Making Do in the Belly of the Beast

Thinking Outside the Box by Moving Into One

On a street in Oakland, Calif., a tiny home sits on wheels. The artist Gregory Kloehn, using recycled materials picked up from the streets, made several such homes and gave them to the homeless in the industrial neighborhood near the Port of Oakland.

By SARAH MASLIN NIR

OCT. 13, 2015 – nytimes.com

OAKLAND, Calif. — This summer, the median rent for a one-bedroom in San Francisco’s cityscape of peaked Victorians soared higher than Manhattan’s, sent skyward by a housing shortage fueled in part by the arrival of droves of newcomers here to mine tech gold.

And so, as the story of such cities goes, the priced-out move outward — in New York City, to Brooklyn and, increasingly, to Queens. For San Franciscans, the rent refuge is here in Oakland, where the rates are increasing as well — so much so that young professionals are living in repurposed shipping containers while the homeless are lugging around coffinlike sleeping boxes on wheels.

May Day 2015 — Dock Workers Walk Out to Protest Police Killings

Workers of All Colors Unite!

International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 10 in the Bay area will use its monthly stop-work meeting on Friday to idle the ports of Oakland and San Francisco to protest recent police killings of African Americans. The executive board and membership of Local 10 aligned its “Union Action to Stop Police Killings of Black and Brown People” with International Workers’ Day, which is celebrated on May 1 in many countries.

May Day in Oakland: ILWU March and Rally Against Police Terror!

STATEMENT TO THE BAY AREA LABOR MOVEMENT

A CALL TO ACTION!

April 22, 2015

The membership of International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 10 has voted at its meeting on April 16, 2015 to call for a stopwork meeting on May 1^st. It is fitting that on May Day, International Workers Day, Bay Area ports will be shut down to protest the racist police killing of mainly black and brown people. This is the first U.S. union to take such action. Local 10 took similar action on May Day 2008 to close Pacific Coast ports stopping all work to demand an end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the first such anti-war union action in American labor history.

ILWU Local 10 dock workers march in San Francisco on May Day 2008 in the first-ever strike action by U.S. workers against U.S. imperialist war. The work stoppage shut down all 29 West Coast ports demanding an end to the war and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as support for immigrant rights.

The System Says: All 59 Police Bullets Were Justified, Every One

4 San Francisco cops cleared in Alex Nieto killing

By Henry K. Lee and Kale Williams, sfgate.com

Friday, February 13, 2015 

March 24, 2014. Nieto was fatally shot by San Francisco police officers Friday evening at Bernal Heights Park. San Francisco police released the names of four officers involved in the shooting on Friday, Jan. 2, 2015, following a court order.

Four San Francisco police officers will not face charges for shooting and killing Alejandro “Alex” Nieto last year in Bernal Heights Park, because Nieto pointed a Taser shock weapon that the officers reasonably mistook for a pistol, the district attorney’s office said Friday.

The officers fired a total of 59 shots, District Attorney George Gascón said in a letter to Police Chief Greg Suhr. Two later-arriving officers opened fire on Nieto after they heard the popping of their colleagues’ gun blasts and believed Nieto was firing back, the letter said.

But Gascón’s report said all four officers had “continued to believe their lives were in danger … until Mr. Nieto’s head and weapon went down.”

The four — Lt. Jason Sawyer and Officers Roger Morse, Richard Schiff and Nathan Chew — had responded to witness reports that Nieto, a 28-year-old Mission resident, had a gun and was acting erratically on March 21.

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The Broken System: No consequence, no confidence. A response to the non-indictment of Alex Nieto’s killers. 

justice4alexnieto.org, February 13, 2015

Not One More Deportation: Tired of Futile Requests, Activists Block Deportations

San Francisco Blocks Deportation Buses

Just moments ago, dozens of undocumented immigrants and allies peacefully sat down in front of the San Francisco offices of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and blocked a bus filled with community members en route to deportation.

The action is occurring at 630 Sansome Street in San Francisco.

Today’s protest marks the expansion of a national movement to pressure the President to use his existing executive authority to halt painful deportations of immigrant community members – a move which will bolster efforts in Congress to win inclusive immigration reform with a path to citizenship for the nation’s 11 million undocumented Americans.

