Calendar
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.
Fan Shigang discusses Striking to Survive: Workers’ Resistance to Factory Relocations in China. In conversation with Li Wen.
What is the meaning of the thousands of strikes in China? Do these strikes add up to a “labor movement”? How can solidarity between Chinese and American workers be built?
Countering the popular myth that Chinese workers are “stealing American jobs,” Striking to Survive documents a recent wave of factory closures in China’s Pearl River Delta and struggles by workers there to hold onto their jobs, their pensions, and their livelihoods.
The struggles of these workers in China’s industrial centers are shaping the future of labor and democracy not only in China but throughout the world. These vivid stories of workers at factories that supply multinational corporations Walmart and Uniqlo, compiled by worker-activists and circulated underground, provide a unique, on-the-ground perspective on the most recent wave of militancy among China’s enormous working class.
Striking to Survive includes a uniquely fine-grained account of the strike organized by “Delegate Wu” – a worker activist who served more than a year in prison after the strike ended. The New York Times produced a video about Delegate Wu, which gives a sense of his work.
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Fan Shigang was born into a family of workers for state-owned enterprises in a northern Chinese city. He has worked as a basic-level employee in several machining factories. He is a contributor to the underground labor periodical, Factory Stories, conducting interviews with factory workers in southern China, documenting their lives, work, and struggles.
Li Wen has worked in electronics and jewelry factories in southern China. She interviews and documents the experience of factory workers who’ve joined collective struggles, and pays particular attention to issues of occupational injury and disease.
The Contra Costa Racial Justice Coalition will host Aaron Zisser, a civil rights lawyer who served as Independent Police Auditor in San Jose.
As IPA, Zisser reviewed internal investigations of alleged officer misconduct and issued policy recommendations. He served in this role for about a year before an intense political campaign, waged by the police union, forced him out. South Bay police accountability activists believe that the campaign against Zisser was the police union’s way to trying to put the brakes on efforts to give the Auditor more powers to hold the agency to account. (As the Mercury News put it, a “veiled opposition to community demands for expanded reach for the IPA, including increased access to internal misconduct investigations – and officer-involved shooting probes.”)
Now that the CCC Racial Justice Task Force is trying to increase accountability over the CCC Sheriff’s office, Zisser will be attending the next CCRJC meeting to help thr group understand various models of independent oversight for law enforcement. Some of these models are described in “Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement Bodies,” a report which describes the pro’s and con’s of different ways that cities oversee their police departments. Options range from civilian police commissions (such as we have here in Richmond) to Independent Auditor models, like the one in San Jose. To find out more or get involved, please attend the meeting on the 10th!
Editors Mateo Hoke (’14) & Taylor Pendergrass discuss their new oral history collection, SIX BY TEN: STORIES FROM SOLITARY, with narrator Mohammed “Mike” Ali. Featuring a reading and Q&A with Mateo, Taylor, and Mohammed, as well as a journalistic reversal in which Mohammed will interview the editors. This event is hosted by the Berkeley Oral History Center and is co-sponsored by Voice of Witness, Haymarket Books and the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
About the book
Six by ten feet. That’s the average size of the cell in which tens of thousands of people incarcerated in the United States linger for weeks, months, and even decades in solitary confinement. With little stimulation and no meaningful human contact, these individuals struggle to preserve their identity, sanity, and even their lives.In thirteen intimate narratives, Six by Ten explores the mental, physical, and spiritual impacts of America’s widespread embrace of solitary confinement. Through stories from those subjected to solitary confinement, family members on the outside, and corrections officers, Six by Ten examines the darkest hidden corners of America’s mass incarceration culture and illustrates how solitary confinement inflicts lasting consequences on families and communities far beyond prison walls. [MORE]
Six by Ten: Stories from Solitary is published by Haymarket Books. Click here to purchase the book before the event.
RSVP: https://goo.gl/KSYYeU
We’re so excited to have Mutual Aid Disaster Relief stop in Oakland during their West Coast tour!
Come hear about MADR’s work including their formation during Hurricane Katrina, solidarity efforts in Puerto Rico, and all the way to their current training program.
This evening will be an introductory presentation: “Protectors v. Profiteers: Communities in Resistance to Disaster Capitalism.”
Free admission – all are welcome!
This event is in OMNI’s Ballroom which has wheelchair accessibility.
Posters from Beehive Collective and other merch will be on sale as a fundraiser for the tour. Please bring cash and support this impactful tour!
