Calendar

Sat, May 24: March Against Monsanto – Bring your signs/costumes. Gather at the Tivoli Fountain on the WA State Capitol Campus at 11am. – TESC Annual Spring Traditional Powwow – Brought to you by Native student alliance TESC, The Evergreen State College, Evergreen Longhouse, Student Activities, Abolish Cops and Prisons, MEXA de Evergreen, and The Flaming Eggplant Cafe. 1pm at TESC in the CRC. – Mad Hatter Tea Party – In celebration of mental health month. Will include Hat making, Photo Booth, Tea Time, Games, Open-mic. 1-4pm at Media Island International, 816 Adams st. SE. – Olympia Record Show – Hosted by Rainy Day Records. A gathering of folks buying and selling all genres of vinyl LPs, 45s, and more. For $3 admission, anyone can come dig for great deals! There will be a full bar available for 21+ and the show runs from 5 til 9 pm at the Olympia Elks Lodge. Tue, May 27: Fighting for a Living Wage – This workshop will explore the possibilities and issues to building a campaign for a living wage in Olympia, similar to the $15 NOW campaign in Seattle. 7pm at Traditions Fair Trade. -- Attend the monthly meeting of the Olympia Fellowship of Reconciliation’s Committee for Alternatives to the Death Penalty: 7:00 pm at a convenient location in Tumwater. We educate ourselves and plan future activities toward abolishing this atrocity. Info: Emily Hammargren 352-0695 or deathpenalty@olympiafor.org Wed May 28: Olympia Movement for Justice and Peace (OMJP) -- Meets at 6:30 pm on the 2nd and 4th Wednesdays of each month to work on a variety of global and local issues. Location and info: Larry 951-4894 lmosqueda@comcast.net -- Learn about and discuss economics with Pete and Savvina: People have been enjoying this informative series at 7:00 pm at Traditions Café, 5th & Water SW, Olympia. Free admission! Info: peterbohmer@yahoo.com Thur, May 29: Feminine/Masculine-Three NW Writers -- Three Pacific Northwest writers, Sophia Pfaff-Shalmiyev, Cooper Lee Bombardier and Inga Muscio, read from their works about gender, loss and racism. 7:30pm at the Timberland Library. Mon June 2: Fellowship of Reconciliation: “Igniting a Grassroots Compassion Movement” -- The Olympia FOR’s June TV program airs at 1:30 this afternoon and three times a week this month on TCTV channel 22 for Thurston County’s cable subscribers. After it debuts on TCTV you’ll be able to watch it at www.olympiafor.org/tv_programs.htm

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Calendar (continued)

Sun, June 1: Media Island International Monthly Benefit Brunch – Please join us for food and friendship to support Olympia's Rachel Corrie Chapter 109 of Veterans For Peace! 11am-2pm at 816 Adams St.

Thurs June 5: Olympia “Move to Amend” group meets tonight: This grassroots movement group is working to get money out of politics and reclaim our democracy! They are helping to collect signatures for Washington State’s Initiative 1329 to overturn the US Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. 6:30-8:30 pm at Thurston County Courthouse, Bldg. 1, Room 152.

Sat, June 7: Garden Center Grand Opening -- Hosted by Olympia Food Co-Op. Come celebrate our latest Expansion project! The Grand Opening Celebration main events will begin in the early afternoon (1pm) on Saturday, and until the evening (7pm) will include live musical entertainment, refreshments, raffle with prizes, and plant-start giveaways. Help us get off to a great start! Take home a six pack of flowers with your $5 purchase at the Garden Center all weekend while supplies last. Thur, June 12: The Earth Does Not Belong to Us – A mixed medium cabaret/vaudeville show called ‘The earth does not belong to us.' The show explores human beings’ relationships with land and environment using a mixture of music, poetry, fiction-reading, puppetry and live art. 8pm at 816 Adams St. Sat, June 15: Olympia Downtown Neighborhood Association Elections -- Please join us for the first annual meeting of the Downtown Neighborhood Association! We will be electing the DNA board & officials for the coming year and would like to see as many neighborly faces as possible. There will be several short speeches about what we are trying to accomplish as a neighborhood association. Takes place at 911 Adams St. SE.

