Calendar
Please join Families for Ceasefire at the Lake Merritt Amphitheater on Saturday February 10th for a children’s rally from 11:30am – 1:30pm, in advance of the Gaza Solidarity Ride and in response to Mosab Abu Toha’s call for children of the world to take to the streets and demand a ceasefire. We will have children’s activities and encourage everyone to bring signs, snacks and noisemakers!
Email strike.debt.bay.area@gmail.com a few days beforehand for the online invite.
For our February meeting we will be reading the first half (Chapters 1 -6) of How Infrastructure Works, Inside the Systems that Shape our World by Deb Chachra. (MIT Press) For our March meeting we will finish reading the book.
“A new way of seeing the essential systems hidden inside our walls, under our streets, and all around us.
Infrastructure is a marvel, meeting our basic needs and enabling lives of astounding ease and productivity that would have been unimaginable just a century ago. It is the physical manifestation of our social contract—of our ability to work collectively for the public good—and it consists of the most complex and vast technological systems ever created by humans.
A soaring bridge is an obvious infrastructural feat, but so are the mostly hidden reservoirs, transformers, sewers, cables, and pipes that deliver water, energy, and information to wherever we need it. When these systems work well, they hide in plain sight. Engineer and materials scientist Deb Chachra takes readers on a fascinating tour of these essential utilities, revealing how they work, what it takes to keep them running, just how much we rely on them—but also whom they work well for, and who pays the costs.
Across the U.S. and elsewhere, these systems are suffering from systemic neglect and the effects of climate change, becoming unavoidably visible when they break down. Communities that are already marginalized often bear the brunt of these failures. But Chachra maps out a path for transforming and rebuilding our shared infrastructure to be not just functional but also equitable, resilient, and sustainable. The cost of not being able to rely on these systems is unthinkably high. We need to learn how to see them—and fix them, together—before it’s too late.”
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, End Times, Jackson Rising Redux and The Feminist Subversion of the Economy.
Speaker: Harpal Brar
Harpal Brar will be speaking on his latest book, Socialism with Chinese Characteristics: Marketisation of the Chinese Economy. which explores the path of China after Mao’s death, considering the role of the Great Leap Forward in China’s economic development and current success, and the truth behind the political events of the Cultural Revolution. Brar tackles the ultimate question: would China have been better off having continued to use centralized planning, or were the reforms and marketization necessary and beneficial?
Harpal Brar, former Chairman of the CPGB-ML, is a prominent political economist, author, and journalist.
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/89531900427?pwd=mXg1rSZe3ONl4pfWlALW4ornc32Eez.1
* Hess is one of the “Uhuru 3” facing 10 years in prison under a bogus DOJ indictment attacking her free speech rights to support black liberation.
* Lawson will speak on the campaign to free Leonard Peltier, an Indigenous leader unjustly imprisoned for 46 years.
* Odom leads the Hands Off Uhuru Fight-back Coalition to fight the US government’s attempt to silence the anti-colonial freedom struggles.
In 2022, the FBI raided seven homes and offices of the Uhuru Movement and the US government indicted Chairman Omali Yeshitela and the Uhuru 3. In 1977, the FBI framed American Indian Movement leader Leonard Peltier. Both are attempts by the US government to silence the anti-colonial struggle.
Come to learn and to join the fight-back of African, Indigenous, Palestinian and all oppressed peoples for free speech and liberation! Free and open to the public. The event is both in person and also will be streamed live at https://www.youtube.com/@UhuruSolidarity
Written by: Cat Brooks
Starring: Margo Hall
Directed by: Elizabeth Carter
Produced by: Black Lives, Black Words
The Black Lives Black Words International Project, in partnership with the Lorraine Hansberry Theater and the Anti Police-Terror Project, is thrilled to invite you to the powerful cinematic experience that is BOTTLED SPIRITS.
A captivating exploration of race, identity and social justice, “Bottled Spirits”, was produced by an almost entirely Black Oakland-based film crew in the historic Esther’s Orbit Room.
We are also excited to announce that Bottled Spirits will be presented following a screening of the film ‘Rideshare’, a psychological thriller exploring themes of race and power dynamics. The feature promises to be a meaningful cinematic experience.
