The City Heights Info Shop? has a growing and wide selection of books that range from organic gardening to sci-fi to community organizing. We also have a constantly growing selection of zines that we distribute to those who come to the Info Shop?. We have recently started receiving letters from prisoners requesting zines from the Info Shop? and we are struggling to get money for postage to send the information requested to them. We have a working relationship with The Groundwork Books Collective at UCSD, they contact us when they have books to donate and we help to distribute them in the community.
SPROUT City Heights encourages urban food sustainability by providing space and resources for those in the community to share their knowledge. Our organic garden is in the front yard so that it is accessible and visible by all in the community. SPROUT City Heights resists the dominant food culture that promotes a lack of understanding and appreciation for where our food comes from. Our resistance is education about plants and healthy ways that we can sustain ourselves with only a small front yard. The garden has also been used as a learning tool during the Food not Lawns edible bike tours.
The Bike Kitchen is a volunteer run cooperative learning space and a do-it-yourself bike repair shop. The cooperative provides skill-shares, workshops, and mechanical assistance for our bike riding community to support the accessibility of bikes for everyone and bike safety. The shop has tools and parts for repairing, maintaining and building bikes. We emphasize creating a space that supports the empowerment and self-sufficiency of women, queer and transgender people. We also hold workshops at community events such as the Dyke Fest 2007. The Free Bike Kitchen has a very diverse volunteer base and support in the community including several bike shops and the Critical Mass.
The Computer Lab is a co-sponsored project with the San Diego Hacklab. Many people in the community who attend the Free Skool English classes bring their friends and family to the Computer Lab every week to learn how to use the internet and e-mail to stay in touch with families out of the country. People from the community have also been learning new software and how to make fliers for their organizations. This free resource and learning space has provided opportunities for people who have never used a computer, an opportunity to learn new skills and not be excluded from the important advantages computer and internet technologies can offer. The Computer Lab is dedicated to making technology assessable in our communities.
The federal government is proposing regulations that would effectively kill adult social-networking sites. This is being done under the guise of fighting child pornography. You have until September 10 to object to these regulations. It’s easy to do and essential. A sample e-mail comment is at the bottom of this page. Please forward this information to your friends!
What’s the Deal?
The Department of Justice is proposing regulations to implement a federal law designed to combat child pornography, known as Section 2257. The law was first enacted in 1998 and was amended in 2006 and significantly expanded to include regulation of the Internet.
While many of the regulations pertain to companies that produce adult entertainment magazines and videos (and are extremely burdensome), they would also affect anyone who uses an adult social-networking site. Here’s how:
* The regulations would require the people running a site to get and maintain personal information from every user (that means you) who posts a “sexually explicit” photo, including your photo ID (driver’s license, passport, or military ID).
* The regulations would allow the Attorney General to conduct warrantless searches at will on the sites’ records, including your personal information.
* There are few safeguards over what the FBI can do with the information it obtains.
* If a site operator fails to comply with the regulations, he or she would face a prison sentence of up to 5 years.
* For more detailed information on Sec. 2257, click here.
Obviously, none of this has anything to do with child pornography. Instead, it is a blatant attempt to end the ability of consenting adults to use adult social-networking sites to meet other people for sex. Obviously, if these regulations go into effect, they will kill this industry.
What You Can Do
The Department of Justice has published these proposed regulations and the public has until September 10 to comment on them.
We need to generate thousands of comments objecting to the proposed regulations – and it’s easy to do via e-mail. Just follow the instructions below.
Why We’re Involved
The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, Inc. is involved in this fight because we believe sexual freedom is a fundamental human right and we don’t think the government has any place in relations between consenting adults. These regulations are part of our government’s hypocritical and punitive views about sex, sexuality, and reproductive rights. All of this – from abstinence-only sex education programs to the elimination of funding for accurate and explicit HIV prevention programs – fall hardest on gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.
For more information about the organizing, advocacy, and public education work of the Task Force, click here.
Take Action Now
Here is a sample letter with the e-mail address you need to send it to (Admin.ceos@usdoj.gov) and the subject you must include in the subject line of your e-mail (Section 2257 Docket No. CRM 104).
Please also consider a contribution to keep this advocacy work going.
Donate
Sample Letter
To: Admin.ceos@usdoj.gov
Re: Section 2257 Docket No. CRM 104
To the U.S. Department of Justice:
I am writing to object to the proposed “Section 2257” regulations.
These regulations are complicated and burdensome on legitimate businesses, and have very little to do with protecting children and minors from pornography. Their reach — particularly into adult social-networking internet services — is overbroad, unnecessary, and would allow the federal government to search and seize personal records of adult consumers without a warrant; a clear violation privacy and constitutional rights.
Specifically, I object to the following provisions:
1. The regulations (18 § 2257(b)(1) and (c)) would force adult social-networking services to obtain and maintain personal information about their users, including the user's photo ID (driver’s license, passport, or military ID). (I must note that the sites already require users to affirm that they are over 18 years of age.) Many sites have tens of thousands of users and it is simply not possible for them to do this. Moreover, many people who use these sites want to maintain their privacy, for any number of reasons, including the sad fact that they might face discrimination and/or violence if others found out they were using these sites. It is still legal in 31 states to discriminate against someone who is gay or bisexual, and in 41 states if the person is transgender. The combination of the recordkeeping requirements and many users’ fears about providing such information will kill the entire industry.
All of this is overkill given that adult social networking sites were not identified as a problem in the production, distribution and downloading of child pornography in the Department of Justice’s own report on “Child Pornography on the Internet” (May 2006).
2. The regulations (18 § 2257(g) and under 28 C.F.R. § 75.5) would allow the Attorney General to conduct unannounced warrantless searches at will on the sites’ records, including reviewing and presumably seizing the personal information on site users. This is an egregious abuse of government authority, an unwarranted invasion of privacy and, in my opinion, a violation of the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
3. The regulations (28 C.F.R. § 75.5(4)) provide insufficient safeguards over what the government can do with the information it obtains through its searches. This, by itself, has a chilling effect on the ability of people to engage in constitutionally protected activities. As noted above, this is particularly dangerous for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.
Let me be clear: I believe children need to be protected from coercion into pornography and it is important for the federal government to do all that it can to insure those protections. Sadly, many of the provisions of the proposed 2257 regulations do nothing to address child pornography, but instead are clearly aiming at destroying an industry and ending a legal and valuable way for adults to meet one another.
Sincerely, (your name)
How Can We Overcome the Weapons of Mass Indoctrination?
by Rich Gibson, emeritus professor, San Diego State University
August 2007
These are harsh times. The economy grinds down and the wars bomb on. In such an era, people define themselves by their actions. Often, there is no reversing the action taken, as a wounded economy and a desperate empire at war have no forgiveness.
This is especially true for educators, school workers, who face the militarization of schooling and the regimentation of what is taught, what kids come to know and how they come to know it, through curricula regulations noosed by high stakes exams. Every educator now faces questions like, “Why am I here? Whose interests are being served? What shall I do?”
Jonathan Kozol was an early inspiration for me and thousands of others, even though he quit as a teacher very early on. Now, he has issued an “Education Manifesto.”
His, Death at An Early Age, and The Night is Dark and I am Far from Home, are wonderful angry classics, as is some of his mostly suppressed work on the revolution in Cuba. I liked his early criticism of free schools, which was supportive, yet sharp. He has worked very hard, produced a great body of work, swimming against the stream of what is called education reform, but is really social reaction.
Since on one hand the issues we face today are very complex and we all have been wrong from time to time, and on the other hand, despite the massive worker/immigrant rights outpouring on Mayday 2006, passivity best describes most of the US working class, I will support with all I can muster nearly anyone who is taking risks and fighting back against the big tests, for school integration, against regimentation of the curriculum, and the racist wars that serve as their foundation--whether I agree with their tactics or not.
However, I think Kozol is likely to lead people into a cul-de-sac, a dead end, if we are to take the last 25 years of his work as a guide.
Kozol’s earlier (1992), Savage Inequalities, followed a path that Lincoln Steffens had traced about 60 years before Kozol in the book Shame of the Cities.
Steffens was interested in the corruption of US cities. He pointed to one form of corruption after another, city officials looting the treasury in a variety of ways, and concluded that what was clearly a pattern was a fluke, could be reformed.
