Calendar

Women to the Front!
We are celebrating Mothers’ Day for Justice and Peace. Hear how the women-led group CODEPINK is addressing militarism, patriarchy, imperialism, capitalism, climate catastrophe and the war economy, from local CODEPINK activists Marjorie Mikels and Cynthia Papermaster, coordinator of the Bay Area Codepink chapter. Tune in to get informed and inspired! There will be plenty of time for your questions and discussion.

Cynthia Papermaster is the Coordinator of the Golden Gate Bay Area Chapter of CODEPINK. She has BA and Masters degrees from UC Berkeley and is a retired law librarian and mother of a brilliant, beautiful, sassy daughter who lives in Oakland. Cynthia is a master pie baker who is interested in peaceful, loving, femin ist revolution and Jack London’s 1906 The Iron Heel, a cinematic novel of uprising and revolution in the United States that is set in Northern California. Her service dog Luck-Key is a trusted colleague who accompanies her everywhere for actions and travel.

Marjorie Mikels is an attorney, with a BA in Sociology and a Law Degree from UCLA, who has been practicing law for over 40 years.  She is a mother of 3 daughters and grandmother of 8 all living in the Bay Area. Marjorie ran as an Attorney/Peace Advocate for Congress against Nancy Pelosi in the March primary, and has been an outspoken Peace advocate, joining with Code Pink, opposing the Weapons Industry and arming Israel. She is an avid gardener and she sings and plays the accordion, having once been arrested for playing her song, “Save the Children”.

Green Sundays are a series of free public programs & discussions on topics “du jour” sponsored by the Green Party of Alameda County and held on the 2nd Sunday of each month. The monthly business meeting of the County Council of the Green Party follows at 7:00 pm, after a 30-minute break. Council meetings are open to anyone who is interested.

Hardware Hacking Tuesdays are better than ever! Plus Fix-It Clinic!

Each Tuesday we welcome all to bring their hardware (and software and firmware) projects to Omni Commons, or simply come by to learn and tinker! All welcome, about 7:30pm until ∞ …whomever’s left standing!

We are inside the Omni Commons at 48th and Shattuck, see the link at the end of this text to call in in case the doors are locked!

○ Projects: can range from building course materials for teaching local kids electronics to a robotic arm that draws, to light projection art, to people building their own microchip boards! We provide the space, tools and peer learning – you bring your project and enthusiasm!

○ Group Sewing: Learn to do simple mending or get help with technical fabric and textile projects. In addition to regular machines our Sewing Lab features heavy-duty industrial sewing machines and sergers. Our in house sewing guru CC has worked for Academy or Art College, Tesla, SuitX, and Zipline and has vast sewing machine repair and maintenance experience; bring your own machine to tune up for tip-top operation and sew alongside others.

○ General Repair: Fix it Clinic’s weekly Oakland residency: bring your broken, non-functioning things – electronic gadgets, appliances, computers, toys, sewing machines, fabric items, etc.– for assessment, disassembly, and possible repair. We’ll provide workspace, specialty tools, and guidance to help you disassemble and troubleshoot your item. First-time repairers and “Fixing Families” are heartily invited. Learn more at https://www.fixitclinic.org/

Join us every Tuesday evening for a trifecta of awesomeness; you can also jump in virtually via our zoom-like video conference at this link: https://meet.waag.org/turtlesturtlesturtles

RSVP here
We will cover our mission + vision, how we get stuff done, and our ongoing projects. You will leave with our handbook, other literature, and next steps to get involved!
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Upcoming Copwatch Committee Meetings

Communications Committee meeting: Thursday 5/16 at 5 PM
Casework Committee training + meeting: Tuesday 5/28 at 6 PM

Wanna join a committee? Come to orientation!

Bay Area! The police & officials are attempting to surveil and disrupt our community with a $44 million Cop City in San Pablo. Come together in the nationwide fight to stop Cop City!

