Non-Colorado
The Reasons Why the US Economy is Dead by Phillip Reynes
Submitted by phil on March 14, 2010 - 2:25pm20 Reasons the US Economy is Dead
Anarchist need to be ready and take heart that the time may be fast coming in the USA where we will have the opportunity to make our case. Social unrest is going to come and it will be a time that will give Anarchist more then just a fair hearing if we can be ready. What follows is the case for why I say this and what you should know.
Even though the U.S. financial system nearly experienced a total meltdown in late 2008, the truth is that most Americans simply have no idea what is happening to the U.S. economy. Most people seem to think that the nasty little recession that we have just been through is almost over and that we will be experiencing another time of economic growth and prosperity very shortly. But this time around that is not the case. The reality is that we are being sucked into an economic black hole from which the U.S. economy will never fully recover.
The problem is debt. Collectively, the U.S. government, the state governments, corporate America and American consumers have accumulated the biggest mountain of debt in the history of the world. Our massive debt binge has financed our tremendous growth and prosperity over the last couple of decades, but now the day of reckoning is here.
And it is going to be painful.
The following are 20 reasons why the U.S. economy is dying and is simply not going to recover....
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High School Students refuse to accept coal money
Submitted by Anonymous on February 10, 2010 - 6:07pmIn Missoula on Tuesday, February 9th, about 100 students from Big Sky High School walked out of class early to protest the proposed leasing of Otter Creek coal, and to send a message to the Land Board that students do not want coal mined in their names. The Otter Creek coal tracts are located under state school-trust lands, which means all income the state receives from exploitation of those lands should be used to fund the state’s education system. After leaving classes in defiance of Big Sky administrators’ efforts to enforce school authority, many students then marched about a mile to the busy intersection of South & Reserve where they held a rally, chanting slogans such as “No blood for money! We gotta keep Otter Creek!”
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“We, as students from Big Sky High School, do not want our school funding to come from coal,” said Allison Lawrence, one of the protesters at the rally. “We would rather live with old books than get blood money for shiny new computers.”
On Thursday, February 11, the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation will submit its official recommendation to the Land Board about a next course of action to be taken at the February 16 meeting. It is worth mentioning that the only member of the Land Board to vote against leasing Otter Creek at the last meeting is Denise Juneau, the Superintendent of Public Instruction, the very institution that would supposedly benefit financially from mining Otter Creek! If other members who voted for leasing the coal tracts only on the condition of getting maximum income from the lease stay true to their words, then next week’s meeting could result in an end to this whole misguided attempt to destroy pristine Montana land. A refusal to lower the bid and royalty prices may effectively protect Otter Creek… for now.
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The Earth First! Journal Needs Your Help To Stay in Print
Submitted by Anonymous on February 10, 2010 - 3:00pm
For almost thirty years the Earth First! Journal has been the voice of the radical environmental movement. For those thirty years the Journal has remained independent by not compromising its values for large grants or foundation money.
Our support comes from grassroots activists and supports from the frontlines in the battle to save what's left of our wild places. While we are often broke and in need of funds, the situation today is more dire then ever before.
The issue of the Journal that we are working on now is struggling to come up with funds to print, and unless people like you step-up and give whatever they can it may not happen. Our print date is less then two weeks away and we are completely out of funds. Zero--zip--zilch.
A break down of our finances goes something like this. We need $1250 to print the next issue. We need $500 to mail out subscriptions (many for free to our comrades behind bars). We need $1000 dollars for rent and utilities for the office (that's due at the end of the month). Lastly, we would like to pay our editorial collective that works full-time putting together the Journal. For payroll we would ideally need $1500 (for five people). Many in the collective have not yet been paid for last month either.
This is a daunting challenge for us, and for our movement. Without generous donations from people like you, the Earth First! Journal may cease to exist altogether.
The High Cost of Making the Bad Guy Pay
Submitted by Anonymous on February 7, 2010 - 10:02pmBy Tom Gomez
Until 2004, Colorado State prisoners were paid $2 a day for our labor, roughly $40 a month. Since that time the Colorado State Legislature, in an attempt to reduce the cost of incarceration while it enacted more laws to lock up more people, for more time, reduced the amount paid to prisoners to $0.62 a day, roughly $13 a month. While the change has made prison conditions harsher, it has done nothing to reduce the spiraling cost of incarceration in Colorado. Despite the change the Department of Corrections budget has grown every year since. Colorado now spends more on prisons than it does on higher education, and there is no end in sight. Last year the DOC population grew by another 2% despite a falling crime rate. At a cost of $30,000 a year for each prisoner it houses DOC is not likely to be able to significantly reduce, or even offset, the high cost of incarceration by such methods as raising the cost of phone time or cutting back on food. Instead state university students and their parents will pay the bill, by absorbing another 9% increase in tuition next year. It will be paid by cuts in services to seniors, by public education, and by the improvised children of the men and women doing time here.
State legislatures across the country have built prisons while cutting funding for education and public health for 30 years now. In the name of cutting the cost of ‘big government’ and getting ‘tough on crime’ they have made prisons harsher, more crowded and dangerous, but not cheaper. Led by ‘tough prosecutors’ who view not only crime, but poverty itself as a moral failing they have given us a nation of tent cities that stretch from sea to shining sea bursting with the nation’s three-million homeless people, and interstates from coast to coast dotted with razor ribbon and guard towers. In many American cities more than half of all public school students will not graduate high school.
Howard Zinn, 1922-2010, Historian, Activist, Writer, Personal Hero
Submitted by tina braxton on January 28, 2010 - 12:17pmAs a historian and member of the Colorado Indymedia Collective, it seems I should be the one to write our obituary for Howard Zinn. I'm finding that hard to do. Howard was one of my childhood role models, one of the reasons I became a historian. His loss is, for me, a personal one.
