Calendar
The community coalition — The Oakland Post Sunday Salon, Oakland Tenants Union, Oakland Alliance, Block By Block Organizing Network, John George Democratic Club, Wellstone Democratic Club — that sponsored the request to declare a “Housing State of Emergency” with Moratoriums on Rent Increases (above CPI), and on No-Cause Evictions, named a volunteer Action Committee at the Mar 13 meeting. The Committee met last week and developed a suggested list of actions (attached) that City Council could consider implementing during the moratorium period.
The “Moratorium Resolution” will be heard and acted on by City Council at the Council’s April 5 meeting.
The Agenda number of the Resolution is not known at this time as the April agenda has not been released (appx 7:30pm may be safe to plan for) .
Please feel free to spread the word, call or email councilmembers, plan to attend, and build a huge attendance at the April 5 meeting.
A rally in City Hall Plaza is being planned to take place before the Council meeting.
Also sign up online to speak when the item number is released.
For Speaker Card: http://www2.oaklandnet.com/Government/o/CityClerk/s/SpeakerCard/SpeakerCard/OAK032373
council@oaklandnet.com. (goes to all council members)
District 2, the Eastlake area Councilmember Abel Guillén
(510) 238-7002, aguillen@oaklandnet.com
District 3, Council President Lynette Gibson McElhaney
(510) 238-7032, lmcelhaney@oaklandnet.com
District 1, Councilmember Dan Kalb
(510) 238-7001, dkalb@oaklandnet.com
District 5, Councilmember Noel Gallo
510-238-7005, ngallo@oaklandnet.com
District 6, Councilmember Desley Brooks
(510) 238-7006, dbrooks@oaklandnet.com
District 7, Councilmember Larry Reid
(510) 238-7007, lreid@oaklandnet.com
District 4, Councilmember Annie Campbell Washington
(510) 238-7042, acampbell-washington@Oaklandnet.com
Councilmember At-large Rebecca Kaplan
(510) 238-7008, rkaplan@oaklandnet.com
City Administrator Sabrina Landreth
(510) 238-3301, cityadministrator@oaklandnet.com
Mayor Libby Schaaf
(510) 238-3141, officeofthemayor@oaklandnet.com
TURN UP FOR APTP’s DIRECT ACTION against Emeryville PD’s use of AR-15s in our communities! Why does a police department require the use of military-style assault weapons when serving its community? We believe that the police should not be at war with the people. TURN UP for this DIRECT ACTION that will begin at the Home Depot in Emeryville at 6:30pm and we will go from there…WE COMIN!
#Justice4YuvetteHenderson
Background:
—First, an offering: We affirm the existence, beauty, brilliance, and right of black, brown, and indigenous folk to self determine and thrive on this earth, in this moment in history, and for all generations. Àse —
Our purpose: Under an oppressive racial regime of white supremacy, thelives of Black folk are consistently devalued, criminalized, and abused by police in the United States due to reaffirmed impunity and increasingly, the proliferation and expediency of a militarized police force.
For Yuvette Henderson, this expediency meant her murder.
In the early afternoon of Tuesday, February 3, 2015, Yuvette Henderson, a 38-year-old mother of four children and one grandchild, was shot and killed by the Emeryville Police Department on the Oakland-Emeryville border of California. Michelle Shepherd and Warren Williams shot Yuvette with three weapons, including an AR-15 rifle—a military-style assault weapon. As the human rights violations in Ferguson exposed to the country last summer, police departments across the nation are abusing their access to military equipment and targeting communities of color.
This misuse of power is as present here in the S.F. Bay Area as it is elsewhere, made painfully clear with the killing of Yuvette. Repeated abuse of state power and increased state terror pose a serious threat to the human and civil rights of all people, including the residents of Emeryville and its surrounding area.
The city of Emeryville spans a mere two-square miles and has a population of 10,000 inhabitants. The presence of military-style assault weapons in a city this small only serves to deepen the divide between surrounding communities and law enforcement.
Enough is enough! State terrorism must end. Emeryville Mayor Ruth Atkin and the city council must ban the use of all military-style assault weapons from the Emeryville PD and ensure that all such weapons removed from the Emeryville PD.
TODAY, 6:30pm, #Oakland: Liberated Lens Local Filmmaker Series presents: FIRST FRIDAY https://t.co/AkPloe2DSR pic.twitter.com/bQv8zUOmAb
— Indybay (@Indybay) April 5, 2016
The Oscar Grant Committee was born from the struggle for justice for Oscar Grant, mudered by BART police on Jan 1, 2009. We organize working class resistance in support of families whose loved ones were murdered by police.
