THIS ITEM SEEMS TO HAVE BEEN REMOVED FROM THE CITY COUNCIL’S AGENDA.

Come to the April 19 meeting of the Oakland City Council to tell them not to hire Environmental Science Associates (ESA) to review evidence about the dangers of shipping coal through Oakland’s bulk terminal.  ESA is not the right choice to evaluate evidence about the health and safety dangers of coal.  No Coal in Oakland will be proposing a better alternative.

ESA is notorious in the Bay Area for writing the Environmental Impact Review that gave the green light to Valero’s crude oil-by-rail project, which is now being contested in Benicia. Many critics, from environmental and community groups to the California’s attorney general, have called that review inadequate because it fails to fully report the many negative impacts the crude-by-rail project would cause. In addition, activists question ESA’s commitment to a fair review of the health and safety dangers of coal, pointing to the fact that the team they propose to do the review doesn’t include a single public health expert. No Coal in Oakland says the city should hire public health experts–not a consulting firm with a vested interest in maintaining a good relationship the fossil-fuel industry — to evaluate evidence about the dangers of coal.

The No Coal in Oakland campaign has been gathering huge support, including a growing grassroots movement of residents, Mayor Libby Schaaf, many local clergy and and labor leaders, newspapers including the San Francisco Chronicle, and State Senator Loni Hancock, who has introduced four bills in the California legislature restricting coal exports from the state. A recent poll by the Sierra Club showed that 76 percent of Oakland voters oppose exporting coal from Oakland. Thanks to all this support, opponents of coal exports persuaded the city council to pass a moratorium on issuing any permits for the Oakland Bulk and Oversize Terminal until this question is resolved. And the council has signaled its intention to enact an outright ban on coal exports.

The focus of the campaign is an agreement the city signed with Phil Tagami’s California Capital and Investment Group to build and operate the terminal at the former Oakland Army Base. Tagami said he had no intention to export coal through the terminal. There was never any environmental analysis of the impacts of shipping coal or other fossil fuels through Oakland. Now he says the city has no right to control what commodities go out through the terminal and threatens to sue the city if it tries to block coal exports.

But the agreement specifies that the city can pass regulations to protect the health and safety of the community and workers if there is substantial evidence that not doing so would be dangerous. The No Coal in Oakland campaign and other groups have assembled extensive evidence from health and legal experts — more than enough evidence to justify banning coal on health and safety grounds. But the city wants to make sure it has solid justification as it faces a likely lawsuit.

The move to hire Environmental Science Associates stems from the city’s need to assemble strong evidence for banning coal. But hiring a consultant with a record of supporting fossil fuel developers against environmental concerns is not the way to go. No Coal in Oakland has an alternative proposal for reviewing evidence that will do a better job of providing the legal justification the city needs to act.

The city council was set to approve a contract with ESA on February 16, but before the council meeting, Mayor Libby Schaaf convinced the council members to postpone the contract vote “so that we may further evaluate other, potentially more effective options,” to bar coal shipments through Oakland. “I remain strongly opposed to the transport of coal and crude oil through our city,” Schaaf wrote in a press release that day.

Now a proposed contract with ESA is again on the table for the April 19 city council meeting. Strong public pressure is needed to tell the council to reject the contract with ESA and make sure the investigation of evidence is valid and unbiased. Come help push the No Coal In Oakland campaign over the finish line.

Please sign up to speak or waive time at
http://www2.oaklandnet.com/Government/o/CityClerk/s/SpeakerCard/SpeakerCard/OAK032373

For Item, enter “coal” or “11.”

Check back for updates at NoCoalinOakland.org or email nocoalinoakland (at) gmail (dot) com

FIERCE GREEN FIRE: The Battle for a Living Planet is the first big-picture exploration of the environmental movement – grassroots and global activism spanning fifty years from conservation to climate change.

Directed and written by Mark Kitchell, director of Berkeley in the Sixties, and narrated by Robert Redford, Ashley Judd, Van Jones, Isabel Allende and Meryl Streep.

Mark Kitchell will be present for Q7A after the film.

doors open at 6:30pm, film starts at 7pm

Homes Not Jails is a consensus-based collective of squatters and squat supporters who believe housing is a human right. Our goal is to open as much vacant housing as possible and to keep it open as long as possible. HNJ is a place to organize mutual aid among squatters and squat supporters and housing rights advocates in the bay. We actively fight to make our space inclusive and safe for everybody and combat oppression in all forms.

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 The Alan Blueford Center For Justice, 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.

Hunger Strike starts Thursday!! Our demands are for Mayor Lee to fire Chief Suhr or step down as Mayor of SF.!! pic.twitter.com/S7DFetupxq

— Equipto (@EQUIPTO) April 16, 2016

 Eat at Cafe Eritrea D’Afrique.
Just stop in for lunch or dinner and tell them you are eating for the Coalition for Police Accountability. 20% of your bill total will go to the CPA.

