Calendar

Please join Share The Bulb for a weekend of actions against the pending eviction of more than 50 people from the Albany Bulb!

January 17th
—————
Residents and allies of the Albany Bulb will rally at Albany City Hall at 4PM, before marching up Solano Avenue. We will stage an overnight campout on Solano Avenue, illustrating the plight of the more than 50 residents of the Albany Bulb, who, if evicted, would be forced onto Albany’s streets.

January 18th
————–
Artists will flock to the Bulb for a day of participatory art, live demonstrations, workshops, and art tours. Join us for an Art Festival at the Bulb from 12-5PM!

*****

The campout is part a West Coast Day of Action to fight the criminalization of homelessness, sponsored by the Western Regional Advocacy Project (WRAP). Cities in the Bay Area and around the country have passed laws making it impossible for homeless people to live within the law. It has become a crime to sit or lie down, to sleep in public, panhandle or otherwise conduct their lives in public view.

The eviction would force Bulb residents back into the same social narrative of police harassment and criminalization of homelessness which originally drove many of them to the Bulb.

We have successfully prevented the eviction from going forward since October, and we’re ready to take the fight into the new year! Come join us, and find out how you can help preserve this unique Bay Area treasure.

Facebook event & RSVP.

Share the Bulb Facebook.

If you’re interested in direct action related to local foreclosure defense, show up early and learn more.

Original notice.

January 18th
————–
Artists will flock to the Bulb for a day of participatory art, live demonstrations, workshops, and art tours. Join us for an Art Festival at the Bulb from 12-5PM!

*****

The campout on Friday is part a West Coast Day of Action to fight the criminalization of homelessness, sponsored by the Western Regional Advocacy Project (WRAP). Cities in the Bay Area and around the country have passed laws making it impossible for homeless people to live within the law. It has become a crime to sit or lie down, to sleep in public, panhandle or otherwise conduct their lives in public view.

The eviction would force Bulb residents back into the same social narrative of police harassment and criminalization of homelessness which originally drove many of them to the Bulb.

We have successfully prevented the eviction from going forward since October, and we’re ready to take the fight into the new year! Come join us, and find out how you can help preserve this unique Bay Area treasure.

Friday’s action.

Facebook event & RSVP.

Share the Bulb Facebook.

The San Francisco Gray Panthers are very concerned about issues of mass incarceration, prison expansion, profiling of minorities and youth, and the criminalization of poverty. Particularly in San Francisco, with such extremes of wealth and poverty, it seems outrageous to build more jail space, when three-quarters of prisoners are there because they’re too poor to make bail.

We are helping to organize two important upcoming events to stop the new jail and we hope you will join us!

Here’s the details:

Saturday, January 18th: Attend our Town Hall meeting to speak out about the jail plan, and get prepared for the upcoming Supervisors meeting: 2-4 PM at the Redstone Building, 2940 16th Street (near mission). Download the event flier here.

Thursday, January 23rd: Speak out at the San Francisco Supervisor�s Neighborhood Services and Safety Committee Hearing on the Jail Replacement Project: 1-3:30pm, in City Hall Room 250.

Join Strike Debt Bay Area in working on some exciting projects locally and nationally to fight unjust debt.

– The latest on our coalition efforts to Save the Berkeley Post Office and fight the privatization of our commons.

– The latest on our efforts to help Richmond and NGO allies push for principal reduction for Richmond’s homeowners. Read an article written by two Strike Debt Bay Area members on the Richmond principal reduction / eminent domain case.

In addition, we are exploring the use of a public bank to help Richmond, CA and other communities escape the thrall of Wall Street.

– A report on FedUp, our action in coalition with Occupy SF and others to highlight (and Illuminate!) the Fed’s contributions to the ills of our economy and call for it to become unprivatized.

– Work on our radio segment on KPFA

– Other projects include efforts to fight against student debt in conjunction with peeps at UC Cal via a Debtors’ Union, a book group with semi-weekly discussions, investigations into the legitimacy of mortgage ownership and therefore the right to foreclose, efforts to thwart payday loan usury and more.

