Feature Archives

6/11/2004:On Friday at noon, there was a commemoration ceremony for the victims of Ronald Reagan's policies. Over one hundred people gathered at the 16th St BART and marched up Mision St to 24th St holding crosses and a coffin and reading the names of Reagan's victims. Photos: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

Ronald Wilson Reagan was born in Tampico, Illinois in 1911 and died quietly in his California home on June 5th, 2004, after living for several years with Alzheimer's disease. Yet it seems that Reagan's Alzheimer's was contagious. While mainstream media fall over themselves in a rush to construct a public memory of the man as a hero, the truth about the life and times of the actor/governor/president is quite different.
Reagan's support for right-wing murderers, most famously in the Iran-Contra scandal; provision of weapons and military training for murderous dictatorships in Latin America (Argentina, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Panama, Grenada),Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa; role in perpetuating apartheid in South Africa; unprecedented promotion of nuclear proliferation; his denial of funding for AIDS research; affront to women's rights; undercutting of environmental protections, perpetuation of racial segregation and discrimination; and gutting of social services are only a few of the events that mark the Reagan years as among the most corrupt and devastating in history. This is the Reagan that must not be forgotten.
Video | Timeline | Quotes | Mental Health | Noam Chomsky on Reagan's Legacy

6/5/2004: Several hundred protesters marched up Embarcadero starting at Justin Herman Plaza a little after 2PM. After five or six blocks the police forced everyone onto the sidewalk and arrested a few people after they stepped into the street. The protest went all the way up to Pier 39, but the police blocked the entrances and told protesters they would be arrested if they entered. The tourists at Pier 39 were not allowed to leave by the police until the protest had left the area. The march then looped on back streets to the Embarcadero and went up the sidewalk to Justin Herman Plaza. After the protesters rejoined the larger anti-war protest the police rushed in and tried to arrest someone. Protesters yelled at the police and the police line formed near the ANSWER stage. After perhaps ten minutes the police charged the crowd throwing three young men on the ground (the police stomped on one young man's head leaving a bloody mark above his right eye) After that the crowd slowly dispersed.
Photos: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5   Breaking Coverage From Saturday

From June 8-10, 2004 the leaders of the world's largest and richest industrialized nations (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States), who are known collectively as the Group of 8 or G8, will meet at Sea Island, Georgia in the US. At the meeting, Bush and company will discuss the war on Iraq, terrorism, the global economy, and the policy in the Middle East. They will enjoy such luxuries as golf courses, fine food and exotic hotels. Protest organizers have been planning their events for months, but have had to change many of their arrangements because of the repression that is coming from the government.

Repression: Organizers in Georgia have faced an unprecedented level of repression. Some events that were scheduled for Savannah have been moved to other cities because of intimidation tactics used by the police. Not only is the summit scheduled to be held on a privately-owned island, but protest permits have been denied in several cities, and the Governor of Georgia has declared a state of emergency from May 24th through June 20th in 5 counties. This means that the Governor is allowed greatly expanded powers, such as the right to "seize any property, public or private, close down events whether public or private regardless of permit status, detain citizens without charging them with crimes, impose curfews, override local ordinances and law enforcement, and to use military personnel for civilian law enforcement." Read more from the Save Our Civil Liberties Campaign

Federal Government and G8 Event Security: On May 10-11, 2004, Attorney General John Ashcroft and Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge met in Washington, DC with the Ministers for Justice and Home Affairs from the G8 countries, and with the European Commissioner for Justice and Home Affairs to discuss such topics as prevention of terrorism and serious criminal acts; border and transportation security; and combating cybercrime and enhancing cyber-investigations. Just two weeks later, on May 26th, Ashcroft announced that there was an increased threat of a terrorist attack sometime between that date and the election, with an extra chance of an attack on the G8 summit, or on either the Democrat or Republican National Conventions. However, "I don't see these new threats being reported changing anything we have in place," said Barry Bennett, spokesman for the federal Summit Planning Organization. "The security is already a 10, it doesn't go to 11. We're maxed." Plans were already set to have 20,000 federal, state and local law enforcement officers help guard President Bush and the leaders of U.S. allies, and keep protesters and their messages away from the G8.

