Calendar
ROAR will be a space to gather, build, and learn from each other’s struggles and continue to build an anti-racist front in the Bay Area and beyond. During these times more and more attention is being paid to those of us who use direct action and hold liberatory and revolutionary politics. We can use this moment not only to inspire others through our actions, but to also inspire with our ideas. To draw a line not just against this or that politician, or this or that alt-right figure, but to construct revolutionary positions such as returning land to the indigenous, centering black folks and their perspectives, community self defense, taking care of one another, putting women and gender non conforming people to the front, obliterating borders, opening prison doors, and gaining our freedom from the state, capitalism, and all the other damning institutions.
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Anti-Facism Movement
Anti-Patriarchy, Transphobia + Homophobia Anti-Racism in Education Black + Brown Resistance Black Liberation/Black Power Community self-defense Crisis Relief Alternative Models/Disaster Solidarity History Lessons from Movements past Indigenous Struggles |
Intersections of racism and disability
Muslim struggles Political Prisoners Policing Prison Abolitionist Radical Self-Care Undocumented + Immigrant struggles Youth Liberation Queer Liberation & Legacy |
Wealth & Income Inequality: A Two-Part Workshop by Strike Debt Bay Area
Everywhere we look, everything from the headlines to our paychecks to the tents under the freeway remind us that rich people are getting richer and poor people are getting poorer. But it can be hard to understand exactly how and why that is happening. If we can’t understand it, we can’t change it. And change it we must!
After a look at the causes of runaway inequality in Part 1, we’ll talk about some fairer ways to provide economic security for all in Part 2. What do alternatives to corporate capitalism look like?
Part 1: How Corporations Move Money from the Many to the Few
Sunday, April 29, 11:00am to 12:45pm
Do you wonder what role racism plays in wealth inequality? Do you wish you understood exactly how Wall Street exploits Main Street? The answers are not terribly complicated, but they are shocking. We’ll learn about stock manipulation, financialization, strip-mining, redlining and more.
Part 2: How We Can Build a More Just Economy for All
Sunday, May 6, 11:00am to 12:45pm
Using our shared understanding of the problem, we will examine past and existing movements for change: what they are, how they work, and how they can grow. We’ll talk about better ways to make sure all have access to the basic necessities. Then we’ll discuss how we can keep the wealth we create in our communities instead of paying it into the bank accounts of global elites. In sum, what might a fair, sustainable, and joyful economic system look like?
We’d love you to RSVP to strike.debt.bay.area@gmail.com so we know how many people to expect.
This workshop is free.
We’d love you to come to both parts if you can.
Wealth & Income Inequality: A Two-Part Workshop by Strike Debt Bay Area
Everywhere we look, everything from the headlines to our paychecks to the tents under the freeway remind us that rich people are getting richer and poor people are getting poorer. But it can be hard to understand exactly how and why that is happening. If we can’t understand it, we can’t change it. And change it we must!
After a look at the causes of runaway inequality in Part 1, we’ll talk about some fairer ways to provide economic security for all in Part 2. What do alternatives to corporate capitalism look like?
Part 1: How Corporations Move Money from the Many to the Few
Sunday, April 29, 11:00am to 12:45pm
Do you wonder what role racism plays in wealth inequality? Do you wish you understood exactly how Wall Street exploits Main Street? The answers are not terribly complicated, but they are shocking. We’ll learn about stock manipulation, financialization, strip-mining, redlining and more.
Part 2: How We Can Build a More Just Economy for All
Sunday, May 6, 11:00am to 12:45pm
Using our shared understanding of the problem, we will examine past and existing movements for change: what they are, how they work, and how they can grow. We’ll talk about better ways to make sure all have access to the basic necessities. Then we’ll discuss how we can keep the wealth we create in our communities instead of paying it into the bank accounts of global elites. In sum, what might a fair, sustainable, and joyful economic system look like?
We’d love you to RSVP to strike.debt.bay.area@gmail.com so we know how many people to expect.
This workshop is free.
We’d love you to come to both parts if you can.
This is one of the biggest events of the year at People’s Park, with a great lineup of music, dance and speakers. Come and participate!
12:30 Michael Diehl greeting
12:35 Yukon Hannibal
1:00 Felix
1:15 Katy Stuck
1:25 Jim Burrill
1:50 Hali Hammer & Friends
2:15 Michael Delacore
2:25 Max Ventura
2:45 Speakers
3:00 Burnt (punk reggae funk)
3:50 Soul
4:05 Ruby’s In Town
4:50 Trump
5:05 Skank Bank
5:50 Closing remarks
East Bay Food Not Bombs will provide free vegetarian / vegan food and drinks for the anniversary! Free food is nice! Thank you Food Not Bombs!
