Zennie 62 on the untold story of Oakland

Dave from Spot.us and I finally met, totally by accident, at a meeting regarding the permits for the Bay To Breakers race. You know, that infamous meeting where protesters came to express their frustrations with the race organizer because the race people wanted to officially ban public urination and drunkeness, which I already thought was illegal.

Whatever.

My take I gave Dave was I expressed concern over how Oakland has become racially fragmented in a way I've not seen in a while. Perhaps then-Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown considered it noble to take on the Black Power structure as he said he did, but I considered the act racist. Sorry I did.

A lot of people of various backgrounds were excited to have Ron Dellums as Mayor, but he's failed to live up to the promise his own legacy established.

Now we have an Oakland that's the home of a kind of "downer mentality" that is in the very DNA of the culture. There are places too where Oakland is almost all White and nothing else. That's not the Oakland I knew, but it's what we have. The City Council and Oaklanders need to make diversity an official objective of the city and inact policies to maintain and encourage a diverse culture.

Zennie's Gold Card Song A Hit On CNN and iReport

I came up -- within a minute in the shower -- a song about how I stopped using my American Express Gold Card and distributed it to various outlets. It's on iReport and CNN used it to my surprise! So for those who want to sing the Gold Card song, the video and lyrics and reasons for them are here!

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Mayor Dellums' Sports and Entertainment Task Force Met Again Last Thursday

I attended my first meeting of the Sports and Entertainment Task Force last Thursday, and which was its second meeting.  It appears that we're on track to produce a document by the April deadline, and I don't write this because I'm on the task force.  I do want this thing to work, and by that I mean we have to create a set of recommendations for the Mayor that's workable and doable.  But I must explain many of the task force members fear the "politicians" will not do anything.  More on that in a bit.


This is where we are:  the first meeting was used to explain what the task force is, and what the Mayor expects to see.  We're a collection of concerned citizens who represent various concerns and backgrounds, from restaurant owners, to Internet business owners (me), to activists like Steve Lowe, and journalists like Chris De Benedetti, who's the chairman, to the Mayor's office, who has a staffer that records the action.  What the Mayor expects to see is a set of recommendations to solve problems the task force has identified.  To that end, we created a SWOT chart to frame our thinking.


SWOT is Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.  It's not something that the task force is required to make; it was something I suggested and the task force agreed to do.  Thus, I ended up doing the recording for the discussion.    I'm not going to jump the gun and list them here, but we did talk about making a kind of wiki to place them online, so stay tuned.  That process worked to stabilize a meeting where at first minutes went by with people "just talking" which is good, but we've got to make a workable document and now we're on the way to doing just that.


Now on the discussion.  There's a real strong idea among task force members that Oakland elected officials will not take action.  My view, expressed at the meeting, is we have to be the leaders and stop expecting someone else to lead.  It's our job to cause change to happen.  It's a scary thing I've found to throw that at people because when one realizes they bear some responsibility to act it makes them ask to what degree they believe in what they're doing.  If you believe in a something you can cause others to believe it to.  That's our job.


Even with all of the criticism, let's face it, if the Mayor didn't want to do anything, this task force would not have existed at all.  We asked for it, its here, now we've got to make it work.  We will.


The next order of business is to make a SWOT chart for entertainment -- the first one was for Sports -- and take our SWOT results, put them in document form, and use that as the basis for forming recommendations.  But once that's done, we've got to sell the results.


And to that I think we really need to use the Internet to open up the process and let the public weigh in on what we're doing.  Given the Oakland A's attempts and failures to leave Oakland, we should establish a kind of solution shop online.  But I will say that what the task force is creating will change the face of sports in Oakland.

Deputy Paul Schene Shown Kicking Black 15-Year Old Teen Girl

From the AP:

Surveillance video released in an assault case against a King County, Wash. sheriff's deputy shows him kicking a young girl, slamming her to the jail cell floor and striking her repeatedly. The deputy has pleaded not guilty in case

This is racist and terrible. She's a 15-year old girl. Deputy Paul Schene apparently claimed she kicked a shoe but the tape does not show that. Another "Oscar Grant" example of a cop acting out of racist intent. We must punish officers who behave this way with jail time of their own. She is defenseless and did nothing wrong.