Feature Archives

From September 26th - 28th, a 10th-anniversary national conference organized by Critical Resistance took place at Laney College in Oakland. Critical Resistance is a group that has been fighting to raise awareness and abolish the prison industrial complex.

Community based human rights film-maker Simón Sedillo, whose work has centered on placing skills, cameras and editing equipment in the hands of communities in resistance, is on a speaking tour with three events in the Monterey Bay area. Sedillo has spent the last six years practicing and teaching community based video documentation in indigenous communities in Oaxaca, Mexico, in immigrant communities in the US, and with youth of color across the US. In Watsonville on September 25th, Santa Cruz on the 26th, and Monterey on the 27th, Sedillo will share some experiences and perspectives on the local and global implications of the peoples' struggle in Oaxaca.

On Tuesday, September 16, a reportback with video from the mobilizations against the political conventions will be held in San Francisco at 7:30pm. "As the dust settles around the storm of protests surrounding the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, Bay Area activists who were on the streets of Denver and the Twin Cities are coming together to talk about their experiences."

The 2008 Republican National Convention was held in St. Paul, Minnesota, September 1st through September 4th. In the Twin Cities, the RNC Welcoming Committee and a number of ad hoc regional activist groups made plans to demonstrate on the first day of the convention, September 1st. Twin Cities and Federal authorities moved hard against the activists by pre-emptively raiding a convergence space and numerous houses, confiscating equipment, and making arrests. After the convention began, police used tear gas, pepper spray, beanbag projectiles, and other weapons against demonstrators throughout St. Paul.

In the early morning of August 25th, three windows were broken and a surveillance camera knocked off the roof of the Ocean Street McDonald's in Santa Cruz. In a post on Santa Cruz Indymedia, not lovin' it writes, "The Beijing Olympics have ended, but the repressive apparatus set up for the Games remains in place: some 300,000 surveillance cameras, 400,000 informants, and a general tightening of government control. McDonald's, one of the major sponsors of the Olympics, also remains omnipresent and continues to reaps its profits with four new restaurants and a large share of the advertising spectacle."

On August 27th at around 10:30am, 5-6 police officers from three agencies made their way into the Long Haul Infoshop in Berkeley, broke down every door, and confiscated all computers on the property. Computers taken included those used by the Slingshot Collective and East Bay Prisoner Support. The police stated that the computer equipment "may have been used to commit a felony." This is the first time there has been a raid since the infoshop opened 15 years ago.

Protests around the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado, August 25th through August 28th, brought thousands of people to the Mile High City. Although numbers were far lower than expected, Recreate 68 had originally anticipated 25,000 to 50,000 would descend on Denver for the demonstrations. The largest demo took place on Wednesday, where more than 10,000 people marched through the streets of Denver behind 70 Iraq Veterans Against the War following a free Rage Against the Machine concert.