Calendar
Waffles & Zapatismo is a free space for learning about and discussing the history, ideas, values and practices of the Zapatista National Liberation Army, EZLN or Zapatistas. We serve waffles at the start of the class to those who want them.
The most known psychedelics are psilocybin (magic mushrooms), LSD, MDMA (ecstasy), DMT, ayahuasca, ibogaine, 5-MeO-DMT or Bufo Alvaris (frog medicine), salvia devinorum.
Psychedelic medicine has been used mostly underground to successfully cure PTSD, depression, different types of headaches, addiction to hard drugs and pharmaceuticals, autism, as well as an array of other mental and emotional conditions.
Despite their tremendous healing properties, most psychedelics are illegal in the United States.
In recent years new studies have been launched with the intent to legalize psychedelics. But the process of FDA approval is so tedious, so expensive and so prohibitively long that activists have decided to take matters in their own hands and start a movement to end prohibition of psychedelics.
Famous body freedom activist and founder of a psychedelic clinic and rehab for street kids in Mexico (Jerry Garcia Family Healing Clinic) Gypsy Taub organized the first legalization rally on August 19, 2018. It took place at Jane Warner Plaza in San Francisco and was followed by the 3rd annual Nude Summer of Love Parade.
The second rally will take place in front of the San Francisco City Hall on Saturday, September 29th and will be followed by a Nude Love Parade through Haight Street.
Thanks to the power of the #MeToo movement and the courage of Christine Blasey Ford, Deborah Ramirez, and now Julie Swetnick, the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, appearing only days ago to be a virtual lock, is now hanging by a thread. Kavanaugh, having amassed a thoroughly reactionary anti-woman, anti-worker, and pro-corporation record as a judge on the District of Columbia Court of Appeals, was already the most unpopular Supreme Court nominee since Robert Bork in 1987.
Come on out on Saturday to build a movement to #CancelKavanaugh and halt these right wing attacks on women!
RPA fall membership meeting (a big one)
Please mark your calendars for the quarterly RPA membership meeting.
Since the election is just around the corner, it is going to be a big meeting – not only will we be talkiing about critical election stuff, including voting on school board endorsements; but there will be important business to conduct, such as formally incorporating the RPA as a 501c4 organization. (Don’t know that that is? We’ll explain what it is and why it’s important!)
This very special event features storytelling and video straight from the field, from the land of the buffalo with Buffalo Field Campaign co-founder Mike Mease, along with Native Music from Mignon Geli and Karaj. The Campaign works to end the slaughter of the last of the wild herds of buffalo, in West Yellowstone, Montana.
BFC uses video documentation, non-violent direct action, education and lobbying to change archaic laws targeting buffalo. Volunteers from around the world spend every day, from sunrise to sunset, monitoring and documenting threats to the buffalo, running patrols on skis, snowshoes and cars to defend buffalo on their traditional winter habitat and advocate for their protection.
The Buffalo Field Campaign (BFC) is the only group working in the field, every day, to stop the slaughter and harassment of the last wild buffalo.
They come with new stories and video each roadshow tour!
Wheelchair accessible, donations at the door / NOTAFLOF
On the 20th anniversary of the first Critical REsistance conference in 1998, we invite you to join us at our new building to celebrate the next 20 years of resistance and community power!
Food. Games. Art. Music. Fun.
NOTE: During the Plague Year of 2020 GA will be held every week or two on Zoom. To find out the exact time a date get on the Occupy Oakland email list my sending an email to:
occupyoakland-subscribe@lists.riseup.net
The Occupy Oakland General Assembly meets every Sunday at 4 PM at Oscar Grant Plaza amphitheater at 14th Street & Broadway near the steps of City Hall. If for some reason the amphitheater is being used otherwise and/or OGP itself is inaccessible, we will meet at Kaiser Park, right next to the statues, on 19th St. between San Pablo and Telegraph. If it is raining (as in RAINING, not just misting) at 4:00 PM we meet in the basement of the Omni Collective, 4799 Shattuck Ave., Oakland. (Note: we tend to meet at 3:00 PM during the cooler months from November to early March after Daylights Savings Time.)
