The Undercurrent

Undercurrent Benefit Show at Tokyo Garden

2010-11-23T16:26:00.000-08:00

Benefit for the Undercurrent Wednesday Nov 24th at Tokyo Garden

Show starts at around 9.30pm with -

College Kids, aka Malcolm Sosa from Rademacher and Kim Haden of Yellow Alex and the Feelings - formerly of Light FM, will be playing their first show in Fresno.

High Winds, aka Nii Lo performing solo

and Brian Kenney Fresno

Friday will be a Hip Hop show with Aesop from Living Legends, Somos One from BRWN BFLO, and Destructo Bunny from the city of mercy. Saturday will be Brother Luke and the Comrades, Archaeology, and the Fresno debut of Rademacher's new fifth member...

Tokyo Garden Thanksgiving Extravaganza

August 2010 Vol. 5, Issue 3

2010-08-04T20:05:00.001-07:00

Open publication - Free publishing - More fiction

California Prison Moratorium Project Supports the Statewide Fast 4 Freedom

2010-08-04T12:51:00.000-07:00

When: August 6, 2010 the event in Fresno will begin at 11 a.m. with fasting all day.

Where: Governor Schwarzenegger’s office at 2550 Mariposa Mall #3013 in downtown Fresno

Fast 4 Freedom – Families and Friends of the incarcerated, along with prisoners within prison walls and several Prison Reform/Abolition groups will fast for one day to shed light and spread awareness of the pervasive injustices within the State of California.

Thousands will fast on August 6th within prisons and in cities and towns across the state. We fast to honor those most affected by the devastating impacts of mass incarceration on our state and local economies and communities. While our state is floundering in budget crisis, millions of dollars are thrown away each year incarcerating Californians for increasingly lengthy sentences, most often fornon-violent, non-serious offenses and even simple parole violations. This past year, the California Department of Corrections has already surpassed its $8.5 billion budget and has begun construction on a $7.7 billion prison expansion project authorized in 2007 under AB900.

There is an easy fix to the budget crisis: change our state's policy of mass incarceration for petty offenses or the non-offense of nonviolent drug use and stop building more prisons. Alternatives to incarceration are far more effective while saving the state money. Thousands of dollars per individual per year could be saved with a policy of prevention and intervention, i.e. funding public schools, mental health care, and drug treatment. Millions could be saved by releasing elderly and disabled inmates who have served their time and pose no threat to society. Reexamining the policy of life without parole, especially for youth who deserve rehabilitation and a second chance, would dramatically reduce overcrowding in a prison system already under federal receivership for overzealous sentencing policies. While our prisons overflow with drug offenders and parole violators, local jails such as the Fresno County Jail fill up with petty offenders who are held in custody sometimes months before they ever go to trial, according to a 2006 audit of the jail. As generation after generation is raised with our state's dismantled public school system and tax dollars redistributed from community services such as parks and libraries to police departments and cages we undermine our youth's rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, a fact addressed in the June 30, 2010 Fresno Bee article "Study sees health risks for black, Latino boys."

It is time to leave the failed 'tough on crime' mentality behind. It has failed to deter crime and in fact backfires as lengthy sentences without rehabilitation or re-entry services isolates and institutionalizes otherwise average people. 'Tough on crime' laws such as Three Strikes and mandatory minimums rips members of our communities away from their lives, families, and jobs. These are our neighbors and relatives who upon release find themselves barred from all public assistance and any possibility of a decent job. 'Tough on crime' sentencing CREATES repeat offenders and compounds the trauma that leads to drug use and/or crime. California is #1 in prison spending while closing schools and firing teachers; shelters, clinics, treatment programs, and public services such as libraries have lost funding; public workers are furloughed and their pay cut; and there appears to be no end in sight to either the financial crisis or California's prison expansion. Mass incarceration is financial famine, and Californians are starving for freedom!

IN A LAND WHERE HUNGER IS PALPABLE, MEXICAN ELECTRICITY WORKERS SET RECORD FOR HUNGER STRIKES - BUT DO NOT GET THEIR JOBS BACK

2010-08-04T11:51:00.001-07:00

by JOHN ROSS

MEXICO CITY (Aug. 5th) - Hunger is palpable in Mexico. Beggars line the streets of the cities with their bowls and their children, pleading for coins: "Para comer, Senor, para comer?" ("To eat, Mister?") Whole families rifle through the trash bins in front of the fast food franchises hunting for discarded scraps. At La Merced market, women like Juana Cortez glean the rotting produce thrown out on the patio. "Para comer, Senor…"

According to National Nutrition Institute (INN) studies, 42% of all Mexicans have experienced some degree of malnutrition in their lives. Millions of children living in extreme poverty go to bed hungry every night. Although tortillas are universally utilized to wrap food or scoop up what's on your plate, for 13 million kids affirms the INN, the tortilla is the whole meal.

