Port of Oakland

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pages: 477 words: 135,607

The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson

air freight, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, Erik Brynjolfsson, flag carrier, full employment, global supply chain, intermodal, Isaac Newton, job automation, Jones Act, knowledge economy, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, oil shock, Panamax, Port of Oakland, post-Panamax, Productivity paradox, refrigerator car, Robert Solow, South China Sea, trade route, vertical integration, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Erie, Globalizing L.A., pp. 80–88. 9. Woodruff Minor, Pacific Gateway: An Illustrated History of the Port of Oakland (Oakland, 2000), p. 45; Port of Oakland, “Port of Oakland,” 1957; Ben E. Nutter, “The Port of Oakland: Modernization and Expansion of Shipping, Airport, and Real Estate Operations, 1957–1977,” interview by Ann Lage, 1991 (Berkeley, 1994), pp. 51, 84, 139; Rosenstein, “The Rise of Maritime Containerization,” p. 45. 10. George Home, “Intercoastal Trade,” NYT, January 29, 1961; Nutter, “The Port of Oakland,” pp. 78–79. American-Hawaiian never received the government subsidies it sought to finance its ships. 11.

American-Hawaiian never received the government subsidies it sought to finance its ships. 11. Rosenstein, “The Rise of Maritime Containerization,” pp. 47, 69; Nutter, “The Port of Oakland,” pp. 79–80; Port of Oakland, “60 Years: A Chronicle of Progress,” 1987, pp. 17–18. 12. Erie, Globalizing L.A., p. 89; Walter Hamshar, “Must U.S. Approve All Pier Leases,” Herald Tribune, April 5, 1964. 13. Nutter, “The Port of Oakland,” p. 82; Rosenstein, “The Rise of Maritime Containerization,” pp. 98–104. 14. Ting-Li Cho, “A Conceptual Framework for the Physical Development of the Port of Seattle,” Port of Seattle Planning and Research Department, April 1966, p. 15; Arthur D. Little Inc., Community Renewal Programming: A San Francisco Case Study (New York, 1966), p. 34. 15.

Rosenstein, “The Rise of Maritime Containerization,” pp. 65 and 85–86; Worden, Cargoes, 148; Nutter, “The Port of Oakland,” pp. 112, 120; Port of Oakland, “1957 Revenue Bonds, Series P, $20,000,000,” October 17, 1978, p. 15; Erie, Globalizing L.A., p. 90; Seattle Port Commission, “Container Terminals 1970–1975: A Development Strategy,” November 1969, pp. 1, 10. 16. Burke, A History of the Port of Seattle, pp. 116, 122; Erie, Globalizing L.A., pp. 85–89; Minor, Pacific Gateway, p. 53; Fitzgerald, “A History of Containerization,” pp. 91–93; Niven, American President Lines, pp. 250–251; Nutter, “The Port of Oakland,” p. 84. 17. U.S. Department of Commerce, Marad, “Review of United States Oceanborne Trade 1966” (Washington, DC, 1967), p. 11. 18.


pages: 498 words: 184,761

The Riders Come Out at Night: Brutality, Corruption, and Cover-Up in Oakland by Ali Winston, Darwin Bondgraham

affirmative action, anti-communist, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bear Stearns, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, COVID-19, crack epidemic, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Ferguson, Missouri, friendly fire, full employment, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Golden Gate Park, mass incarceration, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, old-boy network, Port of Oakland, power law, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra

Many became involved in the drug trade from the early 1970s onward, supplied with tons of heroin lugged home by demobilized Vietnam veterans and sailors smuggling product in through the burgeoning West Oakland docks.19 In Mexico, production of the old narcolero staple of brown tar heroin increased to meet growing demand in El Norte.20 Along with Los Angeles, Oakland became one of the West Coast hubs for the trade. The Port of Oakland, the fifth biggest in the United States, was the first West Coast port to move from break-bulk shipping—that is, loose cargo loads—to containers, in 1962. The new process made trade faster and simpler but also complicated customs inspections. In 1991 the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and US Customs broke up a heroin trafficking network that moved tons of high-quality “China White” from Thailand, seizing a then-record 1,200 pounds from a Hayward warehouse.21 “The Port of Oakland pretty much goes unchecked; I don’t know of any other large port that doesn’t have a police department,” said Vic Bullock, an Oakland native who joined the OPD in 1981.

