Month: November 2014

by Lesley DangerHaddock

All over the world people have been demonstrating against the Keystone XL pipeline, the massive oil pipeline that would send 800,000 barrels of oil per day from Alberta, Canada to Texas. The pipeline would likely spur further development of the Alberta Tar Sands, the largest fossil fuel project in the world that has led to extensive deforestation, water pollution, and violations of indigenous sovereignty, as well as massive contributions to climate change. Keystone XL has been the Keystone issue for many environmental activists.

Matthew and I left on a hitchhiking adventure intending to cover the resistance to the Keystone XL pipeline by following the pipeline the full 1,700 miles. But, as we have talked to activists along the way, we have found that while resistance to the Keystone XL pipeline has brought a lot of needed attention to the detrimental tar sands project, it can also overshadow the equally crucial efforts being made to stop fossil fuel shipment and extraction by local communities.

Before we left we talked to activists in Pittsburg, CA who have been fighting hard against the construction of oil terminals that would receive tar sands shipments by truck and rail, as well as organizers in Richmond, CA who for decades have opposed the Chevron refinery that has been detrimental to the city’s health. As activists in San Francisco locked down the federal building in protest of KXL, the fight against extraction is immediate and personal for local organizers just across the bay.

Our travels thus far have taken us up to Oregon, Washington, and over to Idaho, and organizers there have had similar experiences. In Vancouver, WA we talked to Cager Carbaugh, the president of the ILWU local 4, who has been working with Portland Rising Tide to oppose oil terminals being built in their port. For Cager and the longshoremen, working with volatile oil shipments from the tar sands is a threat to worker safety, and the risk of an oil spill would put their ability to work on the Columbia river at stake.

In Moscow, Idaho, we’ve talked with organizers who have been working upstream of the tar sands fighting shipments of megaloads, massive machinery used for tar sands exploitation, through Idaho. For many local activists, the idea of turning their wild state into an permanent industrial corridor is an outrage. Helen Yost, organizer with Wild Idaho Rising Tide, explicitly told us that the focus on Keystone XL has been a huge barrier, saying that people have been climbing over each other to get arrested protesting the pipeline while ignoring the megaload shipments rolling straight through their towns.

Further, while Keystone XL is absolutely gigantic, there are actually two other pipelines of similar size in the works that, if built, could double tar sands exploitation. The first of these is the $7 billion Line 3 Replacement pipeline project brought to us by Enbridge. Set to open in 2017, this pipeline would ship 740,000 barrels of tar sands per day. The other is the $12 billion Energy East pipeline being constructed by TransCanada. This pipeline is set to open in 2018 and would ship a record-breaking 1.1 billion barrels of tar sands per day.

Keystone XL is tremendously important, but so are the other fossil fuel projects popping up all over North America. With fracking going on in more and more states, the Bakken Shale exploitation in North Dakota, Mountain Top Removal in West Virginia, oil spills happening nearly every week, tar sands exploitation starting in Utah, we can’t afford to focus only on KXL. We have to fight extraction at every level, and look at the work being done in our own communities first.

You can follow our work online at fuelingdissent.org or on Facebook at facebook.com/fuelingdissent. If you have any way to contribute, we need money for food and equipment and you can donate to us through our website.

by Kyle Merrit Ludowitz

In Chiang Mai, the northernmost city of Thailand, many restaurants, venues, and bars cater to the carnal pleasures of tourists and locals alike. One bar however, stands out among the others: the Can Do Bar is proudly owned and operated by a female collective of empowered sex workers.

Currently employing 20 workers, the Can Do Bar provides opportunities for female sex workers rarely ever offered in Thailand’s sex industry, such as: payment at (or above) minimum wage, 10 paid holidays, observance of 13 public holidays throughout the year, voluntary overtime at full pay, and paid sick leave. The workers are encouraged to join a union or association, and are given full rights to settle disputes in a labor court, and instant access to contraceptives and other safer sex methods, as well as an educational center on the second floor above the bar.

Can Do Bar was formed by a group of sex workers frustrated with being controlled for profit, who quit or fled their former houses, banded together, and pooled the initial Baht needed to start their independent collective. While working along the Myanmar border in northern Thailand, I decided to seek out this collective to experience, and understand this new approach to sex work.

Entering the Can Do Bar on a warm fall evening, I get the impression of an intimately friendly den, instead of a booming nightclub; stings of thin, red lights outline the room’s frame, casting a soft, warm glow across the bar’s dark colored wood, and over the floor to the tables in the far corners. A staircase, with a large centerpiece photograph of a client in the midst of a sponge-bath, wraps around to the second and third floors with bedrooms, and the education center.

Visiting the night before the bar’s large Climate Change Cocktail Party, I interviewed the three women working that evening: Mai, Pae, and Oa. When asked over drinks of Whiskey what message they wanted to convey to other sex workers, their replies were confident.

“The Can Do Bar is fair bar” Mai told me simply. “It’s fun, and it’s enjoyable to be here. It’s not always work either. Sometimes we come here when we’re not working to dance, and sing with our friends. We also host social events, and fund- raisers for our programs, as well as other organizations we agree with, and want to help support.”

Pae explained that the bar is not merely a place for people to find sex, but that it is a space for organizers, and friends of the movement to spread awareness about sex worker cooperatives. “Sex workers can open their own business, be their own boss, and take care of themselves,” Pae said.

Oa expressed, “We can work, be artists (sex work as an act of art), and be safe all at the same time. We live here, and work in good conditions. Every bar can be like us with enough time, and effort.”

There are no exact figures as to the total number of sex workers in Thailand, but a conservative estimate puts the number around 20,000-40,000 women, with a large portion being minors. At this time, sex trafficking places many Thai sex workers in the dangerous positions of forced servitude.

The Empower Foundation is the focal advocate, and co-collaborator of the Can Do Bar’s undertaking, since its foundation in 2006. An organization of predominately third-wave feminists from Western countries, Empower Foundation strives to build women’s confidence so they have a stronger foundation to express their preferences and assert their rights. The Empower Foundation views education and literacy as a fundamental part of building confidence, and it provides educational programs to over 30,000 sex workers throughout Thailand, many of whom are receiving education for the first time in their lives. They host classroom style education sessions in Phatpong Alley (a center of prostitution in Bangkok), as well as the southern island of Phuket, the town of Mae Sai, and the city of Chiang Mai.

Before leaving the bar, I met with Liz Hilton, a representative for the Empower Foundation, to discuss the Can Do Bar’s achievements.

