Jonah Raskin : Pancake and Rye in 'Marijuanaland'

Pancake and Rye in 'Marijuanaland'

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / September 5, 2011

Longtime Rag Blog contributor Jonah Raskin, author of Marijuanaland: Dispatches from an American War, will sign books at a Rag Blog Happy Hour, Friday, Oct. 7, 5-7 p.m., at Maria's Taco Xpress, 2529 S. Lamar Blvd in Austin. Everyone is welcome. Raskin will also be signing books Saturday, Oct. 8, at Oat Willie's, 617 W. 29th (2-4 p.m.), and Brave New Books, 1904 Guadalupe (5-7 p.m.).

Jonah Raskin will be Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio on KOOP 91.7-FM (and streamed live on the Internet), Friday, 2-3 p.m. Also, please see "Jonah Raskin's Marijuanaland" by Mariann G. Wizard and other articles by and about Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.

[The following is an excerpt from Jonah Raskin’s Marijuanaland: Dispatches From an American War, published by High Times Books.]

I had met Pancake and Rye in February and followed Pancake around for about eight months. (His brother, Rye, had other matters to attend to.) Pancake showed me their indoor and outdoor operations and talked almost without stopping about politics, pot, his two favorite authors -- Tom Robbins and Kurt Vonnegut -- and his all-time favorite TV show, South Park, which had played, he felt, a crucial role in his development.

Pancake went to work for his dad after graduating high school and learned how to grow legal flowers such as roses and zinnias. “For a while, I hated roses,” Pancake told me. “I once planted 2,500 bare-root roses, thorns and all, and after a while I began to call them ‘bastards.’” For cannabis, on the other hand, he had a real affection; the pot plants were his “darlings.”

During his teens and early twenties, he was in full-blown rebellion, he told me, against his parents, his family, and whatever else came along. He and Rye were both arrested for possession by a cop they knew from their high-school days, and who had never liked their irreverent style. The arrest didn’t deter them from their newfound mission: to grow the best marijuana ever.

Their parents were worried about them, and for a time the family came apart. Then they decided to turn on Dad; he started to smoke marijuana and enjoyed it, and felt pride for his sons who grew such unconventional flowers. The old father-sons rivalry faded away, and the family that smoked together grew closer.

“I started to grow pot when I was a teenager,” Pancake told me one day when we were driving around town in his battered station wagon. “Most of my classmates smoked -- the honor-roll students and the auto-shop guys. I didn’t like the idea of buying weed from someone else; I wanted to be able to smoke my own pot -- and then, after that, I wanted to make enough money by growing it to support myself.”

Pancake parked the car, and we went into a garden-supply store where he bought bags of fertilizer and a pair of clippers. Then, back in the car, he continued his tale.

“At the start, I was a guerrilla grower because I didn’t have land of my own,” he said. “I grew it in a creek bed in direct sunlight; I had to walk a mile or so to get to the site. I pumped water out of the creek and visited the garden every three to four days. I made enough money my first season to move out of my dad’s house, rent my own place and buy a car.”

One day in August, Pancake picked me up at my house and we drove together for about two hours to reach his garden, 1,600 feet above sea level, and also above the highest level of fog that rolled in from the Pacific. Before we left my place, I had shown him my pot, but Pancake was unimpressed. True enough, it wasn’t exactly commercial-grade.

Pancake and his brother were growing on a 40-acre parcel that their father owned. When I arrived, I noticed the American flag at the gate and another flag with the words “Don’t tread on me.” Pancake explained: “We’re libertarians -- we believe in states’ rights. We want the federal government off our land and out of our lives.”

For protection, they had a few guns, but mostly they relied on two ferocious watchdogs, Nightshade and Mugwort. The dogs never took a liking to me, and I did not mess with them.

All around the hills and valleys, their neighbors were growing marijuana; the two brothers knew about these nearby gardens because they routinely scanned the landscape with binoculars and the gardens popped up -- especially at the end of the season, when they were the only green around. “I was relieved to know my neighbors were growing,” Pancake told me. “That meant they had their own and weren’t going to poach my plants.”

