Calendar
In partnership with local and national community-based organizations that continue to lead the way to shape abolition – groups like Critical Resistance, Black & Pink, Love & Protect, Parole Illinois – Prison+Neighborhood Arts/Education Project (PNAP) is kicking off two years of programming with two events featuring key thinkers in conversation about teaching and learning, cultural work, and abolition.
Join us and learn from local and national organizers, cultural workers, educators, and scholars who are building radical teaching and learning pathways for currently and formerly incarcerated communities, sustaining crucial campaigns for freedom, and creating more just and beautiful communities.
Panelists: Angela Davis, Beth Richie, Kathy Boudin, Timmy Chau
Angela Davis
An author, activist, educator, and Civil Rights icon, Davis has authored 10 books that cover race, feminism, class, and the U.S. prison system including If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance, Women, Race and Class, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, and Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. Through her activism and scholarship over many decades, Angela Davis has been deeply involved in movements for social justice around the world. Her work as an educator – both at the university level and in the larger public sphere – has always emphasized the importance of building communities of struggle for economic, racial, and gender justice. Professor Angela Davis, distinguished professor emerita of History of Consciousness and feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is an author of ten books. A political activist, scholar, educator, and founding member of the Critical Resistance, she continues her work focusing on social problems associated with incarceration and the generalized criminalization of those most affected by poverty and racial discrimination. An international lecturer known for powerful speeches and dialogue about injustice, Professor Davis has been involved in movements for social justice worldwide. Since the early 1970s, she continues to address racial injustice and social equity on an internationally recognized platform.
Support the family of Mario Gonzalez tomorrrow, 12 noon @1555 Oak St, Alameda.
The family has seen the devastating footage of Alameda Police killing their beloved Mario.
Join in front of Alameda Police Dept to support the family. Bring signs & posters#Justice4MarioG pic.twitter.com/au5c07U0sm
— Anti Police-Terror Project (@APTPaction) April 26, 2021
🏠 Learn how to protect your home tomorrow, Tuesday 4/7, at our Foreclosure Prevention Webinar in partnership with @BayLegalJustice & Legal Aid of Sonoma County.
This webinar is open to the public.
Register: https://t.co/M2kG5ciujT pic.twitter.com/YukPR7D7UO
— EBCLC (@EBCLCNews) April 26, 2021
Whether you’ve got zero crafting ability or you’re a design genius, we need you to help create the art for the May Day Action! Hundreds of DSA members are joining the May Day March to call for the passage of the PRO ACT, so that means we need a lot of people to help make **hundreds** of red flags for DSA members to wave at the march!
Join us for a socially distant art build on Wednesday, April 28th, 3-7 pm at San Pablo Park, Berkeley near the intersection of Park and Oregon St. In addition to flags, we’ll also be crafting puppets for the DSA PRO Act street theater(!) Come hang and do some art in the park with us!
If you’re a music-maker, bring your instrument! At 5 pm during the art build, those who want to form a DSA marching band for the May Day march will be able to gather and practice!
Please remember to wear PPE (especially a face covering or mask)
Transportation accounts for over half of all greenhouse gas emissions in California. Join the Climate Center in this webinar on equitable transportation and clean mobility strategies that can wean us off fossil fuels.
Speakers:
Assemblymember Phil Ting
Rebecca Fisher, Bay Area Air Quality Management District
Dr. Joseph K. Lyou, Coalition for Clean Air
Andrea Vidaurre, Peoples Collective for Environmental Justice
Ricardo Hidalgo, International Brotherhood of Teamsters
Register here
To see the full lineup of the Climate Center’s Climate-Safe California webinar series, as well as recordings of past webinars, click here.
Amid nationwide reckoning with racial justice and calls to reimagine policing in America’s cities, Oakland has moved ahead with plans to change its public safety funding and performance.
The Defund OPD campaign was launched by the Anti Policy Terror Project five years ago. Join us for a discussion with two leaders in the effort to change the criminal justice system.