We meet on the first Tuesday of every month.
he Oscar Grant Committee Against Police Brutality & State Repression (OGC) is a grassroots democratic organization that was formed as a conscious united front for justice against police brutality. The OGC is involved in the struggle for police accountability and is committed to stopping police brutality.
In alliance with the International Longshore & Warehouse Union (ILWU) we organized the October 23, 2010 labor and community rally for Justice for Oscar Grant. On that day the ILWU shut down the Bay Area ports in solidarity. Our mission is to educate, organize and mobilize people against police and state repression. Sisters and brothers! The Oscar Grant Committee invites you to join us in this vital struggle.
We meet on the 1st Tuesday of each month
You can join our discussion list by sending a blank (doesn’t even need a subject) email to
oscargrantcommittee-subscribe@lists.riseup.net
Laurel Book Store welcomes Sarah Schulman, author The Cosmopolitans, and Lucy Jane Bledsoe, author of the forthcoming A Thin Bright Line, who will discuss queer life in midcentury Greenwich Village through the eyes and stories of their new novels’ characters.
The Cosmopolitans is a novel set in Greenwich Village in 1958. Earl, a black, gay actor, and Bette, a white secretary, have lived next door to each other for thirty years, building a relationship of trust and caring. Then Hortense, a wealthy young actress from Bette’s past appears to “make it” in New York, and all their shared assumptions are shattered.
Sarah Schulman is a novelist, nonfiction writer, playwright, screenwriter journalist and AIDS historian. The Cosmopolitans is her 17th book.
At the height of the Cold war, a heartbroken woman agrees to suppress her homosexual desires in order to take a top secret government job. When she subsequently falls in love, she’s forced to make impossible choices. Based on a true story, A Thin Bright Line is a novel of Cold War intrigue, the birth of climate change research, and the foment of 20th century queer culture.
Lucy Jane Bledsoe’s new novel A Thin Bright Line, based on the life of her aunt and namesake, will be published in January of 2017. She’s the author of five other novels and several kids’ books.
We believe that love is the universal language. We also believe that love is the universal cure to heal what ails societies worldwide. These meditation happy hours are our love offering to the community and are the result of a beautiful new & evolving partnership w/The Art of Living facilitated by Neelam Patil…& the universe ♥
Join the Oakland Privacy Working Group to organize against Stingrays (cell phone interceptors) being acquired by law enforcement agencies, against Urban Shield, and to advocate for privacy and surveillance regulation ordinances to be passed around the Bay Area, especially by Alameda County and by the Oakland City Council. - We are also engaged in the fight against Predictive Policing and other “pre-crime” and “thought-crime” abominations, drones, improper use of police body cameras, requirements for “backdoors” to your cellphone and against other invasions of privacy by our benighted City, County, State and Federal Governments.
OPWG originally came together to fight against the Domain Awareness Center (DAC), Oakland’s citywide networked mass surveillance hub. OPWG was instrumental in stopping the DAC from becoming a city-wide spying network, and its members helped draft the Privacy Policy that puts further restrictions on the now Port-restricted DAC.We were also the lead in having Alameda County pass the most comprehensive privacy and usage policy in the country for deployment of “Stingray” technology (cell phone interceptors).
Stop by and learn how you can help guard Oakland’s right not to be spied on by the government & if you are interested in joining the Oakland Privacy Working Group email listserv, send an email to:
oaklandprivacyworkinggroup-subscribe AT lists.riseup.net
For more information on the DAC check out
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.
Benicia’s City Council is about to make a decision that could put our communities at risk. Valero Energy Corporation wants to build an oil-by-rail terminal at their Benicia refinery — meaning more dangerous oil trains coming through the Bay Area.
If approved, this terminal would allow trains carrying over 2.5 million gallons of toxic, explosive crude oil to travel through the area every day. We don’t need more fossil fuel infrastructure that puts communities and our climate at risk. Greenlighting fossil fuel infrastructure is the last thing our cities should be doing.
On February 11th, the Benicia Planning Commission voted unanimously to deny Valero’s dangerous plan, but Valero has appealed that decision to the City Council and is trying to rush through a reversal. The Benicia City Council will hear public comment on Valero’s appeal on April 4th. We know Valero is putting lots of pressure on the City Council to approve their project — that’s why we need to make sure City decision makers know that residents from across the region are watching.
