Occupy Oakland

Heading East: The photographer

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This week’s Guardian takes a look at San Francisco versus Oakland — and asks whether the big city may have lost its caché to the East Bay

caitlin@sfbg.com

Sasha Kelley grew up in the East Bay. The 22-year old photographer moved to San Francisco for the love of art — but she moved back East for the same reason.

“I was expecting [SF] to be this free-loving, accepting, encouraging place where anything can happen and everything would be welcomed.” Kelley told the Guardian through a series of phone and email interviews. “But it’s a place that is already established, the different art scenes have been formed and branded. Unless you are fortunate enough to have your own space, you are almost forced to fall into line with the given formula.”

That wasn’t the kind of artistic guidelines Kelley was looking for when she moved to the Tenderloin to study at the Academy of Art. While in San Francisco, she started C Proof (c-proof.org), a site she uses to explore African American life.

But she was having trouble finding the black arts community in the city. Besides MoAD, “the big exception,” as she put it, “the voice of the black artist just wasn’t there.”

And the call of home was a BART ride away. After three years in SF, Kelley decided to move away from the cramped studio she shared with two other people to Oakland in the summer of 2011.

“Right now in Oakland there is a little more wiggle room for experimentation,” she said. “There is still a lot of room to grow, to hold space, and establish new norms.”

One day, attending a general assembly meeting of Occupy Oakland, she met artist Githinji Mbire, who was opening up Omiiroo, a community gallery just one block from the 12th Street BART station (400 14th St., Oakl.) Kelley spent eight hours there the first time she visited.

“We just talked about art,” Kelley said. “A vision of a community space where people could just be and where it’s not about the formal aspects of it, it’s just really the work and reaching out to people.”

Now, Kelley hosts Sunday dinners at Omiiroo to bring together local artists. It’s become a drop-in creative space where Mbire crafts his multimedia maps of Africa. Local vegan food activist Bryant Terry stops by to sell his tea and talk to passers-by during the neighborhood’s thriving monthly Art Murmur. Kelley thinks such a space is possible in SF, but it would depend on finding an investor. “It’s a lot easier to sustain yourself in the East Bay,” she said.

Who bombed Judi Bari?

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THE GREEN ISSUE Darryl Cherney is determined. “I have a mission in life,” he says. “And that is to find out who bombed Judi Bari.” This week, a judge may have gotten him closer to that goal, ordering evidence in the case be sent to a lab for forensic testing.

Cherney was in the car with Bari, a fellow environmental activist from Earth First, when a pipe bomb wrapped with nails exploded, maiming Bari and leaving Cherney with serious injuries.

It was 1990, and the two were in Oakland on their way to speak about the upcoming Redwood Summer, three months of picketing, tree-sitting, and otherwise blocking the clear-cutting of the California redwoods.

The Redwood Summer went on, but not before Bari and Cherney were arrested: The Oakland Police Department said they had constructed the bomb themselves and were transporting it in the back seat.

Before Bari and Cherney went to trial, it became clear that the bomb had been under the front seat (Exhibit A: Bari’s shattered pelvis and the unscathed backseat), and that there was absolutely no evidence Bari or Cherney had known it was there, and the charges were dropped. But the true culprit was never found.

In 2002, Cherney sued the FBI for attempting to frame him and Bari (who died of breast cancer in 1997), and won. But he’s still set on testing the remaining evidence for DNA.

“We rely on the government to examine physical evidence in a violent criminal case, and when they fail to do that, we have to react,” Ben Rosenfeld, Cherney’s attorney, told the Guardian.

“It should be an open attempted-murder investigation.”

But the authorities not only weren’t investigating, they were seeking to destroy the evidence, something Cherney and his lawyers have been fighting. On April 2, they scored an important victory when U.S. District Court Judge Claudia Wilkens issued an order preserving the material and allowing its transfer to a Hayward forensic lab for testing.

In August 2010, government lawyers had unceremoniously announced that they planned to destroy the case’s remaining evidence, which includes remnants of this bomb and another one that partially exploded in Cloverdale two weeks earlier, as well as a hand-lettered sign that was near the Cloverdale bomb. The Cloverdale bomb and the bomb that exploded in Bari’s car were constructed similarly, and no one has been convicted of either attack. Because they contain unintentionally intact evidence, partially exploded bombs are “considered to be the Holy Grail in bombing investigations. That slightly exploded bomb in Cloverdale is key to solving the case,” said Cherney. Lawyers for Cherney responded with a motion calling instead for testing of the evidence; the government opposed the motion.

But at a Sept. 8, 2010 hearing, Magistrate Judge James Larson ordered the FBI to turn the evidence over to an independent analyst for testing.

Again, the feds opposed the order, and asked for a de novo review of the case, essentially asking that the court go over all previous briefings once again. The motion seemed like a stalling tactic, and it worked; the motion was pending in court for a year.

Recently, it was brought back up again, when the plaintiff’s motioned to move forward with testing the evidence. They suggested a lab in Hayward, Forensic Analytics Laboratories, and Wilkens agreed on April 2.

Bari’s case came out at the start of what became a large-scale FBI crackdown on environmental justice movements in the 1990s and throughout the 2000s. Activists protesting companies that they thought were harmful towards animals and the earth became a special target of the FBI in what became known as the “Green Scare.”

The era was characterized by crackdowns on the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front, although it also affected groups like Food Not Bombs and Earth First.

“The case was an early forerunner of what we call the Green Scare cases, where the government sets out to make examples of people it perceives as leaders to try to chill activism in the environmental movement,” said Rosenfeld. “It was quite a scary season for environmental activists.”

The Green Scare did a lot to quell environmental activism, and some who were arrested at its peak remain in prison. But it didn’t stop many — including Bari and Cherney — from continuing their work.

“Both Judi and I continued right out of jail. Actually, in jail the police wrote in their police report that I was trying to convert them to environmentalism,” laughed Cherney.

“I participated in Redwood Summer and the Headwater Forest Campaign right through 1999 and continued through 2003. And now I’m making a movie about it.”

The movie, Who Bombed Judi Bari? has been doing well since it had its world premiere at the SF Green Film Festival March 2.

The film’s reception is “definitely very gratifying,” says Mary Liz Thomson, the film’s director, who “spent a lot of time editing it living in a cabin on [Cherney’s] land up in the woods, using solar power.”

Now she’s touring California with sold-out screenings, as well as some free screenings, including a well-attended March 26 screening at Occupy Oakland.

Thomson says she has gotten positive feedback from occupiers and others currently working in social movements.

“We’re just at the beginning of our launch and people are saying that it’s really relevant right now. The timing was great”

Indeed, laws that build on the Green Scare have been rapidly passed in recent months, targeting other political groups.

Controversy flared after President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act, which allows the U.S. to detain suspects without charge. Attorney General Eric Holder claimed that the government can kill its own citizens abroad without trial. And on Feb. 27, The House of Representatives voted in favor of HR 347, the so-called “Anti-Occupy Bill.”

Who Bombed Judi Bari? is an important history lesson for those faced with these new challenges. And Cherney may finally be on track to finding out the answer to the title’s question.

Breaking: hundreds with OccupySF ‘occupying’ building

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UPDATE: Representatives of the Archdiocese have made clear that they will not make a decision regarding the building occupation until the morning 

OccupySF, along with at least 400 supporters and homeless advocacy groups, have entered a vacant ’building and plan to turn it into a community center. Participants served a free dinner, unrolled sleeping bags and tacked up posters in rooms marked “sleeping quarters” by organizers, and are currently meeting to decide next steps.

“Occupy San Francisco and Occupy Oakland originally were providing food and shelter to those who didn’t have it previously. That’s the plan I think, to provide food, shelter and a space for political organizing,” said protester Samantha Levens, 33, a deckhand on the Alameda-Oakland Ferry. 

The building, 888 Turk, is the former site of Westside Mental Health Center and has been vacant since the closure of that mental health clinic about five years ago. It is owned by the Archdiocese of San Francisco.

It is available for lease through HC&M Commercial Properties.

About 400 marched to the building at 4:30pm, trailed by an former AC Transit decorated and converted to a protest-party vehicle by Occupy Oakland. The march had the air of an April Fools Day Carnival, complete with clowns, jugglers, and a man dressed as Captain America alongside people with bandanas and Guy Fawkes masks. Protesters marched from Union Square on Geary, chanting “homes not jails” and ”housekeys not handcuffs.”

The march followed a rally in Union Square, in which homeless advocates from Berkeley, Oakland and Sacramento spoke to the crowd, and performers including the Mixcoatl Anahuac dance group and the Brass Liberation Orchestra kept the mood festive.

The protest was part of a national day to defend the rights of the homeless with protests in 17 cities. Paul Boden of the Western Regional Advocacy Project, which planned the Union Square protest, spoke speficically about Business Improvement Districts in San Francisco, which he claimed funell property taxes to businesses at the expense of the homeless.

When the march arrived at Turk and Gough, the site of the building, it had already been unlocked from the inside, and protesters on the roof held a sign reading “organize or starve.”

About 40 police officers provided an on-foot escort for the march. Officers as well as several police vehicles are currently standing by the “occupied” site, and declined to provide comment at this time. 

An OccupySF-associated building takeover occurred Jan. 20 just a few blocks away at the former Cathedral Hill Hotel. At the request of the building’s owners, police entered the building, and no occupiers remained the following morning.

“Occupy SF through the OccupySF commune has inhabited a vacant building for the purpose of creating a community center in the spirit of the buildings original intention, to create a center for health and healing,” according to a press release issued by the group.

 

Black Power, then and now

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“We’re not ever to be caught up in the intellectual masturbation of the question of Black Power. That’s a function of people who are advertisers that call themselves reporters.”

That’s how the radical student and civil rights leader Stokely Carmichael opened a speech about Black Power — a term he helped popularize — at UC Berkeley in 1966. But the ideas and concepts behind Black Power proved to be an enduring ones that are enjoying a resurgence today.

Angela Davis epitomized the Black Power movement to many observers. The author, scholar, and professor was a Black Panther Party member who then joined the Communist Party USA and brought a class analysis to issues of race, building on the movement that began in the ’60s for decades to come.

In recent months, as the Occupy Wall Street movement began to focus the country’s attention on economic and social inequities, Davis has spoken out regularly in support of the movement and drawn connections back to her early activism. She has embraced the “99 percent” paradigm, and the connections between various issues that Occupy activists have sought to highlight.

“Our demands for justice lead us toward demands for prison abolition. And our demands for prison abolition lead us to demands for free, quality education. And our demands for free quality healthcare, and housing, and an end to racism, an end to sexism, an end to homophobia,” Davis said March 1 in Oakland at a benefit for Occupy 4 Prisoners, a coalition of Occupy protesters and prison justice advocates.

Consciousness surrounding those connections can be largely attributed to efforts from Black Power organizers.

“When I listen to the way young people so easily talk about the connectedness of race, gender, and sexual issues, and I remember how we groped our way towards an understanding of those connections, it makes me really proud,” Davis said in a January interview with Independent Lens.

And as Davis said at the March 1 event: “One of the most exciting accomplishments of the Occupy movement has been to force us to engage in conversation, explicit conversation about capitalism, for the first time since the 1930s.”

