I just sent this as a Letter to the Editor to the Oakland Tribune:
What a mockery, the Port of Oakland purporting to be a “friend” of the 99%! Using public lands, it hosts rent free the world’s largest maritime companies. This includes war profiteers APL and SSA, the latter controlled by Goldman Sachs. Not a penny of the nominal fees it charges them goes to the debt-ridden Oakland Public Schools nor to any of the vital services provided by Alameda County, including desperately understaffed Highland Hospital. Yet the Port found $500,000 to underwrite Jerry Brown’s charter school, the Oakland military academy.
The Port and its clients in the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) refuse union recognition to port truckers working endless hours at rock bottom pay while PMA conspires with EGT and its Japanese and Korean partners to break the ILWU in Longview, WA. There police have beaten, pepper sprayed and terrorized union families for the past 6 months.
The ILWU International should be welcoming the support of Occupy protestors in every port; and it should be organizing longshore workers coastwide to strike against scab grain shipments from Longview.
Bob Mandel
involuntarily retired Oakland Adult Education ESL teacher
we should target the 1%, not the people who benefit from the 1%. that’s all of us. sheeeeeesh.
Thank you, Bob, beautiful post. I taught here in Oakland also in the late 1990s/early 2000s, and I consider it a real honor. Wish I could have dedicated myself to it more, but the system is just messed up. I felt complicit sometimes in things that weren’t good for the kids, even though I tried really hard to be there to help them. I think sometimes about how some of those kids are probably the young people in their early 20s that are part of Occupy Oakland now and I’m marching with them for that dream of something better.
The media can spin it; and we should remember that the Port had to buy that ad (which I haven’t seen yet). in this world we’ve constructed, money IS speech. Occupy Wall St. and Occupy Oakland and other groups are trying to break through that block, to speak with our own human voices and our tribal voices against the strictly commercial voices that populate every radio frequency other than KPFA and that populate the entire cable TV spectrum. Occupy Oakland I’m sure would never, and should never, approve to spend thousands of dollars to buy an advertisement in the very same commercial medium where “business as usual” is the ONLY consideration.