- Carpools: We’re setting up carpools from the East Bay & Davis. Sign up to be a driver or passenger here.
We need to protect our communities and our climate. We need to stop this project once and for all.
City Council Agenda (sole) item:
Open the public hearing and solicit public comment. After public testimony at this meeting:
1. Add an additional hearing date of April 18, 2016
At the following meeting(s), Staff recommends the City Council continue to take public
comment, consider all appropriate documents and testimony, and then consider the
following actions:
1. Consider and reject the applicant’s request for continuance.
2. Deny the appeal and uphold the Planning Commission’s unanimous decision to deny
certification for the EIR and to deny the Use Permit; or
3. Decline to certify the EIR and provide specific comments on the deficiencies of the EIR
and direction on what needs to be improved in the EIR and remand back to Staff with
direction to return to Council with the EIR and Use Permit; or
2
4. Uphold the appeal and
i. Adopt the draft Resolution certifying the Final Environmental Impact Report, adopting
CEQA findings for the Project and adopt the Statement of Overriding Considerations and
the Mitigation Monitoring and Reporting Program and
ii. Uphold the appeal and adopt the draft Resolution approving the Use Permit for the
Valero Crude by Rail Project, with the findings and conditions listed in the resolution.
FIRE CHIEF SUHR!
CHARGE THE OFFICERS WITH MURDER!
INDEPENDENT INVESTIGATION!
Justice 4 Mario Woods. Justice 4 Amilcar Perez Lopen. Justice for Alex Nieto.
Join us at a townhall meeting to make our voices heard.
Refreshments will be available.
The new book, China on Strike, is based on dozens of interviews with workers in Pearl River Delta factories, an industrial region of region of 60 million people that has become the “workshop of the world,” as China has become the fastest growing major economy in the world over the last three decades. Pearl River Delta factories supply the world’s most profitable corporations, like Apple, Nike, Hewlett Packard, and many others. These interviews document the processes of internal migration in China, changing employment relations, worker culture, and other issues related to China’s explosive growth. China on Strike is the first English-language book to provide an intimate and revealing window into the lives of workers as they organize against low pay and brutal working conditions, launching the world’ largest strike wave in the 21st century. Two of these contributors will be in attendance and will speak and answer questions via interpreter Alex T. Tom.
“As these vivid case-studies illustrate, the real sleeping dragon—China’s enormous factory proletariat—is wide awake and fighting back on all fronts. Indeed, here is first-hand evidence that Chairman Xi Jinping may soon confront the largest labor rebellion in history.”
—Mike Davis, Professor Emeritus, University of California, Riverside, and author of Planet of Slums
Fang Gang has worked in factories since he graduated from university, conducting interviews with other workers about their collective struggles in the Pearl River Delta and compiling them into articles that are published and distributed. An example is his 2013 piece “Strikes over the relocation of factories.” Currently, Fan Gang assists with workers taking collective action in the Pearl River Delta.
Mi Tu has been engaged in doing translations of literature on workers’ struggles in other countries, as well as researching the conditions of workers in China’s state-owned enterprises (SOEs), since her university days. Since graduating, Mi has worked in factories, interviewed workers engaged in struggles in the Pearl River Delta, and compiled and circulated these oral histories. Mi currently assists workers taking collective action against occupational diseases.
Alex T. Tom (interpreter) is the Executive Director of San Francisco’s Chinese Progressive Association.
Admission is free.
 AROC Presents: Palestine Before 1948
Sherene Seikaly on her new book, Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine.
Men of Capital examines British-ruled Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s through a focus on economy. In a departure from the expected histories of Palestine, this book illuminates dynamic class constructions that aimed to shape a pan-Arab utopia in terms of free trade, profit accumulation, and private property. And in so doing, it positions Palestine and Palestinians in the larger world of Arab thought and social life, moving attention away from the limiting debates of Zionist-Palestinian conflict. |
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.
Sometimes you’ve just got to take it to the streets, and this is one of those times. Sunflower Alliance is sponsoring a canvassing day to put rent control and just cause for eviction on the Richmond ballot in November. Bring a friend, or partner up with another canvasser when you get here. And if walking isn’t your thing, you can man (or woman) a table outside FoodsCo, Walgreens or Target. We’ll provide juice, coffee, and snacks at the Bobby Bowens Center to get you jump-started or tide you over. Come for one hour or the full four—or more. Bring a hat, sunscreen, and water bottle. Added bonus: An overwhelming majority of Richmond voters support this ordinance, so it’s an easy sell. If you care about stabilizing low-income communities and slowing rampant gentrification, this is your opportunity to make a difference.
