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On this past Easter Sunday a group of at least 8 activists liberated a vacant house in San Francisco’s Mission District. The occupation of the building served as a protest to draw attention to SF’s vacant and abandoned buildings as well as the immense homeless population. The day’s action started with a rally and march from a nearby subway station to the occupied house with placards that read “House keys not handcuffs.” The action was organized by the 18-year-old SF group Homes Not Jails. The occupation lasted from the very early hours of Sunday morning into Monday afternoon. It ended when the SF Police attempted to batter down the door, the occupiers complied and let the police in. They were cited with misdemeanor trespassing and walked out of the house without ever being placed in cuffs.

HNJ formed in 1992 by squatters, homeless people and their supporters to advocate the use of vacant and abandoned buildings for people who are homeless. HNJ promotes the idea that people need a home in order to escape from the spiral of poverty and to get them back on their feet, something that typical homeless shelters cannot adequately provide. The group uses public actions, education and covert squatting to convey their message.

Pointing at the current economic recession and the collapse of the housing market, squatting has the decisive opportunity to demonstrate how to build from the ashes of the old by creating positive spaces away from the traditional norms of housing consumption.

“Space and property is used by people in an unjust unethical way to manipulate others,” said Sasha, a HNJ volunteer. “People play the game, work their job, pay their rent and one fucked-up thing happens and they’re on the streets.”

The weakness of the system is the ideal contrast to showcase our alternatives to capitalism through squatting such as — mutual aid, autonomy and consensus. Circumnavigating the status quo allows opportunities for transformation — teaching people to support themselves and each other outside of the hierarchical landlord-tenant relationship.

“People have this weird idea that a squat is not a home and that paying rent gives you more rights and we would like to get rid of that myth. If you live in a place and you close the door, you cook your food, you sleep there then that’s your home. Its just as much of a home as if you were paying rent,” said Sasha.

“The stigma of the word squat is kinda fucked up, we don’t like to use the word squat because of that. For us a squat is a home,” added Sasha.

Squatting, for the most part, has been absent from the minds of most Americans and mainstream media even though there is an estimated 1 billion squatters worldwide, according to Robert Neuwirth, author of Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World.

Tim, another HNJ volunteer said, “The need that HNJ serves is the direct gap between vacant buildings and homeless people. Government will tend to talk all day long about how they have an interest in seeing how buildings aren’t vacant and that they want people to have homes, and yet you have a vacant building and a homeless person sleeping on the street in front of it. In the legal-realty-money-world, when its all said and done, you still have a vacant building and someone sleeping on the streets. What HNJ does is covertly put people into these buildings. Even though the legal system may not see the validity and value in this change we nonetheless do it. And the public actions serve as a reminder to people that this is going on.”

The involuntariness of squatting for so many people worldwide is an important distinction that we must recognize from politically motivated squatting, but HNJ unites the two skillfully.

When asked how they thought the action went, Sasha said, “It was the best possible thing that could have happened. We did what we wanted to do. The cops never bothered us. We had the full support of the neighbors and no one was arrested. We had coverage on BBC, Indymedia, Fox News and even in Jakarta and Australia. It was great for a media trick. We got worldwide coverage.”

“I think the action went well, but unfortunately the building is still vacant and the elderly gentleman who was kicked out of this building is still fighting to get back into his home. It drew attention to this sad story and the fact that egregious injustices like this happen everyday,” said Tim.

So you want to start squatting? Its great to have an organization like HNJ behind you but it is not necessary. There are numerous online resources that can give you the technical knowledge of how to turn on electricity and water, to the appropriate tools and attire for entering a building. They also help you get an idea of what you need and what to expect, good and bad.

For more info: contact@homesnotjailssf.org, www.homesnotjailssf.org www.squat.net, www.squattheplanet.com

The 5th Annual Slingshot Award for Lifetime Achievement was awarded to Lydia Gans in March at Slingshot’s 22nd birthday party. The Award, also known as the Golden Wingnut Award is to honor people in the radical community who have spent their lives working for alternatives to the current system and deserve proper recognition. Their stories are worth telling. Lydia Gans has been active in the East Bay since 1988 but was an activist for virtually her whole adult life. Thank you, Lydia, for your inspiration and dedication.

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Lydia Gans is a woman of small stature but of grandiose courage and passion. She has become a role model in the radical activist community here in the East Bay. Throughout her life Lydia has found herself affected by the larger context of political turbulence and was thus repeatedly at the heart of major social movements, such as the woman’s movement, racial integration, and the struggle for rights for disabled people. Her involvement in progressive movements has been heartfelt and sincere, as she herself and people close to her have experienced oppression. She continues to work tirelessly, despite the inevitable ageing process, for social justice and humanity. Currently, Lydia volunteers with the Disaster Relief Project of the Red Cross in Oakland, which is a program that offers immediate food, shelter, and clothing to people affected by disaster. She also holds down the Tuesday kitchen for the People’s Park meal serving with East Bay Food Not Bombs, directly feeding hungry people, a job she has kept for about 20 years. Lydia maintains her photojournalism career through writing and photographing for Street Spirit, the East Bay monthly publication featuring poetry, artwork, and legislative news regarding houseless and poverty issues. To feed her heart and soul, Lydia participates at the Berkeley Community Chorus, volunteers at the Telescope in the Chabot science center, does math problems, and reads plays with a local theater group.

Born in pre-Hitler Germany in 1931, Lydia immigrated to New York with her family upon their first chance of escaping the immanent persecution of Jews. They arrived in 1938 when Lydia was seven years old. She did not know a word of English when she arrived to this new country, but it took her only three weeks to feel comfortable with the language. Lydia attributes her learning of English to the encouragement and positive enthusiasm of her teacher and school peers. “Everyday,” she says, “my peers wanted to have play dates and to teach me English.” In 1948, Lydia passed the entrance exam to get into Hunter High School, at the time an all women’s high school. Throughout high school she walked the city streets for fun and focused on her studies. She graduated at the age of 17 and immediately moved westward to Berkeley, California. Lydia was the only woman from her high school class to move so far from New York. Other woman stayed close to home and – despite their intelligence and potential – became victims to the cultural normality of woman’s roles. One of her friends from high school had an uncle who was a leftist in California; it was through him that she was able to get her foot in the door working with Marxist youth. As Lydia said, “and then I got mixed up with the radicals.”

Lydia started college in the wake of the McCarthy era. She began a physics major, but changed to mathematics. There was a real fear due to McCarthyism that spying and government infiltration played in the physics field attributed to fresh discoveries in atomic science. She didn’t finish school until later in her life because she moved from Berkeley, fell in love, and had kids. Lydia married a black man as the civil rights struggle occurred; it was illegal in some states to have a biracial marriage. Lydia did eventually go on to receive a doctorate in mathematics, where she pioneered women in the field.

As a professor at Cal Poly Pamona, Lydia became insecure and believed she was not as smart as other professors in her mathematics department because she was always being put down, not being promoted, and not permitted to teach higher level classes. In fact, there were only a handful of women in the sciences who finally, one day at lunch, got to stare each other in the face and validate for one another that in fact they were intelligent, strong, and doing fabulous work. For these women, finding supporters helped to alleviate the hatred, anger and frustration caused by their oppression. “…That’s what the woman’s movement was about.” Lydia was a professor from 1963 to 1988, and continued to fight sexism throughout that time. During her time as a professor, Lydia became President of the teacher’s union and served on the statewide academic senate. The union activities enabled Lydia to exercise political action in the school system.

