Calendar
Our “DIY drive-in” continues Jodie’s driveway every Thursday night at 6pm.
This week we are showing Exit through the Gift Shop.
Hot cocoa and cider, popcorn, and community!
Come on by and chat, chill or whatever!
Occupy Oakland Foreclosure Defense Group.
No One Gets Put Out.
“Solidarity is the People’s Weapon”
Street block to cell block, lets ring in the New Year Oakland style – against the racist prison system!
An uncompromising event organized by people of color in solidarity with all those behind bars and all those facing state repression.
Sponsorship unknown.
Come Meet us at the Grant Station for the 4th annual vigil for Oscar Grant to be held on New Year’s Day at the Grant Station (Fruitvale BART Station).
Join Oscar Grant family on this Day of Remembrance!
WE ARE ALL OSCAR GRANT
SPEAK OUT
• Family of murdered victims
• Chairman Fred Hampton Jr
• Community Activist
LIVE Performances of
• Libation
• African-Native-Latino Ceremony
• Poetry, music, spoken word
• Candle lighting, Balloon Releasing
• Words of inspiration Min. Keith Muhammad
• Much More!
Guest Appearances:
Donald E. Lacy, Jr. is a S. F. S. U. alumnus, who holds a B. A. Degree in Theater Arts, (with a film minor). His acting credits include: “Jack”, “Blood In, Blood Out”, “L.A. Heat”, “Hangin’ With Mr. Cooper”, “Wolf”, and many more. He will perform “Black Man Endangered Species
Carlos Aguirre: Musician, Actor/Educator known as Emcee Infinite will perform a Beatbox tribute to Oscar Grant
Zar the Dip, Entertainer/Artist will perform new activist song “Pathetic Justice”
Chairman Fred Hampton Jr is President and Chair of the Prisoners of Conscience Committee (POCC). He is the son of Fred Hampton, Sr, activist and deputy chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party (BPP)
Ras Ceylon Coming straight out of the West Coast (Bay Area & Southern California) representing Gideon.Force, Ras Ceylon is an emcee, educator and organizer bringing revolutionary music, a hip-hop meets reggae dynamic and explosively conscious lyrics. Drawing on his Sri Lankan roots and Rastafarian faith, Ra…hear his live performance
Why?
1. Because We Are All Oscar Grant
2. Because we should not forget
3. Because to release a balloon in the name of your Love one Killed
4. Come to embrace and Support all who have lost a Love one
5. Show your Love to Oscar Grant daughter, Tatiana , now 7yrs old.
Much Love from Tatiana and family of Oscar Grant, Hope to see you at the vigil!! “We Are All Oscar Grant”
There will be poetry, music, spoken word, candle lighting, Balloon releasing and speak out.
“Every tragedy represents an opportunity to move the agenda for justice forward.” We cannot forget and will not forget what happen on January 1, 2009 at 2:11 am. Join us in remembering and celebrating our martyr comrade brother, Oscar Grant. His life was taken to remind us that We Are All Oscar Grant
It was the COMMUNITY that led to the resignation of Alameda County District Attorney Tom Orloff.
It was the COMMUNITY that led to the resignation of Bart Chief of Police, Chief Gee.
It was the COMMUNITY that led to the resignation of Bart General Manager, Dorothy Dugger.
It was the COMMUNITY that led to the resignation of police officer Johannes Mehserle.
It was the COMMUNITY that led to the Department of Justice to open a investigation of Civil Rights violation against the Bart Police
It was the COMMUNITY that led the demonstration Downtown Oakland, making it known, “No Justice, No Peace”.
It was the COMMUNITY that joined with the ILWU Local 10 to shutdown l the ports in Northern California.
It was the COMMUNITY that helped usher in the US 9th Circuit court of Appeals establishing that using stun guns without an imminent threat of harm is unreasonable.
The COMMUNITY have made HISTORY, not VICTORY for the first time in 458 years of California History a officer was charged, arrested, convicted and sentenced to prison for killing a unarmed Black Man in the line of duty. Victory is when we have DESTROYED a racist criminal justice system and replaced with a true Freedom , Justice & Equality system for all people.
More information: Facebook Event.
WHAT: Bring an open heart, and material support to offer inmates who may be released during this time and any loved ones who may be there visiting current inmates.
