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Fighting the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” Decision

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By Paul Keleher and John Lawrence

The balance is tipped towards the interests of the rich when vast amounts of money are required in the exercise of free speech. There is obviously a difference between someone spouting off on a street corner and some entity organizing and paying for advertising on TV which is the form most political speech takes. Unless any legitimate group is given a certain amount of free TV ad time and every group is limited to the same amount, the balance of political speech is tipped in favor of those with the most money whether it is individuals or corporations. Wolf-Pac is dedicated to the public financing of elections.

Justice Stevens, in arguing for the minority on the Supreme Court, said that the Court’s ruling “threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the Nation. The path it has taken to reach its outcome will, I fear, do damage to this institution. A democracy cannot function effectively when its constituent members believe laws are being bought and sold.” He argued that in a democracy money should not determine the outcome of an election.   [Read more…]

Anti Choice Women’s Clinics Seek to Defy State Law in San Diego County and El Cajon

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Editor Note: This article was originally published on March 15, 2016. The effort to erode women’s reproductive rights and access to health services here in San Diego was one of the under-reported stories of 2016.

The County of San Diego and the City of El Cajon are considering a proposed settlement with anti-choice crisis pregnancy centers, amounting to a pledge not enforce the Reproductive FACT Act.

In response, local pro-choice activists are presenting El Cajon City Attorney Morgan Foley and San Diego County Counsel Thomas Montgomery with petitions signed by 25,000 Californians urging them to enforce the letter and the spirit of the law.

NARAL Pro-Choice California, UltraViolet and Courage Campaign have been gathering signatures since the anti-choice organizations offered to remove local authorities as named defendants in lawsuits if they agree not to apply the law.   [Read more…]

California Legislators, School Boards Brace for Trump’s Assault on Immigrants

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President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration may be six weeks away. Elected officials in Sacramento and San Diego are already taking actions aimed at shielding those who may be victimized by the new administration.

Newly sworn in lawmakers at the State capitol proposed legislation providing attorneys to immigrants in the country illegally, refusing to aid any proposed registry of Muslim immigrants and requiring voter approval for any wall built along the Mexican border.

This evening San Diego Unified School Board will likely approve a resolution to protect all of its 130,000 students and staff in the district.   [Read more…]

What Bob Marley Can Teach Us About Donald Trump

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If he were alive, the Honorable Robert Nesta “Bob” Marley, O.M. (Order of Merit), would have celebrated his 71st birthday on February 6. Even with the thirty-fifth anniversary of his tragic death from cancer last May, Bob remains the most recognizable ambassador of reggae music the world over.

Marley’s timeless appeal and continued relevance stems in no small part from the stirring political, racial, and social consciousness painstakingly infused in his songbook. From tracks like One Love to War (adopted from Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie I’s historic speech before the United Nations General Assembly in 1963), Them Belly Full (But They Hungry), Get Up, Stand Up, Concrete Jungle – and many, many more of his songs – Bob Marley used the bully pulpit of international music stardom to disseminate the treasure of his accumulated moral wisdom.   [Read more…]

What Cornel West Got Wrong – and Right – in San Marcos

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By James Anderson

When noted philosopher and public intellectual Cornel West spoke to and fielded questions from a capacity crowd gathered in the ballroom on the second floor of the Student Union of California State University San Marcos, he hit just about every note.

With West’s stated intent to “unsettle” and “unnerve” everyone that Friday, November 4 – coupled with hefty doses of humility and humor – he delivered a compelling exegesis on democracy.

You cannot sustain a democracy based on superficial spectacle of the sort on display in the present electoral arena and in major media, he said. Online news media offer an illusion of hope, but as a recent piece denouncing West’s appearance at Cal State San Marcos as a “Totalitarian Conference to be Held at UC Marcos—With Your Tax $$” – despite there being no UC, a.k.a. University of California, in San Marcos – illustrates, the cybersphere serves as a space for amplifying confusion just as often as it functions as any sort of meaningful public sphere.   [Read more…]

A Fifth Column Inside the FBI

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The Daily Beast’s Wayne Barrett has written a blockbuster of a story detailing the rebellion going on inside the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

It’s a tale of active and former agents, many of them with ties to former NYC Mayor Rudy Guliani, whose actions amount to a law enforcement thumb on the scale of democracy.