“The Empower Foundation and the Can Do Bar were born out of sex worker frustration” Liz explained. “Workers voiced concerns to their government, but with no active response, they decided to pool together in a collective effort to show that their jobs can be done safely and responsibly.”

“We recently exceeded a global population of 7 billion people,” Liz continued. “That means there have been at least 7 billion sexual acts. The global community does not seem to have a problem with this fact, and regards sex as a natural, private, and personal act. That is, until money comes into the equation.”

Liz Continues“Women have a right to do whatever they choose with their lives, and should be given autonomy to proceed in a positive way. That is what we are doing here. That is what the women of the Can Do Bar are doing.”

With thousands of women involved in Thailand’s sex industry, the struggle to secure fair wages, the necessities of education, medical care,andaccess to contraceptives is an immense task. The thousands of workers denied these essentials each day urgently need change to this system.

Leaving the bar, and looking back at the lights illuminating the painted Can Do sign, I am inspired by these women’s stories, and by seeing what can be accomplished when determined individuals organize. By working together as a collective to empower sex workers, the Can Do Bar shows us the true strength of women when they claim their workplace and sexual rights, and define their own future.

 

by Joey

Folks who have been in or around gender and sexuality-based movement for the past decade or so have probably noticed an explosion of identities. These new words, new names, new ways of describing oneself and one’s relation to the world — and I’m not sure whether they’re really new, or just more visible than ever before — are maybe most apparent in the lengthening of what gets called “the acronym”: LGBT*QQIAP+, as it’s often written in the queer spaces I inhabit. (The T* is for trans* [gender, sexual, etc.] the first Q is for queer, the second for questioning, the I for intersex, the A for asexual, the P for pansexual, and the + for other identities that haven’t made the leap to acronym status yet.) These complex identities and their infinite, unique combinations show a world that is rich in its forms of gender, desire, play, presentation, and power — as some of the subjects in Sarah Deragon’s recent photo show The Identity Project, like Queer Butch Trans Top, Homo Queer Fag Boy Daddy, Daddy Fem Dyke Dom Queen, and Gender Blind Femme Bottom, among others, show. This growing alphabet soup seems to follow a sort of liberal, multicultural logic: the more people’s identities we acknowledge and make visible around the big gender-desire table, the better.

And yet there’s definitely a more complicated internal politics at play: how did we get from LGBT (still the most common form currently, as far as I can tell) to LGBT*QQIAP+? How many people had to identify as pansexual before educators, activists, writers, and others would remember to write a P? Which identities are struggling to be acronymized? More importantly, what is gained and what is lost in the struggle for acronym status, and in the focus on identity that it requires?

***

I come to the acronym from a position of privilege, not just as a white, able-bodied, college-educated cisguy, but as someone who arrived on the scene late enough to find that when I thought of myself as bi, there was already a B waiting for me; and when I thought of myself as gay there was a G, too; and when I started thinking of myself more as queer, well, there was usually a well-entrenched Q. I also came out early enough that my identity never got viewed as opportunistic or new-fangled, the way some people roll their eyes when they hear newer terms like trans-spirit, demisexual, biromantic, etc. While I’ve had to explain what I mean by Queer to more than one relative and doctor, I can generally assume (at least in the Bay Area) that most folks will understand what that means.Since I can sometimes pass as straight — especially when I need to, in this heterosexist world — focusing on identityforegrounds an aspect of myself that, unlike whiteness, male-legibility, and able-bodiedness, might remain invisible. It also probably increases the likelihood of striking up a conversation, making out with somebody, etc., when around others whose queerness is similarly visible. At the same time, as Julia Serano argues in her recent book Excluded (reviewed in this issue), foregrounding queerness as an identity can also be insular and clique-ish, in ways that I’m just starting to think about.

All this business about identity makes a lot of sense to me. When you’re told — by doctors, by family, by psychiatrists, by teachers, by politicians — that you’re one thing and you feel like you’re another thing, it’s powerful to say, “You say I am this thing, but I identify as this other thing. (PS: fuck you).” It sets up an opposition between the world of descriptions by those in power, often with authoritative qualifiers like “biologically,” “legally,” “really” — and on the other hand, a world of self-descriptions, focused on a different kind of authority: individual experience. Breaking down essentialist barriers into who could call herself a woman was one of the major triumphs of feminism in the late 20th century. In this sense, identity is political, proposing a different way of grounding claims about what people are. It’s also immensely helpful, literally saving the lives of folks (especially youth) who are going through the process of finding something affirming and communal to latch onto in a hostile, straight society. And yet, the emphasis on identity seems to have already conceded part of the battle. If those with the prescription pads and guns get to use the verb “to be” — to say what stuff in the world is — why do we hedge our bets with “identify as”? (Here’s a hunch: I think folks are worried that describing themselves as e.g., “being trans” commits oneself to too much permanence, denying the fluidity and change that identity is supposed to allow. If this is true, it’s unnecessary; “I’m lesbian” doesn’t need to mean anything more fixed than the fact that I’m hungry right now. Though a little awkward, Judith Butler’s statement, “a lesbian is what I’ve been being” makes the point well [Imitation and Gender Insubordination; emphasis mine].)

On the other hand, there seems to be some push-back among folks who’d just as soon give up the identity game in favor of a short and manageable description like, “the queer and trans community.” This approach has an obvious problem: it sacrifices some identities while privileging others, contributing to the invisibility of those who don’t feel any resonance with these terms. But maybe that’s the point: by self-consciously substituting an approximation of a lot of people’s identities, it shifts the focus from the person to the political. Here, “queer” and “trans” (but we could probably insert other words) are proxies for folks whose genders, desires, practices, etc. expose them to oppression. The people who feel represented by it, like myself, might see in it less a mirror than a shared politics. What it loses in apparent inclusion it gains in accessibility and recognition. It pushes us outward, proposing other axis for connection and intimacy. It suggests, critically, that our shared identity may not be as fertile a ground for collaboration as we thought, that identity might turn out to be a poor predictor of politics. (I often find more common ground with straight radicals than with queer liberals.)

