FEED THE HOOD If you’ve been wondering how you can help people who are currently living on the streets, here’s a community event worth adding to your schedule — Feed the Hood. Community group East Oakland Collective (EOC) and nonprofit Struggle 2 Bubble Foundation are joining forces to host this event, where participants will assemble and distribute bagged lunches and hygiene bags to people living in homeless encampments throughout Oakland. The group is asking those who’d like to participate to either donate food items (e.g. loaves of bread, lunch meat, juice boxes, cases of water) or personal care products (e.g. socks, feminine hygiene products, travel-size bottles of lotion or mouth wash), or make a monetary donation so that food and supplies can be purchased. RSVP at http://bit.ly/feedthehood2. Feed the Hood takes place at 7:30 a.m. on Sept. 17 at San Antonio Park, 1701 E. 19th St. (at 17th Ave.), Oakland. 

The East Bay-San Francisco Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom is honored to have Maxine Hong Kingston, celebrated author and professor of creative writing at UC Berkeley, in the last of our Peace Talks series. She will reflect on her life, her writing and creativity; on immigration, war, peace, and activism in conversation with Kate Raphael, author and producer of KPFA’s Women’s Magazine.  The event is free, all are welcome, wheelchair accessible, refreshments.

Kingston’s first book, a memoir entitled The Woman Warrior, was published in 1976 and won the National Book Critic’s Circle Award, making her a literary celebrity at age thirty-six. Her second book, China Men, earned the National Book Award. Both books are still widely taught in literature and other classes. Kingston has earned additional awards, including the PEN West Award for Fiction for Tripmaster Monkey, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and the National Humanities Medal, which was conferred by President Clinton. Her most recent books are The Fifth Book of Peace and I Love a Broad Margin to My Life.  Kingston is currently Senior Lecturer Emerita for Creative Writing at the University of California, Berkeley. In July 2014, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Obama.

The Peace Talks Speaker Series is a presentation of the Women’s  International League for Peace and Freedom, East Bay and San Francisco branches.

In July Governor Jerry Brown and representatives of the oil industry crafted a bill to renew California’s greenhouse gas cap and trade program. The governor then rammed the bill through the legislature in less than two weeks.  In this forum, oil industry experts and activists in the climate and environmental justice movement will explain what cap and trade has (not) accomplished, what the new law will do, and how it passed so quickly. And we’ll talk about future strategies for stopping the fossil fuel industry from poisoning communities, increasing climate catastrophe, and corrupting our politics.

Speakers:
Roger Lin, Center for Race, Poverty, and the Environment
Danny Cullenward, Stanford School of Earth, Energy, Environmental Sciences
Amy Vanderwarker, California Environmental Justice Alliance
RL Miller, California Democratic Party Environmental Caucus
Janet Stromberg, 350 Bay Area
Representatives from the Asian Pacific Environmental Network and the California Nurses Association

More information at http://www.sunflower-alliance.org/the-cap-and-trade-scam-sept-17/

Longtime UC Berkeley sociology professor Arlie Russell Hochschild has centered her work on understanding how those in the majority culture discuss and perceive minority groups. She spent five years in the area around Lake Charles, La., studying the mindset of Tea Party members and exploring the contrast between the population’s disdain for government and their apparent need of its resources. Her findings were chronicled in 2016’s Strangers in Their Own Land, which was a National Book Award finalist.

On Monday, Hochschild — in conversation with actor Benjamin Russell — will discuss how theater can allow individuals to overcome an “empathy wall” and grasp the “deep story” and experiences of the other. Part of Arts + Design Mondays, which is presented and sponsored by Berkeley Arts + Design and hosted at BAMPFA, the event will consider how these stories can lead to cooperative partnerships.

Critical Oakland city council vote: what you can do

Oakland city council is planning to vote this Tuesday, September 19th, 2017, on authorizing the Oakland public bank feasibility study. Here are two ways you can help ensure we get the five votes on Tuesday:

First, call and urge your councilmember to authorize the public bank feasibility study. You can speak with a staffer or leave a voicemail. Here’s a suggested script:
Hi, my name is ________ and I am a constituent of councilmember _______. I wanted to let my councilmember know that I strongly support the public bank feasibility study. Please vote yes on the public bank feasibility study authorization on September 19th.

