As we head into the midterm elections, the administration’s “Make America White Again” agenda is kicking into high gear.
The zero-tolerance program at the border, which had zero intention of ever showing any compassion to children separated from their families has 497 of migrant kids *still* in custody, according to a just-filed government update. Parents of 322 of those kids have already been deported; 22 of the still-separated kids are under 5 years old.
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By Jeoffry B. Gordon, M.D. / OB Rag
Fifty years ago this week, I was in Chitown.
Having just finished my medical internship and working several years with the famous pediatrician Dr. Ben Spock on anti-war issues, I was in a white coat among the checkered blue caped and the robins-egg blue-helmeted police and real people.
I will never forget walking along the lines of scared, sweating teenage national guardsmen with fixed bayonets, trying to calm them down by talking about how we were all brothers, and now remembering Kent State – I think, Thank God, there was never a charge by them. [Read more…]
Wildfires continue to ravage California. Instead of hiring firefighters to put out the fires, the government is turning to incarcerated people for labor. More than 3,400 prisoners risk their lives every day to tackle the wildfires. While the average California firefighter earns $74,000 plus benefits annually, imprisoned people are paid as little as $2 a day. By relying on prison labor, California avoids spending $80 to $100 million a year.
I first learned about the exploitation of imprisoned laborers during the snowpocalypse that hit Boston in 2015. Imprisoned workers were paid 20 cents an hour for shoveling the city in the freezing cold that no one else wanted to venture out and brave. It dawned on me then that prison wasn’t just about gruesome punishment: it’s about profit. And prison labor is responsible for more of this country’s everyday products and services than is let on.
Today, the United States holds 5 percent of the world’s population and incarcerates 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. More than 2 million people are separated from their families, deprived of basic human rights, abused, and left to suffer in cages. Incarceration has increased by 500 percent in the last 40 years, even though crime rates have decreased. More than one-half of all federal prisoners are incarcerated for a nonviolent drug offense. [Read more…]
One hundred ninely+ locations in all fifty states hosted events protesting the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court on Sunday.
Led by Move On, NARAL, and the People’s Defense Coalition, more than 70 activist organizations endorsed the rallies and marches.
The event in San Diego was held at Waterfront Park on the west side of the County Administration Building. Roughly 300 people attended, cheering on speakers and marching thru downtown afterward.
[Read more…]
On Sunday, August 26th, local activists, leaders, and champions for women’s reproductive freedom will gather for a Unite for Justice Rally and March at Waterfront Park in San Diego, beginning at 10am.
Donald Trump has long promised to only nominate a justice who will end Roe v. Wade and criminalize abortion. Trump has found his man in Brett Kavanaugh.
We can’t and won’t go back to the days when abortion was illegal in this country. We know what’s at stake in this fight: our most precious and fundamental rights. Brett Kavanaugh will not only work to end Roe and criminalize abortion, he will rule to gut health care, voting rights, LGBTQ rights, environmental protections, workers’ rights, and immigrant rights. And his record of arguing for extreme executive privilege, such as suggesting that the Supreme Court was wrong to compel the Watergate tapes from President Richard Nixon, creates the real threat that confirming Kavanaugh will help Trump put himself above the law. [Read more…]
The stretch run for general elections is supposed to start after Labor Day. At least that’s the way it used to be. Activists countywide aren’t waiting for Septemeber this year. Instead, they’re canvassing, phone-banking, and organizing at a level I’ve never seen before. My first campaign volunteer work was for Senator Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 presidential run, and while I’ve taken a year off now and then, suffice it to say I’ve seen a few elections. This one is special.
There are 17 events for progressive-leaning candidates (that I’m aware of) that are directly campaign-related in this week’s calendar. Best of all, there’s a healthy mix of bigger and lesser name candidates: Monica Montgomery (SD City Council D4), Dr. Akilah Weber (La Mesa City Council), Dr. Jen Campbell (SD City Council D2), Ammar Campa-Najjar (50th Congressional District), Consuelo Martinez (Escondido City Council D1), Tommy Hough (SD City Council D6), Nathan Fletcher (County Supervisor D4), Mike Levin (49th Congressional District), Alan Geraci (State Assembly 75th), Michelle Gomez (County Supervisor D5), Jeff Griffith (State Senate 38th), Tazheen Nizam (Vista City Council D4), and James Elia (State Assembly 71st). Do check out these candidates at the links embedded in their listings.
Lest we become solely focused on electoral politics, there are three activist events that jump out at me as especially important. The UNITE for Justice rally (Sunday, August 26) to protest the runaway train that is Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court, the National City Council Meeting (September 4) provides yet another opportunity to keep the pressure up over the death of Earl McNeil at the hands of police, and the September 8th Rise for Climate Action rally at the Civic Center (September 8) is a necessary reminder of the incredible damage the Trump administration is doing to the environment.