This Eritrean cafe focuses on bold flavors in traditional stews, vegetable platters & honey wine.
  Phone:     (510) 547-4520
  Hours: 10:00 AM to 11:00 pm
Menu: www.urbanspoon.com

If you can’t make it, you can make a donation at www.coalitionforpoliceaccountability

This funding will be used to print petitions for our Oakland Police Commission ballot measure, flyers, and order more tee shirts, among other needs we have.

Let’s make this a HUUUGE success – we intend to make this a regular feature, with new restaurants each time.

“Occupy The Farm” tells the story of 200 urban farmers who walked onto a publicly owned research farm and planted it with two acres of crops in order to save it from becoming a real estate development. The Village Voice calls the film, “Riveting from the start.” This story took place in the East Bay, and is still unfolding to this day.

The filmmaker and some organizers from Occupy The Farm will do a Q&A following the screening.

Seating capacity is limited to 45. First come, first served.

View Trailer

As part of 8 days of anarchy, homes not jails will be screening films about squatter movements from around the world. This will be followed a panel and discussion about the films and squatting in general.

Donations will support east bay homes not jails and the omni commons.

Urban Shield is a weapons expo and war-like police training that brings together law enforcement agencies from across the country and world to learn how to better repress, criminalize, and militarize our communities.

It is a key player in creating militarized emergency response systems that make police the first responders to everything from climate disasters to uprisings. But as we saw during Katrina, when “public safety” relies on armed emergency management, communities of color, and particularly Black communities, become an “emergency” that need to be controlled and managed with a military response.

Join the Stop Urban Shield Coalition to learn about the fight and how to get involved. Space is wheelchair accessible.

The “Is Climate Change Protest Broken?” panel will include Bay Area activists. The forum will conclude with a question-and-answer session moderated by Michelle Myers of the Sierra Club.

Micah White, one of the founders of the Occupy Wall Street protest movement, will participate in the forum on the past and future of environmental protest. White is the author of “The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution,” which contends that reliance on materialism, empiricism and scientism has limited the potential of environmental protest, necessitating a social revolution for individuals, communities and the planet.

Laurel Bookstore welcomes Reverend Billy Talen, spiritual leader and global activist, to speak on Earth Day from his new book The Earth Wants You.

A preacher’s exhortation, an activist’s primer, inspired visions and a call to arms for a wild, creative, Earth-led cultural revolution.

Civic life in the time of climate chaos—floods, fire, drought and superstorms—will require intensive policing and social control. Governing bodies will transform and democracy will fall by the wayside; the banks and the power stations will be heavily defended; whole populations will be incarcerated. While this might seem like dystopian fiction, it’s actually a description of life as it’s lived in much of the world now, and will become the norm unless we can stop it. When the ocean is pouring in through the door, will we find the will to act before we drown?

This book is a call for action as extreme as the weather. It’s meant to radicalize those who didn’t think the climate crisis would require any risky personal commitment. The Earth revolution is upon us, and it must be as wild and as unpredictable as life on Earth itself! Earth-a-lujah!

Reverend Billy and his choir of singing-activists are on the front lines of creative direct action, and here they offer up a distillation of the passion, the inspiration, and the hopes for love and survival that fuel their work. In a mix of essays, polemics, surrealist scenarios and news flashes from the frontlines, Reverend Billy answers the question, “What are we to do?” with a resounding chorus of “Take Action NOW!”

Starting in April, Berkeley Copwatch is kicking off our ongoing *weekly* copwatching shifts! We’ll be out in the streets most Fridays and Saturdays witnessing and documenting police activity and doing outreach. Please join us!

No experience required — any experience welcome. We’ll train you in the essentials for documenting police activity and staying safe in the process.

If you are able to bring a car and be a shift driver, that would be GREAT! Please let us know in the “discussion” section or by sending Berkeley Copwatch a message.

APRIL COPWATCH DATES AND TIMES
(Check this page for updates)

Friday 4/1 – 8pm
Saturday 4/2 – 8pm

Friday 4/8 – 8pm
Sat 4/9 – 8pm

Friday 4/15 – 8pm
Saturday 4/16 – 8pm

Friday 4/22 – 8pm
Saturday 4/23 – 8pm

Friday 4/29 – 8pm
Saturday 4/30 – 8pm

ABOUT OUR MASS COPWATCH SHIFTS
Since October 2015, Berkeley Copwatch has been holding “mass copwatch” events. It’s been fun and very empowering to have up to five cars full of copwatchers patrolling our city and on the scene when police stop people.

The Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair is an annual event for people interested and engaged in radical work to connect and learn through book and information tables, workshops, panel discussions, skillshares, films and more! We create an inclusive space to introduce new folks to anarchism, foster productive dialogue between various political traditions and anarchists from different milieus, and create an opportunity to dissect our movements’ strengths, weaknesses, strategies, and tactics.

