Homes like these in the village of Madam Bernard, Ile à Vache, Haiti, might be removed to make way for tourist development or islanders removed from other areas might be relocated here. Credit: Judith Scherr/IPS

By Judith Scherr
ILE À VACHE, Haiti, Aug 8 2014 (IPS)

Calm waters lap the shore beneath stately coconut palms. Mango trees display their bounty alongside mangrove forests. Goats graze peacefully on hillsides.

Ile à Vache is “the Caribbean’s last treasure island,” says Haiti’s Ministry of Tourism. Just 10.5 km off Haiti’s southwest coast, the 13 by 3.2 km haven is, the ministry continues, “unpaved, unplugged, unspoiled and unlike anywhere else,” and “singular for its complete absence of roads and cars.”“After three successive demonstrations, they sent police to terrorise the people of Ile à Vache." -- Alexis Kenold

These words were written, however, before mangroves were cleared for an international airport, coconut palms were bulldozed for a road, a bay was dredged for yachts and some 40 police officers came with weapons and three all-terrain vehicles to quell protests.

Islanders, estimated at between 14,000 and 20,000, are angry at their exclusion from the government decision-making process that has opened the island for investment in an international airport, hotels, villas, a golf course, and an underwater museum — investments that place residents’ futures in limbo.

“The project came to the island by surprise,” Alexis Kenold, a 40-year-old father of five, told IPS. “The government hadn’t talked to us about it. They want to kick us out in favour of those who would profit from tourist development.”

On May 10, 2013, President Michel Martelly decreed that the island was a “public utility,” zoned for tourism.

“The decree says that no inhabitant of the island owns his land and that the state can do whatever it wants with it,” said Kenold, a member of Konbit Peyizan Ilavach, Farmers Organization of Ile à Vache, formed to oppose the project.

Minister of Tourism Stephanie Villedrouin Balmir, who declined an interview for this story, has said that no more than five percent of the islanders will be displaced, that they will be relocated, not removed from the island, and that they will be compensated for their losses.

But involuntary relocation is unacceptable to the islanders, who have held several large demonstrations since December demanding retraction of the decree.

The government reacted to the protests by beefing up police forces and throwing KOPI Vice President Jean Matulnes Lamy into the National Penitentiary, Kenold said. Officials say Lamy is detained on charges unrelated to the protests, but activists say his imprisonment is political.

“After three successive demonstrations, they sent police to terrorise the people of Ile à Vache,”
Kenold said, charging that when he was away from home police ransacked his house and took money he’d saved for his children’s school fees.

He said they’ve harassed and beat others, and now islanders live in fear of the police. Before the demonstrations, there were just three or four police on the peaceful island, he said.

A spate of planned investment projects on Ile à Vache, Haiti has placed residents’ future in limbo. Credit: Judith Scherr/IPS

Islanders say they don’t oppose tourism – they might benefit by getting electricity, potable water and government services. But they don’t want to be moved from their five-room homes with spacious yards for trees, gardens and animals, to crowd into two rooms up against neighbours.

And they worry about the island’s fragile ecology.

“The forest is the lungs of the island,” Kenold said. “It’s like they want to sacrifice the heart and the lungs of the island to put in an international airport.”

There’s concern as well for the waters surrounding the island. They “began dredging a pristine bay known as Madam Bernard without an assessment of the environmental impact on marine ecosystems,” Jessica Hsu of the NGO Other Worlds and radio host Jean Claudy Aristil said in a joint presentation at a July Innovators in Coastal Tourism symposium in Grenada.

The project has already impacted some islanders economically. School director Dracen Jean Louienel told IPS that people had used the mangroves that were cut down for the airport to produce charcoal.

“That was how people made their living,” he said, “This destroyed their livelihood.” And building the road removed coconut trees on which other families depended, he said.

Louienel said, moreover, promises of work have not been fulfilled. “People signed up to work on the road, but few were hired,” Louienel said.

Some islanders, however, have profited from the project and support it. Standing in the clearing where the airport is to be built, Gilbert Joseph called the project “a wonderful thing.” Joseph works as a security guard there at night and sells beverages to the construction workers during the day.

Clausel Ilmo, whose son is working as a translator for the Dominican road-building company, also likes the project. He pointed out that where it once took hours to walk to distant parts of the island, one now can go quickly on the road by motorbike.

Father Guy Carter Guerrier, a Catholic priest, did not join the militant protests. Still, he has concerns. “To me, developing the island could be a beautiful project,” he said. “The problem is, the government didn’t include the people here. They even passed over the church. They left everybody out.”

Up the hill from Guerrier’s church, Sr. Flora Blanchette, a French-Canadian Franciscan nun who’s run an orphanage on the island since 1981, shared her hopes and concerns.

New roads can help people access health care, schools and food, she said, but the fruit trees that nourish the children should be protected.

“What I’m hoping is that they bring the essentials for people living on the island,” she said, “that they truly bring development for all the social classes to benefit.”

In Costa Rica, the whole population has benefited from tourism, Elizabeth Becker, author of “Overbooked: the Global Business of Travel and Tourism” told IPS by phone. There, locals have input into development, she said.

Implemented correctly, Haiti could greatly benefit from the booming tourism market, she added.

However, “bottom-up tourism is the best way to do ecotourism,” Becker said. “People should not be losing their property rights in order to have tourism. People should instead have … a voice in what kind of tourism they want.”

Cambodia’s tourist development provides a cautionary tale, she said. The government took away people’s property rights and parks protections and did not consult locals before installing hotels and airports.

In Cambodia, “all that great money that supposedly comes from tourism doesn’t land in local hands,” she said. “It either lands with the elite or with foreigners.”

Haiti’s Ministry of Tourism emphasises environmentalism. The Ile à Vache “project objective is to develop sustainable tourism based on the practices of ecotourism,” an online ministry slideshow says. But islanders say the government hasn’t demonstrated care for the environment.

Documents also say the government will undertake a “social improvements programme.” It has recently dug new wells, built a community centre, installed outdoor solar lights, and distributed rice and fishing equipment.

But Kenold says it was only “after the population rose up, that they came with a few grains of rice to appease the anger of the people.”

“I’m not against tourist development, but it’s the way they’re going about it,” Kenold said, adding that people are open to dialogue with government officials, but only after the decree is retracted, Lamy is released from prison and police are removed from the island.

“After lifting the decree that would disposes the inhabitants,” he said, “they can come with their projects and we will come with ours.”

Edited by: Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at judithscherr@gmail.com

Mexico is fighting obesity and accompanying diseases with a one-peso per litre tax on sugar-sweetened beverages that kicked in Jan. 1. France implemented its “cola tax” in 2012. Several U.S. states tax sugar-sweetened beverages, including Vermont, Rhode Island, Arkansas, Tennessee, West Virginia and Virginia. Illinois legislators are considering such a tax.

To date, no U.S. city has approved a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages. Advocates of the tax in San Francisco and Berkeley, California hope they will be the first. But they’ll have to fight the “big soda” industry lobby to do it."We don’t want to start a precedent - every time a corporation threatens to put a bunch of money in, we back down.” -- San Francisco Supervisor Scott Wiener

Proponents say the taxes would reduce consumption of drinks that contribute to costly diseases like diabetes. But the American Beverage Association, representing the 141-billion-dollar non-alcoholic drink industry, says the tax would hurt the poor by inflating grocery bills, and argues that the choice to drink sugary beverages should be made by the individual, not the government.

Berkeley and San Francisco residents will vote Nov. 4 on whether to tax sugary drinks.

Dr. Vicki Alexander, MPH, co-chairs the Berkeley Healthy Child Initiative Coalition, the tax measure sponsor in Berkeley. She said sweetened beverages can be even more harmful than cake or cookies.

“When [a sugar-sweetened drink] enters your mouth, it is quickly swallowed and enters the organ that regulates sugar in the bloodstream,” Alexander said at a recent council meeting. “You don’t even have time to feel full. So you drink more – you supersize it. This high sugar content can lead straight to diabetes.”

The ABA spent millions of dollars opposing sweetened-drink tax campaigns in Richmond and El Monte, California, soundly defeating both in 2012.

But Berkeley City Councilmember Darryl Moore said the powerful industry doesn’t scare him. “We were the first community to divest [from South Africa], the first community to have domestic partner benefits, the first to put curb cuts for our disabled community,” he said at a recent city council meeting. “No city has been able to successfully pass a sugar-sweetened beverage tax, but it will happen here in Berkeley.”

Across the Bay, San Francisco Supervisor Scott Wiener is sponsoring San Francisco’s ballot measure to tax sugar-sweetened beverages. Like Moore, he said he’s ready to take on big soda.

“The beverage industry is a bad actor,” Wiener said. “They are going to put a lot of money into the campaign, just like tobacco and big oil put a lot of money in any time we try to do anything in California around taxes or regulations. We don’t want to start a precedent – every time a corporation threatens to put a bunch of money in, we back down.”

Tax measure details won’t be finalised until July. In its present form, the San Francisco measure would tax sugar-sweetened beverages at two cents per ounce; Berkeley’s levy would be one cent per ounce. Sodas, sports drinks, and sugar-sweetened teas would be taxed; the tax wouldn’t include milk and medical drinks, diet sodas and alcohol.

Distributors would pay the tax, which proponents believe would be passed on to consumers. Adding a penny-per-ounce tax on sweetened beverages across the U.S. would prevent 240,000 cases of diabetes per year, according to Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, associate professor of medicine, epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California San Francisco.

The San Francisco measure directs tax funds to nutrition, health and physical activity programmes. The Berkeley coalition is evaluating polling data to decide whether its measure will specify where funds are spent.

Advertising by the sweetened beverage industry often targets children. Credit: Judith Scherr/IPS

Retired cardiologist and former Richmond Councilmember Dr. Jeff Ritterman, who spearheaded failed efforts to pass the tax in Richmond, is advising proponents in San Francisco and Berkeley.

“Being first out of the gate, we didn’t have money,” Ritterman told IPS. “We didn’t have professionals running the campaign. And we didn’t have polling data. A cardiologist turned city councilmember flying by the seat of his pants is what we had in Richmond.”

The beverage industry spent 2.5 million dollars in Richmond, a city of about 100,000, and 1.5 million dollars in El Monte, with about 20,000 people, to defeat the measures. (Berkeley’s population is about 112,000 and San Francisco’s is about 825,000.)

With seven months before the election, tax proponents in Berkeley and San Francisco have instituted many elements the Richmond campaign lacked. They’ve tapped volunteers, raised funds, hired professional consultants, taken polls and launched websites.

The beverage industry also got an early start. It established the Coalition for an Affordable City, which sent mailers to San Francisco voters targeting the city’s “rising cost of living, escalating rents, [and] impending evictions,” arguing that instead of addressing housing costs, tax proponents want to make life harder by taxing sodas.

Supervisor Wiener said the mailer used “the very real anxiety around the cost of housing” to attack the tax. “To suggest that a two-penny per ounce tax on soda is even in the same universe as seniors who are losing their housing is pretty specious,” he said.

IPS asked the ABA for comment; they responded by directing this reporter to their websites.

An overarching question is how the Berkeley and San Francisco campaigns will compete, given that, no matter how much money they raise, the industry will outspend them.

San Francisco campaign consultant Maureen Erwin said they’ll depend, in part, on “enthusiastic” volunteers. “Person to person contact is absolutely the best method of getting the message out,” she said.

In Richmond, the beverage industry split the community along racial lines, garnering opposition to the tax from minority city council members and communities by claiming the tax was regressive and would hurt poor Latino and Black communities.

Dr. Alexander, who is African American, told IPS that although seven of the 15 members of the Berkeley coalition steering committee are people of colour, and the initiative is endorsed by the local NAACP and prominent Latino organisations, there is still need for vigilance.

“If they offer a [Black] minister 5,000 dollars for a church garden, would he accept it?” Alexander asked. “We’re prepared for attempts to divide the community.”

Another argument the beverage industry used effectively in Richmond, and the Coalition for an Affordable City is using in San Francisco, addresses the issue of personal responsibility.

“When it comes to our food and beverage choices and the choices we make for our families, we don’t need the city government’s input,” the Affordable City SF website says. “It should be up to parents to make responsible choices for their children. A beverage tax is no substitute for parental responsibility.”

But Sara Soka, consultant to the Berkeley pro-tax coalition, told IPS that while people have nominal choice about what they drink, “pervasive marketing from the beverage industry has made having a real choice a lot harder for all of us, especially kids and their parents.”

The beverage industry ads target children – especially children of colour, she said, adding, “About two-thirds of California teens drink one or more sweet drinks each day. And cheap drinks don’t help. A sugary drink tax is one way we can fund programmes that raise awareness for kids and parents.”

Berkeley Councilmember Laurie Capitelli cautioned it won’t be easy to fight the industry. “They’ll try to divide us by race, they’ll try to divide us by class, they’ll accuse Berkeley of trying to be a ‘nanny state,’” he said.

But Ritterman said understanding the tactics and messages big soda used in Richmond and El Monte, the Berkeley and San Francisco campaigns will “inoculate the public to what’s coming and take the power out of the beverage industry message.”

Kayla Moore, in photo with her infant niece, suffered a mental health crisis and died in police custody. She is remembered in a community birthday celebration by her sister, Maria Moore. Credit: Doug Oakley/IPS

By Judith Scherr
BERKELEY, California, U.S., Nov 26 2013 (IPS)

Just before midnight on Feb. 12, Kayla Xavier Moore’s roommate dialed 911. Moore, 41, a paranoid schizophrenic, was off her prescription meds and highly agitated. The roommate thought he knew the drill – Moore would be taken to a psychiatric hospital, stabilised with medication and allowed to go home in 72 hours.

That’s not what happened. Finding Moore had an outstanding warrant, Berkeley police decided to take her to jail. When they tried to handcuff her, Moore, who was also African American and transgender, resisted – and died."All of a sudden there would be these invisible people in the apartment coming after her and she’d have to move again.” -- Elysee Paige-Moore

The coroner said Moore died from obesity, drugs and cardiovascular disease. Moore’s family blames the police.

Moore was not creating a disturbance and presented no threat, her sister Maria Moore told the community at a meeting on the incident.

“When you put your hands on someone who is a paranoid schizophrenic, who does not trust police, they are going to fight that,” she said. “If [police] had just stopped for a minute instead of trying to be enforcers, had listened and found out what the situation was about, Kayla would be alive.”

Police involvement in the death of people with mental health emergencies is not uncommon. In fact, an investigation by the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram one year ago estimated that at least half of the 375 to 500 people shot and killed by police in the United States annually suffer from mental health issues.

“Always a happy child”

Arthur Moore remembers the day he brought his first-born child home from the hospital and the joy Xavier brought the family. (This article refers to Xavier, the child, in the masculine and to Kayla, the adult, in the feminine.)

“Xavier was always a happy child. Whatever he focused on, he would focus on it with a lot of joy and a lot of intensity,” Arthur Moore said in an interview at the family home. “He was very bubbly and curious about everything.”

As he grew older, Xavier was found hiding twice for extended periods, something the family would come to see as an early sign of his illness.

As an adult, Kayla Moore was haunted by voices and often chose street drugs over prescribed medicines. Known by friends and family as a poet, talented cook and hilarious impersonator, Moore lived in shelters, the streets, cheap hotels, the family home and finally in a subsidised apartment.

She’d settle in a new place, “then all of a sudden there would be these invisible people in the apartment coming after her and she’d have to move again,” said Elysee Paige-Moore, Kayla’s stepmother.

Police reports indicate that Kayla Moore initially cooperated with police on the night she died, stepping outside the apartment to speak with officers. But when they told Moore she was going to jail, she rushed inside, demanding to speak with the FBI for confirmation.

Police called for backup. Officers struggled with the 347-pound Moore until she lay on her stomach on a mattress on the floor, with several officers straddling her to place her in handcuffs and ankle restraints. When she stopped struggling, officers rolled Moore to her side. Police say she was breathing then, but soon stopped breathing and could not be revived.

Some Berkeley police have completed 40 hours of specialised Crisis Intervention Training, but no CIT officer was available when Moore was in crisis, and Berkeley’s Mobile Crisis Team of mental health clinicians clocked out at 11 p.m.

“If you’re going to be in a mental health episode in Berkeley, make sure you’re going into it during business hours,” Berkeley Mental Health Commissioner Paul Kealoha Blake quipped at a community meeting.

Shifting out of “cop mode”

Crisis Intervention Training is premised on the principle that people experiencing mental health distress need compassion and treatment, not jail.

“The tactics we are taught in the academy often are not the best tactics for dealing with someone in crisis,” Philadelphia Police Captain Fran Healy says in “An Integrated Approach to De-escalation and Minimizing Use of Force,” published by the Police Executive Research Forum.

“We reiterate to our officers that they need to shift out of ‘cop mode’ in these situations…[CIT] gives the officers an awareness of when they have to change their approach and shift more to ‘social worker mode,’” Healy writes.

Initiated in Memphis, Tennessee in 1988, Crisis Intervention Training teaches officers recognition of mental illnesses, de-escalation techniques, and the principle of “diverting people that have serious mental illnesses away from the criminal justice system and back into the community system of care,” said Officer Jeffrey Shannon, Berkeley’s CIT coordinator.

Just eight percent of Berkeley police are CIT trained, though Shannon hopes that will grow to 20 percent. Most of the 2,000 communities with CIT programmes train a fraction of the force; Portland, Oregon trains the entire department.

Partnership with the mental health community is the heart of CIT training, said Laura Usher, CIT programme manager with the National Alliance on Mental Illness, which co-founded the Memphis CIT.

“There’s usually a component of the training where individuals just tell their stories – what it’s like to have a mental illness, what it’s like to be in crisis and what it’s like to be in recovery,” Usher said. “Officers say it’s the first time they’ve ever seen someone with a mental illness who is not in crisis. They realise, ‘This is a person just like me.’”

Many communities have Mobile Crisis Teams of mental health professionals who respond to people experiencing mental health distress. The downtown Oakland, California MCT partners with police and is available weekdays for about nine hours each day.

Stephanie Lewis, who heads the team, explains that when police get a call saying, for example, that a loved one is agitated, pacing or yelling, the MCT will respond. First police make sure the situation is safe, then clinicians try to connect with the individual, calling the person by a name they prefer, modulating their tone of voice, and, especially, showing respect, Lewis said.

Collaboration with police has been built over 10 years, said George Karabakakis, head of Health Care & Rehabilitation Services, the nonprofit that employs the embedded mental health staff.

“It’s not something you just say – ‘We’re going to embed someone in the police department,’” Karabakakis told IPS. “There has to be a lot of preparatory work to build those connections.”

In Berkeley, a coalition led by the local NAACP, the nation’s oldest civil rights group, is responding to Kayla Moore’s death and related issues by pressing city officials for around-the-clock mobile crisis teams, restricting police response to mental health calls to dangerous situations, increasing mental health services and hiring more Black and Latino clinicians.

“We have to make some sense out of Kayla’s death,” said Maria Moore. “We have to make some change from this.”

Many people celebrated marriage at the San Francisco Pride Parade. Credit: Judith Scherr/IPS

By Judith Scherr
SAN FRANCISCO, Jul 2 2013 (IPS)

Sporting wedding gowns, tuxedos, leather, beads, bangles, union t-shirts and Free Bradley Manning buttons – and some wearing just about nothing at all – some 1.5 million people poured into downtown San Francisco Sunday to celebrate lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender pride.

The 43rd San Francisco Pride Parade – the largest of many around the nation and the world – came just four days after the U.S. Supreme Court issued two historic rulings: one overturning a ban on gay marriage in California and the other invalidating part of a 1996 federal law denying spousal benefits to same-sex couples.

Joey Cain was preparing to march with more than 1,000 others in the contingent honouring Bradley Manning, the gay whistleblower on trial in military court for leaking classified documents to Wikileaks.

Dressed in a purple shirt and matching hat, a camouflage skirt that Cain said “reclaimed the colours of the earth back from the military,” and accessorized with a yellow boa and sparkling disco-ball earrings, Cain recounted his earliest experience in the gay rights movement.

“My first gay demonstration was in 1971 in Buffalo, New York, where we stood outside of a gay bar picketing it because it wouldn’t let same-sex people dance together,” he said.

He marveled at how far the movement has come today: “People can actually get federal benefits” for same-sex partners, he said, adding, “It’s amazing; it really is.”

A former Pride Parade Grand Marshal and member of the Pride Parade body that names grand marshals, Cain created a stir when he nominated Bradley Manning for one of the 2013 grand marshal slots.

The other electors agreed, but Pride Board President Lisa Williams reversed the decision calling it a “mistake”.

“Bradley Manning is facing the military justice system of this country,” Williams said in a written statement. “We all await the decision of that system. However, until that time, even the hint of support for actions which placed in harm’s way the lives of our men and women in uniform – and countless others, military and civilian alike – will not be tolerated by the leadership of San Francisco Pride.”

But Cain insisted, “We’re still declaring him a grand marshal. I nominated him because I felt that … he wanted that information released so people knew the truth of what was going on so that they could make informed decisions. He put himself in a dangerous position and I felt that was a heroic act. I wanted the LGBTQ community to know more about him and to come out and support him. And we’ve been wildly successful.”

The Bradley Manning contingent – Number 179 out of some 235 contingents – marched behind a banner proclaiming “Pride in our Whistleblower.” Standing in for the jailed Manning and riding in a pick-up truck marked “Bradley Manning Grand Marshal,” was Daniel Ellsberg, 82, who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971.

“Free Bradley Manning” placards were carried by individuals walking with many of the other contingents as well and those standing in the crowd.

Removing Bradley Manning as grand marshal wasn’t the only criticism of the Pride parade coming from the left.

Deeg, who uses only one name, criticised what she said she sees as the parade’s increasing “corporatisation.”

“Some of these corporations are criminals. They steal people’s homes,” she said of the sponsorship of various banks, including Wells Fargo, Bank of America and Chase. Other corporate sponsors included breweries, clothing stores and manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, HMOs, hotels and media. Many corporations and businesses promoted themselves with elaborate floats in the parade.

Another sore point for some was the military recruiters who had a booth at Civic Center, where festivities continued after the parade.

“I am so angry – first the pride committee dishonours a gay hero by rescinding his election, and then they turn around and invite the military to come here and to recruit young, vulnerable people,” said Code Pink activist Xan Joi. “Exposing them to the danger of the military is outrageous.”

The recruiters’ work, however, was interrupted after the parade by members of the Brass Liberation Orchestra, along with a number of anti-war activists, including war veterans. The group surrounded the recruiters and the band played marching music, making interaction with the public difficult for the recruiters.

Along the parade route, spectators stood five-to-ten persons deep. The event kicked off, as always, with Dykes on Bikes riding dozens of motorcycles, many of them flying rainbow flags.

Loud cheers rose from the crowd when Kris Perry and Sandy Stier of Berkeley, and Paul Katami and Jeff Zarrillo of Burbank, rode by in convertibles. It was their challenge that resulted in the court lifting the ban on gay marriage in California. Both couples were married Friday.