Kozol went around the US much later and pointed out that schooling is segregated, racist to the core, and he even signaled that there is an economic basis to all that (without, as I remember it, using the term "capitalism").
He did a fine job, in popular terms, describing the horrors that are daily life in many urban schools. Then he suggested that inequality could be voted away, as if people could vote away the fundamental Master/Slave relationship of the exploitation of wage labor and the land that is the heart of capitalism. Later on, Kozol got religion, and most recently he mostly reiterated what he said in Savage Inequalities.
He has lost the edge of his earlier days, if his speeches that I attended are any indication. He portrays himself as a "simple-minded guy" (who is a Rhodes scholar from Harvard) and he wants the US, "to not be two societies, to be the good democracy we can be." He wants "teachers to protest the (high-stakes) tests, but do not make your principals miserable."
He wants capitalist schools without capitalism.
That, in my eyes, is a real mistake. Over time, it becomes mis-leadership. I believe the plan behind Kozol is "Vote Democratic," or, at the very least, "vote in mass."
The Masters will never adopt the ethics of the Slaves. Never. Not without a bitter fight. That fight has to be a real fight and some principals will need to be made more than miserable.
Voting will not solve the problems we face. Worse things could be done than casting a ballot, but voting should be at the bottom of the activist list.
Why? The answer lies in a practical answer to what appears to be a philosophical questions: Why have government? Why have schools? Who are "we" and what is our relationship with others in this world? That is a question usually absent in social studies classes; the US government or something like it is assumed to be the highest form of human development.
However, in my eyes, Marx, Engels and many others answered that question more than one hundred years ago, and Kozol (and Steffens) would do well to learn from them (see the quote from Engels appended below).
Our society is a capitalist society. The best description of our government is capitalist government. Capitalism requires inequality and, over time, it systematically creates greater and greater inequality. In order to preserve the system that demands inequality, government arises to protect the powerful and maintain domination. That is why government exists, all government. Behind the carrots of smiling politicians and glib school superintendents lies the force and violence of the capitalist state, the military and the cops. Don't come to school and we will arrest you. Your students fail the test and you lose your job. Or, remember the Troop Surge in San Diego schools last spring, with military recruiters on the hunt for bodies everywhere south of I- 8.
In the US, government is not a neutral body.
Government is a weapon of the rich. That is true of every aspect of government schools, cops, the military, politicians and the political processes , the laws, the courts, and I will toss in the press as well.
Schools in capitalist society are capitalist schools although, as on any job, people fight back, resist. We resist on fairly common grounds with industrial workers. We fight about class size and hours of work (the speed-up and stretch out), we fight for supplies, for better wages and working conditions. We fight for freedom, too, just like all workers fight for freedom. However, our fight for freedom is a little different as, at least in the case of some of us, we fight for the freedom to make our product (kids) free. Ford workers have no real reason to take the side of the Mustangs they build, but we have every reason to ally with parents, kids, and community people, not only because that is nice, but they are key to our winning any form of power.
Why have school? Capitalist schools serve a variety of functions. It’s helpful to see schools as missions for capitalism, and many educators as capital’s missionaries. It does not have to be that way.
Schools are huge markets (think of the salaries, the costs of busses, the architects for the buildings, the land, the textbooks, etc). As markets, the processes of capital always intervene, pitting people against people in a struggle for profits, jobs, and status, power. The market requires inequality, as we can see now.
Two key forms of inequality in school are easy to see: race and sex. Schools and the teacher work force are segregated by race and sex, with kids of color getting the most regimented forms of schooling, and women doing most of the front line work. Beneath that works social class, allowing those who arrive in life with the least capital to be hurt first and worst. But the rest are sure to follow.
Schools are huge tax-funded day care centers (with the tax system aimed away from the rich, we can see how the government, the capitalist government, taxes poor and working people to subsidize what should be company-paid day care).
Schools warehouse kids, keeping them out of the labor market, which is largely what the California community college system does.
School do skills training (reading, writing, math) in inequitable ways (segregated by race and class, then segregated by the substance of the curricula and teaching methods) and ideological training (nationalism, racism, sexism, the myth of US democracy, etc).
But above all, schools fashion hope, real or false. A society that can offer no hope to its youth will face upheavals, like France in 1968 demonstrated. A society that can dangle false hope to youth can hang on for awhile, as we see today. Many kids, though, know there is little real hope for them. They can look forward to lousy jobs or the military, fighting the enemies of their enemies, but they do not know why things are as they are, and their teachers often do not either. Kozol is no longer helping on that question.
There is an unbroken spiral of a line from capitalism to imperialism to war to racism to segregation to curricular regimentation to high-stakes testing to the role of school to the nature of government and, finally, to social change. To try to split out any one part of that and ignore it, obscure it, is, I think, misleading. It has deadly results, i.e., thousands of US kids serving in Iraq really never heard of imperialism. That is no mistake.
Teachers are relatively privileged people, among the last in the US with regular wages, some job protections, and health benefits. So far, elites in the US have succeeded in creating a teaching force that is mostly made up of those missionaries for capitalism.
However, capital always seeks to diminish everyone it touches, even those who think they are riding it. In the case of teachers, the goal of the boss is very similar to the goals Henry Ford had in his plants in the 1920's (and still today)to replace the mind of the worker with the mind of the boss, right down to every movement the worker (teacher) makes.
The next step in that relationship is to convince the worker that there is no boss/worker relationship, the old Master/Slave allegory is no longer valid. If that goal is achieved, then subservience is freedom.
Even those workers who appear to win within capitalism (skilled tradesmen in the US up to, say 1990) lose in the short term (tying their humanity to the accumulation of possessions when, in most cases, the more we have the less we are)and the long run as well (skilled tradesmen--and they are almost all white men become obsolete because capitalism is as fickle to its allies as the US is---remember those US allies in Vietnam).
School workers will endure the same fate, unless we fight back--with wisdom. That means, at bottom, making those connections about capitalism noted above.
The reason that some working people in the US are able to live much better than most of the workers in the world is because US imperialism was fairly successful in the last century (by staying out of most of WWI, profiting from arms sales, etc, staying out of the European wars in WWII until the end, defeating the state-capitalist system in the USSR, but then losing in Vietnam, and never recovering). Since Vietnam, as US imperialism grew weaker economically, politically, morally, and militarily, there has been less and less available to the ruling classes to turn over to labor leaders and some workers in the form of bribes, to betray the rest of the working classes of the world.
There is a direct connection from the fruits of imperialism (won through war, looting raw materials, forcing cheap labor, brutally opening markets) and the relatively high wages that, for example, National Education Association's labor leaders earn, some at $450,000-plus a year. That is a bribe from imperialism, and those union bosses know it.
Teachers, however, usually do not know they are being bribed by the fruits of imperialism to offer children to the processes of capitalism, but that is what is happening, and they need to be told in ways that will show them that, over time, they will lose, which is a fact.
We do not need to build a get out the vote movement to rescue capitalist schooling. We do not need to urge people to choose a somebody else to act for them, to alienate the solution of social problems, which is what voting is about. And surely we do not need to get people to pick, again, which millionaire will oppress them best, as is the case in almost every election.
We need to rescue education from the ruling classes, reason from un-reason, freedom from oppression. This is a practical social question that is finally a pedagogical problem. What is it that people need to learn, and how do we need to come to learn it, in order to create the transformation that allows a future world to be reasonably caring, free through human connectedness rather than separation, equitable, and democratic? Since all learning combines theory and practice, it is a problem of doing and thinking---what school should be.
I think a key element of this is to show people that we make our own histories, but not in conditions we choose. We are responsible for our actions. We are what we do. History judges us against an ethic that did not fall from the sky, but an ethic that can be torn from the past: internationalism, reason, anti-racism, opposition to personality cults, anti-sexism, equality inside democracy, working class solidarity (it is wrong to exploit people, selfishness is bad), for freedom in production--and reproduction. We are what we do. It is an ethic that tests us, not at the gates of heaven, but in our lives, because when working people behave otherwise, we lose. We lose morally, and practically. An articulated ethic can be used to measure leadership.
I believe we need to show people where power is. Alinsky said, "power goes to two poles, those who have money, and those who have people." That is mostly true.
