Month: January 2012

By Gail Powell / Special to the OB Rag

The Occupy movement has some people thinking that the anti-Wall Street political group has co-opted the medical marijuana issue. Where once the closing of dispensaries would have incited the wrath of medical marijuana activists; now many of those same people are off doing their Occupy thing. That is not to say that the issues of the people supporting the utilization of medical marijuana is dead: it is not.

And I do not wish to make it seem that political protesters are dilettantes who jump from one exciting activity to another. But the federal pressure on the clinics that has come down from the Obama administration is a part of the bigger picture of injustice from the national level filtering malice upon the local level.

Most stood and spoke with pride and respect, cradling their cause reverently, boldly, while others barely concealed their rage with fiery speeches. They told of being knocked to the ground, punched, the burn of mace in their faces, shoved against concrete walls, brutally dragged to police vans, being booked into jail on outrageous felony charges; all in retaliation for using their U.S. Constitutionally guaranteed rights of free speech and free assembly.

Forty citizens gathered at the San Diego Citizens’ Review Board on Police Practices, Tuesday evening, January 25, pleading with its 23 members to investigate not only the San Diego Police Departments continuing harassment of the Occupy San Diego movement but the SDPD’s frightening new policy of allowing police officers to change, modify and make new laws on the spot.

Middle-class housewives, small business owners, veterans, an attorney, college students, even downtown employees passing by, victimized by the sustained police violence in the Civic Center Plaza.

Editor: The Ocean Beach Mainstreet Association has issued a call for OBceans to join a city-wide campaign to save special events in San Diego. There’s a press conference on Friday – see below – and also a petition to sign – also see below.

Action required to save special events in the city of San Diego!

By OBMA

The Ocean Beach MainStreet Association would like to get you involved in a critical movement to save special events throughout the city of San Diego. Make your voice heard today by signing the petition on the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce “Save Our Events Coalition” website.

Nick Taliaferro of Ocean Beach was on the ill-fated Italian cruise ship with his girlfriend when it hit a reef and sank last week. Now some of the passengers are calling Taliaferro a hero for assisting them and their children getting into lifeboats despite calls by crews that everything was okay.

A website in Nick’s hometown of Hannibal, Missouri, ran a piece about him last week, see this: Hannibal.net :

A former Hannibal resident is being called a hero by some of his fellow passengers aboard the cruise ship Costa Concordia, which was carrying more than 4,200 passengers and crew when it hit a reef and sank last Friday off the tiny Italian island of Giglio.

Judge Faults Balboa Park Traffic Plan – A $40 million plan to take traffic out of the heart of Balboa Park has been dealt a legal setback

By Gene Cubbison / NBC San Diego / Jan 24, 2012

A $40 million plan to take traffic out of the heart of Balboa Park has been dealt a legal setback.

Critics say they hope the Superior Court ruling by Judge Judith Hayes will prod the plan’s backers — led by Qualcomm founder Irwin Jacobs — to consider other options. The Plaza de Panama project is among the preparations for the centennial celebration of Balboa Park’s 1915 Panama-California Exposition, which helped raise San Diego’s national and worldwide prominence at the time.

But historic preservationists say it’s misguided.

“There are probably ten really good alternatives that we could wholeheartedly support,” says Bruce Coons, executive director of Save Our Heritage Organisation (SOHO), which filed the lawsuit.

The State of Our Disunion: A Globalizing Private Sector, A Government Overwhelmed by Corporate Money

By Robert Reich / RR’s Blog – RSN / January 24, 2012

Who should have the primary strategic responsibility for making American workers globally competitive – the private sector or government? This will be a defining issue in the 2012 campaign.

In his State of the Union address, President Obama will make the case that government has a vital role. His Republican rivals disagree. Mitt Romney charges the President is putting “free enterprise on trial,” while Newt Gingrich merely fulminates about “liberal elites.”

American business won’t and can’t lead the way to more and better jobs in the United States. First, the private sector is increasingly global, with less and less stake in America. Second, it’s driven by the necessity of creating profits, not better jobs.