Councilmember phone numbers:
District 1: Dan Kalb (510) 238-7001
District 2: Abel Guillén (510) 238-7002
District 3: Lynette Gibson McElhaney (510) 238-7245
District 4: Annie Campbell Washington (510) 238-7004
District 5: Noel Gallo 510-238-7005
District 6: Desley Brooks 510-238-7006
District 7: Larry Reid 510-238-7007
Councilmember at-large: Rebecca Kaplan 510-238-7008

To find out which district you live in, go here and type in your address.

Second, attend the council meeting.
Date: Tuesday, September 19th, 2017
Time: 5:30pm
Location: 1 Frank Ogawa Plaza
Room: City Council Chamber, third floor

The Friends of the Public Bank of Oakland will be out in full force at the council meeting. Please find us in our bright green shirts; we’ll have signs for you to hold up. We will also have t-shirts available for sale.

Learn more about public banking:
upcoming panel discussion at city hall

Want to learn more about public banking and how it can speed the development of local renewable energy and bring jobs to Alameda County? Come to a free panel discussion!

Date: Monday, September 25th, 2017
Time: 7-9pm
Location: 1 Frank Ogawa Plaza
Room: City Council Chamber, third floor

Pennie Opal Plant of Idle No More will open the evening with an invocation.

The panel will include:
� Wolfram Morales, Chief Economist for Spaarkasse, the association of local public banks in Germany
� Nicolas Chaset, CEO of East Bay Communitty Energy, Alameda County’s soon-to-launch Community Choice energy program
� Greg Rosen, founder and principal of Higgh Noon Advisors, currently working on a local community-shared solar project
� Jessica Tovar, an organizer with East Baay Clean Power Alliance.

The SFPD will be holding a community meeting regarding Tasers​. Meet at city cafe in the student union building.

Once again SFPD is trying to further arm their officers with more tools to use against the people. The Police Commission will be holding two community meetings before it will come to a vote(the date of the vote has not been determined).
It is vital that we turn out our people to these community meetings and make our voices heard, NO TASERS IN SF!!! We have beaten this before by turning out as many folks as possible!!!

RSVP and more info

Join Climate Workers for a special Labor Screening of “The North Pole,” a new comedic web series from Movement Generation, followed by a conversation with the show’s Executive Producer Josh Healey and a panel of union workers/organizers on labor’s role in combating climate change and defending our homes – from our neighborhoods to our planet.

“The North Pole is a political comedy web series about three best friends born and raised in North Oakland, CA, who struggle to stay rooted as their neighborhood becomes a hostile environment. Across seven outrageous episodes, Nina, Marcus, and Benny fight, dream, and plot hilarious schemes to save the place they call home. Facing both gentrification and global warming, they combat evil landlords, crazy geoengineering plots, and ultimately each other. Cameos by W. Kamau Bell, Mistah Fab, Boots Riley, and Ericka Huggins.”

Watch the trailer.

A Presentation by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)

The Alternative Right, commonly known as the Alt-Right, is a set of far-right ideologies, groups and individuals whose core belief is that “white identity” is under attack by multicultural forces using “political correctness” and “social justice” to undermine white people and “their” civilization.

A Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) expert on hate and extremism will share information on an orchestrated campaign by white nationalists to make college campuses their battleground. The battle is not over free speech or political conservatism. Come learn about what they’re pushing, why they’re obsessed with UC Berkeley and how we can effectively resist.

Speaker Bio
Ryan Lenz is the Senior Investigative Writer for the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project and editor of its Hatewatch blog. Before joining the SPLC in 2010, Lenz was a regional reporter for the Associated Press and an Iraq war correspondent for the wire service from 2005 to 2008. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)
The SPLC is dedicated to fighting hate and bigotry and to seeking justice for the most vulnerable members of our society. SPLC is headquartered in Montgomery, Alabama and have of offices in Atlanta, Miami, Tallahassee, Jackson, Mississippi and New Orleans.
https://www.splcenter.org/
http://www.splconcampus.org/
http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/14/us/splc-guide-dealing-with-alt-right/index.html

Come show your solidarity with the Black community of St. Louis. The cops are out of control, arresting over 80 people and taking the people’s chant “whose streets, our streets” to claim the streets are theirs.#AnthonyLamarSmith #JasonStockley #StLouis

MARGARET RANDALL: KPFA’s Tribute to the great writer, poet, feminist, photographer and international activist
Hosted by San Francisco Poet Laureate Alejandro Murguia

This rare tribute by KPFA is presented to honor the life and work of an author who has shown exceptional creativity and a lifelong striving for justice and equality.

