The next North Oakland Mutual Aid distro this weekend (Nov 27-29)….
Let's help our unhoused neighbors !#MutualAid #Oakland #Berkeley #eastbay #omnicommons #grassroots #activist #collective #community #collective #center pic.twitter.com/bvv3gPxPr9

— Omni Commons (@omnicommons) November 27, 2020

Sun, Nov 15, 2020: 10:30 am to 12:30 pm
The Ongoing War on Syria & Why it Matters |
Rick Sterling will discuss the current situation in Syria and future prospects if Biden assumes the Presidency. Unreported in mainstream media, the US and allies continue to wage hybrid warfare on Syria – economically, politically, judicially and militarily. Why does the US persist in attacking Syria, preventing it from recovering and harming millions of Syrians? Will this change with a Democrat in the White House?  Why has this struggle become a focal point of East – West conflict? What are the best and worst things that could happen?
   Rick Sterling is on the Steering Committee of Syria Solidarity Movement.

He is an independent journalist who has written many articles about Syria..
LOGIN INFORMATION
The meeting will be opened up, as usual, at 10:15 for anyone to join and discuss technical matters, catch up with each other, say Hi, etc. We Intend to start the presentation as close to 10:30 am as possible. The program (and recording) will end at 12:30, but the Waiting Room will remain open for informal discussion.

Raj Sahai’s Zoom Meeting. (TO BE CONFIRMED)

Sun Nov 15, 2020 10:15am – 1:15pm Pacific Time

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/2591082607?pwd=TTdlcFlnZEVCdWt2VlRHeWZLeHNKQT09

Meeting ID: 259 108 2607

Passcode: 6MwQP7

Sun, Nov 22, 2020: 10:30 am to 12:30 pm

How the US Dominates the World Economy: Failings of Modern Monetary Theory and why the US can print trillions of dollars and not experience inflation.

Stansfield Smith will explain how the US control of the world economy since the end of World War II has enabled it to bully the world’s countries into depending on the US dollar and using it as the international currency. This requires world countries to amass quantities of dollars to operate and to pay the cost of upholding the value of the dollar, which includes investing in the growing US debt. This also explains how the US can use its economic sanctions to punish countries that seek independence from US control. While Modern Monetary Theory gives an account of why the US can continue to print vast sums of money and suffer little inflation, its explanation avoids confronting the reality of US control of the world financial structure.

Stansfield Smith’s presentation is based on his articles: Inadequacy of Modern Monetary Theory and the Power of the US Dollar in the World Economy and Why the US Can Keep Increasing its Debt and not Suffer Inflation.
Stan Smith has been involved in the Freedom for the Cuban Five movement and the movements in defense of the sovereignty of El Salvador, Cuba, Venezuela, and other Latin American countries for 40 years. He has written numerous articles such as: First Two Months in Power: Hitler vs. Trump; What North Koreans Think; Framing North Korea; Is Russia imperialist; China’s International Solidarity Aid to the World During the Corona Pandemic; Chomsky and Other Liberal Intellectuals Ask Us to Join Them in Throwing in the Towel. He produces a weekly compendium of articles on Latin America at https://chicagoalbasolidarity.wordpress.com/.

Sun, Nov 29, 2020: 10:30 am to 12:30 pm (Thanksgiving weekend)
TENTATIVE: Abhinav Sinha on the International Working Class
Our speaker is editor of the renowned Hindi magazine ‘Muktikami Chhatron-Yuvaon ka Aahwan.’

Sun, Dec 6, 2020: 10:30 am to 12:30 pm
The Logic of Capitalist Production and Marx’s Ecology
Even many Marxists are convinced that Marx believed in production without limitations, and thus Marx was oblivious to the question of ecology of the planet. Today the world is caught in a double jeopardy: on one hand capitalism is reducing workers’ organized bargaining power by production shifted to lowest wage countries pitting workers of one country against another and on the other capitalist production is consuming the resources of the planet provided by Nature rapidly while massively polluting land, water, and air. Since the fall of the USSR, China has been touted as the successful model of socialism using the capitalist market, or what is termed as “Market-Socialism”. This leads workers in US with no hope unlike in 1930s when they saw hope after the revolution in the USSR and workers had state power and were constructing socialism. A section of the US workers were drawn to a demagogue, namely Trump in the US and in India a majority of workers followed another demagogue: Modi in India. This trend is also developing in other countries. Raj Sahai will analyze this situation in the first hour and then in the second invite comments from the audience.

We’re excited to announce Community Dialogs, a public education program offering events on topics related to mass incarceration and higher education. Events will feature guest speakers including students, our local community, and national experts; film and book discussion groups featuring Mount Tamalpais College faculty; and online workshops free of charge.