In order to decipher where power is located for working people, in any society, we need to look for its "choke points," the places where change could be reasonably be expected to originate, and where change might extend centrifugally. It is important that people learn how to do this kind of analysis themselves, on their own, so the process of discovering that is significant.
However, it appears to me that in the US now, there are quite a few choke points: schools, the military, prisons, the immigrant rights movement, the transportation system (tied to immigrant workers) and to a limited extent the health care system. I am not Cassandra, gifted with prophecy but cursed because nobody believed her, but I think these are good guesses.
Students whose hope is daily eradicated, soldiers sent to die by witless officers in service to the rich, prisoners in US gulag jails, and those who have no hope because the health care system is in ruins, are likely to fight back---especially people of color and immigrants. In most cases, people fight back because they must fight back. Entire cities, like Detroit, are so destroyed that the people who live in them have little to lose but to fight back. That is why Detroit teachers, who do not want to strike, went on two wildcat strikes in th last five years.
Teachers are very well positioned to play a historical role in those fights, although I am quite sure many will not. I will bet my house that most, by far most, professors will not. These people are of little matter.
Power has a geography. School workers' power is based in and near schools---not in distant ballot boxes. School workers' power lies in our solidarity with each other, with kids, and parents; against the interests of wealth. Power at work is demonstrated by the ability to control the work place, specifically to be able to open and close it. That can only happen when we take responsibility for ourselves and our colleagues' actions.
School workers create value collectively, in a relationship with each other, with kids, with parents, and communities. In order to gain power over the value we create, to rescue education from the ruling classes, we need to act collectively, on the job and in communities. We need to build close personal, trusting, ties in our school communities, which can take time, but can also be speeded by collective, sometimes sudden, action. The best way to do this is to walk door to door in school communities and talk to people, hand out a leaflet, share some coffee, etc.
The choke points of school are, now, the Big Tests, curricula regimentation, immigration and attendance sweeps, cops and the military in schools, issues about books and supplies, class size, free health care and food, and the unjust tax system. Racism infests every one of those issues. It is clear any movement to oppose oppressive schooling must be integrated, often led by the people at the shortest end of the stick--since they usually best understand the stick. Margaret Haley, who founded the AFT and helped build the NEA, fought about most of these issues more than 75 years ago, and often won---so these fights are winnable.
We can shut down the big tests and drive the military recruiters off our campuses. The tests are designed to teach lies to kids using methods so obscure that kids learn to not like to learn–a key goal of elites, and currently their success. The military and the struggle for what is true have only contradiction in common, meaning they have no business in schools, urging kids to go fight the enemies of their real enemies, the rich in the US.
I think the Big Tests and the military are the main things school worker-activists should focus on. Shut down the tests and couple that with the kinds of Freedom Schooling that the civil rights movement showed us are possible. Even if we cannot conduct freedom schooling, we can shut down the tests with boycotts (as in Michigan) and do the best we can with Freedom Schooling. Confront the military recruiters and move them away from the youth.
The method of that Freedom Schooling should be critical and purposeful, seeking to show people how to do analyses of the processes of capitalism and how to get beyond it (see related links below).
We need to show masses of people that we can understand and change the world through mass, collective, direct action---and reflecting on what we and others have done.
I do not believe the top teacher union leadership will be helpful in this struggle. They want us to think of the union as a vending machine. We pay money and it acts for us. As long as we think like that, they win. The same is true of politicians. Nobody is going to save us but us.
I doubt Kozol will get beyond voting and, maybe, some pretty restricted demonstrating, but because he has earned considerable respect for his struggles over the years, I hope I am wrong, and may work with his group to find out and to struggle for sharper positions.
However, very few groups anywhere in the world have been willing to make the links of capitalism, imperialism, war, racism, and unjust schooling. The Rouge Forum has done that. Substance News from Chicago does it. Who else? Justice, after all, requires organization. The other side is organized, and ruthless.
The Rouge Forum has moved along with fits and starts. We are not doing nearly enough. We have about 4400 people on our email list. We have had big conferences and little ones, good conferences and not so good ones. We shut down the Michigan tests but did only very limited work with Freedom Schooling, and were self critical openly about all of it. We were instrumental, but not key, in the school walkouts against the war in California, Michigan, Florida, and New York. We play a pivotal role in a couple professional organizations, causing the passage of anti-war motions, etc. We continue a role in NEA and the AFT.
Rouge Forum members work within the San Diego Coalition for Peace and Justice in planning demonstrations on the third Friday of the coming months of this year, and a San Diego anti-war teach-in on October 20. You are welcome to join us.
I have to close by saying that there is urgency in my analysis.
Fascism is emerging all around us. US imperialism is in rapid decline. The vaunted US military is being fought to a standstill in Iraq and Afghanistan by an opposition that has no rational ideology, no truly tested leaders (no Hi Chi Minh nor General Giap), no supply lines, no outside state support, no internal regions to produce arms and munitions.
The Russians (who have nukes, a military, and emerging nationalism of their own), the Chinese, the Europeans, can easily see the debacle that is the US military, and they all desperately need the Caspian, Middle-eastern, Venezuelan oil fields, not merely to fuel their economies, but to fuel their militaries (key to their economies). There is no solution to the oil problem by conserving energy, because oil is, above all, a military tool, vital to rule, social control
Every one of these other powers can see the US has lost in Afghanistan and Iraq, already. The US military is already stretched far too thin. It has to be tempting to competing powers to test the US might. Moreover, the US is incessantly provoking them, especially the USSR, which the US is surrounding, claiming what was Soviet territory is now US-interest territory.
There are also wild card players out there that could set things off very fast: Pakistan, India, North Korea, even G. W. Bush. It is hard to foresee exactly how this will all play out, but unless working class action is taken within the heartland of the most aggressive imperial power, the US, it is reasonable to say that the immediate future looks severe.
The US economy teeters on bankruptcy, dependent on virtual loans from China.
The "civil liberties" and the social safety net that were won in 1930's street battles by the US industrial working class are vanishing because the industrial working class has been dis-empowered, there is little resistance from them or their unions, and because there is much less left over in the imperial pot to share. So, the bosses cut back in every social arena (massive auto layoffs, 2.2 million in jail, etc) both because they must, and because there is little fight-back now.
Moreover, people in the US are under constant surveillance, and gulled by spectacles, already.
I do not think we have an unlimited amount of time to act.
In the long run, capitalism cannot solve its own problems of the endless battles for markets, cheap labor, raw materials; cannot even solve the problems of immigration since it must have cheap workers inside the imperial nations, but cannot stand to keep them inside when they complain about being cheap labor. Capital, however, thrives on crises and death (cigarette production is a good example). Capital does not care who is riding it, who thinks they are winning from year to year. Capital is fickle and will leave one nation for another---whoever exploits best.
In the long run, it only makes sense to believe that the Masters will not forever rule the slaves, the few dominate the many. All it takes to get beyond capital is a massive change of mind, and some very militant action. That, though, is also a lot.
In the short run, though, things can get very, very ugly. Time is short. And Kozol is wrong. We can understand and transform the world.
Engels from Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State:
The state is, therefore, by no means a power forced on society from without; just as little is it "the reality of the ethical idea," "the image and reality of reason," as Hegel maintains (Grunlinken der Philosophie des Rechts, § 257 and § 360). Rather, it is a product of society at a certain stage of development; it is the admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it has split into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel. But in order that these antagonisms and classes with conflicting economic interests might not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, it became necessary to have a power seemingly standing above society that would alleviate the conflict, and keep it within the bounds of "order" ; and this power, arisen out of society but placing itself above it, and alienating itself more and more from it, is the state.
Ollman on What Capitalists Are Hiding http//www.pipeline.com/~rgibson/OllmanCapitalistsHide.htm
Gateways to Understanding Marx http//www.pipeline.com/%7Ergibson/gateways.htm
Analytical Thinking http//www.pipeline.com/%7Ergibson/scedialectical4.htm
Questions about the Master/Slave Allegory http//www.pipeline.com/~rgibson/masterslave.htm
What is Fascism? http//www.pipeline.com/%7Ergibson/fascism.html
More stuff on my www page http//www.pipeline.com/~rgibson/gibson.htm
For materials on Freedom Schools, see Kathy Emery's www page
This essay refers to Jonathan Kozol's "An Update, Bulletin, and Manifesto to the Education Activists who have asked meWhere do we go next?" (see http//susanohanian.org/show_nclb_stories.html?id=298)
I didn't want to do this, but here's my pic of the eclipse...