Let’s do this thing, folks! The persistence of our resistance is starting to pay off. [Read more…]
It’s not just ICE and local bigots harassing immigrants and people who they think might be immigrants anymore.
Activists are claiming U.S. financial institutions, encouraged by the Department of Treasury, are including citizenship status as part of the Customer Identification Program provision of the USA Patriot Act, even though it is not legally required.
What this means in practical terms is that existing customers, like Josh Collins and wife Jessica Salazar Collins who thought envelopes from Bank of America were junk mail, are having their accounts suspended until such time as questions about citizenship are answered.
[Read more…]
The world just keeps getting hotter, and California burns ever-more-furiously as one epic blaze after another strain not just our resources, but our ability to cognitively adjust to the fact that this is the new normal. As I wrote in response to the huge fires in Los Angeles last December, “Reality is exceeding the capacity of our dystopian imaginations.”
Temperatures broke records worldwide this summer prompting the Washington Post to run a startling headline about our “red-hot planet”, while the New York Times observed how “Scorching Summer in Europe Signals Long-Term Climate Changes.” Here in California, Governor Jerry Brown visited the devastation in the wake of the Redding fire and bluntly commented that the problem behind these horrifying disasters was that, “We’re fighting nature with the amount of material that we’re putting in the environment, and that material traps heat.”
That fire was then followed by the largest blaze in state history in Northern California and another big fire in Orange County, both coinciding with the huge inferno shutting down Yosemite, and others still. Earlier in the summer, San Diego suffered through the Alpine fire and its own series of heat waves and freakishly warm, record-setting ocean temperatures in early August.
The list goes on and on. [Read more…]
It’s time to make some noise. The fix is on. Republicans have stacked the deck in ways never seen before to enable the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court.
On August 26, in more than 100 cities across the country, people will be attending rallies and protests against a nominee with ultra-conservative legal views on a range of issues. He has repeatedly argued the Supreme Court should put the president above the law. Given that Donald Trump is at the center of a criminal investigation he should not be allowed to pick his own judge and jury.
Kavanaugh’s vote on the court would enable reactionary policies on reproductive freedom, health care, the environment, voting rights, workers’ rights, LGBTQ rights, and immigrant rights for generations. [Read more…]
By Jake Johnson / Common Dreams
Amid a news cycle dominated by the day-to-day chaos, antics, and scandals of the Trump presidency, new government numbers released on Thursday offered a grim reminder that the humanitarian travesty sparked by President Donald Trump’s inhumane family separation policy is still ongoing, despite the fact that it has faded into the background of corporate news coverage.
In court filings on Thursday, lawyers for the Trump Justice Department said that 565 immigrant children remain separated from their parents and held in detention facilities more than three weeks after the court-mandated deadline for reunification.
While immigrant rights activists and advocacy groups have continued calling attention to the crisis and working tirelessly to ensure that every child is ultimately reunited with their families, much of the media “has largely moved on, worn out and dazzled by other outrages,” observed Toronto Star columnist Bruce Arthur. [Read more…]
Brown’s Last Chance is a campaign demanding Governor Jerry Brown halt the development of unsustainable, polluting, fossil fuel infrastructure and begin an immediate phase-out of fossil fuels in California. If he’s unwilling to do so, a multitude of organizations (environmental, health, justice, community, consumer) are prepared to protest the upcoming Global Climate Action Summit.
This climate summit, held in San Francisco next month from September 12 to 14, was the brainchild of Gov. Brown. It was conceived of in response to President Trump withdrawing the United States from the international Paris Climate Accord. World leaders will be in attendance to continue the work of past international climate conferences to mitigate climate change. There will be numerous affiliate marches and rallies around the world (including San Diego’s Rise For Climate March) to demand a transformation to clean energy and real action on climate change. [Read more…]
Today – August 16 – in over three hundred editorials published in newspapers and on media platforms large and small across the country, the American press is standing up and renouncing president Trump’s declarations of the media as “the enemy of the people.”
The San Diego Free Press and the OB Rag join these denunciations, in the call to confront Trump first put out by The Boston Globe, which began its call with:
A central pillar of President Trump’s politics is a sustained assault on the free press. Journalists are not classified as fellow Americans, but rather “the enemy of the people.” This relentless assault on the free press has dangerous consequences. We asked editorial boards from around the country – liberal and conservative, large and small – to join us today to address this fundamental threat in their own words. [Read more…]