League of Women Voters of Piedmont Speaker Series
Catherine Crump is an Assistant Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic at U.C. Berkeley Law School. She will speak about surveillance, public safety, privacy and civil rights. A former staff attorney for the ACLU, Professor Crump has focused her career on free speech, privacy and the impact of modern technology on the law.
This event is open to the public and is co-sponsored by the City of Piedmont and City Councilmember, Jen Cavenaugh.
You are invited to
A conversation with Terry Kupers:
Why we need to be concerned about mass incarceration and supermax solitary confinement
The prison population is seven times what it was in the 1970s, and meanwhile the proportion of prisoners with serious illness has grown. Tens of millions of people have served time and experienced resultant compromised lives.
Solitary confinement is pervasive in the prison world and causes great human damage. Let’s get beyond the “lock ’em up and throw away the key” sensibility and talk frankly about how mass incarceration, solitary confinement and the criminalization of mental illness damage our social fabric.
Speaker
Ashby Village member Terry A. Kupers, M.D., M.S.P., is Professor Emeritus at The Wright Institute and Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. He provides expert testimony in class action litigation regarding the psychological effects of prison conditions including isolated confinement in supermaximum security units, the quality of correctional mental health care, and the effects of sexual abuse in correctional settings. His recently published book is Solitary: The Inside Story of Supermax Isolation and How We Can Abolish It. He is also the author of Prison Madness: The Mental Health Crisis Behind Bars and What We Must Do About It, and co-editor of Prison Masculinities. Terry Kupers is a contributing editor of Correctional Mental Health Report. He received the 2005 Exemplary Psychiatrist Award from the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI).
The location is accessible.
Space is limited!
and presence that characterized people in the U.S. during the next decade
With Steve Martinot
Preceding the Occupy Oakland General Assembly
The 1960s were an exciting time to live through for those who could see what was happening, because they were a time when, all over the world, people were coming together, organizing themselves, and living their lives according to principles – principles of opposition, of democracy, of cooperation, of justice, and of liberation from the colonialisms of former centuries, both in the colonies and in the colonialist countries. 1968 marked a node in this historical development, in which huge events materialized and concretized movements as upsurges that focused on contesting corporate colonialist and militarist power.
We could list the Vietnamese Tet offensive that deconstructed US strategies there, the strike in France that was the largest strike in history, rebellions in black communities across the US in response to the assassination of MLK, the formation of Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement and other RUMs throughout the auto industry along with the first massive strike in Lordstown, the student upsurges in the US that seized Columbia Univ., SFSU, NYU, and others to stop the military’s braintrusts and make education relevant, the civil rights movement in Ireland, the Cultural Revolution in China that was at its populist high-point before being organized into a vast sectarian campaign, Prague Spring, the massive uprising in Mexico City during the Olympics (with solidarity from John Carlos and Tommy Smith), and the beginning of that new form of international anti-colonialist solidarity epitomized by groups of USians working in Cuba and later organized as the Venceremos Brigades.
All these events had profound influence on the thinking of the world’s people, leading almost to an inability of the power elites of the corporate world to govern in the old way. Socialist and socializing ideologies became general ways of thinking, the difference between party politics and people’s politics thrust parties aside, and movements teaching people how to establish political and cultural autonomy as a source of real political strength and not of division took hold for the next ten years.
Steve Martinot has been a union and community organizer, lecturer at the Center for Interdisciplinary Programs at SFSU, and written extensively on the structure of racism and white supremacy in the US, as well as on corporate economics and culture.
Dinner: 6:30 PM
Movie: 7:30 PM
Film Night: Dispatches from Resistant Mexico – Producer/Director Caitlin Manning will present her film from communities and peoples in resistance in Mexico. Sponsored by Liberated Lens and co-sponsored by the Chiapas Support Committee
Calvillo Manriquez v. DeVos – Fraudulent Student Debt
On April 30, 2018, the Court will also hear argument on Plaintiffs’ Motion for a Preliminary Injunction in a class-action on behalf of certain Corinthian borrowers (though the result of this case will set an important precedent for ALL former for-profit students). Through this motion, Plaintiffs seek an order stopping the Department of Education from partially denying these class members’ borrower defense applications and an order requiring the Department to grant them a full loan discharge as it was doing under its streamlined process before January 20, 2017. Although it is unlikely that we will get a ruling that day, we will will get to hear how the judge is thinking about the issue.
The Debt Collective submitted an amicus brief in this case detailing harms former students experienced and asking the court to provide full relief to all. You can read the brief here.