After about 2:30AM it becomes fun to ride the streets of San Diego. Hardly any cars - most are overly respectful of cyclists and others are wildly high on mind-altering substances and generally easy to spot and avoid. Pedestrians mostly seem to be operating outside the system, seeking sex, drugs, money or maybe just a friend. Much more interesting than suits and shoppers!
I couldn't find anyone to ride with, but it was cool rolling with my own thoughts as the earth's shadow swallowed up its smaller counterpart and then coughed it back up again. My attempts to interest my fellow late nite travelers in the spectacle failed miserably - my enthusiastic discourse was met with car windows rolling up and fast stepping walkers staring at the ground. I encountered only one other cyclist - on his way to work for the man.
As the eclipse was nearing its end, marine layer clouds starting drifting past the dazzling moon, marking an eerie end to my encounter with nature as the morning traffic started revving up.
Scientific study, precise calculations, news reports, photos, videos, animations, simulations and more have reduced mind-blowing phenomena such as eclipses to routine, scripted series of steps far less engaging than the latest video game. But last night, for me, the eclipse was much more than that.
The next lunar eclipse visible here is February 21 (early evening). Anyone want to ride it?
To download the video and then view it, you can use the quicktime player or download the free, open source video program VLC, by clicking here, clicking on your operating system (Windows, Mac OS X, etc.) and following the instructions.
If you encounter any problems viewing videos on san diego indymedia, please write to us at
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Later this year we hope to considerably simplify uploading and downloading video, pix etc. with an upgrade of our software. Thanks for your patience!
from chicago indymedia
7/19 Emergency Alert! Immig Activist Elvira Arellano Arrested in Los Angeles!
by Leslie (repost from LA Indymedia) Sunday, Aug. 19, 2007 at 5:16 PM
Elvira Arellano, who, with her son Saul, has become a national symbol of the destruction of families by federal policy, was taken into immigration custody today in Los Angeles. What follows is a call for a nationwide protest and vigil in downtown LA and phone calls to ICE.
Supporting organizations of national sanctuary movement are calling for NATIONWIDE PROTEST, at 8pm PACIFIC TIME, at local ICE OFFICE. We must not let Elvira get deported. Liliana is safe here in Long Beach still on Sanctuary.
National Immigrant Solidarity Network
webpage: http://www.ImmigrantSolidarity.org
e-mail: info@ImmigrantSolidarity.org
Please join the immigrant Solidarity Network daily news litserv, send e-mail to: isn-subscribe@lists.riseup.net or visit:
http://lists.riseup.net/www/info/isn
Emergency Alert! Immigrant Activist Elvira Arellano Arrested in Los Angeles! Your URGENT Support is Needed!
Elvira Arellano, the immigration activist who sought refuge inside a Chicago church for a year was arrested in Los Angeles this afternoon after taking her campaign on the road. We need to act quickly to demand her release! (see below)
National Immigrant Solidarity Network
Immigration activist Arellano arrested
By Antonio Olivo
Chicago Tribune
August 20, 2007
LOS ANGELES—An immigration activist who sought refuge inside a Chicago church for a year was arrested in Los Angeles this afternoon after taking her campaign on the road.
Elvira Arellano was arrested about 4:15 p.m. Chicago time by law-enforcement officials after leaving Our Lady Queen of Angels Church in downtown Los Angeles, said Emma Lozano, an adviser who was there during the arrest.
After talking to news media inside the church, Arellano and her supporters got into their van to head north to San Jose, where she was scheduled to speak at another church, Lozano said. Moments after they entered the van, an unmarked vehicle stopped them.
The driver of Arellano's van, Roberto Lopez, poked his head out because he wanted to see why they were being blocked. Several other unmarked vehicles surrounded their van.
v Agents emerged from all the cars screaming for Arellano to get out, Lozano said. Her 8-year-old son, Saul, started to cry, and Arellano said to everyone in the car, "Calm down. Don't have any fear. They can't hurt me."
Then she turned to the people who were about to arrest her and she said, "You're going to have to give me a minute with my son," Lozano said. She spent time with her son in the car, then surrendered.
Arellano was arrested on Main Street, near the church, where she slept Saturday night and where she's held several press conferences Saturday and today.
aolivo@tribune.com
Suggest Immediate Actions to Support Her:
1) Call U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office, demand them the safety of the Elvira Arellano, no deportation, and demand her immediately release from the ICE custody.
ICE Field Office Director, Los Angeles
300 North Los Angeles St., Room 7631A
Los Angeles, CA 90012
Phone: 213-830-7911
ICE Headquarters, Director, Office of Detention and Removal Operations
801 I St, NW
Suite 900
Washington, DC 20536
Phone: 202-305-2734
2) Daily peace vigil at the Los Angeles ICE office until Elvira Arellano's safe release.
ICE Field Office, Los Angeles
300 North Los Angeles St., Room 7631A
Los Angeles, CA 90012
Phone: 213-830-7911
It's very hard for youth today, committed to activism - the ones who do manage to become activists, against all odds and against the university - to see the kind of brutality they are facing in the city. The hardest thing for them when they go to school is to find teachers to listen to them. The hardest thing for teachers who are activists to keep from getting fired and to keep from being depressed ourselves... You will be amazed how when you are part of all the wonderful activities around the world right now, you don't have quite enough time to as depressed as you would otherwise.
The right is always going to come to the left...Some of the best philosophy I've ever learned... clubs, raves, sitting on a mattress, that's where ideas come from, from the street, from anarchist collectives, from Marxist-Leninist collectives, from feminist collectives, from Chicana-Lesbian collectives, any kind of collective where people are starting with somebody and they read it out loud and the next person says 'what do you think?' and it goes around the circle and everyone talks about it. That's where ideas come from. Is the university supporting that? No...
Emily Hicks Veer Towards Queer Interview Part One
0:00 Veer Towards Queer Intro
5:00 Events in San Diego and the World
12:45 Emily Hicks Intro
17:14 Emily Hicks Performance Piece
29:30 Problems We Are Facing
31:40 Military-Industrial-Academic Complex
37:10 Denial of Tenure to Pat Washington
41:20 What's Behind the Mechanics of the Corporate University? Bill Gates and Open Source Software
46:30 Overcome Alienation from Equipment/Technology
48:10 Power Structures in the University
51:25 The Right Coming to the Left for Ideas
Emily Hicks Veer Towards Queer Interview Part Two
0:00 Creating Community with Music
9:05 Bisexuality Doesn't Exist: The Study
17:00 The Altar in the Trailer
18:45 Open Source Lab for Chicanas
25:50 Open Source Software: For Geeks Only? For Anarchists!
40:00 The Ideology of The Border
45:20 Elites and The Border
49:00 Vision of the Open Source Lab for Chicanas
Good afternoon, Before I begin my presentation. Let me announce that
the San Diego Coalition for Clean and Fair Government will be running a
slate of candidates for all four council races and the mayors office. I
will be their candidate for mayor, Kevin Mock, our Green Party
treasurer, will be the candidate for the 3rd district Council seat.
My friends. I would like to personally thank you for attending this
meeting. You know, it often seems, like there are so few of us.... for
so big a struggle.
However, as Greens, we weave ourselves, like a fine thread of silk
through the tapestry of local activism. Just this week, Mark and I, on
Tuesday, joined with others to object to yet another military training
program in yet another high school, with 75% students of color. We
faced a right-wing school board, with four of its five members, either
former military officers or married to military personal. The
district's chief operating officer is a former admiral.
On Monday, I wore my Green Party T-shirt to the Hiroshima Day
observance in front of the warship, the Midway; and, a week ago
Saturday, Ann Menasche and I participated in the strategic planning
session of the Peace and Justice Coalition.
We will, I foresee, become the political wing of the local peace and
justice movement. But we must do our part. For instance, we must
consider running candidates for every school board in every part of the
county; raising the alarm against the militarization and exploitation
of our children, particularly in poorer neighborhoods, as cannon
fodder.
Peace and justice dosen't come easy. If it did, Corporate America would
find a way to package it and sell it back to us. As a political party,
we have been strong on theory, short on action. We must find better
ways to promote solidarity among people with different priorities. The
right is damn good at it, we on the left fail miserably. We must also
expand our understanding of society, develop visionary goals and create
effective strategies. We are good at the first two, slip a bit on the
third.