Media Island International (MII) is a resource and networking center for individuals, organizations and movements working on social justice,economic democracy, ecological sustainability

and peace. We gather, evaluate and distribute under-published information on critical issues at strategic times.

mediaisland.org / kowalp.org

106.5 KOWA is a young, fully licensed 100 watt low power FM

radio station in Olympia, WA at the beautiful base of the Puget Sound. We are a non-profit radio station whose mission is to give

voice to individuals, organizations and movements working for social justice, economic democracy,

ecological sustainability and peace.

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Issue#2 (May 15th, 2014) PeaceWorks Conference emphasizes problems and solutions for

mass incarceration in Israel and the U.S

By Ian Riise On Saturday, April 19 the Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice hosted PeaceWorks 2014, a daylong conference at The Evergreen State College culminating in a keynote conversation with longtime activist Angela Davis and human rights attorney Noura Erakat. It was an event that brought together local, national and international organizers to discuss the similarities between the United States and Israel's use of a system of social control whose primary means of enforcement is the mass incarceration of subjugated populations. Today five thousand Palestinians are in captivity, and more than 726,000 have been detained by Israeli forces since 1967 with a conviction rate of 99.7% in military courts. Thousands have been held in what Israel calls “administrative detention”– imprisonment without

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(Peaceworks continued...) charges that can be renewed indefinitely. The U.S. been providing Israel with $2-3 billion per year to help continue this illegal occupation, while their own incarceration rates have tripled since 1980. Now it is the highest rate in the world, with 0.7% of the population behind bars. These rates are largely due to the emergence of the “War on Drugs,” which has not only increased the amount of prisoners, but has led to disproportionate targeting of minorities as well. Davis mentioned that African Americans are sent to prison for drug charges at 10x the rate of white people yet they only make up 12 percent of of the total population of drug users.

Both Erakat and Davis identified the services of G4S, an important aspect of U.S. and Israeli incarceration. This company is largely responsible for the prison industrial complex by providing manned security services and security systems in U.S. and Israeli prisons, and the U.S./Mexico as well as the Israeli/Palestinian border. These are just a few G4S operations, which have helped them become the world's third-largest private sector employer. The conference also included workshops and testimonies on: the school-to-prison pipeline, immigrant activism, political imprisonment, alternatives to incarceration, solitary confinement, prison strikes, and Palestinian solidarity. The Rachel Corrie Foundation “encourages grassroots efforts in pursuit of human rights and social economic, and environmental justice, which we view as prerequisites for world peace.” The foundation is dedicated to continuing the work of TESC graduate Rachel Corrie, a journalist who was crushed to death in 2003 by an Israeli military bulldozer while nonviolently protesting the demolition of Palestinian civilian homes. Nine years after filing a civil suit against the State of Israel for the her wrongful death, her family finally had their appeal heard before the Israeli Supreme Court on May 21 only for the court to rule that the state was not responsible for her death, shifting the blame for the killing on to Rachel herself. Video of Davis and Erakat’s discussion is available on YouTube

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There have been numerous instances lately wherein a relatively small number of people have staged some kind of large public protest over something and suddenly Congress could not pass or kill a bill fast enough. This means that we can actually affect public policy even on the federal level. It’s just that every individual instance requires a mass-mobilization and they counter us by wearing us out with so many outrages that we simply cannot keep up with all of them.

I think the lesson there is that we need to carefully choose our battles.

Check out Dana’s weekly newsletter, The Thunderbolt at http://dana98501.wordpress.com

