This September in San Francisco, the Global Climate Action Summit will bring together leaders from state, tribal, and local governments, business, and citizens from around the world, to demonstrate how the tide has turned in the race against climate change, showcase climate action taking place around the world, and inspire deeper commitments from each other and from national governments in support of the Paris Agreement.

2018 is a turning point: countries and all of us must step up the commitments that were made in Paris and do more. The momentum we generate this year must lead to a climate turning point by 2020 in order to prevent the worst effects of climate change. It must be the beginning of a new phase of action and ambition on climate change.

In 1963 the waters began rising behind Glen Canyon Dam and 170 miles of the Colorado River slowly disappeared as the riverbed and surrounding canyons filled with water. Those who supported and those who opposed the dam considered it a longterm transformation; environmentalists mourned Glen Canyon as dead and gone forever. But it’s coming back, in a victory that is also the pervasive disaster of climate change.

“Lake Powell and the wreckage of where it used to be and will never be again was the right place to think about the madness of the past and the terror of the future, even amidst the epiphanies of beautiful light and majestic space,” writes Rebecca Solnit in Drowned River:  The Death and Rebirth of Glen Canyon on the Colorado (Radius Books), her collaboration with photographers Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe.

350.org executive director May Boeve talks about the near future of climate activism, including September’s Climate Summit.

NY Times bestselling author, Richard Rothstein, will discuss his recent book, The Color of Law, and the role of the state in creating and maintaining segregation, to the detriment of African Americans and society as a whole. This panel will situate the author’s work in West Oakland, a community that was created/disadvantaged by redlining, “urban redevelopment,” nearby industrial zoning, and other government actions. The panel will pull together activists, electeds, and community members, to reflect on how we got here and the role of government and private actors in remedying it.

Gentrification comes up constantly in the Bay Area, but few of us feel equipped to take action against it. Is it inevitable? What can we do now to prevent displacement?

Berkeley City Councilmember Cheryl Davila is hosting a SURJ workshop which will put gentrification and displacement in a historical context so we understand the racialized political and economic drivers. You’ll hear about past and current struggles led by communities of color to preserve their homes and communities.

Facilitators from SURJ – Oakland/Bay Area will present analysis based on the work of Causa Justa :: Just Cause. SURJ (Showing Up for Racial Justice), Bay Area chapter, is part of a national network of groups and individuals organizing white people for racial justice through community organizing, mobilizing, and education. However, all are welcome at this workshop regardless of identity.

We are asking for $5-$20 donation, sliding scale, which will go to support CJJC’s work challenging gentrification and fighting displacement. However, no one will be turned away for lack of funds.

Building Accessibility: Neyborly can accommodate mobility devices.

Scents: ask everyone to please arrive at meetings fragrance free to support access for folks who experience multiple chemical sensitivities and allergies. This means using only body products and laundry detergent that say “fragrance free” or “unscented” on the label and do not have scented ingredients.

More info on Causa Justa: http://www.cjjc.org/

SPREAD THE WORD, INVITE YOUR FRIENDS!

Come join Local Clean Energy Alliance and Rosana Francescato and Matt Renner from the Clean Coalition, who will explain what a microgrid is, the basics of how it works, and how Community Microgrids provide economic, environmental and resilience benefits to communities.

We will hear about the Clean Coalition’s plans for microgrids in fire-devastated parts of the North Bay, and in other areas, to create islands of power sustainability as part of the rebuilding process.

For a 90-second video on Community Microgrids, follow this link.

Tickets are free, but space is limited.  Get tickets at Eventbrite.

We all have a right to a healthy life. That means a right to healthcare, a right to clean air, clean water, and a clean earth, to healthy food, a right to a job and housing and the right to live a life free of discrimination and oppression.

WE NEED IMPROVED MEDICARE FOR ALL NOW. The U.S. is one of the only countries in the “developed” world that does not guarantee universal health coverage. We pay more for health care and have worse outcomes (http://www.commonwealthfund.org/interactives/2017/july/mirror-mirror/) because our system isn’t built to take care of people, it is built so that private health insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies can make more and more money.

Private healthcare in this country is bad enough, but Trump and the GOP are on a mission to make it far worse through cuts to the ACA, Medicare, and Medicaid. We need these programs, and much more.