Margaret Randall, born in New York City, is a writer, photographer, poet, activist and academic. She lived for many years in Spain, Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua, and spent time in North Vietnam during the last months of the U.S. war in that country. She has written extensively on her experiences abroad and back in the United States, and has taught at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and several other colleges.

Randall moved to Mexico in the 1960s, married Mexican poet Sergio Mondragon and gave up her American citizenship. She moved to Cuba in 1969, where she deepened her interest in women’s issues and wrote oral histories of mainly women, “wanting to understand what a socialist revolution could mean for women.” Her 2009 memoir To Change The World: My Years in Cuba chronicles that period of her life. She lived in Managua, Nicaragua, from 1980 to 1984, writing about Nicaraguan women, before returning to the U.S. after an absence of 23 years.

Among her best-known books are Cuban Women Now, Sandino’s Daughters, and When I Look into the Mirror and See You: Women, Terror and Resistance.

Alejandro Murguia, San Francisco Poet Laureate, is the author of This War Called Love (City Lights), Southern Front, Volcan: Poems from Central America, and Stray Poems.

KPFA Radio 94.1FM presents

MARGARET RANDALL: KPFAs Tribute to the great writer,
poet, feminist, photographer and international activist
Hosted by San Francisco Poet Laureate Alejandro Murguia

advance tickets: Books Inc/Berkeley,  Pegasus (3 stores), Moes, Walden Pond Bookstore, Diesel a Bookstore, Mrs. Dalloways

This rare tribute by KPFA is presented to honor the life and work of an author who has
shown exceptional creativity and a lifelong striving for justice and equality.

Margaret Randall, born in New York City, is a writer, photographer, poet, activist and academic. She lived for many years in Spain, Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua, and spent time in North Vietnam during the last months of the U.S. war in that country. She has written extensively on her experiences abroad and back in the United States, and has taught atTrinity Collegein Hartford, Connecticut, and several other colleges.

Randall moved to Mexico in the 1960s, married Mexican poetSergio Mondragonand gave up her American citizenship.She moved to Cuba in 1969, where she deepened her interest in women’s issues and wrote oral histories of mainly women, “wanting to understand what a socialist revolution could mean for women. Her 2009 memoirTo Change The World: My Years in Cubachronicles that period of her life. She lived in Managua, Nicaragua, from 1980 to 1984, writing about Nicaraguan women, before returning to the U.S. after an absence of 23 years.

Shortly afterward she was ordered deported under theMcCarran-Walter Actof 1952. The governments case rested on two arguments. First, while living in Mexico and married to a Mexican citizen, she had taken out Mexican citizenship, thereby presumably losing her U.S. citizenship.This was in 1967. In addition, under McCarran-Walter, the government claimed that the opinions Randall expressed in several of her books were “against the good order and happiness of the United States”. TheINSdistrict director gave the justification that “her writings go far beyond mere dissent. With the support of many well-known writers and others, Randall won aBoard of Immigration Appealscase in 1989, ordering the INS to reinstate full citizenship.

Among her best-known books areCuban Women Now,Sandinos Daughters, andWhen I Look into the Mirror and See You: Women, Terror and Resistance. Recent titles includeTo Change the World: My Years in Cuba, Che On My Mind, andHaydée Santamaría: She Led by Transgression, and Exporting Revolution: Cubas Global Solidarity. Among her most recent poetry collections: My Town, The Rhizome as a Field of Broken Bones, About Little Charlie Lindbergh, She Becomes Time, and The Morning After: Poetry and Prose in a Post-Truth World.

Alejandro Murguia, San Francisco Poet Laureate, is the author of This War Called Love (City Lights),  Southern Front, Volcan: Poems from Central America, and Stray Poems.

American Friends Service Committee, Buddhist Peace Fellowship, Episcopal Peace Fellowship, and San Francisco Friends Meeting and suppporters observed the occasion with their weekly 12-1pm vigil rain or shine every Thursday at 450 Golden Gate, the Federal Building.

Why We Vigil

For five years we have stood on this corner every Thursday from noon to 1:00. We come because we believe that what our government is doing is wrong. The so-called war on terror is a disaster, doing more to stimulate the growth of terrorism around the world than to keep our country safe.

We believe justice is the way to a terror-free world. We urge the United States to devote our resources to things that help humanity. Rather than investing in armaments, destruction and death, this country should be working to see that nobody in the world is starving or without shelter, clothing, education and medical care.

