San Diego Free Press

Grassroots News & Progressive Views

You are here: Home / Archives for Columns

The Coming Supreme Court’s Taint of Illegitimacy

by

By Bill Adams / UrbDeZine

The circumstances underlying the creation of a strongly conservative Supreme Court for decades may have earned this Court the taint of illegitimacy. Here’s how it went awry.

The “One Person, One Vote” principle is strong in the consciousness of the American Public. It arises from fundamental notions of fairness, equality, and democracy. These notions arise from the spirit of the U.S. Constitution, even if the document itself is less direct in support of the One Person, One Vote principle.  In addition to the high-minded ideals of freedom and equality, the U.S. Constitution was born of compromises arising from practical considerations such as wooing slave states into the new union.

Now we have arrived at a perfect storm of factors to subvert the will of the people. It is the result of the distrust of direct democracy embedded in the Constitution combining with undemocratic intent. The majority is ruled by the minority. There has been a massive abrogation of the One Person, One Vote principle.  We are now rated as a “flawed democracy,” 21st among democratic countries in the company of Italy, Botswana, and Mexico.   [Read more…]

What ‘No-Poach’ Rules Mean For Fast-Food Workers | Video Worth Watching

by

Tip: It has nothing to do with the way food is cooked. The Washington Post reports that Attorneys general in ten states and the District of Columbia are investigating the practice of franchises including provisions in their agreements that restrict hiring among franchisees. They are being led by Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey (D), and along with Massachusetts, the group includes attorneys general in California, the District of Columbia, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.   [Read more…]

Activist Actions in San Diego Keep Up the Pressure on Border Enforcement Issues

by

Ongoing injustices require ongoing resistance. Such is the case with efforts to call public attention to the plight of immigrants and asylum seekers along the southern border of the United States.

The mass demonstrations of June have given way to July’s protests near locations with literal or symbolic connections to the Trump administration’s enforcement mechanisms.

Despite the court rulings saying Zero Tolerance and its kindred sadism aren’t legal, authorities are stalling and/or proceeding as though some draconian solution will eventually prevail.   [Read more…]

Watch Tearful Migrant Families Reunite After Weeks of Separation | Video Worth Watching

by

Some good news, courtesy of Mother Jones, on the reunification of families separated at our borders.   [Read more…]

The State of Hate in California – Three Consecutive Years of Double Digit Increases

by

The California Department of Justice released its annual report on hate crimes reported in 2017 on Monday, July 9. Local law enforcement agencies reported 1,093 hate crimes last year, a more than 17% increase from 2016, which was an 11% increase over 2015.

San Diego County had the second highest statewide total of reported hate crimes with 95 events, 121 offenses, 114 victims, and 82 suspects apprehended. Los Angeles County (with three times the population) was California’s biggest hotbed of hate, with 419 incidents.

A hate crime, as defined by the state, is a crime against a person, group, or property motivated by the victim’s real or perceived protected social group. The data included in the report does not include hate incidents, defined as is an action or behavior motivated by hate but legally protected by the First Amendment right to freedom of expression.   [Read more…]

Can Trump Really Pardon Himself? | Video Worth Watching

by

Vox’s Danush Parvaneh ruminates on the question of whether a president has the ability to self-pardon. Note that one of the checks discussed is the judicial system, ultimately the Supreme Court. How about that as another reason for demanding no nominations until the Mueller investigation is concluded.   [Read more…]

Smart Activism: Not Every Protest Or Petition is Worthy of Your Time

by

Amy Siskind has published a weekly list of specific news stories representing eroding norms in the United States since Donald Trump took office. It’s a depressing read, and in recent weeks it’s gotten longer and more intense.

Over the weekend, we learned about an administration effort to quash a UN resolution encouraging breastfeeding. This wasn’t just a “hey, we disagree” situation; representatives of the U.S. Government threatened backers with trade sanctions and cuts to military aid. Outrageous.