Medical illness is the number one cause of personal bankruptcy in the U.S. There are 4 paid lobbyists for every single congressperson in Washington DC and health industry lobbying spending continues to rise as the expectation and discussion of healthcare and medicare for all grows. Both Republicans and Democrats at the state and federal level take millions from those who profit off of the sickness and suffering of US residents. The private health insurance companies don’t want to pay for the health care we need because it would impact their profits. IT’S TIME TO GET PRIVATE PROFITS OUT OF OUR HEALTHCARE.

In California, the Democratic Party has a supermajority, which means that they can pass any law they want. They control the Senate, the House, and the Governorship, but they have shelved SB 562, the bill that would guarantee healthcare as a right for all California residents. We need independent corporate-free representatives who will unapologetically support single payer healthcare.

A HEALTHY LIFE MEANS BREATHING CLEAN AIR AND DRINKING CLEAN WATER. West and Downtown Oakland residents have some of the highest asthma rates in the country, and have higher stroke, heart failure, stress, and diabetes rates than other areas. The higher air and environmental pollution exposes people living in these and other environmentally polluted areas of the Bay Area to worse Health outcomes than higher income communities in other areas (https://www.edf.org/airqualitymaps/pollution-and-health-concerns-west-oakland). Fossil fuel companies, including the 5 corporations that have oil refineries in the Bay Area, do not base their decisions around the health of human beings or the environment. They exploit resources and pollute our communities in search of greater profits.

A HEALTHY LIFE MEANS A LIVING WAGE AND A PLACE TO LIVE. That means enacting a minimum wage that is a living wage, a wage that allows us to purchase healthy food and afford to live where we work if we want to. 3 men in the U.S. have more money than half of the US population, over 160 million people (https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/nov/08/bill-gates-jeff-bezos-warren-buffett-wealthier-than-poorest-half-of-us). Corporations don’t want to pay workers a living wage because it would impact their profits, but they wouldn’t be able to make that surplus without profiting off of the real value that the workers’ create. Developers don’t want rent control and affordable housing because it would impact their profits. There are currently over 500,000 unhoused persons in the US at this time (https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/12/the-number-of-homeless-people-in-america-increased-for-the-first-time-in-7-years/) and there are more vacant houses than unhoused people.

A HEALTHY LIFE MEANS LIVING FREE OF DISCRIMINATION AND OPPRESSION. Institutionalized discrimination and oppression lead to economic inequality, higher stress, worse health outcomes and shorter life expectancy.

Our health needs are at odds with the profit motive of private health insurance, pharmaceutical companies, developers and fossil fuel companies.

Stop Trump’s Attacks on Our Health!
Fight cuts to the ACA, Medicare, and Medicaid.

We Need Medicare for All!
Release and pass SB 562 in California as a step towards nationwide Medicare for All.

No More Evictions!
Enact living wage laws, rent control, and publicly fund affordable housing.

Fight Climate Change and Environmental Pollution!
For a mass green jobs program to invest in renewable energy to replace fossil fuels.

No More Institutionalized Racism and Sexism!
Halt all deportations, full legalization for all US Residents, Equal Pay for Equal Work, Equal access to opportunity for all regardless of ability, race, or gender.

https://www.marchforourhealth.org/

Endorsements:

Healthy California
Health Care for All California
Socialist Alternative Bay Area
East Bay Democratic Socialists of America
Democratic Socialists of America: San Francisco
Physicians for a National Health Program
National Union of Healthcare Workers
UPTE-CWA Local 9119
California Alliance for Retired Americans
California Partnership
UC Berkeley Progressive Student Association – Our Revolution
East Bay Young Democrats
Our Revolution California
Our Revolution East Bay
Our Revolution Contra Costa County
Courage Campaign Contra Costa
El Cerrito Progressives

Bring your daughters, mothers, and entire family. Walk in unity & spirit for the original mother’s day purpose (post-Civil War): To Unite Women to End War. “We will not raise our children to kill the children of other mother’s.” Gather on either end of the eastern walkway, & converge in middle. Wear PINK, or not. Rally afterwards.

#Justice4Sahleem Rally & March—Monday, 5/14/18, #Oakland!
11 AM—County Courthouse, 12th & Fallon
1:30 PM—March to Webster & 20th
2:30 PM—Dedication to the Life & Spirit of #SahleemTindle
4 PM—BART Police Citizen Review Board Meeting, 2040 Webster@APTPAction & #MothersFightBack pic.twitter.com/LS4CzEjbPh

— Elizabeth Fitzer (@ItsBethFitzer) May 14, 2018

From Global Women’s Strike Omni Collective – please circulate wildly. Bay Area GWS participant and welfare mother Jane Welford will be among the key speakers in Sacramento.

