Introduction – How the Assessment was Made
Much of my research is inspired by a collective of revolutionaries I meet with several times a month. The League of Revolutionaries for a New America (LRNA) supports every struggle that holds the government accountable. They host political education classes and have several chapters across the country, which have different fronts of struggle committees within those chapters. My committees are involved in Oakland, CA, and East Bay Area assessments and politics.
Late last year, we met in person and were all asked several questions about our current concerns regarding our locations, political environments, dominant issues of concern, and personal experiences. The feedback was given to me to write an assessment, which took about six months to complete with several editorial meetings. We had an in-person meeting a few months ago and approved the final 2024 Area Assessment by vote, and the members agreed I could share the assessment with the public.
The assessment aims to assess our concerns and issues and then pinpoint which ones we can focus on to develop strategies. Those strategies are the part of the assessment I will not share. But I do share this assessment in hopes it gives others in our community an idea of how they can organize. Of course, if anyone wants to join one of our meetings and see if LRNA is a good fit, I welcome you all to join one of our public meetings. We host many well-organized dialogues in which people are encouraged to participate or listen without pressure to become a member.
The next open-to-the-public meeting is Beyond the Elections: The Political Revolution Continues, sponsored by the League of Revolutionaries for a New America and Hip Hop Congress. It will be held on Saturday, November 16, 2024, at 11 AM Pacific Time. You can RSVP Here.
I’m transparent about this aspect of my life because I believe it’s essential to be transparent when I form ideas and gather perspectives in my shared research. This group of revolutionaries is not the only place I receive inspiration. I scrape various social media apps like TikTok to gauge political engagement and use Twitter X to research local political operations. I also go into Facebook groups and Reddit Oakland groups to gauge public perspective, get inspiration, and give output.
Most importantly, I’m open to speaking to anyone of any background and affiliation as long as they are sincere. Speaking to someone with a scripted narrative and purposeful, misleading objective wastes energy and time.
Present (2024) Objective Situation
National, California, and East Bay-Bay Area Oakland-Centered Political Assessment
The United States is increasingly embroiled in a revolutionary transformation process. We can no longer sustainably live in old systems. Corporate control of housing has driven rent and housing costs beyond what most people can afford. While housing insecurities grow year after year, corporate politicians plot to ban encampments and criminalize living on the streets as prisons use prison labor to provide consumer goods in mass. All of these issues are connected, and that is just the tip of the iceberg concerning the dangers threatening to shred what little democracy remains nationally and locally.
Fascists are focusing offensive strategies locally. Using press conferences and media to create political theatre along with fears of crime, the ruling class is appearing out of the shadows, funding puppets of propaganda to arouse fear, division, and hate.
Their focus is attacking newly elected 2022 progressive leaders with unfounded expensive recalls while propagating a Doom Loop narrative. If they can convince everyone to fear their neighbors, fear other neighborhoods, and better yet—fear new governing tactics that provide social services instead of leaning on police state tactics—then the ruling class accomplishes their goals of keeping the masses divided and weak.
With endless streams of doom loop articles and “poverty porn” videos on social media connecting the dispossessed class to crime and business closures that were failing due to changes in consumerism before the pandemic, ridiculous political advocates of the ruling class exhaust the public. The goal is to overstimulate the media with repetitive narratives that do not tell the full stories so that people forget what created these issues. By causing chaos in public spaces of debate, it makes all politics look dysfunctional and in need of “moderate leadership” funded by right-wing billionaires to save the day. The end goal would undoubtedly defeat optimism and hope within communities, breaking the will of the working class to coordinate and consolidate power with the dispossessed so they can govern and empower themselves.
The Oakland City Council did not defund the police, yet they are continuously accused of defunding them. Crime has been rising since the pandemic due to pandemic closures and previous leadership ending crime prevention programs, yet current progressive leaders are being blamed. This narrative is influenced by billionaires attempting to manipulate local elections using dark money in a bid to change the State from bourgeois democracy by crushing the electoral process to tyrannical corporate dictatorship employing regional, national, and social media. At the same time, the State of California puts Oakland in virtual receivership to facilitate corporate dictatorship, hiding it being tough crime policies – advancing Project 2025. 2024 will be a consequential election year locally, statewide, and nationally, defeating Project 2025.