We say: Stop the war
Stop the torture
Bring the troops home now
Defend civil liberties
PRACTICE NONVIOLENCE

We believe in the American dream. We believe that the only way to live the American dream is with nonviolence. Please join us to stand against all war and to pray for all victims of war.

Please stand with us.

We have stood on this corner every Thursday since October 2001. We come to say NO to war and to speak up for nonviolence. All in agreement are invited to vigil with us.

This vigil was started by two Quaker groups–American Friends Service Committee and San Francisco Friends Meeting. They have been joined by Buddhist Peace Fellowship and Episcopal Peace Fellowship. Participants come from a range of backgrounds. Some of us are silent, praying or meditating. Others do not keep silence and are happy to speak with you.

Please vigil with us every Thursday.

Contact information: American Friends Service Committee
65 Ninth St., San Francisco, CA 94103
415 565-0201
www.afsc.org/

Buddhist Peace Fellowship
P.O. Box 3470, Berkeley, CA 94703
www.bpf.org/

Episcopal Peace Fellowship
415 824-0288
http://www.episcopalpeacefellowship.org/

San Francisco Friends Meeting
65 Ninth St., San Francisco, CA 94103
415 431-7440
Welcome to San Francisco Friends Meeting

To contact the vigil:

Come learn about criminalization and supporting our unhoused neighbors. The Coalition on Homelessness is creating a new community program, Sweeps Watch.

We will be educating unhoused and housed people in tactics for responding to Sweeps of encampments in our neighborhoods. We hope to build a network of solidarity, where housed folks are supporting the self determination of folks in crisis, with no where to go. We are doing this by building a network of rapid community responders that will have the skills to respond to police activity in their community safely and affectively.

We will have a more complete agenda closer to the date.

Some of what we will be learning about includes:
Filing claims against the city
How to document police activity and how best to take down a statement from a witness
Your rights during a police interaction
Strategies for fighting criminalization in SF

Please direct any questions that you may have to our Human Rights Organizer:

Dayton Andrews- dandrews@cohsf.org

Who we are:The NLG is a membership organization of radical lawyers, legal workers / legal activists, law students and jailhouse lawyers, originally founded 80 years ago as the first racially integrated national bar association. Its mission is “in the service of the people, to the end that human rights shall be regarded as more sacred than property interests.” We are active on a wide range of issues. The Bay Area Demonstrations Committee started in 1984 in order to organize legal support for protests against the Democratic Convention, and has supported most Bay Area progressive demonstrations and actions ever since, from antiwar protests to Occupy, Black Lives Matter, and anti-fascist actions. Within our capacity, we willprovidelegal support for any local progressive group that opposes racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism and transphobia. The Bay Area NLG chapter does not have any legal staff and the Demonstrations Committee is a group of volunteers – we do not have our own staff.

What we have typically done so far:The Demo Committee has a volunteer pool of criminal defense lawyers, legal observers, and legal hotline workers, as well as lawyers and legal workers with specific expertise on various issues. We train and organize lawyers, legal workers, community activists, and students as legal observers, legal hotline workers, and criminal defense attorneys for demonstrators or persons targeted by the state for political activity. We provide KYR and legal self defense education, and legal briefings and advice as part of direct action trainings and pre- and post-action meetings with organizers. By request or on our own initiative, we provide legal observers at protests, raids and actions to monitor the police, document arrests and police misconduct, and help communicate with off-scene legal support about arrests. We also train activists as legal observers. We line up lawyers to be on call to deal with jail release and to provide defense of criminal charges, as much as we are able, often in conjunction with the public defender. We often operate a legal hotline during actions and until everyone is released from custody. We can also train activist groups to do their own hotline or help staff ours. Our consistent efforts to provide aggressive criminal defense to demonstrators have resulted in thousands of charges being dismissed and significantly decreased the prosecution rate for low level demonstration-related arrests locally. We try to track each arrestee’s case through the entire process, and to provide volunteer court support in collaboration with activists’ wishes. Over the years, we have followed up on major police misconduct issues through media and policy work and advocacy, complaints with civilian review bodies, and occasionally through impact litigation, and have brought about significant reforms in police demonstrations, crowd control and mass arrest policies in San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley.

