Come hang out at the Empty Homes Tax mobilization tomorrow at noon — we will be training for signature gathering and having a fun BBQ 😎 See you there! pic.twitter.com/CgM10SfpWy

— DSA San Francisco (@DSA_SF) April 15, 2022

New Member Orientation!

Get involved with community-based police accountability and the struggle for justice! Copwatch will be hosting a new volunteer orientation (with snacks) where we will have info sessions on copwatching shifts, Know Your Rights trainings, creative projects, casework, and our police incident database.

This even will be held outside, socially distanced with masks.
Accessibility: The location is at ground level, in a grassy area.

For questions, email: berkeleycopwatch@yahoo.com

It’s been almost 2 years since SLPD officer Jason Fletcher murdered #justice4steventaylor while he was having a mental health crisis. Join us on Saturday, April 16th at the new Steven Taylor Park Site (@ San Leandro Marina) to celebrate life, justice, and community healing! pic.twitter.com/6eVkvNyLoR

— CURYJ (@CURYJ) April 14, 2022

Email strike.debt.bay.area@gmail.com a few days beforehand for the the online invite.

For February, 2022 we’re reading the first three chapters of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by the late David Graber and co-author David Wengrow.

For March, we’re reading the next four chapters, 4-7.

For April, we are finishing the book.

All are welcome!

“A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution―from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality―and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation…”

Strike Debt Bay Area hosts this non-technical book group discussion monthly on new and radical economic thinking. Previous readings have included Doughnut Economics, Limits, Banking on the People, Capital and Its Discontents, How to Be an Anti-Capitalist in the 21st Century, The Deficit Myth,  Revenge Capitalism, the Edge of Chaos blog symposium , Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons, The Optimist’s Telescope, Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism, Exploring Degrowth, The Origin of Wealth and Mine!.

Ww have invited Laura Wells to discuss the historic decision this year in which the Green Party and the Peace and Freedom Party created a Left Unity Slate of statewide candidates for the June 7, 2022 primary in California. This cooperative strategy was based on the many shared values between the two parties, all of which will save lives, money, and the planet. Among the values are a single-payer “Medicare for All” healthcare system, real justice not increasing criminalization, truly affordable housing, public ownership of energy, ending wars for profit, public banking, and a comprehensive climate plan including meaningful work that provides a living without destroying the planet.

Topics to discuss include the challenges and successes of these two progressive socialist and eco-socialist parties, and ultimately, the question of what does it really take to shift our states and nations toward socialist values for the survival of people and planet?

Laura Wells is a political activist in California and in solidarity with Latin America. She has been an organizer and a candidate for the Green Party, and is running again for state Controller in 2022. She also ran for Congress in 2018, and governor after the global financial meltdown in 2010. A former financial systems analyst, Laura focuses her platform on taxing the rich, public banking, reforming Proposition 13, and saving money and lives with an improved Medicare for All healthcare system.

For a list of the Left Unity Slate candidates, see https://leftunityslate.org/, and for Laura’s blog and campaign website, see https://laurawells.org/

ZOOM LINK

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/2591082607?pwd=c1JuWjJyQ1hqTWFTNE8xUmhNYjJsdz09

Meeting ID: 259 108 2607
Passcode: ICSS2247rs
One tap mobile
+16699006833,,2591082607#,,,,*0620301838# US (San Jose)
+13462487799,,2591082607#,,,,*0620301838# US (Houston)

Dial by your location
+1 669 900 6833 US (San Jose)

NOTE: During the Plague Year of 2020 GA will be held every week or two on Zoom. To find out the exact time a date get on the Occupy Oakland email list my sending an email to:

occupyoakland-subscribe@lists.riseup.net

The Occupy Oakland General Assembly meets every Sunday at 4 PM at Oscar Grant Plaza amphitheater at 14th Street & Broadway near the steps of City Hall. If for some reason the amphitheater is being used otherwise and/or OGP itself is inaccessible, we will meet at Kaiser Park, right next to the statues, on 19th St. between San Pablo and Telegraph. If it is raining (as in RAINING, not just misting) at 4:00 PM we meet in the basement of the Omni Collective, 4799 Shattuck Ave., Oakland. (Note: we tend to meet at 3:00 PM during the cooler months from November to early March after Daylights Savings Time.)

On every ‘last Sunday’ we meet a little earlier at 3 PM to have a community potluck to which all are welcome.

OO General Assembly has met on a continuous basis for over six years, since October 2011! Our General Assembly is a participatory gathering of Oakland community members and beyond, where everyone who shows up is treated equally. Our Assembly and the process we have collectively cultivated strives to reach agreement while building community.