Civil Liberties Groups and Tech Firms Plan a Day of Action as a

Result of Outrage Over Government and Corporate misuse of the Internet

By Ian Riise

On June 5th, the one year anniversary of the first Edward Snowden story, nearly two-dozen tech companies and civil liberties groups are launching a new fight against mass internet surveillance. In the official Reset the Net video (resetthenet.org), organizers claim that” “Government spies have a weakness: they can hack anybody, but they can't hack everybody. Folks like the NSA depend on collecting insecure data from tapped fiber. They depend on our mistakes, mistakes we can fix.” Led by Fight for the Future, the plan is to battle the NSA in the same way they did against the 2012 Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in which thousands of websites went dark or partially dark to halt the legislation. One setback for this campaign was that SOPA was backed by nearly every big tech firm, but some companies like Google and Twitter, haven't given their support for this effort. Both companies among others, recently put their support behind the fight to save net neutrality in an open letter to the FCC (business users and consumers have a common interest in being able to offer and consume content in a fair manner). It's contradictory for Twitter and Google to oppose Internet service providers from discriminating against their users, while staying silent on online surveillance, as both issues concern the prospect of a free and open internet. In light of Edward Snowden's leaks, it's clear that the NSA has been able to reach us through tech companies, but as more leaks are published, the nature of this relationship is still being revealed. Google's decision not to get behind the June 5th event can partially be explained by a revelation earlier this week by Al Jazeera, which spoke volumes about their insidious involvement with the NSA. Emails between Keith Alexander and Google executive Eric Schmidt show that they (among other industry leaders) were invited to a classified threat briefing. Schmidt politely declined, which suggests that Google's claim that they

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Alexander spoke to The Australian Financial Review earlier this month. In an interview filled with bitter rhetoric, he had this to say about Snowden's leaks: “I’m greatly disappointed that we have rewarded those who have put so many lives at risk. . . . At the end of the day, I believe peoples’ lives will be lost because of the Snowden leaks because we will not be able to protect them with capabilities that were once effective but are now being rendered ineffective because of these revelations.” In a write-up of this interview, journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has been involved charge of deciding which leaks to be published had this to say about Alexander's comments: “For that sort of irony, nothing will beat that episode where the US Pentagon chief and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff announced that WikiLeaks – not themselves, but WikiLeaks – has “blood on its hands” by virtue of publishing documents about the U.S. war in Afghanistan. In the world of the U.S. National Security State and its loyal media, those who go around the world killing innocent people over and over are noble and heroic, while those who report on what they do are the ones with “blood on their hands”. Reset the Net isn't just about the NSA's 4th amendment violations, but also ensuring fair internet access and service. On May15th, the FCC voted to strike down net neutrality by setting up a” fast lane” online, while still claiming that net neutrality would be maintained if this proposal was implemented. The FCC made this decision despite protests on the day of the vote, and mostly negative public opinion on the move. Now it's up to President Obama, who spoke in favor of net neutrality before he took office, to approve or dismiss these proposed rules. However this is another situation where the president has turned away from an issue he spoke so passionately about in 2007-8. Last year he chose Tom Wheeler, a long time telecommunications industry lobbyist as the FCC chairman, showing a complete disregard for our already commercialized and consolidated media industry. Wheeler was no stranger to Obama when he was appointed. He spent six weeks in Iowa aiding Obama's first campaign and went on to raise a combined $500,000 for both campaigns. Despite this setback, the fights for a fair internet and 4th amendment rights online have converged, and will stand stand against corporate and government tampering with the web on June 5th. Maybe now with these combined efforts, we can finally make the internet the common carrier public good it was meant to be.

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(Artesian Well continued…) Whether or not this would be the best use of the well, this restriction ends a long history of open well access in Olympia and ends its run as a commons. H2Olympia points out that dozens of cities in the U.S. still embrace their wells the way Olympia once did, calling themselves “artesian cities.” This potential appears to be lost in our city, but it shouldn't stop us from trying to uncap and develop some of the many hidden wells in a way that rejects privatization and restriction.

Two Exciting Summer Delegations to Central America!

By Bruce Wilkinson - Alliance for Global Justice

The mission of the Alliance for Global Justice is to achieve social change and economic justice by helping to build a stronger more unified grassroots movement. We recognize that the concentration of wealth and power is the root cause of oppression requiring us to work together across ideologies, issues and communities. The Alliance nurtures organizations seeking fundamental change in international and national conditions that disempower people, create disparities in access to wealth and power,

poison the earth, and plunder its resources.

