Calendar

According to our speaker, the Biden administration’s lawfare against Trump is supported by the left because of their own McCarthyism. The national security state, through the Biden administration, is engaging in lawfare to eliminate Biden’s only serious challenger and fix the 2024 election. Much of the progressive movement, rather than protest and stop police state interference, is supportive of it, even though this lawfare will be used against them in the future. The cause for the silence among liberals and leftists is their own McCarthyism: people are baited, and fear being baited not as Reds, but as Trump supporters. This left McCarthyismm pushes people towards voting for the supposed lesser evil Democrats and towards defending the actions of the national security police state. This national security state finds the Democratic Party a more useful tool to criminalize opposition to US wars and maintain their control over the US government.

Our speaker, Stansfield Smith, is a member of Chicago ALBA Solidarity, formerly the Chicago Committee to Free the Cuban 5. He has published in LA Progressive, Dissident Voice, Council on Hemispheric Affairs, Covert Action, Monthly Review online, and other websites. Smith is a long time anti-war activist, and opposed US interference over the years in Latin America. He produces AFGJ’s Venezuela & ALBA Weekly News and the online newsletter for the Nicaragua Solidarity Coalition. His website is ChicagoALBASolidarity.org.

Recent articles include:

* “The Danger that Lawfare against Trump Presents to the Progressive Movement,” https://dissidentvoice.org/2023/09/the-danger-that-lawfare-against-trump-presents-to-the-progressive-movement/;

* “JFK’s World Peace Speech and National Security State Takedowns of US Presidents,” https://dissidentvoice.org/2023/08/jfks-world-peace-speech-and-national-security-state-takedowns-of-us-presidents/; and

* “John F. Kennedy on Ending the US War on Vietnam � His Owwn Words,” https://www.laprogressive.com/war-and-peace/ending-the-us-war-on-vietnam.

* “Liberal and Left Silence on National Security Police State When Used Against Trump and His Supporters,”

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/06/21/liberal-and-left-silence-on-national-security-police-state-when-used-against-trump-and-his-supporters/

Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81133350622?pwd=dUUyUWppbWt6djVTaElISUhocXpSUT09

Meeting ID: 811 3335 0622
Passcode: ICSS2717rs

Dial by your location
+1 669 444 9171 US
+1 669 900 6833 US (San Jose)

Find your local number: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kdVC04xvn9

NOTE: During the Plague Year of 2020 GA will be held every week or two on Zoom. To find out the exact time a date get on the Occupy Oakland email list my sending an email to:

occupyoakland-subscribe@lists.riseup.net

The Occupy Oakland General Assembly meets every Sunday at 4 PM at Oscar Grant Plaza amphitheater at 14th Street & Broadway near the steps of City Hall. If for some reason the amphitheater is being used otherwise and/or OGP itself is inaccessible, we will meet at Kaiser Park, right next to the statues, on 19th St. between San Pablo and Telegraph. If it is raining (as in RAINING, not just misting) at 4:00 PM we meet in the basement of the Omni Collective, 4799 Shattuck Ave., Oakland. (Note: we tend to meet at 3:00 PM during the cooler months from November to early March after Daylights Savings Time.)

On every ‘last Sunday’ we meet a little earlier at 3 PM to have a community potluck to which all are welcome.

OO General Assembly has met on a continuous basis for over six years, since October 2011! Our General Assembly is a participatory gathering of Oakland community members and beyond, where everyone who shows up is treated equally. Our Assembly and the process we have collectively cultivated strives to reach agreement while building community.

At the GA committees, caucuses, and loosely associated groups whose representatives come voluntarily report on past and future actions, with discussion. We encourage everyone participating in the Occupy Oakland GA to be part of at least one associated group, but it is by no means a requirement. If you like, just come and hear all the organizing being done! Occupy Oakland encourages political activity that is decentralized and welcomes diverse voices and actions into the movement.

General Assembly Standard Agenda

Welcome & Introductions
Reports from Committees, Caucuses, & Independent Organizations
Announcements
(Optional) Discussion Topic

Occupy Oakland activities and contact info for some Bay Area Groups with past or present Occupy Oakland members.

