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It’s a Safe Health-Food Wonder, Agricultural Dream and Economic Jackpot: It’s Time to End our Government’s Insane Hemp Prohibition

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The Declaration of Independence was written on hemp, our ships had hemp sails, and pioneers’ covered wagons were covered in — what else? — hemp.

AlterNet / By Jill Richardson

David Bronner was recently arrested for attempting to eat a healthy breakfast. Does that sound stupid? Even once you know the details, it should sound stupid:  Bronner’s food of choice was bread spread with hemp seed oil he pressed himself from industrial hemp plants, which he did in front of the White House under a banner reading: “Dear Mr. President Let U.S. Farmers Grow Hemp.”

Bronner’s company, Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps, spends over $100,000 to buy over 20 tons of hemp seed oil from Canada each year to use in its soaps. Bronner wants to give that money to American farmers instead.

If it’s legal to use in soaps – and even to eat – then why is it illegal to grow here? Because according to the government, hemp is a drug. Specifically, it’s considered identical to its close cousin, marijuana. But Bronner says it is no more a drug than a poppyseed bagel. The plants he gathered seed from to press his oil in front of the White House had been tested to confirm they contained less than 0.3 percent THC, which means it would be “impossible to get a high of any kind” even from smoking extremely large quantities of it. A more likely result from smoking that much industrial hemp would be a bad headache or perhaps a sore throat.   [Read more…]

Sustainability Report Now Available for San Diego International Airport

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Scoop San Diego

The San Diego County Regional Airport Authority, manager and operator of San Diego International Airport, has launched its first comprehensive sustainability report. The report complies with the rigorous international standards of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), and San Diego International Airport is the first airport in the country to issue such a report.   [Read more…]

WE DON’T HAVE TO SHOW NO STINKING PAPERS! Supreme Court Immigration Ruling strips 50 million Chicanos/Latinos of Rights!

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Immigration or a Historical Labor Issue?

By Herman Baca

To this date, it never ceases to amaze me that the biggest problem/issue (the war in Afghanistanand economy) for the great-great-great grandchildren of immigrants who immigrated to the U.S.is…. immigration? This week, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Arizona’s (Nazizona) draconian SB 1070’s main provision, “show me your papers.” The court left standing SB 1070’s most controversial provision requiring Sheriff Joe Apario type, “state and local police to check the immigration status of anyone that they suspect is in the country illegally; if that person was initially detained for other legitimate reasons.”

There can be no mistake that the ruling was aimed solely at persons of Mexican ancestry and their rights, whetherU.S.born, legal or undocumented. The unanimous ruling by the Supreme Court Justices’ (including Sonia Sotomayor) brings the U.S. closer to a police state, legalizes racial profiling, revives the segregationist “Jim Crow” system, and sanctions a South African apartheid state for this nation’s fastest growing (50 million Chicanos/Latinos) population.   [Read more…]

What Winning Looks Like in Reproductive Rights

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The fight for Women’s Reproductive Freedom has been going on in every country around the world. Jane Cawthorne has been a long-time advocate for women’s rights in Canada. She is the writer of the play “The Abortion Monologues”. The play, according to Vicki Saporta, President and CEO of the National Abortion Federation,“…gives a voice to the perspectives of real women who are all too often missing from the public debate. These powerful monologues have the potential to change the way people talk about abortion.”

In the following article, Jane asks us to take a moment to appreciate what our work can accomplish.

By Jane Cawthorne

Calgary, Alberta – These days with women’s reproductive rights under constant attack, especially in the United States, it’s sometimes hard to remember our true goals are in the reproductive justice movement. While we are busy trying to explain what’s wrong with legislating mandatory transvaginal ultrasounds for women seeking abortions, or explaining why it’s unacceptable and unethical for doctors to be forced to lie to women about their pregnancies so they won’t consider abortion, or fighting to make sure women facing poverty can access contraception, we might need a reminder of what winning really looks like when it comes to reproductive rights.

In Canada, a recent report describes how teen pregnancy and abortion rates in Canada dropped 36.9% between 1996 and 2006. This is an incredible achievement. The study is from the Sex Information and Education Council of Canada and Alexander McKay, one of the reports’ authors, credits this incredible decline to Canada’s “balanced, sensible approach to adolescent sexual health.”   [Read more…]

Corporate Profits at All-Time High; Wages at All-Time Low: Can We Call it Class War Yet?

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The middle class is being hollowed out; increasingly, there are the super-super-rich, and there are the rest of us.

AlterNet / By Sarah Jaffe

June 29, 2012 | This week, David Segal at the New York Times broke the news to America that not only was Apple — the computer and gadget manufacturer formerly seen as a symbol of good old American ingenuity — making its profits on the backs of abused factory workers in China, but also on poorly paid store employees here in the US.

Apple store workers, he wrote, make up a large majority of Apple’s US workforce—30,000 out of 43,000 employees in this country—and they make about $25,000 a year, or about $12 an hour.

Lawrence Mishel at the Economic Policy Institute notes that that’s just a dollar above the federal poverty level. This for a company that paid nine of its top executives a total of $441 million in 2011.

