Author: 8420a707a8099321768f84ad8b407c7c

Slingshot is an independent radical newspaper published in Berkeley since 1988.
Slingshot isn’t like other papers. In the mainstream press, you’ll find glossy articles about things that already make perfect sense. They feature fake controversies that mislead us into believing that we don’t have the power to enact change ourselves, but that we must go through the “proper” channels, like voting, writing letters to the editor, etc, instead of taking to the street. We are not the rulers of the world — we are not in charge — our narrative is broken by the limits of our power. We are engaged in projects that are not yet complete — projects that are being actively blocked by those who have accumulated wealth and use their power to control everyone’s lives while running the planet towards destruction.
We aim to be edgewalkers; working on projects at the edges of capitalism — radical squats, experimental farms, urban guerilla collectives — while striving to extract our psyches from the sway of consumerism. Every few months, we take a break from these projects and come together to create Slingshot. These are the ideas that come to us as we lay awake at night, dreaming of new spaces, reflecting on what we have accomplished.

Our articles can be rough at the edges, the arguments incomplete, but grappling for insight. The arrows of inquiry are shot out into the void, but don’t always reach a target — they burn up in the atmosphere, like so many meteors that never reach the earth.
A number of articles in this issue struggle with identity and privilege in different ways. With each voice, different assumptions are made. Often words of an author become mired in complex tangles that cannot be so readily teased apart. Not every person in the collective nor in our readership identifies with these pieces, but we present them to open a conversation about real positions in our world.
At one point while making this issue, one of us exclaimed “I detest this article!” but as we discussed it, other people saw things in it that were important, and in the end it went into the paper unblocked. We hope that, if you feel strongly, you will join the discussion by sending us an article for the next issue.
***

The centerfold poster was inspired by poetry Sean Swain sent us from his prison cell:
A Handful of Leaves
A prayer for the children of the next Neolithic,
That we leave to them
A field of lilies where a WalMart once stood,
Salmon upstream from the ruins of a dam,
Kudzu vines embracing skeletons of skyscrapers,
Cracked & overgrown ribbons of nameless
super-highways
That you may lay entwined in fields of lilies,
Sustain yourselves on sister salmon,
Climb the vines of kudzu to shelter,
Salt meat on the remains of the highway,
and use this poem for kindling at sundown
So you can spare a handful of leaves
Where the gods write poetry of their own.
***

As the paper went to press, we unpacked a huge truck of 2013 Organizer calendars, which is how we fund this paper. Last spring, we decided to make a version of the Organizer for smart phones since so many people use them instead of paper calendars nowadays. We have a good idea of how we want it to look but we’re still looking for someone to write the code, so if you know how, contact us. We need someone with follow through and the time and skills for a paid gig. Target completion date; Jan. 1, 2013.
***

Slingshot is always looking for new writers, artists, editors, photographers, translators, distributors, etc. to make this paper. If you send something written, please be open to editing.

Editorial decisions are made by the Slingshot Collective but not all the articles reflect the opinions of all collectives members. We welcome debate and constructive criticism.

Thanks to the people who made this: Angie, Ant Claire, Coleen, Dana, Darin, Enola, eggplant, Gnatalie, Jasmine, Jesse, Joey, Jonathon, Julia, Kermit, Lew, Kilroy, Samara, Sandy, Solomon, and all the authors and artists.
Slingshot New Volunteer Meeting

Volunteers interested in getting involved with Slingshot can come to the new volunteer meeting on Sunday December 16, 2012 at 4 p.m. at the Long Haul in Berkeley (see below.)
Article Deadline & Next Issue Date

Submit your articles for issue 112 by January 19, 2013 at 3 p.m.

Volume 1, Number 111, Circulation 20,000
Printed September 28, 2012

Slingshot Newspaper
A publication of Long Haul
Office: 3124 Shattuck Avenue
Mailing: PO Box 3051, Berkeley, CA 94703
Phone (510) 540-0751 • slingshot@tao.ca slingshot.tao.ca • fucking twitter @slingshotnews

Circulation Information
Subscriptions to Slingshot are free to prisoners, low income and anyone in the USA with a Slingshot Organizer, or $1 per issue or back issue. International $3 per issue. Outside the Bay Area we’ll mail you a free stack of copies if you give them out for free. Each envelope is one lb. (9 copies) — let us know how many envelopes you want. In the Bay Area, pick up copies at Long Haul or Bound Together Books in SF.

Slingshot Free stuff
We’ll send you a random assortment of back issues of Slingshot for the cost of postage: Send $3 for 2 lbs. Free if you’re an infoshop or library. Also, our full-color coffee table book about People’s Park is free or by sliding scale donation: send $1 – $25 for a copy. slingshot@tao.ca / Box 3051 Berkeley, 94703.

