Latest Posts

Street-medic live action role playing April 29 9 am to 5 pm

Hey there! As a fun way to get ready for may day, we will host a wonderful medic l.a.r.p.ing event.

This event might be more useful if you have already been a street-medic, and or you have been trained. We will not go over a whole training at this event, this is just to  practice your skills and for us to hangout and have fun!

Please bring: Clothes you will get dirty in! supplies to share! A lunch or money/ebt etc to get one. friends who want to be lovely actors, your awesome skills.

Tentative schedule:

9am-12pm workshop skill share discussion, social, maybe breakout groups for detailed workshops

12-1pm lunch and social and supply swap!

1 til 4pm scenarios, feedback, and live action role playing.

4 til 5pm socialize

5pm end of the event!

First come First on the list. Limited room. Please RSVP to bayareastreetmedics@gmail.com

Please note the event might be abrasive and loud.

Please forward widely!

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An Invitation to the Oakland Community: Oakland Police Department Open House – May 4th, 5pm – 7:30pm

From the OPD:

Please join us on Friday, May 4th, at the Police Administration Building located at 455 – 7th Street, for the first ever Oakland Police Department Open House event. During this event, sponsored by the Oakland Police Foundation, you will have an opportunity to meet members of the organization, learn all about the different services we have to offer, get to know other members of the community, and meet the Chief of Police and his executive team. We look forward to seeing you there!

For more information, please contact –
Ms. Yolanda Morris (ymorris@oaklandnet.com), or
Ms. Leah Rubio (lrubio@oaklandnet.com)

For more information about the Oakland Police Foundation, please visit http://www.oaklandpolicefoundation.org/

Address/Location
Oakland Police Department – Office Of The Chief
455 7th St
Oakland, CA 94607

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M1GS Street Action Panel and Skill-Share 4/29/12 (Sunday) Noon-2:30

With May Day approaching in less than two weeks, the Safer Spaces committee invites activists and allies together for a two and a half hour panel and skill share session on:

*Basic tips for a sustainable street action

*Emotional First Aid: trauma education, emotional self care tips for pre, during and post action

*First Aid: simple street medic tips, physical self-care for pre, during and post action

*Coping with activist burnout and keeping the movement connected

When:  4/29/12 (Sunday)

Time: Noon-2:30 (hope everyone is ok with a slight overlapping of the GA)

Where: 19th and Telegraph

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Call for Perm-Trans-Occupy Strategies to Revitalize Burlingame (CA) Post Office – Willi Paul

Hi Folks –
I would appreciate any project templates, community organizing tips or re-use strategies in support of a community revitalization design for the historic Burlingame Post Office. Time is short to bring the community together. My letter to the San Mateo Daily Journal is below (see PlanetShifter.com Magazine post).
Thanks for any assistance.
WOX
(April 19, 2012)

Editor,
With now less than 15 days to intervene in the undemocratic, rushed sale of the Burlingame post office to the “highest bidder,” it is deeply troubling that your publication can completely miss the multiple concerns that were expressed by the public in attendance at the U.S. Postal Service meeting Monday night (in response to “Burlingame gathers input for post office relocation” in the April 17 edition of the Daily Journal). Your reporter completely omitted the voices of local residents who want to have a say in the fate of our beloved historic postal office. It is also worth noting here that Councilwoman Terry Nagel said nothing in support of a community-sponsored re-use or revitalization vision.
In addition to my call for a community group to challenge the City Council and private developer process now in place, citizens also need to petition the USPS officials and their consultants for an extension so the public can develop their plans for the property.
The time is now to organize and discuss a possible lease-back, community-based program for our post office.
Willi Paul
Burlingame
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Occupy Bohemian Grove: State of the Counterculture Union Address 2012 by Dr. Ryan Bartek

Follow the Occupy Bohemian Grove PDX Committee and Bohemian Grove Action Network this July to Monte Rio California and tell the global elite their party’s over.

OCCUPY BOHEMIAN GROVE:
STATE OF THE COUNTERCULTURE UNION ADDRESS 2012
Br Dr. Ryan Bartek

(Edited by VVV PR for format but not verified as to content.)

It was barely a year after the fall of Wall Street, in February 2010, when I penned the first SOTCU ADDRESS. I was literally stranded on the Treasure Island of Pyrate Lore, licking my wounds in Florida, hopelessly treading water amidst the utter decimation of the American economy.

My secret tropical island paradise had frozen to record low temps – black ice slicked the pavement, palm trees were brown. I was working 15 hours a week at minimum wage for one of the most evil corporations in America, only because there was no other way out. Even hustling like a Crackhead Spainjer was ironically useless, because here I was in one of the biggest tourist traps of The South and it was an absolute ghost town. This venerated rich kid Spring Break Hallelujah Town was Arctic as the ICE PLANET HOTH. Even the homeless bums migrated like sparrows.

OBAMA had still yet to completely turn heel and was still struggling to pass “ObamaCare.” There was still a thread of hope attached to this man, even if saturated by mainstream DNC influence. After all, he wasn’t Skull and Bones or a Freemason; he wasn’t quite tied to old money or The Hidden Hand. Surely he had a corporate stooge streak (he was a Capitalist President, after all) – but he wasn’t one of “them.” OBAMA seemed to know that by proxy he was setting an example as a historical figure and tried to live up to that pressure as humanistic as possible. When I met the man, long before he was president, I did not get the vibe of pure evil. To be honest, he had an aura like a powerhouse. I knew he was going to significant.