I think this is what Eve Sedgwick was getting at when she argued in The Epistemology of the Closet that our way of talking about sexuality is limited, our terms tending to focus on the gender of the person using the term and the gender of their sexual partners (e.g., so the story goes, a lesbian is a woman who desires and/or has sex with women). This way of thinking about sexuality leaves out a lot of the sexual picture: What kinds of sex do people have? Do they practice good consent? Do they have sex in exchange for money or other goods? Do they talk with their partners about STIs? Do they film themselves fucking? What sexual politics do they have? How do they view the world? On this score, the proliferation of identities may be helpful: a self-description like “cisgendered feminist butch queen” tells me about this person’s exposure to gender discourse (“cisgendered”) and a little about their politics (“feminist”). But these terms are also flexible and vague — “butch” looks very different for different folks — and for a good reason: it doesn’t help anyone to police a right or wrong way of being butch, queer, etc.

In pointing this out, I’m not suggesting that the solution is to further expand the taxonomy, adding more identities in a never-ending search for total descriptive perfection, which might only lead to a more atomized culture. (Though I think there’s a pretty radical argument to be made for proliferating identities so infinitely that the concept stops meaning anything altogether — a critique that might end up tracing the limits of language itself, the impossibility of reducing desire or gender to words.) Instead, I wonder about the implications of a suggestion bell hooks offered in 1984: “Often emphasis on identity and lifestyle is appealing because it creates a false sense that one is engaged in praxis… To emphasize the engagement with feminist struggle as political commitment, we could avoid using the phrase ‘I am a feminist’ (a linguistic structure designed to refer to some personal aspect of identity and self-definition) and could state, ‘I advocate feminism.’” (Feminist Theory from Margin to Center, 30-1). This proposal fits gender and sexuality awkwardly at best: one isn’t necessarily advocating anything when one comes out as this or that. But I think that’s exactly the point! Maybe identity is ill-suited to politics to begin with.

That’s not say to that we should discard identity-talk altogether: I don’t think we could if we wanted to, and, again, identity has proven itself to be a helpful tool for figuring ourselves out, socializing, countering oppressive externally-imposed descriptions, and more. These are all definitely important functions, but maybe they’re more helpful for forming a personal bedrock for politics than for praxis itself. hooks’ suggestion makes me wonder: What if we focused less on who’s under the acronym-umbrella (acrobrella?), and more on fighting sexuality- and gender-based oppression? Less on who people are, and more on what they advocate, what they’ll fight for? Doing so might allow us to focus on issues that have been overlooked as “not queer/trans enough.” It might also help us to see how heterosexism and transphobia actually hurt straight and/or cis people, too; after all, these too can be fragile, contingent identities. (To give just one example, “straightness” often comes at the cost of having to constantly shore up one’s identity through self-policing and public disavowals like “no homo.”) Most important, we might see how those not under — or excluded from — the acronym have a stake in the movement, too.

Works Cited:

Butler, Judith. Imitation and Gender Subordination. The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. New York, NY: Routledge, 1993. 307-20.

hooks, bell. Feminist Theory from Marin to Center. London: Pluto Press, 2000. 1st ed 1984.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley, CA: UCP, 1990.

Serano, Julia. Excluded. New York, NY: Seal Press, 2013.

By Alec

I am a senior in college awaiting graduation this summer.  I was a violent child. From pre-school on through middle school and even early high school I suffered from outbursts of aggression. I would attack my peers, teachers, parents and counselors; anyone who came into my vicinity. I had more anger than I knew how to articulate.  I would not be on this successful path if there had been a police presence in my elementary, middle or high school.

The Oakland Unified School District employs six times as many police and security officers to patrol the schools as they have counselors for students.  There were 36,180 students, 2,008 teachers, 115 police and security officers, and 20 counselors during the 2012-3 academic year. Black youth in Oakland are being targeted by police, arrested and referred to probation at two and a half times their percentage of the population.  Black youth make up around thirty percent of the youth population in Oakland but eighty percent of youth who are arrested are black.

Raheim Brown was sitting in the passenger seat of a parked car outside of a school dance when he was shot by a school police officer in January 2011. The officer claimed that Raheim attempted to stab him with a screwdriver. The Oakland School District failed to take any action against the officer, Sgt. Barhin Bhatt, who was later made Interim Chief of the Oakland School Police. His successor, Pete Sarna, was put on paid leave due to racist epithets yelled at a black officer. The Black Organizing Project, a community organizing and advocacy group in the Oakland African-American community, took action against Raheim’s killer’s promotion and Barhin Bhatt was replaced by James Williams, the current Interim Chief of the Oakland School Police. Sergeant Barhin Bhatt still patrols Oakland public schools.

Some Oakland students report that school feels like jail as a result of the police presence and that they feel intimidated and unsafe. They feel that the money spent on policing would be better spent providing more opportunities for student work and recreation, keeping them safe by keeping them occupied. Teachers are underpaid and overworked and ten percent of students exhibit chronic absence. A survey conducted by the Black Organizing Project found that sixty-four percent of Oakland public school students don’t like the police presence in their schools and feel that they could have safe schools without police.  

In 2012, the Oakland Unified School District, citing exhaustion and conflicting demands, hired 25 extra police and security officers to patrol Ralph Bunche High school, Frick, Roosevelt and Elmhurst Middle schools and Lockwood and Parker Elementary schools.   

A review of Oakland School Police policies shows that the Oakland School Police have no special training or criteria for dealing with youth. They treat students as though they are adult criminals, arresting them for minor infractions without regard to the problems they may be dealing with in their lives.  No school counselors have been hired by the Oakland School District in recent history.

The police are interfering with children’s lives at their most delicate stages of development. I understand fears about gun violence and bullying in schools as well as drug use, but teachers and counselors are trained to deal with kids whereas police are not. Sometimes all a kid needs is the proof that some people care about them in order to make a positive contribution to her community.

 Oakland students are not getting the opportunities I had: once they get into trouble with their school, they get into trouble with the law and face juvenile detention and court appearances.  Studies show that an arrest at a young age doubles the student’s chances at being pushed out of high school and a court appearance quadruples those chances.

Oakland School police data reveals that forty nine percent of contact the police make with students is for non-criminal behavior such as classroom disruption.  Even the brightest and most talented of our children are known to screw up at some point in their development.  By subjecting them to arrests in their schools we are nullifying their chances at success.   Involvement with the juvenile justice system makes youth far less likely to obtain future employment, go to college or even graduate from high school.

The information for this report was drawn from the Black Organizing Project’s Report, “From Report Card To Criminal Record, the Impact of Policing on Oakland Youth” and from the Oakland Unified School District website.

By Kermit

A karass – a group of people linked in a cosmically significant manner, even when superficial links are not evident.