1913, The Gadar Party, and the Roots of India’s Armed anti-British Colonial Struggle–in San Francisco

[In 1913, a growing number of migrants from India to Canada and the US  formed The Gadar Party in San Francisco, designed to  organize an army to overthrow British colonial rule in India.  This organization  organized thousands of primarily Punjabis and Sikhs to return to India with the purpose of launching armed revolts (and mutinies among Indian soldiers in the British colonial army), and thereby sparked the struggle of millions during the first half of the 20th Century.  The noted revolutionary, Bhagat Singh, was himself motivated strongly by the Gadar Party’s revolutionary struggles.  Eventually, much of the party was crushed and its members hanged–and the remainder split into Communist and anti-Communist sections.  Today, while millions of Indians celebrate this heroic resistance and heritage, people in the US remain largely ignorant of the important history of these revolutionary and criminalized migrants.  We salute the heroic and historic resistance, 100 years ago, of these remarkable revolutionaries!  —  Frontlines ed.]

“The Ghadar Party’s main support came from Punjabi peasants who had begun to migrate from Punjab in the 1890’s. Moving east to Hong Kong and further east to the United States, and Canada in search of better wages, these men, most of them Sikh, worked as laborers in the Pacific Northwest. During the slump of 1907, Punjabis in Canada found themselves the butt of racial prejudice, as had other Asian immigrant groups also sources of cheap labor, who preceded them. The Punjabis were vilified as “ragheads” and the “turbanes tide”, and they found themselves at the storm center of racial tensions that occasionally flared into violence. Stung by their bitter experiences with prejudice and bigotry, disheartened by the British government’s failure to assist with problems of immigration to Canada, harboring a persecuted immigrant’s need to reaffirm his cultural identity, the Indians in California and the other coastal states were primed to be receptive to the idea of fighting a revolutionary struggle for India’s freedom.”

–from  “The Ghadar Party – Historical Assessment of an Indian Revolutionary Movement” by Emily Datta

“The major weakness of the Ghadar Party was its exceptionally poor sense of secrecy, which made it an easy target for British imperialism, armed as the latter was with the knowledge of the Ghadarites’ plans, not to say a monstrous police and military machine for suppression of the Indian people. The second weakness of the leadership of the Ghadar Party was its failure to understand the essence of imperialism. Hence the entertainment of the illusion by it that it could rely on the assistance of imperialist Germany for India’s freedom, whereas German imperialism was only interested in using the Ghadarites against Britain and snatching the latter’s colonial possessions for itself. Such an understanding had to await the epoch-making victory of the October Revolution in Russia.”  —  by Harpal Brar

Gadar – Overseas Indians Attempt to Free India from British Serfdom

By Inder Singh

Gadar Movement is the saga of courage, valor and determination of overseas Indians who had come to Canada and the United States either for higher education or for economic opportunities. They imbibed the fire and zeal of revolutionaries and became the trail blazers of freedom struggle for their motherland, India. They may have lived ordinary lives but they left an extra-ordinary legacy.

Cover of “India Against Britain” by Ram Chandra. Published in San Francisco by the Gadar Party [1916]. Excerpts from articles that refute allegations made by loyalists to the British Raj.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, both India and Canada were British dominions, so, Indians had easier access to emigrate to Canada. The new immigrants were hard working and accepted lower wages, so some Canadian companies publicized the economic and job opportunities available in Canada to seek more cheap labor from India. During the first few years, every year about 2000 immigrants, mostly Punjabi farmers and laborers were permitted to come. As the number of immigrants increased, the locals felt threatened by labor competition from the hardy and adventurous Punjabis. Fear of labor competition led to racial antagonism and demands for exclusionary laws from cheap foreign Asian workers. In 1909, severe immigration restrictions virtually ended legal Indian immigration to Canada.

When Indian immigrants saw the doors closing on them in Canada, they started coming to the United States which needed more people to do hard labor work to build new communities. In the U.S, they faced many difficulties, suffered numerous hardships and encountered rampant discrimination. Initially, they could find only menial jobs, but over a period of time and with their hard work and determination, many of them became successful farmers with their own land.

Within a span of few years, number of immigrant workers had swelled, so they starting facing widespread hostility which led to racial riots, resulting in certain cases, a loss of life and property. Like Canada, the United States, which had initially welcomed the Asian labor to do menial jobs, enacted Asian exclusionary laws to bar Asians emigrating to the United States.

