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California medical marijuana operation targeted by feds

Article from L.A. Times
By Joe Mozingo, Los Angeles Times

The federal government is moving to shut down the nation's largest and highest-profile medical marijuana dispensary operation, filing papers to seize properties in Oakland and San Jose where Harborside Health Center does business.

Copies of the federal Complaint for Forfeiture were taped to the front doors of the two dispensaries Tuesday, alleging that they were "operating in violation of federal law."

Medical marijuana advocates, as well as some state and local officials, decried the action, saying it hurts patients in legitimate need of the drug and breaks repeated promises by President Obama's Justice Department that it was targeting only operations near schools and parks or otherwise in violation of the state's laws.

The U.S. attorney for Northern California, Melinda Haag, said she now found "the need to consider actions regarding marijuana superstores such as Harborside" because they presented unique opportunities for abuse.

Harborside was co-founded by outspoken marijuana activist Steve DeAngelo in 2006 and was the subject of a reality show, "Weed Wars," on the Discovery Channel last year. While other dispensary operators have sought a low profile since California's four U.S. attorneys began cracking down on the industry in October, DeAngelo has consistently railed against the federal intervention, advocated for better state regulations and become a leader in the movement.

"People are not going to stop using cannabis, they're just going to buy it in the illegal marketplace … on the streets," he said Wednesday in an interview. "Why are federal prosecutors using their discretion to do something so profoundly destructive?"

DeAngelo said that he would fight the Justice Department "openly and in public" and that he would resist any effort by his landlords to evict the dispensaries in response to the federal complaint — which targeted the property owners, not the tenants.

While all marijuana use and sales are illegal under federal law, Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder told the House Judiciary Committee last month that federal agents were targeting only those large-scale growers and dispensaries that have "come up with ways in which they are taking advantage of these state laws, and going beyond that which the states have authorized."

In a statement released late Wednesday, Haag suggested "superstores such as Harborside" fit that bill.

"The larger the operation, the greater the likelihood that there will be abuse of the state's medical marijuana laws, and marijuana in the hands of individuals who do not have a demonstrated medical need."

She noted that Harborside claims to have "over 108,000 customers."

California's medical marijuana laws are nebulous in regard to how the drug is to be distributed and courts have yet to settle the matter. Still, marijuana activists often hail Harborside as a model of professionalism and compliance. Its main facility in Oakland is one of four independent enterprises permitted and strictly regulated by the city.

"If Harborside is not in compliance with state law, no one is," said DeAngelo, 54.

The Oakland dispensary was awarded its permit in 2006 after the city put out a request for proposals. DeAngelo says it does about $22 million in annual sales, and the San Jose shop does about $8 million. Together they pay about $3 million in city and state sales taxes, and employ more than 100 people.

The state Board of Equalization estimates it collects $58 million to $105 million in annual sales tax from dispensaries.

"If we continue to drive everything underground, we're going to create an unsafe environment for patients who need this product … and lose revenue," board member Betty Yee said.

This week's move against Harborside further highlights the continuing conflict between local and federal officials over the drug.

"The city of Oakland has developed a system to assure such distribution occurs according to state law in a fair and orderly process," Nancy Nadel, member of the Oakland City Council and vice mayor of the city, said in a statement. "It is most unjust to our citizen patients and distributors who have followed local guidelines to be harassed and treated as criminals by federal officials."

Medical marijuana advocates said the Obama administration has repeatedly reneged on its promises that it would not meddle with the state laws.

"This is the most obvious and significant step by the federal government in attacking completely law-abiding dispensaries," said Kris Hermes, spokesman for the advocacy group Americans for Safe Access. "It becomes more untenable for them to say they are just going after certain facilities and not just undermining the state's marijuana laws."

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Presidential Candidate Ron Paul Speaks in Berkeley, CA

LAST NIGHT RON PAUL WAS IN BERKELEY, CA!

UNPRECEDENTED CROWD OF SUPPORTERS AND UNDECIDED VOTERS GREETS DR. PAUL AT FINAL OF THREE CALIFORNIA EVENTS HELD DURING THIS VISIT

LAKE JACKSON, Texas – 2012 Republican Presidential candidate Ron Paul attracted a peculiar 8,500-plus voters to the third of three town hall meetings he held in California this week, this time at UC-Berkeley. In drawing such a huge crowd to Berkeley, the 12-term Congressman from Texas shattered his unrivaled town hall meeting attendance record.

At similar events held yesterday and Tuesday, respectively, Dr. Paul drew remarkable crowds of 6,200-plus voters to Cal State – Chico, and 6,000-plus at UCLA.

Ron Paul’s college campus town hall meeting took place at 7:00 p.m. PST at UC-Berkeley’s Memorial Glade, where he addressed the crowd from atop the steps of Doe Library, Berkeley, CA 94720.

