Not news.

This is what media bias looks like.

Today The Oakland Green Party was not news.

It was NOT NEWS that 4 Oakland Greens with a group of 40 supporters backed by 5,000 registered voters announced our slate to run in 3 council, and one school board race this November.

I was not news, as I am one of those four and I announced that I will run in the 1st District Council race.

The people who asked questions were not news.  The answers were not news. 
The only place you will hear about our press conference will be in the Indy News and on line. 

After our press conference two of us candidates went across town with lots of friends and fellow Greens and other activists to see a review of police activities around the Occupy Protests. This event was supposed to be hosted by our Citizen’s Police Review Board, but they canceled at the last moment.  The Grand Lake Theater offered a location and Occupy hosted.  We heard reports from experts and saw a 45 min presentation on what the police have really been doing. The chief of police was invited to speak.

All of that was also NOT NEWS. A couple hundred people, including prominent civil rights lawyers, political activists and many Occupy protestors were there.  They might as well join us in the Green Party because together we are all NOT NEWS.

So what is news?

Well according to the Examiner quoting the Tribune:

Occupiers marched from a courthouse to Frank H. Ogawa Plaza for a noon rally only to find about 40 people protesting them.
The group, calling itself Stand for Oakland, was organized by several neighborhood leaders to show public opposition to Occupy Oakland's recent costly demonstrations and its focus on Oakland police, rather than the travails of the poor and middle class.
"I think this will make them see that the citizens are concerned and that the citizens are tired of the actions that they are taking," said Angela Haller, a Neighborhood Watch leader who helped organize the rally.
Among those participating in Stand for Oakland was Councilwoman Desley Brooks, several neighborhood leaders, developer Phil Tagami and Oakland Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce official Paul Junge.

When something like this is done in Cuba or Syria we call it a stage managed pro-government demonstration with few, if any, followers not on a public salary.

So, an established political movement and an established civil rights movement are not news, but an astro-turf group invented on the fly by the local wealthy and a politician is headlines? 

A few years ago Amy Goodman, the voice of Democracy Now, spoke at Berkeley High where my son was going to school.  She asked a question that I have not had an answer for:

“If we had state controlled media in America,
how would it be any different than what we have now?” 

We should all ask ourselves some quick questions:
•    Where do all those demo-republicans spend all those campaign adverting dollars? 
•    Ever hear of a company that does not cater to its owners and its clients?
•    What else are we not being told because it does not meet the advertisers’ wishes?

When the same kind of pro system media domination comes to play in Russia, our corporate press talks about how their elections are not free and fair. I agree they do not have free and fair elections in Russia.  Can we call our system where the two official political marketing companies hold all but one of the congressional seats free and fair?  Russia has more political diversity than we do.  

So here is some information that the Greens can share that is also probably not news too:
We are not going to just go away.  Neither is Occupy for that matter. 
We are finding ways to speak directly to the people in this election. 
So has Occupy for that matter.
That is how 5,000 people decided to register Green in the first place. 
And that is why the theater was full, despite the lack of news coverage.

A  suggestion:
Support independent media as if your democracy depended on it because it does.

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. 

No more 4-4 behind closed doors.

No more 4-4 behind closed doors. 

The last time we discussed our two year Oakland City budget, meaning about six months ago, we heard nothing from our city council members for several weeks after the mayor put her proposal forward. 

Then 4 came up with one plan, and another 4 came up with another plan. 

 

Mayor Quan cast the tie breaking vote.  She chose the Reid plan, supposedly because of support for Chabot Space and Science.  

The reason we supposedly did not get more action or more than 4 people to a plan was because, supposedly, the Brown Act precludes more than 4 of them meeting and discussing a counter proposal.  That may be true as far as discussing politics behind closed doors goes

.

Nothing stops them from discussing their ideas and negotiating out a compromise, in public, in council chambers in open discussion. 

 

Today the Mayor has a new budget proposal to deal with the 30 million that will no longer go to pay for general fund items.  

This time it would be great if our city legislature help open debate.  Polled its members for votes and just plain hashed out the new budget sitting in their council chairs instead of their office or coffee shop chairs. 

Re: A Recall is Divisive and Harmful

 Re: A Recall is Divisive and Harmful

As you may know, the Greens have not yet taken a position on this recall effort.
As far as I know, we are the only group to invite both sides to come and speak to one of our meetings.

And as many remember, we did advise voting for Quan as second choice because we found her the lesser evil.
That thought is no longer an easy sell.
But the point is, we are not Quan supporters, so we view the recall from that point of view.

I have not heard anyone say that Quan has done something illegal.
What the public is discussing is a recall, not an impeachment. 

Speaking for myself and not for the Greens, I have some concerns about the recall process.
It does not seem very democratic to only require a 50% vote to recall.
If the vote proceeds with state rules, then only a plurality would elect the replacement.
We could end up with more people voting against the recall than for the replacement mayor.

That said, I am not willing to go so far as to call the money and influence soaked media circus
and advertizing war that passed for an election last time something democratic, or even better
than the recall process.

What we really need is some kind of reforms here to get money out of our local elections and
to get a council composed of community leaders.  I do not hear proposals from MOBN or
Tramutola's (sp?) TOLA other than term limits.  Nothing to make the process of  STARTING a term
any more democratic and nothing to ensure that all views are represented.

How would recalling the Mayor make Oakland any more democratic?

Having the Mayor's ear does not sound very democratic either.
Is this having her ear to do what she told her voters that she would do?
That sounds more like how one deals with a non-profit, not an elected official.

In this, I think the Greens are also the only ones who keep going back to the need for budget and charter reform.
I see no reason to change my mind about that.  Other places do better, so can we.

One group has every right in the world to recall Mayor Quan:  Her supporters.
I would like to hear what the Block-by-Block folk feel and think about all this.
Many of them should feel disappointed in her leadership at the budget and dealing with Occupy.

When I hear people say that a recall would be divisive, harmful, or as the unions say, a distraction,
I have to ask, What unity?  To do what?  What harm?  What is being done that we do not want damaged?
And what is going on that we should be paying attention to if we want to avoid a distraction?

Instead of telling us what we should unify around or pay attention to, let's accept that we have a mayor in crisis and ALL of us are part of the process.  It is easy to ask for unity when it is your  group in power.

I want to ask everyone for responsibility. 

If you support Quan staying office, why?  and if not, why not?

--

Don Macleay
dmacleay@earthlink.net
510 290-1200

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