Calendar
Assuming it is open, we will be meeting in-person at our old haunt, the OMNI, and, as an experiment, with a Zoom live link for those who can’t be there physically. Check back here a few days before the event to insure the availability of the OMNI, otherwise we will meet again solely online.
Due to the exponential growth of Delta COVID in Alameda County we will still be meeting online in July. The August meeting may be held dually online and at the OMNI Commons.
Stay tuned!
Email strike.debt.bay.area@gmail.com for up-to-date status and the online invite.
Our current topic is degrowth. Our book is Exploring Degrowth: A Critical Guide, by Liegey and Nelson, available from its publisher Pluto Press and elsewhere, including Amazon. We will be reading the first half of the book this month, constituting the first three chapters, through page 85 of the paper back edition, and the second half of the book for our August meeting.
“A sense of urgency pervades global environmentalism, and the degrowth movement is bursting into the mainstream. As climate catastrophe looms closer, people are eager to learn what degrowth is about, and whether we can save the planet by changing how we live. This book is an introduction to the movement. As politicians and corporations obsess over growth objectives, the degrowth movement demands that we must slow down the economy by transforming our economies, our politics and our cultures to live within the Earth’s limits. This book navigates the practice and strategies of the movement, looking at its strengths and weaknesses. Covering horizontal democracy, local economies and the reduction of work, it shows us why degrowth is a compelling and realistic project.”
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, and Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism.
Register
This fire season we’ve seen the largest known wildfire ever in California, bringing the climate crisis literally to our front doors. This is not an isolated event. Climate scientists have been warning that extreme weather would be coming if we continued to burn fossil fuels, and yet, because of capitalism, we’ve only seen the use of those fuels skyrocket. In the past month reports about this crisis have come out with dire warnings, letting us know that tipping points that mean an unavoidable cascade of the irreversible climate crisis, are approaching rapidly if they haven’t had already been reached. All of this means that our task is enormous and urgent. Climate change is a direct result of the capitalist system, and we will not be able to address the climate crisis without getting rid of it altogether.
Join the East Bay DSA Political Education Committee and Green New Deal Committee as we look at why capitalism is incapable of addressing the climate crisis, and why the fight for socialism is our only way out.
Join Zoom Meeting
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Meeting ID: 828 7705 1499
Passcode: school
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Reading List
Part 1: THE CURRENT CLIMATE CRISIS
(very brief articles about the current state of the climate crisis)
‘Nobody’s Safe’: 10 Takeaways from New International Climate Change Report
Climate crisis: Scientists spot warning signs of Gulf Stream collapse: Article from The Guardian
Part 2: CAPITALISM AND CLIMATE CHANGE
(Don’t mourn organize! These are the main readings, start with the first one, or chose whichever you would prefer!)
What it Will Take: Ch.27 Beyond Capitalism by Carol Dansereau
A good place to start: a general introduction to why socialism is the only answer to the climate crisis
Introduction and First Chapter of Red Green Revolution by Victor Wallis
A deeper dive into the concepts of ecosocialism
Part 3: ON THE GREEN NEW DEAL
Climate Change Is Class Struggle by Matt Huber
A review of On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal by Naomi Klein that highlights the need for class struggle in the fight for the Green New Deal
2021 DSA Convention: Decade of the Green New Deal: Planetary Crisis and Socialist Power
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfYwKCKZvC270piELHNDhnJ5zaxQ1-SoVcIlGihiAZF1f53gQ/viewform
The Struggle for People’s Park is a 2-unit student-led class offered to UC Berkeley Students during the Fall 2021 semester under the Democratic Education at Cal (DeCal) program.
You may apply by clicking the “take my class” button above.
Note: Grading will be based on a pass/fail framework depending on the participation and development designs regarding People’s Park.
For more information and updates, please contact our student facilitator, Aidan Hill at hillae@berkeley.edu
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfYwKCKZvC270piELHNDhnJ5zaxQ1-SoVcIlGihiAZF1f53gQ/viewform
The Struggle for People’s Park is a 2-unit student-led class offered to UC Berkeley Students during the Fall 2021 semester under the Democratic Education at Cal (DeCal) program.
You may apply by clicking the “take my class” button above.
Note: Grading will be based on a pass/fail framework depending on the participation and development designs regarding People’s Park.