“Just as bosses are dependent on workers, so are lenders dependent on borrowers. If workers walk out, the enterprise stops. If borrowers refuse to pay their debts, the lenders could be in real trouble. Each side depends on the other. The millions of underwater mortgage holders, of student debtors and credit card holders, need the bank loans –  but so do the banks need those borrowers, and they especially need them to cooperate by paying their monthly charges. Otherwise, the capital that the banks list on their books begins to drain away.” ~Francis Fox Piven

Check out our website, our Facebook, and follow us on Twitter.

Through the end of January we will have General Assembly at the sudoroom on 2141 Broadway, Oakland, CA.

Here are instructions to access the room, the entrance is on 22nd Street:

https://sudoroom.org/wiki/Getting_there

This Sunday will be a Cryptoparty at the sudoroom, along with the third Sunday in January, these will be opportunities to update your digital profile so the government can’t easily track your every move.  More blather on this to follow this afternoon when I have a moment.

Our General Assembly is a participatory gathering of Oakland community members and beyond, where everyone who shows up is treated equally and has equal decision-making power. Occupy Oakland’s General Assembly uses a participatory decision-making process appropriately called, “Occupy Oakland’s Collective Decision-Making Process.” Our Assembly and the process we have collectively cultivated strives to reach agreement while building community.

Autonomous Action & the General Assembly
The bulk of the work of Occupy Oakland does NOT happen in the General Assembly. It happens in various committees, caucuses, and associated groups that report back to the general assembly. Everyone participating in Occupy Oakland should be part of at least one associated group. Occupy Oakland encourages autonomous actions that do not require consensus from the General Assembly. This encourages political activity that is decentralized and welcomes diverse voices and actions into the movement.

General Assembly Standard Agenda

1. Welcome
2. Welcome Announcements
3. Agenda Overview
4. Forum
5. Reports from Committees, Subcommittees, Caucuses, & Working Groups
6. Action Announcements
7. General Announcements

Garden Project Workday.
Free Pancake Potluck Breakfast.
Sign up to Plant a Fruit Tree in your Yard.
Restorative Justice Community Healing Circle.

Source: Facebook announcement.

Reclaiming Finance: How Time is Stolen and can be Taken Back

In The Thief of Time Terry Pratchett imagines time as a substance that can be moved from place to place. In his novel monks guard giant jars of time and make sure it flows just how it is supposed to. Though intended as humor Terry Pratchett’s novel mirrors the reality of banking. In the current global capitalist order central banks and large financial institutions direct the flow of time through currencies and credit in order to reserve it for governments and global conglomerates. Dante Popple, a senior at Bard College at Simon’s Rock studying Politics and Philosophy, will discuss the mechanisms by which banks and governments steal time and how they can be undone, and what a socialist form of finance might look like.

The Postal Service has put the Berkeley Post Office up for sale!!

The Postal Service has started to outsource Post Office services to Staples, replacing union jobs with low-paying, low benefit work.

We’ll be reviewing our Festival of Celebration and Resistance on the 18th.

Come help us plan our next steps. Come help us plan our action for the 25th.  Come help us prepare for the City Council meeting soon at which the Zoning Overlay Ordinance will be considered.

WE MAY BE WINNING!

AND CHECK OUT OUR SPIFFY NEW WEBSITE.

The film will be followed by Q&A and discussion led by Andrea Pritchett,
one of the key people in the “Divestment Movement” to end Apartheid in South Africa.

Announcements to follow.

Join NYU Professor and activist Andrew Ross for a discussion of his new book:
 
 
Creditocracy and the Case for Debt Refusal
 
 
(He will also be speaking on the UC Campus on Tuesday.)