Following this double feature, we will be joined by celebrated television host and activist W. Kamau Bell who will be hosting a post-show discussion featuring the film’s writer, director, and star, Cat Brooks, Elizabeth Carter, and Margo Hall.
MEETING ID: 864 6575 2525; PASS CODE: 465295
PHONE IN: 699-900 9128 US (SAN JOSE)
“What is truly ‘affordable’ housing in SF and how can we get it?”
SF Gray Panther membership meeting from 2:30 to 3pm.
The lack of truly affordable housing in San Francisco is a serious problem that we need to solve. What can we do about it? Will the city and state measures on the March 5, 2024 primary ballot help us meet the need for affordable housing in SF? What else is being done about it? Join us to find out. Bring your questions and comments to our SF Gray Panther forum
The Israeli state claims that its genocidal slaughter in Gaza is self-defense. To maintain the support of the Israeli population for its horrific assault, it has exaggerated the impact of Hamas’s attack on October 7 and hidden the brutal nature of its war on the Palestinians. Israel’s propaganda has been repeated by the U.S. media and by U.S. politicians who have given Israel’s bloody war their total support.
Tali Shapiro, Israeli anti-Zionist activist and researcher whose work has exposed the lies spread by the Israeli state, will be speaking to us live from Ramallah, Palestine. Tali has over a decade of experience in Palestine solidarity efforts in the West Bank and anti-Zionist protests in Israel. Today she is a coordinator of campaigns for the movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel, the international effort initiated by Palestinian civil society organizations to apply moral, economic, and diplomatic pressure against Israel so long as the human rights of Palestinians continue to be violated.
zoom:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82158800683?pwd=N2J6UjgxNWhNak1WRWdUdm9CUit4QT09
Meeting ID: 821 5880 0683
Passcode: 340756
Speaker: Andrew Feinstein
Andrew Feinstein, a former South African anti-apartheid activist and member of the African National Congress will speak on
- Apartheid in South Africa before it was abolished vs. what is practiced by Israel, as a Zionist state.
- Antisemitism – what it is and its abuse by the defenders of Zionism.
- Israel in global arms trade, and how it serves imperial interests.
- What lessons of the struggle against apartheid in SA could be applied to the struggle against Zionism today?
Our Speaker, Andrew Feinstein, is a London-based activist, filmmaker, author, political scientist, and filmmaker. He is chairman of the AIDS charity Friends of Treatment Action Compaign and executive director of Corruption Watch UK
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/89531900427?pwd=mXg1rSZe3ONl4pfWlALW4ornc32Eez.1
Please register at: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/oakland-greens-free-dinner-a-movie-discussion-series-tickets-786403252297?aff=erelpanelorg
Sausage Party is a 2016 adult computer-animated black comedy film directed by Conrad Vernon and Greg Tiernan and written by Kyle Hunter, Ariel Shaffir, Seth Rogen, and Evan Goldberg from a story by Rogen, Goldberg, and Jonah Hill. It stars the voices of Rogen (in a dual role), Kristen Wiig, Hill, Bill Hader (in a triple role), Michael Cera, James Franco, Danny McBride, Craig Robinson, Paul Rudd, Nick Kroll, David Krumholtz, Edward Norton, and Salma Hayek. The film follows an anthropomorphic sausage who lives in a supermarket and discovers the truth about what happens when groceries are purchased leading him on a journey with his friends to escape their fate while also facing a lunatic and malicious douche who wants to kill him.
The film’s animation was handled by the Vancouver-based Nitrogen Studios. It is the first computer-animated film to be rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). The film’s rough cut premiered on March 14, 2016, at South by Southwest, followed by its general theatrical release in the United States on August 12, 2016, by Columbia Pictures.
The film received generally positive reviews from critics, who praised its story, voice acting and humor, though its animation and heavy use of profanity received some criticism. It grossed $141 million against a budget of $19 million, becoming the highest-grossing R-rated animated film at the time until it was surpassed by Demon Slayer: Mugen Train in 2020.
