5/22: Pretrial hearing for Kali in Dept 704 of Gale-Schenone Hall of Justice (Pleasanton), 9am.
5/23: One comrade in Dept 115 of Wiley Manuel, 9am.
5/24: SENTENCING HEARING FOR JESUS, Dept 14, Rene Davidson, 9am.
Two comrades in 104 for pretrial at Wiley, 9am. One arrested at the farm, one arrested on May Day.
5/25: One comrade in Dept 111 of Wiley Manuel, 9am.
chris in dept 112, 2pm, wiley manuel (arraignment).
– excerpt –
If we can get the power of myth from storytellers and the printed page, then why not from soundscapes?
– how to interpret an integrated set of sound symbols as a myth?
– sound symbols or textures connected to memories and new feelings, please
– not like songs – like meditations
– what is a mythic experience?
– requires a new language, code, key
– silence is a sound symbol
On May 20th during the Occupy Oakland General Assembly a representative of the Winnemem Wintu tribe requested support for their War Dance. The War Dance will take place on May 24-27, which they hope will convince the Forest Service to close the river for their Coming of Age ceremony.
The tribe is located by the Shasta Lake near Redding California. On the first right after passing the Shasta Lake bridge, about 14 miles from the i5 Freeway.
For more details and directions please watch the video below:
The tribe’s website is: http://www.winnememwintu.us/
* Video Recorded by: Mollie
Join us for the first gathering to begin re-imagining the General Assembly on Saturday June 16 at Mosswood Park, starting with music and food at 1:00pm.
Please fill out our survey to share you thoughts on the GA:
Please spread the word.
The group planning this gathering meets on Fridays from 6 to 8 at Cafe Madrid, 2001 Broadway in Oakland. We welcome additional help with logistics, outreach and design planning.
As soon as I arrived to the blocked entrance of the Gill Tract I noticed that some occupiers were sad, in silence, and some even in tears.
What bothered the most was to see the Police on the other side of the fence mocking when I was taking their pictures. I felt reluctant to photograph them because of their actions; I yelled at them “You’re not funny!” They yelled back at me something as I walked away ignoring them. I had tuned out into a different world, because I was upset that they do not care and make fun of other people’s feelings.
Now when writing this report I realized that I should have taken those pictures, so that you see them doing that.
If you are a relative of any of these cops, I am sorry for you. I hope you are a better human than them.
Anyways, the farm looks flat.
The University, I imagine, have sent people to cut the grass,and bulldozed areas of the farm. They also have brought some intense portable stadium like light posts. The police cars inside the farm and other vehicles including the cops on bicycles reminds me of the border patrol at the border with Mexico, like dogs waiting for their prey.
From the distance you can see the green sprouts. It is a sad feeling to see the plants coming out the soil, because we know that soon they will die for the lack of water, and care. I understand the occupier that I photographed with tears on her face, because while I write this I am sad too.
They can bulldozed all the plants, but they cannot stop the spring, and the occupiers!
http://planetshifter.com/node/2017
http://communityalchemy.com/Chameleons/Chameleons.pdf
My involvement in the Occupy Movement has largely been in a supportive capacity: I went on late-night postering runs for J28, I took over the Oscar Grant Plaza Gazette when the original editors dropped out and I became heavily involved in the Anti-Repression Committee. Spending so much time promoting Occupy and trying to keep it alive has of course begged the question: what is this thing that I am working so hard to protect?
I know what I have wanted Occupy Oakland to be. Months ago, I saw Occupy Oakland as a leader in an national movement (with international ties) to reclaim the commons as a first step in a prolonged and coordinated fight against economic injustice and the subordination of the world’s majority to racist, patriarchal, heteronormative domination. After the clearing of the first encampment, we started to look outward, beyond the necessities of our own daily self-maintenance. Then again, as repression increased we redoubled our focus on our own self-preservation, fetishizing the plaza and various milestones in our own brief history. Occupy Oakland as such is on a slow and sure downslide as we fail to become less insular and self-referential and remain largely irrelevant to local struggles.
