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has written 24 articles for the OB Rag!

Citizens’ Review Board Gets an Earful About Police Harassment of San Diego Occupiers

January 25, 2012 by Rocky Neptun
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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.

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San Diegans Rally to Support America’s Soldier of Conscience – Bradley Manning

December 19, 2011 by Rocky Neptun
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Julia Glover pulls on her knitted gloves, wraps her scarf tighter around her shoulders as the chilly breeze whips through San Diego’s newly named Freedom Plaza. Fixing her eyes grimly on the costumed patrons of the ballet in tuxedos and firs as they line up for the annual Nutcracker presentation at the Civic Theatre, across the square from the Occupy San Diego base camp, she shivered and said sadly, “there they go, the fools of empire, the subsidiaries of the 1 percent, they will never understand, much less appreciate what Bradley Manning did for us.”

From Florida, she was visiting a friend in San Diego and was determined to spend her 68th birthday marching for Pfc. Manning on their shared birthday, December 17th. As she waited for the Saturday march to begin, listening to San Diego Occupiers discuss strategy at their daily General Assembly gathering in the plaza, she commented “we need to occupy Ft. Meade; all of us, thirty or forty thousand from across the nation, marching upon the base, requiring our government to release this young hero.”

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Occupy San Diego Holds Freedom Plaza

October 29, 2011 by Rocky Neptun
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In spite of the 51 arrests early Friday morning, Occupy San Diego managed to hold the Civic Center Plaza, what some young people are calling ‘Freedom Plaza,” through the night and into Saturday morning. After a tense standoff with about 30 police officers over one of the two arrests during the night and a noisy march through downtown, occupiers meeting at their nightly General Assembly split evenly over whether to continue to occupy the plaza, but since there was not a single block on the action, about 75 OccupySD folks stayed.

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City Council Session Shut-down by Citizens Demanding Constitutional Rights in San Diego

October 25, 2011 by Rocky Neptun
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Tuesday, Oct 25:After spending almost an hour discussing an illegal scheme to transfer even more wealth to downtown hotel owners using taxpayers’ money; the San Diego City Council literally turned tail and ran from the council chambers when a coalition of community groups joined the Occupy San Diego movement in asking council members to support their rights to free speech and assembly within the city.

About 60 citizens marched from Children’s Park just before the 10 a.m. Council session and met up with the several hundred young people camped at the Civic Center Plaza. Ignoring the police demands to stay on the sidewalk, protestors took to the streets the entire route.

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Latin American Labor Conference to Focus on Worker Emancipation

October 24, 2011 by Rocky Neptun
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From Tehran to Scotland, from Hong Kong to the always fiery, militant youth of Rome, the Occupy Wall Street movement has spread across the globe. Tired and angry over decades of corporate owned capitalism, where wealthy stockholders and huge multi-national corporations set the agenda for political and economic policy decisions, plunging millions of middle-class families into poverty, exacerbating the conditions of the already destitute, and forcing millions of youth into either wage slavery or no future at all; the world’s 99% have taken to the streets.

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San Diego’s Freedom Square Attacked by Police – OccupySD

October 14, 2011 by Rocky Neptun
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Handed a printed ultimatum late afternoon Thursday, October 13 to either remove all tents by midnight or get arrested, the 150 Freedom Occupiers at the San Diego Civic Center held a democratic general assembly and decided to peacefully resist the assault on their rights of free speech and assembly.

The occupiers, mostly youth , many of color, had been camped near City Hall since Saturday to proclaim solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street protests nationwide and to begin a movement of youthful confrontation with local injustice.

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Tijuana Protesters Demand ‘Stop the Blood!’

May 10, 2011 by Rocky Neptun
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Close to five hundred people gathered Sunday, May 7 in Tijuana’s Zona Rio to call on President Felipe Calderon to end Mexico’s “failed” war on drugs. Converging beneath the city’s Monument to Two Cultures, which honors U.S. and Mexican society with two scissor shaped columns, protestors divided into two distinct groups.

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San Diego’s Eighth Anniversary Peace Festival – ‘Hiding in the Park’

March 21, 2011 by Rocky Neptun
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“Why do you people hide in the park?” one person asked me.