We lost Howard yesterday. He died of a heart attack, at age 87, in Santa Monica, California. Howard was on the road, still working. He was in Santa Monica for an appearance at The Santa Monica Museum of Art, scheduled for February 4.
I don't think I have to list a lot of facts about who Howard was or the things he did. People who read Indymedia know him well. For anyone who wants to know more, or who wants to read something truly inspiring, I will recommend the book I've been recommending ever since it came out, Howard's 1994 autobiography, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train.
The best words to describe Howard are his own. So I will let him finish this article himself, by reprinting his own words.
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The Optimism of Uncertainty
by HOWARD ZINN
[posted online on September 2, 2004 at http://www.thenation.com/doc/20040920/zinn]
In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy?
I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world.
Call For Support From Indigenous Resistance Communities of Big Mountain, Black Mesa, AZ
Submitted by Dirty Hands on January 22, 2010 - 4:37pm
Immediate Call For Support From Indigenous Resistance Communities of Big Mountain, Black Mesa, AZ in their struggle for Life, Land and Dignity. January 18, 2010
Although there’s been a recent victory against the reopening of the Black Mesa Complex, the Kayenta mine is still operating and elders on the front lines fighting the continued impacts of coal mining and forced relocation efforts are still requesting support.
We are writing with a request for direct on-land support on behalf of families of traditional resistance communities of Black Mesa, AZ.. One of the Big Mountain elder matriarchs, Blanche Wilson, the mother of Mae Tso, who hosted the 2008 caravan, passed away yesterday. Please hold her and her family in your thoughts and prayers. Mae and Samuel, two of Blanche’s children, and elders themselves, are living alone at their homesite. They are in much need of support–they will need to take four days away from basic necessities and work for the traditional funeral. Additionally Mae injured her back on Christmas day and has been in pain for the last three weeks and at a limited work capacity; Samuel has been working double what he normally does. There are supporters there now until Wednesday the 20th. The funeral will be after that so, as mentioned, they really need the help at this time.
The Supreme Court has Given America to the Corporations By Phillip Reynes
Submitted by phil on January 21, 2010 - 8:57pmWe as a nation my well be doomed. By the time I post this many of you here at COIMC and in IndyMedia's around the country will have heard the shocking news. Namely that the Supreme Court today not only reaffirmed that corporations are people, but that corporations may spend an unlimited amount of money to tilt election campaigns. This is an unprecedented turn of events that threatens to make real the crossover of our country into overt corporate fascism.
You and I and all who care about freedom need to fight this perversion of justice. One thing that you can do is go to this site (http://www.movetoamend.org )and sign a petition to get a constitutional amendment that would explicitly declare that corporations do not have the rights of citizens and are not people.
Our nation is being taken over by corporations and this court decision will make there takeover complete if left unchallenged. This decision by the Supreme Court will shred any hope of anything but the transition of the United States into a corporatocracy! If unchallenged there will be no hope of any compromise short of violence in defense of our rights as people.
The fact is corporationsare not people. Corporations do not die are not subject to the laws of nature, feel no emotion and worst of all live forever with no soul and a relentless desire to maximize profit. This ruling extends the very rights of a person to all corporations that operate within the United States and so this ruling means that foreign multinational corporations that operate in the United States will have more power over our election system than American citizens themselves.
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Censorship on Colorado Indymedia?
Submitted by Anonymous on January 12, 2010 - 8:44pmThe Red Pill has been active on the Colorado Indymedia site now for about five years. Never it that time have we ever seen any censorship or suppression of debate. But today we are very concerned that photos attached to the announcement that Bash Back's 2010 Convergance is going to be held in Denver have been removed, and comments disabled. We would like to see a full explanation of why the photos were removed, and comments reactivated on that post. That is not too much to ask for an open publishing site that is supposed to be non-hierarchical.
Thank You
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Bash Back! 2010 Convergence in Denver!
Submitted by Dirty Hands on January 12, 2010 - 4:14pm
bash back denver is pleased to host the twenty-ten bash back! convergence from may twenty-seventh to thirtieth.
rsvp > www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=408915865626
more pics > boulevardier4eva.wordpress.com
have pics 2 trade? > bashbackdenver |at| gmail |dot| com
see you in denver
<3 <3 <3
bb!
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Wild Roots Feral Futures 2010: Dates & Call for Workshops
Submitted by Dirty Hands on January 4, 2010 - 1:58am
The 2010 Wild Roots Feral Futures will take place for a seven-day duration, a quarter moon cycle, from June 19th-26th (from the First Quarter Moon on the 19th through the Summer Solstice on the the 21st to the Full Moon on the 26th) in the foothills of the mighty and wild San Juan Mountains of Southwest Colorado.
We are looking for folks of all sorts to join us and help facilitate workshops, conflict resolution and management, direct action and medic trainings, wild food walks, and much more! We will be focusing on many things, including but by no means limited to anarchist theory and praxis, rewilding, ancestral skills, indigenous solidarity, direct action, forest defense, security culture, civil disobedience, hand to hand combat, survival skills, evasion tactics, green anarchism, anti-civ, post-civ, star watching and navigation, maps and orienteering, shelter building, and whatever YOU care to bring and provide. But we need everyone's help to make this as safe, positive, and productive a space as it can be. Our own knowledge, skills, and capacities are limited. We need YOUR help!
Roles we REALLY need filled:
• Kitchen! (we've reached out to Everybody's Kitchen and Seeds of Peace)
• CRAM team (conflict resolution and management: we need people of diverse gender/sexual orientations who know how to give support to survivors of sexual assault and to people with PTSD)*
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