Deep in the pocket

Anti-Occupy Organizer Outed

2012-02-11T09:14:00.000-08:00

Standing for the bankstas comes with a price.

Occupy Oakland sympathizers aren't just targeting cyber attacks at council members and top city administrators; they've also gone after at least one of the organizers of a recently formed anti-Occupy citizens group.

Nancy Sidebotham has been a thorn in the council's side way before tents were ever pitched at Frank H. Ogawa Plaza, but she apparently ran afoul of Occupy supporters Monday when a group she helped start, Stand for Oakland, staged a rally decrying recent Occupy Oakland actions.

Sidebotham, a community policing leader and former City Council candidate, got a voice mail Tuesday evening from a man with a Texas-based phone number, saying "Hi Nancy, for some oddball reason your life history seems to have been plastered all over the Internet."

Sidebotham Googled herself and found that just like city leaders, her phone number, address and lots of biographical information had been posted on the file-sharing website Pastebin.com.

The information, which was likely culled from other public websites, included a nasty note from someone claiming to represent the hacker group Anonymous: "After looking into your background, it has come to our attention that you are involved in a self-aggrandizing political game you should not have involved yourself in, as now you have drawn our attention."
-Inside Bay Area

Greek Police Union Threatens Bankstas

2012-02-10T21:40:00.000-08:00

"Since you are continuing this destructive policy, we warn you that you cannot make us fight against our brothers. We refuse to stand against our parents, our brothers, our children or any citizen who protests and demands a change of policy."

"We warn you that as legal representatives of Greek policemen, we will issue arrest warrants for a series of legal violations ... such as blackmail, covertly abolishing or eroding democracy and national sovereignty."
-Greek Police Union to the Bankstas

A new era

2012-02-09T12:58:00.000-08:00

Occupy Oakland has paid its dues, and is now truly and officially an Oaklander. The movement is diverse and foward-thinking, is committed to working together to move forward into the future, cares about everyone in its community, has been scapegoated and misrepresented in the media, has been evicted twice, has been repeatedly shot and grenaded and teargassed, is ALWAYS being watched by the police (and most likely the feds as well), and now has a major case of PTSD that no one else seems to care about, and actually seems to blame them for. Most importantly though, despite all of the state repression/oppression and harassment and intimidation, the movement is still alive and well (even though homeless and misunderstood). That's about as Oakland as it gets.

The powers that be are LYING about the movement. The J28 "Move-in Day" action, and the criminally violent suppression of that attempted action, have forced a major rift in the broader society between those who instinctually trust the police, and those who know better.
J28 was the epitome of the class war that has been raging in the country for generations: a homeless movement was attempting to peacefully occupy a blighted, unused public space, and the police showed up armed for war. The video evidence alone proves whose agenda was actually carried out that day.

The Occupy Oakland movement is about democracy. Period. It is about an inclusive process where anyone who wants in can be in, and no one is left out. Anyone who says otherwise is a LIAR.
Resident livestreaming videojournalist Spencer Mills extended a polite invitation to Oakland Police Chief Howard Jordan to participate in tonite's community forum on police actions. Hojo, of course, declined. OPD has never and will never be interested in dialog. Just ask Bobby Hutton and Judi Bari.
Even back when Mayor Quan was trying to "dialog" with the labor council (her best attempt at trying to understand the movement was to call in the usual suspects, most of whom had NOTHING to do with the actual movement on her front lawn) OPD was calling for violent action rather than talk. When she realized that she couldn't bully big labor into controlling the movement (i.e. when she realized that they weren't in charge), she ignored the progressive voters who got her elected, and let OPD have their way. Rather than waiting her turn to speak to a general assembly and having genuine dialog, she conspired via teleconference with Homeland Security to help orchestrate a nationwide series of violent assaults on Occupy camps. That's her interpretation of democracy apparently.

The funny thing is, her blatant subservience to the radical right has earned her no respect in their eyes either. A recall campaign to oust her from office is currently underway, and its backers all represent "business" interests. Clearly, it was an incredibly stupid move on her part to try to make them happy...they didn't want her elected in the first place.

Oakland City Hall could learn a lot from the Oakland Raiders, who are risking short-term criticism from their fan base in exchange for long-term success. The Raiders are cleaning house in a quest for better communication, more discipline, improved teamwork and increased productivity (the same values that Occupy Oakland has prioritized since its inception).
It is painfully clear that OPD needs a similar cleansing.

Only one person had to die in order for the Raiders to move forward.
How many will it take before OPD and Oakland City Hall clean up their act?

Debt Bomb

2012-01-06T21:40:00.000-08:00

West coast port blockade on Monday

2011-12-10T21:08:00.000-08:00

westcoastportshutdown.org

Oakland and Alameda County cops trained by Middle Eastern occupation forces to violently repress Occupy Oakland

2011-12-09T10:01:00.000-08:00

A month before riot police violently raided the Occupy Oakland camp using chemical weapons, rubber bullets and flash grenades – a raid which led to a protest where riot police critically injured Iraq war veteran Scott Olsen when they shot him in the face with a tear gas grenade launcher gun – the Oakland Police Department and the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department trained alongside a military unit from Bahrain and an Israeli Border Police unit.

The occasion was Urban Shield 2011, an annual training competition which gathers heavily militarized police from the United States and across the globe to explore the latest in tactical responses and to promote collaboration. It’s a training that northern California police departments credited for their “effective teamwork” in dealing repressively with Occupy Oakland.
-AlterNet

The Iraeli goon squad, the Yamam, specializes in extra-judicial assassinations, while the Bahraini soldiers were from a unit that recently shot live rounds at unarmed, peaceful protestors in that country.
You can bet that this isn't just cops in Oakland, and police forces across the United States will only increasingly become more militarized and more brutal...they are learning from the most experienced assassins and thugs in the world.

Cops are banksta lapdogs...duh.

2011-12-08T16:36:00.000-08:00

1033 Program

2011-12-07T23:19:00.000-08:00

“It’s totally contrary to what we think is good policing”
-Joseph McNamara
Former Police Chief in Kansas City, Mo., and San Jose, CA

The 1033 program, passed by Congress in 1997, was created to provide law-enforcement agencies with tools to fight drugs and terrorism. Since then, more than 17,000 agencies have taken in $2.6 billion worth of free equipment, paying only the cost of delivery. This year alone, more than $500 million of military gear was given to U.S. police forces, and next year’s orders are up 400%.
The hand-me-downs are supposed to help law-enforcement fight terrorism and drugs, but amidst a 40-year low in violent crime, what are they really being used for?

“If we’re training cops as soldiers, giving them equipment like soldiers, dressing them up as soldiers, when are they going to pick up the mentality of soldiers?” he asked.
“If you look at the police department, their creed is to protect and to serve. A soldier’s mission is to engage his enemy in close combat and kill him. Do we want police officers to have that mentality? Of course not.”
-Arthur Rizer
Lawyer who has served as both a military and civilian police officer

Mehserle on trial for police brutality

2011-12-07T07:40:00.000-08:00

The former BART cop who was caught on multiple cell phone cameras murdering Oscar Grant at the Fruitvale train station on New Year's morning in 2009 is once again on trial for excessive force.

Less than two months before he executed Grant at pointblank range in an Oakland, California train station, the ex-officer allegedly used excessive force and violated the constitutional rights of Kenneth Carrethers at a separate Bay Area Rapid Transit hub.
Carrethers’ attorneys say that on November 15 2008, their client was angry over the BART cops’ lack of help in a case of vandalism that targeted his car. Carrethers says that he called the police force “useless,” and from there Mehserle and a handful of other offices became irate. According to court filings, Mehserle used a leg sweep to take Carrethers to the ground, then punched and kicked him while he was on the pavement.
The complaint continues that cops tied up Carrethers’ arms and legs before hauling him away.
"Well, have you learned not to mess with police officers?" Mehserle allegedly asked him.
-Russia Today

Democracy is dead

2011-12-04T08:58:00.000-08:00

The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 (S. 1867, Levin), which passed the Senate late Thursday night by a vote of 93-7, declares the entire United States of America a battleground. The bill, or a companion one similar to it, is now being debated in the House.
If passed out of the House and signed into law, the U.S. Military would be allowed to operate with impunity, having been granted the unchecked power to arrest, detain, interrogate, and even assassinate United States citizens (or anyone else in the world) with impunity.
In a nutshell, almost every right under the Bill of Rights would be stripped away from American citizens.
Senator Al Franken (D-Minn.) said that the act "denigrates the very foundations of this country."
Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) added, "it puts every single American citizen at risk."
Although authored by Senator Carl Levin, Sentors John McCain, Lindsay Graham, and Joe Liebermann have been major supporters.

Recall Quan campaign update

2011-12-04T08:50:00.000-08:00

A third draft of the petition to recall Oakland Mayor Jean Quan is "almost" ready to be signed by City Clerk LaTonda Simmons. After that, petition author Gene Hazzard will have 160 days to gather 19,109 valid signatures (10% of the residents who voted in the last election) to qualify the measure for the November 2012 ballot.
Just 11 months into her first term, Quan is being blamed by conservatives for layoffs in the Oakland Police Department at a time when the crime rate is rising. She is also being criticized from all sides regarding her handling of the Occupy Oakland movement.
In a nutshell, Quan is being scapegoated for the inevitable collapse of the global infinite-growth paradigm.

"It's so unfair," she said. "I'm the first Asian-American mayor of a major American city. They are not going to take me out without a fight."
-Inside Bay Area

December 12

2011-12-03T21:55:00.000-08:00

As of November 27, 2011, the Occupy movement in every major West Coast port city: Occupy LA, Occupy San Diego, Occupy Portland, Occupy Tacoma, Occupy Seattle have joined Occupy Oakland in calling for and organizing a coordinated West Coast Port Blockade and Shutdown on December 12, 2011. Other West Coast Occupies, including Occupy Anchorage and Vancouver, Canada are planning to join the economic blockade and disruption of the 1% on that date, according to organizers.

“We’re shutting down these ports because of the union busting and attacks on the working class by the 1%: the firing of Port truckers organizing at SSA terminals in LA; the attempt to rupture ILWU union jurisdiction in Longview, WA by EGT. EGT includes Bunge LTD, a company which reported 2.5 billion dollars in profit last year and has economically devastated poor people in Argentina and Brazil. SSA is responsible for inhumane working conditions and gross exploitation of port truckers and is owned by Goldman Sachs. EGT and Goldman Sachs is Wallstreet on the Waterfront” stated Barucha Peller of the West Coast Port Blockade Assembly of Occupy Oakland.

“We are also striking back against the nationally’ coordinated attack on the Occupy movement. In response to the police violence and camp evictions against the Occupy movement- This is our coordinated response against the 1%. On December 12th we will show are collective power through pinpointed economic blockade of the 1%.”

Each Occupy is organizing plans for a mass mobilization and community pickets to shut down their local Port. The mobilization of over 60,000 people that shut down the Port of Oakland during the general strike on November 2, 2011 is the model for the West Coast efforts. Organizers state that a police attempt to disrupt the port blockade or police violence against any city participating will extend duration of the blockade on the entire coast.

“These Ports are public. People have a right to come to the Port and protest. The ILWU has historically honored picket lines at the Port.” stated Clarence Thomas, a member of ILWU Local 10.

ILWU longshore workers are involved as individuals in the planning of the Shutdown. “I am a longshoreman and I support the December 12th Blockade against EGT. EGT is a threat to the survival of the ILWU,” stated Anthony Leviege, a member of Local 10. Dan Coffman, the president of Local 21 in Longview, has publicly thanked the Occupy movement and Occupy Oakland for its actions on November 2nd.

Further interviews and details can be obtained through local Port Blockade committees and the Oakland West Coast Port Blockade Assembly.

http://westcoastportshutdown.org/

World Revolution Update

2011-12-02T07:32:00.000-08:00

God turning His back on the bankstas

2011-11-27T00:23:00.000-08:00

First veterans, now churches too.
Traditional bases of support are turning.

