Monthly Archives: April 2017

Maxine Waters stood before a crowd of young people Friday at Busboys and Poets, a Washington, D.C., restaurant that doubles as stomping ground for social movements. At the event, which she organized as a soulful open mic before the following day’s Tax March, the congresswoman doubled down on her call for the impeachment of President Donald Trump with a combined bluntness and realness one wouldn’t expect from a politician: “We’ve got to stop his ass!” After nearly 40 years in public service, Waters has become the Democratic face for the resistance against Trump.

Attorney Adante Pointer of the Law Offices of John L. Burris filed and served a First Amended Complaint in Santa Clara County Superior Court specifically naming Jay Way Jenkins, aka Young Jeezy, Live Nation and other persons affiliated with the Under the Influence Tour as defendants in a wrongful death lawsuit for the murder of well-known San Francisco Bay Area based concert and party promoter and loving father, Eric Johnson II. Pointer is incensed by what he considers a botched investigation and cover-up.

As Phase One of Treasure Island redevelopment gets under way, the Island’s subsidized and market rate residents are experiencing increasing intimidation and harassment and fewer services. Damian Ochoa, a seven-year market rate renter in good standing at John Stewart’s “The Villages,” describes intensifying “habitability issues,” amounting to prohibited Eighth Amendment “cruel and unusual punishment,” officiated over by John Stewart Property Manager Dan Stone.

Now, as the San Francisco Bay View newspaper’s 40th birthday year comes to a close, is the time to bring up to date the historical sketch of our paper that I began with Part 1 in the January paper. Piles of old papers rest on my desk, waiting to be read once again – a banquet of stories and pictures of our lives, our hopes, our goals. Let me let you taste the flavor of the freedom we continue to fight for in the age of Trump.

It’s 2016, 40 years since Muhammad al-Kareem founded the New Bayview, now renamed the San Francisco Bay View, in 1976. Inspired by Malcolm X, he wanted to bring a newspaper like Muhammad Speaks to Bayview Hunters Point. He’ll tell the story of those early years, and I’ll pick it up now at the point when my wife Mary and I took over in 1992. Watching our first paper roll through the huge two-story tall lumbering old press at Tom Berkley’s Post Newspaper Building on Feb. 3, 1992, was a feel-like-flying thrill we’ll never forget.

When the sexual scandal involving his young intern almost engulfed his presidency, Clinton ordered missile attacks on a pharmaceutical factory in the Middle East, Al Shifa. Clinton critics derided this attack as “Monica bombs,” meant to deflect from the rising flood of scandal. President D.J. Trump’s bombing of a Syrian airfield, with scant proof of Syrian state involvement in a recent chemical weapons attack, seems pretty Clintonian to me.

My regular readers know I’ve come under recent fire for exposing abuse and corruption in Texas prisons. Despite outside protests and support, retaliations have escalated and most recently culminated in officials directing outright criminal acts at me, including guards I’ve reported on recovering a weapon from the scene of an altercation and planting it in my cell the next day, and guards confiscating most of my belongings (again) with the intent of destroying them.

Went out to MLK Civic Center Park in downtown Berkeley to watch fight after fight after fight take place between neo-Nazi pro-Trump supporters and folks who came out to defend against fascism and to defend the Bay. For the most part, the Trump folks who were bold enough to wave flags and chant “F--- the Bay and Build a Wall” got stomped out over and over again. One cat, after talking smack, got beat so bad they had to haul him off to the hospital.

On the second weekend of June this year, the San Francisco Black Film Festival will be celebrating its 19th year by screening over 100 independent Black films in this annual four-day cinema marathon. San Francisco Black Film Festival director Kali O’Ray, son of founder Ave Montague, sits down to discuss how it feels for the festival to celebrate its 19th birthday, the importance of indie films, remaining in a city that was once a lot more chocolate but has been gentrified to 3 percent Black – and more.

On April 19-20, Bay Area community members and groups representing a wide range of stakeholders, including students with criminal records and their families, higher education program administrators, Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf and other elected officials, local employers Checkr and Uber, workforce development professionals, and social service agencies will gather to discuss barriers to education and employment for students with records and learn about opportunities for record clearing, advocacy, empowerment and coalition building.