A granfalloon – a group of people who affect a shared identity or purpose, but whose mutual association is actually meaningless. A false karass. (Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle, 1963)

Even if you believe that we live in a godless and rational universe governed by physical laws, it is difficult to deny that language is a kind of magic. Through language, we perceive, interpret, and create the stories that frame our understanding of what is possible and fuse meaning onto our lives. Some of these stories break like waves, spectacular and momentary, over the surface of our existence while others are more subtle but longer lasting. They can take the form of fiction, history, science, or conventional wisdom and all of them claim some relationship to physical or emotional truths. As they are told and retold, stories account for and explain the immense variety of lived human experience.

Over time, some of these stories become layered on top of one another and are replaced in everyday thought and speech with a kind of shorthand; a few words or phrases which stand in for complex experiences or insights. This is useful so that we don’t have to pull out a lyre and spend several hours singing the song of ourselves every time we meet someone, but it also lets us live in the illusion that if we use the same code words and root for the same sports team (or broad political tendency), then our ideas are basically the same.

Becoming intimate with someone is a process of unpacking some of the stories that have shaped us and being vulnerable enough to sing them to each other. This intimate sharing thickens the connections between people and contributes to the sense that you and I are part of a rhizomatic social cluster that is palpable and significant. The extent to which a claim of community feels meaningful to me depends, in large part, on whether or not the people in it are linked together with intimate bonds – not necessarily on whether they share an aesthetic, set of judgments, common history, or way of speaking.

The poverty of political stories

The problem with most political discourse is that it tends to emphasize the sameness of our shorthand, rather than the complexity of our individual songs. Politicians are primarily concerned with telling stories that promote orthodoxy and conversion – those which can be bent to the service of convincing people to think the right way. This can even be true when their code words include ‘autonomy’ and when they are overtly critical of the orthodoxy and conversion tactics of others. Over time, it can become easy for those of us who are moved by political rhetoric to slowly, and at times unwittingly, replace a complex understanding of reality and our ambiguous emotional responses to it with clear moral distinctions and strongly held beliefs that feel like party lines.

One effect of this is that people tend to assume that they are members of much larger coherent communities than are actually possible. All of the grand lies of nationalism (whether or not they are attached to states) are based on the assumption that we are very much the same as thousands, or perhaps millions of other people who happen to share a similar quality, belief, heritage, or aesthetic. There is a comfort that comes from this because it simplifies the world and numbs our awareness of the poverty that can exist in everyday life, but it also distracts us from deeper and more thorough lines of inquiry and limits our ability to imagine other possibilities.

In Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut invents a word to describe this type of faux-community. A granfalloon is an imagined community not built on actual connections between people, but on the mistaken assumption that some superficial similarity is significant in a way that overrides factors of personality, context, or circumstance. Granfalloons are always false and often harmful because they misrepresent the nature of human connection, but they also become particularly weak and ugly when their objective rationality is questioned.

The stories that create granfalloons depend on an illusion of unity and when that is broken, as it inevitably is, the first response is often to try to salvage the grand narrative at all costs. Frequently this means treating critical voices as enemies and open conflict as a crisis necessitating the ejection of people from our social worlds. This has historically been true whenever the narrative underpinnings of states, religions, and other centers of authority have been challenged.

Unfortunately, radical communities and revolutionary moments are particularly prone to this kind of reactionary response. Do not misunderstand, there are good reasons to be defensive and protective of our actual intimate networks, but when radicals seek to silence dissent within large scale ‘communities’ held together by the thinnest of justifications for the sake of abstract ideals, we mimic the mechanisms of the powerful systems we claim to abhor.

This silencing of critique is particularly troubling. I tend to be more of a mediator when confronted with people or ideas that are in conflict and the skills I sometimes have to smooth things over have been very useful. Despite this – or perhaps because of it – I highly value the presence of strong, critical voices in my social world, voices that force me to look closely at my assumptions and sit uncomfortably in my skin rather than seek easy resolutions and comfortable answers.

Relationship-scale communities are stronger when they are composed of people with diverse constitutions and opinions, including those who are willing to pick fights with orthodoxies. If we shut down without attempting to understand another person’s criticism when it calls our particular orthodoxy into question we miss opportunities to complicate and enrich the stories we are telling

The power to re-enchant our worlds

What I am struck by most, however, when I think about this stuff is the incredible power we all have to shape our understanding of the world. The more aware we are of the inevitable process of narrative co-creation and manipulation inherent in knowing, the more able we are to take responsibility for composing and editing the stories we choose to believe in. The more willingly we accept this responsibility, the more possible it seems to create meaning and purpose for our lives in ways unrelated to received authority or the simplistic rejection of received authority.

Stories which obscure our awareness of our own creative power only serve to strengthen calcified channels of systemic power by encouraging us to submit to narratives we have not shaped. Creating spaces in the world to interact with each other and pursue our passions outside of those systems must involve embracing our own power as story-tellers.

The stories we create are a part of this but they do not exist in a vacuum. Instead, they rub up against one another and are judged by how true they appear in light of other stories we have already accepted. In this way we determine if new stories relate to our established narrative reality or not. Recognizing this process can allow us to more easily focus on and move toward goals that we have shaped ourselves based on our own understanding of reality and our desire to interact with it.

Making people aware of the creative magic inherent in language and storytelling and the extent to which we are connected through the stories we share with each other is, in a way, about re-enchanting the world. To enchant something is, quite literally, to fill it with song. An enchanted world is one that has been sung into existence. The way to understand it is through song and story and myth. This is an inherently subjective process which is, of necessity, recreated every time a story is told.

By Tommi Avicolli Mecca

These days, Tony Bennett wouldn’t be leaving his heart in San Francisco. He’d be leaving his apartment and friends because he got priced out of the city. Or evicted by some speculator looking to make a mint off his beautiful Victorian flat.

Scott McKenzie would simply be telling folks *not* to come to San Francisco unless you work for the tech industry and can afford more than a flower in your hair.

Times have certainly changed for the city that gave the world the Summer of Love and North Beach beatniks, not to mention wonderfully diverse ethnic neighborhoods and a refuge for LGBT folks escaping the horror that still is the heterosexual nuclear (as in toxic) family in this country. Pure unadulterated greed is destroying the heart and the soul of the rebel city that has always welcomed the underdog.

Rents are now the highest in the country. In the working-class Mission district, home to a large immigrant Latino population and scores of artists and political activists, a lovely two-bedroom condo can be rented for $10,500 a month. In the still gay (but becoming straighter by the day) Castro where I live, there are $8,000 rentals above a brand new Whole Foods, proving once again that in America, healthy food is only for the wealthy. Poorer neighborhoods don’t even have supermarkets, only corner stores that soak them for the basics.

