Calendar

Register in advance (click here)

with David Cobb and Debbie Notkin

The AFJM Communications and Website Committee is pleased to welcome David and Debbie to share about their legislative successes as it pertains to Public Banking in California.  Although PBI and AFJM have very different approaches to democratize the money system, we are natural allies and we can learn from each other, especially around effective public education strategies and grassroots organizing.  There will be a short 30 min. presentation, and then most of the time will be for open discussion.

Public Banking is one way to  democratize economic decisions, and the movement is  growing across the country. California is at the cutting edge of this effort. AB 857 passed last year, which allows for the creation of 10 local/regional public banks. This legislative session AB310 is being introduced, which would create a statewide Public Bank for California.

The CA Public Banking Alliance has been the driving force behind this movement. They will share details about public banking generally, and what they have learned in the process of building a grassroots movement and successfully engaging in the legislative process.

About the Speakers:

David Cobb is a “people’s lawyer” who has sued corporate polluters, lobbied elected officials, run for political office himself, and been arrested for non-violent civil disobedience. He ran for Attorney General in Texas, pledging to use the office to revoke the charters of corporations that violate the law. He was the Green Party nominee for President in 2004, and managed the Jill Stein Presidential campaign in 2016. He is active with the CA Public Banking Alliance, and  Cooperation Humboldt.

Debbie Notkin is Chair of the Board of Directors of Public Bank East Bay, and is an active member of Strike Debt Bay Area (SDBA). She was one of two people who led SDBA’s successful effort to erase $1.6 million in unpaid medical debt for East Bay residents in 2019, following in the footsteps of the national Rolling Jubilee. She believes that economic justice work is a comparatively clean way for white people to advance racial justice. She was a founding member of science fiction’s James Tiptree Jr. Award (now the Otherwise Award) for works of science fiction and fantasy that explore and expand gender, and was deeply involved for many years with WisCon, the world’s first feminist science fiction convention. She blogs regularly (yes, still!) on a wide variety of body image and political topics with Laurie Toby Edison at www.laurietobyedison.com/body-impolitic-blog.

OTU’s Mission

The Oakland Tenants Union is an organization of housing activists dedicated to protecting tenant rights and interests. OTU does this by working directly with tenants in their struggle with landlords, impacting legislation and public policy about housing, community education, and working with other organizations committed to furthering renters’ rights. The Oakland Tenants Union is open to anyone who shares our core values and who believes that tenants themselves have the primary responsibility to work on their own behalf.

Monthly Meetings

The Oakland Tenants Union meets regularly at 7:00 pm on the second Monday evening of each month. Our monthly meetings are held in the Community Room of the Madison Park Apartments, 100 – 9th Street (at Oak Street, across from the Lake Merritt BART Station). To enter, gently knock on the window of the room to the right of the main entrance to the building. At the meetings, first we focus on general issues affecting renters city-wide and then second we offer advice to renters regarding their individual concerns.

If you have an issue, a question, or need advice about a tenant/landlord issue, please call us at (510) 704-5276. Leave a message with your name and phone number and someone will get back to you.

Register Here

The Everett Program presents a two week webinar series: “Re Imagine Everything: Leveraging Transformative Justice Theory to Advance a World Beyond Incarceration”. Executive Director of Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Zach Norris, and Underground Scholar, Steven Czifra join us to discuss transformative solutions to stop the school to prison pipeline on March 10th.

Website:https://ucsc.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0ucuyvrDgvHdRffC-KtNL6lc8UmKhKb3IL%20

We meet virtually on zoom on the second Wednesday of every month from 6-7:30pm. These meetings are open to the public. The content of our meetings span from trainings, campaign updates, teach-ins, debates, roundtable discussions, etc. Click below to join the meeting or use this link: https://zoom.us/j/96555663590

2021 General Meeting Dates: February 10, March 10, April 14, May 12, June 9, July 14, August 11, September 8, October 13, November 10, December 8

Join us for a 90 minute virtual discussion about safety in Oakland from a youth perspective on what really keeps us safe. Register here: http://bit.ly/investOak

While the nation was taking to the streets for George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the Bay Area was rocked by the murders of Steven Taylor, Sean Monterrosa, and Erik Salgado by law enforcement. Oakland youth and community took to the streets to demand police accountability and that we #DefundOPD to #ReinvestInCommunity.

Oakland Police Department takes almost half of our city’s budget. There isn’t enough money for services that create peace in our community like education, housing, health services, and youth programming. Last summer’s youth-led activism led to the creation of the Reimagining Public Safety Task Force, which was tasked with figuring out how to take 50% of OPD’s budget to invest in community.

