UPDATE 7:18 p.m. The entrance to BART is still closed on the southwest side.
UPDATE 7:12 p.m. There are still a lot of police on the scene. Protesters have started to sit down on the BART station benches. The station by Wells Fargo is still closed. There are still a lot of young kids in black milling around and saying things like “$%LD” the police and “it’s easy to be free when you’re a rich white man,” between refried beans and rice.
UPDATE 7 p.m. Police just cleared the crowd, moving it to the sidewalk. Traffic is starting to move. Chants of “Huelga General” begin, but are not being picked up. Sidewalks are starting to clear up. It looks like the crowd is starting to disperse and traffic is returning to normal.
UPDATE: 6:45 p.m. Lots of black flags, chanting and signs. The demonstrators are blocking the buses at the Mission Street. The southwest entrance to BART has been closed.
UPDATE 5:40 p.m. The protest has started moving towards 16th and Mission with people joining as they advance. Police are accompanying them as the march moves down Mission Street. People keep joining the protest as it moves with about 200 at present.
Photo via Instagram by Tigerbeat.
4:15 p.m. Everyone’s setting up and getting ready at 24th and Mission for the May 1st Protest —International Labor Movement. The May Day protest is not just about fair conditions in the place of work or about getting a fair wage for workers. It calls attention to issues that all workers see themselves affected by. From the flyer:
Today, as workers are facing poverty wages, evictions and foreclosures, deportations, polic brutality and countless other forms of oppression, the date is an important one which can unite these issues that affect all workers.
- The following is a list of demands:
- Full rights for all immigrants! Stop the deportations!
- End the evictions and gentrification! Housing is a right!
- Stop Police Brutality!
- Stop the privatization of public services, equal living and wage now!
- Halt and reverse environmental destruction
- No to wars and occupation
Considering that minorities and the working class have been and are being chased out of the Mission, all you’ve done is prove the merit of their arguments.
Yes, whites are being driven out of the Mission on those goddamn google buses.
People like TwoBeers use the word “minority” without really thinking.
And lots of shuttle riders are Asian. Are they a minority too? Or don’t they count because they are the model minority?
No, you use language to destroy language.
You and everyone else know what I mean by “minority.”
Your disingenuous nitpicking only makes you look like a liar, a fool, and an ant …..
I don’t use the word “minority” to mean a class of people who are a majority.
That much is true.
You use all your words without thinking.
dude, how do you find so much time to post in the middle of all that jerking off to Donald Trump?
That was funny, thanks.
Not a single person I talked to at 16th and Mission yesterday lived here, they all came from somewhere else to disrupt my neighborhood while shouting “off the pigs”.
Rats, If i had a alcohol or drug dependency, a criminal record, and was covered with piercings and tattoos, i might have received a invite to this protest.
I’m all down with protest, but the protests have to target the targets and not the intended beneficiaries of protest.
Inconveniencing working people on international workers’ day by delaying transit at the precise stops where the community is resisting google buses delaying transit makes no sense as protest, it is incoherent.
The Mission is unfortunate enough to be lodged between radicals who have been incorporated into the neoliberal growth machine as dependents and radicals who are raging against capitalism as well as against working people who do not rage against capitalism.
The commonality here is that neither the liberalized radicals in the nonprofit world nor the outside radicals, vanguard anarchists [wtf?] and commies, the ones who are speaking authoritatively for “the people,” give a rat’s ass about what “the people” think.
That alienation from “the people” benefits the oppressors and clears the way for the neoliberals to rampage. Just because people are doing things for what they think are the right reasons does not make those reasons correct nor does it mean that the things that they do move us closer to the outcomes they desire. Such narcissistic and solipsistic thinking is the major impediment facing working peoples’ resistance to the rampages of neoliberal capitalism.
Of course even pointing this out is viewed as tantamount to supporting neoliberalism and opposing everything that the activists stand for. Once political discourse is short circuited this way, the beast lumbering across the savannah slowly succumbs to its wounds and collapses.