The movement’s economic message also seemed useful to Kiilu Nyasha, a San Francisco-based journalist and former member of the New Haven Black Panther Party.

“Globalization has already happened. It’s not happening, it’s happened. One percent, internationally, owns and controls 80 percent of the world’s resources. People are dying all over the world of every complexion which you can think of” Nyahsa said March 14 at a panel discussion called Reboot the Rainbow.

The original Rainbow Coalition- the topic of the March 14 panel- included the Black Panther Party, the Puerto Rican Young Lords, and the poor white Young Patriots organization, and was committed to a Black Power concept: organize your own, fight together. Building coalition is more important now than ever.

“It’s not Black Power right now,” says Terry Collins, president of KPOO radio, a black-owned station long focused on community empowerment. “It’s people power. It’s power unto the people who are in need: all the people out there who are out of their homes, students who owe so much that they’re like indentured servants.”

Occupy the Hood is a national effort to encourage participation of people of color in Occupy Wall Street. In its mission statement the group writes, “It is imperative that the voice of people of color is heard at this moment!”

The focus of San Francisco’s Occupy the Hood chapter is “three-fold,” according to organizer Mesha Irizarry: “The cop-watching in neighborhoods that are criminalized, especially poor neighborhood of color. It’s freedom fighters against foreclosures. It’s also bank transfers.”

Occupy the Hood showed up March 16, when a group known as the Foreclosure Fighters- organized and supported Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, Homes Not Jails, and related groups—occupied their latest foreclosed home. “We’re liberating this house. We’re taking it out of the hands of the oppressor,” said Archbishop Franzo King of the African Orthodox Church.

“Jesus Christ was an uncompromising revolutionary. He spoke truth to power. Then they killed him for it,” added King in a nod to the radical religious leaders who have influenced liberation movements throughout the years.

Black Power was concerned with self-determination, with organizing within community. That legacy is still strong as San Francisco’s African American communities experience an out-migration and continuing police harassment and violence.

“Black sailors and black army personnel built the shipyard,” said Jameel Patterson, a founder of the Bayview-Hunters Point-based community organization Black Star Liner Incorporated. “Hunters Point, West Point, Harbor Road—they’re all military names. The soldiers stayed there with their families. The area has a rich African American legacy going back to the ’40s. Now it’s fading…we want to make sure that community’s still here 20 years from now.”

Patterson remembers being a child in the ’70s when, on the tail of an era brimming with black liberation efforts. “There were more community events,” he said, but now, “People don’t have connections with each other. That’s what we’re building.”

The group does regular events where they serve free home-cooked meals to residents, reminiscent of the Black Panther Party’s free breakfast program. “With every plate, you get information,” often Know Your Rights reminders for encounters with police, said Tracey Bell-Borden of Black Star Liner.

They have also spent countless hours in City Hall meetings advocating for their community and reporting back on city policies that affect it. “We occupy the Police Commission meeting,” said Bell-Borden.

Police are a central and tricky question for the Black Power movement of the ’60s, as well as organizing efforts today. Black Panther Party members spent years serving free breakfast to children, writing and selling newspapers, and even running election campaigns, but they are often remembered for carrying guns and efforts to “police the police.” So many leaders were arrested that energy that could have gone into feeding or education was often channeled into freeing prisoners.

“I was in the second chapter of the Black Panther Party,” Nyasha said at the March 14 event, “which basically existed to get the first chapter out of jail.”

Recent police crackdowns have fed indignation not just about policing protesters, but about the role police play in poor communities of color. “One thing Occupy has done is address the issue of policing in communities of color, to the extent that some aftermath of what we’re seeing at Occupy is shedding light on how police can sometimes treat people,” said Kimberley Thomas Rapp, executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the Bay Area.

“In black neighborhoods, police should be community partners, not come in and exert more force than necessary. And at protests, they should be there to ensure safety, not just to arrest people unnecessarily or use excessive force,” Rapp said.

Police crackdowns on Occupy are the first exposure many white protesters of the younger generation have had to excessive police force, an issue that was central to the story of the Black Power. Sadly, for many black and other protesters of color, excessive police force is nothing new.

“It’s absolutely the case that police brutality shown towards many Occupy protesters has brought to the forefront the issue of police violence and led to an awakening among many white folks of the day to day reality of police violence that many people of color have lived with now for many years,” Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, told the Guardian.

Enraged at police beatings (see “OPD spies on and beats protesters,” Feb. 14) both Occupy Oakland and Occupy San Francisco have held “fuck the police” marches. March 18, after a six-month commemoration celebration brought 3,000 to Zuccotti Park in New York City, followed by 200 arrests and rampant police violence, Occupy Wall Street protesters followed suit, holding their first anti-police brutality march.

Occupy Wall Street has reanimated concepts that burned through the ’60s, such as violence vs. nonviolence, the systemic causes of personal economic woes, and the peoples’ relationship to police. With the consciousness created by Black Power activists, today’s organizers have a foundation on which to build their own answers to these questions, across issues and generations.

National Occupy the Hood has called for action concerning Trayvon Martin, the unarmed black 17-year-old who was shot Feb. 26 and whose confessed killer has yet to be arrested. Taking up high-profile cases of injustice and working more closely with organizers to respond to the needs of local African American communities could bring more power and truth to the rage for justice currently galvanizing a new generation.

“It’s about black re-empowerment,” Archbishop King said. “It’s like the torch, the light of freedom and justice, has actually gone out. And we’re trying to relight that. That’s why I’m so excited about the Occupy movement; it ties into the Black Power struggle. And I think it’s waking up some of us old revolutionaries to stand up.”

Alerts

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THURSDAY 22

The longest war: Afghanistan beyond the Taliban

Two veteran journalists who have covered Afghanistan talk about the war that has surpassed Vietnam as the longest in US history. Masood Farivar, a former fighter in the Afghan anti-Soviet resistance before becoming a newswire in New York, then returning to Afghanistan in his capacity as journalist, and Tim McGirk a former Time magazine bureau chief in the region who has reported from Afghanistan since 1990, will have a conversation hosted by Jason Motlagh, a freelance journalist/filmmaker and former Time magazine correspondent in Kabul. A short documentary, Million Dollar Militia , will also be screened. What does a continued US presence—or, potentially, troops preparing to leave—mean for the country’s future? What political environment exists there?  Oakland-based production company Blackbeard Films launches a series that will highlight reporting on underreported stories with this event. 

7 p.m., free

Arbor Café

4210 Telegraph, Oakl.

www.blackbeardfilms.com 

 

SATURDAY 24

Wilderness first aid for the streets

In the saga of Occupy Oakland clashes with police, perhaps none are more unsung than the medics. These volunteers do everything from flushing eyes of tear gas to being first responders to protesters with broken limbs and gushing wounds. The medics team up for a training to others who want to do what they do. “Developed for wilderness situations, this course is adapted for urban uprisings, and will include care for chemical weapons exposure, herbal first aid, and public health considerations for long-term occupations,” according to the Occupy Oakland medics committee. This course is serious, covering two full days- March 24 and 25, 10am to 8pm. Red Cross certification and Continuing Education Units credits are available for $20, and scholarships are available.

10 a.m., donation suggested

The Holdout

2313 San Pablo, Oakl.

www.occupyoakland.org

WFAforthestreets@gmail.com 

 

St. Patricks Day Ceili

Did you make it through that special day without participating in a ceili, a traditional Irish social dance that is a hallmark of St. Patricks Day? If so, you’re in luck — you will be given a second chance. This dance is easily accessible for newbies and much more fun than cheap plastic green stuff and day-drinking. 

7 p.m., $10 (free for children)

United Irish Cultural Center 

2700 45th Ave., SF

www.irishcentersf.org  

 

MONDAY 26

Speaking youth to power

When it comes to climate change, young people know what’s up. Specifically such acclaimed young people as project coordinator for the urban farming non-profit Urban Tilth and Green For All Fellow Tania Pulido, Adarsha Shivakumar, founder of Project Jathropa, and Abigail Boroh, the student best known for interrupting the Durban, South Africa Climate Conference in December to bring urgency to the less than promising conference proceedings. Join them for a discussion on civic engagement within the climate justice movement. 

Doors 5:30, program 6pm, $20 (free for members and students)

Commonwealth Club

595 Market, SF

www.commonwealthclub.org

 

Black Power and OWS

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OPINION Since its inception in September of 2011, The Occupy Wall Street movement has come to mean many things to many people. For some it’s a movement to end skyrocketing tuition at State Colleges and Universities. For others its a platform to stop and bring attention to unfair and illegal foreclosures. Still others see the Occupy as a movement that’s going to bring back unions and level the playing field for workers.

But one of the nagging critiques of OWS has been that it’s a movement for white middle-class youth who were late to the social justice arena — where many who are poorer and darker had been struggling for years. While economic disparities on the surface appear to be universal, the challenge has been recognizing how many who are white and part of the 99 percent have been used strategically by those in power as a sort of buffer to keep black and brown folks at an economic disadvantage. Many have brought into the narrative that underachievement by blacks is the result of individuals not applying themselves hard enough.

The economic downturn in the white communities is now viewed as systemic, with a call to arms and a move to confront the system. What’s been missed is that for decades folks in the hood have been challenging the system, trying to survive and barely holding on. Only now are you starting to see deeper discussions between OWS and black and brown community members about how this economic system has uniquely impacted them.

Because we’ve seen former black panthers and leaders within black liberation struggles like Angela Davis, Elaine Brown, Bobby Seal, Mumia and Dave Hilliard work with or show support address OWS, the question of how OWS relates to the Black Power Movement has emerged.

Like OWS, Black Power means many things to many people, from economic empowerment to political empowerment. If we go back to what Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leaders Stokley Carmichael (Kwame Toure) and Willie Ricks (Mukasa Dada) meant when they first coined the phrase in 1966, it was a call for solidarity and challenging racism and the systems giving it light..

Black Power leaders back then weren’t about trying to reform the system and its institutions, but dismantle it and rebuild. That approach, and the militancy that came along with it, caused a split in the Civil Rights Movement. It was break from Dr. King and the nonviolent approach by the so-called Big 5 civil rights organizations.

Today, many of the aforementioned leaders, along with others, have evolved in their definition and understanding of what it means when we say Black Power. Not to short change or misspeak for anyone (keep in mind entire courses are devoted to the topic), today we see that Black Power has expanded on its critique of capitalism. That, of course, has been echoed in many sectors of OWS. In fact, that’s what’s attracted many from the old guard to it.

Today we see many in the Black Power movements dealing with issues like the Prison Industrial Complex, the mass incarceration of black folks, and tactics like stop and frisk, gang injunctions, war on drugs etc. Any conversation about economic disparity inevitably leads back to discussions on the prison system in the black community.

While we hear within OWS calls to rebuild the system and harsh critiques of capitalism, we haven’t always seen an emphatic call to arms to deal with the PIC and issues related to police terror — even as OWS members are frequent victims themselves.

In places like Occupy Oakland, we see those bridges being built in meaningful ways. We’ve seen the forming of Occupy the Hood, which frequently addresses those issues — but talk to OTH organizers in various cities and they’ll tell you it’s still a struggle to get folks on board and make this an intuitive part of their day to day outlook.