West Coast G8: People in the Bay Area are organizing several events during the days of the G8 summit. On June 8th at 5PM in UN Plaza West Coast G8 and Reclaim the Streets will throw a Mutant Street Party to "To UNwelcome the Biotech Conference to San Francisco (June 3-9), toast the death of the G8, and dance for Mutant Freedom Now!" Read more about the planned protests on the Globalization page. Other G8 Websites: G8 Resistance | Criticism of Counter-Summits | Fix Shit Up call from the Southeast Anarchist Network | How You Can Help the Georgia protesters

April 15, 2004: A number of organizations chose to protest the April 15th Tax Day because they do not agree with the US government's use of their tax money.
In Oakland, 16 people were arrested at the federal building when they formed a circle in the rotunda lobby and recited statistics about how U.S. tax dollars have paid for death and destruction in Iraq and Palestine.
Photos: 1 | 2   Report
There were also anti-war tax protests in Palo Alto, San Jose, and the Central Valley.
Nationwide, LGBT activists held "No Taxation with Discrimination" protests demanded equal marriage rights.

Relatives of victims of the World Trade Center bombings gasped in horror and disgust as Condoleezza Rice testified at the 9-11 Commission's ninth public hearing that she had briefed President George Bush with an August 6, 2001 CIA-memo entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside United States". As Rice danced around the majority of the questions put to her by the 9/11 Commission, several relatives yelled, "Shame!" while she continued to deny that the White House had knowledge prior to 9-11 of a possible terrorist attack on key designations on the East Coast. Many San Franciscans will remember that Rice must have known something serious enough to warrant a personal warning call to Mayor Willie Brown a full eight hours before the attacks. Many critics feel that her political connections to the two-party controlled commission helped to dumb down her interview, which was supposed to allot ten minutes per commissioner, but was instead eaten up by Rice's long-winded replies. Her credibility only continues to be degraded when one considers the outright lies that she has spun on Saddam and Iraq.

Rice is not alone in her spin-fest, though. No team of complicit war-mongerers would be complete without a suspect Secretary of Defense, and Donald Rumsfeld has told his own share of whoppers, including the one about "imminent threat," brilliantly captured on TV. Bush and Cheney are still planning to appear before the commission, though they have made it clear that they need each other in the interview and refuse to go it alone, to the derision of many. According to White House statements, neither the pre-9/11 memo nor the Bush and Cheney joint interview will be declassified or made available to the press or public.

City Attorney admits decision is "contrary to both public policy and common sense.”
(San Francisco) – Four people – including a Green Party congressional candidate – were arrested after a dramatic sit-in at the Department of Elections at City Hall late yesterday afternoon. All were cited and released. About two dozen demonstrators entered the Elections Office at about 4:30 p.m. Monday to protest voting irregularities during the March vote.
Terry Baum, a write-in candidate for Congress (8th District) on the Green Party ballot in March, was among those being arrested. Others include voters who said their votes were not counted in March.
Baum had apparently won her party's nomination in March – but then lost it when the city decertified hundreds of votes that it had previously counted.
City elections officials, a week after the Primary, told Baum she had won the Green Party nomination with 1,659 valid write-in votes, 54 more than necessary – the first third party write-in to win a state nomination in 36 years. But, a week later, the city invalidated hundreds of ballots, claiming voters, despite hand-writing in Baum's name, had failed to fill in an "arrow" on the ballot correctly, thus technically violating an obscure state code.
"We refuse to allow San Francisco to become another Florida. If disenfranchised voters in Florida in 2000 had been willing to go to jail to preserve their voting rights, we might not be facing the horrible mess in Iraq that we read about every day with such pain, and sense of doom," said Baum earlier Monday.

PunkVoter.com is organizing shows featuring well-known punk musicians all over the country as part of an attempt to bring 500,000 new, young voters to the polls for this fall's presidential election. Organizer "Fat Mike" Burkett of the band NOFX says, "We may be more concerned with humane drug laws or the Rave Act or the Patriot Act, but we still have concerns like any other citizens." More about the punkvoter.com project.
Jello Biafra perform Saturday, April 3rd, at Berkeley's Greek Theater. Photos
See more California Tour Dates.
PunkVoter.com is one of several organizations nationwide that seek to bring out voters who would normally be too alienated to participate, or who might disagree with electoral politics. Music for America | League of Independent Voters | Progressive Voter Project | National Coalition on Black Civic Participation