If last issue on mailing label says #111, contact us or be deleted!

Please note: If you handwrite an address here and drop it into a post box, it will not magically get delivered for free. Instead, it will get returned to Slingshot and the post office will charge us $2.50 per copy.

October 18 – 22
Radical Mycology Convergence – Port Townsend, WA radicalmycologyconvergence.com

October 19 – 21
Mountain Justice Fall Summit Rock Creek, WV www.mountainjustice.org

October 20 • 12 – 6
Southeast Zine Fest – St. Charleston, SC southeastzinefest.com

October 21 • 7:30 pm
Long Haul Oral History project on The Mission Yuppie Eradication Project – 3124 Shattuck, Berkeley thelonghaul.org

October 26 • 6 pm
San Francisco Critical Mass Halloween bike ride – dress up/gather@Justin Herman Plaza

November 9 – 11
Boston Anarchist Bookfair – Simmons College bostonanarchistbookfair.org

November 9 – 11 • 8 pm
East Bay Bike Party – start location TBA eastbaybikeparty.wordpress.com

November 10
Carrboro, NC Anarchist Bookfair carrboroanarchistbookfair.wordpress.com

November 16 – 18
Protest School of the Americas – Ft. Benning, GA soaw.org

November 21 • 7:30 pm
Long Haul Oral History project on The 1999 protests that Shutdown the WTO – 3124 Shattuck, Berkeley thelonghaul.org

November 23
Buy Nothing Day in N. America (Nov. 24 in UK)

December 1 • 11 – 6 pm
East Bay Anarchist Bookfair – Conversations & Books- Oakland, CA eastbayanarchist.com

December 8 • 10 – 5
East Bay Alternative Book & Zine Fest – eastbayalternativebookandzinefest.com

December 8
Humboldt Anarchist Bookfair – near Eureka, CA humboldtgrassroots.com/hg

January 19 • 3 pm
Slingshot article deadline for issue #112

January 20
Application deadline for the Montreal International Anarchist Theatre Festival (May 21/22) anarchistetheatrefestival.com

March 16 – 17
Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair – San Francisco new location 14th & Mission bayareaanarchistbookfair.wordpress.com

Conspiracy to Riot in Furtherance of Terrorism: The Collective Autobiography of the RNC 8

Edited by Leslie James Pickering

Published Oct 2011

Arissa Media Group

www.arissamediagroup.com

In the days leading up the 2008 Republican National Convention, police raided homes, rallies, and public parks, arresting the eight young activists who organized the RNC Welcoming Committee. While there were many groups facilitating protests of the convention, the Welcoming Committee was explicitly anarchist/anti-authoritarian, and operated on a leaderless model. After their arrest, the organizers were charged under the Minnesota Patriot Act with “conspiracy to riot in the second degree furtherance of terrorism.” Since then, many of us have rallied in support of the RNC 8. But who are these eight extraordinary revolutionaries? And what can they teach us?

This book chronicles the lives of RNC 8 members in their own words. They tell their stories, recounting formative childhood moments, the development of radical ideals as young adults, and the organization of the Welcoming Committee. They also discuss their experiences of other actions, adventures traveling the country, and dealing with informants. An great book for anyone involved with activism, providing inspiration and useful internal critique. (samara)

Node Padjomo – Summer 2011

Po Box 2623

Bellingham WA. 98227-2632

This year was declared “The Revenge of Print” by some and if you want to catch a whiff of it you can check this shit out. Though this one doesn’t focus on zines entirely so much as it covers Tape Trades, Mail Art and other resources. So really it might be construed as a splinter group out to get you to use the post office before it goes the way of video stores. I especially appreciate how it is hand made with trippy layouts, and how it comes out methodically three times a year. Next deadline is November 15th. And if you want to further investigate zines check out your local library, or find Zine World, Xeography Debt or Maximum Rock & Roll. (egg)

DAYGLOAYHOLE, Issue #1

benpassmore.blogspot.com

benPassmore@rocketmail.com

When a porning oogle spills beer on his laptop, the computer morphs into an evil overlord that blows up half the world and enslaves most survivors. Out from the rubble marches a lone hero by the name of No Limitz: a katana-totting gutterpunk with a badass dog and his name tattooed to his forehead. No Limitz doesn’t give a shit about saving the world–just about filling his belly–and perhaps it is his very lack of ideology that makes him immune to the evil computer’s powers of enslavement. As No Limitz wanders the disseminated landscape in search of grub, he is forced to fight his way through roving bands of bloodthirsty cops, mutant scarbo ‘rough bears, and various minions of the digital overlord. Created by the illustrator of the Raging Pelican, every page of this comic is statured with traveler jokes and hilarious details, inviting the reader to slow down and take it all in. I laughed my ass off at least five times while reading the fifteen pages–and I rarely laugh when I read. If you liked Brandon Graham’s Multiple Warheads, you’ll royally dig DAYGLOAYHOLE. (samara)

