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Lilia Lopez: From Logan Heights to the United Nations

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Introducing our new series ‘Latinos in San Diego’

By Maria E. Garcia

If you have not met eighty-seven year old Lilia Lopez, wife, mother, friend, feminist and activist, you have missed out on a woman who has influenced many people. She has worked diligently to improve the lives of women, not only in San Diego, but all over the country and Mexico and Europe.

Lilia says that I am responsible for her becoming involved in Chicano issues. While I was a student teacher at Lowell Elementary School in the 1970s, I invited her to attend a meeting with a group of moms. She says that was when she understood the injustices the women were facing. She couldn’t sit back and do nothing.

Lilia did not need me or anyone else to take the leadership role in so many issues that affected Latinas.   [Read more…]

Hey, Here’s An Idea! Let’s Sexualize A God-Awful Disease That Kills and Maims Thousands of Women!

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By Abby Zimet / Common Dreams

Today we mark the low point of the breast cancer industrial complex’s already sketchy Pinktober – the month wherein insatiable capitalism touts spending money on all things pink “for the cure” – with National No Bra Day, the semi-pornographic, useless, entirely counter-intuitive “holiday” that calls for women to let their (blessedly healthy) breasts flow free in the name of ill women who are “scarred, radiated, burned, nauseated, and fighting for their lives.” No Bra Day, notes one observer, is “the latest way to do nothing about breast cancer.”   [Read more…]

Charger Stadium Deal Could Be Key in Block vs Atkins Senate Contest

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By Doug Porter

New polling from the Garin-Hart-Yang Research Group indicates increased voter awareness of Assemblywoman Toni Atkins willingness to ease environmental challenges to a proposed publicly subsidized NFL stadium in San Diego may be her Achilles heel.

The September 24-26 survey of a representative sample of 401 likely 39th Senate district primary voters was, according to a summary issued by Hart Research, fully representative of the district by geography, inclusive of variables such as race and partisanship, and has a margin of error of ±5.0 percentage points.

The summary indicated Atkins name recognition and favorability rating are higher among voters on first blush. When voters were presented with positive, similarly long descriptions of both candidates, incumbent Senator Marty Block gained ground. A shorter comparative description mentioning Atkins’s willingness to ease CEQA challenges to the proposed NFL stadium, voter preferences shifted to give Block a 46-to-35 advantage over Atkins.   [Read more…]

California Here We Go: $15 Minimum Wage Headed for Statewide Ballot

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By Doug Porter

California advocates for a statewide $15 per hour minimum wage are marshaling their forces in support of a November 2016 initiative. The mayors of San Francisco and Oakland, cities which have already passed increases, appeared at a press conference on Tuesday to announce they will be leading the effort. The measure was submitted to the state by the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West.

The Fair Wage Act of 2016 will raise the minimum wage for all California workers by $1 annually, effective January 2017. Once the minimum wage reaches $15, it will automatically go up each year to match the cost of living. The state’s minimum wage is currently $9 an hour and is set to rise to $10 on Jan. 1, 2016. Cities will continue to have the option of setting higher local minimum wages.

San Diego events related to the Fight for $15 movement are already planned as part of the build-up to next year’s election. A regional wage hearing set for October 17th will hear testimony from workers, economists, academics, students, and labor leaders as a prelude to garnering commitments from local political leaders. A Day of Action in November will see protests on college campuses, at fast food restaurants, and in downtown San Diego.   [Read more…]

Do All “Black Lives Matter?”

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By Ernie McCray

Damn. One day I’m writing a piece concerning discrimination against lesbians and gays, making a pitch for us to let the now proverbial Adam and Steve or Alanna and Eve feel at ease in just being themselves.

And the very next day, to my dismay, I hear of a little 5-year-old black girl who is kicked out of a school, the Mt. Erie Christian Academy, because she has two moms.

Whoa, right back where I started from. Another story about “beliefs.” Christian beliefs. But I just have to say I can’t see Christ turning some child away from a school with some lame excuse like “The Bible says homosexuality is a sin,” making that little girl, in essence, a victim of her mothers’ sins.   [Read more…]

University Contract Workers Wages –Or Lack Thereof– in the Crosshairs

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By Doug Porter

Today (Oct 1), some contract employees working on University of California facilities will be seeing a pay hike to $13 an hour. The university system is California’s third largest employer and the largest employer in San Diego.

Earlier this year UC President Janet Napolitano announced a plan to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour over a three-year roll-out for all workers, including contract ones, and today’s bump is just the first stage.  