., 5–6, 133, 168–69 Noll, Holly, 261–62 Norfleet, Derrick, 254 Norteños (gang), 195, 267–68 North Side Oakland (NSO, gang), 265–66 Nowak, Steven, 41, 44 NSA, see Negotiated Settlement Agreement (NSA, OPD) Nut Cases (gang), 303 O Oakland, California, 177–78, 242–44, 247, 258, 273–76, 302, 305–6 Caldecott Tunnel fire (1990), 174–75 Citizens’ Police Review Board, 7, 19, 132–33, 157–58, 174, 182, 189–93, 290–91, 306, 351–52, 374 crime statistics, 34, 163, 175, 178–79, 186, 266, 302, 308, 341 disinvestment and white flight, 5–6, 33–39, 125–26, 152, 162–67, 175–76, 179 drug trade, see drug trade economic rebounds / gentrification, 16, 24–25, 125–26, 179, 181, 281, 314 financial challenges, 158, 162–63, 167–68, 243, 273–74, 280–82, 302 Ghost Town (Hoover-Foster neighborhood, West Oakland), 5–6, 14, 59, 222, 303–4, see also Black Panther Party (BPP); the Riders history of ethnic conflicts and corruption, 100–108, 110–20 history of labor conflicts, 108–13, 127, 288–91 Ku Klux Klan and, 103–6, 107–8 legal settlements, see Negotiated Settlement Agreement (NSA, OPD); Oakland, California legal settlements and jury award payments Loma Prieta quake (1989), 173–74 Measure Y parcel tax, 243, 274–76 Measure Z parcel and parking tax, 314 Occupy movement, see Occupy movement police department, see Oakland Police Department (OPD) Port Chicago disaster (1944), 131 Port of Oakland, see Port of Oakland Privacy Advisory Commission, 311, 382, see also surveillance racial discrimination and segregation, 121–29, 131, 171, 201, 299, 312–13 rise of Black leadership, 34, 38 school boycott (1966), 121–22, 124 Oakland, California legal settlements and jury award payments, 83, 88–89, 296, 298 Melvin Black killing, 156 Bradshaw / Meyer illegal strip-searches, 224–25, 272 Burris / Chanin Warrantgate class action lawsuit, 220–21, 224 federal consent decree, 94–96, 98–99, 207, 240, 265, 374, see also Negotiated Settlement Agreement (NSA, OPD) Matthew Hornung wrongful termination suit, 81 Gary King, Jr. killing, 193 Uganda Knapps, 272 Monell doctrine and, 89–90 for OPD abuses of protesters, 264 for OPD officer punitive damages penalties, 272 Matthew Watson, 98 D’Wayne Wiggins, 18 Willie Wilkins killing, 201 Mack “Jody” Woodfox killing, 206 Oakland Black Officers Association, 148, 155, 369–70, 377 Oakland Direct Action Committee (ODAC), 121–22, 123 Oakland Economic Development Council (OEDC), 132–33 Oakland Police Commission Community Police Review Agency (CPRA), 352–53, 367, 369 creation of, 352, 375 sexual exploitation scandal and, 352 termination of Anne Kirkpatrick, 372–76 Oakland Police Department (OPD) absence of US Justice Department “patterns and practices” review, 62–63 achieves compliance with the NSA, 378–79 Chief Armstrong, 366, 377–79 Chief Batts, see Batts, Anthony Black Lives Matter and, 244, 316–17, 353 Black officer resistance to police violence, 138–41 Black Panthers and, see Black Panther Party (BPP) Citizens’ Police Review Board (CPRB) and, 7, 19, 132–33, 157–58, 174, 182, 189–93, 290–91, 306, 351–52, 374 code of silence, 18, 24, 29, 54–57, 63, 68–70, 73, 138–39, 291–92, 297, 327, 340, 383 community-policing model, 177–78, 274–76 Crime Reduction Teams (CRTs), 39–41, 48, 52, 182, 217, 308, 359 Criminal Investigation Division (CID), 256, 297, 343–44, 348 directed patrols, 78–79, 300 DNA testing, 227–28, 245, 305 documentary film about, 313–14, 342 drug trade, see drug trade early intervention program and, 7–8, 341 Executive Force Review Board (EFRB), 186, 197–98, 279–80, 366–70 FBI investigations of, 154, 233, 234, 236, 278, 288 federal court oversight and reform, 3, 94–96, 98–99, 107, 180, 240, 265, 374, see also Negotiated Settlement Agreement (NSA, OPD) Fruitvale BART Station rally for Oscar Grant III shooting, 237, 239–44 Chief Gain, see Gain, Charles gangs and, see drug trade; gangs Grove-Shafter Freeway sniper, 153–54 Chief Hart, see Hart, George T.