A small but growing number of religious communities across the country are removing their money from Wall Street banks to protest what they see as unfair mortgage foreclosures and unwillingness to lend to small businesses.

The New Bottom Line (NBL) coalition of congregations, community organizations, labor unions and individuals is promoting a "Move Our Money" campaign with the goal of shifting $1 billion from big banks to community banks and credit unions.
-Huffington Post

OPD thugs terrorize people serving free turkey dinners on Thanksgiving Day

2011-11-25T09:47:00.000-08:00

OPD flipped out when port-a-potties arrived at Oscar Grant Plaza while people were serving free turkey dinners. Then they started assaulting people. If that wasn't enough, as you can see at the end of this video, one officer tried to tase an unarmed man, but a woman pushes his arm down and ruins the officer's shot.
OBVIOUSLY, if the intended tasee had committed ANY kind of crime, the officer would not tolerate a bystander preventing him from getting his tasing on. Instead, a woman physically intervenes (with alleged "police work", which is allegedly a crime in itself), but the officer simply shrugs it off and allows the intended victim to continue mouthing off (which is not a crime).
This is OPD folks.

Happy Thingstaken Day

2011-11-24T09:59:00.000-08:00

Today, I’m thankful for the validation.
The world really is watching. This really is the future, and though the revolution may not necessarily be televised, it is being streamed and youtubed and tweeted and facebooked.
Joblessness, homelessness, shootings, starvation, mental illness, professional motherfuckery, rats in City Hall, undas, cops, pigs and shit…none of this is new to us. This is how we roll. They killed Lil Bobby, Judy Bari, Oscar Grant, and countless others. Each time, we came back stronger than before, letting them know that we would not be intimidated.
This is why I built a life here, planted a garden and joined the community. Oakland keeps it real.
I’m not a pacifist. Because I grew up in Nazi territory during the 80s, I strongly believe in everyone’s right to defend themselves, but I’m also trying to raise a son in a world where people use their words before their fists. The strong commitment to non-violence in Oakland, a place where people are not afraid to fight by any means necessary, is incredibly encouraging, and we should all be proud.
People in Oakland get it, and have gotten it for a long time. This is the best place to experience the collapse, because people have been preparing for it, people have been organizing around it, and most importantly, people are willing to work together to survive it. All 99.99% of us.
Oakland really is a commune. It was before the Occupy movement, and it will be after. That’s how we roll. People who don’t know don’t know, and they can judge from that position of ignorance all they want. We don’t need anyone else’s validation, especially if their perspectives are rooted in the old played-out infinite growth paradigm. They are the dinosaurs, and we are the birds.
Even if the Occupy movement died tomorrow, hella people still got an unprecedented sensitivity training for free. They didn’t have to go off to some foreign land in search of meaning, as they had a convenient excuse to come to Oakland as part of some sort of urban domestic peace corps minus the fees and bureaucracy. No passport was needed for this trip. They served the people here in this country, and I highly doubt that they’ll be satisfied going back to a meaningless life of endless consumption. I doubt that anyone will really have that choice to be honest.
Besides, the movement ain’t dyin tomorrow anyway. It was never just about the camp. The camp, which was unlike any other camp anywhere else in the country, was but one protest out of many in Oakland. The camp was merely a symbol that could be replicated elsewhere, like the mouse ears of the movement. It was important for the homeless people, but it wasn’t the end goal.
The end goal was, and still is, a better world. The path to that goal is the process, and that still lives on.
Inclusiveness.
Everyone in, no one left out.
Judgement is the bankstas’ way. Mutual respect is the only way we can learn from one another, and if we can’t learn from each other, we can’t learn.
We have a lot to learn if we want to survive, and there really isn’t a better place to learn than right here, right now.
So I have to also be thankful for the bankstas’ predictable greediness. They couldn’t possibly save themselves from themselves, and they partied like it was 1999…for an extra decade.
And now the collapse is here. It was inevitable to us, and that’s why we have been preparing: dreaming and planning, learning and sharing, organizing and working to make a better world. Now, thanks to the teargas and the pepperspray, more people have a reason to notice, and be curious. They are all welcome to join the movement towards a better world, and they can do so in their own home towns. Oakland isn’t just a place, it’s a way of life, one that the overwhelming majority of us have chosen.
We aren’t where we need to be yet, but we are still ahead of the curve, and it’s being noted. For those of us committed to the struggle, who have been screaming for years/decades hoping to be heard, it is nice to know that the tide has shifted away from willful ignorance and towards curiosity. That’s actually more than we realistically hoped for, and it is a call to action for us to step it up and continue building on the momentum.
The whole world is watching.

The Occupation Illustrated

2011-11-23T11:35:00.000-08:00

#OO in-house documentarian Susie_C has posted a great Illustrated History of Occupy Oakland. Check it out here.

18th & Linden

2011-11-22T20:58:00.000-08:00

A vacant lot facing foreclosure in West Oakland was occupied yesterday.

Surrounded by a chain-link fence, the lot at 18th and Linden streets has food and water for anyone who asks, about a dozen tents, tarps, protest signs and even entertainment -- a man belting out a raspy, undecipherable tune on a weedy knoll outside the camp.
-Inside Bay Area

They are being raided as I write this.
Very intresting.
This is the first occupation in the hood. People in West Oakland are acting like people from West Oakland, but the cops are treating this like Snow Park by the lake.
And now the cops are leaving because they realized that it isn't Snow Park.
It wasn't the occupiers who ran the cops off either.
It was the neighborhood.

Or maybe the cops didn't really have authorization from the property owner to evict?
Who knows.

Some people tried in vain to organize a march to Oscar Grant Plaza after the cops left. Eventually though, the group was gone after slowly dwindling down throughout the night.

Here's the official story:

OAKLAND -- A confrontation between police and a diverse group of Occupy Oakland protesters ended late Tuesday, when campers moved out of a vacant lot that they had taken over a day earlier.

About 100 people gathered on the sidewalk outside the lot after police issued a 30-minute warning to vacate the lot inside a chain-link fence that surrounds 18th and Linden streets. The displaced campers were scrambling to figure out a new plan late Tuesday, and it was unclear if they planned to camp overnight.

A lot owner must file a complaint with police before officers can clear the premises.

Earlier Tuesday night, police appeared ready to move in on the group. About 30 police officers were at the scene, most of them in riot gear.

About 20 people set up tents on the lot late Monday night, and Tuesday afternoon the camp was bustling with people. Food and water were available for anyone who asked.

Police gave the protesters a 30-minute warning about 8:30 p.m. to leave the camp or be arrested. But at 9:50 p.m., police surprised protesters and observers alike when several of them removed their riot gear and all the officers promptly drove away. Police helicopters remained in the area and it was unclear what the department's next move would be.

It was not immediately clear whether they left because they did not have authority to evict the protesters.
-Inside Bay Area

Occupy Oakland Update

2011-11-21T08:58:00.000-08:00

Watch live streaming video from occupyoakland at livestream.com

On Saturday, a rally and march and new occupation took place in Oakland. A victory garden was planted at Oscar Grant Plaza during a long rally. A march through downtown Oakland followed, ending at a new location in the heart of Uppity Uptown at 19th & Telegraph. True to form, a huge dance party ensued. Police raided the new camp at 19th & Broadway and destroyed the victory garden early Sunday morning. They then raided Snow Park early Monday morning.

During the GA on Friday, a resoution calling for a December 12 West Coast Port Shutdown was approved unanimously.

Occupy Oakland calls for the blockade and disruption of the economic apparatus of the 1% with a coordinated shutdown of ports on the entire West Coast on December 12th. The 1% has disrupted the lives of longshoremen and port truckers and the workers who create their wealth, just as coordinated nationwide police attacks have turned our cities into battlegrounds in an effort to disrupt our Occupy movement.

We call on each West Coast occupation to organize a mass mobilization to shut down its local port. Our eyes are on the continued union-busting and attacks on organized labor, in particular the rupture of Longshoremen jurisdiction in Longview Washington by the EGT. Already, Occupy Los Angeles has passed a resolution to carry out a port action on the Port Of Los Angeles on December 12th, to shut down SSA terminals, which are owned by Goldman Sachs.

Occupy Oakland expands this call to the entire West Coast, and calls for continuing solidarity with the Longshoremen in Longview Washington in their ongoing struggle against the EGT. The EGT is an international grain exporter led by Bunge LTD, a company constituted of 1% bankers whose practices have ruined the lives of the working class all over the world, from Argentina to the West Coast of the US. During the November 2nd General Strike, tens of thousands shutdown the Port Of Oakland as a warning shot to EGT to stop its attacks on Longview. Since the EGT has disregarded this message, and continues to attack the Longshoremen at Longview, we will now shut down ports along the entire West Coast.
-Occupy Oakland

World Revolution Update

2011-11-18T07:37:00.001-08:00

Linton Johnson demoted

2011-11-15T07:39:00.000-08:00

OAKLAND, Calif.—Longtime Bay Area Rapid Transit spokesman Linton Johnson has been removed from that position at the agency.
BART Board President Bob Franklin said this week that Johnson has been assigned to a new role and will develop large-scale communications strategies for major agency programs.
Johnson had come under fire after taking credit for an August decision to shut down cell phone service in BART stations. The goal was to hinder protests that began after the fatal shooting of a transient by BART police.
Johnson also reportedly tried to stock a news conference with supporters angry about the protests.
-Inside Bay ARea

Occupy Oakland Inspires Moral Courage

2011-11-15T07:36:00.000-08:00

This guy gets it.

It's annoying that the MSM demands to know what the demands are, and they act like no clear message has ever been voiced. In fact, the primary demand has long been articulated very succinctly: Join us.

We have so many varied fronts, all united in the common purposes of getting along, learning from one another, and creating a better world together.
The MSM wants to poke and prod and identify divisions in the movement, and hence the "demands" wedge. They want something to attack, and it needs to be something more tangible than illegal camping. The camp highlights the very important issue of homelessness, but that is just one of many issues. There are too many to list.
The revolutionary aspect of the occupy oakland movement is it's process, and the dialog that results.
That's what this is really about. Dialog.
Everyone has a voice, because we'll only make it together.
Today, Oakland was Berkeley and Berkeley was Oakland.
The dialog continued.
Tomorrow, the movement will grow even more.
We'll find more space and continue the dialog and we'll make a better world.

So to the haters tryin to divide us, I have this to say:
Sit yo ass down, and let us handle this.

Occupy Oakland lives!

2011-11-14T20:33:00.000-08:00

Well the bankstas wanted us gone, and they got rid of us...for one morning.
They spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to arrest 32 people and clear a park for part of one day.

They failed to clear everyone though.
Zachary Running Wolf managed to avoid forced dispersal by sitting in a tree along 14th street. He's still there too.
So is the General Assembly.
Occupy Oakland lives.
We retook Oscar Grant Plaza shortly before 6pm, slightly over 12 hours after several hundred riot cops cleared out the 32 remaining campers and stole everything that was left.
They watered the lawn too.
Over the sounds of three helicopters circling overhead, a packed General Assembly celebrated a very important homecoming, and got back to business as usual.