The first event is scheduled for Tuesday, December 1, 6:30pm-7:45pm, and will feature the premiere screening of With This Knowledge, a short documentary series following two former students on their reentry journey. Film subjects Sumit Lal and Sajad Shakoor, and filmmaker R.J. Lozada will discuss the film, facilitated by Aly Tamboura. Please RSVP for this free virtual event here.

We hope to see you there!

With warm regards,
Mount Tamalpais College

RSVP Here

Socialists talk a lot about the working class. Why is that? Well, we think workers play a particular role under capitalism that makes them central in the fight for socialism. As the main producers of society’s wealth, workers have the potential power to halt the system. What does it mean to build this power and how does that inform our organizing today?

Join the East Bay DSA Political Education Committee for a discussion of these questions and more!

Reading + Listening

Hal Draper, Why the Working Class

Vivek Chibber, Why the Working Class

Video: Why Do Socialists Talk So Much About Workers? with Vivek Chibber (Optional)

Join Zoom Meeting

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84783105991?pwd=Tlk5SENqWHFHV216M1lSZkRtUGk2dz09

Meeting ID: 847 8310 5991

Password: 897028

One tap mobile

+16699006833,,84783105991#,,,,0#,,897028# US (San Jose)

+13462487799,,84783105991#,,,,0#,,897028# US (Houston)

ECOTOPIA 2050 5-PART SPEAKER SERIES

Ecotopia 2050 is designed as a 5 Episode speaker discussion series with the first episode serving as an introduction/prelude to the event. The speaker discussion series is paired with corresponding book club meetings that give participants a more intimate opportunity to discuss the themes of the book in the community.

Based on the 1975 blockbuster utopian novel Ecotopia, this discussion and book club event series revisit some of the futuristic visions of the Ernest Callenbach classic. His visionary ideas, and those of his generation, that he so skillfully captured in Ecotopia are a fascinating amalgam of technical, economic, societal, and cultural transformations. They are predictive on so many levels, and the series will explore what has come true, what remains on the list of things to do that were proposed, and what new visions we might begin to pull together in the construction of an updated Ecotopian vision of today.

Registration Instructions
1. Choose your experience (single episode) or full series
2. Are you joining the book club? *choose the add on
Note: You must be registered for the full series if you register for book club.
3. Check out.
4. A secure Zoom link will be sent 24 hours ahead of event time to registered email.

Register Here

This is a letter-writing party to get together on Zoom and write letters together for this campaign organized by XR DC.

Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83713470647?pwd=SEVXeW5nc25wRncwM041aWNxNGxLZz09

Info about the campaign:

The Trump administration is working to open Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to oil mining before leaving office in January. This is something that climate deniers and extinction profiteers have been trying to accomplish for decades, but was too extreme for even the George W. Bush administration. Now, after the election, and with no hope of holding onto power, they’re trying to rush it through on their way out.

From November 17 through December 17 the Bureau of Land Management is taking nominations for land tracts to be auctioned and leased to oil companies. They’ve divided the coastal plain of ANWR up into potential tracts and are seeking suggestions on which tracts would be best for oil extraction and/or input on how their existing delineation of the tracts should be changed. After the nomination period they will publish a lease notice, announcing which tracts they intend to make available at an auction. Once they publish the lease notice they are required to wait 30 days before auctioning off the mining rights. With the Presidential inauguration taking place on January 20, 2021, they have a very narrow window of time to review all tract nominations and publish their lease notice. Any delay in this process, even a matter of hours, could result in the lease not being finalized until after President Biden is sworn in, effectively killing the deal.

ACTION

Submit as many letters as possible to the Alaska Bureau of Land Management. These should be notes or letters, not actual (or fake) lease tract nominations.

Some potential submission strategies:

• Write a love letter to the future, to your grandchildren, to the planet.
• Write personal letters to the BLM Alaska employees, letting them know the consequences of their actions and what they could do to help. Encourage them to delay the nomination review by dragging their feet. Remind them that they might need a bathroom break, or a cup of coffee. Get creative.

NOTE: Interfering with a federal submission process could potentially be a crime. Posing as an oil exploration company and submitting legitimate seeming nominations could potentially add to the seriousness of this and increase the likelihood of an investigation. We do not recommend you include any identifying information, including your name, contact info, address, etc.

MAILING ADDRESS

State Director
Bureau of Land Management, Alaska State Office
222 West 7th Avenue, Mailstop 13
Anchorage, AK 99513-7504

Please mail your letters as you have them ready. Rather than delivering a giant pile of these all at once, we want a constant barrage that they can’t keep up with. To reach Anchorage by the deadline (December 17) all letters must be mailed no later than December 9 with normal postage. Also consider sending them from different zip codes so that they will not all have identical postmarks.