By the time that crack cocaine arrived in the 1980s, Oakland’s social fabric was already ripping under economic pressures. Violent crime hit its apex in 1991, when 165 Oaklanders were murdered, mostly in turf wars between competing drug organizations.1 Large stretches of the West and East Oakland flatlands, where the drug trade and underground economy flourished for years in symbiosis with the Port of Oakland, military installations, and the growing logistics industry, were now home to open-air bazaars where hustlers sold crack and heroin. Oakland voters had moved significantly to the left in the mid-1970s, when the city’s Black community united with white liberals and Latinos to overthrow the conservative Republican business community that had dominated city hall for decades.


pages: 537 words: 99,778

Dreaming in Public: Building the Occupy Movement by Amy Lang, Daniel Lang/levitsky

activist lawyer, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bonus culture, British Empire, capitalist realism, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate personhood, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, deindustrialization, different worldview, facts on the ground, gentrification, glass ceiling, housing crisis, housing justice, Kibera, late capitalism, lolcat, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, plutocrats, Port of Oakland, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Slavoj Žižek, social contagion, structural adjustment programs, the medium is the message, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, white flight, working poor

After the first attempt by the police to evict the camp on 25 October, thousands took to the streets marching in protest and the police responded with brutal repression, using ‘chemical weapons’ against the protesters. On 26 October, following a second march, at the General Assembly of Occupy Oakland, 3,000 people approved a call for a General Strike on 2 November. The Oakland General Strike on 2 November (the first in the city since 1946) was an overwhelming success, blockading the Port of Oakland, with more than 50,000 people participating. Since then, the Occupy Oakland movement continues to resist, alongside related movements throughout the world, and we are very concerned by the possibility of another eviction attempt and more repression in the coming days. For these reasons, we feel it is extremely important to send this message of solidarity to our comrades on the Other Side of the border, to show our support.

The UC Davis Bicycle Barricade collective go beyond growing calls for their removal, proposing that nothing short of structural change, within the university as outside, will do and arguing that internal repression cannot be separated from other forms of complicity with violence, like UC Davis’ involvement in agribusiness operations both in the US and in US-occupied Afghanistan. After the successful shut-down of the Port of Oakland during the Oakland General Strike, West Coast Occupy/Decolonize groups called for a Pacific Coast port blockade. The call was in part a response to specific requests to Occupy for solidarity with the labor struggles of port truck drivers in Los Angeles and longshore workers in Longview, Washington.