At the GA committees, caucuses, and loosely associated groups whose representatives come voluntarily report on past and future actions, with discussion. We encourage everyone participating in the Occupy Oakland GA to be part of at least one associated group, but it is by no means a requirement. If you like, just come and hear all the organizing being done! Occupy Oakland encourages political activity that is decentralized and welcomes diverse voices and actions into the movement.

General Assembly Standard Agenda

Welcome & Introductions
Reports from Committees, Caucuses, & Independent Organizations
Announcements
(Optional) Discussion Topic

Occupy Oakland activities and contact info for some Bay Area Groups with past or present Occupy Oakland members.

Occupy Oakland Web Committee: (web@occupyoakland.org)
Strike Debt Bay Area : strikedebtbayarea.tumblr.com
Berkeley Post Office Defenders:http://berkeleypostofficedefenders.wordpress.com/
Alan Blueford Center 4 Justice:https://www.facebook.com/ABC4JUSTICE
Oakland Privacy Working Group:https://oaklandprivacy.wordpress.com
Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity: prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity.wordpress.com/
Bay Area AntiRepression: antirepression@occupyoakland.org
Biblioteca Popular: http://tinyurl.com/mdlzshy
Interfaith Tent: www.facebook.com/InterfaithTent
Port Truckers Solidarity: oaklandporttruckers.wordpress.com
Bay Area Intifada: bayareaintifada.wordpress.com
Transport Workers Solidarity: www.transportworkers.org
Fresh Juice Party (aka Chalkupy) freshjuiceparty.com/chalkupy-gallery
Sudo Room: https://sudoroom.org
Omni Collective: https://omnicommons.org/
First They Came for the Homeless: https://www.facebook.com/pages/First-they-came-for-the-homeless/253882908111999
Sunflower Alliance: http://www.sunflower-alliance.org/
Bay Area Public School: http://thepublicschool.org/bay-area

San Francisco based groups:
Occupy Bay Area United: www.obau.org
Occupy Forum: (see OBAU above)
San Francisco Projection Department: http://tinyurl.com/kpvb3rv

Join KPFA for this very special, IN-PERSON EVENT, when Beverly Guy-Sheftall hosts Alice Walker and her book, Gathering Blossoms Under Fire.

From National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize�winning author Alice Walker and edited by critic and wwriter Valerie Boyd, comes an unprecedented compilation of Walker’s fifty years of journals drawing an intimate portrait of her development over five decades as an artist, human rights and women’s activist, and intellectual.

*Proof of COVID-19 vaccination required for entry, masks strongly encouraged.

[TICKETS / MORE INFORMATION]
Buy Tickets

Lead the way in bringing change to the California State Capitol and all our communities!

Virtual. Link will be shared upon registration.
SIGN UP

Led by organizers from the three ACLU California affiliates and ACLU California Action, the 2022 ACLU California Action Conference will kick off on Tuesday, April 19 and be followed with training and visits to lawmakers’ offices to lobby for the change we seek.

This legislative session, activists like you will help pass key bills to:

• Increase oversight of officer-involved deaths.
• Protect students from unnecessary interactions with law enforcement.
• Limit police use of facial recognition technology.

These bills will continue to push California leaders to embrace the change our communities demand.

Register now for this free, virtual event.

In Solidarity,

Carlos Marquez III
Executive Director, ACLU California Action
Donate Now

Add your support for a proposed Bay Area Air Quality Management rule that would ban gas hookups in new buildings.

This measure would update the Air District’s guidelines for applying the California Environmental Quality Act.  It’s a way to extend the good work that dozens of Bay Area cities have done with reach codes and regulations to require all-electric new construction. This would apply a similar standard to the whole region.

Methane ( 80 – 90% of “natural gas”) is a much more potent greenhouse has than carbon dioxide. Extraction, transportation , and use of natural gas inevitably produces methane leaks all along the supply chain – in addition to the carbon dioxide produced by burning the gas.

In addition, methane is a toxic gas that increases acute and chronic respiratory problems including asthma, damage to lung development in children and other respiratory diseases. Several studies have linked asthma to use of gas stoves.

And use of natural gas increases the risk of fires and explosions.

Join the meetings where the Air District will consider this proposal and add your voice:

WHERE

Links to meetings here

In a related Air District process

In addition to the proposed ban on gas hookups in new buildings, the Air District has already committed to a zero-nitrous oxide (NOx) standard for home heating and hot water, “with a plan for an equitable, affordable transition.” Gas appliances could not meet that standard.

NOx is produced when fuel is burned. This is a toxic gas that  interacts with sunlight in atmosphere to produce ozone and PM2.5. This mixture causes respiratory problems (asthma, wheezing, decreased lung function), heart disease, and early death).

In the Bay Area, household appliances release nearly three times as much NOx as light-duty passenger vehicles and more than eight  times as much as power plants

A letter from the Sierra Club and other groups is urging the Air District to “lead a broad, multi-stakeholder effort with two working groups to ensure an equitable transition to electric space and water heating.”

