A 21st Century Soapbox for San Diego

On Monday, March 4, Kelly Mayhew, Jim Miller and myself are launching a new publication for, by, and about San Diego.

Welcome to The Jumping Off Place, a soapbox of sorts, and a nod to the dreamers drawn to the promise of America’s Finest City. Too many found misery and disappointment didn’t go away on sunny days. We’d like to offer hope, connection, and encouragement free of the trappings of a plantation mentality.

I’d love to promise you winnings from the Publisher’s Clearinghouse, or solutions for our city’s many problems,  but there is a lot we don’t know just yet. What we’re doing is new, gathering many voices in a single outlet with a logistical and business model being used successfully by thousands of writers nationwide.

Is our new home a form of social media? Is it a blogging platform? How big can the tent be? Are we a news & opinion site? A literary outlet? A journal? We don’t know the answers yet. It could be all those things.

What we’re seeking is a better means of communication, of bringing people with good intentions together, and punching holes in the silos built by a pandemic and general alienation in recent years. 

The old ways aren’t working, both financially and as purveyors of information. Many of the services once provided through linear and non digital means are now just a tap of an app away. Huge government funded public relations offices are issuing reams of press releases, hoping to motivate scribes to adopt their preferred framing. 

Dead tree and digital representations of dead tree journalism are mostly mediocre, both sides-ing and trivializing what little content they publish. What unvarnished truths they offer are lost in a forest of meh.

Facebook has announced it’s dropping a dedicated section for news, a move that’s understandable because it’s a) hardly visible and b) chock full of MAGA clickbait. The company’s effort to place blinders on reality —starting with downgrading traffic to certain websites in 2016 —has reached its logical conclusion.

In my daily readings of conventional media, I’m all-too-often reminded of the opening verse of the Fugs’ —arguably the first underground rock group of all time— Nothing:

Monday, nothing
Tuesday, nothing
Wednesday and Thursday nothing
Friday, for a change
A little more nothing
Saturday once more nothing

The editors of The Jumping Off Place have made an initial determination to keep money out of this project, in part because we can, and in part because we want to avoid the headaches and effort required to function as a business entity.

We believe our focus should be on what writers are saying and showing, not on how much you’ll be asked to pay to read or subscribe. The Jumping Off Place is about ideas. Not just political discourse,  but a range of human experiences from the perspective of people working for a more just and self-sustaining world.

We have gathered more than thirty people with something to say and easily passed the century mark in subscribers prior to launch. Every Monday we’ll publish a set of essays; our initial dilemma is that we have too many stories lined up to fit in our format.

I expect we’ll make a bunch of mistakes, both technical and presentation-wise. It’s my hope that every mistake will be regarded in a manner that concludes we’ll do better next time.

Consider this your personal invitation to sample our wares by signing up at:

 PS—The inclusion of my name as byline in the above (free) subscription link is a bug we’ll figure out eventually. Jim Miller and Kelly Mayhew are founders, editors, and guiding stars.

PPS– Words and Deeds will continue to publish five days a week.

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Friday’s Other Stories of Note

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145 GOP Members of Congress Ask Supreme Court to Slash Access to the Abortion Pill by Susan Rickman at Jezebel (they’re back!)

• Nearly 150 Republican lawmakers asked the Supreme Court Thursday to restrict access to the abortion drug mifepristone—citing a law from 1873—when it hears a case on March 26. In a legal filing known as an amicus brief, 26 Senators and 119 Representatives argue that not only did the Food and Drug Administration not follow proper procedure when it updated the pill’s labeling in 2016 and then allowed telemedicine prescriptions in 2021, but they claim the agency “blatantly disregard[ed] the federal law’s prohibition on the mailing and interstate shipment of abortion-inducing drugs.”

• The GOP brief doesn’t refer to that federal law by name, but rather by its federal statute number, 18 U.S.C. 1461 and 1462. But it’s the 19th-century Comstock Act, a zombie law that conservatives want Donald Trump to enforce should he win the presidency in November as a way to ban abortion nationwide without Congress. Read broadly, it could be used to not only ban medication abortion, but by prohibiting shipments of medical supplies used in clinics, it could outright ban abortion procedures in all 50 states. Yes, even ones with laws that protect abortion.

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The private chats and chance encounters that shape Joe Biden’s thinking by Tyler Pager at The Washington Post

• Biden’s aides concede privately that Americans’ perception of him as a declining octogenarian is now his biggest political hurdle. That comes partly from his physical appearance: At 81, he walks stiffly, speaks haltingly, squints awkwardly. The concerns were underlined by special counsel Robert Hur’s recent report that his decision not to prosecute Biden for mishandling classified documents was partly due to the president coming off as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

• Aides and allies of the president insist that description bears no resemblance to the man they know, saying their jobs would be much easier if it did. In private, they say, Biden swears. He raises his voice. He demands more information. He dresses down aides, on occasion threatening to fire them, though he never does.

• Staffers have learned to brace for a particularly fierce barrage from the president on Mondays after he returns from his regular weekend trips to Delaware, as he demands answers to questions from residents of Wilmington or Rehoboth Beach with whom he has chatted.

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Seven Lessons from Starbucks Workers’ Historic Victory by Eric Blanc at Jacobin

• Why did Starbucks settle? Sustained workplace organizing was certainly a critical factor. Despite two years of scorched-earth union busting — estimated to have already cost the company over $240 million — nearly four hundred stores have successfully unionized. And a record-high twenty-one stores filed for union election just last week. Yet this amount of shop-floor power on its own could not have plausibly forced a company with over fifteen thousand stores in the United States to the table.

• Here’s the other piece of the puzzle: service sector companies depend on a loyal customer base to continue buying products, creating significant potential for leveraging consumer pressure — especially for brand-sensitive “liberal” companies like Starbucks.

• SBWU has provided a master class in how to win the battle for public opinion and inflict major brand damage by combining inspirational shop-floor militancy with a savvy, worker-led communications strategy. In my research, I found that the Starbucks drive was the single most cited effort driving up the explosion of the media’s union coverage from 2022 onward (see figure below). Billie Adeosun in Olympia summed it up well: “I love that we’ve made unionizing sexy.”