Category: Civil Disobedience

As we celebrate the rich legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., I am drawn back to my favorite speech of his, “Where Do We Go From Here?”. This was Dr. King’s last address as President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, given toward to end of his life in 1967. It outlines two core principles of King’s unfulfilled legacy that united the questions of racial injustice with those of economic inequality and rampant militarism.

By Naomi Wolf / Guardian UK / December 29 , 2012

New documents prove what was once dismissed as paranoid fantasy:
totally integrated corporate-state repression of dissent

It was more sophisticated than we had imagined: new documents show that the violent crackdown on Occupy last fall – so mystifying at the time – was not just coordinated at the level of the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and local police.

The crackdown, which involved, as you may recall, violent arrests, group disruption, canister missiles to the skulls of protesters, people held in handcuffs so tight they were injured, people held in bondage till they were forced to wet or soil themselves -was coordinated with the big banks themselves.

By Nadin Abbott

Occupy San Diego reached an important milestone this weekend. Occupy San Diego is now one year old, and like all children, it has learned a lot this year, but also achieved quite a bit.

The weekend saw a series of events, some low key, some going back to it’s roots in the streets, celebrating the fact that OSD is still here. The first event was at Balboa Park on Saturday afternoon.

When I reached the Park I was no longer surprised to see San Diego Police coming in to talk to an Occupier. Well, so what is new? Same old, same old – right? This time, the officers had cause. No, not the usual we saw over the course of last year. They had a call, from another occupier, reporting what can best be described as a domestic dispute. Given the Occupier in question wore a Guy Fawkes costume with knives (which I could not tell at a distance were plastic either), the cops showed up in force. This is standard.

Moreover, while the Police kept an eye on Occupy, like they do on every demonstration that happens in this town, they also kept their actual contact to a minimum, and kept their distance.

By Kali Kat / Special to the OB Rag

With the one year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street just around the corner on September 17, and many other cities’ occupy anniversaries falling in the weeks just after, like Occupy San Diego’s one year anniversary on October 7, the question being begged is:

“What is the current state of the Occupy movement?” If you go down to the Civic Center or your local City Hall, are people still living there?

The Occupy movement, including Occupy San Diego (OSD), is still alive and well, but no, there are not people still living there – well not people flying the Occupy flag anyways.

By Michael Moore and Oliver Stone / New York Times / August 20, 2012

WE have spent our careers as filmmakers making the case that the news media in the United States often fail to inform Americans about the uglier actions of our own government. We therefore have been deeply grateful for the accomplishments of WikiLeaks, and applaud Ecuador’s decision to grant diplomatic asylum to its founder, Julian Assange, who is now living in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London.

Ecuador has acted in accordance with important principles of international human rights.

By Eugene Davidovitch / Americans for Safe Access

BACKGROUND: On October 7, 2011, at a press conference in Sacramento, US Attorney Laura Duffy, along with several other US Attorneys, announced a statewide crackdown on medical cannabis cooperatives, collectives, gardens, and others.

Without citing any specific violations in state law, Duffy’s office claimed all were out of compliance and would be targeted for eradication including those fully licensed and regulated by local government and law enforcement.

Here is a video from Occupy Wall Street. Plans are being made to hold a three day festival of protest and resistance beginning September 17th – the one year anniversary of the birth of the occupy movement in New York City.

Yesterday – July 31 – witnessed a page right out of the annuals of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin – pranksters from the Yippie days of the Seventies: several newspapers, including the prestigious LA Times and our local San Diego Reader, ran stories about how the US Attorney in San Diego, Laura Duffy, was starting to target pharmacies for illegal sales of drugs. (See this story from San Diego Free Press.)

The stories were sent to the media by emails that purported to be from Duffy’s office. But the emails were discovered to be phonies and Duffy had to send out her own email saying so. Hours later at a press conference, Americans for Safe Access, a national advocacy group for medicinal cannabis with a local chapter, announced that they were responsible for sending out the false emails. Eugene Davidovich, the head of the local chapter, stated that it was a “satirical” way for his group to call attention to the federal crackdown on medical marijuana dispensaries. He called it civil disobedience.

July 1970: construction begins on the jetty at north beach in OB.Editor: We originally posted this article about the movement to stop the jetty that the City of San Diego and the Army Corps of Engineers had designed for north OB as part of our series on the early history of the original OB Rag in November 2007. We re-post it now for its historic significance.

The Jetty is Stopped

There was definitely turmoil in OB the summer of 1970. For a number of weeks during those hot days, OB residents used a combination of direct action and legal moves to battle efforts by the Army Corps of Engineers and the City to construct a jetty parallel to the southern edge of the San Diego River channel — next to what is now Dog Beach.

Many locals viewed the jetty as a prelude to an attempt by the City and developer interests to create a marina and resort district at Ocean Beach’s waterfront.

Every year for the past several, there’s a whole lot of soul-searching done by OBceans when they survey the gooey mess left over from the July 4th traditional OB Marshmallow War. There are usually calls to ban it outright and much gnashing of the teeth as volunteers struggle to clean up the beaches, the streets, the monuments, the …. everything else that got caught in the targets of marshmallow throwers.

In 2009, the OB Rag did a poll of readers on whether the tradition should continue.

… 69% of the respondents to the OB Rag poll want the Marshmallow Wars tradition to continue, although nearly half of those want some kind of controls placed on the event by volunteers, whereas 27% believe the event is out of control and want it to end. 3% wanted to study the issue. At that time we had 62 respondents.

Here, then is the OB Rag’s Archives on the OB Marshmallow Wars, collected over the last several years – several of these articles have some tremendous comments, so make sure you read them as well. (Click on the the headlines.)

• Who Started the First OB Marshmallow Fight? by Frank Gormlie, July 4, 2009

• Veteran’s Memorial Clean-Up Slated for This Saturday – July 18th by Jon Carr, July 17, 2009

The 99% and all that stuff
is a movement that’s all about US
and with that in mind
one might opine
that many of US
can remember times
when we could barely
pay the rent
and when the rent
was made good with all good intent
the food money
was gone…spent.

U.S. prosecutors asks Manhattan Federal Judge Katherine Forrest to undo ruling against military detention law

By Basil Katz / Chicago Tribune – Reuters / May 25, 2012

NEW YORK – Federal prosecutors on Friday urged a judge to lift her order barring enforcement of part of a new law that permits indefinite military detention, a measure critics including a prize-winning journalist say is too vague and threatens free speech.

Manhattan federal court Judge Katherine Forrest this month ruled in favor of activists and reporters who said they feared being detained under a section of the law, signed by President Barack Obama in December.

The government says indefinite military detention without trial is justified in some cases involving militants and their supporters.