A recent report from the Brookings Institute in Washington shows that the city isn’t just the most expensive place to live, it’s also the municipality with the fastest growing income gap between rich and poor. The Institute’s results are based on income reported in the 2012 Census. The tech boom has climbed a chunk of degrees higher since then, meaning the income disparity is even wider now than two years ago. We’re in serious trouble, Houston.

According to the Institute’s study, households earning 95% of AMI (Area Median Income) bring home about $353,576 which is 16.6 times more than those making 20% of AMI which is around minimum wage or $21,313. We may be living in lean times, but the cats at the top are not feeling any hunger pangs.

Income disparity is not the only thing rising astronomically. So are evictions. Now the highest in at least a decade, they are mainly the work of speculators and investors from far and wide cashing in on a sizzling housing market that shows no signs of cooling down, a housing market fueled by thousands of tech workers to the south of here wanting to call San Francisco home. While politicians scramble to introduce legislation to curb the displacement of longtime residents, larger and larger buildings are being cleared of rent-controlled tenants paying lower rents in favor of those who can fork out the ridiculous amounts being demanded for a roof over their heads.

Already, a large part of the city’s work force, including teachers and fire fighters, have been forced to live outside San Francisco. Public transportation to the East Bay is expensive. Within the city it’s simply a nightmare. Google and other company buses create congestion and delays by using MUNI stops (and pay only $1 a stop for the privilege). Their fines go unpaid because of a nod and a wink from city officials.

Meanwhile, Mayor Ed Lee has proposed 30,000 new units of housing, but only one-third of them will be for those who are low-income. The rest will go to the middle-incomers. With 7,000-8,000 homeless on the streets and low-income housing waiting lists in the tens of thousands, you’d think that those without housing and those on the lists would get first dibs when the apartments are built.

Forget it. Lee’s mantra these days is “housing for the 100%.” Meaning that he’s just as concerned about households making $353,576 as those earning minimum wage.

These days, cardboard boxes and jails are the new housing for the poor in “progressive” San Francisco where anti-panhandling and sit/lie laws easily keep the homeless out of sight and out of mind. I honestly have never seen things so bad.

I was born in 1951 in a poor immigrant Italian neighborhood in South Philly. My grandfather came here, like his paesani from il mezzogiorno (southern Italy), with the idea that the streets were paved with gold. Wrong. They were paved with the blood, sweat and tears of men like him who worked for next to nothing and were told over and over again that they weren’t welcome. The Statue of Liberty had a message for them: huddled masses of dagos and wops, go home.

Working six, sometimes seven days a week, Papa made it into the working class, with a house and a car and a small amount of comfort. But not before we were booted out of our neighborhood and the house where I grew up was torn down and “redeveloped.” There went the neighborhood — to the more upscale folks, the yuppies of that decade.

I left Philly in 1991 and moved to San Francisco’s Castro District. I was there when the dot-com boom hit the city like a tornado, causing rents — and evictions — to skyrocket. I helped organize the Castro Tenants’ Union to stop long-term tenants with AIDS from being evicted in my neighborhood. We worked with the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition and other groups that wanted an end to the speculation and displacement and community control of our neighborhoods.

I also helped set up three shelters for homeless queer youth, a free meals program and a place for homeless persons in the Castro and Mission to shower. These days, queer youth make up 40% of the homeless youth population in the city. According to the city’s homeless count, 29% are LGB and 3% identify as transgender.

Things looked dire back then, but who knew they could get so much worse? Far worse. City-wide economic cleansing. Soon, there will only be extremely wealthy and extremely poor people in the city. Our wonderful diversity will be erased. Already, the African American population has been reduced to 6%. In no time at all, if the current rate of evictions continues, the Mission will be predominantly white, the Castro predominantly straight.

We need to take back our housing and our communities. The only way to do that is to take back the land. No one owns the earth. Capitalist society slices it up like a pie and gives people deeds to each piece. Speculators and investors buy up many pieces of this pie and flip them, especially when the market is hot, emptying them of tenants and walking away with huge profits. It doesn’t matter if the tenant is a 97-year-old woman or a gay senior with AIDS. The ends, making lots of dough, justify the means, tossing out single mothers with children or people living on SSI. Under capitalism, housing is a commodity rather than an essential human need, as are healthcare and food, two other human needs that are reduced to mere commodities.

Unfortunately, there’s no magic bullet to turn all this around, short of ending capitalism and making housing a guaranteed right, something that isn’t likely to happen anytime soon. However, there are ways to hopefully provide some relief.

We’ve got to take as much of the land off the market as we can so that it can’t be speculated on and doesn’t contribute to gentrification. Using models like the Community Land Trust (CLT), we can turn apartment buildings into co-ops where the existing tenants pay 30% or less of their income on rent, and no one gets displaced. The CLT maintains the mortgage on the land, the tenants in the building make the rules and manage the property. The CLT helps train people on how to live cooperatively, and how to take control of their own lives.

Whole neighborhoods or sections of a city can become CLTs. Dudley Street Land Trust in Boston is the best example. A poor African American community with empty lots that were being used as dumping grounds by people from throughout the city, transformed itself through a CLT. Funding was brought in from outside to help the community build itself up from within.

The CLT is not a quick fix. The acquisition of land is hindered by the ridiculous cost of real estate in cities such as San Francisco. Relying on generous individuals to donate buildings is like counting on politicians or preachers to be honest. Unless one can guilt-trip tech moguls into raising billions for the SF CLT, this is more of a long-range plan for changing how we do housing in this country.

Meanwhile, people should continue to squat and advocate for empty buildings and abandoned land to be transformed into affordable housing controlled by the residents. Legislative fixes, such as California Senator Mark Leno’s proposal that someone has to own a building for five years before he or she can use the state Ellis Act to evict the tenants are helpful in cutting down on speculation, but expect challenges in the courts and the men and women in the black robes to be on the side of those who profit from housing.

Still, legislators need to be finding creative ways to limit and even eliminate speculation and activists should push them to keep working on stronger and stronger measures to keep speculators out of working-class and poor neighborhoods.

Another fix is to fight for true rent control, which would include vacancy control. California cities, such as San Francisco, Los Angeles and Berkeley, have rent stabilization, which only controls the rent while the tenant lives in the apartment. Once he or she moves out, the landlord can raise the rent on the vacant unit to market value. Berkeley once had true rent control (which made it affordable to students), but it was reduced to rent stabilization by a 1995 state law called Costa Hawkins. The fight to strengthen San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley’s rent stabilization has to be done on a state level and is going to be difficult, but it’s a worthwhile one.