Outlaw grape growers existed side by side with the pot growers in these parts. The grape growers did not bother with permits from the county and did not follow county rules and regulations; it was too expensive. Even if the grape growers were caught and fined, it would be less expensive than paying the necessary fees for the vineyards.

In addition to marijuana, Pancake and Rye grew vegetables and fruits: tomatoes, basil, pumpkins, apples, blueberries, grapes and corn. They had a grove of olive trees for olive oil. They installed solar panels for electricity and pumped water from a spring down the hill to a large tank uphill; gravity then delivered that water to their plants.

Self-sufficiency was their goal, and they were getting there quickly thanks to marijuana. Before long, their enterprise would be sustainable.

[Jonah Raskin's latest book is Marijuanaland: Dispatches from an American War, published by High Times Books. A communications professor at Sonoma State University and a former Yippie activist, Raskin has written about cannabis politics and culture since the 1970s. Raskin has authored a dozen books, including biographies of Abbie Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack London. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

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Tony Platt : Prison Strike at Pelican Bay

Image from Los Angeles Times.
The shame of California:
Prison strike at Pelican Bay

This strike has drawn worldwide attention to the widespread use of torturous practices by the United States against its own citizens.

By Tony Platt / The Rag Blog / August 9, 2011

BIG LAGOON, California -- I’ve been eating well this summer, enjoying the local fruits and vegetables of Northwest California, while 60 miles away a group of men risked their health by refusing to eat for three weeks.

I’m in Big Lagoon, surrounded by ocean, lagoon, and forest in an area of coastal California described by National Geographic as among the top 20 “unspoiled” tourist destinations in the world. An hour’s drive north of here is Pelican Bay State Prison, a state-of-the-art hellhole that was recently the center of a three-week hunger strike led by prisoners in the Secure Housing Units (SHU).

Pelican Bay was California’s first supermax prison, built in 1989 on 275 acres of clear-cut forest near Crescent City. With an annual budget of $180 million, it has a payroll of more than 1,600 guards and service workers.

The prison was built for 2,280 prisoners, but its current census is close to 3,500, almost half of whom are housed in a prison within the prison, the SHU, an X-shaped cluster of brutalist concrete buildings, surrounded by guard towers, electronic fencing, and barren ground.

Here, more than a thousand men, whose families live hundreds of miles away, are imprisoned 23 hours a day in 8 x 10 foot, windowless, constantly lit cells, subject to sensory deprivation and social isolation, sometimes for years.

The hunger strike at Pelican Bay, which lasted from July 1st to July 22nd, was led by long-term prisoners in the SHU. It is estimated that on any given day in the United States, at least 25,000 prisoners are held in isolation, and perhaps as many as another 80,000 are kept in segregation units, typically in isolation. Writing in The New Yorker (“Hellhole,” 30 March 2009), Atul Gawande calls this practice “legalized torture,” resulting in long-term physical and mental damage to many of its victims.

Pelican Bay, like many of California’s prisons, was built on formerly agricultural land in a region seeking to resuscitate its depressed economy. The hardscrabble Crescent City, briefly a boomtown during the Gold Rush and once a beneficiary of the lumber and commercial fishing industries, has one of the state’s highest unemployment rates and among the most stingy public services.

When the state borrowed from public funds to build the high security prison at a cost of $277.5 million to taxpayers, it was supposed to boost the local economy. But the benefits primarily went to local landowners, and construction and utility companies; to national chains like K-Mart, Ace Hardware, and Safeway; and to the politically powerful guards’ union. Meanwhile, the county’s unemployment rate is almost 14 percent and one out of three people live in hand-to-mouth poverty.