About the Speakers
Cat Brooks is an activist, performer, politician and speaker or who has served as the communications director for Coaching Corps, as executive director of Youth Together and executive director of the National Lawyers Guild. Brooks is the co-founder of the Anti Police-Terror Project (APTP) whose mission is to rapidly respond to and ultimately eradicate what it calls state violence in communities of color. With APTP, she shepherded the development of a “first responders” process, which provides resources and training for a rapid community-based response to police violence. She also helped negotiate the passage of AB392, AB 931 and SB 1421 and has organized with local housing advocates to bring Proposition 10 (Repeal Costa Hawkins) to the ballot in November. n late 2018, Cat was the runner up in the Oakland mayoral race. Brooks currently serves as the executive director of the Justice Teams Network, a network of grassroots activists providing rapid response and healing justice in response to all forms of state violence across California. In addition, she is touring her one-woman show, Tasha, about the in-custody murder of Natasha McKenna in the Fairfax County Jail. She lives in West Oakland with her daughter.
Born and raised in Natick, MA, James Burch grew up with the direct impacts of a punitive carceral system within his immediate family; all three of his siblings have been entangled in the criminal justice system for their entire lives. To address this, James became a lawyer after attending Yale University and Georgetown Law School. Upon moving to the Bay Area, James became an active member of the Anti Police-Terror Project, eventually becoming the director of policy and a member of the Black Leadership Team. Burch now works as the policy director for the Justice Teams Network (JTN), a statewide coalition working to end state violence in California. James is also the current president of the National Lawyers Guild of the Bay Area.
This program was rescheduled from April 12, 2021.
This is a free, online-only program; you must pre-register to receive a link to the live-stream event. We welcome donations made during registration to support the production of our online programming.
Aviva Chomsky restores the region’s fraught history of repression and resistance to popular consciousness and connects the United States’ interventions and influence to the influx of refugees seeking asylum today.
At the center of the current immigration debate are migrants from Central America fleeing poverty, corruption, and violence in search of asylum in the United States. In Central America’s Forgotten History, Aviva Chomsky answers the urgent question “How did we get here?” She outlines how we often fail to remember the circumstances and ongoing effects of Central America’s historical inequality and oppression, a direct result of colonial and neo-colonial development policies and the cultures of violence and forgetting needed to implement them.
Chomsky expertly recounts Central Americans’ valiant struggles for social and economic justice to restore these vivid and gripping events to popular consciousness. She traces the roots of displacement and migration in Central America to the Spanish conquest and brings us to the present day, where she concludes that the more immediate roots of migration from the three Northern Triangle countries (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) lie in the wars and in the US interventions of the 1980s and the peace accords of the 1990s.
Chomsky also examines how and why histories and memories are suppressed, and the impact of losing historical memory. Only by erasing history can we claim that Central American countries created their own poverty and violence, while the United States’ enjoyment and profit from their bananas, coffee, vegetables, clothing, and export of arms are simply unrelated curiosities.
Aviva Chomsky is a professor of history and the coordinator of Latin American Studies at Salem State University. The author of several books, including Undocumented and “They Take Our Jobs!,” Chomsky has been active in the Latin American solidarity and immigrants’ rights movements for over thirty years.
Mickey Huff is the current Director of Project Censored and president of the nonprofit Media Freedom Foundation. He has edited or co-edited ten annual volumes of Censored, and contributed numerous chapters. He is currently professor of social science and history at Diablo Valley College, where he is also co-chair of the history department. He is executive producer and co-host of the Project Censored Show, a weekly syndicated public affairs program aired over KPFA Radio and fifty community radio stations.
MACRO is the alternative emergency response that displaces police with well-trained community members to help with some emergency situations. Oakland-wide meeting to hear more on Thursday, April 29th, 6:30, on Zoom. Register at https://t.co/aIBSRrF2xD pic.twitter.com/VMNXZ44GQD
— Coalition for Police Accountability (@oakcopoversight) April 26, 2021
Global Women’s Strike/Bay Area, part of the Alliance for Social and
Economic Justice, invites you to take part in the film festival (info
below) to help raise funds to launch a Center for Social and Economic
Justice in the Redstone Labor Temple in SF.
The mission of the San Francisco Social and Economic Justice Film Festival is to provide a platform for films made by independent filmmakers who are exploring and advocating for social and economic justice. The Social and Economic Justice Film Festival highlights films and videos to encourage change around the world and to promote a global culture of equality. The festival will showcase works that challenge exploitative and oppressive social and economic systems and structures on a global and local level.