Last week, Theodore A. Postol, professor emeritus of science, technology, and national security policy at MIT, released his analysis of the White House statement claiming intelligence findings that prove the Syrian government was responsible for the nerve agent attack on April 4, 2017, in Khan Shaykhun, Syria. “What it indicates is a willingness on the part of high-level people in the White House to distort, to use intelligence claims that are false to make political points and political arguments,” he said. But his statement has reached only a tiny audience.

Back during the Black Power Era, if you were down for the cause, people called you “aware.” In the Hip Hop Era, the term for being politically up to date was “conscious.” Now, with the Millennials, if you are in tune with what’s going on in the world, you are referred to as “woke.” For the past few years, since the murder of Trayvon Martin, there has been a steady rise in cultural awareness within the Black community. The Black truth now gets as much traction as the white mainstream news on Facebook. So why is the church, arguably the spiritual center of the Black community, still running two steps behind?

Poet-composer-playwright-critic Mari Evans Phemster was funeralized March 21, 2017, at St. Luke’s United Methodist Church in Indianapolis, Indiana. Like her friend, Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000), Mari’s output preceded the Black Arts Movement, though many of her titles and themes – like “I Am a Black Woman” – became anthems of BAM.

“Jitney,” August Wilson’s first play, set in 1977, takes place in the Hill District in Philadelphia, a place Wilson called home. “Jitney,” a part of Wilson’s 10-play canon that chronicles Black life from Jim Crow South to illusive Northern freedoms, speaks to the absence of permanent change for Black people despite legislative acts 1865 to now. It runs through April 16; visit www.african-americanshakes.org.

In the netherworld of American prisons, one must jettison any medical assumptions one brings in from the so-called “free” world. We have been conditioned to see nurses as sweet sources of solace and doctors as people dedicated to healing the sick and easing our pains. In prison, new rules govern medicine and care. Here, money is master; the ill are all but ignored. This may seem harsh but, I must assure you, reality is even harsher.

I had a hard time writing a KPFA-Berkeley Radio News report last Saturday. I was trying to report on the racist, Christian fundamentalism of NPR commentator Scott Simon and Canadian Gen. Romeo Dallaire, both of whom argue that God and the devil are manifest in Syria, as they were in Rwanda in 1994. Dallaire even adds that “the white man” – his words – has a moral obligation to intervene on God’s behalf.

We are all upset about United Airlines as we should be, but that’s low hanging fruit. It’s easy to smash down on the airlines – and, again, they deserve the backlash. But the actual brutality was carried out by officers from one department and backed up by a blatant lie issued by officers from another – which is under a federal consent decree. Let that sink in for a minute and let’s see if accountability will really happen beyond a paid suspension. Let’s see if accountability will happen over the lie told by Chicago Police. Let’s not overlook the larger picture in play around this horrific incident with United Airlines.

The debate about what are considered fundamental human rights is constantly evolving and changing. And in the United States, incidents like the recent water crisis in Flint, Michigan, have raised questions about whether or not access to clean water is a basic right – although arguably this has been a discussion among people all around the world, and in marginalized parts of the U.S., for quite some time. A new report issued by the NAACP also reframes access to energy service and electric power as a basic human right.

When Chief William Scott had been on the job for just a few weeks, he came to the Joseph Lee Gym in Bayview Hunters Point for a townhall meeting with the community March 9. This first-ever community meeting with the new chief was presented by Wealth and Disparities in the Black Community – Justice 4 Mario Woods. Chief Scott said his goal is to “reduce deaths at the hands of police” and asked to be held accountable. Will Chief Scott be a better chief for San Francisco than his predecessor? We don’t know. But we do know that we will, as Scott said, hold him accountable.

The Rwandan political opposition coalition would like to condemn in the strongest terms possible the sickening cynicism of Rwandan Gen. Mubarak towards vulnerable people, like survivors of genocide, his sectarianism and incitement to hatred against survivors of genocide as well as the thinly veiled policy of regional destabilization and expansionist policies.