The fight may seem daunting, but, as the Chinese philosopher Laozi once said, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

by Suzy Q

Lately, some in the Bay Area radical scene (overwhelmingly people with decent jobs who rent), have been dismissing squatting, and those who choose to squat, with what I believe are shallow generalizations and stereotypes. The pitfalls of squatting are the pitfalls of anarchy, and we’re going to have to figure them out.

Most of Oakland’s squatters are people of color, often long-term residents, who don’t call themselves anarchists. There are no official statistics, but I know this because I keep bumping into them. Anyone scouting squattable buildings in these parts has to be cautious of disturbing people already there. In addition to these precarious squatters, many of the local squatters I meet are ordinary working people who stopped paying rent to their absentee slumlord years ago.

My current house is a good example. From what I’ve been able to piece together through things left in the house, and research at the courthouse and online, the last resident was a man who had previously rented the house, and continued to live there for two years after his landlord died, refusing to leave when served a Notice to Quit. He fought his eviction, but missed a filing date due to being in jail for a few weeks. Also, when we moved in, a man had been sleeping on the porch for about 5 months, hidden by the overgrown hydrangea bushes. He’s still at the same address, but now has a roof and electricity. The point is, my squat had already been squatted twice, in very different ways, by people of color.

The rest of this article is about and is directed to members of the predominantly white, young, and mobile anarchesque milieu, not because we’re especially special as far as squatting is concerned, but simply because that’s what I am. This is why I see squatting as part of the anarchist project.

We avoid paying rent, and therefore have time for our lives, whether that’s caring for friends and sweeties, educating ourselves, making music, engaging in community activism, or committing petty vandalism against developers and banks. It’s a special kind of a place. It allows a certain fluidity of people moving in and out, existing without their address being recorded by the state.

We get practice at the nitty gritty of anarchy. We have to figure out how to live outside of police and property titles, resolve our own conflicts, and share a resource that really matters to us. I’ve rented several times, and even though neither myself nor anyone involved has even considered calling the landlord or the police to resolve our conflicts, the subtext of property rights is always there. Even if we have guests and travellers, and do everything by consensus – I pay $400 a month for the right to this room. But in a squat, I am there because everyone else wants me to be there. Even if I found, opened, and fixed up the building, at the end of the day I don’t have any enforceable rights over anyone else.

Many of the same issues come up in an open squat as in an infoshop, but unlike most activist groups, we have a physical incentive to commit rather than drop out when things get hard. Squatting can be an intense experience because you can’t just skip the meeting Tuesday if the project is frustrating you. Anarchy is our life rather than a recreational activity after work.

Squatting and fighting for buildings has the potential to concretely disrupt the gentrification process. Once established, clever squatters can subvert tenant protection and property laws to drag a legal case, and therefore their occupancy, out for years. We waste developer and bank resources that would be used to do more damage elsewhere. The Hot Mess/RCA squat has delayed Rockridge Realty from developing an entire block of north Oakland for 2 1/2 years so far, and has cost them god knows how many thousands in legal fees.

In my experience, most people who assert that squatting causes gentrification cannot articulate the mechanism by which they believe this occurs. However, I can see two ways that members of the predominantly white, transient youth subculture that is our radical milieu choosing to squat might contribute to the gentrification process.

Firstly, it can bring white folks into marginalized, and therefore easily squattable areas, both as squat residents and through throwing shows that attract hipsters. One impediment to the gentrification of black neighborhoods is the racism of white yuppies, who don’t want to live among people of color. A neighborhood containing white squatters often feels more comfortable to a white yuppie than one of black working families. The same applies to white punks renting in these same neighborhoods, except that squatters have to be on decent terms with their neighbors, while white punks with a lease are free to be assholes to marginalized people if they feel like it.

White squatters don’t have to limit their activities to poor Black neighborhoods. C’mon guys, don’t keep taking remedial math, move onto calculus already! The logic of capitalism ensures that there will always be a few houses empty, even in the highest-rent areas. You can exploit that white privilege to take those houses, and then bring a few of friends of color with you.

Secondly, squatters and renters are much easier for developers and city governments to push around than people who own their homes. If a collective buys a house together, rather than squatting, they will be in a position to resist gentrification. This is great for people who have enough resources to pool to buy a house. I am not one of those people. Owning a house requires paying not just the mortgage, but taxes, garbage fees, etc. As an anarchist, I would rather not hand my resources to those people even if I had them.

Also, you can still squat in partially gentrified areas that would be too expensive to buy a house in, so the house-buying strategy relies on aiding the initial process of gentrification, in order to benefit from it in the end. Many of the SF and Berkeley co-ops either sold their buildings or gentrified internally.

Some dismissal of squatting has to do with personal experience of some squatters being assholes and some squats being drama bombs. I have to say that some squats/squatters do suck, but plenty of renters and homeowners suck as well. It seems odd for radicals to demand an infinitely higher standard of behavior from a group of people just because they don’t pay rent.

The absence of set rules and laws can be surprisingly hard to navigate. Often, people do the work to scout, research, and squat a house, but then, because they have no sense of ownership, let assholes and wingnuts move in and don’t feel they have the right or ability to kick them out. Our rent-paying friends tend to dump their unwanted people at squats to get rid of them.

Learning how to make decisions collectively and share resources and power is a difficult but essential part of the anarchist project. We need to develop a system of belonging outside of the capitalist model of property. We need to keep ourselves safe from people damaged by the police state without resorting to it. We need to make and hold each other to collective agreements.

These issues come up most fiercely in larger and more open collective projects, because people have different backgrounds and expectations, and there are too many people for everyone to develop close relationships with everyone else. Possibly because of this, most squats, even most anarchist squats, aren’t open to all and sundry. My current place isn’t. Everybody just talks about the more public and dramatic places.

In the end, anarchist housekeeping is sometimes tricky, but it’s worth it. Squatting offers many benefits to the individual anarchist and the promotion of anarchy at large. The difficulties that it offers are opportunities for learning and growth. These types of problems are not unique to the squatting situation, but rather arise with any group of people learning to do something that really matters to them in a non-hierarchical way.

To my friends who squat, who work shitty jobs to pay their rent, who sleep in their cars, under bridges, in parks – I love you all.