FILM TOPICS
- Organizing for justice in the time of COVID-19
- Hunger, poverty, homelessness
- Worker justice
- Racism and oppression
- Women’s rights and gender equality
- LGBTQ rights
- Prisoner justice and mass incarceration
- Disability rights
- Environmental justice and sustainability
- Water and food insecurity
- Privatization and corporate control
- Alternative economies
- Arts and rights of expression and speech
- Immigrant Rights and Migrant Justice
- Access to public education, including higher education
- Living wage jobs
This weekend, North Oakland Mutual Aid will be at Omni Commons for taking in donations for the next round of resource materials to be collected and redistributed to our neighbors who are unhoused and/or precariously sheltered.#north #oakland #mutualaid #omnicommons #oakland pic.twitter.com/6wLi2n4MFW
— Omni Commons (@omnicommons) April 28, 2021
SF Bay Area May Day Parade & Rally for Workers’ Rights & Racial Justice
Join Bay Area Labor on May 1st as we recreate the famous 1934 May Day march up Market Street from the Embarcadero to Civic Center for a rally. Wear your union shirts and jackets! Organizations should sign up HERE. You can also download the FLIER.
Celebrations of International Workers’ Day, also called May Day, date back over 100 years to the fight for an eight hour work day. In San Francisco, May 1 has also played host to a rich history of collective action by workers—and this year will be no different.
The triple-threat of rising income inequality, racial injustice, and COVID-19 has hit working families hard. In order for our communities to emerge from this crisis healthy and prosperous, we need a just and equitable recovery for all.
That means building support for key legislation like the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which will empower workers to exercise our freedom to organize and negotiate for better wages and working conditions. It also means uniting together—no matter who we are or where we come from—to #StopAsianHate, proclaim that #BlackLivesMatter, ensure immigrants are safe and welcome in our communities, and fight to ensure that workers everywhere can live and work with the dignity and respect we all deserve.
Saturday, May 1 @ 10 am
Meet at the Embarcadero
Organizations should RSVP at http://www.bit.ly/mayday2021
Salute the working-class rebels who sparked this international holiday
A story in song, dramatic readings and images Explore May Day’s origins in the world struggle for an eight-hour day and honor the heroes who put their lives on the line for the rights of every worker.
From copy violence to military violence to workers’ rights, SOLIDARITY is our strength!
People Over Profit! Educate! Agitate! Organize!
5pm Rally in West Oakland at a to-be-disclosed location.
We still meet via Zoom.
Email strike.debt.bay.area@gmail.com for the invite.
For our April meeting we’ll be reading the first five chapters of
The Optimist’s Telescope – Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age by Bina Venkataraman.
“Instant gratification is the norm today—in our lives, our culture, our economy, and our politics. Many of us have forgotten (if we ever learned) how to make smart decisions for the long run. Whether it comes to our finances, our health, our communities, or our planet, it’s easy to avoid thinking ahead.
The consequences of this immediacy are stark: Superbugs spawned by the overuse of antibiotics endanger our health. Companies that fail to invest stagnate and fall behind. Hurricanes and wildfires turn deadly for communities that could have taken more precaution. Today more than ever, all of us need to know how we can make better long-term decisions in our lives, businesses, and society.
Bina Venkataraman sees the way forward. A former journalist and adviser in the Obama administration, she helped communities and businesses prepare for climate change, and she learned firsthand why people don’t think ahead—and what can be done to change that. In The Optimist’s Telescope, she draws from stories she has reported around the world and new research in biology, psychology, and economics to explain how we can make decisions that benefit us over time. With examples from ancient Pompeii to modern-day Fukushima, she dispels the myth that human nature is impossibly reckless and highlights the surprising practices each of us can adopt in our own lives—and the ones we must fight for as a society. The result is a book brimming with the ideas and insights all of us need in order to forge a better future.”
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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
and Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons.
Join us – all are welcome!
Global Women’s Strike/Bay Area, part of the Alliance for Social and
Economic Justice, invites you to take part in the film festival (info
below) to help raise funds to launch a Center for Social and Economic
Justice in the Redstone Labor Temple in SF.
The mission of the San Francisco Social and Economic Justice Film Festival is to provide a platform for films made by independent filmmakers who are exploring and advocating for social and economic justice. The Social and Economic Justice Film Festival highlights films and videos to encourage change around the world and to promote a global culture of equality. The festival will showcase works that challenge exploitative and oppressive social and economic systems and structures on a global and local level.
