Category: Politics

by Michael Steinberg / blackrainpress – Indybay.org

A report released just recently detailed a government spy network that was employed to monitor the Occupy movement “hour-to-hour” during 2011.

The Washington DC- based Partnership for Justice Fund just released an investigative report, “The Hidden Role of Fusion Centers in the Nationwide Spying Operations against the Occupy Movement and Peaceful Protest in America.” It took two years to carry out this investigation. Its principal authors are PFJF members Maria Verheyden-Hilliard and Carl Messineo.

Fusion Centers, funded by hundred of millions of dollars from the Department of Homeland Security, sprung up across the nation after the 911 attacks. Their mission was ostensibly to fight terrorism. But ten years later they made fighting the Occupy Movement their Number 1 priority.

By Ernie McCray

I hear all kinds of arguments about what’s wrong with schools and the sentiments tend to avoid the keys to what’s essential in the creation of a learning environment: an understanding of “who” the person is who’s being educated. And nothing gets at “who” a child, a student, is more than an educator who respects and appreciates that person’s culture and gives him or her an education that’s rich in the arts.

With that being said, on May 2, 2014, a hero of mine, a teacher extraordinaire, Jose Luis Solis Lopez (Galeano), was assassinated at the Zapatista’s “Little School” (La Escuelita), in Chiapas, Mexico. The school was built to celebrate “who” children are and “who” they can become.

It’s about time we had new ideas, new imaginations, and an encompassing and inclusive governance.

By Luis J. Rodriguez

I am not a career politician. I won’t accept corporate donations. I am not a Democrat or Republican. And I’ve been blocked from print or airtime in the major media. Still, I’m running a serious independent campaign to be governor of the largest state in the union, one of the 10 largest economies in the world, with the third largest agricultural business anywhere.

I say it’s about time.

California has been governed by politicians, business people, accountants, actors, and,..

Library materials budget reduced by $500,000 to pay for pilot after-school program

By Anna Daniels / San Diego Free Press

Update: San Diego Citizens packed the council chambers last night – Monday, May 19th- in a three hour budget hearing. Members of the Library Organizing Project testified against the proposed raiding of the materials budget to pay for an after school homework program. They also raised concerns about proposed library open hour schedule.

All libraries will close at 7PM, which is restricts program activities in the evening for working people. …

By Tony de Garate / Special to the OB Rag

With just seven months remaining on his interim term on the San Diego City Council, Ed Harris intends to be “hands-on when it comes to planning issues” and “make constituent services” his No. 1 goal, an aide said last week.

Harris was appointed to the City Council last month to complete the term of now-Mayor Kevin Faulconer. His representative, Rollin Bush, introduced himself May 15 at the monthly meeting of the Peninsula Community Planning Board (PCPB).

Bush outlined a few priorities …

Editor: the following is based on a speech delivered by the author, Niall Twohig on last Friday, May 9th, in front of a group of fifty gathered in Revelle Plaza at UC San Diego to unveil The May 1970 Peace Memorial. The Memorial is dedicated to George Winne, who immolated himself and died as a protest against the Vietnam War in May of 1970, plus it’s dedicated to those students who carried on the May 1970 Student Strike.

By Niall Twohig

Why a memorial for May 1970? Why a memorial for peace? Why now?

To suggest some answers, I want to ask you, the reader, to take an imaginative leap back in time to May 1970.

In order to make this leap, we have to remember that the U.S. was waging an unpopular proxy war in Southeast Asia, made all the more unpopular after the invasion of Cambodia at the end of April.

If we found ourselves transported to May 1970, this would be all too apparent. We would see the images?the aerial views of bombs upon bombs pulverizing the Vietnamese countryside, images of GIs burning huts, footage of badly burnt villagers running from the firestorm of napalm, photos of rows upon rows of mutilated bodies scattered in the fields and anonymous soldiers packed away in coffins draped in stars and stripes.

Editor: The other day the Widder Curry caught up with Sarah Boot, candidate for the District 2 City Council seat and explored two issues that mean a lot in southern OB and that area of Point Loma where the Widder lives. See our earlier interview with Boot last month here.

By Judi Curry

For those of us living along the Sunset Cliffs corridor, I have a question for you. When was the last time you were able to leave your home and go directly to the Highway 8 on-ramp without being detoured around Ocean Beach? Yesterday it took me over 10 minutes to get to the freeway because of the streets that were blocked off – again – and detour signs were everywhere.

When I came home from my excursion to El Cajon, the detour signs were gone but the roads from Newport to Santa Cruz were so bumpy I thought my car would end up with flat tires. That, plus the steel plates all over the road only tell me that today will be the same way, and probably for weeks to come.

What about the streets in OB?

I discussed this problem with Sarah Boot, the 32 year old that will make a difference in San Diego politics. So what does she suggest for the roads of District 2?

The arguments against legalization simply don’t hold up.

By Owen Poindexter / AlterNet

For decades, cannabis opponents controlled the messaging around the popular plant and cultivated any number of lies about its effects. This built up a powerful stigma against marijuana, the effects of which have not worn off. The racist, expensive and failed U.S. war on drugs continues to rage on. The criminalization of cannabis users and distributors remains a top priority in that war. The government stubbornly classifies it as a dangerous Schedule I substance with no medical value, despite stacks of evidence to the contrary.

“Everyone who wants to preserve community control over the planning process should be afraid because your community will be next!” —Georgette Gomez, Associate Director of the Environmental Health Coalition

By Jim Miller

As we head toward the June 3rd election, the same corporate interests who spent big money to fund a petition drive based on lies to force a vote on the Barrio Logan Community Plan are now funding an equally dishonest campaign to defeat it.

As the San Diego Reader recently noted, the No on B and C Campaign’s sleazy tactics include teaming former mayor and current corporate front man Jerry Sanders up with a “crooked ex-admiral” to repeat the same bald-faced lies about how the Barrio Logan Community Plan will kill jobs and drive the Navy out of San Diego.

Rally along Torrey Pines Road with 50’ Keystone Pipeline Banner, signs, chants

From SanDiego350

On Thursday, May 8, 2014, over 100 San Diegans gathered along Torrey Pines Road in La Jolla to call on President Obama, who was in the neighborhood for a fundraiser, to reject a permit for the Keystone XL Pipeline. The “KXL”, which would carry dirty tar sands oil from Canada to Texas for refining and export, has been called “game over” for the climate by the nation’s foremost climatologist, Dr. James Hansen.

Participants held large signs, including a 50-foot cardboard depiction of the Keystone Pipeline with the words “Stop the Keystone Pipeline. Fight climate change” in huge letters on it, and a large banner with a quote from the President that participants want to see him keep:

“We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.”

We met, we debated and we agreed, mostly. Here are the people we’d like you to vote for in the June 2014 primary.

DON”T FORGET TO VOTE!