San Diego Free Press

Grassroots News & Progressive Views

On Love and Meritocracy – Part 1

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We Don’t Need Another Gadget

What the world needs now is love… so wrote Hal David in 1965 with music by Burt Bacharach. It was true then and even truer now. We don’t need another gadget, we don’t need another smartphone, we don’t need another IPO which only increases the economic divide between the 1% and the 99%.

Economic progress has utterly failed us. It won’t prevent the world going up in flames and/or being flooded out due to global warming. It hasn’t prevented war and violence crowding out every other story on the evening news and getting worse by the day.   [Read more…]

San Diego City Council Votes on Plastic Bag Ban

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By Roger Kube and Michael Torti / Surfrider Foundation

On Tuesday, July 19th the San Diego City Council voted and passed the Single-Use Carryout Bag Reduction Ordinance, or “bag ban.” San Diego now becomes the 150th jurisdiction in the state of California to be covered by a ban.

In the City of San Diego, 700 million plastic carryout bags are distributed each year and less than 3% are recycled. This ordinance will remove 665 million plastic carryout bags from distribution and San Diego will take a huge step in reducing plastic pollution at its source and ultimately protecting our ocean and beaches.   [Read more…]

Hating on Hillary & Loathing In Cleveland

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Also: 7% Plagiarism is Okay

I was impressed by the first day of the 2016 GOP Convention. It had everything you could want from a collection of shysters and more.

America is a dangerous place, we learned, and so is the world. It’s all Hillary Clinton’s fault. The Democratic nominee for president belongs, if you listened to the speakers and read the tee shirts being hawked outside, in jail.

The last gasp of dissent within the Republican party was crushed as Trump supporters chanted “USA! USA!” as the microphones to suspect delegations were turned off.   [Read more…]

It’s Not Just Dog Owners Who Want to Keep Fiesta Island ‘Wild’

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Perhaps you’ve been too busy with summer to notice, but there’s been a ‘quiet’ debate going on recently in certain circles – including the op-ed pages of the San Diego Union-Tribune – over the future of Fiesta Island.

Fiesta Island – you know that flat and sandy piece of land that juts out into Mission Bay – it’s not really an island as it’s connected with the rest of San Diego by a narrow land bridge with an asphalt road – where people bike, do day-camps on the sand, water or jet-ski, or take their horses, have fires in the firepits, – oh, and who take their dogs to the great off-leash area on the Island.

The land of Island Fiesta itself is what’s left from all the sludge dredged up during the 1950’s development of Mission Bay Park.   [Read more…]

Tri-City’s Fired CEO Cleared Again of Wrongdoing

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When Tri-City Medical Center fired Larry Anderson three years ago, they wanted to save the $650,000 in severance pay his contract required if they fired him without cause.

They chose to rely on an anonymous telephone call, followed by a secret internal investigation conducted by hospital attorneys, to come up with a list of fourteen reasons to fire him for cause. He was accused of one or more of the following offenses: committing a felony, an illegal act involving moral turpitude, a willful and dishonest act, or a breach of duties and obligations.

Without telling him in advance what the charges were, the hospital offered Anderson thirty minutes to defend himself at a hastily arranged board meeting. When he refused to attend the board voted to fire him.   [Read more…]

2016 Political Conventions: The End of the World As We Know It (Or Not)

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The news over the next four days will obsessively focus on the quadrennial Republican convention in Cleveland, Ohio.

News Flash: Donald Trump will be the nominee. Fear of the ‘other’ will be the main message, abetted by a compliant media overly concerned about equivalence. The basic premises upon which GOP Truths are built upon will be largely unchallenged.

News Flash #2: There is a Democratic convention next week. Hillary Clinton will be the nominee. Lots of Very Serious folks will make promises about inclusiveness and progress. The underlying reasons for the necessity of those promises will be ignored, abetted by a compliant media overly concerned about equivalence.   [Read more…]

Photo Gallery: Pride 2016 San Diego

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An estimated 100,000+ people showed for the 42nd Annual LGBT Pride Parade on Saturday, July 16.

The weather was perfect. The crowd was loud and proud, with an undercurrent of poignancy due to memories of the Pulse nightclub attack on June 12, where 49 people lost their lives to a gunman. People used the word Orlando in many ways throughout the event, symbolizing solidarity, love, and courage.

Photographer Haley Joy Porter was there and took these photos.   [Read more…]

Photo Gallery: #Alton #Philando Vigil & March

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Several hundred people rallied in City Heights on Friday night, marching to protest the fatal police shootings of Alton Streling in Lousianna on July 5 and Philando Castile in Minnesota on July 6.

There were no reports of arrests or violence during the protest, which included briefly blocking traffic on southbound Interstate 15.

  [Read more…]

2016 Summer Chronicle 5: The Spaces We Live In

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Where we live is who we are. Surely, the country, state, city, and neighborhoods we occupy profoundly shape us, but does not the house craft our being in the most intimate of ways?

Gaston Bachelard observes in The Poetics of Space, “For our house is our corner of the world. As has often been said, it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word.”

Hence, the kind of space we choose to live in has a particularly profound impact on our identity. Bachelard again notes, “Thus the dream house must possess every virtue. However spacious, it must also be a cottage, a dove-cote, a nest, a chrysalis. Intimacy needs the heart of a nest.”   [Read more…]

Looking Back at the Week: July 10-16

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This week’s edition of Looking Back at the Week features articles, commentaries, columns, and other work by San Diego Free Press regulars, irregulars, columnists, at-large contributors, and sourced writers on: protest and racism, Dems kind of uniting, the City Attorney being a jerk, B.A.STA!, gun sales rising, the new pedestrian crossing at the San Ysidro port of entry, the LeGerrette’s, the Convadium, turf wars at school, BLM, bomba founders moving away, and lots of other inspiring, grassroots news & progressive views from San Diego’s friendly, neighborhood, all volunteer, slightly funky, community news site.
  [Read more…]

Carlos and Linda LeGerrette: Abiding Commitment to Community Service

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Part II

In Part I the activist path of Linda and Carlos LeGerrette connected them with United Farm Worker efforts in Keene California in the early 70s. Part II provides more details about their work with César Chávez and the UFW, how the couple faced personal crises and their abiding commitment to community service here in San Diego.

César Chávez approached Carlos and Linda about going to La Paz, where he had moved the United Farm Workers’ headquarters in 1971 from Delano. “On 187 acres in the small Tehachapi mountain town of Keene, Chávez began building a community of fellow union members and volunteers who worked with him full time for social justice.”

La Paz was housed in a former tuberculosis sanatorium. Linda and Carlos’ room was in what had been the kitchen.   [Read more…]

Geo-Poetic Spaces: Angry White Man In My Mirror

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Angry white men
make my pale skin crawl
taking ugly mug shots
under shrouds
inciting walls
burning their black savior’s cross   [Read more…]

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