With hunger so rooted in Mexican demographics, it seems a jarring anomaly that deliberately starving oneself should be so popular a tactic of achieving redress for social grievances but activists here seem to reflexively go into hunger strike mode when they have exhausted all other remedies to reverse perceived injustices.

Indigenous Zapatista prisoners in Chiapas jails stop eating to protest inequities. So does their emeritus bishop Samuel Ruiz who once hunkered down in a freezing cathedral and refused food for weeks until the government made room for his peace group at the negotiating table. 91 year-old Luis H. Alvarez, once a right-wing PAN party presidential candidate, sat on the steps of the Chihuahua legislature and refused to eat for 41 days to protest electoral flimflam as did his successor as PAN presidential hopeful Manuel Clouthier after the 1988 election was stolen. Rodolfo Macias, a self-proclaimed president of Mexico, went 50 days in the Zocalo to protest the government's refusal to recognize his exalted stature.

Rosario Ibarra de Piedra, whose activist son disappeared in police custody and is the force behind the Mothers of the Disappeared, has staged seven hunger strikes demanding the reappearance of those who have been taken. This reporter went 26 days without eating in front of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to protest a Latin American debt that takes food off the table from those at the very bottom of the food chain.

This past April 25th, over a hundred members of the Mexican Electricity Workers Union (SME) lay down under a tent pitched in the great Zocalo plaza here, the heart of the Mexican body politic, and declared themselves to be on hunger strike. When medical emergencies forced many of the original strikers to abandon the strike, others stepped up to take their place on the cots under the tent. But after three months, their numbers had been winnowed down to 14. Two of the survivors, Cayatano Cabrera and Miguel Angel Ibarra, vowed to fast to the death to get their jobs back.

Both Miguel Angel and Cayatano had worked for years for "Luz y Fuerza del Centro" ("Light & Power of the Center"), a state-run enterprise that distributed electricity throughout Mexico City and five central states. On October 11th, 2009, President Felipe Calderon declared "Luz y Fuerza" to be a debilitating drain on Mexico's floundering economy and shut down the company. Thousands of federal police and army troops swarmed over 103 generating stations, pushing 44,000 SME members out of their work places at bayonet point.

Shuttering Luz y Fuerza and the subsequent displacement of union workers was one further step in the creeping privatization of the electricity generation sector here that the Constitution mandates to be the domain of the state. Despite constitutional restrictions, over 30% of Mexican electricity generation is now in private - and often transnational - hands.

Calderon's takeover of Luz y Fuerza appeared to be predicated on his fascination with the company's 24,000 kilometers of transmission lines upon which he hopes to lay fiber optic cable and sell off the technology to the highest bidder.

From the get-go, it was evident that the Calderon government was equally as dead set on dismembering the Sindicato Mexicano de Electricistas (SME), the second oldest union in Mexico, born 96 years ago at the zenith of the Mexican revolution during a strike against the transnational Canadian Light & Power that then monopolized Mexico City electricity generation. The SME, which remained largely independent of the long-ruling PRI during that party's 71 year rule, has a tradition of solidarity with social organizations in struggle - SME volunteers hooked up turbines deep in the Lacandon jungle to bring light to Zapatista villages and, in the aftermath of the horrific 8.1 1985 earthquake here, quickly repaired fallen lines in working class colonias and got Mexico City humming again.

In a not so subtle maneuver to break union solidarity, Calderon and his hard-nosed labor secretary Javier Lozano, who political wags suggest is being groomed to succeed his boss, offered the displaced workers indemnization based on seniority if they would give up their SME affiliation. Bonuses were promised to those who cashed out quickly and the ex-workers were told they would soon be re-contracted by the Federal Electricity Commission. The CFE is charged with distributing energy outside of Mexico City but has temporarily taken over Luz y Fuerza's operations here - but only a hundred ex-SME members were ever hired.

To sweeten the offer, government financial advisors were made available to counsel the former workers on how best to invest their payouts. Fast food franchises were offered but proved to be prohibitively expensive - former electricity workers were soon selling old clothes in the streets. Under the Calderon-Lozano putsch that involved prime time TV spots and even Twitter messages to prompt cash-outs, 60% of the SME membership was snookered out of fighting for their jobs.

