Christmas is bittersweet for Maria Marroquin this year. Only fifteen percent of the workers who show up at the Day Worker Center of Mountain View have been matched with jobs on any given day. Gifts from the community supplement the meager incomes earned by those who come seeking jobs every morning...and wait. As Executive Director of the Center, Maria looks back at the financially bleak 2009 with high hopes for the promise 2010 holds.

On Friday, December 11th, more then 150 people marched to Sheikh Jarrah, to show support and solidarity with the families who have been evicted from their houses, and those facing evictions. Upon arriving at the neighborhood, the protesters continued to the Al-Kurd’s home where settlers have taken over parts of the house, making the Al-Kurd lives a living hell. After an Israeli flag, which represents colonialism and more then 60 years of apartheid and ethnic cleansing, was removed from the stolen settler house window, the police charged the protesters, beating and arresting 23 people.

PORTLAND — Dec 16th, 2009 — Jeff Free Luers, political prisoner and environmental activist, was released from the Columbia River Correctional Institution this morning after serving nine and a half years. Luers was originally sentenced in 2001 to twenty two years and eight months for the politically motivated arson of three SUVs at a car dealership in Eugene, OR. This sentence was deemed grossly disproportionate to the damage sustained by the car dealership and was condemned by legal professionals, human rights groups and activists worldwide. At an appeal hearing in 2007 it was ruled that Luers' original sentence was illegal, and was consequently reduced to ten years.

Global UN Climate negotiations are proceeding in Copenhagen with over one hundred heads of state expected to attend in the next week. 2009 was the fifth hottest year on record, and scientists are saying a Climate Treaty is more urgent with global carbon emissions still increasing and acidification threatening marine biodiversity.

On December 12th, 100,000 people took to the streets of Copenhagen, but around 3pm police charged into the march and made arbitrary arrests of an estimated 1,000 people. Further protests are occurring over the next week inside the conference center and on the streets.

Students at UC Berkeley re-grouped Friday evening to protest an early morning raid on the Open University at occupied Wheeler Hall. A rally at Wheeler was followed by a concert and a march on the north side of campus. Police dispersed the march and arrested eight people who face multiple felony charges. Among the eight was an Indybay photographer covering the event.

Having received a $465 million low-interest loan from the US Department of Energy, Tesla Motors will soon be deciding on a site to locate their electric car manufacturing plant. On December 10th worker safety activists visited Tesla's world headquarters in San Carlos to report on the continuing contamination and dangerous working conditions at a site in southern California under consideration. They asked that Tesla not choose the site in Downey for their new plant.

Students occupied the business building at San Francisco State University before dawn Wednesday, December 9th to protest higher tuition, massive layoffs, hundreds of classes cut and millions for administration salary. Hundreds of students linked arms at various points throughout the day in solidarity against the complete dismantling of the education system in California. Students drew connections between layoffs and cuts in other public sectors, billions spent on war and millions of people without health care. Just before 4am the next day, almost twenty-four hours into the occupation, riot police rushed the building, breaking a window to gain access, and arrested those inside.

This is the second in a series of profiles of activist and alternative media workers in the Bay Area by Indybay contributor Peter M. Featured in this profile is Bradley, who works with Santa Cruz Indymedia. Bradley spoke about his life as a student, his work, and his connection to Mexico.

Chevron employees arriving to work in the early this morning of December 7th were met by nearly 100 people who gathered in protest of Chevron’s global destruction of communities, the environment and the global climate. Protesters interrupted business as usual at Chevron headquarters in San Ramon, blocking several entrances. 31 people were arrested.

Jeffrey Luers was originally sentenced to 22 years and 8 months for the burning of three SUV's in Eugene, Oregon to make a statement about global warming. In 2007 Jeff won his appeal and his sentence was reduced to 10 years. He is scheduled to be released this December. A final San Francisco benefit for Jeff to raise funds to help him as he transitions back to life on the outside will take place on Tuesday, December 8th starting at 8pm at El Rio.

On December 5th, women and men protested the Stupak amendment to the US Congress health care bill with a march and die-in in front of San Francisco's Ferry Building. Demonstrators wore black and rallied for full access to reproductive services, including abortion on demand.

On Sunday, December 6th at 3pm at the Peace Resource Center in Seaside, three members of the Watsonville Brown Berets will present about their experiences with the 2009 Pastors for Peace 20th annual Caravan to Cuba. The Caravan is a nonviolent direct action that brings literally tons and tons of aid to the island nation in open and direct defiance of the US embargo and travel ban against Cuba.

After fifteen months, more than a dozen court appearances, three major motions, four rejected plea deals, two district attorneys, and nearly a thousand hours of defense work, the case against drum circle supporters, Wes and Jack, is finished.

On December 4th, 1969, the FBI, working with the Chicago police department, assassinated the Chicago Black Panther Party Deputy Chairman Fred Hampton in his bed as he slept. Along with the murder of Mark Clark in the same apartment that night, the "raid" was one in a long line of illegal actions taken by the FBI as part of its COINTELPRO war against the social justice and anti-war movements. Fred Hampton Jr. embarked on a speaking tour to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the assassination of his father.