We are living in the cruel grip of a creditocracy—where the finance industry commandeers our elected governments and where the citizenry have to take out loans to meet their basic needs. The implications of mass indebtedness for any democracy are profound, and the historical record shows that whenever a creditor class becomes as powerful as Wall Street, the result has been debt bondage. Following in the ancient tradition of the jubilee, activists have had some success in repudiating the debts of developing countries. The time is ripe for a debtors movement to use the same kinds of moral and legal arguments to bring relief to household debtors in the North, and to create an alternative economy, independent of the debt-money system.

Hear histories and current news about one of today’s strongest grassroots social movements, the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST). The MST is a movement of 1.5 million landless women, men and children, who have forced the Brazilian government to redistribute 20 million acres of farmland in Brazil through the occupation of large unproductive land estates. This year marks the 30 year anniversary of the MST’s founding, and in February there will be a one-week gathering of over 20,000 MST activists to discuss the future of the movement. The MST has invited a delegation of 10 U.S. activists to attend the conference, including several Bay Area Activists.

Speakers include members of the U.S. delegation to the MST’s upcoming National Congress:

-Becky Tarlau, Friends of the MST organizer and PhD candidate at UC Berkeley.
-Shango Abiola, The Black Riders Liberation Party
-Effie Rawlings, Occupy the Farm

Facebook event & RSVP.

Andrew Ross just wrote a “movement book” for Strike Debt – Creditocracy. He has been super active in working against student debt and in Strike Debt NY.

We are living in the cruel grip of a creditocracy where the finance industry commandeers our elected governments and where the citizenry have to take out loans to meet their basic needs. The implications of mass indebtedness for any democracy are profound, and the historical record shows that whenever a creditor class becomes as powerful as Wall Street, the result has been debt bondage. Following in the ancient tradition of the jubilee, activists have had some success in repudiating the debts of developing countries. The time is ripe for a debtors movement to use the same kinds of moral and legal arguments to bring relief to household debtors in the North, and to create an alternative economy, independent of the debt-money system,

From the book blurbs:

In this lucid and accessible book, Andrew Ross argues that we are increasingly oppressed by the rule of credit and that ever more people must go into debt just to access life’s necessities. But Ross not only names the problem; more importantly, he points toward solutions. Read this book and join a debt resistors movement.

From his Wikipedia biography:

Andrew Ross is a professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. A writer for The New York Times, Artforum, The Nation, Newsweek and The Village Voice, he is also the author and/or editor of numerous books. Much of his writing focuses on labor, the urban environment, and the organization of work, from the Western world of business and high-technology to conditions of offshore labor in the Global South. Making use of social theory as well as ethnography, his writing questions the human and environmental cost of economic growth, has an activist, alternative globalization approach, and emphasizes principles of sustainability.
 
He has been active in the anti-sweatshop movement since the mid-1990s. From the late 1990s, he has turned his attention to the academic labor movement, both in the national AAUP, and at NYU as a vocal supporter of the graduate student union, and as a founding member of Faculty Democracy. In 2007, his co-edited volume, The University Against Itself, documented and analyzed the long strike at NYU in 2005 by GSOC-UAW (The Graduate Student Organizing Committee). A founder of the Gulf Labor Coalition, he has helped to organize campaigns to raise migrant labor standards in the United Arab Emirates. An early participant in Occupy Wall Street, he helped found the Occupy Student Debt Campaign and has been an integral member of the Occupy Debt Assembly and Strike Debt—a coalition formed in the summer of 2012 to help build a debtors movement. Strike Debt produced the Debt Resistors Operations Manual and organized the Rolling Jubilee.

He will also be speaking on Monday, the 20th in Oakland.

ATTENTION: The #DAC WILL NOT be on the agenda for the 1/21 #oakmtg. Admin plans to bring to Public Safety on 1/28, then to Council on 2/4.

per Dan Kalb
https://twitter.com/DanKalb/status/421360306829279232

So we won’t be holding a big demonstration on Tuesday the 21st, but a few folks will probably show up with a bit of chow for those that didn’t get the change-of-date message.  If folks are interested we’ll show a movie at the Plaza at 7ish.

