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San Francisco

A People’s History Of San Francisco’s Most Notorious Neighborhood

April 1, 2025 Steve Early, Popular Resistance. , , ,
Few San Francisco neighborhoods have had more ups and downs than the 33-block area still called “The Tenderloin”—a name which derives from the late 19th century police practice of shaking down local restaurants and butcher shops by taking their best cuts of beef in lieu of cash bribes. At various periods in its storied past, the Tenderloin has been home to famous brothels, Prohibition-era speakeasies, San Francisco’s first gay bars, well-known hotels and jazz clubs, film companies and recording studies, and professional boxing gyms. 

Supreme Court Weakens Rules On Discharging Raw Sewage Into Water

March 5, 2025 Cristen Hemingway Jaynes, EcoWatch. , , , , , ,
The United States Supreme Court has voted five to four to weaken rules that govern how much pollution is discharged into the country’s water supply, undermining the 1972 Clean Water Act. The case involved San Francisco suing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) after the city was found to have violated the terms of a permit required for the discharge of wastewater pollution into the Pacific Ocean, reported The Washington Post. San Francisco officials argued that the EPA’s authority had been exceeded due to vague permit rules that made it impossible to tell when a line had been crossed.

Congo Activists To NBA: Black Lives Matter In DRC

February 21, 2025 Ann Garrison, Black Agenda Report. , , , , ,
Activists protested the National Basketball Association's close relationship with Rwanda outside the NBA All Star Game at San Francisco's Chase Center on Sunday, February 16. Their action was complemented by an online appeal to the NBA via their social media platforms particularly on X. The NBA has a longstanding relationship with the Rwandan dictatorship despite decades of UN documentation of its human rights abuses inside Rwanda and war crimes in the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo , where Rwandan troops and the Rwandan-commanded M23 militia now occupy the capital cities of Congo's North and South Kivu Provinces.

Arab Street Corner Bakery Challenges Inequality with Cooperation

January 12, 2025 Mari Nishitani, Grassroots Economic Organizing. , , , , , , ,
Reem’s California is an Arab bakery shop in San Francisco. Proudly embracing the slogan “Arab Street Food made with California Love,” this restaurant serves traditional Arab bread infused with fresh, locally sourced ingredients from California. As soon as you step in, you will be welcomed by a vibrant mural titled “Seeds of Love” which includes a quote by Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan: “If it were in my hands, if I were able to flip this world, if I possessed the ability to fill this world with seeds of love.” This space is filled with the inviting aroma of freshly baked bread, a scent infused with the love, care, and mutual support of Palestinian Americans and local community organizers.

Demand The Reinstatement Of Dr. Rupa Marya At UC San Francisco

December 30, 2024 Alice Rothchild, Mondoweiss. , , , , , ,
In September 2024, the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) placed Dr. Rupa Marya on paid leave and threatened her medical license. These actions against Dr. Marya, a professor of medicine who has written extensively on the health impacts of systemic oppression, provoked many important questions. After being approached by alarmed students, Dr. Marya raised concerns about the implications of admitting students who may have recently served in the Israeli Defense Force, which has credibly been accused of human rights violations, war crimes, and genocide in Gaza and the West Bank.

How San Francisco Longshoremen Made Their Union A Powerhouse

August 13, 2024 Peter Cole, Jacobin. , , , , ,
Peter Cole is a professor of history at Western Illinois University and the author of Dockworker Power: Race & Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area (University of Illinois Press, 2018). In this interview, Cole and Jacobin’s Benjamin Y. Fong discussed the dedication and success of the longshore workers in the 1930s and ’40s in overcoming racial division on the docks. Clips from this interview are included in Episode 6 of Organize the Unorganized (among others), which also includes archival interviews with the first International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) president, Harry Bridges, and the first black president of ILWU Local 10, Cleophas Williams.

Kamala Harris’s Environmental Deceptions

August 10, 2024 Ann Garrison, Black Agenda Report. , , , ,
Richard Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency and the strongest environmental protections the US had ever seen in response to the mass movements of the 1960s. After Nixon, environmental laws gradually improved until Bill Clinton’s administration started rolling them back, especially through global “free trade” deals like NAFTA and those of the WTO, putting the environmental movement on the defensive. Every president since Clinton, Democrat or Republican, has successively worsened environmental protections. Obama expanded fossil fuel production more than any other president in US history, and Biden continued to expand it even more than Trump had. There’s little reason to think that Kamala Harris would be different, and she’s already reversed her opposition to fracking.

Appeal In Biden Gaza Genocide Case Heard Today

June 11, 2024 Center for Constitutional Rights. , , , , , , ,
June 10, 2024, San Francisco, CA – Today before a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, Palestinians from Gaza and Palestinian-Americans with family in Gaza argued that the courts have a constitutional obligation to hear their claims that President Biden, Secretary of State Blinken, and Secretary of Defense Austin violated their legal duty to prevent – and are complicit in – Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The lower court had found a plausible case of genocide and urged the Biden administration to reexamine its “unflagging support” for Israel’s siege of Gaza, but dismissed the lawsuit in January, finding it was not the court’s place to rule on what it determined was a “political question.”

