Politics
After months of discussions, protests from community organizations and residents, on Tuesday night the Oakland City Council voted to end its relationship with Goldman Sachs.
On Wednesday evening, a crowd of nearly 150 people, many of them parents, kids, and Occupy Oakland protesters, gathered on the concrete steps of Lakeview Elementary School hours after their two-week-old tent city was raided by Oakland Unified School District police and other law enforcement officers. The encampment was an effort to protest the district’s decision to close five elementary schools —Lakeview, Lazear, Marshall, Maxwell and Sante Fe—and keep all neighborhood schools open.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to uphold President Barack Obama’s signature law, the Affordable Care Act, this week came as a lifeline to the most needy in Oakland’s ongoing efforts to provide medical support to AIDS patients.
The tent city at Lakeview Elementary School has been dismantled. At 4 a.m. Oakland Unified School District police and other law enforcement officers raided the encampment where parents, teachers, and community activist had been sleeping for two weeks in an effort to protest the district’s decision to close five elementary schools.
After 16 days, the number of tents visible at the encampment at Lakeview Elementary School has doubled and protesters have changed their rules: No one is allowed to know the number of kids or adults who occupy the site in an effort to avoid a police raid. To celebrate the first two weeks of the sit-in protesting the closure of Oakland elementary schools and the launch of the People’s School of Public Education, the tent city residents hosted a community potluck on Sunday, as well as a documentary screening.
Two Oakland based organizations, the National Coalition of 100 Black Women Inc. and advocacy group California Prostitute Education Project (CAL-PEP) are leading efforts to reduce the rate of new HIV infections among young people in Oakland with free testing and a billboard campaign dubbed “Sistahs Getting Real about HIV.”
Over 200 Oakland residents of all ages crowded onto the main floor of the Scottish Rite Center Friday night to kick off the two-day “Voices for Peace” festival with singing, dancing, and messages of nonviolence. The festival, a benefit for Oakland’s Urban Peace Movement, is part of a three-month “Summer of Peace” global celebration that features youth outreach programs, weekly online “telesummits” and multicultural events.
In response to what organizers at the Oakland-based Martin Luther King Freedom Center, Institute for Community Leadership say is a broken public service system in the Bay Area, at least 55 professionals from government and municipal institutions will convene this week in Oakland and explore ways to make public institutions more efficient and accessible.
On Saturday afternoon nearly 200 protestors showed up for a 1.7 mile march organized by a coalition of community organizers, Occupy Oakland supporters and Lakeview Elementary parents to protest the closure of five Oakland elementary schools by the Oakland Unified School District.