Feature Archives

On January 7, Israel made public a list of 20 organizations, including five U.S.-based organizations, whose leadership is barred from entering Israel due to their support for boycotts for Palestinian rights. US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR) Executive Director Yousef Munayyer said, “We wear this designation as a badge of honor." Banning entry is by no means a new tactic in the maintenance of Israeli apartheid, but a policy that Israel has been enacting for decades, first and foremost by denying Palestinian refugees their right to return, and then by denying supporters of Palestinian rights.

For the fourth year in a row, the Anti Police-Terror Project has called for 96 Hours of action over the King Day Weekend. From Friday, January 12 through Monday, January 15, people will take to the streets in a series of direct actions, vigils, rallies and film screenings. The weekend concludes with the Reclaiming Kings Radical Legacy March on Monday beginning at 14th and Broadway. Friday's actions address State-Sponsored Violence; Saturday's confront the Housing crisis; Sunday's focus on Indigenous/International Solidarity; and Monday, "We reclaim the Radical legacy of MLK."

In honor of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, the Santa Cruz branch of the NAACP and the Santa Cruz Police Department are co-sponsoring an event titled "March for the Dream: Honoring the Past - Impacting the Future" on January 15. In an open letter to police chief Andy Mills, former city council candidate Steve Schnaar questions if SCPD's dream for a better society is really in line with the dream of King.

On November 11, the Korea Peace Walk traveled 20 blocks along Telegraph Avenue in Oakland, pausing to rally at historic sites of the labor movement and Black Panther Party activism. The celebrated date activists chose originated as Armistice Day on November 11, 1919, the first anniversary of the end of World War I. About 70 people marched for over two hours from from 23rd to 44th Street. At the final rally at Koryo Place, the center of a district of small Korean family owned businesses, pungmul (풍물) drummers pounded furiously. Pungmul drumming and dancing is rooted in Korea’s collective farming culture and has long been actively used in political protest there.

For over fifteen days, tents, couches, tables of food, and dozens of students have decked the halls of Eliot Hall, Reed College’s administration building in Portland, Oregon. Students are occupying the building in protest of the college's financial ties to Wells Fargo. Demonstrators say the college holds around $300,000 in the bank on a daily basis. Wells Fargo is an American international banking and financial services holding company well known to be one of the primary investors in private prisons, immigration detention, the Dakota Access Pipeline, police foundations and the Israeli Apartheid, among other oppressive institutions.

Spicing up their press conference with a Day of the Dead theme, health advocates from Fresno, Tulare, and Kern Counties rallied outside the central regional office of the Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) on November 1 in Clovis. Their action was part of a continuing campaign to get DPR to urge the state to suspend agricultural use of brain-harming chlorpyrifos. Last May, the deadly pesticide was implicated in a drift incident that sickened dozens of farmworkers near Bakersfield; health advocates say that more than twenty years of research links the pesticide to neurological disorders in children.

Oakland will spend $75,000 on a study to examine the feasibility of establishing a public bank in the city. The impact on the cannabis industry would be huge, because most corporate banks do not conduct business with the cannabis trade even where their operations are legal. Without bank credit card services, business transactions must be conducted in cash. Even filing taxes with the IRS is problematic. Nearly all large corporate banks are involved in unethical practices of one kind or another. A public bank would also allow people of conscience to bank without supporting unconscionable investments.