Calendar
CRAIG DILWORTH in person
Author of the profound 2010 book:
TOO SMART FOR OUR OWN GOOD
The Ecological Predicament of Humankind
Our ecologically disruptive behavior – which is the same as our explosive technological know-how — is rooted in the nature of Homo Sapiens. Humankind’s development consists of an accelerating movement from situations of scarcity, to technological innovation, to increased resource availability, to increased consumption, to population growth, to resource depletion once again — in a vicious circle from the dawn of humanity and continuing today. Craig Dilworth amasses enormous evidence to prove that technology is our undoing: his Vicious Circle Principle trumps our intelligence.
January 11, 2014 marks the 12th anniversary of the opening of the prison at Guantánamo. This month as Andy Worthington and Debra Sweet tour cities and campuses raising the call, Close Guantánamo NOW! – they’ll be joined at various events by other powerful speakers including Jeffrey Kaye, Jason Leopold, Michael Kearns, and Todd Pierce. The new documentary film Doctors of the Darkside will also be shown at some events.
All three Bay Area events are open to the public including at the Stanford and Hastings campuses. Contact World Can’t Wait SF Bay, sf [at] worldcantwait.org or 415-864-5153, to volunteer your help staffing programs (we especially need videographers, photographers), and ideas for publicity and media. Donate to support the tour here: http://www.indiegogo.com
Film screening “Doctors of the Dark Side” with Andy Worthington & Debra Sweet in conversation.
The US Chemical Safety Board (CSB) has chosen Richmond as the location for voting on its final report on the August 6, 2012, Chevron Richmond Toxic Explosion and Fire. The hearing will be at 6:30 p.m. in the Richmond City Council Chambers at 440 Civic Center Plaza.
Please join Communities for a Better Environment, APEN, RPA, ACCE, 350.org Chevron Watch and Bay Area, the Richmond Environmental Justice Coalitionand community representatives from Pittsburg, Rodeo/Crockett and Benicia at 5:30 p.m. for a rally in the Civic Center Plaza.
This is a MAJOR event for our communities, because the CSB is recommending a new standard for regulating Big Oil’s refineries in the US – the Safety Case regime. We demand Safety First! No new Permits w/o the Safety Case!!
Please come out and support the CSB, the people of Richmond and the Bay Area refinery towns!
San Francisco Living Wage Coalition Meeting. The Living Wage Coalition is building a grassroots movement of low-wage workers and their allies to win economic justice. Anyone who works full time should be able to survive on what they earn and support themselves and their children. Come to be a part of discussing next steps in pursuing an economic justice agenda.
The Oakland Privacy Working Group will meet at the Sudoroom Wednesday Jan. 15th at 6:30 to organize to stop the planned building of an Oakland-wide surveillance grid to monitor the citizens of the East Bay.
Approval for a contractor to take over Phase II of the DAC contract from SAIC – summarily dismissed months ago for violations of Oakland’s Nuclear Free Zone Ordinance – is supposed to take place at the January 21st City Council meeting.
For more information on the insidiousness of the DAC and how it came to b in Oakland check out the DAC FAQ, the Oakland Wiki Domain Awareness Page and the Oakland Privacy WordPress.
OPG hopes to have a large presence and a big rally on February 4th in front of City Hall at Oscar Grant Plaza, and YOU ARE INVITED. We are planning to have potluck food & drink at the plaza at 6:15 before going in to the council chambers to voice our opinions on this spy-network. So far the City has always scheduled this skulduggery as the last item on the agenda, well after midnight, to try to discourage public comment, so we are planning to show movies in the Plaza to keep folks entertained while waiting for the item to come up. Let’s stop this fucking thing, privacy is an essential element of freedom.
Join Oakland Privacy Working Group to organize against the Domain Awareness Center (DAC), Oakland’s citywide mass surveillance center.
If you are interested in joining the Oakland Privacy Working Group email listserv, send an email to: oaklandprivacyworkinggroup-subscribe@lists.riseup.net
On line petition to stop the DAC
On line petition to stop the DAC
$12 advance tickets: brownpapertickets.com :: 800-838-3006
or Pegasus (3 locations), Marcus Books, Moe�s, Walden Pond, Diesel a Bookstore, and Modern Times.