Pathetic wretch, ad hominem is all he’s got.
LOL, marcos, I was actually agreeing with you, for once.
I think you would do a better job of effectively protesting than these idiots did.
You’d still lose, but at least you’d have the semblance of a coherent message.
Viva la gentrificacion!
Bunch of freeloading losers.
Glad these conversations are still happening.
In the long time tradition of protest in the Bay Area, if you don’t like protests, you don’t like San Francisco.
Are you kidding John?!…Occupy WON!…the national conversation is all about inequality and the 99 percent!…the voters of California passed a ballot measure spearheaded by Gov Brown in 2012 to raise billions for education and social services…In the final analysis, Occupy has—and continues to—win!
Chris, it’s possible to measure inequality. But it isn’t possible to measure who has “won the ideological battle” because that is a very subjective notion. There are no metrics that you can furnish to prove that’s the case.
If i look at the stock market, the housing market and the job market, they are all now much stronger than when Occupy happened and when we had the sub-prime contraction.
So the fiscal mess has been cleared up, but not by ideological banter but rather by economic policies and hard work.
Sure, there are some people who think that inequality is somehow bad, and isn’t just the inevitable result of having some very successful people. But that has not translated into anything material in terms of tax or economic policy. without tangible results, you cannot credibly claim victory.
The American people do not believe that high tax rates create prosperity, and Occupy really hasn’t changed that view at all. There might be a little more envy around now, but I don’t see that as a positive thing at all.
John…let me concede your point that inequality is perhaps worse now than two years ago—but, the Occupy movement has won the IDEOLOGICAL battle nationwide as I stated above.
This is an important start in confronting the 1 percent, plutocracy and the utter corruption of the two-party monopoly….
No, TwoBeers, I’m not here because I am worried. That is fanciful. You can’t touch me.
It amuses me to see the half dozen or so socialists here writing like they believe that the great revolution is just around the corner when, in fact, the one time they actually got their asses in gear to camp out with a message, the bailed as soon as it stated raining.
You guys think SF is a hotbed of revolution and protest but the truth is that it is just another American city with a tad more quirk.
You want to see a real protest that can change society. Go to Paris, Rome or Athens. Those guys create change. This is just a bunch of trust fund kids and under-employed losers having a rant.
Hopeless. You’ve lost ground since Occupy, and even I didn’t think that was possible.
Before Occupy, there was no national awareness or discussion of the rapidly increasing equality, and the factors causing it.
Yes, inequality is even worse now, possibly worse than ever in our nation’s history, but at least there is an awareness and inchoate discourse on the issue.
That you are here 24/7 trying to control (hog, suffocate, shit on) the discourse, shows that you feel the need to push back against the discussion of inequality, gentrification, racism, plutocracy, etc.
No, Occupy didn’t “win.”
But your noxious omnipresence here shows you’re worried about something.
PS. This isn’t a conversation, its noise and a nuisance.
Godzuki: As much applauding as you might receive for saying that, from people who agree with you, that’s a nonsensical platitude.
One can dislike protests (or just many of the ones that occur here) and still love San Francisco.
I agree. Human feces is a long tradition here in the Mission, but I don’t have to like it.
I agree! We need to see the faces of our long time neighbors and hear the stories.
Laws?, Laws?,
We don’t need your stinkin’ laws!!!
These guys are actually pretty funny. Serious time warp happening here. Hee! hee!
News flash – everyone on that bus is a worker.
Yes, it amuses me that a bunch of people who don’t work are protesting against those who do on International Workers’ Day. I doubt they see the irony.
Full rights for all immigrants! Housing is a right!
So, you want to come here illegally and then get a free house…sure, why not?
I think you’re missing context pete, see those are not one bullet point but two different bullet points. Immigration rights and stopping evictions are not the same thing, ie. it does not mean they want illegals to have free housing. I am happy to see this conversation still happening, protests are large part of SF history.
Protesting for the sake of protesting. Great.
These morons are self-destructing. LATERS!