Parade participants also included around 150 Mormons, marching behind the Mormons for Marriage Equality banner. “Gay kids grow up Mormon – I’m here to keep them safe,” read one of their signs. The Mormon church poured some 20 million dollars into the fight to support the 2008 ban on gay marriage in California.

There were girl scouts, opponents of circumcision, vegans, Latino parents of gays and lesbians, gay police with colourful balloons tied to their squad cars, a hotline for youth trying to understand their sexuality, a bagpipe brigade, and lots of individuals celebrating their relationships, such as one couple holding the sign: “16 years + 3 children, 1 grandchild – finally married. Proud of My Family.”

Alex Aldana, who said he’s undocumented and queer, marched with Undocuqueer behind the banner: “Don’t stop at Marriage. Queers are getting deported.”

Aldana called the defeat of parts of the federal law “a great victory,” giving binational immigrant couples the ability to sponsor their non-citizen partners for residence. Still, the ruling doesn’t help two undocumented immigrants, Aldana said.

“If I happened to be dating someone who is also undocumented, we wouldn’t be able to sponsor each other because he is not a citizen.”

Aldana said the Supreme Court rulings won’t help undocumented transgender immigrants who continue “to be not only criminalised by the police department because of their transgender identity, but also because of their undocumented status. They get put into detention centres and they suffer discriminatory treatment.”

Aldana said the Supreme Court decisions are a great victory. But he cautioned, “We want all of our immigrant families to be included in that conversation. That’s a human right.”

Many in the crowd of San Francisco May Day marchers wore butterfly wings; the Monarch butterfly migrates to Mexico and then back to the U.S. every year. Credit: Judith Scherr/IPS

By Judith Scherr
SAN FRANCISCO, California, May 2 2013 (IPS)

More than 1,000 people marched under the brilliant San Francisco sun on May Day. Their signs, such as “Work in America/Live in America/Dream in America. Immigration reform now,” their songs, chants and speeches wove together the twin themes of the day: worker justice and immigrant justice.

Alphonso Pines of the hotel and restaurant workers union Unite HERE put it this way, speaking to the crowd before the march: “We’re marching for our families; we’re marching to honour the sweat and the contributions of each and every working person. We’re marching to honour the beauty of each and every family – queer or straight, immigrant or born here. We’re marching because together we can make history.“People are getting separated from their families every day. We want a stop to that immediately." -- Kitzia Esteva of Causa Justa

“Together we can win immigration reform that includes all workers and all families. Together we can stop the pain of deportation.”

In all, there were some 85 marches calling for worker and immigrant rights around the U.S., including a march of 700 in Oakland, California, 2,000 in Los Angeles and several thousand in New York.

Seattle-based journalist Mark Taylor Canfield told IPS that unions brought large numbers of people out to a peaceful march of several thousand in Seattle. A break-off group broke windows and damaged property. Police reacted with “large amounts of pepper spray and flash-bang grenades,” he said. There were 13 arrests.

In San Francisco, Tessa Levine was getting ready to march with Mujeres Unidas. Like many in the crowd, she wore butterfly wings. The Monarch butterfly flies to Mexico then back to the U.S. every year, she said, explaining, “It’s really a symbol that migration is beautiful, that migration is natural.”

Still, migration is regulated by law. And at this point, no one knows exactly what the new immigration law will look like – or if one will actually make it through both houses of Congress and on to the president’s desk.

A number of demonstrators told IPS they had serious questions about the bill known as the Bipartisan Framework for Comprehensive Immigration Reform scheduled for consideration by the Senate Judiciary Committee on May 9.

A primary concern with the bill is the 13 years it would take most immigrants in the U.S. without documents to become citizens. The positive aspect is that, during the waiting period, they would be able to work legally. However, during that time, they would be excluded from social services, including the right to purchase health insurance under the Affordable Care Act.

“We want a fast and just path to citizenship,” said Kitzia Esteva, of the advocacy organisation Causa Justa.Just Cause, noting that immigrants’ taxes pay for these services.

Emily Lee, with the Chinese Progressive Association, expressed similar concerns. Noting that one million out of the 11 million undocumented persons living in the U.S. are Asian-Pacific Islanders, she asked, “What does that mean when you’re paying back taxes, and you’re expected to contribute to the society, but you’re not receiving the benefits?”

But even getting onto the path for citizenship under the Senate bill under discussion could be impossible for people who have worked informally as day labourers or domestic workers, since the applicant is expected to show proof of having worked in the U.S.

“These are men who are working every day,” said Emiliano Bourgois-Chacon, with the San Francisco Day Labor Program and Women’s Collective. But because they are undocumented, they don’t have paperwork to prove they have been working, Bourgois-Chacon said.

Keeping the family together was another concern of May Day demonstrators.

The bill in the Senate would make it more difficult for families to sponsor siblings. “Family reunification has been a cornerstone of immigration in the U.S.,” Lee, of the Chinese Progressive Association, said. “And to start chipping away at that…is very problematic.”

Many people in the Chinese community wouldn’t otherwise have been able to come to the U.S., she added.

Deportations that rip families apart are of great concern to a number of demonstrators IPS interviewed. There have been some 800 deportations from San Francisco since 2009, with the introduction of Secure Communities or “S-Comm”, the programme where local police share arrest information with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to Estava of Causa Justa.

Across the Bay in Alameda County, the Oakland-Berkeley area, there have been 2,000 deportations since 2009.

“People are getting separated from their families every day,” Estava said. “We want a stop to that immediately. We are fighting to get local police to stop the collaboration between police and ICE, and we have that same demand on the national level with immigration reform.”

Deportation has also heavily impacted the Arab immigrant community, said Lara Kiswani of the Arab Resource and Organizing Center. “There’s obviously racial discrimination and systemic criminalisation of Arabs and Muslims here in the United States, which leads oftentimes to deportation,” she said.

Like Estava, Kiswani said the high number of deportations comes from collaboration between local and federal law enforcement. “There should be an end to S-Comm so that there’s more accountability to local law enforcement and so that people aren’t unjustly targeted and deported for various misdemeanors,” she said.

Another problem with the current and proposed law is the E-verify programme through which an employer can verify a person’s social security number. ICE can request an employer perform an E-verify audit.

Olga Miranda, president of Service Employees International Union Local 87, said a few years ago several hundred of her union janitors were targeted by an E-verify audit, fired, and “lost everything overnight”.

Esteva pointed to another problem with the proposed law: putting resources into enhanced law enforcement on the border.

ICE and the border patrol have the most law enforcement money in the country, Esteva said. “Instead of putting that money into border enforcement, we could see a lot more social services and resources for the community. We think that money would not be well invested in protecting the border.”

Nancy Mackowsky marched the two-mile route holding an American Federation of Teachers banner. She teaches English as a second language at San Francisco City College and said some of her students work from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., then come to her class in the evening four days a week.

“They have goals, they have dreams and they deserve to be able to fulfill them,” she said.

Kyle and Scott Kuwahara, nine-year-old twins, talk to their friend Rodrigo Guzman via Skype in their Berkeley, California home. Credit: Judith Scherr/IPS

By Judith Scherr
BERKELEY, California, Mar 28 2013 (IPS)

Rodrigo Javier Diaz Guzman was a fairly typical Berkeley, California kid. He loved playing baseball and video games, enjoyed school and got good grades, watched Ninjago on TV, and ate take-out burritos and Chinese food whenever he could.

His mother was one of those parents who always showed up at school with snacks for field trips and came along to help if she could get away from work.In school we are learning about all these important people like Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks who fought for people's civil rights and freedom. So what about Rodrigo's freedom?

But today, the Mexico-born nine-year old who came to Berkeley with his parents when he was not quite two can’t come home at all.

On a stop-over in Houston, Texas, on their way home from a Christmas trip to see relatives in Mexico, airport immigration officials interrogated the father for hours and determined that the family’s visas had expired. They sent them back to Mexico, saying they could not reapply for visas for five years.

Incensed at the injustice of their friend being prevented from coming back to school, Rodrigo’s fourth-grade classmates, with some parental help, launched a campaign they’re calling “Bring Rodrigo home.”

Unwittingly, the children thrust Rodrigo and his family onto the stage of a raging national debate on immigration reform.

“The law isn’t fair and Rodrigo should be able to come back to his classmates and his friends,” Rodrigo’s classmate, nine-year-old Aminah Diaby, said.

The campaign to bring Rodrigo home got press attention when the local school board and city council each voted unanimously to ask congress and the president to support the family’s return.

“We need to do what we can here in Berkeley to try to bring Rodrigo home and also to try to change our immigration system so that people can become citizens of our country by a much quicker process,” said Berkeley City Councilmember Jesse Arreguin. “While their visas did expire, because of the way our immigration system is, it’s very difficult for them to get legal citizenship. They’re the victims of a flawed federal policy.”

Rep. Barbara Lee, representing the Berkeley-Oakland area and among the most pro-immigration-reform members of congress, invited a few of Rodrigo’s classmates to a private meeting with her before a Mar. 26 community-wide immigration forum at St. Elizabeth’s Catholic School, located in the heart of Oakland’s Latino community.

With parental help, the children brought Rodrigo himself via video Skype to meet Lee in a classroom next to the auditorium where the forum was to take place.

“Can you please help get me and my parents get back home, back to Berkeley?” Rodrigo asked the congresswoman.

“We’re going to do everything we can do,” Lee responded. “But let me tell you—what has happened to you is a real example of why we have to have comprehensive immigration reform. So while we work on that, we’re going to do everything we can do to help you get back. But we want people to know that you’re a real example. And what happened to you is why we have to work to get [immigration reform] done this year.”

Rodrigo and his parents are just three among 11 million people in the U.S. without legal status. At the forum that followed Lee’s meeting with the children, sponsored by the PICO National Network’s Campaign for Citizenship, “undocumented” people lined up to urge Lee to take their stories to Congress.

“For 16 years we’ve paid our taxes year after year; we read the sacred scriptures on Sundays at St. Bernard’s church,” Mireya Chavirria said in Spanish, speaking through an interpreter. “And I’ve been very active in our community working to stop violence as well as working to stop foreclosures, so that people don’t get kicked out of their homes.”

She talked about her dying mother in Mexico, whom she cannot visit, due to her immigration status. “This is a road filled with pain,” she said.

The forum, attended by more than 300 people, demonstrated the breadth of those involved in advocating immigration reform.

Nunu Kidane of the Black Immigration Network told the audience that 10 percent of immigrants to the U.S. are Black. Calling for “full citizenship now,” she said, “Whether it’s a Spanish-speaking person, or Asian, African, Haitian, Hispanic, we all stand together for all rights and justice and humanity for all.”

Labour unions were also represented. “A high percentage of our union members are immigrants,” said Josie Camacho, executive secretary-treasurer of the Alameda County Central Labour Council.

Camacho expressed concern for non-union immigrant workers, who are subject to exploitation by their bosses, sometimes not paid at all, or paid less than minimum wage.

“Employers know they won’t report them as a result of people being afraid about their status,” Camacho said, arguing that immigration reform would help end the exploitation of immigrant workers.

Washington lawmakers are deep in discussions about immigration reform, though no legislation has been written. Given their losses in the 2012 election, Republicans – many opposed to immigration reform in the past – appear to be leaning toward support of a law that would regularise the status of people without valid permission to be in the U.S.

At this point, it’s unclear what the legislation will look like. While many in congress talk about “a path to citizenship,” they differ on who gets to walk that path. Some conditions are likely to be a clean criminal record, paying back taxes and speaking English.

Some lawmakers want to allow LGBT (lesbian gay bisexual transgender) couples to be considered as families for the purpose of immigration. Some want to issue temporary worker status for certain “low skill” jobs. Some want to increase the number of visas available to university graduates with hi-tech skills.

Many advocate increasing security with the U.S.-Mexican border so that new undocumented immigrants won’t follow those already in the U.S.

It’s unclear how Rodrigo’s family, currently barred from U.S. soil, will fit into any eventual reform.

Immigration reform “basically lays out important values for California and the nation,” said Reshma Shamasunder, executive director of the California Immigrant Policy Center.

“It will determine the fate of millions of people like Rodrigo’s family. It’s being written right now. Our policy-makers need to be made aware that they must consider the painful realities of people like Rodrigo and others,” she told IPS.

The children campaigning for Rodrigo’s return don’t know a lot about the complexities of the current immigration discussion. They just know that their friend is unhappy and stuck in a country he scarcely knows. They’re planning a trip to Washington D.C. to lobby congress for his return.

Standing at the public microphone at the Campaign for Citizenship forum, Rodrigo’s classmate Kyle Kuwahara, nine, read a letter he wrote to President Barack Obama.

“It is really important to us that he is allowed to come back,” he said. “He has been in our school for five years and he is a friend of mine. Rodrigo is not free to come back. In school we are learning about all these important people like Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks who fought for people’s civil rights and freedom. So what about Rodrigo’s freedom? Who is fighting for his freedom?”

Berkeley activists march in San Francisco from the offices of Richard Blum, chair of realty giant CBRE which is selling post offices for the U.S. Postal Service, to the office of Blum’s wife, Sen. Dianne Feinstein. Credit: Harvey Smith/IPS

By Judith Scherr
BERKELEY, California, Jan 31 2013 (IPS)

Several dozen people filled the seats in a downtown storefront Tuesday night to plan how to save a landmark they say belongs to the community – a 99-year-old post office the United States Postal Service wants to sell.

Berkeley is just one of thousands of cities across the U.S. that has lost or is facing the loss of its post office. For tiny hamlets, such as Deadwood, Oregon with a population of 200, the crisis is not about losing a historic landmark, it’s about losing the community’s gathering place.

Where the USPS isn’t shuttering “underperforming” post offices, it’s slashing hours. It is also consolidating sorting centres and trying to outsource trucking services. These actions cause service reductions and kill middle-class jobs, but post office officials say the growing debt requires scaling down.

Community and postal worker activists disagree. “These (post offices) are the commons,” said Dave Welsh, a Berkeley resident and retired letter carrier. “These are buildings paid for by our parents and our grandparents and our great grandparents. It’s public space. It’s taking our commons away from us.”

No one disputes that the post office is bleeding red ink. Most evident is the increase in electronic communications and decrease in first-class mail. Less known is a 2006 law requiring the Post Office to prepay 75 years of retiree health benefits over 10 years. That costs the USPS about 5.5 billion dollars annually. Adding to the deficit, the USPS has overpaid billions of dollars into pension funds.

Postmaster General Pat Donahoe has asked Congress to adopt legislation that would reverse the requirement to prepay retiree benefits and rectify the pension fund overpayment. He also wants legislators to allow cuts in postal delivery from six days to five – a move that would cut 25,000 jobs according to the National Association of Letter Carriers – and to increase prices on postal products based on market demand.

Speaking at a legislative hearing, the postmaster general underscored the contradiction: Congress expects the post office – which gets no taxpayer subsidies – to perform as a for-profit business, but at the same time Congress has imposed restrictions on pricing and product sales.

While they support the postmaster’s demand to stop prepayment of retiree benefits and rectify overpayments, post office activists and union workers have spoken out against the closures, consolidations and plans to privatise functions.

Jessica Campbell of Oregon’s Rural Organizing Project says downsizing leads to poor service and pressure to privatise. “It’s like the process that privatisers take to privatise social services,” Campbell told IPS. “They defund it or they disable it in some manner and then they can point at it and say, ‘Look how this service is failing. And wouldn’t a private alternative serve us better?’”

In fact, some 800 USPS truck drivers in California are currently in federal court fighting a move by USPS to turn their routes over to private companies. “Some of the big trucking companies – their mouths are watering at the prospect,” Welsh said.

Tom Dodge, a USPS truck driver in Baltimore, Maryland, said the California case is just the beginning of an attempt to privatise 6,900 union trucking jobs across the country. He said trucking companies motivated by profitability, won’t respect the post office mission of delivering mail to customers quickly.

“In the trucking industry, the way they make money, is by running full trucks down the road, so they use the least amount of fuel, and the maximum load in a certain period of time,” Dodge told IPS.

“Applying that to the mail industry isn’t going to work. If you have a scheduled time to get people’s mail delivered, you have to be able to pick that mail up quickly and get it to a sorting facility and back out on airplanes and across the country.”

The service cuts will cost jobs. Postal jobs have declined from 750,000 two decades ago, to about 550,000 today. Union contracts prohibit layoffs for workers on the job for six years, but relocation to available positions is not an option for everyone.

“In this time of high unemployment, the federal government should be creating jobs, not destroying them,” Welsh said.

Steven Pitts, labour policy specialist at the University of California Berkeley Labor Center, said one should look at how cuts at the post office impact whole communities, especially the African American community, given the “greater openness in the public sector” to employ racial minorities.

While African Americans are 13 percent of the U.S. population, they make up about 21 percent of the USPS workforce, according to 2009 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission data. That means post office layoffs hit the African American community hard.

“We have clear sectors where African Americans are employed,” Pitts told IPS, “and when those sectors get destroyed, that’s what we mean by structural unemployment, structural racism. What’s frustrating is, when people look at the well-being of the Black community, and they look at outcomes in terms of crime and the larger issue of poverty, what people fail to do is look at what’s done to destroy those pillars of success.”

Some activists fear dismantling the post office will eventually lead to privatisation, as has happened in public education and prisons. A recent white paper, “Restructuring the U.S. Postal Service: The case for a Hybrid Public-Private Partnership,” calls for privatising all postal functions except the “last mile” mail delivery.

The “hybrid” post office would slash the number of union workers: “The new system accommodates the ongoing loss of tens of thousands of employees through retirement and separation incentives, including nearly 50,000 mail handlers, more than 100,000 postal clerks, tens of thousands of managers and supervisors, and thousands of other support and overhead personnel,” the paper says.

Edward Hudgins, director of advocacy at the Atlas Society, participated in writing the paper. He told IPS that because the post office is a monopoly, people don’t have the choice of a less expensive vendor. People prefer shopping at Walmart rather than going to a “cute little mom and pop store,” because Walmart goods cost less, he said.

“If you want to have a government monopoly that guarantees extra-high pay – higher than what the market would allow for – that is a problem,” he said.

But Sally Davidow, spokesperson for the American Postal Workers Union, believes the calls for privatisation are disingenuous. “There are people who can’t wait to get their hands on the publicly-owned post office,” she said.

San Diego Veterans for Peace demonstrate weekly near General Atomics against domestic and military drones. Credit: Dave Patterson/IPS

By Judith Scherr
OAKLAND, California, Dec 7 2012 (IPS)

Better known as drones, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles piloted by military in the U.S. hunt and kill suspected enemy combatants abroad. Now the drones are coming home to beef up local law enforcement.

But people across the U.S. are pushing back, contending that domestic drones could invade personal privacy or chill free speech by monitoring political activities.

“They want to use it for intelligence gathering – that’s spying,” Linda Lye of the Northern California American Civil Liberties Union told media at a hastily called press conference Dec. 4 outside the Alameda County administration building in downtown Oakland.

That morning, the Alameda County sheriff’s request for the Alameda County Board of Supervisors’ acceptance of Homeland Security grant funds for a drone was almost buried in a 66-item meeting agenda.

But when the Northern California ACLU – a member of Alameda County Against Drones – learned of the sheriff’s request, they called the press conference to expose a process they said ignored the community. The sheriff subsequently removed his request from the agenda.

And so, rather than a cursory board review, the supervisors’ Public Protection Committee will hold a comprehensive discussion on the drone question in January.

“Public policy should not be made by stealth attack,” Lye said, calling for debate on “the important questions of whether a drone is even appropriate in our community and if so, what safeguards should be in place before we buy a drone.”

Speakers at the press conference pointed to special circumstances in Oakland that call for protection against law enforcement abuse.

“When we see in the (sheriff’s Jul. 20 application to Homeland Security) that the drones could be used for large crowd control, naturally everybody thinks of Occupy Oakland,” said Trevor Timm of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, referring to alleged police abuse of Occupy activists.

The Alameda County Sheriff’s Department is just one of many law enforcement agencies across the country lining up for free money for drones from Homeland Security. They often point to popular uses for the technology, such as searching for missing children or escaped convicts.

But those concerned with privacy issues note that the technology allows drones to peer through walls and ceilings, monitor cell phone calls and texts, read license plates, recognise faces and record a person’s every move.

Some domestic drones, like the ShadowHawk acquired by Monterey, Texas, are able to carry “less lethal” weapons, such as tear gas and rubber bullets.

As the Afghanistan war winds down, the defence industry is intensifying its push for domestic drones, which Susan Aluise, writing in investorplace.com, calls the “next market opportunity”.

“Just when you think the (drone) market cannot go any higher, it does,” says Forecast International’s unmanned vehicles analyst Larry Dickerson, quoted on the Defense Professionals website. “No matter how many systems are built, operators want more.”

Dickerson estimates the industry’s value over the next decade at 70.9 billion dollars, with the civilian market worth 600 million to one billion dollars.

The industry is fueled by a 60-person congressional Unmanned Systems Caucus whose members have pocketed some eight million dollars in drone-related campaign contributions over the past four years, according to a Hearst Newspaper and Center for Responsive Politics investigation.

Citizens concerned with drone misuse are lobbying local officials. Buffalo, New York and Portland, Oregon activists want their city governments to ban drones entirely from airspace above the city.

Syracuse, New York petitioners are calling for an ordinance that “declares Syracuse and its airspace to be a SURVEILLANCE DRONE FREE ZONE wherein such drones are banned from airspace over the City of Syracuse until Federal legislation is adopted that adequately protects the population as guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.”

San Diego Veterans for Peace and their allies take their protest each Thursday to a busy corner near General Atomics, the manufacturer of Predator and Reaper drones.

“The technology’s not going to go away; we want oversight,” said VFP activist Dave Patterson, whose sign reads, “G.A. drones surveil America. Is that OK?”

Like Alameda County, Buffalo, Syracuse, Portland and San Diego don’t have drones.

Seattle does – but they’re not deployed, except for training missions. Like activists in Alameda County, Seattle residents were unaware when Seattle police initially pursued a Homeland Security grant for the drones.

They also were unaware of their delivery in 2010. The Seattle City Council and community learned of the drones in April of this year, when the Electronic Frontier Foundation uncovered the 82,500-dollar acquisition through a freedom of information request.

Police insist they did not keep the drones a secret, but concede they could have kept the public better informed.

Alerted to the acquisition, the ACLU of Washington sounded the alarm, saying in an April press release that, while drones could have valid domestic uses, they also “provide an unprecedented ability for the government to engage in surveillance of the activities of law-abiding people.”

Seattle Councilmember Bruce Harrell, chair of the Public Safety, Civil Rights and Technology Committee, said at a meeting in May that he was concerned that “the federal government is coming in making funds available through Homeland Security…and basically getting into the city’s business.”

In a recent phone interview with IPS, Seattle City Council President Sally Clark said if she had discretion over the grant funds, she’d opt to spend the money on city priorities, such as paying for an additional police officer.