HOW: Some suggestions include bringing food, drinks, smokes, cell phone to make calls, clothes, info/resources for both immediate and ongoing needs post-incarceration, ears to listen, BART/bus fare, an extra sweater/jacket/shirt, etc.
WHY: FtP! Fuck the Prison industrial complex and all tools of oppression!!!
Mutual aid, because “inside or outside, we’re all on the same side.”
SPECIAL CALL TO ALL NATIVE DANCERS AND SINGERS! Please come with your drums, regalia, and songs in honor and prayerful support of Chief Spence and First Nation peoples.
We will arrange for any gifts and offerings for Chief Theresa Spence to get to her.
“Idle No More calls on all people to join in a revolution which honors and fulfills Indigenous sovereignty which protects the land and water. Colonization continues through attacks to Indigenous rights and damage to the land and water. We must repair these violations, live the spirit and intent of the treaty relationship, work towards justice in action, and protect Mother Earth.” — #IdleNoMore
We humbly request that you turn to your elders and ask for their blessing and prayers for the round dance.
Here are some guidelines:
• Remember that we will be in Ohlone territory.
• Assume that you are being videoed and photographed. If you do not wish to be, please let those with cameras know.
• Native drummers and singers will call you into the circle at 2:00 pm.
• Please watch out for one another, especially children and the elderly.
• Remember why we are there: to honor and pray for Chief Theresa Spence and to show our First Nation brothers and sisters in the north our support.
• We expect the police might run us off at some point. Please be calm, peaceful, and honorable in your conduct. We can always scatter and regroup or move to another location. We will take direction from the elders.
Wanishi (thank you).
Belated Holiday Party! Everyone invited! Of particular interest to those who support alternatives to the two capitalist Parties.
The Alameda County Board of Supervisors Public Protection Committee will be holding a hearing on immigration detainers (S-Comm).
Keep our Families Together, End ICE Holds in Alameda County!
Join us at the
Alameda County Public Protection Committee Hearing on “ICE Detainers”
Please join us on January 10th at the Alameda County Public Protection committee hearing on “ICE Detainers”. Community members with advocates and organizers will offer testimony on the devastating impacts of detention & deportation and urge Alameda County to adopt a new policy that ends the enforcement of ICE holds!
Increased federal immigration enforcement has resulted in a record number of deportations nationally and results in the separation of families, including here in Alameda County. In 2011, there was an unprecedented number of deportations, 400,000, more than any year before! California has had over 82,531 deportations as a result of S-Comm, more than any other state. In Alameda County approximately 2000 immigrants have been deported and many more individuals have been turned over to federal authorities by the County, facing deportation.
For the past two and a half years we have been pushing for an end to S-Comm and this is the first hearing in Alameda County where the Board of Supervisors will hear directly from our communities about the devastating impacts of local police collaboration with ICE.
We want this hearing to be filled with everyone in the community who opposes the separation of families and believes that enforcing immigration is not the job of local police.
Saturday 12 January 2013
San Antonio Park
3:00pm;
1701 East 19th Street, Oakland, CA1701 East 19th Street, Oakland, CA
Come out & celebrate MLK’s b-day by helping us stop the ignorance & STOP THE VIOLENCE!!! Too many are dying in our community and it’s gonna take a village to get us out of this.
Refreshments will be provided.
from facebook event
Join the Justice for Alan Blueford Coalition and allies on Tuesday 1/15 to tell City Council that we reject Bill Bratton and his racist, fascist policies. Meet up at 5:00 for a rally with the meeting at 5:30. Make sure to fill out speaker cards online beforehand or at City Hall (http://www2.oaklandnet.com/Government/o/CityClerk/s/SpeakerCard/SpeakerCard/OAK032373).
If you can’t attend in solidarity with the JAB Coalition, here’s a petition for you to sign, voicing your discontent with the cities plans:
http://www.change.org/petitions/oaklanders-against-william-bratton-and-racial-profiling
As some of you may have heard, OPD has a new strategy to reduce crime in Oakland. This plan is to ask City Council for an additional $250,000 to hire Bill Bratton as a consultant for one year. They have happily announced that they are bringing in the man responsible for NYC’s dramatic drop in crime and the man who helped the LAPD work through their own federal difficulties after the Ramparts case.