SPONSORED BY THE ALGORITHMIC FAIRNESS AND OPACITY GROUP (AFOG)AND THE CENTER FOR SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, MEDICINE, AND SOCIETY (CSTMS).
As the filtering and curation of everything has been taken over by computers, “fair algorithms” has become both a legal problem and a rallying cry. Researchers in machine learning are now trying to explicitly incorporate fairness into their conceptualization of the algorithmic systems that curate today’s job applicants, predict recidivism, offer housing, find rides, and filter social media. Commercial platforms that operate these systems have, belatedly and after a series of scandals, started to recognize that fairness is a problem. Yet the fairnesses addressed so far have mostly been limited to an arid definition where “fair” means statistical fairness or compliance with certain US laws. This is kind of fairness is relatively clearly defined and largely uncontroversial. But a technically-legal algorithm that will still be widely perceived as unfair is no solution to algorithmic fairness. This paper argues that these platforms now need to grapple with the more expansive meanings of fairness, even if this entangles computing with the morass of applied ethics, philosophy, and public opinion. To that end, the paper proposes a list of the kinds of fairness that are relevant for people who operate algorithmic platforms that curate, filter, or predict. It also argues that these kinds of fairness are already present in other “technical” engineering work although they have been resisted by software engineering.
Christian Sandvig is professor in both the School of Information and the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan. He specializes in the design of Internet infrastructure and social computing. His current work focuses on the implications of algorithmic systems that curate and organize curate culture, especially social media. He has also written about social media, wireless systems, broadband Internet, online video, domain names, and Internet policy.
Before moving to Michigan, Sandvig was a faculty member at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (where he founded the Center for People & Infrastructures) and Oxford University. Sandvig has also been a visiting scholar at McGill University, the Oxford Internet Institute, the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at Oxford, Intel Research, Microsoft Research, the Sloan School of Management at MIT, and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard. His work has been funded by the US National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council of New York, the MacArthur Foundation, the Economic and Social Research Council of the United Kingdom, and the Internet Society. Sandvig’s research has appeared in The Economist, The New York Times, Le Monde, National Public Radio, CBS News, and other media outlets.
- 10:00 AM – Rally, Berth 63, 1579 Middle Harbor Rd., Oakland
- 11:00 AM – March to Little Bobby Hutton (Defemery Park) for Rally, then march to…
- 3:00 PM – Rally and March at Oscar Grant Plaza for Immigrant and Worker Rights.
The ILWU will stop work for eight hours at all 29 ports on the West Coast. Join dockworkers Local 10 & 34 for a day of solidarity and resistance.
Justice for Stephon Clark. Justice for Saleem Tindle.
This week Occupy Forum is heading out to another location for several authors’ readings
Richard Walker, author of
Pictures of a Gone City: Tech and the Dark Side of Prosperity in the San Francisco Bay Area &
Phil Cohen, author of
Archive That Comrade! Left Legacies and the Counter Culture of Remembrance
Richard A. Walker is professor emeritus of geography at the University of California. He has written on a diverse range of topics in economic, urban, and environmental geography. He is coauthor of The Capitalist Imperative (1989) and The New Social Economy (1992) and has written extensively on California, including The Conquest of Bread (2004), The Country in the City (2007) and The Atlas of California (2013). Walker is currently director of the Living New Deal Project, whose purpose is to inventory all New Deal public works sites in the United States and recover the lost memory of government investment for the good of all.
Phil Cohen played a key role in the London counterculture scene of the 1960s. As “Dr. John” he was the public face of the London street commune movement and the occupation of 144 Piccadilly, an event that briefly hit the world’s headlines in July 1969. He subsequently became an urban ethnographer, and for the past forty years he has been involved with working-class communities in East London documenting the impact of structural and demographic change on their livelihoods, lifestyles, and life stories. Currently he is research director of LivingMaps, a network of activists, artists, and academics developing a creative and critical approach to social mapping. He is also professor emeritus at the University of East London and a research fellow of the Young Foundation.
Author Event: HABEAS DATA: Privacy vs. the Rise of Surveillance Tech
Kick off Digital Privacy Week with Ars Technicareporter Cyrus Farivar’s fascinating discussion of his new book HABEAS DATA: Privacy vs. the Rise of Surveillance Tech.
As technology has made our lives easier, it has simultaneously made it possible for all of our personal information to be collected. We are being watched.
Is it even legal? Come find out!
This week Occupy Forum is heading out to another location for several authors’ readings
The SF Tenants Union and the San Francisco Community Land Trust Present:
Amanda Huron, author of Carving Out the Commons: Tenant Organizing and Housing Cooperatives in Washington, D.C.
