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Civil Disobedience Action At APEC CEO Summit

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

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.”

Signs Of Our Times

Tens of thousands rallied in San Francisco on October 28 to call for a ceasefire in Gaza and then marched to disrupt traffic on the freeway to get the attention of an otherwise inattentive press. That demonstration joined multitudes globally protesting the on-going genocide. Signs read, “You can’t hide genocide.” “Genocide Joe” placards connected the dots to the White House’s complicity with the collective punishment of civilians. “Free Palestine!” signs proliferated. Another sign said, “America’s 9/11 is Palestine’s 24/7.” “We are all Palestinians” signs voiced a message of solidarity and common humanity. “US Jews say ceasefire now!” signs were prominent. A clear distinction was drawn between cultural Judaism and political Zionism. The latter weaponizes religion in service of settler colonialism and is an adjunct of US imperialism. The slogan “never again,” a reaction to the original genocide committed against the Jews, has taken on new meaning to anti-Zionist Jews protesting the current holocaust being perpetrated in their name.

No To APEC Coalition Calls On City Officials To Defend Free Speech

San Francisco - The No to APEC Coalition demands immediate action by Mayor London Breed, the federal government, and all San Francisco elected officials to reaffirm long standing support for civil and human rights, rights to free speech, protest, and dissent during the upcoming Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) “Economic Leaders’ Week” and “CEO Summit,” in November 11-18, 2023. “The Department of Homeland Security has designated the APEC Summit as a ‘National Special Security Event.’ The Secret Service is creating a protest exclusion zone around the Moscone Center, where the event will take place, which threatens to prevent the public from exercising its First Amendment right to protest within sight and sound of the APEC and CEO summit delegates.

No Business As Usual At Rally In Solidarity With Gaza

As people got off work on Thursday evening, October 19, the street in front of the Federal Building in San Francisco swelled with a spirited crowd chanting, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” An ocean of demonstrators had stopped traffic as Homeland Security police looked on and a helicopter hovered overhead. With less than 24 hours’ notice, the “All Out for Gaza” emergency protest amassed two to three thousand demanding an end to the siege on Gaza and an immediate cessation of US aid to Israel. Organizers included Al-Awada, Arab Resource and Organizing Center, Jewish Voice for Peace, Party for Socialism and Liberation, Palestinian Youth Movement, and Workers World Party.

Chesa Boudin On Decarceration In Our Lifetimes

San Francisco joined the short list of cities with reform-oriented prosecutors in 2019 with the election of Chesa Boudin, a rising star in the progressive prosecutor movement. The child of two parents incarcerated for their involvement with the leftist group Weather Underground, Boudin campaigned on ending cash bail, decarceration, and police accountability. The city saw many real results as he followed through on several of these promises his first year in the role. Boudin forbade his staff from requesting money bail under any circumstances, San Francisco’s jail population dropped by 25%, and law enforcement officers were charged in three different police brutality cases.5591

Lessons From San Francisco About Overcoming Our Transit Deficit

Many a scholar and policy analyst has lamented the United States’ dependence on cars and the corresponding lack of federal investment in public transportation throughout the latter decades of the 20th century. But as I show in my new book, “The Great American Transit Disaster,” our transit networks are bad for a very simple reason: We wanted it this way. Focusing on Baltimore, Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Boston and San Francisco, I trace the overwhelming evidence that transit disinvestment was a choice rather than destiny. There were a few exceptions to this mostly distressing story – such as San Francisco, where the publicly-owned Municipal Railway, or Muni, offers positive lessons for contemporary policymakers, politicians and voters.

Graffiti Writers Paint Over A Pro-Police ‘Street Art’ Campaign

A “street art” campaign backed by Welsh tech billionaire and venture capitalist Michael Moritz is being targeted by graffiti artists in San Francisco, California. The campaign features posters and even wheat-pastes which call for a “law and order” approach to homelessness and fentanyl related deaths in San Francisco. Moritz, in an effort to further social cleanse the poor from urban core areas, along with many on the Right, have rushed to blame “the Left” for rising homelessness, crime rates and drug use in San Francisco. In February, the New York Times published an editorial by Moritz entitled, Even Democrats Like Me Are Fed Up With San Francisco, which echoed far-Right talking points demonizing those most displaced and excluded from the capitalist system.