Our taxpayer dollars also paid for a successful effort at this World Health Assembly meeting removing suggestions of introducing a soda tax from a document advising countries on fighting high rates of obesity.

This week in San Diego, mass trials for people charged with immigration violations, aka Operation Streamline, are starting up. Lawyers for the accused get a few minutes to speak with their clients in a courthouse garage, with US Marshalls standing nearby.   [Read more…]

Malcolm X and Police Accountability on My Mind

by

I attended a meeting the other night at the Malcolm X Library about a proposed Amendment to the City of San Diego Charter to create a Commission on Police Practices.

I couldn’t help but think of Malcolm throughout the evening because he would be pleased at the very idea of why we were gathered together, considering that he relentlessly tried to keep an eye on the police, especially in black communities where they have, throughout our country’s history, practically run rampant in black neighborhoods: cruising up and down the street flashing “the look”; messing with folks for giving them “the look”; taking somebody out because of “how they looked.”

And Malcolm would appreciate that the proposed commission would be devoted to holding the police department accountable for their interactions not only with communities of color but with all of the folks they’re supposed to “serve and protect” – like the members of Women Occupy San Diego, most of them white, who were mistreated by law enforcement officers at a protest a few years ago.
  [Read more…]

Summer Chronicles 2018 # 4: Getting Inside the Inexhaustibility

by

“A desire to be inside the inexhaustibility.”
–Karl Ove Knausgaard My Struggle

In Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, he writes eloquently about how writing is what helps one escape the prison of our “purely fabricated world” that gives us the feeling that “the world is small, tightly enclosed around itself, without openings to anywhere else.”  This bubble world that the construct of modern civilization has locked us into is only exacerbated by the closed feedback loop of our cell phones and social media which pretend to expand our known worlds while, in reality, deeply limiting our consciousness to a simulacrum of screens.  

What does writing do? Well, as Knausgaard observes, it speaks to our desire for more, “The longing I always felt, which some days was so great it could hardly be controlled, had its source here.  It was partially to relieve this feeling that I wrote, I wanted to open the world by writing.” And despite people’s dismissal of his romanticism, he insists on the reality of “sudden states of clear-sightedness that everyone must know, where for a few seconds you catch sight of another world from the one you were in only a moment earlier, where the world seems to step forward and show itself for a brief glimpse before reverting and leaving everything as before.”     [Read more…]

The Immigrants Deported to Death and Violence – The Backstory – The New Yorker | Video Worth Watching

by

A grim reminder of what is at stake for many of the asylum seekers that make it to our border and why they U.S. government needs to treat the issue of asylum deadly seriously. Back in January of this year The New Yorker’s Sarah Stillman reported on people who fled their home countries fearing for their lives, and the tragic consequences when they were sent back. This video provides some of the back story. The original New Yorker story from January is here.   [Read more…]

Looking Back at the Week: July 1-7

by

This week’s edition of Looking Back at the Week contains articles, commentaries, columns, and other work by San Diego Free Press regulars, irregulars, columnists, cartoonists, at-large contributors, and locally and nationally sourced writers on June’s Biggest Loser, Operation Streamline resistance, Zapf’s eligibility questioned, state propositions, The Second Civil War in letters, not iReady, and lots of other grassroots news & progressive views from San Diego’s feisty, all volunteer, slightly funky, community news site.   [Read more…]

Fitz and the Tantrums – A Place for Us | Video Worth Watching

by

Here’s the 2016 release from Fitz and the Tantrums – A Place for Us. Updated: found the YouTube video version.

From the YouTube website:

Help Us Share A Positive Message + Support A Great Cause With Every T-shirt Purchased at bit.ly/FitzPopUpShop

Film and send us your own answers to the questions in the video using #Place4us on all social platforms!

100% of the net proceeds from the month of sales through July, on these t-shirts are being donated to Together Rising for their fundraising efforts for legal council for migrant families and children seeking asylum that have been detained at our southern border.

(h/t to Lisa J.)   [Read more…]

©2010-2017 SanDiegoFreePress.org

Code is Poetry