Here’s what they’re not telling you about Bratton’s multi-pronged approach to crime reduction:
1) Bratton takes credit for implementing NY’s broken window policy. On the surface, the policy sounds great – if you repair minor damage then you don’t send the message that an area is worthless and thus raise civic pride and prevent crime. But Oakland has already instituted a new policy along these lines that exposes a key flaw. It is not the city that pays for this damage but home owners and business owners. Businesses and homes that fail to remove graffiti promptly can be fined. So it is the homeowner who is punished for the police’s ineptitude at preventing vandalism in the first place. Moreover, one can no longer simply leave the graffiti up and appreciate the art because the city sees it as counter-economic to have graffiti anywhere. Ultimately, broken windows forces civilians to take on police roles they already pay others to do regardless of whether they personally believe in the laws or not.
2) Bratton believes in a zero tolerance policy for all crime. This means harsher punishment and more policing of minor infractions (including public protest, public disturbance, vagrancy, public intoxication, smoking marijuana, etc). This sort of strategy takes a way a cop’s (meager) rationality and forces them to further criminalize the public. For those police who already have no problem seeing Oakland residents as criminals, zero tolerance encourages them to punish as harshly as they can to deter crime.
3) In a recent interview, Bratton talked up the importance of stop and frisk and compared it to chemotherapy (http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20120322/manhattan/former-nypd-chief-bill-bratton-compares-stop-and-frisks-chemotherapy). That’s right. Bratton thinks the people being stopped are like a cancer, and the rest of the city (the innocent ones) simply need to endure the poison (in this case the unlawful stops and searches) in order to make the city healthy again. There is no doubt that bringing a de jure Stop and Frisk policy (to replace the already existent de facto policy) will only encourage police racism and police violence. Moreover, with recent comments by Fruitvale’s new City Councilmember Noel Gallo in which he proclaimed his own desire for a “search and frisk” policy, there is no doubt that the Council will be moving in this direction.
4) Bratton has also been vocal in his disgust with cities that have tolerated Occupy camps. In regard to NYC, he reportedly almost ran for mayor because he was so angry at how tepidly Bloomberg had responded to the Zuccotti Park Camp. Bratton despises the tents for the same reason as the broken windows and encourages harsh response to populist movements to preserve the status quo.
So what’s really going on here? The last two consultants, Frazier (who they chose) and Warshaw (who was forced on them by Judge Henderson), both wrote scathing reports of OPD that Deanna Santana tried to cover up and edit. So now they found someone to say exactly what she wants to hear. They’re not out of control, they’re too controlled. They’re not too violent, they’re not violent enough. Also, with the new Federal Compliance Director coming in with a clear mandate to stop Stop and Frisk as it already exists off the books in Oakland and to work against racial profiling, the Police and City Officials want to make it harder to change their backwards, racist policies. Oakland has become the epicenter of anti-brutality campaigns, so those who want the brutality to continue are bringing in their big guns. They know that in the wake of Oakland’s crime and murder spike, that the people of Oakland will be much easier to bully into whatever program they recommend.
We say no.
No to zero tolerance!
No to “broken windows” policies!
No to Stop and Frisk!
No to racial profiling!
No to Bill Bratton!!
Come out and tell the Public Safety Committee that we want none of this and that we will be heard. Get a speaker card, bring a banner, get rowdy. Remind City Council whose city this is.
Join the JAB Coalition and allies on Tuesday 1/15 to tell City Council that we reject Bill Bratton and his racist, fascist policies. Meet up at 5:00 for a rally with the meeting at 5:30. Make sure to fill out speaker cards online beforehand or at City Hall.
As some of you may have heard, OPD has a new strategy to reduce crime in Oakland. This plan is to ask City Council for an additional $250,000 to hire Bill Bratton as a consultant for one year.
Here’s what they’re not telling you about Bratton’s multi-pronged approach to crime reduction…
Stop the Injunctions Coalition writeup.
City Council Public Safety Committee Meeting Agenda (The 2nd item listed, labelled as Item #4).
The benefit will feature “Fighting For Our Lives,” a short documentary about the history of resistance to medical neglect at CCWF & VSPW plus presentations by prison survivors, information about the protest and sign-making. We’re so grateful for the community support!
