Calendar
All Out to Sacramento Wednesday October 9!
11:30 am: Opening Rally
1:00-3:30 pm: California Public Safety Hearings on Solitary Confinement & Human Rights
4:00 pm: Closing Rally
During their historic 60-day hunger strike, California prisoners were able to endure incredible violence from prison administrators and garner international support for their cause. As a result, on October 9, California’s Public Safety Committee will hold the first of several promised hearings to address and take action around solitary confinement and human rights abuses in California prisons. Former prisoners, loved ones, lawyers, experts and advocates will testify before the legislature and rally with the people.
These Public Safety hearings provide a key opportunity for us to take the next steps toward ending solitary confinement. Mobilize, rally and continue to stand in solidarity with the Hunger Strikers! Continue the fight to win their demands!
“We will be with the prisoners in the courts, in the legislature, and out in the community. We will use every venue available to us, until the torture is ended.”
Bring signs and art to make the rallies visually stunning! Self-care and community-care: Bring a lawn chair if you want to rest at the rally and some water/snacks to stay healthy.
Need a ride? Have a car and can offer rides? Please RSVP to Tynan@curbprisonspending.org by Monday, October 7.
Carpools will leave from MacArthur BART in Oakland at 9:30am on Wednesday.
Support Richmond eminent domain Wednesday October 9
Join the demonstration in Oakland to support the Richmond local principal reduction program, called by ACCE/Home Defenders League with the endorsement of Strike Debt Bay Area. Richmond has offered to restore financial stability to hundreds of homeowners by buying their distressed mortgages and negotiating new loans at fair market value–or seizing the mortgages by eminent domain if necessary. The banks holding these mortgages ignored the offers, Wells Fargo and other banks filed a law suit (dismissed for the time being) and Wall Street withheld purchasing a city bond. Wall Street is fighting back–and so are we! Show your opposition to the 1% and your support for Richmond’s creative campaign to protect homeowners. The demonstration will also push the Oakland City Council to make a strong statement to the banks that will express Oakland’s support for Richmond.
For more background information on the Richmond campaign see http://strikedebt.org/em-dom-richmond/
Almost three years have passed since the events that led to the ousting of Hosni Mubarak after 30 years of autocratic rule. In her talk, Shimaa Helmy, a young human rights activist, will give a first-hand account of the unfolding crisis in Egypt, the state of human rights and media activists, and will offer some insight into what is next for Egypt.
The event is hosted by: HASS Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society.
Event cosponsors: Center for African Studies and Center for Middle Eastern Studies at UC Berkeley
Facebook event & RSVP. Flyer available in comments.
What the new globalized, high-tech imperialism means for the class struggle in the U.S.
This beautiful poster by Sandy Sanders will be Chalkupied! 2nd Anniversary activities will commence an hour later.
What’s Up?.
Come join comrades. Talk. Reflect. Enjoy. Music. Speakers. Food will be served, and movies will be shown as soon as it gets dark. Other activities as they develop!
Read an article with more details on the Anniversary Party here.
Theme.
Solidarity with the 60 day California Prisoners’ Hunger Strike and the 60 hour Solidarity Fast by two OO participants, opposition to solitary confinement, privatization of prisons and the rest of our commons.
Schedule.
2:00 PM – 4:00 PM. Music by Rocker T, JuJu, Street Black, TMac and possibly others.
4:00 PM: Keynote speakers:
Sarah Shourd, kidnapped and in solitary confinement in Iran before Occupy began, and who spoke to Occupy Oakland days after the encampment started.
Fred Hampton Jr. (either in person or via speaker phone) – See more at:
4:40 PM – 5:00 PM: Other speakers, including Occupy Oakland’s own Laleh and activist lawyer Dan Siegel with an update on Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity happenings.
5:00 PM – 6:00 PM: Reports by activist groups in an around Oakland. 3:00 minutes per group spokesperson, or
more if the number of reports to be given allows.
6:00 PM – 7:30 PM. Food, camaraderie, enjoying the evening.
7:30 PM. Movies! (Some new Occupy Oakland videos, other titles TBA)
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View archived images of our original occupation flyers! Here’s one:
BART workers could go out on strike at 12:01 AM Friday, October 11th. BART management may attempt to run BART trains between West Oakland and Embarcadero.
Sponsored by the Transit Workers Support Committee.
On Friday at 6:30 pm we will be screening “Bum’s Paradise”, a documentary about the Albany Bulb, outside the Sierra Club’s bi-monthly “Green Friday” event. The Sierra Club is pushing a project on the land that would result in the eviction of the Bulb’s 60+ residents. Our screening will demonstrate to the Sierra Club that there is public support for the continued existence of the Bulb.
Food will be provided but bring blankets, folding chairs, mats, and warm clothing to stay warm!
