POLICE REFORM:  Alameda County Urban Shield/UASI Task Force   

For six years, Bay Area activists have pushed to repurpose Homeland Security disaster preparedness funds away from the hyper-militarized training exercise Urban Shield. Finally the Alameda Board of Supervisors agreed and convened a task force to end “Urban Shield as we know it”.  The  task force has provided dozens of recommendations to do exactly that.

There is lots of pushback and lots more coming, according to the SF Chronicle, which announced the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department is “primed for battle“.  But this is our taxpayer money to protect us and help us recover from disasters like catastrophic wildfires. We get a say in how it is spent.

You can view some of the proposed recommendations here and here. The recommendations follow years of problems with racial profiling, right wing vigilantes, and environmental abuse. Your physical presence on the 26th is important, but you can also use this easy action alert to tell the Supervisors not to buckle to the pressure and really change Urban Shield. Now:

Easy Action Alert

Take action right now.
Take Action

POLICE REFORM:  Alameda County Urban Shield/UASI Task Force   

For six years, Bay Area activists have pushed to repurpose Homeland Security disaster preparedness funds away from the hyper-militarized training exercise Urban Shield. Finally the Alameda Board of Supervisors agreed and convened a task force to end “Urban Shield as we know it”.  The  task force has provided dozens of recommendations to do exactly that.

There is lots of pushback and lots more coming, according to the SF Chronicle, which announced the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department is “primed for battle.  But this is our taxpayer money to protect us and help us recover from disasters like catastrophic wildfires. We get a say in how it is spent.

You can view some of the proposed recommendations here and here. The recommendations follow years of problems with racial profiling, right wing vigilantes, and environmental abuse. Your physical presence on the 26th is important (look out for an event invite), but you can also use this easy action alert to tell the Supervisors not to buckle to the pressure and really change Urban Shield. Now:

After 5 years, Urban Shield may end on February 26 …. with your help

Since 2013, the Bay Area has been trying to transform Urban Shield from a highly militarized SWAT competition and weapons expo into a community-focused safety and resilence exercise

And now we are almost there.

The second Alameda County task force has completed its work and issued a long and thorough list of recommendations that include ending the weapons expo that features spying and crowd control gadgets, ending the violent SWAT competition to focus on training other first responders, and.directing $5 million in new funding to health and social services.

But we need to make the adoption of these recommendations by the Supervisors a reality – and that means countering the Sheriff’s Department pressure with our own.

Take action right now.
Take Action

Write to the Board of Supervisors with this easy one-click action from our friends at Media Alliance and share it with others.

And join us at the Alameda Administration Building on February 26 at 10:45am to end Urban Shield.

Board of Supervisors – Alameda County
Alameda County Administration Building
1221 Oak Street, 5th Floor
Oakland

Tuesday  February 26  10:45AM Meeting Start

More Info About Urban Shield

2018 Urban Shield Promo Video

2018  Notes From The Last Urban Shield As We Know It 

2017 Urban Shield Community Report Card from the Stop Urban Shield Coalition

2017 ICE At Urban Shield Photo Gallery

Oakland Privacy Recommendations to Task Force

Dr. Tina Sacks discusses her book “Invisible Visits: Black Middle-Class Women in the American Healthcare System”.

All out for City Council on Tuesday, February 26 to demand written commitment to community benefits for the proposed Mandela hotel.

Development without community benefits = displacement of Oakland’s Black community!

To get involved please contact Pastor David Brazil at 510-508-7104 or david@workingeastbay.org

The Sanctuary City Contracting Ordinance will keep the money of Berkeley’s residents from lining the pockets of companies that collaborate directly with the Trump administration’s lawless and unconstitutional immigration policies.

The contracting ordinance will phase out gradually the use of vendors that supply ICE with information that helps them to better terrorize immigrant communities. Combined with similar actions by other Bay Area cities, the ordinance will send the message that it isn’t good business to separate young children from their parents, violate asylum seekers constitutional rights and lock people up in private immigration detention facilities like Adelanto and Otay Mesa that don’t conform to UN human rights standards.