The good news is we see conversations taking place and folks trying to work it out..

And while OWS deals with building bridges into communities of color, in our own ranks we have the challenge of class divisions. We have folks who are black, and have means, who won’t even give lip service to these issues.

But then again, mass movements even during the hey day of Dr. King always had those who spoke out, got in the way and took up space for real change. With spring coming, there’s a lot of hope that things will pick up.

Join vets at City Hall today to mark nine years in Iraq

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Lest we forget, today marks the ninth anniversary of the start of our war in Iraq. If you plan on passing by City Hall today, you’ll have a vivid reminder of today’s important milestone — 481 pairs of combat boots will be lined up on the seat of our city government’s steps, a visual precursor to the afternoon of speeches by vets and their families that has been organized by the Bay Area chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War.

The vets’ message is rendered all the more important now that US conflict in Iraq technically ended last December. A US service member commits suicide once every 36 hours, and 223,609 veterans are struggling with possible signs of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Many battle with the after-effects of head trauma, a poorly-understood injury that can lead to serious psychological problems (the suspect in the massacre that took the lives of 16 Afghanis a few weeks ago was a US soldier who suffered from head trauma and multiple re-deployments.)

President Obama has decided that today will be a “Day of Honor” for our veterans. Now might just be a good time to get down to City Hall and hear what the United States citizens most affected by our engagement in the Middle East and elsewhere have to say. Today’s speakers at the City Hall demonstration will include Scott Olsen (the vet whose skull was fractured by a police-thrown projectile in an October Occupy Oakland demonstration), Ryan Hollerman (an active-duty soldier), and Paula Santos, whose son commited suicide after coming home from war, in addition to others from Swords to Plowshares and Military Families Speak Out

Iraq Veterans Against the War press conference and “Eyes Wide Open” exhibit

Press conference: Mon/19 noon, free

Exhibit: Mon/19 9 a.m.-5 p.m., free

City Hall

One Carlton B. Goodlett Plaza, SF

www.ivaw.org

Oakland police keep track of “anarchists”

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Oakland Police Department’s internal communications about the Occupy Oakland movement, which the Guardian obtained through the California Public Records Act, reveal interesting patterns of what officers deem important to note about protesters.

Officers’ reported observations of the crowd generally concern activity, movement, and sometimes mood. However, there are also mentions of the percieved political affiliations of protesters. In an Oct. 24 briefing, a plainclothes officer, having strolled through the encampment, reports that “the group is diverse, made up of persons including self proclaimed anarchists, labor unions, long term homeless individuals, special cause supporters and others.” 

But by Nov. 2, it seems, all other categories fall away and officers seem interested in reporting on only one perceived type of protester: anarchists. 

Police make several reports in the notes of where and when they’ve noticed “anarchists” or “anarchist behavior.” 

In activity logs reporting “major events” throughout Oct. 25, police include anarchist sightings in that category. In the afternoon, there is “black block (sic) spotted, approximately 12.”

When protesters briefly occupied the Travelers Aid Society building on Oct. 25, police reported “10 anarchists on the roof and inside.”

In an afternoon planning meeting Nov. 3, an officer describes the scene on the streets: “there have been reports that there were 5000 people with relatively no injuries. There seem to be people dressed in regular clothing displaying anarchist behavior.” 

A press release from Nov. 2 also states that “the Oakland Police Department has identified a small group of anarchists roaming through the crowds. OPD is focused on preventing illegal activity while affording the majority their rights to assemble and march.”

It seems that those officers reporting on the crowd equate anarchists with illegal activity, and believe they can identify adherents to anarchism based on appearance and behavior.

Anarchism is a political ideology, and not illegal. Yet officers apparently count out individuals that they perceive as anarchists. 

While popular stereotypes associate illegal activity such as vandalism with anarchism, many who identify with anarchist principles have not broken laws in that fashion. In fact, these documents imply that police may be associated with another illegal activity; targeting some of those they protect and serve based on political belief.

Freeing the information

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news@sfbg.com

The Society of Professional Journalists, Northern California chapter, will honor champions of the First Amendment at the 27th annual James Madison Awards Banquet on Thursday, March 15, at the City Club of San Francisco.

William Bennett Turner, who has spent his career defending the First Amendment and civil rights, as well as 25 years teaching new generations of journalists and attorneys, is to receive this year’s Norwin Yoffie Award for Career Achievement from the Society of Professional Journalists, Northern California Chapter.

Turner heads a list of a dozen recipients of the James Madison Awards that SPJ NorCal presents annually to champions of the First Amendment and freedom of information.

In his legendary career, Turner has argued three cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, two on First Amendment rights, published more than 40 law review articles and taught First Amendment law at the University of California, Berkeley, for 25 years. He was instrumental in overhauling conditions in the Texas prison system and in 2011 he published the critically-acclaimed book, Figures of Speech: First Amendment Heroes and Villains.

The Yoffie award is named for one of the founders of SPJ NorCal’s Freedom of Information Committee, who as an editor and publisher of the then-family-owned Marin Independent-Journal was a vigorous advocate for transparency and accountability in the public-services sector. Other honorees are:

– Roger Woo, a teacher at Tokay High School in Lodi, California, has forged a strong reputation for quality teaching over decades of instruction. He has seen the work of his students recognized hundreds of times for stories, photos and layout. And in the words of a former student, now a newspaper publisher, Woo taught ethics, pride, and professionalism. Woo will be honored with the Beverly Kees Educator Award, named for a late, former SPJ NorCal president who was an educator and nationally recognized journalist.

– Attorney Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, will receive the Legal Counsel award for her litigation and oversight of countless significant First Amendment and open government cases. She is currently challenging the National Security Agency for alleged spying on the communications of Americans.

– Erin Siegal is being honored in the Author category for her investigation of human rights abuses in Guatemala’s adoption industry, as well as the U.S. government’s role, in which children have been stolen, sold, and offered as orphans to well-intentioned Western parents. Her book, Finding Fernanda, has received wide acclaim.

– The Hercules Patch, the local news site operated by America Online, receives the News Media award for its dogged tracking of the questionable financial management practices in the East Bay city of Hercules. Patch produced more than 13 investigative stories and 100 daily stories, and created 20 databases to follow the money.

– The San Francisco Chronicle, also will be honored in the News Media category for keeping a spotlight on the aftermath of the deadly PG&E natural gas line explosion and fire in San Bruno. The Chronicle’s persistence on the story kept readers abreast of the political fallout, the bureaucratic failings, and reform measures meant to prevent another such disaster.

– Tim Redmond, executive editor of The San Francisco Bay Guardian, receives the Professional Journalist award for his investigation of state agencies’ legally questionable acquisitions of a drug used for lethal injections that is no longer produced in the United States.

– Patrick Monette-Shaw, this year’s Advocacy award recipient, spent nearly two years following a crooked money trail to expose mishandling of millions of dollars at San Francisco’s Laguna Honda Hospital. The scandal he reported in the Westside Observer and his examiner.com articles led to an investigation of the city controller’s Whistleblower program.

– Susie Cagle, a cartoonist and journalist, has earned this year’s Cartoonist Award for her dedicated reporting on Occupy Oakland and for portraying the confrontation through her art. Additionally, she stood up for the rights of all journalists after being arrested at an Occupy Oakland rally that turned violent.

– Citireport.com, produced by Larry Bush, gets the accolade in the Community Media category for shining a bright light not only on San Francisco government but also on the city’s Byzantine political world. Bush, as editor and publisher, has spent nearly 30 years fighting to keep city government publicly accountable.

– Allen Grossman is the recipient of this year’s Citizen award for his efforts over the past several years to advance open government at San Francisco City Hall, whether by prodding the city’s Sunshine Ordinance Task Force to hold agencies and public officials accountable or by prying loose disclosable records that Ethics Commission staff aides wanted to withhold.

– The Bay Citizen, which put campaign finance data to good use, is to receive the Computer-Assisted Reporting award for its detailed political database on the San Francisco mayor’s race in 2011. The Bay Citizen made it easy to track contributions of every stripe. In addition, The Bay Citizen’s use of police records and public input has produced a highly interactive chart of bicycle accidents, letting riders pinpoint the most dangerous routes in the city.

The James Madison Freedom of Information Awards is named for the creative force behind the First Amendment and honors local journalists, organizations, public officials, and private citizens who have fought for public access to government meetings and records and promoted the public’s right to know and freedom of expression. Award winners are selected by SPJ NorCal’s Freedom of Information Committee.

JAMES MADISON AWARDS BANQUET

Thu/15 reception at 5:30 p.m., dinner and awards ceremony at 6:30 p.m., $50 SPJ members and students/$70 general admission

City Club of San Francisco

155 Sansome, SF

www.spjnorcal.org

Green Film Fest shorts: Just Do It

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Activist ire need a jump start? The Green Film Festival takes over Japantown’s San Francisco Film Society Cinema now through Wed/7. Go for tidings on the fight for our planet around the world — documentaries, expert panel presentations, and short films will be taking place. Check out Ali Lane’s previous reviews from the festival here.

Just Do It

In this intimate peek inside the world of “Environmental Direct Action,” viewers will marvel at the organization and cooperation displayed by the film’s English subjects. Occupy Oakland could really learn a thing or two from these self-proclaimed “domestic extremists,” champions against climate change, who the filmmakers followed for a year. The film starts off in the lead-up to “Climate Camp,” a literal camp-out of protesters in a secret location on a hill above London. From here, the protesters plan an “action.” Their actions seem pretty harmless and whimsical: gluing their hands together and invading the trade floor of RBS to sing songs; putting up posters at the entrance of a bank that says “Undergoing Ethical Renovation”; handcuffing themselves to the front gate of an MP’s home in order to publicly berate his policies. But these protests work. They get the news media to cover topics that were previously ignored.

The subjects of this film are mainly photogenic young people, with a few seasoned veterans as well, like . Some are Cambridge educated. All are uniformly anti-capitalist, as they believe capitalism inevitably leads to exploitation of the environment. They designate spokespeople, meticulously map out their “actions,” and memorize the legal consequences and potential charges faced, making sure to minimize any criminal property damage along the way. Before going out on an action, they write the phone number of their organization’s legal counsel on their forearms. What they’re doing is certainly risky, disobedient, and outside the margins of normal behavior, but the viewer gets the sense that these people have their act together and aren’t much of a threat to civil society.

This is a very sympathetic portrait of a movement, and it’s clear where director Emily James’s heart is. Her subjects’ enthusiasm for the cause, and for activism in general, is infectious. By the end it’s hard not to feel like a lazy bum as one subject intones, “Anyone out there thinking, ‘I wanna do more,’ just do it!” Indeed, this film doesn’t just give an impetus, but also a blueprint for how such things can be done.

The lingering question I had while watching the film, however, remained unanswered: where did these people get their money, for camp tents, and massive amounts of food, and buses, and superglue, and d-locks, and ladders: everything that it takes to protest, and live full-time as a protestor. Where do those funds come from? Perhaps this is a question to ask the filmmakers at the closing night party.