When speaking of a movement composed of innumerable left tendencies with no clear objective, it is necessary to paint a picture of success for the sake of reference. I want a mass movement. I want an organizing body that welcomes motivated and talented folks at all levels of political experience to mobilize around concrete political issues. Occupy Oakland understands itself to be completely open, but is in fact organized like a social scene which is completely impenetrable to many: the unacknowledged (and therefore unaccountable) leadership is composed of people who have the most experience, political training, time or resources (or a combination of the above) and there is no mechanism that I have witnessed to develop new leaders. Feuds between groups and between individual organizers have become entrenched. Occupy Oakland as such has run its course. We put on inspiring spectacles, we empowered new organizers, we made connections between pre-existing grassroots working groups and created new ones. But no one new is coming in and the attendance at general assemblies is dwindling. It’s time to take the network we have forged and turn it toward organizing projects aimed at political realities outside Occupy.
When the old Gazette crew dropped out and I became the week-in, week-out bottomliner, I re-assessed the role of the gazette in the organism of Occupy. It was important to have a newsletter to welcome people who were new to the movement, to acquaint them to the range of our politics. The Gazette was also a forum to to have the debates that were crucial to the development of the movement. Alas, no one new has come to the general assembly in quite some time. We routinely have less than a hundred people on Wednesday nights and, in the wake of May 1st, even Sunday assemblies barely have quorum. There are plenty of other forums for movement news and debate.
I have never been full time on the Gazette: my energies have always been split between work and other projects within and outside of Occupy. The Oscar Grant Plaza Gazette has therefore not always been as relevant, as up to date, or as thorough as I would have liked it to have been. If I don’t quit now, it will become sporadic and careless. One project in particular, The Summer Where No One Leaves, is poised to monopolize my time and creativity. This project, spearheaded by the East Bay Solidarity Network, will involve most organizations currently doing anti-foreclosure work in the Bay (including OOFD) and a host of organizers new to the housing struggle in a coalition to build neighborhood councils that could be ready to defend against foreclosure and eviction as self-organized bodies by the end of the summer. It will be a concentrated push for anti-foreclosure work as a social movement in a time where foreclosure represents one of the largest mass thefts of wealth from the black community in history. The Summer Where No One Leaves could not have gotten to its current advanced planning stages without Occupy Oakland. Indeed many occupiers will be crucially involved. This project, Occupy AC Transit, Occupy the Farm and recent solidarity actions with the families of Alan Blueford and Brandy Martell can be counted as the future of Occupy.
Goodbye from the Oscar Grant Plaza Gazette. It’s been real.
Re-Posted from IndyBay
Objecting to a never-ending stream of increasing fares, reduced service, and concessions by transit workers, Occupy Oakland and a rank-and-file AC Transit driver held a press conference outside of the Fruitvale BART station on May 16th. Austerity measures by AC Transit fall hardest on those who can least afford it, low-income riders and drivers who are pushed to do more for less, creating a less safe transportation system that ill serves those who need it most. While noting that the campaign intends to escalate over the long term if demands are not met by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), Occupy AC Transit initially is asking drivers to show solidarity by honoring bus transfers for the three hours in which transfers were once honored before recent cutbacks.
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results – like voting on false choices in rigged elections with predetermined outcomes.
AMERICANS HAVE THREE CHOICES IN NOVEMBER: BUSHBAMNEY, THIRD-PARTY OR NOBODY
As they’ve done so many times in the past, on Tuesday 6 November 2012 American voters will go to the polls to decide absolutely nothing. At least not at the presidential level, where electing either corporate-controlled Democratic puppet Obama or corporate-controlled Republican puppet Romney will mean a continuation of perpetual wars for profit and oil abroad and continued constitutional erosion and decline into police-state fascism at home:
Of course they supposedly differ on social and other wedge issues the ruling elite contrive, revive and broadcast incessantly through mainstream media to keep people divided and fighting each other rather united and fighting them. But once they get elected, what really changes?
NOT MUCH.