This 5-part course is designed for anyone interested in studying technology and data as the new frontier in organizing against the systems of enforcement and criminalization that harm our communities.

Three years since beginning our monumental #NoTechForICE campaign, we’re launching this course to share resources we’ve developed and to create a digital space for deepening our collective understanding of the ever-expanding state of surveillance––and how to organize against it.

By signing up for this course, you will hear from organizers, professors, and movement leaders who contribute towards this powerful movement for a surveillance-free future. Lessons will cover: data colonialism, race and policing, immigration enforcement, border militarization, global migration, organizing tools, and more.

Alongside key speakers, you will engage with selected readings, reflection questions, and meet other people thinking through these issues of 21st century technologies in their own communities. Join us every two weeks for one hour as we learn together and continue to build a path that centers communities targeted by the detention and deportation machinery, policing, and military operations.

We know that left unchecked, we will be facing down a new world order designed and controlled by big tech and enabled by the government.

MAY THE FORCE BE WITH US!

Session Dates

Live sessions will take place biweekly on Wednesdays for one hour at 3pm PST/5PM CST/6pm EST. Lesson materials and content for each lesson will be unlocked prior to the live session.

Session 1: February 23rd
Session 2: March 9th
Session 3: March 23rd
Session 4: April 6th
Session 5: April 20th

 CancelStudentDebt: A Conversation with Organizers from the Debt Collective — A panel of organizers from the Debt Collective, the nation’s first debtors’ union, make the case for cancelling all student debt — THE ISSUE OF STUDENT DEBT GETS TO THE HEART of questions about inequality, democracy, and the future of the economy in the United States. It also poses a challenge to the way higher education is currently organized in the country.

Please join HANNAH APPEL and BRAXTON BREWINGTON, organizers from the Debt Collective, the nation’s first debtors’ union, as they make the case for cancelling all student debt. They will discuss what they have experienced in the course of their organizing and their evolving strategies in the face of the federal government’s shifting positions on student debt cancellation. Moderated by Mitchell Center Graduate Fellow INDIVAR JONNALAGADDA —

THE DEBT COLLECTIVE organizes debtors’ unions using an emancipatory activation of household debt under finance capitalism. Alone, our debts are a burden, but together they make us powerful. Household debt leveraged collectively in the threat of a debt strike creates the power to remake contemporary financial relationships. The Debt Collective’s first debtors’ union has won over $2 billion in debt abolition for people holding debt from for profit colleges. They have published a book entitled Can’t Pay Won’t Pay: The Case for Economic Disobedience and Debt Abolition (2020)

HANNAH APPEL is an economic anthropologist interested in transnational capitalism and finance; finance, debt and debtors’ unions; the African continent’s place in global capitalism; the economic imagination; anti-capitalist and abolitionist social movements. Her research and teaching interests are guided by the economic imagination. What does it mean to understand racial capitalism ethnographically, and to work actively to undo it? Her first book, The Licit Life of Capitalism, is both an account of a specific capitalist project – U.S. oil companies working off the shores of Equatorial Guinea – and a theorization of more general forms and processes that facilitate diverse capitalist projects around the world. She is also a co-founder and organizer with the Debt Collective and co-author of Can’t Pay Won’t Pay: The Case for Economic Disobedience and Debt Abolition

BRAXTON BREWINGTON is communications professional and electoral organizer, focused on racial, economic and democratic justice. Braxton currently works with The Debt Collective, a national debtors union fighting to cancel debts and defend millions of households. Recently, Braxton worked as a Communications Lead for the Democratic Parties of Georgia and North Carolina, and served as a Field Organizer for U.S. Senator Cory Booker’s presidential campaign. Braxton was a Democracy Fellow with Common Cause, where he worked to galvanize students to become civically engaged by registering them to vote on campus, organized marches to the polls, and lobbied Congress. Braxton was a state spokesperson in North Carolina for the Rucho case, and cites his speech at the steps of the US Supreme Court as the event that propelled him into fighting for a powerful multi-racial democracy:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cancelstudentdebt-a-conversation-with-organizers-from-the-debt-collective-tickets-309845184287?aff=ebdsoporgprofile

Next Friday: Earth Day Youth Rally

What: Show Up to Support the Youth Earth Day Rally

This Earth Day, join Youth Vs. Apocalypse and other allies at 10 AM at Civic Center Bart Station to demand environmental and climate justice.

Demands to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Mayor Breed, the EPA, State Department of Toxic Substances Control, the State Water Quality Control Board, and all elected officials include:

1. Retesting with independent community oversight of Hunters Point Naval Shipyard Superfund site & adjacent areas
2. Full and comprehensive cleanup of all contamination to mitigate community vulnerability and d the threat posed by rising groundwater and sea levels.
3. Full reparations including financial compensation and lifetime health services for all residents, ex-residents and workers exposed to and impacted by Shipyard contamination

Mark your calendars for next Friday, April 22!

