The Kaiser Convention Center should be occupied.

How many cities have a boarded up convention center? 

I know a lot of cities in the USA are just like Oakland and have boarded up businesses, boarded up homes and abandoned properties in them. The new American Gothic includes the homeless encampment in the freeway landscaping and the mentally ill on the sidewalks.  But a whole convention center?  

How do we categorize this problem?  

Mismanagement and neglect would be a good category.  That would lump the convention center in with the rotting Victorian mansions, concessions stands and bathrooms in our parks.  Has anyone from the public seen the inside recently?  Is it OK?  It may not be given the way the old gymnasium in North Oakland was allowed to rot with roof leakage so badly that a million dollar wooden floor is now worthless.  I am very serious, when was the last time that building was inspected or open to a press visit?  This building belongs to us, our city is known for neglect.  IS IT OK?  

Under and miss utilization would be another good category.  Back when the Kaiser Center was ostensibly open it was never really getting the attention and bookings it needed.  This is from the same city government that ropes off downtown and builds fences so that it can charge the public for its Art and Soul Festival but cannot find any events for a major convention center on a lake with a Museum, Junior College and a BART station for direct neighbors.  What I was told by those “in the know” at the time of the closure was that we were going to focus on the Fox Theater.  Is that development?  Build one multimillion dollar facility while we throw another away?  

Fiscal fiasco should also be considered as a category.  Who owns the Kaiser Convention Center now?  Who could sell it?  Who could rent it out?  During the circus that passed for a budget debate 6 months ago we “sold” the building from the City to “Redevelopment”.  The building was used as collateral for some loans that got “transferred to the City Hall building”.  That would mean if we did not pay the debts, we would have to sell City Hall to pay it!  Of course that NEVER happens, but jeez.  A lot of things that “never happen” have been happening in state, county and city budgeting recently.   Did they really go through with that plan or was it just still a plan when the State of California shut down the redevelopment agencies?  If they did, who owns the building now?  There is supposed to be a “successor agency” if I understand it right.  Who is that?

Selling a major asset to pay day-to-day bills is not a secure budget plan.  In fact it is about the worst budget plan.  Things like this make me want to raise the bar on the Council selling off public property.  It just should not be so easy to do.  

So now we have a multimillion dollar, historical convention center boarded up in the middle of our city.  The Occupy protestors who wanted to “Occupy” it would have in effect opened it back up.  We all missed a golden opportunity in a cloud of stubbornness and teargas.  All that Occupy energy could help our city at the Kaiser Convention Center. 

The public should insist that the building be put back into use.  If civic groups can turn it into some kind of civic center and pay the utilities, then the city should allow them to do it.  Right now it is just a scandal.  

One of the things that the occupy encampment showed was how much energy was available for this kind of civic center activity.  That little encampment was feeding and housing homeless people.  They had a free health clinic.  There was a series of art programs.  There was a children’s village.  There were library groups, free school, theater etc.  And the list goes on and on from a media center to community gardens.  

Our convention center is a vacant property.  It needs an occupant and we have a volunteer.

Occupy is a movement, not an organization

Occupy is a movement, not an organization 

The “straw man” is one of the mainstays of dishonest argument.  It is the art of making your opponent out to be something that he or she is not, and then arguing against that “straw man” depiction instead of arguing against what your opponent is really saying.  This is what is being done to the Occupy movement.  It is being made out to be an organization, and an extreme one at that, and then accused of being an irresponsible organization.  

This whole thing did start with some extreme behavior.  

There was the extreme loss of trillions of dollars worth of real estate and stock value around the world in 2008.  The blurred line between mortgages, banks, securities and ratings agencies was extreme. There was some extreme damage to people’s personal lives, their retirements, their home values and for many many many Americans, there was the foreclosures of them homes and no accommodation of the extreme conditions in employment caused by this housing value collapse.  

The tax break offered to the wealthy, while giving the common people a hard shaft of cutbacks was extreme. It started before this securitized mortgages fiasco under Bush and continued to the letter under Obama.  To combine it with the largest income disparity in US post slavery history makes it all the more extreme.  The only thing that caused us to miss how radical it was the slow build up of the effects.  

The bailouts were very extreme.  The excessiveness of it was reckless as was the lack of accountability.  That we did it without a reform of the banking and investment system showed us who our government works for.  To say that the banks paid it all back is to deal in another type of dishonesty and in case you missed it, to hand the biggest failures in financial history since the crash of 29 enough money to consolidate their banks and holdings even more at a time when the peoples government should have been breaking them up is daring and extreme.  

So extreme in fact that it finally provoked a reaction.  That reaction is Occupy.  

Occupy is a movement against economic injustice.  It is an injustice how the rich own our country and its politicians.  It is an injustice to have so much wealth and so little responsibility for it.  It is an injustice to help out those who profit and force cutbacks on those of us who really make the system work.  

The resistance to the war in Vietnam was also a movement, as was the struggle against segregation and for civil rights.  No one group marked it.  At the time all those who headed it up were slandered and hated by our officialdom.  People fought hard and broke the law to stop those injustices.  

And they are doing so now in the Occupy movement.  

