Please come out to support folks who got arrested in the streets on protesting the election. MONDAY and TUESDAY 9am Monday morning at Wiley Manuel Dept 112.
What are the disproportionate impacts of climate change on households most at risk, including people of color, with low incomes, or with disabilities? How can community leaders and agency staff work together to systematize social justice in climate resilience?
Join grassroots leaders from the Resilient Communities Initiative (RCI), and key agency staff from the Office of Planning and Research (OPR), California Department of Public Health, and other agencies in the second joint policy workshop in a series that seeks to identify how communities most at-risk from climate change can move from input to leadership in resilience policies. The workshop will focus on systematizing and funding social justice in climate resilience planning.
The RCI’s first joint policy workshop brought together 90 grassroots community leaders and agency staff to tackle social justice in sea level rise and flooding. Several promising regional joint initiatives between community groups and agencies are emerging as a result. This workshop will focus on other ways climate change impacts the Bay Area.
Key justice and equity issues to be addressed include:
This joint policy workshop is part of the Regional Resilient Leadership Academy series presented by the Resilient Communities Initiative to bring grassroots community leaders most impacted by climate change together with key governmental staff to build long-term partnerships.
Dinner provided, and complimentary translation services and childcare available upon request — see registration page for details.
Special thanks to the Kresge Foundation, San Francisco Foundation, and Marin Community Foundation for supporting the Regional Resilience Leadership Academy Policy Workshop Series.
OccupyForum is proud to once again host Deni Leonard who will speak about Standing Rock, the general history of Tribal Governments’ relationship with the U.S. Federal Government, and issues which are present today.
Biography of Deni Leonard: Served as National Chairman of the G.I. Alliance which directed the protests at the U.S. Army Bases around the U.S. and territories. While in the U.S. Army, closed down the Presidio Stockade, occupied Fort Lawton Army base in Seattle, Washington, and organized protests around the country. Testified at the Winter Soldier Investigation in Detroit to describe my experience at the Presidio Stockade and met David Dillinger, John Kerry, Donald Sutherlin and several members of the Chicago 7.
Served as a National Consultant to the U.S. Commission On Civil Rights and investigated the Pine Ridge election between Dick Wilson and Russell Means, investigated racial discrimination on the Navajo Reservation and organized a national civil rights hearing. Served on the Oregon State U.S. Commission On Civil Rights Committee and served as the first Executive Director of the Oregon Human Rights Commission.
Stood with the Traditional Leaders on reservations and brought strategies to protect them from progressive Tribal Leaders that supported the Bureau of India Affairs. Keynote Speaker at National Tribal organizational conferences, NCAI, National Indian Gaming Association and International Gaming Association about using municipal bonds to fund their projects.
Announcements will follow. Donations to OccupyForum
to cover our costs are encouraged; no one turned away.
OTU’s Mission
The Oakland Tenants Union is an organization of housing activists dedicated to protecting tenant rights and interests. OTU does this by working directly with tenants in their struggle with landlords, impacting legislation and public policy about housing, community education, and working with other organizations committed to furthering renters’ rights. The Oakland Tenants Union is open to anyone who shares our core values and who believes that tenants themselves have the primary responsibility to work on their own behalf.
Monthly Meetings
The Oakland Tenants Union meets regularly at 7:00 pm on the second Monday evening of each month. Our monthly meetings are held in the Community Room of the Madison Park Apartments, 100 – 9th Street (at Oak Street, across from the Lake Merritt BART Station). To enter, gently knock on the window of the room to the right of the main entrance to the building. At the meetings, first we focus on general issues affecting renters city-wide and then second we offer advice to renters regarding their individual concerns.
If you have an issue, a question, or need advice about a tenant/landlord issue, please call us at (510) 704-5276. Leave a message with your name and phone number and someone will get back to you.
Bay Area Stands for No Dakota Access Pipeline
Host: Idle No More SF Bay, Diablo Rising Tide, 350.org
National Day of Action called by Indigenous Environmental Network and 350.org
Sunrise Ceremony at San Francisco Civic Center Plaza followed by solidarity action and rally at the Army Corps of Engineers office, demanding they revoke the permits to bore under the Missouri River and complete a full Environmental Impact Statement.
