Feature Archives

On May 1st, International Workers Day, rallies and marches were held in the San Francisco Bay Area, Santa Cruz County, and the Central Valley. Demonstrators called for action in defense of jobs, families, immigrants, and unions.

On April 19, injured workers in Southern California joined together in front of the Downey Kaiser medical center to speak out about workers killed and injured at the site which was formerly a military industrial nuclear facility. On April 28th in San Francisco, Workers Day Memorial events included a press conference at the Pfizer Research Facility and a speak-out at the ILWU Local 34 Hall.

Earth Day 2009 was cause for celebration with festivals in Sunnyvale and Santa Cruz, but also cause for concern. While elementary school students in the East Bay cleaned up pollution along the Albany waterfront, university students at Stanford addressed the problem of access to water in Africa. More than 60 students carried water in buckets across Stanford's campus to bring attention to the fact that daily clean water access is not a reality for 1.1 billion people around the world.

Anti-tax "Tea Party" rallies held in San Jose and San Francisco on April 15 brought out about 500 conservative activists in each city. Although the majority of participants appeared to be white Republicans, contingents of Libertarians and members of the vigilante Minuteman organization also displayed signs. In San Jose about 50 anti-war/anti-racism demonstrators countered the right wing demonstrators. A heavy police presence utilized batons to keep the two groups apart as the two sides faced off.

The Obama administration was in San Francisco on Thursday, April 16th, to hold a day-long public hearing on Bush's offshore oil and gas proposal, which would open nearly the entire US coast to offshore drilling, including Northern California's Point Arena Basin. Protests against the drilling proposal continued throughout the day.

On Friday, March 27, protesters decried budget cuts to home care workers in front of the State Building in Oakland. SEIU claimed that the California budget passed in February contains $1 billion in "trigger cuts" to home care, health care, higher education, SSI/SSP, and CalWORKS. The protest was part of a day of action organized by SEIU that included a rally at the Capitol Building in Sacramento and in five other cities.

On March 16, 2009, students and educators from public colleges all over the state converged on Sacramento to demand that California fully fund higher education and not raise tuition. Over 6,000 students, teachers, administrators, and education workers converged in Sacramento. They came to demand, “Keep the doors open,” “No budget cuts,” “Bail out colleges, not banks,” “Fund education, not war,” and “Money for schools, not prisons.”