Seattle’s Public Safety Committee will take up drone regulation in January. Harrell told IPS he’d like the law to restrict use of the drone to monitoring specific individuals named in a warrant, rather than allowing general surveillance. He said he’d like the law to require an officer with the rank of sergeant or above to authorise drone missions, and he wants public logs kept for each drone deployment.

He said the drones won’t fly until regulations are in place. Moreover, he said the council “put a requirement in our budget for next year, 2013, that there be no more purchases of drones.”

Occupier tears up symbolic debt. Credit: Judith Scherr/IPS

By Judith Scherr
SAN FRANCISCO, U.S., Sep 18 2012 (IPS)

Led by a spirited brass band and waving placards decrying corporate greed, hundreds of occupiers took to San Francisco streets Monday to celebrate Occupy Wall Street’s first birthday, culminating in a ceremony where they symbolically ripped apart loan documents.

The anniversary was also celebrated in New York City and some 30 other cities around the world.

“Debt buys us all,” said Amy Oh of Occupy San Francisco, addressing the crowd before the march. “We’ve got housing debt… student debt; healthcare debt; credit card debt…. Your city, your county, your state are also in debt … to the bankers.”

Cities cut social services and the state cuts transportation subsidies to pay the debt, she said. “(Debt) is affecting all of us.”

Neighbourhood occupy groups held anniversary events during the day. On the courthouse steps, occupiers tried to outshout an auctioneer selling foreclosed homes.

At the War Memorial, they held a press conference with seniors facing foreclosure. Robert Moses is a disabled 92-year-old African American World War II veteran. “I was paying my notes – I had no problem paying my notes – but they doubled the payments on my mortgage,” he said. Moses had paid off the original loan, but refinanced to make repairs.

The banks target African Americans and Latinos, said press conference emcee Archbishop Franzo King, of the Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church. Banks prey on unsuspecting people, he said.

“They begin to tell you stories about…how they can create an inheritance for your children,” he said. “Then you find out that these banksters are just like Satan and they make promises that they have no intention of keeping.”

The day was joyful, with occupiers taking over streets without police intervention. The media turned out in force. Occupiers reminded the nation that they haven’t gone away.

In reality, however, the hard work goes on when the party’s over and TV crews leave. IPS talked to several activists about their day-to-day work and Occupy’s influence on it.

Refusing to be a statistic

On Dec. 6, 2011, Gayla Newsome and her daughters walked back into the West Oakland townhouse from which they’d been evicted five months before. Occupy Oakland joined forces with the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) to support the family and keep vigil at the house until they were sure the sheriff wasn’t coming back.

Today, Newsome and her children are still in their home. One of two home loans has been forgiven; the second loan is being modified.

The housing defence movement was born long before Occupy. Bill Chorneau began organising tenants in the 1970s. “I found the whole experience empowering,” he said. “It hooked me for life.”

Now he works with ACCE to address foreclosure issues and applauds the Occupy Movement’s work.

“All of a sudden protesting didn’t seem like such a marginalised activity,” Chorneau said. “The idea of the one percent vs. the 99 percent caught people’s imagination. That really helped change the dynamic; previously the borrower was getting blamed by most people.”

While the fight against foreclosure is among the most visible Occupy targets and perhaps the one that has borne the most concrete success across the country, Occupy has also injected new life into broader struggles for basic rights among the most oppressed groups, especially people of colour.

“Occupy has to reach out…”

Melvin Dickson, a former Black Panther Party member, edits the Commemorator, the newspaper of the Commemoration Committee of the Black Panther Party.

The committee, formed in 1989 after the party’s dissolution, preserves and disseminates the party’s history. But more importantly, Dickson says, it teaches about the past, in particular, the party’s 10-point programme – including the right to self-determination, housing, health care and education, ending police brutality and wars of aggression – in order to transform communities today.

Dickson compares the Panther’s goals to Occupy’s.

“Occupy came on the scene and they have a bigger picture – the 99 percent vs. the one percent – that’s what we’ve been talking about all along,” Dickson said.

“We were talking about U.S. imperialism, particularly the Viet Nam War. We came out denouncing that and took a position…because we recognise a connection between the same class of people who benefit from the wars are also benefitting from the oppression of black people, brown people, and poor whites in the United States.”

Dickson called Occupy’s work an “inspiration to us”, but cautioned that they have some differences with Occupy.

He faults Occupy for not incorporating disenfranchised communities. “Occupy has to reach out to various oppressed groups,” he said. “Every group has a special kind of oppression. The programme needs to be devised on that basis, not just, ‘we’re all in this together.’ You have to have some analysis of the oppression.

“You have to come up with solutions that address those particular problems of the particular people who have experienced that oppression. You can’t solve their problems alone. You can’t be condescending to this group of people. You’ve got to listen to them. And get behind them. Not try to get in front of them.”

Nonetheless, he praised Occupy’s work for connecting like-minded people, for letting them know “that there are many other people around the world, and many other people around the country, who have similar concerns.”

Retaking public spaces

Occupy’s most visible actions have been the occupation of public and private spaces for public benefit. They’ve occupied shuttered schools, boarded-up libraries, parks and universities.

In the small town of Albany, California, not far from the University of California, Berkeley, a group that became known as Occupy the Farm, celebrated Earth Day by marching to open space owned by the university, breaking in, bringing out rototillers and seedlings they’d stored nearby, and creating an urban farm.

The struggle to transform this land into an urban farm didn’t start with Occupy. It began 15 years earlier with a coalition of some 30 groups; the coalition was succeeded by other organisations.

Jackie Hermes-Fletcher, a former teacher living in Albany, got involved a decade ago. She said each time she drove by the land, she’d think about how it could be used for children to learn about farming.

She joined Urban Roots, the successor organisation to the coalition. Like the coalition, they tried working with the city and university to get use of the land. “We were pretty much ignored,” Hermes-Fletcher said.

They got city councilmembers elected who promised to fight for the land, but then ignored their promises, she said.

Over the years people have gotten burned out. There were just a few who would go with Hermes-Fletcher to council meetings, especially to oppose a mega supermarket now planned for part of the open space.

But early this year Hermes-Fletcher got invited to a meeting.

“I found myself– it gives me chills – in a room with all these young people,” she said, beginning to choke up. “They were going to occupy the land – it was incredible.” Some were from Occupy Oakland and the others were university graduate students.

The group, joined by dozens of community members, farmed the land for three weeks before university police evicted them. They’ve returned to harvest, then given away hundreds of pounds of vegetables.

“Occupy The Farm showed the community what an urban farm looks like,” Hermes-Fletcher said. The group is keeping future plans under wraps.

“We’ve got a huge burst of energy again, thanks to Occupy the Farm,” she said. “It’s been so heartwarming, so hopeful.”

Paramilitaries destroyed the free school buses that had been operating in Cap Haitian under Aristide's government. Credit: Judith Scherr, Cap Haitian, Haiti, August 2004.

By Judith Scherr
OAKLAND, California, Aug 16 2012 (IPS)

Haiti’s brutal army was disbanded in 1995, yet armed and uniformed paramilitaries, with no government affiliation, occupy former army bases today.

President Michel Martelly, who has promised to restore the army, has not called on police or U.N. troops to dislodge these ad-hoc soldiers.

Given the army’s history of violent opposition to democracy, Martelly’s plan to renew the army “can only lead to more suffering”, says Jeb Sprague in his forthcoming book “Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in Haiti”, to be released mid August by Monthly Review Press.

The role of Haiti’s military and paramilitary forces has received too little academic and media attention, says Sprague, a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He hopes his book will help to fill that gap.
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Sprague researched the book over more than six years, traveling numerous times to Haiti, procuring some 11,000 U.S. State Department documents through the Freedom of Information Act, interviewing more than 50 people, reading the Wikileaks’ files on Haiti, and studying secondary sources.

The author is an academic, but he doesn’t strive for neutrality. His is an unapologetic belief in the right of the Haitian masses to control their destiny.

To support his narrative, Sprague includes 100 pages of footnotes.

“I know there will be critics of the book,” he told IPS, “I wanted to have a lot of information there to back up what I’m saying, so it’s not just seen as conjecture or rumour.”

In his historical analysis, Sprague takes the reader back to the “poison gift” the U.S. gave Haiti during its 1915-1934 occupation: an army “that would continue the U.S. occupation long after U.S. troops were gone,” Sprague writes, explaining that U.S. Marines created an army “subservient to the interests of the U.S., the bourgeoisie, and the big landowners”.

Sprague writes about the period of the father and son dictators Duvalier, 1957-1986, when the U.S. considered the Haitian army a “bulwark” against the spread of communism. He explores the military’s “incestuous” relationship to the Duvaliers’ infamous Tontons Macoute, whose purpose, he writes, was “to extort and attack government critics, often acting as secret police or executioners”.

After the Duvaliers, paramilitary forces continued their violence. In 1988, gunmen were thwarted in their attempt to murder the liberation theologian priest Jean Bertrand Aristide, whose popularity was rising; 13 people were killed and 80 injured in the attack.

The gunmen didn’t act alone. Sprague ties these paramilitaries to a former Macoute trained at the School of the Americas, the mayor of Port-au-Prince and wealthy businesspeople.

Throughout the book, Sprague underscores links between paramilitary forces committing overt violent acts and the often-hidden forces of wealth, and national and international political power supporting the paramilitaries.

In 1991, Aristide became the first democratically elected president of Haiti, but the army overthrew him after less than eight months in office. The military didn’t act alone. Sprague writes that it took Haitian elites, officials in Santo Domingo, Washington and Paris, and “even the Vatican” to pull off the coup.

In 1994, President Bill Clinton and 20,000 Marines returned Aristide to office. Aristide presided over a government that was weakened by the terms of his reinstatement, particularly an agreement to drastically reduce tariffs on rice, a severe blow to Haiti’s rural economy.

Aristide disbanded the army in 1995, an act celebrated by the masses, but one that former and would-be military personnel continue to revile today.

Disbanding the army did not rid the country of militarism. Few soldiers surrendered their guns; many fled to the Dominican Republic.

Still others were integrated into the police force. The U.S. took advantage of the situation, bringing recruits to the state of Missouri for training. Sprague quotes Aristide’s legal counsel Ira Kurzban, who visited Ft. Leonard Wood in Missouri.

“’When we drove into the base … the first thing we saw was an army intelligence unit,’” Kurzban writes in an email to Sprague. “’We later learned that the infiltration process began at Ft. Leonard Wood and the U.S. intelligence concept was to pick those people (or push those people) who they thought would be leaders in the police, corrupt them, and have them at the U.S. government’s disposal.’”

A unique contribution of the book is Sprague’s detailed analysis of the role of neighbouring Dominican Republic in support of Haitian paramilitaries.

In 2000, just before Aristide was to take over from President Rene Préval for his second term, paramilitaries attempted a coup which failed. Those responsible fled to the D.R. Haiti asked for their return, but D.R. officials refused.

Over the next few years, the D.R. would provide a safe haven for paramilitary forces making murderous incursions into Haiti and returning to safety in the D.R.

Neither the U.S. nor the Organisation of American States “put pressure on the Dominican government to stop…the cross-border murder sprees,” Sprague told IPS.

During this period, the U.S. funded opposition parties that Sprague says met in the D.R. with paramilitaries.

Skewed media reporting also supported the paramilitaries and their allies. Opposition protests usually drew a few hundred people and could depend on media coverage. But, Sprague wrote, Aristide’s Lavalas movement “could count on huge rallies…but it had the coverage of only a few small grassroots and government-financed media outlets….”

While paramilitaries dramatically destroyed police stations to take control of a number of cities and towns, it was U.S. officials in the dead of night that physically removed Aristide, quietly flying him to a seven-year exile.

With Aristide gone, the paramilitaries took on new roles. “In March 2004,” Sprague writes, “a reinvigorated paramilitary campaign was launched in the face of an anti-coup backlash by Haiti’s poor, who organized huge demonstrations and rallies.”

On the civilian front, the U.S., France and Canada set up an interim government headed by a Haitian-born Floridian. Sprague writes: “At the top of their agenda was stabilizing the country and securing it as a platform through which global capital could flow freely.”

The U.S. stance toward the paramilitaries was inconsistent. Sprague writes that soon after the coup, the U.S. ambassador spoke on Haitian radio in their favour, but later recognised that the ex-military might eventually undermine the government.

Some 400 paramilitaries were integrated into the police force after the 2004 coup. Haiti’s small police force works, sometimes uneasily, with the 10,000 UN troops stationed in Haiti since the coup.

Today, Sprague writes, “with a large U.N. presence, a new kind of ‘normality’ was forced upon the country. Following the horrendous earthquake of January 2010, and with the return of Jean-Claude Duvalier and the controversial election of Michel Martelly… disgruntled ex-army paramilitaries have gained more freedom. Numerous neo-Duvalierists and rightist ex-army work key security positions for the Martelly government….”

“And Martelly’s trying to bring back the army; but he’s saying, ‘Oh it’s not a military.’ They have a different name they’re giving it (the ‘public security force’),” Sprague told IPS, adding that today, as in the past, “the elites are trying to find the right ingredient to maintain their control.”

*Jeb Sprague will be traveling around the U.S. with his book. For information, see http://jebsprague.blogspot.com.

Amber and a friend sit on Shattuck Avenue in downtown Berkeley, where homeless people may be targeted for fines. Credit: Judith Scherr/IPS

By Judith Scherr
BERKELEY, California, Jul 13 2012 (IPS)

Amber, 24, who’s been living on the streets half her life, was sitting on a sunny sidewalk in downtown Berkeley last week, cuddling her three-month-old puppy and talking to a friend. But if voters approve a measure the city council placed on the November ballot, sitting on the sidewalk – after a warning – could cost her 75 dollars.

“That law will give us tickets we can’t pay, then we’ll have warrants and end up in jail,” said Amber, who “spanges” – asks for spare change – to feed herself and her unborn child.

Although the council chambers was packed with those opposing the law, the city council, at the end of a dramatic meeting that went past midnight on Jul. 11, approved putting the sit ban to a vote. The proposed ordinance is similar to statutes in Seattle, Washington, Anchorage, Alaska and Santa Cruz, San Francisco and Palo Alto, California. It would ban sitting on the sidewalk in commercial areas between seven a.m. and 10 p.m.

Some four dozen public speakers addressed the council, many arguing that the economic downturn is to blame for Berkeley’s vacant storefronts, and that punishing the homeless won’t bring back business.

John DeClercq, Berkeley Chamber of Commerce CEO, the sole speaker favouring the measure, said the law would make the city’s business districts “more welcoming”.

Once the public speakers queue wound down, the meeting took an unexpected turn when several activists stood up and led the public in the civil rights protest song, “We Shall Not Be Moved.”

The three councilmembers opposing the sit ban joined the sing-along, as the five other councilmembers present left the room. When they returned, in the midst of chaos, the majority voted to place the measure on the ballot.

The dissident councilmembers contend the vote was taken without council debate and therefore illegal. “They can’t stand a people’s democracy,” said Councilmember Max Anderson.

Hundreds of cities around the United States have laws advocates say unfairly target the homeless, including bans on sitting, lying, begging and placing objects on the sidewalk. Other laws, such as prohibitions to loitering, drinking alcohol in public, smoking and jaywalking, are applied to this population selectively, homeless advocates say.

Two years ago, San Francisco banned sitting on all city sidewalks. But the law hasn’t stopped the practice. IPS visited San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury commercial district and counted nine individuals seated on sidewalks.

Michael Anthony Billingsly, 21, was sitting on Haight Street with a friend, singing for spare change. People came by and dropped dollar bills into his paper cup; some tourists waved from a passing bright red two-decker bus.

Billingsly was hoping police wouldn’t cite him – again – for sitting on the sidewalk. “The cops should give me a guitar strap and I’ll stand up,” he joked.

“It’s so sad,” he said. “The reason we can’t sit here is because they want to kick out all the homeless people. It’s a tourist thing. There’s all these people walking by, and they love us sitting down. The cops just want us out.”

A recent study of the San Francisco law by the nonpartisan City Hall Fellows wraphome.org/pages/downloads/sitLieCHFReport.pdf concludes the law “has fallen short of its intended purpose. The same people are being repeatedly cited, a majority of Haight Street merchants do not believe the ordinance is effective, and most offenders are not being connected to services.”

Paul Boden, of the San Francisco-based Western Regional Advocacy Project, likened “quality of life” laws that target the homeless to racist “Jim Crow”, “unsightly beggar”, and sundown town laws intended to exclude poor and non-white people.

“All these laws also used use low-level infraction or misdemeanor offences so that the police had the authority to get you out of town,” Boden said.

Business interests appear to drive passage of such laws.

“Persons who sit or lie down…deter residents and visitors from patronizing local shops, restaurants and businesses,” the San Francisco ordinance says. “Business areas and neighborhoods become dangerous to pedestrian safety and economic vitality when individuals block the public sidewalks. This behavior causes a cycle of decline as residents and tourists go elsewhere to walk, meet, shop and dine….”

The Berkeley ballot language says public space in business districts has become “increasingly inhospitable … because groups of individuals, often with dogs, have taken over sidewalk areas in those districts, obstructing pedestrian access and intimidating pedestrians and potential business patrons…. The only practicable solution to mitigating the conditions described above that impair the city’s economic health is to limit sitting on sidewalks in certain areas at certain times.”

DeClercq of the Chamber of Commerce told IPS that the programme would be primarily implemented by “ambassadors”, people hired by the city’s Business Improvement Districts to clean sidewalks and monitor street behaviour. The ambassadors will make people understand that sitting on the sidewalk is “no longer appropriate in the city and they’ll change their behaviour,” DeClercq said, adding, “The ambassadors can really help people sort out what they need, where the services are.”

Homeless advocates, however, predict that compliance will be handled through police, courts and jails.

She scoffs at the notion that there are adequate services for people age 16-25. The city’s sole youth shelter sleeps 25 of the estimated 225 young people on Berkeley streets every night and is open just half the year.

The city has no daytime centre for youth and lacks lockers to store belongings. There are some supportive housing opportunities, but no “wet” housing for young people who use drugs and alcohol, Hindman said, underscoring that it is insufficient for an ambassador to simply tell homeless youth where to find a programme.

Hindman often hears people say that young people on the street are out for a lark.

“There are a variety of factors beneath the nice smiley faces; there are enormous experiences of trauma and abuse,” she said.

Twenty percent of youth on the street are GLBTQ (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, questioning), displaced because of persecution in their homes or home towns, she said.

Thirty percent of the street youths experienced first episodes of mental illness, and left home “because their environments are not able to understand that what they were exhibiting were signs of the onset of mental illness,” Hindman said.

Osha Neumann, an attorney who defends disenfranchised youth, said most youth won’t pay citations for sitting. Many have no address to receive court date notices and to get to court without public transportation fare is difficult, he said.

When people don’t show up, they get cited for failure to appear, a warrant is issued and they can be arrested. Once someone has a criminal record, it’s harder to get housing and employment.

“Criminalisation will only drive them away from services, and more deeply alienate them,” Neumann said.

Neumann fears commercial real estate interests will heavily finance the campaign to enact the sit ban. “People sitting on the street don’t have that kind of money,” he said.

Adonis Pollard, 19, became homeless at 15. Today, he’s housed and works as an artist-trainee at Youth Spirit Art.

The proposed Berkeley law “is not going to do any good,” he said. “It’s basically going to finance the prison system. All they’re going to do is get more money per head that comes into the jail cells. There’s still going to be the problem of homelessness. There’s going to be the problem of poverty.”

Using grant funding from the Dept. of Homeland Security, UC Berkeley is preparing to buy an armoured vehicle, which it will share with the city. Credit: Gary Dorrington/IPS

By Judith Scherr
BERKELEY, California, Jun 22 2012 (IPS)

The city of Berkeley, California has long been regarded as a leader in the movements for peace, free speech and civil liberties. But this very city is now poised to follow the lead of hundreds of others around the United States where local police deploy armoured vehicles to fight crime and terrorism.

The University of California, Berkeley police department is using grant funds from the Department of Homeland Security to purchase a Lenco Ballistic Engineered Armoured Response Counter Attack Truck, better known as BearCat. The university will share the BearCat with police from Berkeley and the neighbouring city of Albany, where it will house the vehicle.

Purchasing the vehicle was raised at a Berkeley City Council meeting as part of a larger discussion on the city’s relationship to Homeland Security agencies that award grants and collect information on citizens.

Police Chief Michael Meehan defended the BearCat, telling the council he would have used it last year in a situation where a mentally ill man held off police officers with a gun for several hours. An armoured vehicle would have allowed negotiators to safely approach the suspect, Meehan said, although in this instance, police eventually took the man into custody without incident.

But Daniel Borgstrom, Occupy activist and former Marine, warned the council on Jun. 19 that the vehicle could be used to chill free speech.

“I’m asking, please stay out of this urban warfare stuff,” he said.

While Meehan called the armoured personnel carrier “a defensive resource” without weapons, Councilmember Max Anderson argued that the vehicle has gun ports and that weapons would be easy to supply.

“While we might count [the vehicle] as being protective of officers, they also carry an offensive component that could be misused under certain circumstances,” Anderson said.

No transparency

Citizens and councilmembers also criticised the secrecy with which the purchase was taking place.

Because the vehicle is being purchased by the university, and not a city governed by elected bodies, and because no matching funds were required – which the council would have had to approve – the Berkeley police department was not required to disclose the grant application.

Berkeley citizens found out about it only when the watchdog organisation, Berkeley Copwatch, discovered the project as a result of a Public Records Act request for general information on police equipment, according to Andrea Prichett of Copwatch.

The armoured vehicle has not been publicly discussed in Albany, and no such discussions are scheduled, according to Albany’s city clerk. Occupy Cal activists contacted for this story were unaware that the university was buying the armoured vehicle.

“I feel a certain level of – I have to use the word – betrayal,” attorney Sharon Adams told the council.

Adams works with a community coalition that has been meeting with police over concerns about local Homeland Security agencies, including the Urban Areas Security Initiative that is awarding the university about 200,000 dollars to purchase the BearCat.

“During all this time, police never told us they were going for this armoured tank,” she said.

Militarising cities – and police forces

Since 9/11 and with a surplus of combat equipment, armoured vehicles have become popular in larger higher-crime cities like Oakland, California, as well as tiny crime-free places like Keene, New Hampshire, where just two murders have been reported since 1999.

These armoured vehicles are part of “an alarming increase in militarisation” of the police, said Norm Stamper, former Seattle police chief and author of Breaking Rank: A Top Cop’s Exposé of the Dark Side of American Policing.

Stamper explained in a phone interview that, in addition to 9/11, the war on drugs has fuelled the drive toward police militarisation, exacerbating conflict between those targeted – people of color, youth and the poor – and law enforcement.

Once targeted, these communities become the enemy. “We start adding the military nomenclature and the military equipment and military tactics and strategies, and we find SWAT units hitting the house of somebody suspected of having half a bag of marijuana,” he said.