Honduras: Human Rights Accompaniment – June 22-July 1, 2014: On the fifth anniversary of the coup that overthrew democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya, the nonviolent National Front for Popular Resistance, farmers, students, labor unionists, LGBT activists, and regular people request our accompaniment in the face of violence and repression. This delegation will join with a delegation from the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) for a trip to the Southern part of the country where a charter has been granted for a Model City. Never heard of a Model City? Well, this delegation will help make sure that everyone learns about this perverse concept where North Americans set up a city outside the laws and jurisdiction of the Honduran law. This is not uninhabited land. Help AfGJ and the NLG investigate who will be displaced and what other effects this pernicious dream of North American libertarians will have on Honduras. The delegation will be based in the capital city of Tegucigalpa will also travel to Zacate Grande where communities that have inhabited the land for generations are being threatened by tourism and African Palm business interests. We will also visit Siria Valley where environmentalists are under death threat and legal actions for their activism against North American mining interests that are destroying their water and their health. In Tegucigalpa the delegation will meet with human rights defenders and leaders of popular movements struggling against state violence and impunity. Learn about how North American foreign policy impacts these communities generating further human rights issues, social conflict and militarization. Nicaragua: Climate Change – Aug. 3-12, 2014: Rich in natural resources, Nicaragua has one of the world’s great stores of fresh water. It is also one of the countries most vulnerable to climate change. Since the Sandinistas return to government in 2007 Nicaragua is also a country with a growing consciousness of its environmental

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treasures and that its future depends on preserving its forests and environment, as well as food sovereignty. Over 50% of Nicaragua’s electricity is now generated from renewable sources. While the leaders of developed countries “fiddle while Rome burns”, Nicaraguans are fully aware of the dangers of climate change and are experimenting with how to ameliorate its effects. The delegation will visit projects coping with climate change, in Managua, Esteli, Somoto, Condega, and Leon. It will visit projects to conserve rain water, small scale hydro electric plants, sustainable agricultural projects,and geothermal and wind energy projects. It will also travel to Grenada and learn about the proposed inter-oceanic canal and talk to people for and against it. A cultural night and a beach day will also be part of the itinerary. Delegation Cost: The $1,000 cost covers all in-country travel, housing (double occupancy), food, translation, and materials. It does not cover international airfare. For an application or more information send an email to:Chuck@AFGJ.org or call 202-540-8336 x1.

The Africans Have Some New Friends Too!

By Dana Walker Over the last decade several million mostly civilians have been killed in the Congo with nary a peep from the western Media Machine. Evidently they have more important things to cover. (What did happen at Ben Ghazi anyway?) The kidnapping and enslaving and/or forced-marrying of young girls has also been a common practice in central Africa for a long time now and again the Media Machine has never thought this worthy of much if any comment. Suddenly — for some unknown reason — they are paying attention to something that happened to some Africans! Suddenly everyone is rising up in outrage over the mass-kidnapping of several hundred young African girls! Some cynics (you know who you are!) would point out that you can’t believe much of what the Media Machine tells you about much of anything and that any time they are creating a new bogeyman you must take anything they say about them with a ton of salt — but this time Boko Harum themselves put out a video showing what violent murderous nut cases they are. Thus, they can be easily dehumanized and exterminated rather than asking the hard questions about why some people are reduced to such insanity. Some cynics might also speculate that the publicity being given to these new African bogeymen is associated with the warning I issued last year when the US government announced that Africa was now getting its very own American Military Command called AFRICOM, and I warned that this meant that the African people had better watch their backs and head for the hills because the USA is about to drop a ton of democratic whoopee on their asses. Things like Boko Haram and Kony

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can be transformed into a cassus belli to insert military shenanigans into a valuable area if you play your cards right… But that’s only the cynics who think things like that. We must clearly cheer nearly any step taken with the intention of taking down these heavily armed mass-murdering lunatics who kidnap and rape little girls — and just continue to ignore all the other things that are happening there and all the things that continue to happen. For instance: Boko Harum has continued to attack villages and kidnap little girls but even though the Media Machine actually has reporters on the ground in country at the moment (who knows for how long?) they are focused only on the single mass-kidnapping and they continue to ignore the smaller less spectacular lower profile kidnappings that are happening right under their noses even as they continue their breathless coverage of the latest officially designated media circus…

Check out Dana’s weekly newsletter, The Thunderbolt at http://dana98501.wordpress.com

What’s Your Nakba?