But then he pushed through the health care plan, and for the GOP it was like smashing a hornets nest with a baseball bat. He crossed the line and the propaganda flood was totalitarian in its vengeance. Exactly as I’d said – the second OBAMA gets in, the avalanche of doom the Neo-Cons manifested would plow him right under.

And then poking around online, in the dead of frozen night, I found a video with Obama and John Walsh (of “America’s Most Wanted” fame). Obama explained how he was trying to put through legislation that would require every cop to take DNA Samples from anyone they pulled over in traffic without requiring a warrant or just cause. That this DNA would be logged in an international database in which all branches of the FBI/CIA/Interpol/ISI would have unquestioned legal access.

That’s when my extremely cautious and shaky honeymoon with Barack Obama ended. Soon after that I arrived in Portland, Oregon, the day of the BP Oil Catastrophe. That’s about the time Obama went gray, when he started looking as haunted as Mussolini in 1945. Most assumed The Illuminati just flipped the remote control of a Manchurian Candidate-like microchip in the back of his head and rendered him a human robot. Or perhaps the Aliens came down and replaced him with a genetic CloneSlave. Surely that would make more sense then the incoherent enigma that is his presidency.

Nothing he does adds up, and with the severity that the Lusitania or Gulf of Tonkin doesn’t add up. Which is to say it isn’t supposed to “add up,” but rather only to contribute to that old world scheme residing behind that all too familiar curtain of Oz. He’s just another stooge, as they all are. This is why the Federal Reserve has gone on without penalty or oversight. This is why the Patriot Act was passed once again without dissent. This is why he’s aggressively furthered pointless wars which like all American wars are never meant to be won, only sustained to line the pockets of Dow Jones profiteers.

As is why he’s filled his cabinet with the same wrecking ball economists that are behind the switchboards of this blatantly phony “recession” just as they were during “the great depression” or any other similar pyramid scheme of “economical calamity.” How are we in a great depression when every Fortune 500 company is making record profits? When we are besieged with a period of historical, staggering abundance?

We’ve reached a point where their hands are so far into the cookie jar they don’t even feel the need to mask it anymore. They went whole-hog for the grand burglary and no one said a god damned word. The people just took it, buying the careful matrix of propaganda built from the leverage and participation of the reigning media tycoons. It really isn’t much more difficult than that. They sunk the Lusitania, they forced the Japanese to attack us, they fabricated the Gulf of Tonkin, they framed the Bay of Pigs, they killed 1500+ people at The World Trade Center. The clear evidence does not support any other view and I cannot even communicate with anyone who doesn’t see through this.

And people wonder why we are so angry. Why we’re marching in the streets. Why even after they beat, torture, paralyze and terrorize us we refuse to give up or go home. Somehow we’ve reached a point where even the most fever-pitch kook calling in to the Alex Jones show is probably right about everything.

Most still have no idea about COREXIT 9500, even in the Age of Occupy. In April 2010, to combat the BILLION GALLONS OF CRUDE OIL that shot from the Earth’s Crust, Obama allowed BP to dump 50 MILLION GALLONS of Corexit 9500 into The Gulf, which is a chemical 4 times more toxic then the crude oil itself. Corexit’s function is to literally eat the oil, instantly obliterating it into minuscule particles. In theory, these particles are biodegradable and mix into the ocean currents like loose grains of sand. In reality, Corexit had never actually been used on anything larger then 1000 barrels of oil – which is why all of these globules have accumulated into a massive jelly blob which is crawling along The Gulf floor.

Furthermore, the chemical immediately releases the most deadly, latent properties of crude, causing the surrounding water to soak up 3,500% more of the toxic properties then it would in its natural state. This aquatic Corexit landmass – this oxygen-deprived, toxic vacuum – has already killed millions of fish, altering the eco-system and supposedly mutating the genetics of all ensnared life forms. As this Blob lingers off the coast of Florida for the next few hundred years, smaller chunks continue to wash ashore in Louisiana, Georgia, Mississippi, Florida, etc. At a microscopic level, it’s been continually ingested through skin contact of any and all swimming those same beaches. Having never been tested at length on human subjects – and quickly banned in the UK – a 2011 investigation determined that Corexit is a confirmed carcinogen in all probability worse then Agent Orange itself. It literally makes red blood cells hemorrhage when ingested. When the EPA refused to test the seafood for months, Walmart threatened to pull out of selling any seafood from The Gulf. Then the EPA panicked and said 300 PPM of COREXIT 9500 on food was fine – and ever since then people have been devouring this neurotoxic poison en masse. Furthermore, this mix of Corexit, crude oil and methane gas has for some time been evaporating and, in turn, raining down upon the region – supposedly all the way into Canada. This precipitation was (and still is) affecting plant life like an acidic pesticide. One search on YouTube will bring forth hundreds of amateur videos of these events throughout 2010, as well as testimonials from people dizzy/vomiting after heavy rains, sick for days – their homes covered in oily residue and streets slicked with that distinctive “rainbow film.”

I wrote about this crisis extensively and worked closely with journalists who traveled to New Orleans/Florida to cover this when OBAMA signed an executive order stating that any journalist or new agency caught filming the “clean up effort” (i.e. criminal cover up) would be sentenced to 15 years in prison with a federal felony and charged a $40,000 fine. If you don’t believe me, they shut down Anderson Cooper live on CNN. And then the story went away. Read my report here:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/39720625/ACROPOLIS-NOW-The-Great-American-Blackout-by-Ryan-Bartek

Obama has knowingly murdered tens of thousands from chemical poisoning and given millions more crippling defects which will not be apparent for many years.