When she lived in East LA, Lydia participated in radicalizing the Democratic Party and fighting racism. She and her husband worked with the Chicano community to gain more representation in government. The community of organizers were successful in electing the first Chicano city councilman along with a democratic governor to end a republican stint. Until they started organizing, Mexican-Americans were sorely underrepresented in democratic government.

In 1967, when restrictive housing laws were overturned, which had restricted people of color from living in particular areas, Lydia was living in Southern California in a town called Altadena. Lydia moved to Altadena so that her children could find a community with which to identify being that they were biracial. She and her family joined with neighbors to support racial integration. The neighborhood came together during meetings and through their children playing. “This house is not for sale” was a common slogan posted at people’s homes, because realtors would bother people to leave their homes to escape minorities – a practice deemed ‘white flight’. Lydia remembers her life in Altadena fondly. There was a lot of open space as the town borders National Forestland and the area itself has roots of revolutionary activity. It was a hot bed of abolitionists after the civil war when Owen Brown, son of John Brown (leader of the Harper’s Ferry revolt) moved to Altadena where he is buried with the tombstone saying “here lies Owen Brown, son of the liberator; 1895”.

Lydia moved back to Berkeley in 1988 and started taking classes in photojournalism. She became interested and involved in disability activism — mostly because she had had disabled friends in Southern California. Until the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, disabled persons could hardly get around and were not treated as equal people in society. If someone was in a wheelchair one would have to go blocks out of their way to a driveway as an access point onto the curb. In the late sixties, disabled students at UC Berkeley became the forefront of the disabled persons’ struggle, named the Independent Living Movement. The movement was still happening when Lydia returned to the Bay and a man by the name of Ed Roberts became Lydia’s peer and role model. Lydia met Robert’s through a friend of her’s in southern California. Roberts lived with polio since the age of fourteen. He created the Disabled Students Union and fought for ramps on campus and in Berkeley. Lydia worked closely with Roberts on various projects to gain more rights for disabled people on campus. Through working with disabled people and learning about photojournalism, Lydia was inspired to take pictures and write books about the subject. Roberts helped her to publish two books called: To Live With Grace and Dignity and Sisters, Brothers, and Disabilities. Her books document disabled peoples and their caretakers, and how families function with disabled children, respectively. To create the books she was welcomed into people’s lives with her camera, developed relationships with the people she photographed, and captured emotion and passion to
make her books come alive.

Before Lydia started working with East Bay Food Not Bombs (EBFNB), it had never occurred to her to work with food. Philosophically, she is not an anarchist, but EBFNB functions well in that context when people are so committed to actualization of the group’s goals. The group of people who were EBFNB impressed her because, “everyone was dedicated to the community, and dedication is what we all believe in, which is pretty unusual, most people do things because they’re supposed to, but at Food Not Bombs no one tells another what they have to do.” As she has lived her life in the East Bay participating in Food Not Bombs and Street Spirit, Lydia has proved her own dedication to the causes that directly affect the quality of life for so many people including herself and her nearest community. With the risk of sounding hokey, Lydia explains that each relationship is a treasure, especially compared to the academic world.

Looking back on her life, Lydia says that at one point politics seemed simple, black and white, it was bad versus good; but now she sees more gray areas and complexities. She says that people in general need to find common ground, more humanity. And when asked what kept her going through lull periods and tough times, she responded by saying, “well activism always keeps you going…”

One of my best friends is a butch genderqueer lesbian who competes locally in womens’ sports. Recently she told me “I think it’d be fascinating to find out if I’m at all intersex like you.” I said “not if you know what the Olympics are trying to do to intersex people.” The International Olympic Committee (IOC) isn’t playing fair with intersex athletes. They’re playing gender and appearance police on female athletes, and only female athletes, in a witch-hunt against butch and intersex women. The IOC is using hateful language against intersex women and demanding that female athletes found to be intersex submit to forced hormone treatments or forced surgery akin to female genital mutilation if they want to compete as the women they are. This violates basic human rights and a 1990s international court ruling in favor of intersex women in sports.

Intersex refers to being biologically in between or outside medical/legal definitions of male and female due to natural variations in sex hormone balance, chromosomes, or internal & external genitalia. Many people don’t know they’re intersex. As the same fetal tissue can develop into either male or female genitalia, many people have some variations in either internal or external genitalia, which can include men with ovaries or uterine tissue (including some cases of men who menstruate), women with internal testes, people with an ovary and a teste and people with ovatestes (a combination of both) to name a few variations. Everyone who produces sex hormones (some people don’t) has some balance of estrogen and testosterone. And the average person doesn’t know what their sex chromosomes are unless they’ve had a medical need to know or competed in sports before the Maria Pettino ruling.

Intersex differs from transgender, which is living as a gender other than the one assigned at birth. Some intersex people identify as transgender (this is known as intergender), some as men or women. Intersex people who live as men are men, and intersex people who live as women are women.

The IOC refuses to consider intersex as a valid human population with natural biological variations. Instead they’re using disease language. The phrase “DSD” (Disorder of Sex Development) was imposed on intersex people in 2006 without our consent or input. Think about it, who would want to be refereed to as being a “disorder?”

DSD was created by doctors who see intersex people as diseased and want the world to agree. One of the most infamous, J. Michael Bailey, has written a book and articles defaming the transgender and intersex communities, claims Latin women are inferior (as in his now-discredited book The Man Who Would Be Queen), belongs to a racist and anti-immigrant think-tank known as the Human Biodiversity Institute and publicly advocates aborting “gay babies.” Since 2006 the intersex community and our allies have devoted much activism to challenging DSD. Many places people who started using it are dropping it – except now the IOC.

The “current” controversy over intersex women in sports actually goes back over 60 years. In the 1930s Stella Walsh, a Polish Gold-medal Olympian, who set the world discus throwing speed record, was taunted by detractors as “Stella the Fella” and claims that she “isn’t a woman” until her supporters threatened her rivals with similar accusations. After Walsh’s death she was discovered to have been intersex.

During the Cold War chromosome, testing was added to the Olympics. This was apparently from fears that the Soviet Union would, as one writer of the day said, “sneak hermaphrodite super-athletes into womens’ sports.” Under chromosome testing many women were told they weren’t women, despite the reality of their bodies and lives. In the most ridiculous incident, a 1960s Eastern European womens’ swim team were all disqualified and told they “aren’t really women.” They all went home and every single one of them became pregnant soon afterward.

“Gender testing” policies for female athletes continued to be used to deny women opportunities and have been used to physically harm women. Several women in the last 20 years have been targeted under an appearance profiling system. This means that the officials have singled out women for seeming “too masculine,” “too butch” and other ways of saying that because they don’t fit stereotypes of femininity that they “mustn’t really be women,” which is plainly misogynist. That this system has been used primarily against women of color shows this to also be a racist policy. One of the most horrific uses of this policy was in the 1980s when Brazilian judo champion Edinanci Silva was forced to either undergo what the IOC called “Feminizing surgery,” to remove part of her genitalia or be banned from competing. This is akin to female genital mutilation.

The Pettino decision is supposed to have ended chromosome testing. In 1985 Spanish hurdler Maria Pettino faced being banned and losing her medals because of the results of her chromosome test. Pettino has an intersex variation known as AIS (Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome) where her body does not respond to testosterone; this can lead to a woman having a female body with male chromosomes. Pettino fought the IOC in world court and won in 1992 on the basis that she is a woman and her body is female and she should be allowed to compete in womens’ sports. The courts ruled that intersex women are women, and chromosome tests were supposed to be dropped … until now.