By Avery Cushman

Al-Nakba means “the catastrophe” in Arabic referring to the continuous displacement of Palestinians in Israel. May 15, 1948 is known worldwide as the day the new state of Israel was created, but for the Palestinian people it is synonymous with the beginning of al-Nakba when over 700,000 Palestinians were displaced and over 450 Palestinian villages were destroyed to prevent the return of refugees. ”Because the Palestinians were not Jewish, their presence and predominant ownership of the land were obstacles to the creation of a Jewish state.”

This May we mark the 66th

anniversary of the destruction that took place between 1948 and 1949 while taking notice and action of the displacement that is still continuing to go on. At this moment there are more then 4 million registered Palestinian refuges worldwide and the 22 percent of land the Palestinians still have hold of is slowly slipping away for the expansion of Israeli settlements and the construction of the separation wall. Many Palestinians continue to be dispossessed of their homes, lands, and livelihoods to this day. Monday, May 12th, at Heritage Park in downtown Olympia, the Rachel Corrie Foundation commemorated Nakba Day with a display featuring the Palestinian villages destroyed in 1948, as well as signs with quotes from documents and specific events, and a few miscellaneous signs relating to issues in the US. I arrived at Heritage Park at 7 am that morning and began to set up. I decided to line the path of the park with signs on both sides. Within the first five minutes of setting up a man had come up to me to ask what I was doing, so I began to explain what the signs were displaying and what my purpose was. When I was finished speaking he looked down at the large piles of signs by our feet and then to

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(NAKBA continued…) the empty park and back to the signs, “Whoa. That’s a lot of signs,” he said to me reeling with an epiphany on the inside as he was really registering it for the first time. He then got quiet and I could tell he was uncomfortable. It was a common reaction from people when they didn’t know how to respond to this issue. It was a tense subject that lingered in the air with clashing. It was easily misunderstood. It was easily misinterpreted. It was easily avoided. The man then proceeded to wish me luck and continued on with his day.

It took me about an hour to set up all the signs and information. When I was finally done I switched on my Palestinian rap CD and settled into my char. People filtered in and out of the park slowing weaving through the display giving me a polite smile and wave or coming up to the table to ask whatever questions had come to mind. Conversations ranged from 5 minutes to an hour covering subjects from how I was able to obtain a permit for this event, to questions on the topic, to the originality and genealogy of man. I felt as though I talked about anything and everything at the park that day. It was quite interesting to see where our conversations could end up. I learned difficultly but quickly how to converse with people on this subject and to watch what I said before I understood their standing on this issue. I think the most difficult time I had throughout the day was when I was speaking with an elderly lady when she looked me in the eyes and said, “Well what if I am old and tired of fighting.” At first I understood but then I quickly felt the anger rising. I told her that I didn’t believe any one person had the responsibility of taking action but if we all thought that way then nothing would be done. It was one of those conversations where both points are equally correct and there wasn’t much else to say. However, things will still exist whether you choose to be part of it or not.

We all have al-Nakba in our lives. That was the big thing I took from this event. That was what everyone took from this event. Whether it was something specific to yourself or your life, what is happening to the Palestinians or any other issue going on in the world, there is something we want to change and better. I quickly realized that if I were to listen to what someone presented as their Nakba then in return they would listen to what I had to say about the Palestinians. It was our chance to relate through fighting for a cause, to educate and to inspire each other. We were relating to each with what we believed in and seeing that we had commonalities made it all the more intriguing to learn what the other had to say. We all have Nakba in our lives that we view as unjust and we all have things that we want to change for the better, its all on unifying struggle.

The Department of Ignorance

By Dana Walker The only reason for a security state is to provide a tool for a small minority to control the masses. The real purpose for the phrase ‘national security’ is to provide an excuse to keep the public uninformed. The security state exists not only to let them know what is going, but even more importantly it exists to intimidate people in order to keep them