Which brings us to the next point – FUKUSHIMA. When that 9.2 earthquake rocked Japan on March 11th, it crippled three nuclear power plants in one blow (the entire Fukushima Diachi complex). All three plants experienced total nuclear meltdown and have since released staggering amounts of radiation that are so unfathomably high the highest-tech equipment mankind possesses cannot gauge it…

These aren’t nuclear meltdowns – they are melt-throughs. Something, you must understand, which has never happened in all of history. The radioactive ooze inside the broken reactors is so uncontrollably hot that it’s burned through the containment units. Just imagine the blood splatter from James Cameron’s Aliens and insert Mother Earth into the equation. If these volatile streams of toxic ooze burn their way to underlying volcanic activity, then the chain reaction could make the entire complex explode – thus sending a portion of the world into a sort of nuclear winter, rendering significant parts of Japan/Indo-China uninhabitable…

As the guts of Fukushima hollow their path through Terra Firma, all groundwater and soil it connects with will be coated with lethal radiation and genetic mutagens that will last for 12 billion years. In response to this problem, Tepco (the Corporation which owns these reactors) has admitted that they cannot in anyway coat these plants with concrete and forge a makeshift band-aid of lead and cement like the Russians did at Chernobyl.

You may have heard the plant workers were dumping seawater inside the reactors with fire hoses to keep them from exploding, and this part is true. What they haven’t explained is that every time they stop, 50 years of spent uranium catches on fire and releases about 1000 times the amount of radiation the Hiroshima bomb let off.

At this point, in June, Japan has been coated by an estimated fallout that is equivalent to 20,000 atomic bombs and that the rain coming down on the Japanese people clocks in the same as a highly targeted dose of aggressive chemotherapy. The sewers of Japan are now clogged with raw sewage on par with near-identical levels. You ask: “Where does radioactive sewage come from?” Well, from people shitting pure radiation…

What you also don’t know is that the Japanese government – at the behest of the Obama administration – has dumped this radioactive seawater (which registers at 7.5 million times the legal limit) directly into the ocean. This factoid comes from the Chinese government’s official website, who recently posted this as a warning to their citizens. Their discovery is that a 250,000 kilometer slick of radiation is now floating in The Pacific (aka 100,000 square miles). And this lethal, eternal sludge is on a time frame to coat the beaches of Hawaii and the entire West Coast of the United States by 2013…

One speck of these radioactive properties (like plutonium or cesium) will absolutely kill you and could easily be ingested in a piece of fish, seaweed or rainwater. Once you have one of these particles in your system, this mutates you a cancer-radiating death totem for all those surrounding you. When you die the particle lives on, buried with you forever; eventually flushed out through decomposition into the soil/water supply that in turn finds its way back into the population…

Researchers are pulling car filters out of vehicles in Seattle and said filters are setting off Geiger Counters – the data shows everyone in the Northwest has been inhaling 5 hot particles of radiation a day; the Japanese 30. The data also indicates that the evacuation levels of Chernobyl are now permanent life in the soil and water supply of Tokyo – in some cases registering 30 times higher then the Russian calculations…

The US government’s answer has been to stop testing the rain and raise the “safe levels” of radiation intake by 300% (the Japanese raised it 2000%). In reality, the rain in San Francisco recently tested at 18,000 times the normal level, and particles of Plutonium have been discovered in milk as far East as Vermont. It’s being found in the tap water of virtually every major USA city and where it’s been strongest the death rate of newborns and infants (including miscarriages) has shot through the roof…

Amidst this murderous, negligent rampage we view the true face of Barack Obama – withered and gray, unhinged and desperate, simmering with destitute hypocrisy. No other character in literature comes so close to representing his abhorrent duality than Harvey Dent. For the man who once promised the most transparent administration in history has now sustained and illegally launched more wars and draconian police state laws then any other President in USA history. BUSH II was so horrible that he made Ronald Reagan look good by comparison – but OBAMA somehow making BUSH II seem tame by comparison? OBAMA beefed up the NDAA, thus making the military and the police one in the same, rendering the USA a legal battlefield in which anyone can be assassinated, black-bagged, tortured, erased without a warrant or even just cause. He extended “Homeland Security” to over million employees, manned the FEMA camps with armed MP’s, launched the ICE centers, sold himself wholesale to the Bilderberg mob. He shredded the constitution, eliminated Habeas Corpus, filled his administration with the same criminal political mafia that has haunted our country forever. And when the Occupy Protests started, the Federal Government (under executive directives) launched a Cointelpro operation where they were coordinating raids against dozens of our camps throughout the nation and sending Homeland Security en masse to stalk us, arrest us, beat us, wipe us out. From BUSH nothing changed – it only got worse.

The recently passed dictatorial order “National Defense Resources Preparedness Executive Order” does to the country as a whole what the NDAA did to the Constitution – completely evaporates any form of due process or judicial oversight for any action taken by the Government in the interest of “national security.” This new Executive Order gives supreme power to the president and his cabinet. The Secretary of Defense has power over all water resources; The Secretary of Commerce has power over all material services and facilities, including construction materials; The Secretary of Transportation has power over all forms of civilian transportation; The Secretary of Agriculture has power over food resources and facilities, livestock plant health resources, and the domestic distribution of farm equipment; The Secretary of Health and Human Services has power over all health resources; The Secretary of Energy has power over all forms of energy. Don’t believe? Read here:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/03/16/executive-order-national-defense-resources-preparedness

What is the alternative? No challenge from the left, and the Republican role call of candidates is symbolically as disgusting as the reality at hand. Romney (the Bilderberg stooge), GinGrinch (the Bohemian Grove puppet), Bachmann (the Tea Party ignoramus), Cain (the Federal Reserve implant) and Santorum (the anti-gay nut-job literally named after sloppy queer buck-shot ass-froth).

