Calendar
Bay Area comics perform STAND UP! Comedy: Featuring Natasha Muse, with Veronica Porras, Lalique D’Bruzzi and Emily Van Dyke. Natasha Muse is a performer and writer of comedy in the Bay Area. She is also a skeptic, an agnostic, and at least the second funniest trans-sexual you know––guaranteed. Come to the emerging and energizing OMNI COMMONS and laugh with us while you support autonomous education for indigenous Zapatista children.
No More Locked Doors- a conference on political prisoners and revolutionary prisoner support- May16 Oakland pic.twitter.com/RDmWWQbcYQ
— Alyssa (@alyssa011968) April 11, 2015
Join us for tabling, flyering, and door-knocking Wednesday May 13 @ 5 p.m. and Saturday May 16 @ noon. Both @ Ashby BART station. #15Now
— 15 Now Berkeley (@15NowBerkeley) May 11, 2015
No to the War on Yemen!
No to Foreign Intervention!
Yes to self determination of the Yemeni people!
Stop the Saudi bombing!
#HandsOffYemen
UN Plaza
Saturday, May 16th
12pm
PF Publishing invites you to celebrate T. Thorn Coyle’s first novel, dedicated to Alan Blueford, and to all victims of police violence.
Like Water:
a story of love and sudden violence.
a story of a ghost and a city.
a story for our times.
Welcome to the streets of Oakland, CA.
Meet Alex and Jonah.
Best friends since childhood: one poet, one professor, one black, one white. One dead–killed by police with a Taser to the heart–and one bereft, trying to figure out how to go on living…and how to find justice.
“One day he was laughing on a bright summer sidewalk. What seemed liked seconds later, he was gone.”
Come out Saturday, 5/16 at Legionnaire for our 2nd Left Bass Dance Party! Last month, the club was packed by 10pm, the party went OFF, and we raised over $1,800 for BlackOUT Collective. Let’s do it in May for APTP!
LEFT BASS is an Oakland Dance Party for all us activists, organizers, artists, and just plain MOVEMENT FOLKS to shake a tail feather together and continue to support local organizing.
Get down with “Feminist/Panther/Hip-Hop Heroine” Coco Peila, featured DJs Camilo (Queer Qumbia) and Xander (Mondial Afrique) and resident DJs Baagi and T. Rockwell.
This month’s party will benefit the Anti Police-Terror Project (https://www.facebook.com/
Idle No More SF Bay and citizens from front-line refinery communities invite you to attend the second of four walks. The Walk will begin near the Martinez Shoreline Park at the end of Ferry Street in Martinez, and will end at the 9th Street Park in the City of Benicia.
8:00 a.m. Water Ceremony & Registration
9:30 a.m. Walk Begins
This walk is approximately 9.5 miles from beginning to end. There will be vehicles available for people who wish to take breaks during the walk. Medics will also be available. Water will be provided but you should plan to bring your own water in reusable containers.
There are several places along the walk where folks can join the walk – please see the details of the route. For more information and a map of the route, please visit the Healing Walk web site.
From Oakland to Baltimore, police harassment and murder of poor Black, Brown and Native American women, men and transgenders is an epidemic. What will it take to bring justice for Freddie Gray, Oscar Grant, Mya Hall, Alex Nieto, Michael Brown and all those killed? How do we end the structural racism and brutality that warps the lives of the poor? Join a candid discussion that ranges from calling for civilian review boards over the police to replacing the whole rotten U.S. system.
A home-cooked brunch is served at 12:15 pm for an $8 donation. Everyone welcome.
West Berkeley Forum
Sponsored by the
Berkeley Neighborhoods Council
Following up on our very successful April 8, 2015, Forum at the Berkeley Media Center, the Berkeley Neighborhoods Council invites you to a community forum to discuss responses to the city’s construction and development plans.
The purpose of the meeting will be to foster discussion among members of the community and to affirm the necessity of the community having a voice in these developments
a form of “modification-power”
“We’re not against development. But it should be development in which people have a say, a voice in the process, more than a mere minute in a hearing. It should not be imposed from above, nor destroy a community’s style of life.”
A West Berkeley community member
NO CONSTRUCTION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION
Some of the the impacts these plans will have on our community:
• The loss of commercial establishments,
• The loss of low-rent housing,
• The loss of community style of life,
• Traffic jams, and big parking problems.
The following speakers will discuss the City’s overall development plans, and the impact these plans will have on our neighborhoods.