Carl Dix will be in conversation with Alec Karakatsanis.

This virtual program will stream on YouTube and FaceBook https://www.facebook.com/revbooksnyc/live/
To register for the event, go here. https://www.eventbrite.com/e/alec-karakatsanis-on-usual-cruelty-the-complicity-of-lawyers-tickets-131059812427

Alec Karakatsanis is interested in what society chooses to punish. For example, it is a crime in most of America for poor people to wager in the streets over dice; dice-wagers can be seized, searched, have their assets forfeited, and be locked in cages. It’s perfectly fine, by contrast, for people to wager over international currencies, mortgages, or the global supply of wheat.

Alec Karakatsanis is also troubled by how the legal system works when it is trying to punish people. The bail system, for example, is meant to ensure that people return for court dates. But it has morphed into a way to lock up poor people who have not been convicted of anything. He’s so concerned about this that he has personally sued court systems across the country, resulting in literally tens of thousands of people being released from jail when their money bail was found to be unconstitutional.

“[Usual Cruelty is] a devastating indictment of the legal profession by one of our most important young lawyers, Usual Cruelty cuts to the core of what is critical to understand about our legal system, and about ourselves. Every law student and lawyer should read this book.”
—Anthony D. Romero, exec. director, American Civil Liberties Union

Usual Cruelty is available at Revolution Books in Harlem, or at RB’s online store here: https://shop.revolutionbooksnyc.org/book/9781620975275

Read an excerpt from Usual Cruelty about the money bail system in Time magazine here: https://time.com/5749542/cash-bail-impact/

Alec Karakatsanis is a former public defender. He is the founder of the Civil Rights Corps, an organization designed to advocate for racial justice and bring systemic civil rights cases on behalf of impoverished people. He was named the 2016 Trial Lawyer of the Year by Public Justice, and was awarded by Gideon’s Promise for contributions to indigent defense in the South.

Carl Dix is a co-founder with Cornel West of the Stop Mass Incarceration Network; a co-initiator of RefuseFascism.org; and a follower of the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian.

Connect with https: https://tinyurl.com/election2020-WTF

Speakers and themes include:
* Dr. Laurence Shoup: The factors behind the vote: Historical, economic, social and political

* Michael Rubin: The political reality revealed: What should socialists do now?

* Marsha Feinland: California politics unmasked: What ballot initiatives have become

This event is sponsored by the Oakland Greens, Bay Area System Change Not Climate Change, and the Alameda County Peace and Freedom Party.

EMAIL STRIKE.DEBT.BAY.AREA@GMAIL.COM FOR
ZOOM INFO A FEW DAYS BEFORE THE MEETING.

MAX HAIVEN, THE AUTHOR, WILL BE JOINING OUR DISCUSSION IN DECEMBER!

Strike Debt Bay Area hosts a 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, and The Deficit Myth.

For our October discussion we will be reading the first two chapters of  ‘Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts‘ by Max Haiven (You can order it from Pluto Press.)

For our November discussion we’ll be reading the third and fourth chapters, and for our December discussion we’ll read the final chapters and closing material.

Join us – all are welcome! (This is a dense and intricate book, so if you want to join in on the discussion in December as opposed to just auditing the discussion and listening to the author we’d ask that you make sure you’ve read it…)

Capitalism is in a profound state of crisis. Beyond the mere dispassionate cruelty of ‘ordinary’ structural violence, it appears today as a global system bent on reckless economic revenge; its expression found in mass incarceration, climate chaos, unpayable debt, pharmaceutical violence and the relentless degradation of common life.

In Revenge Capitalism, Max Haiven argues that this economic vengeance helps us explain the culture and politics of revenge we see in society more broadly. Moving from the history of colonialism and its continuing effects today, he examines the opioid crisis in the US, the growth of ‘surplus populations’ worldwide and unpacks the central paradigm of unpayable debts – both as reparations owed, and as a methodology of oppression.

Revenge Capitalism offers no easy answers, but is a powerful call to the radical imagination.

Max Haiven is Research Chair in Culture, Media and Social Justice at Lakehead University, Canada. His books include Art after Money, Money after Art (Pluto, 2018), Crises of Imagination, Crises of Power (Zed Books, 2004), Cultures of Financialization (Palgrave MacMillan, 2014) and the Radical Imagination (Zed Books, 2014).

Health Care for All – Contra Costa County News / 12-06-19 Zoom
meeting

If you are interested in joining us, please email Yi Shepard.
Links to the draft agenda and draft October meeting notes.

And at this meeting we will elect directors and officers for 2021. Therefore Contra Costa County chapter members are highly encouraged to attend.