In 2009 South African runner Caster Semenya found herself in world headlines because the IAAF (International Association of Athletics Federation) targeted her for being butch, claiming Semenya couldn’t be a woman because she’s muscular, has short hair and deep voice. They demanded she submit to several types of biological gender tests, including a highly invasive internal examination. Semenya has been found to have internal testes, though this was not about her being intersex so much as her being found to be intersex because they targeted her appearance.

While Semenya is seen as a hero in South Africa, the IAAF and several other sports bodies are trying to keep her from competing. They claim her levels of testosterone give her “an unfair advantage.” This is nonsense. Almost all women also produce testosterone, some more than others. What flows naturally in your veins is not a “performance-enhancing drug.” Athletic excellence isn’t about who’s bigger, faster or stronger. It’s about who trains harder, works longer and is willing to push their body to its limits, even sacrificing time with family and friends to be the best. Lindsay Van (not to be confused with athlete Lindsay Vonn) just broke a world record for ski-jumping, but the IOC won’t let her compete because she’s a woman and “womens’ parts aren’t made to handle that sort of jumping.” Can they think they can get away with even saying that in 2010?!

The Olympics’ reaction to Semenya’s existence is to pretend the Pettino verdict never even happened. They want to make Caster Semenya have her testes removed. They’re also demanding that female athletes be put through biological gender tests, and many say these tests will be selectively enforced on butch women.

Organisation Intersex International (OII, website: www.intersexualite.org) is not about to let the IOC have their way. OII has been raising awareness about this whole situation for some time now and is currently working to urge the IOC to stop discriminating against intersex women and allow intersex women to compete without fear of being singled out for harassment, pathological labels or the kinds of barbaric “treatment” the IOC has been demanding. Activists are working on various awareness raising measures, including a petition which can be found and signed at http://www.intersexualite.org/IOC-petition.html

The goal is a Games where even the officials have to play fair.

Sources:

1) DSD Fact Sheet, Organisation Intersex Internati
onal, found at www.intersexualite.org/DSD_Activists.html

2) Edinanci Silva’s story, Organisation Intersex International site, found at www.intersexualite.org/Edinanci_Silva.html

3) J. Michael Bailey’s statements about wanting to abort “gay babies, found at ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/Bailey/HBES/Bailey%20on%20homosexuality.htm

4) KQED interview addressing J. Michael Bailey’s claims about Latinas, found at www.tsroadmap.com/info/alice-dreger/bailey-kqed.html

5) Maria Pettino’s Story, found at www.medhelp.org/ais/articles/MARIA.HTM

6) “Queer Science,” Southern Poverty Law Center Intelligence Report (about Bailey and the Human Biodiversity Institute), found at www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?sid=96

7) Rachel Maddow on Lindsey Van, youtube clip at www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/#35375415

8) Stella Walsh articles, found at www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/1462

9) TS Roadmap archive of transgender community criticism of found at www.tsroadmap.com/bailey/

There are few things as powerful as identifying the manufacturer’s mark on what we have perceived as our personal demons.

–Aurora Levins Morales

My heart beat fast as I wrote many of these words. I did the research for this article to try and make sense of this story I carry around with me about being someone who is seen as mad, who struggles with what this society considers a serious “brain disorder.” My hope is that by the time you finish reading my words you will have more tools to analyze this hyper-complicated world around you, tools to find points of connection between people you might never have thought you had much in common, tools to tear apart the psychic walls that keep us from understanding ourselves and one another. Part of building a movement, in this case what we might as well call the mad movement, is the conscious telling of our stories and history. This isn’t my personal story, but one that ties together the larger story of psychiatry and economics in all of our lifetimes. The important part to keep in mind is that it is very much a story in progress and that we all are characters in it. My hope is that we can use this knowledge to raise our collective consciousness and to write the next chapter together with brilliant colors and the visionary fire of our growing mad community.

The biomedical model of psychiatry, or “biopsychiatry,” rests on the belief that mental health issues are the result of chemical imbalances in the brain. This is actually a very new idea, but in a short period of time it has come to be regarded as common sense by a whole lot of people all over the world. More and more, the belief that our dissatisfaction and disease is a result of our individual “brain chemistry” has been desensitizing many of us to the idea that our feelings and experiences often have their roots in social and political issues. We find ourselves with all this medicalized language in our mouths about neurotransmitters and serotonin that doesn’t actually get to the heart of so many of the problems we see around us. How this change in understanding came about is important to understand if we are going to something about it. In this article I will explain how there were very powerful political and economic forces, here referred to as neoliberalism, which began in the 1980’s, and played a huge role in the drastic paradigm shift in mental health care towards what today is known as biopsychiatry. I will paint a rough potrait for you of the situation, using the example of clinical depression, in the hopes that it inspires you to explore the story further, and I’ll conclude with some ideas about the emerging radical mental health movement in case you want to get involved, or at least know about so you can point others our direction.

1980 Was the Year

1980 is a useful date for understanding the recent transitions in our conceptions of mental health and illness. In 1980, the American Psychiatric Association published the third edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-III). The DSM, although it was intentionally written in a style that makes it sound scientifically objective, was a creation of one particular school of psychiatrists at a particular point in history with a particular world-view slanted towards the biomedical model. The 1970s were a socially volatile time: the discipline of psychiatry was under attack on all sides for both being oppressive and “unscientific.” The markers of the DSM packaged it as scientific and neutral, reframing the concept of diagnosis from a loose and vague set of descriptions based on Freudian psychoanalysis to a detailed symptom checklist. Today, with the massive support of the pharmaceutical industry, it is accepted as the “Bible” of psychiatry and used as a diagnostic tool all over the world.

1980 was also the year that Ronald Reagan was elected as President of the USA, ushering in what is known as the “neoliberal revolution.” The older “liberalism” has its roots in the 19th century philosophy that emphasized minimal state intervention and free trade. The horrors of the Great Depression, the spectre of fascism in Europe, and a strong labor movement made the idea of unrestrained free market capitalism less attractive in the 1930s. The period in history from the 1930s to the 1970s saw the rise of welfare states the US and UK, a philosophy that prioritized social security, public education, and welfare. The 1980s saw the liberalization (loosening government restrictions) of trade, business, and industry, massive transfer of wealth from public to private, enormous growth in power of multinational corporations, and the triumph of consumer culture.

Obviously these are huge topics that require much time and space to truly unravel. Right now I’m just going to focus on one example of the way biopsychiatry and neoliberalism united to affect our lives: the shifting understanding of “depression.” As I intend to show, Western cultures and increasingly the rest of the world, are coming to relate human sadness and distress to an individual’s brain chemistry. While there is absolutely no scientific proof that this is the case , the biopsychiatric world view helps enable big business to maintain power and fuels the needs of the market based economy.

The Birth of the DSM: How Sadness Became a “Brain Disease”

Modern psychiatry has its roots at the beginning of the industrial revolution and it can be useful to see it as a response to the massive reorganization of an entire society along market principles which undermined traditional ways of caring for the sick and older support networks and healing modalities , but to tell this part of the story I am actually going to begin in the 1940s. At the end of World War II psychoanalysis completely dominated the field of mental health, providing the leading explanations of mental illness and their treatments. The 1960s were a time of great social and political upheaval that reshaped the landscape of ideas of the self and what health and wellness looked like in society. By the 1970s, psychoanalytic theoretical schools, and different clinicians, had many various ideas about the fundamental nature, causes, and treatment of mental disorders. There was a growing anti-psychiatry movement that accused psychiatry of using medical treatment mainly in the interests of social control. There were highly publicized experiments showing the complete lack of reliability of diagnosis made in mental hospitals (where it was documented across the country that healthy individuals were being diagnosed with schizophrenia.) Psychiatry’s legitimacy as a medical field was seen to be in jeopardy. It was at this point in history that the DSM-III was developed.