March to 455 Market St. @ 11th St. (just south of Van Ness), San Francisco
Please come out to support folks who got arrested in the streets on protesting the election. MONDAY and TUESDAY 9am Monday morning at Wiley Manuel Dept 112.
Join us on Tuesday, November 15 for a solidarity action and rally at the Citibank Branch office in Albany at 1377 Solano Avenue at 4 pm calling on them to revoke the funding for this dirty oil pipeline.
The Army Corps fast-tracked the Dakota Access Pipeline without proper consultation, and as a result, bulldozers are approaching Standing Rock as we speak. But with coordinated, massive demonstrations across the country, we’ll make it clear that this powerful movement will not allow the Obama administration or the incoming President to sacrifice Indigenous rights, our water, or our climate – they must reject this pipeline.
This day of action is one of many calls for solidarity actions targeting not only the Army Corps, but stakeholders at every level — including the banks who are funding Dakota Access and the companies building the project.
Please bring art and banners — and be sure to share on social media with #NoDAPL. Some sample messages for art include:
* People over Pipelines
* #NoDAPL
* In Solidarity with Standing Rock
* Obama: Stop the Dakota Access Pipeline
KPFA Radio 94.1FM and Code Pink present:
The co-founder of Code Pink and Global Exchange courageously explores the curious relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia, a country long infamous for brutally repressing women and dissidents, supporting terrorists worldwide, and promoting Wahhabism, the most extreme interpretation of Islam.
Assuming you live in the United States, you should be aware of how much effort your government puts into facilitating and defending the crimes of Saudi Arabia. The Saud royal family keeps millions desperately poor. They send religion police around to beat the hell out of people, while they themselves party all over the globe with alcohol, cocaine, prostitutes, and gambling. Most religions are banned; you can be imprisoned, tortured, mutilated, or beheaded simply for being a follower of another religion.
With U.S. support, Saudi Arabia manages to be both the only nation that bans all churches and any non-Muslim religious building, and the leading proponent of global terrorism. In fact, Saudi Arabia spends three times as much per person as the U.S. does on its military, and it spends the biggest chunk of it buying weapons from U.S. profiteers. As the U.S. State Department is well aware, there are no civil liberties in Saudi Arabia. People are jailed, whipped, and killed for speaking out. Saudi Arabia didn’t ban slavery until 1962 and maintains a labor system referred to as “a culture of slavery.” Saudi schools have helped to create branches of Al Qaeda and other extremist groups across Western Asia and Northern Africa at least since the joint U.S.-Saudi operation in Afghanistan that created the Taliban, not to mention the Saudi role in Iran-Contra, in Boko Haram in Nigeria, in Yemen, in Syria and in Europe. — Excerpted from Counterpoint
Medea Benjamin is one of America’s best-known activists. She is the author of Drone Warfare, and the recipient of the 2012 U.S. Peace Memorial Foundation’s Peace Prize.
Kevin Pina is an American journalist, filmmaker and educator. Pina also serves as a Country Expert on Haiti for the Varieties of Democracy project sponsored by the University of Notre Dame. In addition, he is one of the producers of KPFA’s Flashpoints, which airs weekdays.
KPFA benefit
Advance tickets: $12 : brownpapertickets.com :: T: 800-838- 3006
or Books Inc, Pegasus (3 sites), Moe’s, Walden Pond Bookstore, Diesel a Bookstore, Mrs. Dalloway’s
S.F. – Modern Times. $15 door
Please come out to support folks who got arrested in the streets on protesting the election. MONDAY and TUESDAY 9am Monday morning at Wiley Manuel Dept 112.
We need to make our voices heard! It looks like we can no longer count on next spring’s scheduled vote by the Board of Directors of the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD) on our proposal to set strict limits on pollution from oil refineries—greenhouse gases, toxic gases (NOx and SOx), and dangerous particulate matter. This proposed regulation would stop oil refineries from increasing the amount of pollution they emit, and it will be in trouble unless we turn things around.
