Calendar
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.
Oakland May Day: March for Immigrant and Worker Rights
CALL TO ACTION
https://
Visit our website to add your organizations name to the list of endorsers or message us here.
We’ll be marching again on May 1st, 2018.
This year and every year we fight for migrant and worker justice!
~~JOIN ILWU LOCAL 10 as they gather at 12pm (noon) at the Oakland Matson Terminal (near the end of the Adeline viaduct)
~~ March to Oscar Grant Plaza and join Oakland Sin Fronteras rallies and march.
CO-ORGANIZORS
67 Sueños
Anakbayan – East Bay
Anti-Police Terror Project
California Immigrant Youth Justice Alliance
Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice
Community READY Corps
Critical Resitance
Design Action
Leumsae
Mujeres Unidas Y Activas
Showing up for Racial Justice
VietUnity – East Bay
Workers’ World Party
Xicano Moratorium Coalition
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
Immigrant rights activists, community leaders and people who have been directly affected by the immigrant detention system will gather in front of the West County Detention Facility (WCDF) for a people’s tribunal to hold Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Contra Costa Sheriff’s Office accountable for their culture of secrecy and systemic abuse.
The tribunal is one of a series of coordinated people’s tribunals across the country as a part of the #ICEonTrial campaign. The campaign comes with a rise of retaliation by ICE against activists, as the agency is emboldened to be less transparent and unaccountable and to act with increased impunity under the Trump administration.
Justice comes from the people!
La justicia viene del pueblo!
Who: CIVIC (Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement); Detention Watch Network; Pueblo Sin Fronteras; Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity; Let Our People Go
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CIVIC (Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement) is devoted to abolishing U.S. immigration detention, while ending the isolation of people currently suffering in this profit-driven system. We visit and monitor 43 facilities and run the largest national hotline for detained immigrants. Through these windows into the system, we gather data and stories to combat injustice at the individual level and push systemic change.
www.endisolation.org
Detention Watch Network (DWN) is a national coalition of organizations and individuals working to expose and challenge the injustices of the United States’ immigration detention and deportation system and advocate for profound change that promotes the rights and dignity of all persons. Founded in 1997 by immigrant rights groups, DWN brings together advocates to unify strategy and build partnerships on a local and national level to end immigration detention.
www.detentionwatchnetwork.org
Pueblo Sin Fronteras is a collective of friends who decided to be in permanent solidarity with displaced peoples. For more than fifteen years, members of Pueblo Sin Fronteras have been reaching out to the most vulnerable immigrants in the United States and to migrants and refugees on the move. We accompany migrants and refugees in their journey of hope, and together, we demand our human rights. We provide humanitarian aid to migrants and refugees on the move. Our dream is to build solidarity bridges among peoples and turndown border walls imposed by greed.
www.pueblosinfronteras.org
The Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity works to achieve an equitable, inclusive and healthy society, culture, and economy where the most vulnerable, disenfranchised and marginalized have equal opportunities and access to the resources and tools needed to achieve a dignified quality of life.
www.im4humanintegrity.org
Kehilla Community Synagogue’s Immigration Committee holds a monthly multi-faith, one-hour protest on site called Let Our People Go, on the second Sunday of every month. Let Our People Go is a youth-and-elder-friendly, accessible action that opposes the detentions/deportations and mass incarceration with activist debriefs, music, art, stories and representation from different faith communities (including faithful and faithless humanists).
www.kehillasynagogue.org/immigration-committee
Summon Alameda County Sheriff Gregory Ahern to Appear at a People’s Tribunal
On Saturday, May 5, 2018 immigrant rights activists, community leaders and people who have been directly affected by the immigrant detention system will gather in front of the West County Detention Facility (WCDF) for a people’s tribunal to hold Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Alameda and Contra Costa Sheriff’s Office accountable for their culture of secrecy and systemic abuse.
The tribunal is one of a series of coordinated people’s tribunals across the country as a part of the #ICEonTrial campaign. The campaign comes with a rise of retaliation by ICE against activists, as the agency is emboldened to be less transparent, unaccountable and act with increased impunity under the Trump administration.
Justice comes from the people!
La justicia viene del pueblo!
Who: CIVIC (Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement) and Detention Watch Network
The SF Living Wage Coalition invites you to our spring art and literature gala. A celebration of cross-border unity and taking back the TRUE meaning of the holiday. MUSIC/ART/FOOD.
We will celebrate the two hundredth birthday of Karl Marx (b. March 5, 1818) with discussion led by three volunteers who will share their views on the contemporary significance of Marx: Antonio Trossero, an Argentinian labor leader and political exile living in the Bay Area; Eugene Ruyle, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, Cal State Long Beach; and Raj Sahai, our ICSS member from India, and longtime Bay Area resident.
Sun, May 6, 2018: 1-2 pm
Planning Session
We get together after the morning session on the first Sunday of every month to discuss things in general and plan the schedule for our Sunday Morning at the Marxist Library forums. This is an open meeting. Everyone is welcome to help plan our future sessions. Please come with suggestions and concrete plans. Newcomers and Old Timers welcome
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.
Mobilization to Submit Reports to the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination
It comes as no surprise that the Trump administration seems to have failed to submit its report to the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) by the deadline November 20, 2017. The Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute (MCLI) continues to reach out to the community to ensure that all forms of racism by the federal, state, and local governments in the U.S. are included in a shadow report to be submitted by MCLI and allies working in communities experiencing racism at the hands of the government.
With the election of Donald Trump racism in the U.S. has been amplified. The struggle of the Water Protectors at Standing Rock, the “Muslim Ban”, the repeal of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), the police violence against and mass incarceration of African Americans, harassment and criminalization of immigrant communities, and exploitation of immigrant labor are just some of the forms of racism that the MCLI would like to address in the upcoming report.
MCLI is holding this event to explain the process of holding the U.S. accountable for racism, to include the lived experiences of community members who have experienced racism at the hands of the government as well as social justice organizations working in communities of color, and to seek assistance compiling the report.
MCLI wants our shadow report to be as expansive and comprehensive as possible. The only way we can do this is with community input and assistance. Please come to this event to find out how your experiences can be included and how you can help MCLI compile this report.
There will be a presentation by organizers working with MCLI followed by a Q and A.