The DSM-III was an attempt to create a universal guidebook for psychiatric diagnosis. It was written by a school of psychiatrists who saw it as their mission to rid psychiatry of prejudice and superstition, by turning it into an “objective science.” Their intention was to be scientifically rigorous and “theory neutral,” meaning that it claimed not to presuppose a particular theory or cause of why a patient was mentally ill. The idea was to define disorders on the basis of symptoms and not causes. “It shifted psychiatric diagnosis from vaguely defined and loosely based psychoanalytic descriptions to detailed symptom checklists–each with precise inclusion and exclusion criteria.” But in its attempt to be scientifically neutral, the DSM-III left no room for any ideas of mental distress that were not viewed as “illness” and “disease.” Furthermore, the idea of “scientific objectivity” put the power for determining well being and sanity in the hands of the psychiatrists, using a vocabulary that while sounding “objective,” was in fact culturally based in Western scientific practice. The new “objective” diagnostic criteria worked better if there were defined treatments for the “disorders.” As it turned out, this was very beneficial for the bottom lines of the pharmaceutical companies, as well as opening
the door for a drastic shift in the psychiatric paradigm.

Let us now turn to the case of “depression.” The way that the DSM diagnostic criteria for Major Depression was written fails to distinguish adequately between two types of depression: “normal sadness” and “melancholia.” These diagnoses share similar symptoms including “sadness, insomnia, social withdrawal, loss of appetite, lack of interest in usual activities.” But the DSM fails to distinguish between normal sadness that has an outside cause, and a depressive disorder that does not. The unwitting result of this effort was a massive pathologization of normal sadness.

The Prozac Revolution

In the 1980’s the development of Prozac and the ensuing explosion in popularity of Prozac-like SSRI (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor) antidepressant drugs dramatically changed the landscape of treatment for depression. Almost one in four people in the United States were started on an SSRI between 1988 and 2002. The drugs were marketed and prescribed for depression, but the shifting definition of “depression” left room for many emotional states that once were considered normal suddenly to be put into the category of pathology. The diagnosis of Major Depression, which used common symptoms such as sadness, lack of energy, or sleeplessness as indicators was well suited for the massive expansion of the market for antidepressant drugs, because it encompassed huge portions of the general population!

Meanwhile, for many people the drugs themselves, at least at first, appeared to have positive benefits. This created a situation where the seeming effectiveness of the drugs ended up proving the existence of the “disease” of depression, and generally blurred the lines between happiness, wellness and functioning in society. Suddenly it became easier and more natural to talk about brain chemicals, rather than social conditions or family issues. And this ability to “treat” sadness with a pill was a defining feature of the period. Anti-depressants seemed to quickly work their way into the lives of many people. Whether they chose to try it or not, taking an anti-depressant became a question hanging in the air, a potential option for them to choose.

In 1997 the FDA approved the use of direct-to-consumer drug advertisements, and suddenly daytime and evening television was flooded with “ask your doctor” drug ads. “Prozac was one of the first of the new psychopharmaceuticals to sit uncomfortably between a treatment and an enhancement, between a medication and a mental cosmetic.”(Brad Lewis 125)

The pharmaceutical industry became immensely powerful during this period, and not just financially. It became a force in determining how we think about ourselves and our happiness. The example of depression is an important one. The influence of the pharmaceutical industry extends deep into patient and family advocacy groups, such as the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), groups that promote the view that depression is a chemical deficiency that requires the use of their drugs. There are now widespread educational campaigns such as National Depression Awareness Day that offer free screenings for depression in universities and hospitals. The pharmaceutical industry sponsors much of the clinical research on depression. Industry-academic collaborations are becoming an increasing source of funding for universities, academic medical centers, and hospitals. Never before has this “biopsychiatric” culture, which defines our health and happiness in terms of brain chemistry, been so heavily promoted through the mass media, become embedded in central institutions and embraced by policy makers.

Rise of the Neoliberals

During this same period, an equally complicated paradigm shift was happening in the world of economics and politics. The 1980s saw the rise of neo-liberal economic ideology: the privatization of public enterprises, the reduction of wages by de-unionizing workers and eliminating workers’ rights that had been won over many years of struggle, the elimination of many health and environmental regulations, and the dismantling of social services such as health and education and welfare. The consequence of these policies: massive unemployment, underfunded schools, overcrowded prisons and the shrinkage of our social and economic safety nets. Along with all of these political and economic changes, has been the transformation of poverty from a social problem to an individual failure.

Similar to the ideology of biopsychiatry, neoliberalism uses scientific sounding language that talks about “free trade” and “self-regulation of markets” that on the surface appears to be neutral, but masks an ideology which benefits the powerful and already wealthy; and the two systems work seamlessly together. The notion of a chemical imbalance in our brains easily plants the seeds of doubt in our minds about our own happiness and wellbeing. One of the driving forces of the market economy is dissatisfaction – the market place would not function without a consumer culture that operates on feelings of inadequacy and lack of personal fulfillment. But what if it is actually the society itself, and the toxic world-views we have inherited, that are driving us mad and making us depressed?

“A society that is increasingly socially fragmented and divided, where the gulf between success and failure seems so large, where the only option open to many is highly demanding and low paid work, where the only cheap and simple route to carelessness is through drugs, is likely to make people particularly vulnerable to mental disintegration in its many forms. It has long been known that urban life and social deprivation are associated with high levels of mental disorder. Neoliberal economic policies are likely to further increase their pathogenic effects. By medicalizing these effects, psychiatry helps to obscure their political origin…The social catastrophe produced by neoliberal policies has been washed away and forgotten in the language of individual distress.” . (Joanna Moncrieff 251-3) Meanwhile, both the biopsychiatric model and neoliberal economics are global. There is a lot of evidence that, with the help of the DSM and the pharmaceutical industry, the biopsychiatric paradigm is rapidly spreading throughout the world. From Hong Kong to Tanzania to Sri Lanka, Western ideas of mental illnesses — depression, schizophrenia, anorexia, and PTSD are growing, with the resulting, loss of traditional forms of knowledge and understanding of health and wellness.

A Growing Movement at the Intersection of Social Justice and Mental Health

So the question becomes: what can we do to change this situation? One of the reasons it is so difficult to discuss is that the situation itself lies at the intersection of all these different fields: from biology to neuroscience, cultural studies, economics, history, and politics. It is very challenging to untangle the social, political, and economic hijacking of what is considered mental health and illness, when these are states we tangibly live with and have to navigate on a daily basis. What is inside us and what is outside in society? How does the language and diagnostic categories that we use to talk about each other affect our understanding of ourselves? It is a multi-layered knot of enormous proportions.

If we are going to do anything to change the mental health system we need to begin by simply acknowledging how fundamentally flawed the current model is – how little room it leaves for alternate views of health and wellness, how it privileges the knowledge of scientists and experts, and belittles the resources of local communities, families and alternative health care practitioners. We need to draw a clearer distinction between the usefulness of some modern psychiatric medications, and the reductionist biopsychiatric paradigm that reduces our emotions and behavior to chemicals and neurotransmitters. We need to talk publicly about the relationship between unhealthy economic p
olicies, the pharmaceutical industry, and our mental health. We need to start redefining what it actually means to be mentally healthy, and not just on an individual level, but on a collective level, community and even worldwide. We need to move away from the ideology of disease and its treatment, to that of public health and disease prevention. We need to look more closely and critically at the root causes of our mental distress, because it is likely that many of the causes come from the same ideology that offers the current biopsychiatric solutions.

