Birds Before The Storm

I just returned from the PIELC conference in Eugene, Oregon. PIELC stands for Public Interest Environmental Law Conference, and it’s pronounced “e-law” owing to people’s fine habit of ignoring when things change their name.

Tomorrow I’ll talk about PIELC and the amazing workshops I went to, and you can learn all kinds of good stuff about biomass electrical generation (in short: it’s bad). Tonight though, I just came back from the saturday night show. Two bands played: Samba Já, a 30-piece drum corps; and Blackbird Raum, my friends and comrades from Santa Cruz. Activist and ex-prisoners Jeff “Free” Luers and Ramona Africa of MOVE.

Until his release last December, Jeff Luers had been in prison the entirety of my involvement with anarchism. The short of it was that he burned two SUVs at a car dealership in the middle of the night as a statement against car culture’s destruction of the earth, and was sentenced to 22 years for something like $40,000 dollars in damage. After years of appeals, his sentence was dropped to 10 years, which he served. He’s a natural speaker, and he talked about the need for the environmental and social justice (and anarchist) movements to stop being so divided. About how our commonalities are so much more important than our differences. That we need pretty much every tactic available to us: not just direct action, and certainly not just arson. We need lawsuits and marches, we need public awareness and we need media campaigns, and we need direct action.

Blackbird Raum has always been dear to my heart. I don’t want to talk shit, but I’m not really a fan of “folk punk,” by and large. Usually, it kind of takes the worst parts about bad punk (three random chords on a guitar, bad lyrics) and the worst parts about bad folk (lack of energy), and combines them into, well, the worst of both worlds. (Folk metal, by the way, is the inverse: the good stuff out of metal and out of folk). Anyhow, Blackbird Raum is the good stuff out of punk (anger and alienation expressed intelligently, plus the unity and comradery of mosh pits) and the good stuff out of folk (accordions, washtub basses, interesting and complex music, great shit to dance to). This was the first time I’d seen them on a stage and all electrified and such, but it was amazing nonetheless.

And then, Ramona Africa. Ramona Africa, well… in 1985, the philly cops firebombed the MOVE (a primarily african-american environmental organization) house, killing everyone except Ramona and one child. The fire eventually consumed the entire city block, all to stop the group from composting and broadcasting their political messages. Anyhow, Ramona is still part of MOVE, which continues to this day, and her speech was simply astounding. She was a keynote speaker earlier at PIELC, so I heard her twice today.

There’s that cliche, “all power to the people.” And you know? I’d never heard it explained. But it’s beautiful. The idea is simple: the power is always in people, in us as individuals. Governments only have power when we pretend like they do. If we stop believing they exist, they will cease to be. Obama doesn’t go to war: soldiers go to war. When we say “all power to the people,” we are saying “we are responsible for our fate. Always have been, always will be. The government isn’t going to stop oppressing us of its own free will.” We are awknowledging that we all have responsibility for what’s happening. We need to stop abdicating our power. We need to bring the power back to the people.

“The people,” isn’t just a mythical thing, an abstraction like “The Man.” “The people” is us. It’s not like “hey, we’re the people, so our protest is instantly right and everyone needs to agree with us, cause we’re the people.” It’s that we’re the people, you’re the people, even the people who hate us are the people. But we, the people, have all of the power. Always have, always will. It’s not a request, it’s not a demand, it’s a statement of truth.

The Oregonian wrote a rather nice piece about Ursula K LeGuin, including a bit about her anarchist politics and the event we did together at Powell’s. I’m pretty wary of corporate media, of course, but the only problem I’ve got with this article is that they claim I was wearing a kilt. It was clearly a skirt. I don’t wear kilts.

Killjoy, who wears a kilt and has dreadlocks, calls himself Magpie when he plays the accordion. He helps edit SteamPunk Magazine and maintains a blog of erotica called Steamypunk. He gives a loose, knowledgeable overview of anarchist literature and tells a story about Kurt Vonnegut Jr. being asked, “Why are you ruining the youth of America?” and walking away in disgust.

A few minutes later, after Killjoy talks about Tolstoy and writers who explicitly identify as anarchists, he pauses and takes a drink of water.

“Why are you ruining the youth of America?” Le Guin calls out, laughing.

Questions come thick and fast from the audience. Killjoy makes the point that anarchy and organization are not contradictory and that anarchists are productive people who get things done without a government structure. Someone asks about the role of anarchism in the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle and in a 1993 incident with police in Portland. Le Guin responds:

“As an inveterate peace marcher … I’ve marched around Portland more times than anyone in this room except my husband. I did get cross with the self-styled anarchists, the noisy ‘look at me’ people, whereas just as Margaret said, a lot of the organizers and people who were keeping it so it worked were also anarchists.”