Please join us to tell the City Council what you think on February 4th:

http://occupyoakland.org/ai1ec_event/dont-sell-people-oakland-dept-homeland-security/?instance_id=259287

Click to download full-sized printable flyer

Sponsored by the League of Women Voters Oakland:

How does a city like Oakland respond to residents’ demands for more effective crime prevention and reduction while protecting everyone’s civil liberties? What is the Domain Awareness Center and how will it impact Oakland? How much surveillance is enough — or too much — to enhance our law enforcement capabilities?

Bring your ideas and a friend or neighbor to discuss these important issues with knowledgeable resource people and fellow Oaklanders.

Hewlett Packard is developing and supporting a biometric ID system installed in Israeli checkpoints in the Occupied West Bank which categorizes citizens by their ethnic background. In the United States, HP is profiting from work with the US prison system and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) through a contract with the US Department of Homeland Security ICE Law Enforcement Support Center (LESC) to speed up the internal process of deciding a person’s documentation status.

Come and learn from art activists about how to make creative and effective art installations and action props that can be used as we confront corporations who profit from suppression.

Surveillance, policing, prison and corporate complicity: let’s take action!

The Oakland Privacy Working Group will meet at the Sudoroom Wednesday Jan. 22nd at 6:30 to organize an action for February 4th at City Hall to stop the planned building of the DAC, an Oakland-wide surveillance grid to monitor the citizens of the East Bay.

The City Council will be voting on selecting a contractor to take over Phase II of the DAC contract from SAIC  (who was dismissed for violating Oakland’s Nuclear Free Zone Ordinance, which prohibits the city from knowingly doing business with any entity that is engaged in nuclear weapons work).  Apparently all the other alternatives have dipped their toes in the nuclear pool, as well.  The Oakland Privacy Working Group hopes to have a big presence in Oscar Grant Plaza in front of City Hall before we go in to the chambers to voice our opinions about building out this privacy-destroying networked spy hub. We are planning on a potluck at 6:15 in the plaza, bring goodies to share. There will be speakers and music, as well. Since the City Council never seems to address the DAC issue before the witching hour or later we will also have some movies in the plaza.

For more information on the insidiousness of the DAC and how it came to be in Oakland check out the DAC FAQ, the Oakland Wiki Domain Awareness Page and the Oakland Privacy WordPress.

Plans for the demo that need to be firmed up:

1. Facebook Event Page

2. Brass liberation orchestra

3. Music - Last bar fighter

4. Food

5. Movie

6. Sound System

7. Puppets

8. Speakers

   1. suggestions? Daniel Ellsberg?  Edward Snowden?  Batman?

   2. Fired after

   3. Anti Repression Committee

   4. press outreach

9. press release

10. press conference

Please sign the on line petitionetition to stop the DAC

Sign the on line petition calling for the DAC to be defunded. We got 4,000 signatures in about a week and need another 900 to reach our goal.

Click for printable PDF

Have you ever needed a document and not known where to find it? Have you ever been told you can’t access a document that you need? Or perhaps you want to request documents from a government agency but don’t know how or what you have a right to ask for.

Don’t fret, we have just the person to answer your questions.

Join the Bay Area News Group’s award-winning investigative reporter and author, Thomas Peele, for a free session on how to access public records. The workshop will provide information about laws governing the release of records as well as how to file Freedom of Information requests.

The session is part of the Independent Journal’s community engagement initiative, which also includes informal public meetings in communities across the county.

Reservations are necessary for the Jan. 22 public access workshop on a first-come, first-served basis. Each attendee must reserve a space. To sign up, visit this signup site.

For more information about the IJ’s community outreach and Peele’s talk, visit Editor Robert Sterling’s blog at blogs.marinij.com/notesonnews.

For details on Peele’s talk, also contact Martin Reynolds, Bay Area News Group senior editor for community engagement, at mreynolds@bayareanewsgroup.com or 510-390-1779.