Protests will be held at Oscar Grant Plaza (14th and Broadway) at nine, noon, and at five. They have opted to schedule multiple mass convergences so that those who cannot leave the workplace can participate in the evening. The evening plan, as I understand it, is to march south from the plaza to the Port of Oakland and to arrive before the change of shifts that will take place at seven o’clock. They plan to shut down the port, which happens to be the fifth-busiest container port in the country. This is hardly an impossible task. In 2008, union workers and protesters who opposed the Iraq war successfully shut down much of Oakland’s port.


pages: 173 words: 54,729

Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action That Changed America by Writers For The 99%

Bay Area Rapid Transit, citizen journalism, collective bargaining, Day of the Dead, desegregation, feminist movement, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, independent contractor, intentional community, it's over 9,000, McMansion, microaggression, Mohammed Bouazizi, Occupy movement, Port of Oakland, We are the 99%, young professional

While the strike did not totally shut down the city, it did garner the widespread support of students, workers, labor unions, and even small business owners, some of whom closed down in solidarity with the Occupy movement. Thousands of demonstrators, with tacit solidarity from ILWU dockworkers and independent contractor port truck drivers, shut down the Port of Oakland for the evening. The success of this “General Strike” in Oakland invigorated activists across the country and the world, leading to solidarity actions by the New York occupation and others, and giving many a new sense of the possible and the power of the 99 percent. More generally, the Oakland occupation and its success helped spark debate in the camps and around the country about expanding the movement’s tactics— from the occupation of new spaces, such as foreclosed homes, to the costs and benefits of “property destruction,” such as graffiti and breaking windows. *** A Dispatch From the Midwest By Dan La Botz, an organizer for Occupy Cincinnati In a bid to achieve critical mass of their own, activists in Cinncinnati staged an occupation of their own.

The judge said she had already decided to grant the restraining order because the curfew was a “clear prior restraint on free speech rights.” Military veterans join the protesters at Zuccotti Park. November 2—Demonstrations continued in Oakland, California, with a citywide general strike taking place in response to the serious injury sustained by a protester on October 25. Protesters shut down the Port of Oakland, the nation’s fifth busiest port. November 3—Riot police clashed with Occupy Oakland, firing tear gas and flash bang grenades. Over a hundred protesters were arrested, including another Iraq veteran who was seriously injured by police. Occupy Seattle protesters and police briefly clashed in protests sparked by Chase CEO Jamie Dimon’s visit to town.


pages: 243 words: 76,686

How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell

Airbnb, Anthropocene, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Big Tech, Burning Man, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, context collapse, death from overwork, Donald Trump, Filter Bubble, full employment, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Ian Bogost, Internet Archive, James Bridle, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, Minecraft, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, Port of Oakland, Results Only Work Environment, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Snapchat, source of truth, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, union organizing, white flight, Works Progress Administration

During the nineteenth century, this site served as the western terminus of the Southern Pacific Railroad, and in World War II was a supply base for the Pacific Fleet of the US Navy. Eventually it ended up in the hands of the Port of Oakland, who turned it into one of the few parks in West Oakland. Like most of the land edging the San Francisco Bay, this was once a wetland ecosystem, but building a port also meant dredging the shallows for ships. When the Port of Oakland took ownership of the land in 2002, it used sediment to re-create a lagoon and a beach in the hopes of supporting the local shorebird population. It also built an observation tower named after Chappell R.


pages: 326 words: 29,543

The Docks by Bill Sharpsteen

affirmative action, anti-communist, big-box store, collective bargaining, Google Earth, independent contractor, intermodal, inventory management, jitney, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, new economy, Panamax, place-making, Port of Oakland, post-Panamax, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, strikebreaker, women in the workforce

For that, you have to be a regular reader of the union’s monthly newspaper, the Dispatcher. For late 2007 through 2008, it listed three fatalities on the job: ╯ ╯ Edward Hall, Local 10, struck and crushed by a yard hustler Carlos Rivera, Local 13, hit by a forklift carrying rolls of sheet metal Delmont Blakeney, Local 91, struck by a container and thrown into the bay at the Port of Oakland, where—with no emergency lad╯ 46â•… /â•… Moving Cans der available to reach him—he spent more than thirty minutes in the cold water and eventually lost consciousness; he was proÂ� nounced dead once he was pulled out and taken to a hospital ╯ So I ask MacDonald why such an important statistic as deaths doesn’t go in the PMA’s record.

