Hi! My name is John and I am a Wage Slave and a Debt Peon. (Hi John!) 

I participate in the Omni member collective, the Global Women’s Strike. I am also a recovering Catholic, a recovering lawyer, and a recovering academic. While I am an expensively educated and highly indebted activist, I identify as a worker and a member of the working class.

I have been active in the community including helping start up the Asian American Bar Association of New York over thirty years ago. While a graduate student at Columbia Law School I became severely emotionally depressed and following expulsion transferred into Berkeley’s Ethnic Studies Ph.D. program where I completed a dissertation on immigration policy enforcement during the Cold War. During the last financial depression I was hired by the California Employment Development Department and right away became a union shop steward with a strong focus on grievances by fellow workers living with disabilities who sought reasonable accommodations. California Unemployment Insurance is thus my state day job. I now serve on the EDD Director’s Statewide Disability Advisory Committee.

I agree that state worker and anarchist is a contradiction in terms. However I participated in Occupy Oakland and identify increasingly with anarchist philosophy. There I became familiar with and known to many Oakland activists and organizations. Previously, I was involved in communes, collectives and cooperatives on and off over thirty five years. I lived in housing collectives in Santa Cruz and Brooklyn, NY over a dozen years. I participated in both a Santa Cruz and the Park Slope food coops. My short organizing jobs have been in small self-governing collectives. Lastly, while still in New York I served 10 years on the board of directors of the Asian and Pacific Islander Coalition on HIV/AIDS, Inc. as it transformed from a grass-roots ACT-UP-like formation to something akin to an Asian American Gay Men’s Health Crisis.

In Occupy Oakland from 2011 I was active in the Queer People of Color/People of Color and Labor Solidarity Committees. Informed and inspired by the Occupy moment, I have helped start up and run three social justice grass roots Bay Area organizations since 2012, the Oakland Privacy (Working Group), the Oakland Livable Wage Assembly, and most recently the Bay Area Poor People’s Campaign Steering Committee. I am and have always been very excited about the utopian experiment that is the Omni Commons.

I am thrilled for the opportunity to learn from and collaborate with all the Omni Commons collectives and their members to build a sound basis for a long-term sustainable future for this critical Oakland cultural and revolutionary community.  I am eager, willing and able to use my organizing and union leadership and legal trainings, and with your help, to make our Omni Commons a domestic and international model for what we utopians can both imagine and make happen in the real world.

Thank you for your support.

510-480-6153