San Diego Free Press

Grassroots News & Progressive Views

You are here: Home / Archives for Source

The First 100 Day Resistance Agenda: We’re Not Going Away

by

By Robert Reich

Trump’s First 100 Day agenda includes repealing environmental regulations, Obamacare, and the Dodd-Frank Act, giving the rich a huge tax cut, and much worse. Here’s the First 100 Day resistance agenda [with thanks to Alan Webber]:

1. Get Democrats in the Congress and across the country to pledge to oppose Trump’s agenda. Prolong the process of approving choices, draw out hearings, stand up as sanctuary cities and states. Take a stand. Call your senator and your representative (phone calls are always better than writing).   [Read more…]

The Dark Rigidity of Fundamentalist Rural America: An Insider View

by

In deep-red white America, the white Christian God is king

By Forsetti’s Justice / AlterNet

I grew up in rural, Christian, white America. You’d be hard-pressed to find an area in the country that has a higher percentage of Christians or whites. I spent most of the first 24 years of my life deeply embedded in this culture. I religiously (pun intended) attended their Christian services. I worked off and on, on their rural farms. I dated their calico skirted daughters. I camped, hunted, and fished with their sons. I listened to their political rants at the local diner and truck stop. I winced at their racist/bigoted jokes and epithets that were said more out of ignorance than animosity. I have also watched the town I grew up in go from a robust economy with well-kept homes and infrastructure turn into a struggling economy with shuttered businesses, dilapidated homes, and a broken down infrastructure over the past 30 years. The problem isn’t that I don’t understand these people. The problem is they don’t understand themselves, the reasons for their anger/frustrations, and don’t seem to care to know why.   [Read more…]

San Diego DA’s Unjust Asset Forfeiture Fight Over Family’s Savings Continues

by

By Terrie Best – San Diego Americans for Safe Access

The James Slatic family sat in San Diego Civil court Monday, November 15th, along with an impressive group of supporters, to listen to testimony on just why The San Diego District Attorney confiscated each of the family of four’s checking and savings accounts and has refused to give the funds back in the absence of criminal behavior. It was tough to understand government seizing money from two young girls and their parents and as the testimony unfolded it became clear no financial investigation was conducted either. Still, anti-cannabis Judge Jay Bloom ruled against the family and the case will now be moving up to a higher court.

Husband and step-father, James Slatic was partnered with two others in a cannabis related organization. The facility, now closed, was located in Kearny Mesa, a business/industrial area in the city of San Diego. Med-West, LLC employed 35 patients and had collective members who provided hash oil the organization would refine and use in vape pens and other cannabis-infused products. The products were sold to other mutual benefit corporations. A scenario vetted by Med-West’s attorneys and legal in the state of California.

The Kearny Mesa facility had been inspected by the San Diego city attorney’s office and had a business license. The organization was paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in state and federal taxes every year. Yet, in January, 2016, 20 members of Team 9 of the cross-deputized Narcotic Task Force rolled in and forced Med-West’s employees to the ground at gun point.   [Read more…]

Gregory Canyon Landfill Plan Trashed – Pala Tribe Buys Land to Protect Sacred Sites and Habitat

by

A decades-long battle over the proposed Gregory landfill has ended. On Nov. 17 , the Pala Band of Mission Indians announced the tribe has complete purchase of more than 700 acres of the property—including most of Gregory Canyon and Gregory Mountain, a sacred site known as Chokla.

Shasta Gaughen with the Pala Indians called the news “amazing,” adding in an e-mail, ”This means that a dump in Gregory Canyon will never happen. Chokla, Medicine Rock, and other spiritual and cultural sites on the property will now be protected forever. Critical wildlife habitat, endangered species, and the San Luis Rey River will be spared the threat posed by millions of tons of polluting garbage.”   [Read more…]

Police Use Water Cannons in Freezing Weather on Protesters at Standing Rock

by

Police used water cannons and tear gas against hundreds of Dakota Access Pipeline protesters in Cannon Ball, North Dakota, late Sunday, Nov. 20. At least one person was arrested and dozens injured.

The confrontation began at 6pm, near the encampment were the protests against the $3.8 billion pipeline have been ongoing for months. According to the Morton County Sheriff’s Department, 400 protesters attempted to cross Blackwater Bridge on state Highway 1806 after removing a burned-out truck.   [Read more…]

National Immigration Law Center: Know Your Rights

by

Everyone has certain basic rights, no matter who is president.

By now everyone knows that Donald Trump has been elected president of the United States and will begin to serve his term in January 2017. No matter who is president, everyone living in the U.S. has certain basic rights under the U.S. Constitution. Undocumented immigrants have these rights, too. It is important that we all assert and protect our basic rights.