KICKOFF ACTION MAY 14, THE DAY AFTER MOTHERS’ DAY!

Protests in over 30 state capitols across the US

IN CA: RALLY & PROTEST ACTION 2PM SACRAMENTO STATE CAPITOL BUILDING

The theme of May 14th actions is
SOMEBODY’S HURTING OUR PEOPLE: CHILDREN, WOMEN AND PEOPLE WITH
DISABILITIES IN POVERTY

Somebody’s hurting our people and it’s gone on far too long!
Together, we will rise up and challenge the evils of systemic racism,
poverty, the war economy, environmental devastation, and the nation’s
distorted morality!

WE ARE DAYS AWAY from the May 14th kick-off of the Poor People’s
Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, demanding a massive
overhaul of the nation’s voting rights laws, new programs to lift up
the 140 million Americans –  70% women and children – living in
poverty, immediate attention to ecological devastation and measures to
curb militarism and the war economy. May 14th actions kick off 40 days
of sustained moral fusion nonviolent direct action and activities
building on the work of Dr. Martin Luther King.

For more information and to participate in the May 14 rally/direct
action,
HTTPS://POORPEOPLESCAMPAIGN.ORG/ [1] OR EMAIL
CALIFORNIA@POORPEOPLESCAMPAIGN.ORG

HTTPS://FACEBOOK.COM/CALIFORNIAPPC/ [2] OR

Virginia Eubanks talks about her book
Automating Inequality:
How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor

Virginia Eubanks is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University at Albany, SUNY. She is also the author of Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age. Her writing about technology and social justice has appeared in The American Prospect, The Nation, Harper’s and Wired. For two decades, Eubanks has worked in community technology and economic justice movements.

As Californians, we understand the urgency of climate action. From droughts, fires, oil spills, to deadly air pollution, we’re seeing the impacts of fossil fuels firsthand.

Despite this, California has yet to take the action we know is necessary to stop climate change: commit to a fast and just transition to 100% renewable energy and keep fossil fuels in the ground. We know this is what science and our communities demand, and there’s no time to wait.

That’s why community and movement leaders are coming together for an exciting event on Monday, May 14 in Oakland to discuss how California can be an example for the world and go completely fossil free. Get your ticket today to join this vital conversation.

In our state, we have toxic oil wells in our neighborhoods in LA, fracking wells next to schools in the Central Valley, and ships with dirty tar sands oil coming into the Bay Area – disproportionately affecting low-income communities of color. This isn’t what climate leadership looks like.

Our elected leaders including Governor Brown haven’t done nearly enough to protect our communities from the impacts of fossil fuels. It’s time for all of us to rise up and demand true climate action.

The panel event will feature Bill McKibben, Juan Flores, Pennie Opal Plant, Kathryn Lybarger and Antonia Juhasz — leaders who can help light the path forward for California to be a real climate leader.

Tickets must be purchased in advance and are available on a sliding scale. No-one will be turned away for lack of funds. No tickets available at the door. Please contact events@350.org​ for comp ticket and if you have accessibility or translation needs. All tickets are general admission seating.

Peace Flag raising ceremony. With Conscientious Objectors and War Resisters from WWII, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War and the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars.

Sing Along with Max Ventura, Hali Jammer, and Nancy Schimmel.

The recent incident that took place at Lake Merritt surrounding charcoal grilling is not only an example of how the police are used to control African Americans, it also exemplifies the growing tensions for how Black Oakland experiences a changing city.

Join us in solidarity to protect Black Oakland and to push elected officials to do something about the abuse of city resources. We don’t want more meetings, forums or empty gestures – we want action so this doesn’t happen again.

Deport ICE Richmond !

Making Sanctuary Real continues in the Bay Area. The Sanctuary City Contracting and Investment Ordinance will cut the data pipes to ICE by prohibiting municipal contracts and investments with data brokers that sell information to ICE to track and profile immigrants. This gets public money out of subsidizing the Trump deportation machine.

Press Conference at 6pm, Council meeting starts at 6:30pm.

In Richmond, our bill sponsors areCouncilmember and AD 15 candidate Jovanka Beckles and Councilmembers Ada Recinos.

This will be the first Deport ICE ordinance in the Bay Area, but more are coming in Alameda, Berkeley and Oakland.