This Earth Day 2016, MARCH FOR THE EARTH in honor of Cesar Chavez because environmental rights are human rights! Gathering at 10am at 19th and Dolores, the parade departs promptly at 11 to walk to 24th and Mission. The festival is on 24th Street between Bryant and Treat. Please don’t miss the music, speakers and community! Bring signs and friends! Organizations please call John (415) 312-6924 or email marchfortheearth@gmail.com if you would like to be listed in the parade roster.

Want to learn how to work toward abolishing the cops? Want to hear how we challenge the notion that policing keeps us safe? CR Oakland regularly offers this workshop that looks at the role and history of policing in the U.S., the way it has impacted various communities, and how people have resisted and challenged its inherent violence. This workshop also goes over how we can reduce our reliance on policing by highlighting the various ways that building up community strength and practices lead to true safety that does not depend on law enforcement.

The building is wheelchair accessible. Please email croakland@criticalresistance.org to RSVP.

Join us to celebrate EARTH DAY WEEKEND at the Gill Tract where we will come together to BUILD OUR POWER and continue the fight to DEFEND THE LAND.

As many of you know construction has started on the southernmost part of the Tract below Monroe St. UC Berkeley has sold out that parcel of public land to be turned into a luxury senior housing complex. But we won’t let the rest of the southside of Gill Tract be paved into a corporate chain grocery store. It’s a critical moment as permits may be issued any day now. Let’s seize this weekend of celebrating and protecting Mama Earth to resist further threats to this historic farmland and greenspace.

We’ll have a weekend full of engaging activities planned including speakers, music, food, and much more, SO COME OUT ALL DAY EACH DAY AND PLAN TO STAY THE NIGHT.

Saturday 4/23
*12 Noon: meet on the corner of San Pable Ave and Monroe St.
*Activities will include altar building so bring decorative fabric, remembrance pictures/images, flowers, battery-powered lights, special/sacred objects, etc.
*5pm Speakers: TBA
*6pm Dinner served
*7pm Music: Future Twins, group jam, more (tba)
*Camp out under the stars!

Sunday 4/14
*We will go support the fun activities at the northside Community Farm.
*6:00 Dinner
*Night time film screening of “This Changes Everything” (the Naomi Klein film) w/ popcorn

What’s Next in the Fight to Protect Public Spaces, the Rights of Homeless People, AND Free Speech

Why: Though our occupation has been torn down, the fight to preserve public resources, free speech, and the rights of homeless people must continue

Though the Main Berkeley Post Office is not currently up for sale, the USPS continues to pursue a “shrink to survive” strategy by reducing and outsourcing services, chiseling away at union employment, and selling post offices around the country.  Management of this huge enterprise is neglected with only three Governors on the Board that is chartered for eleven.  The Postal Service continues to ignore the strong recommendations of its own Inspector General to correct anti-competitive practices in its real estate division and to pursue financial viability by offering banking services to its customers.

Allowing the USPS to wither in this way threatens the citizenry with the loss of universally accessible mail service, with a devastating injury to organized labor, with the elimination of public space on Main Streets throughout the country, and with the abdication of the Constitutional mission to provided a vehicle for the transmission of free speech.

During our 17-month occupation of the Main Berkeley Post Office, we expanded our mission to protest the criminalization of homeless people.  Solving the widespread social problems that result in homelessness is not, nor can it be, the job of the police.  We will continue to raise awareness of this strategic miscalculation by city officials and to demand that truly affordable housing be created for the homeless so they can spend more time putting their lives in order and less time shifting their belongings from pillar to post.

Our press conference will review the course of our 17-month occupation.  We will thank everyone who played a role in sustaining our presence on the grounds of the post office.  And we will discuss our strategies going forward:

– To organize community members to call out the USPS for not using the Main Berkeley Post Office to its full potential, and for not heeding their Inspector General’s recommendations to crack down on their real estate division and to institute postal banking.

–   To invite candidates for election in November to use the Main Berkeley Post Office as a backdrop for supporting union labor, for Main Street Not Wall Street, and for attacking the predatory fringe finance industry.

– To retain and build on the way we’ve used public space for free expression. No matter how one might speculate as to the reasons why the Postal Police tolerated our occupation for so long, we demonstrated that public officials may not have absolute control over the use of spaces they administer, but that communities can override authorities without relying on permits, petitions, lawsuits, lobbyists, threats, or bribes. We can just use those spaces.

– To continue to nurture the community garden that we planted on neglected post office property over a year ago, and to which we are currently denied access by US Postal Police.

Berkeley Post Office Defenders: http://berkeleypostofficedefenders.wordpress.com/

First They Came for the Homeless: https://www.facebook.com/pages/First-they-came-for-the-homeless/253882908111999?ref=br_tf

BPOD is affiliated with Strike Debt Bay Area: http://strike-debt-bay-area.tumblr.com/

Saving the United States Postal Service as a Public Enterprise: http://tinyurl.com/ltqq7ng

Privatization Is Social Cancer; Saving the US Postal Service: http://tinyurl.com/mbcbzrf

THIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED UNTIL SOMETIME IN MAY, DATE TO BE DETERMINED.