Of 44,000 workers, only 16,400 remained on the SME books and Lozano went after the hold-outs with a vengeance, refusing to accept election results that had returned the union's secretary-general Martin Esparza to office for a second term and freezing 100,000,000 pesos in union funds.

Popular resentment to the Calderon-Lozano assault on the SME flourished briefly. Five days after the takeover, a quarter of a million citizens marched through Mexico City to demand the workers' reinstatement. Over the next months, according to city transit officials, the SME initiated nearly 900 marches and rallies (nearly three a day), further snarling Mexico City traffic that at best moves at a snail's pace, to gridlock. Two attempts at a national strike fizzled. Esparza flew off to Geneva to plead the SME's case before the OIT or World Labor Organization, a wing of the United Nations. Despite the OIT's condemnation, Calderon and Lozano would not budge. Finally, on April 25th, Cayatano and Miguel Angel and their comrades lay down in the Zocalo and declared they were not going to eat again until they got their jobs back.

The weeks and months mounted up. By June, Cayatano had clocked 53 days on hunger strike, one more than Provisional Irish Republican Army leader Bobby Sands who expired in the Maze prison in 1981 under British custody - 10 more Provos would starve themselves to death before they won recognition for their struggle. In Ireland, hunger strikers honor the martyrs of the Easter Rebellion who back in 1916 resorted to starvation to win freedom from the British yoke.

By the beginning of July, Cayatano was trespassing into Gandhi's territory - the Mahatma went on multiple prolonged hunger strikes to win India's independence. Hunger striking is an Indian tradition in which the aggrieved lay themselves down on the doorstep of those who have wronged them and seek to shame them into just compensation by starving themselves to death.

Now, as he entered his 75th day, Cayatano's numbers were running neck and neck with Turkish political prisoners, nearly 80 of whom have died in the last decade to protest repression in their country. Turkish activists proudly wear the clothes of those who starved themselves to death in pursuit of justice.

Day after day, Cayatano and Miguel Angel, the others, lay on their cots in the Zocalo. The World Cup, broadcast on giant screens to multitudes in the great plaza, came and went. A tropical music festival followed. Demonstrators for diverse causes tramped into the square. The summer rains inundated the SME camp.

By mid-July, Cayatano Cabrera was fading fast, down to skin and bones, his body eating itself to provide desperately needed nourishment. He had lost 60 pounds, a third of his body weight, suffered two pre-heart attacks, and needed oxygen to breath. The physician who attended the strikers, Alfredo Verdeleguel, pronounced him near death. The government threatened to suspend the doctor's license if Cayatano died. Verdeleguel began receiving anonymous death threats.

Cayatano and Miguel Angel insisted upon an audience with Felipe Calderon: "if he fails to give us this right, then he will be responsible for our deaths," Cabrera gasped, reading a letter to the press that both workers had signed, demanding their jobs back. But Felipe Calderon was preoccupied with praising other hunger strikers, Cuban political prisoners that the Castro government had just released.

When corporate media charged that Cayatano was faking it, that he was sipping atole (corn gruel) and munching on pan dulce in the mornings, his SME comrades ripped off their shirts, plunged syringes into their veins to draw blood, and painted banners with it denouncing the calumnies.

But as Cayatano neared the Guinness Book of Records mark of 94 days set by an IRA prisoner decades ago, the Calderon braintrust was getting jumpy. A government ambulance was stationed in the Zocalo to whisk Cayatano off to hospital if he fell into a coma but the workers drove it off. Mexico is a mess these days with the economy in freefall and 25,000 citizens sacrificed in Calderon's foolhardy drug war and the death of a hunger striker or two would only pour gasoline on the blaze. Moreover, many world dignitaries would be showing up in the very plaza where the hunger strikers were starving themselves to death in just six weeks for Mexico's bicentennial celebrations. Something had to give.

On July 15th, the President fired his Interior Secretary Fernando Gomez Mont, the second most powerful politico in the nation and a staunch proponent of labor secretary Lozano's hard hand. The new Interior minister was an unknown from Baja California, Francisco Blake Mora, a school chum of Calderon's that he could control. Blake's appointment undercut Lozano who by now was sending out 5000 Twitters a day threatening to jail Esparza for murder if Cayatano croaked. Blake summoned the SME secretary general to his offices to negotiate an end to Cayatano's hunger strike.

After months of rejection and frustration, the union had distilled its demands down to three. Sensing that the SME would never get back the Luz y Fuerza jobs, Esparza focused on the figure of a "substitute patron", i.e. finding a new boss for the workers, a practice embedded in Mexican labor law - indeed, Luz y Fuerza had been founded on the same principle in the 1960s when Canadian Light & Power gave up the ghost.