After two disastrous terms with Dubya, Obama was sold to the Sheeple as “Change” incarnate in 2008. But what really changed? Goldman Sachs alum were in charge at the Treasury under Bush; Goldman Sachs alum are in charge at the Treasury now… Wall Street got bailed out while Main Street got sold out under Bush; that continues under Obama, but now we call it a “jobless recovery”… Our Military/Intelligence/Terrorism Industrial Complex had a blank check under Bush. Our Military/Intelligence/Terrorism Industrial Complex has a blank check now… In Iraq, hundreds of thousands died and trillions of dollars were wasted *after* Dubya declared “Mission Accomplished”; the death and destruction continues today, long *after* Obama declared our troops would be “home for the holidays”… Under Bush, we went to war in Afghanistan with Pakistan as our “ally”; under Nobel Peace Prize winner Obama the war has expanded, the situation has worsened, and American bombs and drones are now killing innocent civilians on both sides of the Af-Pak border and around the globe as well… Dubya gave us the USA Patriot Act and AUMF 2001, under which he declared executive authority to waive habeus corpus and hold American citizens in indefinite detention without charge or trial; Obama renewed the Patriot Act and signed NDAA 2012, which codified indefinite detention of American citizens by military as well as civilian authorities… Dubya filled Guantanamo with 9/11 scapegoats; Obama’s complicity guarantees none of them will ever get their day in open court… Dubya and Darth first used armed Predator drones to take out suspected terrorists – or innocent men, women and children asleep in their mud huts – in Af-Pak in 2001; Obama signed HR 658 releasing 30,000 such drones into American skies… Dubya used “free speech zones” to corral and avoid American citizens exercising their First Amendment Rights; Obama signed HR 347, making the exercise of those rights where and how it matters most a felony…
I COULD GO ON, BUT YOU GET THE POINT.
It is said that the Republican Party exists to make the Democratic Party look like a viable alternative to wannabe revolutionaries who don’t really wanna be revolutionaries. But does it? Clearly the Democrats and Republicans have the same core agenda and answer to the same global elite, so voting for the candidates of either merely perpetuates their “two-party tyranny”:
So short of storming the Bastille, what options remain for the few Americans who actually give a damn about something other than sports scores, spoiled celebrities, (un)reality shows, choice-limiting apps for their slave-built iPhones and inconsequential updates to their Fakebook pages? Writing for Global Research, Professor Peter Phillips credits Chris Hedges with this suggestion:
“Don’t waste any more time or energy on the presidential election than it takes to get to your polling station and pull a lever for a third-party candidate – just enough to register your obstruction and defiance – and then get back out onto the street. That is where the question of real power is being decided.”
Others will say “Vote for Nobody!” in alignment with Wally Conger’s Anti-Electorate Manifesto:
“We, the Anti-Electorate, do not believe there is a need for ‘strong leadership’ in government. We are not drawn to ‘intellectual’ authorities and political ‘heroes’. We are not impressed with titles, ranks, and pecking orders – politicians, celebrities, and gurus. We do not struggle for control of organizations, social circles, and government. We do not lobby the State for favors or permission to control those with whom we disagree. Rather, we advocate freedom. By its very nature, the State does not. Exercise your right to say “No” to the warfare – welfare system. Refuse to vote. Then tell your friends why.”
Still others are asking themselves what Thomas Jefferson would do if he were alive to see what a mess we’ve made of things, and these words of his are really making the rounds:
“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”
Personally, I’d like to see us get to what I previously called “that point”:
“The traditional Left/Right, Liberal/Conservative, Democrat/Republican dichotomy is a false and failing paradigm propagated by the powers-that-be to perpetuate division. The true political spectrum is not a straight line but a circle: There is a point where Far Left meets Far Right, where Anarchism merges with Libertarianism and these and the rest of our outmoded labels melt away. In that point must we place our hope, for only from that point can we build a better future.”
If we can’t get to “that point”, then storming the Bastille may be the only alternative.
NO MORE LEFT. NO MORE RIGHT. TIME TO UNITE. STAND AND FIGHT!
IronBoltBruce via VVV PR ( http://veritasvirtualvengeance.com | @vvvpr )
Related Image: http://veritasvirtualvengeance.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/bushbamney-insanity-nobody.gif
Related Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luWgyVpDEa8
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Tag: #bushbamney, #bushbama, #obamney, #obomney, #bush, #obama, #romney, #voting, #elections, #democrats, #republicans, #gop, #demopublicans, #republicrats, #votefornobody, #sheeple, #fascism, #fascists, #occupywallst, #occupy, #ows, #vvvpr
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