Please join us on Saturday, April 9th for “Fair Chance to Advance,” a community resource fair!
Free services include: Proposition 47 lawyer consultation, DMV vouchers, job training, EBT and Medi-Cal Support, veteran services, immigration consultation, and housing assistance services. There will be a bouncy house and childcare services for kids.
– Do you have a felony that is keeping you from securing housing, employment or public assistance?
– Do you have questions about your immigration status?
– Would you like information about the new DMV amnesty program?
If you or someone you know answered yes to any of these questions, please join us and spread the word about this incredible community resource fair.
Fair Chance to Advance events were created to reach community members who may qualify for Proposition 47 crime reclassification. Indivduals with felony convictions often experience difficulty secure housing, employment and public assistance. Proposition 47 allows individuals with certain types of non-serious, non-violent felony convictions to re-classify their conviction as a misdemeanor, helping to increase an individuals’s ability to get their life back on track.
Of course, this is an event for any and ALL community members in need of legal assistance, housing assistance, support with access to jobs, assistance filling out healthcare documentation, and more, not only for those seeking conviction reclassification.
This event is sponsored by Oakland Community Organizations, the Ella Baker Center, Imani Community Church, the East Bay Community Law Center, the Alameda County Public Defender’s Office and other assistance providers.
With support from Oakland Vice Mayor Annie Campbell Washington and Supervisor Nate Miley.
Join EFF on Saturday, April 9 for a first-of-its-kind crowdsourcing campaign to hold California law enforcement agencies accountable for their use of surveillance technologies. Please pre-register here.
Volunteers like you will help us track down the privacy and useage policies of law enforcement agencies across California and add them to our database. We’ll show you how to do it, and you can be anywhere with an Internet connection to participate.
Last year, the California legislature passed two key transparency bills. S.B. 34 requires anyone uses automated license plate recognition (ALPR) systems, as well as end users of license plate reader data, to develop privacy and usage policies and post them on their websites. S.B. 741 creates identical requirements for law enforcement agencies that use cell-site simulators (i.e. IMSI catchers, Stringrays, and Dirt Boxes).
ALPR refers to systems of high-speed cameras that capture photos of license plates, convert the plates into machine readable text, and store them in databases that can be searched. Police can also set up “hot lists” so that they get pinged every time a camera spots a particular vehicle. In aggregate, this data can reveal all kinds of personal information, such as where you sleep at night, where you take your kids to school, where you worship, and what doctors you visit.
Cell-site simulators are devices that masquerade as a legitimate cell phone tower, tricking phones nearby into connecting to the device in order to log the IMSI numbers of mobile phones in the area or capture the content of communications.
We are asking supporters to join us in combing through the websites of more than 130 California local government and law enforcement agencies to collect these policies. We also want to identify which agencies are not yet complying with these laws, which went into effect on January 1.
The event will kick off at 12 pm PT on Saturday, April 9, and last until 4 pm PT. You can join in at anytime and take on as many agencies as you can. You can join us virtually online or come join us in person at EFF’s offices in San Francisco.
Due to the sensitive nature of the project, we are asking that participants pre-register for the event.
We will have our first vote on candidate endorsements and on our final document outlining our expectations for our endorsed candidates.
We’ll also do a training on how to gather signatures for our three endorsed ballot measures and connect with our neighbors district by district to create canvassing teams.
Please remember that if you would like to vote at this and future Oakland Justice Coalition membership meetings, you must join as a voting member. Contact info@oaklandjustice.org to join.
Check out the new OJC information flyer.
The Oakland Justice Coalition is a coalition of organizations and individuals that came together around common goals for the 2016 Oakland elections. Our aim is to build people power and advance radical change through the arena of electoral politics. It is time for us to unite around the causes we all believe in stronger protections for workers and renters, an end to displacement and police violence, a public education system that serves all its students well and act in solidarity together to advance a political agenda that serves the people of Oakland.
We’re building a people’s movement driven by the power of organizations with different goals coming together as one to support each other and build collective strength. We have anchored our 2016 work in three demands, all captured in ballot initiatives proposed by community-led grassroots organizations.