The stakes have been raised

2011-11-12T11:00:00.001-08:00

So on Thursday, right before the start of the Raiders/Chargers nationally televised prime time game, a man known as "Alex" was murdered in front of Tully's coffee house near the Occupy Oakland encampment in Oscar Grant Plaza. He was allegedly a resident of the camp, and had gotten into an argument with another camper. Other Occupy Oaklanders intervened and the argument ended. The other camper called some of his homies (allegedly) who showed up and attacked Alex. Once again, Occupy Oakland security forces intervened, and one of the attackers resorted to gun play and fatally shot Alex. None of the attackers were campers, and Oakland Police still have not identified nor caught any of them.
Machine politician Larry Reid and Howard Jordan had to leave the football viewing parties they were attending to come down and capitalize on the tragedy by blaming the month-old protest and calling for its end. Never mind that councilmember Reid's district has NEVER gone a month without a shooting.
Please don't believe the hype.
The violence was not a result of the Ocupy Oakland movement, it was a result of the unjust and corrupt society that the bankstas have created. Violence is an everyday reality on Oakland's streets, a reality that Chief Jordan and Councilmember Reid and Mayor Quan and countless other banksta lapdogs before them have FAILED to address for generations. Let's be honest here, it is a reality that they rely on in order to stay in power.
Another reality is that the Occupy Oakland camp has handled its own security internally for a month without any fatalities, something that the city can not claim. We don't know whom the assailants were, because the police have failed to catch them. We do know that members of Occupy Oakland stopped two altercations that night before one of the outside agitators resorted to gun violence. Further, Alex was not left to die alone and anonymous on the streets like thousands of others have in Oakland. Occupy Oakland medics were immediately on the scene trying to save his life. Even in failure, they provided much more to Alex than the city ever has for one of its citizens.
That is the real story here.
Violence happens in an unjust and corrupt society. At least we care, and at least we tried to do something about. Even more, we are trying to change the conditions that promote lawlessness and callousness.

As the banksta stooges were screaming for an end to the Occupy Oakland camp, someone was shot nearby White House in Washington, DC. Hypocritically, none of them blamed the White House for the violence.

In other news, the city has decided to evict the camp, but an affinity group in the camp had already started making plans to move into an abandoned building. We'll see which move happens first.

Outside agitators demand "forceful action" to oust Occupy Oakland

2011-11-09T08:06:00.000-08:00

The Downtown Oakland and Lake Merritt/Uptown District Community Benefit District Boards of Directors called on Mayor Quan to evict the Occupy Oakland camp. They take credit for making the Downtown area the cool hipster place it is, and they claim that the protests are ruining their little multi-cultural Neverland.

It is extremely frustrating, then, to see that our efforts to fund improvements and improve
parks and public spaces, all designed to attract new businesses and create opportunities for new entrepreneurs and employees in Uptown and Downtown, have been threatened by weak, confusing and inconsistent messages from the City in addressing the ramifications of the Occupy Oakland protest.
-The Downtown Oakland and Lake Merritt/Uptown District Community Benefit District Boards of
Directors

Business is all about buzz, and Oakland got more Buzz now than it ever has. There have always been protests, riots, rats and drug abuse. Every real Oaklander knows that this city has long had major problems with police brutality, homelessness, and mental illness. The Occupy Oakland movement hasn’t created any of these problems. In fact, we’re talking about how to address them, and we’ve called international attention to them. Apparently, the business community is really clueless about the city that they are trying to exploit.
I for one can say that I don’t hang out in downtown Oakland at night very often anymore. I’m a parent, not a hipster. The skyrocketing rents forced me to move my family even further East as the business community turned downtown Oakland into East Emeryville.
Don’t get me wrong, I like that downtown and the lake areas are now bustling with newcomers who have both disposable income and cool places to spend it. However, the business community needs to understand that Jerryfication may have gotten a lot of shiny new buildings constructed, but the real character of Oakland (diverse, multicultural, conscious, radical, futuristic, easily mobilized) is what filled up those buildings with people who were willing to flood the streets the night after we got shot and teargassed. It’s the business community, not the city, that has learned nothing from past riots. Riots happen, and we move on, and people still flock to come here and be a part of this community.
It is true that I didn’t spend any money downtown on the night of the 25th when the city was blowing $1 million brutalizing its own citizens in defense of a patch of dead grass, but I did get my wife to come out the next night to the GA, and afterwards we went and had a beer and some food at a downtown establishment. That’s something we haven’t done together in years.
Duh.
Every smart business person knows that you need to create a market more than you need to create a product, and Occupy Oakland has IN FACT created a bustling market in Oakland. Maybe not IN the camp itself, but certainly the restaurants surrounding the city center who have something interesting to offer are doing all right considering the economic collapse that triggered the occupy everything movement (the business community also conveniently forgets to address the fact that the collapse came first, not the other way around).
The business community needs to look into its own city’s history to learn that none of this is anything new. It’s just bigger, more organized, and more focused.

Or is that what they’re truly afraid of?

It’s time for bold leadership and forceful action, not unending social experimentation. We call upon the Oakland City Council and the Mayor of Oakland to step up and provide cohesive, common sense leadership ‐ before it really is too late.
-The Downtown Oakland and Lake Merritt/Uptown District Community Benefit District Boards of
Directors

Oakland is alive and thriving.
It’s too late for the old paradigm (infinite growth Ponzi). If you want to cater to lamos, then maybe Oakland isn’t the best market for you.
We’re headed into the future. You’re welcome to join us if you’d like.
Otherwise, stay out of our way.

Shot while holding a peace sign

2011-11-07T22:02:00.000-08:00

Even "experts" on police brutality are shocked.

"It looks terrible," agreed Sam Walker, a professor emeritus of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, who consulted with Oakland police on the federal consent decree emerging from the Riders scandal. "It certainly looks like they singled him out to be shot ... and there does not appear to have been any sort of attack by the protester. Clearly, the camera is not approaching the officers, so they couldn't claim that he posed a threat."

Paul Chevigny, professor emeritus at the New York University School of Law, said it looks like "a violation of his First Amendment rights apart from being a violation of his Fourth Amendment rights. He has a right to take a film of what the police do -- we've been over this thousands of times -- unless he's interfering in some way.

"The basic problem of police retaliating against people who are trying to record what's going on is perennial," said Chevigny, adding this occurs all over the nation. "They (officers) consider it a kind of 'contempt of cop.' It's an expression of the fact that people do not trust the police. The police read it as a criticism of them. It's not even necessarily that they're trying to prevent people from seeing what they're doing.

"But this extreme version (of retaliation) is very unfamiliar to me," he added. "I can't imagine what they're going to say about shooting this guy. Sounds like the Oakland police need a little brush-up on their training."

There have been other allegations of excessive force against Occupy Oakland participants. Best known is the case of Scott Olsen, 24, an ex-Marine and Iraq War veteran struck in the head by what witnesses said was a police projectile Oct. 25. He suffered a fractured skull but is expected to recover.

Another veteran, Kayvan Sabeghi, 32, of Oakland, claims officers beat him with batons and tackled him early Thursday, then denied him medical care for hours. He underwent surgery Friday to repair a lacerated spleen.
-Inside Bay Area

Social media at its best

2011-11-07T21:49:00.000-08:00

Here's a pretty good read about a guy who does the Occupy Oakland live video feed.

Few people would know the name Spencer Mills or be able to identify his face.

But tens of thousands of online viewers around the world would recognize his online alias, OakFoSho. Nearly 60,000 have tuned into his video stream of the violence that erupted after Wednesday's Occupy Oakland general strike. Many heard Mills narrating in the early hours of Thursday while tear gas filled the middle of the city's downtown district.

That the images appeared jerky and blurry dissuaded no one. They could see the flames, the police, the protesters and the boom of the tear gas canisters exploding, all live. The experience provided a new twist to the old Gil Scott-Heron political song "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised."

Mills live-streamed with nothing more than a Motorola Droid X smartphone equipped with an 8-megapixel camera and Web access.

"It was intense. I was just standing there with a camera," Mills said.

"It was social media at its best," he said Thursday, sitting on the stairs of City Hall plaza shortly before midnight.
-Inside Bay Area

Mike Ruppert addresses cops

2011-11-05T22:40:00.000-07:00

A Message to All Police Officers From Occupy Wall Street from CollapseNet.com on Vimeo.

Mike brings it in this video. It's a lengthy one, but well worth the view.
He breaks down the warrior mentality, and challenges cops to be warriors, not cowards who abuse their authority in exchange for the crumbs that fall off the bankstas table.

"When the budget cuts come, you can bet that the first to be let go will be those showing any signs of honor, of compassion, of remorse...showing any signs of humanity, because the only ones that the infinite growth monetary paradigm can afford to pay will be the most ruthless, the most brutal, the sociopathic, the psychotic.

Another vet injured by riot police in Oakland

2011-11-05T21:04:00.000-07:00

First Scott Olsen, now this:

A former U.S. Army Ranger and Occupy Oakland protester was in intensive care on Friday after a veterans' group said he was beaten by police during clashes with anti-Wall Street demonstrators this week.

Kayvan Sabeghi, 32, was arrested and hospitalized about a week after another U.S. military veteran, former Marine Scott Olsen, was badly injured in a confrontation with police that helped spark the latest round of unrest.

The group Iraq Veterans Against the War said Sabeghi was detained during disturbances that erupted late on Wednesday in downtown Oakland and was charged with resisting arrest and remaining present at the place of a riot.
-Reuters

Kayvan was seen in news footage talking peacefully with with riot police prior to his arrest/beatdown. News footage also showed him face-down at the bottom of a pile of baton-wielding riot police. He suffered a ruptured spleen, but police denied him medical treatment for 18 hours.

A man who said he shared a cell with Sabeghi at Glenn Dyer jail in Oakland said Sabeghi showed his wounds, which looked like baton bruises mainly to his torso.

(Sabeghi's friend David) Goodstal said they posted bail about 12:30 p.m. Thursday, but the partner who made the trip down there did not see Sabeghi. The next time they heard from him, he was calling from Highland Hospital.

"I didn't know he was going to take part in the protest; I heard about it when he called me and said he was seriously injured," Goodstal said. "He said he went to the port, and then he and a friend had dinner and he was leaving and was confronted by the police."

Goodstal said his friend told him that he was not part of the group that took over the building or fought with police.

He told him that he was in tremendous pain while he was in jail and asked for help, but none came.

"He said he was throwing up bile," Goodstal said. "He told me one of the cops said, 'You need to get off heroin.' That's what Kayvan told me; I wasn't there. I'm sure the police will have a different story.

"He went by ambulance to the hospital. He couldn't get up himself and walk out so he said they just locked the cell," Goodstal said.
-Inside Bay Area

Protestors had occupied the former Traveler's Aid Society building, and as or beeven before Mayor Quan was offering to negotiate the return of Traveler's Aid Society, Oakland Police and Alameda Sheriffs were posse-ing up for a riot. And then there was a riot.
At a city council meeting the next night, Mayor Quan warned Occupy Oakland to start talking with the city or else...even though she clearly isn't in charge anyway.

It's been interesting to see how the movement has addressed the black bloc issue. Many people are physically intervening. Others are merely calling them out for what they are. The issue, which has been a hot topic over over the past 36 hours, is far from being resolved, but it is good to see the movement majority clearly not fully endorsing such behavior.

World Revolution Update

2011-11-04T07:29:00.000-07:00

Oakland Port shut down

2011-11-03T23:56:00.000-07:00

The night shift workers were sent home with pay.

Oakland General Strike

2011-11-02T07:37:00.000-07:00

How YOU can Participate in the General Strike!
November 1, 2011

WAYS TO PARTICIPATE ON NOVEMBER 2 GENERAL STRIKE & DAY OF ACTION
called for by Occupy Oakland

Occupy Oakland is calling for no work and no school on November 2 as part of the general strike. We are asking that all workers go on strike, call in sick, take a vacation day or simply walk off the job with their co-workers. We are also asking that all students walk out of school and join workers and community members in downtown Oakland. All banks and large corporations must close down for the day or demonstrators will march on them.

The Occupy Oakland Strike Assembly has vowed to picket and or occupy any business or school which disciplines employees or students in any way for participating in the Nov 2 General Strike. Please email OccupyOaklandLaborSolidarity@gmail.com if you are the subject of any disciplinary action.

Occupy Oakland recognizes that not all workers, students and community members will feel able to strike all day long on November 2, and we welcome any form of participation which they feel is appropriate. We urge them to join us before or after work or during their lunch hours.

