Occupy Encinitas today

Occupy Encinitas is back today at noon at 101 & Encinitas Boulevard. The first one, a couple weeks ago, had a good turnout of at least a few hundred. It was the only Occupation in North County that day, and drew people mostly from outside of Encinitas. Today's is likely to be smaller because there are five Occupations from Del Mar to Oceanside.

The Occupiers have a legitimate grievance. Wall Street made themselves filthy rich, crashed the economy, and then got bailed out at our expense (don't believe the "TARP was repaid" canard -- TARP is trivial compared to the trillion-plus dollars printed out of thin air by the Federal Reserve to lend to the banks at 0%). The new crony capitalism literally is privatized profits and socialized losses, and the banks get away with it because they own the politicians of both parties with very few exceptions (Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul being among the few). I've written more about this here.

Unfortunately, the Occupiers' legitimate message is being drowned out by the crazies. A small minority of mentally ill, druggies, thieves, racists, etc., is causing some problems, but that's to be expected in any large group. The bigger issue, though, is that a large plurality if not majority of the protesters are radical leftists who don't just want to stop fraud and corruption on Wall Street and in Washington, but want to smash capitalism completely. Calls for free education and a government living wage for all are monumentally naive fantasies of unlimited resources in a very resource-constrained world. These dreamers don't know it, but destroying free enterprise would make things a lot worse for everyone. I've been to the Occupation, and unfortunately, many participants appear to have similar utopian socialist dreams.

Wall Street is crooked, as are its lackeys in the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve, and Congress. You don't have to be a Marxist to want to change that. The problem is not capitalism, it's crony capitalism.

Jerome Stocks is to the left of Jerry Brown on government union pensions

WSJ:

California Gov. Jerry Brown on Thursday unveiled what would be one of the nation's widest-reaching pension overhauls, a proposal that would raise the retirement age and shift more investing responsibilities to public workers.

The 12-point plan includes meshing a 401(k)-style component into newly hired workers' retirement plans, raising the age at which some future employees retire to 67 from 55 now and boosting pension contributions for current workers. Labor groups immediately expressed disapproval.

Encinitas labor groups don't have anything to worry about. Their bought-and-paid-for councilman Jerome Stocks, who voted to spike city pensions by 35% in 2005, is still stonewalling Teresa Barth's attempts to get pension reform on the Encinitas council agenda. And now it looks like he's about to appoint his longtime crony and union dream candidate Mark Muir to give the unions an even bigger council majority.

Council candidate song and dance show tonight

The appointment candidates present their cases tonight.

Rumor is the council majority wants to appoint a huge Jerome Stocks crony.

A large public turnout this evening, and at next week's appointment vote, might be enough to dissuade some council members from going along with that.

Rubenstein neighbors get traffic calming circles as consolation for stadium lights going in their back yard

That's going to look a lot nicer than those hideous and annoying-at-any-speed plastic bumps on Devonshire.



Summit has also been torn up for several weeks now, likely for similar calming circles.

Red-shouldered hawks of Encinitas

This fellow seen in coastal Encinitas is likely a red-shouldered hawk according to birdwatchers working from a grainy photo.

Your Encinitas Council appointment candidates are...

From Jonathan Horn:

Lisa Shaffer - Maggie Houlihan's dying request and a UCSD professor
Tony Brandenberg - old-time eccentric Olivenhain character known as "the Judge"
Alan Lerchbaker - Cardiff resident and Navy veteran
David Drielsma, Robert Campbell, Joel King - Senior Commission members
Robert Schneider - senior citizen from New Encinitas
Kent Mesplay - senior citizen from Leucadia

I'm guessing the Council majority won't honor Maggie's wish by appointing Shaffer, who would oppose them on most issues.

And "the Judge" could be too much of a wild card and upset business as usual.

So I think the Council majority will pick one of the senior citizens. I hope whoever that senior citizen is won't be persuaded to join a 4-1 super-majority for upzoning.

UPDATE: Late entrants! And yep, there's Muir as well as Alice Jacobson.

EUSD under fire

The Encinitas Union School District is coming under increasing scrutiny for financial mismanagement.

In today's Patch, we learn that the the EUSD is running a $5 million deficit before taking into account the likely December cuts from the state. It is utterly irresponsible to run a huge deficit even under the unrealistically optimistic June budget scenario and then risk making drastic cuts mid-school-year.

Fiscal irresponsibility is a recurring theme at EUSD. Recall that this is the same district that swindled Encinitas voters into taking on 30 years of debt so they could buy iPads for 4th-graders.

But EUSD management is willing to do more than mortgage our future for a little technology bling. They also want to strip the community forever of an irreplaceable prime asset in order to fund current bloated operating budgets. The Leucadia Blog explains the history of the Pacific View site that EUSD wants to sell to the highest-builder.

Most of the property was gifted to our community in 1883 by one of the early town founders, J. Pitcher. Over the last 128 years the remainder of the property has been meticulously deeded down through several generations until it was finally deeded to EUSD in 1964. It was a gift. There was lots of land available in Encinitas in 1883. These town founders were very particular about this special site on top of the bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. They wanted it for the community and its children.

Finally, anonymous commenters at Encinitas Undercover have lots of info (unverified, but believable) on this post, including free preschools for revenue, a sweetheart deal for a Vista farmer, and Tim Baird's background in Ojai.

If you have any information you'd like to share, please e-mail encinitasundercover@gmail.com. Confidentiality is assured.