Locally, police militarisation was evident at the Nov. 9, 2011 Occupy Cal demonstration at UC Berkeley, where combat-gear clad police injured peaceful protesters with baton strikes, and on Oct. 25, 2011 in Oakland, when similarly armed police nearly killed a young former Marine when they fired a tear-gas canister that hit him in the head.

“There’s this mistaken belief, that if we harden the image of the police officers, that will give the forces of law and order more legitimacy,” Stamper said. “What it does, I think, is precisely the opposite.”

When police carry weapons and use chemical agents on non-violent demonstrators, they “appear to be the repressive arm of an oppressive establishment”, Stamper explained. An armoured personnel carrier would serve to reinforce that impression.

A necessary piece of equipment?

However, Stamper allowed, an armoured vehicle can save lives, when used correctly. When Stamper was on the San Diego police force in the 1980s, a man shot and killed 21 people at a McDonald’s restaurant over the course of more than an hour. An armoured vehicle could have ended the event more quickly, he said.

“That was a situation that calls for exactly what I’ve been condemning in our approach to demonstrations,” he said. “You need police officers with ballistic gear, ballistic helmets…you need an armoured personnel carrier, in a situation like that. But you certainly don’t need it when people are peaceably assembling and expressing their first amendment rights.”

Police Chief Meehan acknowledged the growing militarisation of police, noting that in a highly armed society and country like the United States, which has 200 to 300 million gun,”there’s a limited way to protect our officers, especially when you’re talking about gunfire”.

“However much I would love to have something that doesn’t look military that still does the same job, it is what it is,” he argued. “The equipment that is available to us is what we avail ourselves of.”

The question of whether the armed vehicle is necessary remains: the last time Berkeley police officers were killed by gunfire was in the 1970s; no UC Berkeley or Albany officers have been killed by guns, according to the website Officer Down Memorial Page.

Councilmember Kriss Worthington placed the armoured vehicle on next week’s Berkeley council agenda for further discussion. “If this is a joint application that includes the city of Berkeley and the city of Albany, it seems to me that there should be a public vote of the Albany City Council and the Berkeley City Council,” he said.

“It seems to be against the spirit of Berkeley for us to be using it.”

Protesters came from environmental justice organisations such as Amazon Watch and Rainforest Action, as well as Ecuador, Nigeria and Angola. Credit: Judith Scherr/IPS

By Judith Scherr
SAN RAMON, California, U.S., May 31 2012 (IPS)

More than 100 people gathered Wednesday outside the gates of Chevron’s sprawling headquarters in upscale San Ramon in the San Francisco Bay area of California, where police and security barred those without passes to the shareholder meeting from entering.

The activists’ message was inscribed on a giant puppet and on the many placards they waved at passing shareholders: “Occupy Chevron and Big Oil,” “Chevron Makes Orphans,” Fracking is Environmental Rape,” “Chevron: Clean UP and Get Out of Metro Manila.”

Participants came from traditional environmental justice organisations such as Amazon Watch and Rainforest Action; their numbers were bolstered by the 99 Percent Power group, a several-months-old coalition that links the Occupy Movement with the fight against corporate greed and targets shareholders meetings.

Inside Chevron headquarters, a more sedate crowd applauded Chevron’s CEO/Chairman of the Board John Watson, who touted last year’s record corporate earnings of 26.9 billion dollars, the company’s improving safety record and Chevron’s efforts to enhance communities they work in.

“Abundant affordable energy raises living standards,” Watson said.

While some came to cheer Chevron’s progress, a number of shareholders and their proxies brought questions and criticisms focused particularly on the environmental degradation they say Chevron causes in its exploration for and extraction of gas and oil around the globe.

In particular, concern was expressed over contamination of parts of the Ecuadorean rain forest by Texaco, Chevron’s predecessor, and a subsequent 18-billion-dollar judgment against Chevron. In January, an Ecuadorean appeals court upheld the judgment.

Watson, however, told shareholders that the court decision is “an example of a fraud being perpetrated on our company”. He said, in fact, the environmental damage in question was caused by the government-owned oil company Petroecuador, which is spending 70 million dollars to remediate “the consequences of their actions”. Chevron will not pay the judgment, he said.

One group of shareholders took on the Ecuador question by calling for better board oversight. They made a formal proposal to improve management by separating the functions of chief executive officer and chairman of the board.

“Mr. John Watson is his own boss,” said Simon Billenness, speaking to shareholders in favour of the proposal on behalf of the Universal Universalist Association.

Billenness criticised a board decision to approve a 75 percent raise for Chevron’s General Counsel, which they said was based on an assessment of “outstanding management” of the case in Ecuador.

“What is ‘outstanding’ about the case is that the Ecuadorian courts have upheld an unprecedented 18-billion-dollar judgment against the company,” Billenness said, adding that plaintiffs plan to pursue Chevron’s assets in various countries outside Ecuador.

Separating the functions of the CEO and board chair would promote more independent oversight, Billenness said, noting that while the proposal lost, it did get 38 percent, up from 14 percent when the shareholders voted on the same question in 2008.

Other proposals impacting safety and the environment also failed. One would have reserved one board slot for an environmental expert; another called for better accountability around safety issues; and a third proposed preparation of a report to investors on the risks associated with hydraulic fracturing, a controversial process of extracting oil or gas from shale rock that involves shooting water, sand and chemicals down a well.

The shareholder question period got testy. First to line up at the microphones were two Watson supporters.

Shelton Ehrlich blasted those who brought the pro-environment, pro-safety proposals to the meeting. “They were brought to us by left-wing and corrupt groups,” he said, asking Watson, “Why do you put up with this crap?”

Susan Rutherford followed by thanking the corporation “for fighting the shakedown in Ecuador”.

Most of the speakers who followed travelled to San Ramon from the areas they said were contaminated by Chevron.

Luz Cusangua, who is from the damaged region in Ecuador, called on Chevron to take responsibility. “Our children are deformed, while you are celebrating profits,” she said, speaking through a translator.

Emem Okon of the Kebetkache Women Development & Resource Center in Nigeria told shareholders about a fire at a Chevron oil installation that burned for 46 days, contaminating the area and destroying the people’s livelihoods.

Cristóvão Luemba from Angola said, “Chevron’s policies in Cabinda are endangering our communities, particularly the fisheries.” He charged Chevron with daily unreported oil spills.

“When are you going to start acting right and stop thinking about your profits?” he asked.

Henry Clark of the West County Toxics Coalition described problems stemming from the Chevron refinery in Richmond, California, some 35 miles from San Ramon. He talked about the “block toxic smoke” that lasted a week during a recent flare-up at the refinery, and asked the board not to further burden the already overburdened people of Richmond with increased emissions from a new facility being planned.

The Richmond refinery is the largest single stationary source of greenhouse gases in California, according to Antonia Juhasz, writing in the “True Cost of Chevron“, an alternative annual report on Chevron.

Watson responded to each speaker. In Nigeria, Chevron addresses community needs through job creation and microlending programs, he said, and in Angola, the company takes responsibility for the spills that are Chevron’s.

“We have a policy to report every spill,” he said, arguing however that most of the spills are not Chevron’s. He talked about jobs programmes in Richmond and said that city has “some of the cleanest air in the Bay Area”.

Much to the chagrin expressed loudly by a number of activists in the meeting, João Antonio de Moraes, coordinator with the United Federation of Oil Workers in Brazil, was not admitted to the shareholders’ meeting. (He was told there was a problem with his proxy, though he said it was in order.)

In his place, Antonia Juhasz of the True Cost of Chevron coalition told shareholders about a spill in Brazil for which Chevron will be asked to pay around 22 billion dollars.

Watson took responsibility, to a degree. “We regret the 2,400 barrel spill,” he said, explaining that, working closely with the Brazilian government, they were able to stop the spill within four days.

“There was no damage to the environment,” he said, adding, “We’re not perfect. We have made mistakes and we learn from them.”

Unable to enter the meeting, Moraes addressed the activists on the sidewalk outside Chevron headquarters.

“We, Brazilian oil workers, we agree that Chevron is afraid of the people,” he said, speaking through a translator. “What they did on the coast of my country, on the beach outside Rio De Janeiro, a spill of almost a whole kilometre long, we’re going to demand that they pay for this….The force is with us, with the people, and not with the arrogance of Chevron.”

California Occupiers plant crops on an undeveloped 10-acre parcel. Credit: Judith Scherr/IPS

By Judith Scherr
ALBANY, California, May 14 2012 (IPS)

With hoes, shovels, some 15,000 seedlings and a bolt cutter to break the locks that kept them out, students, community members and participants from nearby Occupy movements have laid claim to an undeveloped 10-acre parcel since Earth Day, Apr. 22, in Albany, California.

But Monday, some 100 university, city and county police took back the land and arrested seven occupiers (see sidebar).

“We are reclaiming this land to grow healthy food to meet the needs of local communities,” the occupiers say in a statement on their website. “We envision a future of food sovereignty, in which our…communities make use of available land – occupying it where necessary – for sustainable agriculture to meet local needs.”

The parcel, owned by the University of California, Berkeley and known as the Gill Tract, is located about two miles from the campus. The university plans to sell a portion of the tract to developers for an upscale supermarket and market rate senior housing. Researchers use around two acres annually, for a few months, for crop studies.

The occupation date coincides not only with Earth Day, but with Via Campesina‘s International Day of Peasant Resistance on Apr. 17, when peasants, small farmers, landless people, migrants and agricultural workers around the world attempt to reclaim land.

Calling themselves Occupy the Farm, the activists address socioeconomic inequity and corporate greed. They cite injustice in the distribution of nutritious food in the United States, with 50 million people lacking regular access to healthy food. And they condemn what they say is the growing influence of corporations on the University of California.

The university reacted to the occupation by turning off the water just a few days after occupiers began farming, forcing them to truck water onto the site. After telling activists to leave for two weeks and being ignored, the university stationed police and private security inside the tract, first locking three gates, then locking all four, forcing occupiers to enter and exit over the fence and walk across fields to water their crops with buckets of water, filled from a truck parked outside a locked gate.

On May 9, the university sued the occupiers for trespassing and preventing researchers from doing their jobs. While the university says the researchers cannot conduct their studies with occupiers on the land, occupiers, and at least two of the five researchers, say they can coexist.

Miguel Altieri is a professor in the College of Natural Resources and has conducted research at the tract for 31 years. He’s outspoken in his support for the occupiers. He said, along with community members and nonprofits, he has been calling for opening up the tract for 15 years, but has been ignored by the university.

Altieri would like to see a centre on the land where people learn urban farming, then teach the skills to others in the community. “We need to start raising food in our cities,” Altieri said, noting that there are some 500,000 people in the Bay Area with inadequate diets.

“There’s 120 acres of abandoned land (in Oakland) that could be used to produce food, if the people had the skills,” he told IPS.

The university administration said it would dialogue with the occupiers, but only after they left the property. In response, on May 12, the occupiers removed tents and camping gear from the land, but left their farming tools.

“We decided that we would in fact remove all of our things that support living (and place them) outside, just to be clear that we’re not here to live,” said Anya Kamenskaya, an Occupy the Farm spokesperson. “We’re leaving all the farming infrastructure inside the farm.

“Now, we can really focus on the issue of access. It’s about the community, about anyone who comes off the street who wants to learn about urban agriculture. And it’s about being able to have access to the crops that we’ve put in, and to continue the educational programmes we’ve planned.”

Just as the larger Occupy Movement shines a light on corporate greed, the occupiers are using the farm occupation to confront what they say is increasing corporate influence on the university.

“The global food regime is controlled by a handful of monopolies,” said Eric Holt-Gimenez, speaking at a May 12 workshop at the tract. Holt-Gimenez is executive director of Food First, a non-profit Oakland-based organisation that addresses issues of poverty and global hunger.

“The monopolies that get rich when there are food crises are the same monopolies that get rich over the food insecurity in this country, and they are the same monopolies that have monopolised the research agenda of our public universities like the University of California at Berkeley in which, literally, a half-billion dollars is dumped into agrifuels,” he said. “Virtually no money is put into community food security, and no money is put into urban farming.”

Holt-Gimenez was referring to the half-billion dollars for biofuels research that BP is giving the university.

University spokesperson Dan Mogulof countered that only a “tiny fraction” of research money comes from the private sector and that, when it does, corporations don’t tell academics how to conduct their research. He further pointed out that nonprofits also fund research, such as studies on issues in human rights.

Police guard Gill Tract after making seven arrests. Credit: Judith Scherr/IPS

Until Monday, University of California police had been relatively low-profile since protesters arrived at the Gill Tract. Some have suggested that is because the university and its police departments in Berkeley and Davis have been heavily criticised for police beatings and pepper spray use against Occupy activists in November.

A May 4 report, authored by the dean of the UC Berkeley Law School and the university’s general counsel, said the university needs to change the way it handles protests: “The Chancellor and other administrators should develop and follow a set of guidelines designed to minimize a police response to protests, and to limit the use of force against protesters wherever possible,” the report says.

While police and private security were stationed at the gates and around the perimetre of the tract, they maintained a generally friendly demeanor, unlocking the gates for those who want to leave and ignoring those who scale the fence – or climb up the newly-built stairs and use the slide to slip inside.

At this point, the future of the tract is uncertain. In a May 11 letter, the chancellor’s office recognised value in the occupation: “As much as we abhor the tactics embraced by the occupiers, we acknowledge that their actions helped to raise the public profile of urban agriculture and generate constructive conversation about its value,” it said.

In that letter, the university invited occupiers to a meeting with about a dozen participants the university selected to discuss the tract’s future, with occupiers’ participation conditioned on completely vacating the property.

The occupiers responded by packing up their tents, but refusing to abandon their crops and refusing to participate in a planning process that wasn’t open to all.

Gopal Dayaneni, an Occupy the Farm spokesperson, said on Sunday that he hopes the university will join activists in an open planning process “that isn’t based on sabre-rattling and threats”.

In the meantime, “We’ll be watering our fields and tending our crops,” Dayaneni said.

(END)

By Judith Scherr
OAKLAND, California, May 2 2012 (IPS)

It was May Day and Oakland was bathed in sunshine. Union workers staged militant actions; immigrants and allies marched for justice with brass bands and drummers; spontaneous street parties erupted.

There was also tear gas, flash bang grenades, screams, vandalism and arrests on Oakland Streets.

“Today, as we stand in solidarity with labour, as we stand in solidarity with immigrant workers, as we strike against this exploitative economic system, we also stand up to police violence and state repression,” Laleh Behbehanian of the Occupy Oakland Anti- Repression Committee told a rally in Oscar Grant Plaza, the space renamed by protesters for a young unarmed African American man killed by a transit police officer.

Behbehanian went on to say that Oakland sometimes gets blamed for over-focusing on police violence and “diverting the occupy movement away from its original goals.”

She addressed critics, saying, “Oakland has always stood to remind this country and the larger Occupy Movement, that the unfair economic system we protest is maintained every day by massive police violence and military violence all over this world….

“Whenever there is an unjust economic system, there is a police state to defend it….Today that police state is showing its face all over the world. But all over the world, from Oakland to Cairo, from New York to Syria, people are standing up.”

The midday rally got off to a late start, delayed by a police action. According to one protester, “hundreds of people were just hanging out a 14th and Broadway; everything was chill.” They were waiting for a convergence of several small morning marches protesting banks and various businesses.

Suddenly, police “snatched” a woman from her bicycle as she came into the intersection, the protester said, adding, “Really it seemed like it was just to rile up the crowd. That was successful; the crowd was riled up.”

After that, police used tear gas, shot flash-bang grenades and arrested a number of other demonstrators. In a bulletin issued later in the day, police said the demonstrators threw objects at them.

“The crowd surrounded the officers and small amounts of gas were deployed on three occasions in limited areas to disperse the specific small groups of people who were committing the violent acts,” police said.

Most the marches and pickets during the day were accomplished without city permits, but the immigrant rights March for Dignity and Resistance, had permits. The question of whether to take out permits had been contested within Occupy Oakland.

Those supporting a permitted march argued that immigrants, especially those without documents, feel safer with a permitted march. Others pointed out that, when Occupy had permits, as soon as a permit expired – or wasn’t adhered to, to the letter – police had an excuse to make arrests. The final decision, however, was to take out permits.

The rally was held at Fruitvale Plaza, in the heart of the Latino community, where Oakland’s immigrant rights advocates have held May Day rallies and marches since 2006. The atmosphere was festive and brought out many families with children. An Aztec dance troop set the stage and was followed by spirited speeches and then a march that police estimated at between 3,500 and 5,000.

Sergio Arroyo said he had come to support immigrant workers, especially those without documents, who face particular exploitation.

“I’m here to support folks living in the United States who don’t have a support network,” he told IPS. “The majority of workers are guaranteed that they’ll be paid at the end of the day, but there are undocumented folks who get taken advantage of.”

If the employer decides not to pay the worker, “there’s nothing the undocumented immigrant can do in terms of demanding that pay,” he said.

Asked about his support for the Occupy movement, Arroyo said, “We all fall under the umbrella of the 99. We have different strategies – no one’s right or wrong. We do it in our own way.”

Nearby, Emiana stood with friends. She’s a 79-year-old widow who works as a caregiver for elderly people, earning 40 dollars per day for cooking, cleaning, and bathing her clients. She said she even takes care of the dog. The worst is, “They don’t respect me,” she said. She works with National Domestic Workers Alliance and came to the rally to support the caregivers.

In Oakland and nearby Berkeley as well as in eight other Bay Area cities, 4,500 Sutter Hospital nurses chose May Day for their one-day strike action (the hospital locked them out for four more days) and targeted the corporation they work for, saying Sutter has raked in over four billion dollars in profits since 2007 and that its CEO earns 4.7 million dollars annually, while asking nurses to reduce sick leave and pay more for benefits.

Ann Gabler, neo-natal infant care unit nurse and head of the bargaining team addressed some 250 nurses in Berkeley.

“What we’re asking for is to maintain what we have, what we’ve fought for, for over 60 years of collective bargaining,” she said. “I’m not going to let Sutter Health take a magic marker to our contract and black out sections that they don’t like….I love being a nurse….It’s not just about us; it’s about our patients and about our community.”

Sutter issued a fact sheet that indicates that a nurse’s average full time salary is 136,000 dollars per year, and that retirees at 65 with 22 years on the job receive an 84,000-dollar pension for life.

“CNA (California Nurses Association) refuses to partner in efforts to reduce costs for patients,” the fact sheet says.

“Our goal is to balance the need to reduce costs for patients while also continuing to provide our nurses with wages and benefits that are not only competitive, but at the top of the industry for our region.”

At the end of the day, many from the March for Dignity and Resistance returned to Oscar Grant Plaza downtown. In the intersection by the plaza, there was a street party atmosphere, with drummers and a DJ.

Justin Ryan had been at the plaza and various actions most the day. He told IPS he thought May Day had been an opportunity for people with different interests to come together “and protest the general problems with the system and how it inflicts pain on the average person”.

He went on to express concern: “I’m a little worried that people will become destructive in the evening time,” he said.

And, in fact, just after dark, police reported that they had tried to make an arrest and the crowd began throwing objects at them. They said then they disbursed most the crowd. In total, they made 25 arrests during the day. They reported various acts of vandalism including a police car set on fire.

Ryan talked about property destruction. “There’s a long history in the Bay Area of large protests being a cover for people who want to misbehave,” he said. “There’s not really anything we can do – we cannot not protest, because someone will use that as an opportunity to do something you don’t agree with. And there’s always a chance that police or other interests will come and join a march and do things to try to make us look bad.”

Excerpt:

By Judith Scherr
SAN FRANCISCO, U.S., Apr 25 2012 (IPS)

More than 1,000 people took the Occupy Wall Street Movement message straight to the one percent Tuesday, most of them rallying outside the Wells Fargo stockholders meeting in the heart of San Francisco’s financial district – and some 30 of them “mic-checking” inside the meeting.

Protesters, many of whom had come from out of state, targeted what they said was Wells Fargo’s high rate of foreclosure, predatory lending practices, tax dodging and investing in private immigrant detention centres. Wells Fargo is the nation’s largest mortgage lender.

Rev. Gloria Del Castillo, of the Buen Samaritano church in San Francisco’s largely Latino Mission District, came to the protest as part of an interfaith organisation working for economic and social justice. Her understanding of the mortgage crisis is not theoretical.

“I’m here today, not only as a faith leader in this city,” Del Castillo said, before marching to the Merchants Exchange Building, where the shareholder meeting was to be held. “Myself, I’m going through foreclosure right now, thanks to Wells Fargo. I asked them three times for a loan modification so that I could stay in my home, and they refused.”

Barbara Casey was among the limited number of protesters who were able to tell Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf to his face what they thought. Casey, secretary treasurer of SEIU 503 trade union in Portland, Oregon, was one of the 100 or so demonstrators who had bought single Wells Fargo shares or obtained proxies, allowing them, in principle, to go into the shareholder meeting. And she was one of about 30 who actually made it into the meeting.

(According to the Wall Street Journal, Wells Fargo’s profits last year were at 4.25 billion dollars, up from the previous year’s 3.76 billion dollars.)

When he said it was a difficult year for Wells Fargo, “That’s when some of us stood up and said it was a difficult year for many families,” and commented on the 11 million foreclosures that Wells Fargo was involved in, Casey said.

“As we each made a different remark, the rest of us chanted – that kind of…mic check kind of scenario,” Casey said. “So as we were either initiating a remark or chanting one, one by one, a policeman came for each one of us.” Casey said the officer was polite and said he wouldn’t cite her if she left quietly, which she did.

About a dozen people were reportedly arrested inside the shareholder meeting after Casey and others were removed. Another group of protesters who had blocked entrances were also arrested.

Claudia Reyes was standing with the California Coalition of Domestic Workers and others blocking one of the streets through which shareholders would have had to pass, if they wanted to get into the meeting. (It seems that at least some 250 who were not protesters found ways into the building.)

Reyes said she came to the march and rally both because the domestic workers coalition is concerned that Wells Fargo “is supporting immigrant detention” and because her family had lost their home last year.

“We had been living in it for eight years,” she said. “That was our American dream.” The mortgage doubled at the same time her brother lost his job, and they couldn’t afford it. Bank of America foreclosed.

Reached by phone after the protest, Wells Fargo spokesperson Ruben Pulido said he wanted to correct the record. He said the company didn’t intentionally keep protesters with proxies out of the meeting, but said “there was limited space and we allowed only 250 in.”

Protesters claimed Wells Fargo was an investor in detention centres for immigrants, but Pulido said Wells Fargo doesn’t own stock in companies that manage detention centres. Rather, it “serves as an adviser to a mutual fund” that includes the GEO Group, which manages private prisons, he said. He added that immigration policy is made in Washington and Wells Fargo “doesn’t take a position on immigration.”

Protesters called Wells Fargo “tax dodgers”, and placards read, “Make corporate tax dodgers pay.” According to a report by Citizens for Tax Justice, Wells Fargo paid 3.8 percent in federal taxes between 2008 and 2011. Pulido said the company paid six billion dollars in taxes for 2011 and 33 billion in federal taxes over the previous 10 years.