When I think about solutions to this mess, I envision a vibrant social and political movement made up of a coalitions of locally based community groups and professionals in the field – people who understand the importance of economic justice and global solidarity and the critical need for accepting mental diversity and not falling into the trap of trying to fit into a society that is obviously very sick. I envision a movement that has the wisdom and reverence for the human spirit and understands the intertwined complexity of these things we call mental health and wellness. I envision a movement that understands the importance of language and telling stories and knowing our history. Because the issues are so confusing and intertwined, I would love to see focus groups of scholars and activists who can help to make relevant theories and histories easier to penetrate for larger numbers of people. I see creative organizing on high school and college campuses to counteract the effects of a popular culture steeped in consumerism and intolerance of difference. I see popular education about depression and the economy: if this article were a theatrical performance or a 3 minute YouTube video, what would it look like?

Fundamentally, if we are going to shift the current mental health paradigm we are going to need a movement that both has the political savvy to understand how to fight the system, and the tools to be able to take care of each other as the world gets even crazier. I think some of the answers are going to come from revisiting the useful aspects of counter cultural movements that were questioning the mainstream models of mental health in the 1960s and 70s. From humanistic and Jungian psychology to encounter groups and gestalt therapy, from the Feminist consciousness-raising groups, to the more radical aspects of the “human potential movement,” there were many powerful ideas that came from the intersection of Eastern spiritual philosophies and Western psychotherapies and that were informed by the political charged atmosphere of the times and in the 21st century seem to have been virtually eliminated from the dominant dialog in psychiatry and psychology. While clearly there were flaws in those young movements that seemingly got crushed in their tracks or channeled into a watered down capitalist friendly New Age market, I think it would be quite a worthwhile project to identify which of their aspects and tools would be useful to embrace in a contemporary radical mental health movement.

I find a lot of inspiration looking at the emergence of the growing community around the Icarus Project. I was one of the people that started it back in the day, but now I just watch in awe as it continues to grow and develop. Icarus began as a website in 2002 as an attempt to create an alternate space where people struggling with seriously mental health issues could talk about their struggles and organize local community. It has its roots in the anarchist networks of North America and although it has branched far and wide, the project has maintained it’s radical analysis and is still geared towards those of us engaged in social justice struggles. For those of us who see the critical importance of a radical analysis in understanding mental health, Icarus is an oasis of mad sanity and community. These days Icarus is run by an organizing collective and has many thousands of members all over the world. If you are looking for others to talk about these issues with, organize with, build community with, I suggest starting here: theicharushproject.net The Icarus Project is also having their first national gathering this summer at the US Social Forum in Detroit. Icaristas from near and far will be gathering at the US Social Forum in Detroit this summer, June 22-26. You can join in the planning discussion on the forums or check out and join the monthly community conference call. Mad Love, Sascha scatter@theicarusproject.net.

Fabrega, Horacio Jr. “On the Postmodern Critique and Reformation of Psychiatry” Rev. of Moving Beyond Prozac, DSM, and the New Psychiatry. Psychiatry 71(2) Summer 2008: 183-196. Print

Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization Vintage, 1967. Print.

Giroux, Henry A. “Beyond the Biopolitics of Disposability: Rethinking Neoliberalism in the New Gilded Age”

Social Identites Vol. 14, No. 5 (2008) 587-620

Horwitz, Allan V. and Wakefield, Jerome C. The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow Into Depressive Disorder Oxford University Press, 2007. Print.

Kripal, Jeffery Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion University of Chicago, 2007. Print.

Lewis, Bradley. Moving Beyond Prozac, DSM, and the New Psychiatry: The Birth of Post-Psychiatry

Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. Print.

Martinez, Elizabeth and Garcia, Arnoldo “What is Neoliberalism? – A Brief Definition for Activists”

Corpwatch.org 1996. Web. 1 April, 2010 .www.copwatch.org/article.php?id=376

Moncrieff, Joanna “Neoliberalism and biopsychiatry: a marriage of convenience” Liberatory Psychiatry: Philosophy, Politics, and Mental Health. Ed Carl I. Cohen Cambridge University Press, 2008 235-55. Print

“There is a Policeman Inside All Our Heads: He Must Be Destroyed” The Century of the Self By Adam Curtis. BBC 2002 Television.

Thomas, Philip and Bracken, Patrick. “Challenging the Globalization of Biomedical Psychiatry.” Journal of Public Mental Health. Vol 4 Issue 3 (2005) 23-32. Print.

Watters, Ethan. Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche. New York: Free Press, 2010. Print

Picking up where the first issue left off, the second volume of “16th and Mission Comix” is a treat for the eyes and a shock to the system with its stunning visuals and drug-addled, often off-color sense of humor. In “The Writer,” Christopher Forsley tackles the issue of writer’s block with Cameron Forsley’s heavily shaded, underground comics-influenced illustrations adding a frantic absurdity to that universal feeling of dread that only a deadline can bring. Ryan Yee’s “The Stem,” by contrast, has a more meditative feel, augmented by beautiful tones and ethereal, almost painterly lines. David Chacon’s “Wank Wank”, by contrast, is a rip-roaringly entertaining mess of gross-out humor and freneticism. All these stories, in addition to the three others printed are imbued with a sense of outstanding wildness that only underground comics can provide.

Admittedly, “16th and Mission Comix” is probably not for everyone. The gritty, sometimes disturbing realism of even the more lighthearted stories may prove too much for those who prefer the glossy productions generally released by major comic companies. Likewise, the more adult nature of many of the themes and the graphic nature in which they are portrayed (most notably, the use of penises as weapons in “Wank Wank”) may distract more sensitive readers from the beautiful artwork, emotional truth and many other delights that the comic has to offer. However, those with the stomach and an appreciation for visually striking underground comics will not be disappointed by “16th and Mission Comix”.

The new DVD about the southern grassroots music label Plan-It-X Records has its place in your collective house, but after watching it I’m sure that place will be the free box. The prospect of spending an evening with it seems to be promising at first. The colorful package niftily displays the combined efforts of two long running organizations asking us to pay attention. Both Microcosm and Plan-It-X have run with and in some ways improved upon the models they copied. Plan-It-X fulfills the void created in the late 90’s that should’ve been filled by such labels of catchy and intelligent Pop Punk such as Lookout or No Idea Records. But within a half hour of turning it on I had watched with agonizing interest as the video went through the motions of modern day documentaries covering modern day counter culture music. Not brave enough to turn it off–fearing I would miss something, what I got was another incentive to make people think I am an utter asshole.

But watching this from beginning to end I had to wonder if the makers of this doc actually considered just who their intended audience is. If it’s “The PUNKS”, the insiders and fans of the label’s respective bands and deeds, the viewer doesn’t get much depth into their favorite acts. They’re a good selling point though–live footage and interviews from Against Me!, Spoon Boy, This Bike Is A Pipe Bomb, Kimya Dawson, Defiance Ohio….and a whole legion of good spirited bands. The screen time of live bands is on average 30 seconds–usually there to illustrate some point or tell the story of the label. On the other hand, if the intended audience is the uninformed, then that would explain the doc’s tactic of spelling everything out before getting to the meat and bones of seeing young freaks get all freaky and shit. If that is the case, then this doc has its place on those satellite networks that show programs catered for liberals and progressives. I can see the good intentioned Americans waiting for Democracy Now! to come on watching the phenomenon of deformed gawky white people in Bloomington IN. as they would with the interest of tribal people in Sudan. For the people in between, those who know about the label and who want to learn its story and all the sordid details–how can they stand to give it repeated viewings? Maybe they’re in it, or one of their friends is in it. If I sound harsh it may be due to giving Microcosm a chance before to delight me visually and intellectually–only to be hoodwinked into giving up an hour of my mind and life to subculture navel gazing such as their docs of Portland bike lanes and the game of Risk. I guess given the reality of today’s YouTube, such projects can safely exist to reach the few out there who need this kind of stimulation. But frankly, I wish they hadn’t created the plastic product that would quickly find it’s way to that artificial island in the Pacific.