Green Film Festival closing night film and party

Wed/7 7:30 p.m., $12 for film, $15 for film and party

SF Film Society Cinema

1746 Post, SF

(415) 742-1394

www.sfgreenfilmfest.org

 

The losing bets

26

By Darwin BondGraham

news@sfbg.com

Wall Street’s massive taxpayer funded bailout, initiated by the Bush administration and carried forward under President Obama, never really ended — it just shifted from federal to local sources of funding. Even while local and state governments have been forced to cut back on crucial services, wealthy banks and investment firms are being padded with enormous cash flows sucked directly from the already strained budgets of cities, counties, and public agencies.

That’s the message a growing chorus of activists in the Bay Area are bringing before the boards, councils, and commissions that entered into complex financial deals with Wall Street banks, deals that turned toxic in the crash of 2008. Activists want elected officials and the banks to cancel the contracts and refund the public.

The Bay Area is the epicenter of this renewed movement for financial justice. Last week, teachers from Peralta College, organizers with the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), Oakland religious leaders, and Occupy Oakland activists organized four protests contesting what they say is bank predation on local communities.

At issue are arcane financial instruments called interest rate swaps. Sold by banks to virtually every sizable government and local agency in the US through the 2000s, rate swaps promised governments the ability to “swap” their potentially costly variable rate payments on bonds into a synthetic fixed rate. Seeking to protect local taxpayers during the volatile 2000s, when floating interest rates were rising, local leaders eagerly signed on.

But the economic meltdown turned those tools into golden handcuffs for local government agencies. Taxpayers are now forced to regularly pay millions to the banks simply because variable interest rates, at the urging of the Federal Reserve, have fallen far below the synthetic rates. These deals might seem numbingly complex, but the effects on local communities are clear and painful.

“The Metropolitan Transportation Commission is paying upwards of $53 million a year on rate swaps,” said Alia Phelps of ACCE at a protest on Feb. 21 outside of the former Bank of America building at 555 California Street. “This is money that isn’t going to keep routes in service, that isn’t paying drivers, nor going to repair buses, or to keep fares lower. We need these swaps renegotiated.”

That protest included visits to half a dozen banks. Activists demanded branch managers fax a letter to their corporate headquarters calling on the banks to voluntarily renegotiate swaps signed with the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), the Bay Area’s regional transportation authority, which has lost over $100 million on toxic swap deals.

In 2002 the Bay Area Toll Authority (BATA), a state-level agency operated by the MTC, issued more than $1 billion in bonds to pay for repairs and seismic upgrades of regional toll bridges. Three financial giants stepped forward promising to lower MTC’s long-term borrowing costs on these bonds by using interest rate swaps. Ambac, Solomon Smith Barney and Morgan Stanley signed deals with the MTC to cover $300 million in debt.

“With this transaction, we are getting the peace of mind of a fixed debt payment at a significant discount from traditional price levels,” MTC’s Chief Financial Officer Brian Mayhew said at the time of the deal.

Basically the swap agreement had the MTC paying a fixed interest rate of 4.1 percent to the banks, while the banks paid 65 percent of the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR), a key benchmark used in global financial markets. Whichever party’s sum happened to be higher when payments came due would pay the difference. The advantage of the deal, in the eyes of the MTC’s managers, was that it would lock-in a low interest rate on MTC’s debt, potentially saving as much as $45 million.

“We think it’s a good time to lock in these low rates,” Mayhew said in 2002.

Fast forward to 2009. A year into the financial crisis, interest rates collapsed. LIBOR, which had been fluctuating around 5 percent and reached a peak of 5.8 percent in September of 2007, plummeted to virtually zero. The flow of payments became entirely one-sided, from MTC to banks that offered this deal. The advantage of the swap evaporated, and it became a toxic asset. While the Federal Treasury would offload similar toxic assets from the “too big to fail banks” using the TARP program, local governments were stuck with them.

As Ambac careened toward bankruptcy in 2010 due to its absurdly over-leveraged portfolio of credit default swaps, the MTC was forced to terminate its swap agreement with the company, paying the exorbitant sum of $104 million, after already having paid out $23 million in interest. All of this was essentially bridge toll money, surrendered by drivers crossing the seven state-owned bridges administered by BATA: the Bay, Antioch, Benicia-Martinez, Carquinez, Dumbarton, Richmond-San Rafael, and San Mateo bridges.

The drain on MTC funds indirectly affects all of its programs, including operational support for AC Transit, Muni, and other regional bus and train services. According to its most recent Comprehensive Annual Financial Report, MTC and its transit agency partners are on the hook for another $235 million in interest rate payments due on swaps with a rogue’s gallery of banks including Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Bank of America, JP Morgan, Bank of New York, and Goldman Sachs. All of this money will be diverted from the MTC’s various transit infrastructure, planning, and operations accounts.

“The big picture is service cuts, pay cuts, work speed ups, fare hikes, route eliminations, and other things that harm working people who ride transit,” said retired Muni worker Ellen Murray.

The MTC’s quarter-billion dollar rate swap nightmare is only the most obvious part of a more systemic problem. Until at least 2030, given current conditions, San Francisco’s Airport Commission must make costly rate swap payments to numerous banks, including JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Depfa, Bank of America, and Merrill Lynch, on agreements associated with more than a half-billion in debt. Much of this is linked to commercial paper issued to pay for infrastructure at the Airport (SFO).

Unlike the MTC, SFO’s financial managers were more prudent in entering swap agreements, and therefore secured better terms that have produced a net savings. “The Airport has saved about $92 million to date,” Assistant Deputy Airport Director Kevin Kone told us, referring mostly to gains made between 2005 and late 2007.

But since 2008, SFO’s swaps have been losing money. When Lehman Brothers collapsed, and Bear Stearns imploded and was absorbed into JP Morgan, SFO was forced to terminate swaps with both companies, costing $6.7 million. Last year SFO paid $6.65 million to terminate a rate swap agreement with Ireland’s Depfa Bank. In September, the Airport paid another $4.6 million to end yet another rate swap with JP Morgan. These specific swap agreements, Kone says, “were functioning as they should have early on, providing savings,” but now they’re draining public funds.

SFO’s seven remaining swaps have a negative value of $67 million, according to San Francisco’s 2011 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report. As with the MTC, SFO’s debts will ultimately be paid by passengers and taxpayers. Kone says nobody really knows how much these swaps could ultimately impact the airport, either in terms of cost or savings.

“If interest rates rise, they could have a positive cost savings impact on the airport,” he said.

Joe Keffer of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 1021 said at the Feb. 21 rally that Oakland has already paid Goldman Sachs $26 million on a swap that dates back to 1997, and that under current market conditions, the city will have to pay roughly another $25 million until the contract expires in 2021.

Oakland’s toxic deal with Goldman Sachs is now the subject of much scrutiny. The newly formed Coalition for Economic and Social Justice —made up of churches, labor unions, neighborhood groups, and Occupy Oakland activists— took up the issue with the City Council on Feb. 21, packing the chamber with one of the more diverse activist coalitions in recent memory.

“We’re here to implore you to get the City of Oakland out of this toxic relationship,” Rev. Daniel Buford of the Allen Temple Baptist Church told the council.

Members of the Oakland City Council are sympathetic to this message. In a letter sent last June, Council member Rebecca Kaplan implored Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein to spare Oakland’s taxpayers: “By bringing the contract to conclusion with no penalty fees, and negotiating a reasonable exit strategy, you would be demonstrating good faith to public taxpayers in the most substantial way.” At the conclusion of public comment Tuesday night, Oakland Council member Libby Schaaf promised the public action on the swap.

In a Valentine’s Day protest the previous week, 50 activists visited the Oakland offices of Morgan Stanley. Faculty and students from the Peralta Community College system went there demanding the bank renegotiate a rate swap that is estimated to have cost the college $1.6 million last year. The same day the college’s board of trustees discussed the need to cut $12 million more from the budget in 2012. Morgan Stanley CEO James Goreman’s pay for 2011 was $14 million, opponents of the swap point out.

Peralta student and Bay Area transit activist Adam Ross attempted to reach the 9th floor offices of Morgan Stanley in a small delegation to deliver a letter demanding the bank renegotiate the swap: “There were signs on the door saying the office was closed. They probably got tipped off and locked the doors.”

Afterward, Caesar Swaby of Riders for Transit Justice addressed the rally, connecting dots for the different constituencies present: “Morgan Stanley is taking money from Peralta College, causing classes to be cut. Morgan Stanley is also taking money from transit riders. Morgan Stanley has a $3 million rate swap with the MTC, causing cuts to bus and train services.”

A Morgan Stanley representative declined to comment for this report. Goldman Sachs did not return calls and emails. A spokesperson for the MTC was unable to be reached by deadline.

Alerts

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yael@sfbg.com

WEDNESDAY 29

Funeral for capitalism

Occupy Oakland declares capitalism dead with a funeral procession with New Orleans style brass band, eulogy, and “dancing on the grave to follow.” Organizers want you to “use your extra day to bid farewell to a system that brings us meaningless jobs, billionaires, shopping malls, structural poverty, and ecological collapse.” After all, this is a leap year, so celebrate it right!

6 p.m., free

Oscar Grant/ Frank H. Ogawa Plaza

Broadway and 14th, Oakl

www.leapdayaction.org/event/funeral-capitalism

 

THURSDAY 1

Occupy Education Part 1

As part of a national day of action, join Occupy City College of SF, Occupy SF State, and the Occupy SF Action Council for a teach-in and occupation at the California State Office Building. The event will be followed by a rally at Civic Center Plaza, with speeches and discussions about the causes and effects of deep cuts to the higher education system.

3 p.m., free

California State Office Building

455 Golden Gate, SF

www.occupyed.org

 

Occupy 4 Prisoners benefit

Legendary activist and professor Angela Davis, along with fellow prison-reform activists Elaine Brown and Barbara Becnel, will speak about the prison-industrial complex, followed by a film screening of Broken on all sides: Race, Mass Incarceration, and New Visions for Criminal Justice in the US.

7 p.m., $10 suggested donation

Grand Lake Theater

3200 Grand, Oakl

www.occupyoakland.org

 

SATURDAY 3

The Future of Palestine

Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, general secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative and president of the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees, comes to Berkeley. His talk will center on the impact of the Arab Spring on Palestinian politics, and how non-violent struggle there has succeeded in recent years. Proceeds from the event will benefit medical relief for children in Palestine.

7:30 p.m., $10

Martin Luther King Middle School

1781 Rose, Berk.

www.mecaforpeace.org


MONDAY 5

Occupy Education Part 2

Every year, students, teachers and supporters march on Sacramento to demand better access to education. This year, fueled by Occupy momentum, promises to be a big one. Hundreds of protesters plan to march from San Francisco to Sacramento—a four-day journey—for this day of rallies, a general assembly, and non-violent action trainings at California’s Capitol building. Join them, sign up for a seat on the bus, or head to Sacramento yourself.

10 a.m., free

Southside Park

2115 Sixth St, Sacra

www.occupyeducationca.org/wordpress

Occupy and Castlewood Workers to join up for “perhaps the biggest and most vibrant march Pleasanton has ever seen”

10

Organizers hope for a big turnout Feb. 25 for the latest protest in a two-year saga to demand a better contract.