Patriot Acts: Narratives of Post-9/11 Injustice

Compiled & Edited by Alia Malek

Published Sept 2011

McSweeney’s, Voice of Witness Series

voiceofwitness.org

Meet Adama, a sixteen-year-old Muslim American who was seized from her home by the FBI on suspicion of being a suicide bomber. And Nick, a senior at Ponoma College who was arrested when he tried to board a plane with English–Arabic flashcards in his pocket. And Rana, a Sikh man whose brother was gunned down outside a gas station in the first reported hate murder after 9/11.

Released on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, Patriot Acts is the latest installment of McSweeney’s Voice of Witness series. It contains the first-person accounts of eighteen people who have been subject to human and civil rights abuses in the wake of 9/11, from discrimination to torture to FBI surveillance.

Written simply and clearly, this book is highly accessible and deeply moving. Don’t be put off by the heavy subject matter: in spite of so much abuse and injustice, the narrators are brimming with hope. If you are having trouble explaining why you are radical to your liberal friends and family members, hand them this book. (samara)

VEGAN: Ethics and Nutrition

C_best82@yahoo.com

Strike up the band! The movement now has another tract of front line animal rights ideas to join the small army of propaganda that already exists. This recent document though seems to directly respond to the spate of anti-vegan backlash—mostly from such books as the Omnivore’s Dilemma and The Vegetarian Myth. The arguments seem clear-headed and at times joyfully snotty. I mean really why take such assholes as Michael Pollan seriously?—unless he’s in conversation with an uptight vegan purist. Thankfully this zine isn’t a put off. Though much of the knowledge is from books and internet factoids there is an underlying love for animals motivating this one. There are lots of pictures to warm you up with. The facts are stated and people can join the revolution and are not made to feel less if they don’t. (egg)

WARMER

aidankoch.com

gyunyunyu@hotmail.com

Seattle zinester Aidan Koch splays the gentle fraying of the human spirit in a dreamlike collage of words and line drawings. Faces fade into horrific scribbles, empty word-bubbles erupt from parted lips, chronology unwinds. Unnamed characters sit on porches guzzling two-buck Chuck, stretch out on beaches, and search for warmth in the spaces between gestures and words. An inverted hand motif seems to imply that every action manifests inwardly, as if, perhaps, the real narrator of the zine is some unconscious mind reveling in the lingering imprints of human experience. Fragments of oblique dialogue propel the reader along on this journey: “Some things will never be the same. Bones. And lungs…” This zine spawns more questions than answers as it motions towards those deeper truths for which we have no symbols or pictures. (samara)

About 40 anarchists wearing masks vandalized and disrupted downtown Manila near where the Philippine State of the Nation Address was held July 25. Anarchists acting without leaders were small in numbers in comparison to around 8000 authoritarian-leftist protesters, some of whom got food or money to rally in a permitted zone — wishing for their demands in conjunction with corporate media and state institutions who fuck up the lives of millions of people in the archipelago. These are everyday reflected in the unprecedented growth of poverty, ecological destruction, homelessness, unemployment, hunger and other miserable conditions most of the inhabitants of the country endure.

Massive numbers of riot cops with batons and shields faced the authoritarian left in a typical-protest ritual. Every time is another rallying cry of pacifism, persuading the masses to another form of government, wishing it will happen one day. Of course, they could not get near the Hall of Congress at the back of Sandiganbayan (office of the Ombudsman), where the president (Benigno Aquino III) proudly addressed his accomplishments. The state and the left know each other well. Each of them is a ruling and authoritarian form. They are a bunch of leftist politicians building their nests in congressional bodies making laws and profit at the expense of the obedient citizen.

When the anarchist demo began, we reclaimed the streets and disrupted the normal flow of traffic. It was an unexpected moment for most of the authorities. As the cops watched the permitted zone to control the leftist protestors, they were shocked when they saw anarchists marching against the flow of the permitted march. Our main banner read “There is no change in continued reform. Anarchist revolution is the solution. Destroy hierarchy. Defend ecology. End poverty.”