As for foreclosures, Pulido said they’ve been able to resolve issues with people whose loans are 60 days past due in seven out of 10 instances. Citizens for Tax Justice says “Wells Fargo is one of the top banks foreclosing on Californians and had 17.5 billion dollars worth of foreclosed homes on its books nationally as of June 2010.”

Pulido added that he was “pleased that we were able to complete all the business items on the agenda as planned.”

John Shaban was among the protesters who own one share of Wells Fargo stock and was ready to go into the shareholder meeting. Interviewed early in the morning, just after Shaban had completed training that was aimed at helping people make non-violent decisions about what to do when faced with possible arrest, he said he hoped to tell Wells Fargo officials and stockholders that they should make better decisions when it comes to foreclosing on properties.

Foreclosure takes the property off the tax rolls and lowers property values in the entire community, he said.

Interviewed later in the day, Shaban said he wasn’t among those who made it into the meeting. But he said nonetheless that the day of protest was a success. “It sent a message loud and clear to Wells Fargo and the giant banks that the 99 percent has had enough,” he said. “By any means necessary, we’re going to get that message across to the banks.”

Marchers, who had been accompanied through Richmond streets by a pink-clad brass band, were welcomed with street theatre, more speeches and music. Credit: Judith Scherr/IPS

By Judith Scherr
RICHMOND, California, Apr 23 2012 (IPS)

This year, Earth Day in Richmond, California was more than planting organic gardens or exploring solar panels.

Occupy Richmond and a coalition of progressive allies turned Apr. 20 into Occupy Earth Day, and took aim at Chevron, one of the world’s wealthiest corporations. The corporate giant that turned a 27-billion- dollar profit last year, operates a refinery in Richmond and, according to Occupy Earth Day organisers, is the city’s largest polluter.

“Earth Day is a day of the land where we live, a day of the people, of us who live and play and work on this land we call earth,” Richmond activist Jose Rivera told the crowd gathered at the Richmond subway station, before a march to city hall.

“This is our land and companies like Chevron … are polluting our land, polluting our air, polluting our water. We put this (rally) together to let the Richmond community know … what we are doing here in Richmond, California against the 1 percent, which is Chevron.”

The 100-year-old refinery sits on 2,900 acres of land, which is about 13 percent of Richmond. It processes 240,000 barrels of crude oil per day to manufacture petroleum products, and employs 2,900 people; six percent of them live in Richmond.

In 2010, Chevron spent more than one million dollars to support two pro-Chevron city council candidates and a mayoral challenger, according to the blog, Richmond Confidential. One of the candidates Chevron supported won a council seat, the others were defeated.

In part due to the 2008 Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, Chevron was able to spend almost 10 million dollars in the 2009-2010 election season to influence state and local elections in California and an additional 3.8 million lobbying California state officials, according to Antonia Juhasz, writing in The True Cost of Chevron.

“By standing up to Chevron today, we are showing that we are not going to be dominated anymore,” McLaughlin told the gathering. She pointed to victories in the last few years of the community’s struggle to control Chevron.

“The successes are because of a grassroots movement raising a collective voice for their own interests, for their own empowerment,” McLaughlin said. “That’s why I stand with the Occupy Movement as a whole, because it’s all about empowerment. That’s the only way we’re going to change society.”

The most recent community win was the defeat of Chevron’s claim that it had overpaid its 2007-2009 property taxes by about 79 million dollars, because the county had inflated the value of the refinery. Repaying that sum would have hurt the cash-strapped city and other public agencies that benefit from property taxes.

An appeals board, however, determined that the property value was even greater than previously assessed. And so, instead of the city owing Chevron millions of dollars, Chevron owes Richmond around 27 million dollars.

Speakers at the rally strongly condemned the refinery’s role in polluting the city and linked its emission of greenhouse gases to Richmond’s high rates of asthma, heart disease and cancer. In 2009 and 2010 the California Air Resources Board ranked the Richmond oil refinery as the state’s largest greenhouse gas emitter.

McLaughlin addressed the corporation directly in her remarks: “Chevron, you have been in this city for over 100 years. You have rained your pollution over the heads of the community, and into our lungs and as a result we have among the highest rate of asthma in the state.”

Richmond is facing the possibility of even more pollution, according to Jessica Tovar with Communities for a Better Environment, an organisation that struggles against environmental racism. Notably, among residents living within a mile of the plant, 79 percent are people of colour, and 25 percent live below the national poverty level.

Addressing the rally, Tovar explained that Chevron wants to construct new facilities on its property that would make it possible to process heavier crude oil. But processing heavier, dirtier crude oil puts the community more at risk.

“When you’re processing heavy, dirty crude, you’re running that refinery under heavy temperatures and pressure,” she said. “That increases the risk of spill, of fire, of explosions and flaring at the refinery.”

IPS attempted to contact Chevron but did not receive a response before deadline.

In a 2010 publication, “Chevron Richmond Today”, the company said it has invested in reducing emissions from the refinery and had been successful in decreasing flaring (the process of releasing pressure from the system) by 97 percent between 2007 and 2008.

The publication quoted Tim Burchfield, an environmental specialist with Chevron Products Company. “We again experienced emission reductions in 2009, when we had the lowest emissions of sulfur dioxide and vent gas flared by any Bay Area refinery,” Burchfield said.

At city hall, marchers, who had been accompanied through Richmond streets by a pink-clad brass band, were welcomed with street theatre, more speeches and music. Food was provided by Occupy Oakland – Oakland is about 19 kilometers from Richmond.

In contrast to Occupy Oakland events, where activists frequently clash with police and city officials – and where the Occupy movement bars city officials from speaking at events – Mayor McLaughlin helped with the Occupy Earth Day logistics, making sure city hall bathrooms were available for protesters after normal business hours. A handful of Richmond police followed the march and observed the activities from a distance.

In her remarks to the gathering, McLaughlin gave kudos to the Occupy Movement. “Last fall, when the Occupy Movement really made itself known, we in Richmond embraced it because we have been working in this progressive movement for so long.

“So now we have friends; we have a movement all over this country and we’re going to keep growing this movement and we’re going to keep empowering each other.”

Occupy Interfaith rallies in front of the Oakland City Hall. One pastor wears a mask in solidarity with those banned from the plaza. Credit: Judith Scherr/IPS

By Judith Scherr
OAKLAND, California, Mar 23 2012 (IPS)

A dozen or so people in the Wednesday night crowd of around 150 at the amphitheatre in the public plaza at Oakland City Hall covered their faces with masks or bandanas.

They wanted to make it difficult for police observing the scene to know if activists slapped with judicial orders barring them from the plaza had violated the orders and were at the rally hosted by Occupy Oakland’s Interfaith Committee.

Religious leaders from the Christian, Buddhist, Muslim and Jewish faiths from across the country organised the event, where they called for economic justice and condemned what they said were illegal court orders that banned more than a dozen activists from the physical space that has been the heart of organising for Occupy Oakland since its inception.

“We don’t know if any real people with stay-away orders are with us or not,” said Rev. Doctor Rita Nakashima-Brock, one of the Interfaith Committee rally organisers. “We’re not asking who’s behind the masks.”

Stay-away orders are the newest weapon in District Attorney Nancy O’Malley’s arsenal to control the occupy groups that continue to proliferate in the Oakland-Berkeley area over which she has jurisdiction.

O’Malley issued stay-away orders to Occupy Oakland activists arrested in January, barring most of them from coming within 100 or 300 yards of the public plaza where Occupy Oakland originally set up its encampment and where it continues to hold meetings and rallies.

And this week, O’Malley imposed new stay-away orders for a dozen Occupy Cal activists arraigned Mar. 19, 20 and 21. These activists, mostly University of California, Berkeley students, are banned statewide from University of California property, except to go to class or work.

The American Civil Liberties Union responded in superior court to the Occupy Oakland activists’ stay-away orders with a habeas corpus writ, arguing that the orders violate constitutional protections.

“They are all clearly violations of First Amendment rights, their right to engage in expressive activity,” said Jivaka Candappa, attorney for two of the four people named in the ACLU writ. “They wanted to break the back of the movement and this is a way of teaching these demonstrators a lesson,” he added.

Candappa underscored that none of those facing stay-away orders has been convicted of a crime. “When someone is still fighting the charges, when they’re still presumed innocent under the constitution, to impose these restrictions on their First Amendment rights, is unreasonable,” he said.

Yvette Felarca is one of 12 Occupy Cal activists hit this week with a stay-away order. Felarca, a recent graduate of UC Berkeley’s School of Education, a middle school teacher in Berkeley and organiser with the campus group By Any Means Necessary, was among the UC Berkeley demonstrators, who, on Nov. 9, attempted to link arms to prevent police from tearing down the tent camp they had established.

(Felarca wasn’t arrested at the time, and only found she was charged with obstructing a police officer and maliciously blocking a sidewalk when she received a letter in early March indicating she was to appear at the arraignment.)

You Tube videos watched worldwide showed police beating students with batons and dragging a female professor by her hair. One video shows Felarca, the small 110-pound Asian woman, apparently beaten by police.

“It’s a political witch hunt by the university administration and also by the district attorney… to suppress our right to defend public education,” Felarca told IPS, further alleging that the DA charged protesters selectively.

“All of us charged have been very prominent or public organisers, activists and leaders,” Felarca said.

Attorney Ronald Cruz said he is submitting a brief Friday to ask the court to reverse the stay-away order for Felarca and two other clients banned from university property.

District Attorney O’Malley declined interview requests, but laid out the logic of the stay-away orders in a San Francisco Chronicle editorial. “These (First Amendment) rights…must be and will be measured and balanced with protecting the safety of our community,” she wrote. “Stay-away orders serve a vital community need to keep the peace, avoid further criminal conduct and maintain safety in public spaces.”

The editorial questions the activists’ motives: “These individuals were not rallying on behalf of Occupy Wall Street, or even the greater Occupy Oakland movement. Rather, they advertise themselves as ‘militant, anti-government, anti-police, and anarchists,’ with a mission to destroy the community fabric of Oakland through the use of violence.”

Pointing to his client, Joanne Warwick, who is an attorney and has never before been arrested, Candappa scoffed at the claim that the activists with stay-away orders are violent.

“It was just a blanket request that the court was granting despite (attorney) objections,” he said. “There was no showing that the individuals were engaged in violence or that they had a history of violence or that they were a threat to public safety.”

Candappa said the violence did not come from Warwick. A video of the incident, which took place at a Jan. 28 march, where Occupy Oakland activists were hoping to occupy a vacant convention centre, “clearly shows the officer pushing (my client) with both hands and she tumbles to the ground and she gets arrested by a bunch of other officers,” he said.

Candappa does not dispute claims that there have been acts of vandalism during Occupy Oakland demonstrations. But “to suggest that this entire movement is kind-of one huge gang is just preposterous,” he said.

In the courtroom on Wednesday, attorney Sarah Belletto argued against the stay-away orders for Occupy Cal activist Roman Quintero, a Geography and Ethnic Studies major at UC Berkeley. Belletto entered a not-guilty plea after which a deputy district attorney asked the judge to impose stay-away orders.

Belletto argued that her client was law-abiding and not a risk to public safety. “I cannot believe that a general stay away order is appropriate,” she told the judge. “On Nov. 9, he was exercising his First Amendment rights.”

Judge Paul Seeman imposed the order, saying it was “related to public safety”.

Outside the courtroom, Quintero talked about why he was protesting that day. “I was basically exercising my First Amendment, free speech rights to speak up against the budget cuts, speak up against police brutality, speak out about what’s happening in the U.S. as a whole, with discrimination, class oppression, lack of democracy, lack of transparency,” he said.

Recalling that the university had been home to the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s, attorney Ronald Cruz, also speaking outside the courtroom, accused the government of trying to make an example of the protesters.

“The political forces behind the witch hunt are trying to use the home of the free speech movement to set the precedent nationally that students and others that defend public education will be brutalised and prosecuted,” he said. “This is a nationally prominent case. The students on the campus are going to be key to make sure free speech stays alive in Berkeley.”

Excerpt:

Berkeley High students applaud a dance performance at an education rally. Credit: Judith Scherr/IPS

By Judith Scherr
BERKELEY, California, Mar 2 2012 (IPS)

Shawn Deez, a freshman in peace and conflict studies, says she thinks she knows why some classes are scheduled at the University of California, Berkeley, and some are not. It’s corporate influence that makes the difference, she said.

It was Mar. 1, Occupy Education’s National Day of Action, observed with marches and rallies at some 30 California universities and at a number of venues around the country.

While much of the media focused on the steep tuition hikes at state universities and community colleges, many participants at UC Berkeley used the lens of the Occupy Movement – the 99 percent versus the one percent – to examine the underlying problems in education.

Deez spoke to IPS during a downpour while waiting for a noontime rally on the UC Berkeley campus. She contended that the influence of corporations such as BP – formally British Petroleum – which has partnered with the university and its affiliated laboratories on a 400,000-dollar biofuels institute, heavily influences the departments in which university funds are spent. She said the humanities have no corporate funding and face increasing cuts.

Moreover, she said, corporate interests have turned the university away from its mission.

And then there’s the question of who profits from the steep tuition hikes. Banks have been frequently targeted by the six-month-old Occupy Movement, for their bad home loans and foreclosures. But University of California, Davis instructor Joshua Clover explained to the Berkeley crowd of around 300 how banks profit from the hike in their tuitions.

“The public university wants to raise its price of admission much faster than any increase in people’s ability to pay,” he said. “Those banks really need you suckers for those loans. The university and banks enter into an alliance through which the banks make staggering profits from the university’s huge fee hikes.”

After that, the banks control the debtor’s lives. “This is the outcome of the university’s laying down with capital,” he said, telling the students that the answer isn’t a “kinder, gentler capitalism”, but an end to the system.

Before the rally, “teach-outs” were held in small groupings around the campus. Matt Williams, a senior in sociology, led one on affirmative action. UC Berkeley statistics for 2010 show there were just four percent African American and 13 percent Latino undergraduates.

He said that part of the problem is the different quality of high schools, where some schools offer advanced placement classes in which a student can earn 4.5 points (an A is four points), and where counselors steer students into college preparatory classes and even help students write their entry essays.

Donnell Vital-Gibson, an eleventh grader at Oakland Technical High School, was listening to the speaker on affirmative action and talked to IPS afterward, explaining that he was one of the lucky ones in Oakland. His high school has advanced placement classes, he said, but schools in Oakland’s poorer neighbourhoods do not.

“We’re fighting the one percent right here,” he said.

After the rally, the students took off on a march to Oscar Grant/Frank Ogawa Plaza, the former home of Occupy Oakland, to meet up with community college students and others from Occupy Oakland.

Then some 60 among them marched again, heading to a church in Richmond, about 12 miles away, where they would join students from San Francisco, spend the night at a church, then walk 99 miles over several days, to UC Davis, near the state capitol in Sacramento.

They are planning “Occupy the capitol,” a statewide education rally in Sacramento Mar. 5.

“The march is a way to engage the community,” said Stephan Georgiou, a student at San Francisco City College, a community college where 67 classes were cut this year. Georgiou said they’re facing the “dismantling of community colleges in California,” and that people are not aware of the programme cuts and layoffs.

He said some legislators are trying to “take the autonomy away from the colleges and turn them into vocational schools.”

Around the time Georgiou was marching from Oakland to Richmond, 13 demonstrators were arrested in San Francisco for refusing to leave a state office building until their demands for education funding were met. A City College engineering instructor was among the arrestees.

Around 3 p.m., another rally was held in Berkeley. This one, at the K-12 school administration building, was put together by Occupy Berkeley High and attended by some 600 students, whose signs and t- shirts said: “Wake up! Stand up! Speak up! Shake up! We are the 99 percent. Tax the rich.”

The “tax the rich” refers to a proposed “millionaires tax” that will be on California’s November ballot, if its supporters collect the required signatures. It would levy an additional state income tax of three percent for Californians whose annual adjusted gross income is over one million dollars, and five percent for those making over two million dollars a year.

The funds would restore budget cuts to education, public safety, and other services. The California Federation of Teachers is backing this measure.

Berkeley High senior Amelia McCrea spoke to the crowd, calling for the millionaire’s tax and asking: “Doesn’t the government realise that someday, we’re going to be running the show?

“We are the future innovators, artists, politicians, shapers of the world and we are the ones who supply the hunger for knowledge and drive to learn. We must show the state, the country, that we won’t sit idly by while education is being undervalued.”

McCrea continued, “I believe that students should be recognised as a priority over the funding of prisons,” and then she invited the audience to enjoy the dance performances and music provided by fellow students.

Shawn Deez, a freshman in peace and conflict studies, says she thinks she knows why some classes are scheduled at the University of California, Berkeley, and some are not. It’s corporate influence that makes the difference, she said.

It was Mar. 1, Occupy Education’s National Day of Action, observed with marches and rallies at some 30 California universities and at a number of venues around the country.

While much of the media focused on the steep tuition hikes at state universities and community colleges, many participants at UC Berkeley used the lens of the Occupy Movement – the 99 percent versus the one percent – to examine the underlying problems in education.

Deez spoke to IPS during a downpour while waiting for a noontime rally on the UC Berkeley campus. She contended that the influence of corporations such as BP – formally British Petroleum – which has partnered with the university and its affiliated laboratories on a 400,000-dollar biofuels institute, heavily influences the departments in which university funds are spent. She said the humanities have no corporate funding and face increasing cuts.

Moreover, she said, corporate interests have turned the university away from its mission.

And then there’s the question of who profits from the steep tuition hikes. Banks have been frequently targeted by the six-month-old Occupy Movement, for their bad home loans and foreclosures. But University of California, Davis instructor Joshua Clover explained to the Berkeley crowd of around 300 how banks profit from the hike in their tuitions.

“The public university wants to raise its price of admission much faster than any increase in people’s ability to pay,” he said. “Those banks really need you suckers for those loans. The university and banks enter into an alliance through which the banks make staggering profits from the university’s huge fee hikes.”

After that, the banks control the debtor’s lives. “This is the outcome of the university’s laying down with capital,” he said, telling the students that the answer isn’t a “kinder, gentler capitalism”, but an end to the system.

Before the rally, “teach-outs” were held in small groupings around the campus. Matt Williams, a senior in sociology, led one on affirmative action. UC Berkeley statistics for 2010 show there were just four percent African American and 13 percent Latino undergraduates.

He said that part of the problem is the different quality of high schools, where some schools offer advanced placement classes in which a student can earn 4.5 points (an A is four points), and where counselors steer students into college preparatory classes and even help students write their entry essays.

Donnell Vital-Gibson, an eleventh grader at Oakland Technical High School, was listening to the speaker on affirmative action and talked to IPS afterward, explaining that he was one of the lucky ones in Oakland. His high school has advanced placement classes, he said, but schools in Oakland’s poorer neighbourhoods do not.

“We’re fighting the one percent right here,” he said.

After the rally, the students took off on a march to Oscar Grant/Frank Ogawa Plaza, the former home of Occupy Oakland, to meet up with community college students and others from Occupy Oakland.

Then some 60 among them marched again, heading to a church in Richmond, about 12 miles away, where they would join students from San Francisco, spend the night at a church, then walk 99 miles over several days, to UC Davis, near the state capitol in Sacramento.

They are planning “Occupy the capitol,” a statewide education rally in Sacramento Mar. 5.

“The march is a way to engage the community,” said Stephan Georgiou, a student at San Francisco City College, a community college where 67 classes were cut this year. Georgiou said they’re facing the “dismantling of community colleges in California,” and that people are not aware of the programme cuts and layoffs.

He said some legislators are trying to “take the autonomy away from the colleges and turn them into vocational schools.”

Around the time Georgiou was marching from Oakland to Richmond, 13 demonstrators were arrested in San Francisco for refusing to leave a state office building until their demands for education funding were met. A City College engineering instructor was among the arrestees.

Around 3 p.m., another rally was held in Berkeley. This one, at the K-12 school administration building, was put together by Occupy Berkeley High and attended by some 600 students, whose signs and t- shirts said: “Wake up! Stand up! Speak up! Shake up! We are the 99 percent. Tax the rich.”

The “tax the rich” refers to a proposed “millionaires tax” that will be on California’s November ballot, if its supporters collect the required signatures. It would levy an additional state income tax of three percent for Californians whose annual adjusted gross income is over one million dollars, and five percent for those making over two million dollars a year.

The funds would restore budget cuts to education, public safety, and other services. The California Federation of Teachers is backing this measure.

Berkeley High senior Amelia McCrea spoke to the crowd, calling for the millionaire’s tax and asking: “Doesn’t the government realise that someday, we’re going to be running the show?

“We are the future innovators, artists, politicians, shapers of the world and we are the ones who supply the hunger for knowledge and drive to learn. We must show the state, the country, that we won’t sit idly by while education is being undervalued.”

McCrea continued, “I believe that students should be recognised as a priority over the funding of prisons,” and then she invited the audience to enjoy the dance performances and music provided by fellow students.

(END)

By Judith Scherr
BERKELEY, Feb 29 2012 (IPS)

The world reacted swiftly to Haiti’s catastrophic 7.0 earthquake in 2010. The United States shipped in 20,000 troops, some to perform lifesaving medical procedures, others to protect aid workers from earthquake victims deemed dangerous. Movie stars, criminals and other prospective parents rushed to adopt motherless Haitian babies.

Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and missionaries tripped over each other to distribute aid, from used shoes and bibles, to food and water. Televangelist Pat Robertson grabbed headlines, blaming the quake on Haiti’s “pact to the devil” – referencing Voodoo, Haiti’s traditional religion.

The only ones absent from media reports, it seemed, were Haitians, except as tragic victims.

A new book, Tectonic Shifts: Haiti Since the Earthquake [Kumarian Press, 288 pages], sets the record straight. The compilation of more than 40 articles is edited by Mark Schuller, assistant professor at City University of New York and the State University of Haiti, and Latin American specialist Pablo Morales.

“One of the things we really felt was important was to get Haitian voices out there,” Schuller told IPS in a phone interview from New York. Half of the articles are written by Haitian activists, scholars and journalists, he pointed out.

To tell the story of the temblor that killed more than 300,000 and displaced 1.5 million, Schuller and Morales include information on the history that has left the island-nation particularly vulnerable.

“Understanding the disaster means understanding not only the tectonic fault lines running beneath Haiti, but also the deep economic, political, social, and historical cleavages within and surrounding the country,” the editors write.

A history of intrusion

Haiti has been pummelled by external forces since its birth 200 years ago. Soon after Haitians threw off the yoke of France, the former colonizer led an embargo against the young black republic, forcing Haiti to promise France the equivalent of 21 billion U.S. dollars for the loss of land and slaves. The debt wasn’t paid off until 1947.

Several articles explore international financial institutions’ neoliberal policies that led to overcrowding in Port au Prince and thus the large number of deaths and injuries from the earthquake.