A long question is summed up as, “What do you see role as?”

“What’s our cellular purpose?” Killjoy asks.

“To try to maybe show that there are alternatives to the way we presently do things and that people think is the only way to do things,” Le Guin says. “Democracy is good but it isn’t the only way to achieve justice and a fair share.

On Sunday I went out with some friends to where the Palomar Pipeline is set to cross the Clackamas river. It’s one of the many, many places that this pipeline will be remarkably disruptive: in this case, running across a beautiful section of river and then clearcutting a whole bunch of old-growth. For fun, go ahead and check out the gas company’s myth-busting of common Palomar myths! For example:

MYTH: Palomar will require clear cutting, and the construction will destroy sensitive environmental areas.

Clearing the right-of-way is very different from the clear-cutting claims project opponents have made. Palomar proposes a temporary 120-foot-wide construction easement reduced to a 50-foot-wide permanent easement once construction is complete

this one is awesome cause it’s like: myth: we’ll be clearcutting. When in fact, we’ll be clearcutting. The myth about eminent domain is pretty good too.

anyhow, more pictures of the area after the break.

(more…)

Hurrah! The Hummer brand is going away.

(image is of anarchists and communists awaiting deportation hearings)

Well, maybe he really meant the ALF part, but here’s a quote from a prosecutor, about Scott DeMuth.
“Defendant’s writings, literature, and conduct suggest that he is an anarchist and associated with the ALF movement,” Clifford Cronk, U.S. Attorney wrote. “Therefore, he is a domestic terrorist.”

I’m reminded, of course, of the Haymarket Affair, when the government hanged four people, explicitly because they were anarchists. Only later did it apologize. And of course there’s the Anarchist Exclusion Act, passed in 1903 and never repealed, that allows immigrants to be deported on account of their politics.

Now, I’m not one who really believes in the legitimacy of law, but I fully believe that what laws exist lose their pretense of legitimacy entirely when they are targeted not at people actually committing crimes, but at things that may lead to someone committing crime. For example, curfew laws are aimed at keeping crime down, but there already are laws against assault, vandalism, etc. And then there are sweeping laws like The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act that make free speech a crime, and add additional charges on top of other things, like vandalism and arson (which, last I was looking, were already illegal).

So yeah… being an anarchist isn’t a crime within a society that ostensibly respects the freedom of speech and thought. (that word ostensibly is important in that sentence though.) But here it is, we’re domestic terrorists.

edit: damn, anarchists knew how to dress back in the day. Look how classy!

Baltimore’s Indypendent Reader is a print paper that is circulated freely. Last December, when I was in town, I helped out with the layout of issue #13, themed around the media. It’s filled with amazing articles, the most curious of which are about various radical papers of the 1960s. The counterculture was fascinating. You can download the entire thing for free, if you’re not in Baltimore to pick up a copy. Anyhow, I was invited to write the introduction to the issue, which I’ve pasted below:

No matter what your political or ideological orientation might be, it’s become increasingly difficult to ignore the “crisis” in the world of media. Newspapers are downsizing, magazines are going bust or ceasing print production in favor of a cheaper, but much less substantive online format, and every day there’s yet another casualty in the bookstore world. You can’t read an op-ed section any more without running into somebody waxing poetic about the “death of print,” or lamenting the “end of journalism.” Yeah, we’re just going to go ahead and call bullshit on that. Welcome to the Indypendent Reader, one of the many sources for independent journalism that’s doing just fine.

There’s this thing that happens where people refer to “The Media” as a single, monolithic entity. I’ve fallen for that myself. And certainly, the past few decades have seen more than their share of media consolidation and mega-mergers. The world braced itself for a time when all the news came to us from a single source. That source would claim objectivity, obviously, but of course we would know better.
(more…)

 

Last week I went hiking with two friends out along Fish Creek in the Mt. Hood National Forest. I went to go take pictures of the areas that are going to be clearcut for the Palomar Pipeline LNG project. The super-short version of this is: they want to build more fossil fuel infrastructure in Oregon, including hundreds of miles of clearcutting to run pipelines of Liquefied Natural Gas. Well, technically the pipelines are for normal natural gas, but the idea is that it is shipped from overseas in its supercooled state. There are a lot of things wrong with this.

• Building new fossil fuel infrastructure is ridiculous and generally backwards-thinking.
• LNG tankers are ungodly explosive.
• Clearcutting hundreds of miles through sensitive areas sucks, a lot. A long line of clearcut is actually significantly more invasive than the same acreage felled in a square, because it divides wildlife, creates new false edges to the forest, etc. etc.
• No one actually wants this but gas companies. These terminals were successfully driven out of California, and now Oregon has to deal with it.

