1. Key words, "One of the demands…" There were four demands Dereca Blackmon and CAPE were asking for including the immediate arrest, indictment, and prosecution of Mehserle for murder and a public review of BART history, police policy, strategy, and philosophy to assess whether (A). BART police are really needed and (B). If needed, whether or not they need guns. Sound like a Dellums cover-up to you? I don't think so.

2. If you don't think that the youth of Oakland need counseling for the trauma they have experienced at the hands of the Oakland police and other systems of oppression, you are living in a different city than I live in.

Asking for healing centers is a way to be RESPONSIVE and not just REACTIONARY. Why wait for another community tragedy to demand that Oakland respond to the needs of its young people? I don't disagree with everything you wrote, but I believe you got a big part of this all wrong.

But let me be very obvious about my real point here: burn down Oakland and a lot of people in Oakland will suffer, blacks, whites, Latinos, et cetera.

Those of us with views such as my own, however, do not make bets in that community. Get it?

Here's what will happen if the kind of violence you're inciting in Oakland takes place:

*High-quality, low cost grocery stores will close up shop, to be replaced by low quality, high-cost alternatives, such as more small Mom and pop liquor stores;

*Employers seeking a place to do business will find the cost of security too high, and will find too many employees are unwilling to work in Oakland, resulting in a loss of jobs;

*Property values in neighborhoods where rioting takes place will decline, damaging the balance sheets of black homeowners and pushing them towards foreclosure;

If Oakland burns, the people who live in Oakland lose. End of story.

As for me? I'm right and right wing. That means I hope Oakland does well. However comments like yours make me think that I'm smart not to bet that it does.

Prove me wrong.

In short, it's

Therefore the rich who benefit off of the blood from the inner cities when you burn down the cities you burn down most of those business operated by those who don't even live in the area, they are the ones leaching off the residents who live in the city and don't even give back to the community. You can't say most of the business are Black own if they exist their small in number. Therefore those benefiting from innercity tax dollars will loose

Perhaps the rich are no more or less responsible than the owners of the businesses in downtown Oakland who got thier windows smashed, but on these forums it sounds like folks believe they had to smash and burn stuff to get Mehserle arrested and tried. Not saying I agree or disagree with that logic, except that IF we are going to get disorderly, why not take it to the hills FOR ONCE? Seems a good use for riot energy. I've never been able to understand the logic of burning one's own poor community, as during Rodney King riots. The rich have the funds to rebuild, but not so in the flats and International Blvd. Plus, a good portion of the decision makers live in those tony environs, thinking they are insulated from social unrest. Let them feel it, if only once.

Where does that money in the general fund come from anyways?

What I propose is this: instead of meeting downtown oakland in front of Oakland City Hall, we meet at Lakeshore and Mandana, which is still in Oakland, but right on the border of Piedmont, the richest zip code in the Bay Area. We march up Mandana blvd into Piedmont and for once, FOR GODDAMN ONCE! we make the rich feel the unrest and vulnerability and anger that the ghetto feels EVERY FUCKING DAY!!! When they see an angry mob outside their mansions, they'll stop thinkin it doesnt affect them.

'……America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the Constitution and the Bible which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery-the great sin and shame of America! "I will not equivocate, I will not excuse"; I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, shall not confess to be right and just….'
— excerpted from 'What, to the Slave Is the 4th of July, ~ A History of the Struggle for Black Independence,'
by Frederick Douglass at Rochester, New York 1852
———————————
'Tell me something
what you think would happen if
everytime they kill a black boy
then we kill a cop
everytime they kill a black man
then we kill a cop

you think the accident rate would lower subsequently?
—Excerpted from 'Poem About Police Violence,' by June Jordan
——————-

I am a photojournalist. I was in the streets documenting the first 4 Oakland rebellions against the assassins who stole the life of Ancestor-Warrior Oscar Grant III. Outsiders? What outsiders? Unless of course, Ms. Lee & Ms. Blackmon are referring to the agent provocateurs hired by the police to go among the people and attempt to entrap us into doing patently stupid things – so as to criminalize the outrage of the world's people; in an all out effort to give their handlers of the goon squads (and the corporate media) fuel to report lies concerning 'the wanton destruction of Oakland' by outside 'element's.' Then maybe the useless mayor could convince idiot voters to beef up his small army of police. These police are armed with the latest in state of the art killing weaponry. That's what they're trying to do… kill someone. It's not enough that their brutish ignorance has already murdered many someones. It is not enough that they want carte blanche to continue to do so.

They now want us to continue to participate in our own oppression by NOT taxing their asses to the fullest if they don't get it right in this landmark case of a killer cop on trial for taking the life of an AFRIKAN Man. If Johannes Mehserle had killed a white male, he'd already be strapped to the electric chair, or receiving the lethal injection, or inhaling hydrogen cyanide.

But Ancestor-Warrior Oscar Grant III was an AFRIKAN Man. His executioner is white. The powers that be do not appreciate the fact that the populace has risen up.

Their lies haven't worked. Their provocateurs cannot stop us. We have experienced their threats and their killing machines. The people of Oakland have brought into existence a new consciousness. It is awake. It is aware and to paraphrase James Baldwin: It is unprecedented. We know what is happening. We must act.

Were we to do nothing, we would be worse than the murderers hired in our name.

If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own—which it is—and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night. War Without Terms, m

By the way, "minister of information" (please note the lack of capitalization of "Minister", and therefore much contempt) brings to mind that of Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda for the NAZI party, murderer of +6,000,000. Again, bring it. You're a poseur/poser at best.

Brother Jr, thank you fgor reminde=ing us how NGOs can at times turn out as part of the proiblem, and not as aprt of the solution !