San Diego Free Press

Grassroots News & Progressive Views

Decertification of Barrio Logan Planning Group Election a Civil Rights Issue, Say Activists

by

From the OB Rag

The Peninsula planning board is not the only community planning panel in the city that’s having conflicts. Over in Barrio Logan, there’s some really funky stuff going on these days.

Consider this: in the middle of counting ballots for the most recent annual election to the Barrio Logan Planning Committee held on March 18th – all counting stopped.

Why?

If you asked the current leaders of the planning group, they would’ve said there needed to be another election – a re-election – because activists with the Environmental Health Coalition (EHC) were handing out election fliers too close to the voting.   [Read more…]

Art Students Use Light to Turn Trump’s Border Prototypes Into Art | Video Worth Watching

by

This Voice of San Diego video by Adriana Heldiz features Southwestern College professor Perry Vasquez introducing us to highlights of an art project that incorporates the controversial border wall prototypes near the U.S.-Mexico border at Otay Mesa. The project was a collaboration among Vasquez’ students and two other local artists: Jill Holslin and Andrew Sturm.

Jill Holslin is also an occasional contributor to the San Diego Free Press and Perry Vasquez is the artist and illustrator for San Diego Free Press columnist Jim Miller’s latest publication: Last Days in Ocean Beach (City Works Press, 2018).   [Read more…]

Anti-Criminal Justice Reform Group Names San Diego’s Summer Stephan as DA of the Year

by

San Diego’s interim District Attorney Summer Stephan has received an award from Crime Victims United as their Southern California District Attorney of the Year on Monday.

Local media coverage at CBS8, the Times of San Diego, and KUSI consisted of lightly edited versions of the press release issued by the public relations staff at the District Attorney’s office.

Not noted in the local coverage of Stephan’s award was the campaign being led by the awarding group to place a measure on the ballot rolling back portions of criminal justice reforms enacted by the legislature and California voters in recent years.   [Read more…]

The Homeless Hoarder’s Hunger Book | National Poetry Month

by

By Lyn Lloyd-Smith

The Homeless Hoarder’s Hunger Book

Into the coffee shops of idle eyes
She hikes her threads of tat-torn cloth
And residue of mildew breath.
She deftly drags a bulging pram,
Brimming with her rubbish child
Of cradled, cherished, bloated bags,
And crumpled faces off the road,
Her precious offspring
From the moon-blown streets.
  [Read more…]

Melissa Lozada-Oliva – ‘My Spanish’ | Video Worth Watching

by

Continuing the National Poetry Month theme, from the 2015 Women of the World Poetry Slam, here’s Melissa Lozada-Oliva’s “My Spanish”.   [Read more…]

San Diego Politics in 2018: A Whiff of Racism, the Odor of Misogyny, the Stench of Entitlement

by

Electoral contests in San Diego County government are coming into the final stretch. Mail-in voting is just a month away. A politics column and editorial board interviews at the Union-Tribune, along with the release of depositions from the now-settled lawsuits against labor leader Mickey Kasparian, have all contributed knowledge to what I’ll share today.

First up: a column by Michael Smolens on the race for District Attorney. He describes the contest as insider/reformer (Summer Stephan) versus outsider/advocate (Geneviéve Jones-Wright.

Smollens accurately describes Jone-Wright’s candidacy as the local manifestation of a national movement seeking to address the race and class bias of U.S. criminal justice system and notes the differences in style between the candidates.   [Read more…]

Shedding Light on Marshall Tuck’s Shady Money Trail

by

Recently, when the San Francisco Chronicle endorsed Marshall Tuck for Superintendent of Public Instruction, they did so because, according to their editorial board, he has “the skills and vision to bring about needed change” and would stand up to “the status quo” (read: teachers’ unions).  

While it has become quite common for mainstream corporate media outlets to blindly parrot the rhetoric of corporate education reformers, in this case, it is an exercise in doublethink of Trumpian proportions.  Far from being a populist outsider fighting the establishment, Tuck is the pure product of the billionaire class.

A few weeks back, I wrote about how Tuck’s bid for Superintendent of Public Instruction should not be allowed to slide under the radar because his effort to defeat his opponent, stalwart progressive Assemblyman Tony Thurmond, was a case study of the ways right-wing money is trying to infiltrate Democratic politics.  More specifically, I noted that “it’s not just the usual California members of the billionaire boys club that are backing Tuck this time.  

Updated 2018-10-09   [Read more…]

The Cases Against UFCW Local 135’s Mickey Kasparian: The Depositions

by

On December 9, 2016 Sandy Naranjo was unjustly fired by UFCW Local 135 President Mickey Kasparian and subsequently filed a lawsuit. That firing and lawsuit lead to a chain of events that will soon culminate in the end of Kasparian’s Machiavellian grasp on San Diego’s progressive body politic.

Kasparian settled five civil cases against him. Yet, after all of this, there are still many within the local Democratic Party and a dwindling few within labor that still support him.

Below you will find all of the depositions, in chronological order, that have been made public. Including ones from Kasparian himself, Richard Barrera, Lori Kern, Sarah Saez, and Melody Godinez. Read them for yourself and judge whether or not Kasparian is a detriment to women, labor, and progressive politics in San Diego.   [Read more…]

Fifteen Years Later: Remembering the Invasion Of Baghdad | Readers Write

by

By Kilian Colin

On April 9, 2003, I woke up to the sounds of bombs.

My bed was shaking and my sister, who was sleeping in the bed next to me, was awake crying and shaking in her bed. It was like an earthquake with very scary sounds. Shards of glass from the windows covered my bed. My parents ran into the room. My father said let’s go downstairs.

We lived in a 1-bedroom apartment on the second floor. We went downstairs and knocked on our neighbor’s door. He neighbor opened the door and let us inside his apartment without saying a word. He was clad only in underwear and held a copy of Quran in his hand. His name was Abo-Allaa.   [Read more…]

It Is My Fault | National Poetry Month

by

San Diego Free Press continues its National Poetry Month coverage with the poem Stan Levin, a local activist with Veterans for Peace.

I was not a good kid,
not at home
not at school.
Once I slapped my first grade teacher
and she slapped me back.
I did not like school
and I did not like kids
who liked school
I’m not smart.
I did not like smart kids
Two high schools threw me out
I couldn’t get a good job.
As soon as I could
I left school
I left home
I left the neighborhood

and everything I was mad at.   [Read more…]

Libros – Grupo Pacuprá | Video Worth Watching

by

Sometimes poetry is found in books. Sometimes music is found in poetry. Can it be that sometimes poetry is found in books as music? Here is the Columbian percussion group Grupo Pacuprá performing their work Libros.   [Read more…]

Looking Back at the Week: April 1-7

by

This week’s edition of Looking Back at the Week contains articles, commentaries, columns, and other work by San Diego Free Press regulars, irregulars, columnists, cartoonists, at-large contributors, and locally and nationally sourced writers on National Poetry Month, Trump’s fraudulent voting fraud tales, the 16 trying to replace Issa, Weber’s police accountability bill, former UFCW employees speaking out against Kasparian, and lots of other grassroots news & progressive views from San Diego’s feisty, all volunteer, slightly funky, community news site.   [Read more…]

©2010-2017 SanDiegoFreePress.org

Code is Poetry