Occupy Oakland Web Committee: (web@occupyoakland.org)
Strike Debt Bay Area : strikedebtbayarea.tumblr.com
Berkeley Post Office Defenders:http://berkeleypostofficedefenders.wordpress.com/
Alan Blueford Center 4 Justice:https://www.facebook.com/ABC4JUSTICE
Oakland Privacy Working Group:https://oaklandprivacy.wordpress.com
Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity: prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity.wordpress.com/
Bay Area AntiRepression: antirepression@occupyoakland.org
Biblioteca Popular: http://tinyurl.com/mdlzshy
Interfaith Tent: www.facebook.com/InterfaithTent
Port Truckers Solidarity: oaklandporttruckers.wordpress.com
Bay Area Intifada: bayareaintifada.wordpress.com
Transport Workers Solidarity: www.transportworkers.org
Fresh Juice Party (aka Chalkupy) freshjuiceparty.com/chalkupy-gallery
Sudo Room: https://sudoroom.org
Omni Collective: https://omnicommons.org/
First They Came for the Homeless: https://www.facebook.com/pages/First-they-came-for-the-homeless/253882908111999
Sunflower Alliance: http://www.sunflower-alliance.org/
Bay Area Public School: http://thepublicschool.org/bay-area

San Francisco based groups:
Occupy Bay Area United: www.obau.org
Occupy Forum: (see OBAU above)
San Francisco Projection Department: http://tinyurl.com/kpvb3rv

Starting: Mondays, October 9TH @ 4-6PM ET (ONLINE) This class is co-organized by Democracy at Work.

This 4-Week seminar led by Richard Wolff, will begin with an introduction and brief history of world socialism from its 18th-century beginnings to today. We will examine the different kinds of socialism (Soviet, social democracy, democratic socialism, Cuban socialism, socialism with Chinese characteristics, and worker-coop socialism) and likewise examine the differences among socialism, communism, anarchism, and so on. Finally, we will examine critiques of socialism. Throughout, we will be sensitive to different interpretations of socialism and distinguish between socialism as a critical movement within capitalism (how it began) and socialism as an alternative system (how it evolved).

The dates for each of the four sessions are on Mondays: Oct 9th, 16th, 23rd & 30th. Online Zoom information will be sent through email upon registration.

REGISTER HERE

RSVP now!

With 2.3 million people trapped in Gaza, under fire from Israel’s relentless bombing – including suffocating illegal white phosphorus, peace activists worldwide are demanding a ceasefire to stop the unfolding human catastrophe and lift the blockade barring food, medicine, water and electricity to the Palestinians in Gaza.

After 75 years of occupation and the recent Hamas attacks in Israel, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken flew to Tel Aviv to profess ironclad support and billions of dollars more for apartheid Israel as it imposes lethal collective punishment – a violation of international law – on the people of of Gaza, 50% of whom are children.

Our guests will offer a counter-narrative that affirms the Palestinian desire for liberation, addresses the root causes of the violence and issues a call to action.

Special Guest Co-Host:

Nour is CODEPINK’s Palestine and Iran Campaigner. She graduated from DePaul University with a bachelor’s degree in International Studies in June 2022. Nour has been advocating for Palestinian liberation for over 5 years, including organizing within her university. She also organizes around related issues, such as abolition.

Featured Guests:

Hassan El-Tayyab is the Legislative Director for Middle East policy at the Friends Committee on National Legislation. Hassan leads FCNL’s work calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and an end to the bloodshed in the Middle East. In addition to advocating for Palestinian human rights, Hassan works to end U.S. military complicity in the Saudi-led war on Yemen and advance diplomacy with Iran. Prior to joining FCNL, Hassan served as the co-director of the national advocacy group Just Foreign Policy, where he worked to reassert Congressional war authority and promote human rights in the Middle East and Latin America. His passion for foreign affairs is rooted in his desire to make life safer for people in the Middle East, including his extended family in Jordan, Palestine, and Yemen.

Huwaida Arraf is a Palestinian American activist and civil rights attorney who co-founded the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a Palestinian-led organization using non-violent protests and international pressure to support Palestinians.  A former candidate for US Congress representing Michigan’s 10th congressional district, Huwaida specializes in international human rights and humanitarian law, as well as domestic US civil rights litigation. A Hebrew-speaking Palestinian Christian, Huwaida spent time living on an Israeli kibbutz before rejecting coexistence efforts in favor of advocating for Palestinian resistance. The daughter of two Palestinian Christian parents  her mother came from Beit Sahour in the West Bank, and her father was a Palestinian citizen of Israel  she was born in Detroit shortly after her parents immigrated to the United States. She majored in Arabic studies, Judaic studies and political science at the University of Michigan.

Noura Khouri is Palestinian living in Oakland/Ohlone land and has worked for the past two decades as a human rights activist, campaign strategist and community organizer. Noura lived and worked in occupied Palestine with the International Solidarity Movement and other human rights organizations including Badil Refugee and Residency Center, Al-Haq and Holy Land Trust. She currently works as a preschool teacher, and serves as an Al-Awda Palestine Right to Return Coalition, National Committee Member, Green Party, Intl Delegate and part of Beloved Community Circles – where she conspires to destroy walls and build bridges of solidarity.

RSVP now!

Please email contact@oaklandprivacy.org a few days before the meeting to get up-to-date location information or obtain Zoom meeting access info.

