OB Rag

Editor: We just heard that 94-year-old Pete Seeger has just passed away. When Pete hit 90, we shared the following review of his project by Richard Flacks, a retired UC Santa Barbara professor who has long written about US culture.

BY Dick Flacks

[When] Pete Seeger turned 90 on May 3, 2009, it provided the occasion for a huge Madison Square Garden celebratory concert, featuring a wide array of popular musicians singing his songs and honoring his influence. In the years prior to this event, Pete has gotten more mainstream attention than he’d received in the previous 70 years of performing. Springsteen’s recorded several CD’s called ‘The Seeger Sessions’ and simultaneously went on an international tour featuring material drawn from Seeger’s folksong repertory. There was a documentary film bio, released on public tv and theatrically, called Pete Seeger :The power of song. There’s an ongoing campaign to get him nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

by Sebastian Ruiz / SDNews.com / June 10, 2009

City Council voted on June 9 to term out the current Mission Bay Park Committee by July 1 and replace the board with members that have expertise in city finance and management. It is unclear who the new members will be – and if any of the current board members will return to their seats.

by Lane Tobias

Today’s shooting at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. is a stark reminder to those of us dedicated to equality and social justice that there are people out there willing to disrupt progress with violent acts – even if it puts their own life in jeopardy.

It happened in Texas, back in May. A 72-year old woman was stopped for a traffic violation by a state deputy. She at first refuses to get out of her car. … The deputy threatens to taser her. She dares him. And then he tasers her and she falls to the ground screaming.

Here are some real treasures from OB’s past – these are from the original pages of the OB Peoples Rag – most from 1972.

And it was that merged surfer-hippie-politico subculture that was so unique in Ocean Beach that saved the community from over development.

Ten of America’s largest financial institutions today were cleared to return $68 billion in bailout funds received from the federal Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), after successfully completing a government-administered stress test and raising capital from private sources if it was deemed more was necessary (more on that later).

by Mary E Mann

For weeks, starting in he beginning of May, I was getting up early and taking walks around Ocean Beach. I was looking for the groups of kids (teens and twenty-something’s mostly), who I have heard described as “Pier Kids”, “Anarchist Kids”, “Street Kids”, “Kids with backpacks”, and “Those kids who wear a lot of brown and have dogs, and sometimes cats on leashes”. I will refer to them here as The Kids. The Kids are, in fact, the young and the homeless.

By OB Rag Staffer

Our US employer-based corporate healthcare insurance system is a nightmarish maze of rules and expenses and deadlines. It keeps many patients from receiving the medical care they need. It provides easy access to medical care to those who need it the least, and denies it to those who need it the most.

It provides a lavish, luxurious lifestyle for the corporate executives who reap its financial benefits (and who fight to keep it that way).

by Anna Daniels

“Actress Heather Graham wants women to empower themselves by pole dancing.” I read these words in a filler article in the U-T last Saturday morning (5/31/09). Whatever life lacks in plot, it more than makes up for in irony. Consider the past week’s news.

“LORD KNOWS WHAT WE WOULD GET THEN” The news has delivered up some fascinating responses to President Obama’s proposed appointment of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. …

One in nine Americans are using federal food stamps to help buy groceries as the country’s deep recession forced another 591,000 people onto the federal anti-hunger program at latest count.

The unemployment rate raced to 9.4 percent, the highest since a matching rate in July 1983, from 8.9 percent in April. This reading beat the peak in the jobless rate during the 1973-1975 recession that lasted 16 months.

Some call it the “Tiananmen Square Massacre,” others say the “Tiananmen Square Crackdown,” and in China it is known merely as an “incident,” the “June 4th Incident,” or as the Chinese say, “liù-sì shìjiàn”.

No matter how you refer to the 1989 democracy protests in Beijing and the brutal response by China’s military, on Thursday, June 4th, the world marks the event’s 20th anniversary.

Once upon a time, a citizen-created park existed at the busy corner of Voltaire Street and Sunset Cliffs Boulevard. It had been created and then was maintained by folks from the Ocean Beach Grassroots Organization and supporters.

After the departure of the last business at the location – on property owned by World Oil – the lot had become an eye-sore with weeds and trash strewed about. Without authorization from the City or World Oil, OBGO took it over, uprooting the weeds, dealing with the junk, picking up the old asphalt, and planting flowers, trees and bushes. And watering it.