On every ‘last Sunday’ we meet a little earlier at 3 PM to have a community potluck to which all are welcome.
OO General Assembly has met on a continuous basis for over six years, since October 2011! Our General Assembly is a participatory gathering of Oakland community members and beyond, where everyone who shows up is treated equally. Our Assembly and the process we have collectively cultivated strives to reach agreement while building community.
At the GA committees, caucuses, and loosely associated groups whose representatives come voluntarily report on past and future actions, with discussion. We encourage everyone participating in the Occupy Oakland GA to be part of at least one associated group, but it is by no means a requirement. If you like, just come and hear all the organizing being done! Occupy Oakland encourages political activity that is decentralized and welcomes diverse voices and actions into the movement.
General Assembly Standard Agenda
Welcome & Introductions
Reports from Committees, Caucuses, & Independent Organizations
Announcements
(Optional) Discussion Topic
Occupy Oakland activities and contact info for some Bay Area Groups with past or present Occupy Oakland members.
Occupy Oakland Web Committee: (web@occupyoakland.org)
Strike Debt Bay Area : strikedebtbayarea.tumblr.com
Berkeley Post Office Defenders:http://berkeleypostofficedefenders.wordpress.com/
Alan Blueford Center 4 Justice:https://www.facebook.com/ABC4JUSTICE
Oakland Privacy Working Group:https://oaklandprivacy.wordpress.com
Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity: prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity.wordpress.com/
Bay Area AntiRepression: antirepression@occupyoakland.org
Biblioteca Popular: http://tinyurl.com/mdlzshy
Interfaith Tent: www.facebook.com/InterfaithTent
Port Truckers Solidarity: oaklandporttruckers.wordpress.com
Bay Area Intifada: bayareaintifada.wordpress.com
Transport Workers Solidarity: www.transportworkers.org
Fresh Juice Party (aka Chalkupy) freshjuiceparty.com/chalkupy-gallery
Sudo Room: https://sudoroom.org
Omni Collective: https://omnicommons.org/
First They Came for the Homeless: https://www.facebook.com/pages/First-they-came-for-the-homeless/253882908111999
Sunflower Alliance: http://www.sunflower-alliance.org/
Bay Area Public School: http://thepublicschool.org/bay-area
San Francisco based groups:
Occupy Bay Area United: www.obau.org
Occupy Forum: (see OBAU above)
San Francisco Projection Department: http://tinyurl.com/kpvb3rv
Join community members, immigrants’ rights advocates, and many more advocates at the TRUTH Act forum in Alameda County to demand transparency and accountability! Sheriff Ahern has been collaborating with ICE to facilitate local deportations and the separation of families, it’s time to demand the TRUTH.
Under the TRUTH Act, any jurisdiction that has allowed ICE access in the past year is required to hold a community forum bringing transparency to local jail entanglement with immigration enforcement.
Through our advocacy efforts, the Board of Supervisors scheduled the forum to ensure that our community could obtain information and ask questions about how our county works with ICE. This is crucial as Ahern himself will be present.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1d3LmLYVz4jsV4f7xKekedFh4V9zyvz-n1yE1ynZeRhc/edit
ALL OUT ON MONDAY to get #ICEOutofAlameda! Force @SheriffAhern to be transparent about his practices of ICE collaboration so we can mount a strategic community defense against deportations and family separations. #NoPOLIMIGRA https://t.co/esXzCU11qw pic.twitter.com/TBmaNTXzOz
— CausaJusta (@CausaJusta1) September 28, 2018
We want to hear from the East Bay public banking community (that would be you) about branding our future bank. Are we building a Public Bank of Oakland or a Public Bank of the East Bay? More than a name is at issue. When we talk with people who are just finding out about our bank’we can focus on Oaklandâ€s early leadership and central role—or we can emphasize all the stake-holding jurisdictions, including Berkeley, Richmond, and Alameda County.