Port of Los Angeles Handbook 2009. www.portoflosangeles.org/pdf/Â�Shipping _Handbook_2009.pdf (accessed July 1, 2010). ———. “Port of Los Angeles Tariffs.” June 30, 2006. Price, Tom. “Local 13’s Carlos Rivera Dies in Dockside Tragedy.” ILWU Dispatcher, May 2008. Showalter, John. “The Deadly Side of Longshore Work.” ILWU Dispatcher, May 2008. ———. “Two Deaths at Port of Oakland Prompt Safety Actions by Union.” ILWU Dispatcher, January 2008. Tabor, Damon. “Swept Away by Currents.” Wired, April 2009. Taggart, Stewart. “The 20-Ton Packet.” Wired, October 1999. ╯ Referencesâ•… /â•… 283 Wahner, Christoph M. “Daily Vessel Casualty, Piracy, and News Report.” Law Offices of Countryman and McDaniel, Los Angeles. www.cargolaw.com/ presentations_casualties.php (accessed July 24, 2010).


pages: 397 words: 110,222

Habeas Data: Privacy vs. The Rise of Surveillance Tech by Cyrus Farivar

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, call centre, citizen journalism, cloud computing, computer age, connected car, do-ocracy, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Golden Gate Park, information security, John Markoff, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, lock screen, Lyft, national security letter, Occupy movement, operational security, optical character recognition, Port of Oakland, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech worker, The Hackers Conference, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, uber lyft, WikiLeaks, you are the product, Zimmermann PGP

“But I’m like every nine out of ten people, I just sat on the sidelines,” he said. After graduating with a BA in cconomics, Hofer bounced around, first getting a job as a paralegal in 2004, and eventually landing in law school at the University of San Francisco in 2008. By 2011, he’d graduated, and later joined one of the protest marches to the Port of Oakland as part of the broader Occupy movement. In June 2013, he read in horror about Edward Snowden and revelations of the National Security Agency’s (NSA) overreach. He was trying to figure out how to best channel his nascent political identity—a mix of Bay Area progressivism with an undercurrent of his rural libertarian roots.

Then, in July 2013, when Snowden was still a fresh name, the City of Oakland formally accepted a federal grant to create something called the Domain Awareness Center (DAC). The idea was to provide a central hub for all of the city’s surveillance tools, including license plate readers (LPR), closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras, gunshot detection microphones, and more—all in the name of protecting the Port of Oakland, the third largest on the West Coast. Had the city council been presented with the perfunctory vote on the DAC even a month before Snowden, it likely would have breezed by without even a mention in the local newspaper. But because government snooping was on everyone’s mind, including Hofer’s, it became a controversial plan.


pages: 565 words: 164,405

A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World by William J. Bernstein

Admiral Zheng, asset allocation, bank run, Benoit Mandelbrot, British Empire, call centre, clean water, Columbian Exchange, Corn Laws, cotton gin, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, domestication of the camel, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Eratosthenes, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, high-speed rail, ice-free Arctic, imperial preference, income inequality, intermodal, James Hargreaves, John Harrison: Longitude, Khyber Pass, low skilled workers, non-tariff barriers, Paul Samuelson, placebo effect, Port of Oakland, refrigerator car, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, upwardly mobile, working poor, zero-sum game

Bairoch, Economics and World History, 26. 48. Harley, "Ocean Freight Rates and Productivity, 1740-1913: The Primacy of Mechanical Invention Reaffirmed," 861. 49. Marc Levinson, The Box (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 7-53; Mark Rosenstein. "The Rise of Containerization in the Port of Oakland," New York Univerity master's thesis, 2000, 23-31, http://www.apparent-wind.com/mbr/ maritime-writings/thesis.pdf, accessed on March 13, 2007. Both sources are entertaining and well written: Rosenstein's thesis is the more balanced, readable, and inexpensive of the two. 50. Rogowski, 100-101; quote, 121.

