San Diego Free Press

Grassroots News & Progressive Views

Battling the Death Penalty with James Baldwin

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If you’re thirsting to understand our increasingly cold, jaundiced, at times carcinogenic society, James Baldwin’s singular insight about America and his dizzying, divine command of the English language are as refreshing as an icy elixir on the hottest day in hell.

Moreover, for death penalty abolitionists, Baldwin’s writing is particularly poignant in the wake of:

  1. The Supreme Court’s recent refusal to reconsider the constitutionality of the death penalty, and, “wipe the stain of capital punishment clean” (In the aftermath, Reuter’s Andrew Chung soberly observed that “[t]he Supreme Court has not seriously debated the constitutionality of the death penalty since the 1970s”);
  2. The Trump administration’s doubling down on a harebrained, ass-backward plan to put drug dealers to death;

    3.   [Read more…]

La Mesa City Council Adopts Strong Climate Action Plan

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SD350 Volunteers learn what grassroots organizing can accomplish

By Angela Deegan / SanDiego350

On March 13, the City Council of La Mesa unanimously adopted a strong Climate Action Plan (CAP), with a goal of 100 percent clean energy. This victory came after three years of persistent advocacy and organizing efforts by SanDiego350 La Mesa volunteers and allied organizations.

The SanDiego350 La Mesa CAP campaign began with our attendance at a meeting of the Environmental Sustainability Commission in early 2015. This was where the first draft of the Plan was released. Along with Climate Action Campaign, we identified numerous deficiencies in the Plan — it lacked a goal of 100 percent clean energy and didn’t identify Community Choice Energy (CCE) as a strategy. In addition, the time frame of 2020 was too short, too many measures were identified as voluntary, and, for the most part, the plan was not enforceable.   [Read more…]

Eleven year-old student Naomi Wadler speaks at March For Our Lives Rally | Video Worth Watching

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Eleven year-old student Naomi Wadler speaks at March For Our Lives Rally. “I’m here today to honor the words of Toni Morrison: ‘If there’s a book that you want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, you must be the one to write it.’ ”   [Read more…]

Looking Back at the Week: March 18-24

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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: the March for Our Lives, Women’s Herstory Month, Kasparian’s D4 debacle, Cambridge Analytica, ending the NRA, American war culture, and lots of other grassroots news & progressive views from San Diego’s feisty, all volunteer, slightly funky, community news site.   [Read more…]

D.C. choir sings with Jennifer Hudson, ‘The Times They Are A Changin’ at March For Our Lives Rally | Video Worth Watching

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Jennifer Hudson, accompanied by the D.C. Choir, shapes a new vision of Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A Changin’.

And sometimes silence speaks louder than words. Emma Gonzalez uses a calculated silence to make a powerful statement in her address to the March For Our Lives assembly.   [Read more…]

Marching for Our Lives in San Diego & Other Places | Photo Gallery

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Initial estimates say 10,000 people participated in the March for Our Lives rally at the County Administration Building on the waterfront in San Diego on Saturday morning. Locally, there were also marches in Escondido, Encinitas, Carlsbad, and Temecula.

There were over 830 March for Our Lives events on six continents. In Washington, DC, 800,000 people marched. In New York City, 175,000 people marched. Twenty thousand people took to the streets in Boston.

Today’s post is mostly pictures from around the world, with a few snippets from news coverage I saw.   [Read more…]

Music to Inspire a March For Our Lives Movement | Video Worth Watching

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Here’s some insight into why young people are massing today in Washington, D.C. as well as 835 other locations around the U.S. The survivors of the Parkland, Florida, Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School: “We’re tired of hearing that we’re too young to ever make a change.” … “We’re not gonna let you win. We’re putting up a fight.” … “Stand up for one another and we’ll never give up the fight.”

And they are not marching alone. There will be battle-tested veterans marching with them.   [Read more…]

After the March for Our Lives, What Will You Do? Progressive Activist Calendar March 23-April 2, 2018

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With rallies in over 830 cities worldwide, a handful of survivors of the Valentines Day shootings in Parkland Florida will have inspired one of the single largest expressions of political protest in history. The March for Our Lives can’t end when the day’s events have concluded.

If there ever was a time when assuming everything will be okay in the long run was a bad idea, this is it. There’s an unhinged man-child of privilege in the White House who is seemingly hell-bent on undermining the ideals most people believe this country was founded on. All forms of bigotry, be they racist, misogynist, or religious intolerance, are now being normalized. History clearly shows the next step on this path will be the state using its power to abet or conduct violent acts against those considered the ‘other.’

If you have not registered to vote, do so now. Everything you need to know, including how to register online is to be found on this page at the Women’s March San Diego site. Hopefully, someday they’ll do me the favor of listing this calendar in their Activist Resources.

A revolutionary way to learn about local politics: don’t miss the unique forum on the first Sunday in April, hosted by Flip the 49tth activists.   [Read more…]

Geo-Poetic Spaces: Final Account

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The dead don’t lie
they aren’t sleeping
never passed away
crossed over
departed
nor do they rest in peace   [Read more…]

NRA, Your Time Is Running Out | Video Worth Watching

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Heading into the weekend and this Saturday’s March For Our Lives, here’s a glimpse of how the this generation is turning the tables on the NRA. They’re unabashedly able to take the NRA’s rhetoric (as delivered by one of it’s more histrionic spokespersons) and turn it back on itself. No fear!   [Read more…]

Ending the NRA’s Reign of Terror in the US

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As we head into the March for Our Lives weekend, a look at the organization largely responsible for our glut of guns is in order. When you drill down into the issues surrounding gun violence in the U.S., it’s impossible to escape the conclusion we would not be having this debate if it were not for the National Rifle Association.

It’s my contention people of our country are being held hostage by a small group of people financed by arms manufacturers.

Their approach to keeping us interned involves generating an ‘intense state of fear,’ which just happens to be the definition of terror in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. Terrorism is therefore described as the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion.   [Read more…]

ACLU: Greyhound Must Stop Giving Border Patrol Permission to Conduct Bus Raids

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Greyhound buses, once a symbol of travel on America’s vast highways, have become rolling traps where U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents routinely board to unlawfully interrogate, detain and arrest passengers.

The agents, with the agreement of Greyhound, stage surprise boardings without warrants to question riders about their citizenship and travel plans. In many cases, all too reminiscent of police states, the agents demand to see a passenger’s “documents.”

The warrantless raids, which saw a rapid increase in the past year, are not only a blatant disregard of passengers’ constitutional rights, they are also clearly driven by racial profiling.   [Read more…]

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