If you have any questions contact Susan: susanpark13@gmail.com
THEN, join them on Sunday in SF for a deeper, participatory workshop for affinity groups and individuals who are ready to get involved, “Giving Our Best, Ready For The Worst: Community Organizing as Disaster Preparedness.”
https://www.facebook.com/events/2584142935057711/
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The Mutual Aid Disaster Relief (MADRelief) Training Team is visiting our community. Currently MADRelief is on a national capacity-building and educational tour. They will explain how natural storms turn into unnatural disasters through dangerous new forms of “disaster capitalism” and “extreme resource extraction,” and train diverse affinity groups on principles of grassroots direct action humanitarian aid and crisis response, covering a wide range of topics such as “Principles of ‘Solidarity, Not Charity,’” “Using Privilege to Break Down Barriers,” “Building Power in Collaboration,” and “Overcoming Trauma Together.”
Our Unite HERE 2850 brothers and sisters are on strike against the
Oakland Marriot City Center as part of their national strike along with
more than 8,000 Marriott workers from San Francisco, San Jose, Boston
and Seattle. Local 2850 represents East Bay’s hotel and restaurant
workers union who is saying, _“One job should be enough”_ — enough
for workers at the richest and biggest hotel company in the world.
Wei-Ling Huber, President Local 2850 says, _”Our workers have been
uplifted and empowered by the amazing support of IATSE 107, IOUE
Stationary Engineers Local 39 and others who have reached out.”_ IN
SUPPORT OF THEIR STRIKE, PLEASE JOIN US ON THE PICKET LINE THIS
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 11TH STARTING AT 6AM AT OAKLAND MARRIOTT CITY CENTER,
1001 BROADWAY, OAKLAND, CA. Bring snacks, food and water to donate to
the workers as they will continue to picket every day from 5am to
midnight.
Donate to the “Strike Fund” by sending your check made out to ALC
Community Services Hardship Fund with “Strike Fund” in the memo line and
send to the Alameda Labor Council at 7750 Pardee Lane, Ste 110, Oakland,
CA 94621.
*****CLICK HERE FOR MORE GREAT PHOTOS OF THE STRIKING WORKERS BY
PHOTOGRAPHER, DAVID BACON:
HTTPS://WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/56646659@N05/SETS/72157698901870202 [1]
Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB) is a decent(ralised) secure gossip platform. Imagine if Facebook or Twitter was run by its users, could be extended by anyone, offered cryptographic security, and required no centralized infrastructure!
Come by and learn more about SSB, ask questions, get set up on one of the several client programs, and be free from oppressive centralized social networks.
Read more at https://www.scuttlebutt.nz
Katya Cengel discusses Exiled: From the Killing Fields of Cambodia to California and Back.
“Exiled” traces the story of violence through three generations of Cambodian-Americans by profiling a handful of families. It begins with the grandparents, the elderly who will soon be too old to tell their stories of survival. The violence they endured is recognized as the most brutal, a genocide that killed an estimated 20 percent of the Cambodian population. In Cambodia, the criminals have never fully been brought to justice and the victims remain largely silent. The silence is the same in the United States, where survivors have tried to leave their memories of random killing behind. But trauma like that cannot be escaped so easily, and it followed them, seeping back into their families through their children. The guidance, support and care they were often too traumatized to give their children left those same children vulnerable to gang recruitment. The second generation came of age amidst the violence of the past and the present.
The U.S. deported the criminals who did not hold citizenship, sending them back to a homeland their parents had given up everything to escape. They had neither the practical nor emotional skills to cope and their home country offered little help. In Cambodia they succumb to addiction and mental illness in large numbers. Then there is the third generation, the children, the ones still in America growing up without fathers and mothers, subjected to the violence of loss and longing. This is a story about how regimes as brutal as the Khmer Rouge and as benign as the United States have kept alive a legacy of violence and loss. There are no easy answers here, just the words of survivors and their descendants.
Katya Cengel is a freelance writer based in San Luis Obispo, California, and lectures in the Journalism Department of California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. She was a features and news writer for the Louisville Courier-Journal from 2003 to 2011 and has reported from North and Central America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Her work has appeared in New York Times Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Marie Claire, and Newsweek. She is the author of Bluegrass Baseball: A Year in the Minor League Life (Nebraska, 2012).
advance tickets: $12 : Books Inc (Berkeley), Pegasus Books (3 sites), Moes, Walden Pond Bookstore, Mrs. Dalloways. East Bay Books, $15 door, KPFA benefit.
