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Chilean Activists Meet with UCSD Students

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Provide a history of radical Chilean student movement

By Daniel Gutiérrez

Chilean delegates from Librería Proyección, Periódico Solidaridad and La Alzada Acción Feminista Libertaria (La Alzada Anarcha-Feminist Action) met with students and community members at UCSD, Monday, March 3rd. The delegates met as part of a tour sponsored by the Black Rose Anarchist Federation and the IWW at UCSD to spread word of the student movement in Chile.

The delegates rooted the current education crisis in Chile in the massive reforms made under the US-backed Pinochet dictatorship. Through state repression and intervention, the dictatorship was able to demobilize and dismember the popular movement in Chile. It was during the 1980s that a series of reforms took place that changed the education system to this day. Under these programs, education became two-tiered, in a system where the poor went to private universities and the rich went to public ones.   [Read more…]

Recognize: 58% Of Women Use Birth Control For Reasons Other Than Pregnancy Prevention

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By Rajiv Narayan / Upworthy

I’m looking at these graphics, and I’m thinking to myself, “How did we ever put up with health care before the Affordable Care Act?” Were we really cool with paying $600 a year for birth control pills or being denied coverage for pre-existing conditions? Get the word out: The benefits of this law aren’t good, they’re common sense.   [Read more…]

Remembering the UC San Diego Cookout, the Noose, and their Aftermath

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An Open Letter, Four Years After the “Winter of our Discontent”

Jorge Mariscal / UCSD Professor of Literature
Fnann Keflezighi / UCSD ‘11
Patrick Velásquez /San Diego Chicano/Latino Concilio

Four years ago, the fragile tranquility of the La Jolla campus was shattered by a series of events now known as the “Compton Cookout.” Cutting-edge scholarship on campus climate emphasizes the need for universities to continually revisit their ‘historical legacy’ as a benchmark for progress. Therefore, as much as administrators would like to erase the “Cookout” and its aftermath, it is crucial that we remember the events of February 2010.

We view calls to “move beyond” the past and erase any memory of the events that transpired as nothing more than an attempt to release newly installed administrators from their responsibilities. It is time to hold accountable everyone involved in the “strategic planning” that will determine the future of UCSD and impact the lived experiences of future generations of students.   [Read more…]

To Reach My Goals – Education in Barrio Logan

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Video by Media Arts Center San Diego’s Teen Producer’s Project
Intro by Brent E. Beltrán

With the battle looming over the future of Barrio Logan, due to Maritime Industry’s refusal to accept the Barrio Logan Community Plan update, I feel it is necessary to give voters of the city of San Diego a little history of Barrio Logan and highlight the issues residents face. In June, eligible San Diego voters will go to the polls to vote on wether to approve the community plan or reject it.

This week’s video, To Reach My Goals – Education in Barrio Logan, documents the challenges barrio youth have in school and highlights the Barrio Logan College Institute and their work to get neighborhood kids into college.   [Read more…]

Vergara v. California’s Corporate Heart

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By Julie Gutman Dickinson/Capital and Main

Are job protections for teachers to blame for educational underachievement among low-income students of color in California? That’s the provocative question ostensibly at the heart of Vergara vs. California, which seeks to invalidate the tenure, due process and seniority rights of hundreds of thousands of educators.

Astute observers of the nation’s escalating education wars, however, may be asking another question: When did it become permissible to use the welfare of children as a fig leaf for an all-out legal attack on teachers?

Or, as historian and teacher John Thompson wrote recently in Scholastic, “Are corporate reformers unabashedly using the courts as a battleground for battering employees’ rights, as opposed to helping children?”   [Read more…]

Higher Education: When is Enough Going to Be Enough?

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When is enough going to be enough? When are we as a nation going to get our priorities straight about higher education? When did it become the rule that the cost of higher education was lifelong indebtedness?

Via Occupy*Posters, a group that says it speaks with and not for Occupy Wall Street we present a handy-dandy cartoon (inside) that pretty much says it all about how our system of higher education is failing.

Here’s the About section of their website. There’s lots more great stuff where this came from:

Born of solidarity with the Occupy Movement’s grievances during its earliest September 2011 days, the straightforward, high-contrast designs and impact-filled visual messages of Occupy* Posters have helped change national conversations. Occupy* Posters has contributed hundreds of well-received visual messages to activists, numerous of which have become iconic images speaking to recent times. 

Dozens of Occupy* Posters have gone insanely viral on the Internet, some with millions of shares. Some have also been featured on the BBC, Current TV, the Huffington Post, Upworthy, MoveOn.org, DailyKos, and more. Some even appear in brick-and-mortar museums, and one is in a major college textbook.    [Read more…]

Community Radio Coming Soon to the Greater Logan Heights Area

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Radio Pulso del Barrio will focus on arts and education

By Brent E. Beltrán

For the past few months there have been meetings at various locations throughout the Greater Logan Heights area to implement a public art project called Open Spaces. Open Spaces is a two-year public art initiative that is funded by the James Irvine Foundation through the San Diego Museum of Art to create a community based art project.