“The discrepancy between Apple’s profits/executive pay and its compensation to its workers is a particularly glaring example of what is occurring in the wider economy,” Mishel writes.   [Read more…]

Letter from a Doctor: The Supreme Court’s (grudging) Endorsement of the ACA

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First of all, this is a good step because so much is in action already. Second, it is clear that the US has a fiscal problem. It can be solved in two ways: one is to copy what is done in countries like Germany, which have a host of private insurers, but they are severely regulated by the government. This would reduce their overhead and profiteering at the expense of the sick. If this won’t sit too well with the Congress, which it may well not, the other way may be even more controversial: proceed to a Single Payer alternative by extending Medicare. Clearly, Medicare has not broken the bank yet, nor has it failed to protect the elderly. If it were extended, say, five years at a time, per year, it would be easily accomplished. The private insurance industry, seeing the handwriting on the wall, would begin to cut its overhead and ridiculous executive pay, and switch to “supplemental” policies.   [Read more…]

Power Plant Hearing Draws Strong Opposition from Community and Environmental Groups

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Community and environmental protection groups including the Sierra Club and Save Mission Trails lauded the results of an over-five-hour San Diego Planning Commission hearing held Thursday, June 28. Commissioners were being asked to begin a process to convert land designated as open space near theMissionTrailsRegionalParkto an industrial site for a fossil fuel burning electric power plant.

The power plant applicant Cogentrix, LLC, a subsidiary of the banking giant Goldman Sachs, has already initiated a process with the California Energy Commission to license a 100 MW plant that would require eleven 100 foot tall smokestacks on lands that have been designated as open space for decades in what is known as the East Elliot Community Plan area north of the park.

Over 150 opponents of the proposed power plant including energy engineer Bill Powers, Santee Councilmember John Minto, health professionals and parents provided testimony as to why the power plant is not necessary to meet San Diego’s energy needs, how it increases greenhouse gas emissions and is a highly inappropriate use for the proposed site.   [Read more…]

July 2 – 7: Week of Protest of Trans-Pacific Partnership Talks Being Held in San Diego

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No to NAFTA on Steroids

Coalition to STOP TPP Announces Week of Protest

and an International Community-Based Conference

From June 30 to July 8, the secret, super-treaty negotiations known as the 13th Round of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Negotiations are being held here in San Diego at the Hilton Bayfront Hotel. The Coalition to STOP TPP hereby announces a week with rallies, a march, various other protests, and a week-long international community-based People’s Conference: A Better World Is Possible!

The 11 nations involved in the talks are the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Brunei, Chile, Peru, Mexico, and Canada. Japan has indicated a desire to join. The economic power of this group is more than 40% larger than the 27-nation European Union. The claimed purpose of TPP is to promote development and create jobs. But their reality is different. Though the contents of these negotiations are secret, what is not a secret is that the impacts of the TPP on these Pacific Rim nations, on peasants, on farmers, on workers, on their natural resources, on the environment, will be devastating. Some people describe the TPP as “NAFTA on Steroids.”
  [Read more…]

How Mitt Romney Followed Me Around the Internet

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by Lois Beckett / ProPublica, June 27, 2012, 4:27 p.m.

Last month, I was searching for a peppy Glee song on the music site Grooveshark, and up popped two ads for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign. One invited me to “Learn More.” The other suggested that I “Donate.”

Had Romney’s campaign decided that swing voters might frequent an Internet music site with copyright issues? Are Glee fans now a key demographic?

But it turns out the campaign wasn’t advertising to Grooveshark listeners or a capella fans.

They were targeting me.   [Read more…]

A Hard Look At San Diego: The Kafkaesque Process of Trying to Save a Home from Foreclosure

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by J. G. Robinson
In my last column I began the story of someone I call Jose, and what led to his financial crisis. In this column I look at the Kafkaesque process he went through in his failed attempt to save his home from foreclosure. The experiences I describe here are neither rare nor random. The difficulties Jose and his family encountered in trying to get their bank to re-evaluate their loan were all too representative of the random sample of people I interviewed. The tragic fact is that the delays that Jose’s family encountered were not the result of inefficiency, but rather a deliberate policy to protect banks. Banks do NOT want foreclosures rapidly resolved because that would bring these properties down to market value, reflecting badly on their bottom lines. Thus families like Jose’s are the deliberate casualties of a war of attrition that banks have waged on the public to protect their economic interests.

Jose’s original mortgage was through the Bank of America. The home was a modest condominium in a somewhat marginal area of El Cajon. Marginal, but not horrible—the schools in the area were decent, and that was the main attraction for Jose and his family.   [Read more…]

Killer Drone Attacks Are Illegal and Counter-Productive

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By Marjorie Cohn and Jeanne Mirer

The Bush administration detained and tortured suspected militants; the Obama administration assassinates them. Both practices not only visit
more hatred upon the United States; they are also illegal. Our laws and treaties prohibit torture. The Constitution forbids the government
from depriving any person of life without due process of law; that is, arrest and fair trial. Yet President Obama has approved the killing of
people, many of whom were not even identified before the kill order was given.

Jo Becker and Scott Shane reported in the New York Times that Obama maintains a “kill list.” After consulting with his counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan, Obama personally makes the decision to have individuals executed. Brennan was closely identified with torture, secret prisons, and extraordinary rendition during the Bush administration. The Times story, based on interviews with three dozen current and former Obama advisers, reports that “Mr. Obama has avoided the complications of detention by deciding, in effect, to take no prisoners alive. While scores of suspects have been killed under Mr. Obama, only one has been taken into U.S. custody” because he doesn’t want to add new prisoners to Guantanamo.   [Read more…]

The Great Ramona Zucchini Wars

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By Dave Patterson

Like a shot heard round the world, what was considered beyond the limits of civility was breached while we were away. When we saw what had been left on our doorstep in Ramona, my wife ran away screaming and I was taken aback to witness what depths of decency had been abandoned. I shudder to think what may become of society in Ramona as a result of this dastardly act, because this means war.

Someone left an extremely large zucchini on our doorstep. Zucchinis at this time of year are frightening because we are at wits end with what to do with them.   [Read more…]

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