Plot: Unbeknownst to humans, a supermarket called Shopwell’s is filled with anthropomorphic grocery items that believe that the human shoppers are gods who take purchased groceries to a utopia known as the “Great Beyond”. Among the store’s groceries is a sausage named Frank, who dreams of living in the Great Beyond with his hot dog bun girlfriend Brenda and his friends Carl and Barry. The trailer is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVAcTZKTgmc
Join the Oakland Greens for this free community event, Sunday, February 25. The Oakland Greens Free Dinner & a Movie Discussion Series is normally a hybrid community discussion event. [[Get in-persxn & virtual tickets and information thru http://www.oaklandgreens.org/events These community engagement hybrid events are held the last Sunday of the month January thru October.]] Due to a medical emergency this event will now be online only.
This is a 21 and up event unless with parental supervision.
People’s Park is currently barricaded by stacked shipping containers topped with razor wire and guarded round-the-clock, following a midnight raid in early January by combined police forces from UC, CSU, Alameda County, San Francisco City and County and the California State Highway Patrol, organized by the UC Berkeley administration. Why? “The existing legal issues will inevitably be resolved, so we are taking this necessary step now to minimize the possibilities of conflict and confrontation, and of disruption for the public and our students, when we are cleared to resume construction,” said Chancellor Carol Christ (The Berkeleyan, January 16, 2024). Like others in the flood of official campus public relations communications with which students, faculty and staff have been inundated since the Chancellor’s 2017 announcement of plans to build student housing on the park, this response falls short of explaining why there is such fear of “conflict and confrontation” and such strong opposition to these plans, even from students whose interests the plans are supposed to serve.
For a broader range of perspectives on what was and is going on at People’s Park, Teach-Ins have been organized by UC Berkeley students (January 24) and by community groups (February 4). Please join us for the next one. There will be ample time for Q and A. Fiat Lux!
Presenters:
Harvey Smith, organizer of the People’s Park Historic District Advocacy Group and project advisor for The Living New Deal, UC Berkeley Department of Geography
Tom Dalzell, labor lawyer and author of The Battle for People’s Park, Berkeley 1969
Tony Platt, author of The Scandal of Cal: Land Grabs, White Supremacy and Miseducation at UC Berkeley and affiliated scholar at Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Law and Society
Steve Wasserman, publisher of Heyday Books and park activist since 1969
Sylvia T, recent UC Berkeley graduate, independent archival researcher and People’s Park defender
Sara Pech, Historic Preservation Club, a UC Berkeley student group
Representative from the Suitcase Clinic, a UC Berkeley student group
Moderator:
Kristin Hanson, Professor of English, UC Berkeley
Join the East Bay community as we honor the legacy of Martyr Aaron Bushnell, who courageously gave his life to protest the ongoing genocide. Let us reground ourselves in his final words and our rallying cry: Free Palestine. Free Palestine. Free Palestine
The global Insure Our Future campaign focuses on pressuring insurance companies to stop insuring fossil fuel projects. Join a global week of action to bring this demand to the streets.
Insure Our Future writes:
“In order to build a new fossil fuel project, companies need three things: permits, money and insurance. Without insurance, most new fossil fuel projects cannot go ahead, and existing ones must close. This makes insurance the Achilles heel of the fossil fuel industry. . . .
Insurance campaigning has already made new coal power plants almost uninsurable, threatening their viability, Coal companies are finding it increasingly difficult to access insurance cover even for their ongoing operations. Now we need your help to do the same for oil and gas expansion.”
The Oil and Gas Action Network is hosting the Bay Area action.
Please register in advance at
to receive your personal link to participate in this event online
One year ago, Pamela Price took office. She was elected Alameda County District Attorney on a reform platform that focused on rehabilitation and addressing police misconduct and corruption within the D.A.’s office. Less than 7 months later the recall campaign, part of a backlash to criminal punishment reforms and fear-mongering over crime by police and their political allies, began.
At this forum we will discuss what a criminal justice reform agenda looks like and examine the forces advocating a return to repressive measures that have never kept us safe. Our panelists are:
Walter Riley – civil rights attorney
Linton Johnson – Protect the Win Campaign
Please arrive early to place your order so that you do not miss any of the presentations.