“Bums’ Paradise is a 53-minute documentary that depicts the lives of the men and women who lived in the ten-year-old Albany Landfill community prior to their eviction. It follows them through the eviction and documents them one month after the eviction. The film emphasizes their concepts of community as well as the amazing art that they created. Instead of being a documentary about homelessness, Bums’ Paradise considers the question: What if the homeless — the indigent, the bums — told their own stories?”
http://www.bumsparadise.com/synopsis_new.html
http://sharethebulb.org/
Come help us prepare for the next year in the struggle to get Justice for Alan!
Help us with our new campaign to pressure California’s Attorney General to prosecute Miguel Masso for the murder of Alan Blueford. Join us in demanding that Oakland not implement a proposed youth curfew aimed directly at young men of color. Report on First Friday Outreach,
labor support, more.
Come to the Plaza at 11 am … park below … carpool … take the bus … bike … get dropped off … whatever way you can get there come join us!
The Police Accountability Tour, on the road from mid-August until December, will maximize police accountability by facilitating connections and collaboration among those who know that badges don’t grant extra rights, and through skill sharing and the capturing and dissemination of relevant content.
This tour will help further connect individuals involved with Cop Block, Cop Watch, and Peaceful Streets groups as well as all police-watching groups and people around the world, so we can together advance a reality free from institutionalized violence.
On Saturday, Oct. 12th we’ll have a meetup and patrol in the Mission area of San Francisco. If you’re around you should come on out! There will be a good crew present, lots of good information and ideas shared throughout the night, and almost certainly there will emerge some solid connections and working relationships.
n Saturday, Oct. 19th two short documentaries will be screened at New Parkway Theater – Manufacturing Guilt: A Short Film on the Innocence of Mumia Abu-Jamal and The Battle for Oscar Grant Plaza: OPD’s War Against Occupy Oakland.
Check back here for exact location of meetup.
Our weekly open meeting for members and supporters to discuss the weeks tasks and projects. Come get plugged into ongoing housing defense work! We have abundant and varied work for all folks in any number of meaningful projects.
Rain location: SF Pizza, 1500 Broadway, Oakland
Our weekly open meeting for members and supporters to discuss the week’s tasks and projects. Come get plugged into ongoing housing defense work! We have abundant and varied work for all folks in any number of meaningful projects.
Rain location: SF Pizza, 1500 Broadway, Oakland
Come out on SUNDAY to the Gill Tract Farm
for a Community Field Day!
THIS SUNDAY: Oct 13th, 10am-4pm.
For the first time, a community event is being planned between the College of Natural Resources and a coalition of community groups (which includes Occupy the Farm), to discuss what we’d like to see happen on the Gill Tract! 1.5 Acres has been allocated for the project, so come check it out and let’s brainstorm!
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10:00 AM – Open Field. Play, Check out workshops.
12:00 Noon – Lunch & bakeoff.
1:00 PM – Storytelling.
2:00 PM – Community Forum. Share ideas for next season’s projects.
Facebook page and color poster.
Mike Parker will give an overview of the innovative program, “Richmond CARES”, which was proposed by Richmond’s Green Mayor Gayle McLaughlin to use the City’s power of eminent domain to benefit underwater homeowners.
Mike Parker is an organizer with Richmond Progressive Alliance. He is the editor of RPA’s website and newsletter. RPA works with the Mayor and Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) in the program to stop blight, keep neighborhoods stable, stop foreclosures, and increase community wealth.
Topics to be discussed include:
– What is Richmond CARES?
– Who will Richmond CARES help?
– How likely is it that the program will expand to help more people over time?
– Will the City be buying homes?
– How does this actually work?
– Can the homeowner “flip” the home?
– How will this affect home values in the community?
– Isn’t the value of a mortgage the same as the value of the home that secures it?
– How will the City pay for this program?
– Will the program operators and funders make money off this program?
– What about the charges that this is a Wall Street scheme to “take another bite out of Richmond”?
– Will the City make money off this program?
– Is the City’s plan unfair to the current investors who own the loans?
– Are pension funds helped or hurt by the program?
– Is there any risk to City?
– Will people who go through this program have to pay income tax on the loan reduction?
– Could this program cause the cost of mortgage lending to go up in Richmond?
– Will this program hurt the City’s credit rating and its ability to buy, sell or refinance bonds?
– What is a Joint Powers Authority?
– Is this a legal use of eminent domain?
Numerous top legal scholars and law firms confirm that it is legal, yes. The public purpose of reducing foreclosure and blight is clear, and eminent domain has in fact been used in many cases to acquire “intangible” property including financial instruments. See these articles for more on this topic:
Washington Post “Is Richmond’s mortgage seizure scheme even legal?”