I believe the only way we are going to grow our party is to get out
front and run for office on the issues, year and year, election after
election. Another petition, another policy statement, even brochures
and flyers will not engage those who are disengaged from the political
system. Talk is cheap, actions speak louder than words; only by our
courage and tenacity, our repeated attacks on power and wealth, will we
build a political party that is organic, holistic and holds the ethical
banner to be an attractive and effective alternative.
Now, It is easy to challenge others, harder to challenge oneself. Thus,
I stepped up to run for a political position. But running for public
office in San Diego is like going to a Tupperware party. Part fashion
show, part gripe session; insiders maneuver and squabble amongst
themselves to move up in the pecking order of power. Too much focus on
ego and money. The issues are not discussed; there is a kind of
mindless chatter, small talk for even smaller people. Like our
Tupperware party goers, they mumble about the shapes of the Tupperware,
the pretty colors, even the packaging it comes in; without ever even
questioning whether we should be using plastic in the first place or
the ways we can recycle and minimize its damage to our environment.
If we extend that metaphor of Tupperware to all of the pressing issues
facing us as a city; the need for affordable housing, rent control,
energy independence, public ownership of San Diego Gas and Electric, a
minimum wage for all San Deigns, free public transportation, fiscal
fairness and the right-wing, corporate financed, assault on community
regulation and government - they are not being discussed.
As the ownership of public communication becomes concentrated in fewer
and fewer hands - what is possible, what is thinkable, the notion of
fundamental change, becomes boxed in. The supreme instrument of
power....is the ability to control the definition of the alternative.
That is where we must concentrate our efforts.
Personally, I was always uncomfortable with my political race for the
Council; it required too much ego. The possibility of winning dictated
too many compromises. My human need to be liked fought with the
activist who needed to raise the issues - to talk about power and
money, to step on toes, to challenge the corporate lie we all live. I
considered, like so many of our brothers and sisters in the struggle,
dropping out of the race, scaling back my commitments, individualizing
my life and personalizing my priorities, like so many of my generation
have done over the years.
Yet, as director of the Renters' Union, I get daily pleas for help from
families being dislocated, facing homelessness as rent climb ever
higher and wages, cut by inflation, sink ever further. To watch a
mother's heartrenching sobs because her child has no economic option
other than the killing sands of Iraq. To watch as globalization,
corporate colonialism, destroys the Mexican culture of my lover and
globalization's twin evil... gentrification, as it creates a
class-based caste system in our neighborhoods, continually trips my
feet as I edge toward the door that separates flight from fight.
Luckily, we have come up with a solution that overcomes my personal
struggle with ego and the need to publicize our community agenda. The
Renters' Union will be joining with other organizations and citizen
groups in the San Diego Coalition for Clean and Fair Government.
As a candidate for an office that I can't possibly win, part of a
broader coalition, possibly a local justice movement, if nothing else,
at least an adventure; I am free to campaign on the issues. To go
beyond the media forged parameters of possibility and discussion. To
change the political dialogue or, as that great Chicago organizer, Saul
Alinsky, once said, "to stink up the place."
I will challenge the fundamental nature of store bought politics.
Today's politicians have become squabbling creatures of self-interest.
Our mayor is their poster boy. Jerry Sanders...jerry rigging city
contracts and peddling influence.....JS....BS. The darling of the
corporate media and wealthy developers, he has been called a "crook" by
our own elected City Attorney and "silly and uniformed" in a recent
City Beat editorial. Like Sanders, most local politicians lack vision
and have forgotten how to imagine, prisoners of their own mendacity and
greed. They pander to despair and fear, thumping the virtues of
selfishness and looking out for number one, reducing collective
existence to its most banal aspects.
At City Hall there has been a lack of compassion and a failure to
share. City government seems almost dysfunctional , torn between
special interests that belly up to the public trough. The Mayor hopes,
through his hand picked Charter Amendment committee, to consolidate
even more political power in his office. To feed the right-wing agenda
of privatization of city staff and services. To carve up the public
commons for private profit. To give our water systems to companies like
Exon-Mobil, so taking a shower will cost $35. To give our city services
and infrastructure to companies like Haliburton. To destroy public
libraries and parks in favor of theme parks and stadiums.
Where are the statesmen and stateswomen, the people of vision, in
public life today? We live in well-off neighborhoods, in a rich city,
in an even wealthier state, among the most powerful nation humankind
has ever seen - we need humility, not pandering from grubby
politicians. We need challenges to our better nature, our compassion
and humanity, not appeals to fear and greed. We need community over
individual isolation, sharing over hoarding, participatory economics,
where market forces are not manipulated to enrich a select few.
Wendell Berry said it best ...."our crisis is a crisis of character."
We need to build and nurture institutions and processes that build
autonomy, self-respect and integrity rather than those that cripple our
outrage and numbs our sense of possibility in claustrophobic conformity
behind a mask of individualism.
Instead of building strength in each person as a member of a community,
neighbors who can make decisions, today's politicians increasingly rely
on profit driven corporations who staff government bureaucracies to
institutionalize our lives, usurp ever greater amounts of our
hard-earned dollars into profit and turn us into automated, faceless,
powerless citizens. Wealth imposes (like dictatorships) rather than
proposes (as in a democracy.)
I once heard Buckminster Fuller say that it is not enough to criticize
and protest, we must create new models to replace the old ones. That is
what I hope to do as part of this campaign for clean and fair
government.
Over the last few years, I have come to believe in the basics.
Participatory democracy at the neighborhood level, I feel, is the only
process, the only system of government, that has the possibility to
make a difference against power and wealth. Face to face democracy
breaks down the pyramids of power which institutionalize unfairness,
inequality and privilege. It creates a transforming, educative force
beyond the isolation of self-interest to a sense of human closeness,
friendship and solidarity with our neighbors. That is what I propose
for San Diego.
Having served on the City Heights planning board, elected by my
neighbors; I participated in true democracy. Community members involved
in the political process at the grass-roots level. I found that even
when we disagreed, personal interaction and discussion led to trust -
and trust begins cooperation and a sharing of resources. We begin to
understand that community is not merely living in some space - but
having some measure of control over that space and the quality of our
lives.
As Americans, and as San Diegans, we are at a critical juncture in
human history. We can continue on a collusion course with nature, with
Global warming, and with the rest of the world - increasingly more wars
over shrinking natural resources. Or we can begin to elect public
officials who do not give empty promises about vague solutions.
Statespersons who will give us - as citizens - the means, tools and
governmental capabilities to do it ourselves. Only true participatory
democracy will save this planet. Political power from the bottom-up,
the inside-out, that is self-governing and makes decisions in unity
with our common global needs.
I propose that we work to change the structural characteristics of city
government by building into the very fabric of the administrative
process citizen participation requirements and effective neighborhood
policy-making authority.
In corporate owned government, as the Mayor proposes; we as citizens
are rendered tame, dependent and obedient to the needs of wealth. To
fight back, we must move beyond mere reactive responses. Abstract
actions - signing a petition, giving money, joining yet another
organization - correct neither the cause nor the effect leading to
citizen apathy, cynicism, helplessness and cowardice. To correct this
we must become intimate with our government, we must.....become...the
government. In our front yards, on our blocks, in our apartment
buildings, we must bring the knowledge of self, the needs of our
families and partners, the hopes and dreams of our neighbors together -
to build a community based on compassion, sharing and the needs of the
environment. Rather than an illusion of participation; separated,
unengaged, looking on from a distance, a caricature of democracy; I
believe we can experience a truly sharing community and weld it to the
needs of our threatened planet.
Thank you.
No Borders Camp VIdeo Clip
No Borders Camp Benefit Flyer (pdf)
Cathect at the Groundwork Books Benefit
from focus on the family
Two rival radical-Right efforts are underway to put an initiative on the June 2008 ballot in California to ban legal recognition of same-sex marriages. The difference is one would also invalidate California's landmark domestic partners law, which gives same-sex couples who qualify most of the rights married people have under state law, while the other one wouldn't. But Queer-rights organizations regard both initiatives as equally dangerous.
