Sunday,  May  4  at  1:00 pm
Bay Area Spark Collective Workshops and Chanting Circle
Presented by   James Bianchi	415-824-4220
Come enjoy the FireDance community and find another home in the Bay Area for your heart songs, your dance, your poetry, your music. You do not have to be a good singer.  You do not have to know a single chant.  Just bring your enthusiasm and your spark.  The Bay Area Spark Collective is a new flame, kindled from embers carried home from fire circles around the country -- an intentional community group that meets monthly to celebrate spirit, community, and each other.  Workshops begin at 2:00 pm.  The sacred circle opens at 6:00 pm.  Participants introduce themselves and share their magic;  the four directions are called in;  a chant is sung;  and a sacred play begins.  From here on out, anything can happen:  drumming, a song, a poem, dancing, magic, drawing, writing, massage, deep trance.  As participants take their turns around the circle, they stir the container and mix in their magic to create a synergistic miracle in the space.  Everyone listens to what the moment needs.  Around 9:30 pm the energy of the circle rises to a fever pitch and then sweetly winds down.  The circle is closed with a chant, an "Om," that releases the four directions -- and plenty of hugs.
http://www.sparkcollective.org
$5 Donations Accepted

 

 

 

 

 

Sunday,  May  16  at  2:00 pm
Take Back our Schools
Presented by   Anne Weilles	510-645-9209
This is an evening of celebration and reflection.  Youth Together will celebrate actions of May 15 and reflect on the 54th anniversary of the Brown vs. Board  decision of the Supreme Court to desegregate American schools.  Youth Together is continuing the struggle for equal education.  This evening they will celebrate with a BBQ dinner, music, a youth art auction, live youth performances, and a keynote address by Jeff Andrade from San Francisco State University.
http://www.youthtogether.net/mainframe.php3
Donations Accepted

 

 

 

 

Thursday,  May  18  at  2:00 pm
Annual Banquet and Benefit Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism
Presented by   Karl Kramer	415-863-6637
The Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS), founded in 1992, is a multi-racial organization of people from all walks of life who are active in the movement for democracy, equality, peace, and justice.  CCDS has a vision of a society free of capitalism's greed, exploitation, and inequality -- a new humane system.  Joining CCDS today for their Annual Banquet and Benefit will be the Kendra Alexander Foundation (KAF).  This Foundation was created in order to support the efforts of activists to educate themselves in order to make a socialist perspective a more integral part of the complex of struggles for social justice.  Today's Banquet will feature music of the Billie Holiday Collective and friends and it will be catered by Jordon's Culinary Creations.  Jae Scharlin will be the emcee for the day and Barbara Becnel will speak on "Politics 2008: War, the Economy, and What Else Should Matter."  Many great activists will be honored on this day, including Max Anderson, Alex Bagwell, Harriet Bagwell, James Vann, and Eleanor Walden.
http://www.cc-ds.org
Donations Accepted

 

 

 

 

Thursday,  May  22  at  6:00 pm
Wellstone Democratic Renewal Club Monthly Meeting
Presented by   Jack Kurzweil	510-549-2696
This is the monthly membership meeting of the Wellstone Democratic Renewal Club (WDRC).  The Club works to renew and reform the Democratic Party.  Everyone is welcome to participate in the discussions.  The evening begins with a social hour and pot luck supper at 6:00 pm -- bring food to share.  At 7:00 pm the Club begins it programs and everyone, members and non-members, is invited to participate in the discussions.
http://www.wellstoneclub.org
$5 Donations Accepted

 

 

 

 