Emission caps are crucial not only for protecting our health and safety and the planet, but for preventing the Bay Area from becoming a major outlet for tar sands crude oil. Refining tar sands crude produces much higher levels of both health-harming air pollution and greenhouse gases. With a cap on refinery emissions in place, a tsunami of tar sands into Bay Area refineries could be effectively prevented.
But without intensive public pressure, staff will continue its delay-divert-obstruct-and-kill mode. What should be a public, transparent and democratic process is increasingly being carried out in secret sessions. In these closed meetings, Air District staff continues to argue that the emissions caps are not legal. And it has abandoned its original commitment to a community-based forum in Richmond, where frontline community members were to have weighed in on inclusion of an emissions cap in Rule 12-16. (By contrast, the staff will hold six widely publicized community forums on its alternative Rule 11-18 for reducing health risks from pollutants.) Instead of the promised forum on Rule 12-16, staff is offering two “scoping” meetings for comments on the technical scope of the Environmental Impact Report.
It is critical that we show up for the November 16 Board of Directors meeting. We must demand that our elected representatives on the Board prevent further staff obstructions.
We strongly encourage all public health professionals and all other concerned citizens to attend this hearing. We misjudged the need for turnout at October’s Board meeting: the Western States Petroleum Association (WSPA) turned out over 20 professional refinery staff, and we had only two speakers. The Board pays close attention to public comments, and our strong presence at meetings keeps them on track.
For individuals and organizations desiring to make detailed comments on the rule-making process, please note the December 2nd deadline.
To ensure that the Board doesn’t fall further behind—and votes YES on the proposal next May—we are mobilizing a grassroots campaign in the entire nine-county Bay Area to encourage city councils to pass resolutions supporting caps on refinery emissions.
Thus far the city councils of Belmont, Berkeley, El Cerrito, Emeryville, Oakland, Richmond, San Pablo, San Rafael and San Francisco have endorsed our call for rapid completion of rules for emission caps! This is citizen democracy at its most basic: community residents stepping up to demand their elected representatives act to protect their health and safety. It will take a majority of the 24-member Board of Directors of BAAQMD to vote and pass the regulation limiting refinery emissions.
Gathering support resolutions from city councils and other elected bodies in their districts is the best way to make sure that Air District Board members do their job and protect our communities. Dozens of elected bodies remain to be contacted. We need members of all communities to bring this resolution to their local elected bodies. Join us at our bi-monthly meetings! Contact: sunflowerjsj at gmail.com .
First and third Thursdays of every month, 11 a.m. – 12 p.m.
Bobby Bowens Progressive Center
2540 Macdonald Ave., Richmond
For more information about the Community-Worker Proposal, the draft resolution, and a support letter from United Steel Workers Local 5 (which represents 80% of Bay Area refinery workers), check out these documents:
Model BAAQMD resolution Aug 2016
Full Community-Worker Proposal
Four years. Endless meetings. Hundreds, if not thousands of public comments. And finally last June, overcoming opposition by BAAQMD staff, the Board of Directors unanimously voted to set a date, May 2017, to vote on the Community-Worker proposal to cap refinery emissions at their current level.
But there was a catch. The caps proposal was paired with a staff proposal for a massive program to reduce emissions at all industrial facilities. That’s a worthy goal, but the process could take up to ten years. Unless refinery emissions are capped at their current level, air pollution could rise disastrously while that lengthy process goes on.
The staff proposal was another effort by the BAAQMD bureaucracy to delay and divert attention from our caps proposal. The staff counter-proposed a plan to do a Health Risk Assessment (HRA) on all industrial sources of pollution. This means doing a detailed analysis of the potential health impacts of various amounts of each chemical in the pollution emitted by every industrial facility in the Bay Area.
The positive aspect of the staff proposal is that it would set a stricter standard for protecting health. A Health Risk Assessment (HRA) calculates how many deaths per million would be caused by exposure to different amounts of each chemical. The current standard is that exposure should not cause more than 100 deaths per million people. The new rules would bring this down, first to 25 deaths per million and then to 10 deaths per million—among the strictest levels in the nation. Industrial facilities would be required to install “Best Available Retrofit Control Technology” to bring their emissions down to these levels.
