Calendar
Come out to the new space, OutofLine in Emeryville for a film showing on the Albany Bulb followed by a discussion on how to resist the eviction and save this wild and rebellious space.
FREE!
Recently, the Albany City Council has moved to evict the almost 20 year old squatter encampment at the Albany Bulb and develop the area into a regional park. Dogs will be leashed, the art will be destroyed, and the people that live there, made homeless. Come out to discuss and plan!
Original announcement with color flyer on IndyBay.
Find the event closest to you or of most interest to you in the Bay Area here:
Over 70 events are already planned in states coast-to-coast, and this is shaping up to be an epic — not to mention beautiful — day of action. There are a bunch of neat actions planned: from a solar-powered barn going up in the pipeline route in Nebraska, to a tug of war between the fossil fuel industry and the climate movement in Boston, to a swimming party in a park in Jacksonville that might be underwater in the not-too-distant future — and many more to come.
Join us for food, entertainment and fun while promoting community awareness.
Stand Together for a better today and a promising tomorrow.
The United Nations International Day of Peace is celebrated around the globe on September 21st. Be a part of the San Francisco Bay Area’s Peace Day rally and festival, demand a pardon for Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and other hero and shero whistleblowers, end mass incarceration, solitary torture and other abuses of the prison industrial complex, demand an end to the drone wars and the right to know what is in our food. Thank you Code Pink and many other supporting local groups such as Stop Monsanto and the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition on Saturday September 21, bike, walk, skate or BART to the Civic Center BART stop at the United Nations Plaza in the heart of San Francisco from noon to six. Celebrate and demand peace at home and abroad. Community, music and unity — Peace San Francisco style. Thank you for being a part of the movement!
Thousands are expected to rally for Peace this September 21st, the United Nations International Day of Peace. Peace Day San Francisco, sponsored by Code Pink Women for Peace occurs on Saturday this year at the United Nations Plaza (Civic Center) in San Francisco. From 12:00-4:00 various musicians and speakers address whistleblowers, drone warfare, mass incarceration, the industrial food complex and more. Musical acts include Pamela Parker, Thunderground Collective, Clara Bellino, Drew Southern and other local performers. Speakers include: Daniel Ellsberg on whistleblowers, Terry O’Neill and Patricia Ireland of the National Organization for Women, John Perry Barlow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Pamm Larry of Label GMO Campaign, Stephanie Tang of World Can’t Wait and Toby Blome of Code Pink.
Berkeley Post Office Defense et al will be holding a rally/concert/teach-in on the steps of the Berkeley Post Office in solidarity with the struggle in the Bronx, NYC to save their own Post Office. The Bronx defenders will be holding their own protest rally that day.
Come learn about the latest news in the struggle to save the Berkeley Post Office and prevent the privatization of Post Offices across the country. Enjoy the music and use the public commons as it should be!
Our weekly open meeting for members and supporters to discuss the weeks tasks and projects. Come get plugged into ongoing housing defense work! We have abundant and varied work for all folks in any number of meaningful projects.
Rain location: SF Pizza, 1500 Broadway, Oakland
Our weekly open meeting for members and supporters to discuss the week’s tasks and projects. Come get plugged into ongoing housing defense work! We have abundant and varied work for all folks in any number of meaningful projects.
Rain location: SF Pizza, 1500 Broadway, Oakland
Our weekly open meeting for members and supporters to discuss the week’s tasks and projects. Come get plugged into ongoing housing defense work! We have abundant and varied work for all folks in any number of meaningful projects.
Rain location: It doesn’t rain in Oakland in August or September.
If you would like to help us monetarily with our work. We don’t need much, but we do keep a phone hotline active and do flyers and posters. Any little bit helps.
Resisting Empire on Jeju Island
On a small island on the Southern tip of the Korean Peninsula, for the past 7 years, a small group of villagers have been waging one of the most disciplined, dedicated, creative non-violent movements in the world.
Survivors of one of the most horrific genocides of the postwar era, they are struggling to prevent the Island, a UN designated biosphere reserve, from becoming a deep water military base that will uproot the traditional matrifocal culture, destroy a global ecological treasure, and destabilize the entire pacific region.
This Naval base, functioning as the lynchpin of the US Pacific pivot, will host US aircraft carriers, Aegis missile destroyers, nuclear submarines, and 8-10,000 troops, and turn the Island into a hair trigger for global confrontation.