You know you are absolutely f**ked when Ron Paul is the last true beacon of hope and rational sanity. But when a situation this critical arises, you better pray to whatever deity you subscribe that the crazy guy from Texas whose spent 50+ years ranting about the Orwellian Conspiracy makes it into office. In terms of Paul, he has as many goofy views as he does legitimate ones – and as a third party can fairly much give the Tea Party AND Occupy essentially what they want, or launch us in the direction of clarity. All Ron Paul really needs is 24 hours in office and he’ll wave his crazy old man magic wand and undo everything the Bilderberg/Grove mob put into play through one savage pen stroke.

But reality is reality, and Ron Paul is not going to win. Even if he won the popular vote (as he actually might in Texas and California – something no one in the establishment media wants to ponder) they wouldn’t let him take office. And Romney is not going to win either – there’s no way. A Mormon will not be allowed in the White House. So get used to it – it’s going to be 4 more years of Barack Obama and his raised-chin, resurrected Egyptian Pharaoh bullshit.

And I still haven’t even gotten to my main point – BOHEMIAN GROVE. An old CIA guy once told a friend of mine: “Believe nothing you read and only half of what you see.” Damn skippy.

When the OCCUPY Protests began – when legitimate dissent was under constant threat from gangs of riot cops in storm trooper gear – I kept telling people that we would eventually reach this point. When the charge was led against the obvious, fathomable targets (banks, corporations, corrupt politicians) it would eventually lead down the path I was assured it would. Chiefly, that long, winding road of inescapable conspiracy involving all those scary esoteric fraternities and royal bloodlines. I knew Occupy would soon find itself mired in OCCUPY BILDERBERG, OCCUPY FREEMASONRY, OCCUPY AGENDA 21, OCCUPY GOLDEN DAWN, OCCUPY THULE SOCIETY, OCCUPY SKULL and BONES, OCCUPY FEDERAL RESERVE – all the way down the line, to OCCUPY HOLLOW EARTH. Which is why I’ve gone whole-hog to try and maneuver the Occupy zeitgeist at one target in particular – OCCUPY BOHEMIAN GROVE.

Never heard of this? It’s because you aren’t supposed to know. They’ve flexed all their muscle to bury this from the public for 123 years, but you can’t stop a revelation thats time has come. So imagine if once a year the grand puppetmasters of the 1% all gather together for their own clandestine Burning Man gathering deep in the redwoods of Northern California.

Bohemian Grove is a super-exclusive encampment/party for the most corrupt of “The 1%” whose attendees have included every Republican President since 1888 as well as Fox News CEO Rupert Murdoch, Warren Buffet, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Henry Kissinger, Alan Greenspan, Karl Rove, Norman Schwarzkopf and the Rockefeller Family. Other names include high-ranking members of ALEC, NATO, NAFTA, Stratfor, Haliburton, The United Nations, Bilderberg Group, CIA, FBI, Federal Reserve and the 9/11 Commission report committee. The list continues to spiral with a laundry list of major players in world politics, big business,the banking industry and the military industrial complex.

Those involved are either guests or members of “The Bohemian Club.” Formed in the 1870’s as something resembling an artists’ retreat, this 2700 acre campground (dubbed “Bohemian Grove”) exists 75 miles north of San Francisco. This camp was slowly bought out and became an annual, clandestine party.

Every year from mid-July to the beginning of August, these men hold secretive “Lakeside Talks.” This is the cause of concern – secret seminars involving unbelievable concentrations of wealth and power. One can ask “if it’s secret, how do you know about this?” Because while the contents of these talks remain a mystery, we know for a fact they take place. Also, program guides which have been leaked contain dubious speeches involving everything from reshaping the Middle East through NATO involvement, nuclear energy, prison systems, war strategy, banking cartels, etc.

But here’s where it gets weird – it’s not just a normal camp. You have entire sectors of industry and government camping together by occupation – 118 of these different camps. A major sector of the worldwide banking structure have been secretively, annually and historically camping together as “The Lost Angels.” It’s like a virtual world in itself that’s a cross between an Ewok Village of Endor and a pseudo-mystical, closet queer “Illuminati bathhouse.” They even have “camp valets” which are male prostitutes who accompany guests for both weeks.

Does that make you feel warm and fuzzy inside? Or that the campground is lit by torches, has a mock pagan altar surrounded by a giant pentagram and an “eternal flame” genie lamp in the middle that’s been lit since the 1930’s?Or that there’s even a 30 foot high Buddha shrine thrown in for good measure?

That’s just the tip of the iceburg. The reason The Grove has been so infamous is because the “Cremation of Care” ceremony. You might have heard something in passing – some weird shit about an owl statue, some occult talk before shrugging it off. Well, this centerpiece has been infiltrated and filmed by Alex Jones of Infowars and twice by the BBC:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTVTk3_lttw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHeP4OGZO0g

While many conspiracy types have bought this claim as if this is some literal black magic rite, the more plausible answer is the one given to us by the Bohemian Club itself. Once they couldn’t hide it anymore, they released a statement following the BBC infiltration. Basically, this weird ritual I will describe was part of a larger play that went on in the late 1800’s. The ritual was eventually separated from the larger play and used as a party-initiating spectacle on the big first night.