Immigration Committee and crossover work:The Bay Area Chapter has a number of other committees including a very active Immigration Committee. Among other things, our Immigration Committee recently trained more than 200 people to do immigration focused KYR trainings, is coordinating many KYR requests, and is working with a number of other organizations as part of the NorCal Rapid Response Network to respond to ICE raids throughout the region.The Immigration Committee will be having its own similar meeting with stakeholders to inform its specific work.

On Sept 11, 2001, at the request of community groups, the Demonstrations and Immigration Committee members immediately formed a Post-9/11 Committee to respond to attacks on Muslims and immigrants and political repression. As the legal arm of a community coalition, we were asked to create multi-lingual KYR materials that were widely distributed in targeted communities, and a Post-9/11 Hotline for persons targeted by FBI, ICE or other government agents. The hotline was originally staffed 24/7 by activists as well as by NLG members, and would find callers lawyers for a free consultation and possible pro bono or low fee representation. We quickly obtained grants and were temporarily able to hire a staff person for the hotline and related work. Over the years since then, a number of other groups such as CAIR have hired legal staff and otherwise expanded their capacities such that there are other legal hotlines covering a large part of what the NLG post-9/11 hotline was originally set up for. However, no other local groupsprovidelawyers or legal support specifically for radical activists who are contacted or subpoenaed by FBI or other law enforcement agents. This is still an active phone number in our office but we have not been doing outreach for it and it is not currently answered live; the voicemail is checked. Nor do we have legal staff in our office. This is one example of the type of resource we would like feedback on, as to whether this type of resource is needed in the community. We would like toinviteyou to a meeting to discuss these types of questions and hear from you.

President Trump’s efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act may be dead for now, but healthcare in America still faces a host of challenges from the local to the federal level. What is the current state of American healthcare? What needs to be done? How does it impact our communities?

Join the BDC for a panel discussion on these issues and more. Featured panelists include:

Marty Lynch, Executive Director of Lifelong Medical
Lisa Edwards, Grassroots Organizer and Political Coordinator for Congresswoman Barbara Lee
Delvecchio Finley, CEO of Alameda Health Systems

This will include potential impacts on California if the Graham Cassidy proposal is passed, local and state healthcare issues, and Universal Health Care.

The event is free and open to everyone.

Asm @TonyThurmond is hosting a Disaster Preparedness Town Hall today 6-8 @ South Berkeley Senior Center. Speakers from FEMA & many others. pic.twitter.com/OPzjNZm43f

— Kate Harrison (@KateHarrisonD4) September 21, 2017

Please join AFSC and the Stop Urban Shield Coalition to participate in public comment at the Alameda County Urban Shield Task Force decision meeting.

September 22nd agenda here.

Five members of Alameda County’s Urban Shield Task Force, including AFSC, proposed the abolition of Urban Shield and other regional exercises funded from sources that require a “nexus to terrorism,” as part of recommendations that will be considered at a final meeting this Friday. They cited the “controversy, opposition, and fear” generated by the Homeland Security-funded annual event, which is centered on a massive SWAT team competition in dozens of terrorist scenarios.

In response to widespread community protest against Urban Shield, the Alameda County Board of Supervisors established a Task Force in January to review several questions about the program.

Citing Alameda County’s Emergency Operations Plan, which assesses earthquakes and six other disaster scenarios as more impactful than potential terrorist incidents, the five members called for preparedness to be led by community and non-law enforcement agencies and for a primary focus on prevention of and recovery from disasters.

The final Urban Shield Task Force meeting (agenda) will be held at 9:00 a.m. on Friday, August 25, at 125 12th Street in Oakland(at Oak St., 4 blocks from Lake Merritt BART; 6 blocks from 12th St. BART). Public comment on most proposals will likely be taken between 10:30 and 12:30.

Written public comment may also be submitted before Friday to: carol.burton@acgov.org.

Read the full list of the group’s proposals.

Upcoming:

All Out to Rally Against Urban Shield
Friday, September 8, 4:00 – 7:00 pm

Alameda County Offices, Board of Supervisors

1221 Oak St, Oakland, California 94612

Senator Bernie Sanders will be speaking at the CNA Convention in San Francisco on Friday and it’s open to the public. His speech will highlight his new Medicare for All bill (S. 1804). Please join if you can!

Bernie Sanders Speech Highlighting Medicare for All

What: Sen. Bernie Sanders, public address

The program opens at 12:30 p.m. with a special performance the John Santos Quartet, with guests Destani Wolf and Rico Pabon. Powell St. BART Station.