“Net sharpens divide over cop shootings”

[The San Francisco Chronicle performs its duty as bourgeois media,  blaming the internet for the outrage over police killings.  The epidemic of such killings of, especially,  Black and Brown youth, as detailed in the recent Malcolm X Grassroots Movement report detailing that such killings take place every 26 hours, is not described by the Chronicle as alarming or disturbing.  Instead, they decry the attention given by the internet. — Frontlines ed.]

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Demian Bulwa, San Francisco Chronicle, Sunday, October 14, 2012

[Jimmy Blueford, whose cousin Alan Blueford was shot by police, marches in Oakland. Photo: Sarah Rice, Special To The Chronicle / SF]

From San Jose to Oakland to Vallejo, fatal police shootings often follow a familiar script.

An officer makes a split-second decision to kill, later explaining that he had no choice. His department struggles to communicate with the dead person’s family and the public. Anger spills into the streets, with activists demanding that authorities condemn the shooting – not just as a mistake but as murder. And an investigation clears the officer of any wrongdoing.

This could describe the shooting of 18-year-old Alan Blueford in Oakland in May or many other recent Bay Area cases.

While there is little evidence that police shootings are on the rise, they have become more politically divisive and combustible, people on all sides say, in part because of the spread of video cameras and the immediacy of online communication.

What will it take to remove anti-Palestinian slanders from public transportation?

ABC: “Pro-Israel ads on Muni buses spark criticism”

Zionist Hate Propaganda Promoted On A Bus !

by James Ashburn, Friday, August 10, 2012

SAN FRANCISCO, CA — San Francisco’s Municipal Transportation Agency has a policy against political ads on its buses, but an ad being displayed now comes pretty close. The ad says, “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat jihad.”

James Ashburn was surprised when he saw his bus roll up with the ad on the side. “It really struck me as an inappropriate ad to be on a city bus,” he said. Ashburn took a picture of the ad and sent it to ABC7 News via uReport. He thought the ad crossed a line. “No matter what side you’re on, you should not describe your opponent as a savage,” he said.

The pro-Israel ad was purchased by the American Freedom Defense Initiative run by Pamela Geller. “The reason I wanted to run these ads was to counter the anti-Israel ads that were running in various cities across the country in New York, in D.C., on San Francisco BART,” she said. If you don’t remember any anti-Israel ads on BART, that’s understandable. It has been a year since an ad ran calling on the U.S. to cut military aid to Israel. “It was a fallacious and dangerous message and it had to be countered with the truth,” Geller said.

The truth being in the eye of the beholder, ABC7 News showed the ad to Muslim’s going into Friday prayers at a San Francisco mosque. Adam Kennard called it propaganda. Ted Oriqat pointed out that the ad distorts the meaning of jihad. “Jihad, it doesn’t mean killing people or anything like that,” he said. And Oriqat is correct. Jihad means “struggle” and is frequently used as in “striving towards the way of God.”

Stop-and-Frisk Goes to Frisco

By Glen Ford, Tuesday, 07/03/2012

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

The “progressive” Chinese-American mayor of “liberal” San Francisco is considering instituting stop-and-frisk – which no doubt is already informally practiced by his city’s police. Mayor Ed Lee’s intention to endorse legal apartheid puts him in the historical American mainstream, since “stop-and-frisk never stopped in the United States.” The practice stretches, unbroken, from slavery times. “If the laws are applied unequally, then there is no law, and the police are nothing but an occupying army enforcing martial law” – selectively, against Black and brown people.

Stop-and-Frisk Goes to Frisco

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

“If skin color is treated as reasonable suspicion, then that is an apartheid state.”

The Mayor of San Francisco, the first Chinese-American to hold that office, is considering instituting stop-and-frisk [6] – but mostly in minority neighborhoods, of course. Mayor Ed Lee is all excited about joining the Church of the New Jim Crow, whose leading deacons are New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Philadelphia’s Michael Nutter. Like them, Lee claims he just wants to get rid of guns, although after ten years and the humiliation of literally millions of Black and brown men on the streets of New York, Mayor Bloomberg can come up with no compelling statistics on stop-and-frisk and gun crimes. Neither can Mayor Nutter, a stop-and-frisk fiend, whose city is under a court consent decree [7] to curb the practice.