Provoked by mass evictions and the onset of gentrification in the 1970s, tenants in Washington, D.C., began forming cooperative organizations to collectively purchase and manage their apartment buildings. These tenants were creating a commons, taking a resource – housing – that had been used to extract profit from om them and reshaping it as a resource that was collectively owned by them.
In Carving Out the Commons, Amanda Huron theorizes the practice of urban “commoning” through a close investigation of the city’s limited-equity housing cooperatives. Drawing on feminist and anticapitalist perspectives, Huron asks whether a commons can work in a city where land and other resources are scarce and how strangers who may not share a past or future come together to create and maintain commonly held spaces in the midst of capitalism. Arguing against the romanticization of the commons, she instead positions the urban commons as a pragmatic practice. Through the practice of commoning, she contends, we can learn to build communities to challenge capitalism’s totalizing claims over life.
“Through interviews and historical research, Amanda Huron gives us an in-depth description of the formation of a housing cooperative in Washington, D.C. in the ’70s and develops a theoretical structure enabling us to generalize this experience to other cities.” –Silvia Federici, author of Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation
“Amanda Huron illuminates new ways of thinking what social justice in the City can look like. Her writing is rigorous yet upholds the dignity of the people she studies and their attempts to stake out a right to their city. Carving Out the Commons will be a go-to both for academics and organizers in the coming years.” –James Tracy, author of Dispatches Against Displacement: Field Notes from San Francisco’s Housing Wars
Agenda:
4. 5:15pm: Surveillance Equipment Ordinance – discuss methodology and department outreach for survey of existing equipment.
5. 5:25pm: Streetline Status Report. Review and take possible action on report.
6. 5:30pm: Vehicle-mounted Automated License Plate Recognition (ALPR) for Parking Enforcement. Review and take possible action on use policy.
7. 6:10pm: Oakland Department of Transportation/Vendor use of UAV/Drones. Review and take possible action on use policy.
FLUSH – The Documentary is the surprising story of what happens after we “go”, and a growing movement to change the way we think about waste.
Filmmaker Karina Mangu-Ward wonders if the unprecedented damage from Superstorm Sandy, the drought out West, and the future of our food supply has a lot to do with how we flush. So she gives herself a challenge: follow one flush from beginning to end.
FLUSH – The Documentary is the story of everything that happens next, and the cultural, political, and corporate forces shaping the way we deal with bodily waste in America today. Learn about our local wastewater treatment system at a brief panel to follow the film screening, and meet the Executive Director Shawn Shafter.
Barbara Lee and Elihu Harris Lecture Series presents Danny Glover
RSVP 510 434 3988
Co-presented by the Martin Luther King Jr. Freedom Center
and the Peralta Community College District
We won! After years of committed actions and struggle, the Alameda County Board of Supervisors has voted to end Urban Shield as of 2019. This would not have been possible without all of you!
The ongoing solidarity efforts of this coalition and visions of community safety have been our greatest power through these years and will continue to be the power that ensures that Urban Shield truly sees its end! Now it’s time to celebrate together, to honor the resistance that has gotten us this far and cheer each other on for the future. All are invited to join the Stop Urban Shield coalition for a night of food, drinks and dancing.
*Food and drinks will be available for purchase from the regular Reems lunch/dinner menu.
*DJ and dancing on the patio
*Indoor seating and slideshow: “Stop Urban Shield Through the Years.”
Accessibility info:
*Patio and cafe are located directly off of the Fruitvale Bart and accessible via ramp.
Come join us for the upcoming Repair Cafe, a half-day community gathering where some folks bring broken things, others bring know-how and tools, and yet others bring hospitality – and everyone brings goodwill and zeal for fixing. Though free, Repair Cafes aren’t free repair services. They’re participatory events – neighbors helping each other out, getting to know each other over coffee, baked treats, and repair projects, and squeezing more life out of the things they already have.
Volunteer fixers will be on hand who know how to repair all kinds of things – from lamps, clothing, and toys, to bikes, mechanical, furniture, electronics, and appliances … pretty much anything that can be brought through the door. The fix rate runs about 70%, so your item might not be fixed. It might even get worse! But together you’ll give it a good try and learn a lot about fixing along the way.
You can register or just bring your broken things, puzzle over them with volunteer fixers, then work together to see if you can bring them back to life.
Interested in becoming a Volunteer Fixer or Host? Great! Check the website to find out what it’s about and sign up.
Besides Fixing… We’ll have a cafe coffee, tea and goodies, perhaps repair tutorials, perhaps conversation with folks deeply involved in repair and reuse … all’s in the works.
Co-Organized by The Culture of Repair Project and Transition Berkeley