Workers can not afford housing while necessary consumer goods prices rapidly increase, and at the same time, wages are decreasing in some industries. Nearly 50% of US parents need to support their adult children as multiple generations are not better off than previous generations for the first time in recent history. Part-time contingent jobs are proliferating, while full-time jobs with benefits are not. Workers are increasingly striking and unionizing as major corporations use cunning tactics to prevent labor organizing. Inflation has been blamed for the rising prices of consumer goods and basic life necessities like PG&E utilities, baby formula, and food. Corporations brag about all-time high profits and top executive bonuses as the same corporations tighten the workforce, eliminating 100s of thousands of jobs, including over 300K Tech jobs since 2022. Their solution for the working class is to let them eat cereal for dinner.
Daycare can be as expensive as rent or college, forcing many parenting-age adults to choose not to have children. At the same time, abortion and birth control rights are being stripped, taking away a woman’s family planning options, which rule how well she and her family can live.
Deeply defunded public schools are declining attendance and losing qualified teachers in a community fight to keep public schools open. In contrast, charter schools are granted more real estate and public tax dollars with historically little to no oversight as they pick and choose which child is accepted to attend. College degrees are becoming more useless as some companies no longer require them, while millions of Americans are still deeply in debt with student loans in some cases throughout their lifetime.
Oakland’s homeless population has grown by over since the start of the pandemic, putting the total number of residents living without permanent housing at 5,420. With heavy politicization of homelessness and cities not properly using housing funds in the state of California, Governor Gavin Newson passed an executive order to clear homeless encampments, which gave a pass to many cities to criminalize homelessness.
There is little to no support for mental health, drug addiction, and housing in the aftermath of a historic COVID pandemic. Disconnected communities have created mass social illness in which fear and division are easy to manipulate, and for some, self-medication is the only solution. Prop 1 has passed, promising more treatment for mental health and housing from the state, but the outcome is uncertain as it takes money from local governments to provide services.
East and West Oakland are like pressure cookers with the effects of 40 years of job loss, divestment, and generational systemic institutional racism. Youths are lost without a future to look forward to, and youth development programs like YR Media are in financial limbo.
People are turning to social media apps like TikTok and YouTube to organize solutions while “X,” formerly known as Twitter, becomes a right-wing white nationalist echo chamber. The calls for solutions are many and diverse, from decolonized education to bringing back affordable and accessible “third spaces,” aka public spaces where people can walk locally and gather as a community besides work, school, and home.
A climate of hate continues long after Trump’s presidency into the 2024 presidential election, where the choice for voters is between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. Harris’s popularity has exploded after President Joe Biden stepped down from campaigning for a second term. She plans to give tax cuts to the middle class and assist in building three million homes. Still, her stance on immigration, crime, and military spending leans further toward moderate political-right-leaning policies.
Harris has disappointed younger voters with her stance on Palestine. She echoes Israel’s “right to defend itself” and the decades-old two-state solution with a ceasefire that Israel’s leadership has no interest in. Yet, her administration continues to arm Israel with more weapons as it has bombed Palestine and allowed far-right settler extremist violence to reign in the region. Mass calls for Palestinian liberation have increased hate towards Muslims, Arabs, and Jews despite these groups coming together to demand an immediate Israeli cease-fire and humanitarian aid for Gaza. Younger generations are deeply opposed to President Biden’s active collaboration with the genocide happening in Gaza, nicknaming him “Genocide Joe.” It is a harsh reality to discover United States citizens pay for a genocide they don’t want while supporting Israel, a client state of the United States that can afford universal healthcare, while the United States politicians have said for decades, “How would we pay..” whenever healthcare is brought up.
Record-breaking temperatures occur yearly as sea levels rise along with alarming sea temperatures, and the climate becomes visibly catastrophic. Still, little is being done to reverse climate change. Oil consumption continues to do business as usual, while the Supreme Court has weakened the EPA’s power to enforce the Clean Water Act. Coal is coming back to Oakland. Oakland is being sued for $1 billion for fighting against coal shipped by train directly through its neighborhoods. Coal interests are funding the recall of its mayor and attempting to install a new City attorney. Younger generations recognize an urgent need to save the planet, the environment, and the future. In a battle between private and public property, there is a call for walkable urban spaces, the use of electric bikes, and more public transportation.