Cary McClelland is a writer, filmmaker, lawyer, and rights advocate. His book is an eye-opening portrait of San Francisco transformed by the tech boom. Famously home to artists and activists, the birthplace of the Beats, the Black Panthers, and the LGBTQ movementin recent decades the Bay Area has been reshaped by Silicon Valley, the engine of the new American economy. The richer the region gets, the more unequal and less diverse it becomes. Cracks in the citys facaderapid gentrification, an epidemic of evictions, rising crime, atrophied public institutionshave started to appear. Cary McClelland spent several years interviewing people at the epicenter of the recent change, from venture capitalists and coders to politicians and protesters, from native sons and daughters to the citys newest arrivals. We hear from people who have passed through Apple, Google, eBay, Intel, and the other big tech companies of our time. We meet those who are experiencing changes at the grassroots level: a homeless advocate in Haight-Ashbury, an Oakland rapper, a pawnbroker in the Mission, a man who helped dismantle and rebuild the Bay Bridge, and many fascinating others.
Richard A. Walker is professor emeritus of geography at the University of California, Berkeley where he taught from 1975 to 2012. He has written on a diverse range of topics in economic, urban, and environmental geography, with scores of published articles to his credit. He is co-author of The Capitalist Imperative (1989) and The New Social Economy (1992) and has written extensively on California, including The Conquest of Bread (2004), The Country in the City (2007) and The Atlas of California (2013). Walker is currently director of the Living New Deal Project, whose purpose is to inventory all New Deal public works sites in the U.S. and recover the lost memory of government investment for the good of all.
Sasha Lilley is a writer and radio broadcaster. Shes the host of KPFAs critically acclaimed program of radical ideas, Against the Grain, and the series editor of PM Press political economy imprint Spectre. Her books include Capital and Its Discontents and Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Political Collapse and Rebirth.
Film screening followed by Q+A with Director Laurie Coyle and Maria Moreno’s daughters, Olivia Portugal and Lily DeLa Torre
In Adios Amor, the discovery of lost photographs sparks the search for a hero that history forgot — Maria Moreno, a migrant mother driven to speak out by her twelve children’s hunger. She was the first farmworker woman in America to be hired as a union organizer and became an outspoken leader in an era when women were relegated to the background.
In 1961, UC Berkeley students invited farmworker labor leader Maria Moreno to speak on campus, where she received a standing ovation. A trailblazing activist who paved the way for Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, Maria was forgotten and her legacy buried. Now she’s back to tell her story in an inspiring new documentary.
This event is free and open to the public. Food and drinks will be provided. The MCC is ADA accessible.
Please register for the event by visiting us on Eventbrite or through our Facebook event page.
Co-sponsored by Chicanx Latinx Student Development, Center for Latino Policy Research, and Ethnic Studies Department
To learn more about the film please visit Adios Amor webpage: https://www.adiosamorfilm.com/
Attica – a documentary film by Cinda Firestone
This film documents the events that began on September 9, 1971 when inmates at Attica State Prison seized the prison for four days after months of protesting inhumane conditions. The uprising resulted in the death of 43 people after state troopers were called in to put down the rebellion
This event is the opening night of a three day Revolutionary University
Join us for three days of presentations and discussions to help us understand our current conditions and the problems we face under capitalism. Most importantly, we will talk about the kind of organizing necessary in order to change these conditions and create the kind of society that we need.
For more info:
https://revolutionaryworkers.org/revolutionary-university-fall-2018-oct-12-14/
Bay Area Landless Peoples Alliance:
Regional meeting of landless activists of the San Francisco Bay Area
Join us for three days of presentations and discussions to help us understand our current conditions and the problems we face under capitalism. Most importantly, we will talk about the kind of organizing necessary in order to change these conditions and create the kind of society that we need.
Friday 10/12
6:30pm-9:00pm
Attica – a documentary film by Cinda Firestone
This film documents the events that began on September 9, 1971 when inmates at Attica State Prison seized the prison for four days after months of protesting inhumane conditions. The uprising resulted in the death of 43 people after state troopers were called in to put down the rebellion.
Saturday 10/13
10:30am-12:30pm
The Crisis of Civilization and How to Resolve It: An Introduction to Ecocentric Socialism
Kamran Nayeri is the publisher and editor of “Our Place in the World: A Journal of Ecosocialism”. Political Economist emeritus, UC Berkeley
1:30pm-3:00pm
The Middle East in the Era of Trump
Prof. As’ad AbuKhalil, Professor of Political Science at CSU Stanislaus and author of Saudi Arabia and the U.S.
3:30pm-5:00pm
The “Gig Economy”: A New Form of Servitude for the Working Class?
