Activists Host "Radio Summer" in San Diego August 29 (tags)
Members of San Diego's activist community gathered together at the Media Arts Center in North Park on August 29 to hear about how low-power FM (LPFM) radio can create new opportunities for progressive media and break the Right-wing stranglehold on the local airwaves. The attendees heard a presentation via Skype from Philadelphia-based Ian Smith of the Prometheus Radio Project, which was instrumental in lobbying Congress and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for the LPFM opportunity in the first place, and also heard from representatives of the World Beat Center, Media Rights Coalition and Activist San Diego.
“A Sea Change”: Film Shows What CO2 Is Doing to the Oceans (tags)
Barbara Ettinger’s film “A Sea Change,” shown at the First Unitarian-Universalist Church in San Diego August 5, shows the other side of the climate change issue: what all that carbon dioxide is doing to the oceans, which absorb much of it after fossil-fuel burning and other human activities release it into the atmosphere. It turns into carbonic acid, which alters the pH of the sea and threatens plankton, coral and other small marine life crucially important to the life cycles of fish and marine mammals. “Imagine a world without fish,” says the publicity material for the film, which was followed at this screening by a discussion with two graduate students from Scripps Institute of Oceanography who expressed their frustration at the political opposition to taking climate change seriously.
Congressmember Davis Speaks at Orderly Town-Hall Meeting (tags)
Elsewhere in the country Democratic Congressmembers are being heckled and sometimes driven off the stage when they try to hold town-hall meetings to explain the health-care reform bill the House is currently debating. Not in San Diego August 11, where Congressmember Susan Davis was able to hold a meeting in peace and discuss the issue in a polite, civil manner. This was largely due to the strategy of the sponsoring organization, the Hillcrest Town Council, which admitted their own members and Hillcrest residents first -- thereby assuring Davis a mostly liberal audience that wouldn't try to disrupt her meeting.
Does California Need a Constitutional Convention? (tags)
Does California need a constitutional convention? The question is being raised by a number of organizations, including the Bay Area Council — a group of business leaders based in the San Francisco Bay Area — and the California chapters of the League of Women Voters, Common Cause and the Mexican-American Political Association, all of whom sent representatives to an August 1 meeting that attracted an overflow crowd to the Mission Valley library. The push for a convention is driven largely by the state's inability to govern itself effectively, hamstrung by the current constitution's 2/3 vote requirement to pass a budget or raise taxes, Proposition 13, legislative term limits, legislative "safe seats" and initiatives that have put all but 7 percent of the budget outside the control of the political process.
It’s More than Nuclear Issues, Native Americans Tell Activists (tags)
The event at the First Unitarian-Universalist Church in San Diego August 29 was billed as a program about Native American activists fighting against nuclear testing and waste disposal in Nevada, but it turned out to be considerably broader than that. Speakers Ian Zabarte, secretary of state of the Shoshone nation, and professor Steven T. Newcomb gave their audience a history lesson about the U.S. government's cavalier attitude towards its treaties with Indian nations and the Christian-supremacist ideology that underlies it.