Below are some action ideas for strike participants to consider:

Gather in Downtown Oakland to help Shut Down the City

Join the Mass Gatherings at 14th & Broadway 9:00am, 12:00pm, 5:00pm. Strike Rallies will be held at these times with political speakers as well as time for open mic so that everyone can make their voices heard. There will also be action announcements made from the stage on this intersection for those who are interested in participating in pickets and shut downs of banks and large corporations.
Lead a march from your neighborhood, workplace, school, community center, place of worship etc into downtown Oakland to join one of these three mass gatherings. Have fun and be loud along the way to let people know why you are marching downtown!
Form a mobile blockade or flying picket that can take over important intersections in downtown with street parties and other creative ways to make our voices heard and shut the city down.
There will be numerous pickets and actions at banks and corporations across downtown but we need more! Get a group of friends, family members, co-workers or fellow students together to form an affinity group and make your voice heard and your presence felt at any of these locations in downtown. Let the stage on 14th & Broadway know about your action so they can announce it to the crowd.
There are many other autonomous actions planned for the day that will be occurring throughout downtown. One of them is the anti-capitalist march at 2pm meeting at the intersection of Telegraph & Broadway and another is the Feminist & Queer bloc against capitalism that will meet at 4:30 at 14th & Broadway.
Join the marches from downtown to shut down the Port of Oakland. These marches will be leaving at 4pm and another will be leaving at 5pm for the 2 mile march out to the port to stand in solidarity with the longshore workers and shut down the evening shift of the port.
Join the 4pm Critical Mass ride from 14th & Broadway out to the Port to join the shut down
Best not to drive into downtown: It is likely that many streets will be blocked to traffic so please bike or take public transportation if possible. It will also be useful to have a bicycle to move between actions or to march to the port.
Take Action in Your Own Neighborhoods and Communities

Gather neighbors, co-workers, or fellow students together and organize group walks and small marches around the neighborhood to have fun, raise awareness and encourage others to join you in the streets! Bring noise makers, signs, banners and let your community know why your are participating in the strike.
Stop at banks, large businesses, chain stores, gas stations, corporate headquarters, large commercial media outlets, etc. to protest and picket
Gather in neighborhood centers and on the corners of main intersections to hold speak outs, BBQs and street parties – make your voice heard and raise awareness by reclaiming space where fellow community members can join you and talk about the issues that affect them most and how we can organize together to build a powerful movement
If you must shop, only spend money at locally owned stores and as much as possible purchase locally-produced goods
Nonprofit and Community Organizations

Use your personal and organizational social media accounts (websites, facebook, linked-in, electronic newsletters, etc) to support the actions and keep your constituencies updated about what is going on in the streets of Oakland.
In the event of police violence, use your organization to denounce police repression and call for the release of all arrested strikers.
Provide resources for your staff to participate: allow time away to participate in direct actions; encourage work on projects aligned with general strike and occupy goals, host sign and banner making parties!
Be Prepared

Bring materials to make signs: Banner material. cardboard, poster paper, markers, paint, spray paint tape, dowels, etc
Bring food and water to share!
Bring noise makers, instruments, sound systems and other ways that we can transform downtown into a celebration of our collective power
Write this legal number down on your body in case of arrest: 415.285.1011 The number will be staffed al day long and will coordinate legal support for those arrested in the strike.
Remember these four common points that the General Strike Assembly has agreed upon:
Solidarity with the world-wide Occupy movement!
End police attacks on our communities!
Defend Oakland schools and libraries!
Against an economic system built on colonialism, inequality and corporate power that perpetuates all forms of oppression and the destruction of the environment!
A Few Chants For the Strike

“Strike, Occupy, Shut it Down! Oakland is the People’s Town”
“Every Hour, Every Day! The occupation is here to stay!”
“Occupy Everything! Liberate Oakland”
“Politicians & Bankers, Liars & Thieves, We’re taking it back! We’re not saying please!”
“No more cops, we don’t need ‘em! All we want is total freedom”
“Shut Down OPD! Not the Public Library!”
“Let’s Go Oakland! Let’s Go!” [clap] [clap]
SEE YOU IN THE STREETS! MAKE OAKLAND PROUD!

Occupy Oakland 2.0

2011-10-31T15:14:00.000-07:00

So, along with Mayor Quan's seachange regarding the Occupy Oakland movement (she even officially announced tomorrow's historic General Strike), the mainstream press seems to be less focused on myths about rats and sexual assaults, and more on what is actually happening inside the camp.
It helps that a better camp has been built with input from City Hall and labor unions taken account, but I believe that Quan's reversal has everything to do with her realizing that WE the grassroots got her into office. The political machine, which tried its hardest to prevent her from getting elected, were the people who wanted the PEOPLE evicted from the public park in front of City Hall. She'll never appease those people (The Ignacio de la Fuentes and Larry Reids of the world), and it seems like she is taking less direction from them....for now.
Thankfully, the media has changed course with her, and they are beginning to wake up to the fact that, like the city itself, Occupy Oakland is one of a kind, and the best of the best.

A view is taking shape that while New York was the genesis of the movement, Oakland has become, as one Oakland resident tweeted, the "front line of the revolution."

From the beginning, in fact, the protesters in Oakland set their sights high. They organized and planned for a full week before setting up their camp in the plaza. Once there, they made a point of trying to serve the needs of residents they felt the city had largely neglected -- mostly the poor and homeless. But it was about more than that.

"This is a base camp for a lot of different struggles," said John Reimann, 65, a retired Oakland carpenter and longtime union organizer who helped call for the general strike this week. "We're trying to unite a lot of struggles that people see as separate."

Now, that sense of collective purpose is continuing to draw in people from many sectors of society.

"There's a radicalism in Oakland. The working people, they're not coming to protest and then going home to watch themselves on the news; that makes it special," said Harry Brass, 71, a self-described former radical from Berkeley. "If it stays like this, it could be the leader, Oakland could take over from New York."

Others said Oakland, with its high unemployment rate, violent crime problems, health care disparities and foreclosure scandals, was a convenient and appropriate symbol for what was happening elsewhere in the country, and the world.

"Every community has its own Oakland," said Marco Dondero, 61, a schoolteacher from San Mateo who had come to see Michael Moore on Friday. "The hurt and anger is all over the country. People are here for a reason. They are not going away."
-Inside Bay Area

It was refreshing to see so many "tourists" coming around this weekend to check out the camp. There was so much excitement and energy of the good kind, where people were trying to show off how great the camp is rather than trying to keep outsiders out. I ran in to a lot of people who were coming around for the first time, and they were all amazed at how organized and communal it is.
Don't take my word for it, come on down and see for yourself.

Occupy Oakland Lives!

2011-10-28T20:56:00.000-07:00

Wow, I don't really know where to begin.
This was a crazy fuckin week.
On Sunday, my wife performed her music at the Occupy Oakland Children's Village, and my son decided to take home a piece of lego home with him. When I saw it, I said that I'd have to return it to the camp on Monday.
Unfortunately, I was feeling sick on Monday, and worked from home. By the time I woke up on Tuesday morning, it was already too late to return the piece of lego.
The camp had been destroyed.
I went downtown and saw the damage.
It was horrible.
Riot cops surrounded Oscar Grant Plaza, which looked like a tornado had ripped through it. Banners had been torn down, tents had been trampled, and almost everything was covered in tear gas residue. It was a truly depressing site.
I thought to myself that this was the saddest day in American history.
Somehow, I went to work for a couple of hours, but came back to 14th and Broadway at midday. The scene was even more tense than it had been in the morning. Many campers who hadn't been arrested were there, as were many others who disapproved of the cops' presence.
After work, I joined the march leaving the main library on its way downtown.
The scene when the march first squared off against the police line at 14th & Broadway and chanted "Oscar Grant! Oscar Grant!" can only be described as amazing.
Then later in the night, this happened.

The cops shot some guy in the face with a tear gas cannister, and then when people came to help him, another cop threw a grenade at them.
That pretty much guaranteed that that was the saddest day in American history. Not just because of Scott Olsen, but because of Occupy Oakland. Scott was the cherry bomb on top.
Occupy Oakland, just like its hometown, is like no other in the world.
Diverse.
Conscious.
Organized.
Wired and amplified even.
It provided services for the city's neediest residents that the city was unable/unwilling to provide. Jobs, food, shelter, heath care, community, and electricity. More importantly, it provided meaning for the city's neediest.
It had to be destroyed, because it represented something completely new and radically different.
It represented the future.
Everyone in, no one left out.
This is what democracy looks like.

Mayor Jean Quan really did have a grass roots background, and she really did betray it. She let someone else do her job for her. She is an Oaklander who kept it real, and it was a horrible mistake, but she has a chance to make things right and make history in the process. We'll see where she goes from here.
The day after her police force shot and teargassed and grenaded a thousand of her constituents, three thousand showed up the next night to reclaim Oscar Grant Plaza. There were no cops, and the fence surrounding the grassy area was easily dismantled and made into geometric sculptures. A general strike was agreed upon for November 2. Mayor Quan waited to speak, but was booed back into the confines of the building.
The Occupation continued.

World Revolution Update

2011-10-28T07:47:00.000-07:00

OPD says protestors teargassed them

2011-10-25T11:51:00.000-07:00

This is the kind of outright lying coming out of cops' these days.
They showed up with about 500 cops in gas masks at 3:30 in the morning, started shooting rubber bullets and bean bag rounds, hurled grenades, and yet claim that they got teargassed....even though the protestors didn't have gas masks.
Logic tells you that the people who showed up in gas masks were most likely the ones who used the tear gas.
Duh.

Does this look "peaceful"?

2011-10-25T10:36:00.000-07:00

Pic above from http://twitpic.com/75mjjh/full

Early this morning, sometime around 5am, the rumored and expected police raid came in swiftly and violently. As protestors chanted "You are the 99%!" to the police, their cries were silenced with tear gas, flash bang grenades, batons, rubber bullets, several hundred cops in riot gear and gas masks....the cops trashed the camp and aggressively arrested 75 some people, perhaps more.
The camp now looks like a tornado swept through it....i.e. it now looks how the mainstream media has been presenting it all along.
Protestors who are returning to the camp to get their belongings are allegedly being arrested.
This is one of the saddest days in American history.

More pics here.

Here are two nice before-and-after shots of the camp.

Quan recall effort officially underway

2011-10-24T22:39:00.000-07:00

Gene Hazzard, of the Oakland Black Caucus, filed an official notice of intent to circulate a recall petition against Mayor Jean Quan today .

"She has willfully ignored the City's most pressing issue: public safety," the filing states. "She ignored the call of Oakland residents to significantly increase the number of police officers and instead supported a regressive $11 million parcel tax."

Charles Pine, of the group Oakland Residents of Peaceful Neighborhoods, signed the petition and echoed the complaint, criticizing Quan for her vote in June 2010 to lay off 80 police officers. Quan was then on the City Council, which was facing tense police union negotiations and a huge budget deficit, and the layoffs won by a 5-3 vote of the council.
-Inside Bay Area

Interestingly, rumors are circulating around the Occupy Oakland camp about a raid early tomorrow morning.

Occupy Oakland hits the streets

2011-10-22T23:27:00.000-07:00

#occupyoakland protestors fill the streets after tent city eviction notice from Oakland North on Vimeo.

And apparently, they mobbed a Chase bank down by the lake and shut it down.

Your browser is not able to display this multimedia content.

Occupy Oakland lives

2011-10-22T23:14:00.001-07:00

Second night after getting their first eviction notice, Occupy Oakland is still going strong.
Here's a surprisingly good video from the msm on Occupy Oakland.

Cops in Utah pepper spray haka dancers

2011-10-22T21:24:00.000-07:00

Police in Roosevelt, Utah pepper sprayed a group of haka dancers at a high school football game.