2024 has been an intense election year that requires careful consideration from national to local elections. In San Francisco and the East Bay, billionaires and their networks, disguising themselves as neighborhood activists, actively interfere to dominate local elections—by funding disinformation, expensive recall campaigns, and attack ads—against anyone who works to govern on behalf of the people. Corporate media bias has backed them with apparent collaboration working with public relations specialist Sam Singer.
Humanity is at stake, war is almost imminent, the rights of women, LGBTQ+, disabled, and people of color are on the chopping block of the Supreme Court rule, and the environment is in dire need of care with massive industry reforms. Recalls against elected progressive officials have been funded by the billionaire class and created polarization among the working and disenfranchised classes using fear and blame tactics.
Maneuvering Ruling Class Seeking to Gain Further Authoritarian Control
The ruling class increasingly has few reasons to maintain systems to help reproduce workers. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has opened up new possibilities for future industries and institutions while raising privacy concerns. AI can advance healthcare and science possibilities while alleviating the need for repetitive, laborious work. Still, the ruling class is avoiding the possible space it provides to create new economic standards like universal healthcare, education, and income. The current trends in tech for 2024 have been to downsize staff in anticipation of no longer needing as many workers while sending remote jobs overseas to maintain profits in a slowing economy.
Reactionary politics and Public Relations (PR) propaganda campaigns are being fueled from social media to local news with a narrative that dictates law and order over the unruly working class. Meanwhile, the working class falls further into poverty levels and loses homes. The doom loop narrative is tossed around in media so crime can be blamed for many big-name corporate businesses failing, while in truth, stores in malls were failing for years before the pandemic exacerbated the need to go outside to shop.
Crafty PR campaigns and doom loop narratives traverse from social media “poverty porn” influencers into news broadcasts legitimized by journalists creating more apathy, fear, and hate towards the people who need community support the most. The doom loop narrative invites calls for heavy policing, criminalization, and facilities to lock away societies’ “undesirables” by the very privileged few who have gentrified and exasperated affordability and social networks.
Behind these campaigns are tech billionaires, real estate moguls, secretive super PACs, and nitchy organizing names like “Neighbors Together Oakland.” The best insight into the ruling class’s direction is to review the recent political dynamics of San Francisco. The city had already recalled its newly elected progressive District Attorney (DA) in a campaign fueled by manipulation of fears of anti-Asian hate, grab-and-go theft of near-empty stores, and rising crime. The narrative push affects state and local politics, pushing traditionally neo-liberal politicians further right on policy.
School board councils are also a target of the same conservative activists who attacked critical race theory (CRT) as “racism against white people” and started mass book bannings. The same tactics and circle of ruling class activists are aiming for Oakland next with attempts to recall the newly elected progressive DA Pamela Price and Mayor Sheng Thao.
Much of the ruling class’s animosity is tied to the local police unions, which supported mayoral and DA candidates who lost. Immediately following the election, attacks towards Price and Thao flooded Twitter’s “X.” The people who push the narratives that Price and Thao would do nothing to reduce crime are re-posted and supported by X’s CEO, one of the wealthiest men on earth, Elon Musk as well as Y Combinator Tech CEO Garry Tan who has said there is a need to get rid of progressive leadership in San Francisco and Oakland.
After another scandal with the Oakland Police Department, former Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong stalled the end of over 20 years of federal department oversight. Armstrong participated in a coverup of an officer hit-and-run incident. Mayor Thao fired Armstrong last year, and Armstrong has insisted on being reinstated since. The propagandist reasons that this is a good reason to recall Thao as complicit in allowing crime to run rampant in Oakland.
In April 2023, the Alameda County DA office charged Officer Phong Tran with perjury and threatening a witness. A year later, Oaklandside reported that eight officers, including four commanders, allegedly botched an examination of bribery and perjury charges against a homicide investigator.
In June of this year, Oaklandside revealed former chief LeRonne Armstrong and his immediate successor Darren Allison were investigated and faulted for leadership failures. “Armstrong and Allison failed to ensure OPD’s internal affairs division rigorously and fairly examined the accusations against the detective. Investigators concluded Armstrong and Allison both fell short in their authority and responsibilities as commanding officers.”