Keally McBride is a Professor of Politics at the University of San Francisco. She teaches and publishes on a wide variety of topics, including punishment, law, decolonization, revolutions and political economy.
6:30pm-8:00pm
France: In The Streets, Workplaces, Universities, Schools & Hospitals
Gilles Kobry, an activist in the French Trotskyist group, Fraction L’Etincelle, will discuss the recent struggles against the Macron government’s enforcement of the Labor Law in France, as well as attacks on access to public education and the challenges facing the workers in France and throughout Europe.
Sunday 10/14
2:00pm-3:30pm
Sports And Capitalism – How Sports are Used to Squeeze Public Money for Private Profit
Jules Boykoff, former professional soccer player, currently teaches political science at Pacific University in Oregon. Co-sponsored by the Anthropology and Social Change department at California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco
4:00pm-5:30pm
The Challenges We Face Today – Short-Term Mobilizing or Organizing for Real Social Change
A presentation by Speak Out Now (Revolutionary Workers Group) activists, followed by discussion and time to socialize. Refreshments and snacks provided.
The situation with the lack police accountability in Berkeley has become critical. At this point, the police and their union have been able to compel the city to continue its participation in the Urban Shield military style exercises, scuttle the proposal for an empowered police commission and extract a 9% raise for their already well paid officers.
Despite the known dangers of cyber stalking, we have seen BPD tweet out the identities of anti-fascist protestors and secretly record police stops and then leak the information to the press as a way to humiliate an African American City Councilmember. While refusing to provide basic information via Public Record Act requests and denying the most basic right to watch even to Police Review Commissioners Berkeley police are a partisan political entity unto themselves.
This has got to stop.
We need a powerful coalition to take charge of policy and practice regarding the Berkeley Police Department. It is not tolerable to allow the abdication of power to a department that is more than willing to conceal or release information as suits its need to “control the narrative”.
Please join us! Berkeley Copwatch along with The Way Church and more organizations to a meeting to discuss new strategies for Public Safety and Community Control of the Police. We need a new vision of how to control police functioning and break the structural barriers that allow and lead to police misconduct.
The tech industry has been shaken by calls from workers at companies including Microsoft, Amazon, and Salesforce to stop collaborating with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The outrage, sparked by stories of children being brutally separated from their parents, led many to call for the abolition of ICE.
What would it take to abolish ICE? What is leading so many people to seek refuge in the US in the first place? In solidarity with those impacted by the actions of this agency, we must not only call to abolish ICE but also ask why people are leaving their homes, risking their lives, in search of refuge.
No Wall They Can Build, written by a former desert aid worker, collects the stories of those who make the journey and outlines the forces driving people to the border.
Readings + materials
https://sites.google.com/view/tech-workers-coalition/topics/no-wall-they-can-build?authuser=0
In October, Berkeley may become the 2nd city, following Richmond, to cut municipal contracts with ICE data brokers. The Sanctuary City Contracting ordinance, which ends city business with companies that send information to ICE, will be in front of the City Council in the town where sanctuary was born. Berkeley’s Federation of Unitarian Universalists will talk about it, along with many other social justice efforts, at Active Hope.
Talks:
Action Updates
Tracy Rosenberg/ Sanctuary City ordinance
Shahid Buttar/Kavanaugh
Susan Harman/ Public Bank
David Peattie, Steve Murphy/ Indivisible Berkeley Economic Justice Team: Break Up With Your Bank
Sandy Emerson/ Fossil Free California
Kelly Curry/ Peace Economy and Planting Justice
Ann Symens-Bucher/ Canticle Farm
Janet Scholl Johnson/ Sunflower Alliance
Virginia Hollins-Davidson/ Poor People’s Campaign
CP introduce David Swanson
David Swanson
Q & A
Wrap up, Thank yous
Book signing and sales
Pie extravaganza (selling slices to benefit CODEPINK)
Strike Debt is building a debt resistance movement. We believe that most individual debt is illegitimate and unjust. Most of us fall into debt because we are increasingly deprived of the means to acquire the basic necessities of life: health care, education, and housing. Because we are forced to go into debt simply in order to live, we think it is right and moral to resist it.
- Presenting debt and inequality related topics at forums, workshops and in radio productions.
- Relieving Medical Debt through pennies-on-the-dollar buyback programs.
- Promoting single-payer / Medicare for All to end the plague of medical debt
- Money bail reform and fighting modern day debtors’ prisons and exploitative ticketing and fining schemes
- Tiny Homes and other solutions for the homeless.