🌟Date: Thursday, May 16th
🌟Time: 3-6pm
🌟Location: Point Richmond (900 Dornan Dr, Richmond) pic.twitter.com/79sPjlhUwz

— East Bay DSA 🌹 (@DSAEastBay) May 12, 2024

In the midst of this critical election season, the Berkeley Faith and Justice Coalition has invited a broad array of city leaders to answer pointed questions about the fight for racial equity in Berkeley.  Your presence is needed to underline to the council and school board members and candidates, as well as senior leaders of city management and the police, that Berkeley’s people:

Demand that the needs and initiatives of the most vulnerable and marginalized members of our community are the focus of all city leaders!

A leader of the Coalition, Rev. Angela Jernigan, describes it this way:

Together we represent about 3,000 families in this community.

Our chief aim is to build an equitable Berkeley for the health, safety and wellbeing of all. To that end, we represent and prioritize the voices and interests of Black and Brown members of our community in South and West Berkeley who have been historically marginalized, criminalized, underserved, and underrepresented.

Our areas of focus are the issues most grave for our population: homelessness and housing, violence prevention and interruption, police accountability, youth development and educational equity,  health equity, climate justice and workforce development.

1.  See the May 16 Event Announcement here.

3.  There will also be a Zoom option. But if you are able to, the strongest way you can show city leaders you support racial justice is to come help fill the church.

4.  Please come early so the meeting can start on time!

This Friday, March 22nd from 3-7pm we are excited to do a soft launch of The People’s Clinic!

The People’s Clinic is an abolitionist wellness and recovery center for people impacted by state/police violence and frontline organizers taking action against genocide.

(1/3) pic.twitter.com/aN3uXvzkrf

— Anti Police-Terror Project (@APTPaction) March 21, 2024

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

For our May meeting we will be reading The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy by Anand Giridharadas  (Amazon, Penguin).  For our June meeting we will finish the book.

An insider account of activists, politicians, educators, and everyday citizens working to change minds, bridge divisions, and fight for democracy—from disinformation fighters to a leader of Black Lives Matter to Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and more—by the best-selling author of Winners Take All and award-winning former New York Times columnist

“Anand Giridharadas shows the way we get real progressive change in America—by refusing to write others off, building more welcoming movements, and rededicating ourselves to the work of changing minds.” —Robert B. Reich, best-selling author of The System

The lifeblood of any free society is persuasion: changing other people’s minds in order to change things. But America is suffering a crisis of faith in persuasion that is putting its democracy and the planet itself at risk. Americans increasingly write one another off instead of seeking to win one another over. Debates are framed in moralistic terms, with enemies battling the righteous. Movements for justice build barriers to entry, instead of on-ramps. Political parties focus on mobilizing the faithful rather than wooing the skeptical. And leaders who seek to forge coalitions are labeled sellouts.

In The Persuaders, Anand Giridharadas takes us inside these movements and battles, seeking out the dissenters who continue to champion persuasion in an age of polarization. We meet a leader of Black Lives Matter; a trailblazer in the feminist resistance to Trumpism; white parents at a seminar on raising adopted children of color; Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; a team of door knockers with an uncanny formula for changing minds on immigration; an ex-cult member turned QAnon deprogrammer; and, hovering menacingly offstage, Russian operatives clandestinely stoking Americans’ fatalism about one another.

As the book’s subjects grapple with how to call out threats and injustices while calling in those who don’t agree with them but just might one day, they point a way to healing, and changing, a fracturing country.

Strike Debt Bay Area hosts this non-technical book group discussion monthly on new and radical economic thinking. Previous readings have included (in chronological order) 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, Mine!, The Dawn of Everything  A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, Beyond Money, Less is More,  Cannibal Capitalism,  Debt, the First 5000 Years , Poverty, By America, End Times, Jackson Rising Redux , The Feminist Subversion of the Economy, How Infrastructure Works, Inside the Systems that Shape our World, and Wealth Supremacy.