------------------------------
Radical Right Mounts Two Rival Anti-Marriage Drives
One Would Also Abolish Domestic Partnerships, the Other Wouldn’t
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
(continued from above)
This year, a similar bill has already passed the State Assembly and is pending before the State Senate. What’s more, the California Supreme Court is expected to hear a challenge to the constitutionality of Proposition 22 and issue its ruling shortly before the June 2008 election, when either or both anti-marriage equality initiatives may be on the ballot. Either initiative would nullify a court ruling that the state constitution required the state to recognize same-sex marriages equally to opposite-sex marriages — but the Bowler initiative would go considerably farther.
“An amendment to the California constitution, which requires a vote of the people, is the only way to stop the politicians, and especially the courts, from redefining marriage against the will of the majority of Californians,” Ron Prentice, executive director of the California Family Council, said in a press release from his organization. “We are confident that Californians continue to want to protect traditional marriage as it has always been.”
Prentice’s release also contains his explanation for why the California Family Council initiative isn’t directly attacking domestic partnership rights as well as same-sex marriage. Claiming that California voters “are reluctant to take away existing rights,” Prentice said, “For this reason, I strongly believe that placing the winnable language of Proposition 22 into the state constitution is the best, and only winnable, choice.”
In the Voters’ Right press release, Bowler said his group had an immediate goal to raise $2 million from “people of means who strongly believe in marriage … to override the judges and politicians and fully and permanently protect marriage for one man and one woman. The only initiative that will accomplish this is the rock-solid VoteYesMarriage.com amendment.”
“The threat to marriage in California is very real,” the Voters’ Right release stated. After reviewing the history of the state supreme court case and saying the court “has enough votes to create homosexual ‘marriages’” — a view not echoed in the statements and releases from marriage equality advocates, who are considerably more uncertain about the likely outcome of the case — the release criticized Proposition 22 on the ground that “the proposition’s limited text … left marriage an empty shell devoid of any exclusive value.” This is likely a response to the state court rulings that threw out radical-Right challenges to the domestic partnership law on the ground that Proposition 22 dealt exclusively with defining marriage and didn’t stop the legislature from creating mutual rights and responsibilities for same-sex couples that stopped short of full-fledged marriage.
Despite the clear distinction in strategy and tactics between the two radical-Right groups, Equality California (EQCA), the principal lobby in the state for marriage equality and Queer rights generally, sees no real difference. Criticizing both groups, Equality California’s statement says, “If they had their way, these extremists would completely write LGBT [Queer] people out of the California constitution — the very document that should protect the rights of all Californians. We will not — we cannot — let that happen.”
At the July 15 Spirit of Stonewall community celebration in Balboa Park, which kicked off San Diego’s Pride events, EQCA director Seth Kilbourn made it clear that his group is unwilling to accept any compromise that leaves California’s domestic partnership law in place but closes the door on marriage equality. “Domestic partnerships and marriage will always be unequal in terms of rights and benefits, status and recognition, and dignity and respect,” Kilbourn said. “There are only two reasons to have two different systems, one for Gay people and one for everybody else. Either the systems are unequal in terms of the protections they provide — which they are — or there’s a general acceptance that one group is somehow less worthy than the other. No matter how you feel about the institution of marriage, how can we accept inequality in the law, and accept the notion that Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Americans are somehow ‘less than’?”
The organizations mentioned in this article can be reached at the following Web sites:
Equality California: http://www.eqca.org
California Family Council: http://www.protectmarriage.com
Voters’ Right to Protect Marriage: http://VoteYesMarriage.com
The CPR first publicly declared itself a civilian population under attack in a communiqué issued in September 1990; they had been resisting army violence and capture for more than eight years. The following year the UN dispatched human rights expert Christian Tomuschat to the Quiché highlands of Guatemala to investigate the CPR’s claims – the same region where Don Benjamín was living.
Upon arrival, Tomuschat immediately witnessed an air attack on a civilian community, prompting him to testify in February 1992 before the UN Human Rights Commission about what he had seen. At the time of his report, some 30,000 persons were still living in the CPR. His testimony signaled the end of army bombings on CPR communities and spiked international attention and outrage over the violence.
In 2000, a multiethnic coalition of Maya massacre survivors created the Association for Justice and Reconciliation (AJR), an organization seeking to hold military and political leaders accountable for their role in the violence. Don Benjamín, along with other AJR compañeros (companions in struggle), is risking his life by volunteering to serve as a witness in legal cases charging former dictators and their high commands with genocide against the Maya.
The chief target of the AJR’s organizing is Efrain Rios Montt, an ex-president who ruled over the bloodiest episodes of the genocide. Complicating their efforts is the fact that Rios Montt is running for Congress in September’s national elections, and he argues that, if elected, congressional immunity laws would protect him from prosecution.
WireTap caught up with Don Benjamin to ask about life in the CPR as well as the AJR’s current struggle to hold the genocide’s architects accountable for their crimes.
How did your experience in the Communities of Populations in Resistance (CPR) begin?
Well, it was like this: in 1982, February 14th was the first massacre of my village. The second was the 22nd of March when they assassinated my father. It was the army and the civil patrol . They forcibly disappeared my uncles and other family members were also murdered.
I was 13-years-old and left here towards the river. There we went behind the older people, defending their lives. Traveling, we were very hungry – we had nothing to eat, we were thirsty and left with only the threats from the army. We could no longer walk calmly. We walked day and night without food, without clothes. All of our corn had been burned, and also our houses. That’s how it was defending my life on the way to Ixiltenam.
How was day-to-day life, in terms of finding food and so on, when you were in the CPR?
Well, day to day we were struggling, looking for food, during these times of the internal armed conflict. We would eat roots and other grasses that one must not eat but we were forced to eat due to the hunger. Like that we were defending our lives and living.
When the army attacked you in the CPR was it because there were guerrilla fighters there or why exactly?
They attacked us out of pleasure, to be direct. We were purely civilians: children and elderly men and women living there in these little places. The army arrived to destroy all of our tiny homes. At this point, we no longer had good houses but rather sites where we could live. So they arrived to cut down what we had. We’d change locations, they’d arrive to attack us again, sometimes to capture and murder us, our compañeros, in these places.
What types of threats did the army pose?
Well, either infantries would come or airplanes to bombard us. The blood of various compañeros was spilled for defending the children and the elders. Sometimes our CPR lookouts would end up captured by the army who would then kill them. They would burn them alive - for defending the children. I was growing up during this, for some 14 years; I was resisting like this in the wilderness of Ixiltenam.
Thanks to God for protecting us during the suffering that we passed through – without clothes, without food, without salt. Lots of suffering, and my siblings were very little, and I had to suffer a lot with them.
Did many people die in the CPR, and, if so, from what?
Many compañeros died of hunger, and from the army. There are those who died for only going out to find food but could never return to their little homes because they stayed behind, murdered in the trail by the army. Hunger, too, affected us a lot.
What was your impression of the United States’ role in all of this?
What we want to say is that when the airplanes came to bomb us, they were accompanied by those helicopters from the United States called Chinooks. It frightened us a lot: our compañeros would say, “Those are from the United States. I think they’ve come to terminate us.” But thanks to God, they could not terminate us because many of us were alive and now we are still like that, still here, as those left behind of the victims, of our families.
Although the AJR first filed charges of genocide in 2000, the Guatemalan government has still failed to advance them. Why do the authorities not want to move these cases forward?
Because they are the same people. It is cronyism mixed with militarism: they defend them to defend themselves. Because they feel powerful - not like us, the indigenous, the Maya people that we are. We are very looked down upon by the powerful.
For that reason, we continue soliciting efforts from, and we give thanks to, those from other countries who have often defended us, for supporting us morally so that we may demand our rights. We don’t want for the times that already happened to us to return once again.
Now we see that the authorities have tried to destroy the possibility of us getting involved and rising up to demand our rights. We also see that the authorities, like the civil police, they are the kidnappers that walk around in our country Guatemala, threatening our people.
We want justice. It is what we ask of the international community. We do not want to see any more blood; we no longer want to see all the suffering that transpired in the year 1982. We want to see peace with our families. We want to be the future, the felicity of our country.
What do you make of General Rios Montt’s upcoming, probably successful bid for Congress?
We do not want to see Mr. Rios Montt advance anymore because he is a murderer. May God grant that justice be served for this man, for all of the suffering that he has caused us. And now he wants to remain a candidate, but we no longer want to even see him in Guatemala.