(THE JANUARY 17TH MEETING, 2024 WAS MOVED TO JANUARY 24TH)

Join Oakland Privacy to organize against the surveillance state, police militarization and ICE, and to advocate for privacy, surveillance regulation of both corporations and the state, and government transparency, around the Bay and nationwide.

We fight against spy drones, facial recognition, tracking equipment, police body camera secrecy, anti-transparency laws and requirements for “backdoors” to cellphones; we oppose “pre-crime” and “thought-crime,” —  to list just a few invasions of our privacy by all levels of Government, and attempts to hide what government officials, employees and agencies are doing.

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.

Check out some of what we worked on in 2022, 2021, 2020 and 2019.

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.  We helped fight and in 2018 helped win the fight against Urban Shield.

Our major projects currently include local legislation to regulate state surveillance (we got the strongest surveillance regulation ordinance in the country passed in Oakland!), supporting and opposing state legislation as appropriate, battling mass surveillance in the form of facial recognition and other analytics, mass aerial surveillance, ubiquitous license plate readers,  and street surveillance, and fighting to ensure local governments adhere to State privacy and transparency regulations.

On September 12th, 2019 we were presented with a Barlow Award by the Electronic Frontier Foundation for our work, and on March 16th, 2021 s James Madison Freedom of Information Award by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists.

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, and/or on Mastodon at https://mastodon.social/@oaklandprivacy

Register.

Anti Police-Terror Project is a Black-led, multi-racial, intergenerational coalition that seeks to build a replicable and sustainable model to eradicate police terror in communities of color. We support families surviving police terror in their fight for justice, documenting police abuses and connecting impacted families and community members with resources, legal referrals, and opportunities for healing.

Donate

the Bay Area premiere of FINDING THE MONEY as the Closing Night Film for the Green Film Festival of SF.

Can a new economic theory revolutionize our ability to tackle the climate crisis?

An underdog group of economists is on a mission to instigate a paradigm shift by flipping our understanding of the national debt — and the nature of money — upside down.

FINDING THE MONEY follows Stephanie Kelton on a journey through the controversial Modern Money Theory or “MMT”, as Kelton provocatively asserts the National Debt Clock that ticks ominously upwards in New York City is not actually a debt for us taxpayers at all, nor a burden for our grandchildren to pay back. Instead, Kelton describes the national debt as simply a record of the number of dollars created by the US federal government (the issuer of the US dollar) currently being held in our pockets, as assets, by the rest of us.

MMT bursts into the mainstream media, with journalists asking, “Have we been thinking about how the government spends money, all wrong?”

But top economists and politicians from across the political spectrum condemn the theory as “voodoo economics”, “crazy” and “a crackpot theory”. FINDING THE MONEY traces the conflict all the way back to the story we tell about money, injecting new hope and empowering democracies around the world to tackle the biggest challenges of the 21st century: from climate change to inequality.

Co-presented by the Berkeley Film Foundation, DocLands, and Filmmakers Collaborative SF

A captivating conversation that delves deep into the impact of this veto while examining how caste continues to impact people living in the South Asian diaspora and how the ongoing fight to eradicate caste apartheid intertwines with other civil rights movements in the U.S.

Berkeleyside’s Supriya Yelimeli will guide this discussion with journalist Sonia Paul, state Senator Aisha Wahab and Equality Labs founder Thenmozhi Soundararajan to understand the contemporary context of caste, Dalit activism and civil rights in America.
Last chance for discounted early bird tickets is Friday Oct. 13
Get your early-bird tickets for Idea Makers!

Doors open at 6 p.m. and the program will start promptly at 6:30 p.m.
Thenmozhi Soundararajan’s The Trauma of Caste will be available for purchase.

Our hometown CA *Bay Area premiere*! FINDING THE MONEY will be featured as the Closing Night Film of the Green Film Festival of San Francisco.

A major event Co-Presented by DocLands, Berkeley Film Foundation, and Filmmakers Collaborative SF.

Filmmakers in attendance for reception.

Tickets on sale Now!

This is the 50th anniversary of the US and AFL-CIO supported coup in Chile in 1973. The repression and privatization that the coup and Pinochet brought still torments the people and country.

Join Elisabeth Milos, a Chilean American and member of CWA UPTE UCSF as well as LEPAIO who will be reporting on her trip to Chile on September 11th. She will also show video from her trip.

The Labor Education Project on The AFL-CIO International Operations LEPAIO was formed to educate US trade unionists and workers about the role of the AFL-CIO around the world. The AFL-CIO is receiving over $75 million for the operations of the Solidarity Center which has is in 62 countries around the world and has been engaged in supporting pro-corporate unions and backing US coups and interventions.

LEPAIO
https://aflcio-int.education
info [at] aflcio-int.education
Co-sponsored by KPOO WorkWeek

The Haiti Emergency Relief Fund and Haiti Action Committee invite those who are able to attend the event : We are honored to have Mme Mildred Aristide as guest speaker.