In April this year, Price also filed manslaughter charges against 3 Alameda cops in the death of Mario Gonzalez in April 2021. Previous DA Nancy O’Malley had refused to charge the three officers. Recently, she has been accused of two Oakland police officers with DUIs while on duty and one for a hit-and-run, in which the officer attempted to report their stolen falsely.
When Price assumed office in January 2023, she established the Public Accountability Unit and reopened cases involving police officers that her predecessor had investigated and declined to prosecute.
With police accountability from Oakland Mayor Thao and Alameda County DA Price, the Alameda County police unions support the recall of Price. The recall campaigns have worked in coordination not only to tarnish and delegitimize both the mayor and the DA, but they have also gone after other progressives up for election: Congressional candidate Lateefah Simons, council member Carroll Fife, and Alameda Supervisor candidate Nikki Fortunato Bas, all advocates for housing not just at an affordable level but accessible level for all. This is why Police Unions, Real Estate, Landlord Lobbies, Tech billionaires, and Coal interests have poured immensely toxic campaign efforts to discredit these women of color from leadership roles.
General Solutions and Calls to Action
These are some ideas we have seen online by people. They can discussed further and adapted in many different ways. The ruling class blocks all of these discussion ideas, making it almost impossible to foster change. All of these are possible, but only if we collectively work together to gain political power to implement community desires.
Social Welfare – There is new evidence that child abuse was reduced during the pandemic. The conclusion was that social welfare was provided during the pandemic, and when people had more resources, they had less stress. Stress is a significant cause of child abuse. Stress from lack of resources can, therefore, be attributed to crime as well. Investing in social welfare has proven time and time again to be the best solution for a healthy society.
Environment – Public transit, green bikes, conservation policies, boycotting companies that cause environmental harm, stopping buying fast fashion and plastic/synthesized products that will only be used a few times, and supporting local farmers instead of big industrial farming.
War – Boycotts of gas, corporations, calling representatives
Media – Contact news media when they do not represent the full story or are misleading. Support non-profit and local journalists. Become media literate. Teach media literacy. Bring back a stronger Federal Commission Commission enforcing regulations in broadcast media for news outlets.
Education – Private schools should only be funded by public funds if they can be available to all students in the community. Modernize curriculum at every level—more community colleges and industry skill programs. Education should start with free daycare (also economics).
Housing – Is the YIMBY way the only way? Take over massive corporate real estate, cap on number of homes that can be owned? Or should we focus on the old school tax the wealthiest and have Federal housing programs pay for housing which has worked in the past? Cap on allowing purchasing of homes by non-citizens, community-managed land trusts, and public financing of social housing.
Governance/Politics – How do we support politicians who are not part of the corporate political class without ending up with a dictator? Get rid of the Electoral College vote. Modernize the universal voting process. Transparency is necessary in government. Get rid of insider trading and stock market trading. There is a need for candidates representing the working class/new abolitionist class.
Immigration – The US and the Western ruling world need to address its war crimes against indigenous communities, which have disrupted their lands, making it unsafe for them to live, which leads to mass migration. This includes the environmental impacts of those lands. Eliminate non-documented worker status, and all workers will have the same rights.
Healthcare – Free to low-cost healthcare for humans AND animals. Health promotion, disease prevention, and mental and emotional health education should start in the early years. Elderly care should also be universal. Community-based health at all levels, part of what makes us unhealthy is isolation.
Policing and justice system: Modernize universal public protection social services programs. Modernize universal police databases. Transparency. The ruling class, including police, judges, politicians, private sector executives, and CEOs, must be held accountable. There is no rule of law for only the working class; it must apply to all.
Humanities and human rights – Boycott companies and states that take over Indigenous land and resources while exploiting the population/removing them from their lands.
Economics – Support local businesses and local farms. Spend more on quality, long-lasting local goods and less on fast bulk-purchase consumerism (bulk consumer goods purchased by companies, likely overseas with cheap, practical slave labor often using children). Less is more. Universal income. Tax wealth cap. Do we need the stock market? How do we regulate the stock market so it does not control our politics and way of life?