San Francisco Considers $5 Million Reparations Payouts

San Francisco, California - These were some of the more than 100 recommendations made by a city-appointed reparations committee tasked with the thorny question of how to atone for centuries of slavery and systemic racism. And the San Francisco Board of Supervisors hearing the report for the first time Tuesday voiced enthusiastic support for the ideas listed, with some saying money should not stop the city from doing the right thing. Several supervisors said they were surprised to hear pushback from politically liberal San Franciscans apparently unaware that the legacy of slavery and racist policies continues to keep Black Americans on the bottom rungs of health, education and economic prosperity, and overrepresented in prisons and homeless populations.

1,000 SFO Restaurant Workers Go On Strike

Restaurant workers at San Francisco International Airport declared a general strike early Monday morning after more than nine months of negotiations with their employers.  Unite Here Local 2, the union representing SFO's food service workers, announced in a press release that 1,000 of SFO's cashiers, cooks, baristas, bartenders, servers and dishwashers are participating in the strike. The workers are employed by 84 airport restaurant outlets, all of whom are represented by the SFO Airport Restaurant Employer Council.  "The workers' compensation is currently not enough to live on," Anand Singh, president of Unite Here Local 2, told SFGATE. "[The employers] have not moved nearly enough to get to the place where we can make a deal on a new contract. And that's why we've had to go down this road."

41 Arrested In San Francisco Airport Fast Food Worker Protest

Forty-one people were arrested Friday at San Francisco International Airport as airport fast food workers protested their wages, according to Unite Here, the union that represents many SFO workers. The protesters sat on the airport road outside Terminal 3, blocking traffic. Hundreds of workers and supporters showed up to join in the protest, chanting and forming picket lines. Politicians such as State Senator Josh Becker and Assemblymember Ash Kalra were also at the protest. Most fast food workers at SFO make $17.05 per hour according to the union, which is less than many meals cost at the airport. Some workers said they have not had a raise in three years and have to work multiple jobs to make ends meet. “I have to work two jobs to support my family, and I’m exhausted from living on four hours of sleep a day,” said Lucinda To, a lounge attendant at the United Club and a server at Cat Cora’s Kitchen at SFO.

A New Effort In San Francisco Aims To Debate Rent At The Bargaining Table

San Francisco, California - On April 11, tenant representatives from the Veritas Tenants Association gathered at the mailbox at 150 Larkin St. across the lawn from San Francisco City Hall. They dropped 15 letters to their landlord, Veritas Investments, the largest landlord in San Francisco and the subject of lawsuits alleging tenant harassment, into the mailbox. “We will show what it means to unionize the biggest private landlord in S.F.,” tenant Madelyn McMillian said. “We will be bargaining on a full range of issues affecting our lives.” The letters presented majority approval of tenant associations in 15 Veritas buildings and asked that Veritas formally acknowledge the unions under a new San Francisco “Right to Organize” ordinance, which went into effect April 11.

TANC Organizing Committee On San Francisco’s ‘Right To Organize’

In February, San Francisco officials amended administrative code to “require residential landlords to allow tenant organizing activities to occur in common areas of the building; require certain residential landlords to recognize duly-established tenant associations, confer in good faith with said associations, and attend some of their meetings upon request; and provide that a landlord’s failure to allow organizing activities or comply with their obligations as to tenant associations may support a petition for a rent reduction.” They call it the “right to organize.” While the media and some tenant organizations hailed the legislation as an unprecedented expansion of tenant rights, in key ways the legislation limits its nominal goal and solidifies conditions that undermine mass tenant power.

A School Created A Homeless Shelter In The Gym And It Paid Off In The Classroom

San Francisco, California - On a Friday evening in the fall of 2019, Maria Flores stood waiting with her “crazy heavy” duffel bag and her teenage son outside the office of a man whose home she cleans. A friend of hers had told him that Flores had been evicted from the apartment she had lived in for 16 years. There, the single mom had paid $700 a month in rent ever since she’d moved in eight-months pregnant. Now, one night at a motel cost as much as $250. “Every single day I was looking for a place to live,” Flores said. He’d offered two air mattresses, keys to his office, and permission to sleep there on weekends. For the better part of a year, Flores, who asked to use only one of her two surnames, lived that way: Back and forth, spend and scrimp.

The Effort To Recall Progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin

Chesa Boudin has been serving San Franciscans as their district attorney for nearly two years. He is a leading progressive in what has been called the progressive prosecutors’ movement. Other progressive district attorneys in that small cohort are George Gascon in Los Angeles and Larry Krasner in Philadelphia. In Berger v. United States https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/295/78/, the Supreme Court said that the duty of a prosecutor “in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done.” Yet all too many prosecutors are more concerned with winning cases than with doing justice, which includes the protection of constitutional rights. Boudin campaigned by proposing solutions to the disaster of mass incarceration, one of the leading civil rights issues of our time.
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