For more information and updates, please contact our student facilitator, Aidan Hill at hillae@berkeley.edu
Progressive Law Day is a free half-day conference, historically organized and led by law student members of the National Lawyers Guild, San Francisco Bay Area Chapter, and open to law students, legal workers, lawyers, activists, and anyone interested in learning about radical lawyering and legal work.
Progressive Law Day 2021 will be held in partnership with UC Hastings College of the Law, on the Hastings campus at 200 McAllister Ave in San Francisco. Lunch will be provided for all attendees. Registration is open for both in-person and virtual attendance for all workshops and panels. While we’re optimistic about hosting this event in-person for the fall, we are prepared to fully transition this event to virtual-only in the event of circumstances beyond our control.
YOU GOTTA TAKE THIS CLASS!
Copwatch Presents: the Copwatch DeCal Class on Community-based AccountabilityMondays 5-6:30pm. Open to all.
Registration and more info: https://t.co/LdbC7tEcUeThis class includes opportunities for direct field monitoring of police on duty. pic.twitter.com/gyi5Wr2KWC
— Berkeley Copwatch (@Copwatch411) September 1, 2021
We are the Climate Emergency Mobilization Task Force (CEMTF) a Bay Area coalition of elected officials, city & county staff, nongovernmental organizations, youth, environmental activists, social activists, and front line communities addressing the inequities and causes of the climate emergency. We meet Fridays from 9am-noon, from July-November 2021.
Below are our planned meetings. Visit our website to learn more: https://www.cemtf.org/.
July 30th: Fossil Fuel Free Bay Area
August 20th: Clean and Just Transportation
September 17th: Ecological Protection
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfYwKCKZvC270piELHNDhnJ5zaxQ1-SoVcIlGihiAZF1f53gQ/viewform
The Struggle for People’s Park is a 2-unit student-led class offered to UC Berkeley Students during the Fall 2021 semester under the Democratic Education at Cal (DeCal) program.
You may apply by clicking the “take my class” button above.
Note: Grading will be based on a pass/fail framework depending on the participation and development designs regarding People’s Park.
For more information and updates, please contact our student facilitator, Aidan Hill at hillae@berkeley.edu
“War is Literally Killing the Planet”. The war economy is brought to you by these players: Speaker Nancy Pelosi, BlackRock Worldwide Investments, Lockheed Martin, and Chevron, and you and I bought front row seats. We’re funding it.
With our votes and taxes, we are enabling the destruction of life on earth. We need a peace economy to replace this suicidal situation. We are angry that these players profited handsomely from the 20-year war in Afghanistan. We are grieving that they are destroying the planet worldwide. We are outraged that they are siphoning over 50% of the U.S. federal budget for continuing wars, while people all over the planet are suffering from the climate emergency, pandemic, going hungry, seeing their clean water and air destroyed by wars, resource extraction and fossil fuel emissions, and fearing the future for their children and all beings.
The war economy supplies huge short-term profits to these war profiteers and we are calling them out!
Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s majority in Congress siphons over 50% of our federal budget to fund the skyrocketing costs of war and Pentagon operations with their huge greenhouse gas emissions. Pelosi insists on spending our money on continual wars and refuses to support Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, affordable housing, education, elder and child care, clean water, air, and food — the things that give life and peace a chance.
BlackRock is making a killing on killing with its investments in the war economy and planet destroying fossil fuel and nuclear industries, earning a handsome profit for its investors (https://blackrocksbigproblem.com/the-problems/).
Lockheed buys Congress with it’s generous campaign contributions, acting as the U.S. State Dept. and Pentagon’s master, weaponizing space and urging a war on China, and selling weapons to human rights violators like the Israeli government and the Saudis — who beheaded a journalist, attacked the World Trade Center, and bombed a school bus in Yemen killing 40 children with a 500 pound Lockheed bomb. The Saudis are U.S. allies, thanks to Lockheed, Pelosi, Chevron and BlackRock.
Chevron sits on Lockheed’s Board of Directors and is a major Pentagon contractor, supplying fossil fuels for the military’s immense greenhouse gas emissions. Chevron’s short term thirst for profits, polluting, pillaging and extracting fossil fuels, aided by militarized police forces and private armies, is adding to the planet’s death spiral. Chevron is a criminal enterprise.