Berkeley’s money should not be spent on feeding the deportation pipeline when there are alternatives available and the contracting ordinance will make sure as little of our money as possible will be going to ICE data brokers.

The item is the first item on the action calendar and will likely be heard between 7:30pm and 9:00pm on the evening of February 26. The meeting begins at 6:00pm.

DeportICE website.

Join us for a screening of the documentary City Rising: The Informal Economy, which follows four California workers organizing to find pathways for legalization and protection. The documentary follows the lives of a street vendor in Boyle Heights, a truck driver in Long Beach, a farm-working family in Coachella and an organizer in Oakland fighting for jobs for formerly incarcerated people. Featured in the film, Sylvia Allegretto from CWED will join us in discussion after the screening. Food and refreshments will be provided. Space is ADA accessible.

Co-sponsored by the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics

Enough is enough: The rent is too damn high. East Bay DSA is fighting for bold solutions that don’t depend on the luxury developers or hoping you end up with a friendly landlord.

Come grab a drink, hang out and talk about housing justice with socialists in Berkeley!

Panel Discussion and Q&A.

Panelists: Jim Chanin, Dan Siegel, Carol Denny, Joe Liesner, Andrea Pritchett

Music by Hali Hammer.

Chief Anne Kirkpatrick will provide all publicly reportable information on the
investigation and findings in the police involved shooting of Joshua Pawlik on March
11, 2018.

Full agenda for meeting.

Join the Junior League of Oakland-East Bay, Alameda Point Collaborative, Beyond Emancipation, Richmond Neighborhood Housing Services, Inc., Contra Costa Health Services, Operation Dignity, and BOSS for an expert panel discussion on Homelessness in the Bay Area

The panelists will touch on particularly vulnerable groups like foster youth, veterans, and the mentally ill. They will also discuss the changing face of poverty.

We will examine the state of homelessness and what nonprofit organizations are doing to address it through technology, advocacy, cross-collaboration, outreach, and volunteer work. We will also talk about potential long term, sustainable solutions.

The following experts will participate in the panel:
-Doug Biggs, Executive Director of Alameda Point Collaborative
-Nella Gonçalves, Deputy Director of Beyond Emancipation
-Nikki Beasley, Executive Director of Richmond Neighborhood Housing Services, Inc.
-Jaime Jenett, Continuum of Care Planning and Policy Manager, -Homeless Program, Contra Costa Health Services
-Katie Derrig, Development Manager of Operation Dignity
-Gina Tomlinson of Building Opportunities for Self-Sufficiency (BOSS)

Send questions to juniorspac@jloeb.org.

PDA-CA forum on PUBLIC BANKING

WHAT’S IN A BANK?   WHY WE NEED PUBLIC BANKS & HOW WILL WE GET THEM SOON?
       Having learned how the “big banks” take our money and oft-times invest in things we don’t want, like fossil fuel businesses and corporations who create the mechanisms of war, we are in the midst of a movement to create public banks so we can invest in affordable housing, renewable energy, and other essentials of a society that shares and cares.
Our forum explores the history and progress of 4 Bay Area public bank endeavors and how close they are to making these a reality.   Our guests are:
JACKIE FIELDER–as a co-founder of the San Francisco Public Bank Coalition, a lecturer in the College of Ethnic Studies (being a descendant of the Lakota Nation) at SF State, Jackie holds a Bachelor’s in Public Policy & a Master’s in Sociology from Stanford.
SUSAN HARMAN–having fallen in love with public banking 8 yrs. ago, Susan has been instrumental in getting the East Bay Public Bank through its feasibility study and on to its business plan.
JUDY YOUNG–following Ellen Brown’s work with the Public Banking Institute for many years, Judy was eager to add #Public Banks to her tweets with the South Bay Progressive Alliance, Public Banking Action Team.
LEE CLARK–in the aftermath of Santa Rosa’s fires, Lee feels the work on a Public Bank is critical for recovery from a severe financial crisis and replacing city infrastructure, in addition to many other social justice uses.
Because these and other public banking projects here in California will take some time to come to fruition, we will have CYNTHIA PAPERMASTER speaking on how we can divest our money from fossil fuels & the war machine NOW.   She is a coordinator of the Golden Gate Chapter of CODE-PINK and a member of the Berkeley Mayor’s Task Force on Socially Responsible Banking.
—