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from knowing what is going on. Anyone that says anything they don’t like — especially if what they are saying is true — becomes a ‘national security’ concern. The actions of neither the Earth Liberation Front [ELF] nor the Animal Liberation Front [ALF] has never so much as injured much less killed anyone — yet Kids from ELF and ALF are called ‘terrorists’ and several of them are doing 10-year prison sentences for damaging property — charges for which they would have received 3-year prison sentences had they damaged the same property for purposes of scamming an insurance company rather than having done it for political reasons. Two years ago some idealistic kids broke some windows during a May Day march in Seattle and one of the windows they broke was on a federal courthouse. This elicited a massive expensive no-holds-barred nationwide investigation in which small armies of armed federal agents invaded neighborhoods intimidating and scaring people and involved throwing three kids into prison for several months for no crime whatsoever but instead for refusing to snitch on their friends and if they ever manage to convict anyone for anything then that person will probably be given many years in a federal prison. All of this seems evidence that violent direct action for political purposes is a very risky thing to do. However — as noted last week — this is evidently only true for left-wing political people as a couple of weeks ago a hundred right-wingers faced off the Bureau of Land Management — and the BLM backed down. I would also note the numerous Tea Party gatherings wherein large numbers of participants were fully armed with nary a cop in sight whilst the non-violent and unarmed Occupy Movement had a massive police escort everywhere that we went. Right wingers that murder abortion doctors or blow up buildings or fly airplanes into buildings are not called ‘terrorists’ but the anarchist kids and the kids from ELF and ALF are. Seriously though, while our government is for sale to the highest bidder, I often joyously note the fact that our public mobilizations are still fully capable of trumping their money. There have been several instances lately of some corporate-sponsored outrage that was all ready to fly through Congress with super-majority support — yet was subsequently stopped in its tracks by a large public outcry. There are several issues that enjoy 60% or 75% public support but that cannot get to first base in Congress. It was a real eye-opener for me a few years ago whilst watching a corporate news program about one of these issues (I forget now which specific issue they were addressing) and the commentator commentated that while the issue enjoyed broad public support, there was no political support for it in Congress. Rarely does a corporate shill so freely admit that Congress does not support the will of the public — though he failed to question whose will they do support. Another hopeful aspect of our situation consists of the fact that protest is much more effective than public opinion in getting things done.

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Is the new “Artesian Commons” Park Really a Commons?

By Ian Riise

From roughly 1845 to 1950, Olympia had artesian wells all over town, reaching a peak of 95 at one point. It was a rare and thriving commons, as some wells naturally became areas where settlers gathered to socialize. The public even used this resource to fight privatization, as many wells were drilled as a reaction to the escalating cost of water supplied by private water companies. Today we have one public well left, the infamous one in Diamond Parking's Fourth Avenue lot. Many are now used as a water supply for downtown businesses, while most were simply capped, paved over or forgotten after Olympia constructed the McAllister Springs water system in 1949. Attempts to uncover these wells by the public has been repeatedly denied, leaving citizens of Olympia to fight for the integrity of the Diamond lot well. This has proven so frustrating, that local advocacy group Friends of Artesians (FOA) disbanded in 2008, following 15 years of efforts. Luckily a new group (H2Olympia) rose in FOA’s ashes and currently big changes for the well are finally in progress. In 2010,The first tangible plans for the well came together via a multipronged effort came to three main agreements: do work in stages, confine building to the surface (not “breaking ground”), and to clean up and beautify the area. It looked as though the city was moving in the right direction. However last June, when the park was officially approved, food trucks became a part of the plan. It’s nice to see that there is a plan. For years the well site was simply a concrete block with a pipe sticking out. Despite the improvements in progress, it’s worth noting that it doesn’t seem to fit the vision of the FOA nor does it seem to fit H2Olympia's (according to the goals listed on their websites). The prospect of having three food trucks around near the well also does very little to “beautify the area.” It is a privatization of the well, with each truck paying a $300 monthly lease to emit diesel and noise in a park that would otherwise be a “green space” of sorts. The city's plan also ignores the long fight against restriction from the well, imposing hours of operation from 11 a.m. - 7 p.m. daily. The entire area will be fenced off overnight. The well has long caused controversy over the amount of transients that utilize the space. Last year, Evergreen professor Peter Bohmer and a group of activists actually set up a makeshift homeless shelter around the well. This was an attempt to bring attention to the reliance the homeless have on the space, as well as the lack of shelter available for the homeless, despite a consistent homeless population in Olympia who end up taking shelter under awnings in downtown. The result of this shelters was the arrest of Bohmer.

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