Esparza and his team urged that the Federal Electricity Commission contract the remaining SME workers but Lozano considered this an impossible solution because the CFE already has contracts with its own complaint company union. The creation of a new corporate entity to oversee Mexico City electricity generation was also nixed by Lozano - the Calderon government has budgeted billions for the bi-centennial celebrations and the cupboard was bare.

The second demand was that the labor secretary accept the election results or "toma de nota" (a new vote had been held) ratifying Martin Esparza as the SME's top official and unfreezing 100,000,000 pesos in union funds. The third demand was amnesty from prosecution for SME strikers - as blackouts spread throughout Mexico City and environs, Lozano and the deposed Gomez Mont accused the electricistas of "sabotage."

Following a six hour July 22nd negotiating session behind closed doors at the Interior Secretariat, the protagonists emerged from the inner sanctum to announce the end of… Cayatano Cabrera's hunger strike. No jobs or contracts or new companies or even amnesty for the workers were promised although Lozano indicated that union recognition was under renewed consideration. Blake Mora, Javier Lozano, and Martin Esparza shook hands and posed for the official photo. That was it. No agreement had been signed. The details would be worked out later. Trust me.

Past 2 AM, Martin Esparza sped back to the encampment in the Zocalo in his silver Gran Marquis and disappeared into the tent where the hunger strikers were laid out. For two hours, the SME boss cajoled and browbeat 13 of the starving men into eating again. By acquiescing to the Calderon government's demands, the men gave up the only power card they still held, the threat of their death.

The one holdout was Cayatano Cabrera. All he wanted was his job back. When his companeros were taken to hospital for treatment, he refused to go along and his family carried him to the car and took the emaciated man home. The longest hunger strike in Mexican history was now history and Cayatano had not gotten his job back.

FIN

John Ross, author of "El Monstruo - Dread & Redemption in Mexico City" ("gritty and pulsating" - NY Post), is at home in Mexico City. He is available for dinnertime tete-a-tetes at the Café La Blanca in the Centro Historico. Write johnross@igc.org for info.

Scientists Deeply Concerned About BP Disaster’s Long-Term Impact

2010-08-02T13:24:00.000-07:00

by Dahr Jamail
August 2nd, 2010 | Inter Press Service

Photo by Erika Blumenfeld © 2010

GULFPORT, United States – Contrary to recent media reports of a quick recovery in the Gulf of Mexico, scientists and biologists are “deeply concerned” about impacts that will likely span “several decades.”

“My prediction is that we will be dealing with the impacts of this spill for several decades to come and it will outlive me,” Dr. Ed Cake, a Biological Oceanographer, as well as a Marine and Oyster Biologist, told IPS, “I won’t be here to see the recovery.”

Dr. Cake’s grim assessment stems partially from a comparison he made to the Exxon Valdez oil disaster and the second largest oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico (BP’s being the largest), that of the Ixtoc-1 blowout well in the Bay of Campeche in 1979.

“The impacts of the Exxon Valdez are still being felt 21 years later,” Dr. Cake said, “The impacts of the Ixtoc-1 are still being felt and known, 31 years later. I know folks who study oysters in bays in the Yucatan Peninsula, and oysters there have still not returned, 31 years later. So as an oyster biologist I’m concerned about that. Those things are still affected 31 years later, and that was a smaller spill by comparison.”

Dr. Cake is also concerned about deepwater habitats that are being affected. Given that BP has used at least 1.9 million gallons of chemically toxic dispersants, the vast majority of the oil has remained beneath the surface, and much of that has sunk to the sea floor.

As an example, he told of “a new coral colony ecosystem” within 10 miles of BP’s blowout Macondo Well, which was found by a pipeline company whilst it was producing an environmental impact assessment statement of the route of the pipeline.

“They found some amazing coral communities that no one knew about, and now they will be covered in oil,” Dr. Cake said, “Those will not recover.”

Dr. Stephen Cofer-Shabica, an oceanographer in South Carolina, focuses on the biology of barrier islands. He monitored the affects of the Ixtoc-1 oil disaster on Padre Island National Seashore in south Texas.

“You can go back now, 31 years later, and there’s still oil in the sand there [Padre Island],” he told IPS. But his main concern is now about what the state of Louisiana is doing in response to BP’s oil disaster.

Louisiana’s Governor Bobby Jindal has authorized the dredging and building of sand berms near Louisiana’s barrier islands in a so-called effort to keep oil away from the shore. One area where the dredging project is still underway is the Chandeleur Islands.