We are “connecting the dots” to show that divesting from the war economy — represented by Pelosi, the Pentagon, BlackRock, Lockheed and Chevron– and investing instead in the peace economy we deserve, is the way out of this tragic situation.
For International Day of Peace, CODEPINK and allies are going to expose the war financiers, war profiteers, and war climate destroyers and call for funding a peace economy instead.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfYwKCKZvC270piELHNDhnJ5zaxQ1-SoVcIlGihiAZF1f53gQ/viewform
The Struggle for People’s Park is a 2-unit student-led class offered to UC Berkeley Students during the Fall 2021 semester under the Democratic Education at Cal (DeCal) program.
You may apply by clicking the “take my class” button above.
Note: Grading will be based on a pass/fail framework depending on the participation and development designs regarding People’s Park.
For more information and updates, please contact our student facilitator, Aidan Hill at hillae@berkeley.edu
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfYwKCKZvC270piELHNDhnJ5zaxQ1-SoVcIlGihiAZF1f53gQ/viewform
The Struggle for People’s Park is a 2-unit student-led class offered to UC Berkeley Students during the Fall 2021 semester under the Democratic Education at Cal (DeCal) program.
You may apply by clicking the “take my class” button above.
Note: Grading will be based on a pass/fail framework depending on the participation and development designs regarding People’s Park.
For more information and updates, please contact our student facilitator, Aidan Hill at hillae@berkeley.edu
YOU GOTTA TAKE THIS CLASS!
Copwatch Presents: the Copwatch DeCal Class on Community-based AccountabilityMondays 5-6:30pm. Open to all.
Registration and more info: https://t.co/LdbC7tEcUeThis class includes opportunities for direct field monitoring of police on duty. pic.twitter.com/gyi5Wr2KWC
— Berkeley Copwatch (@Copwatch411) September 1, 2021
We are the Climate Emergency Mobilization Task Force (CEMTF) a Bay Area coalition of elected officials, city & county staff, nongovernmental organizations, youth, environmental activists, social activists, and front line communities addressing the inequities and causes of the climate emergency. We meet Fridays from 9am-noon, from July-November 2021.
Below are our planned meetings. Visit our website to learn more: https://www.cemtf.org/.
July 30th: Fossil Fuel Free Bay Area
August 20th: Clean and Just Transportation
September 17th: Ecological Protection
YOU GOTTA TAKE THIS CLASS!
Copwatch Presents: the Copwatch DeCal Class on Community-based AccountabilityMondays 5-6:30pm. Open to all.
Registration and more info: https://t.co/LdbC7tEcUeThis class includes opportunities for direct field monitoring of police on duty. pic.twitter.com/gyi5Wr2KWC
— Berkeley Copwatch (@Copwatch411) September 1, 2021
What were the key lessons of the ‘60s and ’70s public sector union upsurge that can inform our work today? How did workers organize themselves and their communities? To what extent were the fights against racism and sexism integrated into those struggles? What role did union officials and the state play? And in all of this, what were the strengths and weaknesses that the Left brought to the movements?
This series will explore how the various movements of the period created the possibility for public workers to think of themselves as workers needing unions and with the right to bargain with their bosses collectively. We will especially look at how the civil rights movement paved the way for this to happen and the impact of the disproportionate percentage of black and women workers in this sector, left out of the New Deal labor laws of the 1930s. We will also consider how these unions met or failed to meet the challenges of racism, sexism, and anti-communism in the midst of Cold War America.
Groups will start the week of Monday, October 18th, consist of 10 – 15 people, and will meet on a regular date and time every other week for a total of 5 sessions. Group meeting dates will be assigned based on the overall availability that participants indicate below. Organizers of this series will reach out to those that sign-up a few weeks before the start week to inform participants of their group meeting dates and link them up with their group co-leads who will be facilitating the group.
Readings will be shared digitally at no cost and will average 25 – 30 pages every two weeks. The curriculum also features movies, some of which are assigned as essential curriculum and some of which are assigned as supplemental. A few of the movies will cost a small digital rental fee of $2 or $3 to watch.
To sign-up, fill out this formYOU GOTTA TAKE THIS CLASS!
Copwatch Presents: the Copwatch DeCal Class on Community-based AccountabilityMondays 5-6:30pm. Open to all.