So while these people look terrifying in their robes, this is more a “Fred Flintstone in the Loyal Order of Water Buffaloes” sort of thing. At least theoretically, until you see some of the more disturbing photographs. In fact, even in a cartoon vaudeville context, it’s extremely creepy.

To kick-start the two-week party, our leaders gather around a man made lake in the middle of The Grove. At the shoreline of this lake is a 40 foot stone owl, which is the mascot of Bohemian Club. Dubbed “Moloch” by conspiracy types (but actually called “The Owl of Bohemia” by club members) this owl statue is terrifying looking – ominous, huge and half covered in moss like some pagan black magic god. While the rest of the clubwatches from wooden bleachers, about two dozen Grovers march out in druid-like outfits holding lit torches.

They are cloaked in red KKK-like outfits and are carrying a funeral coffin that is dubbed “care.” Inside this coffin is the dummy of a human that represents the Club’s pent up “cares.” It is placed under this monstrous and gigantic owl statue. The show then begins. The owl speaks from recording equipment rigged inside the hollow statue andrecites a creepy sermon, laughing a mad laugh. Those in the druid hoods then set this coffin on fire with their torches in what appears to be a mock human sacrifice. Pyrotechnics then explode everywhere.

Now, perhaps it really is a “Water Buffaloes” thing, but that’s not really important. They can start wars, destroy the economy, crush our civil liberties and the general populous expects it. But this thing? If we convince even a small portion of the Right Wing, God-Fearing, Tea Partyin’ Christian masses that this is real, we have a wildfire on our hands. As always, they’ll see only what they want to see – namely, Satan incarnate, or what have you.

Bottom line is it’s freakish and damaging beyond all belief. And once this thing gets entrenched in the national dialogue in a serious way, the GinGrinch’s of the world simply cannot talk their way out of it. No way – it’s the ultimate skeleton in their closet and we’ve built an international coalition to relentlessly expose this.

Everything Bohemian Grove represents is in one microcosm all that is inherently wrong about these individuals we’ve collectively deemed “The 1%” and this is clear evidence of clandestine monopoly through 1% brotherhood. Until these people are removed from power – until we finally cast off the ancient, lingering chains of the HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE, the World Bank and the NWO in the broadest sense possible – we will never know peace. Your children will never have a future. Natural time will never be restored. The wars will not cease, because they are only meant to be sustained and never won. They are not for the issues of terrorism or national security, but rather highly crafted products of an international criminal cartel. OBAMA and ROMNEY are the same person and to vote for them is to vote for the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, the Bushes.

Please join us this July:

OCCUPY BOHEMIAN GROVE: July 2012 // Monte RIO, CA // FAQ
c/o The Occupy Bohemian Grove PDX Committee ( @occupybhgrove )
http://www.scribd.com/doc/86505846/Occupy-Bohemian-Grove-July-2012 |

xXx

Dr. Ryan Bartek ( bigshinyprison@gmail.com | ryanbartek.angelfire.com/blog )
The Anomie PR Team ( doctorbartek@hotmail.com | anomiepsyops@hotmail.com )

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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/2012/04/occupy_bohemian_grove.jpg

Related Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm2gGm9_tPc

Show Your Support: https://www.wepay.com/donate/ironboltbruce

Tag: #bohemiangrove, #occupybohemiangrove, #occupywallstreet, #occupywallst, #occupy, #ows, #obama, #romney, #99spring

Key: bohemian grove, occupy bohemian grove, occupy wall street, occupy movement, obama, romney, 99% spring co-opts ows

 

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This document may contain links shortened using http://tinyurl.com to facilitate emailing. If you are concerned we might use them to cloak phishing or malware, we recommend you open them with this: http://longurl.org. Also our thanks to the miami beach web design, miami beach web designer and miami beach web developer that support our efforts.

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Take Over the Wells Fargo Shareholder Meeting April 24, 10 am

When: April 24, 2012 @ 10:00 am – 4:00 pm
Where: Merchants Exchange Building
465 California St
San Francisco,CA 94104

Meet at Justin Herman Plaza
Near the Embarcadero BART where Market St. ends at Stuart
March to Merchants Exchange Building 465 California St.
Wells Fargo profits at the cost of our communities:

America’s Biggest Tax Dodger – Hoarding billions of tax dollars that should be paying for public services and putting America back to work
Leads in Foreclosure – Continuing to foreclose on families in an economy it helped to ruin
Predatory Lender – Targeting those who can least afford it with exploitive mortgages and payday lending,especially low-income communities of color
Corrupting our Democracy – Protecting its profits by quadrupling spending on lobbying since the financial crisis began
Prison Profiteer – Profiting from increased incarceration by investing heavily in for-profit prison corporations and anti-immigrant legislation

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Seeds & Ladders. A Conversation with Permaculture Designer Jenny Pell, Pacific Northwest. By Willi Paul, Permaculture Exchange

Seeds & Ladders. A Conversation with Permaculture Designer Jenny Pell,
Pacific Northwest. By Willi Paul, Permaculture Exchange

 

http://planetshifter.com/node/2007

 

“Another metaphor that I use a lot is one of abundance and how can you
expect the table to be full and abundant if you don’t bring something
to the table? People in our culture have a bad habit of filling up at
the table where someone else planted, harvested, and cooked the food,
eating more than their fill, and then walking away without doing the dishes!
You need to bring something to the table, and I don’t really care what it is,
it just needs to be something! You could be a knitter, you could be a cobbler,
you could be a seamstress, you could care for children, you could tell stories,
you could play music. It doesn’t really matter what it is because there’s no
judgment or standard for what it means.” JP

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OCCUPY420!!! LEGALIZE!!!

