San Diego Free Press

Grassroots News & Progressive Views

ACLU Seeks Public Records On Officer-Involved Shooting of Alfred Olango

by

Serious questions must be answered about El Cajon Police Department policy and procedure when encountering people experiencing mental health crises.

Press release provided by ACLU

In response to community concerns about the conduct of law enforcement leading up to and in the aftermath of the killing of Alfred Olango, the ACLU of San Diego & Imperial Counties sent public record requests to the County of San Diego and the City of El Cajon seeking information concerning policies and protocol for interacting with people experiencing mental health crises, and also El Cajon Police Department policies and protocol for responding to public protest.   [Read more…]

San Diego 2016 Progressive Voter Guide

by

The editors of the San Diego Free Press and OB Rag are pleased to present our 2016 General Election Progressive Voter Guide.

We believe this is a historic election, one that will set the course of the United States for decades to come. If there ever was an election where voting was important — this is it.

The candidacy of Donald Trump is no accident. It is a consequence of decades of building a constituency for a market-driven political economy by capitalizing on fear, bias, and ignorance.

The ballot this year is long and complicated. Not everything is as it seems. Practitioners of deception have deliberately crafted personas and propositions in a manner that trick people into voting against their best interests. There are an equal number of voting decisions to be made on less-than-perfect candidates and causes.

We tried not to let perfect be the enemy of good in our decision making.   [Read more…]

Cleaning Up the City Charter: Measures E thru H

by

In the June primary election voters in the City of San Diego were presented with seven ballot measures aimed at what Council President Sherri Lightner called ‘house cleaning’ for the City Charter. All passed.

The November general election has eight more charter amendments for voters. Some of them go beyond housecleaning into the realm of political agendas. Today, I’ll cover four housecleaning measures in one column. In coming days the more controversial ballot items will get some individual attention.

For those of you with short attention spans– Vote Yes on Measures E thru H. There is no known opposition for any of these items. They’re not necessarily perfect, but nothing there rolls back the clock.   [Read more…]

Largest Elementary School District in the State: Chula Vista

by

Chula Vista Elementary School District (CVESD) is the state’s largest elementary school district (K-6) and good news: the CVESD outperformed its county and state counterparts in 2016 with 62% of students meeting or exceeding the standards in English. In math CV students scored 49% on average compared to the county’s 44% and the state’s 37%.

However, you’ll still want to be careful. In May 2016, shortly before the election primary, Larry Breitfelder-Navas and consultant Kenneth Moser filed a complaint with the Fair Political Practices Commission saying that three trustees: Eduardo Reyes, Leslie Bunker and Francisco Tamayo made campaign violations connected to reporting donations and spending during the 2014 school board election. Now careful. Breitfelder-Navas only named three Democratic trustees and Breitfelder-Navas is a Republican who ran for Chula Vista City Council in 2012.   [Read more…]

Activist-Photographer Fred Lonidier’s Photos of 1972 Anti-War Protest Part of Museum of Contemporary Arts Exhibit

by

Staff / OB Rag

Way back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, there were very active social movements stirring in San Diego – and across the country. Here in San Diego, from the student-based anti-Vietnam war movement to episodes of local labor struggles, there was always this one guy whom some considered the “movement photographer” on the scene. And it was Fred Lonidier, with his long-lens camera dangling from his neck, always there to record it all with his lens.

There was one particular and historic event in May of 1972 where 88 students and supporters were arrested for peacefully sitting down in front of the local Naval District HQ in protest of the Vietnam war. A good number of anti-war activists from OB were there that day, as OB was a center of anti-war activity in those heady days.   [Read more…]

Avoiding Privatization’s Slippery Slide

by

By Donald Cohen / Capital & Main

Last Wednesday was a big day for In the Public Interest. We released one of our longest and most wide-ranging reports, How Privatization Is Increasing Inequality.

