Yearly Archives: 2011

Supporters of Rwandan opposition leader Victoire Ingabire gathered to celebrate her 43rd birthday. Ingabire has been in jail for over a year and her trial continues with almost no attention from the international press, even though she’s charged with challenging the received history of the Rwanda Genocide.

I have been invigorated and moved by the energy surrounding Occupy NOLA. Yet I’ve been faced with the tensions being articulated by so many folks on the Left: How can this energy be connected to and further long-standing organizing work for social and economic justice?

Is the Occupy Movement against slavery, or is it that some people are just mad because they never get to hold the whip? Do you not see racism? Can you see it in this movement? Where is the support for justice for Raheim Brown in Oakland and Kenneth Harding in San Francisco?

The Building Trades tried to kill 1,000 jobs proposed under the Road Repair Bond, Proposition B, because they'd be covered by the new local hire law, which the Plumbers, Electricians, and Sheet Metal Unions oppose.

The struggle against school closures is far from over. Now is the time to stand up and speak out against this attack on public education – an attack designed by those who should be defending it, Superintendent Tony Smith and the OUSD School Board. You can call Superintendent Smith at (510) 879-8200.

The real tragedy in the Penn State football scandal is that nameless, faceless and voiceless boys were invited to play a sick, dangerous and twisted game, while good men watched in silence, and did nothing.

I am not about to trust a “movement” that offers no critique of the role of state violence in upholding capitalist economic interests. I am not about to get arrested with some “white” guys whose interests are just their own, who only noticed injustice when they were the ones who got laid off, arrested, beat down or tased.

On Thursday, Nov. 10, Occupy Oakland was supposed to celebrate its one-month anniversary in the renamed Oscar Grant Plaza in front of City Hall. Instead the Occupy Movement worldwide was shaken by the cold-blooded murder of a participant less than an hour before festivities were scheduled to start.

If this second hunger strike effort has taught us anything, it is that the power to transform an intransigent CDCR must come from the will of the people, from exercising your limitless power. Prison authorities were fully content to let us die this time and even modified their medical responses to maximize the chance of permanent injury or death to hunger strikers, which makes the broader aspects of this struggle so significant. Who dares to struggle? Who dares to win? We do, and we hope you do too. Join us! The power to shape history and the future of the society is in your hands.

Those in the executive environs of the CDCR have continued to evade what I believe is the most important of the hunger strike’s five core demands: staff accountability. Supervisory staff, department heads and managers have the duty to insure accountability of subordinate staff.

The interests of big business have become the law of the land. The fictive “people of Oakland” invoked by business improvement districts (BIDs) LMUDA and DOA are nothing more than the personified corporations who want to turn Oakland into a gentrified metropolis devoid of any real public space.

All of this was more than a reaction to the Occupy movement. It’s best understood as the latest battle between police and residents in at least two years of civil unrest in the city, beginning with the killing of Oscar Grant by ex-transit officer Johannes Mehserle on New Year’s Day 2009.

“I Am America: Black Genealogy Through the Eye of An Artist” will run from Nov. 5, 2011, through Feb. 2, 2012, at the San Francisco Main Library African American Center. A reception with the genealogists and artists will take place on Sunday, Nov. 20, 1-2 p.m. A program follows from 2 to 3 p.m. in the Latino Hispanic Room.

We understand the importance of unity and how our oppressors have played us against each other for far too long. We can probably never get rid of agents/snitches/pig informants but to awake and realize what George’s concept really was about, a people’s revolution. It’s time!

We believe it is fundamentally inadvisable to collaborate with the current Rwandan government, given its grave human rights violations record and overt curtailment of political freedoms in Rwanda. If you move forward, we request that CMU promote democratic space and respect for human rights in the region.

The Kagame regime knows about these minerals that have been entering Rwanda illegally for all these years. We’re happy they gave a little back, but they never should have invaded and occupied the eastern Congo in the first place, so there should be no points given for having emptied the cookie jar and then giving back one of the cookies.

A Bay View resident for 44 years, Rhonda Smith has been participating at the Women’s Building Annual Celebration of Craftswomen for almost three decades. This year the show takes place Nov. 11 to 13, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., at the Festival Pavilion in San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center.

The FBI called to say that four men named in an Atlanta Journal-Constitution story today had listed me as a target for assassination. Please post this message everywhere so that people will know that I will not be deterred from opening communication with other members of the 99 percent and I will not stop my activities for truth, justice, peace and dignity.

The Boston Tea Party was a great event not only of rebellion, but law-breaking. Imagine the worth of crates of imported tea, broken into and tossed into the Boston harbor. Were they un-American? They destroyed private property. They reacted to the rich getting richer by looting their warehouses.

Everything that we have witnessed in Libya, all of the bloodshed, is based on the word of one individual, and he admits on camera that he had not one whit of proof that the letter’s contents were true. And now look at Libya. What of the, by some estimates, 20,000 people killed? What of the Libyans whose skin is dark like mine and who have been targeted for murder? What about those left homeless by U.S.-NATO bombing? In the Jamahirya, every Libyan was entitled to a home.