Guliani’s law firm has long been general counsel to the FBI Agents Association (FBIAA), which represents 13,000 former and current agents. The group’s leader, agent Rey Tariche, resigned from the FBI New York office on Monday following Director James Comey’s release of a memo saying the agency was once agin looking into Hillary Clinton.   [Read more…]

After Two Wars, Standing Rock is the First Time I Served the American People

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By Will Griffin / Common Dreams

I was in Iraq when President Bush announced the “surge” in January 2007. I was in Afghanistan when President Obama announced the “surge” in December 2009. But it wasn’t until I visited Standing Rock in October 2016 when I actually served the American people. This time, instead of fighting for corporate interests, I was fighting for the people.

The Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), or Bakken Pipeline, is a 1,172-mile oil pipeline project that will transfer crude oil across four states: North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, and Illinois. From the Bakken fields of North Dakota, the pipeline will carry in excess of 450,000 barrels per day of crude oil to Patoka, Illinois, and possibly on to Texas and near the Gulf Coast areas for refinement or export. The project will cost $3.7 billion while creating 8,000-12,000 temporary construction jobs and only 40 permanent operating jobs.   [Read more…]

The Color of Surveillance in San Diego

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People of Color Have Privacy Rights Too!

By Christie Hill / ACLU of San Diego

Earlier this month, we learned that three San Diego neighborhoods are unknowing hosts of a new surveillance technology called ShotSpotter. It works by detecting the sound of gunshots and sending information to the police to allow them to respond to the area where gunshots were detected. We learned that the San Diego Police Department acquired ShotSpotter with no public input and only limited input from city council. There is no publicly-approved policy for how SDPD will deploy this technology that can potentially be used to surreptitiously listen-in on conversations within earshot of a ShotSpotter device.   [Read more…]

SDPD Bias Report Fails to Answer Basic Questions

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Long-awaited data from San Diego State researchers on the question of racial bias in city policing has surfaced via a draft report in the form of a powerpoint presentation and it’s next to worthless.

The San Diego City Council Public Safety and Livable Neighborhoods Committee is getting a glimpse of the draft and hearing from the researchers Wednesday afternoon. You can bet their conclusions will include the phrases “more research” and “inconclusive,” words we all should be used to by now when it comes to holding law enforcement authorities to a standard.

The report will point out some already-known disparities, namely that Black and Latino drivers are nearly 2 times as likely to be searched, while Black drivers are 44% less likely to be found with contraband; and Latinos are 46% less likely to have contraband.   [Read more…]

Medical Cannabis Cooperative Compels El Cajon Police to Return Seized Property

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By San Diego Americans for Safe Access / October 10, 2016

With the stroke of a judge’s pen, Justice has prevailed.

Pursuant to Court order, members of San Diego Alternative Care, a lawfully formed medical cannabis Cooperative, retrieved their property last week from the El Cajon Police Department, including 30 pounds of medical cannabis flower, 5 pounds of concentrates, and hundreds of medicated edibles and vape pen cartridges.

El Cajon Police had been in possession of SDAC’s property since late June when the department raided SDAC’s facility. Along with the apprehension of possibly facing felony charges, Cooperative members were confronted with the fact that their property was in police lockup. The property not only included medical cannabis products but also corporate documents, membership records, and office equipment.   [Read more…]

Props 62 & 66 – Nay or Yea on the Death Penalty

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An eye-for-eye and tooth-for-tooth would lead to a world of the blind and toothless.–Book of Exodus [21:24]

Both points of view regarding the death penalty managed to get a measure on the November ballot.

Prop 62 will eliminate the death penalty. Prop 66 will streamline the process of executing people. If both pass, the measure with the most votes will supersede the other.

In a perfect world, there could be a discussion about the advisability of government sanctioned executions involving actual facts and figures. We won’t see much of that sort of thing this fall.   [Read more…]

Why Spanos is Only Trying for a >50% Vote to Get a Downtown Stadium

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An important bit of misinformation has been circulating about Measure C – the Spanos ballot referendum to raise the hotel tax (transient occupancy tax – “TOT”) in the City of San Diego from 12.5% to 16.5% to build a $2 billion-plus downtown combined stadium and convention annex.

Most news stories and conventional wisdom have it that 2/3 of the city’s voters must vote in favor of it in order for it to pass. While some of these articles acknowledge that there is a potential second path to passing Measure C via litigation, it is mentioned only as something that is remote, uncertain, and difficult. As a result, some opponents of the measure have had a somewhat lackadaisical attitude.   [Read more…]

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