Food service workers at Castlewood Country Club were put on lockout on Feb. 25, 2010 when they refused the terms of a contract with the club. The contract stipulated that workers pay $849 per month for health care, a change from the free health care the contract had previously provided.

Lockouts, when employers refuse to let employees come back to work until they agree to contract terms, are a rare but powerful tool used against unions.

“A lockout is the opposite of a strike,” said Sarah Norr, organizer with UNITE HERE local 2850, which represents the Castlewood workers.

Since the lockout began, the club has hired non-union replacement workers and most of the union workers have taken other jobs. But, in order to end the lockout legally, the company must resolve the contract issues.

According to Norr, “It’s illegal to permanently replace locked out workers.”

Workers brought the case to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which filed a complaint against Castlewood August 30, 2010. The complaint states that the club “has been interfering with, restraining, and coercing employees in the exercise of the rights guaranteed in Section 7 of the [National Labor Relations] Act” and “has been failing and refusing to bargaining [sic] collectively and in good faith with the exclusive bargaining representative of its employees.”

An ongoing NLRB hearing on the case is expected to conclude on March 1.

Meanwhile, workers have been picketing daily since the lockout began two years ago. This has sometimes resulted in dramatic clashes with the club members.

One of the workers’ protests last June. Golfers’ reponses, complete with property desctruction, begin around 1:35

“Members of the club harass them on a daily basis. Hitting golf balls at them, throwing racial slurs at them. Some of them are really supportive but some are not so nice,” said Norr.

But workers persevere, and tomorrow they hope for a larch march on the club, joined by OccupySF and Occupy Oakland.

Said Norr, “It’s going to be a big, vibrant march, perhaps biggest and most vibrant march Pleasanton has ever seen. There will be a babies’ and children’s brigade.”

For Occupy organizers, joining up with the protest makes perfect sense.

“Many of Castlewood’s member-owners spent $25,000 for their memberships,” said Ann Worth, a longtime union member and participant in Occupy Oakland, in a press release. “They can justify spending that kind of money to play golf, but they still think it’s okay to squeeze more out of the people who work for them for $10 or $12 an hour. They expect workers to subsidize their expensive game by giving up affordable health care for their kids. It’s a perfect example of what’s been going wrong in this country: the rich are getting richer by denying everyone else their share in the American Dream.”

Occupy 4 Prisoners hits San Quentin

5

About 800 protesters marched to San Quentin’s East Gate in a day to protest what they called inhumane conditions in prison Feb. 20

Protesters called for an end to the practice of trying children as adults, three strikes laws, life sentences, life without the possibility of parole, and the death penalty.They did not call for the dismantling of the prison system or an end to the practice of incarceration, as Chip Johnson implies here.

In San Quentin– and in prisons across the country—inmates are subjected to solitary confinement, sometimes for decades. Kids as young as 13 are tried as adults and sometimes sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. In three-strikes states, people are sentenced to decades in prison for non-violent crimes that sometimes amount to less than a couple hundred dollars in damages. And in death penalty states, state-sponsored execution means that lives, sometimes innocent, are thrown away.

Twenty-four US states do not have three strikes laws, many countries cap prison sentences at 15 years regardless of the severity of the crime, and only one European country- Belarus- continues to impose the death penalty. The United States incarcerates its citizens at a rate that far surpasses any other country in the world; second on the list in Rwanda.

Conditions and laws like these have spurred decades of prison reform and prison abolition activism, both from inmates and supporters on the outside. Feb. 20, this movement joined with Occupy Oakland to protest outside San Quentin prison and demand that these issues be addressed.

As protesters arrived, organizers blasted music, hoping to reach the ears of prisoners. Dozens of prison guards and representatives from the Marin County sheriff’s department were stationed in front of the prison gate, and well as on hills looking down on the protest group.

The loud music continued with a performance from the Brass Liberation Orchestra, and subsequently a drumming ritual.

“As First Nations people, we’re no strangers to occupation. We’re also no strangers to prison. The first prisons were the reservation and the slave plantation,” said George Galvis, Executive Director of Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice.

“We have post-colonial stress disorder in our communities,” added Galvis.

Author, film producer (Redemption: The Stan Tookie Williams Story) and 2006 California gubernatorial candidate Barbara Becnel helped facilitate the event.

In her opening statements, Becnel praised the crowd, packed with Occupy activists, family members of incarcerated people, formerly incarcerated people, and others.

“We should really be proud of ourselves today. Because today, we are history makers. We have merged the prison rights movement with the Occupy movement,” said Becnel to an eruption of applause.

Throughout the program, speakers read solidarity statements addressed to Occupy Oakland from prisoners across the country, including Mumia Abu Jamal, Leanard Peltier, Kevin Cooper, and group statements from Pelican Bay human rights organizers, and those involved in state-wide prison strikes in Georgia.

A movement has coalesced around the claim that Cooper, a death row inmate at San Quentin since 1985, is innocent. Cooper was denied an appeal in 2009 in a ninth-circuit court case in which five judges dissented, declaring that, “the state of California may be about to execute an innocent man.” Their 103-page dissent statement includes descriptions of evidence tampering leading to Cooper’s conviction.

Cooper helped call for the Occupy 4 Prisoners day of action.

Speakers at the rally called for Cooper’s freedom, and for the end of death row entirely.

Becnel related a story about some prisoners, charged with life without the possibility of parole, that she had met while campaigning against the death sentence for Stan “Tookie” Williams.

The men, Becnel said, told her: “We only leave here in a casket also. We are also dead men walking.”

Speakers also decried the use of solitary confinement as a punishment in prisons.

Sarah Shourd, known for her imprisonment in Iran after accidentally crossing the border during a hike, spoke along with fellow imprisoned hikers Josh Fattal and Shane Bauer.

Shourd, who was held in solitary confinement for 14 months, related her experiences.

“After just two months my mind began to slip. I would spend large portions of my day crouched down by a small slot in my door, listening for any sounds from the outside that might distract me from the sheer terror of my isolation.”

A statement from a Texas prisoner, read by an Occupy Wall Street organizer, also addressed solitary confinement.

“We tend to think of man as a collection of individuals, each complete in himself, who just happen to come together to satisfy certain needs. Actually, however, there is nothing distinctly human that can be exhibited by an individual in isolation,” said the philosophical letter.

The Pelican Bay Hunger Strike last year highlighted solitary confinement, and prisoners demanded an end to the practice, in which inmates are held in isolated rooms with no sunlight for 23 hours a day, often for years on end. Some inmates at Pelican Bay have been held in these conditions for over 30 years.

Organizers of the hunger strike called it off when the California Department of Corrections promised to investigate the issue, but started to strike again several months later when no changes had been made to any of the conditions that they were protesting.

Kelly Turner, 42, who was sentenced to 25 years to life for writing a bad check for $146.16 in 1997, was also placed in solitary confinement for one year. However, she focused her speech at the rally on California’s three strikes law, the legislation that turned what would have been a three-year sentence for forgery into a possible life sentence for Turner. Turner said she was lucky that good pro bono lawyers defended her, and would likely still be in prison had they not; she now owns her own business.

Turner, who advocates for Families to Amend California Three Strikes (FACTS), urged the crowd to vote for an initiative to amend the law that is slated to appear on the California ballot this November. 

In her speech, Turner described meeting women in the Central California Women’s Facility is Chowchilla that were also serving decades-long sentences after having been charged with a third strike.

“I am here today for the woman that was on my dorm that had 27 years to life for drinking a 99 cent lemon line soda out of a store. Or the woman who stole a jar of Vaseline, a bottle of vitamins, two pairs of boxers,” said Turner.

Tatiana, a young prisoners rights advocate who spent time in juvenile hall, read a statement from incarcerated youth Veronica Hernandez.

Hernandez, 20, has been imprisoned since age 16.

She was tried as an adult, an outcome that she attributes to a public defender who did not do his best to fight for her.

“There are no law libraries or legal services at juvenile hall, so a juvenile, for better or for worse, is entirely dependent on his or her court-appointed attorney, and must trust that he or she will lead them in the right direction. Unfortunately for me, that direction was to adult court. I now face a life sentence should I be convicted,” said Hernandez in her statement.

No speaker argued for the dismantling of the prison system, instead focusing on what they saw as unjust sentencing and inhumane treatment in prisons.

In a statement calling for Occupy 4 Prisoners, Kevin Cooper connected a call to end the death penalty with struggle for correct racial and economic justice and an end police brutality:

“America has a deep-seeded philosophy in which it only allows for the execution of its poorest people. These seeds have taken root and have grown in such a way that no person who this system sees as a ‘have-not’ is safe from the death machine. Whether they are within (San Quentin) or on a BART platform.”

Bauer also expressed the importance of tying prison rights to the Occupy movement, saying, “This Occupy movement needs to permeate the prisons. God forbid one day some people here will be on the other side of this fence. But when movements get strong, people start getting locked up. We should know this. This happens in every country. Prisons are places where movements are killed. But at the same time, when movements successfully permeate prisons, a space built to break people down, the movement is at its strongest. This is true all over the world.”

Occupy Oakland organizers have already been hit with bizarre and seemingly invalid charges, such as “lyching,” “bike,” “boat,” and umbrella. In one of the most extreme cases, Khali, an Occupy Oakland protester, may face life in prison after being arrested for a allegedly taking a blanket out of a garbage can. Advocates for Khali say that he was denied prescription medications in jail for ten days before allegedly assaulting a police officer; his third strike.

Well-known prison rights advocate and former Black Panther Elaine Brown ended the program. After remarking that “there aren’t enough songs in this movement,” she sang Oh, Freedom as the crowd peacefully exited the site, as several volunteers picked up any trash that was left behind.

“Before I’ll be a slave, I’ll be buried in my grave, and go home to my comrades and be free,” sang Brown.

Alerts

0

yael@sfbg.com

WEDNESDAY 15

Which way forward?

Four panelists will speak on their approach to creating progressive change in the United States. Speakers include Rocky Anderson, former mayor of Salt Lake City and presidential candidate with the Justice Party; Margaret Flowers of Physicians for National Health Program and organizer with Occupy DC; Tom Gallagher, former state legislator in Massachusetts; and Dave Welsh of the San Francisco Labor Council. With moderator Rose Aguilar of KALW’s Your Call radio. A forum organized by the 99% Coalition, a group focused on anti-war and non-violence activism working alongside Occupy San Francisco.

7 p.m., $10 suggested donation

Unitarian Universalist Church

1187 Franklin, SF

(415) 710-7464

www.sf99percent.org

 

Black history film and discussion

A screening of Freedom Riders, the film detailing the story of 400 groundbreaking Civil Rights Movement activists that rode on integrated buses throughout the South despite violent resistance everywhere they turned.

7pm, $5 suggested donation

2969 Mission, SF

415-821-6545

answer@answersf.org


FRIDAY 17

Join the Un-Conference

Reverend Billy Talen, the performance artist pastor of the anti-consumerist Church of Life After Shopping, will give a sermon Friday evening. That part is $10, and all proceeds go to whistleblower Bradley Manning’s defense. But that’s just the first night of a free, three-day “un-conference.” Participants will set their own agenda, and range from experts and stars like Daniel Ellsberg, Annie Sprinkle, and Colonel Ann Wright to your run-of-the-mill folks interested in justice for whistleblowers.