Resisting the Purging of pro-Palestinian Faculty

Speaker: Danny Shaw

Join Zoom Meeting
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/89531900427?pwd=mXg1rSZe3ONl4pfWlALW4ornc32Eez.1

Our speaker, Danny Shaw, is among the many voices for Palestine who have been punished for speaking out against genocide. After 18 years of teaching in the Latin American and Latinx Studies Department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, he was fired last month for his social media posts educating and organizing against the Israeli-U.S. genocide in Gaza. He has been camped out with the hundreds of students, faculty, alumni and staff that make up the Columbia Gaza Solidarity Encampment.

We urge you to sign the petition in support of Danny Shaw, who has spoken at the Marxist Library a number of times. The popular faculty was fired in retaliation for his outspoken public stand for Palestinian liberation. The petition can be found at: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeHtHV8F-TmazoQVzDCTE-Or2DcImwC_92qp8c2oVcOUBGm3w/viewform

The witch-hunt was led by the Zionist doxxing and blacklisting operation Canary Mission. Despite receiving numerous death threats, Danny continues to teach as a volunteer at the Columbia University’s pro-Palestine encampment.

Danny Shaw holds a BA in Sociology and Latin American Studies from Colombia University and a master’s in international affairs with a specialization in South American and Caribbean Studies from Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs.

He is affiliated with the Midwestern Marx Institute and frequently appears on TeleSUR, RT, and other progressive media.  Danny is also a retired Golden Gloves boxer, fighting twice in Madison Square Garden for the NYC heavyweight championship. He is the author of six books and numerous articles.

See:

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/04/17/bpdx-a17.html

https://www.instagram.com/profdannyshaw/reel/C5Ref73uQRu/

Join the Santa Cruz County Chapter of the ACLU of Northern California for this virtual event regarding the rapidly increasing use of mass surveillance technology by local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies. The expert panelists will discuss the current surveillance situation, what’s to come, the dangers of mass surveillance, how to monitor law enforcement’s use of surveillance technology and hold them accountable for misuse, our reasonable expectations of privacy, and what we can all do to protect our privacy and advocate for more protections.

Panelists include:

Tracy Rosenberg, Oakland Privacy & Executive Director, Media Alliance

Nick Hidalgo, Technology and Civil Liberties Program Staff Attorney, ACLU Northern California

Matthew Guariglia, Senior Policy Analyst, Electronic Frontier Foundation

Mike Gennaco, Independent Police Auditor for City of Santa Cruz, Office of Inspector General for Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office, OIR Group

Moderator: Gary Patton, Professor, UC Santa Cruz & former Santa Cruz County Supervisor

If you are requesting Spanish interpreation, please register by Monday, May 6, so that we can make that available. The audience is encouraged to pose questions to the panelists.

Register here

May 20 event on Zoom. Join us! #privacy #surveillance pic.twitter.com/5augKq5jLM

— Media Alliance (@twrling) May 7, 2024

Join experts for a Student Loan Help Clinic hosted online or via telephone. Topics covered include student loan basics, repayment plan information, loan forgiveness options, and more.

Register here

Hardware Hacking Tuesdays are better than ever! Plus Fix-It Clinic!

Each Tuesday we welcome all to bring their hardware (and software and firmware) projects to Omni Commons, or simply come by to learn and tinker! All welcome, about 7:30pm until ∞ …whomever’s left standing!

We are inside the Omni Commons at 48th and Shattuck, see the link at the end of this text to call in in case the doors are locked!

○ Projects: can range from building course materials for teaching local kids electronics to a robotic arm that draws, to light projection art, to people building their own microchip boards! We provide the space, tools and peer learning – you bring your project and enthusiasm!

○ Group Sewing: Learn to do simple mending or get help with technical fabric and textile projects. In addition to regular machines our Sewing Lab features heavy-duty industrial sewing machines and sergers. Our in house sewing guru CC has worked for Academy or Art College, Tesla, SuitX, and Zipline and has vast sewing machine repair and maintenance experience; bring your own machine to tune up for tip-top operation and sew alongside others.