Some were camping, that was illegal or was quickly made so.  Some were feeding the homeless, and that has been illegal for a while already.  Some housed the homeless and thus were slandered with whatever the homeless people were doing that could be pointed to as “wrong”.  And some tried to occupy the Kaiser Convention Center with a march.  These groups of Occupy protestors number in the thousands.  

Others call for strikes, picket banks, hand out flyers, setup mobile libraries, feed the homeless too and all kinds of less publicized actions.  Are these actions less publicized because we are non-violent and that does not fit the straw man the opponents of Occupy want to portray?  You will have to ask the army of spin doctors, think tank pundits and PR agents that work directly for the 1%.  Only they know what the plans are.  The rest of us just get to hear the endless repetition of the talking points.  

Right now the talking points say that our straw man had a good idea, but is going about things the wrong, violent way and that they should go home and the problem should be dealt with in the more civilized manner prescribed by the two official political parties.  

Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavez and all the war resistors did not buy that line of bull and we should not either.  The last thing we need is advice from the rich and powerful or the enfranchised bureaucrats on how we should oppose their fiscal policies.  We do not need the master’s permission to cry freedom. 

This movement will not go away, not even the “extreme” part of it.  

That Saturday something between two and three thousand young people marched on the Kaiser Center.  After a couple rounds of tear gas and other forms of police force about a third of them gathered back at the plaza.  At a call they got back on the street to try it again somewhere else.  

The powers that be should take pause and realize that those kinds of numbers and that kind of determination is not some fringe phenomena.  Occupy is organized in 1400 locations across the USA because there is a problem and it is not fixed.  This is another fracture in our overall relationship with our nation’s youth.  We have other fractures with other parts of our youth.

Hint to the Mayor and the Chief of Police:  These young people do not believe you.  They do not trust you.  They do not respect you.  They think you are sold out and on the payroll. 

Why should they think otherwise?

And the rest of us?  Well, you know we do not believe you either.  You have had decades to address these economic fairness and general well being issues. What have you done?  From the S and L Crisis to the latest tax give away you had done what the rich want, when they want it, as they want it.  

There are tens of thousands of us who demonstrate peacefully as Occupy.  There are tens of millions of us who sympathize with the Occupy movement for good reasons that stem from what we see with our own eyes in our own lives.  One American in six is officially poor.  Many more are only a paycheck away.  

We are not the priority, the banks are, and everyone knows it. 

Nothing has been done to fix the problems.  Nothing has been done for those losing their homes.  Nothing has been done to pull one in six Americans out of poverty and nothing is being done to keep our governments out of poverty.  We call it cutbacks, other nations call it austerity.  The bailout has been “for-rich-only” as obscenely as things were once “for-white-only.”  As long as this goes on people will be in the streets protesting and demanding justice. 

And I will be one of them. 

Some questions and comments about Occupy Oakland Questions:

Is it better now? 
Is the area around city hall safer? Cleaner? Is business back up? Are there less homeless at 14^th and B-way? 

 

What was the cooperation about? Was it nation wide?  Why?  
If this was a local sanitation and public safety issue, then why did we need to coordinate with so many other mayors and have all those raids in the same week?  Why were the billionaire mayor of New York and our “progressive” mayor Quan saying the exact same things?  Was it the exact same situation?  Or did we prep the exact same talking points? 

Who are those folk who come and throw bricks? 
Why was this allowed to happen the evening of the general strike?  This is the second major time this has happened.  The other was the Oscar Grant protests.  Are we investigating these instigators of violence or making use of them to justify shutting down protests we do not like?  

What is Mayor Quan doing about the problems of the 99%?  
Has the City of Oakland done anything about the foreclosures?  Have they even asked or tried?   Are we holding the banks we do business with up to any accountability?  Do we rate them for their ethical practices?  Are we getting any of the redevelopment or stimulus money to directly aid common people?  

Comments: 

If there was no violence at the second raid, it was thanks only to the protestors.

Nancy Nadel, council member for District 3, warned the public that this second raid was going to take place.  The police came again in the dead of night armed for a confrontation.  The protestors had already cleared the tents and were standing on the other side of the cordon.  The only people arrested were from a meditation group and the interfaith taskforce and it was a peaceful act of civil disobedience.  Other than that there was one Native American in a tree. 

When Jean Quan and other city officials went through the camp holding their noses at the filth, what they were really doing was walking through abandoned tents and left behind garbage.  Now, compare these verifiable facts with what you were told in the media.  

Occupy is a popular movement with popular support.  ; there are nearly 1400 protests in the USA. 

 
Tens of thousands of local people came out to support the Occupy Oakland General Strike.  Hundreds, and at times thousands of people have been in the plaza.  Thousands came to protest the West Coast Ports.  People come to the plaza with workshops, theatre, a mobile library, a children’s tent and much more. The original group of young people have been joined by older activists, and the movement is very multi ethnic and growing.  There was a bailout of the banks and Wall Street but no help for the mortgage holders and Main Street. There is a tax holiday for the rich and cutbacks for the rest.  Strong opposition to the economic injustice in our country is taking place for good reasons.

Your neighbor, Green Party activist and Occupy Oakland Supporter, Don Macleay