Secure Housing Unit at Pelican Bay State Prison in Crescent City, California. Photo by Adam Tanner / Reuters.
The city’s misery is compounded by its record rainfall and susceptibility to tsunamis. Unless work or family requires you to stay in Crescent City, this is a place to drive through on the way to somewhere else. No wonder that prisoners comprise about 46 percent of the city’s 7,600 population. Small towns that hoped for a bonanza by inviting prison construction, says Ruth Gilmore in Golden Gulag, are victims of a boondoggle.

California may lag behind many other states in high school graduation rates, welfare benefits, and investment in public health, but when it comes to punishment, we rank at or near the top. Between 1852 and 1964, California built only 12 prisons. Since 1984, the state has erected 43 penal institutions, making it a global leader in prison construction. Today, 90 penitentiaries, small prisons, and minimum-security camps stretch across 900 miles of the fifth largest economy in the world.

In 1982, the prison system cost taxpayers 2 percent of the General Fund; by 2006, it cost almost 8 percent. In 2008, more than one out of six state workers in California was employed by the Department of Corrections, almost three times as many as were employed in Health and Human Services.

In the last decade, “corrections” (with 61,000 employees) has increased its share of state workers, passing the state university system (46,000), second only to the University of California (86,000). Meanwhile, prison suicide and recidivism rates approach twice the national average. And we have one of the most extravagant penal systems in the country, costing taxpayers about the same as the state spends on higher education.

Most of the new prisons have been built in out-of-the way rural areas, like Crescent City, making it easier to lose sight of the humanity of the people we warehouse: mostly men (93 percent), mostly Latinos and African Americans (two-thirds), mostly from big cities (60 percent from Los Angeles), and mostly unemployed or the working poor, victimized by drastic changes in California’s economy over the last 20 years. The prison system is the shame of California, testimony to the persistence of institutionalized racism, the widening economic divide, and the gutting of social programs.

Prisons function as an unemployment program comparable to early capitalist workhouses, except they’ve become warehouses for unused labor rather than sites of production. When prisoners return to their communities, observes Gilmore, the cycle is repeated: they are locked out of “education, employment, housing, and many other stabilizing institutions of everyday life. In such inhospitable places, everybody isolates.”

On July 1st, a small group of prisoners in Pelican Bay’s SHU, calling themselves the Short Corridor Collective, initiated a hunger strike, calling for the abolition of long-term solitary confinement, improvement in programs for SHU prisoners, and an end to various abusive administrative procedures.

Unlike a similar action by prisoners in 2002, this strike drew the support of thousands of prisoners throughout the state. Moreover, Prison Hunger Strike Solidarity was so successful in getting out information about the strike that European human rights organizations urged the Governor to respond to prisoners’ demands and The New York Times carried an Op Ed condemning the “bestial treatment” of prisoners in Pelican Bay State Prison (Colin Dayan, “Barbarous Confinement,” 17 July 2011).

During the strike, according to the Short Corridor Collective, at least 17 strikers, including three leaders, were transferred to another prison for medical treatment. The Collective ended the action on July 22nd after gaining the right to wear cold weather caps, to have calendars in their cells, and to have access to educational programs in the SHU.

Though these concessions by prison authorities are modest, we should not underestimate the larger significance of the strike. It draws worldwide attention to the widespread use of torturous practices by the United States against its own citizens; it forces the government of California to sit down, face-to-face, and negotiate with people who have been demonized as semi-human beasts; and it raises the possibility of once again incorporating prisoners into a larger struggle for social justice.

The civil rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s regarded prisoners as an important constituency, forging intimate ties between community and prison. It fought for massive decarceration, abolition of capital punishment, and ending the racial double standard of arrest and incarceration.

It will take a similar movement today to expose the tragedy of American injustice and make prisoners human again. Thanks to the Short Corridor Collective and thousands of activist prisoners, we now have an opportunity to renew the struggle.

For more information about the strike at Pelican Bay and its consequences, go to Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity.