By Steven DeCaprio

Over a decade ago I started squatting in California because of personal housing dilemmas. While seeking housing I realized that we could never build a stable movement without creating stable housing for organizers. Because of this I started the organization Land Action to help others establish squats in order to expand the circle as well as our capacity to organize. Squatting can provide an opportunity to escape the wage/rent treadmill, and it also prevents greedy speculators from getting their hands on abandoned properties. Because of this, squatters are in a constant state of struggle fighting against these land grabs. Unfortunately a new threat has emerged in the California State Assembly; a bill called AB1513.

The first draft of the bill created a new law that made squatting a felony. The new language of the bill allows a property owner to sign a document called an “Unauthorized Occupant Declaration” and demand that cops remove people from their homes based upon the owner’s declaration that they are trespassers. The cops are required under AB 1513 to treat the owner’s own written declaration as if it were a court ordered eviction. Thus AB 1513 gives property owners the power of the courts to evict anyone, at will, without any process.
Landlords already call the cops on their tenants and accuse them of trespassing all the time. Usually the cops don’t get involved in these disputes. However this bill gives property owners unprecedented power to remove anyone from their properties, and not even the cops can refuse to evict if there is a written request. Anyone with any common sense should realize that by giving landlords this type of power they will be guaranteed to abuse it. 

The only protection we would have for these extrajudicial evictions would be the fact that the landlord would sign the document “under penalty of perjury”. This provides almost no protection because very few tenants would be able to sue the landlord after the eviction, and even if they did a landlord could simply claim ignorance as a defense.
Sadly, property owners already have significant protections against squatters, such as trespassing laws, and in most cases AB 1513 would be totally unnecessary to evict squatters.

On the other hand tenants would likely be harmed significantly. By giving landlords the power of the courts to order an eviction, AB 1513 will remove both state and local protections for tenants, allowing landlords to bypass all the processes designed to protect tenants. Essentially, landlords will be given direct command over the police without due process in the courts.

AB 1513 puts all tenants at risk, but the most at risk tenants will be tenants without a written lease agreement, tenants who do not speak English as a first language, tenants holding over from a previous owner, and any other tenant belonging to a marginalized group. 

Currently this bill is still in the California State Assembly Rules Committee. One course of action to stop the bill is to contact your assembly representative. Another course of action is for us to build a squatting movement so powerful that we can force the banks, speculators, and politicians to recognize that housing is a basic human right. Anyone who wants help establishing a squat in California or anywhere else in the U.S.A. can find information at blogsquats.blogspot.com or contact Land Action at land-action.org.

By Helena Bla-Latchkey (Soren)

I recently visited my mother who lives in the Discovery Bay area, just outside of Port Townsend, WA. Her front yard leads to the beach and her back yard borders on wetlands. In the morning, otters run through the property to rinse themselves in the freshwater ponds; at night, frogs sing and cry into the cold, damp air. Lichens drip off of towering pine, fir, cedar and madrona trees. Ferns, wild flowers and mosses blanket everything. The Cascade mountains glimmer like icy jewels on the horizon when the fog clears. It is a serene, primordially beautiful place, but the peace this small community usually enjoys has been disturbed by a subtle foreboding.

In 2007, the Snohomish Public Utility District received permits and 10 million dollars from the Federal Energy Regulatory Committee to begin researching the installation of marine turbines in Puget Sound. They began looking at seven different locations around the San Juan Islands, areas all known for their natural beauty and biodiversity. In 2010, SPUD honed in on two sites — Bremerton Pass and Admiralty Inlet. They recently settled on the latter as their pilot project. They plan to install two OpenHydro turbines as soon as possible.

Marine turbines sound like a good idea — a cleaner, renewable source of naturally occurring energy. This is certainly how they are portrayed by the SPUD and OpenHydro Corporation, in between assurances that environmental impact will constantly be monitored. How often have we heard this before, during the experimental phases of energy projects? What level of monitoring will these earnest promises ensure?

The truth is that marine turbines inevitably cause damage to life whenever and wherever they are placed near life. Turbines are massive wheels which are propelled by naturally occurring currents in wind or air, such as windmills. A turbine creates a vortex as it pulls these currents within its center. With these currents, modern turbines pull organisms and debris within, chopping them up and shooting them out at high speed.

The turbines proposed by SPUD are open turbines — 6 meter wide steel bands, with fins placed within. There are only a handful of open marine turbines in the world. They are considered relatively new technology and there are many unknowns. However, one known risk is that any marine mammals, fish and invertebrates in the area could be sucked in and battered within the turbines’ wall. The turbines also emit a constant stream of sonic and magnetic pollution. Because many marine animals rely on sounds and polarities in order to navigate, this white noise could disrupt and disorient them. This alone could have a grave impact on the survival of many species.

Simply installing them will involve extensive drilling directly into the sea floor. SPUD has ensured the public that this construction will be “silent and invisible” to surface dwellers. OpenHydro turbines, which will be used, are designed without toxic lubricants which can leak and cause environmental damage. Still, they will require constant maintenance in order to function properly. Salt water is corrosive. It seems difficult to hypothesize how much damage a massive hunk of metal, rapidly spinning in waters that reach 9 knots and connected to electrical transmission cables could do if it were to malfunction.

Puget Sound is home to a rich ecosystem which includes increasingly precarious species such as orca whales and salmon. The Skagit River, which feeds the Puget Sound, is one of the only places in the world where wild salmon still spawn. Salmon runs extend as far as 100 miles from the Strait of Juan de Fuca, utilizing complex and sensitive navigation in order to reach the shallow, temperate beds in which they were born. Doing this requires traveling along Earth’s magnetic fields. The Skagit River has miraculously remained hospitable despite the construction of multiple dams upstream during the 80s. Here, these fish, revered as sacred to the Tulalip, Snohomish and S’kallam tribes, breed and die as they have for thousands of years. If the Skagit River becomes inaccessible due to magnetic pollution, these salmon will have no place to spawn.

Many people who live in the Admiralty Inlet area depend directly on the environment economically. The local economy is largely driven by the Sound — from fishermen, to farmers, to the local service and tourism industries. From liberal, left-leaning Port Townsend, to more conservative Port Hadlock, there is already a seething mixture of anxiety, resentment and outrage over the proposed turbines. Some have come together to object to the turbines or demand more information. There are currently no plans for direct action as far as I could tell. People rightly fear the destruction of their livelihoods and the natural beauty that surrounds them.

