Local News & Views

On Tuesday, Jan. 12, at 12 noon, a press conference will be held on the steps of City Hall in San Francisco by the Ohlone, the original people of the land. It will begin with a welcome and blessing by the Ohlone and, at its conclusion, they will deliver letters to the Planning Department calling for their inclusion in the planning process for Lennar's development of Candlestick Point and the Hunters Point Shipyard and an extension of the draft EIR comment period.

Craft labor unions since 1865 have been ambivalent about their racial policies. They were inclusive for a time. But in the 1900s through 1970 craft unions became virulently anti-Black. Because of public pressure and court actions, craft unions' discrimination has become subtler. In coalition with large white contractors, they control training and work in the construction industry.

The exact moment in time has arrived to pull down the veil of the corrupt, ethics depleted political status quo being perpetuated at City Hall via Supervisor Sophenia Maxwell, who represents District 10. Her controllers do not want to see her moved from that seat one second before January 2011. They have a well established relationship and flow with Ms. Maxwell right where she is. Putting the sledge hammer of RECALL to that coup will speak volumes to that power structure.

Tuesday, Jan. 5, at 4 p.m. in City Hall Room 416 is the FINAL hearing on the Candlestick Point-Hunters Point Shipyard EIR, a very callous, negligent and dangerous document that identifies numerous life threatening and potentially disastrous impacts to human health and the environment - most dangerous of all the potential construction activities at a federal Superfund site listed as one of the most toxic properties in the nation!

The plan to sell off Berkeley’s 75 public housing units is harmful to Berkeley’s poor, elderly and disabled population that fail to qualify for the Section 8 program or meet the minimum income requirements to reside in so-called affordable housing units owned and operated by local nonprofit housing developers.

Universities all over the state of California have erupted into protest over the raising of student fees. In the Bay Area, rebellions have been going down at UC Berkeley and at San Francisco State University regularly; students actually have brought their feelings right to the front door of the chancellor’s house.

Communities from up and down the West Coast that had planned to converge in San Francisco to demonstrate our immense energy and BE THE CHANGE this administration needs to do what is right have been denied a previously approved permit to gather – why? on the grounds that the rally will be too large. Is this a re-run of the rise and fall of the Poor People’s Campaign’s Resurrection City on the Washington Mall in 1968?

Since the inception of BART, this transportation system has excluded Black contractors, Black construction workers and Black riders. Charlie Walker drove a truck into a San Francisco BART excavation site before we could get contracts.

Stand with the residents of Bayview Hunters Point Thursday, Dec. 17, 6:30-10 p.m., at the SF Planning Commission hearing on Lennar's Environmental Impact Report in San Francisco City Hall Room 400. Tell the commissioners: No to bricks on Jello! No building on top of liquefaction! No nuclear stadiums! No capping over toxic landfills! And YES to true complete cleanup of the ENTIRE SHIPYARD.

KPFA has been actively trying to restrain Flashpoints’ success for years now, but most of all during Rijio’s tenure as general manager. We take on the stories that make the establishment nervous, whether it’s police beatings and injustice inside the station – Nadra Foster – or outside the station. We report from the ground, whether it’s from Haiti or the West Bank or at the frontlines of the Native American struggle. Our Palestine coverage in particular has garnered intense scrutiny, to use a euphemism, from the pro-Zionist crowd.

A leader in the movement for justice for Oscar Grant, Minister of Information JR is headed to Los Angeles for a screening of his new film, “Operation Small Axe,” focusing on resistance to police terror in occupied communities, and a discussion of the Oscar Grant case and its implications. It’s this Saturday, Dec. 12, 6:30 p.m., at Leimert Park’s Kaos Network, 4343 Leimert Blvd. Let’s support this brotha!

As San Francisco grapples with a looming budget crisis, Public Defender Jeff Adachi is seeking $2 million in state reimbursement to the City for its defense of eight men charged in a 1971 homicide case involving a police officer. The city’s right to reimbursement is based on the fact that the California Attorney General took on the 36-year-old case after the San Francisco District Attorney’s office declined to prosecute.

The Bay Area is rallying around Minister of Information JR, facing three years in prison for covering the Oakland Rebellion that demanded justice for Oscar Grant and for his courageous coverage of police terrorism known throughout the country. Influential organizations are calling an 8 a.m. rally on Monday, Dec. 7, then to pack Courtroom 11, 1225 Fallon St., Oakland, the courthouse made famous by the many rallies the Black Panther Party held there.

The Clean Slate Program, one of San Francisco’s first reentry programs, was started by Public Defender Jeff Adachi in 1999. Over the past 10 years, Clean Slate has helped thousands of individuals overcome barriers to obtaining employment, housing, professional licenses, certifications and government aid.

On Thursday, Dec. 3, while President Obama holds a national summit on jobs and unemployment, unemployed workers will picket at 11:30 a.m. in front of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office in the SF Federal Building, 90 7th St., calling for Congress to take immediate action to put people back to work.

When America talks about unemployment percentages around 10 percent, I know they are talking about white people. It is talked about as an alarming figure. As a Black man, I am not alarmed. If that were the number in my community, I would rejoice. “No Blacks working! That’s what I see at every construction jobsite in San Francisco,” exclaims Willie Ratcliff, Bay View publisher and lifelong construction worker and contractor.

The City along with its handpicked operator, Bay Area Video Coalition, are planning to close the Community Access Television Center on Dec. 20 without another location where programmers can produce their shows. A picket and press conference will be held on this attack on community access and free speech on Tuesday, Dec. 1, 4 p.m., at Channel 29, 1720 Market St. at Valencia, San Francisco.

KCBS calls it "Another Viral BART Police Confrontation," referring to the now world famous video of a BART officer shooting passenger Oscar Grant in the back as he lay face down on a BART platform at 2 a.m. New Year's Day. The new video, shot Saturday night, shows another BART officer assaulting a passenger almost as viciously. STORY UPDATED TUESDAY, NOV. 24.

With the economic depression setting in and the effects of global warming being seen all over the planet, people are having to find ways to employ themselves as well as create cost effective healthy, earth friendly alternatives to expensive fast food and cheap GMO products. Marcel Diallo, a longtime Oakland community activist and cultural worker turned real estate tycoon, thinks that he has one of the answers, the Village Bottoms Farm in West Oakland.

Supervisors Nate Miley and Keith Carson have restored my faith in Black elected officials. The leverage that public officials have just before contract award is enormous. Nate Miley and Keith Carson by their actions have established a method of enforcing contractor goals that can create economic parity in the Black community.