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Police Use Water Cannons in Freezing Weather on Protesters at Standing Rock

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Police used water cannons and tear gas against hundreds of Dakota Access Pipeline protesters in Cannon Ball, North Dakota, late Sunday, Nov. 20. At least one person was arrested and dozens injured.

The confrontation began at 6pm, near the encampment were the protests against the $3.8 billion pipeline have been ongoing for months. According to the Morton County Sheriff’s Department, 400 protesters attempted to cross Blackwater Bridge on state Highway 1806 after removing a burned-out truck.   [Read more…]

Post-Election: Infighting & Hate Speech vs Emerging Local Actions

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The shock and awe phase of the post-election period is winding down. Now the question ‘what next?’ is coming to the forefront of public consciousness.

Lots of people have ideas. Some of them are pipe dreams. Some of them are impractical. And some of them will evolve into what I can only hope is a wave of widespread, sustained, and effective resistance to the Trump administration’s policy proposals. (Friday’s column will focus on San Diego-oriented activities.)

For the moment what people are protesting is the very idea of Trump taking over the executive branch along with promises made on the campaign trail. It’s a murky mess to organize against because the man has no plan and his advisors are squabbling.   [Read more…]

Discovering the Light In Darkness: Fighting Back Against Trump

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So first, remember to breathe. It won’t change what has happened, but it will keep you alive—and this, as it turns out, is indisputably helpful for what must come next. For only the living can resist.

I wish there were some way to spin this, to soften the sharp edges of these blades slicing into the connective tissue of our nation, but there is not. There is only the scythe, ripping collective flesh and tendon, swung by a deranged reaper and those who saw fit to hand him the tools with which to do such damage.

I wish there were some way to blink really hard, like I used to do as a child when trapped in a nightmare, thereby finding release from the clutches of whatever monster was in hot pursuit. It worked every time in dreams. But sadly, this escape route began to fail me years ago, right around the time I discovered that some monsters are real, some dreams incapable of circumvention. Ever since I came to appreciate that some disasters must simply be faced.   [Read more…]

Here’s the Hate From Donald Trump’s Followers

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We’re sharing a compendium of tweets seen by SDFP editors on social media since election night.

Anybody who has any doubt about what’s coming and the need to organize, mobilize, and fight back should read these all the way through.

Does anybody have a plan yet? Not that we know of. Rome wasn’t built in a day.

That doesn’t mean people aren’t working on it.

Stay angry, my friends; build a network; give hugs where needed.   [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…]

Barrio Logan vs the Stadium: Why it Matters

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By Mario Torero, Brent Beltrán, and Bill Adams / UrbDeZine

Barrio Logan is little known to most San Diegans – beyond being a predominantly Mexican-American neighborhood near downtown. Yet it is one of San Diego’s most historically significant and culturally important neighborhoods.

In particular, it has national prominence for its role in the Chicano / Mexican-American civil rights movement. However, more than a Chicano historic asset, the neighborhood and it’s history stands as a monument to the resilience and survival of the nation’s minority and working class populations in the face of assaults and exploitation by the overwhelming power of the state and business interests.

In particular, many ethnic working-class urban neighborhoods across the country were destroyed or severely damaged by en masse relocation of their residents to build freeways and other neighborhood-destroying and suburb serving facilities. Barrio Logan repeatedly faced such assaults, and not only survived but like putting a bouquet of flowers in a tank cannon, sometimes made beauty and purpose out of injury. Nevertheless, once the second largest Mexican-American enclave in the U.S., it has shrunk to less than 5,000 people as a result of the loss of land to the freeways and industrial uses. It may not survive another such assault.   [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…]

Chunky Sanchez:“A good man, an extraordinary musician, and a tireless Chicano activist”

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By Herman Baca / Committee on Chicano Rights

It was with a sad & heavy heart that we heard of the passing of beloved; Ramon “Chunky” Sanchez. To Isabel Sanchez, the entire Sanchez/Enrique families our deepest & most sincere condolences from the Committee on Chicano Rights, Chicano/Mexicano/Latino community, and my family.

I first met Chunky in the early 1970’s at SD State at a rally where Chunky was a student. At the time both of us were doing what we were to do for the next 45 years, Chunky playing & singing (then with La Rondalla Amerinda, later with Los Alacranes Mojados) & I speaking. We hit it right off, since the both of us were from two small rural agricultural communities, Chunky from Blythe, CA & I from Los Lentes, New Mexico.   [Read more…]

San Diego’s Year of the Political Black Woman

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By Gwen Pierce / The Chocolate Voice

Win or lose, without question the year 2016 will go down in history as the year of making Women’s history. With Hillary Clinton, becoming the first woman in U.S. history to become the presidential nominee of a major political party, many would agree that progress is on the rise.

In San Diego, six Black women are politically shaking things up too, as the year of the Political Black women emerge throughout San Diego County, as they run for State, School Board, College Boards and Lemon Grove Mayor in the County of San Diego!

Accomplished, powerful and smart, all six are representative of a phrase or hashtag that the world has come to know as #BlackGirlMagic.   [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…]

More Port District Pollution Threatens Barrio Logan

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Joy Williams / Environmental Health Coalition

While Port District plans a massive expansion of its operations and diesel emissions from the Tenth Avenue Terminal, the neighboring community of Barrio Logan has been ranked even higher in the newest draft of California’s environmental justice screening model, CalEnviroScreen.

The new draft version three of CalEnviroScreen, released September 6, confirms the pollution hazards and social vulnerabilities in the Barrio Logan/Logan Heights area.

Barrio Logan was already at the very top of the state in version two of CalEnviroScreen – the highest five percent of all 8,000-plus census tracts in the state. The newly released draft version shows diesel hazards a full 15 percentile points higher than previously estimated for this area.   [Read more…]

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