We hope you’ll bring your thoughts to our next meeting on Monday. If you can’t make it, please do email us at contact@friendsofpublicbankofoakland.org. Help keep the “public” in our public bank!
Oakland City Council will discuss creating our local public bank. To review: On September 11, the four-member finance committee looked at the feasibility study, heard from the community, and decided to send the whole matter to the full Council. Now, to make sure the Council keeps moving forward, we need to show up once more. Please attend if you can; we’ll be there with t-shirts and signs for you.
City Council Meeting
Tuesday, October 2, 2018, 6:30pm
Oakland City Hall, third floor
Behind the scenes
Progress toward making our bank a reality can seem maddeningly slow, but it’s happening, even when there are no big headlines. For example, members of the California Public Banking Alliance, including FPBO folks, recently met with the state’s Department of Business Oversight. DBO is key; they’re the ones who issue the licenses for financial institutions in our state.
Come join comrades for a night of solidarity letter writing to inside organizers facing repression from the 2018 National Prison Strike
In solidarity with the National #PrisonStrike, join comrades for a night of letterwriting to inside organizers facing repression from the strike on Monday at Telegraph Beer Garden in Oakland. Find out more info here: https://t.co/xbTbVmS7BU pic.twitter.com/45KNVrRPlS
— East Bay DSA (@DSAEastBay) September 27, 2018
Because of the COVID pandemic we will be meeting virtually via Zoom on the first Monday of the month.
Meeting ID: 828 0976 4186
The Oscar Grant Committee Against Police Brutality & State Repression (OGC) is a
grassroots democratic organization that was formed as a conscious united front for justice against police brutality. The OGC is involved in the struggle for police accountability and is committed to stopping police brutality.
In alliance with the International Longshore & Warehouse Union (ILWU) we organized the October 23, 2010 labor and community rally for Justice for Oscar Grant. On that day the ILWU shut down the Bay Area ports in solidarity. Our mission is to educate, organize and mobilize people against police and state repression. Sisters and brothers! The Oscar Grant Committee invites you to join us in this vital struggle.
We meet on the 1st Monday of each month
You can join our discussion list by sending a blank (doesn’t even need a subject) email to
oscargrantcommittee-subscribe@lists.riseup.net
Turn out for a rally and march calling for FULL sheriff accountability and transparency! In the span of just 6 days, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department has been exposed for:
- Illegally recording attorney & youth-client privileged conversations
- Brutally assaulting a 76-year old disabled woman for jaywalking
- Guards ignoring the screams of a pregnant incarcerated woman for hours while she went into labor in a cold, dirty concrete solitary confinement cell
Join us to demand that the Board of Supervisors authorize an independent audit and full transparency and accountability of the Alameda Sheriff’s Department. #AuditAhern NOW!! For more information visit our Facebook event page.
Oakland City Council will discuss creating our local public bank. To review: On September 11, the four-member finance committee looked at the feasibility study, heard from the community, and decided to send the whole matter to the full Council. Now, to make sure the Council keeps moving forward, we need to show up once more. Please attend if you can; we’ll be there with t-shirts and signs for you.
The financial crisis that erupted a decade ago in the U.S. subprime mortgage market has had immense political and economic ramifications. Ten years after the bail out, the austerity imposed by capitalists and their politicians has made increasing inequality and hardship the norm. The classical meaning of crisis is turning point. Did the crisis mark the decline of the established political consensus? Did it contribute to the rise of Trump one hand and the DSA on the other? How should democratic socialists organize knowing there’s always a next crisis with capitalism? Find out the answers to these questions and many more at the next installment of Night School.
Required Readings
See the readings that we’ll be discussing after a brief introduction from our members.