• Carol Johnson – Berkeley City Planning Dept.
• Patrick Sheahan – former Planning Commissioner and West Berkeley resident
• Kate Stepanski – Oceanview volunteer and grassroots organizer
• Ed Herzog – West Berkeley resident and community organizer
Berkeley Neighborhoods Council http://www.berkeleyneighborhoodscouncil.org
Also see
If OPD violates your rights, abuses you, or worse, murders your loved one, you should not have to go file a complaint against OPD to OPD.
Please join the Coalition for Police Accountability on May 19th in support of agenda item 11 to demand that all walk-in complaints against OPD be moved from the Internal Affairs Dept of OPD and into the hands of the Citizens Police Review Board (CPRB).
The vote at tomorrow’s city council meeting is a very important step towards the ultimate goal of a real functioning CPRB that is fully funded & appropriately empowered to hold officers who commit crimes accountable.
Citizens do not have the same conflict of interest that police do when investigating themselves. It is time for the people of Oakland to be in control of the police, we can no longer allow them to act with complete impunity & zero accountability when the violate, beat, abuse, or murder people of color in our communities.
Please fill out a speaker card even if you do not intend to speak, you may cede you time to another speaker, here is the link, it’s agenda item 11 for the May 19th city council meeting: http://
A comrade who was arrested in December is facing newly-filed charges. This person’s charges were not previously filed at a mass arraignment. Instead of going through this in solidarity with others, they were confronted through a letter from the DA, months later, alone. This is a reminder and a warning: though charges may not have been filed at a first arraignment, the DA may choose to press them within a year of arrest.
Let’s show support for the long haul, beyond the moment of the protest, beyond the mass arraignment. Share, invite, show we stand together even in moments when we’re treated as individual targets. Come do court support at 9 am in Department 107.
At a time when California faces one of the worst droughts on record, Nestle is bottling water out of California’s springs, aquifers and national forests to sell for profit. Nestle is unwilling to stop this practice – and even pumped water using a permit that expired 25 years ago.
We must ramp up the pressure on Nestle – the poster child for corporate water abuse in California. Nestle has two bottling plants in California – one in Sacramento, and one in Los Angeles. Please join us on Wednesday at 11:00 a.m. as we rally outside both bottling plants in Los Angeles and Sacramento.
The San Francisco Sex Worker Film and Art Festival is a biennial cultural event that has been happening in the Bay Area since 1999. We started out as a film festival, but have expanded to become a vibrant venue for performances, workshops, visual arts, community building, political organizing, skill sharing and have collaborated with various organizations to expand into a multi-dimensional project. The Sex Worker Festival recognizes and honors prostitutes, dancers, porn performers and other sex workers from diverse communities, who have been dynamic and integral members of arts communities since time immemorial. Our next festival will be May of 2015 and will be expanding to straddle San Francisco and the East Bay for the first time.
We have been showing films at the Roxie Theatre in San Francisco, and for the first time ever, would like to find a venue in Oakland where we can screen films and host in-depth discussions facilitated by various community members. We are a very low budget operation with a 501(c)3 fiscal sponsor, that is hoping to find a venue that is financially sustainable for us, accessible by BART for our various communities, that shares a vision of social change with us and can generate participation amongst it’s own constituency. We feel your venue is really perfect and fits neatly into all of these requirements, and look forward to a conversation about this potentially dynamic collaboration.
Although we are asking for paid admission, all of our events are no one turned away for lack of funds, and we feel very strongly that this is a vital tenet of our vision.
Here are links to examples of some of the diverse content and events we have featured over the years which were targeted to organizations and communities.
Thanks for your support,
Carol Leigh and Erica Berman
415-751-1659
Current Festival (in progress)
2015 (in progress)
http://www.sexworkerfest.com/
2013 Festival:
http://www.sexworkerfest.com/sexworkerfest2013.html
Some other program-discussion events of past years:
Sex Work, Trafficking and Labor Migration: Views from Inside The Sex Industry
http://www.sexworkerfest.com/swfest2009/SexWorkMigration.html
Intersections: Krip Sex! Krip Sex Work! An evening of film and discussion on interconnections, sex work and the Krip community
http://www.sexworkerfest.com/swfest2009/sins.html
Our program archives are here:
http://www.sexworkerfest.com/archives/
APTP is launching its campaign Invisible Victims of State Terror: Women of Color on 5/21.