Or maybe they won’t be seeing that raise. The Los Angeles Times reports the Department of Labor has launched an investigation into long-time contractor Performance First Building Services failure to pay overtime to workers cleaning up after sporting events at UC Berkeley.   [Read more…]

School Board Trustee Praised, Defended and Investigated, All in a Day at San Diego Unified

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By Doug Porter

School Board Trustee Marne Foster is at the center of several controversies in the San Diego Unified School District. A meeting of the trustees yesterday featured numerous TV trucks lined up outside, partisans and opponents inside, along with three distinct actions and enough drama for a cable mini-series.

Documents released by the district answered many questions raised concerning the School of Creative and Performing Arts, at the center of the current controversy. Responding to charges that Trustee Foster had intervened in school affairs on behalf of her son, the district’s documents amounted to a master class in how to respond to a political controversy: hit’em [critics] hard and hit ‘em long. This situation is far from resolved, however.

Also, the school board authorized an investigation into Trustee Foster’s involvement in a fundraiser on behalf of her son’s college fund and a claim filed against the district allegedly by the child’s father. And they passed a resolution praising Foster for her work promoting equity in the district.  Confused yet? It is complicated, to be sure.   [Read more…]

I Hope We Can Finally Just Let Adam and Steve Be

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(No Matter What our Beliefs Happen to Be)

This Kim Davis situation is just too familiar for my liking, too much like it has always been in this country based on what I’ve seen in 77 years.

I mean I have no idea what this woman’s work entails in a day. But one of her tasks seems, to me, like a dream job, where all she’d have to do is a little soft shoe with jazz hands and a big smile and sing: “Howdy do. Congratulations, you two. Here’s your marriage license. Toddle-oo!”

But she can only do that for “Adam and Eve.” “Adam and Steve” or any woman whose honey is a she has to be insulted by her for all the world to see because of what her scripture has taught her to believe.   [Read more…]

Stand Up for Planned Parenthood on #PinkOutDay in San Diego

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By Doug Porter

Today’s the day. Three months into the latest effort by the self-righteous right to make women’s health into a wedge issue, supporters of Planned Parenthood are standing up for their cause.

There are 4 “Pink Out Day” events in San Diego County and 249 actions around the country planned for September 29th. Coincidentally (okay, maybe not), this is also the same day Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards will face off against the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Back in July, an organization called the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) released a series of videos purporting to show Planned Parenthood doctors selling parts from aborted fetuses to researchers for profit, which would have been illegal. The videos were selectively edited. The people behind the CMP have a long history of harassing medical personnel and women visiting clinics.   [Read more…]

GOP Candidate Proposes Abolishing the National Labor Relations Board

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By Doug Porter

Republican Scott Walker’s idea for turning around his diminishing poll numbers is to go big with his anti-union cred.

At a speech in Los Vegas, the Wisconsin Governor proposed scrapping the National Labor Relations Board, making right-to-work the default national standard for workplaces, eliminating public employee unions, restricting automatic withdrawal of dues, and forbidding union organizers to access employees personal information.  

In other words, he’s declared war. In the perfect world of Scott Walker, the US economy as far as employees are concerned would completely revert to the 1880’s. Yes, indeedy, get your beggars cups ready to catch whatever crumbs fall off the corporate tables.   [Read more…]

Creative Protests Mark Planned Parenthood ‘Show Trial’ in DC, Anti-Choice Group Meeting in San Diego

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By Doug Porter

Battles over abortion, a key element in the right’s war against women, continue on both coasts this week.

In Washington DC, the House Judiciary Committee opened hearings expressly designed to garner publicity for a coming effort to defund Planned Parenthood. Today’s Washington Post quotes a former top Republican congressional budget aide saying there’s about a 60% chance of a government shutdown over the issue.

This week Care Net, an umbrella organization claiming more than 1,100 faux “crisis pregnancy centers” (CPCs) around the country, is having its 2015 National Conference at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel & Marina on Harbor Island. A pro-choice group placed ads in the Daily Aztec and Union-Tribune yesterday touting a “tourist guide” filled with the kind of unreliable information they say women receive when visiting Care Net’s crisis pregnancy centers.   [Read more…]

It’s a FACT, Jack: State Senate Passes Bill Aimed at Faux Women’s Clinics

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By Doug Porter

This week the State Senate voted 23-14 to approve Assembly Bill 775, the Reproductive FACT Act, sending it on to Gov. Jerry Brown.  Backed by a coalition that includes NARAL Pro-Choice and Planned Parenthood California,  AB 775 takes aim at the 200 plus so-called “crisis pregnancy centers” (CPCs) statewide.

The groups supporting the bill say the CPCs spread medical misinformation aimed at manipulating women to keep them from accessing abortion care. Unlicensed facilities  providing pregnancy-related services would be required to prominently display and include in their advertising a statement that clarifies that they are not medical facilities licensed by the state of California.

An undercover investigation by NARAL earlier this year found that 91% of CPCs visited falsely linked abortion with health problems like breast cancer, infertility, depression and even death.   [Read more…]

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