The report describes how the privatization of public goods and services disproportionately impacts poor individuals and families, and people of color. It pulls together issues that at a glance appear unrelated—like private prisons, charter schools and privatized water—to show that handing control of such things as education and infrastructure to the private sector is fueling an increasingly unequal society.

We found five dynamics that are exacerbating America’s historic inequality:   [Read more…]

Props 65 & 67 – Revenge of the Plastic Bag Industrial Complex

by

The bastard sons of the dirty energy industry are trying to pull a fast one on California voters with Props 65 and 67.

In a perfect world, the people who put together Proposition 65, along with forcing us to vote to uphold a legislatively passed ban (Prop 67) on the crappy plastic bags handed out by retail stores, would be tried for crimes against the planet. If found guilty they would be sentenced to picking up cigarette butts on beaches in Libya for a term of no less than two years, wearing tee shirts emblazoned with We Love Imperialism on the back.

What Proposition 65 is all about is revenge. The plastic bag industry and the oil companies who sell them raw materials want to have it both ways. If they’re gonna lose the vote to ban plastic bags, then maybe they can fool voters with a measure promising to do something good for the environment.   [Read more…]

How Much More Extraction of Fossil Fuels Can We Do? Answer: Zero

by

Keep It In the Ground

Bill McKibben of 350.org said recently, “If our goal is to keep the Earth’s temperature from rising more than two degrees Celsius—the upper limit identified by the nations of the world—how much more new digging and drilling can we do? Here’s the answer: zero.”

The goal of keeping earth’s temperature rise below 2 degrees C is already in danger even with the coal mines, oil wells and pipelines currently in operation and assuming there will be no new ones. That means that we shouldn’t be doing any more digging or drilling. It all has to stop – now – if the earth is to survive.   [Read more…]

Save Our Heritage Org. Announces the 2016 Most Endangered List of San Diego’s Historic Places

by

Republished with permission from SOHO

Save Our Heritage Organization’s annual Most Endangered List is a sobering assessment of the state of historic preservation in San Diego County. SOHO is releasing the names of 11 threatened properties this month to coincide with the announcement by the National Trust for Historic Preservation of America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places.

SOHO has nearly a half century record of saving important historic buildings, sites, and landscapes through advocacy, public education, and negotiation, but there are always properties at risk. The Most Endangered List, now in its 29th year, raises public awareness about the valuable historic and cultural resources that are currently threatened with demolition or irreparable alteration by development, deterioration, or neglect.   [Read more…]

Prop 64 – Just Legalize Marijuana, Already

by

California, Arizona, Nevada, Maine, and Massachusetts will be voting on legalizing the recreational use of marijuana this fall.

Some people, including many pro-legalization advocates, think this is about easing another legal intoxicant into society. It’s not. It’s about undoing a prohibition based on ‘scientific racism.’ It’s about a ‘war on drugs’ that served as a gateway towards militarization of law enforcement and eroded the constitutional rights of all Americans.

Legalizing pot won’t undo those things. In case you haven’t noticed, government and society rarely move backward. But legalization does provide a path moving forward that makes a lot more sense than the failed policies proceeding it.   [Read more…]

Medical Cannabis Cooperative Compels El Cajon Police to Return Seized Property

by

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…]

The Second Debate: A Cornered Rat Turns Vicious

by

If you just watched the debate portion of yesterday’s political drama, you missed Donald Trump sitting at a press conference with four women with Clinton issues he’d flown to St. Louis.

Three of the women claimed somebody who wasn’t on the ticket sexually abused them in some manner. One of the women was raped by a man who a young lawyer named Hillary Clinton was assigned to defend in court.

The Trump campaign’s plan, according to today’s Washington Post, was to place the four women in the Clinton family seating area and have them confront the former president on live television at some point in the evening.

The plan was foiled just moments before the debate was supposed to start when Frank J. Fahrenkopf, the debate commission’s co-chairman and a former Republican National Committee chairman, caught wind of the plot and warned the campaign that he’d have security personnel remove the women if this was attempted.   [Read more…]

©2010-2017 SanDiegoFreePress.org

Code is Poetry