- Student debt resistance. Check out the Debt Collective, our sister organization
- Helping out America’s only non-profit check-cashing organization and fighting against usurious for-profit pay-day lenders and their ilk
- Working on debarring US Banks that have been convicted of felonies from municipal contracts, and divesting from the Wall St. banks
- Promoting the concept of Basic Income
- Advocating for Postal banking
- Organizing for public banking in Oakland! We made the first steps happen… now there’s a spinoff group
- Bring your own debt-related project!
If you are new to Strike Debt and want to come early, meet one or two of us and get a briefing on our projects before we dive into our agenda, email us at strike.debt.bay.area@gmail.com
Strike Debt – Principles of Solidarity
Strike Debt is building a debt resistance movement. We believe that most individual debt is illegitimate and unjust. Most of us fall into debt because we are increasingly deprived of the means to acquire the basic necessities of life: health care, education, and housing. Because we are forced to go into debt simply in order to live, we think it is right and moral to resist it.
We also oppose debt because it is an instrument of exploitation and political domination. Debt is used to discipline us, deepen existing inequalities, and reinforce racial, gendered, and other social hierarchies. Every Strike Debt action is designed to weaken the institutions that seek to divide us and benefit from our division. As an alternative to this predatory system, Strike Debt advocates a just and sustainable economy, based on mutual aid, common goods, and public affluence.
Strike Debt is committed to the principles and tactics of political autonomy, direct democracy, direct action, creative openness, a culture of solidarity, and commitment to anti-oppressive language and conduct. We struggle for a world without racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and all forms of oppression.
Strike Debt holds that we are all debtors, whether or not we have personal loan agreements. Through the manipulation of sovereign and municipal debt, the costs of speculator-driven crises are passed on to all of us. Though different kinds of debt can affect the same household, they are all interconnected, and so all household debtors have a common interest in resisting.
Strike Debt engages in public education about the debt-system to counteract the self-serving myth that finance is too complicated for laypersons to understand. In particular, it urges direct action as a way of stopping the damage caused by the creditor class and their enablers among elected government officials. Direct action empowers those who participate in challenging the debt-system.
Strike Debt holds that we owe the financial institutions nothing, whereas, to our friends, families and communities, we owe everything. In pursuing a long-term strategy for national organizing around this principle, we pledge international solidarity with the growing global movement against debt and austerity.
Join us for three days of presentations and discussions to help us understand our current conditions and the problems we face under capitalism. Most importantly, we will talk about the kind of organizing necessary in order to change these conditions and create the kind of society that we need.
Friday 10/12
6:30pm-9:00pm
Attica – a documentary film by Cinda Firestone
This film documents the events that began on September 9, 1971 when inmates at Attica State Prison seized the prison for four days after months of protesting inhumane conditions. The uprising resulted in the death of 43 people after state troopers were called in to put down the rebellion.
Saturday 10/13
10:30am-12:30pm
The Crisis of Civilization and How to Resolve It: An Introduction to Ecocentric Socialism
Kamran Nayeri is the publisher and editor of “Our Place in the World: A Journal of Ecosocialism”. Political Economist emeritus, UC Berkeley
1:30pm-3:00pm
The Middle East in the Era of Trump
Prof. As’ad AbuKhalil, Professor of Political Science at CSU Stanislaus and author of Saudi Arabia and the U.S.
3:30pm-5:00pm
The “Gig Economy”: A New Form of Servitude for the Working Class?
Keally McBride is a Professor of Politics at the University of San Francisco. She teaches and publishes on a wide variety of topics, including punishment, law, decolonization, revolutions and political economy.
6:30pm-8:00pm
France: In The Streets, Workplaces, Universities, Schools & Hospitals
Gilles Kobry, an activist in the French Trotskyist group, Fraction L’Etincelle, will discuss the recent struggles against the Macron government’s enforcement of the Labor Law in France, as well as attacks on access to public education and the challenges facing the workers in France and throughout Europe.
Sunday 10/14
2:00pm-3:30pm
Sports And Capitalism – How Sports are Used to Squeeze Public Money for Private Profit
Jules Boykoff, former professional soccer player, currently teaches political science at Pacific University in Oregon. Co-sponsored by the Anthropology and Social Change department at California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco
4:00pm-5:30pm
The Challenges We Face Today – Short-Term Mobilizing or Organizing for Real Social Change
A presentation by Speak Out Now (Revolutionary Workers Group) activists, followed by discussion and time to socialize. Refreshments and snacks provided.