This presentation, by activists working in solidarity with Jeju Island, will screen excerpts from “The Ghosts of Jeju”, chronicling the genocidal US intervention in Jeju Island in 1948, and the subsequent history of influence and manipulation. There will also be recent eye witness testimonies from the ground, to give a synoptic, historical view of the crucial local, cultural, ecological and geopolitical issues at stake.
For a good background summary, see:
Why Oliver Stone Came to Juju, Korea
Also KPFA show and Flashpoint
Schedule of all events at Niebyl-Proctor.
Help plan and organize our next rally on September 28th. Learn the latest about the fight the save the Berkeley Post Office and against privatization in general.
Occupy Forum presents…
How Do We Build A Better Economic System?
with Marco Vangelisti
Occupy Forum is excited to bring back lecturer Marco Vangelisti, who gave a riveting talk at the “What is Money???” forum in August. As a follow-up, Marco will be presenting the rest of his curriculum.
The current economic crisis is a recurring phenomenon of capitalism – a structurally unstable economic system. We will examine the current economic crisis in its historical context, how we dealt with the last major crisis in the 1930s and how we are (counter productively) dealing with it now. We will also look at the essential features of capitalism that makes it unstable and destructive to communities and ecosystems. Then, the systemic features of a new economic system that would be compatible with long term health of ecosystems and communities will be presented. Finally, we will explore the path from the current system to one that democratizes and localizes economic activity and anchors wealth and capital formation in the community.
Marco Vangelisti is a former Fullbright scholar in mathematics and economics at UC Berkeley. He is now involved with Slow Money, an organization concerned with steering financial investments toward small food enterprises, organic farms, and local food systems. Find more information about Marco at www.ek4t.com
Time will be allotted for Q&A, discussion and announcements.
Original notice from Occupy Bay Area United web page.
Publisher of the Pentagon Papers on 1971, Ellsberg’s revelations played an important role in helping end that war.
Ellsberg was been a lecturer, writer and activist on the dangers of the nuclear era, wrongful US interventions and the urgent need for patriotic whistleblowing.
Daniel’s biography: http://www.ellsberg.net/bio
Starting at 8 AM
Rally at 11 AM — Vigil at 4 PM
Twitter Updates @stopsfevictions
Like thousands of other working class San Franciscans, Mr. and Ms. Lee worked for decades in the city. Now elderly and caring for their disabled adult daughter, they are facing eviction by a real estate investor who bought their eight-unit apartment building in the once blue-collar Polk Gulch neighborhood. The investor has admitted that from the start, his business plan was to evict all the tenants and sell off the apartments. He has almost succeeded. All the other families have moved out and the Lees have also desperately tried to move. But as seniors on a fixed income with a disabled family member they faced a costly and doubly discriminatory rental market. They have applied to dozens of apartments without success. Yet their investor landlord has rejected their requests for help finding alternative housing and has asked the sheriff to force the family into the streets.
The Lee family’s story might be like thousands of others who have been quietly moved without public awareness. But overcoming their initial fears, Mr. and Ms. Lee have decided to take a stand: they are staying in their apartment and publicly protesting their eviction by the sheriff. With the support of the Tenants Union and others, they hope their fight will result in increased protections for all tenants and help for evicted tenants like themselves who need housing in the City.
Last month, a judge approved the eviction of the Lees without a trial, disregarding evidence that the landlord-investor misrepresented in his plans to evict the tenants in order to finance for his project. The court’s has allowed the landlord to proceed to request the sheriff to forcibly remove the family despite a pending appeal of that ruling. The sheriff is now scheduled to evict the family on Wednesday, September 25.
Join Alameda County Supervisor Richard Valle, Alameda County Departments, and the Alameda County Coalition for Criminal Justice Reform for a community meeting on Public Safety and AB109 Prison Realignment.
Light refreshments provided
Please join us on Thursday, Sept. 26 for oral arguments on class certification in Ashker v. Brown, our federal lawsuit on behalf of prisoners at the Pelican Bay State Prison in California.
In the Pelican Bay Security Housing Unit (SHU) and other California SHUs, prisoners are isolated in near-total solitude for between 22 ½ and 24 hours a day, denied telephone calls, contact visits, and vocational, recreational, or educational programs.
The court will hear arguments as to whether Ashker v. Brown should be certified as a class action lawsuit. Plaintiffs are seeking to certify a class of all prisoners serving indeterminate sentences at the Pelican Bay SHU on the basis of gang validation for purposes of our due process claim, and a subclass of all prisoners who have been held at the Pelican Bay SHU for more than 10 years for purposes of our Eighth Amendment claim.