“The Chandeleur project is totally futile and a waste of resources, and I can’t believe they are still doing it,” Dr. Cofer-Shabica said, “That’s what I find totally unfathomable. There’s oil floating around underwater, that has been dispersed and these barrier islands, as constructs will not have any effect on that oil at all.”

According to Dr. Cofer-Shabica, the so-called fix is actually a hugely destructive problem. “From an oceanographic perspective, this was biologically destructive, especially when you start digging up the bottom in shallow water, and building these barrier islands.”

He added, “Louisiana is in a precarious position anyway because of the subsiding that is happening in the delta, and on top of that you have worldwide sea-level rise, so it has two physical factors that are working against its marshes. So building barrier islands to presumably keep oil out, amidst rising sea levels, makes no sense.”

In addition to this, he said that the biological impacts of building islands “are larger than the physical impacts,” and said this of dredging sediment from those areas: “You’re in shallow water, that is biologically rich with clams, worms, and bacteria, that will all be dug up and destroyed.”

Dr. Cake is also worried about oil contaminating the oysters. He has seen much oil in Louisiana’s marshes. “One of the experts with us worked for NOAA on the Exxon Valdez spill, and he told me if the oil is on the marsh grass, it’s in the oysters.”

BP and the Coast Guard are currently under scrutiny for having used so much oil dispersant, an industrial solvent that breaks up the oil so that it will sink below the surface.

For example, a 1979 report, “Effects of Corexit 9527 on the Hatchability of Mallard Eggs” in the Bulletin of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology, showed that even though dispersants are applied to minimize oil impacts to visible and charismatic species, Corexit actually enhances the lethal effects of crude oil to birds that are exposed.

Corexit 9527 penetrates eggshells and shell membranes as readily as crude oil. When applied to an eggshell near the embryo, the embryo would fuse to the shell membrane and die within 24 hours.

“Corexit breaks the oil up into mirco-globules,” Dr. Cake said, “That’s the harmful part for oysters. Oysters are filter feeders, and they feed on a range of three to 12 millionths of a meter as particles. You can grind up graphite from a pencil in fine enough particles and they’ll run it through their system. It’s the same with the micro-globules of oil. They’ll be taken in, but in going through the system, and in absorbing some of that oil, it’ll cause lesions. So it’s actually what the Corexit does to the oil, that’ll affect the oysters in the end.”

According to Dr. Cake, his study teams have people watching and monitoring affected areas.

“In the past month in Bretton and Chandeleur Sounds, oil was there during the day, it was sprayed with Corexit at night, and the next day it was gone. Where did it go? It went to the bottom, and that’s adjacent to where these oyster farms are. So at that point, there’s a lot less water for that Corexit to disperse into, and there may be an impact from that on the oysters.”

Dr. Cake said that while scientists have found very large plumes of dispersed oil at depth, “I’m not sure that oil will ever get here as dispersed clouds. It’s getting here as sunken clouds, because that’s what they [BP] wanted it to do. Sink it, get it out of sight out of mind. But what about all that that’s already here? I think it came in and they sprayed it, and it’s now sunk because of the spraying.”

Chasidy Hobbs, with Emerald Coastkeeper in Pensacola, Florida, is on the City of Pensacola Environmental Advisory Board and Escambia County Citizens Environmental Committee. Hobbs also directs the environmental litigation research firm, Geography and Environment.

“We’re poisoning the entire Gulf of Mexico food web,” Hobbs, who is also an instructor and advisor in the Environmental Studies Department at University of West Florida, told IPS, “It’s crazy, and it’s criminal. I’m deeply concerned with the long-term ecological and human impact.”

Dr. Cake is among a large and growing group of scientists who are discussing a grim future for much of the Gulf of Mexico as a result of BP’s disaster.

“The oil itself on the bottom is being eaten by bacteria. This has always been the case in naturally occurring seeps across the Gulf. But now we’ve introduced much more oil, and as the bacteria grow they are consuming the oxygen that is in that area. And that oxygen loss will result in dead/hypoxic zones, like the one off the West side of the Mississippi over towards Galveston where there’s one that is 3,000 square mile area of dead bottom. Now we’re looking at that along the eastern part because of the presence of so much more bacteria.”

August issue will be out shortly

2010-07-29T16:10:00.000-07:00

Hello all,
The August issue of The Undercurrent will be out shortly. We are putting finishing touches on the issue. We hope to use this site more for updates, post, reviews, and other exciting news. Come back often and help us build it into something exciting.