It is not an accident that I viewed this work the day I heard the news of Malcolm Mclaren’s passing from this world. Malcolm was instrumental in the explosion of the Sex Pistols and hence punk’s first years in the public consciousness. Arguably every thing associated with punk can trace roots to Malcolm’s outlandish ploys for attention. He is in death just as intentful as he was on upstaging any contenders to his legacy. They worked by the way. Just watching a few minutes (again) of the movie of the Sex Pistols USA tour called DOA, it is simutamously seedy and inviting. The makers of “If It Ain’t Cheap” could learn something from this film and another one called “Decline of Western Civilization,” which likewise spends time explaining the L.A. Punk scene, but gives the viewer a feel and personality lacking today. But maybe that’s the problem–television. The people in the late 70’s early 80’s had sought to go out and do things besides being glued to some screen waiting for inspiration. The doc on Berkeley’s Gilman St. music club is pretty much as vapid and predictable as this new work. Though the people and scene we have today as seen with the Plan-It-X doc are on the right track at times, they largely have their integrity more intact than Mclaren and Decline’s maker Penelope Spheers. I guess we should get it straight when presenting ourselves to the straights; should we define ourselves in painful detail, or should we fascinate and shock them into attention?

Recently, two exciting small press books were published that discuss mental health and self-care from radical perspectives. Firewalkers: Madness, Beauty, & Mystery – Radically Rethinking Mental Illness was published in February by VOCAL, a non-profit based in Virginia that is made up of people in “mental health recovery”. The seven different personal stories in this collection speak to the deep transformations that can occur through a mental health crisis. It is reminiscent of the Icarus Project’s Navigating the Space Between Brilliance and Madness as well as my ‘zine, Counterbalance in terms of the personal and candid style in which each tell their stories. The stories in Firewalkers are told through interviews with the women who share their stories of mental health struggle, but this book is really about the transformation that comes from making it through these struggles. What is extra exciting to me about this book is that these women are talking about a whole new way of relating to mental health, seeing these struggles as more of a transformative journey than an illness. To quote from the book, “firewalkers redefines mental illness as: emotional turbulence and altered states; visionary meltdowns and spiritual breakthroughs; ecstatic visions and crazy blessing”. After the personal stories, Firewalkers turns to a section called “Burning Questions” which explores topics such as: “What is in your wellness toolbox?”; “What if you could change one thing about the mental health system?”; “Can mental illness be learned?”; “What’s the hardest thing to get people to understand about mental illness?” and more. What I may have found most interesting about this book is that these folks do not seem to be coming out of a political or radical community – they are not your (stereo)typical Slingshot reading punks or activists – they are people who have come to a radical way of experiencing their mental health struggles – I find this quite intriguing.

The other small press book came out in January on Feral Book Press (this is their first book). Living in Liberation: Boundary Setting, Self-Care, and Social Change does come out of the punk and activist community. The author, Cristien Storm, is a long-time Seattle activist who co-founded Home Alive, an anti-violence, self-defense non-profit established in 1993 after the rape and murder of Mia Zapata, singer for The Gits. Storm is now a therapist, writer and performer. Storm’s writing style is clear and direct, personal and even funny and beautiful at times. This book is about boundaries, a topic I feel I know little about and personally struggle with a lot in my life; Storm goes deep into this topic – exploring how we define them, set them, and what our intentions, goals, and objectives are around them. She encourages us to be authentic and really be accountable for ourselves and the context of our boundaries, what she calls “taking ourselves to task” – Storm delves into how racism, privilege and issues of invisibility play into boundaries. Living in Liberation also explores how we create support systems and this whole idea of liberation or how we get stuck in wishing things were different, rather than accepting things as they are (which to me really speaks to Buddhist ideas that are close to my heart). As Storm says, “There are things in life that are unfair, painful and devastating. Accepting those sucky things does not mean we don’t work to change or avoid what we are able to do.” Storm also discusses how boundaries and all the above connect to self-care (e.g. “Self-care is boundary setting.”), connection and community. This book is a practice I will come back to over and over. Isn’t it interesting how things that often seem so right, clear and even obvious, are the hardest things to really deeply know and act from consistently? The topics in Living in Liberation are hard work, work we can all benefit from – Storm closes the book with exercises to work with and resources as well.

For more information on Firewalkers go to www.thefirebook.org; for Living in Liberation go to www.feralbookpress.com. For the Icarus Project or Counterbalance go to www.microcosmpublishing.com and the www.theicarusproject.net. Contact the reviewer at counterbalance@riseup.net.

The news item on the radio in early Spring was buried as always under a gauntlet of ulcers. The dreaded “No Child Left Behind” policy of the Bush Presidency would be struck down. Like so many of the Obama Administration’s deeds this was a mixed bag–usually the devil being in the details. No Child Left Behind is being discontinued in name only. It seems that this new policy will continue the work of destroying teacher’s unions and school boards nationally, school boards being the way citizens have access to the way schools are operated. But also part of the plan is for mass closure of schools that are deemed “underperforming.” The public schools then will be converted into charter schools. The emphasis of class time placed on students processing information and testing. The young people under pressure will someday resemble the hang-ups given to them. Like most people, I have turned away from the depressing details of today’s news stories, as I mostly turned away from the state of schools today. I particularly associate it with the dread of my own school years that I would wish to leave behind me.

As protests over education cuts heated up locally and I attended planning meetings to help in the resistance, I dreamed for a moment of making a one sheet flier to hand out. A veritable Berkeley Rant–one I used to see across public walls and telephone poles throughout my youth. In my one moment of fame I would hand out my collected thoughts to the crowd, some of those disgruntled UC Berkeley students likely one day to become part of the managerial class of our society and therefore more influential in policy making than little old me. My rant would be rather utopian–assuming that we can make it thru this psychic hump created from the unnatural gasses of the economic bubbles that seem to span decades. Admittedly, some of my ideas would be informed by the anarchic thought of 60’s counter culture; present day schools using the business model, or the assembly line production model of instruction are damaging to the budding person. The idea is added to in Peter Watkins’s movie La Commune. In it there is a scene where a woman decries the over stimulation that happens in schools. She urgently implores the audience in a tone that seems to run the movie’s 3 hour running time, “What we need to teach children is how to read, how to write, and how to count. All the rest of the things schools do to children are harmful.”

RANT

My own two cents look more at what we are doing right. I agree with the theory of shaping the curriculum to the needs of the student, which almost necessitates a smaller class size. But more precisely, we need to change the quality of the little Americans who are being shaped. The counter culture loves to speculate that the system tends to breed a nation of conformists, as if the punks are striking up a chorus with Malvina Reynolds in a replay of “Little Boxes.” But I feel what is really being rendered in schools is a vicious attitude of competitiveness, with a companion effect of dependence to the system–which I will get to later.

The recent fight to stop UC Berkeley from cutting down native Oak trees to put up a dubious (and undoubtfuly ugly) sports training building signaled to me the preference the mother culture in America gives to competitive frames of life. The way that testing is used as a measure of achievement supports this. The better you do the better your school does. Team spirit. Or rather your social group needs to be better than your neighbors’. This practice helps to rationalize the invasion of other countries for such reasoning as “protecting our freedom”.