Anyhow, Fish Creek is an area that the Forest Service admitted it needed to protect better, and they actually pulled out all the roads in the area so as to let the forest heal. And now? A damned pipeline looms. The bridges you see in these pictures are remants of the old roads… you have to hike miles to get to them. Personally, I’m a sucker for ruins, for abandoned elements of civilization. I actually think they’re prettier than regular, untouched nature. I guess that’s why I’m post-civ, not primitivist.
(more…)

Over on the Infoshop News post about Joseph Stack, there’s a raging debate about whether or not “we” as anarchists should support this action. I guess I’m not really seeing it in those terms. I’m seeing it as an event that happened, perhaps like an earthquake or something. I don’t support earthquakes, and I’m not anti-earthquake. They are events that occur. People feel screwed by the system and end up wingnutting out. In this case, the person got into their plane and crashed it into an IRS building. I still haven’t heard a death count, but it looks like at least two (one potentially being Stack himself?).

It is, however, heartwarming to read in those comments more than a few people pointing out the absurdity of anarchists embracing random violence.

I don’t know everything about this yet. But this morning, a 53 year old white software developer crashed his own plane into the IRS building in a suicidal direct action against the government. What is fascinating is that he wasn’t a libertarian, pro-business type, he was concerned with the greed and destruction of the capitalist system. The news I’ve read implies that two people were hospitalized and one person is missing, though I don’t know if this list includes Andrew Stack.

Before the attack, he uploaded a six-page rant about why he did it. The really short version is that he has been screwed by tax law again and again in his life, in particularly gross ways. I’ve pulled some excerpts below.

Here we have a system that is, by far, too complicated for the brightest of the master scholars to understand. Yet, it mercilessly “holds accountable” its victims, claiming that they’re responsible for fully complying with laws not even the experts understand. … the incredible stupidity of the American public; that they buy, hook, line, and sinker, the crap about their “freedom”… and that they continue to do so with eyes closed in the face of overwhelming evidence and all that keeps happening in front of them.

and he ends with this:

I know I’m hardly the first one to decide I have had all I can stand. It has always been a myth that people have stopped dying for their freedom in this country, and it isn’t limited to the blacks, and poor immigrants. I know there have been countless before me and there are sure to be as many after. But I also know that by not adding my body to the count, I insure nothing will change. I choose to not keep looking over my shoulder at “big brother” while he strips my carcass, I choose not to ignore what is going on all around me, I choose not to pretend that business as usual won’t continue; I have just had enough.

I can only hope that the numbers quickly get too big to be white washed and ignored that the American zombies wake up and revolt; it will take nothing less. I would only hope that by striking a nerve that stimulates the inevitable double standard, knee-jerk government reaction that results in more stupid draconian restrictions people wake up and begin to see the pompous political thugs and their mindless minions for what they are. Sadly, though I spent my entire life trying to believe it wasn’t so, but violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer. The cruel joke is that the really big chunks of shit at the top have known this all along and have been laughing, at and using this awareness against, fools like me all along.

I saw it written once that the definition of insanity is repeating the same process over and over and expecting the outcome to suddenly be different. I am finally ready to stop this insanity. Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let’s try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well.

The communist creed: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed.

Joe Stack (1956-2010)

In a six page impassioned letter, the corporate media (Fox and the BBC (what, you didn’t know the BBC was bullshit too?) sum him up by quoting “violence … is the only answer.”

note: I’m not convinced that violence is the only answer (but notice how easily the government and the public get all in an uproar about violence coming from anyone but police and the government? Yet police and soldiers act with a weird ethical impunity?). I’m actually not convinced that it’s useful at all: the government is really, really good at violence.

So… there’s this goth woman named Wolfie Blackheart who identifies as a wolf and likes to taxidermy roadkill. She found a roadkill dog (pictured above) and decapitated it to do something with its skull. And now everyone is freaking out about it. The people who’s dog it was found the photo and are trying to press charges, but what’s particularly fascinating and sad is the media freaking out about it because she doesn’t fit in with the majoritarian view of what consists of reality. (since she’s goth, wears a tail, and considers herself a half-werewolf or something.) The smartest thing I’ve seen said about it was a comment on the Boing Boing post about it:

She should know that the only acceptable garb for a taxidermist (even an amateur taxidermist) is camo and a baseball cap.

People should grow the hell up, understand that what floats their boats don’t float other people’s boats, and leave this person alone. (That said, I can understand why the people who looked after the dog when it was alive were kinda freaked out.)