We were loud even without a megaphone with our screams, drums and brave passion. We handed out leaflets and threw paint bombs at buses covered with advertising. We covered the permit zone with graffiti, stickers and circle A symbols directed against the state and capitalist oppression. In front of UCPB bank we set off firecrackers and protested.

Fighting the political death machine by disrupting the State of the Nation Address was a new tactic for us–the local version of disrupting the WTO, JPEPA, ASEAN, APEC and other capitalist trade talks, which are ruining the world and dooming its inhabitants to annihilation and destruction.

It was war from our hearts. It was spontaneity. There were no arrests.

People’s Park

As construction continues on a massive 620-unit University of California (UC) dormitory across from Berkeley’s People’s Park, the whirlwind of controversy that has hovered over the Park since its’ inception got stirred up again in August by the Telegraph Business Improvement and Development Association (TBID). They released a letter calling the park “a detriment to both the business and general community” and claiming the park is “a conduit for criminal activity and [ ] an unsafe, unpleasant place to visit.”

The letter asks UC to use their police force to hassle activists and “homeless” people who use the park and to prohibit free food sharing at the park. It called for a total redevelopment of the park using guidelines laid out by a corporate landscape architect’s design study, commissioned by UC at great expense 4 years ago and immediately relegated to the waste bin by most Berkeley residents. It calls for the destruction of improvements constructed by volunteers and installation of security cameras and lighting. The ultimate goal: gentrification of the park and elimination of non-consumers.

People’s Park in Berkeley has been contested ground since it was joyfully and cooperatively constructed — without permission — on a vacant lot owned by the University of California (UC) in 1969. Thousands of freaks and regular people worked to make an ugly and neglected lot beautiful — an act of creation, hope and reverence for the land and the beings who use it and a rejection of the private property system that values profit over use. After several weeks of construction, the university brought in police to crush the park, leading to rioting, one death and 150 wounded when police fired live ammunition into crowds. Governor Reagan ordered the National Guard to occupy Berkeley. Two years later, rioters destroyed a fence around the site and it was reclaimed as a park.

Since then, the university has always claimed to legally own the land on which the park sits, but many Berkeley residents reject this claim as covered in blood and thus void. Over the years, Berkeley people have practiced “user development” of the park — park users have constructed gardens, a free speech stage, free clothing boxes, bulletin boards, benches and tables, and users try to maintain the park. User development has always been frustrated by the University, which has repeatedly sent in police to tear out improvements. In a dense student neighborhood near campus, the park is one of the few pieces of ground where you don’t have to spend money — open to everyone regardless of wealth or social status. East Bay Food Not Bombs has served in the park five days a week for 20 years, and has become as much a fixture of the culture of Telegraph Avenue as any of the for-profit businesses that operate there.

The TBID letter caused a backlash and was embarrassing to some merchants — perhaps because it expressed some of their secret thoughts too openly. Park activist @RT thinks the letter controversy can be a useful kick in the pants for complacent Berkeley radicals who’ve forgotten about the park:

“After failing to pass an ordinance in the Berkeley City Council last winter prohibiting sitting or lying on the sidewalk (mainly spearheaded by TBID), this most recent failure of the Berkeley bourgeoisie to bully the least fortunate is heartening in several ways. For instance, after a many decade hiatus, People’s Park Volunteer Activist Committee is now holding regular meetings at the Grassroots House, 2022 Blake St., on alternate Thursdays at 7pm. We are also doing work parties in the park on alternate Sunday afternoons.”

He continues: “Every bit of volunteer effort that you invest in People’s Park is ultimately invested in alternatives to capitalism. Because of this, People’s Park in many ways defines Berkeley, gives it personality, uniqueness, vibrancy, and funk (not to mention honesty — a necessary ingredient of free speech.) If People’s Park was an anomaly at its’ inception, it is even more so in the midst of what is now an ultra-corporate urban environment. The fact that it is still there is an utter miracle, and a testament to the tenacity of this community of resistance. This tenacity, and sheer stubborn resistance is the reason why we will never go to a bank to get some money so we could landscape that place neat as a pin.”

@RT adds: “Unfortunately, another defining factor of People’s Park has been disfunctionality, perhaps almost the definition of it . . . and the only thing that can make it work is WORK. We really need to dedicate ourselves to that place if we are going to have a useful organizational structure in place in which to facilitate user-development. This is the time to invest ourselves as anarchist organizers in creating a truly democratic, consensus-based non-profit organization that promotes volunteer activism in People’s Park, now and for the future.”

In another development, anarchists have just begun a weekly anarchist liberated space / assembly every Sunday at noon inspired by the spaces occupied by anarchists in Greece. For info check berkeley.anarchyplanet.org/