Calendar
The Oakland Police Commission will vote on OPD’s request to acquire new military equipment. We’re calling on the Commission to hold the line and reject any new military equipment. Oakland doesn’t need more weapons — we need investment in our people and our communities.
Protective Presence Against Occupation of Palestine – Conversation with Will (in-person in East Bay; audio online option)
I just returned from three weeks in the occupied West Bank during the olive harvest, where international volunteers were invited to do nonviolent protective presence work with Palestinian farmers resisting military and paramilitary violence. Settling civilians in occupied territory is a war crime (Geneva articles 49, 85; ICC article 8) backed by US empire; nonviolent presence imposes privileged western bodies in conflict zones to support indigenous resistance to ethnic cleansing.
Soldiers and settlers repeatedly claimed false legal grounds to demand expulsion from ancestral indigenous lands Palestinian families have harvested for generations. Many of the trees we harvested were hundreds of years old, carefully cultivated by people who have lived on this land for millenia – some olive trees can live to be more than 2,000 years old.
I was invited to offer an informal conversation with people about what I experienced – I’m not an expert, and I want everyone to listen to Palestinians and people more knowledgable than me directly, but I’ll do my best to share some of what I learned and what it means for me and host a discussion. I’m very much a learner here and trying to make sense of how to live in integrity in a world that is completely crazy. I don’t have answers but I will encourage you if you can to consider joining protective presence brigades, as well as consider other ways to support indigenous resistance including material aid, prisoner support, the BDS boycott campaign, direct action disruption, and solidarity movements against zionism and US empire. And above all speaking the truth.
Truth, risk, and sacrifice seem to be the most important meditation prompts for personal action.
(Content may be upsetting; this event is for good faith dialogue and learning, not a space for denial of ongoing US imperialist and zionist genocide.)
Click here to RSVP.
Join a forum on the ICE raids, militarization of our cities, the government shutdown and the calls for a general strike by Brandon Johnson, the Mayor of Chicago and Sara Nelson, President of AFA-CWA.
Working people are under assault from the fascist immigration raids to the attacks on public education, public services, healthcare and the government shutdown to the US support for Israeli genocide and the Trump’s war on Venezuela and Colombia.
The danger of martial law and the use of the National Guard, ICE and US troops to institute a fascist take-over is growing and it is funded with $170 billion from Trump’s budget earlier this year.
This panel will also look at how working people are being affected and why some unions are taking action including UAW NOLSW-LAE which had a one-day work action with a picket of the ICE office in San Francisco.
The call by Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson and AFA-CWA president Sara Nelson on No King’s Day for a national general strike will be discussed and how working people and unions can build support for such action to stop the war on working people, unions, the poor and immigrants.
Speakers:
UAW NOLSW-LAE
Cheryl Thorton – SEIU 1021 SF Community Healthcare Chap. Chair
Sang Hae Kil – SJSU Professor & CFA Leader
Lisa Milos – UPTE Members For Palestine.
Steve Zeltzer – WorkWeek
Ricardo Ortiz – Labor Researcher & Puerto Rican Internationalist
Endorsed by: WorkWeek, UAW NOLSW-LAE, UFCLP, RWF, UPTE Members For Palestine
For more info: http://www.ufclp.org, info [at] ufclp.org
‘Time for a general strike!’: Union president Sara Nelson calls for action at DC “No Kings” protest
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jhbtL5pLnY
WASHINGTON, DC: At the “No Kings” protest in the nation’s capital—one of thousands of demonstrations that took place across the country on Saturday—labor leader and international president of the Association of Flight Attendants Sara Nelson spoke with TRNN about the role unions must play in ending the current government shutdown and stopping the oligarchy’s war on democracy.
Join us for the discussion of our next film, Petra Kelly – Act Now!, which will be available to view online for one week before our discussion on Saturday, November 22, at 7:00 p.m. PT.
Petra Kelly, feminist co-founder of the German Green Party, was a pioneering advocate for peace, environmental protection, and human rights. Inspired by the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King Jr.’s concept of civil disobedience, she championed radical social change and solidarity worldwide. Her issues are today more topical than ever before.
90 mins | 2024 | Director: Doris Metz | English, German, English Subtitles | Germany
RSVP and donate by Thursday, November 13, on our website, https://www.
* Gerlind Institute members: $10 • General Public: $20. Please donate via our website, https://www.gerlindinstitute.
* By check, payable to Gerlind Institute for Cultural Studies
* Zelle or credit card via our website. Contact info@gerlindinstitute.org for more information.
* If you are unable to donate, please get in touch with JB at info@gerlindinstitute.org, as we strive to make our events accessible to everyone
Thank you if you are a Gerlind Institute member or donor. If you are not yet a member, please consider a membership for 2026 at https://www.
Please note the following timeline:
* RSVP and donate by November 13, 2025
* On November 14, we will send out the film & Zoom links
* You have one week to watch the film before the discussion
* Saturday morning, November 22, we will resend the Zoom link as a reminder
* Saturday, November 22, join us via Zoom, at 7:00 p.m. PT for a discussion of the film
We appreciate your donation for the film and the professionally moderated discussion, which supports our behind-the-scenes work in bringing film gems to our community.
Best wishes,
In memoriam, a Thanks-Giving
Celebration of the Centennial Life of
ANN FAGAN GINGER
Champion of Peace, Human Rights, and the Rule of Law
Berkeley’s Oracle of Justice
in Music ~ Song ~ Poetry ~ Video ~ Remembrance ~ Giveaway
Ceremony 2:30 til 4:00 pm
Community Fellowship, Refreshments 4:00
All are welcome.
Email strike.debt.bay.area@gmail.com a few days beforehand for the online invite. All are welcome!
For our December, 2025 meeting we will be reading and discussing the first two chapters of What’s Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis by Malcolm Harris (Amazon) (Hatchette). For our January meeting we will finish the book.
A vital guide for collective political action against the climate apocalypse, from bestselling progressive intellectual Malcolm Harris—“a brilliant thinker and writer capable of making the intricacies of economic conditions supremely readable” (Vulture).
Climate change is the unifying crisis of our time. But the scale of the problem can be paralyzing, especially when corporations are actively staving off changes that could save the planet but which might threaten their bottom lines. To quote Greta Thunberg, despite very clear science and very real devastation, the adults at the table are still saying “blah blah blah.” Something has to change—but what, and how?
In What’s Left, Malcolm Harris cuts through the noise and gets real about our remaining options for saving the world. Just as humans have caused climate change, we hold the power to avert a climate apocalypse, but that will only happen through collective political action. Harris outlines the three strategies—progressive, socialist, and revolutionary—that have any chance of succeeding, while also revealing that none of them can succeed on their own. What’s Left shows how we must combine them into a single pathway: a meta-strategy, one that will ensure we can move forward together rather than squabbling over potential solutions while the world burns.
Vital and transformative, What’s Left confirms Malcolm Harris as next-generation David Graeber or Mike Davis—a historian-activist who shows us where we stand and how we got here, while also blazing a path toward a brighter future.
Strike Debt Bay Area hosts this non-technical book group discussion monthly on new and radical economic thinking. Our first book was Doughnut Economics, and our most recent books were The Age of Insecurity and Elinor Ostrom’s Rules for Radicals”. For the rest of our reading list see here.
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