overwhelming number of cases.— May 30, 2010 12:37 a.m.
San Diegan Bill Lerach out of prison, living in luxury
Comment on #46. Agreed. Which is why we need more Eliot Spitzers and Bill Lerachs. I wish they were running the the DOJ, the SEC and the other agencies charged with holding the corporate monoliths to acount. But no...they become political targets and have their careers terminated. Not to mention the US Attys who didn't carry water for the last administration and were summarily fired. And maybe the most abominable and disgraceful case of political assassination, former Ala. Gov. Don Seigalman---who held every top office in Alabama history in his 26 year career. 44 state Attorney General and 50 US legislators petitioned for his release, which occurred in March of 2008. Siegelman is currently working to see Karl Rove held in contempt for refusing to testify before a House committee that is investigating his conviction. Although Siegelman was convicted, his argument is he may not have been investigated, if not for Rove. As to the Pentagon, it is so huge, I'm not sure they are accountable to anyone. When the budget was signed into law on October 28, 2009, the final size of the Department of Defense's budget was $680 billion, $16 billion more than President Obama had requested. Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff expected an additional supplemental spending bill, possibly in the range of $40–50 billion, by the Spring of 2010 in order to support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Defense-related expenditures outside of the Department of Defense constitute between $216 billion and $361 billion in additional spending, bringing the total for defense spending to between $880 billion and $1.03 trillion in fiscal year 2010. By comparison, the state govt of CA spent about $204 billion in FY 2007-8. I'm not sure if this includes the $44 billion for the CIA or not. In any case, staggering sums for our standing military. No wonder we have found wars to fight. We're all for a strong defense...but a little overkill here, don't you think?— May 29, 2010 9:16 p.m.
San Diegan Bill Lerach out of prison, living in luxury
True, a2zresource ... the Big Defense umbrella is large.— May 29, 2010 5:20 p.m.
Proposition D: How to Buy an Election
the Mayor needs to be back on the City Council...and we need a sharp, honest, accessible financial administrator with enhanced transparency and accountability. (or am i dreaming?)— May 29, 2010 5:03 p.m.