Calendar
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.
6 pm: Rally at Sproul Steps
7pm: Procession to People’s Park for a Candlelight Vigil
Black Lives Matter.
𝗦𝗙 𝗕𝗮𝘆 𝗔𝗿𝗲𝗮 𝗩𝗶𝗴𝗶𝗹 𝗔𝗴𝗮𝗶𝗻𝘀𝘁 𝗜𝘀𝗹𝗮𝗺𝗼𝗽𝗵𝗼𝗯𝗶𝗮
𝗜𝗻 𝗦𝗼𝗹𝗶𝗱𝗮𝗿𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗪𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗢𝘂𝗿 𝗕𝗿𝗼𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿𝘀 & 𝗦𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝗡𝗲𝘄 𝗭𝗲𝗮𝗹𝗮𝗻𝗱
As we mourn the loss of life in New Zealand, let’s honor their lives by expanding, connecting and defending our movements. Join us Monday evening for community vigil against Islamophobia to express solidarity with our brothers and sisters in New Zealand, and all those targeted by white nationalism.
To endorse or for more information please contact:
𝗶𝗻𝗳𝗼@𝗮𝗿𝗮𝗯𝗼𝗿𝗴𝗮𝗻𝗶𝘇𝗶𝗻𝗴.𝗼𝗿𝗴
In Solitary Man, Charlie travels to Crescent City to visit a lifer named Otis Washington (played by Fred). A 64 year old native of New York City, Otis has been imprisoned since 1975 and at Pelican Bay since it opened in 1989. They get to know each other during the visit, and Otis explains some of what he has learned and experienced.
Solitary Man is directed by Mark Kenward.
No-Host Bar at the Marsh
Here is a video preview of the play!
http://lifewish.org/solitaryman/
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/solitarymantheplay/
Social reproduction—the often gendered labor that goes into creating workers and the conditions under which people can work—is a critical concept in socialist theory that has gained new currency from the teachers’ strike wave, including right here in Oakland. Come join us to learn and talk about the connections between emerging workers’ movements and socialist analyses of gender and how labor is reproduced.
Accessibility: Wheelchair-accessible entrance and restrooms
Required Readings
See the readings that we’ll be discussing after a brief introduction from our members.
Judge William Alsup (of Berkeley Post Office lawsuit and DACA fame, amongst many cases of note) will hear two cases involving First They Came for the Homeless and the treatment of homeless people and activists supporting them by the Berkeley Police.
3:17-cv-06051-WHA – Sullivan et al v. Bay Area Rapid Transit
Motion for Summary Judgment
3:17-cv-06774-WHA – Armstrong-Temple et al v. City of Berkeley et al
Motion for Summary Judgment
https://www.cand.uscourts.gov/CEO/cfd.aspx?7137
Come learn how you fit, and where you can plug into, the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative.
The East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative (EB PREC) uses community investment to develop permanently affordable cooperative housing that uses regenerative practices, like wealth re-distribution, to empower sovereign, self-determined Black Indigenous and POC communities.
Our mission is to facilitate BIPOC and allied communities to cooperatively organize, finance, purchase, occupy, and steward properties, taking them permanently off the speculative market.
By co-creating community controlled assets, thereby reducing risk of displacement, we help people meet their basic social, economic, and emotional needs, and empower them to cooperatively lead a just transition from an extractive capitalist system into one where communities are ecologically, emotionally, spiritually, culturally, and economically restorative and regenerative.
Points of Unity:
This is not an exhaustive list and it is a work in progress. For now, EB PREC has adopted the following points of unity.
~We stand for the liberation and healing of all people and lands oppressed and exploited by histories of Genocide, Slavery, Low wage labor, Land theft, Predatory lending, and Forced migration.
~We provide mutual aid to front-line communities first, the liberation of black and indigenous communities is fundamental to the liberation of all people, a rising tide lifts all boats.
~We believe restorative solutions are rooted in collective land stewardship and decision-making. We prioritize people, planet, and future generations over profits. We move at the pace of community, not capital.
~We build trust and safe spaces with each other by doing the healing work required to transform antiquated capitalist notions into regenerative and cooperative relationships.
~We build productive capacity for disinvested BIPOC communities through community education and networks of cooperatives. EBPREC helps communities manifest vision into reality on the communities terms.
Come out to our next general meeting to celebrate the volunteers who made Reclaim MLK Day possible and to get a recap of the highlights from that day!
CANCELLED.
KPFA Radio 94.1 FM presents
advance tickets: $12: brownpapertickets.com :: T: 800-838-3006
or Pegasus Books (3 sites),
Books Inc (Berkeley),
Moe’s, Walden Pond Bookstore,
East Bay Books,
Mrs. Dalloway’s
A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award & National Book Critics’ Circle Award now offers an eye-opening new interpretation of our history.
“To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.”