It is time for the Task Force to deliver its recommendations to the Oakland City Council to impact the City Budget. Join us for this community dialogue to discuss what really keeps us safe. Share your experiences and perspective to end criminalization of Black and Brown communities and #InvestInCommunity.

Hosted by Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice

Our Green New Deal Committee meets on the second Wednesday each month. We will discuss eco-socialist issues, upcoming events and actions, committee priorities, and campaigns. All are welcome! Please RSVP for February meeting to receive the URL to the meeting or email green-new-deal@eastbaydsa.org.

RSVP for March meeting

No More Fukushimas, No Olympic In Japan In the Middle Of Pandemic

Sponsored by No Nukes Action

Thursday March 11, 2021 is the tenth anniversary of the earthquake and meltdown of three nuclear reactors at Fukushima.
The nightmare for the people and refugees of Fukushima and Japan continues. They are struggling to survive.
Despite promises that the melted nuclear rods would be removed they have not been and the recent earthquake has added greater dangers.
Two reactors at the wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan have begun leaking cooling water following last weekend’s 7.3 magnitude earthquake, indicating that the existing damage to TEPCO’s Unit 1 and 3 reactors has worsened, according to Keisuke Matsuo.
The government is also planning to dump over a million tons of contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean despite the opposition of the Fisherman’s co-operative and the people of Japan and Korea.
At the same time the Japanese government under former Japanese prime minister Abe and now Suga continue their denialism mode. They say that they have overcome the nuke plant meltdowns and still want to have the Olympics in Japan this summer in the midst of the greatest world pandemic in over 100 years.
They also have shown their sexist attacks on women when the former head of the Olympics Yoshiro who was also a former prime minister said women speak too much. He was forced to
resign but their reactionary sexism, denialism and racism continues.
Nuclear clean-up workers including workers from overseas and other workers continue to get contaminated with no proper health and safety education and tens of thousands of bags of radioactive waste continue to remain scattered throughout the prefecture with no place to go.
The criminal negligence of having the Olympics under these circumstances with a full blown pandemic and a three leaking nuclear reactors is a sign of insanity and a danger to not only
Japan but the world.
No Nukes Action calls on all those opposed to nuclear plants and weapons, against the in Tokyo and Fukushima Olympics and those opposed to have this event in the middle of a pandemic to join the action.
It it time to remember the families and children who are still suffering from this man-made
disaster and let them know that people in the United States and around the world stand with them.

Physical distancing and masks for all participants at action

MARTIN ESPADA, a poet who stirs our social consciousness, has published twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator, including Vivas To Those Who Have Failed and Pulitzer Prize finalist The Republic of Poetry.

His latest book, Floaters, offers exuberant odes and defiant elegies, songs of protest and songs of love. The title is a term used by some Border Patrol agents to describe migrants who drown trying to cross over the border. Espada bears eloquent witness to confrontations with anti-immigrant bigotry. He also knows that times of hate call for poems of love. Whether celebrating the visionaries – the fallen dreamers, rebels, and poets – or condemning the outrageous governmental neglect of his father’s Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria, Espada invokes ferocious, incandescent spirits.

DENNIS BERNSTEIN , a poet and investigative journalist, is the producer of Flashpoints (heard weekdays at 5pm on KPFA Radio 94.1 FM. His political essays have appeared in numerous newspapers, magazines and websites. His latest book of poems is Five Oceans in a Teaspoon, with typographic visualizations by Warren Lehrer. The poems in it reflect the struggle of everyday people trying to survive in the face of adversity. It spans a single lifetime: from growing up confused by dyslexia to becoming a frontline witness to war and its aftermath, to prison, street life, poverty, love and loss, to open heart surgery. Five Oceans in a Teaspoon speaks to the madness, vulnerability, aspiration and language of our time. The raw emotion of the writing has a freshness rarely encountered. The book was a winner for Poetry in the 2020 Best Book Awards/American Book Fest, and a finalist in the International Book award for Poetry.

Suggested Donation $1-$20.

Is it time to finally agree that maybe a bunch of white enslavers from the 1700s didn’t come up with the best system ever? Do you have questions about participatory budgeting, CDP’s campaign, and the future of democracy under a pandemic?

We have a few ideas (four to be exact) about HOW to replace our current system. And we have just the idea about WHAT to replace our current system with. Join us for a fishbowl conversation to learn more!

ASL interpretation and/or Closed Captioning will be provided.