We have chosen this date for our launch in solidarity with the national call by The Black Youth Project to uplift the Black women who are murdered by law enforcement agencies across the country.
The Invisible Victims campaign was born in February in response to the murder of #yuvettehenderson by the Emeryville Police Department on February 3, 2015.
On 5/21, we will gather in the Home Depot parking lot (where the events leading to Yuvette’s murder began) for a brief rally and program.
Immediately following, we will distribute thousands of flyers detailing the stories of Black women who have been stolen by state violence.
The average life expectancy for Black trans women is 35 years. An estimated 25.1 percent of Black American women live in poverty – a higher rate than any other ethnic group.
Black women and girls, trans* and cis, are routinely harassed by police and abused by the state. While we’ve witnessed entire cities rise up to resist the murders of Black men, the murders of Black women continue to go largely ignored.
Silencing the pain of our sisters only perpetuates this violence. #BlackSpring is here: it’s time to remember and lift up the most marginalized victims of state brutality.
Join BYP100’s Bay Area Chapter this Thursday for a National Day of Action to demand #JusticeForRekia and ALL Black women and girls. Together, we’ll paint the town Black with their names, faces and stories.
*Black folks meet-up, 6PM @ Alan Blueford Center* (2434 Telegraph Ave)
#JusticeForRekia #SayHerName #BlackSpring #SayTheirNames #BlackLivesMatter
WHAT: Mass vigil at sunset against mass surveillance – happening in 50 cities across the U.S
BRING: A cell phone, laptop, tablet, and candles with the protestsign.org already pre-loaded. Make a big sunset sign and write “Sunset the Patriot Act”.
WHY WE NEED YOU:
This is the week when we have a chance to sunset the PATRIOT Act!
The PATRIOT Act could end this week if Congress fails to reauthorize it by this Friday ahead of its June 1st expiration. So, on Thursday May 21st, people are organizing a mass vigil in 50 cities across the U.S. to demand their Senators let the Patriot Act expire.
And we’ve set it up so its super easy to get involved:
Gather as the sun is setting
Load protestsign.org on your phone, tablet or laptop
Take a picture of your group with signs outside of Senator Dianne Feinstein’s office.
Post your pictures to the Sunset Vigil Facebook page and on Twitter with the hash tags #sunsetpatriotact #sunsetvigil and your @SenFeinstein.
You can also sign the online letter at http://sunsetthepatriotact.com/
This protest is being organized by your friends at Demand Progress, Restore the Fourth, Credo, MoveOn.org, Free Press, and Fight for the Future.
The City of Berkeley’s Fair Campaign Practices Commission will consider whether to recommend that the Berkeley City Council establish a public financing system – one of the best tools we have at our disposal to fix our broken electoral process.
As public officials are being bought and sold by billionaires and wealthy special interests, the need for comprehensive campaign finance reform is more urgent now than ever.
Sign up to attend and testify in support of public financing!
Public financing allows candidates to rely on small dollar donations and aims to accomplish two primary goals: 1) Candidates should be able to campaign without the cloud of corruption that comes from over-dependence on money from outside interests and 2) Grassroots candidates with strong community ties should be able to run competitive campaigns.
In solidarity with the global movement to take back our food, that is… REAL FOOD FROM REAL SEED as Mother Nature and human evolution intended…
Please save the date and take part in the groundswell of PEOPLE RISING in defense of unadulterated SEEDS, PROTECTION OF BIODIVERSITY, RESPONSIBLE STEWARDSHIP OF THE SOIL, ETHICAL PRACTICES, TOXIN FREE FOOD SYSTEM AND THE SUSTAINABLE FUTURE WE ALL WANT.
Millions of years of natural evolution and diversity of seeds are being wiped out in a generation if we don’t leverage our collective outrage to DIVEST from systematic poisoning of HUMANITY and PROTECT our children’s future.
Join us as we MARCH AGAINST MONSANTO!
11:30 – Meet Up & Welcome at Frank Ogawa / Oscar Grant Plaza
12:00 – March begins
1:00 – Reassemble at Lake Merritt Pergola Area for RALLY!
http://www.labelgmos.org/realfoodforall
Occupy the Farm organizer Vanessa Raditz will be speaking tomorrow at the rally following Oakland’s March Against Monsanto! Come on out and join the Occupy the Farm contingent! We will have a banner so you can find us at Frank Ogawa Plaza before the march takes off.