We need Richmonders to turn out, but all of us in the Bay Area are in the sanctuary city battle with the Trump Administration. We need to support our elected officials all over the Bay Area in standing up with our immigrant communities.

More at www.deportice.org.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz talks about her latest book
Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment
Introduced by James Tracy

From the author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Loaded is a deeply researched and deeply disturbinghistory of guns and gun laws in the United States.  From Daniel Boone and Jesse James, to the NRA and Seal Team 6, gun culture has colored the lore, shaped the law, and protected the market that arms the nation. In Loaded, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz peels away the myths of gun culture to expose the true historical origins of the Second Amendment, revealing the racial undercurrents connecting the earliest Anglo settlers with contemporary gun proliferation, modern-day policing, and the consolidation of influence of armed white nationalists. From the enslavement of Blacks and the conquest of Native America, to the arsenal of institutions that constitute the “gun lobby,” Loaded presents a people’s history of the Second Amendment.

“Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s Loaded is like a blast of fresh air. She is no fan of guns or of our absurdly permissive laws surrounding them. But she does not merely take the liberal side of the familiar debate.” – Adam Hochschild, The New York Review of Books

“Her analysis, erudite and unrelenting, exposes blind spots not just among conservatives, but, crucially, among liberals as well. . . . As a portrait of the deepest structures of American violence, Loaded is an indispensable book.” -The New Republic

The most interesting man in the world
— Business Insider

One of the greatest political memoirs of all time.
—The Guardian

In this blistering memoir and expose, Varoufakis blows the lid off the world’s deep establishment, exposing what actually goes on behind the scenes through the corridors of real power. He offers a fascinatingly candid I-was-there account of his meetings with Barack Obama, Lawrence Summers, and European leaders.

He exposes the hypocrises, power plays, and frustrated good intentions that control the fate of nations large and small. While he was finance minsiter of Greece, Varoufakis sparked one of the most spectacular and controversial battles in modern political history when he fought to renegotiate his country’s relationship with Europe’s banks and governments. Despite the mass support of the Greek people and the logic of his arguments, Varoufakis succeeded only in provoking the fury of both the political and media establishment.

The future of the world economic order now hangs in the balance. As Varoufakis argues, the only way it can survive is if the truth is known, ushering in a new era of radical transparency and accountability.

One of my few heroes. As long as people like Varoufakis are around, there is still hope.
—Slavoj Zizek

Riveting… An extraordinary account of low cunning at the heart of Greece’s 2015 financial bailout…Varoufakis is a motorcycling, leather-jacketed former academic and self-styled rebel who took pleasure in winding up the besuited political class… An admirably believable depiction of a Greek and European tragedy.
— The Guardian

Yanis Varoufakis is the former finance minister of Greece and cofounder of an international grassroots movement campaigning for the revival of democracy. He is the author of “And the Weak Suffer What They Must?, The Global Minotaur, and Talking To My Daughter About the Economy, in which Varoufakis sets out to answer his daughter Xenia’s deceptively simple question. Drawing on memories of her childhood and a variety of well-known tales – from Oedipus and Faust to Frankenstein and The Matrix — Talking To My Daughter About the Economy explains everything you need to know in order to understand why economics is the most important drama of our times.

Join us as we live stream the world premiere of a series of short videos produced by Common Justice of people who have survived or committed violence, followed by a panel discussion that will explore healing, safety, and accountability after violence.

Recently, Phil Tagami announced plans to host the 2018 East Bay Innovators Awards on behalf of his childrens’ school, East Bay Innovation Academy. But Tagami is completely draining Oakland of its resources, and threatening our health and climate with a toxic coal terminal, targetting a predominantly low-income community of color with environmental injustice, and was planning to honor DA Nancy O’Malley, who has a record of protecting police, not youth of color.

After plans were announced for a youth-led protest, the venue and tone suddenly changed. But we we are still calling on Tagami to stand up for all youth and drop his coal-powered lawsuit. We want to educate the community on what is going on in our city and how this coal terminal will affect all of us.

Youth Vs Apocalypse will be attending the event to speak out with art, drumming, poetry, chanting, information and solidarity. We invite allies to stand behind youth activists while being mindful of the school venue.

We need innovators that help our city, not destroy it. We want youth voices to be more heard. We want a thriving earth, equal rights, kindness, compassion and common sense. We say no to environmental racism, no to police racism, and no to climate chaos.