Dr. Paul spoke about his platform of constitutionally-limited government, the enduring bonds between economic and civil liberties, and elements of his ‘Plan to Restore America,’ a fiscal blueprint the cuts Washington spending, shrinks the national debt, and reverses the federal government’s harmful growth and intrusiveness.

Ron Paul’s town hall meetings in California were organized by ‘Youth for Ron Paul’ (YFP). YFP, an initiative of the Ron Paul 2012 Presidential campaign, launched in September 2011, and since its inception, students nationwide have organized 591 chapters and recruited more than 53,600 people. To learn more about ‘Youth for Ron Paul,’ including how to sign-up and establish a local chapter, visit the YFP website by clicking here.

Photographs of Ron Paul’s UC – Berkeley town hall meeting with 8,500-plus voters follow.

MIND MASTERY

Bay Area Wakes Up To Magnitude 4.0 East Bay Quake

EL CERRITO (CBS 5 / KCBS) — An earthquake with a magnitude of 4.0 shook the Bay Area at 5:33 a.m. on Monday.

The shallow quake was centered a mile north of El Cerrito, two miles from Richmond, four miles north of Berkeley and 13 miles from San Francisco City Hall.

To Read the rest of this article, please click here.

Stockton Going Broke Shows Cop Pay Rising as California Property Collapsed

By Alison Vekshin The bankruptcy that Stockton (3654MF), California, resisted for three years is now at its doorstep, spurred by the weight of retiree costs, the housing bust and accounting blunders that drained the city’s coffers.

Stockton, 80 miles (130 kilometers) east of San Francisco, rode the boom-and-bust cycle of the 2000s with a surge in new- home construction that attracted buyers seeking an affordable alternative to Bay Area real estate. Then a crash came, as homeowners faced a wave of foreclosures that sapped the city’s tax-revenue gains.

The city born in the gold rush has struggled for decades, relying on revenue from farming and shipping at its river port. Meanwhile it granted employees some of the state’s most generous benefits, and now has 94 retirees with pensions of at least $100,000 a year -- more than twice as many as some comparably- sized California cities. It has a history of ethnic tension and the notoriety of a 1989 schoolyard shooting in which five children were gunned down.

“We’re really struggling,” City Council member Dale Fritchen, 51, said by telephone Feb. 28. “There were horrible decisions made. City leaders spent money faster than it was coming in, thinking that the gravy train would never go away.”

This week, Stockton moved closer to bankruptcy with a City Council decision to preserve cash by defaulting on $2 million in bond payments. It also voted to begin a mediation process required under state law prior to seeking court protection. The city said its goal is to avoid bankruptcy. If it files, it would be the most populous U.S. city to do so.

Bankruptcy Code

From California to Rhode Island, cities are using the federal bankruptcy code to get out from under billions of dollars in obligations they can’t afford. Central Falls, Rhode Island, filed for protection in August after failing to win concessions from its unions. Jefferson County, Alabama, turned in the biggest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history last November, with $4.2 billion in debt. Vallejo, California, sought Chapter 9 reorganization in 2008.

Stockton’s unemployment rate soared to 17.3 percent in 2010, the country’s sixth-highest, from 7 percent in 2000, according to the California Employment Development Department. The foreclosure rate in the Stockton metropolitan area was the second-highest in the U.S. last year, after Las Vegas, according to Irvine, California-based RealtyTrac Inc. Violent crime in the Stockton area was the eighth-highest rate in the nation in 2010, according to FBI data.

Gold Rush

Stockton was founded in 1849 as a supply center for people rushing to work in mining, a year after gold was discovered on the American River east of Sacramento. Early settlers flocked from eastern states and from Asia, Europe and Africa.

Later, shipbuilding became a major industry in Stockton, with its deep-water port on the San Joaquin River. Agriculture surged as the region supplied asparagus, cherries, tomatoes, walnuts and almonds.

In the 1990s, city officials doled out generous retirement health benefits without ensuring the city could afford the payments over time, City Manager Bob Deis said at a Feb. 24 news conference. A worker employed as little as a month could qualify for city-paid retirement health care for the retiree and his or her spouse for life, Deis said.

“It was not a Cadillac plan,” Vice Mayor Kathy Miller said in a telephone interview. “It’s a Lamborghini plan. No one in the private sector had anything like that.”

Among expenses the city can no longer afford is a $417 million unfunded retiree health-care liability.

‘Nobody Asked’

“The problem is, nobody asked the question: ‘How do you fund it?’ And consequently there was no money set aside to fund those commitments,” Deis said. “It was an unsound decision and it has similarities to a Ponzi scheme.” In the 2000s, as housing prices soared in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, buyers from San Jose to Oakland seeking affordable alternatives flocked to Stockton, where starter homes cost around $400,000. Single-family home construction, which had averaged 2,500 units a year from 1991 to 1997, tripled to 7,500 annually from 2003 and 2005, according to Robert Denk, senior economist at the Washington-based National Association of Home Builders.