City Arts & Lectures Presents ASTRA TAYLOR

Film screening and discussion with director Astra Taylor

Astra Taylor’s engagement with philosophy, democracy, and political organizing transcends form, emerging through documentary films, books, essays, and social activism. Her feature documentaries include Zizek! (2005) and An Examined Life (2008). Her most recent film, What is Democracy? (2018), collapses time and space, doggedly pursuing the eponymous question, while exploring a conglomeration of threads that refuse to be constrained by the camera’s frame, continuing the conversation rather than offering decisive answers. The film has been called “a deliberate challenge to complacency” (The Guardian), and features the political activists and thinkers Cornel West and Silvia Federici.

Taylor is also the author of Democracy May Not Exist, But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone, and the American Book Award-winning The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age. Her essays have been published in The Nation, The Washington Post, n+1, The New York Times, and The Baffler, where she is a contributing editor.

Taylor was active in the Occupy Movement and was the co-editor of Occupy!: An OWS-Inspired Gazette with Sarah Leonard of Dissent magazine and Keith Gessen of n+1.^[18] The broadsheet covered Occupy Wall Street in five issues over the course of the first year of the occupation and was later anthologized by Verso Books.^[19]

*** Register here: http://bit.ly/2SrWFOt ***

Did you know? The historic Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center is where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. addressed 7,000 East Bay residents in 1962 on the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation.

Now, Orton Development proposes to rehabilitate and adaptively reuse the center as a performing arts venue and office space for arts and non-profit organizations.

Join Councilmember Nikki Fortunato Bas 4 Oakland and Laney College Facilities Planning Committee to hear plans from Orton and share feedback and questions about the project:

Please message tkang@oaklandca.gov if you need childcare or translation.

Join Haiti Action Committee for an eyewitness report  about the unstoppable fight of Haiti’s people for liberty and justice. Since February 7^th, which was the anniversary of Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s 1991 inauguration as Haiti’s first democratically elected president, hundreds of thousands of Haitians have been demonstrating in the streets of cities and towns throughout the country. When thousands are in the streets in Europe, we see live coverage. Not so with Haiti. The U.S. and the Haitian elite are afraid of the mobilization of the poor. Media silence and disinformation are weapons of empire to marginalize the struggle of the Haitian people.

Chanting “we are hungry, we can’t take it anymore,” protesters demand that the totally corrupt and fraudulently (s)elected president, Jovenel Moise, resign immediately. Police and paramilitary forces have killed at least 12 people, with many more wounded. Protests have come in waves ever since Moise was announced the winner of the sham electoral process in late 2017. Moise refuses to step down, and ominously threatens to “clean up the country.” Similar threats by government officials in the past have been followed by police killings. One such instance was the November 2018 state-sponsored massacre in the La Saline neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, during which Haitian police working with weaponized gangs ruthlessly murdered more than 77 men, women and children. Numerous rapes brutalized young women and further traumatized the entire community.

Oil supplied to Haiti through PetroCaribe, Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution project, lies at the heart of the protests. Through Petrocaribe, Venezuela sells oil at a discounted rate to a country out of solidarity, with the expectation that the oil will be sold at market rate and the profit used for economic development of the country. In Haiti, a new report by a government watchdog group documents $4.2 BILLION of this profit has disappeared, unaccounted for. The report lists a number of companies that have received the money, two owned by Moise, with no accounting for how it was spent. Meanwhile, teachers have not been paid for months, and sanitation services are nil. High inflation makes even the basics unaffordable for many people. Haitians throughout the country demand to know what happened to the money, while police and members of Moise’s PHTK Party attack demonstrators with impunity, reminiscent of the Duvalier ton-ton macoutes death squads.