—Anne Carson
From the very beginning of this nation, the idea of an open frontier has been at the core of our American identity, symbolizing a future full of promise. Today, however, the USA has an entirely new symbol: the border wall. In The End of the Myth, acclaimed historian Greg Grandin explores the meaning of the frontier across the full sweep of US history, from the American Revolution all the way to the Trump presidency. Throughout the centuries, Grandin shows, America’s constant expansion served as a “gate of escape,” helping to deflect domestic conflicts outward. But this deflection meant that they country’s problems, from racism to inequality, were never confronted directly. Now the 2008 financial meltdown and our unwinnable wars in the Middle East have slammed this gate shut, bringing political passions and ugly racist nationalism back home with a vengeance.
We now have a president who has obsessively updated the frontier not to affirm brotherhood and internationalism, but resentment-stoked domination. “We have been taken advantage of by the world,” he insisted. “That is not going to be happening anymore.”
Greg Grandin is the author of The Empire of Necessity, which won the Bancroft Prize; Fordlandia, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, plus a number of other widely acclaimed books, including Kissinger’s Shadow, Empire’s Workshop, The Last Colonial Massacre, and The Blood of Guatemala . A professor of history at New York University and a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Public Library, Grandin has served on the United Nations Truth Commission investigating the Guatemalan civil war and has written for The Nation, the London Review of Books, and the New York Times.
KPFA benefit
Coalition for Police Accountability to the Federal Monitor-Police Chief Anne Kirkpatrick Must Be Removed
Oakland, CA.- The Coalition for Police Accountability, comprising more than 25 groups and individuals, will hold a press conference in front of City Hall calling on Federal Compliance Director, Robert Warshaw, to fire Police Chief Kirkpatrick based on his own findings in the police shooting death of Joshua Pawlik, according to the East Bay Times, “she went light on cops who made serious errors and ignored a key piece of evidence, according to internal documents released Wednesday.” https://eastbaytimesca.newsmemory.com/?publink=0075c8e87
Coalition leader, Rashidah Grinage, states, “The Compliance Director has the authority to do what is needed. It’s in his job description to remove impediments to compliance.” Coalition members have concerns about other aspects of the chief’s leadership, among them:
- Promoting officers implicated in the cover-up of the sex trafficking scandal,
- Covering up her part in authorizing OPD to assist in the flawed ICE raid which had been prohibited by city policy,
- Allowing the department to slip backward in its 16-year struggle to comply with the Negotiated Settlement Agreement.
In addition to replacing the chief, the Coalition calls on the mayor, city administrator, and city council to ensure that the Police Commission has the independence and resources it needs to bring OPD into compliance.
As Oakland attorney Henry Gage said in The Oakland Post this week, “The Chief of Police has failed to deliver appropriate consequences, and by doing so, she is making true accountability impossible.”
The Press Conference calling for the Oakland Police Chief’s termination has been postponed for one week (originally called for March 14th) out of respect for the tragic loss of Oakland City Councilwoman Lynette McElhaney’s son. Our City mourns the loss of her child.
Please join Councilmember Cheryl Davila for
Berkeley Vigil for
Victims of the New Zealand Mosque Shooting
Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Park
EAST BAY BOOKSELLERS welcomes JJ Mulligan Sepulveda to discuss his new new book No Human Is Illegal. He will be joined by Lauren Markham.
The perfect author on one of today’s hottest topics– an immigration reform lawyer’s journalistic memoir of being on the front lines of deportation.
NO HUMAN IS ILLEGAL is a powerful document of one lawyer’s fight for those seeking a better life in America against its ever-tightening borders. For author Mulligan Sepúlveda, the son and husband of Spanish-speaking immigrants, the battle for immigration reform is personal. Mulligan Sepúlveda writes of visiting border detention centers, defending undocumented immigrants in court, and taking his services to JFK to represent people being turned away at the gates during Trump’s infamous travel ban.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
J. J. MULLIGAN SEPÚLVEDA is an immigration lawyer working at the Immigration Law Clinic at the University of California Davis School of Law. He is a former Immigrant Justice Corps fellow and Fulbright Scholar. This is his first book.
Lauren Markham is a writer based in Berkeley, California. Her work has appeared in VQR, VICE, Orion, Pacific Standard, Guernica, The New Yorker.com, on This American Life, and elsewhere. Lauren earned her MFA in Fiction Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and has been awarded Fellowships from the Middlebury Fellowship in Environmental Journalism, the 11th Hour Food and Farming Journalism Fellowship, the Mesa Refuge, and the Rotary Foundation. For the past decade, she has worked in the fields of refugee resettlement and immigrant education.
Bay Area Landless People’s Alliance meeting to discuss plans, outreach, organizing regarding regional homeless communities and organizations.
For more info: https://www.facebook.com/groups/541837129562482/
A talk by Edgard Sánchez, leader of the (Partido Revolucionario de losTrajabadores de Mexico (Mexican Revolutionary Workers Party)
Sponsored by Solidarity and Northern California Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism
Love jigsaw puzzles?