6 p.m., $10

UC Berkeley International House

2299 Piedmont, Berk

www.freshjuiceparty.com


MONDAY 20

Stand with prisoners

A demonstration to protest racism and economic injustice perpetuated by mass incarceration and the prison-industrial complex and to stand in solidarity with prisoners and their families. This event is called by prisoners and sponsored by Occupy Oakland, reminding us that “there are more African Americans under correctional control today — in prison or jail, on probation or parole — than there were enslaved in 1850.” It will feature speakers and musical performances.

10 a.m., free

1540 Market, SF for bus and carpool

www.occupuy4prisoners.org

 

Occupying elders

The Gray Panthers present a discussion with participants in Occupy Bernal and the Wild Old Women, Occupy Oakland, and Occupy San Francisco. How can elders contribute to Occupy? Come find out from the people on the ground, including Ginny Jordan of the Wild Old Women, who have shut down more banks than any other Bay Area Occupy group, and Tova Fry of Occupy Oakland.

1 p.m., free

Unitarian Universalist Center

1187 Franklin, SF

graypanther-sf@sbcglobal.net

Hearing today on bizarre Occupy Oakland stay-away order case

8

The first Occupy Oakland protester to allegedly be in violation of a stay-away order has a hearing today.

Joseph Briones, 30, was arrested along with 408 others at an Occupy Oakland protest Jan. 28. He is one of 12 who were apparently issued the restraining orders, and is therefore barred from being within 300 yards of Oakland City Hall, potentially for the next three years, according to Alameda County Deputy District Attorney Teresa Drenick.

But based on a Feb. 8 hearing, Briones and his lawyer understood that he did not have a stay-away order against him, said Occupy Oakland media committee member Omar Yassin.

“That’s why he was at the plaza, carefree, on Wednesday,” said Yassin. That’s when Briones was arrested.

In a Feb. 9 press release, Officer Johnna Watson of Oakland Police media relations said that “Joseph Briones is one of four individuals charged with a violent felony offense stemming from the Jan. 28 protest.” But according to records at the District Attorney’s office, that’s incorrect; Briones is charged with three misdemeanors.

While everyone scrambles to get their story straight, Briones is still in jail. He has a hearing at 2 o’ clock today. If found to have violated a stay-away order, he could face six months in prison.

So far, Briones is legally innocent of any crime; he has not been convicted of any of the charges leveled on him in connection with Jan. 28. None of the other 11 who are prohibited from going near City Hall have been convicted of anything either.

Besides all that, the stay-away orders may be entirely illegal.

According to Jivaka Candappa, one of the attorneys working on the stay-away order cases, “the orders are unconstitutional and unreasonable.”

Most of the charges on the twelve are as benign as blocking the sidewalk and remaining at the scene of a riot (the latter is the same charge that was placed on  hundreds who were cited and released with no bail, and whose charges will likely be dropped—including me.) Even the felony charges, such as assault of a police officer, are common charges leveled on protesters that are usually dismissed. It is highly unusual to ban individuals from any public place, for any reason, let alone City Hall and a public plaza so obviously necessary for access to First Amendment rights, under any circumstances.

“This is legitimate action in, for example, a domestic violence situation. Here, protesters have not attacked anybody and they’re not a physical threat,” said attorney Mike Flynn, president of the San Francisco chapter of the National Lawyers Guild.

Candappa says that he and his colleagues may file motions in the Alameda County Superior Court challenging constitutionality of the stay-away orders.

Said Candappa, “preventing someone from exercising their First Amendment rights doesn’t promote public safety. Courts are very reluctant to restrain someone’s expressive rights, because its really a cornerstone of any democracy and if you want to be able to participate in democracy you’ve got to have a right to express yourself. To take away that fundamental right to express yourself is something courts are very reluctant to do, especially when those conditions are applied against someone who has not yet been convicted.”

 

Right about now

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THEATER It’s a rare thing, really too rare, to find an audience eagerly erupting into political discussions between acts of a play. But that’s what Little Brother inspires, and in an unaffected way, without pretension or unwelcome goading. It’s too cool, confident, and contemporary for that. After all, the night I saw the play — adapted by director Josh Costello from the 2008 teen novel by Canadian sci-fi author and activist (and co-editor of Boing Boing) Cory Doctorow — was just one night after Occupy Oakland tried to convert a vacant building into a much-needed community center for the needier of the 99 percent. That didn’t go too well. The street clashes with shock-trooping Oakland police forces led to something like 400 arrests before the night was over.

That latest incident, in an ongoing resistance to systemic and overweening injustice, resonated effortlessly with the proceedings onstage at Custom Made Theatre. There, on an intimate thrust stage, three sharp young actors (Daniel Petzold, Marissa Keltie, and Cory Censoprano) smoothly embodied a fleet series of characters in a story pitting a group of Mission District high school teens against the Department of Homeland Security. The battle takes place in the aftermath of a terrorist attack that levels the Bay Bridge and unleashes an all-out totalitarian crackdown by the federal government. It’s a dramatic, humorous, irreverent, and urgent story all at once. While far from a perfect play (dramatic consistency and verisimilitude are stretched a bit thin by the end), Little Brother is probably the most exciting thing on stage just now, alive like few other productions in its response to the present moment.

Behind the dynamic trio onstage stands a patchwork wall-projection screen (courtesy of set designer Sarah Phykitt, video designer Pauline Luppert, and video engineer Darl Andrew Packard) papered over with pages seemingly torn from radical histories and revolutionary tracts (it was easy enough to make out Emma Goldman’s visage among the repeated black-and-white pages), and periodically set aglow with live video feed, scene-setting photo montage, text messages, and hacker scrawl across computer and videogame screens.

While DHS is synonymous with Big Brother throughout, and for good reason — the agency is at the forefront of a total invasion of American private life and the Gitmo’ing of American teens — it can also be understood at times as a synonym for the state at large, from high school vice principals on up. As main character Marcus Yallow (a bright, engaging Petzold) explains in an early address to the audience, he’s a senior at a San Francisco public high school. Even before the Bay Bridge attack, “that makes me one of the most surveilled people in the world.”

Before being transformed into an all-out revolutionary by his violent, extra-constitutional encounter with DHS, Marcus and buddy Darryl (a sharp and versatile Censoprano) are fun-loving rebel hackers and gamers often on the receiving end of unwanted attention by the usual authorities. In an early scene, an inept school administrator interrogates Marcus, believing him, correctly, to be the hacker menace “w1n5t0n” (though, hilariously, pronouncing the handle literally instead of the intended “Winston”). Marcus outwits him, and the administrator loses his grip on the free-roaming online hooligan who, among other things, has handily derailed the “snitch tags” the school plants in library books to track the students.

At this point, Little Brother bears a striking similarity to The North Pool, Rajiv Joseph’s psychological two-hander set in a vice principal’s office after school, which had its premiere last year at Palo Alto’s TheatreWorks. But Joseph’s battle, while resonating with a larger political and historical context, ultimately remains more personal than political. Little Brother moves via the next terrorist attack into the realm of all-out political crisis, as short a distance from here as that may seem, and in this way resists reducing its themes to merely personal terms, highlights a tension with the personal throughout — even as it cleaves to a familiar coming-of-age narrative involving Marcus and girlfriend-coconspirator Ange (played compellingly by Keltie).

Costello shrewdly emphasizes this tension in his staging, which begins with the three principal characters recreating the story for a video cam so that it can be posted online. As Marcus begins a first-person account, his cohorts interrupt him almost immediately. “Dude, you can’t make it all about you,” says Darryl, with good-humored conviction. “It’s too big.”

 

LITTLE BROTHER

Through Feb. 25

Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m., $25-$32

Gough Street Playhouse

1620 Gough, SF

www.custommade.org

Alerts

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yael@sfbg.com

THURSDAY 9

Occupy Oakland Forum on Police Actions

Oakland’s Citizen Police Review Board had been planning a forum on the Oakland Police and Occupy Oakland for months — until they announced at the last minute that it was canceled. In response, the Occupy Oakland Forum Committee is hosting essentially the same forum, and inviting the same speakers, including Jim Chanin, civil rights lawyer from the Oakland Riders case, and Police Chief Howard Jordan. They hope to give the community a chance to respond to the recent controversy surrounding treatment of Occupy Oakland by police.

6:15 p.m., free

Grand Lake Theater

3200 Grand, Oakl.

oakland@occupyreport.org

 

Reelect David Campos

District 9 Sup. David Campos and his re-election campaign are throwing their first fundraiser event in the Mission. It will include drinks, appetizers, and a chance to talk with the man himself.

6 p.m., free

Blue Macaw

2565 Mission, SF

(415) 920-0577

 

FRIDAY 10

Kenneth Harding benefit

A star-studded night of music to benefit the Kenneth Harding Jr. Foundation. Support the foundation created after Harding, an unarmed black 19-year-old, was killed by SFPD officers in an incident spurred by an unpaid $2 train fare. The night’s line-up includes Fly Benzo, BVHP neighborhood resistance leader, emcee and City College student, who faces four years in prison on multiple counts including “videotaping the police” for his responses to the shooting.

9 p.m., $12

330 Ritch, SF

www.330ritch.com/calendar

 

SUNDAY 12

Move to Amend

David Cobb, spokesperson for the Move to Amend campaign, will speak about corporate personhood. Move to Amend is an effort to amend the constitution to abolish corporate personhood, which saw a large turnout on its national day of action on Jan. 20. Cobb is also a former Green Party presidential candidate.

7 p.m., $5-10

Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalist’s Hall

1924 Cedar, Berk.

(510) 841-4824

www.movetoamend.org

 

Harlem is Nowhere

Hear author Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts and organizer Alicia Garza talk about the history and meaning of Harlem as a center for black politics and culture, the effects of gentrification, and the geography of building power for people of color. This event is part of an ongoing “authors in conversation” series at the Museum of the African Diaspora. Rhodes-Pitts is the author of Harlem is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America, and Garza is the co-executive director of People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER) in San Francsico.

2 p.m., free

Museum of the African Diaspora

685 Mission, SF

www.moadsf.org/visit/calendar.html

Downtown action: Sex shop Feelmore510 celebrates one year of community pleasure

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The sex shop Feelmore510 is located on the corner of Oakland’s Telegraph and 17th streets, across from an Obama campaign office, in between a pawn shop and the oldest African-American owned shoe store in town. The neighborhood is in transition, a place with old roots and a lot of new blooms – most businesses on this stretch of Telegraph opened within the last five years. Feelmore510 will celebrate its one-year anniversary Sun/12 when owner Nenna Joiner helps host Town Love, a new party at Hibiscus’ Rock Steady.

But those businesses aren’t the shop’s only neighbors. This fall, Feelmore510 also lived alongside Occupy Oakland’s City Hall encampment. Though many local business owners have expressed anxiety about the effect that protests were having on their sales, Joiner is in full support of the movement. She sometimes walked over to visit friends who were “occupying,” and was happy to donate safe sex supplies to the camp. “Sex is a basic need for survival,” she said in a recent in-store interview with the Guardian. Joiner allows protestors to chill in the store and talk politics — as long as they aren’t running from the cops.