Radical economist Richard Wolff recently exploded into the forefront of progressive thinking in the United States with his brilliantly insightful book Capitalism Hits the Fan, which chronicled Wolff’s growing alarm and insights as he watched the economic crisis build, burst, and dominate world events. His analysis differs sharply from explanations offered by politicians, media commentators, and other academics. While he retains many Marxist contentions, Wolff rejects the economic determinism typical of most schools of economics.
“Richard Wolff is the leading social economist in the country. This book is required reading for anyone concerned about a fundamental transformation of the ailing capitalist economy.” — Cornel West.
Professor of Economics Emeritus from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Wolff is currently a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs at the New School University in New York. In recent years while delivering public lectures at many colleges and universities, as well as to community and trade union meetings, he has built a reputation for blunt speaking, clarity, refreshing scorn, and an enjoyable wit.
Wolff is the author of many books, including Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism, Occupy the Economy: Challenging Capitalism, and Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It. He hosts the weekly hour-long radio program Economic Update on WBAI (Pacifica Radio) and writes regularly for The Guardian, Truthout.org, and the MRZine.
�Bold, thoughtful, transformative – a powerful and challenging vision that takes us beyond both corporate capitalism and state socialism. Richard Wolff at his best!�
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The Postal Service is still trying to sell the downtown Berkeley Post Office (and privatize the entire USPS). We’re still trying to save it. The Berkeley City Council will be considering a proposal in late January to help that effort, a Zoning Overlay Ordinance that will make the entire Historic District Area (including the Post Office) less attractive to private, commercial development.
To keep up the pressure on all concerned, and let them know that the people STILL do not want Post Offices sold, Berkeley Post Office Defenders invite you to twenty-four hours of activities beginning at 11:00 AM.
Activities will include
- petition signing and flyer distribution (11- 5)
- presentations, teach-ins (11:30 – 2:00)
- music (2:00 – 5:00), including the Funky Nixons, Phat Love and Fresh Juice Party!
- arts and crafts
- dinner and a movie (6:00 – 10:00)
- letter writing (11:00 – 2:00)
- an empathy circle
- a study group
- a free clothing box
- tents and signs
- light brigade spelling out slogans of resistance (around 7:00 PM)
Come join us! Bring your friends!
Berkeley Post Office Defenders.
Please join Share The Bulb for a weekend of actions against the pending eviction of more than 50 people from the Albany Bulb!
January 17th
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Residents and allies of the Albany Bulb will rally at Albany City Hall at 4PM, before marching up Solano Avenue. We will stage an overnight campout on Solano Avenue, illustrating the plight of the more than 50 residents of the Albany Bulb, who, if evicted, would be forced onto Albany’s streets.
January 18th
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Artists will flock to the Bulb for a day of participatory art, live demonstrations, workshops, and art tours. Join us for an Art Festival at the Bulb from 12-5PM!
*****
The campout is part a West Coast Day of Action to fight the criminalization of homelessness, sponsored by the Western Regional Advocacy Project (WRAP). Cities in the Bay Area and around the country have passed laws making it impossible for homeless people to live within the law. It has become a crime to sit or lie down, to sleep in public, panhandle or otherwise conduct their lives in public view.
The eviction would force Bulb residents back into the same social narrative of police harassment and criminalization of homelessness which originally drove many of them to the Bulb.
We have successfully prevented the eviction from going forward since October, and we’re ready to take the fight into the new year! Come join us, and find out how you can help preserve this unique Bay Area treasure.
If you’re interested in direct action related to local foreclosure defense, show up early and learn more.
January 18th
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Artists will flock to the Bulb for a day of participatory art, live demonstrations, workshops, and art tours. Join us for an Art Festival at the Bulb from 12-5PM!
*****
The campout on Friday is part a West Coast Day of Action to fight the criminalization of homelessness, sponsored by the Western Regional Advocacy Project (WRAP). Cities in the Bay Area and around the country have passed laws making it impossible for homeless people to live within the law. It has become a crime to sit or lie down, to sleep in public, panhandle or otherwise conduct their lives in public view.
The eviction would force Bulb residents back into the same social narrative of police harassment and criminalization of homelessness which originally drove many of them to the Bulb.
We have successfully prevented the eviction from going forward since October, and we’re ready to take the fight into the new year! Come join us, and find out how you can help preserve this unique Bay Area treasure.
The San Francisco Gray Panthers are very concerned about issues of mass incarceration, prison expansion, profiling of minorities and youth, and the criminalization of poverty. Particularly in San Francisco, with such extremes of wealth and poverty, it seems outrageous to build more jail space, when three-quarters of prisoners are there because they’re too poor to make bail.