Hate white supremacy?
Want to #MoveInSolidarity with #BlackSolidarityWeek?
Join us at the ACCE office in Oakland for two hours of solving puzzles to raise money for the Black Solidarity Fund, a project of Community READY Corps.
We’ll have 2500 pieces worth of puzzles and 2 hours to put together as many pieces as possible. People who want to donate to the drive will pledge a certain amount of money per piece solved*. For example, if a donor pledges to give 2 cents per piece, and we manage to complete 1500 pieces worth of puzzles, that person would donate 1500 * 2 cents = $30.
You can help out by showing up to the event as a participant and helping us solve puzzles, or by pledging to donate.
For donors, sign up to donate here: https://puzzlesforjustice.typeform.com/to/jVMVJO
and we’ll send you the total amount to donate once the event is over and we know how many pieces we managed to solve.
For participants, we’ll have food and snacks and a chance to have fun with fellow justice-minded puzzle solvers.
Solve puzzles! Sign up to donate! Fight racism! Invite your friends!
- NEW: Relieving millions in local Medical Debt through pennies-on-the-dollar buyback programs.
- NEW: A book group and seminar focused on Economic Inequality and Economic Theory for the modern age.
- Presenting debt and inequality related topics at forums, workshops and in radio productions.
- Promoting single-payer / Medicare for All to end the plague of medical debt
- Money bail reform and fighting modern day debtors’ prisons and exploitative ticketing and fining schemes
- Tiny Homes and other solutions for the homeless.
- Student debt resistance. Check out the Debt Collective, our sister organization
- Helping out America’s only non-profit check-cashing organization and fighting against usurious for-profit pay-day lenders and their ilk
- Working on debarring US Banks that have been convicted of felonies from municipal contracts, and divesting from the Wall St. banks
- Promoting the concept of Basic Income
- Advocating for Postal banking
- Organizing for public banking in Oakland! We made the first steps happen… now there’s a spinoff group
- Bring your own debt-related project!
If you are new to Strike Debt and want to come early, meet one or two of us and get a briefing on our projects before we dive into our agenda, 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.
Bay Area Artists Benefit featuring Souls of Mischief, Jenny Lim, Phavia Kujichagulia, Avotcja, Robert Wood, GoodLOVE, Destiny Muhammad, Toreadah Mikell, Tacuma King, Stone’s of Fire, Sankofa Akili Dance Ensemble and more! Come out for a great show and give to support Haiti at the same time. Tickets $20 Please share!!!
Climate change is upon us, and the time has come to decide: will we live under socialism, or live under water? We’ll take socialism, thank you, and so come party at the launch of East Bay DSA’s Green New Deal campaign.
Explore the stark divide between the nihilism of market-driven climate destruction and the hopeful future of ecosocialism in two theme rooms, enter the costume contest to see who can enshrine each eco-timeline sartorially, and learn a little about our campaigns to support the Green New Deal and bring PG&E into public ownership. We’ll be raising funds for future work with raffle prizes, drinks and a sliding-scale cover charge.
Tickets: Set up a monthly, sustaining donation of $5 or more to East Bay DSA (or increase your existing donation by at least $5) for free admission and an open bar. Or, make a one-time donation of $5-20 sliding scale for admission — just go to eastbaydsa.org/donate and show your email receipt at the party. Donations by cash and venmo (@eastbaydsa) will also be accepted at the door.
Alcohol policy: This is an all-ages event, but you must be 21+ to drink. Non-alcoholic beverages and snacks will be abundant.
Accessibility: The space is fully wheelchair accessible, and parking is available on the street. Please message the East Bay DSA account with any accessibility questions or concerns that would help you enjoy this event.
Curious about the labor movement after the recent teachers strike wave? Trying to figure out why socialists talk to much about labor? Maybe thinking about getting a union job? Come on out, and bring your friends!
Socialists have always seen organized labor as the vital center of a broader working-class movement, and in the 19th and early 20th centuries, socialist politics largely emerged from the labor movement. But since the red-baiting and McCarythism of the Cold War, the connection between socialists and the labor movement has been dramatically loosened.
But many socialists have worked union jobs and participated in their unions as rank-and-file members over the past decades.
The first part of this event will be a panel discussion of socialists who have been rank-and-file union workers, discussing their experiences and perspectives on the labor movement.
The second part will be a kind of rank-and-file job fair. DSA members who work in union jobs in a variety of industries will have tables set up where you can chat with them about their experiences, hear about what different union jobs are like, and talk about how they navigate the broader politics of labor.
This is a FREE event co-presented by Appreciating Diversity Film Series
I was in prison before I was even born.’ So begins the story of Dr. Victor Rios who, by 15, was a high school “dropout,” heroin dealer, and Oakland gang member with multiple felony convictions and a death wish. But when a teacher’s quiet persistence, a mentor’s moral conviction, and his best friend’s murder converge, Rios’s path takes an unexpected turn.