Feature Archives

On Wednesday, May 12th, Seize BP held a protest in front of the BP offices on New Montgomery Street in San Francisco, to demand that the U.S. government seize BP and all of its assets. BP is involved in a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that is still leaking 5 to 25 thousand barrels of oil daily into surrounding waters. Other corporations involved include Transocean and Halliburton. On Friday, May 14th, Act Against Oil demonstrated in Berkeley at the site of a new BP building under construction next to the UCB campus.

A clamor across the country to hold banks and Wall Street accountable for the financial crisis started in earnest this week with a large demonstration in San Francisco. Hundreds of protesters rallied in front of the building where Wells Fargo's annual shareholders meeting was being held on April 27. They said bankers broke laws, lack ethics and need to create jobs for working people instead of rewarding themselves with huge bonuses.

Four-Twenty (including 4:20, 420 and 4/20) has long been associated with marijuana use and marijuana activism. 4:20 is a time of day when people smoke marijuana. April 20th has evolved into a counterculture holiday, known for large gatherings of people celebrating and consuming marijuana, a.k.a. cannabis. Thousands of people gather annually in Boston, Boulder, New York, Santa Cruz, Seattle and many other cities in the United States, Canada, New Zealand and elsewhere around the world.

Mike Eli writes about the mine blast at Massey’s Upper Big Branch: "I have (as you can imagine) watched the coverage of Upper Big Branch closely... But if you had sat alongside me listening to those news report, you would not have known what every single miner in southern West Virginia knows: Massey was the national flagship of union breaking."

After the recent uprisings in Portland in response to two police murders, a call has gone out for "West Coast Days of Action April 8th and 9th, From the Bay to the Sound: No More Police Killings!" The call to action reads in part: "Organize protests and autonomous actions in your own city!" Announced actions include non-violent civil disobedience at Embarcadero BART station in San Francisco on April 8th and an Anti-Police General Assembly in Portland and a march against police brutality in Seattle on April 9th.

On March 14th, Greek anarchists from Athens, along with an American who has been living in Barcelona, spoke about the Greek uprising of December 2008 at the 11th annual Anarchist Theory Conference held at UC Berkeley. They addressed where the rebellion came from and where it is now. More than just presenting the story of Greece, their talk was about sharing ideas that could be useful to the social struggles in England, Barcelona, and the U.S.

Barbershop Punk is the true story of an unlikely hero who takes on the system, a classic David and Goliath story that plays out within the internet neutrality debate and larger context of censorship and access. When software engineer Robb Topolski uncovers that telecommunications company Comcast has been lying to the public, the Federal Communications gets involved, and the case for internet freedom makes headlines.