More info at the Occupy 4 Prisoners website.
On Tuesday, January 22nd, join the JAB Coalition and allies and come on back out to City Hall as the full City Council weighs what to do now that the Public Safety Committee has recommended moving forward on the Wasserman/Bratton consultancy proposal. In addition, the 22nd will be the 2 year anniversary of the murder of Raheim Brown by OUSD police officers Barhim Bhatt and Jonathan Bellusa. Please join us to come together for a rally to honor the lives of all of Oakland’s sons and daughters murdered by the police. The City Council meeting will begin at 5:30 and the rally will start at 5:00.
Although Wasserman vehemently denied that he or the City Council were in any way trying to bring Stop and Frisk or gang injunctions or youth curfews or zero tolerance policing to Oakland, it is impossible to deny that the choice of a contract with Bill Bratton suggests the opposite. Bratton was on air the night before the Public Safety Committee meeting proudly proclaiming yet again his support of Stop and Frisk and his belief that any city that doesn’t have a Stop and Frisk policy is “doomed to failure.” Wasserman also kept repeating the importance of community involvement and bringing the community together (and even seemed to take credit for the hundreds who came out to protest the Bratton contract), but neither in his time consulting with the OPD nor when he and the city announced a month ago that the Bratton hiring was a done deal (it wasn’t) did he ever bring the community in. How are we as a community supposed to believe what Wasserman says when he’s been so clearly dishonest this far?
Much more at the Facebook event page
We brought our solutions to city hall. The council heard the public loud and clear: NO MORE MONEY FOR OPD; invest the money in our schools, in our shuttered libraries, in youth centers and job programs. Unsurprisingly they have decided to hand more money in a broken and visibly racist police force. So in light of the recent and expected arrogance on the part of city council, we converge in the streets to voice our rage and to make it perfectly clear we will not allow ourselves to be further criminalized.
Most of us know that speaking to city council is a futile exercise, but one of the greatest parts about city council meetings is that we hear each other. We had so many beautiful and brilliant voices last night, but we don’t need their forum to speak to each other. Come to the plaza to rally and discuss how we can stop the violence of poverty in Oakland without them.
When we talk about stopping the violence, we are talking about eliminating the desperation that life under capitalism causes, and we are talking about ending the violence of the police occupation we live under.
Please join us for a discussion/GA at 5 pm to strategize as to what our course of action and response to this decision should be for this evening and into the coming years. Let’s remind them that we are ungovernable. Bring your ideas and your noisemakers.
The Healthcare Movie
Potluck at 6pm
An entertaining 65 minute documentary explaining how Canada got their beloved healthcare system. The Healthcare Movie is full of lessons that we can use in our campaign for single payer healthcare.
A discussion will follow the film.
Dear Friends,Please join us as we gather to remember Aaron Swartz. Speakers will include Danny O’Brien, Lisa Rein, Peter Eckersley, Molly Shaffer Van Houweling, Cindy Cohn, Brewster Kahle, Tim O’Reilly, Elliot Peters, Alex Stamos, and Carl Malamud; there will be an opportunity for brief remembrances.
RSVP.
A Foreclosure Defense Group Orientation and Training
Foreclosures, evictions, gentrification, massive displacement… These are facets not of a “crisis” but of a targeted, ceaseless attack, an attack of one class and its institutions upon another with communities of color taking the brunt of the assault.
The Occupy Oakland Foreclosure Defense Group forwards an anti-capitalist perspective built on community organizing, self defense and our experience and successes.
This Friday, January 25th, we offer an orientation on the local political terrain, on the forces at play in this current attack and an introduction to our vision, our work and how we get down.
We especially encourage to attend those many folks that have put in work around our recent fights and those who are interested in becoming more involved in these immediate and tangible struggles.
Presenters include
Darwin Bond-Graham, noted sociologist and journalist who has published extensively on the political economy of Oakland. (You might have seen him in the streets around Occupy Oakland as well!)
Anthony Panarese, longtime local community organizer and notorious pain in the ass of the local establishment, now a staffer with the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment.
Core organizers with the Foreclosure Defense Group
Hope to see you there!
For any questions you can email us at foreclosure@occupyoakland.org or call the OOFDG hotline 510.207.0182