[Tony Platt is the author of 10 books and 150 essays and articles dealing with issues of race, inequality, and social justice in American history. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Truthdig, History News Network, Z Magazine, Monthly Review, and the Guardian. Platt, now an emeritus professor living in Berkeley, California, taught at the University of Chicago, University of California (Berkeley), and California State University (Sacramento). This article was also posted to his blog, GoodToGo.]

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Jonah Raskin : The Last Great California Hunter

Wild boar photographed on Cottontail Creek Road in the hills behind Cayucos, California. Photo from goingslo's photostream / Flickr.
Tooch Colombo:
The last great California hunter

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / March 23, 2011

Tooch Colombo isn’t like you, me, most of our friends and family members. When he wants to eat meat he doesn’t go to Central Market, Whole Foods, or Safeway. He goes for his guns and heads for the wilds of California where his ancestors hunted for thousands of years.

He’s been hunting his whole life -- including a stint as a professional hunter -- and when he stops hunting, a way of life will die with him. He’s the last of the great hunters in California; most of the men with whom he hunted are dead, and the plentiful game they once hunted has long since been annihilated.

Colombo is one of a kind, a survivor of a way of life that as recently as the 1970s in California was also a way of making a decent living. Hunting in the wilds just doesn’t pay anymore, though Colombo still thrills to the excitement of the hunt.

Most men half his age have given up hunting, though they still remember week-long jaunts in the mountains where they shot deer, pigs, antelope, and bear, slept under the stars, told stories, and cooked and ate over an open fire what they had killed.

Colombo is unusual in more than just one way. He does almost everything himself, or nearly so. He’s not only a hunter, he’s also a butcher, a cook, and, of course, an eater with a ravenous appetite. “I eat everything that I kill,” he told me when I first met him at the offices of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, a tribe in which he’s a leading member. He adds, “I’m the complete cycle.”

Colombo’s hair is white and his face is ruddy. He wears battered cowboy boots and well-worn jeans. He is intense and funny and very serious about hunting for wild game and about the centuries-long hunting of Indians by white men that nearly exterminated all of the Indians.

Before he goes hunting, Colombo says a prayer to the “Grandfather in the Sky,” as he calls the Great Spirit. “Let me find game,” he says. “Let me be merciful and let the animal die with one shot.” After he kills a deer or a pig he gives thanks and he means it, too.

Tooch Colombo’s ancestors lived on the coast of California for thousands of years, though he didn’t know anything about them until he was an adult. No one, not even his mother who was born a Miwok, told him that he was an Indian when he was a boy growing up not far from the Pacific Ocean, where his forefathers also fished.

“In those days it was a disgrace to be a Indian,” he told me. “You didn’t advertise the fact.”

On his father’s side, his ancestors were Italians, as the family name Colombo attests. The mixture of Indian and Italian has made for a lifetime of exciting cooking and eating and for an appreciation of the sacredness of food and of life itself.

For Colombo, the authentic life starts with hunting in the rugged terrain of California, where he’s roamed ever since the 1940s. When he was a younger man he worked 9-to-5 as a butcher for Safeway, Lucky, and other supermarkets, but he always took a month off for hunting, which meant that he always had to find another job at the end of hunting season. No one was willing to rehire a butcher who took off for a whole month to stalk, track, and hunt.

At the age of 75, he still goes out for deer in August and for pig all year long, as hunting rules allow. He loves racing up and down steep inclines, his heart pumping. He’s no lonely hunter, either. He goes into the wilds with his buddy, Euell Baker, who is 78, and with three or four dogs that are indispensable for the hunt.

“The dogs are able to track and then to stop a pig long enough for me to get close and to shoot it behind the ears,” he tells me on an afternoon when he remembers a lifetime of hunting stories that would make Ernest Hemingway or William Faulkner proud.

In the field, he skins and guts the animal he kills, and at home he cuts it up into chops and roasts. Sometimes he ages the meat; since he can’t cook and eat everything he kills all at once he freezes a lot of it and thaws it out when he needs it.

