Tag: tobacco

SF DA Chesa Boudin with Keker Van Nest & Peters, LLP and Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence puts a bite in the death-for-profit ghost gun industry.

In the documentary “Farming a Legacy,” I learned that since the Emancipation Proclamation, one of the biggest fights that Blacks have had in this country was and is to own and retain farmland. In the 1920s, there were 1,000,000 Black owned farms in the United States. By 2013, that number had dropped to 18,000. “Farming a Legacy” is a majestic cinematic look at the day to day life and family history of a third generation farmer named Dale Jones.

Our American economy was built on the backs of Black slaves who were initially brought to America to work in the cotton, tobacco and sugar cane fields. America’s dilemma today is what to do with 40 million Black American descendants of those slaves who were shipped, as commodities, to American shores 400 years ago for their economic value yet whose heirs today are deemed of no value to America’s economic mission.

The pastor said he doubted the same people who were raging on the other end of West Florissant had burned his church. Instead, he said, he suspected white supremacists who wanted to punish him for his support of the Brown family, who had just been baptized there.

Tobacco-related diseases kill more Blacks than AIDS, violence and other non-tobacco related cancers combined. Over 160,000 African Americans will be diagnosed with cancer in this year alone. Whether it is from breast, prostate or lung cancer, The African American Tobacco Control Leadership Council urges all Californians to Vote Yes on 29!

The wealthy Tiburon owner of Oakland’s low-income residential Menlo Hotel has been arrested and is facing 10 years in prison on suspicion of hiring someone to burn down the hotel, according to officials with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

On a recent visit we learned that Cuba has been raising its fruits and vegetables organically for more than 15 years, using worm and vegetable compost and integrated and natural pest management to raise crops for its people. In the process they have decentralized agricultural production, tripled farmers’ average income, built stronger communities and shown the way to living well after the end of cheap oil.

The racist assault on United States President Barak Obama by the Honduran military coup government, installed on June 28, 2009, was greeted by the U.S. media with what John Pilger called “contrived silence, a censorship by omission.” (Amy Goodman, Democracy Now, 7/6/09) The poisonous racist attack on the first Black U.S. president was based on racist preconceptions and was carried out by interim Honduran Foreign Minister Enrique Ortez Colindres on June 29, the day after the democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya was arrested and sent into exile in his pajamas.