Author: Source

NEW UPDATE:
1200 Demonstrate at Governor’s San Diego Office

By Hoa Quach / SDNN

A daylong effort against budget cuts led by student organizers throughout the San Diego region concluded with about 1,200 protesters gathering outside Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s San Diego office late Thursday afternoon.

UPDATE:
Californians Protest Education Cut-backs – UC Davis students try to block highway

Trying to keep on top of the March 4 Day of Action? Here are a few resources that you’ll definitely find useful.

Student Sources

* UC Regent Live(blog) will have a team of writers covering national events throughout the day.
* The blog Occupy CA has been breaking stories about radical protest actions all year.
* This site will of course be passing on everything we get.
* Our national March 4 map includes links and contact information for many local actions.
(SEE INSIDE FOR LINKS AND MORE …)

March 4th Actions Begun in California Have Spread Across Nation

Rally and march in San Diego today at 3pm precedes teachers’ march to Sacramento

With our state government paralyzed and public services as fundamental as education and roads cash-starved and crumbling, it’s easy to forget that California is still the world’s 8th-largest economy. We have riches — and they can be directed toward our common good.

The once-great state of California is self-destructing through irresponsible tax policies stretching back 32 years to Proposition 13, which made it so hard to raise taxes — requiring a two-thirds vote of the Legislature — that the state can’t generate the revenue for its basic needs.

No one has confirmed that Black shock-comedian was behind the racist February Compton Cookout

Student Activism / March 1, 2010

Okay, I guess I have to address this, since it’s coming up more and more often in comments on my coverage of the UC San Diego situation: There is NO evidence that the black shock-comedian “Jiggaboo Jones” was behind last month’s racist “Compton Cookout” at UCSD. None. Zero.

Here’s the deal.

Sometime in early-to-mid-February, the invitation to the Compton Cookout party was posted on Facebook. As word of the party got around, complaints began to mount, and on February 16 the UCSD administration condemned the event.

The Guardian, UCSD’s student newspaper, has printed a statement that it says was written by the student who hung a noose in the campus library last week.

The student — who remains anonymous — claims that last Tuesday, two days before the noose was found, a friend of hers fashioned it from a piece of rope she had found on the ground, “without thinking of any of its connotations or the current racial climate at UCSD.” She herself then carried the noose with her to the library “and ended up hanging it at my desk.” It was, she says, “a mindless act and stupid mistake.” When she left the library hours later, “I simply forgot about it.”

No one knows what history will make of the present — least of all journalists, who can at best write history’s sloppy first draft. But if I were to place an incautious bet on which political event will prove the most significant of February 2010, I wouldn’t choose the kabuki health care summit that generated all the ink and 24/7 cable chatter in Washington. I’d put my money instead on the murder-suicide of Andrew Joseph Stack III, the tax protester who flew a plane into an office building housing Internal Revenue Service employees in Austin, Tex., on Feb. 18. It was a flare with the dark afterlife of an omen.

What made that kamikaze mission eventful was less the deranged act itself than the curious reaction of politicians on the right who gave it a pass — or, worse, flirted with condoning it. Stack was a lone madman, and it would be both glib and inaccurate to call him a card-carrying Tea Partier or a “Tea Party terrorist.” But he did leave behind a manifesto whose frothing anti-government, anti-tax rage overlaps with some of those marching under the Tea Party banner.

Editor: Check this out. The Coffee Party movement has begun – an answer to the Tea Party movement. One of our bloggers last week in his post called for a “coffee grounds” movement. Well, his call has been answered. It is official, San Diego will have its own Coffee Party and it will form from these pages. Sign up here.

By Dan Zak /Washington Post / February 26, 2010

Furious at the tempest over the Tea Party — the scattershot citizen uprising against big government and wild spending — Annabel Park did what any American does when she feels her voice has been drowned out: She squeezed her anger into a Facebook status update.

by Earl Ofari Hutchinson/ Huffington Post / February 23, 2010

University of California, San Diego chancellor Marye Anne Fox, the president of Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity, UCSD student leaders, and a bevy of civil rights leaders, and black and minority California lawmakers leaped over each other to lambaste the now infamous Compton Cookout at UCSD as racially insulting, insensitive, and demeaning. On February 24, days after the furor broke, UCSD officials held a campus racial sensitivity teach-in to quell racial tensions on the campus.