Joiner envisions her store as more than just a place to shop – it’s also a community center. On a recent afternoon, Joiner shook each customer’s hand and asked them their name. Her goal is that all comers can shop for augmentations to their love life in comfort. 

A cross-section of Oakland’s entire population converges in this particular area of downtown. Joiner sees everyone from rich vintage porn collectors — drawn to her extensive selection of old magazines and videos — to people who ask to pay with California welfare benefit cards. 

Her best-selling items, which are taken home by customers who are male, female, straight, bi, and trans, are the queer porn films that Joiner herself directed, edited, and produced. 2010’s Tight Places features diverse actors and she made Hella Brown with a cast of all African American women. Hella Brown is made in a semi-documentary style – Joiner shot interviews with over 50 queer and trans subjects about their sexual proclivities while making the movie. 

Artfully-displayed contraptions at downtown Oakland’s favorite sex shop. 

Joiner’s films are unique in the way that they showcase different sexual practices and different body types from mainstream porn, which is often geared towards a heterosexual male audience. Her films show women of all shapes, having queer sex — fellating strap-ons and other acts you might not catch in other kinds of porn. While the films are not shot with the straight male audience in mind, that group does seem to enjoy them, often buying the first film and then returning for more. Joiner sees her films as educational tools, especially for what she calls the “brown community,” where things like transitioning from one gender to another are often socially stigmatized and restricted by financial limitations. 

“Queer women of color possess a whole different intelligence and mentality,” she says, adding that many women have a certain shyness about “packing,” (wearing a flaccid prosthetic penis underneath clothing) and getting cosmetic gender modification surgery. Joiner fully embraces her role as an educator in the Oakland queer community. 

Joiner refers to dildos as “prosthetics,” – she says that this language is less alienating to those unfamiliar with their usage. She keeps a packer on prominent display, in order to provoke people into asking questions, which can open up a dialogue about passing as a man, transitioning, or simply stuffing one’s jock with something more substantial than a tube sock. She says customer preference in prosthetics can vary. Many want a life-like phallus, while others request dildos that don’t look like penises, going for glass, sculptural, or abstract designs.

Joiner feels that she is at the intersection of several different communities in Oakland. Joiner goes to two church services every Sunday. She buys passing school kids lunch at Ms. Tina’s, the little sandwich shop next door. She’s active in the queer scene, and she’s also a small business owner who encourages other vendors to promote their own businesses by using her store as a launchpad. 

“Having a space allows other people to identify with a vision of opening their own space.” When she first opened her store, naysayers questioned her brick-and-mortar approach over the Internet. But she says a website cannot replace the tactile satisfaction of a place to gather, to talk, to share. She uses her store to hold classes on topics rarely discussed other places, like sex industry work.

Joiner wants the toys she sells to be safe and fun for anyone, and to open up a conversation about sex, gender, and pleasure with Feelmore510. It works – her space encourages one to think of sex in a different, more open way. Joiner’s toys are all just tools for lovers to transfer feeling, power, and energy between each other. There is no single way to have sex, just endless different first-time experiences. It’s a new kind of space in an old part of Oakland, open for all comers to explore their most innovative sexual selves.

 

Feelmore510 one-year anniversary party at Town Love

Sun/12 5-11 p.m., $5

Rocksteady at Hibiscus

1745 San Pablo, Oakl.

(888) 477-9288

Facebook: Feelmore510 anniversary party at Town Love

 

After the tear gas clears

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yael@sfbg.com

After a chaotic day of marches and confrontations between police and protesters Jan 28, I was arrested along with about 400 others who were trapped by police in front of the downtown Oakland YMCA. Seven of us were journalists.

The goal of the march was to take over an abandoned building — an the vacant Kaiser Convention Center, a city-owned building that’s been closed since 2005, was a prime target.

I have not yet been able to retrieve my property, including my recorder and notebook, which is being held by the Oakland Police Department. What follows is a pieced-together account and a perspective on what the events of Jan. 28.

I spend 20 hours behind bars, and missed the later parts of the action. But I was able to observe what happened in jail and make some sense of what happened.

Occupy people are constantly debating tactics and goals, and for many, the idea of occupying a vacant building made sense. When Occupy Oakland had a camp in Frank Ogawa Plaza, also known as Oscar Grant Plaza, and commonly shortened to OGP, it created a strong community. That community bridged divides between the homeless and the housed, between students and labor organizers, and between Oakland residents of different races, genders and levels of ability in an unprecedented fashion.

The camp had a kitchen that fed hundreds of people everyday and a network of shared tents and blankets which welcomed in hundreds who otherwise would have slept on the streets, often feeling isolated from other residents of their city and made to feel inferior.

The camp was repeatedly raided, Occupiers were tear gassed and shot with rubber bullets, and when OGP was cleared out, the community no longer had a home. And the police started that violence.

That was the practical reason for wanting to occupy a vacant building: to have a social center for Occupy Oakland.

Of course, there are other reasons. There’s the question that many squatters and homeless advocacy groups have been making for decades: why let buildings lie vacant while people freeze on the street?

Remember: The building that Occupy wanted to occupy is public property, and right now nobody is using if for anything.

In one exchange in jail, a guard asked a protester why the activists thought they had the right to take over a vacant building. “I mean, it’s not yours,” he insisted. The protester replied that many vacant buildings are government-owned and therefore public.

“So it’s the government’s,” the cop said.

“But I pay taxes,” the protester responded.

“Me too!” replied the cop. “It’s mine!”

“It’s both of ours,” smiled the protester. “It’s all of ours.”

That’s what made the convention center action such a clear and easy political decision.

A lot of people in Occupy would go further, saying that at a time of a severe housing crisis, it’s perfectly legitimate to take over privately owned buildings that are sitting there vacant. It’s part of the central argument of Occupy — that corporations and the rich unfairly own and continue to acquire much more wealth than the majority of people. For many people, owning a vacant building and doing nothing with it, while hundreds freeze on the streets, is a crime itself.

 

UP AGAINST THE COPS

Then there’s the question of the police — and violence.

The word “nonviolent” has a specific meaning in the history of political movements. Martin Luther King Jr. defined it in his essay “The Meaning of Non-Violence”: “If you are hit you must not hit back; you must rise to the heights of being able to accept blows without retaliating … But it also means that you are constantly moving to the point where you refuse to hate your enemy. You are constantly moving to the point where you love your enemy.”

It’s a philosophy but also, in political terms, a tactic.

Many of the people who make up Occupy Oakland get their start as activists organizing against police brutality in a city that has longstanding problems with violent and undisciplined officers.

Police Chief Howard Jordan said in a press release that “It became clear that the objective of this crowd was not to peacefully assemble and march, but to seek opportunity to further criminal acts, confront police, and repeatedly attempt to illegally occupy buildings.”

It was certainly clear that the intent of the crowd was to illegally occupy a building. And any honest assessment of Occupy Oakland would have to acknowledge that some members are not wedded to King-style nonviolent civil disobedience. (Neither, by the way, were a lot of the protest movements of the 1960s.) Many protesters wore masks and bandanas to disguise their identities and protect them from tear gas and pepper spray, and the march was led by protesters with makeshift shields, which suggests that they expected to be attacked. You could certainly argue that what those people were doing wasn’t confrontation; it was self-defense.

Frankly, it made sense to be prepared: In other Occupy Oakland actions, police have attacked with batons, tear gas, pepper spray, flash-bang grenades, and smoke bombs. And for quite a few Oakland residents, the police have always been seen as an outside force that can’t be trusted.

In fact, violence did break out. Many, including myself, have eyes still stinging from tear gas. I saw several wounds caused by rubber bullets shot at protesters. I spoke individually to at least a dozen people — one of them a pregnant woman — who were struck with police batons.

And protesters did not remain peaceful while this violence was being used against them.

Some picked up tear gas canisters and threw them back towards police; that much I saw. I also saw protesters throw empty plastic bottles at police.

According to the police, they also threw metal pipes, rocks and bricks. According to the protesters, they threw mainly empty plastic bottles and fruit at police. But as protesters often say of the police, “They’re the ones who showed up with the guns.” If the cops didn’t want violence, why unleash such an arsenal of weapons?

People got hurt, protesters and police alike. Several bystanders who had nothing to do with the situation were swept up in the mass arrest.

The city of Oakland, already in dire financial straits, likely spent hundreds of thousands of dollars reacting to the protests. Police claim that they were unable to sufficiently respond to violent crimes over the weekend, including five murders, because they were overwhelmed with Occupy troublemakers.

Of course, city officials were the ones who decided to arrest 400 people — with all the expense that involves.

There are, at this point, no reports of serious injuries to any police officers. However, at least a dozen protesters had welts on their faces or bodies from being beaten by clubs or shot with rubber bullets. One woman was shot in both arms with rubber bullet; one man was shot in the face with rubber bullets while holding a video camera to document the events. Several protesters were shoved to the ground and received wounds on their faces while being arrested. Police raised their rubber-bullet rifles to the faces of protesters throughout the day, threatening attacks. A rubber bullet to the face can cause brain damage and blindness.

 

 

DID IT HAVE TO HAPPEN?

How could this have been prevented?

Police say that “while peaceful forms of expression and free speech rights will be facilitated, acts of violence, trespassing, property destruction and overnight lodging will not be tolerated.” But 40 people were arrested during an ongoing Occupy Oakland vigil in the first weeks of January for having “illegal property” at OGP in what many saw as clearly a peaceful expression of First Amendment rights.

On KGO radio Jan. 29, Chief Jordan said that he has allowed Occupy Oakland to protest without a permit and would continue to do so, but those early January raids were ostensibly due to permit violations — violations of the terms of a permit that Occupy Oakland did in fact have.

There’s no question: The police response to Occupy Oakland over the past few months has caused some people in the movement to get more radical.

Many Occupy Oakland-affiliated medics condemned those who threw objects at police, saying that they provoked a backlash that caused more injuries. Many Oakland residents who might be in line with the socio-economic critique presented by the Occupy movement feel endangered and confused by marches that result in the massive use of police weapons in broad daylight. A lot of people would rather protest in a lot of ways that less resemble urban warfare.

On the other hand, there are also ways that Oakland officials could have prevented the consequences of weapons deployed and 400 arrested Jan. 28. They could, for example, have allowed protesters to occupy the vacant building.

When protesters seized a building Jan. 20 in San Francisco, police first attempted to prevent them. They lined up in front of the targeted building. They deployed pepper spray and struck several protesters with batons. When they were unsuccessful, and protesters entered the building from the back, they opted to block the surrounding streets and wait until the time seemed right to enter the situation and make arrests. Police spokesperson Carlos Manfredi told me that the cops were not going to rush into the situation and were trying to prevent injury and violence.

The Kaiser Convention Center has been vacant for years. The city of Oakland recently made plans to sell it to its Redevelopment Agency, but that plan fell into legal limbo when Gov. Jerry Brown signed AB26, a bill that dissolved all California redevelopment agencies.

At this point, nobody at Oakland City Hall has any plans whatsoever for the big, empty structure.

