Tag: Greenaction

The lines are drawn – Captialism’s Profits over People, or, Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win, all Power to the People

Voting in the Bayview community is being encouraged and supported with education, registration and myriad other day-to-day needs by SF Bay View Assistant Editor Malik Washington, Managing Editor Nube Brown, Mother Brown’s, Gwendolyn Westbrook of UCHS and so many others to lift Black voices for Black rights.

Endlessly bombarded by the triple slam of the capitalist corporate installed food desert, poverty and government refusal to take responsibility for the toxic remains of the Hunters Point Navy Shipyard wedded to developer greed and other shenanigans, Bayview Hunters Point community continues to take the steps necessary to claim a healthy environment.

The Navy appears to be in violation of the regulatory requirement to “reassess community interest at least every 24 months.” It has been over a decade since Laura Duchnak signed the Navy’s Letter of Intent to Dissolve the RAB.

Remember the many years Marie Harrison owned the back page of the Bay View? She defined what “speaking truth to power” means. With headlines like “We’ve always survived your whip and your noose” and observations like “Voter education isn’t just somebody educating the voters; it’s the voters educating the people they elect,” as we carry on without her, we must infuse every fight with her courage.

You’ve been an especially effective, strong, patient and articulate voice confronting forces that do not respect human rights or human life. You’ve told these opportunists firmly and politely that every human being on earth has the right to live and raise their children and see their grandchildren thrive in pollution-free places and to breathe clean air without toxins.

Our story begins on any weekday morning in the mid 1940s, when thousands of men, migrants from the American South to “Frisco,” converged upon the gates of the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard on their way to work. To do their jobs building and repairing ships for the biggest employer in the San Francisco Bay Area during the war time economic boom. By 1908, the San Francisco Drydock, operating at the shipyard, had become “the world’s greatest shipping yard.”

Breaking news reports in the mainstream media this week supplant the humble role the SF Bay View has played for over two decades in alerting the San Francisco community to the ongoing threats to health, safety and the environment stemming from the botched radiological remediation that continues at the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. On Jan. 31, 2018, the US Navy has scheduled an Open House on Radiological Cleanup. Be there and be heard. It is time to take a stand against the final straw of criminal negligence, coverup and dangerous corruption that is driving the shipyard development like a diesel powered train on a track to nowhere!

State and federal regulators asked the Navy to stop transferring land from the Hunters Point Shipyard to San Francisco’s control while investigators look into reports that contractor Tetra Tech misrepresented its work cleaning up the toxic Superfund site. In a Sept. 13 letter to Navy official Lawrence Lansdale, the Environmental Protection Agency’s Angeles Herrera and the California Department of Toxic Substances Control’s Janet Naito requested confirmation that the Navy will not propose any land transfers for the time being.

Bayview Hunters Point residents are invited to attend the first monthly meeting of the new Bayview Hunters Point Environmental Justice Response Task Force on Wednesday, July 22, 2015. Community members, industry representatives and officials from local, regional, state and federal environmental agencies will be present and will participate in this important task force to remedy pollution problems in the community.

Contrary to Mayor Ed Lee’s claim in a press release issued yesterday by the Mayor’s Office, the Superior Court issued an important victory for Bayview environmental health advocates by blocking the proposed early transfer of the toxic parcels of the Hunters Point Superfund site.

The fight by the people of San Francisco to hold the San Francisco Department of Public Health and mega-developer Lennar accountable for clean air and the health of Hunters Point residents endured another round Thursday, June 23, at City Hall. The verdict? Jury still out.

Glen Cove is acknowledged by the Greater Vallejo Recreational District and the City of Vallejo to contain many burials and to be important culturally, yet as of Thursday night they were still were planning to move forward with plans to build a toilet and parking lot on this sacred site.

Community outrage over Florida-based developer Lennar sending an armed ex-SFPD officer to a meeting where a scientist invited by the EPA was criticizing a controversial report favoring Lennar’s massive development plans for Hunters Point will be aired on Monday, April 12, at a 9 a.m. hearing in the Legislative Chamber, Room 250, of San Francisco City Hall. Don't be tricked. The meeting time was advanced from 10:30 to discourage attendance. Please be there!

In December 2009, leading climatologist Dr. James Hansen cited new satellite data doubling or tripling previous sea level rise predictions. Climate change, he said, “is really a moral issue analogous to that faced by Lincoln with slavery,” an apt comparison considering the dangers for peoples of color in the Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood of San Francisco.

Turning to Lennar’s recent activities, Sumchai’s politics came into focus. “We have to fight to control this property. We have to be stakeholders at the table of what goes on in the development of not only this property but other properties throughout southeast San Francisco.

After more than 15 years of “cleanup,” the Shipyard is still a toxic mess – and now Lennar is moving forward to build residential housing on the site.