In one, Alex Dupuy, chair of African American studies at Wesleyan University, cites World Bank and International Monetary Fund support for urban assembly factories, which brought peasants to the cities.

The international lenders further damaged the rural economy by imposing tariff reductions on agricultural products. Haiti’s markets had to compete with subsidized U.S. rice, “undercutting local production of the nation’s staple crop and dismantling the rural economy”, writes anthropologist Anthony Olivers-Smith.

A major theme throughout Tectonic Shifts is the negative role of NGOs, present in large numbers even before the earthquake.

In 1994, when President Bill Clinton brought President Jean Bertrand Aristide – Haiti’s first democratically elected president – back to Haiti after a coup d’état, the U.S. Congress bolstered NGOs’ presence. It refused to give aid directly to the Haitian government and instead filtered funds through NGOs, strengthening them and weakening the public sector.

The number of NGOs multiplied after the earthquake and included, according to Yolette Etienne, Oxfam America Haiti program director, “the full range of humanitarians, ranging from the most specialised organizations to amateur groups and even criminals on the lookout to exploit all forms of human misery”.

After the earthquake, the United Nations (U.N.) established “clusters” through which NGOs addressed issues of sanitation, water, food and housing.

But Haitians were largely excluded, as Melinda Miles of Transafrica writes. “By holding nearly all of its meetings within the confines of the [U.N.] base and refusing to offer Creole translation, Haitians… were effectively kept out of the process.”

Haitians are also kept out of relief contracts. The Centre for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) studied USAID contracts worth 200 million dollars and concluded that just 2.5 percent went to Haitian companies.

Militarisation in Haiti

A number of articles underscore the destructive role of the U.N. Stabilisation Mission in Haiti, or MINUSTAH. After the United States flew Aristide into involuntary exile in 2004, Marines policed the country for several months and were replaced by MINUSTAH.

After the earthquake, the U.N. added more than 3,000 troops and police to the force, bringing the total to around 13,000.

U.N. military personnel have been accused of acting like an occupying force, murdering and sexually abusing Haitians and bringing cholera to the country. “To many, MINUSTAH’s primary role is to keep Haiti as a leta restavèk, a child domestic worker serving foreign interests,” write Tectonic Shifts editors.

The U.S. earthquake response was also militarised. Charles Vorbe, political science professor at the State University of Haiti, recalls media images depicting the “degrading nature” of giving aid. “U.S. soldiers perched in an army helicopter in full flight, tossing sacks of food overboard on earthquake victims, who, on the ground, come running from everywhere and fight among themselves to collect whatever they can.”

The military’s preoccupation with security is incompatible with the “respect for the dignity… of the beneficiaries,” Vorbe writes.

Meanwhile, about 600,000 Haitians still live in squalid camps, often lacking water and sanitation. Many face eviction. (The 600,000 doesn’t include evicted survivors living on the streets or in red- tagged houses.)

Legal complications

Mario Joseph, human rights attorney with the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux, writes that claims to land titles are unclear. “It is uncertain whether the alleged landowners who attempt to evict [Internally Displaced People] …really have legal rights to the land,” he explains.

“Because those purporting to own the land usually come from Haiti’s tiny but powerful elite, their word itself is generally feared among IDPs.”

In a Skype interview from Port au Prince, Joseph told IPS that the debate around land ownership avoids the central issue: international law and U.N. guidelines prohibit eviction of IDPs. “But the U.N. doesn’t apply this in Haiti,” Joseph said.

Still, the problem isn’t just with the U.N.

“The NGOs and the Haitian government, too, don’t… respect the rights of the Haitian people,” Joseph added, contending that because the international community put the president into power, government allegiance is to foreign interests and the wealthy elite, not to the Haitian masses.

To that end, Tectonic Shifts includes several articles about international interference with presidential elections that excluded a dozen political parties including Aristide’s party, Lavalas, the largest and most popular party.

“The international community is complicit with the rich people in Haiti to gut the rights of Haitians,” Joseph said, noting that he’s successfully trained camp leaders to organize others to effectively stand up for their right not to be evicted.

Tectonic Shifts includes hopeful articles about grassroots groups pressuring the government for change, but none address the future of Lavalas or the impact of Aristide’s return to Haiti one year ago. IPS asked Schuller about the omission.

“As a political party, Lavalas is factionalized,” he said, underscoring that, as a foreigner, it was not his place to comment on internal politics. He said the editors attempted to be balanced and non- partisan in the choice of articles.

“Maybe work is being done internally – they’re not out [in demonstrations] in big numbers; they’re not making a political statement,” he added.

Creole and French translations of the book will be published later this year, which means Tectonic Shifts can be used as an educational and organizing tool by grassroots activists and human rights workers, Schuller said.

“I see hope in the [grassroots] movements, despite the many challenges.”

Excerpt:

Ten months after the earthquake in Haiti, protestors condemn NGOs and the U.N. for lack of shelter and basic services. The back of the man's red T-shirt says in Creole, "Down with NGO thieves/ We want good houses to live in." Credit: Judith Scherr/IPS

By Judith Scherr
BERKELEY, Feb 28 2012 (IPS)

The world reacted swiftly to Haiti’s catastrophic 7.0 earthquake in 2010. The United States shipped in 20,000 troops, some to perform lifesaving medical procedures, others to protect aid workers from earthquake victims deemed dangerous. Movie stars, criminals and other prospective parents rushed to adopt motherless Haitian babies.

Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and missionaries tripped over each other to distribute aid, from used shoes and bibles, to food and water. Televangelist Pat Robertson grabbed headlines, blaming the quake on Haiti’s “pact to the devil” – referencing Voodoo, Haiti’s traditional religion.

The only ones absent from media reports, it seemed, were Haitians, except as tragic victims.

A new book, Tectonic Shifts: Haiti Since the Earthquake [Kumarian Press, 288 pages], sets the record straight. The compilation of more than 40 articles is edited by Mark Schuller, assistant professor at City University of New York and the State University of Haiti, and Latin American specialist Pablo Morales.

“One of the things we really felt was important was to get Haitian voices out there,” Schuller told IPS in a phone interview from New York. Half of the articles are written by Haitian activists, scholars and journalists, he pointed out.

To tell the story of the temblor that killed more than 300,000 and displaced 1.5 million, Schuller and Morales include information on the history that has left the island-nation particularly vulnerable.

“Understanding the disaster means understanding not only the tectonic fault lines running beneath Haiti, but also the deep economic, political, social, and historical cleavages within and surrounding the country,” the editors write.

A history of intrusion

Haiti has been pummelled by external forces since its birth 200 years ago. Soon after Haitians threw off the yoke of France, the former colonizer led an embargo against the young black republic, forcing Haiti to promise France the equivalent of 21 billion U.S. dollars for the loss of land and slaves. The debt wasn’t paid off until 1947.

Several articles explore international financial institutions’ neoliberal policies that led to overcrowding in Port au Prince and thus the large number of deaths and injuries from the earthquake.

In one, Alex Dupuy, chair of African American studies at Wesleyan University, cites World Bank and International Monetary Fund support for urban assembly factories, which brought peasants to the cities.

The international lenders further damaged the rural economy by imposing tariff reductions on agricultural products. Haiti’s markets had to compete with subsidized U.S. rice, “undercutting local production of the nation’s staple crop and dismantling the rural economy”, writes anthropologist Anthony Olivers-Smith.

A major theme throughout Tectonic Shifts is the negative role of NGOs, present in large numbers even before the earthquake.

In 1994, when President Bill Clinton brought President Jean Bertrand Aristide – Haiti’s first democratically elected president – back to Haiti after a coup d’état, the U.S. Congress bolstered NGOs’ presence. It refused to give aid directly to the Haitian government and instead filtered funds through NGOs, strengthening them and weakening the public sector.

The number of NGOs multiplied after the earthquake and included, according to Yolette Etienne, Oxfam America Haiti program director, “the full range of humanitarians, ranging from the most specialised organizations to amateur groups and even criminals on the lookout to exploit all forms of human misery”.

After the earthquake, the United Nations (U.N.) established “clusters” through which NGOs addressed issues of sanitation, water, food and housing.

But Haitians were largely excluded, as Melinda Miles of Transafrica writes. “By holding nearly all of its meetings within the confines of the [U.N.] base and refusing to offer Creole translation, Haitians… were effectively kept out of the process.”

Haitians are also kept out of relief contracts. The Centre for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) studied USAID contracts worth 200 million dollars and concluded that just 2.5 percent went to Haitian companies.

Militarisation in Haiti

A number of articles underscore the destructive role of the U.N. Stabilisation Mission in Haiti, or MINUSTAH. After the United States flew Aristide into involuntary exile in 2004, Marines policed the country for several months and were replaced by MINUSTAH.

After the earthquake, the U.N. added more than 3,000 troops and police to the force, bringing the total to around 13,000.

U.N. military personnel have been accused of acting like an occupying force, murdering and sexually abusing Haitians and bringing cholera to the country. “To many, MINUSTAH’s primary role is to keep Haiti as a leta restavèk, a child domestic worker serving foreign interests,” write Tectonic Shifts editors.

The U.S. earthquake response was also militarised. Charles Vorbe, political science professor at the State University of Haiti, recalls media images depicting the “degrading nature” of giving aid. “U.S. soldiers perched in an army helicopter in full flight, tossing sacks of food overboard on earthquake victims, who, on the ground, come running from everywhere and fight among themselves to collect whatever they can.”

The military’s preoccupation with security is incompatible with the “respect for the dignity… of the beneficiaries,” Vorbe writes.

Meanwhile, about 600,000 Haitians still live in squalid camps, often lacking water and sanitation. Many face eviction. (The 600,000 doesn’t include evicted survivors living on the streets or in red-tagged houses.)

Legal complications

Mario Joseph, human rights attorney with the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux, writes that claims to land titles are unclear. “It is uncertain whether the alleged landowners who attempt to evict [Internally Displaced People] …really have legal rights to the land,” he explains.

“Because those purporting to own the land usually come from Haiti’s tiny but powerful elite, their word itself is generally feared among IDPs.”

In a Skype interview from Port au Prince, Joseph told IPS that the debate around land ownership avoids the central issue: international law and U.N. guidelines prohibit eviction of IDPs. “But the U.N. doesn’t apply this in Haiti,” Joseph said.

Still, the problem isn’t just with the U.N.

“The NGOs and the Haitian government, too, don’t… respect the rights of the Haitian people,” Joseph added, contending that because the international community put the president into power, government allegiance is to foreign interests and the wealthy elite, not to the Haitian masses.

To that end, Tectonic Shifts includes several articles about international interference with presidential elections that excluded a dozen political parties including Aristide’s party, Lavalas, the largest and most popular party.

“The international community is complicit with the rich people in Haiti to gut the rights of Haitians,” Joseph said, noting that he’s successfully trained camp leaders to organise others to effectively stand up for their right not to be evicted.

Tectonic Shifts includes hopeful articles about grassroots groups pressuring the government for change, but none address the future of Lavalas or the impact of Aristide’s return to Haiti one year ago. IPS asked Schuller about the omission.

“As a political party, Lavalas is factionalized,” he said, underscoring that, as a foreigner, it was not his place to comment on internal politics. He said the editors attempted to be balanced and non- partisan in the choice of articles.

“Maybe work is being done internally – they’re not out [in demonstrations] in big numbers; they’re not making a political statement,” he added.

Creole and French translations of the book will be published later this year, which means Tectonic Shifts can be used as an educational and organising tool by grassroots activists and human rights workers, Schuller said.

“I see hope in the [grassroots] movements, despite the many challenges.”

Occupy activists from Wall Street to San Francisco’s financial district have dramatised their anger with big financial institutions by blocking JP Morgan Chase Bank doorways, dancing atop Wells Fargo counters, pitching a tent in a Bank of America lobby, hanging banners across Citibank windows, and accompanying the actions with the now-familiar chant “Banks got bailed out, we got sold out.”

Protesters chained themselves to the door of the Wells Fargo Bank in San Francisco's financial district. Credit: Judith Scherr/IPS

The Occupy Movement condemns the banks’ role in predatory lending and the foreclosure crisis, the high-interest student loans they say enriches the bankers and impoverishes college students, bank investments in private prisons and more.

But protesting isn’t enough for Occupy San Francisco activist Brian McKeown. He says a bank should be a transparent institution whose mission is to help people. And so, with like-minded partners, McKeown is putting together a plan for the People’s Reserve Credit Union (PRCU). Occupy San Francisco is encouraging the venture.

In the next few weeks, McKeown says he’ll be ready to submit the PRCU’s application for a charter to the California Department of Financial Institutions.

“The country’s been devastated economically because of greed and government malfeasance,” McKeown said in a recent interview at the downtown San Francisco Public Library. “I don’t think it’s hard for folks who are educated to understand that the banks have ripped us off.”

The PRCU will be patterned on the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, where McKeown spent three months studying microfinance. Its interest rates will be low and loans will go mostly to people who couldn’t otherwise qualify for loans at banks or even at most credit unions. However, they won’t be targeted to people who cannot pay them back.

Borrowers will be required to attend classes in business and personal finance and will have mentors to help their businesses succeed and to enhance their ability to pay back the loan. The PRCU will work with San Francisco State’s Community Service Learning Project to provide the education component, McKeown said.

San Francisco entrepreneur Tim Mayer, who is advising McKeown, said the bank will offer the same services other banks do. “But there will be a different consciousness,” he said. The PRCU board “will not focus on shareholder profits,” he said, but will be “concerned with the welfare of those they are servicing.”

“I’d rather support 12 taco stands than one Taco Bell,” McKeown quipped.

To apply for the charter, McKeown needs to have his board of directors in place – he said he does, but is not yet ready to reveal their names. (Selection of the board will be preliminary and subject to an eventual election by PRCU members.)

McKeown needs to present a business plan and show that he has adequate capitalisation to get chartered. He said they already have some wealthy backers and a fundraising concert is in the works.

The road ahead for the new credit union will not necessarily be easy, cautioned Rafael Morales, public affairs and west coast programme officer at the National Federation of Community Development Credit Unions.

“There’s generally a high rate of failure for most start ups,” said Morales, who has had preliminary meetings with McKeown. He said usually the NFCDCU recommends that a credit union begin with operating capital of one to two million dollars to carry it through several years.

“The first couple of years are unprofitable,” Morales said. “The more working capital, the higher chance of success.”

Others say it can be done for less. Warren Langley, former president and CEO of the Pacific Exchange in San Francisco – and a supporter of the Occupy Movement – told IPS he thought a credit union could be established with 100,000 to 200,000 dollars.

McKeown said he plans to capitalise the bank at 250,000 to 500,000 dollars for the first year, keeping expenses at a minimum with bank officials working at low or deferred salaries and some without compensation. Mayer acknowledged, however, that it will be a challenge to find a CEO for the PRCU that has the requisite experience, shares the PRCU philosophy and will work for low wages.

A startup credit union also needs “a committed, capable organising committee”, Morales said, noting that McKeown’s group is very strong in this area.

The Occupy Movement is a “big tent” that includes libertarians, Democrats and communists. McKeown may part ways ideologically with those among his fellow Occupiers who reject capitalism.

“I’m a capitalist,” he said.

The problem, as he sees it, “is in the way capitalism is run. When my business fails, it doesn’t get protected. No one comes and bails me out. Why are we bailing out the businesses – financial institutions – – that are supposed to be the most conservative in the world?” He said if the system were working, the big banks would have failed.

“When we had that 800-billion-dollar bank bailout….they took the money and allowed the mortgages to fail,” he said. “Now all of a sudden Wall Street is making profits again, like it was before. It’s a jobless recovery. People have a right to be pissed off. Access to capital and credit made this country great.” He intends to make that access possible through the PRCU.

Of course, one new small credit union won’t make big changes in a system that’s not working. Langley, the former Pacific Stock Exchange CEO, noted, however, that the PRCU could solve the problem for its members.

“And if everybody, then does more of those [credit unions], it would certainly help,” he said. “It provides people alternatives.”

With its encampments mostly destroyed, the nascent Occupy Movement in thousands of communities across the U.S. and dozens more around the world has not faded away.

Occupy protesters march in Oakland, California in November. Credit: Judith Scherr/IPS

Instead, it has rebounded in multiple forms, reclaiming foreclosed homes, occupying banks, shutting down ports, interrupting university trustee meetings and political speeches at the Iowa Caucuses, and forcing people on the streets, in Congressional corridors and at city halls to address how the one percent’s wealth and power has created a stranglehold on the 99 percent.

The Occupy Movement exploded after the Wisconsin state Capitol occupation and Arab Spring, as if tens of thousands of people suddenly discovered allies and a voice to confront what they perceive as a corrupt power structure.

As the movement matures, however, it will be challenged to sustain its momentum, while continuing to embrace a diversity that includes anarchists and progressive Democrats, those without homes or jobs or hope and those in the middle class, and people who suffer from racism, sexism and homophobia as well as those who do not.

The future of the consciously leaderless movement is being determined both within the confines of its formal decision-making structures and, increasingly, through allied and autonomous groupings.

General assemblies, the decision-making body of most Occupies, were designed to give voice to multiple views. Eschewing majority rule, the Occupy GAs generally require 80-to-90 percent approval of proposals.

Nonetheless, some participants say the system remains biased. Frequent attendance at GAs is difficult for many. Others say that concerns of people with minority positions are ignored.

The 90 percent required in Oakland “is really a supermajority”, said former Oakland City Councilmember Wilson Riles, active with Occupy Oakland‘s Anti-racist Decolonizing working group. “A voting process gives huge power to a disciplined majority.”

Oakland housing rights activist James Vann is among Occupy Oakland participants who have called in vain for a GA statement supporting non-violent actions. He says these concerns are ignored by the majority. The GA approved a statement that accepts “diversity of tactics”, which can include property destruction. It takes a 90 percent vote to reverse the decision, which observers say is unlikely.

“There was a reason that the civil rights movement was established as nonviolent,” Vann said. “Dr. (Martin Luther) King knew from the very beginning that if the civil rights movement was violent, there would be no way to get the sympathy of the public behind it.”

While Oakland’s GA attendance has dropped from thousands to dozens, the movement itself “keeps going, forcing people to think about new ways to move forward and to resist the disenfranchisement that motivated the occupy movement to begin with,” said Scott Campbell, an Occupy activist shot by police with what was likely a lead-filled bag while filming police lines at the Nov. 2, 2011 General Strike.

Campbell said dialogue among people of diverse views is the way toward a more unified movement, but without an encampment, spontaneous discussions don’t happen. Space to meet and exchange ideas will be reestablished when Occupy Oakland takes over an empty building Jan. 28, he said.

Meanwhile, many participants are turning their energies from assemblies to other ways of participating. Neighbourhood occupies are being formed. An activist known as Stardust is working with newly- formed Occupy Bernal. The San Francisco neighbourhood in has been heavily impacted by foreclosures, with some 900 since 2008, Stardust said. The area includes around 100,000 people.

One of Occupy Bernal’s first activities was to chart new foreclosure notices in the area, initially identifying 80. “We’re going house by house,” Stardust said. Anyone wanting help to save a home will get it.

Assisted by housing rights organisations, Occupy Bernal will support homeowners asking banks for loan modifications. They’ll also demonstrate at banks, interrupt foreclosed home auctions, reoccupy foreclosed homes and shame foreclosed home buyers. Stardust said Occupy Bernal coordinates with Occupy San Francisco.

And there are nationwide organising efforts. Occupy Our Homes supports homeowners re-entering foreclosed buildings and targets corporations profiting from unscrupulous loans. It sponsored the national Occupy Our Home Day Dec. 6.

Just before the New Year, IPS interviewed Maiya Edgerly at her mother’s West Oakland townhouse, which the family re-occupied with the support of Occupy Oakland and the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment on Occupy Our Home Day.

In July, Edgerly, 22, a student at Texas Southern University, and her 14-year old sister were ordered out of the house the family had lived in for 15 years and onto the curb by a deputy sheriff. Edgerly’s mother was at work.

ACCE, Occupy Oakland volunteers and friends help the family protect the home. After two demonstrations at a local Chase Bank branch and an Occupy Wall Street demonstration at bank headquarters in New York, Chase sent Edgerly’s mother a letter saying they would meet with her, but the bank has not followed through, Edgerly said.

She added that while the experience has turned her into an activist, it’s still difficult to make friends and relatives advise the family to “‘Just keep along to get along,'” Edgerly said. “But from my (African American) background, from my ancestors, I think it would be wrong to sit back and not do anything.”

Scott Campbell questions the extent of the Occupy Movement’s participation in getting people back into their homes; he would like the movement to aim higher.

“Instead of challenging Wells Fargo in its entirety, for example, we’re challenging one house being foreclosed on by Wells Fargo,” he said. “It’s fantastic that this direct mutual aid and solidarity is happening, but it risks falling into a very local micro level which, if we do it house by house by house, won’t achieve the goals of the movement.”

Worker solidarity is another theme that west coast Occupies plan to carry collectively into 2012.

On Nov. 2, Oakland’s General Strike shut down the evening shift at the Port of Oakland in solidarity with International Longshore and Warehouse Union workers, in a dispute over hiring non-ILWU workers by Export Grain Terminal (EGT) in Longview, Washington. This dispute was also the target of the Dec. 12 action which Occupies from San Diego to Alaska supported. (ILWU leadership opposed the action.)

Occupiers from several west coast cities plan to travel to Longview this month to picket EGT on behalf of union workers. Occupy Wall Street donated 12,000 dollars to the effort.

Another Occupy target is the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling that treats corporations as humans, with the same rights. Occupy and the organisation Move to Amend are planning the occupation of 80 federal courts on Jan. 20. Occupy San Francisco will target the Financial District.

Students are playing key roles in Occupy, challenging tuition hikes and the banks that profit from student debt. During winter break, a group of Northern California students, faculty, university workers and community Occupy groups have been planning a week of action in March and gearing up to support a California initiative to tax millionaires.

“Moving forward, we need to make the bankers and millionaires who caused this crisis refund us,” said Charlie Eaton, a graduate student in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley and United Auto Workers 2865 financial secretary, helping to organise the campus movement.

“We need to continue making them face personally the crisis they’ve caused for all of us,” he said, promising “unrelenting direct action” from students.

“It’s not one day here and one day there,” he said. “But direct action until we get fundamental change.”

Occupy members shut down the port of Oakland, protesting its control by the "one percent". Credit: Judith Scherr/ IPS

By Judith Scherr and - -
OAKLAND, California, Dec 13 2011 (IPS)

Occupy movements in Oakland, California; Portland, Oregon; and Longview, Washington claimed victory Monday when they prevented workers from loading or unloading ships at the three ports.

Occupy members shut down the port of Oakland, protesting its control by the "one percent". Credit: Judith Scherr/ IPS

“I’m impressed that so many people got up at 5 o’clock in the morning… We can’t stop here.”