Youth response to this action has been huge! If you’d like to donate to the Youth Vs. Apocalypse transportation support fund, please click here to go to their gofundme page.

RSVP and more info on the Earth Day rally here.

Save the date! Don't miss our webinar on April 22, at 12:15 pm PT/3:15 pm ET, "Immigration Prison: Hard Questions About Abolition." Register at https://t.co/K0erK3YTuE. 1/6 pic.twitter.com/e00L7ebMXL

— UCLA Center for Immigration Law and Policy (@UCLA_CILP) March 29, 2022

Celebrate Earth Week with the pick of the year’s best environmental films, in person on the big screen at the David Brower Center or live on-demand at home with your computer.

Films explore nature, community activism, adventure, conservation, water, energy and climate change, wildlife, environmental justice, agriculture and more.

Showcasing people’s ongoing heroic efforts to

• save endangered wildlife,
• protect frontline communities, and
• raise awareness about local and global environmental challenges and solutions.

IN PERSON FRIDAY APRIL 22

• Goldman Theatre, David Brower Center, Berkeley
• Eco Fair, Silent Auction, Prizes: 6 pm
• Films: 7 pm
• Ticket includes on-demand access to full program for one week —  April 22 – 29

VIRTUAL-LIVE FESTIVAL, APRIL 22 – 29

with live chat:

• Virtual doors & chat: 6:30 PM
• Films: 7 PM
• Full program on-demand: 7 – 10 PM

Tickets $15 – $25
$5 discount for Sunflower Alliance! Discount code WSFFSFA

Info on films and and showings and ticket purchase here.

Hosted by Citizens Climate Lobby and community partners including Sunflower Alliance

▪️Who is a "journalist" under legal definitions?
▪️What are your rights to film police?
▪️When do shield laws apply?
▪️Where can journalists be in a disaster or after police curfew?

Get your questions answered.

SATURDAY | 10 AM |
RSVP | (CC)https://t.co/KSaY8G8GYD pic.twitter.com/QhUczHe8lp

— First Amendment Coalition (@FACoalition) April 20, 2022

Join us for a comprehensive overview of legal protections and practical considerations for covering protests, filming police in the field and more.

This free webinar is presented by: Asian American Journalists Association, Los Angeles, California News Publishers Association,  Californians Aware, First Amendment Coalition, Los Angeles Press Club, Media Alliance, Media Guild of the West, National Association of Black Journalists of Los Angeles, National Association of Hispanic Journalists,  National Press Photographers Association, Pacific Media Workers Guild, NewsGuild-CWA Local 39521, SPJ/LA, SPJ NorCal

Register for the Webinar

Sun, Apl 24, 2022: 10:30am-12:30pm Pacific

The economic depression ongoing since 2008 has put the dangeers of fascism and imperialist world war, but also popular revolts and revolutions, back on the agenda. While the working class and oppressed communities around the world have been rising in revolt for more than a decade, no revolutionary organization adequate to face up to the task of bringing down the bourgeois order has crystallized. Meanwhile, the Covid-19 pandemic and the danger of fascism have been ravaging humanity.

In this presentation, we will consider the tactic of Workers’ United Front as a way out of the dilemma facing the revolutionaries today. Applied successfully in revolutionary Russia in 1917 and formulated by the Communist International a few years later, this policy has found a wide range of applications to respond to different problems in different countries. We will consider the tactic both historically in its specific applications from the Russian and Chinese revolutions to revolutionary movements in the US and Turkey in the 1970s, as well as applied to contemporary politics.

About our speaker: Ahmed Shakur (Ahmet Şakır). Ahmed is an independent labor researcher, journalist, and activist. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, he has been active around numerous united front efforts in labor and anti-imperialist movements. He has also contributed to various left-wing media. He is part of the RedMed Internet Network.

LOGIN INFORMATION

Our Zoom room will be opened up, as usual, at 10:15 for anyone to join and discuss technical matters, catch up with each other, say Hi, etc.. The program (and recording) will begin as close to 10:30 am as possible and will end at 12:30, but the Waiting Room will remain open until about 1 pm for informal discussion.

ZOOM LINK

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/2591082607?pwd=dmxvYkR0azFpanFGVktnTkJUQUdtQT09

Meeting ID: 259 108 2607
Passcode: ICSS22424r
One tap mobile
+16699006833,,2591082607#,,,,*5063519715# US (San Jose)
+13462487799,,2591082607#,,,,*5063519715# US (Houston)

Dial by your location
+1 669 900 6833 US (San Jose)