○ General Repair: Fix it Clinic’s weekly Oakland residency: bring your broken, non-functioning things – electronic gadgets, appliances, computers, toys, sewing machines, fabric items, etc.– for assessment, disassembly, and possible repair. We’ll provide workspace, specialty tools, and guidance to help you disassemble and troubleshoot your item. First-time repairers and “Fixing Families” are heartily invited. Learn more at https://www.fixitclinic.org/

Join us every Tuesday evening for a trifecta of awesomeness; you can also jump in virtually via our zoom-like video conference at this link: https://meet.waag.org/turtlesturtlesturtles

Speaker: Mark Albertson

Extract: Sykes-Picot (May 1916) was a secret convention held during World War-I between Britain and France supported by imperial Russia for the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. The Sykes-Picot agreement led to the division of Turkish-held Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine into various French- and British-administered areas. Mark Albertson, historian, will go through that progression of the April 1914 request by Arab nationalists desiring British assistance with their nationalism in throwing off the Ottoman yoke; the British acquiescing in November 1914 when the Ottomans join the Germans and Austria-Hungary; the Hussein-McMahan Correspondence; the Damascus Protocol; Sykes-Picot Agreement; Balfour Declaration; San Remo Conference; Treaty of Sevres; & the Treaty of Lausanne.

The inhabitants of the area in question did not forge the borders of the nations they are in, the British and French did, for colonial aspirations in expectation of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.  Sole Arab nation of any consequence forged by Arabs was Saudi Arabia. The Palestine-Israel conflict is a product of this colonial division of the land of Arabs.

Our speaker, Mark Albertson, is a frequent presenter at the Library. Mark is a military historian with a commanding knowledge of geo-politics. He is the historical research editor at Army Aviation magazine and is the historian for the Army Aviation Association of America. He has authored several books: USS Connecticut: Constitution State Battleship; They’ll Have to Follow You! The Triumph of the Great White Fleet; On History: A Treatise. He is at work on a two-volume history on the saga of Army aviation. Mark teaches history at Norwalk Community College in Norwalk, Connecticut.

Join Zoom Meeting

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/89531900427?pwd=mXg1rSZe3ONl4pfWlALW4ornc32Eez.1

Tonight, May 27th
All Eyes on Rafah
Vigil for Palestine
Lake Merritt Amphitheater
7:30pm@YallaBerkeley @AROCBayArea pic.twitter.com/kgafEG7Rv3

— Mama Lisa (@LisTeague) May 27, 2024

Hardware Hacking Tuesdays are better than ever! Plus Fix-It Clinic!

Each Tuesday we welcome all to bring their hardware (and software and firmware) projects to Omni Commons, or simply come by to learn and tinker! All welcome, about 7:30pm until ∞ …whomever’s left standing!

We are inside the Omni Commons at 48th and Shattuck, see the link at the end of this text to call in in case the doors are locked!

○ Projects: can range from building course materials for teaching local kids electronics to a robotic arm that draws, to light projection art, to people building their own microchip boards! We provide the space, tools and peer learning – you bring your project and enthusiasm!

○ Group Sewing: Learn to do simple mending or get help with technical fabric and textile projects. In addition to regular machines our Sewing Lab features heavy-duty industrial sewing machines and sergers. Our in house sewing guru CC has worked for Academy or Art College, Tesla, SuitX, and Zipline and has vast sewing machine repair and maintenance experience; bring your own machine to tune up for tip-top operation and sew alongside others.

○ General Repair: Fix it Clinic’s weekly Oakland residency: bring your broken, non-functioning things – electronic gadgets, appliances, computers, toys, sewing machines, fabric items, etc.– for assessment, disassembly, and possible repair. We’ll provide workspace, specialty tools, and guidance to help you disassemble and troubleshoot your item. First-time repairers and “Fixing Families” are heartily invited. Learn more at https://www.fixitclinic.org/

Join us every Tuesday evening for a trifecta of awesomeness; you can also jump in virtually via our zoom-like video conference at this link: https://meet.waag.org/turtlesturtlesturtles