Please pack the Court on August 22nd.
What:
– 1:00 PM: Press Conference and rally outside the Courthouse.
– 2:00 PM: Oral Argument in Ashker v. Brown on class certification, before Chief District Judge Claudia Wilken.
We suggest arriving 30 minutes to one hour early, in order to go through security. Everyone will need a current form of identification in order to get inside the building.
People will be staffing a table with information about California solitary confinement conditions in solidarity with the suspended prisoners’ hunger strike.
Come on down and hang out and help pass out literature.
The CIA began Operation Gladio shortly after WWII in order to stop, or repress, the Italian communists from coming to power in Italy… The US continues to use repressive tactics against the population in other countries, most notably in the Middle East… Snowden and Manning are revelating that the US hired and funded terrorists long before 9/11… The War on Terror is used as justification for the US to attack and deny our civil liberties…
Oscar Grant Forum Series.
Berkeley Post Office Defense et al will be holding a rally/concert/teach-in on the steps of the Berkeley Post Office.
Come learn about the latest news in the struggle to save the Berkeley Post Office and prevent the privatization of Post Offices across the country. Enjoy the music and use the public commons as it should be!
Special Guest Speaker:
Peter Byrne, author of Going Postal: U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein’s husband sells post offices to his friends, cheap..
National award-winning investigative journalist Peter Byrne reports that the husband of U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein of California has been selling post offices at bargain basement prices—often to his own business partners. Richard C. Blum is the chairman of CBRE Group Inc., the largest commercial real estate firm in the world. In 2011, the Postal Service awarded Blum’s company an exclusive contract to sell off postal real estate in cities and towns across America. Byrne’s in-depth investigation details the many apparent conflicts of interests driving the CBRE deals. It brings to light a scathing government audit of Blum’s contract that is being ignored by the Obama administration. The investigation reveals how Senator Feinstein pressured the Postmaster General to stop a postal construction project, and to favor the interests of a developer working with her husband’s firm. Byrne explains why the Post Office is not really broke and how powerful forces on Capitol Hill are angling to franchise the U.S. Mail monopoly. We learn that the post office executives in charge of Blum’s contract have been up to a financial shenanigans of their own. This is first class investigative reporting on a vital issue of the day that you will not find anywhere else.
Music by the Funky Nixons, Hali Hammer and Redd Welsh.
A Quick Update on the status of the proposed zoning ordinance for the Historic District which includes the Berkeley Post Office may be provided by Berkeley City Councilperson Jesse Arreguin.
An Update on what’s happening with the ever-closer threatened eviction of the Albany Bulb residents will be provided.
Food!
Join Strike Debt Bay Area in working on some exciting projects locally and nationally.
– We are still working jointly to Save The Berkeley Post Office and defend against privatization in general. An announcement of a sale of the downtown Berkeley Post Office by the Postal Service could come and at any time and we need to be ready to mobilize.
– We are actively engaging in the fight by Richmond, CA to save its citizens’ houses from foreclosures using a novel tactic employing the taking by eminent domain of mortgages (not houses) from banks (not homeowners). Richmond, CA, ACCE, and the Richmond Progressive Alliance are taking on the entirely of Wall Street as it does everything it can to prevent anything of the sort from happening, and could use all the help that can be mustered.
In addition, we are exploring the use of a public bank to help Richmond, CA and other communities escape the thrall of Wall Street.
– Other projects include efforts to fight against student debt in conjunction with peeps at UC Cal, support for tenants’ rights in Oakland, a Debtors’ Union, a book group with semi-weekly discussions, and more.
THE ENTRANCE TO THE PUBLIC SCHOOL SPACE IS ON 22nd ST. (SOUTH SIDE). YOU MAY NEED TO BE BUZZED IN. THE BEST WAY TO GET THERE IS VIA THE 19th ST. BART, AS PARKING IN THE IMMEDIATE NEIGHBORHOOD IS LIMITED IN AVAILABILITY AND DURATION.
Seventy people, many living on the Albany Bulb for years, even decades, are scheduled to be evicted from their homes beginning October 1st. (See this essay for what the Albany Bulb is and more details).
The Bulb community is sponsoring a Potluck and Open Mic event, followed by Music from BLACKBIRD RAUM of
Santa Cruz.
Protect autonomous and free space! Come visit the Bulb and see what we all can do to stop the evictions!
5:00 PM: Potluck begins.
8:00 PM: Music!