Registration and more info: https://t.co/LdbC7tEcUeThis class includes opportunities for direct field monitoring of police on duty. pic.twitter.com/gyi5Wr2KWC
— Berkeley Copwatch (@Copwatch411) September 1, 2021
Building Capacity for Mutual Aid Groups
Building Capacity for Mutual Aid Groups: A Workshop Series
4 Sessions, Thursdays, 7 p.m. ET: Oct 28, Nov 18, Dec 9, Jan 20
Sponsored by BCRW, Fireweed Collective, and Survived & Punished NY
In this series, Dean Spade, author of Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During this Crisis (and the Next), will present four interactive workshops designed for people working in mutual aid groups. Each workshop provides tools for addressing common obstacles and growth areas for people doing sustained work together to meet basic survival needs in their communities. The workshops are appropriate for people doing work in all-volunteer groups or in groups that have some staffing.
October 28: Workshop 1 – No Masters, No Flakes! (more info here)
Group culture, capacity, overwork, procrastination, and perfectionism in mutual aid groups.
November 18: Workshop 2 – Decision-Making (more info here)
Planning and making decisions together in mutual aid groups.
December 9: Workshop 3 – Skills for Abolitionist Practice (more info here)
Giving and receiving feedback in mutual aid groups.
January 20: Workshop 4 – Leadership (more info here)
What does leadership look like in mutual aid groups? Moving together and mobilizing while we fight to survive.
About the Presenter
Dean Spade has been working in movements to build queer and trans liberation based in racial and economic justice for the past two decades. He’s the author of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law, the director of the documentary “Pinkwashing Exposed: Seattle Fights Back!,” and the creator of the mutual aid toolkit at BigDoorBrigade.com. His latest book is Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next).
Building Capacity for Mutual Aid Groups
Building Capacity for Mutual Aid Groups: A Workshop Series
4 Sessions, Thursdays, 7 p.m. ET: Oct 28, Nov 18, Dec 9, Jan 20
Sponsored by BCRW, Fireweed Collective, and Survived & Punished NY
In this series, Dean Spade, author of Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During this Crisis (and the Next), will present four interactive workshops designed for people working in mutual aid groups. Each workshop provides tools for addressing common obstacles and growth areas for people doing sustained work together to meet basic survival needs in their communities. The workshops are appropriate for people doing work in all-volunteer groups or in groups that have some staffing.
October 28: Workshop 1 – No Masters, No Flakes! (more info here)
Group culture, capacity, overwork, procrastination, and perfectionism in mutual aid groups.
November 18: Workshop 2 – Decision-Making (more info here)
Planning and making decisions together in mutual aid groups.
December 9: Workshop 3 – Skills for Abolitionist Practice (more info here)
Giving and receiving feedback in mutual aid groups.
January 20: Workshop 4 – Leadership (more info here)
What does leadership look like in mutual aid groups? Moving together and mobilizing while we fight to survive.
About the Presenter
Dean Spade has been working in movements to build queer and trans liberation based in racial and economic justice for the past two decades. He’s the author of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law, the director of the documentary “Pinkwashing Exposed: Seattle Fights Back!,” and the creator of the mutual aid toolkit at BigDoorBrigade.com. His latest book is Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next).
We are the Climate Emergency Mobilization Task Force (CEMTF) a Bay Area coalition of elected officials, city & county staff, nongovernmental organizations, youth, environmental activists, social activists, and front line communities addressing the inequities and causes of the climate emergency. We meet Fridays from 9am-noon, from July-November 2021.
Below are our planned meetings. Visit our website to learn more: https://www.cemtf.org/.
July 30th: Fossil Fuel Free Bay Area
August 20th: Clean and Just Transportation
September 17th: Ecological Protection
This Zoom workshop, hosted by a large group of local climate justice and conservation organizations, will include presentations on the latest science on sea level rise, the potential and current impacts of sea level rise and groundwater rise to contaminated sites around the San Francisco Bay, a community panel with speakers from frontline and shoreline communities around the Bay, discussions between community and government on next steps to address this critical threat to communities, and more. You can learn more about the workshop and register HERE.
With Love and Rage and Action,
Extinction Rebellion SF Bay Area
https://www.xrsfbay.org