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Following on the heels of Anticut 1 nearly two weeks ago, Anticut 2 is set to take place this Friday, June 17. Last week saw roughly 150 demonstrators flyering against austerity, with a special emphasis on the impending library closures, during Art Murmur. Let’s see if we can turn out a larger crowd this time around. People will begin gathering where Telegraph meets Broadway at 3 pm. Anticut 3 is scheduled for July 8; check the Bay of Rage site in a few days for details.
The following text appeared on leaflets distributed during the anti-Mehserle march last Sunday:
Oscar Grant (RIP), our brother.
It feels like the man has just been laid to rest, and the pig is already out of jail.
Like adding insult to injuries, poverty to brutality, the policy of austerity is now about to starve our schools, libraries, WIC, and social services of funding. The white male power structure has caused an economic crisis. Andas usual, they expect us to pay for it with our futures: with our educations, our libraries, and in brother Oscar’s case (and many more), our lives. We’re left with few other options for survival other than turning to the underground economy: hustling or homelessness. And as you read this, they’re inventing brand new ways to put you in jail for both.
You and I would have to be blind and bamboozled to ever think that any politician liberal will ever deal with our problems. For proof, we need only look at how they treat our children, and our martyrs. Our Oscar Grants. Our Gary Kings, whose mural was sand-blasted off of the pillars on MLK in north Oakland. The policy of Austerity is not just cutting a school budget. It is not just closing libraries. It’s filling prisons and killing poor people, as the alternative to the libraries, schools, and services they cut. It’s a whole worldview, that the rich deserve to get richer by making us poorer. A whole system of “crisis” that makes the poor pay for the problems caused by the rich.
Mehserle’s release in light of all this disregard for our lives just confirms what we know: the machine does not care. The faces of racism and capitalist change. From Bush, Schwarzenegger, and Dellums, to Brown, Quan, and Obama. The endless cycle of two-faced politicians supervising our genocide goes on endlessly because we have allowed them to control our lives.
We must take matters into our own hands.
To the streets, where the real power has always been.
Mehserle is out of jail. Maybe Oscar Grant can’t get justice. But what we learned during these past two years isn’t off the table: when we seize the time, seize the streets, and openly rebel, we can effectively chin-check these pigs and make City Hall do a double-take before funking with us again. If it weren’t for you and I, and our collective power to rebel, Mehserle would never even have been arrested.
Let’s build our power in these streets. Here’s somewhere to start:
Anticut 2: Let’s block everything!
Friday, June 17th 3pm at Broadway and Telegraph
p.s. due to gentrification (genocide), the black population of Oakland has dropped by 25% since 1990. Due to austerity (genocide), 14 of our 19 libraries may be closed to keep the police paid and the prisons open.
“Your child’s future was the first to go with budget cuts.
If you think this hurts, then wait here comes the upper-cut:
The school was garbage in the first place: that’s on the up-and-up.” -Lupe Fiasco