OCCUPY 420!!! Legalize Cannabis!!!
        #OpCannabis

http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2012/04/opcannabis_anonymous_marijuana.php

SUPPORT CCHHI !!! JOIN US GET INVOLVED!!!

https://www.facebook.com/groups/cchhi2012

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Occupy Oakland, Permitted Protest, and Police Repression: The State Will Never Protect Those They Are at War With

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/04/17/occupy-oakland-permitted-protest-and-police-repression/

by MIKE KING

As the Occupy movement around the country begins to get more involved in immigrant struggles, or around the struggles of people of color more generally, complicated questions of race and risk, tactics and differential legal consequences for people of color are arising.  These are complicated questions that are not new, and certainly have no clear or easy answer.  This May 1st in Oakland, the main May Day march is being organized by the Coalition for Dignity and Resistance, which is comprised mainly of various immigrants’ rights groups and some people from Occupy Oakland.  They are planning a permitted march from the Fruitvale neighborhood in East Oakland to Oscar Grant Plaza, with a permitted event at the Plaza.  It should be noted that this has been the march route every year for the last 6 years, and it has always been permitted, in an effort to provide a safe space for undocumented immigrants to protest.  Nevertheless, there was a highly contentious debate around permits in Occupy Oakland for a number of reasons, not least of which was the fact that the last time a permit was taken out in the Plaza (again, without Occupy Oakland’s approval) it led to targeted raids on people in the Plaza for violating the stringent terms of the permit.  These reasons were made clear to the coalition and Occupy Oakland has never supported any permits in OG Plaza.  The concerns on both sides are completely legitimate.  The question that has arisen and has yet to be adequately answered is, “How do we come together, from different experiences, identities and politics, and work together in a way that is mutually respectful without sacrificing core commitments to our respective movements?”  Personalizing these differences is not constructive.   These are hard questions.  How do we provide security for people in our movements?  What is security?  How can militant direct action take place in a way that doesn’t turn vulnerable populations into police targets?

In the often muddy overlap between race and political position, it is easy to essentialize.  For white radicals this can mean drawing a political line around not granting the State legitimacy by asking permission to protest, a position I generally agree with, but one that admittedly glosses over, at times, the differential policing and legal treatment of people of color, the undocumented in particular.  For organizers of color, taking the most ignorant arguments of individual white protesters as representative of all white protesters is a way of avoiding political discussion.   Insinuating that the legitimate concerns about permits, and their negative consequences for Occuppiers, Occupiers of color in particular, is ultra-leftist or dismissive of communities of color itself glosses serious issues of race and police power.  The crux of the matter is far more complicated.

Police, Permits and Vulnerability in Context 

Oakland’s recent history of permitted events in Occupy Oakland and the earlier Oscar Grant movement should inform this discussion.  In the Oscar Grant movement, multi-racial street militancy resulted in young black men facing serious charges, while white protesters largely saw their charges dropped.  A legitimate debate arose in the movement, which I never felt was adequately addressed, around what we should do about this.  Many black organizers pointed to the contradiction that a movement oriented towards ending police targeting of communities of color, was leading to the incarceration of more people of color.  Most of the white street militants never really engaged this debate.  The response was largely that white anti-capitalists don’t have any control over what the police do and we must respect a diversity of tactics.  Here we had a shining example of how the “non-violent” position and the “diversity of tactics” position both missed the mark completely and people in the movement simply talked past each other, or never really engaged in the discussion.  The march on November 5, 2010, after the sentencing of Johannes Mehserle, was permitted to try to create a safe place for people of color to protest.  The police revoked the permit at the last minute and, when we marched anyway, arrested over 150 people in mass arrests, a large number of whom were people of color.  The movement faded and the lessons were only learned by a small number of people.  Talking past each other, or essentializing each other, failing to address each other’s legitimate concerns amidst political difference, on political terms, will keep us repeating these mistakes.

Looking at the history of the immigrants rights movement and the young Occupy movement shows that while seeking protection through permits often does not work, hiding behind a diversity of tactics doesn’t work either.  I hope we have it in us to develop a praxis around security that seriously questions permits but also dispenses with the philosophy of “anything goes.”  The same State that wants to see us all gone will never deal with us in an even-handed way.  This doesn’t mean that concerns about security are liberal or that they should be dismissed.  How do we come to terms with this?  How do we attempt to provide security, without that security being at the whim of a police force, city government and a system of law, that wishes us harm and that we all oppose?  I’m not saying I have the answer, but I think collectively we could find one.  Or make one.