About 800 people showed up for the pre-dawn action in near-freezing weather, chanting, “Whose port? Our port!” and holding placards that called for “Solidarity With Longshoremen Against the One Percent” and “Cerremos Wall Street del Puerto”.

The protests, stretching from San Diego to Anchorage, Alaska, aimed at the control of the terminals by those whom the Occupy Movement has dubbed the “one percenters”, especially Goldman Sachs, primary investor in terminal operator SSA Marine.

The port action was just the latest in the tactics of the nimble Occupy Movement that, in Oakland, began with tent camps, twice destroyed by police. Last week it changed course and occupied foreclosed homes and on Monday, it rallied supporters to shut down work at the port.

“What is amazing about this movement is that it refuses to be dismantled,” said activist and retired university professor Angela Davis, speaking at an afternoon rally in downtown Oakland before the second wave of picketers left for the port.

“The occupy movement has had its tents destroyed, has had its encampments dismantled,” Davis said, adding that the police and corporations believed the movement would die when the camps were crushed, but “from those ashes, the occupy movement has risen once again, like a phoenix rises.”

To prevent port workers from on and off loading ships, an arbitrator had to certify the picket line was a health and safety issue for the workers.

Although the determination was made in the morning for both morning and evening shifts, a crowd estimated in the thousands and led by Scott Olson, the young Iraq War veteran hit in the head with a police projectile in Oakland on Nov. 2, marched back to the port in the late afternoon to renew the picket and celebrate victory.

They stayed the night and ended up blocking the 3 a.m. shift at the port, according to KPFA radio.

Controversial closure

The decision to shut down the port, however, was controversial both inside and outside the Occupy Movement, even though targeting Goldman Sachs and its role at the port was not in dispute among occupiers.

“Goldman executives can take credit for many of the financial crises of the last decade, including insider trading, fraud, credit default swaps, and subprime mortgages,” wrote Michael Siegel, attorney and Occupy Oakland activist.

Still, most unions sat out the port blockade, neither condemning nor supporting it.

The Oakland Education Association did, however, strongly endorse the action, with Betty Olson-Jones, OEA president, directly linking port operations to Oakland school needs.

Private maritime businesses in the Port of Oakland “use rent-free public land [that] generates 27 billion dollars annually in trade”, Olson-Jones said. She suggested that taxing them one percent would be enough to pay off Oakland school debt, restore full library services and rehire ever laid off library worker.

While some longshore workers were prominent individually in organising the port shutdown, union leadership opposed it. Much of the controversy centred on a labour dispute between the ILWU and Export Grain Terminal (EGT) in Longview, Washington.

Both the West Coast Occupy movements and the ILWU say that EGT broke a promise to hire ILWU workers, and both want the pledge fulfilled.

Meanwhile, an EGT company spokesman said the company tried to negotiate an agreement with ILWU, but that the union wanted a pension plan that was too expensive, reported the New York Times.

When the Occupy Movement began organising against EGT without the ILWU’s blessing, ILWU President Robert McEllrath reacted, telling the Occupy Movement to stay out of the conflict.

The ILWU’s fight for democracy “is the hard-won right to chart our own course to victory”, he wrote, warning that the union doesn’t want outsiders to adopt the struggle as their own, given the danger that they might do so “in order to advance a broader agenda… destructive to our democratic process and [one that] jeopardises our over two year struggle in Longview”.

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan pleaded with Occupy Oakland not to persist with the shutdown.

“The Port of Oakland is not the home of the one percent,” he wrote. “Rather, it generates over 73,000 jobs in the region and is connected to more than 800,000 jobs across the country. It is one of the best sources of good paying blue-collar jobs left in our city.”

The port commission wrote that the shutdown would “hurt working people and harm our community”. Even some within Occupy Oakland expressed concern that independent truckers would lose a day’s pay. During the morning picket at Berth 55, Alameda County sheriffs tried crossing the picket line twice to take a bus into the port area. Blocked the first time by pickets, sheriffs turned the bus around and returned on foot, using batons to force their way through the picket line and line up between protesters and port property. No one was hurt or arrested.

The second time the sheriffs attempted to drive into the port area, four or five picketers with bicycles stood ground directly before the bus, which soon left the area.

Protests in other cities

From Portland, organiser Tomas Bernal said in a phone interview that the 300-400 protesters there also succeeded in shutting down the port in the morning. “It’s quite historic – with only two and a half weeks to prepare,” he said.

The Portland terminals were also shut down in the evening, Jamie Partridge, another Portland activist, told IPS in an email.

In Longview, where the EGT terminal is located, about 100 protesters arrived at the port’s main entrance. Workers were reportedly sent home due to safety concerns.

But in Vancouver, Long Beach and San Diego, protesters were unable to stop work at the port, while in Seattle police reportedly used flash-bang grenades and pepper-sprayed demonstrators, blocking one of the terminal entrances and arresting 11.

The Seattle Times reported that organisers claimed victory because the workers at two terminals didn’t come to work. The port, however, sent out a press release saying the protest had minimal impact.

Excerpt:

People march through West Oakland to the foreclosed home now owned by Fannie Mae that will be occupied as a community centre. Credit: Judith Scherr/IPS

By Judith Scherr
OAKLAND, California, Dec 7 2011 (IPS)

Five months ago, Gayla Newsome was at work when she got the call. A sheriff had come to her home of 15 years and put her two pajama-clad daughters out on the curb of her West Oakland street. Newsome knew the bank was about to foreclose, but thought she still had time to fight it.

On Tuesday, she marched in triumph back to her former abode – along with some 75 supporters. It was Occupy Our Homes Day across the nation, feted by Occupy organisations in more than 20 cities; it was a day to condemn the bank seizure of more than one million U.S. homes in 2010.

Newsome’s home will be occupied 24/7 by volunteers from Occupy Oakland and the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment.

“I’m here to reclaim what belongs to me and to the community,” Newsome said, standing in front of the home, as a masked man affixed a “Save Gayla’s home” banner to the front of the two-story townhouse.

The day of actions marked a new direction for Occupy Oakland and many other Occupies which have been chased from their tent cities. Their decision to use a “diversity of tactics” can translate into occupying a foreclosed house one day or calling a general strike the next – whatever they can do to continue to shine a glaring light on what the Occupy Oakland General Assembly has called “a deliberate Wall Street strategy that has made billions for those at the top while devastating the 99 percent”.

“Unfortunately, the situation is poised to get worse as more adjustable rate mortgages reset, unemployment rates remain unabated, and subprime lending persists, particularly in communities of color,” the report says.

Before marching the half-block to her foreclosed home, Newsome, who is African American, addressed supporters at Defermery Park, underscoring the legacy of activism in Oakland, and noting in particular that Defermery Park was a significant gathering place for the Black Panther movement.

Newsome talked about losing her home. After losing a job and falling behind in her mortgage, she tried to work with Chase Bank for a loan modification.

“I kept faxing loan modification applications,” she said. “I kept calling; they said they never got it. I faxed it again; they said they never saw it.”

Finally, the bank turned down the modification and foreclosed on the property, which is now advertised as “WONDERFUL FAMILY HOME IN FENCED COMMUNITY; 3 BEDROOM, 2.5 BATHS IN MOVE IN CONDITION. MUST SEE!!!!” Newsome said saving her home was more than trying to help her family – it was part of stopping the rapid gentrification of West Oakland. “I’m not just here personally to reclaim my house,” she said, “I’m here to encourage people to reclaim this community.”

Earlier in the day, about a mile from Newsome’s home, Nell Myhand from Causa Justa addressed a crowd at the West Oakland subway station. Putting the housing crisis into perspective, Myhand condemned the federal government for disinvestment in affordable housing.

“For the last 30 years, they have neglected public housing (and) failed to put any pressure on developers around affordable housing,” she said. “That set us up for the banks to then target us for predatory loans.”

These sub-prime loans were directed to black, Latino and elders in three East Oakland neighbourhoods, and “cost our communities wealth and even our health,” she said.

Stress, blight and crime are just some of the consequences foreclosures have on entire neighbourhoods, further devastating communities of colour “that have suffered from decades of policies rooted in discrimination”, says the “Rebuilding Neighborhoods” report.

Margarita Ramirez’s family also suffered a foreclosure. Speaking in Spanish, with English translation, she addressed the crowd at the subway station, explaining that in 2009, her husband lost his job and consequently the family was unable to make house payments. They lost their East Oakland home.

They applied to Fannie Mae through the Bank of America, which serviced the loan, for a modification. But after submitting a series of documents, which the bank would lose time and again, Fannie Mae ultimately turned down the requested modification.

So they began working directly with the Bank of America for a modification, but after a few weeks got a notice that the home was sold to Fannie Mae. Both the Bank of America and Assemblymember Sandre Swanson tried to get Fannie Mae to rescind the sale, but it refused, Ramirez said.

Ramirez explained that Occupy Oakland and the housing organisations plan to occupy a vacant home near the West Oakland station owned by Fannie Mae. “We’re here to reoccupy Fannie Mae homes until they give us our home back,” she said.

In both the Ramirez and Newsome cases, the need to modify the terms of a loan came as a result of a period of unemployment.

“What has fueled the foreclosures in the last year and a half or so, has been the massive unemployment,” said Robbie Clark of Causa Justa, co-author of the “Rebuilding Neighborhoods” report.

The unemployment rate for people of colour in Oakland is significant: in 2010, African American unemployment in Oakland was 19.6 percent and Latino unemployment was 15.2 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Chanting “ain’t no power but the power of the people and the power of the people don’t stop,” the group of around 100 people left the subway station and marched three blocks to an unoccupied, foreclosed home owned by Fannie Mae. Activists decorated the home with placards such as “Give Back the Deed/Regresen El Titulo” and “welcome home.” They plan to turn the 121 year-old building into a center for classes on tenants’ and homeowners’ rights – in fact they had workshops scheduled for late afternoon. And they also said they would use the property for low-income housing.

On Saturday in San Francisco, homeowner and tenants rights activists took to the streets with marches in four communities coming together downtown to target the banks they blame for foreclosures. About 100 people rallied in the heavily-Latino Mission District.

Tenants spoke about how they were being pushed out by “Ellis Act evictions,” that is landlords who evict tenants when they quit the landlord business. These landlords can circumvent rent control and profit by turning their apartment buildings into condominiums.

“My entire family (grandparents, aunts, cousins) has lived together for more than 27 years,” Brenda Medina tearfully told the gathering in the Mission. “With rents being so high, we might be forced to move outside San Francisco,” and they may have to break up the mutually dependent family unit of several generations.

Wednesday morning at 2:18 a.m., the Occupy San Francisco communications team sent out a message saying the San Francisco encampment was being raided by police.

Some 1,500 people marched for the 99 percent in Oakland Nov. 20. Credit: Judith Scherr/IPS

By Judith Scherr
OAKLAND, California, Nov 21 2011 (IPS)

Twice evicted from its encampment just outside city hall, Occupy Oakland sprung back to life Saturday, erecting a new three-dozen-tent camp and defying multiple city warnings that lodging in public spaces would not be tolerated.

Sunday morning, however, police raided the lot and occupants left without resisting and without arrests.

Before protesters tore down the no-trespassing signs, and knocked over the chain-link fence that bordered the large, city-owned lot, some 1,000 people rallied Oakland-style at the site of the original encampment just five blocks away; they beat drums, danced, applauded street theatre and mixed a good time with serious words from housing and union activists and a supporter from Egypt.

The crowd swelled to around 1,500 and marched to the beat of bands and drums two miles to Lakeview Elementary School, one of five Oakland schools slated for closure.

The school board “isn’t listening to us anymore”, said one man identifying himself as the grandfather of two Lakeview School children, addressing the crowd from the back of a flat-bed truck.

“It’s the same thing across the nation, with all the [public] institutions. They work for us….They’re taking our money to invest in war. They can find 2.5 million dollars to take you out of the park downtown, but they can’t find two million dollars to keep the schools open. We’re the government. The people are the government.”

The key event of the day was the takeover of a lot belonging to the city. There had been some disagreement among Occupy Oakland sympathisers about whether to occupy this space – 65 percent of a general assembly had voted to reverse an earlier decision to occupy the lot, but a 90 percent vote was necessary to overturn the earlier vote.

A number of nearby residents, including Occupy Oakland supporters, opposed the plan, as did a charter school located across the street from the would-be encampment.

Still, about 500 people returned to the downtown lot, tore down the fence, erected tents and celebrated by dancing in the streets.

Austin Retzlaff set up a tent around seven p.m. He said he was prepared to be arrested and expected the arrest would be non-violent.

“It’s a peaceful movement and I will be peaceful,” he said, explaining that the importance of the occupation movement to him was creating a society where “no one uses power to control what others have.”

Samantha Love stood nearby in the dark, holding her daughter. She said she was there because she felt stuck in her life; she can’t get a job without a college degree – and she can’t afford to go to school.

“No matter what I do in this capitalistic society, I can’t win and I can’t be happy,” she said.

Community attorney and artist Osha Neumann was seated on a bench near towering bronze statues of Ghandi, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglas, Thich Nhat Hanh and Mother Teresa, in a little park just beyond the lot populated by hundreds of people, tents, tables where food was being served, and canopies to protect people from the rain.

Observing the scene, Neumann commented on the irony he saw: the peacemaker-statues, who, he said, “embodied the spirit of this movement of transgression and resistance and civil disobedience and nonviolence,” would be looking over an area that would likely be invaded by a violent police action.

But as it turned out, in the early-Sunday-morning drizzle, police did not use batons, pepper spray or tear gas. They gave the sleeping campers 20 minutes to pack up their gear and leave the lot. All complied peacefully.

However, on Thursday, about 70 miles north of Oakland, students at the usually sedate University of California, Davis – best known for agriculture and veterinary studies – were pepper- sprayed at close range by campus police as they sat silently in the quad, where they had pitched tents.

The police action was captured on video and seen by thousands. As a result, more than 43,000 people signed an online petition calling for UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi, ultimately responsible for police actions, to resign.

Two campus police officers involved in the pepper spraying were placed on administrative leave Sunday; an investigation has been launched.

According to Occupy UC Davis media liaison Chris, who didn’t want to give a last name, UC Davis students began the occupation Wednesday inside the administration building. University police forced them out of the building and they regrouped in the quad Thursday, where they set up around 20 tents.

On Friday, campus police attempted to clear the quad. “We prepared to meet them by forming a human chain,” Chris said. “The police started yanking students out of the chain; then spectating students joined.”

The arrested students were then surrounded by police; and other students then surrounded police, linked arms and sat down, Chris said.

Then “one officer stepped over the students and pepper-sprayed them.” The pepper spray was administered at close range. The video shows the students screaming in pain. Two students were reportedly hospitalised.

Nine students and one non-student were arrested and released after about four hours, Chris said. Students from UC Sacramento are joining UC Davis students in a noontime demonstration in on the UC Davis quad Monday to oppose the pepper-spraying incident.

Reacting to the outcry, the 10-campus University of California President Mark Yudof issued a statement, likely referring to both the UC Davis and earlier UC Berkeley incidents of alleged police brutality.

“I am appalled by images of University of California students being doused with pepper spray and jabbed with police batons on our campuses,” he said, promising he would “protect the rights of our students, faculty and staff to engage in non-violent protest.”

Occupy UC Davis was born out of campus rallies opposing fee hikes, and students’ worsening educational experience, Chris said, underscoring, however that the issue is larger.

“Occupy Wall Street is a protest over the privatisation of public space,” he said. “What’s happening in California is the privatisation of public education.”

Excerpt:

Occupy Cal marches through Berkeley streets chanting "No hikes, no fees, education must be free." Credit: Judith Scherr/IPS

By Judith Scherr
BERKELEY, California, Nov 16 2011 (IPS)

Occupy Cal students were clubbed by baton-wielding university police Nov. 9 – with beatings captured on video – when they linked arms and refused to disband the tent camp they had erected on the University of California, Berkeley campus.

Tuesday night, at the end of a campus-wide strike and a vote of the Occupy Cal General Assembly, the tents were back.

This took place as police dismantled tents at New York and San Francisco occupation sites.

Honest Chung was among the students university police beat last week. He addressed some 1,500 people from the Mario Savio Steps, in front of the administration building on Tuesday.

“We weren’t getting beat because tent poles are a safety hazard,” he said. “We were getting beat because we wanted to stop the privatisation of what’s supposed to be a public university.”

The memory of Mario Savio, the student leader who enflamed Berkeley’s Free Speech movement in 1964, and ties to Occupy Cal to the Free Speech Movement was invoked time and again, with Savio’s now-famous words:

“There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious – makes you so sick at heart – that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop.”

At the evening General Assembly, on the steps and surrounding plaza, students and community members voted at 92 percent to re-constitute the encampment. Speaking in favour of the camp, a student identifying himself as Javan argued that the chancellor and police took down the tents, not because the tents disrupted learning, but because their presence is an effective and powerful way to build a movement that connects with other occupation movements and challenges corporate greed.

The decision to reestablish the camp was followed by a talk by Robert Reich, former secretary of labour under President Bill Clinton and currently a professor of public policy at UC Berkeley. The long- planned talk, part of the annual Mario Savio lecture series, was to be given in a university auditorium, but organisers agreed to take the talk outside, where it drew upwards of 4,000 people.

“The sentiment and words of Mario Savio are as relevant today as they were then,” Reich said, going on to condemn the role of power and money in today’s political climate, and arguing that the role of money makes it even more important to protect the rights of free speech.

“The top 400 richest Americans now own more of America then the bottom 150 million Americans,” he said. “The problem is, we are losing equal opportunity in America. We are losing the moral foundation stone on which this country and our democracy are built.”

Reich praised the occupy movement, saying it is “beginning to respond to the crisis in our democracy” and concluding that, “The days of apathy are over….If we allowed America to continue in the direction it was going, when the wealth and the income and the power and the political potential for corruption that all of that represents, then the bullies would be in charge.”

As most eyes were riveted on Reich as he spoke, students within the crowd quietly brought in tents and poles and began the erection of a new encampment. After the speech, the gathering broke into a celebratory mode, with music blaring from a loud speaker, dancing on the steps and soap bubbles floating in the air above the crowd.

Cal student Navid Shaghaghi was planning to stay the night. “Every tent that goes up is a petition of redress for grievances against the destruction of our First Amendment, which says every citizen has the right to petition the U.S. government,” he said. “And every time a tent comes down, it is a violation of our First Amendment right.”

Earlier in the day, Occupy Cal marched through parts of the city of Berkeley, but before the march, Robert Slaughter, a student at St. Mary’s College, addressed the crowd just outside campus. Slaughter, who is African American, was arrested Nov. 9, but separated from the other 38 arrestees and placed in a holding cell mostly with people accused of gang-related issues.

A contingent of St. Mary’s students joined the march in his support, saying his treatment in jail was based solely on the colour of his skin.

A contingent from Occupy Oakland also marched about five miles to the Berkeley campus, arriving for the late-afternoon General Assembly. The Occupy Oakland encampment in front of Oakland City Hall was raided by police before dawn Monday morning.

The arrests of 33 people were peaceful, in contrast to an earlier police response to the tent camp and demonstrations against the aggressive police behaviour during the raid on the encampment.

Many of the occupants of the Oakland encampment joined a second camp about a half mile from the original one. Oakland officials have said it’s illegal, but to date have made no move to disband the camp.

About half of those arrested Monday were religious leaders who sat silently in front of the camp’s Interfaith Tent. Protesters who did not want to be arrested had all left the camp before the raid.

All were released soon after arrest, with the exception of Francisco “Pancho” Ramos Stierle, a 36-year-old Oakland resident who faces deportation to his native Mexico. Stierle and two companions were arrested while sitting cross-legged and meditating silently in the plaza.

Occupy Cal activists had planned to bus students across the San Francisco Bay to the Board of Regents meeting scheduled for Wednesday, where new fee hikes were on the agenda. The regents, however, cancelled the meeting, citing fear of “rogue elements intent on violence” that would take part in the demonstration.

In his speech to Occupy Cal on Tuesday, Honest Chung argued that the regents were part of the wealthy one percent. “The big banks are directly connected to the university through the regents,” he said, pointing to a vice president of Wells Fargo Bank, a director on the board of Bank of America, and an investment banker who serve on the regents.

“These are the people who run our university,” he said. “They use violence to protect their own financial and political interests.”

A spokesperson for the regents did not return a call for comment.

Excerpt:

By Judith Scherr and - -
OAKLAND, California, Nov 13 2011 (IPS)

On Nov. 2, the day of Occupy Oakland’s General Strike, the streets were filled with chants and music and the sounds of people speaking in the many tongues of Oakland residents.

A member of Occupy Oakland attempts to defuse a confrontation with police on Oct. 25, the afternoon after the first eviction. Credit: John Jernegan/IPS

Protesters almost believed the 99 percent could triumph over the greedy one percent.

The day was mostly peaceful.

But in the afternoon, black-clad protesters wearing bandanas shattered bank windows and spray-painted storefronts, and late in the evening they built bonfires in the streets and tried to occupy an empty building. There were arrests; one protester was hospitalised from what he said was a police beating.

Though relatively few demonstrators took part in the vandalism, next- day news stories featured smashed windows, graffiti, and protester stand-offs with police.

No individual or group has taken public responsibility for the vandalism. Many believe agent provocateurs are responsible. Whether these are government agents or young people who believe destroying property builds the Occupy Wall Street Movement – or both – the question discussed since the General Strike is key: how should the movement respond to acts of property destruction and violence by those in its ranks?

A sharp disagreement exists among those who say there’s no room in the movement for people who won’t protest peacefully; those who want to embrace protesters who destroy property and at the same time encourage them to behave “responsibly;” and those who say they meet police violence with their own, while building a movement.

One group of people responded by writing a resolution to present to the Nov. 9 general assembly that says: “Those who launch physical attacks on people or property are not welcome to do so at or near Occupy Oakland events and encampment.”

The resolution, however, was withdrawn at the general assembly by its author, Allan Brill, who told the gathering of more than 900 in the open-air amphitheater adjacent to the occupation site that he feared putting the question to a vote would exacerbate divisions within the movement.

“Let’s solidify; let’s protect occupy Oakland,” Brill told the assembly, later explaining to IPS that the decision to postpone the resolution was tied to threats to the encampment and the critical need for the movement to be united.

The threats came from five city council members who held a press conference in the afternoon before the general assembly – a press conference interrupted by chanting demonstrators – to announce that they would close down the camp at some unspecified time.

Oakland housing activist James Vann was disappointed that Brill didn’t bring the resolution to the body. People who espouse violent or destructive tactics should be expelled from the movement, Vann said.

“If this tendency that exists within Occupy Oakland isn’t dealt with in some fashion, it stands to split the movement and to destroy all credibility that the movement has,” Vann said. “We can’t justify the destructive actions being carried out by a splinter group.”

The rules that govern Occupy Oakland include prohibitions against police or other government officials entering the encampment. There is no Occupy Oakland liaison with police or city officials.