IF YOU CAN’T FIND US IN MUDRAKER’S, LOOK FOR US AT WILLARD PARK, ONE BLOCK EAST ON STUART AND A HALF BLOCK NORTH ON REGENT. WE WILL GO THERE IF MUDRAKER’S IS TOO CROWDED OR TOO NOISY. BRING A BLANKET OR SOMESUCH TO SIT ON THE GRASS.
- student debt resistance
- organizing for public banking
- advocating for Postal banking
- fighting modern day debtors’ prisons and exploitive ticketing and fining schemes
- helping out America’s only non-profit check-cashing organization and fighting against usurious for-profit pay-day lenders and their ilk
- our famous Strike Debt radio program
- Working on debarring US Banks that have been convicted of felonies from municipal contracts
- Working on ways to kickstart the drive for basic income
- Presenting debt-related topics at forums and workshops
- and much more! Bring your own debt-related project!
If you are new to Strike Debt and want to come early and meet one or two of us before the formal meeting starts, 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.
When heavily militarized police in Ferguson, Missouri, confronted African American protesters angry at the police murder of Mike Brown in 2014, Palestinians watching events unfold from Gaza began sending tweets about how to cope with the teargas filling the streets.
Such an act of solidarity was more than a mere expression of support from people who, though half a world away, know firsthand about state repression. Police in cities across the U.S. – including police in Ferguson and Baltimore – have turned to Israel for training in how to deploy tactics honed in suppressing the Palestinian struggle for justice. The U.S. directly supports Israel’s dispossession of the Palestinians – to the tune of some $3 billion per year.
Many of the issues facing the Black community in the U.S. – police violence, job discrimination, poverty, and environmental racism – are the same problems that Palestinians face.
A new generation of activists is forging ties of solidarity between the struggles of Palestinians and African Americans – struggles for equal rights, for dignity, for freedom. This tour hopes to make a modest contribution to this project – by unearthing the inspiring history of Black/Palestinian solidarity and by making these lessons relevant for present-day efforts seeking to transform the future.
Featuring
Aaron Dixon is one of the co-founders of the Seattle chapter of the Black Panther Party, chronicled in his 2012 book http://www.haymarketbooks.org/pb/My-People-Are-Rising. Dixon has since founded Central House, a nonprofit that provides transitional housing for youth, and was one of the co founders of the Cannon House, a senior assisted-living facility. Aaron ran for US Senate on the Green Party ticket in 2006.
Boots Riley is the lead vocalist for The Coup, a hip hop group from Oakland. He is a lifelong revolutionary, and he played an important role in Occupy Oakland and other Bay Area political struggles. Boots recently released a book about the lyrics and backstories of his music: Tell Homeland Security – We Are The Bomb.
Khury Petersen-Smith co-authored, with Stanford alum Kristian Davis Bailey, the influential 2015 Black Solidarity Statement with Palestine, covered by Ebony and other outlets. Khury is a member of the International Socialist Organization and is active in Palestine solidarity and anti-racist organizing. He has written about the politics of Black liberation for Jacobin Magazine and the International Socialist Review.
Wael Elasady* is a Palestinian-Syrian activist living in Portland. He is a co-founder of Students United For Palestinian Equal Rights at Portland State University and a member of the International Socialist Organization. He was co-host of One Land, Many Voices a community radio show bringing the question of Palestine to the Portland area.
Majd Quran* is a member of Stanford Students for Justice in Palestine. She grew up in Ramallah, a city in the West Bank of Palestine. Majd worked with Area C students in the Jordan Valley as part of her school’s Right to Education club. She also worked with internally displaced refugees and victims of home demolitions
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Oakland
Saturday April 9th – 5:30 PM, Oakland Peace Center, Shelton Hall, 111 Fairmont Ave. Sliding scale: $5 – $20 / no one turned away for lack of funds *Wael and Aaron will be speaking on Sat. April 9th *Boots will not be speaking on Sat. April 9th
Stanford University
Tuesday April 12th at 7 PM, Black Community Services Center. *Majd will be speaking on Tue. April 12th. Cosponsors for Stanford event: NAACP, Black Student Union, Students for Justice in Palestine, Muslim Student Union, MEChA, Asian American Student Association, Students for Alternatives to Militarism, Stanford Asian American Activism Committee, Student and Labor Alliance, National Lawyers Guild
UC Berkeley
Wednesday April 13th at 7:30 PM, Valley Life Sciences Building room 2040
Presented by
Haymarket Books
Cosponsors
International Socialist Organization
Arab Resource and Organizing Center
Middle East Children’s Alliance