Sadly, local residents do not have any choice in the matter. If SPUD gets their permits, they already have the green light. They plan to do this through their pilot project — the two small turbines at Admiralty Inlet. How can these two turbines demonstrate that more extensive installation of turbines will not cause more substantial environmental impact? The FERC has promised them up to 10 million more to continue research. Obtaining permits will simply be a matter of SPUD jumping through all the right bureaucratic hoops.

The power output the turbines will have is relatively unknown. I was told by a Port Townsend local that once all ten were installed and the project was complete, they would have a power output equivalent to a standard light bulb a year for every person in the greater Seattle area. This is the sort of vague approximation I would expect to hear. Blame for energy consumption is pushed back onto individuals and personal consumption, when industry and corporate business use far more. Energy industrialists tell us that we have demanded more energy and that development must take place in order to fulfill our supposed needs. However, if SPUD had peoples needs and desires at heart, they would listen to the people of Jefferson, Snohomish and Island Counties.

Sadly, there are few ways to obtain “clean” energy and no ideal ways to generate it at the volume it is currently used. Capitalist industry will inevitably drive itself forward until it is too late — no technology too untested or territory too sacred to spill blood on. Seductive lies do little to obscure the obvious: obtaining permits does not give them permission to destroy life and livelihoods.

By İnci Stan, reporting from Istanbul

Things started to change in Taksim Square in Istanbul, Turkey a year ago May 27 2013. This time the demonstrations were not about Kurdish people’s rights, education fees or a specific person. The initial protest in Istanbul was about saving a park and its trees. An affluent man wanted to build a new shopping center to earn more profits, and to do so he would have to pave over the expansive Gezi Park.

The less nature there is, the more important it is. In Turkey, especially in Istanbul, a busy city of 16 million people, you can see lots of people hanging out on grassy knolls near freeways trying to find something besides pavement. Smelling and breathing the fumes of thousands of cars a few feet away shouldn’t be the only access to nature. Of course people don’t prefer to hang out there, but finding a green area is not easy in this city. That is why we and Istanbul cannot allow or afford to lose any more trees and nature as Istanbul is not in need more shopping centers, parking lots, and apartments.

Protests are a part of regular life in Istanbul. If you are a tourist, you might see more than 5 protests in the same day. Everyone thought that the police would come and the demonstrations would be over as usual. The police came and harassed the demonstrators but this time they didn’t leave. Despite the Turkish police using gas and water hoses, the park was still full of people. Not just the stereotypical Turkish protester but every kind of person was there: high school students, elderly people, taxi drivers, prostitutes, artists, homosexuals, children, elites, Kurds, tourists, Muslims, intellectuals, etc. All sorts of different people were uniting behind a common goal. The goal was not just about saving a park anymore — the goal was to change the government, the power structure, and the system.

Nobody could have foreseen this reaction. Turks as a people are afraid of protesting because of our bad collective memory of demonstrations in the 70s when many people were killed for speaking out. While younger people might not remember, our parents certainly do because they lived through those horrible days. What made people of all generations dare to protest while disregarding their fear of being killed for standing up? Perhaps because this time it was about the environment and excess development which is impossible to ignore. People demanded a humane life free from domination by a government that many Turkish people consider a dictatorship. Every hour the protest became more and more powerful.

Together we built a free zone in the center of the city in which there were no police. People were sharing. We built a library, held concerts, practiced yoga, offered workshops, handed out free food, made art, and welcomed varied political ideas, sexual identities and religions. All of this wasn’t easy. Dedicated anarchists constructed barricades around the park and fought against the police day and night. They were not violent to anyone directly, but they were willing to defend themselves. During the fighting, 6 young protesters were killed by the police. More than 8000 people were injured because of gas, water, and rubber bullets. The government pushed and attacked the protesters for hours. The stress of being abhorred by the populace caused at least 5 police officers to commit suicide.

Mainstream media didn’t show any of the demonstrations, from walls on the street full of political mottoes and unique art, to hospitals full of injured protesters. When an entire country was standing up, CNN preferred to air a documentary about the lives of penguins. We had to create our own media with tablets, smart phones, social media and the Internet with the slogan ‘’WE are media!’’.

Everyone agreed to protest in a peaceful way from the first day. The protesters tried to give out flowers, read passages from powerful books loudly, share food and water, and give hugs. They wanted to avoid violence but it was impossible. One guy stuck his hands deep in his pockets and stood silently for hours in the square. Even though he was just standing the police pushed him over. They couldn’t tolerate seeing a man who was simply standing.

After months the government gave up building the shopping center, but this didn’t resolve the main issues. It was a big disappointment for many people because the powers structure stayed the same and the media was still biased while business as usual continued. Nonetheless, the people of Turkey had stopped ignoring the fascism of the government and changed their minds. Defraudation, discrimination for marginalized people, putting Alevis, atheists and students on the spot had become part of the culture. Berkin Elvan, a fourteen year old boy who was going to buy bread for his family found himself on the wrong side of the protest and was gunned down.

His name has became another name on a wall in memory of all the injustice occurring. The problems haven’t stopped. Secret tapes of president Erdogan have been released. When Turkey prepared for the election, the revolution in Ukraine inspired the youth of the country. I think that revolution is not impossible but will not be easy either! This is more than a personal hope. This is all in hopes of waking a generation to say “Stop” to all old fashioned mindsets, rules, laws, and political techniques. This incites the question, “If I am smarter, more open minded, more well-educated, more intelligent than the politicians, then how can they manage my rights?” This practically screams out, “We don’t need borders, visas, stupid papers, ugly buildings, dirty air, artificial food, liar media, sexist beliefs, secret plans, war for more money, education for brain washing, taxes for the powerful, low living standards, gray cities, awful public transportation and health systems! We need trees, music, good books, sharing, love and understanding!” We understand that there is no problem with sexual, ethnic or religious differences — the problem is where the power is placed.

What about the art covered walls in the streets? They painted them over in gray — the government’s favorite color. They are not fond of the idea of seeing art covered walls again, but we must still show our colorful life-styles, otherwise they will think we have turned gray, too.

After almost one year, Erdogan who had a Twitter account with 4.17 million followers, became outraged and called all social media, “the worst menace to society,” and banned Twitter just before the election. Within hours, hashtags including #TwitterisblockedinTurkey and #DictatorErdogan were trending worldwide. Erdogan’s Development Party (AKP), received 43 per cent of the overall vote from the last election. Many people reported that votes were stolen on social media. This scandal reminded us of Emma Goldman’s quote; “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.” So if we can’t change anything by voting, we should realize that now is the time to stand up and make change happen!