FILM TOPICS
- Organizing for justice in the time of COVID-19
- Hunger, poverty, homelessness
- Worker justice
- Racism and oppression
- Women’s rights and gender equality
- LGBTQ rights
- Prisoner justice and mass incarceration
- Disability rights
- Environmental justice and sustainability
- Water and food insecurity
- Privatization and corporate control
- Alternative economies
- Arts and rights of expression and speech
- Immigrant Rights and Migrant Justice
- Access to public education, including higher education
- Living wage jobs
This weekend, North Oakland Mutual Aid will be at Omni Commons for taking in donations for the next round of resource materials to be collected and redistributed to our neighbors who are unhoused and/or precariously sheltered.#north #oakland #mutualaid #omnicommons #oakland pic.twitter.com/6wLi2n4MFW
— Omni Commons (@omnicommons) April 28, 2021
Connection information here close to the event date
Just as Darwin discovered the law of motion of biological evolution, so Marx and Engels discovered the law of motion of human history and with it, placed the science of human society on a firm, working class basis. In 1880, Engels published Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, explaining how socialism had been transformed from a utopia into a science. This science was further developed by Lenin who led the world historic October Revolution and is continuing to develop in other world historic revolutions in China, Vietnam, and Cuba, and well as revolutionary movements throughout Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Unfortunately, some comrades have chosen to reject science and revert to utopianism. We will examine this question in Group Discussion in which everyone may participate fully.
Organizer: Eugene E Ruyle is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at CSU, Long Beach; President of Veterans For Peace, East Bay Chapter 162 (Berkeley/Oakland); and active in a variety of working class organizations, including the ICSS.
At its May meeting, Sunflower Alliance is proud to present three warriors in the struggle against the international fossil fuel giant headquartered in our own backyard—Chevron, or as it’s pronounced in Ecuador, Chev-wrōng.
Please RSVP at action@sunflower-alliance.org. You’ll receive a Zoom link along with the meeting agenda and campaign updates on Friday, April 30.
From its environmental crimes in Nigeria to the Ecuadorian Amazon, and its support for a fascist military dictatorship in Myanmar, Chevron has established an egregious record of human rights abuse, environmental degradation, and the deliberate poisoning of global communities. The toxic plume of particulate matter emissions from its Richmond refinery affects half a million people in the Bay Area, especially Black and Brown residents of San Pablo, North Richmond, and Richmond. Come hear about why it’s so important to show up for Anti-Chevron Day on May 21st.
Speakers:
Paul Paz y Miño, Associate Director at Amazon Watch.
Andrés Soto, Northern California Organizer for Communities for a Better Environment.
Jed Holtzman, Policy Analyst for 350 Bay Area.
Paul Paz y Miño will address Chevron’s international record: its persecution of lawyer Steven Donziger, who has spent two years under house arrest for representing a group of Indigenous peoples and rural farmers in Ecuador in a lawsuit against Texaco, which was accused of dumping some 16 billion gallons of toxic waste in what would become known as the “Amazon Chernobyl.” That lawsuit began in 1993, ricocheted between US and Ecuadorian courts, and continued after Texaco was acquired by its now-parent company of Chevron. The plaintiffs represented by Donziger won the case, forcing Chevron to pay a $9.8 billion dollar settlement. Chevron retaliated, and Donziger ended up under house arrest. His trial for criminal contempt is scheduled to begin on May 10th.
Andrés Soto will bring the focus back to Richmond: the scope of community resistance to Chevron’s Refinery Modernization Project, its catastrophic refinery explosion and fire in 2012, and February’s oil spill in San Francisco Bay.
Jed Holtzman will discuss current efforts to reduce harmful particulate matter emissions emitted by the refinery (and the PBF refinery in Martinez) and explain how you can support that crucial effort at the Bay Area Air Quality Management District.
We are excited to announce @decarcerateAC is hosting a vigil this Sunday. Join us for an evening fo reflections, prayers, and hope.
Sunday at 5:00 p.m.
Lake Merrit Columns
577 Grand Ave Oakland pic.twitter.com/UfgoEWnQgq— Ella Baker Center (@ellabakercenter) April 30, 2021