Berkeley

6 Things Mainstream Media Won’t Tell About Berkeley Protests

December 10, 2014 Steven Rosenfeld, www.alternet.org Resist! Berkeley, police brutality, Protests

In Berkeley, California, a second consecutive night of demonstrations against police brutality turned ugly late on Sunday when a handful of the 500 protesters who began marching hours before broke police car windows and began vandalizing corporate chain businesses on several commercial streets. By Monday morning, that vandalism was beginning to eclipse the main points that protest organizers have been trying to make about ending the institutional racism in the legal system, as newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle led with businesses “assessing damages” and the local FOX News affiliatedescribed the clean up after “destructive protests.”

Three Nights Of Protests And Aggressive Policing In Berkeley, CA

December 9, 2014 Staff, www.PopularResistance.org Resist! Berkeley, Eric Garner, Ferguson, Michael Brown, Police abuse, police brutality, Police riot, Racism

The corporate media has described protesters in Berkeley destroying property and being violent, but reports from protesters describe it as a police riot. Police have repeated trapped protesters in kettles and made mass arrests, used billy clubs aggressively to attack protesters and used smoke bombs. They describe an organized protest being turned into confused havoc as a result of the 'police riot.' Protesters have been shutting down roadways and highways. The aggressive policing is not stopping the protests. On the third night of protests highways were shutdown and people laid down in front of an Amtrak train; once again there was police kettling and more than 100 were arrested.

UC Berkeley Shuts Down Beehive Collective Art

October 24, 2014 Sue Udry, www.defendingdissent.org Resist! Art, Berkeley, Drought, Freedom of Speech and Assembly, GMOs

Students at the University of California at Berkeley were forced to bring an art project on drought and California water policy to the main campus on October 21 after a dean prevented them displaying it at Gill Tract Community Farm, an “urban farm” in nearby Albany run by the university and community volunteers. The students say that Steven Lindow, executive associate dean of Berkeley’s College of Natural Resources, kicked the exhibit—a collaboration with the Beehive Collective, a political art group based in Maine—off the farm for clearly political reasons. They say that Lindow is tied to the genetically modified organism industry, and their event criticized Proposition 1, a state ballot initiative supported by the GMO industry.

The Legacy And Promise Of The Free Speech Movement

October 4, 2014 Educate! Berkeley, Freedom of Speech and Assembly

At the beginning of the fall term of 1964, the university administration imposed a series of strict regulations limiting the right of students to engage in political soliciting on campus. Berkeley students had for several years been active in opposing the House Un-American Activities Committee, pro-labor, and anti-racism protests and demonstrations throughout the Bay area. This picture of the university as a hotbed of political activism was undermining the carefully honed image being disseminated by the state of California as the leader in public higher education: in the conservative post-war period, Berkeley was being touted as not only a world class research university but at the forefront of preparing a modern elite meritocratic student body primed for corporate and governmental leadership. What the university administration failed to consider was the fact that many activist Berkeley students had embraced new levels of commitment to political organizing by participating in Freedom Summer, an initiative by radical civil rights organizations in the South to mobilize black Americans to challenge segregation and demand voting rights.

UC Berkeley Administrators Not Dismissed from Occupy Cal Lawsuit

January 23, 2014 Somin Park, www.dailycal.org Educate! Berkeley, Rule of Law

U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled the protesters’ allegations are sufficient to suggest the administrators were responsible for failing to prevent the police violence. “The allegations … give rise to a plausible claim that, by the evening, it was or should have been obvious to the UC administrators what would be the likely result of Birgeneau’s directive that they ‘not back down’ on the no-encampment policy: a violent response from the police that would lead to excessive use of force and false arrest by the officers under their control,” Rogers wrote in her ruling.

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