Calendar
Our weekly open meeting for members and supporters to discuss the weeks tasks and projects. Come get plugged into ongoing housing defense work! We have abundant and varied work for all folks in any number of meaningful projects.
Rain location: SF Pizza, 1500 Broadway, Oakland
Our weekly open meeting for members and supporters to discuss the week’s tasks and projects. Come get plugged into ongoing housing defense work! We have abundant and varied work for all folks in any number of meaningful projects.
Rain location: SF Pizza, 1500 Broadway, Oakland
Come out on SUNDAY to the Gill Tract Farm
for a Community Field Day!
THIS SUNDAY: Oct 13th, 10am-4pm.
For the first time, a community event is being planned between the College of Natural Resources and a coalition of community groups (which includes Occupy the Farm), to discuss what we’d like to see happen on the Gill Tract! 1.5 Acres has been allocated for the project, so come check it out and let’s brainstorm!
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10:00 AM – Open Field. Play, Check out workshops.
12:00 Noon – Lunch & bakeoff.
1:00 PM – Storytelling.
2:00 PM – Community Forum. Share ideas for next season’s projects.
Facebook page and color poster.
Mike Parker will give an overview of the innovative program, “Richmond CARES”, which was proposed by Richmond’s Green Mayor Gayle McLaughlin to use the City’s power of eminent domain to benefit underwater homeowners.
Mike Parker is an organizer with Richmond Progressive Alliance. He is the editor of RPA’s website and newsletter. RPA works with the Mayor and Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) in the program to stop blight, keep neighborhoods stable, stop foreclosures, and increase community wealth.
Topics to be discussed include:
– What is Richmond CARES?
– Who will Richmond CARES help?
– How likely is it that the program will expand to help more people over time?
– Will the City be buying homes?
– How does this actually work?
– Can the homeowner “flip” the home?
– How will this affect home values in the community?
– Isn’t the value of a mortgage the same as the value of the home that secures it?
– How will the City pay for this program?
– Will the program operators and funders make money off this program?
– What about the charges that this is a Wall Street scheme to “take another bite out of Richmond”?
– Will the City make money off this program?
– Is the City’s plan unfair to the current investors who own the loans?
– Are pension funds helped or hurt by the program?
– Is there any risk to City?
– Will people who go through this program have to pay income tax on the loan reduction?
– Could this program cause the cost of mortgage lending to go up in Richmond?
– Will this program hurt the City’s credit rating and its ability to buy, sell or refinance bonds?
– What is a Joint Powers Authority?
– Is this a legal use of eminent domain?
Numerous top legal scholars and law firms confirm that it is legal, yes. The public purpose of reducing foreclosure and blight is clear, and eminent domain has in fact been used in many cases to acquire “intangible” property including financial instruments. See these articles for more on this topic:
Washington Post “Is Richmond’s mortgage seizure scheme even legal?”
New York Fed’s Current Issues in Economics and Finance “Paying Paul and Robbing No One”
Stanford Journal of Law, Business, and Finance “It Takes a Village”
– Who is most opposed to Richmond CARES and why?
Essentially the battle is between the interests of real estate speculators, and the interest of Richmond residents who want to keep their neighborhoods stable, keep people in their own homes instead of forcing them to rent, and stop the spread of blight.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Richmond CARES http://www.richmondcares.com
Save Richmond Homes http://www.saverichmondhomes.org
Richmond ACCE (Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment) http://calorganize.org E-mail contracosta@calorganize.org or call 415-377-9037
LA Times http://www.latimes.com/business/realestate/la-fi-hiltzik-20130901,0,1360275.column
The Atlantic Cities http://m.theatlanticcities.com/housing/2013/09/why-wall-street-very-very-angry-richmond-california-today/6858
Mother Jones http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/09/richmond-eminent-domain-wall-street-nightmare
USA Today http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/09/29/richmond-eminent-domain-foreclosures/2834299/
KQED Forum http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/R201308080900
PBS Newshour discussed on Daily Kos http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/09/20/1240246/-PBS-Newshour-Richmo nd-CA-Government-Uses-Eminent-Domain-to-Solve-Its-Foreclosure-Crisis#
*** Compare with: Use of Eminent Domain to grab land for the Keystone XL pipieline http://stateimpact.npr.org/texas/2012/09/28/eminent-domain-casts-its-long-shadow-over-the-texas-legislature ***
DIRECTIONS: One block north of Alcatraz on the West side of Telegraph, wheelchair accessible. Buses pass by regularly. Ashby BART is approximately 7 blocks away.
