San Diego Free Press

Grassroots News & Progressive Views

You are here: Home / Archives for Columns / My Niche

Nailing Monsanto

by

At the tail end of CBS This Morning this Wednesday, was a brief interview with Monsanto’s CEO, Hugh Grant (not the movie star), on the debate over GMO labeling. He tried to come off as a soft-spoken, reasonable man, describing his company as “…an agricultural company. We sell seeds to farmers and those farmers make harvests and those harvest end up on plates around the world.”

Cool. The man running the company that is poisoning our planet and our population is just so damn nice, what with putting all that poison (err food) on our plates!

What if we don’t want his poison? Nice Mr. Grant wants to cram it down your throat. His nice agricultural company spent over $4 million killing a GMO labeling initiative in Colorado. They spent $6 million stopping a similar effort in Oregon.   [Read more…]

Heroes and Fire Ants

by

In this season when we should be enumerating all of the reasons we feel grateful, many of us are feeling so overwhelmed by the number of critical issues that need to be addressed that it is nearly impossible to summon up gratitude.

We are disheartened by the pervasive tirade of mean-spirited, uninformed yelling coming from mass media and our neighbors. The temptation is to cocoon – to crawl into our personal space, lick our wounds and resign ourselves to defeat.

We can’t! We know deep down we can’t stop!   [Read more…]

San Diego’s Hidden Homeless

by

Homeless women and children undercounted and underserved.

It looks like the issue of homelessness will be getting some airtime during the 2016 election season in San Diego. That should be good news for anyone who is deeply concerned about homelessness in the region. Problem is that some candidates might use the issue to put forth solutions, without taking the time to understand the problem.

By feeding the electorate with misinformation that plays into their eagerness for a quick and easy fix to the city’s growing homeless situation, they will not only fail to solve the problem, they will exacerbate it.

Take a recent plan offered by San Diego City Attorney candidate, Robert P. Hickey, that he calls his “Community Care Plan”. Why would the City Attorney be making homelessness a cornerstone to his campaign?   [Read more…]

Surviving Sudden Poverty

by

By Jeeni Criscenzo

While trainloads of Americans, who never expected to make the journey from the complacency of middle class to the downward spiral of poverty are trying to figure out how this could have happened to them, those fortunate enough to still be holding on to the American Dream seem oblivious to their own vulnerability. Smug in their financial security, they watch the repo man haul off their neighbor’s car as everything they own is unceremoniously carted to the curb under the oversight of the sheriff.

And they think the fate of their neighbor was their own doing, the result of poor choices. It will never happen to them, they believe, because they have worked hard and managed their finances and played by the rules. No doubt their unfortunate neighbors believed that myth once too—not long ago.
  [Read more…]

Geo-Poetic Spaces: My Family Thinks I’m a Pot Farmer

by

Got to wonder
if my family has a contact high
when they call out of purple haze
to ask if I’m a marijuana farmer

Hydroponically speaking
I don’t have a pot to piss in
not that I’m opposed
to organic chemotherapy
or the buzz of tax revenues
instead of drug wars   [Read more…]

It Was in the Back of my Mind …

by

By Jeeni Criscenzo

It was in the back of my mind
in line with everything I’ve meant to do,
to visit you
and get a personal tour of your gardens.
But days flew by
and well, you know how it goes,
though our paths crossed occasionally
elsewhere,
I never got there.   [Read more…]

Wonder Where San Diego’s Redevelopment Money Went?

by

…Not to address homelessness

By Jeeni Criscenzo/ Part one of a series

Since the statewide dissolution of redevelopment agencies in 2011 Katheryn Rhodes, a local advocate for homeless people, has been speaking up at City Council meetings about the millions of dollars that could be used to address homelessness that the City is letting slip away. You’d think that someone suggesting that there is money available for a problem that is starved for adequate funding, would get an eager audience. Problem is, no one seemed to understand the reams of spreadsheets and data the soft-spoken Rhodes provided to support her claims.

At a recent event, I told City Councilmember Gloria that I believe Rhodes claims have merit, but I’m at a loss how to explain it. He sighed, admitting no one seems to be able to figure it out. That’s actually progress because for the past five years eye-rolling has been the usual response to Rhodes’ requests to consider her findings. Reasonably smart people, myself included, assumed that since they couldn’t make sense of the myriad of acronyms, encumbrances and legal requirements Rhodes offered to support her claims, that she is either a financial savant or a flake. No one likes to admit that something is too complex for them to comprehend.   [Read more…]

Race to the Bottom

by

By Jeeni Criscenzo

Driving back to San Diego from a conference in Fresno
down 99 through the San Joaquin Valley,
you’d have to be sleep-driving not to see it – the Death Valley of California.
Miles after miles,
acres after acres,
east and west,
abandoned farmland as far as the mountain edged horizon,
not so long from being lush that you couldn’t identify what once was,
or dread what isn’t yet – that rugged desert
that comes next, after the tiniest bit of rain.   [Read more…]

Planning My Garden for an El Niño Winter

by

By Jeeni Criscenzo

Now that my knee is healing, and the weather is cooling off a bit, my attention is turning back to my garden. Knee problems aside, the oppressive heat of the past two months pretty much silenced the siren call of my garden. Just dragging my sweaty self out to feed the chickens was my quota of physical exertion for the day. Some evenings didn’t even cool enough to inspire my meditative stroll through the succulent labyrinth.

Resigned that my vegetable garden this summer was a total disaster, I had removed all of the fencing that kept the chickens out of my raised beds. So while I wasn’t working, the chickens were.   [Read more…]

Random Acts of Kindess

by

By Jeeni Criscenzo

Thoughts while enjoying the super moon during the lunar eclipse of Sept. 27, 2015

Although raised Roman Catholic and indoctrinated with 12 years of Catechism classes in parochial school, I decided, even before graduating high school that neither Catholicism nor any religion, was for me. When the Sisters of Charity taught that faith is a gift, I responded that I didn’t get the gift and didn’t want it. Long before I was “expelled” from the church for marrying a second time, I had decided that I could be a good person without following rules written by men who “believed” the earth was flat.

So as I followed the coverage of Pope Francis’ recent visit to the United States, I kept in mind that he was the leader of a faith that will not relinquish power to women to make their own medical decisions or to give them access to leadership as priests, bishops or the papacy.   [Read more…]

Lively Hoods

by

Why are we asking for jobs?

Most jobs are a lopsided trade agreement
where we relinquish the majority of our waking hours,
and our labor and talent
to make someone else
wealthy – wealthier!
in exchange for just enough money to survive.
Sometimes it’s not even enough
…used to be.

What we all really want
and need
is a means of living
that makes being alive meaningful.   [Read more…]

San Diego’s Police Citizen Review Board Falls Short on Transparency, Accountability

by

Opportunity to provide citizen input at September 23 meeting

By Jeeni Criscenzo

Four years ago today (September 17, 2011) the Occupy movement began in New York City’s Zuccotti Park in Wall Street. Like wildfire the movement that defined Us (the 99%) vs Them (the 1%) spread from city to city.

Three weeks later a large and exuberant crowd gathered in San Diego’s Children’s Park before marching defiantly to Civic Center Plaza, and Occupy San Diego was born.

And from that emerged a group of mostly “mature” women (of which I was one) who used our experience and energy to advance the movement long after the camps in cities throughout the nation had been aggressively dismantled by an organized police campaign. It was in that “dismantling” that many of the original members of Women Occupy San Diego (WOSD) came face to face with the ugly underbelly of SDPD.   [Read more…]

©2010-2017 SanDiegoFreePress.org

Code is Poetry