Editor: Finally some pushback against DA Bonnie Dumanis’ persecution of the Democrats in the South Bay Sweetwater school district. U-T reporters Fry and Moran have spoken with people in the South Bay who are upset with what they see as Dumanis’ apparent election-year grandstanding and over-arching hypocrisy. Even the U-T poll showed this doubt with its readers. The U-T asked: Are Bonnie Dumanis’ prosecutorial decisions for elected officials affected by politics? “Yes” was the response of 86% with 334 votes, whereas “No” was received by 13% with 54 votes, for total of 388 votes (as of 9 am today).

by Wendy Fry and Greg Moran / U-T San Diego / Jan. 21, 2012

The elected official accepted hundreds of dollars of theater and opera tickets, all the while steering millions of taxpayer dollars to the people paying the bills.

A South Bay official charged with corruption? No.

Supervisor Pam Slater-Price accepted the tickets, while dispensing grants to the opera and the Old Globe Theatre. After The Watchdog revealed she failed to report the gifts on state forms, she was given a $2,000 administrative fine in 2010.

Slater-Price’s act — failing to report gifts on state-mandated forms — is what has four current and former officials of the Sweetwater schools in trouble with the District Attorney’s Office.

They are accused of taking meals (and theater tickets) from a contractor and then steering public money toward his contract. They have pleaded not guilty to perjury and filing false statements, 24 felonies total related to the failure to disclose the gifts.

Missed the opening of the San Diego Free Speech Centennial Exhibition in the Centro Cultural de la Raza on January 6th?

Not to worry. The celebration of the 100-year anniversary of the San Diego Free Speech Fight continues this Thursday, January 26th at the Saville Theatre (where 14th Street meets C in downtown) on the City College campus from 7:00-9:00 PM.

This event will feature music by Gregory Page and the Proles; a reading from my IWW novel Flash; a special Voices of Peoples’ History presentation focused on the free speech fight by City College students; and the premiere of a short documentary on this important piece of local history. Before and after the performances you can view Golden Lands/Working Hands, the California Federation of Teachers’ mobile labor history exhibit. This event is free and open to the public.

Hey, there’s people
out there stressin’
going”What’s up with all this ‘Occupy?'”
Well, I tell you one thing
and this ain’t no lie.
Occupy
as a concept,
ain’t something
that just dropped from the sky.
Unh. Unh.
Not even a close try….

By Herman Baca, President – Committee on Chicano Rights / January 20, 2012

In Mexico they call it what it is, “Corruption, La Mordida.” In the U.S. especially in San Diego County they call it, “Campaign Contributions.”

District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis is the most anti-Mexican District Attorney in SD County’s history, a Republican with a political agenda, running for Mayor of San Diego. Dumanis has a long history of criminalizing, profiling, and defaming persons of Mexican ancestry (i.e. Chula Vista Councilman Steve Castenada), and entire Mexican communities such as Old Town National City.

“Old Town National City (OTNC) gangs, which has prowled National City streets since World War II and whose members, in some cases go back four generations in the same family, etc.”

When Papa Doug Manchester bought the San Diego Union-Tribune late last year, there was a hint that the “new” U-T would be different.

But with the daily’s total black-out of a rally on Saturday by hundreds of San Diegans against corporate monies in politics and elections, we can now see that the “new” U-T is the same as the old U-T: both ignore as best as they can progressive gatherings against causes the owners and editors like.

The “old” U-T was adept at ignoring rallies by several thousand labor supporters for example – all the while high-lighting a tiny gathering of tea party types. We documented this in the past.

At least 250 San Diegans rallied on Friday, January 20th, in downtown San Diego against the US Supreme Court case known as “Citizens United”. It was the one year anniversary of the court decision that gutted campaign finance reform and that has eroded citizens’ rights of freedom of speech.

Organized by Women Occupy San Diego and Common Cause in conjunction with a national group called Move to Amend, the well-attended gathering next to the Federal Building was the largest protest in this city against the Supreme Court decision that has come to represent everything bad in modern American elections.