Hosted by The Community Democracy Project

COVID-19 is shining a spotlight on the cruelty of the U.S. healthcare system — a system designed to maximize profit, not patients’ well-being. Millions of working-class people have lost their jobs and their health insurance in the pandemic-driven recession. Meanwhile, in California alone, 165 billionaires have seen their wealth increase by $175,000,000,000 since March 2020.

In the wealthiest state in the wealthiest country in the world, this is unacceptable. We must make healthcare a human right for all our residents. We must pass Assembly Bill 1400, the California Guaranteed Health Care for All Act, also known as “CalCare.”

To win “CalCare,” we need a working-class movement to apply pressure on Democratic lawmakers into supporting Assembly Bill 1400. Our first target: California State Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan of Assembly District 16, one of California’s most wealthy State Assembly districts.

Join us for our first in-person, no-contact, socially-distant Day of Action.

We will begin our Day of Action with a rally from those fighting for healthcare justice, creating a movement to win California Medicare for All, and pass AB 1400 – “CalCare.” Then, we will go throughout Orinda to hang door hangers to send a message to Assemblymember Bauer-Kahan that her constituents support a California Medicare for All system.

Join us in our movement to win California Medicare for All today. RSVP for this event here:

https://actionnetwork.org/events/doorhangers-for-medicare-for-all-in-orinda

People’s Strike Bay Area and our incredible community partners invite you to a virtual gathering to commemorate International Working Women’s Day 2021, the 113th anniversary of the first women’s strike in NYC in 1908.

FaceBook Event Details Here

Register Here: https://tinyurl.com/IWWDMarch2021

Join us on Saturday, March 13th at 4PM PST as we Uphold the Legacy and Power of Women’s Resistance Here & Abroad! Together, we will be lifting up the internationalist struggles and stories of women workers, human rights defenders and Trans, and Gender Non Conforming communities around the world.

Let us gather together to RISE Up to demand an end to gender based violence against women and TGNC communities, RESIST militarization and displacement, and UNITE for relief, adequate protections. and mental health support for all workers.

Our #IWWD201 Points of Unity are:

• We believe in open borders and rise up against the violences of immigration, forced migration, and displacement which make unwilling detainees and refugees of our communities and rip our families apart.
• We are committed to exposing, fighting and dismantling imperialism, militarism, and state repression-. We echo the calls to Defund the Police, and invest in community-led public safety, which does not seek to silence or control us.
• We are in solidarity with Black, Brown, and Indigenous women from Oakland to Palestine and the Philippines, demanding sovereignty and self-determination for their peoples.
• We support women and TGNC communities who are fighting economic injustice in the face of institutions and governments that value profit and political dominance, even in the midst of a deadly global pandemic, over the health and safety of their people.
• We resist the extractive industries who control our current global economy and know that in order to secure a just and equitable future, we must combat the climate crisis.

Organizers of this event
GABRIELA Oakland
Mujeres Unidas y Activas (MUA)
ASATA – Alliance of South Asians Taking Action
“Comfort Women” Justice Coalition
California Nurses Association
Cal-Nev Philippine Solidarity Task Force (UMC)
Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC)
Workers World Party
Palestinian Youth Movement -Women’s Committee
People’s Strike Bay Area
International Women’s Alliance

Co-Sponsors
Filipina Women’s Network
Jewish Voices for Peace-Bay Area
Forward Together
API Equality � Northern California (APIENC)� �
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League of Filipino Students at UC Berkeley
Asian Pacific Environmental Network
Catalyst Project
V-Day/One Billion Rising

Endorsers
NLG-SF Bay Area
California Coalition for Women Prisoners
Haiti Action Committee
AYPAL: Building API Community Power
Center for Political Education

If your organization would like to support this year’s #IWWD2021 please fill out this form

We’ll meet via Zoom.
Email strike.debt.bay.area@gmail.com for the invite.

For our February meeting we’ll be reading Part I of
Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons

by Silvia Federici.

For our March meeting we’ll be reading the rest of the book, pp 78-196

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 and the Edge of Chaos blog symposium.

Join us – all are welcome!

A look at both the history of collective actions taken by workers in the tech industry and the current state of the movement. Tech has long been seen as an industry that has resisted worker organization for many reasons. However, there has actually been a long history of organization among tech workers. And, in the last few years, there has been a groundswell of worker organizing in many of the largest tech companies including Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. What are the strategies that have been taken by the movement to build worker power and how successful have they been? What is different and unique about organizing workers in the tech industry? Come find out!
Bios:
Sarvesh Rajasekaran has been working in the tech industry as an engineer and product manager for over a decade and helps maintain Collective Action in Tech. He has also been a community organizer for Bernie 2020 and Homes not Handcuffs among other electoral and issue campaigns.
Kristen will provide her bio shortly!