The group in Roosevelt, a town of 8,000, had traveled about 125 miles east from the Salt Lake City area to watch a relative play his final game for Union, which lost to rival Uintah and finished the season without a victory.

The group reportedly was trying to boost Union's morale with the Haka as the players left the field.

Spectators, coaches and players told police that everything was fine and they should let the men perform, Jessica Rasmussen said, but officers asked them to make room and started using pepper spray.

Rasmussen said she and other bystanders also got spray in their eyes, ears and mouths.

Union fan Jason Kelly said the way police reacted was an embarrassment to the community of Roosevelt.

"I've never seen anything like it," Kelly said. "It was totally unprovoked."
-Associated Press

Cops got evicted from Occupy Oakland

2011-10-21T09:50:00.000-07:00

So this week, the mainstream media and Oakland City Hall ramped up their campaign against the Occupy Oakland encampment with stories about rats, drug use, sexual harassment, graffiti, yadda yadda yadda...
They claim that the protestors don't have any demands, but the protestors have been unified in their main demand: "Join us."
Please don't believe the lies.
Occupy Oakland, like the city itself, is unlike any other. It is diverse, political, organized, and a little crackhead-y too (You can't win them all).
The most notable thing about the now two-week-old protest is that it is an unparalleled experiment in human civilization. They have toilets, food, shelter, roads, educational workshops,informational booths, political discussions, a full entertainment schedule, a family zone, and a first-aid tent too. They even have their own pedal-powered media tent. Every night, the general assemblies are vibrant and chaotic....and somehow effective. Last night, under the threat of eviction from the city, they approved a no-smoking no-drinking policy. Oh yeah, and they collectively thumbed their noses at the eviction notice.
This ain't no burning man. This is democracy at its best/worst.
Everything is free, and everyone is welcome in this utopia.
Well, everyone but the mainstream media and the cops.

Since the City has sent out an eviction notice, this link might be useful to anyone hanging around the camp over the next few days.

Also, here's a good read from the Huffington Post which lists 10 ways you can suport the Occupy Everywhere movement wherever you might be.

The real rats are in city hall, not Frank Ogawa Plaza

2011-10-21T08:33:00.000-07:00

An interesting piece that clairifies the rat situation at Occupy Oakland:

The fact that the journalist “reporting” the story simply repeats, at length, what a single city spokesman tells him should be seen as the gift from the newspaper to City Hall that it is. I’ve underlined the main verbs in the first six sentences to make that as clear as possible; that story is almost literally nothing but variations on “what City Hall told us [about the people protesting against it].” And so, the “objective” reporting just happens to repeat exactly the narrative that city hall wants to tell — things were under control before, but now the demonstrators are “attracting rats, alcohol and illegal drug use” — and imagine out of existence any possible counter-narratives which might be told.[1]

But the story that city hall wants to tell is preposterous. There are rats there at night because there are always rats there at night. I’m sure the smell of food does attract more vermin than usual — even as the presence of people also repels them — but the bottom line should still be obvious to anyone with a brain: you don’t normally have a rat “problem” in the park at night because you don’t normally have any people there (or at least not any people the city cares to notice). Even during the day, the only people that use this (quite unused) park are on their lunch break, eating their sandwiches or whatever, and then at night the rats eat their leavings. And no one cares. But now that there are people there — people creating a political headache for city hall — now, suddenly, the rats are an important problem. Suddenly, coincidentally, the city is very concerned about “rats.”

I invite you, by the way, to take a stroll through any part of the adjacent downtown Oakland at two in the morning and observe the rats which have been living off Oakland’s messy humans for many decades, and who will for many more. They’re not hidden, or even particularly shy; you’re just not there to see them and have your sensibilities offended by their presence. But that entire area is a filthy fast-food ridden stretch of a typical dirty downtown, well and truly “marred” by the fact that day-time human leave their waste everywhere for the night janitors to feast on, and who are the real causes of whatever vermin problem it has. It would be truer, in fact, to say that Oakland’s rats are invading the Occupation’s camp.
-Zunguzungu

World Revolution Update

2011-10-21T07:30:00.000-07:00

Mayor Quan has issued an eviction notice to Occupy Oakland camp

2011-10-20T22:34:00.000-07:00

View the livestream here.

Less than 1 in 4 have faith in financial institutions

2011-10-20T22:18:00.000-07:00

According to the Chicago Booth/Kellogg School Financial Trust Index, 23% of people surveyed trusted US financial institutions.
What do the bottom 22% of those people not get?

Trust in banks has experienced an even steeper decline, falling from 39% in June to 33% in October. Notably, people were much more inclined to trust local banks and credit unions: More than half of those surveyed said they still had faith in those institutions.

The survey also revealed that nearly 60% of respondents were either angry or very angry about the current economic situation -- the highest level of anger measured since the earliest months of the financial crisis.
-Daily Finance

And that is why tent cities are springing up everywhere.

Irishman tries to make gold out of poo

2011-10-20T21:43:00.000-07:00

I shit you not.

A man from Northern Ireland has been jailed after an experiment in which he attempted to turn his own faeces into gold went wrong and started a fire in a block of flats.

Paul Moran will now serve three months in jail and a further 12 months on license after the failed experiment caused a fire at his Housing Executive home in Derrin Park, Enniskillen.

Moran admitted arson and endangering the lives of others in the fire, which reportedly caused over £3,000 worth of damage.

It is thought that as part of the bizarre experiment Moran left his faeces, along with other waste products such as fertiliser, on a heater.

In his ruling Judge McFarland told Moran: “Rather bizarrely you were attempting to make gold from human faeces and waste products.

“It was an interesting experiment to fulfil the alchemist’s dream, but wasn’t going to succeed.”

Moran’s barrister mentioned that his client was a man of ‘considerable intellectual ability’ but that he had problems battling drug abuse.
-Yahoo! News

Murder is terror

2011-10-20T10:00:00.000-07:00

2003: "Hey, you're Al Qaeda, we're gonna kill you and steal your oil."
2011: "Hey Al Qaeda, can you help us kill this other guy and steal his oil?"

Moral of the story: If you get in bed with the CIA, you'll prolly end up dead.

Jerry Amaro's family wins $1.7 million settlement

2011-10-18T23:07:00.000-07:00

Today, the Oakland City Council voted unanimously to approve a $1.7 million settlement to the wrongful death lawsuit filed by the family of Jerry Amaro, who was beaten to death by as many as five Oakland police officers in 2000.

Amaro, 36, died on April 21, 2000, from pneumonia caused by multiple rib fractures and a collapsed lung. He had told his mother and several other people that he had been beaten by police officers who arrested him during a drug sting on March 23, 2000. The police report of the arrest made no mention of use of force.

Amaro was jailed for five days and repeatedly complained of pain in his ribs, which jail officials noted. On April 18, Amaro saw a doctor who took X-rays that revealed five rib fractures and a collapsed lung. The doctor recommended that Amaro seek emergency medical treatment to drain fluid from his lung. Amaro did not seek further treatment and died in his friend's basement three days later.

Attorneys John Burris and Jim Chanin filed the federal wrongful death lawsuit on behalf of Amaro's mother, Geraldine Montoya, in March 2009, shortly after the details of the internal police investigation were leaked to the press.

Investigators found that Amaro had been "severely injured" during his arrest, and at least five officers had used "some form of physical prowess" on Amaro without noting the reason for such force or mentioning the use of force at all.

The report also concluded that the reporting officer falsified his supervisor's signature on the police report and the commanding officer, Lt. Edward Poulson, inappropriately met with the arresting officers before the interviews with Internal Affairs investigators.

The investigation also found that the officers were "derelict" in not seeking medical attention for Amaro.
-Inside Bay Area

SFPD gets their canopies

2011-10-17T13:28:00.000-07:00

Shortly before midnight last night, 50 SFPD officers marched into the Occupy SF encampment. The officers aggressively removed the camp's two canopies. Then, they trashed and seized the belongings and supplies of the camp. The 150 camp members and supporters attempted to block the streets to prevent the DPW trucks filled with their belongings from driving away.
A number of participants tried asking the SFPD to end this intimidation and asking the truck drivers to show their support. Instead they were met with swinging batons and were nearly run over as the first truck filled with supplies was leaving. Protesters who laid down in the street to block the police vans from leaving with those arrested were beaten with nightsticks and thrown to the curbs.
The results of the night were five arrests, one injury, one serious injury, and a vivid reminder of who's side the police stand on.
The SFPD tore-down and trashed many of the personal belongings of the camp. They need our support to rebuild. Go to occupysf.com for a list of items required.

Join today's General Assembly meeting at 6pm at Justin Hermann Plaza (Embarcadero BART Station) to show your solidarity.

World Revolution Update

2011-10-14T08:01:00.000-07:00

Glenn Beck < A Nazi propagandist

2011-10-11T17:37:00.000-07:00

Glenn Beck is a douche bag, and that isn't news to anyone.
But wow, on his Monday show, he called the Occupy Wall Street Movement (Americans gathering in a public space and exercising their freedoms peacefully) a bunch of murderers.

"Capitalists, if you think that you can play footsies with these people, you're wrong. They will come for you and drag you into the streets and kill you...they're Marxist radicals...these guys are worse than Robespierre from the French Revolution...they'll kill everybody."

He also warns that getting into bed with the "Michael Moores of the world" will result in your death, even though Michael Moore has never been accused of murder by anyone. I highly doubt that anyone on this planet would ever openly admit to thinking that Michael Moore was in any way intimidating even...other than Glenn Beck that is.
Disturbingly, Beck cites a Nazi political assassination campaign as his dream end to the Occupy Wall Street movement.

"It will be the Night of Long Knives. It will be a purging of this country."

At the risk of sounding mysogynistic, Glenn Beck is the epitome of some clueless person having their panties in a twist. Is he afraid of real democracy, or is this just more of the same from Beck (i.e. blind lapdogging for his corporate pimps)?
Either way, he is being dangerously immature once again, especially given the lower IQs of his followers.

RIP Coach

2011-10-10T22:35:00.000-07:00

"You don't adjust. You just dominate."

2011-10-08T21:05:00.000-07:00

So everybody is saying nice things about Al Davis now that he is dead.
Steve Sabol often had nice things to say about Al while he was still alive, so check out this great video tribute by Sabol.

The thing that strikes me the most about Coach Davis is that, not unlike Steve Jobs, for better or worse, he always did it his own way.
No one is perfect.
But few people have the courage to truly be themselves. Fewer have the drive to relentlessly push themselves to be the best that they can be...and then still lust for more.
Al was a character indeed, but he was mostly a good person. The media has portrayed him otherwise though, and that is a testament to his disdain for the status quo. He didn't care about being popular, or even likable. He knew what he was doing, and he was gonna do it his way.
He wasn't just likable though, he was lovable. Every owner, player and fan has him to thank for the lucrative spectacle that is professional sports.
He wasn't just a billiant evaluator of talent, he also had a knack for bringing the best out of people, especially those who had previously been cast off onto the scrap heap. He let his players be who they were, and they kept themselves in line for him...to some degree. His motley crew of America's worst nightmares delivered on Sunday, that's for sure.
Al was so comfortable with diversity (he was instrumental in opening the doors to professional sports for black athletes, and he hired the first Latino coach, the first black coach, and the first female CEO) that he openly admitted that he studied and admired Hitler...and he didn't care if you thought less of him for it.
He was who he was, and the people who knew him loved him because he was a good person who championed the little man and judged people by their commitment, not by anything else.
And he was human and had his faults.
He was about as Oakland as you could possibly get.

He was also the greatest mind in the history of professional sports, and Coach Davis lived and breathed the Raiders, in a way that no other professional sports franchise owner has ever or will ever.
Al has missed on his share of occasions, and it seemed for a while there that he had completely lost it, but in 2009, he started making a series of decisions that can only be described as clutch.
The current team is 100% his, both those who are on it, and not on it, and they have an opportunity to be special. Now that they have some motivation, we'll see.