Union Members Step Up And Dig In For Palestine Solidarity

March 6, 2024 Bahaar Tadjbakhsh, Labor Notes. , , ,
When street protests seem ignored by the war machine, what are union members to do? In the San Francisco Bay Area, unions and rank-and-file networks are using direct action and endorsement-revoking campaigns to target the politicians who are still shipping weapons to Israel for its scorched-earth campaign. Meanwhile we’ve held a teach-in and launched campaigns to boycott Israeli goods and divest our pensions from the occupation. Nearly six months in, Israel’s invasion of Gaza is responsible for 30,000 Palestinian deaths and counting. Across the U.S., more than 100 union locals, six internationals, and the AFL-CIO have called for a ceasefire.

Other Avenues Grocery Cooperative

March 6, 2024 Storied: San Francisco, Grassroots Economic Organizing. , , ,
From a collection of neighborhood clubs called the Food Conspiracy, whose motto was, "If you can't walk to Food Conspiracy, it's time for a new Food Conspiracy," to the People's Food System, which included Other Avenues, Rainbow Grocery, Veritable Vegetable, and other co-ops that don't exist anymore, there's proof all over today that cooperative models work. We like the sound of that, in fact, compared to competitive businesses. Other Avenues' doors opened in 1974. By 1987, a hybrid system of worker and community management was adopted. And the worker-owned model that exists today started back in 1999.

Protesters Outside Google Call For Immediate End To ‘Project Nimbus’

December 15, 2023 Rachael Myrow, KQED. , , , , ,
Pro-Palestinian Google employees protested outside Google offices in San Francisco on Thursday to demand the tech giant cancel a $1.2 billion contract — called “Project Nimbus” — with the Israeli government and military. An estimated 500 protesters chanted “Google, Google you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide,” reflecting growing outrage over the contract during Israel’s ongoing bombardment of Gaza. The Israeli Finance Ministry described the Project Nimbus contract as “intended to provide the government, the defense establishment and others with an all-encompassing cloud solution.”

Why Activists Shut Down The 2023 APEC Summit In San Francisco

December 13, 2023 Ju-Hyun Park, The Real News Network. , , , , ,
From Nov. 11-17, leaders from 20 nations across the Pacific Rim gathered in San Francisco for the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit. An activist coalition known as No to APEC greeted the visiting world leaders with a countersummit decrying APEC as a forum to advance the interests of transnational corporations at the expense of workers and the environment. While the Biden administration worked to construct a new free trade regime in the Pacific exclusive of China, known as the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF), grassroots organizations in the No to APEC Coalition advanced an alternate vision of international cooperation and development in opposition to the corporate, pro-war agenda pushed by the US and allied governments at APEC.

No To APEC Coalition Unity Statement

November 20, 2023 International League of People's Struggle, US. , , ,
At the close of our People’s Counter Summit Against APEC, we issued a unity statement to summarize the positions of the No To APEC Coalition during our 2023 campaign culminating in the 800+ person Counter Summit.  The statement is titled “People and Planet against Profit and Plunder: Towards a World Beyond Profit-Oriented Systems!” We publish this statement as the APEC Heads of State concluded their own Summit with the so-called “Golden Gate Declaration” to lay out the rosey-sounding false solutions they spent an entire year writing while desperately-needed practical policies for reversing the global economic, political and climate crises eluded them.

Civil Disobedience Action At APEC CEO Summit

November 17, 2023 No to APEC Coalition, Popular Resistance. , , , ,
San Francisco, CA - Members of the No to APEC Coalition engaged in a civil disobedience action by blocking access to the site of the APEC CEO Summit at the Moscone West Convention Center in defiance of the hyper-militarized structures erected by the local and federal government. This action is the latest effort by the No to APEC Coalition during its months-long campaign to highlight the global and local harms of free trade and global free market agendas while demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.  “We know APEC and IPEF do not represent the interest of the people or the planet,” said Rhonda Ramiro from the No to APEC Coalition.

APEC Summit In San Francisco Met With Mass Protests

November 14, 2023 People's Dispatch. , , , , ,
10,000 people took to the streets on Sunday, November 12 to protest the start of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Leaders Meetings taking place in San Francisco this week. The APEC summit will run from November 11 to 17. The protest took place following a 1,000-person APEC counter-summit on November 11. The mobilizations have been organized by the No to APEC Coalition, which represents almost 150 organizations across the United States. “APEC is the epitome of all that is wicked and corrupt in our society today,” said Simon Ma, a family doctor and member of the anti-imperialist Korean-American organization Nodutdol. He described APEC as a “cabal of billionaires and politicians scheming behind closed doors, trying to come up with new and innovative ways to further exploit the working class of our planet.”
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