On November 19th the University of California Board of Regents approved a 32% fee increase in undergraduate fees, pushing fees to over $10,000 a year. "The UC administration say it is the state that is to blame," notes gazuedro group. "They tell us to bring our fight to Sacramento to demand a bail-out for public education. To that we say, THAT’S YOUR FUCKING JOB! In fact, we don’t want a bail-out as it does nothing to fundamentally change the unjust structure of the UC system at large."

East Palo Alto residents surrounded city council members as they entered City Hall on December 1st. Residents of Page Mill Properties and their supporters rallied in front of the building to attempt to secure the support of council members in the tenants' long battle against the mega-landlord. Page Mill, East Palo Alto's largest landlord, has been in dispute for years with tenants. In September, Page Mill failed to make a $50 million payment and a judge appointed Ward Realty Advisors to take control of their 1,800 rental units in the city.

On December 1st, Jesse James Forrey, who served two and a half months in a Ramsey County, Minnesota jail for "damage to property" during the 2008 RNC in St. Paul, was released. Jesse and his co-defendant have a court date on Thursday, December 10th concerning restitution, and they still need financial support.

On December 1st 2009, U.S. President Barack Obama announced that he would send an additional 30,000 US troops to Afghanistan in the coming months, bringing the total number of American troops occupying Afghanistan to nearly 100,000. Describing the war as "not just America's war," Obama vowed to start bringing the troops back home by the middle of 2011.

On December 2nd, several hundred protesters gathered at 5pm at Powell and Market in San Francisco to voice their opposition for Obama's war plans.

An anonymous post to the newswire reports, "In late July and late October, 2009, attacks against intersection and freeway surveillance cameras took place in Santa Cruz County. Thirty cameras had their cables cut, rendering them inoperable. This was done as an act of resistance against increasingly pervasive surveillance technologies."

On November 30th, the 10th anniversary of the global justice movement’s successful non-violent shut-down of the WTO in Seattle, activists exposed some of San Francisco’s worst climate criminals, demanding that they stop financing climate change and standing in the way of climate solutions. Protesters met at Justin Herman Plaza marched to a non-violent civil disobedience at the Bank of America where about two dozen people were arrested.

On November 29th, Honduras held elections and the next day Porfirio Lobo was announced as the next president. On the day of the election, a picket was held at the Honduran Consulate in San Francisco; protesters described the elections as a sham organized by a government installed by a military coup. They demanded that there be, "no recognition of the coup regime and its election." Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela, have refused to recognize the vote, and the UN, EU and the Carter Center, had condemned the electoral process as illegitimate and refused to send observers. The US, Peru, Panama, Colombia, Costa Rica and Israel are the only nations to have publicly indicated recognition of the electoral process and future regime.

Lynne Stewart, the much admired civil rights attorney who is struggling with cancer, has had her bail revoked, and she is now being held in jail after a Federal Court ruled on her appeal November 17th. On November 23rd, demonstrators in San Francisco protested against the ruling.

On Friday, November 20th, members and supporters of the transgender community in San Francisco held an event at the API Wellness Center in San Francisco called the 11th Annual San Francisco Transgender Day of Remembrance. Many people turned out for the event including Alexandra Byerly from El la program, Senator Mark Leno, Theresa Sparks and plus the many many speakers from the community who simply wanted to pay tribute to all the transgender men and women who have been killed.

An article anonymously published to the newswire on November 26th reports that the FBI has been showing up at peoples' workplaces and homes, asking questions about some or all of the AETA 4, as well as other groups and movements to their interest.

David Shulman writes: "I’ve been trying to explain in my talk why I keep going down to the South Hebron hills when, after all, our impact on the situation there is so minimal, so pointillist, the task so Sisyphean, the sense of futility so overwhelming. I claimed that despite all this, there is something good about being there, in those landscapes and with those people, and that it had something to do with the difference between truth and falsehood."

G. Melesaine writes: "When I saw the trailer for the new film 'Precious' I cried. This film made me think a lot about an old life I was too familiar with. It made me think about a lot of women that I am close to. It made me think about my sister in her Tenderloin days, about that loud funny girl in class that smacked her gum too loud, about that girl in West Point who had AIDS and everyone stayed away from her, about that girl walking up and down Folsom pretending she has somewhere to go, about that teacher I use to have a crush on in middle school, about women. 'Precious' women. This was their story."

On Thursday, Novemember 19th, Superior Court Judge Morris Jacobson ordered that Johannes Mehserle's trial for the murder of Oscar Grant be moved to Los Angeles County. In the hearing to decide if the venue should be held in San Diego County or Los Angeles County, the determining factors were: pretrial publicity, relative hardship to parties, conservation of judicial resources and public funds, and demographics.

On November 23rd, immigrant rights groups held actions in San Francisco and Washington D.C. to expose the unjust treatment of immigrants in both Congressional and Senate health care bills. In San Francisco, hundreds of people joined a vigil at House Speaker Pelosi’s office to urge her to fight against anti-immigrant amendments to the bills. The same day, a group of Asian Americans and Latinos confronted staff in the office of US Representative Joe Wilson of South Carolina.