Coach Davis will be missed by many.

Davis, who died Saturday, wasn't an only-in-America success story. He was an especially-in-America success story, with his abiding appreciation of hard work, wealth, confrontation and litigation. He loved victory, mystery and standing on the outside looking in.

He inspired awe, disdain, blind loyalty, blind rage, imitators, sycophants, friends and enemies. He was so much to so many for so long that he defies a complete and fitting eulogy.

He would have liked that.
-Inside Bay Area

World Revolution Update

2011-10-07T08:17:00.000-07:00

The Second Front

2011-10-06T23:21:00.000-07:00

Al Jazeera has a bunch of great pics along with this article:

The 'War on Terror' rages in the Philippines
In 2002, the US launched Operation Enduring Freedom-Philippines; nine years later, the campaign there continues.

As violence between insurgent groups, local governments and American troops still rages in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States continues to sponsor local military missions to combat "terrorism" in dozens of countries encompassing every major region of the world. The so-called Global War on Terror, now entering its tenth year, has become a military behemoth that accounts for the majority of US defense spending.

In the Philippines, a staunch US ally that receives most of its military funding and training from the US, the Pentagon launched Operation Enduring Freedom-Philippines - part of a military effort linked with the main Operation Enduring Freedom mission in Afghanistan - to fight "terrorist insurgent groups" in 2002.

Although the military describes its mission in the Philippines as a success, nearly ten years later, the results are devastating. All-out wars against the Muslim separatist group Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), the communist guerilla group New People's Army (NPA) and the Islamist insurgent group Abu Sayyaf have left a trail of destruction across rural areas of the country.

While the American military argues that its presence has been a stabilising factor in the southern Philippines, wars between the government and insurgents continue with killings on a near-daily basis. And although the Philippine constitution prohibits foreign troops from participating in combat operations in the country, joint operations in war zones are often labeled military "exercises" to avoid controversy.

Nearly ten years after the initial troop deployment some 600 American special operations forces remain in the country, and will likely stay there for the foreseeable future.
-Al Jazeera

We face a "Worldwide Banking Meltdown"

2011-10-06T21:47:00.000-07:00

IMF advisor Robert Shapiro warns of a meltdown worse than 2008.
So what’s a country to do when faced with sovereign default?
Well in the birthplace of democracy, as the Greek government circles ever-increasingly down the toilet of fiscal insolvency, it apparently has found enough money to purchase 400 M1A1 Abrams tanks from the United States.
Well, I guess if they can’t afford to provide the Greek people with good governance, I guess they will NEED 400 tanks to keep the Greek people in line.

To the west, Spain tops that by offering Uncle Sam a navy base.

Under the agreement, four U.S. Aegis ships will be based at the Rota naval base near Cadiz in Spain. The agreement is part of U.S. President Barack Obama's phased adaptive approach to missile defense, under which ship-based, anti-ballistic missiles are being deployed in the eastern Mediterranean followed by ground-based systems in Romania and Poland.
The agreement "reflects a commitment of both countries to the alliance" and marks "an important step forward to protect NATO territories against missile threats," Rasmussen said. "It is smart defense at its best," he said, describing it as "countries working together and sharing together to provide something that benefits us all."
-Defense News

Come to think of it, considering that 169,000 Americans lost their job in September, Uncle Sam might need some more tanks and missile boats too.

Oakland OKs small urban farms

2011-10-05T18:32:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday, the Oakland City Council voted to lift an outdated ban on selling home-grown produce within city limits.

"It's the first step in legitimizing urban agriculture in Oakland," said Esperanza Pallana, 37, who has a 1,200 foot backyard plot in the Grand Lake neighborhood and has been pushing for the change. "It's also preserving our right to grow our own food for ourselves and our community."

The code change altered the definition of "home-based businesses," which previously mandated that it had to be indoors. The new code allows outdoor vegetables as long as it didn't need farm equipment to produce it. Previously, all it took was one phone call from a neighbor to bring down the city's wrath on someone selling backyard carrots.

Eric Angstadt, the city's deputy planning and zoning director, said he estimates that anywhere from a half to three-quarters of urban farmers in Oakland will be protected by this change.

"These are people for whom urban farming is not a primary, money-making occupation," he said. "These are maybe people who are just trying to recover their own costs of growing, or maybe people who are trying to see if it can be a possible commercial occupation."
-SF Gate

The code change won't allow large commercial farms to operate within Oakland, and it doesn't address the issue of farm animals. It simply allows residents to sell produce that they grow in their own yard.

Occupy Oakland

2011-10-05T12:18:00.000-07:00

People are pissed

2011-10-04T21:31:00.000-07:00

Good ol Paul Farrell.

Occupy Wall Street is a virus spreading rapidly as Occupy Everything, a reform movement that will overshadow the GOP/Tea Party as the voice of the people, leading to an Occupy America.
-MarketWatch

And Jesse La Greca explains it another way:

Linton Johnson still MIA

2011-10-04T20:59:00.000-07:00

Oh brotha, where art thou?

Linton Johnson, the all-purpose public voice of BART, remains on leave more than a month since his public relations war with protesters put him even more under the spotlight. BART officials said Wednesday they don’t know when he will return. Johnson’s response to email messages says that he is on a two-month leave for family reasons and he will return around Oct. 17.

His previous email message had him returning Sept. 19, but that was amended with the later return time.

Johnson, the chief media spokesman for an agency often in the news, made news in the last month during the continuing tensions between BART and protesters and hackers upset with shootings by BART police officers.
-Inside Bay Area

Family reasons?
More like he has been shamed into submission by anonymous hackers who posted a picture of him exposing his family jewels while embracing a shirtless man.
His incompetence on the job, which is detailed in the Inside Bay Area article quoted above, pales in comparison to the damage done by this.
Even though Anonymous gets accused of being immature and unfocused, I call this brilliant move very strategic and very targeted, and apparently, extremely effective.
Immature, maybe, but effective as well.
When you're paid a helluva lot of money to be a public persona, don't be surprised if your persona is made public.

China: Don’t electioneer at our expense

2011-10-04T19:43:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, the US Senate voted 79-19 to open a week-long debate on a bill that calls for U.S. tariffs on imports from countries with deliberately undervalued currencies.
(Ahem)
Naturally, the move prompted an angry rebuke from China, which holds down the value of its yuan currency to give its exporters an edge in global markets. China claims it is committed to gradual currency reform, noting that the yuan has risen 30 percent against the dollar since 2005, and warned that passage of such legislation will spark a trade war.

Supporters of the legislation say it would create new jobs and boost the U.S. economy, but China, and some in the United States, say it could trigger a damaging trade war.
The Chinese central bank warned the proposed law would not fix the economic problems in the United States and could cause more serious problems.
If the bill passes, it "cannot resolve insufficient saving, the high trade deficit and the high unemployment rate in the U.S., and it may seriously affect the progress of China's exchange rate reform and may lead to a trade war, which we do not want to see," the bank said.
-Yahoo! News

Top Republican legislators in the US agree.

The strong misgivings of House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner were the first clear sign the currency legislation might fizzle out, as similar bills have done since lawmakers began targeting China's yuan policy in 2005.
"I think it's pretty dangerous to be moving legislation through the United States Congress forcing someone to deal with the value of their currency," Boehner told reporters.
"While I've got concerns about how the Chinese have dealt with their currency, I'm not sure this is the way to fix it."
-Reuters

So Democrats want to, Repulicans don't want to...no news there.
What is news though, is that China is pissed off at the rhetoric flyin around inside the beltway...and that's actually pretty big news.

The men who crashed the world

2011-10-01T15:10:00.000-07:00

Meltdown is a four-part investigation that takes a closer look at the people who brought down the financial world. It can be seen on Al Jazeera English from Tuesday, September 20, at the following times GMT: Tuesday: 2000; Wednesday: 1200; Thursday: 0100; Friday: 0600; Saturday: 2000; Sunday: 1200; Monday: 0100; Tuesday: 0600.

In the first episode of Meltdown, we hear about four men who brought down the global economy: a billionaire mortgage-seller who fooled millions; a high-rolling banker with a fatal weakness; a ferocious Wall Street predator; and the power behind the throne.

World Revolution Update

2011-09-30T07:59:00.000-07:00

Feds give Oakland $10 mil for more cops targeting youth

2011-09-29T23:07:00.000-07:00

Oakland has won a $10.7 million grant from the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, or COPS, and will be able to hire 25 more cops.
The city intends to use the federal money to put more cops in middle schools and hookers.

The officers will be focused on a community-policing effort at four middle schools in high-crime neighborhoods, as well as working on the twin problems of human trafficking and the prostitution of teenage girls, police Chief Anthony Batts said.
-Inside Bay Area

China claims Asia

2011-09-29T22:36:00.000-07:00

The Chinese Communist Party’s People’s Daily has warned its Asian neighbors to be on guard against the “danger” of feeling they can “do whatever they want” in the region because of the financial support and physical presence of Uncle Sam.

The U.S. set off China’s ire in 2010 when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, speaking at a regional summit in Hanoi, called resolving the competing claims to the sea “a leading diplomatic priority.” That drew a rebuke from Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi, who said internationalizing the incident with U.S. involvement “can only make matters worse and more difficult to solve.”
-Bloomberg

Basically, in response to a US military spending spree in region, the China has claimed Southeast Asia as its bitches.

"I dream of another moment like this."

2011-09-27T19:50:00.000-07:00

Goldman Sachs rules the world, and they know the market is toast. Lol.
A trader was on the BBC, speaking the truth, and apparently it was news to the talking heads and the people who aren't plastic-looking-enough-to-be-talking-heads.

Speaking of news vs. the not news, I remember seeing a video from the occupation of Wall Street, and reading some commenter who said that the women were over-reacting to simply being corralled. I thought to myself, they're reacting as if they just got maced. Well, apparently they got peppersprayed, and some dude has posted this great slo-mo breakdown of the incident.

World Revolution Update

2011-09-23T09:42:00.000-07:00

Oakland still ridin'

2011-09-21T22:39:00.000-07:00

US District Judge Thelton Henderson, who last year threatened OPD with a federal takeover, has ordered the city of Oakland to address its noncompliance with 5 provisions of the historic 2003 Riders settlement.

* The rehiring in March of Officer Hector Jimenez, who was fired after he shot and killed two unarmed suspects within seven months of each other in 2007 and 2008, including a man shot in the back. Jimenez and his attorney fought the firing, and an arbitrator sided with him against the city, forcing the department to return Jimenez to work under the rules of its contract with the police union. He is currently assigned to maintaining the fleet of police vehicles and keeping in-car computers up to date.

* July's "Operation Summer Tune-Up," a four-day crime prevention effort in which police issued 28 parole violations, made 17 arrests and recovered seven guns. Henderson is likely concerned about the connotations of the term "tune-up," widely used as a euphemism for the beating of suspects by police.

* The finding by the internal affairs division that accusations of illegal public strip searches of suspects by police were unfounded, despite a federal judge agreeing with the case made by at least two suspects to whom she awarded more than $100,000 each.

* A special report in August by the federal monitoring team, charged with tracking the OPD's progress in the reforms, which found that in 28 percent of the instances when Oakland officers draw their guns and point them at someone, the person has demonstrated no threat to anyone. In some cases, the monitors said, the person wasn't even a suspect in a crime.

* The process by which the department hires outsiders to stand on boards that evaluate police use-of-force incidents. The details of this issue remained unclear Wednesday.
-Inside Bay Area

I am Troy Davis

2011-09-20T23:57:00.000-07:00

RAND: pot clubs deter crime

2011-09-20T23:44:00.000-07:00

RAND of all places, has released a study that medical pot dispensaries actually deter crime.

A new study casts doubt on many law enforcement agencies' assertion that medical marijuana dispensaries contribute to local street crime.