National Call to Action
Stay Mobilized Until Kavanaugh is Defeated: No “Business As Usual”
Everyone Who Can Possibly Go to Washington, DC Between Now and When Kavanaugh is Defeated—Get There NOW
No Reliance on the Politicians
The Hands of the FBI Must Not Be Tied, the FBI Must Be Free to Conduct a Full Investigation of All the Charges Against Kavanaugh
Mass Direct Action Now to Defend Democracy and Defend Women’s Rights
Confirming Kavanaugh sends a message to women across the country that victims of sexual assault should stay silent. Defeating Kavanaugh sends a message that victims should speak out, stand up, and fight.
Resist. Confront. Disrupt. Fight to win (AND WE CAN WIN)!
Over the past week, the protests and confrontations in Washington, DC, by the Resistance, the mass movement against Trump, have been pivotal in reversing the impending catastrophe of Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination. Above all, the courageous determination and action of women who are survivors of sexual assault and abuse have been decisive in making it possible to defeat Trump and the Republicans’ rush to put a sexual abuser on the US Supreme Court. The indelible courage of Christine Blasey Ford’s disclosure of Brett Kavanaugh’s sexual assault and her testimony last Thursday showed the nation a real hero. Other women have answered her call, and have since come forward with their own searing accounts of Kavanaugh’s sexual assaults: Deborah Ramirez, Julie Swetnick, and Elizabeth Rasor. Our support for Dr. Ford and all these women is unequivocal and categorical. The stand they have taken has dragged this nation from the precipice of a national and international disgrace to the genuine possibility of saving American democracy.
Despite Professor Blasey Ford’s courageous and obviously true testimony Thursday, afterwards, on Thursday afternoon and Friday morning, the Republican politicians were still attempting to jam Kavanaugh’s nomination through the US Senate Judiciary Committee, filling the Senate hearing room with the gross male rage of a bunch of crude sexist bullies, repeating one after the other the long-discredited arguments misogynists have used to silence women trying to fight against sexual assault. The Democratic politicians on the other side who supposedly opposed Kavanaugh and rightly claimed to support Dr. Blasey Ford’s testimony, behaved far too much as if they had been abused into passivity themselves by the Republicans’ abusive ranting and raving, rather than finding the courage to really defend Blasey Ford’s heroic stand and actually fight to win.
Under these circumstances, two young women, Ana Maria Archila and Maria Gallagher had to join Blasey Ford and the other Kavanaugh accusers as the real heroes of this struggle. On Friday morning, after the supposed open-minded Republican Senator Jeff Flake announced that he would actually vote with the other Republicans to send the Kavanaugh nomination to the full Senate for a vote for confirmation, these two women caught the cowardly Senator Flake in an elevator. They genuinely and passionately spoke truth to power. They expressed the indignation and determination of millions of women across the nation and the Resistance fighting for the future of democracy in America to break the suffocating silence imposed on the victims of sexual assault and abuse by American society for far too long. Their confrontation with the timid Senator Flake communicated the reality that for the rest of his life, wherever he goes, he will be held accountable for his role in accepting or rejecting sexual predator Brett Kavanaugh on the US Supreme Court. They demanded, “Look at me when I’m talking to you,” when Flake tried to avoid hearing their own declarations of their histories of sexual assault. Their bold and decisive action, not the passive, boring, and half-stepping speeches of politicians inside the committee, forced Flake, after the elevator confrontation, to change his position and demand an independent FBI investigation of the sexual abuse charges against Kavanaugh before a vote could take place in the full Senate. The audacity of Archila and Gallagher is a model for how our movement can and must carry through on the fight we need to make now.
With MORE of this kind of bold and determined direct action in DC between now and the final vote on Kavanaugh, our movement can win. We must make the most of this opportunity. With the Senate confirmation vote officially postponed only by a week, we must act and we must act fast. Hundreds of people have been protesting inside and outside of the Capitol. Throughout the course of this entire process, fresh Resistance forces need to flood the capital. We need a mass confrontation of the movement with the politicians, especially the ever-so-timid waverers Jeff Flake (R), Susan Collins (R), Lisa Murkowski (R), Paul Manchin (D), and Heidi Heitkamp (D), and demand that they oppose Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation. This entire fight over Kavanaugh’s nomination makes clear Rule #1 of the movement: do NOT rely on the politicians to fight; rely on ourselves and each other to win.
