San Diego Free Press

Grassroots News & Progressive Views

The Shape of the Human Heart | Readers Write

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By Trevor Barton

As an elementary school teacher and a writer, I often recognize my students as the shape of the human heart.

One of those students is Maria, a 7-year-old second-grader. Her parents fled the after-effects of the brutal civil war in El Salvador and found a new life on the farms and in the fields of South Carolina.

She is like those farms and fields, with dark skin the color of the ground and a garden of a heart that produces love and joy as if they were tomatoes and beans.

I have seen her hold the hand of a frightened kindergartner in the cafeteria lunch line during early morning breakfast and offer her shoulder to a crying friend who scraped her knee on the blacktop during recess. She is a beautiful child.   [Read more…]

The Right-Wing Firestorm Starting With the Smear of ACORN Rages On

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By Peter Dreier

In their recent documentary ACORN and the Firestorm, Reuben Atlas and Sam Pollard not only reveal how the mighty ACORN fell but also show how the attack on ACORN was a dress rehearsal for our current toxic political culture, including the rise of Donald Trump and the alt-right.

Through archival clips and interviews with ACORN staffers, leaders and members, friendly and hostile politicians, and political analysts, the film recounts the group’s history, starting with its founding in Arkansas in 1970 by Wade Rathke, a charismatic and brazen young organizer.

In addition to registering millions of voters, ACORN assisted the working poor to buy homes and avoid foreclosure, challenged banks’ racist and predatory lending practices, stopped companies from spewing cancer-causing pollution in low-income neighborhoods, got local governments to fix up abandoned buildings that had become havens for crime, and fought for fair treatment by employers, landlords, insurance companies, and government. ACORN led the campaign to get Congress to strengthen the anti-redlining Community Reinvestment Act. It organized the victims of Hurricane Katrina to gain a voice in the rebuilding of the Gulf Coast. It spearheaded the living-wage movement in more than 100 cities and helped make the federal Earned Income Tax Credit an effective anti-poverty program.   [Read more…]

Robert Reich: We’re Living a Constitutional Crisis | Video Worth Watching

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I’ve read quite a few ruminations regarding what will precipitate a constitutional crisis during this administration, but as Robert Reich is here to explain, there’s no need to wait. We are in a constitutional crisis.   [Read more…]

Roy Rogers ~ Talking Walls | Video Worth Watching

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All this news lately about taped conversations and secret meetings makes me wonder if the walls could talk, what stories would they tell? Well, we may never hear from the Trump Tower walls, but here’s some Talking Walls from slide guitarist Roy Rogers that’ll do just nicely.   [Read more…]

Pacuprá – Body Percussion | Video Worth Watching

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Time for some industrial strength body percussion. Here’s Grupo Pacuprá, the youth ensemble of the Colombian group Cantoalegre.   [Read more…]

Rep. Duncan Hunter’s Looking Mighty Nervous | Progressive Activist Calendar July 27 – August 6, 2018

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Congresscritter Duncan Hunter certainly looks and acts like a man in legal trouble. An ongoing Justice Department investigation into questionable campaign spending practices has been threatening to derail the East County Republican for over a year.

On Thursday, Rep. Hunter took to the floor to denounce the Justice Department, starting off with “…imagine living in a country where the federal government decides whether you’re jailed or set free based on your politics.”

He went on to support the now-dead bill to impeach Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, saying the DOJ is“corrupt, answers to no one and uses the law to corrupt countless others…” Maybe he was just in a hurry to join the gang for cocktails. Maybe not. It’s weird how all these Republicans are up in arms over the actions of an agency when they control all three branches of government.     [Read more…]

As Medicare and Medicaid Turn Fifty Three, Republicans Plan to Privatize One and Gut the Other

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By Martha Burk / Other Words

July 30 marks a very important anniversary in our modern political history.

Fifty-three years ago in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed Medicare and Medicaid into law, creating two programs that would disproportionately improve the lives of older and low-income Americans — especially women.

Fast-forward to 2018, and both programs are very much under siege. Nowhere is the struggle starker than in the House Republican budget — titled “A Brighter American Future” — now on Capitol Hill.   [Read more…]

Arrival | Geo-Poetic Spaces

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The last seat
on the final train

Sitting behind
a window

The world moving frame by frame
home
to me   [Read more…]

The Spy Who Loved the NRA | Video Worth Watching

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Full Frontal’s Samantha Bee highlights the peculiar relationship between an alleged Russian spy and the NRA. She also pointedly notes that the NRA, which typically blasts back at the slightest intimation of criticism, has been markedly silent on this issue: no comments since the news broke on July 17th with the indictment of Maria Butina by the Justice Department. Hmmm.   [Read more…]

Immigrant Family Reunification Falls Way Short

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It’s been nine weeks since U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw gave the government a deadline for reuniting the more than 2,500 children who were taken from parents apprehended while crossing the border.

This isn’t over. What passes for compliance in the eyes of the court and the chattering class on cable news doesn’t match reality for hundreds of parents and children.

As the deadline came and went dozens of children and their parents engaged in non-violent civil disobedience at the U.S. Capitol proclaiming I AM A CHILD. They sang lullabies and drew pictures of their families to remind elected leaders that all children are human beings who belong with their families.

  [Read more…]

Free at Last! Free at Last! (A Dad’s Reflections of a Life That Was Enough)

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Guy Ernest McCray, my oldest son,
has passed away
and needless to say
that saddens me in
the deepest way.

Yet, at the same time,
knowing the grind
he had in life,
I find myself whispering to the wind
that he is now:
“Free at Last! Free at Last!”

  [Read more…]

Thoughts and Prayers for Trump’s Hollywood Star

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Oh dear. Increasingly but mystifyingly, it seems some people are unhappy with their “president.” On Wednesday, a group of immigration protesters from Rise and Resist closed down 5th Ave. in front of Trump Tower, chanting “If you take the kids, we take the streets.” A number of them were arrested in the first of evidently more planned acts of civil disobedience to protest the Trump regime’s failure to reunite thousands of immigrant families in the wake of their grotesque child kidnappings. And hours earlier, at around 3 a.m., a lone but resolute patriot took a pick-axe to Trump’s long-dubious, frequently vandalized star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, obliterating it once and for all.

Witnesses said a man walked up to the star with a guitar case, pulled out the pick-axe, and had at it. He was evidently far more effective than James Otis, who in 2016 also took a shot at it, getting three years probation, community service and a fine for his act of patriotism; the star, for which Trump paid $30,000, has also been defaced with obscenities, dog poop and a mini-wall to keep out Mexican rapists and CNN reporters.   [Read more…]

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