In fact, minor crime rises markedly in surrounding neighborhoods when dispensaries close, at least over the short term, according to a study released Tuesday by the nonpartisan RAND Corp.

"Overall crime increased almost 60 percent in the blocks surrounding closed clinics in the 10 days following their closing," the study said.

Researchers studied crime before and after a large number of dispensaries were shut in Los Angeles and found that incidents, such as break-ins, rose near the closed dispensaries when compared to neighborhoods where dispensaries remained open.

The study suggested several theories for what might drive these results, including the loss of on-site security and surveillance, a reduction in foot traffic, a resurgence in outdoor drug activity and a change in police efforts.

Steph Sherer, executive director of Oakland-based Americans for Safe Access, a medical marijuana advocacy group, said her organization has reached the same conclusions, but "law enforcement has largely ignored or refuted these findings" as various cities have closed dispensaries, put a moratorium on new ones or banned them altogether.

"Dispensary regulations bring greater oversight and less crime to local communities," she said.
-Inside Bay Area

Maybe that's why law enforcement wants to close them down.

SFPD tries to shoot fleeing suspect in the back, accidentally shoots two bystanders

2011-09-17T15:26:00.000-07:00

Early this morning, cops in San Francisco were chasing a "wanted" suspect and shot at him as he fled. They missed the suspect, but shot two innocent bystanders instead. The suspect did not shoot at the police as he ran away from them, begging the question: why were they trying to kill him in the first place?

World Revolution Update

2011-09-16T10:07:00.000-07:00

The End of Suburbia

2011-09-14T22:25:00.000-07:00

Two interesting reads from Yahoo! of all places, although I totally disagree with the title of the quoted article. We've been here for a couple of years now.

In the years following World War II, the United States experienced an unprecedented consumption boom. Anything you could measure was growing. A Rhode Island-sized chunk of land was bulldozed to make new suburbs every single year for decades. America rounded into its present-day shape.

Along the way, there were three inexorable trends at the base of the societal pyramid. First, we plowed more energy into our homes each and every year. We cooled and heated our houses more (sometimes wastefully, sometimes not), brought in more and more appliances, added televisions and computers and phones. Per capita electricity shot up from about 4,000 kilowatt-hours per US resident to over 13,000 kilowatt-hours by the 2000s. Second, we needed more electricity because our houses got huge. The median home size shot up from about 1,500 square feet in the early 1970s to more than 2,200 square feet in the mid-200s. Third, we drove more and more miles every year to get around and between our sprawled-out cities. Back in 1960, Americans drove 0.72 trillion miles. By 2000, that number had reached 2.75 trillion miles. In 2007, vehicle miles traveled hit 3.02 trillion.

Now, though, the relentless growth in those figures is coming to an end. The AP's Jonathan Fahey reported last week that the utility company research consortium, the Electric Power Research Institute, projected that residential electricity demand would drop over the next ten years.
-Yahoo! Finance

NMA Anonymous/BART cartoon

2011-09-14T22:21:00.000-07:00

Philippine Air Force sucks

2011-09-10T23:26:00.000-07:00

This isn't really news, but the Philippine Air Force is totally incapable of defending the Philippines.

MANILA - More than three-quarters of Philippine military aircraft are not fit to fly - hampering the country's ability to protect its airspace and territorial waters, the air force said on Sept. 10.

Air force spokesman Miguel Ernesto Okol said the military fleet was in dire straits, backing up a 2010 government audit that found only 91 of the 393 aircraft were "full mission capable".
-Defense News

The Philippine Air Force is composed of several-decades-old hand-me-downs from Uncle Sam (think Korean War-era hunks of junk). In general, the Philippine military is only capable of counter-insurgency (think torturing peasants).
The country has historically just relied on its neo-colonial relationship with the United States for defense, and that has been sufficient. However, now that tensions in the South China Sea have the government talking diplomacy with China, the hawks feel compelled to point out the historically obvious: the Philippines can't fight a war against an external enemy by themselves.
Duh. That's why Manila is talking peace, and that's exactly why Washington DC is talking war. If the Philippines (and other ASEAN nations) really do negotiate treaties with China, there would be less need for half-a-century-old hand-me-downs, and less need for a declining empire as a bodyguard.

RIP Mark Duggan

2011-09-09T15:11:00.000-07:00

Mark Duggan, the British man whose murder by police set off several days of rioting and looting throughout the UK in early August, was buried in North London today.

"There is an inquiry underway into what happened to cuae his death, but there have been no results so far."

Duggan, a 29 year-old father of four, was shot twice by police officers who had stopped him while he was riding in a minicab. The police said that he fired first, but the handgun that was allegedly in his possession had not been discharged at the time of the murder. These same lying cops claim that they had been watching him, and knew that he was on his way to avenge the murder of his cousin.
The police who killed Duggan were part of the Specialist Firearms Command (CO19), accompanying officers from Operation Trident, a London Metropolitan police unit that focuses on the black community.

World Revolution Update

2011-09-09T14:15:00.000-07:00

UPDATE: Dutchsinse youtube channel back up

2011-09-09T14:08:00.000-07:00

Thanks to widespread support for Dutchsinse from real Youtube users, Youtube agreed to review the flagging of dutchsinse's channel and posts, and upon that review, decided that the flagging was unwarranted. His channel has been restored.
Kudos to all the supporters who spoke up, and to Youtube as well, for allowing democracy to run its course.

Dutchsinse under attack

2011-09-05T22:38:00.000-07:00

Dutchsinse's youtube account has been shut down for "multiple violations of community guidelines AND/OR copyright violations." I am periodically having trouble accessing his website too (actually, only from google).
This is more than a bit ridiculous.
It's so blatant it's scary.
For those of you who don't know who he is, he reviews and analyzes data on weather and volcanic and seismic activity, and he does stuff like this on the regular:

And here comes 9/11.

Are you ready for some football?

Dying Detroit Looting Itself

2011-09-04T16:28:00.000-07:00

Detroit's automakers were given handouts from the federal government, but the people of Detroit are even worse off. Once the epitome of America's technological advancement and innovative manufacturing, Detroit now relies on looting itself for scrap.
This is collapse.

World Revolution Update

2011-09-02T16:05:00.000-07:00

The fraud is about to be finalized

2011-09-02T15:59:00.000-07:00

A Huge Housing Bargain -- but Not for You
This column by Roger Arnold originally appeared on RealMoney on Aug. 11

NEW YORK (RealMoney) -- The largest transfer of wealth from the public to private sector is about to begin. The federal government will be bulk-selling the massive portfolio of foreclosed homes now owned by HUD, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to private investors -- vulture funds.
These homes, which are now the property of the U.S. government, the U.S. taxpayer, U.S. citizens collectively, are going to be sold to private investor conglomerates at extraordinarily large discounts to real value.
You and I will not be allowed to participate. These investors will come from the private-equity and hedge-fund community, Goldman Sachs(GS_) and its derivatives, as well as foreign sovereign wealth funds that can bring a billion dollars or more to each transaction.
In the process, these investors will instantaneously become the largest improved real estate owners and landlords in the world. The U.S. taxpayer will get pennies on the dollar for these homes and then be allowed to rent them back at market rates.
On Wednesday, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the U.S. Treasury Department issued a Request for Information (RFI) concerning the disposition of the inventory of foreclosed homes owned by the federal government.
An RFI is ostensibly a way for the federal government to get input from the private sector on how to accomplish the goals laid out in the request. But that's really just a facade, as the RFI was structured by the investors to begin with.
In reality, the RFI is a way for the members of Congress to find out if they can get away with bulk-selling these homes to private companies without incurring the wrath of their constituents, taxpayers and former owners of the properties.
Assuming taxpayers don't push back, the next step will be to issue a Request for Proposals (RFP). The RFP will be the bid and plan for these homes by investors.
The way to keep taxpayers from pushing back is to structure the RFI so that the real intention, the bulk sales, is masked by feel-good goals, such as stabilizing neighborhoods and increasing the supply of rental properties.
As intended, the mass media are playing their part in classic style. Every major newspaper in the U.S. has run articles discussing the plan as a rental conversion, allowing readers to assume that Fannie, Freddie and HUD will be renting the properties directly to families who need housing. And although there is an allowance for these kinds of rentals, it is a minor political facade to the obvious true goal of bulk-sale privatization of these homes.
The investors in this program have been waiting for this opportunity since the portfolio of homes owned by HUD began to spike in 2007, when foreclosures surged first in the "Rust Belt," principally Ohio and Michigan.
Since then, of course, the systemic collapse of housing has engulfed all of the major urban coastal regions of the U.S., as well as Phoenix and Las Vegas, and caused the homes owned by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which are now under the direct control of the U.S. Treasury Department, to spike as well.
Even before this crisis occurred, HUD, i.e. the U.S. government, was the largest improved real estate owner in the world, because of its portfolio of foreclosed homes, which is classified as "real estate owned" (REO). The entire massive HUD REO Portfolio is quietly managed by a handful of private firms already, a group listed as Management and Marketing Contractors.
These M&M companies are principally owned by and employ former high-ranking government officials from the various germane agencies -- the Treasury, HUD, FHA and others. And they will provide the necessary access to the current government employees who are tasked with bringing this program to fruition. Once the privatization is complete, those government employees will move from their positions, and many will take up new employment at one of the M&Ms or the new vulture funds.
I am not currently aware of any way for retail investors to participate in this process.
It is probable, however, that once the privatization has occurred and the properties are generating rental income for the investors, the initial investors will cash out by forming real estate investment trusts (REITs), real estate operating companies (REOCs) or limited partnerships (LPs) that will be made available to retail investors.
-The Street

This is how you waste $1.6 billion

2011-09-01T08:01:00.000-07:00

I often have to drive down 880 to San Jose for work. For the past few years, I couldn't help but notice the gargantuan Solyndra campus near the county border. Set in a relative lull between two brutal stretches of stop-and-go traffic, I'm usually whizzing by the solar panel manufacturer quickly without taking a good look. What I recall though, is that I'm always amazed by not only how big, but how shiny and ornate the main building is, complete with a fancy water feature that seems to scream, "We're doing quite well, thank you."
Apparently, it was all a lie.
Despite $1.6 billion in funding, half a billion of which came from the American tax-payer, Solyndra has suddenly gone belly up, leaving 1,100 employees out in the cold.

Solyndra was one of about 40 projects funded since 2009 through a U.S. Department of Energy loan program that helped major wind, solar, nuclear and ethanol projects. Together, those projects are expected to create about 60,000 jobs, according to the DOE.

The department on Wednesday defended the Solyndra loan, saying public investment is needed to help U.S. companies keep pace with heavily subsidized Chinese firms.

"The alternative is simply walking off the field and letting the rest of the world pass us by," DOE public affairs director Dan Leistikow wrote in a blog post.
-Inside Bay Area

Uh, so we stayed on the field and got our asses handed to us anyway. Gotta admire that good ol' stubborn American bravado. At least we wasted that money in America, and not in China...

D.U.M.B.s

2011-08-29T19:49:00.000-07:00

Crazy video about Deep Underground Military Bases (D.U.M.B.)
Someone is building a post-modern day noah's ark. The american taxpayer is footin the bill, but we ain't invited.
Thanks Dutchsinse.

World Revolution Update

2011-08-27T09:17:00.000-07:00

0% is a pretty good rate.
That sounds a lot like socialism for the rich indeed.

Man dies during attempted copper theft

2011-08-25T22:55:00.000-07:00

This is what it's come to.

A 21-year-old Woodland, N.J., man was electrocuted while attempting to steal copper wiring from a vacant Bucks County building shortly before midnight Aug. 16.

Patrick D. Dembrowski was dead when officers arrived at the former METCO Manufacturing building at County Line Road and Titus Avenue in Warrington, police said Wednesday.