San Francisco’s mayor describes himself as a “progressive,” but we all know that word doesn’t mean much of anything anymore, certainly not in the Age Of Obama. The cops in his city are already practicing stop-and-frisk on the same people and neighborhoods the mayor wants to target, and have doubtless stepped up their racial profiling since hearing about the mayor’s remarks. The fact is,stop-and-frisk never stopped in the United States. Stop-and-frisk was invented in the slaveholding states as a matter of daily practice, when Black people carried around permission from their masters to move outside his property, and free Blacks had to show papers proving their status. Stop-and-frisk was part of the Black Codes following Emancipation. The Old Jim Crow was designed to control Black people’s physical and social movements, and African Americans who could not prove that they were employed, through documentation or some white person’s word, were sent to prison work camps – the genesis of the penal system in the South. There’s nothing new about stop-and-frisk, although it is central to the New Jim Crow, a racial caste system whose primary institution is mass Black incarceration. Stop-and-frisk was the hallmark of apartheid in racist South Africa. A variant is enforced in Israeli-occupied Palestine.

“If there is equal protection under the law, then stop-and-frisk is illegal.”

Stop-and-frisk is necessary wherever racial supremacists want to separate those whose human rights are to be respected from those who are outside of legal protection.

If there is equal protection under the law, then stop-and-frisk is illegal. Period. The law applies in those sections of New York and Philadelphia and San Francisco that have high crime rates, just as it does in Bloomberg’s and Nutter’s and Lee’s neighborhoods. At least, that’s what the U.S. Constitution says. If the laws are applied unequally, then there is no law, and the police are nothing but an occupying army enforcing martial law. As one of the signs in New York’s recent “Silent March” against stop-and-frisk read: “Skin Color Is Not Reasonable Suspicion [8].” If skin color is treated as reasonable suspicion, then that is an apartheid state.

Mayor Lee will surely caution his police to be courteous as they enforce apartheid on Black and brown San Franciscans, just as Mayor Bloomberg is now urging his cops to do. But there is no fundamental distinction between polite applications of apartheid and the rougher kind. How do you politely tell someone that they are lesser human beings, existing outside of constitutional protections, exceptions to the rule of equal treatment under the law?

Either stop-and-frisk is a crime against humanity, or Black people have no rights that police are bound to respect. There is no gray area, just as there is no white law.

For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Glen Ford. On the web, go to BlackAgendaReport.com.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com [9].

The Revolutionary Poets Brigade at Occupy San Francisco

November 20th, 2011, the evening after the police raid at the Federal Reserve building,
occupiers crowded together to close down the block of 101 Market Street.
After Daniel Ellsberg spoke to the crowd,
the Revolutionary Poets Brigade appeared and gave this spirited reading.

Video by: Danielle Peterson

SF Bayview Community Activist repeatedly arrested for protesting police abuse

DeBray Carpenter aka Fly Benzo, community activist and hip-hop artist, is again facing trumped-up charges for his outspoken opposition to the SFPD’s harassment, stalking, framing and brutality against the targeted Black community in the San Francisco’s Bayview District.  This time, he was assaulted by police for videotaping their military occupation tactics, and then they threw the book of trumped-up lies at him.  His next hearing will be in the San Francisco Hall of Injustice on Wednesday, November 16.

It’s Really Real TV: FLY Benzo – “War On Terror” // #BlackPOWER #DropTheCHARGES

FLY Benzo’s “War On Terror” Music Video… Filmed, Directed and Edited by Phil Jackson.. Black Power… United We Stand… Divided We Fall… STOP THE VIOLENCE.. START THE HEALIN’!!

Police Fire Tear Gas, Flash Grenades as Occupy Oakland fights Tent City Eviction

[After scenes and statements from the Oakland streets, Democracy Now interviews an activist from the Oscar Grant struggle (against police abuse and killings) who links the long struggle for justice with the current battle, and a county Supervisor from San Francisco, who is trying to prevent any similar police suppression of Occupy San Francisco. — Frontlines ed.]

