San Diego Free Press

Grassroots News & Progressive Views

Community Protests Ignited By Building in Point Loma

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Point Loma Leaders Meet with Mayor’s Staff

By Don Sevrens / OB Rag

The City has come up with a proposed solution to strengthen and protect the 30-foot height limit on the Point Loma side of the peninsula, community representatives said Thursday, September 1st, after the second Mayor’s meeting on the issue.

Waves of community protest were ignited by the construction of four-story buildings at Emerson and Evergreen, capped by a town hall meeting attended by 250 persons.

Following the town hall, several community advocates attended the first Mayor’s meeting on the issue at City Hall at the invitation of Mayor Faulconer.   [Read more…]

Sanchez’ Long Shot Chance for Victory in US Senate Race

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The optics of Democratic Senatorial candidate Loretta Sanchez touring with Republican Congressman Darrell Issa recently can be difficult to understand until you realize they actually need each other at this point.

The well is dry for Sanchez when it comes to pumping up support from her party. And Issa needs to convince voters in his district that he’s less of an ogre than his choice for president, Donald Trump.

Such is the state of politics on the Left Coast these days. The woman who unseated Rep. Bob Dornan–who spent 18 years being the enfant terible of the Congress–is now tying her fate to the man who many accuse of leading witchhunts for the past eight years.   [Read more…]

Nuclear Shutdown News – August 2016

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By Michael Steinberg / Black Rain Press

US nuclear industry reaches a new low with resale of decrepit nuke plant already scheduled to permanently shut down next year.

On July 12, Syracuse.com in upstate New York announced, “Entergy to sell FitzPatrick to Exelon in mid-August.”

The FitzPatrick nuclear plant is located in Lake Ontario near the Canadian border. It started up in late 1974, not long after Richard Nixon’s reign over the White House permanently shut down. This means the nuke plant’s one reactor has been cranking away for almost 42 years, releasing radiation into the air and water in the Great Lakes region all the while.

US nuclear reactors were designed to operate only 40 years.   [Read more…]

Anti-Bobism Will Be The Death of this Country

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What’s wrong with Bob?

It’s a question I ask myself almost every day, usually after reading the news.

For the last 100 years* it’s been the third most popular name in America (if you’re including Robert), yet we’ve had no President Bobs. Not one.

We’ve had six James’s (the most popular name in the U.S.) and five Johns (the second most popular) elected president even though there’ve only been 50, 717 more Johns than Roberts born in this country over those 100 years. Bobs are solidly in third place in this country but we haven’t sent a single Bob to the White House.   [Read more…]

Happy Labor Day, California Style

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Last year my Labor Day column, “Happy Labor Day?: The Jury is Out,” began by starkly pondering the potentially devastating effects a bad Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association ruling at the Supreme Court might have had not just on public sector unions but on the labor movement as a whole. Later, in the same column, I looked more hopefully at the potential for organizing contingent workers, like those involved in the Fight for $15 movement.

The twelve months that followed that column brought good news for labor on multiple fronts. First, with the long, strange journey of the Friedrichs case that came to the Supreme Court with a good chance of passing before everything was turned upside down by Justice Scalia’s death, a 4-4 split decision that was a victory for unions, and finally the Court’s refusal to rehear the case.   [Read more…]

Dakota Access Pipeline Company Attacks Protesters With Dogs and Mace

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By Nadi Prupis / Common Dreams

The ongoing Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) protests were hit with violence on Saturday, as private security forces reportedly hired by the pipeline builders descended on the Native American activists with pepper spray and dogs that bit and threatened the protesters.

Democracy Now!, which was on the ground at the time, posted several photographs and video of the attack   [Read more…]

Black Folks Have Long Memories, Mr. Trump

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By Denise Oliver Velez / Daily Kos

Today, let’s remember the courage of Elizabeth Eckford. While Donald Trump plays games pretending to court black voters (who don’t support him, and almost unanimously loathe and reject him) in order to convince some white folks that he “isn’t so bad,” let’s remind him—and anyone who buys his bullshit—that we black folks have long memories.

The screaming, spittle-flecked people in the crowds drawn to him like flies on shit, his supporters waving confederate flags, shouting racial epithets, and grinning proudly at their own bigoted cleverness evoke a racial déjà vu that some of us participated in, or remember witnessing firsthand on the news, or heard stories about from older kinfolks. We saw Eckford brave an angry crowd alone, separated from the other members of the group who would come to be known as the “Little Rock Nine.” The photograph of a lone Eckford, captured by young journalist Will Counts, will forever remain in my memory and in the minds and souls of all who have seen it.   [Read more…]

Local Native Community Rallies Against Dakota Access Pipeline

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Water is Life, You Can’t Drink Oil

On Sunday, August 28 Native people and their allies from throughout San Diego County came together in Horton Plaza Park to rally against the Dakota Access Pipeline. The Standing Rock Sioux reservation, lead by Chairman Dave Archambault, has made a call to all Native Americans and supporters to nonviolently protest the creation of the pipeline which would cross the Missouri River potentially harming this great, natural source of water.   [Read more…]

Looking Back at the Week: Aug 28-Sept 3

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This week’s edition of Looking Back at the Week features articles, commentaries, columns, toons, and other work by San Diego Free Press regulars, irregulars, columnists, at-large contributors, and sourced writers on: SB 32, Trump trying to go black, the upcoming propositions, taco trucks on every corner, love in the anthropocene, Colin Kaepernick, drugs, the plastic bag battle, free classes in SD, and lots of other grassroots news & progressive views from San Diego’s friendly, neighborhood, all volunteer, slightly funky, community news site.   [Read more…]

Geo-Poetic Spaces: Manzanar

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10.000 blossoms
36 blocks plucked and blown
Into Sierra’s

Cement foundations
Hold up machine gunned peaks
Snowy kimonos   [Read more…]

The Battle Against Plastic Bags in California; A Brief History

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By Mitch Silverstein

Of the 17 measures on this November’s ballot, two in particular deal specifically with California’s statewide plastic bag ban.

Prop 67 presents a fairly straightforward referendum; Prop 65, on the other hand, is a deceitful measure designed specifically to trick us. As the outcome of these measures will determine if California enacts the nation’s first statewide single-use plastic bag ban, let’s take a brief look at how we got here.

San Francisco passed the first single-use plastic bag ban in 2007; other bay area and coastal cities quickly followed suit. With these bans came wide media exposure, and several studies showed significant reductions in plastic waste in cities that adopted them.   [Read more…]

Hillary’s Got Hot Sauce for a Taco Truck on Every Corner

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A self-loathing Hispanic surrogate for Donald Trump took to the airwaves yesterday to warn about “Taco Trucks on Every Corner” unless immigration was stopped.

Marco Gutierrez, the founder of Latinos for Trump went on MSNBC yesterday and said the following:

“My culture is a very dominant culture. And it is imposing, and it is causing problems. If you don’t do something about it you are going to have taco trucks on every corner.”

Given that taco trucks a much higher approval rating than just about any politician running for office, the internet has gone nuts.     [Read more…]

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