Occupy Oakland has never taken out a permit for any event.  However a small group did take out a permit for Oscar Grant Plaza without the endorsement of Occupy Oakland.  Although the permit would have ostensibly allowed people to safely maintain a presence in the park, without police harassment, this turned out to be far from reality.  The permit was used in a series of late night raids on the Plaza in late-December, and into January.  People were arrested for possession of a blanket, sleeping on benches, and other petty infractions that were violations of the permit, but otherwise legal.  Instead of keeping the police out, the permit invited them in.  One man, Kali (Marcel Johnson), was arrested for possessing a blanket, denied psych medication in jail, and is now being charged with assaulting a corrections officer.  All of this started with increased and targeted policing around the enforcement of the permit.  Over 40 people were arrested in these raids, many charged with trumped-up felonies.  They were disproportionately people of color, particularly those facing serious charges.  These two examples clearly show how, in Oakland in the last few years, permits have not kept vulnerable populations safe.   In fact, permits have been used as an effective weapon against the social movements that have pursued them, particularly targeting people of color in those movements.

The Myth of Effective, “Sanctioned Non-Violence” 

The strength of any movement, regardless of tactics, is its ability to disrupt the smooth functioning of the existing order.  A key way that the police have sought to contain protest movements for the last four decades is through the normalization of permits.  I was interviewed by Kevin Fagan of the San Francisco chronicle in the lead-up to the December 12, 2011 West Coast Port Shutdown.  His questions and thearticle he wrote centered around, “how do we get protesters to obey police orders and peacefully submit to arrests like they did in the 60s?”  He kept asking, “How can we have good relations between the police and protesters like we had in the 60s?”  My head filled with images of Fred Hampton’s apartment, police dogs, FBI surveillance and political prisoners.  What Fagan and his quoted police sources were alluding to, the “good, permitted, obedient” protesters of the early Civil Rights movement, is a complete historical farce.  People were non-violent, people did submit to arrest, but within a very explicit strategy of taking personal risk in mostly un-permitted civil disobedience designed to expose the violence inherent in the existing order.  Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote “Letter From Birmingham Jail” while being held for protesting without a permit.  His words in that letter reflect his pacifist position on the law, permits, and social change very clearly:

“Sometimes a law is just on its face and unjust in its application.  For instance, I have been arrested on a charge of parading without a permit.  Now, there is nothing wrong in having an ordinance which requires a permit for a parade.  But such an ordinance becomes unjust when it is used to maintain segregation and to deny citizens the First Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and protest.”

There were no “free speech zones” at Civil Rights protests in part because of the overtly racist nature of the State, but also because a large part of the point was that people don’t need to ask for free speech, they have it inherently already.  The attempts to suppress that free speech laid bare the bankruptcy of the Jim Crow South in a strategic way that advanced the movement.  King makes clear that that was the strategy.  The norms of permitted marches, and non-violent civil disobedience coordinated with police came years later, as police sought to prevent disruptive tactics, whether they be militant or pacifist.  Through negotiated management the police were able to take personal risk out of the equation and obtain undue influence over social movements, which has consistently deprived many movements of their ability to effectively disrupt everyday life, regardless of the tactics used.

I am not suggesting undocumented immigrants put themselves at further risk, or that permits are a bad idea in all contexts, but we should see them as what they are, and in historical context, and weigh their costs and benefits.  Are there ways in which we can keep vulnerable populations safe at protests while not counting on the police to do it for us?  Four years ago, there was a large ICE raid the day after the May Day marches in the Bay Area.  The community mobilized and responded, which was followed by another ICE raid the following day.  These raids did not come at the marches or protests, they came after.  By no means can it be argued that the permits led to the raids.  It seems likely that they were timed as a means of harassment of the immigrants’ rights movement and a flaunting of the State’s power to target immigrant communities, even within the various sanctuary cities of the Bay Area.  While permits are not to blame for ICE’s actions, they cannot provide the type of security they are being pursued to provide.

Occupy Oakland has never sought permits, despite the fact that we also have many people in the movement who are police targets, often racialized police targets.  I have already mentioned Kali, who is looking at years in prison.  An undocumented Occupier, Francisco “Pancho” Ramos-Stierle, was arrested and eventually released after public outcry.  A victory, but not something we should count on in the future.  We have had two people of color charged with lynching, for allegedly trying to free themselves from police custody.  We have three people, two of them black, facing a hate crime charge after being attacked by a white counter-protester.  Kerie Campbell, a single mother, recently had a court take her children away because she took them to Occupy events.  We have unconstitutional “stay away” orders on many people from Occupy Oakland, preventing them from attending meetings and protests.  We have been and will continue to resist these various repression efforts, which have only been aided by the one permit that was taken out.  Another permit in Oscar Grant Plaza will surely compound these problems.

Again, I am not making an argument about militant versus pacifist tactics, but about the efforts we use or don’t use to attempt to protect the people in our movements and the likely outcomes of those efforts.  This isn’t an argument to have a “diversity of tactics” march with large numbers of undocumented immigrants.  I would not be surprised if we saw a bit of non-strategic militance in Oakland on May Day (away from the march), as we have seen in major Occupy actions in the past.  Ironically, the biggest action Occupy Oakland be involved in, on a May Day full of various actions, is mass civil disobedience to shut down the Golden Gate Bridge, in solidarity with workers who are planning to strike that day.  This is about effective, strategic disruption on one level, but this critique does not disregard the precariousness of immigrant communities or suggest that everyone should be at risk.  It is an understatement to say those same communities are at risk just trying to work and live in this country.  More fundamentally this critique is about the inherent problems involved with seeking state-sanctioned tools to protect people that inadvertently turn into highly effective instruments of police repression.  We are all in the streets, in large part, because the State is not an arbiter of justice.  Entrusting the State with legitimate jurisdiction over our actions does not guarantee security – it guarantees insecurity and future repression.

Mike King is a PhD candidate at UC–Santa Cruz and an East Bay activist, currently writing a dissertation about counter-insurgency against Occupy Oakland.  He can be reached at mking(at)ucsc.edu. 