What do you think about the AJR’s struggle and the genocide cases you all are pursuing?
I am very supportive of the AJR, and for the same reason that I am a witness, too - for my parents who were assassinated by the army. This is why I demand, as my right, that it is just what the AJR is doing, to demand justice. I wish that the international community would support the AJR even more so that we might continue pressing forward.
Because we are already tired of all the threats our population has suffered. And now, today, every day men and women are dying, there are kidnappings, torture. We are coming to learn that the same government has authorized these threats against the Guatemalan people. And so I ask that the international community support us in demanding justice so that peace might be made here in Guatemala.
4 Ways to Support the AJR:
* Email Guatemalan President Oscar Berger and Ambassador Jose Guillermo Castillo to demand that they prosecute Rios Montt for his leadership in the genocide: click here
* Organize a postcard drive in your community. Contact Amnesty International to request free copies of a new, informative postcard demanding that Guatemalan authorities finally let the survivors testify and move the charges forward: ija (at) aiusa.org (e-mail) | website
* Apply to become a human rights accompanier. AJR activists, because of the threats facing them, have requested for Westerners to live and travel with them as a measure of protection. Apps due August 17: click here
* To see more of Jonathan Moller’s photography of the CPR in Guatemala and to learn how to host his consciousness-raising exhibits in your community, check out these portfolios: Refugees Even After Death & Our Culture is Our Resistance -- click here-1 | click here-2
Author’s note: Various details were altered to protect the identity of Don Benjamín.
Peter Phillips
Phillips Says Impeachment Essential, but Not Enough
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2007 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
Ever since 1976, an aggressive group of faculty, students and staff from Sonoma State University in Northern California have been part of “Project Censored,” an organization aimed at finding the news stories least likely to be covered in the U.S. mainstream media. Since 1996, the project has been headed by Peter Phillips, who spoke July 25 at the First Unitarian-Universalist Church in San Diego and explained not only how the program operates but why it’s needed.
Phillips started his talk by demonstrating that, common to the Right-wing myth that America has a “liberal media,” in fact “the media maintain a corporate bias through concentrated ownership, self-censorship, reliance on government and official sources for ‘news’ and an almost reverent attitude towards the ‘free market.’ The owners and managers of the media share a class identity with the powerful, and their sense of what is ‘newsworthy’ is influenced by their social background, their values and what they call ‘common sense.’ Journalists and editors are not immune from influence from owners and managers if they want to see their stories in print. As editors come and go, they learn the parameters of this so-called ‘common-sense’ view of the world. So a lot of what passes for ‘censorship’ or ‘manufacturing consent’ is structural, in that journalists and editors come to understand what is ‘acceptable’ news.”
According to Phillips, when Project Censored started in 1976 there were 50 large companies that owned almost all the American corporate media. Today, due mostly to mergers and acquisitions, it’s down to 10. What’s more, many of the major media conglomerates also share members of their boards of directors with leading defense contractors, private equity firms like the Carlyle Group, and other major corporations. Phillips added that, just like the media companies to which they supply “news” stories, public relations firms have also consolidated, and companies like WPP and the Rennen Group have actually launched successful campaigns to get Americans to support wars in the Third World.
WPP’s Hill and Knowlton subsidiary was responsible for the false story that Iraqi forces involved in the 1990 invasion of Kuwait seized incubators from maternity wards in Kuwaiti hospitals and left the babies on the hospital floor to die, Phillips said. The Rennen group, Phillips added, not only ran the first Bush administration’s campaign against Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega in 1989 but “created the Iraqi National Congress and hired Ahmad Chalabi to run it. They coordinated the pulling down of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad in 2003 and helped promote Jessica Lynch’s famous ‘rescue.’ According to Phillips, that last stunt was designed to make sure the U.S. media didn’t mention that on the same day, U.S. forces shelled the Palestine Hotel, where most foreign journalists covering the Iraq war were staying, and targeted the Baghdad headquarters of the Arab news channel al-Jazeera.
Phillips pointed out that under the current Bush administration, U.S. government spending on public relations zoomed up from the $38 million Clinton’s presidency spent in its last year in office, 2000, to over $1.6 billion between 2003 and 2005. He noted that the “New American Censorship” — the title of his talk — “has gone beyond simply ‘manufacturing consent’ to the deliberate management and containment of information.”
One particularly “censored” story Phillips cited was the report from the American Civil Liberties Union in October 2005 on autopsies of 45 detainees who had died in U.S. custody in Afghanistan and Iraq. According to the reports, 23 of their deaths were listed as “homicides” — which, the ACLU claimed, meant they had literally been tortured to death — and most of the rest died of heart attacks likely induced by torture. The ACLU gave a press conference and the Associated Press covered it, sending a 1,000-word story to over 1,700 U.S. newspapers — but only 12 used it, and the Los Angeles Times was the only major paper to pick it up.
The Left alternative press didn’t do any better on this story than the corporate mainstream did, Phillips added. Mother Jones, Znet and the truthout.com and commondreams.org Web sites had the story, but The Nation, The Progressive and Amy Goodman’s well-respected “Democracy Now” radio show all ignored it. “So there’s some degree of self-censorship in all media in the U.S.,” Phillips said.
“One story in Censored 2008 will be about the Military Commissions Act and how it allows the suspension of habeas corpus for any person in the U.S. who’s designated an ‘enemy combatant,’” Phillips said. “No witnesses, no lawyers: you just disappear. Non-citizens can be locked up pending designation as ‘enemy combatants’ by the President, so the 24 million legal and illegal aliens in the U.S. can be locked up forever without legal representation. The New York Times covered this but said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s only for terrorists.’ There’s an effort in Congress to restore habeas corpus, but that’s missing from the public dialogue because the media aren’t covering it.”
With that revelation, Phillips segued into the second part of his three-part talk, detailing the sheer extent of the attacks on civil rights and constitutional traditions being launched by the supposedly “conservative” Bush administration. He cited “Operation Falcon,” under which all federal, state and local law enforcement agencies coordinate their powers and execute mass arrests of 10,000 or more. According to Phillips, this has already happened three times, and not only have the media not reported it but the government has only announced how many “felons” they have apprehended. He also mentioned provisions in the 2007 Defense Authorization Act that gut the 1886 Posse Comitatus Act and allow the president to station military troops anywhere in the U.S. and use them “to suppress any ‘public disorder’ he wants.”
Phillips also cited the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) mass raids on the homes and workplaces of supposedly undocumented immigrants, and the no-bid contract Halliburton, vice-president Dick Cheney’s former company, received last year for $385 million to build mass “detention centers” within the U.S. He mentioned a contract given to Lockheed Martin to develop a spy blimp that could be put in place permanently to take high-resolution photographs over a 600-mile radius, and a rival effort by Blackwater to develop a similar blimp of their own. Phillips also discussed the Animal Enterprise Control Act, a recent law which defines any interference with a business that uses animals in any way as “terrorism.” According to Phillips, “the language is so broad it could make ‘terrorists’ out of boycotters of a grocery store.”
Where all this is coming from, Phillips explained, is the mind-set of the part of the ruling class, the so-called “neoconservatives,” currently in charge in the U.S. He briefly mentioned the philosopher Leo Strauss (1899-1973), who was born in Germany, left a year after the Nazis took over, settled in the U.S. in 1937 and, while at the University of Chicago, formed an intellectual circle that included Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas; former Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork; former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, former assistant to vice-president Cheney; former Assistant Secretary of State Alan Keyes; former Secretary of Education William Bennett; Weekly Standard editor and former Quayle Chief of Staff William Kristol — all of whom studied either under Strauss himself or under professors trained by him.
“Neoconservatives,” Phillips explained, “believe that democracy is best defined by an ignorant public and a powerful, strong state; that such nationalism requires an external threat; and if such a threat doesn’t exist, it must be manufactured.” Phillips traced the history of neoconservative ideas from Strauss’s openly antidemocratic principles to the role of his disciples in the first Bush administration and the report Cheney, Wolfowitz, Libby and former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld wrote in 1992 “calling for U.S. domination of the world and overthrow of any rivals that could challenge us, so the United States must be all-powerful.”