For me what is recyclable about American public schools is the mixture of peers spending time together experiencing events and problem solving together. There is a remarkable opportunity there with the mixing of little people across class lines, gender, ethnicity–people who haven’t fully formed attitudes and practices of bigotry. With this in mind I would structure class time to have a significant foundation in time to Share and Tell. Have this time to replace the practice of devouring information for the sake of regurgitation in the form of testing. Teach active listening and breed respect in people’s differences. Have students bring in aspects of their home life to engage their classmates–stories of their ancestors, a song that is sung in the house, a dish of food they subsist on. Then once a week, students from a nearby school would visit the school and tell of the customs they practice a few miles away. Then once a month kids from the school visits a far away region to share their customs.

MY OWN SCHOOL DAYS

This Friday’s quiz you have 10 minutes to complete the questions. Those of you who take longer will have to make it up during your lunch hour. Remember no talking or looking at your phone. Bathroom breaks will not be permitted.

A) If Mark Yudoff, whose salary is more than President Obama’s, is speeding in his car 12 miles over the legal limit from his office in Oakland to a lunch party in Sacramento but first he has to stop off at his other office to fire 13 janitors, 21 teachers, raise tuition in 7 schools–discontinue 14 classes, and help usher in a dozen new construction projects….when will he hit the wall?

Most people talk of the nightmares they have of school and you hear the standard of being naked amongst classmates. But isn’t this a hangover of the realities of the prudish 1950’s. What of the waking nightmares that are being practiced daily today? My own conversion to disliking school occurred in Jr. High school. I know several other people who really started to develop “problems” with their education at this time. Before Jr. High I used to enjoy the material and atmosphere of the classroom. A clear example of the institutional bummer was in my 7th grade math class. A crowded classroom trying to tackle a complex subject was not helped by the authoritarian teacher. Such emphasis placed on being seated by the ringing of the bell, having pencil in hand with book out mirrors the emphasis to performing high in tests and doing homework. The Filipina teacher who was always angry probably had a justified need to be so heavy handed–a large class of angsty kids being forced to contemplate an abstraction does not go so smoothly.

This was the Reagan 80’s, and even as an adolescent I could sense that the people in control were intentionally fouling the future up. But it was becoming evident that I was being weaned to take on heavy loads of “work” irregardless of its meaning for me, and to seek reward in abstract letter grades and numbers. Because of this time I went from being spiritually fed by learning to being attracted to dropouts. The heavy metal kids or comic book collectors seemed to use imagination and took a self-defined path that appealed to me more than the honor role robots or the sports heroes. My own nightmares of school would resemble the panic of trying to get my locker open before the second bell screams for all to be seated and ready to work.

I wish people would wake up sweating thinking that the children are being exposed to cancerous toxins from being located near freeways and areas with heavy traffic. That reading has become an aversion to most who go through school because they are forced fed antiquated authors with no relevance to their world today. That tiny growing bodies are being denied rest and then reprimanded for not being able to sit still, stay awake and be quiet. That the solutions for their squirming has been to put children on drugs and create rigid rules that help to exclude those who can’t conform. That the failure to put our resources into civil society is directly related to the emphasis placed in developing war, and war industries. I’m sweating now over the prospects of this kind of practice.

MOTHER/DAUGHTER

Popular slogans one sees in the Left’s commentary of reality is, “Capitalism is the Crisis.” Well I contend this may only be slightly agreeable to commo
n people especially, say a single parent of a teenager. For them the crisis is around their child and mitigating the demands of reality they encounter.

As an adult, many people I know either became parents and/or teachers. Suddenly I had to identify with the people who I once thought of as implementing oppressive policies. To boot, I also started to associate groups of rowdy youth as disruptive and violent. If anything, they gave me reason to accept the long hours that kids are kept locked up in schools. But I know this isn’t the solution. I know quite a few parents who have home schooled their kids well aware of what’s in store for them in the public schools. Those parents also know that what’s missing from home schooling, which is the one thing I purpose salvaging–the schools as a space of socialization.

The other day, I hung with a mother and daughter who did home schooling and asked them if they thought they gained anything avoiding high school. They clued me in that their relationship had changed since her daughter was no longer being shipped off to what is essentially day care for most parents. Normal parent/child relationships contend with an institutional alienation robbing them of their best years together. The daughter also related how important life skills are not taught in schools. Like learning to build our own homes and fix them, or growing our own food. These ideas made me think we also need skills to problem solve and have tools to express our emotions throughout the various challenges of our lives. When she was telling me this I realized we are intentionally NOT taught these skills. Not because they are useless skills in the modern world–but not knowing them makes people helpless through their whole life. Therefore we will have to go through corporations and the state to mitigate our needs in society.

There are many things to be said on how people have adapted to accept an absurd reality. We know we are on the brink of a new reality–a new world unlike the one we’ve been living in. Whether it’s the world of Rightwing think tanks, leftist collectives, or what not will need your input. Just remember the Right has a way of inserting ideas in your head and then you think you had them. An idea I had when experiencing children in the subculture is that the structures and ideas I showed them was taken as matter of fact. I helped create the foundation for reality. Just as I grew up with pot growing in the backyard and thinking the White House was full of criminals, despite the rules of the outside world. I have learned that what we do and say around the youth will help to usher in those practices when they fully take the world. But in the mean time the thing kids gotta do is have a good time–if not with our help then without our interference. If we provide a reality structured on joy and peace then they will seek to create those aspects when they are the adults. We are losing these basic principles by people who advertise “Never Ending War”, then make sure that is what goes down in places like schools. To free us from this path has to be a collective effort.

Coda

What 20th century meeting of leftists occurred without an opening or closing song? Since I referred to Malvina Reynolds already let us sing one of her compositions as we go out. Not “Little Boxes”–how tacky and American(!) to only sing the most popular tune. Yet this is the land of tinsel and tin men. I’m sure there is some who would tolerate her song “The Money Crop”, if it were only sung by a dude in aggressive punk type pounding ripping agony. But for now we’ll part with the way she recorded it. The singing wizened and old, therefore delicate — as it conveys the brave words telling truth to power. In this case let us dedicate it to the bureaucrats who wish to persuade us in compromising what we have in things like the environment, or what we will someday will give to the world–that being our children, in order to feed the…

THE MONEY CROP

Well money has its own way,

And money has to grow,

It grows on human blood and bone

As any child would know.

It’s iron stuff and paper stuff

With no life of its own,

And so it gets its growing sap

From human blood and bone.

Many a child goes hungering

Because the wage is low,

And men die on the battlefield

To make the money grow.

And those that take the money crop

Are avid without end,

They plant it in the tenements

To make it grow again.

The little that they leave for us

It cannot be a seed,

We spend it on the shoddy clothes

And every daily need,

We spend it in a minute,

In an hour it is gone,

To find its way to grow again

On human blood and bone,

Blood and bone.

Words and Music by Malvina Reynolds.

Copyright 1966, Schroder Music Co.

You’re pretty powerful when you’re 16. Even if the world doesn’t recognize this.

In the Finger Lakes region of Upstate New York — a beautiful, wild part of the country, dotted with farms and homesteads — activists are fighting to keep the five lakes free from byproducts of natural gas drilling. Natural gas, which is being touted as “clean, green energy,” is far from it. Gas is a fossil fuel that emits C02 when it is burned to generate electricity or for residential uses, contributing to global warming. Getting gas out of the ground requires a tremendous amount of resources and the drilling creates toxic byproducts.