If you find you have to deal with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or other law enforcement officers at home, on the street, or anywhere else, remember that you have the rights described in this factsheet. The factsheet also provides suggestions for what you should do to assert your rights.   [Read more…]

Activists push colleges to make their campuses sanctuary sites

by

By Kerry Eleveld / Daily Kos

A movement has begun on college campuses across the nation to shield undocumented students, staff and their family members from deportation.

Efforts have emerged at UC-San Diego, Yale, other Ivy League schools, and elsewhere to limit the ability of local law enforcement and campus police to cooperate with federal Immigration, Customs and Enforcement (ICE) officers.   [Read more…]

Get Your Birth Control Now, Before Obamacare ‘Reform’

by

By Joan McCarter / Daily Kos

While the outlook for Obamacare under the new Republican regime isn’t entirely clear, you can bet women’s health care is not going to survive. The first and foremost casualty: getting prescription birth control without a copay. Long a target of the right (Hobby Lobby, anyone?) the contraception mandate is most definitely a target of the repealers. Planned Parenthood funding, which now comes primarily from Medicaid, will be just as big a target. Expect the Republicans to find a way to shut that down.

So what’s a woman of child-bearing age who doesn’t want a child to do? Give to Planned Parenthood—and get thee to your doctor for an IUD, like all the other women are doing.   [Read more…]

Discovering the Light In Darkness: Fighting Back Against Trump

by

So first, remember to breathe. It won’t change what has happened, but it will keep you alive—and this, as it turns out, is indisputably helpful for what must come next. For only the living can resist.

I wish there were some way to spin this, to soften the sharp edges of these blades slicing into the connective tissue of our nation, but there is not. There is only the scythe, ripping collective flesh and tendon, swung by a deranged reaper and those who saw fit to hand him the tools with which to do such damage.

I wish there were some way to blink really hard, like I used to do as a child when trapped in a nightmare, thereby finding release from the clutches of whatever monster was in hot pursuit. It worked every time in dreams. But sadly, this escape route began to fail me years ago, right around the time I discovered that some monsters are real, some dreams incapable of circumvention. Ever since I came to appreciate that some disasters must simply be faced.   [Read more…]

ACLU Statement on Donald Trump’s Election

by

If Donald Trump Implements His Proposed Policies, We’ll See Him in Court

By Anthony D. Romero, ACLU Executive Director / ACLU San Diego

[On November 8], Donald J. Trump was elected the 45th president of the United States, and the ACLU has a message for him.

President-elect Trump, as you assume the nation’s highest office, we urge you to reconsider and change course on certain campaign promises you have made. These include your plan to amass a deportation force to remove 11 million undocumented immigrants; ban the entry of Muslims into our country and aggressively surveil them; punish women for accessing abortion; reauthorize waterboarding and other forms of torture; and change our nation’s libel laws and restrict freedom of expression.   [Read more…]

If You Voted for Trump Because He’s ‘Anti-Establishment,’ Guess What: You Got Conned

by

By Paul Waldman / Excerpt from the The Washington Post

The greatest trick Donald Trump pulled was convincing voters he’d be “anti-establishment.”

Well, maybe not the greatest trick. But in a campaign full of cons, it has to rank close to the top. This was near the heart of Trump’s appeal to the disaffected and disempowered: Send me to Washington, and that “establishment” you’ve been hearing so much about? We’ll blow it up, send it packing, punch it right in the face, and when it’s over the government will finally be working for you again. And the people who voted for Trump bought it. After all, he’s no politician, right? He’s an outsider, a glass-breaker, a guy who can cut out the bull and get things done. Right?

But the idea that he would do this was based on a profound misunderstanding of what the establishment actually is, and who Donald Trump is.   [Read more…]

Decoding the Power of Symbols

by

Rev. Jim Conn / Capital & Main

When Cesar Chavez led a band of farm workers on their historic 300-mile march from Delano to Sacramento half a century ago, they prominently displayed banners of the Virgen de Guadalupe throughout the line. Why? Because that image held symbolic weight far beyond any other the group could carry.

We often dismiss such symbols as empty of meaning or hollow of intention. “It’s just symbolic,” people say. But those images or slogans can hold a deep emotional meaning that communicates in a moment what discursive language would take pages to evoke. The Virgin speaks of justice dating back to colonial Mexico. She illustrates a story of peasants lifted from their caste and honored. She embodies an empowerment beyond the social system that had kept the people powerless.   [Read more…]

©2010-2017 SanDiegoFreePress.org

Code is Poetry