SPONSOR: Green Sundays are a series of free programs and discussions sponsored by the Green Party of Alameda County. They are held on the 2nd Sunday of each month.
The Post Office has put the Berkeley Post Office up for sale!! Come and help plan our next actions in defense of our post office and against privatization.
Last week we learned that perfidious Post Office Executives, who only the week before had sent a letter to the Berkeley City Council offering to negotiate until at least November 12th, had had CBRE (Richard Blum’s company) list the downtown Berkeley Post Office for sale.
Check out the video of Peter Byrne’s talk last week at our Save the Post Office Rally!
Brutal and Unequal:
Disruption, Precarity and the New Tech Boom
with Darwin Bond-Graham and Ryan Smith
“The tech sector,” said sociologist and writer Darwin Bond-Graham, “has obtained a strategic power over the rest of the economy … Flows of income and distributions of wealth have been equally transformed by the rise of the tech-centric economy, as by the rise of finance.” The ideology of the new tech boom is disruption, “a code word for forms of sabotage that benefit a few monopolizing corporations,” Bond-Graham said. A key to fighting back against disruption is to understand what it is and how it functions: Bond-Graham will use the ridesharing phenomenon as a focal point for a discussion of how the industry uses disruption to ” … extract wealth from billions of workers and consumers across the planet.”
What happens when the whiz kids of high tech concentrate on inventing ever more airtight forms of exploitation? With all of the brainpower they have to throw at the engineering puzzles of exploiting others, how can ordinary workers hope to resist this juggernaut? Ryan Smith, longtime Occupy activist, former tech employee and a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) will discuss his experiences in workers’ struggles and working in the belly of the beast. The Wobblies are famous for “unionizing hundreds of thousands of workers previously regarded as ‘unorganizable.'” Can precarious, isolated workers benefit from IWW techniques in the coming century?
Time will be allotted for Q&A, discussion and announcements. Donations to Occupy Forum to cover costs are encouraged; no one turned away!
Discussion sponsored by the ISO.
There are many specters haunting Oakland–from BART managers who care more about beating the union than running the trains to police harassment, from low wages and lost jobs to drug war violence. For young people looking for work, as for homeowners struggling to pay mortgages, capitalism offers only bad choices.
Democratic politicians we elect, like Republicans, pay more attention to the rich who give them money than to our real needs, while most of us don’t even theoretically have a say in how real estate developers, giant shippers and tech corporations invest the vast resources that they alone control.
But we do have power. Our labor is the source of all of their wealth. The 1% need us, and ultimately we don’t need them.
Does that mean we can make a better world? What would an alternative to capitalism look like, and how could we get there, starting from here? Please join us to share your thoughts, fears and hopes and hear the case for the project of building a socialist organization.
Rally with Fast Food Workers as we hold Fast Food companies accountable!
While the fast food industry makes billions in profits, hard-working fast food workers are struggling to afford their basic needs like food, clothing and rent, and often rely on public assistance. Fast food companies rely on the fact that taxpayers will pick up the slack for their low wages. This is outrageous. Let’s hold fast food companies accountable.
End all U.S. military aid to Colombia, and close the U.S. military bases
Repeal the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade agreement
End the Repression of the Agrarian, Labor and Popular Movements!
Free Hubert Ballesteros; unionist, peasant rights and peace activist!
Support negotiations with Colombian popular movements
Stop the exploitation of Colombian human and natural resources by U.S. corporations, including Chiquita, Drummond, and Monsanto
Colombia has suffered from mass repression, poverty, and displacement, among other things, for many years but the resistance has grown and unified. After a long peasant movement in Catatumbo this year, popular sectors of the country called for a general strike on August 19. The movement grew nationwide and many organizations participated, making it the largest mass movement in the country in many years. It is still in process and some of the demands are being negotiated with the government at this moment.