An open discussion will follow the presentations.
We will be accepting donations which will be divided among the sponsoring organizations.
This event is sponsored by the Alameda County Peace and Freedom Party,
the Alameda County Green Party and Bay Area System Change Not Climate Change.
For more information email <info@sudssnackssocialism.org>
Speaker: Radhika Desai, International Manifesto Group.
Our program addresses the rapidly changing world order. This last year has been a time of summits: BRICS, G20, and G77 and the UN General Assembly. That these summits have been so hectic and have felt like such a whirlwind of events is because each marks the accelerated tempo of change on the international plain.
At the NATO summit in July, Zelensky failed to get even a timetable to get into NATO. The BRICS summit in Johannesburg in August admitted six new members. Then Putin hosted the vitally important meeting of the Eastern Economic Forum to showcase Russia’s own pivot to Asia, which was a friendly one. The Far Eastern economies are increasingly the dynamic center of the world economy. At the G77 plus China meeting in Havana, China restated its commitment to the development of the majority of humankind as the principle that should govern international relations. Then came the United Nations annual meeting in September.
Our speaker, Radhika Desai, is especially qualified to address these global changes. She is the convener of the International Manifesto Group (https://
Radhika Desai is Professor at the Department of Political Studies, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada. She is the author of Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire (2013), Slouching Towards Ayodhya: From Congress to Hindutva in Indian Politics (2nd rev ed, 2004) and Intellectuals and Socialism: ‘Social Democrats’ and the Labour Party (1994), a New Statesman and Society Book of the Month, and editor of Revitalizing Marxist Theory for Today’s Capitalism (2010), and Develop
The website for the Internationam Manifesto Group is:
Thee Intercept is coming to San Francisco!
Join me for a discussion on the progressive political movement at Book Passage Nico Pitney, my former colleague at HuffPost and co-founder and senior director of More Perfect Union, a nonprofit advocacy journalism organization, will moderate the conversation. Attendance is free and seating is on a first-come, first-served basis.
During the event, I will be discussing my new book,“The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution,” which explores the history and future of the progressive movement and takes a deep look at the role of AIPAC and the super PAC Democratic Majority for Israel in shaping the contours of political debate on Israel–Palestine.
I’m proud of it and I know that as a reader of The Intercept, it’s a book you’ll be glad you read. (I can’t guarantee you’ll enjoy it, though.)
I look forward to seeing you there.
Ryan Grim
D.C. Bureau Chief
Email strike.debt.bay.area@gmail.com a few days beforehand for the online invite.
For our February meeting we will be reading the first half (Chapters 1 -6) of How Infrastructure Works, Inside the Systems that Shape our World by Deb Chachra. (MIT Press) For our March meeting we will finish reading the book.
“A new way of seeing the essential systems hidden inside our walls, under our streets, and all around us.
Infrastructure is a marvel, meeting our basic needs and enabling lives of astounding ease and productivity that would have been unimaginable just a century ago. It is the physical manifestation of our social contract—of our ability to work collectively for the public good—and it consists of the most complex and vast technological systems ever created by humans.
A soaring bridge is an obvious infrastructural feat, but so are the mostly hidden reservoirs, transformers, sewers, cables, and pipes that deliver water, energy, and information to wherever we need it. When these systems work well, they hide in plain sight. Engineer and materials scientist Deb Chachra takes readers on a fascinating tour of these essential utilities, revealing how they work, what it takes to keep them running, just how much we rely on them—but also whom they work well for, and who pays the costs.
Across the U.S. and elsewhere, these systems are suffering from systemic neglect and the effects of climate change, becoming unavoidably visible when they break down. Communities that are already marginalized often bear the brunt of these failures. But Chachra maps out a path for transforming and rebuilding our shared infrastructure to be not just functional but also equitable, resilient, and sustainable. The cost of not being able to rely on these systems is unthinkably high. We need to learn how to see them—and fix them, together—before it’s too late.”
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, End Times, Jackson Rising Redux and The Feminist Subversion of the Economy.