Why not allow Occupy to use the convention center? It’s not downtown, where Mayor Quan says businesses have been adversely affected by Occupy Oakland’s presence. It would give the movement a chance to stop focusing on trying to occupy spaces and start focusing on benefiting the community with food, shelter, and community programs that they provided when they had a camp. It would give the building tenants who could be held responsible for maintaining it. It might even help get Occupy Oakland and the Oakland Police Department out of the cycle of violence that they have been spiraling into for months.

Each time arrests occur, each time violence occurs, both sides blame the other. Both sides are correct that they were provoked. Both sides are correct that something that they think is worth defending was violated — for the cops, it’s the law. For the protesters, it’s the right of the people to assemble.

In fact, many Oakland residents have experienced violence at the hands of the Oakland Police Department for years before Occupy began. There was already a mass movement formed around the murder of Oscar Grant, and thousands of people fed up with police murders of unarmed, often black, suspects.

In recent decades, other radical groups, notably the Black Panthers, insisted that their community lacked basic needs because the city of Oakland refused to prioritize them. The Black Panther free breakfast program served food in a strikingly similar way to Occupy Oakland. Black Panthers were also notorious for carrying guns to defend themselves against police violence.

Occupy Oakland protesters (unlike Tea Party members) certainly don’t carry guns. But, more and more, they cry “fuck the pigs” as much as any Panther.

For much of the Occupy movement’s 99 percent, unjust actions by banks, corporations, and the government officials that they have often bought and paid for are the worst problems facing the United States today. For others, particularly the poor and people of color, these problems are magnified and exacerbated by the fact that they feel the threat of police harassment every day. For years, they’ve understood that police disproportionately do not investigate or solve crimes that happen to them and their families.

 

 

THE RADICALS AND THE BROADER MOVEMENT

The Oakland General Assembly Jan. 29 was the biggest it’s been in weeks. While there were still over 300 people in jail, 300 more came out to get involved with the meeting. That happened at the same time that many who felt that inexcusable violence and property destruction occurred Jan. 28 and concluded they could no longer have anything to do with Occupy Oakland.

It’s a challenge for the movement nationally, too: How do you accept and encourage the people whose legitimate anger at economic injustice and police abuse turns them toward more radical responses — and at the same time make room for a people who want nothing to do with the black bloc Fs, vandalism, and confrontation with the police?

There are tactical issues with the way the building occupation was planned. Many who were completely in line with the concept felt unsafe and uncomfortable with the secretive nature of the organizers who planned it. The location of the building targeted for occupation was kept secret for practical reasons; police could easily prevent a successful takeover. Supporters must often be led to the locations of planned takeovers without knowing where the action is and how they’ll get there. But how do you reconcile this with the transparency required when organizers are leading more than 1,000 people who want to use tactics they feel comfortable with and make their own choices?

Occupy Oakland is asking the people to imagine a world where property rights wouldn’t prevent them from doing all the good that they could do with a building like the Kaiser Convention Center. They must also ask themselves to imagine a world in which goals like a building occupation can be achieved in a way that everyone involved is able to consent to their involvement.

These debates continue to occur at Occupy Oakland. Some will leave the movement, some will join. Some will take the ideas and try to manifest them in new and different ways. Participants in Occupy Oakland desperately want basic needs of food and shelter met for their community members, and for the system that governs the city to do so in a way that allows people to thrive when it comes to health, education, and opportunities for creativity and growth. They think that they have the beginnings of a community and a process that can achieve those visions, better than the city government ever has, and they care more about achieving it than respecting the property rights of the owners of abandoned buildings.

Editor’s notes

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tredmond@sfbg.com

I used to go to Grateful Dead shows at the Oakland Auditorium, which is now called the Kaiser Convention Center. One night I saw Bill Graham, the late concert promoter, ride a zip line from up near the ceiling to the stage in a giant paper mache joint called the “S.S. Columbian,” which looked like it was going to fall apart at any minute as he swung back and forth 50 feet over the crowd, trying to smile and wave in a bizarre promotional stunt that confused even the deadheads. I bet he shit his pants.

The place was a pretty good venue for a big concert, but it never worked out as a convention center, and the city shut it down in 2005. It needs seismic work and about $5 million in maintenance. It sits near Lake Merritt, on the edge of downtown Oakland, a giant empty building just waiting for something to happen to it.

It’s a perfect spot for an Occupy Oakland headquarters. I’m surprised it took the Occupy folks this long to figure it out.

Look: Oakland’s a working-class city, and it’s having severe financial problems, and sending hundreds of cops to arrest Occupy protesters is sucking up money that’s desperately needed for other things. Mayor Jean Quan complains that police were unable to respond to emergency calls in other parts of the city because they were all downtown dealing with the demonstration.

Understood — and it’s clear that the Oakland Police, whether the Occupy folks like it or not, are going to arrive in mass numbers to make sure that there’s no damage to local businesses or City Hall (where, oddly, there were no arrests, because the cops were elsewhere).

But the empty Kaiser Center, which isn’t even in the downtown center? Why bother?

Seriously: Why not just give it to Occupy Oakland? Tell the group that the city will strictly enforce fire and health codes, that the Occupy people will have to clean the place up and keep it clean, that they can’t damage the place … and hand over the keys?

It’s public property. Nobody using it now. Occupy might actually bring some excitement to the scene. If it became a center for political meetings and organizing, for education and performances, it could be a be a very positive thing.

Declare at truce in the Occupy wars. Let the cops go after murderers; give Occupy the vacant convention center. Nothing else is working. It’s worth a try.

Occupy Oakland inmates at Santa Rita attacked- developing story

153

(THIS STORY HAS BEEN UPDATED)

In the aftermath of the mass arrests of Occupy Oakland protesters– and whoever else happend to be on the wrong street at the wrong time– on Jan. 28 in Oakland, there have been loads of reports and rumors about brutality inflicted on those arrested. Most of those arrested were held in Santa Rita jail.


My observations:

I spent 20 hours in jail, and I saw some cruel treatment. I saw people suffering after being denied medication. I saw people with allergies to the food that was provided refused any substitute and unable to eat, sometimes for more than 24 hours. I saw people crammed into holding cells meant for groups a third their size, so that some people had to remain standing, sometimes for more than 24 hours. As many arrestees were wearing clothing coated in tear gas and pepper spray, those chemicals continued to waft through cells and affect all present.

Reports:

I have reports directly from sources of arrested occupiers being beat up in jail with police batons. At least 20 people were ziptied, meaning their hands were cuffed behind their backs– and more often than not, if they happen to be cuffed too tightly and their hands go numb and even blue, police won’t loosen them– for more than eight hours. I know that some people who were denied access to a restroom ended up sitting in their own vomit and urine for at least four hours in some cases.

UPDATE Another report from Joshua Clover, a professor of English at UC Davis, who was released Monday night, :
“I was held for 53 hours for a misdemeanor charge which every single person here, and there, knows will never be brought, and indeed which will be met with a class action suit for wrongful arrest that the city of Oakland will be compelled to settle. I have a perforated peptic ulcer. Early on in the stay I requested non—prescription care — liquid antacid, which the jail keeps on hand — when I began to have an ulcer attack, which is to say, when I began to bleed internally. I was not given such care until an attorney was able to intervene by phone many hours later. I received one capful, which was mildly effective for about three hours. Further requests were ignored. As many will know, a bleeding ulcer attack is both painful and potentially fatal”

UPDATE When I questioned Alameda County Sheriff’s Department Public Information Officer Sergeant JD Nelson about this, he responded that “[Clover] was obviously seen by a medical person, and they said that was enough medicine.”

But accoridng to Clover, via an email, “The one time that I received medication, a deputy came to the cell door accompanied by someone who may have been a nurse, holding a capful of antacid. I asked for more but was not given it.” And was Clover seen by a medical professional to determine the correct amount of medication? He says, “Definitely not.”

Also according to Clover, “Food was often not provided for periods of up to 14 hours. For a long period I shared a cell with 27 other people; it was about ten by ten feet. For a period I was in a cell labeled ‘Maximum Occupancy: Two.’ There were ten of us, three very sick. We stood. One of the people slumped over on the toilet, that being the alternative to standing.”

UPDATE

“Three people I know were denied medication for HIV infections while being held for multiple days, which is a life-threatening choice made by the county”

“two women were denied anti-depressants that they had with them when they went to jail”

UPDATE According to an anonymous source, “My 12×12 cell had 28 people. There was a toilet, a concrete bench, and enough hard floor space for three or four of us to sleep at a time. A girl in the cell across from ours told the guards she needed Lexapro or she would go into withdrawl. They ignored the request. One of my cellmates was HIV-positive. When I last saw him at 2 a.m. on Monday morning he had not yet been given his medications. As I exited the jail I saw a woman who had just been released lying on the floor. She was having a seizure and being tended to by a couple of firemen.”

UPDATE From Alyssa Eisenberg, who has multiple sclerosis:
“I take my medication at least twice a day…without it, the pain is, everything kind of goes numb and tightens up. Somtimes I can’t even see without it. When  had to sign the booking form about noon i couldn’t even see it, my vision was so blurry…I was told they don’t give meds to people that are going to be cited and released, only to people that are going to stay and get charged.”

Unconfirmed reports:

Daily Kos quotes an anonymous source who reports that “prisoners from the Oakland Commune were being denied medications (some had seizures) while the guards said they didnt care if they died. Some people were brutally beaten. The put tear gas in the vents of my cell twice.”
According to Occupy Oakland media spokesperson Omar Yassin, a report that someone was tear gassed in the jail’s hallway is likely credible.

Then there’s the peolpe who were injured during the protests Jan. 28. Also according to Yassin:

At least a dozen people had welts on their faces or bodies from being beaten by clubs or shot with rubber bullets. One woman was shot in both arms with rubber bullet; one man was shot in the face with rubber bullets while holding a video camera to document the events. Several protesters were shoved to the ground and received wounds on their faces while being arrested. Police raised their rubber-bullet rifles to the faces of protesters throughout the day, threatening attacks– a rubber bullet to the face can cause brain damage and blindness.

 

A spokesperson for the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department refused to comment, although she did say that they’ve “been bombarded with calls about this all day.” Shocker.

UPDATE According to Alameda County Sheriff’s Department Public Information Officer Sergeant JD Nelson, no complaints of mistreatment at Santa Rita have been filed.

Nelson said that peanut butter was made avaliable to vegans those allergic to meat, in direct contrast to what I witnessed in jail.

In response to reports that some detainees were held on buses in the Santa Rita parking lot for up to eight hours, during which time they were refused bathroom access and in some cases made to sit in their own urine and vomit, Nelson said that “Generally when they come to the jail the buses are unloaded fairly quickly. Obviously some people are going to go first, some last.”

He told me that detainees were denied medication because “We do we allow them to take their medication in jail. People will try to smuggle stuff in.”

When asked about reported beating in jail, Nelson replied, “I haven’t gotten any reports of any skirmishes between officers and those arrested. We would report it if  there was any use of force,”

According to Nelson, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office has video footage of all of the areas in the jail where arrestees were held, and, unless there was a lawsuit preventing its release, he would make the footage available to me soon. For now he said, “I don’t even know if they’ve been developed.” (Is this 1984? Not in the Orwellian sense. In the technology sense.)

More on this soon. Send me information that you have, yael@sfbg.com