It is important to support the Colombian mass movement here in the U.S. The US has had an infamous role in supporting repressive forces in Colombia in order to make way for the large US corporations, the maquiladoras, mining, banking, etc. They want Colombia to be the right wing trampoline for control and intervention in the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean by building a strong right wing government.
We need to become informed of the role of the US in Colombia and Latin America, support resistance movements and show the world that the resistance to US imperialism is everywhere. Join our demonstration in San Francisco.The movement in Colombia has issued a worldwide call to progressives, unionists and justice loving people everywhere to support the peace process in Colombia.
SUPPORT JUSTICE FOR KAYLA MOORE! Copwatch to Release Findings of People’s Investigation PEOPLE’S INVESTIGATION REPORT FINDS BERKELEY POLICE AND INADEQUATE POLICIES RESPONSIBLE FOR IN-CUSTODY DEATH.
Press Conference and Rally Demand that Police Review Commission to hold Special Hearing into the Death Of Kayla Moore.
According to a detailed report just released by a People’s Investigation, the in-custody death of Xavier Christopher Moore never should have happened. A coalition of groups and individuals will convene in front of the Police Review Commission offices on Wednesday October 16th at 4pm to submit the necessary signatures to administratively compel the Police Review Commission to hold a special hearing. Our goal is to present the report to the Commission and allow members of the public to express their concerns. I think the report is eye opening and extremely accurate in terms of what is going on with mental health services in Berkeley.
“The lack of those services means that police are the first responders to people in mental health crisis and they are not trained for these situations,” said Maria Moore, sister to Kayla Moore. “Our family is completely in the dark regarding what the city intends to do about this situation. We hope that the report and special hearing will act as a catalyst for the PRC and the City Council to take action.”
Although the PRC maintains that it began an investigation in March, no findings have been released or updates on their investigation made public. Berkeley Copwatch convened a variety of individuals and sources to find out what actually happened to Xavier Moore, also known as Kayla, when police entered her home on February 13th 2013. The People’s Investigation directly interviews witnesses and reviews documents in order to make a honest appraisal of a particular event and provide findings to the community. After a thorough examination of witness statements, police policies, mental health budgets, police reports, after interviewing Moore’s neighbors and family members, the People’s Investigation has reason to believe that, in addition to poor judgment and insufficient training of individual officers, there is a lack of city services, funding and policies about how to humanely provide emergency mental health services to the people of Berkeley.
The reports identifies these as factors that contributed to her death. The city of Berkeley has slashed the budget for mental health Crisis and Assessment in half since 2011. People in crisis are treated like criminals instead of patients. The Berkeley Police Association repeated their calls for tasers in response to a recent episode involving a mentally ill man. “Are tasers really going to be the way that Berkeley provides mental health care? It is time that our city comes to terms with the fact that people are dying because we don’t provide adequate mental health services,” said Andrea Prichett of Berkeley Copwatch.
PLEASE JOIN US ON WEDNESDAY OCT 16th!!! ———————-
Berkeley Copwatch
2022 Blake St
Berkeley, CA 94704
Discuss next actions and organizational steps in the fight to save City College.
Ocean Campus Map and other info.
The Ocean Campus is located adjacent to the Balboa BART station.
While Congress shuts down the Government and delays immigration reform, our communities continue to be terrorized by ICE.
Stop the unjust detentions and deportations.
*He signed SB 4, which will frack up CA
*He supports the Delta tunnels diverting water to Big Ag and Big Oil
*He refuses to reject REDD carbon credits, which will devastate indigenous communities around the world.
On Oct. 17, Governor Jerry Brown is being given the Right Stuff environmental award by the Blue Green Alliance. Brown just gutted and signed SB4 which will ramp up fracking in the state. He has declared war on CEQA, the environmental review law that is our last resort against polluters. And he is pushing the $54 billion Orwellian named Bay Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP) known as the twin tunnels. This is really a corporate water grab for Big Ag and Big Oil that will actually destroy a valuable ecosystem, the largest estuary on the West Coast of the Americas. Also, Brown’s Air Resources Board has not ruled out using REDD credits in its carbon trading scheme. These credits are having disastrous effects on indigenous communities around the world. We need to show him that his record cannot be green washed by even the most well meaning organizations and that we demand a ban on fracking, the strengthening not gutting of CEQA and the withdrawal of the twin tunnels plan.