Live music: Tarika Lewis and Destiny Muhammad, Francisco Herrera
      Speakers: Pierre Labossiere and Walter Riley
Peace and more Peace in Haiti and in our fragile world.
Sister Maureen

In the wake of the indiscriminate attack by Palestinian military forces from Hamas, which has left some 1,200 people dead and 2,000 wounded, the Israeli government is blaming Palestinian’s for Hamas’s attack, and promising to make Palestinians pay “an unprecedented price.” Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has announced that Israel has begun a “long and difficult war” to turn Gaza into “rubble.” President Biden has said that U.S. support for Israel’s massacre is “rock solid and unwavering.”

Since 1967, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank have been militarily occupied and controlled by Israel. Israel has used the occupation to further its genocidal erasure of the Palestinian people to take more of their land, and force Palestinians to live like prisoners, under constant violence, or trapped in Gaza, under a constant state of siege. And the U.S. has supported Israel every step of the way.

We cannot be silent in the face of this slaughter of Palestinians. We must stand up and demand:

END THE ISRAELI WAR AND OCCUPATION OF PALESTINE!
DOWN WITH THE GENOCIDAL ISRAELI STATE!
NO U.S. AID to ISRAEL!

Join us for a presentation and discussion about the current situation, what has led to this, and what role we can play here in the U.S.

Can’t join us in person? Join on Zoom:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82158800683?pwd=N2J6UjgxNWhNak1WRWdUdm9CUit4QT09

Meeting ID: 821 5880 0683
Passcode: 340756

Email strike.debt.bay.area@gmail.com a few days beforehand for the online invite.

For our October meeting we are reading Parts 5 and 6 of Jackson Rising Redux: Building the Future in the Present. (PM Press, Amazon).  For our  November  meeting  we  are reading  Parts  7,  8 and  the  Afterwords.

Mississippi is the poorest state in the US, with the highest percentage of Black people and a history of vicious racial terror. Black resistance at a time of global health, economic, and climate crisis is the backdrop and context for the drama captured in this new and revised collection of essays. Cooperation Jackson, founded in 2014 in Mississippi’s capital to develop an economically uplifting democratic “solidarity economy,” is anchored by a network of worker-owned, self-managed cooperative enterprises. The organization developed in the context of the historic election of radical Mayor Chokwe Lumumba, lifetime human rights attorney. Subsequent to Lumumba’s passing less than one year after assuming office, the network developed projects both inside and outside of the formal political arena. In 2020, Cooperation Jackson became the center for national and international coalition efforts, bringing together progressive peoples from diverse trade union, youth, church, and cultural movements. This long-anticipated anthology details the foundations behind those successful campaigns. It unveils new and ongoing strategies and methods being pursued by the movement for grassroots-centered Black community control and self-determination, inspiring partnership and emulation across the globe.

Strike Debt Bay Area hosts this non-technical book group discussion monthly on new and radical economic thinking. Previous readings have included Doughnut Economics, Limits, Banking on the People, Capital and Its Discontents, How to Be an Anti-Capitalist in the 21st Century, The Deficit Myth,  Revenge Capitalism, the Edge of Chaos blog symposium , Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons, The Optimist’s Telescope, Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism, Exploring Degrowth, The Origin of Wealth, Mine!, The Dawn of Everything  A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, Beyond Money, Less is More,  Cannibal Capitalism,  Debt, the First 5000 Years , Poverty, By America,, and End Times.

The Oakland Greens Virtual Town Hall
Can non-monogamy be a family value? — Join the discussion — The Green Party has many Consensual Ethical Non-Monogamous (CENM) members. When the Oakland Greens added CENM language to promotional graphics and merchandise, it sparked a lively debate. Check our YouTube channel for those discussions. That debate gave way to having the discussion for one of our townhalls. So for our final VTH event of the year, we will discuss the idea of whether CENM is a Green Party family value. Our special guest for this event has over twenty years’ experience living this ideal. Join our regular panel as we deep dive into another progressive issue. Go to oaklandgreens.org/events, Eventbrite Oakland Greens, or Facebook Oakland Greens. For any questions email contact@oaklandgreens.org or oaklandgreenparty@gmail.com

Vicente has been CENM since 1999. CENM directly navigated Vicente through their life journey to the social justice movement. Vicente’s experience includes working with the Bay Area’s Midnight Special Law Collective of the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) for five years, and the Prevention of Trafficking project for the Oakland Greens since 2019. They also have conducted a Radical Love workshop on prejudice within the Poly/Kink community and organized a sex worker union. Since 2012, Vicente has been the Event Producer for the Oakland Greens.

Please register by tonight (Friday), via Eventbrite, here:  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-oakland-greens-vth-october-is-non-monogamy-a-green-party-family-value-tickets-560051859187?aff=ebdssbdestsearch