Rodrigue, Jean-Paul, "Straits, Passages, and Chokepoints: A Maritime Geostrategy of Petroleum Distribution," Les Cahiers de Geographie du Quebec 48, no. 135 (December 2004): 357-374. Rodrik, Dani, Has Globalization Gone Too Far? (Washington DC: Institute for International Economics, 1997). Rogowski, Ronald. Commerce and Coalitions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). Rosenstein, Mark, "The Rise of Containerization in the Port of Oakland," New York University master's thesis (2000),23-3 1, http://www.apparent-wind.com/mbr/ maritime-writings/thesis.pdf, accessed March 13, 2007. Rostow, W.W., The World Economy (Austin: University of Texas, 1978). Roy, Tirthankar, "Economic History and Modern India: Redefining the Link," The Journal of Economic Perspectives 16, no. 3 (Summer 2002): 109-130.


pages: 244 words: 78,238

Cabin Fever: The Harrowing Journey of a Cruise Ship at the Dawn of a Pandemic by Michael Smith, Jonathan Franklin

airport security, Boeing 747, call centre, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, Donald Trump, global pandemic, lockdown, offshore financial centre, Panamax, Port of Oakland, Snapchat, social distancing, Suez canal 1869

Cruise ships were a rabbit hole, and the White House didn’t need a cruise ship crisis to further drain resources and brainpower. Olivia was stunned, but she understood the clear message: Let the locals handle it. Several weeks earlier, the federal government had deployed massive resources to coordinate the docking of Carnival’s Grand Princess at the Port of Oakland, California. It had been a logistical nightmare. The overlapping jurisdictions, regulations, and teamwork required were massive, so the White House had simply passed the problem down the line, forcing every state to invent its own protocols. They were all exhausted by the ceaseless outbreaks on cruise ships.


pages: 287 words: 85,518

Please Report Your Bug Here: A Novel by Josh Riedel

Burning Man, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, financial independence, Golden Gate Park, invisible hand, Joan Didion, Mason jar, Menlo Park, messenger bag, off-the-grid, Port of Oakland, pre–internet, risk/return, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, tech bro, tech worker, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

“You’ll see when you meet them. I want you to visit, before an acquisition makes that less possible.” We made plans to ride BART together into West Oakland the next morning. “This is their warehouse,” she said, handing me her phone, open to a satellite image. The warehouse was nestled near the train tracks, close to the Port of Oakland, where cargo ships arrived with supplies from the other side of the world. I handed her phone back. “Meet at Civic Center?” “Sure,” she said, sliding her phone into her pocket. “But be patient. I’m taking the N.” * * * Two N MUNIs passed Civic Center station, seventeen minutes apart, and Noma still hadn’t shown.


pages: 291 words: 90,200

Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age by Manuel Castells

"World Economic Forum" Davos, access to a mobile phone, banking crisis, call centre, centre right, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, income inequality, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Port of Oakland, social software, statistical model, Twitter Arab Spring, We are the 99%, web application, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, young professional, zero-sum game

Oakland witnessed several major, violent confrontations in repeated attempts to dislodge the occupied square, with dozens of injured, hundreds of arrests, and two veterans seriously injured and hospitalized. This police action radicalized the movement in Oakland, to the point that on November 3 demonstrators succeeded in shutting down the Port of Oakland, the second largest on the US Pacific Coast, at the price of pitched street battles with the police. New York oscillated between its initial tolerance of the occupation and several instances of harsh repression. Many university campuses, including some of the elite universities such as Yale, Berkeley, and Harvard, were occupied.


pages: 306 words: 94,204

Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer by Novella Carpenter

back-to-the-land, crack epidemic, David Attenborough, dumpster diving, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, haute cuisine, hobby farmer, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Mason jar, McMansion, New Urbanism, Port of Oakland, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rewilding, Silicon Valley, urban decay, urban renewal, Whole Earth Catalog