The Compton cookout, of course, was the boneheaded stunt by a handful of white and non-white students at an off campus to mock, poke fun at, and revel in what’s presumed to be the sway and swagger of ghetto life. There’s a problem, actually, two problems with this.

SAN DIEGO — Student protesters have taken over the offices of University of California San Diego Chancellor Marye Anne Fox as a third racially charged episode has brought a new wave of outrage.

Students are protesting atop desks and countertops throughout Fox’s suite, except for her own sanctum. They are chanting, “Real pain, real change.” Some are playing drums.

Fox has twice addressed students today, once outside the library where a noose was found last night and once in a eucalyptus grove outside her office. Students remain upset with the pace of the administration’s response to their demand for action over ongoing racial strife.

“You can’t imagine how pained we are, we are heartsick,” Vice Chancellor Penny Rue told the students on a bullhorn.New Update: UCSD campus police and president of the regents have reported that the woman student said she had two accomplices.

Some professors have called off their classes for the day and have called for a strike and “disruptive demonstrations” at the campus in protest of the now three racial incidents.

Campus police at the University of California San Diego are questioning a student who admitted she hung a noose on the seventh floor of the university library Thursday night.

Thousands of students and administrators attended a “teach-in” at UC San Diego Wednesday to address a recent ghetto-themed party intended to mock Black History Month and the racial unrest it sparked on campus, but the event was disrupted when the bulk of students in attendance walked out.

About an hour into the event at the university’s student center, two female students with the Black Student Union stood up and blasted the teach-in, with one saying, “The university and our community will not be fixed by a two-hour teach-in.”

Saying the university was doing little to address racism on campus, the pair urged their fellow students in the packed auditorium and overflow room to march out of the event, and the vast majority complied. The students filed out of the auditorium, loudly chanting “Whose university? Our university!”

Editor: The following was originally two comments left by Camper, a young, dread-locked traveler. We decided to post it – with some editing – as one article. This, in the midst of some local OB hate mongering – as we have been told that someone is passing out fliers that say “Trolls go home.” Here, then, in his own words, ….

by Camper

So my name is Camper. My side of the story might strike your interest as I may be the first traveler to take the time and let you know where I’m coming from.

I’m from Detroit, Michigan and have been traveling for quite sometime. How long does not matter. Long enough to go from being that kid that every OB local can’t really stand, the kid in patchwork clothes panhandling for nothing but booze money, to someone who simply cares for his freedom, and wants a lifestyle not created by small group of narrow minded men.

Editor: It seems there is a renewed interest in why our great state is so broke. Here, we are re-posting two articles from last Spring.

by David Dayen / Calitics / May 27, 2009
Despite his admission that California is ungovernable, the Governor soldiered on today, announcing the full slate of revised budget cuts to replace his proposed borrowing, since scrapped, and to fill the even larger deficit estimated by the Legislative Analyst. As expected, the Governor called for eliminating the CalWORKS program for the poor, eliminating Healthy Families to provide health insurance to poor children, and phasing out the Cal Grants program which provides financial aid to California students. But that’s not all. As Noreen Evans says, the Governor’s cuts “dismantle the New Deal.” Here are some of the lowlights in these 25 distinct cuts:

1. President Obama Cut Your Taxes

As in April, the Tea Baggers continued to display their fundamental misunderstanding of U.S. history and the American Revolution. Apparently, the right-wing zealots are outraged by no taxation with representation.

As promised, Barack Obama in the stimulus package delivered on his pledge of tax relief for 95% of American households. Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) didn’t only jump start gross domestic product and refill empty state coffers in the second quarter of 2009. As Nate Silver thoroughly documented, “Obama has cut taxes for 98.6% of working households.”

Nevertheless, raging Tea Baggers spouting Republican Tax Day lies took to the streets not to thank the President, but to blame him for the tax cuts they received.