Democracy Now, October 26

San Francisco, October 16: “Free Oscar López Rivera, Puerto Rican Political Prisoner”

West Coast Speaking Tour

CARLOS ALBERTO TORRES (for 30 years a Puerto Rican Political Prisoner)

calling for the freedom of Puerto Rican Political Prisoner Oscar López Rivera

Culture/Music:  Rico Pabon & Las Bomberas de la Bahia- Afro Puerto Rican Bomba

WHEN:  Sunday, October 16, 2011, 4 PM

WHERE:  Mission Cultural Center (MCC)

                   2868 Mission Street, San Francisco (at 25th Street/24th St BART)

$10-50 (no one turned away for lack of funds)

In 1980 and 1981 15 Puerto Ricans were arrested and charged with seditious conspiracy -fighting for the independence of Puerto Rico.  In 1999, after many years of struggle both here and in Puerto Rico,  President Clinton commuted the sentences of most of those who remained incarcerated.  In 2010 Carlos Alberto Torres was granted parole after serving 30 years.  Oscar Lopez-Rivera remains in prison having been recently denied parole.  It is time for him to come home and be with his family and community!

for more information or to endorse:  freeprpp2011@gmail.com

SPONSORS:  Bay Area Boricuas & National Boricua Human Rights Network

San Francisco police remove protest camp of Occupy SF protesters on Market Street overnight

Occupy SF protest camp at the Federal Reserve Bank, before police suppression

By: Staff report, SF Examiner — 10/06/11 8:17 AM

The camps are gone but the protesters remain on Market Street in San Francisco’s Financial District, after police confronted the group late Wednesday night.

The protesters associated with “Occupy SF” had set up a minitent city in front of the Federal Reserve Bank at 101 Market St. They are occupying the area in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street as part of a movement to protest the disparity between the rich and poor.

But police forced the protesters to take down their camp Wednesday night, saying that while they have a right to demonstrate they cannot block sidewalks with items such as tents, crates and other objects.

At one point there were upwards of 70 cops waiting around the corner from the camp on Main Street.

There was one arrest. An assault on an officer, police spokesman Officer Albie Esparza said.

Some of the protesters were loudly debating whether they should take down the camp or stay and get arrested.

California: BART caught organizing and scripting “spontaneous” citizens demanding repression

BART spokesman Linton Johnson arranges "citizen demands" for political repression; says people have no rights when in transit system

BART spokesman in hot water for staging support

Justin Berton, Chronicle Staff Writer

Thursday, September 15, 2011

SAN FRANCISCO — The head of BART’s Board of Directors on Wednesday denounced an attempt by the transit agency’s chief spokesman to stock a news conference with riders critical of activists who have staged rush-hour protests in downtown San Francisco stations.

The spokesman, Linton Johnson, sent an e-mail to BART colleagues hours before a planned protest Aug. 11 in which he outlined a strategy to win over public opinion by showcasing “loyal riders” at a news conference. The riders were to say that protesters were putting their safety at risk.

Johnson planned for two sport utility vehicles to bring 10 to 15 riders to the news conference at the Powell Street Station in San Francisco, where they would read from scripts that the spokesman wrote. The scripted statement concluded, “We riders demand an immediate end to these illegal acts that make us late and put our lives at risk.”

Homeland Security systematizing-federalizing the police repression of BART protests

August 30, 2011

By Ali Winston

Justice Department, Homeland Security personnel present at #OpBART protests

Officers from a Department of Homeland Security Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response unit in the Civic Center BART station on August 29, 2011. photo by Geoff King

Amongst the dozens of riot gear-clad San Francisco and BART police officers that have packed Downtown San Francisco streets during the OpBART protests for the past three Mondays, you may have spotted some officers wearing khaki slacks and bulletproof vests, a far cry from the heavy duty helmets and body armor worn by officers from other agencies.

Those lightly-clad officers were part of a Department of Homeland Security Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response (VIPR) unit, an anti-terror unit charged with protecting transportation infrastructure from potential acts of terrorism. VIPR units are run by the Transportation Security Administration. According to the TSA’s website, VIPR teams are terrorism deterrents that “a random, announced, high-visibility surge into a transit agency, in addition to enhancing agency resources during special events.” VIPR teams have been deployed more than 50 times since the program began in 2005, and regularly patrol New York’s Metro North and Long Island Railroad commuter systems.