“Do you think that you are going to change a damn thing?” another asked. “Obama promised to end the wars if we elected him and he lied, just like Bush” she continued.

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Peace Campus Opens in San Diego

March 14, 2011 by Rocky Neptun
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What is peace? Is it merely the absence of war? Or, like Switzerland and Costa Rica, the refusal to use aggression as national policy? Is it micro or macro; harmony in the family or tranquility in our nation’s inner streets? Is it a noun or a verb? Something one has, like a bank account or a house, or is it something one does, a way of life?

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San Diego Troublemakers Go to School

March 9, 2011 by Rocky Neptun
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In that town called San Diego when the workers try to talk, The cops will smash them with a sap and tell them “take a walk”, They throw them in a bull pen and they feed them rotten beans, And they call that “law and order” in that city, so it seems. From the July […]

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Ending Corporate Welfare in San Diego!

March 4, 2011 by Rocky Neptun

Serra Mesa, San Diego: To kill the Beast or not, was the question. Has it grown into an enormous creature with an insatiable hunger for more and more tax dollars supporting the profits of developers and wealthy speculators? Has what was once a modest program to end blight in inner cities by creating safe, decent, […]

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It’s Time to Support Our Workers

February 21, 2011 by Rocky Neptun

The greatest threat of the 21st Century is not terrorism or religious fanaticism or nationalism….. it is concentrated power – both political and economic – within the corporate state. That very power, concentrated in an elite, an oligarchy, whether national or local, is an interlocking system of wealth, politics, media, and corporations whose sole purpose is to destroy the ability of individual citizens to organize together for the common good through the mechanism of government.

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Bread, Circuses and The Welfare King: Alexander Spanos

January 20, 2011 by Rocky Neptun
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Editor: This contribution by Rocky Neptun is a continuation of the debate about a new football stadium in downtown San Diego, begun by Andy Cohen here.

When I began my property maintenance business a few decades ago, I used 80 percent of my assets and borrowed an amount equivalent to another 50 percent. At that time, or even now, there was never a consideration that you, as a taxpayer, should finance my business venture.

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Artifice at the Theatre: Mayor Sanders’ State of the City Speech

January 17, 2011 by Rocky Neptun
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Like a bogus Thespian, Jerry Sanders took to the stage of the Balboa Theater in mid-January, using every ounce of verbal ruse and sleight of mouth he possessed to attempt a bravado performance heralding his dreary and monotonous six years as Mayor of San Diego.

Sander’s speech, like his devious administration of city government as water boy for the corporate state, reflects a continuing tale of two cities.

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Live by the Sword, Die by the Sword: San Diego LGBT Publisher Kills Himself

December 14, 2010 by Rocky Neptun
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Excerpts from San Diego: 1st City of Empire, by Rocky Neptun, to be published in May, 2011 by the San Diego Renters Union The suicide of the city’s most well-known publisher and the saga of the “Empress” of San Diego mirror the store-bought culture of San Diego’s LGBT ghetto. It is an urbanity based on […]

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Privatization in Mexico resulted in the deaths of 48 children.

December 7, 2010 by Rocky Neptun

Privatize! Then, Bury Your Children! Tijuana, Mexico. Dec. 5: Protesting the scorching deaths of their children for profit, several dozen families brought their heartbreak and anger to the streets of Tijuana last Sunday. Seeking support in their call for justice for the blaze which consumed 40 children immediately, with eight subsequently succumbing to their burns […]

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Jesus, George Washington and San Diego’s Medical Marijuana Struggle

November 16, 2010 by Rocky Neptun
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Editor: This two-year old post by Rocky Neptun is a constant favorite or our readers. We thought we’d just bring it out for some more sun – but please realize dear reader, that it was written in November of 2010.

By Rocky Neptun

Under the shadow of a venomous San Diego District Attorney and a cliff-hanger Attorney General election between a fanatical D.A. from Los Angeles and a sympathetic D.A. from the Bay Area, medical marijuana patients, providers and activists met near Mission Bay under the banner of “putting patients first.”

The November 14th, all-day gathering, at the Marina Village Conference Center reflected both the radiance of altruism in the medical marijuana movement, its ancient heritage, and the potential to humanize the medical-care-giving industry, as well as the dangers members and patients face from reactionary forces still fighting the obsolete cultural wars of the 1960’s.