Dembrowski, an employee with an auto auction facility in Mansfield, N.J., used a set of bolt cutters to get past the lock of a chain-link fence marked with a “high voltage” sign to get to an outdoor generator, police said.

He then attempted to cut into a piece of copper wiring inside the generator. A female companion called 911 when volts of electricity started coursing through Dembrowski’s body. When officers arrived, he was dead, police said.

Warrington Lt. Joseph Knox said that copper theft is very common and that Dembrowski’s death should be a warning to others that this type of illegal activity is dangerous. The incident remains under investigation.
-PhillyBlurbs

Steve Jobs

2011-08-25T22:46:00.000-07:00

Anonymous posts pic of Linton Johnson's...Johnson

2011-08-24T16:48:00.000-07:00

While the BART board was coming up with a protocol for when to deny its customers their ability to communicate freely, Anonymous posted a picture of BART spokesman Linton Johnson exposing his wiener while in the embrace of a shirtless man.
I debated whether or not to post the actual pic, but wth, I'm clearly not a principled professional journalist anyway, so here it is.

My deepest apologies.

"They are all over the place"

2011-08-23T22:15:00.000-07:00

This may be a little nerdy, but if you sit through it, you'll learn that not only did HAARP apparently play a role in the magma pile spewing out radioactivity in Fukushima, but there are also apparently several HAARPs scattered throughout the world.

War against BART

2011-08-21T22:43:00.000-07:00

Don't let the door hit ya...

2011-08-19T08:13:00.000-07:00

OUSD Police Chief Pete Sarna has retired from police work as he is being investigated for a racist tirade he went on in front of two subordinates.

Sarna, who is white, attended the charity golf tournament at the Sequoyah County Club in Oakland on July 18 with two other sergeants from his department, one who is African-American and one who is white. The white sergeant, who filed the complaint, is represented by San Francisco attorney Joe O'Sullivan.

Because the men were drinking alcohol during the Sequoyah event, an officer was called to drive the trio to their homes.

According to O'Sullivan, on the drive to Orinda, where the African-American sergeant lives, Sarna called the African-American sergeant a racial slur "several times, told him that he had no right to live in (the area) because he's African-American, although he didn't use that word, told him he should be hung in the town square because he's African-American ... told him that he would be the last African-American he'd ever hire."

O'Sullivan said Sarna later approached the African-American officer and told him "that thing that happened never happened." The names of the officers involved in the incident were not released.
-Inside Bay Area

Good riddance asshole.

STFU all hypocritical politicians

2011-08-19T08:07:00.000-07:00

Max Keiser loses it in this clip from a recent Keiser Report, and though he's talking specifically about the hypocrisy from David Cameron's UK government, the same can be said about any politician who is trying to capitalize on the rise in lawlessness by advocating for a more repressive state (to secure the lawless and soul-less economic climate).
It's not rocket science. If there were true law and order in the world, there wouldn't be so much lawlessness. Duh.

BART police union website hacked

2011-08-17T18:54:00.000-07:00

Now we're talkin. Anonymous hacked into the MyBART website and released names and contact info of its customers on Sunday. That's how they usually roll, and it's a tactic that doesn't exactly win them a lot of public support. However, today, in the wake of a mildly annoying protest in San Francisco on Monday, they took the fight to the cops.

A hacker group broke into a BART police union website Wednesday and released names, home addresses, email addresses and personal passwords of 102 officers in the second cyberattack against the transit system in a week.

BART and the police union confirmed the attack and criticized it as jeopardizing the security of police officers, who guard their home addresses carefully.
-Inside Bay Area

Forensics don't lie

2011-08-16T21:26:00.000-07:00

(sigh)
The medical report from the first post-rape examination of Nafissatou Diallo apparently confirms that the former hotel worker was indeed raped/sodomized in a non-consensual kinda way by former IMF Chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

"Cause of the injuries: assault. Rape," the report said, according to the French translation in L'Express.

A lawyer representing the accuser said the report proves the attack occurred.
-Yahoo! News

Wow.
Meanwhile, DSK is still out of jail and megarich, and Diallo's life is even worse off than it had been before she was raped.

Bay Area Billionaire wants to build floating libertarian countries

2011-08-16T09:39:00.000-07:00

Pay Pal founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel has given $1.25 million to an initiative to create floating libertarian countries in international waters, according to a profile of the billionaire in Details magazine.

Thiel has been a big backer of the Seasteading Institute, which seeks to build sovereign nations on oil rig-like platforms to occupy waters beyond the reach of law-of-the-sea treaties. The idea is for these countries to start from scratch--free from the laws, regulations, and moral codes of any existing place. Details says the experiment would be "a kind of floating petri dish for implementing policies that libertarians, stymied by indifference at the voting booths, have been unable to advance: no welfare, looser building codes, no minimum wage, and few restrictions on weapons."
-Yahoo! News

Yay! Monkey knife fights are that much closer to reality now...

BART cuts cell phone service, then has to shut down stations due to protests

2011-08-16T08:27:00.003-07:00

This week, Operation Empire State Rebellion has set its sites on San Francisco.
On Sunday, Anonymous hacked into the MyBART website and published the contact info of its customers. The group called for a protest at the SF Civic Center BART station, where BART police officers murdered a "wobbly drunk" homeless man after he threw a knife on July 3.
Two BART officers approached 45 year-old Charles Hill on the Civic Center platform and shot him dead within 23 seconds of their arrival. They did not claim to mistake their guns for tasers...because only an idiot would do that.
At least one witness has publicly stated that Hill was neither running away nor lunging at the officers. BART station video of the shooting shows an object (allegedly a knife) sliding along the ground past an officer's feet (after it was thrown against a train) as he fires his weapon. Several people are seen slowly walking away from the scene, clearly not fearing for their lives. However, they begin to hurry away once the police start shooting.

Allegedly, Hill had first thrown a bottle at the officers, although there is no video evidence. This naturally begs the question....if a "wobbly drunk" throws a bottle and then a knife at officers, is he still a threat? He had no weapons on him when he was shot, so how can the police claim "self-defense?" Why did they opt for guns instead of tasers?
Having any object tossed at you is certainly cause for alarm, but IMHO, it doesn't justify murder/manslaughter/death-related-to-an-officer-involved-shooting.
BART seems to think it does though, as neither officer has been disciplined. One of them has actually been hired by the FBI, who is obviously impressed with his police work (murdering a drunken homeless man within 23 seconds of encountering him).

Two weeks later, and just a few days after the SFPD murder of Kenneth Harding over transit fare evasion, a protest shutdown 3 BART stations in downtown San Francisco. Protestors held open the doors of a train, and one man attempted to climb on top of a train.
On August 11, another protest was called for at the Civic Center station. BART officials got wind of it, and shut off cell phone service in all of the downtown SF BART stations.
This was the same week that the UK government talked openly of cutting off internet service amidst nationwide rioting in response to the police murder of Mark Duggan.
The tactic by BART succeeded in thwarting the protest for that day, but it opened up a whole new can of worms for the transit agency.
Anonymous got involved, hacked the MyBART website, and called for a 3rd protest on Monday, August 15. That protest only temporarily closed down several stations, but passengers were frustrated by the lack of communication from BART about where and when service would be restored.

For the better part of two hours, passengers were allowed to disembark trains and stations, but were not allowed to enter them, forcing commuters to seek other ways home. Some sat on the steps down to the BART stations, simply waiting out the chaos. Others walked from station to station, chasing rumors — many originating from BART officials themselves — that they had reopened.
-SF Examiner

Cell phone service was not interrupted this time.

Here's a great video of BART mouthpiece Linton Johnson defending HIS decision to cut off cell phone service on August 11...even though he initially denied that BART had done it, and then blamed subordinates for the decision once it became clear that BART was responsible.

You can't really get more spineless than that.

Both the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation announced today that they have backed off from threatened legal action against BART over the denial of service.

OUSD schools chief went on racist tirade in front of three subordinates

2011-08-16T07:36:00.000-07:00

Oakland Unified School District Police Chief Pete Sarna has been placed on administrative leave while the district investigates a complaint that he repeatedly used a racial slur and threatened to kill a black subordinate while driving home from a nonschool sponsored charity event last month.
After a golf tournament, the 4 officers drove home together, and Sarna went off on a racist rant against one of the officers in the car, a black sergeant. Sarna told the subordinate that he should be lynched in the town square, and the meltdown was so horrendous that one of the two other officers filed the complaint.

Sarna was a lieutenant in the Oakland Police Department when he was tapped by then Attorney General Jerry Brown in December 2007 to become deputy director of the state Department of Justice Division of Law Enforcement, where he commanded a 1,300-strong force. But Sarna resigned in August 2007 after he crashed his state vehicle in Walnut Creek and was arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence.

Sarna's father, Peter Sarna, Sr., was a former captain in the Oakland Police department.
-Inside Bay Area

As the saying goes, "the bad apple doesn't fall far from the tree."

OUSD police are already under fire for the assassination of Raheim Brown, who was shot 5 times (twice in the head) because his car smelled like marijuana and he was trying to hotwire it during a high school dance.

Tamisha Stewart, the only civilian witness to the killing, who was in a car with Brown outside Skyline High, spoke for the first time publicly about the event. The screwdriver Brown was accused of using as a weapon, according to Stewart, was being used in an attempt to hotwire the car, and it “never left the ignition.”

While hotwiring a car might be cause for police attention, it is not cause for five bullets, including two to the head. Stewart added, “There was nothing that Raheim did that he deserved to die.” According to statements at the press conference, after Brown was killed, Stewart was beaten badly and jailed for almost a week.
-SF Bay View

Our fleet is so much bigger than yours

2011-08-14T22:41:00.000-07:00

So a week after China debuted it's very first aircraft carrier ever, the United States sent one of its own carriers to the coast of Vietnam, where leaders from that country got a ride and an airshow. This was the second visit in as many years for the USS George Washington.
Apparently the two countries are over that whole 'war' thing.

China claims nearly all of the South China Sea, which the U.S. has said it has a national interest in making sure freedom of navigation continues in an area home to vital shipping lanes.

Vietnam, the Philippines and several other Asian nations also stake claims to all or part of areas of the sea believed to be potentially rich in national resources. Both counties have looked to the U.S. following recent blow-ups with China over their oil exploration activities. Beijing denies it has interfered, but Hanoi and Manila have accused the communist giant of overstepping its bounds.

Hanoi has reacted sharply, holding live-fire drills in the South China Sea and allowing rare protests to be held for more than two months.
-Inquirer

The carrier arrived from Thailand, where it had partied.

George Washington's mission is to ensure security and stability in the 7th Fleet AOR and to be in position to work with our allies and regional partners to respond to any crisis across the operational spectrum as directed.
-Commander, US 7th Fleet

New Zealand backs Philippines on Spratly issue

2011-08-13T21:52:00.000-07:00

About that $30 billion in US military aid to the Philippines...
Money can apparently buy you love.
After 'dialoging' with their counterparts in Manila earlier this month, the New Zealand Department of Defense has publicly backed their new BFFs on the issue of how to deal with territorial disputes in the Spratly region.
On Friday, the New Zealand Department of Defense has said that it is necessary for claimant countries to abide by the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and adhere to the 2002 ASEAN-China Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea.

The New Zealand government also agreed during a recent meeting with Filipino defense officials that the Spratly claimants—the Philippines, China, Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia and Taiwan—should abide by the code of conduct they had signed in 2002 about settling territorial dispute peacefully, the defense department said in a statement.

The UNCLOS sets a country’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ)—an area where it has a right to explore for and exploit natural resources while allowing freedom of navigation and overflight to others— at 200 nautical miles from its coastline.

The Philippines has tussled with China over certain isles and reefs in the vicinity of the Spratly chain that fall within what Manila considers its EEZ as well as Beijing’s “nine-dash-line” claims over the West Philippine Sea (South China Sea).
-Inquirer