Even if the mass demonstrations force Moise to leave, the international corporatocracy and the Haitian elites will try to force a caretaker government to do their bidding, rather than one that supports the demands of the demonstrators, so this will be a protracted struggle.

Join Haiti Action Committee to hear an eyewitness report about these events and about the unstoppable fight of Haiti’s people for liberty and justice.

Indigenous Red Market is this Sunday!
Make sure to get all of your Indigenous Goodies! pic.twitter.com/qrm1SUZGbU

— Native Health (@7Gen1D) February 28, 2019

HOT CHOCOLATE FOR PEACE / CHOCOLATE CALIENTE POR PAZ
Since our first Hot Chocolate/Churros stand last Sunday, Lily & Lauren (Age 10) have raised $8500 To Reunite Immigrant Families.

JOIN US this Sunday, hosted by the First Unitarian Church of Oakland, from 1-3:30 p.m. All donations will support RAICES, whose mission is to “help separated families, detained families, unaccompanied minors, and others who are seeking asylum in the United States.”

The girls decided to host the chocolate and churros stand as a response to the 7 year old boy in Austin, TX, whose hot chocolate stand raised more than $5,000 to support building the wall between the US and Mexico. Lily and Lauren could not accept this, when families are still being separated, with children being caged, illegally adopted and parents unable to be reunited.

Lily is an integral member of the GRAMMY nominated kids hip hop group Alphabet Rockers, who will provide music at the event. Lauren’s mom own’s Jennys Churros, who will supply the hot beverages and churros for the fundraiser.

Volunteer support will be generously provided by teenagers from Boys & Girls Clubs of the Peninsula Keystone, the premiere teen character and leadership program. Grateful for the leadership support from the church, special shine on: Pastor Jacqueline Duhart and Stefan Schneider, Director of Joyful Noise Band.

Special thanks to Remezcla and LatinLive for lifting up the work of these girls, and to Berkeleyside, The Daily Californian and NBC Bay Area for covering us last week (see story here): https://www.facebook.com/alphabetrockers/videos/2248272052111108/

You can donate here: https://www.gofundme.com/mexican-hot-chocolate-stand-for-raices-texas
or Venmo @alphabetrockers – with note #hotchocolateforpeace #chocolatecalienteporpaz

#hotchocolateforpeace #chocolatecalienteporpaz
#alphabetrockers #jennyschurros

PRESS: Beth Blenz-Clucas / Sugar Mountain PR beth@sugarmountainpr.com
EVENT: Alphabet Rockers Jennys Churros

The interwoven story of two of the most significant workers’ rights struggles of our time: the 2011 weeks-long fight by public employees in Wisconsin, and the long struggle by teachers in Chicago to win quality public schools and democracy in their union, culminating in a 2012 teachers strike. Working class struggle is analyzed through union history and a radical critique of the Democratic Party.

Panel with Oakland’s striking teachers after the screening

free admission

free snacks and popcorn

Liberated Lens Film Collective is screening the move Schoolidarity at the Omni Commons in support of the striking Oakland Unified teachers on Sunday, March 3rd at 5 PM.

Omni Commons 4799 Shattuck Ave Oakland

The interwoven story of two of the most significant workers’ rights struggles of our time: the 2011 weeks-long fight by public employees in Wisconsin, and the long struggle by teachers in Chicago to win quality public schools and democracy in their union, culminating in a 2012 teachers strike. Working class struggle is analyzed through union history and a radical critique of the Democratic Party. Panel with Oakland’s striking teachers after the screening Free admission Free snacks and popcorn Trailer

We’re still playing every Monday that it doesn’t rain!

Occupella organizes informal public singing at Bay Area occupation sites, marches and at BART stations. We sing to promote peace, justice, and an end to corporate domination, especially in support of the Occupy movement.

Music has the power to build spirit, foster a sense of unity, convey messages and emotions, spread information, and bring joy to participants and audience alike. See spirited clip of an action at BART. Check out the actions calendar and come add your voice. There are lots of ways to participate and everyone is welcome.