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By Mike Rhodes
Two days after the final assault on homeless encampments by the City of Fresno and Caltrans, Rose and her daughter were trying to find someplace where they could sleep. When I found them, they were under a bridge, being told by three Fresno police officers to move on. Rose asked, “Move where?” One officer replied that they needed to move somewhere out of sight. “We tried that the last several nights and you idiots wake us up every two hours and tell us to move on.”
Rose went down a list of places they had been …[Read the details]
By Jesse Franz
Occupy Fresno has energized the progressive movement in this community, bringing out a younger crowd that identifies with the 99%. Local law enforcement has done what it can to repress the movement and protesters’ right to free speech. Photo by Simone Whalen-Rhodes
On Nov. 14, after a week of nightly arrests by sheriff’s deputies, Occupy Fresno, a group that has continuously encamped at Courthouse Park since Oct. 15, filed a lawsuit in federal court claiming that its civil liberties and First Amendment rights had been violated by Fresno County.
What started as …[Read the details]
Our Voice from Inside the Prison Industrial Complex
A lot has happened in the past several months that prevented me from submitting articles to the Community Alliance about life behind prison walls in California.
Since May 2011, I’ve been fighting trumped-up charges by a rogue prison guard, who has been hell-bent on retaliation. There are those who still feel prisoners do not have a right to define their surroundings or express themselves. I’ve filed staff/citizen complaints that require many hours of research, filings, hearings and responses. Consultations with my attorneys regarding my pending civil action against the Department of …[Read the details]
By Paul Gilmore
“Every city is full of ghosts, and learning to see some of them is one of the arts of becoming a true local.”—Rebecca Solnit
Why in the last couple of months have thousands of people throughout the United States demonstrated and been arrested and beaten? Why Occupy Wall Street? Why Occupy Oakland? Why Occupy Fresno?
Perhaps the following quote might offer some idea of an answer:
One cause, perhaps the greatest, is this: Enormous wealth in the hands of a few—produced by the hands of toil. The government at Washington was being controlled in …[Read the details]
Michael Parenti
By Michael Parenti
(Editor’s note: Reprinted with permission of the author.)
Beginning with Occupy Wall Street in September 2011, a protest movement spread across the United States to 70 major cities and hundreds of other communities. Similar actions emerged in scores of other nations.
For the first two weeks, the corporate-owned mainstream media along with NPR did what they usually do with progressive protests: They ignored them. These were the same media that had given the Tea Party supporters saturation coverage for weeks on end, ordaining them “a major political force.”
The most …[Read the details]
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