New York Fed’s Current Issues in Economics and Finance “Paying Paul and Robbing No One”
Stanford Journal of Law, Business, and Finance “It Takes a Village”
– Who is most opposed to Richmond CARES and why?
Essentially the battle is between the interests of real estate speculators, and the interest of Richmond residents who want to keep their neighborhoods stable, keep people in their own homes instead of forcing them to rent, and stop the spread of blight.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Richmond CARES http://www.richmondcares.com
Save Richmond Homes http://www.saverichmondhomes.org
Richmond ACCE (Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment) http://calorganize.org E-mail contracosta@calorganize.org or call 415-377-9037
LA Times http://www.latimes.com/business/realestate/la-fi-hiltzik-20130901,0,1360275.column
The Atlantic Cities http://m.theatlanticcities.com/housing/2013/09/why-wall-street-very-very-angry-richmond-california-today/6858
Mother Jones http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/09/richmond-eminent-domain-wall-street-nightmare
USA Today http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/09/29/richmond-eminent-domain-foreclosures/2834299/
KQED Forum http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/R201308080900
PBS Newshour discussed on Daily Kos http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/09/20/1240246/-PBS-Newshour-Richmo nd-CA-Government-Uses-Eminent-Domain-to-Solve-Its-Foreclosure-Crisis#
*** Compare with: Use of Eminent Domain to grab land for the Keystone XL pipieline http://stateimpact.npr.org/texas/2012/09/28/eminent-domain-casts-its-long-shadow-over-the-texas-legislature ***
DIRECTIONS: One block north of Alcatraz on the West side of Telegraph, wheelchair accessible. Buses pass by regularly. Ashby BART is approximately 7 blocks away.
SPONSOR: Green Sundays are a series of free programs and discussions sponsored by the Green Party of Alameda County. They are held on the 2nd Sunday of each month.
The Post Office has put the Berkeley Post Office up for sale!! Come and help plan our next actions in defense of our post office and against privatization.
Last week we learned that perfidious Post Office Executives, who only the week before had sent a letter to the Berkeley City Council offering to negotiate until at least November 12th, had had CBRE (Richard Blum’s company) list the downtown Berkeley Post Office for sale.
Check out the video of Peter Byrne’s talk last week at our Save the Post Office Rally!
Brutal and Unequal:
Disruption, Precarity and the New Tech Boom
with Darwin Bond-Graham and Ryan Smith
“The tech sector,” said sociologist and writer Darwin Bond-Graham, “has obtained a strategic power over the rest of the economy … Flows of income and distributions of wealth have been equally transformed by the rise of the tech-centric economy, as by the rise of finance.” The ideology of the new tech boom is disruption, “a code word for forms of sabotage that benefit a few monopolizing corporations,” Bond-Graham said. A key to fighting back against disruption is to understand what it is and how it functions: Bond-Graham will use the ridesharing phenomenon as a focal point for a discussion of how the industry uses disruption to ” … extract wealth from billions of workers and consumers across the planet.”
What happens when the whiz kids of high tech concentrate on inventing ever more airtight forms of exploitation? With all of the brainpower they have to throw at the engineering puzzles of exploiting others, how can ordinary workers hope to resist this juggernaut? Ryan Smith, longtime Occupy activist, former tech employee and a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) will discuss his experiences in workers’ struggles and working in the belly of the beast. The Wobblies are famous for “unionizing hundreds of thousands of workers previously regarded as ‘unorganizable.'” Can precarious, isolated workers benefit from IWW techniques in the coming century?
Time will be allotted for Q&A, discussion and announcements. Donations to Occupy Forum to cover costs are encouraged; no one turned away!
Discussion sponsored by the ISO.
There are many specters haunting Oakland–from BART managers who care more about beating the union than running the trains to police harassment, from low wages and lost jobs to drug war violence. For young people looking for work, as for homeowners struggling to pay mortgages, capitalism offers only bad choices.
Democratic politicians we elect, like Republicans, pay more attention to the rich who give them money than to our real needs, while most of us don’t even theoretically have a say in how real estate developers, giant shippers and tech corporations invest the vast resources that they alone control.
But we do have power. Our labor is the source of all of their wealth. The 1% need us, and ultimately we don’t need them.
Does that mean we can make a better world? What would an alternative to capitalism look like, and how could we get there, starting from here? Please join us to share your thoughts, fears and hopes and hear the case for the project of building a socialist organization.
Rally with Fast Food Workers as we hold Fast Food companies accountable!
While the fast food industry makes billions in profits, hard-working fast food workers are struggling to afford their basic needs like food, clothing and rent, and often rely on public assistance. Fast food companies rely on the fact that taxpayers will pick up the slack for their low wages. This is outrageous. Let’s hold fast food companies accountable.