Message from Chapter Co-Chairs

We hope this finds you well.  We are relieved at the outcome of the federal election, which makes any effort to legislate health care reform at the State level, though not easy, more of a possibility.  Despite and because of what COVID has revealed about problems in our health care system, our work advocating for single-payer reform continues with more commitment than ever.

As most of you know, meetings of Newsom�s Healthy California for All Commission have been postponed until February.  In the meantime, we can write letters to the editor, continue to educate our friends and contact our legislators about the need for single-payer healthcare reform.

We continue to look for someone willing to post our newsletter every other month. If you are willing to do so and have some knowledge of HTML, please contact us.

We hope that you continue to stay healthy and wish you the best.

Susan Buckland and Janet Thomas

Sun, Nov 15, 2020: 10:30 am to 12:30 pm
The Ongoing War on Syria & Why it Matters |
Rick Sterling will discuss the current situation in Syria and future prospects if Biden assumes the Presidency. Unreported in mainstream media, the US and allies continue to wage hybrid warfare on Syria – economically, politically, judicially and militarily. Why does the US persist in attacking Syria, preventing it from recovering and harming millions of Syrians? Will this change with a Democrat in the White House?  Why has this struggle become a focal point of East – West conflict? What are the best and worst things that could happen?
   Rick Sterling is on the Steering Committee of Syria Solidarity Movement.

He is an independent journalist who has written many articles about Syria..
LOGIN INFORMATION
The meeting will be opened up, as usual, at 10:15 for anyone to join and discuss technical matters, catch up with each other, say Hi, etc. We Intend to start the presentation as close to 10:30 am as possible. The program (and recording) will end at 12:30, but the Waiting Room will remain open for informal discussion.

Raj Sahai’s Zoom Meeting. (TO BE CONFIRMED)

Sun Nov 15, 2020 10:15am – 1:15pm Pacific Time

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/2591082607?pwd=TTdlcFlnZEVCdWt2VlRHeWZLeHNKQT09

Meeting ID: 259 108 2607

Passcode: 6MwQP7

Sun, Nov 22, 2020: 10:30 am to 12:30 pm

How the US Dominates the World Economy: Failings of Modern Monetary Theory and why the US can print trillions of dollars and not experience inflation.

Stansfield Smith will explain how the US control of the world economy since the end of World War II has enabled it to bully the world’s countries into depending on the US dollar and using it as the international currency. This requires world countries to amass quantities of dollars to operate and to pay the cost of upholding the value of the dollar, which includes investing in the growing US debt. This also explains how the US can use its economic sanctions to punish countries that seek independence from US control. While Modern Monetary Theory gives an account of why the US can continue to print vast sums of money and suffer little inflation, its explanation avoids confronting the reality of US control of the world financial structure.

Stansfield Smith’s presentation is based on his articles: Inadequacy of Modern Monetary Theory and the Power of the US Dollar in the World Economy and Why the US Can Keep Increasing its Debt and not Suffer Inflation.
Stan Smith has been involved in the Freedom for the Cuban Five movement and the movements in defense of the sovereignty of El Salvador, Cuba, Venezuela, and other Latin American countries for 40 years. He has written numerous articles such as: First Two Months in Power: Hitler vs. Trump; What North Koreans Think; Framing North Korea; Is Russia imperialist; China’s International Solidarity Aid to the World During the Corona Pandemic; Chomsky and Other Liberal Intellectuals Ask Us to Join Them in Throwing in the Towel. He produces a weekly compendium of articles on Latin America at https://chicagoalbasolidarity.wordpress.com/.

Sun, Nov 29, 2020: 10:30 am to 12:30 pm (Thanksgiving weekend)
TENTATIVE: Abhinav Sinha on the International Working Class
Our speaker is editor of the renowned Hindi magazine ‘Muktikami Chhatron-Yuvaon ka Aahwan.’

Sun, Dec 6, 2020: 10:30 am to 12:30 pm
The Logic of Capitalist Production and Marx’s Ecology
Even many Marxists are convinced that Marx believed in production without limitations, and thus Marx was oblivious to the question of ecology of the planet. Today the world is caught in a double jeopardy: on one hand capitalism is reducing workers’ organized bargaining power by production shifted to lowest wage countries pitting workers of one country against another and on the other capitalist production is consuming the resources of the planet provided by Nature rapidly while massively polluting land, water, and air. Since the fall of the USSR, China has been touted as the successful model of socialism using the capitalist market, or what is termed as “Market-Socialism”. This leads workers in US with no hope unlike in 1930s when they saw hope after the revolution in the USSR and workers had state power and were constructing socialism. A section of the US workers were drawn to a demagogue, namely Trump in the US and in India a majority of workers followed another demagogue: Modi in India. This trend is also developing in other countries. Raj Sahai will analyze this situation in the first hour and then in the second invite comments from the audience.