We are helping to organize two important upcoming events to stop the new jail and we hope you will join us!
Here’s the details:
Saturday, January 18th: Attend our Town Hall meeting to speak out about the jail plan, and get prepared for the upcoming Supervisors meeting: 2-4 PM at the Redstone Building, 2940 16th Street (near mission). Download the event flier here.
Thursday, January 23rd: Speak out at the San Francisco Supervisor�s Neighborhood Services and Safety Committee Hearing on the Jail Replacement Project: 1-3:30pm, in City Hall Room 250.
Join Strike Debt Bay Area in working on some exciting projects locally and nationally to fight unjust debt.
– The latest on our coalition efforts to Save the Berkeley Post Office and fight the privatization of our commons.
– The latest on our efforts to help Richmond and NGO allies push for principal reduction for Richmond’s homeowners. Read an article written by two Strike Debt Bay Area members on the Richmond principal reduction / eminent domain case.
In addition, we are exploring the use of a public bank to help Richmond, CA and other communities escape the thrall of Wall Street.
– A report on FedUp, our action in coalition with Occupy SF and others to highlight (and Illuminate!) the Fed’s contributions to the ills of our economy and call for it to become unprivatized.
– Work on our radio segment on KPFA
– Other projects include efforts to fight against student debt in conjunction with peeps at UC Cal via a Debtors’ Union, a book group with semi-weekly discussions, investigations into the legitimacy of mortgage ownership and therefore the right to foreclose, efforts to thwart payday loan usury and more.
“Just as bosses are dependent on workers, so are lenders dependent on borrowers. If workers walk out, the enterprise stops. If borrowers refuse to pay their debts, the lenders could be in real trouble. Each side depends on the other. The millions of underwater mortgage holders, of student debtors and credit card holders, need the bank loans – but so do the banks need those borrowers, and they especially need them to cooperate by paying their monthly charges. Otherwise, the capital that the banks list on their books begins to drain away.” ~Francis Fox Piven
Check out our website, our Facebook, and follow us on Twitter.
Through the end of January we will have General Assembly at the sudoroom on 2141 Broadway, Oakland, CA.
Here are instructions to access the room, the entrance is on 22nd Street:
https://sudoroom.org/wiki/Getting_there
This Sunday will be a Cryptoparty at the sudoroom, along with the third Sunday in January, these will be opportunities to update your digital profile so the government can’t easily track your every move. More blather on this to follow this afternoon when I have a moment.
Our General Assembly is a participatory gathering of Oakland community members and beyond, where everyone who shows up is treated equally and has equal decision-making power. Occupy Oakland’s General Assembly uses a participatory decision-making process appropriately called, “Occupy Oakland’s Collective Decision-Making Process.” Our Assembly and the process we have collectively cultivated strives to reach agreement while building community.
Autonomous Action & the General Assembly
The bulk of the work of Occupy Oakland does NOT happen in the General Assembly. It happens in various committees, caucuses, and associated groups that report back to the general assembly. Everyone participating in Occupy Oakland should be part of at least one associated group. Occupy Oakland encourages autonomous actions that do not require consensus from the General Assembly. This encourages political activity that is decentralized and welcomes diverse voices and actions into the movement.
General Assembly Standard Agenda
- Welcome
- Welcome Announcements
- Agenda Overview
- Forum
- Reports from Committees, Subcommittees, Caucuses, & Working Groups
- Action Announcements
- General Announcements
Garden Project Workday.
Free Pancake Potluck Breakfast.
Sign up to Plant a Fruit Tree in your Yard.
Restorative Justice Community Healing Circle.
Source: Facebook announcement.
Reclaiming Finance: How Time is Stolen and can be Taken Back
In The Thief of Time Terry Pratchett imagines time as a substance that can be moved from place to place. In his novel monks guard giant jars of time and make sure it flows just how it is supposed to. Though intended as humor Terry Pratchett’s novel mirrors the reality of banking. In the current global capitalist order central banks and large financial institutions direct the flow of time through currencies and credit in order to reserve it for governments and global conglomerates. Dante Popple, a senior at Bard College at Simon’s Rock studying Politics and Philosophy, will discuss the mechanisms by which banks and governments steal time and how they can be undone, and what a socialist form of finance might look like.
The Postal Service has put the Berkeley Post Office up for sale!!