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Campaign forms in San Diego to halt ICE raids

November 9, 2010 by Rocky Neptun
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By Rocky Neptun

Next March will mark the 57th anniversary of Anne Frank’s death. Branded an illegal alien of the occupied Netherlands because she was Jewish; she and her young friends had to hide in fear of the black-shirted fiends known as the Protective Squad (Schutzstaffel) or SS as it was commonly called.

Roaming through neighborhoods they were the enforcers of ethnic purification. Their unspeakable atrocities against human beings in the name of the law still lacerate our sense of humanity. And while the ends of their sickening purposes still surface occasionally in places like the Sudan, Rwanda and Bosnia; their means continue to be used as weapons against targeted peoples like today’s Department of Homeland Security thugs.

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Donkey Tears in San Diego – Can Progressives Build a Majority Here?

November 8, 2010 by Rocky Neptun
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By Rocky Neptun

About forty activists, mostly Democrats, gathered last week for breakfast at the office of the San Diego Foundation for Change to lick their wounds, investigate what went wrong and listen to an exciting presentation on possible future progressive election victories.

Lamenting the Republican gains in the mid-term elections, participants, ranging from the chair of the San Diego Democratic Club to the editor of Indian Voices to church groups, power liberals all, spoke of their despair over what many saw as a conservative turn to the electorate.

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Anti-War Activists in the Nation’s Heartland Under Attack!

September 27, 2010 by Rocky Neptun

By Rocky Neptun

The sweeping assaults across the nation on peaceful anti-war activists Sept. 24th represent an ominous divergence for an administration which was elected to change the heavy-handed policies of the Bush regime. Like something straight out of the Ashcroft playbook, FBI agents, in cooperation with local authorities, raided homes and offices in Michigan, Illinois and Minnesota. Government thugs also showed up at the doors of progressives and human rights activists in North Carolina and San Jose, California.

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Affordable Housing is a Human Right!

September 20, 2010 by Rocky Neptun

By Rocky Neptune

Every human right has had to be fought for against powerful interests who profit from the subjugation and misuse of their fellow persons. The right to vote was opposed by kings and emperors and is still occasionally nullified by millionaire judges, …

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Arizona’s Sheriff Arpaio: Abuse protected by the badge

August 23, 2010 by Rocky Neptun
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By Rocky Neptun

“Do not forsake me, ohhhh..my darling,” the deep raspy voice of Gary Cooper intoned as Hadleyville Marshal Will Kane walked out into the middle of town to meet the evil that was arriving on the noon train. Having just gotten married to a pacifist Quaker that day, hanging up his guns and badge; he would have to make a choice between the effortless escapism in the waiting buggy, horses harnessed and ready, and facing down the malicious criminal who was approaching – even though everyone in town was frightened and hid.

Gary Cooper won a Best Acting Oscar for that performance, while Tex Ritter’s theme High Noon won Best Song.

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No Place at the Table: Feeding the Hungry in San Diego is a Crime!

August 18, 2010 by Rocky Neptun

By Rocky Neptun

“Mommie, I’m hungry,” the little girl cried as she stood shivering in the cold wind, waiting for food. The image has never left me…and now that I am semi-retired I want to be part of an effort making sure no more children starve on San Diego city streets.

I want to help buy a catering truck. A fellow member of the San Diego Renters Union, who was once homeless, has gotten a modest settlement and has agreed to match whatever the Renters Union can raise toward buying a food truck to feed the homeless. As someone who spent their teen years on the streets of New York City, I learned very early, as I camped under a hedge at New York University, that whatever didn’t fit in a back-pack was useless. I had no possessions, so possessions did not possess me. But I did know hunger and, often, what crimes against society – and oneself – it took to obtain money for food.

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San Diego Blog Journalist Thrown Out of Public Press Conference

February 18, 2008 by Rocky Neptun

Pat Flannery Assaulted & Removed In Front of DA and Sheriff by Rocky Neptun San Diego slid ever further into a police state last Thursday, as independent journalist and blogger, Pat Flannery, was assaulted and thrown out of a press conference at the Westgate Hotel. Under the eye of San Diego Sheriff William Kolender and […]

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