Contrary to the common wisdom that Bush’s defeat in the 1992 election put the neoconservative project on hold for eight years, Phillips explained that President Clinton “had to deal with pressure from defense contractors,” so the much-vaunted “peace dividend” from the collapse of the Soviet Union never materialized. “Clinton got people in the government o propose selling U.S. weapons abroad to keep the defense companies profitable and allow them to merge,” Phillips explained. Meanwhile, the neoconservatives from the first Bush administration regrouped and formed the Project for a New American Century, whose 2000 report became the foreign-policy blueprint for the second Bush administration and its so-called “war on terror.” (It also named China as the main potential rival to U.S. world domination that had to be contained — ironically, since in order to maintain its empire the U.S. is running a huge national debt, much of which is being financed by China and its bondholders.)
“So when you talk about impeaching Bush and Cheney, it’s not just them,” Phillips said. “It’s a handful of military companies making huge profits. In order to justify this huge expenditure, and the over 700 military bases America maintains worldwide, we need a ‘war on terror.’ Cheney told a Jewish-American group last year that the terrorists ‘have no sense of morality’ and intend first to seize one country, then to establish a totalitarian Islamic empire from Spain to Indonesia. So, according to Cheney, we have to occupy these regions to prevent that. It means space weapons, satellite spy blimps surrounding China, and containing China’s ability to meet their oil needs by attacking Iran.”
Though Phillips clearly regards the impeachment of Bush and Cheney as only the beginning of the struggle to defeat the neoconservatives and restore American liberty, he also sees impeachment as a necessary first step. Indeed, one of the books he was promoting at his talk was a compilation of various Left-wing writers offering 12 reasons for impeachment. “The big ones are lying to the American people to get them to support the war in Iraq; authorizing and directing the torture of thousands of captives — and it’s not just Bush and Cheney, it’s the entire power structure,” Phillips said. “It’s building an imperial presidency; ordering free-fire zones and killing 10,000 Iraqi civilians each month. When people say we shouldn’t impeach now — when they say we should just let the clock run out on the Bush administration and keep the war going as an issue against the Republicans in 2008 — I say 10,000 civilian deaths per month is a big reason for impeachment and ending the war now.”
A petition for rehearing was denied on April 16 – with eight of the Ninth Circuit’s judges dissenting from what Judge Harry Pregerson characterized as an “unprecedented blow at the core of Fourth Amendment protections” and “an assault on our country’s poor as we require them to give up their rights of privacy in exchange for essential public assistance.” Judge Pregerson observed that only the poor, so far, have had to put up with such invasions of privacy in return for participating in a governmental program. “The government does not search through the closets and medicine cabinets of farmers receiving subsidies,” or “dig through the laundry baskets and garbage pails of real estate developers or radio broadcasters.” (Copy of Decision)
Though largely ignored by the San Diego press, the decision was the subject of a July 16, 2007, New York Times article by Adam Liptak titled Full Constitutional Protection for Some, but No Privacy for the Poor. And Stephen Colbert now has made it the focus of his “The Word – Premium Package” commentary on the July 23, 2007, Colbert Report.
Ricardo Flores Magón (left) and his brother Enrique
La Revolución Mexicano: ¿Tierra y Libertad?
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Looking at the Mexican Revolution from a distance, we can see that the overt theme was set in the tone of the poor versus the rich; those who drank pulque and had a sense of community and those who sipped fine wine at the expense of the working-class, with an affinity for privileged isolationism.
Under dictatorship, Mexicans became more and more resentful towards Porfirio Diaz, whose rein was not in the interest of the Mexican people, but instead his interest having to do with being rich and powerful. An example of his apathy or even aversion towards his own people can be seen with the Cananea Strike of 1906.
On 16 January 1906, the Union Liberal Humanidad was formed by staff members of the Cananea-based radical newspaper El Centenario, which re-published many articles from Regeneración, a San Luis Potosí-based radical magazine. Members of Union Liberal Humanidad numbered around fifteen members, and then followed the Cananea Strike, which took place on 01 June 1906, after months of unrest at the Cananea Consolidated Copper Company.
Although not so cut-and-dry, the contrast during the Mexican Revolution was undeniably tied to the protection of the rich by the dictator Porfirio Diaz, whose tyranny and apathy for the poor led to his inevitable demise. His behaviour insofar as the Cananea Strike of 1906 was indicative of his eventual demise. Diaz requested help from the United States government and allowed them to send in U.S. troops to break-up the strike in Cananea and repress the workers in the town on the Arizona border. This was one major incident that led to the resentment and ultimate revolt against the Diaz government.
The government that replaced the dissolved Diaz dictatorship in 1910 could be considered more democratic than its predecessor, but was it truly revolutionary in its nature? Some Mexican revolutionaries sought to end capitalist government as a whole in Mexico, for the benefit of the people. One of these revolutionaries, namely Anarchist Ricardo Flores Magón, was very much opposed to Francisco Madero, the “bourgeois revolutionary” (Albro, p.127). Flores Magón feared that the revolution of the maderistas would be one of mild reform lacking any real change, or as he put it, “an opera bouffe revolt, ending in the enthronement of a new tyrant.” (Albro, p.133)
Porfirio Diaz, was a dictator whose tyrannical and undemocratic rule was favoured by the rich, who enjoyed life on their haciendas; estates and ranches kept by people who had great wealth and allowed the poor to work on their land, but never allowed them to own the land. On the anti-Diaz end of the spectrum were la Gente, or “the People” who made up the great bulk of Mexican society and lived as pueblos, and whose sense of community was real, unlike the rich who made up what some referred to as “Imaginary Mexico”.
Another leading factor in the Mexican Revolution was the fact that many people remained poor in Mexico while U.S. Imperialist interests— via companies in Mexico and Latin America— led to great resentment towards Porfirio Diaz for his lack of opposition to the U.S.
One of the main consequences for Mexico was that its people were short-changed after the decade of struggle in the revolution. Not only was Porfirio Diaz replaced with a reformist and non-revolutionary leader, such as Francisco Madero, but their semi-democratic society was still riddled with substantial poverty and inequality.
Many of the revolutionary battle cries for Tierra, Libertad, y Pan were ignored, and instead many Mexicans were left to endure a less-tyrannical president, because anything seemed better than the wrath of the former president and dictator Porfirio Diaz. At least with Diaz ousted, workers had substantially better rights, with unions and labour able to organise without as much repression.
Francisco Madero and Venustiano Carranza were part of the bourgeoisie, and although they were at unrest with Diaz, they did not have the true sense of revolutionary fervour that was a big part of the movements who followed Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa. Villa and Zapata, whose revolutionary spirits live on to this day (as seen by the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, for example). Madero and his maderistas were perhaps not as great as they may have seemed at the outset of the Revolution.
There were not many consequences for the United States as a result of the Mexican Revolution. In some aspects, the U.S. did not have a strong of an imperialistic hold on Mexico. In other ways, however, the U.S. was able to take advantage of the Revolution and the unrest in Mexico by taking land and setting up businesses in Mexican territory, thereby using cheap Mexican labour, as is the case to this day. Leading up to the Revolution, the United States took Arizona away from Mexico’s territory, however, after the Revolution, the United States was not able to oppress the people of Mexico as easily as was allowed under Diaz and under the volatility of the Revolutionary struggle.
Mexican-Americans were caught up in the whole mess, as many Mexicans fled northward during the Revolution and became refugees in a new society that was very different from their familiar barrios and without pulquerias; some families were split apart and displaced.
Ricardo Flores Magón may have been right all along when he said that:
“The dreamer is the designer of tomorrow. The practical man, the sensible, cold head, can laugh at the dreamer; they do not know that he, the dreamer, is the true dynamic force that pushes the world forward. Suppress the dreamer, and the world will deteriorate toward barbarism. Despised, impovershied, the dreamer opens the way for his race, sowing sowing sowing the seeds which will be harvested, not by him, but by the practical men, the sensible cold heads of tomorrow, who will laugh at the sight of another dreamer seeding, seeding, seeding.” (Albro, p.139)
Let us hope that the seeds of change are still in the soil of Mexico and that it will soon be harvested for the good of all people.
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Works Cited:
Gonzales, Juan. Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America. United States:
Viking Penguin Press, 2000 (member of Penguin Putnam Inc.)
Albro, Ward. Always a Rebel: Ricardo Flores Magón and the Mexican Revolution.
United States: Texas Christian University Press, 1992