However, the entire process—doing an extensive HRA, determining and agreeing on needed retrofits, installing them, demonstrating their efficacy, remediating retrofits that don’t achieve necessary goals—could easily take five to ten years or even longer. Moreover, this process must be done on a case-by-case basis for thousands of individual industrial pollution sources. Without a cap in place, refinery emissions will inevitably increase during these extended studies.
BAAQMD Staff continues to oppose the refinery emissions cap, supporting the fossil-fuel industry’s false claims that:
The board set a specific schedule for the work on the two proposals:
Release of the NOP for the EIR is already two three months late!
The Board has committed to monitor progress. It agreed to separate the two rules, as we have been demanding all along, if combining the two regulations were to delay adoption of the emissions cap.
(Note: The significance of the August 19, 2016 date is that regardless of the final completion date, this sets the reference point used to calculate the current refinery emissions baseline.)
In addition to delaying tactics from its own staff, the Air District Board faces strong opposition from the Western States Petroleum Association and other oil industry groups. Without intensive public pressure, the Board could give in to pressure from Big Oil for more delay, and reject this critical proposal when it comes up for a vote.
This is why a coalition of organizations—including the Sierra Club, Communities for a Better Environment, Sunflower Alliance, 350 Bay Area, Asian Pacific Environmental Network, Richmond Progressive Alliance, and others—have launched this major grassroots campaign to let the Bay Area Air Quality Management District know: The people of the Bay Area demand caps on pollution from oil refineries!
[Event] Meeting Video 5 Years After Fukushima & US Bases and War In And On Okinawa https://t.co/bAS0uDusTs
— Indybay (@Indybay) November 8, 2016
JOIN CODEPINK, WORLD CAN’T WAIT, OCCUPYSF Action Council and others at the huge PEACE banner
Theme this week is: “REFUGEES…”
Feel free to bring your own signage, photos, flyers, …Additional signs and flyers provided.
Stand (or sit) with us and the huge PEACE banner.
Plan for the December 9th Day of Action.
Tell the Berkeley School Board: No More Racially Targeted Interrogations of Students!
Monthly APTP meeting, held on every 3rd Wednesday of the month.
The Anti Police-Terror Project is a project of the ONYX ORGANIZING COMMITTEE that in coalition with other organizations like Idriss Stelley Foundation, Community READY Corps and Workers World is working to develop a replicable and sustainable model to end police terrorism in this country.
We are led by the most impacted communities but are a multi-racial, mutil-generational coalition.
Come by our open Delegates Meetings every First and Third Thursday of the month at 7pm! We’ll give space to brief announcements, updates from working groups, proposals up for consensus, and discussion around important issues. The schedule is created weekly at the following url: https://pad.riseup.net/p/omninom
Noura will speak about “From Occupation to Warfare: How Israel Expanded its use of Force and Diminished Palestinian Resistance.”
With Special Guest Palestinian musician Yara Mubarak
Tickets: $10 low income, $15 general, $25 supporter, $50 freedom fighter, $100 change-maker!
NOURA ERAKAT is a human rights attorney, activist, and Assistant Professor at George Mason University. She is a Co-Founding Editor of Jadaliyya, an ezine on the Middle East and an Editorial Committee member of the Journal of Palestine Studies. While an undergraduate student at UC Berkeley, Noura helped launch the first university divestment campaign in 2001. Upon graduating from Berkeley Law School, she helped seed BDS campaigns throughout the country as the National Organizer with the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation.
Noura has served as Legal Counsel to a Congressional Subcommittee in the House of Representatives as well as the Legal Advocacy Officer for the BADIL Resource Center for Refugee and Residency Rights. Most recently, she released a short multimedia documentary, Gaza In Context, that rehabilitates Israel’s wars on Gaza within a settler-colonial framework. She also produced the short video, Black Palestinian Solidarity. Currently Noura is writing a book tentatively titled, Law as Politics in the Palestinian-Israel Conflict.
Benefit for the Middle East Children’s Alliance, wheelchair accessible.
$10.00 – $100.00, sliding scale.
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