LOGIN INFORMATION
The meeting will be opened up, as usual, at 10:15 for anyone to join and discuss technical matters, catch up with each other, say Hi, etc. We Intend to start the presentation as close to 10:30 am as possible. The program (and recording) will end at 12:30, but the Waiting Room will remain open for informal discussion.

LOG-IN INFO WILL BE POSTED BY HERE BY FRIDAY

Join us for a voting General Meeting of East Bay DSA! We will debate and vote on resolutions and hear reports from projects and committees around the chapter. This month, we will debate and vote on a resolution regarding out 2021 Local Convention and its Priorities Resolution Process. Please see the agenda here.

If you would like to submit an amendment for consideration at the March GM, please send it to resolutions@eastbaydsa.org by 11:59 pm on Tuesday, March 9th, 2021.

The meeting will be conducted via Zoom — please register and find the call-in info below!

Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88197589947?pwd=eDJvajZYdUF1VlRxd1loRGI0QThBdz09

Meeting ID: 881 9758 9947
Passcode: 215458
One tap mobile
+16699006833,,88197589947#,,,,,,0#,,215458# US (San Jose)
+13462487799,,88197589947#,,,,,,0#,,215458# US (Houston)

NOTE: During the Plague Year of 2020 GA will be held every week or two on Zoom. To find out the exact time a date get on the Occupy Oakland email list my sending an email to:

occupyoakland-subscribe@lists.riseup.net

The Occupy Oakland General Assembly meets every Sunday at 4 PM at Oscar Grant Plaza amphitheater at 14th Street & Broadway near the steps of City Hall. If for some reason the amphitheater is being used otherwise and/or OGP itself is inaccessible, we will meet at Kaiser Park, right next to the statues, on 19th St. between San Pablo and Telegraph. If it is raining (as in RAINING, not just misting) at 4:00 PM we meet in the basement of the Omni Collective, 4799 Shattuck Ave., Oakland. (Note: we tend to meet at 3:00 PM during the cooler months from November to early March after Daylights Savings Time.)

On every ‘last Sunday’ we meet a little earlier at 3 PM to have a community potluck to which all are welcome.

OO General Assembly has met on a continuous basis for over six years, since October 2011! Our General Assembly is a participatory gathering of Oakland community members and beyond, where everyone who shows up is treated equally. Our Assembly and the process we have collectively cultivated strives to reach agreement while building community.

At the GA committees, caucuses, and loosely associated groups whose representatives come voluntarily report on past and future actions, with discussion. We encourage everyone participating in the Occupy Oakland GA to be part of at least one associated group, but it is by no means a requirement. If you like, just come and hear all the organizing being done! Occupy Oakland encourages political activity that is decentralized and welcomes diverse voices and actions into the movement.

General Assembly Standard Agenda

Welcome & Introductions
Reports from Committees, Caucuses, & Independent Organizations
Announcements
(Optional) Discussion Topic

Occupy Oakland activities and contact info for some Bay Area Groups with past or present Occupy Oakland members.

Occupy Oakland Web Committee: (web@occupyoakland.org)
Strike Debt Bay Area : strikedebtbayarea.tumblr.com
Berkeley Post Office Defenders:http://berkeleypostofficedefenders.wordpress.com/
Alan Blueford Center 4 Justice:https://www.facebook.com/ABC4JUSTICE
Oakland Privacy Working Group:https://oaklandprivacy.wordpress.com
Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity: prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity.wordpress.com/
Bay Area AntiRepression: antirepression@occupyoakland.org
Biblioteca Popular: http://tinyurl.com/mdlzshy
Interfaith Tent: www.facebook.com/InterfaithTent
Port Truckers Solidarity: oaklandporttruckers.wordpress.com
Bay Area Intifada: bayareaintifada.wordpress.com
Transport Workers Solidarity: www.transportworkers.org
Fresh Juice Party (aka Chalkupy) freshjuiceparty.com/chalkupy-gallery
Sudo Room: https://sudoroom.org
Omni Collective: https://omnicommons.org/
First They Came for the Homeless: https://www.facebook.com/pages/First-they-came-for-the-homeless/253882908111999
Sunflower Alliance: http://www.sunflower-alliance.org/
Bay Area Public School: http://thepublicschool.org/bay-area

San Francisco based groups:
Occupy Bay Area United: www.obau.org
Occupy Forum: (see OBAU above)
San Francisco Projection Department: http://tinyurl.com/kpvb3rv