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How to Protect Students from Sexual Violence? Pepper Spray Them!

Last week, the UC Davis “Pepper Spray Incident Task Force,” dubbed the “Reynoso Task Force” for its chair, Law School Professor Emeritus and former California Supreme Court Justice Cruz Reynoso, released its report. The conclusion was that the pepper spraying of studentsseated in the Quad on November 18, 2011 “should and could have been prevented.” Well it’s a relief that the task force’s three-and-a-half-month investigation proved what pretty much all of us who watched the red spray come out of that hose over and over again on our television screens surmised.

The task force was specifically not charged with recommending discipline against any individuals, though it does find that Chancellor Linda Katehi and police chief police Annette Spicuzza showed “lack of leadership” (no doubt some right-wing pundits will use this as evidence that women should not be chancellors or police chiefs – I might agree but for different reasons). The task force criticized Lt. John Pike for using the spray at closer range than recommended by the manufacturer, though in fact, the report also notes that campus police are not authorized to carry that high-powered spray device at all.

Most disturbing to me was the section called “Background,” which explained that the context for the administration’s decision to break up the encampment on campus violently nearly as soon as it began was based on reports – false, as it turned out – that there were “non-affiliates” from Occupy Oakland participating.

Such “outside agitator” claims have been leveled at campus movements since – well probably since Harvard, the first college in the thirteen British colonies on American soil, opened its doors in 1636. Writes Jo Freeman, in “What Happened at Berkeley: How the Cold War Culture of Anti-Communism Shaped Protest in the Sixties”:

“The pivotal event in California was the San Francisco general strike of 1934, which badly scared the Regents of the University of California. To appease the Regents and reassure the legislature that the University was in safe hands, President Robert Gordon Sproul issued some new regulations. These regulations limited on-campus speakers to persons approved by the administration, and prohibited “exploitation” of the University’s prestige by unqualified persons.”

In the early sixties, the presence of non-student activists from the Congress On Racial Equality at a literature table touched off U.C. Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement. When I was at Oberlin in the late seventies, a forum on divestment from South Africa was nearly cancelled by the administration because of the threat that one actual Black South African, who was not a student, might try to speak.

In fact, the fears expressed by the UC Davis administration hearken back to those halcyon days.

… the Chancellor explained her concerns about the involvement of “non-affiliates” with the UC Davis Occupy movement and encampment. Chancellor Katehi stated, “We were worried at the time about that [nonaffiliates] because the issues from Oakland were in the news and the use of drugs andsex and other things, and you know here we have very young students . . . we were worried especially about having very young girls and other students with older people who come from the outside without any knowledge of their record….”

Vice Chancellor Meyer expressed similar concerns in an interview conducted on Dec. 7. He explained, “our context at the time was seeing what’s happening in the City of Oakland, seeing what’s happening in other municipalities across the country, and not being able to see a scenario where [a UC Davis Occupation] ends well . . . Do we lose control and have non-affiliates become part of an encampment? So my fear is a longterm occupation with a number of tents where we have an undergraduate student and a non-affiliate and there’s an incident. And then I’m reporting to a parent that a nonaffiliated has done this unthinkable act with your daughter, and how could we let that happen?”

It’s good to know that university administrators are so concerned about protecting women on their campuses from rapists. One assumes that we are going to see police wielding pepper spray canisters at the doors to every fraternity party at Davis from now on.

The website of UC Davis’s Men Acting Against Rape provides these statistics from the U.S. Department of Justice-Violence Against Women Office.

  • In a survey of college women, 38% reported sexual victimization which met the legal definition of a rape or attempted rape, yet only 1 out of every 25 reported their assault to the police.
  • In a study of college students, 35% of men indicated some likelihood that they would commit a violent rape of a woman who had fended off an advance if they were assured of getting away with it.
  • 1 in 12 male students surveyed had committed acts that met the legal definition of rape. Furthermore, 84% of the men who had committed such acts said what they had done was definitely not rape.

So how does the University of California deal with “affiliates” who actually victimize their women students, as opposed to theoretical nonaffiliates who might?

According to a 2000 report, “Reports of rapes and sexual assaults at University of California campuses are seldom included in the campus security report.” Speaking specifically about the Davis campus, the Sacramento Bee charged that “Students and parents have not been provided with adequate safety information.”

At UC Irvine last year, the student regent was found guilty of “unwanted touching”– i.e., sexual assault – by a college disciplinary board and placed on academic probation, but not removed from his position representing the student body on the powerful Board of Regents. By contrast, 30 students who participated in civil disobedience actions at the college were criminally prosecuted for misdemeanors, and given suspensions and community service by the college disciplinary committee.

Besides being racist fear-mongering, the claim that the encampment at Davis was full of “nonaffiliates” from Occupy Oakland also turned out to be completely fictitious. According to the Task Force report:

“One UC Davis police officer who spent the night at a Mrak Hall protest on Nov. 15 wrote that “the majority (of protesters) were NOT affiliated with the University [but were] part of the ‘Occupy’ movement.” UC Davis Police Chief Spicuzza informed the Leadership Team that her officers suggested that 80% of the protesters participating in the encampment on the Quad were not students….

Assistant Vice Chancellor Castro informed the Leadership Team that based on her observations of the Occupy encampment on the quad on Nov. 17, “the only non-affiliates I saw were people from the interfaith communities providing food … and they were not spending the night.”

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