Category: Politics

It’s time to ditch nonstick cookware — and then reform our laws.

By Jill Richardson / Otherwords

Teflon, you might have heard, may cause cancer.

The culprit was a toxic, now retired compound called PFOA. Also known as C8, the chemical became the subject of a major lawsuit accusing DuPont — the manufacturer of the popular nonstick coating — of sickening thousands of Americans.

Yet Teflon is still on the market, The Intercept reports, with a secret new active ingredient.

The following article originally appeared in 1988 in Justice Speaks, a publication of Black Workers For Justice, in North Carolina.

by Michael Steinberg

On November 29th [1988] the European Court of Human Rights ruled that a British law allowing Britain to detain suspects for up to 7 days without charging them is a breach of the European Convention of Human Rights. The court’s decision is a blow to Britain’s attempts to crush the 800-year old Irish national movement. While the British government incorrectly portrays this as a religious conflict, in reality it is a political struggle for liberation and independence from British rule.

Union-Tribune Finally “Finds” San Diego’s Black Panthers

In a very decent February 28 article about San Diego’s Black Panthers penned by Peter Rowe of the San Diego U-T, some of the city’s turbulent civil rights and Black power movement history from the Sixties and Seventies was uncovered.

First, it’s amazing to some San Diegans, including Rowe, that San Diego even had a Black Panther chapter back in the day. And that’s a credit that the San Diego Union and Tribune themselves can claim, for the coverage of local Panthers and the civil rights movement in general was skewed due to the right-wing – and yes, racist – policies and bias of its owners and editors. Think the Copley family, who ran the city’s only pair of dailies for decades.

But now thanks to Rowe, some of this history has been dusted off and bared for all to read. Much of the article recounts the experiences of one Henry Lee Wallace, now 64 and still in San Diego, but back then, a member of the local Panthers.

By Rob Tindula

A few weeks ago, the City Attorney’s Office released an 11-page memo outlining the public disclosure of police records, including body camera footage.

The report stated that the Mayor has exclusive rights when it comes to releasing the department’s body camera footage to the public and listed a number broad of exemptions to go along with it.

This is unfortunate for all San Diego residents. Police body cameras have the ability to increase the accountability of officers while performing their daily duties because video evidence can provide an unbiased account of what happened at the scene.

By Jim Miller

Sarah Saez is best known locally for her work on the heroic United Taxi Drivers of San Diego campaign. As labor leader Richard Barrera noted after their big win in 2014:

The victory by UTWSD comes five years after drivers, improperly classified as independent contractors and without NLRB recognition, came together and organized a strike to protest their wages, benefits and working conditions.

Despite constant harassment, retaliation and intimidation by permit holders and dispatch companies over the last five years, and despite obstruction by public agencies, these workers stuck together, fought back against injustice, and prevailed.

By Howard M. Blackson III / San Diego UrbDeZine

California’s Bay Area housing disaster tells Southern Californians that our housing crisis will only get worse and doing nothing is both an irrational and irresponsible response.

We are faced with deciding to have more neighbors or pay more taxes as we desperately need money to fix our city’s crumbling infrastructure. The conundrum is that we despise taxes and the mere mention of ‘density’ polarizes any discussion into either demands for no new growth or building tall towers.

I believe answers to meet San Diego’s housing demand are found in the following two-tier approach:

The first tier is a baseline ‘Beach Density.’ An existing housing model found in our older, traditional beach neighborhoods that fills our need for the ‘missing middle’ types of housing.

Where are these women activists of OB’s past – from the ancient year of 1975?

The above photo is a cropped version of the photo on the front cover of the OB Rag, March 1975.

OB Rag staff organized this photo shoot on the OB Pier for the Women’s Day front cover.

If you recognize anyone, please let us know in the comments, and let us know if you know what they’re up to these days, if they have prospered and survived, or …

“If people divide their understanding of militarized violence into normal and not normal, acceptable and not acceptable, it makes a terrible kind of sense: violence against women has been “normalized.”

By Lauren Wolfe / Common Dreams

Two years ago I was on vacation in Maine when I started getting really, really mad. I’d been working to track sexualized violence in the Syrian war for a long time and had gotten very little response from policy makers despite many meetings with those in our government and the UK’s and at the UN.

By Jim Miller

Last week I had the pleasure of going to see a talk at Alliance San Diego by Steve Phillips, author of Brown is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority.

The central point that Phillips makes is that, at present, we already have a new American majority of 51% of the electorate comprised of progressive people of color and like-minded whites.

The problem we face, Phillips argues, is that we are failing to mobilize that majority because many in the consultant class and the upper reaches of the Democratic Party don’t believe the numbers and/or are stuck in an old pattern of chasing after the elusive “swing voter” typically identified as white who could be persuaded to vote for a Republican or a Democrat.

By Bob Dorn / San Diego Free Press

I got one of those faux political surveys from the Democratic National Committee in the mail recently, the one my now-deceased mother-in-law used to receive because we listed her address as our own after she fell into Alzheimers years ago.

The surveys continued to arrive at our address, perhaps four times a year, until this time my name showed up on the envelope.

The introductory letter from the chair of the DNC, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, addressed me as a party leader — odd because I’m registered as “no party preference” — but I suppose that means Wasserman Schultz sees me as a California leftie and dropped the survey on me in hopes I can be attracted to Hillary.

By Marjorie Cohn / Common Dreams

Hillary Clinton refuses to make public the transcripts of her speeches to big banks, three of which were worth a total of $675,000 to Goldman Sachs. She says she would release the transcripts “if everybody does it, and that includes Republicans.” After all, she complained, “Why is there one standard for me, and not for everybody else?”

As the New York Times editorial board pointed out, “The only different standard here is the one Mrs. Clinton set for herself, by personally earning $11 million in 2014 and the first quarter of 2015 for 51 speeches to banks and other groups and industries.”

Troubling Trend Continues When City Departments Fail to Show at OBTC Meeting

We have to call it the way we see it. It appears that the City has once again snubbed Ocean Beach.

Point in fact: No one, not one soul, from the City’s Department of Transportation and Storm Water nor from the City department that repairs street lights, nor from the City’s PR department showed up at the most recent OB Town Council meeting to debrief the community on what was going on.

These folks – these representatives of the City’s bureaucracy and departments that serve the public – had been invited by the Town Council to discuss with Ocean Beach their measures to prevent future flooding and their schedule to repair broken streetlights.

We all know how badly OB was hit with the January storms.