This is the second Open Spaces project in San Diego. The first is ongoing in Lincoln Park.

“Open Spaces goes out into communities and allows community members and residents to be the decision makers on what public art should look like in their area. And that would be content, medium and location,” says project coordinator Irma Patricia Aguayo Esquivias.  “Coming into these communities we never know what it is going to be. We have no idea until we are actually participating in the community meetings then people start to voice what they’d like to see.”   [Read more…]

Photo Gallery: A Love for San Diego’s Wetlands

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On the northern edge of Mission Bay sits the Kendall-Frost Mission Bay Marsh Reserve, a 16-acre wetlands habitat overseen by the University of California at San Diego, that is home to a wide range of wildlife. A recent repopulation program has been initiated in an effort to increase the number of endangered Light-footed Clapper Rails living in the marsh, and those who frequent the area say 28 of the rare birds have been sighted over the past few months.

Saturday, Feb. 15, marks the beginning of the Clapper Rail nesting season, which will be kicked off by the ever popular Love Your Wetlands Day event.   [Read more…]

Point Loma High School Students Honor “Blackfish” Director and Her SeaWorld Expose

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By Frank Gormlie / OB Rag

Hundreds of Point Loma High School students honored the director of the controversial film “Blackfish” – the expose on SeaWorld’s treatment of their Orcas – on Monday, Feb. 3rd.

Director Gabriela Cowperthwaite came to the campus after some film students had produced their own film criticizing SeaWorld and addressed an assembled group of them.  She told them she wanted her documentary about the water-park’s captive killer whales to persuade SeaWorld to discontinue “using animals as entertainment.”  Cowperthwaite also told the students that they need to form their own opinions on the issue.

Her film began, she said, as a research project on the death in 2010 of Orca trainer Dawn Brancheau and Tilikum, the killer whale.   [Read more…]

My Hopes for the Next 35 Years

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I recently was reminded that the Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft (COMD) has been around for 35 years; 35 wonderful years I might add. I mean they’ve worked tirelessly in society’s behalf to challenge the military establishment’s overbearing intrusions in our lives.

They, with a host of other peace groups, have kept military issues in our collective consciousness via community forums, in the streets, and through youth outreach, keeping us aware of how much the military strains our economy, how much it magnifies a negative image of our country around the world, how much racism and sexism and homophobia it nurtures throughout its hierarchy.

COMD is a big part of why I continue working with the Education Not Arms Coalition (ENAC) to counter the recruitment of our children.

Without us there would still be rifle training on our campuses sponsored by the JROTC. To us, teenagers firing rifles on their school grounds made a mockery of San Diego City Schools’ Zero-Tolerance of Weapons Policy.   [Read more…]

College Graduates Beg for a Shrinking Pool of Jobs

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PhDs Go Begging, Microsoft Lays Off High Tech Workers, Graduates Not Able to Cope with Student Loan Debt Getting Jobs as Baristas…

By John Lawrence

…That’s the new reality for today’s college graduates.

Have America’s young people been sold a bill of goods? They thought that a college degree guaranteed them an entry to a good middle class life. Many are now finding out that that’s not the case as they struggle to pay student loans and try to cope with an anemic jobs market. For-profit colleges are advertising on TV in order to perpetuate the myth that a college education is a panacea. Even President Obama spouts that everyone should go to college, saying that’s what will cure the nation’s ills and prevent us from falling into the abyss of national mediocrity.

But don’t count on it.   [Read more…]

Low Income Housing Fee Opponents Up to the Same Old Tricks in Signature Drive

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By Doug Porter

Oops. They’ve doing it again. San Diego’s voters are once again being hoodwinked into signing petitions. Given that our City Attorney apparently thinks this behavior is part of the “democratic process,” the likelihood is they’ll get away with it. 

Currently supporters of an initiative to overturn yet another City Council action have deployed an army of paid signature gatherers at shopping centers in San Diego.  At issue is an ordinance restoring linkage fees on large scale developments to pre-recession levels as a mechanism for funding low income housing. 

As has happened with other recent signature drives sponsored by corporate interests, those individuals are “stretching the truth” in their quest to earn their pay-per-signature wages.  Whether or not these representations cross the line into outright lies is something I hope the courts will someday decide. These latest tactics shouldn’t surprise anybody in the wake the hysterical “the Navy is leaving” campaign staged by opponents of the Barrio Logan Community Plan.   [Read more…]

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