Rules excluding police don’t sit well with John Murry, a member of Occupied Oakland’s media committee, who spoke to IPS on his own behalf. Police are needed inside the camp when there are thefts and fights, Murry said, criticising activists who see the police as part of the “one percent” of wealthy, greedy elites.

They are “a collection of individuals who have jobs”, he said, contending that police who made “unconstitutionally illegal attacks on demonstrators” are not from Oakland.

Murry said the future of the movement turns on resolving the issue. “I think (the vandalism) is absurd,” he said. “I think that this movement will fail completely unless someone condemns it.”

He said that supporters of the vandalism call it “militant non- violence”. He characterises that view as “an utter oxymoron”.

“To smash a window when other people are inside is terrifying,” he said. “It’s a violent act.”

Things are different at Occupy San Francisco, where there’s an official police liaison. According to Jason McArthur, a member of the Occupy SF Communication Team, “The major rallies are peaceful.” He credits social pressure placed on those who may want to destroy property.

An Occupy San Francisco security committee has formed to step in if problems arise similar to Oakland’s, he said. The team will surround people that look like they want to destroy property and ask them to remain peaceful. If they won’t, he said the security team will “non- violently” detain the disruptors and call police.

Occupy SF also calls police to the camp when necessary. The reality is that “we’re not our own country,” McArthur said. “We can’t pretend we’re the judge and jury.”

Lynx, an anarchist and musician, says people who smashed windows and attempted to occupy the building are misunderstood. They use “black bloc” tactics, he said, defining black bloc as a group of people who take action in a group without revealing their identities. He criticised the media for looking only at the property destruction carried out by those using black bloc tactics, which, he said, becomes an excuse for police brutality.

He said that some people acknowledged to him that they were responsible for damage at Whole Foods grocery and a couple of banks. Lynx said they told him that damage was justified by the actions of police who had destroyed protesters’ tents and belongings.

However, “People came forward saying they weren’t responsible for damage to small businesses,” he said. “They had specific targets, but were not responsible for others.” He said they believe police infiltrators were responsible for damage to small businesses.

Unlike some of his anarchist friends, Lynx said he disapproves of the property damage during the General Strike, because the tactic could destroy ties with friends. “You can’t be an ally if you don’t listen to your allies,” he said. “You have to be accountable to your allies.”

Lynx said the movement could police itself by training people to use shields to protect the camp. This “occupy bloc,” as Lynx called them, would “physically put themselves between the police and pacifist comrades or vulnerable allies to directly counter the violence that police habitually direct against resistance movements,” he said.

Laura Turiano, a physician assistant and medic at Occupy Oakland, is not a pacifist, but also disagrees with the protesters’ decision to vandalise property. Turiano, however, said a general assembly resolution would not get people to change their tactics. She said she’s been told that the group will go ahead and destroy property even if the general assembly passes a resolution against it.

She said a better idea would be to engage with those who want to destroy property.

“There’s a lot of discussion going on behind the scenes with people involved in tagging, property destruction and all that kind of stuff,” she said. There are “older anarchists talking to younger black bloc people, trying to give them a little bit of perspective on the relationship of tactics to responsibility of others.”

Turiano summed up the thinking of many, saying, “I think strategies and tactics need to be thought out and you need to use the ones that are going to work to achieve your goal.”

Excerpt:

By Judith Scherr and - -
OAKLAND, California, Nov 3 2011 (IPS)

The early morning sun bounced off of the 150 or so multicoloured tents that crowded into the re-populated Oscar Grant Plaza Wednesday, just one week and one day after police raided the Occupy Oakland camp and evicted its occupants using tear gas, batons and possibly rubber bullets.

Demonstrators take over downtown Oakland streets during one of many General Strike marches. Credit: Judith Scherr/IPS

“Strike, occupy, shut them down, Oakland is the people’s town,” they chanted.

Towards evening, the crowd grew and thousands of people – reported variously between 4,500 and 15,000 – marched to the Port of Oakland, making it virtually impossible for dock workers and truckers to get to work, had they wanted to do so. Port Director Omar Benjamin announced that the port had been shut down.

Occupy Oakland‘s general assembly, in a meeting of around 1,600 people, decided just last Thursday to attempt a General Strike. Sceptics said they should have waited longer to plan better. But people were so angered by the police action initially supported by the mayor – particularly in light of the Iraq veteran whose skull was fractured by a projectile thought by many to be a police tear-gas canister – that they did not want to delay.

While unions couldn’t formally endorse the day as they might a strike against the bosses, many did encourage workers to take vacation or furlough days and participate.

The Oakland Education Association supported the action and turned out in force. Michele Espino and Mitchell Singsheim teach at East Oakland’s Castlemont High. Teachers are overworked and underpaid, Espino said, crediting the underfunding of education.

Singsheim noted that, “We don’t have a single computer in our school.” And that’s where the digital divide and the 99 percent comes in: “You are extending the inequities that are in our country,” he said.

Postal workers, threatened with severe cuts, were also on hand. “The working class people are under attack,” said postal worker Jose Carlos. “I see this movement representing what is happening in this society.”

Service Employees International Union member Gino Long works at Highland Hospital, where they’re looking at outsourcing his unit. Gerald Baxter, a subway worker and member of SEIU said the strike would educate the 99 percent.

“The one percent (of wealthiest U.S. citizens) already knows what’s going on,” he said. “A lot of the 99 percent have had a Jedi mind trip played on them and they don’t really understand and I believe that this is an opportunity for education.”

Some 200 city workers, part of SEIU, took the day off. One, who declined to give her name, said she sees herself part of the 99 percent, as her department is shrinking. “City services are going away,” she said. “The system is not working.” She added that she had some concern with protesters occupying public space.

Throughout the day, various groups snaked around the city, ending at Oscar Grant Plaza. Community college students participated in one of those marches.

Frederick Watson is an unusual community college student. He’s 58 years old and has been away from school for 40 years. He’s in a special programme called Bridge, where students study basic skills they may have forgotten. Eliminating the entire programme is under discussion. Learning “gives me something to be proud of,” he said.

One of the main themes of the day, given the harsh police response to the occupation, was the general behaviour of police in its role defending the one percent.

“Oakland is demonstrating to occupy activists everywhere that the 99 percent must say no to police violence, no to gang injunctions, no to the violence of the prison-industrial complex,” said Angela Davis, former member of the Black Panther Party and retired UC Santa Cruz professor, speaking at one of the rallies.

“Economic justice includes freedom from police aggression,” she said. “Economic justice includes freedom from racist violence.”

Kenneth Barker, an African American high school freshman, made a similar point, in a more personal way. He said he gets good grades and loves poetry, but is stereotyped by police.

“I don’t appreciate when I’m walking down the street when I get harassed by police because of the colour of my skin,” he said.

There were separate marches to the Plaza for families with children: “Too little to fail,” said one of their signs. Disabled people, facing severe cuts in funding for their home health-care assistants, also marched separately to the nearby state building – the state is responsible for the funding they may lose – where they blocked the doors.

The day was mainly peaceful, however, some people reportedly smashed bank windows and windows at a Whole Foods store, where it had been announced that management would not permit employee absences to go to General Strike events.

Media is reporting that late Wednesday night, a breakaway group broke into a downtown Oakland building that formerly housed homeless services and that there were arrests, although the number could not be independently confirmed by deadline.

It was reported that in other cases, protesters were able to dissuade individuals from vandalising property.

Oakland Police kept pretty much out of sight most of the day.

Most marches to the banks in the area – there were several that day – took on a carnival atmosphere with marching bands, giant puppets and lively chants such as “we are the 99 percent – shut down the one percent” and actions that included taping information pieces to walls outside of banks that mocked Wells Fargo for its support for militarism and private prisons.

“The banks have been bailed out, but we never got our bailout,” said Yvette Felarco speaking to a group of protesters at the Wells Fargo Bank. “We’ve lost homes; we’ve lost jobs; police have attacked innocent black and brown people on our streets. We’re fighting to keep our schools open. This is our day today and we’re not going anywhere.”

Excerpt:

By Judith Scherr and - -
OAKLAND, California, Oct 28 2011 (IPS)

Several dozen tents popped back up Thursday afternoon at Oakland’s Oscar Grant Plaza as people played music and shared hugs. But as darkness fell, a sombre mood overtook the nearby corner of 14th Street and Broadway, where friends and supporters of Scott Olsen lit candles and spoke quietly.

Olsen lay in a hospital bed with a fractured skull after being struck by a police projectile during a march Tuesday to protest the protesters’ eviction from the plaza. A member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, the former marine had served two tours in Iraq. The hospital announced Wednesday that his status had been upgraded from critical to fair.

Early Tuesday morning, Oakland police and officers from neighbouring departments had destroyed or removed the approximately 200 tents Occupy Oakland had installed in the plaza, which activists renamed to honour the young man killed by a subway police officer in 2009.

Officers also chased away or arrested the occupants, camped there in solidarity with the anti-Wall Street movement.

Amber Rose, a member of Iraq Veterans against the War, was at the vigil. “It’s ironic that he survived two tours in Iraq, only to come home and be taken out by Oakland PD during a peaceful protest,” she said.

Rose said she wasn’t present when Olsen was injured, but had watched videos widely available on Youtube that show him protesting peacefully.

“He wasn’t doing anything to provoke the actions of Oakland PD,” she said. “He was standing peacefully – and he is now awaiting brain surgery. That’s not okay.”

Olsen’s friend Jason Matherne placed a candle among the dozens already burning. “He is a generous, peaceful person,” Matherne said. “He believes what the occupation stands for – [correcting] the economic inequality that’s going on in America.”

Matherne called his friend “inspirational” and praised his “courage to speak out and to be an activist and do what he does and follow his beliefs and not just sit on the sidelines”.

Vigils in support of Olsen were held in several U.S. cities as well as in Cairo, Egypt.

At 7 p.m., Olsen’s friends and supporters took the vigil to Occupy Oakland’s General Assembly, held in the outdoor amphitheatre between City Hall and the grass tent-camp area.

They distributed candles and photos of Scott Olsen to many of the 1,000 people there and gave accounts of how a police projectile hit Olsen and how the police ignored calls for medical help. The crowd cheered as one speaker called for the mayor to resign and the police chief to be fired.

Mayor Jean Quan, under fire for the eviction of the protesters and the alleged use of force to do so, attempted to speak to the crowd around 10 o’clock Thursday night, but was booed off the stage.

Instead, she issued a statement Thursday saying, “Ultimately it was my responsibility, and I apologise for what happened.” She said she has opened an investigation into Tuesday’s use of force, including tear gas, that she hoped to meet with Occupy Oakland representatives.

In a letter to the city, the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California (ACLU) called for a full investigation of Tuesday’s events, especially in light of a settlement agreement resulting from a 2003 incident at the Port of Oakland, where police fired bean bags and other projectiles directly into crowds and used multiple rounds of tear gas.

In that historic settlement, the Oakland police department adopted “a crowd control policy that strictly limits the use of force and prohibits the indiscriminate use of bean bags and other projectiles against crowds or passive resisters, except in unusual circumstances”, the ACLU letter said.

It demanded that the city come forward with explicit information about the alleged use of force and chemical agents.

Congresswoman Barbara Lee, who represents Oakland, added her own stinging criticism. Speaking on KPFA radio Thursday, she called the incidents “a major overreaction by police” and underscored the protesters’ “right to free speech”.

She further said the Occupy Movement should be supported in order to stop war and create jobs.

Police responded to criticism by saying they reacted with legal means due to incidents of rock and bottle throwing.

Former Councilmember Wilson Riles said the police action highlights ongoing problems with the department. He pointed specifically to the case known as the Riders, where plaintiffs won a settlement against police officers accused of battery, falsifying police reports and other misconduct.

The courts mandated improvements, but the department has yet to implement all those it required, Riles said.

Riles added that the community should use this spotlight on Olsen to emphasise the underlying problem with police. “There are people in this city that are being hurt by [the police] who won’t be on TV and won’t be in the newspapers,” he said.

Now that Occupy Oakland has returned home to Oscar Grant Plaza and is expecting 200 tents on Friday, thanks to a donation by Occupy Wall Street, it is seeking to heighten public awareness of the gap between those who own most of the country’s wealth and those who don’t, whom they call the 99 percent.

At Wednesday’s General Assembly, 96.6 percent of 1,607 people voted to have a General Strike in Oakland on Nov. 2. They’re asking people to stay home from work or school that day.

Acupuncturist Nishanga Bliss came early to the meeting to offer free acupuncture treatment, especially to those traumatised by the arrests and police actions of Tuesday.

She said she and her colleagues plan to do more than simply honour the general strike by staying home. Instead, she’ll be working for free on Nov. 2.

“The vision is to create a healing zone in the middle of the city where we can offer acupuncture, massage and other healing arts services,” she said. “To me, it’s not only a general strike, but let’s create the world that we want to see. And part of that is free health care for all.”

Bliss went on to say that what was happening in Oscar Grant Plaza before the eviction was that people were providing for needs such as food, as the Black Panthers did in the 1960s. “They saw a need in the community and they came in and filled that,” she said. “I couldn’t understand why the city would want to shut that down.”

Excerpt:

By Kanya D'Almeida, Judith Scherr, and - -
NEW YORK/OAKLAND, Oct 28 2011 (IPS)

Barely a month after the first group of protesters set up its encampment in Zuccotti Park in New York City, the phrase “We are the 99 percent” has already become legendary.

Clarence Thomas of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and a former Black Panther stressed the need for the 99 percent to come together. Credit: Judith Scherr/IPS

But in a country still highly segregated along race, colour and class lines, the words “99 percent” continue to be points of contention for minorities involved in the movement.

According to a new report released earlier this week by the Center for Social Inclusion (CSI), “Jim Crow still exists today in the (U.S.) job market,” with more black and Latino workers relegated to the realm of “second-class workers, over-represented in low-skill, low-wage occupations with limited chances to move up the ladder of opportunity”.

The report says that people of colour and immigrants are systematically excluded from the job market as a result of underfunded public schools in their neighbourhoods, which in turn prevents many young minorities from obtaining a college degree.

“People of color cannot get to job centers far from their homes due to inadequate public transportation services. Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, and particular populations of Asians, live where employers don’t locate, where local and county governments have failed to build public transit, and where the tax base is too small to properly fund schools,” the report said.

Disparities in the 99 percent

On Tuesday evening, a group gathered in Battery Park, just a few blocks away from Occupy Wall Street, to participate in a conversation about power and privilege.

The discussion was organised by the people of colour working group (POC WG) for Occupy Wall Street, which has fought hard to insert a discourse of structural inequalities into the movement.

“A month ago a group of people from South Asians for Justice went down to the General Assembly at Wall Street in time to hear the reading aloud of what would have become the first official document to be released publically, called ‘the declaration of the occupation of New York City‘,” Thanu Y, an organiser with the POC WG, told IPS.

“We were all immediately struck by the second paragraph of that document, which read: ‘We the occupiers, formerly divided by the colour of our skin, gender, sexual orientation (etc)…are one race, the human race.'”

“We felt that language erased histories of communities of colour and immigrants in the U.S. and assumed we were all starting from the same point, economically and politically, when we came to protest this economic crisis – something we all felt was incorrect,” Thanu Y said.

“Personally, I believe a discussion of those inequalities really needs to be at the forefront of this movement here in the U.S., and even globally, where realities of class and caste just cannot be ignored. The ways in which we are divided is part of the reason there’s an economic crisis in the first place,” she added.

So the group decided to block the declaration from passing and stayed at the park till close to midnight, amending the declaration to better reflect the diversity of experience and privilege within the movement.

Since then, the POC WG has been a major organising force in OWS, facilitating teach-ins, running a blog dedicated to “critical voices in the 99 percent” and linking up with groups like the Movement for Justice in El Barrio and Occupy the Hood to embrace and encourage minorities’ participation in the movement.

Black participation in a majority white movement

Despite a brutal shutdown of the Occupy Oakland encampment on Tuesday, organising efforts are continuing in earnest in California, with increasing numbers of African Americans stepping up to continue the city’s legacy of struggle.

The Black Panther Party was born in Oakland on Oct. 15, 1966. The city was also home to a strong black-led anti-apartheid movement and boasted the largest, strongest Rainbow Coalition chapter in the country.

Today, over four decades later, Occupy Oakland has support from individual black Oaklanders, but hasn’t yet garnered unqualified support from two key constituencies: black ministers and black elected officials.

To a great extent, there’s limited black participation because it’s a white-led movement, according to African American attorney and civil rights veteran Walter Riley.

“Any time there’s a movement in this country that is primarily initiated by white people, there is a tendency for there to not be a large number of black people,” he said.

“That does not mean that black people do not support it,” he continued, pointing out that the heart of the Occupy Movement – condemnation of the banks – is central to grievances within the African American community, namely, the lack of capital investment in black neighbourhoods and communities of colour.

“Banks are getting away with stealing our money,” Riley said. “The government has given money to them and has not insisted that they give loans. They have not invested in our communities.”

Oakland, too, represents the disparity within the 99 percent. The differences between white, black and brown joblessness is stark: in 2010, white unemployment was seven percent, while black and Latino unemployment was 19.6 percent and 15.2 percent, respectively.

Riley said elected officials – including elected officials of colour – – should be in the forefront of Occupy Oakland, focusing on community needs.

“I would like to see the City of Oakland expressly say, ‘let’s make [Occupy Oakland] work. Let’s keep it going,” he stressed.

Alameda County Supervisor Keith Carson, also an African American, supports the anti-corporate message of the movement but called the leaderless structure “unsettling”. He said with other organisations, you know where to go to get information or who to talk to. That’s not the case with Occupy Oakland.

And Carson said occupiers were sending the wrong message by camping in front of City Hall, when the real targets ought to be the banks. “Local government is under siege,” he said, underscoring that local government builds roads and provides for the health and safety of people in the city.

Lack of strong black participation might be also understood in the shift in demographics.

In the 1980s, 46 percent of Oaklanders were African American. Today, just 27 percent of Oakland’s population is black, while 25 percent is white, just slightly more than the Hispanic population.

As Reverend Daniel Buford pointed out, now that the more affluent white community is hurt by unemployment and foreclosure, they have become leaders in the movement to fight the corporations and banks. The black church, he said, continues to do what it’s been doing all along – organising around bread and butter issues, particularly education that leads to good jobs.

“We as clergy have a role to play, not just a role of protest, but of vision,” Buford said, adding that he supports concrete demands, such as the proposal in San Francisco to open a municipal bank.

Buford said he helped organise an interfaith march on Monday in solidarity with Occupy San Francisco, where one group of marchers carried a golden calf to illustrate a biblical verse condemning “fiscal idolatry”.

Clarence Thomas, executive board member of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union in San Francisco and a former Black Panther, stressed the need for the 99 percent to come together.

He pointed out that one of the strengths of the Panther movement was its ability to develop coalitions with white allies, who were referred to at the time as “white radicals of the mother country.” He said he thinks this can happen in the Occupy Movement.

“It’s a mistake to say, ‘this is a white youth-led movement; there is not room for people of colour,” he said, pointing to movements like Occupy the Hood in Chicago.

“It is a matter of us getting involved in the process,” he said. “That doesn’t mean there won’t be bumps in the road, but anything worth fighting for is worth the sacrifice of struggle to work it out. The ruling class is depending on us not being able to come together,” he added.

*This story is the first of a two-part series about the influence of race, colour and class in the U.S. Occupy movements.

Judith Scherr reported from Oakland, California.

Excerpt:

As the sun came up over Oakland City Hall Wednesday, Mike Porter, 24, was standing behind police barricades, watching a public works crew power wash the plaza that had been home to some 200 participants in the Occupy Oakland movement.

A crowd gathers on the Oakland library steps Oct. 25, following the police raid. Credit: Judith Scherr/IPS

Police raided the camp early Tuesday morning, tore down the tents and arrested more than 100 people. Porter was among them.

The young man said he had been on watch at the camp at around 2:30 a.m. and saw police massing around the square, which activists had renamed Oscar Grant Plaza to honour the man subway police killed in 2009.

By around 4:30 a.m. Tuesday, “There were literally at least 500 cops shoulder to shoulder” surrounding the plaza, Porter said. “Then they slowly started closing in. We stood our ground doing chants and locked arms. They threw a flash-bang [grenade] which landed right on top of a tarp. As I looked back I saw someone crawling out of that tarp…. ”

Porter was arrested and released on his own recognizance Tuesday night. “It’s a tremendous waste of taxpayer dollars, seeing as how it was a peaceful gathering,” he said.

The Occupy Oakland encampment is just one of hundreds that have sprung up around the country in recent weeks to protest rising poverty and income inequality in the U.S.

At a press conference Tuesday, police denied using flash-bang grenades. “The loud noises that were heard originated from M-80 explosives thrown at police by protesters,” they said.

Police further said that they used tear gas to defend against protesters who threw glass bottles, rocks, pots, and kitchen utensils at them.

However, a video taken by a local radio reporter shows a flash-bang grenade detonating in the crowd. One protester, Scott Olsen, a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, was badly wounded in the raid. The group said in a statement that Olsen “sustained a skull fracture after being shot in the head with a police projectile while peacefully participating in an Occupy Oakland march.”

The city had put the protesters on notice, saying the camp was infested with rats and that there were problems with sanitation, drunkenness and that there had been an assault. Protesters responded by further cleaning the site and instituting self-policing. They told IPS that the rats had been there long before they were and that, while not tolerating anti-social behaviour, that it is part of any urban social context.

Like Porter, Max Bell Alper, whose parents’ and uncle’s homes were foreclosed on, also spent most of Tuesday in jail. He said that after the police surrounded the camp, he complied with an officer’s demand that he move.

He said, however, when he asked for the officer’s name, “Three cops grabbed me; folks on our side grabbed me and pulled me back. And that’s when dozens of police officers came in swinging batons at us.” Alper pulled up his shirt sleeve to show the two-inch bruise on his arm where he said he’d been hit by a police baton.

The arrests and destruction of the camp didn’t deter the activists. Five hundred to 1,000 people regrouped Tuesday afternoon on the steps of the downtown library and in the street in front of it.

“At a meeting of a general assembly of Occupy Oakland, we recognise that our ability to occupy that space comes not from the benevolence of the police, but from our collective power as a community,” one speaker said, as the crowd cheered.

Another speaker was on a cell phone call to the National Lawyers Guild, which is serving as the arrestees’ legal team. She listed the charges arrested protesters were facing: remaining on the scene of a riot, illegal lodging, resisting arrest and battery on an officer.

She further reported that the National Lawyers Guild “says there was a massive amount of excessive force that was used ” and that there were two people jailed with broken hands and one hospitalised with a head injury.

The crowd marched back toward the barricaded plaza, where police arrested another 100 people. Occupy Oakland will regroup Wednesday evening for a general assembly and decide on next steps.

“We’re not going anywhere,” said a young man who identified himself as “E”, sitting on the street near the plaza behind the police barricade Wednesday morning. “We’re going to wait them out,” he said.

His friend “D”, who had been arrested Tuesday morning, added: “This is not going to stop us; it’s only going to fuel the fire.”