The Postal Service has started to outsource Post Office services to Staples, replacing union jobs with low-paying, low benefit work.
We’ll be reviewing our Festival of Celebration and Resistance on the 18th.
Come help us plan our next steps. Come help us plan our action for the 25th. Come help us prepare for the City Council meeting soon at which the Zoning Overlay Ordinance will be considered.
AND CHECK OUT OUR SPIFFY NEW WEBSITE.
OccupyForum presents the film�
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“Berkeley to Soweto”
The film will be followed by Q&A and discussion led by Andrea Pritchett,
one of the key people in the “Divestment Movement” to end Apartheid in South Africa.
Announcements to follow.
Join NYU Professor and activist Andrew Ross for a discussion of his new book:
Creditocracy and the Case for Debt Refusal
(He will also be speaking on the UC Campus on Tuesday.)
We are living in the cruel grip of a creditocracy—where the finance industry commandeers our elected governments and where the citizenry have to take out loans to meet their basic needs. The implications of mass indebtedness for any democracy are profound, and the historical record shows that whenever a creditor class becomes as powerful as Wall Street, the result has been debt bondage. Following in the ancient tradition of the jubilee, activists have had some success in repudiating the debts of developing countries. The time is ripe for a debtors movement to use the same kinds of moral and legal arguments to bring relief to household debtors in the North, and to create an alternative economy, independent of the debt-money system.
Hear histories and current news about one of today’s strongest grassroots social movements, the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST). The MST is a movement of 1.5 million landless women, men and children, who have forced the Brazilian government to redistribute 20 million acres of farmland in Brazil through the occupation of large unproductive land estates. This year marks the 30 year anniversary of the MST’s founding, and in February there will be a one-week gathering of over 20,000 MST activists to discuss the future of the movement. The MST has invited a delegation of 10 U.S. activists to attend the conference, including several Bay Area Activists.
Speakers include members of the U.S. delegation to the MST’s upcoming National Congress:
-Becky Tarlau, Friends of the MST organizer and PhD candidate at UC Berkeley.
-Shango Abiola, The Black Riders Liberation Party
-Effie Rawlings, Occupy the Farm
Andrew Ross just wrote a “movement book” for Strike Debt – Creditocracy. He has been super active in working against student debt and in Strike Debt NY.
We are living in the cruel grip of a creditocracy where the finance industry commandeers our elected governments and where the citizenry have to take out loans to meet their basic needs. The implications of mass indebtedness for any democracy are profound, and the historical record shows that whenever a creditor class becomes as powerful as Wall Street, the result has been debt bondage. Following in the ancient tradition of the jubilee, activists have had some success in repudiating the debts of developing countries. The time is ripe for a debtors movement to use the same kinds of moral and legal arguments to bring relief to household debtors in the North, and to create an alternative economy, independent of the debt-money system,
From the book blurbs:
In this lucid and accessible book, Andrew Ross argues that we are increasingly oppressed by the rule of credit and that ever more people must go into debt just to access life’s necessities. But Ross not only names the problem; more importantly, he points toward solutions. Read this book and join a debt resistors movement.
From his Wikipedia biography:
Andrew Ross is a professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. A writer for The New York Times, Artforum, The Nation, Newsweek and The Village Voice, he is also the author and/or editor of numerous books. Much of his writing focuses on labor, the urban environment, and the organization of work, from the Western world of business and high-technology to conditions of offshore labor in the Global South. Making use of social theory as well as ethnography, his writing questions the human and environmental cost of economic growth, has an activist, alternative globalization approach, and emphasizes principles of sustainability.
He has been active in the anti-sweatshop movement since the mid-1990s. From the late 1990s, he has turned his attention to the academic labor movement, both in the national AAUP, and at NYU as a vocal supporter of the graduate student union, and as a founding member of Faculty Democracy. In 2007, his co-edited volume, The University Against Itself, documented and analyzed the long strike at NYU in 2005 by GSOC-UAW (The Graduate Student Organizing Committee). A founder of the Gulf Labor Coalition, he has helped to organize campaigns to raise migrant labor standards in the United Arab Emirates. An early participant in Occupy Wall Street, he helped found the Occupy Student Debt Campaign and has been an integral member of the Occupy Debt Assembly and Strike Debt—a coalition formed in the summer of 2012 to help build a debtors movement. Strike Debt produced the Debt Resistors Operations Manual and organized the Rolling Jubilee.
He will also be speaking on Monday, the 20th in Oakland.