The city’s population grew 20 percent in a decade, to 291,707 in 2010 from 243,771 in 2000, driven by a surge in Hispanics who identify themselves as Mexican, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. That ethnic group jumped 56 percent in the period, to 104,172 from 66,900, while the black population grew 30 percent and the Asian population rose 29 percent, Census figures show.

‘Boom Time’

“Money was just pouring into the city coffers for development fees and permits,” Miller said. “Property taxes were going through the roof. It was boom-time.”

Pay and benefit packages continued to swell. In 2005, the city completed a new ballpark and arena on the waterfront using bond funds. “There was an unspoken policy that to keep the unions from complaining about the amount of money being spent on projects, the easiest way to do that was to continue sweetening their compensation packages,” Miller said.

Among those measures were automatic salary increases regardless of whether the city had the revenue to support them. The contract with the fire union required the city to compare its pay with that of 16 cities including Huntington Beach, Anaheim and Torrance. Stockton firefighters’ salaries were required to rank fifth-highest, according to the city’s May 2011 emergency declaration document.

$100,000 Pensions

Stockton retirees also fared well. The 94 with pensions of more than $100,000 compares with 38 in Bakersfield, which has 347,000 residents, and 35 in Chula Vista, with a population of 244,000, according to data compiled from state pension records by the California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility, a Citrus Heights-based group that advocates pension reform.

An epidemic of foreclosures reached Stockton in 2007, as the recession left thousands of homeowners unable to afford their mortgages. Home construction collapsed and housing prices plummeted.

Revenue dwindled to an estimated $161.8 million in fiscal 2012 from $203.1 million in fiscal 2009. The city fired 25 percent of its workforce.

In Stockton’s San Joaquin County, assessed property values tumbled almost 11 percent in fiscal 2010, followed by 3.9 percent in 2011 and 4 percent in the current year, according to the county’s website.

‘Drastic Decisions’

“In the beginning, when this whole economic bubble burst, everyone had the attitude, ‘We’ll just avoid making drastic decisions and in a year or two things will be back to normal,’” Miller said.

The base pay for a Stockton police officer can be as much as $76,860, while a sergeant’s can reach $90,836, according to data provided by the city. In 2010, 87 percent of police officers got additional pay that added 8.7 percent for a canine handler, 4.3 percent for SWAT and 5 percent in “longevity pay” at six years of service. All are included in the calculation of retirement benefits.

“We are now the fifth-lowest paid police organization in the county where we handle the majority of the calls,” Kathryn Nance, a Stockton Police Officers’ Association board member, said in a telephone interview.

By 2009, city officials began considering bankruptcy.
Bankruptcy Protection

Fritchen, the council member, asked the city attorney’s office to lay out the pros and cons of bankruptcy protection at a budget committee meeting.

A year later, in May 2010, the city declared a fiscal emergency to deal with a $23 million deficit. The declaration allowed the city to make changes to existing labor contracts.

Crime escalated as the police force was reduced by about 27 percent to 324 sworn officers from 441, according to Pete Smith, a police spokesman. There were a record 58 homicides last year, most involving gang violence, Smith said.

“We’re losing our grip on some of the more troubled neighborhoods and don’t have the ability to police the city as proactively as we did,” Smith said.

In the spring of 2011, Deis met with about 15 police employees and budget officials to seek concessions from the union.

‘Breaking Our Contract’

“He said if we continue to fight on them breaking our contract, then he is going to push the reset button and go bankrupt and we will all lose,” Steve Leonesio, president of the police union, said in a telephone interview. The union is suing the city, challenging its authority to reduce benefits under the emergency declaration.

Last year, city officials uncovered bookkeeping errors requiring $15 million in budget cuts that “will have the effect of stripping Stockton’s cupboards bare,” Deis said.

The mistakes included double-counting of $500,000 in parking-ticket revenues and overstating the city’s available balance by an estimated $2.8 million.

On Feb. 24, Deis walked into a news conference at City Hall and announced that the errors and the recession represent “the knockout blow” for the city’s finances. He recommended the city invoke the state bankruptcy law. “We see no viable alternative,” he said.

Oakland Raiders: Reggie's Got To Go!!

Who does he think he is?? Honestly, maybe he didn't watch anything last season, Stanford Routt was worth every dime in 2011. This will prove to backfire on the Raiders next Season. If Reggie doesn't stop to notice what he's doing, he will ruin the teams trade value. Many teams would've traded a good DE, or a higher draft pick for him, waiving him to save the bonus money??? Get out of town, before the mob comes to get ya!!!

Political With Ridicule!

    Only three months left until I publicly announce my candidacy for the Office of Mayor here in Stockton, California.  That will be the moment I can estimate the reality of me holding the Office.  Whether I win, or lose I know what is best for the City, and how to get back under budget.