In the tiny village of Pultney, which overlooks one of the Finger Lakes (Keuka Lake), residents were able to block a proposal to dump bi-products from a natural gas drilling process known as hydro-fracturing, or “fracking” for short. Fracking is a technique used to create fractures in shale, tight sand or coal beds in order to retrieve more oil or gas from the ground. According to Earthworks.org “Typically, in order to create fractures a mixture of water, proppants (sand or ceramic beads) and chemicals is pumped into the rock or coal formation. Eventually, the formation will not be able to absorb the fluid as quickly as it is being injected. At this point, the pressure created causes the formation to crack or fracture.”

The use of fracking to extract natural gas from Marcellus shale — black shale bedrock in parts of New York, Pennsylvania and West Virginia — is expanding rapidly as gas consumption expands and other sources of gas dry up. Fracking requires some pretty nasty chemicals to break up the shale to get to the natural gas. In some parts of Pennsylvania, for example, Chesapeake Energy is responsible for multiple spills of hydrochloric acid, one of the chemicals routinely pumped with water into the ground as part of the “fracking” process. Other chemicals used include: volatile organic compounds, such as BTEX formaldehyde, sulfur dioxide, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, nitrogen oxides, metals such as arsenic, barium, cadmium, chromium, lead and mercury, hydrogen sulfide, and diesel fuel, as well as many others.

Most of the chemicals used to frack stay in the ground, and may eventually seep into ground water. But about 2 percent of the contaminated water seeps back up and has to be put somewhere. Since Pennsylvania, the area where most of the drilling is occurring, passed laws keeping Chesapeake Energy and other companies from disposing of their waste water there, they’ve turned to New York to look for places to put it. They decided the best way to dispose of the polluted water is to truck it to other wells they have drilled that have either “dried up,” or never produced much, pump the toxic waters into these wells and then “cap” them. Supposedly capping the wells will keep the toxic sludge underground and in the wells.

But this makes no sense. How can anyone believe Chesapeake Energy when they claim there will be no leaking of these toxins into surrounding water? Essentially, they are creating little fault lines in our bedrock, which makes it very easy for water to seep from one place to another.

The well in Pultney that residents were most concerned about was only about a fourth of a mile from Keuka Lake, which remains one of the cleanest of the Finger Lakes. Chesapeake Energy wanted to send three trucks to the well per hour, filling the well with 180,000 gallons of toxic water per day for ten years! Residents of Pultney pointed out that the roads leading to the well are mostly seasonal, in some cases dirt roads, so the possibility of a truck turning over and toxic waste spilling was very high. Chesapeake Energy sent letters to town supervisors assuring them that their truck drivers where careful and that such accidents would be quickly handled by HazMat professionals. But the nearest city with a HazMat facility is nearly a two hour drive. By the time a HazMat team would be able to respond to a spill, chances are most of the toxins would be in the lake.

Luckily for Pultney and other residents of Keuka Lake, both human and nonhuman, area-activists swiftly responded to the proposal and got Chesapeake Energy to back down, at least for the moment. Chesapeake Energy sent a letter to Eric Massa, claiming they didn’t need that well anymore anyway, because they “have significantly enhanced our produced water recycling program and, as a result, we are no longer actively pushing for the resolution of our local permit request.” How long they stop actively pushing is anyone’s guess. Most of Pultney’s residents fear this isn’t the end of the battle. They continue to be diligent and keep their eyes on the activities of Chesapeake Energy, preparing for what some fear will be a long-term battle with the energy giant.

Meanwhile, gas drilling is expanding across the region, spewing toxic waste and prolonging addiction to earth-destroying fossil fuels. What can we learn from Pultney’s small victory and how can we expand it to thousands of towns and villages across the globe?

Check out: www.un-naturalgas.org

“Is there any man or woman–nay, any child–who does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is commercial and industrial rivalry?” — President Woodrow Wilson, September 1919

Unlike some gullible chaps who have faith in electoral politics as a representative democracy, I did not experience a yawning chasm of disappointment or abandonment upon the realization that Obama is not the messiah who will rid the world of all pestilence, trickery, and wrong. To this day the mainstream media is touting Obama as a great conciliator and philanthropist in his single-minded quest to rid the world from the threat of mutually assured nuclear extinction. But the more you unravel Obama’s political alliances and network of election financiers, the more you come to understand how deeply beholden the President of the United States is to the nuclear energy industry as well as nuclear weapons development.

Obama made his way into office at the hands of corporate financiers, who are heavy hitters in the financial industries as well as “essential services” such as the nuclear power industry.

They helped elect him, they were thrilled to death when he won, and his cabinet is no stranger to the business of building new nuclear power plants.

David Axelrod, Obama’s chief political strategist, had a previous position with nuclear energy firm Exelon to win public support for rate increases. Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, was instrumental in the creation of that company, which went on to become the nation’s most valuable nuclear utility based on market value.

His nuclear family close at hand, he pledges to build “a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants.” In his climate change policy, Obama openly embraces nuclear power as a carbon-free alternative to petro-energy. The government plans to subsidize the construction of over 30 nuclear reactors in the coming years. While the carbon imprint is less than coal or natural gas, there is no known method of safely storing or disposing of the spent fuel rod waste from nuclear reactors. Each one has a half-life of 10,000 years, which means any facility built to store them must last at least that long.

Creating deadly poisonous waste and stockpiling barrels of it along fault lines at seismically unfit facilities is ecological suicide. But so is the government’s nasty habit of dumping this waste on Native reservations and sacred sites, often targeted for their “sparse levels of human habitation”.

But more nuclear reactors responsible for more nuclear waste only promises to kill people slowly, over time. Obama’s investments in the nuclear arms industry is more distressing. With an arsenal bulging upwards of 10,000 nuclear warheads, Obama ordered large increases to pad the budgets of the National Nuclear Security Administration (13% raise) and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, up 22% from last year.

This funding increase to the National Laboratory in Albuquerque is to begin construction of the innocuously named “Chemistry and Metallurgy Building Replacement Project”, a multi-billion dollar laboratory capable of manufacturing over 200 plutonium pits per year, a crucial ingredient of the nuclear bomb. Meanwhile, Lawrence Livermore Laboratory is making strides towards the world’s first “subcritical” warhead. It’s for projects like these that Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, formerly of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, proclaims we must train and recruit a new generation of nuclear scientists to build a new generation of warheads for America’s arsenal. It’s these lab managers, nuclear scientists, and military planners who create livelihoods from sowing the seeds of political instability the world over.

How can you pay lip service to a nuclear free world (see his magnanimous “Yes, we can!” speech in Prague) one moment and up funding to the nuclear laboratories to build MORE bombs the next? We have 24,000 plutonium pits in the arsenal, only half actively deployed in weapons. We have 50,000 warheads in the world and enough enriched uranium for the production of over 200,000, enough to blow to smithereens every man woman and child on Earth. With so many avenues of annihilation already available, why must we produce more under the banner of arms reduction?

This leads us to a few possibilities concerning Obama’s intentions. He might be a hypocrite, a political flip-flopper, or a mastermind of Orwellian inversion, most poetically displayed when he asserted the necessity of war while accepting the Nobel Peace Prize with absolutely no hint of irony. Anyone who believes Obama is truly interested in ridding the world of the threat of nuclear warfare hasn’t studied history hard enough. The American economic empire is predicated on perpetual warfare and the threat of warfare as an engine of commercial growth. Ultimately, we need to blame the free market system that rewards this sociopathic and genocidal behavior, but that doesn’t remove Obama’s personal culpability in constructing a dangerously deceptive nuclear policy in a supposedly post-Cold War world.