Since my mom and dad had both lived in the Bay Area in the 1960s—she as a political-science student at UC Berkeley, my dad as a classical guitar player in Oakland—I would have thought that they would have lots of stories to tell. They even lived together in West Oakland at one point: after they met in Mexico (my mom still insists that it’s not a good idea to meet your life partner while on vacation), they shacked up near the Port of Oakland, about twenty blocks from where I live today. But neither of them could remember much about Oakland back then. My mom had a vague memory of buying tamales from the lady living next door to them, but that was all. My dad said they lived near some Black Panthers and wannabe rock musicians, but when pressed, he couldn’t recall much else.


pages: 379 words: 99,340

The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium by Martin Gurri

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Ayatollah Khomeini, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Burning Man, business cycle, citizen journalism, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, dark matter, David Graeber, death of newspapers, disinformation, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, job-hopping, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, Port of Oakland, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Skype, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, too big to fail, traveling salesman, University of East Anglia, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional

Nor did OWS manage to attract African-American or Hispanic activists in any numbers. Every Occupy site embraced nonviolence, but some were more nonviolent than others. In Oakland, protesters fought pitched battles against police, with each side accusing the other of brutality. Occupy Oakland’s “General Strike and Anti-Capitalist March” on November 2 managed to close the Port of Oakland – probably the only significant economic impact of the protests. Sanitation was always a problem, and was frequently cited by the authorities as a pretext for clearing out the encampments. Crime became a concern with the passage of time, as the homeless and other distinctly non-middle-class elements drifted into the sites.


pages: 326 words: 48,727

Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth by Mark Hertsgaard

addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, Berlin Wall, business continuity plan, carbon footprint, clean water, climate change refugee, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, congestion pricing, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, defense in depth, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, food miles, Great Leap Forward, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Kickstarter, megacity, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, ocean acidification, peak oil, Port of Oakland, precautionary principle, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, the built environment, transatlantic slave trade, transit-oriented development, two and twenty, University of East Anglia, urban planning

The flourishing of urban gardens in Detroit was described in "Detroit Arcadia: Expiring the Post-American Landscape" by Rebecca Solnit, Harper's, July 2007. The history and achievements of Victory Gardens were described by Fred Kirschenmann in an author's interview. Chapter 9: While the Rich Avert Their Eyes The vulnerability of the ports of Oakland and Long Beach (and much else in California) is documented in the Pacific Institute study The Impacts of Sea-Level Rise on the California Coast (see http://www.pacinst.org/reports/sea_level_rise/report.pdf) and in the state government's 2009 California Climate Adaptation Strategy report, available at http://www.energy.ca.gov/2009publications/CNRA-1000-2009-027/CNRA-1000-2009-027-F.PDF.


Frommer's San Francisco 2012 by Matthew Poole, Erika Lenkert, Kristin Luna

airport security, Albert Einstein, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Blue Bottle Coffee, California gold rush, car-free, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, El Camino Real, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, high-speed rail, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Mason jar, Maui Hawaii, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, off-the-grid, place-making, Port of Oakland, post-work, San Francisco homelessness, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, Torches of Freedom, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, Works Progress Administration, young professional

The USS Potomac: FDR’s floating white house It took the Potomac Association’s hundreds of volunteers more than 12 years—at a cost of $5 million—to restore the 165-foot presidential yacht Potomac, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s beloved “Floating White House.” Now a proud and permanent memorial berthed at the Port of Oakland’s FDR Pier at Jack London Square, the revitalized Potomac is open to the public for dockside tours, as well as 2-hour History Cruises along the San Francisco waterfront and around Treasure and Alcatraz islands. Prior to departure, a 15-minute video, shown at the nearby Potomac Visitor Center, provides background on FDR’s presidency and FDR’s legacy concerning the Bay Area.


pages: 615 words: 187,426

Chinese Spies: From Chairman Mao to Xi Jinping by Roger Faligot

active measures, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business intelligence, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, illegal immigration, index card, information security, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, offshore financial centre, Pearl River Delta, Port of Oakland, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, South China Sea, special economic zone, stem cell, union organizing, young professional, éminence grise