Meet on the street in front of the hotel. A smaller group will be formed to stand at the entrance to the parking lot.
Bring creative signs saying “Ban Fracking Now”, “Stop The Tunnels,” Don’t Gut CEQA” and whatever other environmental issue you care about that Brown is assaulting.
California Institute for Integral Studies Presents a Lecture by Michelle Alexander.
Michelle Alexander is breaking the silence about racial injustice in the American legal system. In her book, The New Jim Crow, she explores the cultural biases that still exist, and how segregation has been replaced by mass incarceration. Currently there are more African Americans in prison than were enslaved in 1850. She blames the drug war for many of these, as people are then labeled as felons and stuck in an endless cycle of discrimination. How can they improve their lives when they can’t get a job, housing, or health benefits? This acclaimed civil rights lawyer explores the myths surrounding our criminal justice system from a racial and ethical standpoint, and offers solutions for combating this epidemic.
Michelle Alexander is a highly acclaimed civil rights lawyer, advocate, and legal scholar who currently holds a joint appointment at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Moritz College of Law at The Ohio State University. Prior to joining the Kirwan Institute, Professor Alexander was an associate professor of law at Stanford Law School, where she directed the civil rights clinics.
In 2005, she won a Soros Justice Fellowship, which supported the writing of her first book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (The New Press, 2010). The book has been featured on national radio and television media outlets, including NPR, The Bill Moyers Journal, The Tavis Smiley Show, C-Span Washington Journal, among others. The New Jim Crow challenges the conventional wisdom that with the election of Barack Obama as president, our nation has “triumphed over race.” Alexander argues that the sudden and dramatic mass incarceration of African American men, primarily through the War on Drugs, has created a new racial under-caste-a group of people defined largely by race that is subject to legalized discrimination, scorn, and social exclusion. Alexander challenges the civil rights community, and all of us, to place mass incarceration at the forefront of a new movement for racial justice in America.
For several years, Professor Alexander served as the Director of the Racial Justice Project for the ACLU of Northern California, where she helped to lead a national campaign against racial profiling by law enforcement. She is a graduate of Stanford Law School and Vanderbilt University. Following law school, she clerked for Justice Harry A. Blackmun on the United States Supreme Court, and for Chief Judge Abner Mikva on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
Net proceeds from this event will go to the California Institute of Integral Studies Arc of Justice Bachelor of Arts Completion Scholarship Fund for formerly incarcerated students.
According to this tweet by Lauren Riot Bart picketing will begin at 1:00 AM at the Lake Merritt BART station.
According to email from an SEIU organizer:
Pickets Start At
4:00 AM at the following BART Locations
Lake Merritt (Major Staging Area)
Richmond
Concord
BART Command Station
Opens at Midnight, 100 Oak Street
510-350-4568
BART Hotline
510-350-4550
Friday, Noon Rally
Lake Merritt
Friday, Noon Rally
Lake Merritt
Facebook Page & RSVP.
BART Command Station
Opens at Midnight, 100 Oak Street
510-350-4568
BART Hotline
510-350-4550
People will be staffing a table with information about California solitary confinement conditions in solidarity with the suspended prisoners’ hunger strike.
Come on down and hang out and help pass out literature.
All supporters of the BART workers and the right to picket please assemble at Piers 30-32 at 5 pm.
Also a tweet:
lauren riot @laurenriot
#BARTstrike support action at 5pm is MOVED! Instead of West O #BART meet at Berths 30-32/Middle Harbor Park for Port of O action!
Here’s an account of what’s happened:
There was a successful picket line this morning called by striking members of ATU 1555 (with supporters from other unions and TWSC ) Members of ILWU 10 honored the picket line and refused to cross. The action targeted that facility.
However shortly before the picket line ended this morning a High ranking OPD cop (who identified himself as Chief of Operations) falsely stated that any picket line in the entrance of the Berths was ”illegal” – that the only thing he would permit would have to be on the side of the driveway or across the street.
The workers refused his ”request” plan to have a genuine picket line once again beginning at 5 pm .
All supporters of both the BART workers strike and the democratic right to picket are urged to participate.