We document current events, make films together, steward an editing suite and share a film equipment library. We also host film screenings, often with local directors, and put on an annual short film festival for independent Bay Area filmmakers. Our goal is to make the digital filmmaking accessible – no overpriced college degree or certificate program required!

We are also a good group to reach out to if you’d like to screen a film at the Omni. We can be reached at [ liberatedlens@lists.riseup.net ].

We usually meet in the basement, unless otherwise noted.

Join us on May 13 for the next Indivisible Berkeley General Assembly featuring the IB Elections Team. We’re six months out from the midterms and it’s time to make moves to take back Congress!

The Elections Team will have specific actions and ways to contribute. So come on down and bring a friend!

Doors open at 7. We start promptly at 7:30.

Our pre-GA training will take place at 6:30. Topic TBA.

Questions? Email info@indivisibleberkeley.org.

ADA Accessibility: The Finnish Hall has stairs leading up to the entrance so is not ADA accessible. Please email us at info@indivisibleberkeley.org with questions.

#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

Open to the public.

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.

OTU’s Mission

The Oakland Tenants Union is an organization of housing activists dedicated to protecting tenant rights and interests. OTU does this by working directly with tenants in their struggle with landlords, impacting legislation and public policy about housing, community education, and working with other organizations committed to furthering renters’ rights. The Oakland Tenants Union is open to anyone who shares our core values and who believes that tenants themselves have the primary responsibility to work on their own behalf.

Monthly Meetings

The Oakland Tenants Union meets regularly at 7:00 pm on the second Monday evening of each month. Our monthly meetings are held in the Community Room of the Madison Park Apartments, 100 – 9th Street (at Oak Street, across from the Lake Merritt BART Station). To enter, gently knock on the window of the room to the right of the main entrance to the building. At the meetings, first we focus on general issues affecting renters city-wide and then second we offer advice to renters regarding their individual concerns.

If you have an issue, a question, or need advice about a tenant/landlord issue, please call us at (510) 704-5276. Leave a message with your name and phone number and someone will get back to you.

We are a group of Bay Area tenants who are fed up with rising rents, evictions, and harassment at the hands of landlords. We are fed up with our neighbors having no option but to live unsheltered and at constant risk of police harassment. We want to stop landlords, developers, and cops from looting our communities.

A council is a group of tenants who work together to wield collective power against a shared landlord in order to improve their conditions. While, in general, councils may organize for more affordable, habitable, and safer housing, the issues that a council decides to organize around is ultimately dictated by its members. Councils can be powerful because they can directly apply their collective pressure on their landlord without the permission of city hall or other third parties.

TANC will help organize councils and bring them together as a network. While councils interface directly with their landlord, they can find support from other councils who rent from different landlords. We will assist in getting the word out to tenants and researching landlords. Neighbors will get to know each other during dinners, BBQs, and other events that TANC will support. We will compile complaints that are common across councils and aid in seeking their resolution. Councils will discuss and demand timely repairs, and support tenants threatened with eviction. Ultimately, the point is to reconfigure power dynamics of landlords and tenants in the Bay Area.

Please join us for our first open meeting!

More info: www.baytanc.com

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.

Hello we are here to Save the Internet!

Join us every Tuesday in the Omni Commons mezzanine to help build a community-owned and -operated wireless mesh network in the East Bay!

Every Tuesday night, we meet to discuss on-going projects, technical bugs, community and media outreach, finances and budgeting, and upcoming events, such as node mounts, office hours, and workshops.  Newcomers are encouraged to come on the last Tuesdays of the month for general orientation, but are welcome at any meeting.

A wireless mesh network is a network where each computer acts as a relay to other computers, such that a network can stretch to cover entire cities.

Our goal is to create a wireless mesh network that is owned and operated by the community.

Want to help create an alternate means of digital communication that isn’t governed by for-profit internet service providers? Join us for the mesh hacknight! We need people of all backgrounds to help with everything from community involvement and grant writing to mounting antennas on buildings and developing software!

Learn more at https://peoplesopen.net and http://sudomesh.org/

Join Oakland Privacy to organize against the surveillance state, police militarization and ICE, and to advocate for surveillance regulation around the Bay.

We fight against “pre-crime” and “thought-crime,” spy drones, facial recognition, police body cameras and requirements for “backdoors” to cellphones, to list just a few invasions of our privacy by all levels of Government.

We draft and push for privacy legislation for City Councils, at the County level, and in Sacramento. We advocate in op-eds and in the streets. We stand in solidarity with Black Lives Matter and believe no one is illegal.

Oakland Privacy originally came together in 2013 to fight against the Domain Awareness Center, Oakland’s citywide networked mass surveillance hub. OP was instrumental in stopping the DAC from becoming a city-wide spying network.

Our major projects currently include local legislation to regulate state surveillance, opposing Urban Shield and pushing back against ICE with local legislation.

If you are interested in joining the Oakland Privacy email listserv, coming to a meeting, or have questions, send an email to:

contact@oaklandprivacy.org
Check out our website: http://oaklandprivacy.org/   Follow us on twitter: @oaklandprivacy

“WATCHING YOU WATCHING US”

Oakland Privacy works regionally to defend the right to privacy and enhance public transparency and oversight regarding the use of surveillance techniques and equipment. This month Oakland Privacy will be preparing for the passage of transparency ordinances in Oakland and Berkeley and kicking off new processes in Richmond and Alameda County,  To help slow down the encroaching police state all over the Bay Area, join us at the Omni.

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.