The couple were both attachés at the Chinese embassy in Washington in the 1980s, charged with cultivating valuable arms trading relationships and with establishing a pro-China lobby populated by well-known American figures. But in 1996, US police arrested seven people in San Francisco suspected of having brought approximately 2,000 Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifles and 800 handguns into the United States. The cargo was seized in the port of Oakland, California, thanks to a patient FBI intelligence operation that brought to light the leading role of two Chinese state-owned firms in the affair: Norinco (North Industries Corporation) and Poly Technologies. Norinco had ten offices around the world, including in Hong Kong. Two of those who worked in the San Francisco office, Zhang Yi and Lu Yilun, ended up in jail.


pages: 828 words: 232,188

Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy by Francis Fukuyama

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, British Empire, centre right, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, crony capitalism, Day of the Dead, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, household responsibility system, income inequality, information asymmetry, invention of the printing press, iterative process, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labour management system, land reform, land tenure, life extension, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, means of production, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, open economy, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, Port of Oakland, post-industrial society, post-materialism, price discrimination, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, stem cell, subprime mortgage crisis, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey, zero-sum game

The explosion of opportunities for litigation gave access and therefore power to many formerly excluded groups, beginning with African Americans. For this reason, litigation and the right to sue has been jealously guarded by many on the progressive left. But it also entailed large costs in terms of the quality of public policy. Kagan illustrates this with the case of the dredging of Oakland Harbor. During the 1970s, the Port of Oakland initiated plans to dredge the harbor in anticipation of the new, larger classes of container ships that were then coming into service. The plan had to be approved by a host of governmental agencies including the Army Corps of Engineers, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Marine Fisheries Service, the EPA, and their counterparts in the state of California.


Rough Guide to San Francisco and the Bay Area by Nick Edwards, Mark Ellwood

1960s counterculture, airport security, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Blue Bottle Coffee, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, carbon footprint, City Beautiful movement, Day of the Dead, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Nelson Mandela, period drama, pez dispenser, Port of Oakland, rent control, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, transcontinental railway, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, young professional

.*--&3 &VHFOF 3&(*0/"- 0/FJMM 1"3, )PVTF $)"#05 3&(*0/"-1"3, .06/5%*"#-0 .U 45"5&1"3, %JBCMP 0BLMBOE *OUFSOBUJPOBM "JSQPSU | 1BDJmDB -JWFSNPSF )":8"3% '3&.0/5 )BMG.PPO#BZ 1FTDBEFSP4BOUB$SV[ 286 .JTTJPO 4BO+PTF NJMFT 1BMP"MUP4BO+PTF its livelihood from shipping and transportation services, as evidenced by the cranes in the massive Port of Oakland, but Oakland is in the midst of a renaissance as it lobbies to attract businesses and workers from the information technology industry. Oakland spreads north along wooded foothills to Berkeley, an image-conscious university town that looks out across to the Golden Gate and collects a mixed bag of international students, heavily pierced dropouts, aging 1960s radicals, and Nobel Prize-winning nuclear physicists in its cafés and bookstores.


Northern California Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, Apple II, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, big-box store, bike sharing, Burning Man, buy and hold, California gold rush, California high-speed rail, call centre, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, company town, dark matter, Day of the Dead, Donald Trump, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Frank Gehry, friendly fire, gentrification, gigafactory, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, McMansion, means of production, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, Peoples Temple, Port of Oakland, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, the built environment, trade route, transcontinental railway, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Frogs and Wolves Long before Huck Finn, Twain got his break with a story called The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, which he wrote while living in a cabin in the California foothills. Every year the central event of Twain’s story still sees the competition of little green contestants at the Calaveras County Fair in Angels Camp. Jack London was also a restless vagabond. Born in San Francisco, London shipped in and out of the ports of Oakland, which informed seafaring stories and adventure novels such as White Fang, The Call of the Wild and The Sea-Wolf. London’s old neighborhood isn’t the turf of salty dogs any more; the waterfront area in Oakland is now a dining and entertainment district that bears his name. Beatniks A generation later came the Beats, a collection of poets, novelists and alternative thinkers who populated San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood.