Author: Slingshot Collective

The Energy Biosciences Institute (or EBI) was created by the largest deal in US (and possibly world) history between a corporation and a university. In February 2007 The University of California and BP (formerly British Petroleum) announced that BP would commit $500 million to UC Berkeley, the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in order to establish a center for biotechnology research, development and deployment for energy production. The main focus of the research center will be “next-generation biofuels”, which are being touted as the solution to global warming, but will also include research on biological technologies that will increase fossil fuel extraction.

The EBI will introduce onto the Berkeley campus a large, sealed-off, private research facility — a base for fifty BP employees to work closely with university researchers who are looking to develop bio-technologies with the most money-making potential. BP will get first pick of any new technologies and it will also decide what gets researched, as it has an equal say with all of the academic partners combined.

When people got wind of the deal, opposition quickly mounted, and the University went on the defensive. A protest with a fake “oil spill” (really molasses) attracted attention, and students organized teach-ins where professors spoke about the problems with the project. Faculty members denounced the deal in public and EBI opponents quickly won the battle of public perception. Chancellor Birgeneau switched from talking about “this generation’s moon shot” to saying that the EBI wasn’t all that big, or that groundbreaking, really. The deal was reported in the media as “controversial” and as a question of how much influence big corporations should have in public universities, rather than as a chance for idealistic scientists to do good for the environment.

The BP/Berkeley contract was signed in November 2007, but opposition continues, particularly to the construction of ten buildings that Lawrence Berkeley Labs plans to build in the hills above the Berkeley campus over the next decade. Meanwhile, the university has continued entering into similar deals, such as the Joint Biosciences Energy Institute (funded by $125 million from the Department of Energy, best known for managing the nation’s nuclear arsenal), and a $10 million “sustainable research” deal with Dow Chemical, who so far has brought us napalm, Agent Orange, and the Bhopal chemical disaster of 1984.

Next-generation Biofuels?

Most folks these days know about biodiesel and ethanol, two proposed plant-based substitutes for gasoline. The theory is that they are carbon-neutral fuels, since plants are part of the global carbon cycle the carbon released when they burn was taken up by the plant from the atmosphere, so no net carbon is released. But remember: these are plants; they have to grow somewhere. Biodiesel sold in Europe was recently calculated to be responsible for ten times more carbon than gasoline, since Indonesian rainforest is being razed to plant oil palms to meet the increased demand. This illustrates a fundamental problem with any plant-based fuel: planting fuel crops will compete with other uses of the land, reducing the amount of land for native habitat and for food. By any estimate, the amount of land needed to replace fossil fuel consumption with a plant-based fuel would be huge, putting first-world consumption in direct competition with third-world bellies and ecosystems.

Already the increased demand for biofuels is causing increased food prices (mostly due to the use of corn for ethanol) around the world and intense deforestation in Brasil (for sugar cane), Indonesia (for oil palm), and other places.

The proposed solution to all these problems is the promised “next-generation biofuels”, which are still far enough out of reach that all kinds of wonderful things can be said about them. Foremost is the idea of ”cellulosic ethanol”, which will be made by genetically engineered microbes out of the inedible portions of plants, supposedly removing the pressure on the world’s food supply. Even if the technology comes to fruition, only the most starry-eyed claim that we’ll be able to keep consuming as much energy as we currently do without continuing global ecological disaster.

However, this is precisely what UC Berkeley researchers will be working on, under the direction of BP, a technological “solution” that trivializes the social and ecological realities of the situation. The researchers will have high-profile, high-budget lifestyles working to “save the world”, BP will get to greenwash its image, and possibly glean very lucrative patents, and the rest of us get no voice and business as usual, while support for research into real alternatives, like sustainable agriculture and transportation, dries up.

Technological Solutions

The research-industrial complex in general, and UC Berkeley specifically, has a long history of providing technological solutions to major world problems. The best-known example was supposed to end all wars: the nuclear bomb. Pushers of the EBI strove to highlight this connection, drawing parallels between the Manhattan project and future research at the EBI.

Today’s biofuel boom is a reaction to one specific crisis that modern, industrialized society is facing: global warming. Industrialized biofuels are one proposed way to get around that particular crisis, but as they are envisioned, even if they help reduce carbon emissions, they will likely worsen many of the other problems associated with industrialized agriculture: global economic inequality, deforestation, topsoil depletion, soil salinization, loss of biodiversity, and water pollution. Industrialized biofuels will not threaten the profits of agroindustry, the auto industry… or of BP, if they control the technology.

Throwing our weight and resources at this particular capital-intensive solution diverts attention and funding from other solutions that address the root causes of the issue, like decreasing consumption and localizing agriculture. BP is not interested in funding research that will allow people to drive less, nor will technology that allows small farming communities to become energy-independent allow them to continue to profit.

Climate Justice

The BP/Berkeley partnership represents a clear choice of one vision of the planet’s future – a global corporate consumer car-culture for the lucky and a miserable life of toil for the rest – as opposed to an egalitarian, democratically sustainable alternative future. As the changing climate transforms from a fringe issue to a global economic crisis and corporations and governments scramble to seize control of the new energy economy, climate justice movements are sprouting around the world. Landless peasants organizing against slave labor on sugar-cane plantations that produce Brazilian ethanol, South Africans fighting to keep communal land from being taken for biofuel production, and Brits sitting-in to stop a new runway at Heathrow airport are all part of the same movement: it is now clear that while the climate crisis is an environmental issue, what we do about it is a global justice issue. Like the Dineh (Navajo), Brazilians, South Africans and others, the people in Berkeley who have organized against the EBI are fighting to prevent global corporate energy projects from destroying their community. It is our responsibility and a never-to-be-repeated opportunity to create a sustainable and just new world. Corporations that have spent the last century promoting internal combustion, plotting the overthrow of foreign countries, and investing in propaganda to discredit climate change research can only stand in our way.

As I write this, activists are sitting in trees at the University of California, Santa Cruz. UCSC has tried to quell the growing protest by arresting people who would support the tree-sit and filing a lawsuit, a la UC Berkeley. They have even gone so far as to pepper-spray a group of students and community members gathered at the base. But the people in the trees remain. The trees and adjoining parking lot are slated to become the site of UCSC’s new Biomedical Sciences Facility — only the first project in the 2005 Long Range Development Plan (LRDP), which would replace 120 acres of forested land with students housing, recreational facilities, roads and research facilities.

The University of California, Santa Cruz, is not your typical UC campus. Unlike UC Berkeley or UCLA, which are outgrowths of suburban sprawl surrounded by university-themed shopping centers, UCSC occupies a space made of meadows, chaparral, mixed evergreen and redwood forests on a mountain above the city of Santa Cruz. Only about a third of the campus land is built upon. The north part of campus is undeveloped, with an impressive array of forest ecosystems crisscrossed by hiking trails and dirt roads. Over 500 distinct plant species and 500 species of mushrooms have been identified within campus boundaries. Furthermore, UCSC is surrounded by protected State and City park lands: Wilder/Grey Whale Ranch State Park, Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park and the Pogonip city preserve. Upper Campus is an important wildlife corridor between these parks, and contains the headwaters of three important watersheds that each pass through downstream wildlife preserves before draining into the Monterey Bay.

The LRDP maps out a rapid expansion of campus facilities over the next 13 years to accommodate up to 4,500 new full-time students. It plans new buildings and roads on 120 acres of currently forested land and promises to degrade the quality of life in Santa Cruz at large, a community which is already completely “built out” and experiencing traffic congestion, water shortages and unaffordable housing costs.

The ecological and academic consequences of the trajectory set by the LRDP will be far-reaching. One must ask, what is pushing these plans forward, in the midst of a general lack of funding for existing programs? UCSC is under pressure to give up its counter-cultural, liberal arts reputation and become an impersonal research institution with tall, glassy laboratories that can attract private funding and prestigious faculty. The ecosystems that have always been so vital to both the campus and surrounding community are now appreciated only for the “green aesthetic” that they lend to UCSC’s public image.

In the early hours of November 7th, people began hoisting climb lines and wooden platforms into three clusters of redwood trees. By 11 am that morning, one person had been arrested and three people were in redwood trees surrounded by UC police. The tree-sitters had been without food and water all night and one sitter, whose platform had been confiscated before it could be raised, sat in a redwood tree in only his climbing harness. Elsewhere on campus, a planned rally in opposition to the LRDP was underway. Hundreds of students listened to speakers elucidating the numerous problems with UCSC’s expansion plans. In a burst of energy, the rally morphed into a march, led by Santa Cruz’s own Trash Orchestra, to deliver supplies to the tree-sitters.

Hundreds of supporters arrived at the tree-sit on Science Hill armed with food and water. The first group of people to break police lines with bags of food were tackled to the ground by police and arrested, additional waves were met with pepper-spray and batons, but the crowd was not deterred. In a burst of success, they pushed the police line back and surrounded one of the tree clusters. Cheers went out as food and water began going up. The police seemed powerless in the face of the determined mass of people and eventually left, much to the surprise of the crowd.

Opposition to the expansion has been fomenting from all quarters of Santa Cruz society since the University began the planning process three years ago. The comment section of the LRDP’s Environmental Impact Report is flooded with criticisms and concerns, citing the inaccuracy of impact analysis and the inadequacy of proposed mitigations. The city, county and community organizations have filed dozens of lawsuits, after having their concerns ignored by the UC, which holds the authority of a state agency yet behaves in many ways as a private corporation. In August of this year, a judge ruled that the university’s EIR did not adequately account for housing, traffic and water impacts. This lawsuit is currently stalled in attempts at out of court negotiations. The final outcome of these court cases is anyone’s guess, and the University is showing no intention of altering its plans. Before giving their final approval to the LRDP, in spite of the criticisms and exhortations of city officials and local residents, the only comment from the Regents — the board that governs the entire University of California system — was to ask – why only 4,500 new students?

On campus, little had been said about the LRDP since its final approval in 2006. But since November 7th, forums and discussions have being held, educating students and generating ideas that were never touched upon during the original planning process. Professors discuss the issues in their classes, anti-LRDP graffiti abounds and the administration has devoted considerable resources to trying to repair their image after the police violence of November 7th.

At UC Berkeley, tree-sitters are celebrating a year spent in the trees, and in light of UCSC’s reluctance to respond to criticism the UCSC tree-sitters are prepared for a long-term campaign that may take on many different forms before the expansion plans are called off. But the forest of UCSC is worth the effort and energy that will be required. The tree-sitters recognize their struggle in the larger context of defending the little remaining wild areas that exist and opposing the profit-driven agenda that the LRDP represents.

For more information, please visit http://lrdpresistance.org/

Book Review: Subcommander Marcos: The Man and the Mask ($24.95 Duke, 2007), By Nick Henck, 499 pp.

The Zapatistas are widely credited with launching the anti- globalization movement on New Year’s day 1994, the first day the North American Free Trade Agreement came into effect. What is less known is that in doing so the Zapatistas created a new model that has made taking up arms compatible with simultaneously taking up the cause of grassroots democracy, a paradoxical phenomenon vividly illustrated by Nick Henck in his fascinating new book Subcommander Marcos: The Man and the Mask.

When I interviewed Subcommander Marcos and reported for CNN on the uprising on that day in San Cristobal de las Casas, it appeared as if they had emerged overnight, a spontaneous rupture in the supposed political calm of Mexico and the emerging web of a restructured global system. Nothing could be further from the historical record, a record Hick Henck, associate professor of law at Keio University in Japan, recounts and examines with exhaustive thoroughness and insight. The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN or Zapatista) uprising was no spontaneous rebellion, but a model of revolutionary armed struggle refashioned by local indigenous communities facing the terror of local violent greedy landholders and corrupt local and state officials.

While never having met Marcos, Henck’s biography carefully explores countless published interviews, communiques, media reports, web postings, and the two other existing published books about Marcos. Although a biography, Henck’s focus is informed by his passion to understand the movement of Zapatismo from the perspective of the man who has become a charismatic, even sexy, icon of the rebellion. Subcommander Marcos makes a convincing case that Zapatismo transformed not only the global movement challenging to “neo- liberalism” and globalization but how the movement was organized.

Despite preparing for guerrilla warfare in the jungles and countryside for 10 long years, after a mere 12 days of conflict in 1994 the Zapatistas agilely transformed themselves from an “army of liberation” into a facilitator of mass mobilization of what they call “civil society”. That they were eventually successful in achieving significant progress towards three major objectives in less than a decade has remained the backstory to coverage about the enigmatic and secretive masked pipe brandishing icon Subcommander Marcos. The Zapatista uprising put indigenous issues center-stage with the Mexican media and public for the first time, with an indigenous rights bill being debated in both chambers of the Mexican Congress. This debate led to the passage of a watered down version of the San Andres Accords between the Zapatistas, its civil society allies and the government as a constitutional amendment. Although it is impressive that the government would amend the constitution in response to the Zapatista movement, the amendment has not lived up to claims that it expanded the rights of Mexico’s indigenous peoples. The amendment also did not reverse NAFTA’s rescinding of Article 27 of the constitution, which prohibited the privatization of communal ejido land, and some indigenous groups even consider it to be unconstitutional. Lastly, the Zapatistas were one of the primary forces that contributed to the end of the PRI’s seven decades of one party rule.

It appears that for Henck the transformation of the Zapatistas into Zapatismo is of much greater significance than either the story of the former professor turned revolutionary cell leader Subcommander Marcos or their ability to change government policy and provoke a political realignment. After a few years of being ignored in the jungles the handful of FLN (Forces of National Liberation or Fuerzas Liberacion Nacional) members who composed the cell in Chiapas found the locals were sympathetic to calls to pick up arms in self-defense against the theft of their lands by rancher death squads. But the indigenous only really responded to their calls to organize and arm themselves when Marcos and his compatriots realized that “in order to survive we had to translate ourselves using a different code…this language constructed itself from the bottom upwards.” (p. 94)

This was no abstract rhetorical exercise but took on tangible dimensions for those who joined, especially among women. As Henck so fascinatingly details, once local young indigenous women discovered that joining the Zapatistas protected them from being raped and forced marriages, they began to join in droves. (p. 100-101) And as the Zapatistas gained a few allies in assorted villages those allies used their family relationships and status in their communities to literally open the tap to a rush of recruits.

As Marcos so deftly recognized, after years of futile effort the number of recruits exploded from only a few dozen members to thousands in just a matter of a few months when they finally surrendered to the needs of the local communities and “decided it would be better to do what they said.” (p. 135)

Whether this sudden change in fortunes for the EZLN was catalyzed by Marcos’s own innate skill of organizing or something that was thrust upon him from below is less important than Marcos’s own flexibility in recognizing the need to break with his own inflexible model of insurgent politics. Eventually, the EZLN formally broke off from the increasingly irrelevant and inactive FLN.

The shift from a military to political strategy resulted in a shift in the man we know as Marcos. As Henck explains, “Marcos abandoned his own personal dreams of becoming a revolutionary guerrilla hero and, reacting to the general public’s response to the uprising, began to explore an alternative role for both himself and the movement. He and the EZLN had been gearing themselves for a decade toward a predominantly military role. Now, almost overnight, they opted instead for a predominantly political one. Few politicians and military men have abandoned so rapidly a course of action pursued so intensely, for so long, at such a high personal cost to adapt, revise, and reject their strategies when faced with the dawning realization that they were obsolete.” (p. 224)

This internal shift in Marcos’s thinking makes Henck’s book invaluable less as a biography than as a case study of the emergence and evolution of a new political model, one in which a marginalized top down political organization is reformulated by those it aspires to lead to being led by them. In this process of self-organization from below the movement’s objectives become indistinguishable from the model they choose to organize themselves. As a result the EZLN transformed itself from vanguard to facilitator of a horizontal political project of movement building and decentralizing and de- evolving power to local autonomous communities.

Soon after the ending of actual fighting, the EZLN became the framework for building a national movement of movements to challenge the neo-conservative restructuring forced upon Mexico by the PRI and NAFTA. The EZLN and its network of allies soon began organizing frequent Encuentros (or “encounters”) and nationwide tours to accompany numerous rounds of negotiations with the government. These efforts were facilitated by the charismatic Marcos becoming an irresistible media spectacle that could at once attract vast national and international media coverage and attention and facilitate a bridge across the diversity of interests among its allies in civil society.

Under the emblem of Subcommander Marcos, the EZLN gave birth to a new radical democracy that at once built a national movement to challenge the global capitalist agenda while linking up to the movement as a support network to defend its project of de-evolving political power to local autonomous cooperatively run villages.

Ever able to read political forces of change and adapt, Marcos early on recognized the shift taking place: “What other guerrilla force has agreed to si
t down and dialogue only fifty days after having taken up arms? What other guerrilla force has appealed, not to the proletariat as the historical vanguard, but to the civic society that struggles for democracy? What other guerrilla force has stepped aside in order not to interfere in the electoral process? What other guerrilla force has convened a national democratic movement, civic and peaceful, so that armed struggle becomes useless? What other guerrilla force asks its bases of support about what it should do before doing it? What other guerrilla force has struggled to achieve a democratic space and not take power? What other guerrilla force has relied more on words than bullets?” (p. 235)

The answers to these questions are less important than the fact that they were being asked by the nominal leader of an armed guerilla “army of national liberation.” Merely asking these questions underlined a gradual shift of autonomous politics from the margins to the center of the methodology and strategies of the global resistance, anti-war, social justice and environmental movements that have blossomed over the past 13 years. Self-organized, de- centralized, bottom up, and horizontally organized movements, networks, affinity groups and campaigns have achieved a new level of respect, legitimacy and power since the emergence of Zapatismo. These models are exemplified by the higher profile anti-WTO/IMF/World Bank and environmental justice movements, the massive growth of the World Social Forum and less obviously the indie music, microcinema and freecycling movements to name just a few. We have Zapatismo to thank for the re-emergence of what some now call “horizontalism” since 1994.

Throughout Henck’s Subcommander Marcos its is hard to avoid asking the inevitable question of “why a biography?.” Despite all the glittering stardom for Marcos, his mask and pipe, the success of Zapatista movement is about far more than the man behind the mask. Even as he was “outted” as former UAM professor Rafael Guillén, his own identity no longer mattered. Like the similarly masked hero “V” in the film “V for Vendetta”, Marcos had become the anonymous face of those who dreamed of justice and flirted with the forbidden thoughts of escaping to the jungles and picking up a gun to get it. In Mexico at least, where millions answered his calls to mobilize against military repression, it was a dream shared by too many for either the PRI (the Institutional Revolutionary Party or Partido Revolucionario Institucional) or its successor the PAN (the National Action Party or Partido Acción Nacional) or needless to say the Zapatista’s “ally” the PRD (the Party of the Democratic Revolution or Partido de la Revolución Democrática) as well to ignore. As Henck generously concludes, “Marcos’s charisma served a higher cause than his own ego; it elevated the Zapatista struggle from a localized indigenous uprising to an internationally recognized symbol of resistance to neo- liberalism.” (p. 239)

If there is one failing in Henck’s biography is it exactly how Marcos was able to translate the hopes and aspirations of the indigenous led Zapatistas into an effective digital media campaign at the dawn of the internet age. Henck provides us with little to envision how Marcos’s skillful use of the internet and relationships to Mexican and international celebrities and elites could have possibly emanated from the remote EZLN jungle camps and low tech impoverished indigenous villages. But then again, that could be because it is a safely guarded secret tactic held closely to the chests of the Zapatistas. Despite the obvious need for secrecy, my insatiable craving to know how the EZLN not only crafted their message but actually got it into the right hands to build the national and international recognition and support that repeatedly halted the onslaught of the Mexican military and brought them back to the negotiating table has not been satisfied. For that one must turn elsewhere such as the writings of theorist Harry Cleaver for insights into the workings of the Zapatismo media machine.

For all my biases as the reportedly first journalist to break the story of the Zapatista’s new year’s uprising for the English language media , Henck’s Subcommander Marcos is less a biography than an enlightening case study of how one of the possibly most influential political movements of the 21th century was born, faultered and was then rejuvenated by those it sought to lead. Subcommander Marcos convincingly demonstrates that Zapatismo has created a new model in which taking up arms may finally no longer be incompatible with simultaneously taking up the cause of autonomy and democracy. This book has arrived just in time, when the anti-globalization movement appears to have run out of steam precisely because it has failed to provide a visionary model of the future in the present.

Robert Ovetz, PhD is an adjunct instructor of political science at College of Marin and of sociology at Cañada College in California. Write him at rfovetz@riseup.net

Tanya Ciszewski, an early Slingshot collective member from the 1980s, animal rights activist and sensitive, compassionate person, died October 18. She was 48.

I don’t know much about Tanya’s life before I met her around the time Slingshot started publishing in 1988. She was finishing up her undergraduate degree at Berkeley and taking a good, long time to do it. She and I, along with Ian and K, became best friends within the activist scene at Berkeley. We all worked on Slingshot — writing articles, doing layout, handing out papers, and going to meetings. The four of us were always together during those years. We were part of an affinity group we joking called “people with jobs” because of the critics at protests who would yell “why don’t you get a job?” We all had jobs. I can’t remember precisely which actions Tanya and I went to jail for in those days because the emphasis was on the group and the action. There was a lot of hugging, a lot of talking and laughing and a great sense of engagement.

It is hard to pick out which articles Tanya wrote for Slingshot because no one signed most of the articles in those days — not even with pseudonyms. She was focused on animal rights — she was vegan and wore no leather. She was amazingly compassionate towards everyone and wouldn’t preach at you or act self-righteous. When Slingshot was publishing its first Disorientation issue, she ended up siding with a troubled individual who was disrupting the meetings because she always sided with the underdog, even if they were a pain in the ass. Tanya would refuse to kill ants if they were in her kitchen or mosquitoes if they were flying around her in the woods.

In many ways, Tanya was too sensitive and compassionate for this harsh, modern, capitalist world. She was often a frustrating friend because she would spend her rent money taking a stray cat to the vet. I would dread that we would meet a sick animal when I hung out with her because she was so aware of pain around her — physical or emotional, human or animal — that she couldn’t walk past: she would stop what she was doing to help. Tanya could be extremely stubborn and fierce. She mostly lived in poverty because she refused to work jobs that contributed to oppression in any way. That meant she mostly worked low-paying caretaking jobs. Tanya felt most comfortable caring for animals and people who needed help: sick people, the elderly and children.

One of her finest activist moments was when she and a group of animal rights activists occupied a 140 foot tall construction crane that was building the Northwest Animal Facility at UC Berkeley — an underground animal research lab where animal experimentation could be carried out completely hidden from animal rights advocates. She and the others climbed the massive crane in the middle of the night with backpacks of food and water, barricading the trap door at the top so they couldn’t be arrested or removed. Then they unfurled a banner and sat atop the crane, demanding an end to construction. They lasted a week atop the crane before they ran out of supplies and surrendered to police. A ground support crew gathered across Oxford street near Hearst with loud speakers and signs and you could drop by to say hi to Tanya over the loudspeaker. I’m pretty sure Tanya was afraid of heights. Her passion and commitment to ending suffering gave her super-human courage and determination in that action and at many other protests and actions. Tanya was generally mellow but she could be fierce when it came to fighting for animals or the oppressed.

We didn’t know it at the time, but Tanya was pregnant while she occupied the crane. She had a home birth on December 7, 1989. Aside from her activism, my main impression of Tanya is her incredible devotion to her daughter Leila who she raised as a single parent. Tanya never had money and struggled heroically to give Leila an amazing, alternative, loving upbringing. Leila started college at UC Santa Cruz just a few weeks before her mother’s death.

Everyone who knew Tanya will miss her sensitive, caring presence. We write obituaries to say goodbye to those we love, but also to share clues we’ve learned from others about what is meaningful in life. Tanya lived her life caring deeply about other people, animals and the earth and putting her body on the line to fight for what mattered. She didn’t let the American empire distract her with money or power, but instead concentrated on relationships and life.

On November 15, 2007, generations of peace activists met at the San Jose Public Library to commemorate the fifty years of the San Jose Peace Center. Founding members Alice Cox, Barby Ulmer, and former director Kathy Lynch gave presentations about their involvement with the Peace Center.

, The cold war, fallout from nuclear tests, and Mutually Assured Destruction gave little comfort to the pacifist George Collins. He started distributing flyers calling for nuclear disarmament in downtown San Jose. A group meeting at his house decided to make efforts to end war and educate the public by opening a Peace Center and starting publication of a newsletter, the Peace Times. The San Jose Peace Center opened its doors in 1957.

The fifty years of the Peace Center saw rapid changes in San Jose and rural Santa Clara County. One man remembered riding his bike around downtown and being yelled at by yokels coming into town on the weekends from the surrounding farms and orchards looking for trouble. These days he rides his bike unaccosted by tan musclebound hayseeds. The aerospace industries and electronics industries at the core of the military industrial complex planted themselves in Santa Clara County in the 1960s and orchards were bulldozed to make way for suburban tract housing. The Peace Center moved through many different rented offices as well before finding a permanent home.

Alice Cox, one of the founding members of the Peace Center, was first involved in protesting the hydrogen bomb detonations at the Nevada Test Site and the development of nuclear weapons at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. These tests spread radioactive fallout across the Southwest. She participated in the drive to collect children’s teeth for radioactive isotope Strontium-90, proving mothers’ milk in the West had been affected by fallout from the tests. Many members remembered contributing their babys’ teeth to the drive. The Peace Times published Dr. Spock’s concerns about the effects of fallout on infants. Her husband Bill Cox opened a print shop in San Jose and printed the Peace Times as well as the thousands of leaflets and posters for social causes.

As a young woman in Nuremburg, Germany, the importance of disobeying illegal orders was drilled into Lisa Kalvelage by the American Consul during her immigration interview. In the United States, she found herself in a country committing criminal acts of aggression. She committed her energies to the peace movement. With three other housewives she blockaded a forklift loaded with napalm bound for Vietnam on May 25th, 1966. During her trial for trespassing, Kalvelage argued that the Kellog-Briand Act’s ban on chemical weapons rendered the use of napalm illegal. Her statement against the war was immortalized in the Pete Seeger song “I am Lisa Kalvelage.”

Many Peace Center members remembered participating at the die-in at San Jose State when Dow Chemical brought its recruiters to the university in the winter of 1967. Police panicked and rioted when the demonstrators tossed fake blood at the administration building, bashing heads and spilling the real blood of the crowd.

A spurt of reactionary terrorism in the South Bay struck at the Peace Center offices in 1969. A small pipe bomb smashed the window of their storefront on February 11 and exploded, doing little damage and causing no injuries.

The Peace Center served as a distribution point for over 15,000 flyers for the November1969 Vietnam Moratorium demonstration in San Francisco. The activists distributed flyers at train stations, college campuses, and at factory gates, building a broad resistance to the war.

Founding Peace Center member Barby Ulmer trained with the Central Committee of Conscientious Objectors and converted the Peace Center into a draft counseling center as the war escalated in Vietnam. The hotlines provided many thousands of worried young men with information about resisting the draft.

In the 1980s Peace Center activists worked in solidarity with Nicaraguan Sandinistas and South Africa’s African National Congress. Kathy Lynch, director of the Peace Center from 1980 to 1986, found time to raise her kids in between the consensus meetings dragging on into the night, the non-violent demonstrations, and the day-to-day work of keeping the center open. She organized trips to Nicaragua to witness the destruction caused by the covertly funded contras and the progressive policies of the democratically elected Sandinistas.

The growing tide of the worldwide anti-nuclear movement swept across California in the early 1980s. Many members reminisced about arrests at the Lockheed plant and Lawrence Livermore Labs. Lynch recalled the effort to stop construction of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power reactor. 20,000 people assembled at the construction site of the reactor and 1,960 people were arrested on the grounds in 1981, the largest anti-nuclear demonstration in the U.S.. Lynch was a part of the affinity group San Jose Medflies that landed a small boat on the coast and hiked for two days to get to the construction site..

In 1984 the embarrassed Los Angeles District attorney returned a stolen copy of the Peace Center’s membership lists, a mild reminder of the constant threat of harassment and surveillance. How the L.A.P.D. obtained the membership list was never explained.

In June 1986 the Peace Center purchased a dilapidated former frat house with a leaky roof, finally finding a permanent home after thirty years. Members pitched in to renovate the structure and struggled to pay off the mortgage.While Reagan waged covert wars in Afghanistan and Nicaragua, Richard Ramirez battled the Rambo worshipping political climate with a wave of bilingual counter-recruiting presentations at local high schools. Peace Center members burned their mortgage at a party in 1991.

The Peace Center recognizes the need for social change to permanently end war. The Peace Center served as a meeting space and incubator to many organizations, including the San Jose Green Party, Big Mountain Support Group, the urban youth magazine DEBUG, and the Impeachment Center. Many of the women involved in the Peace Center are members of the Women’s International League of Peace and Freedom. South Bay Mobilization currently organizes protests against the Iraq war and meets at the Peace Center.

Peace Center members opposed U.S. involvement in the 1991 Gulf war and protested the sanctions depriving Iraqis of food and medicine. In 2001 Peace Center members met to begin opposition to the War On Terror as the bombs fell. The invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, the unlawful detentions at Guantanamo, and the looming threat of invading Iran demanded renewed energy. Many demonstrators have been appearing at weekly vigils held at the corner of Second and San Carlos since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. A 2007 article in the New York Times revealed the Boeing subsidiary Jeppeson was booking flights for the CIA’s kidnappings of suspected terrorists. Protests have targeted this company acting as the travel agent for torture flights.

Alice Cox deplored the persistence of the problems that motivated her protest: nuclear proliferation, wars of aggression, and social inequality. Although the anti-war movement left a definite mark on American culture, military buildup and war planning continues in much the same vein as in 1957. Alice Cox died on her way to a Peace Fair in December 2007.

Governor Schwarzenegger’s recent budget proposal upsets most Californians and will hopefully be trashed by the time Slingshot goes to press. He currently proposes closing 48 state parks and cutting Medi-Cal, among other cuts to the General Fund.

Strangely enough, delayed plans to spend $350 million on a new death row chamber at San Quentin are going ahead full steam. The whole world is horrified by California’s expansive abuse of the death penalty. Schwarzenegger’s own home town of Gratz, Austria, cut its ties to the Governor in 2005, removing his name from their soccer stadium and forcing him to return the town’s ring of honor after he ignored their protests and executed Stanley “Tookie” Williams. What is the sense on spending lavishly on death and cutting off services to the living?

All Schwarzenegger’s talk about Universal Health Care -“California is going to lead the nation in breaking new ground to meet the health care needs of its people”- proved to be no more than hot air. Instead, he insulted Californians receiving SSI, calling us “unproductives… who deserve nothing from the state.” He added injury to insult by vetoing the annual cost of living increase for SSI recipients in May and draining $300 million from Medi-Cal funds in August 2007. Depleting Medi-Cal left a lot of people stranded in the emergency room after clinics lost funding. The flooded emergency rooms of public hospitals were awash in blood after Schwarzenegger’s decision. I sat with a woman for over eight hours seeking treatment for a miscarriage until she eventually gave up and went home. This was only one incident among the sea of malpractice caused by the state’s policies, and the new budget includes more cuts to Medi-Cal.

How do we live with this nutcase? Unproductive and dishonest, he deserves nothing from this state but vigilant protests wherever he goes.