Thursday,  May  29  at  7:00 pm
Made in America: World Food Crisis and Starvation
Presented by   Penny Hess	510-625-1106
Three billion people around the world are facing starvation right now!  Thirty people a minute are dying of starvation in a world where half the world’s population lives on less than $2 a day.  Thirty countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America are undergoing massive food rebellions.  In Haiti, 80 percent of the population no longer have the resources to eat food.  Millions in Haiti are forced to subsist on mud mixed with sugar and shortening.   But we Americans are likely to believe that world starvation of this kind has nothing to do with us.  However, global hunger has everything to do with us.  Every aspect of this world food crisis is made in white America, by Americans, for America’s economic benefit.  Today’s skyrocketing rice and grain prices are not the result of shortages!  We are seeing record rice crops globally this year! Real factors contributing to the current rapid rise in food costs and starvation worldwide are: 1)  Wall Street speculation.  Commodities like grains are thought to be safe investments against the falling dollar and loss of faith in the stock market.  The surge in grain and agriculture investment has created a grains bubble.  By now all the bad subprime mortgage bonds in money market or retirement funds have been replaced with commodities.  Baby boomers will enjoy a “secure” retirement at the cost of the death of many children all over the world!    2)  Biofuel genocide.  Wall Street investors are creating an ethanol bubble too, driving up the prices of grain grown for fuel rather than for food.  Farmers around the world can no longer afford to grow grain for food when the earnings for fuel are far greater!  Fidel Castro has said that biofuels will take the lives of three billion people, turning their stable crops into fuel for transportation for the rich.  “This colossal waste of cereals for producing fuel… would serve only to save the rich countries less than 15 percent of what is annually consumed by their voracious automobiles.”   3)  Free Trade Agreements.  Historically governments kept restrictions on the price of food to prevent speculation and price gouging.  Now governments around the world have agreed to the forced deregulation of world agricultural markets.  Haiti, where people are today forced to subsist on mud, is a perfect example.   Twenty-five years ago Haitian farmers grew and exported their own rice.  In the late 1980s the U.S.-backed International Monetary Fund forced Haiti, as a condition for a desperately needed loan, to deregulate their markets and open them up to competition from the outside.  The U.S. then dumped its government-subsidized rice onto Haiti (and many other countries around the world) selling the American rice cheaper than Haiti farmers could sell theirs for.  The U.S. rice dumping brought to an abrupt halt Haiti’s own self-sufficient agricultural infrastructure and forced millions of people into desperate poverty. 4)  U.S. Agribusiness.  Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, and Bunge control the majority of the global grain market while Monsanto controls over a fifth of the global market in seeds.  While billions of human beings are starving, Cargill’s third quarter 2007 profits increased more than 86 percent and Monsanto’s were up 45 percent.  In fact they are using the current crisis to further impose their genetically modified seeds on the peoples of the world. The U.S. will not be immune from this crisis.  Almost 22% of African families in America experience food insecurity — not knowing where their next meal will come from.  One out of twelve Indigenous families forced onto reservations on their own land experience food insecurity with hunger.  Throughout the U.S. the African community has been hit hard by the collapse of the subprime mortgage scam, which again made Wall Street bankers and investors billions of dollars.  Cities with high African populations, such as Cleveland, Baltimore, Detroit, and Atlanta are seeing tens of thousands of families facing foreclosure and homelessness as a result of this.  When the full weight of this crisis hits over the next couple of years, millions of African people in America will be plunged even more deeply into poverty. What can we do?  The only thing that will really end this crisis is ending the system that acts as a parasite sucking the blood of the peoples of the world.  Let’s face it: the prosperity of the white world is directly dependent on slavery, genocide, and theft of the resources of just about everyone else.  For us Americans to live, they can’t!  World peace and cooperation is, of course, forever impossible under such a system.  Going “green” in and of itself is no solution.  Environmentalism inside of a system sitting on a pedestal of slavery and colonialism will do nothing but make us feel good for recycling bottles or saving the ozone, while the majority of people continue to suffer and die.  Environmental destruction is simply a byproduct of a system that wipes out whole peoples and civilizations to maintain our artificial life style!  To end starvation, the earth’s oppressed peoples need to take control over their land, resources, lives, and destinies again.  The people of Iraq, Palestine, Venezuela, along with African, Mexican, and Indigenous people colonized inside America are struggling for this.  This is the struggle for national liberation.  The Uhuru Solidarity Movement, led by the African People’s Socialist Party, has built a people’s organization that defends the democratic rights of the African community that has been massively imprisoned, placed under martial law, and subjected to oppressive educational systems worldwide.  White people who find that living at the expense of the suffering of the vast majority of humanity is intolerable can join the Uhuru Solidarity Movement led by APSC.  You and I can make a difference and build a system of justice and peace, not as mere consumers of information, but by taking a real stand in solidarity for the future of the planet in the hands of African and oppressed people.
http://uhurusolidarity.blogspot.com/2008/04/world-food-crisis-and-starvation-made.html
Donations Accepted