“Never again” begins now. It is obvious the confirmation of Kavanaugh will send a message that in America, people who are sexually assaulted or abused should keep silent. That message must be defeated, and the message sent by Christine Blasey Ford and the other heroic survivors who have been speaking out must prevail. Kavanaugh has also clearly, throughout his career, been an enemy of the legal and political gains of the women’s movement, in particular an enemy of the right of women to control over their own bodies secured in 1973 in the Roe v Wade decision. Despite the statements to the contrary of certain cowardly waverers, it is obvious that Kavanaugh will take advantage of the first opportunity he could get to overturn Roe all together, and until he can accomplish that, vote to render Roe v Wade a dead letter in practice as much as possible. Trump would not have nominated him if that were not the case.
In addition to the message aimed at silencing the struggle against sexual abuse and the attack on the fundamental rights of women, the threat of Kavanaugh’s confirmation places democracy at stake in yet another way, which is completely bound up with Donald Trump’s aspiration to create an authoritarian presidency. Even among Trump’s short list of reactionary candidates to nominate to the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh stood out as holding absolutely extreme positions in favor of presidential power and against presidential accountability. In particular, Kavanaugh has publicly argued repeatedly that presidents should not be subject at all to investigations like the Mueller investigation. For the past year, the Mueller investigation has been the only governmental process aimed at determining the role the Trump campaign may have played in conspiring with Putin’s attempt to distort and determine the results of the 2016 presidential elections. Only the Mueller investigation can make possible holding Trump accountable for his numerous efforts to obstruct justice and turn the FBI, the Justice Dept. as a whole, and the nation’s intelligence agencies into his own personal state police. Given that there are already four judges on the Court ready to uphold a very expansive view of presidential power, Kavanaugh’s confirmation would create a long-term majority prepared to uphold the emergence of a reactionary, authoritarian presidential dictatorship over the next period of American history, beginning with an imminent set of decisions pertaining to the Mueller investigation.
The future of democracy is at stake. We are being called by history to meet the challenge of this extraordinary moment.
To all supporters of the movement to defeat Kavanaugh and Trump: get to DC this week, however you can. Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the US Supreme Court must be defeated. While Dr. Ford’s forthright courage was celebrated across the nation, anyone watching last Thursday’s performance by Brett Kavanaugh shuddered in disgust at his debauched rage. His performance was, from the beginning to end, the behavior of a guilty man. His testimony left no doubt that he is a dangerous misogynist and sexual predator. He presented an appalling display of exactly the kind of judge who should never receive a lifetime appointment to the most powerful court in the world. His testimony made utterly clear that Kavanaugh on the Court would be the closest equivalent to giving Donald Trump a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court.
Until Dr. Ford came forward, Kavanaugh’s nomination seemed all but secured. Today, the opposite is true. Today, Kavanaugh’s nomination presents a test of the #Metoo movement that has come forward against Trump’s misogyny, his promotion and defense of sexual assault that has been central to his political platform. As long as Donald Trump, as Abuser-in-Chief, remains in office, misogynist men like Kavanaugh will feel they have a greenlight to attack, harass, objectify and abuse women. By defeating the nomination of Kavanaugh we will be dealing a blow to Trump’s attacks on democracy and his movement of reactionary supporters who have been emboldened to carry out misogynist, immigrant-bashing, and racist attacks.
Now more than ever, as our nation stands at a crossroads, the Resistance must rise to our historic challenge. This is no time for “business as usual” or to rely on the promises and maneuvers of cynical politicians or the FBI. BAMN calls on all anti-Trump and pro-democracy Resistance fighters to join us in action to defeat the nomination of Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court, and to force Trump to resign or be removed. The future of freedom and democracy is in our hands.