If he has both venison and pork on hand in his kitchen he mixes the two together and makes his own version of Italian sausage. He won’t tell me the whole recipe, and he insists that, “Italians will go to their grave rather than give away the secret ingredients,” but he does say that he uses “lots of wine and lots of garlic.” After all, he’s half Italian and he lives up to his roots on both sides of his family.

Occasionally, he also forages for plants that Indians, including his mother, used for cooking and for medicinal purposes.

Colombo has always been a meat eater and he always will be. Years ago, he turned his wife, who was a vegetarian, into a meat eater, too. He started with abalone that she loved and then he made a dish he calls “Pork a la Toochi” that persuaded her to eat the wild pig he hunted and killed.

Still, he doesn’t insist that meat is for everyone. “If you want to eat snow peas for the rest of your life go ahead,” he says. He’s well aware of the impact of hunting on the environment and on wild animals, and he tells me, “there are too many people looking for too few resources.”

There will always be wild pig in the West, he believes, but he has noticed that deer are becoming scarcer, even in rural areas. “My Indian grandmother remembered elk and grisly bears,” he explains. “She also said that the grass was so high after the rains that a man on horse could hardly see over it.”

For a time, he served as the chairman of the California Fish and Wild Life Advisory Board, and tried to implement rules about the protection of fish and game. “I was a voice crying in the wilderness,” he says. “I was hunting in the hills and I could see that the limits had been reached, but I couldn’t persuade others to see them, too.”

Hunting is in Colombo’s blood, and he’s as proud of his skills as a hunter as he is about his identity as an Indian. He’s also not the same hunter at 75 that he was at 13 when he killed his first deer with a rifle his father bought for him.

“Hunting has been a way of life for me,” he says. “It has put food on the table, and it still keeps me in shape. These days, I don’t kill as much as I used to. I’ve learned how precious life is, and how much we need to protect it.”

[Jonah Raskin is the author of Field Days: A Year of Farming, Eating and Drinking Wine in California.]

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Larry Ray : Politicians Packing Heat? That's the Ticket...

Our OK Corral: Shootin' irons for all?
OK Corral in California?
Politicians packing heat, oh my...

By Larry Ray / The Rag Blog / March 16, 2011

Got an email this evening from a old friend who keeps a pretty good daily watch on the news, especially the really bizarre and extreme news stories about America in 2011. The article he forwarded had this headline:

California politicians demand right to carry arms

Sacramento state assembly members have introduced a bill that would entitle them to carry concealed weapons

The whole idea of elected representatives and lawmakers who want to make a law to let them pack a gun because they felt threatened by negative e-mail and mean phone calls triggered a top of the head response to my friend, Harry, who sent me the news article.

Here's my reaction to these Left Coast pol's whose proposed legislation would help fulfill the NRA's desire to have everybody packing heat.

Harry, old friend, it occurs that by arming every person capable of loading a gun and letting them carry it in their belts, holsters, or wherever, we actually would create a non-nuclear version of MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction... sort of. It would be more mutual for some folks than others.

Problem is, that a couple of hours on a shooting range and a pat on the back is not going to really make a scared politician packing heat any safer from an enraged, focused person intent upon blowing him away.

Harper's Magazine had a cover article last year on how this all really shakes out when someone decides to have a gun on him, or her, at all times. One's thinking changes completely and the really remote chance that someone is going to do you harm becomes an obsession.

So, a simple advance, for a completely innocent reason, by someone into this legally ready-to-shoot-gun-toting person's "territorial imperative" space around him could result in murderous gunfire.

Like the guy wearing a hood, or the turban-wearing tourist, or whoever you do not recognize and feel threatened by. Some poor soul fumbling for a paper with address on it in his pocket who was just trying to ask you where the city museum is located.

The whole mindset that life is like a cowboy movie reduces humanity and common sense to a perceived primal battle where everyone goes around with a semi-automatic bludgeon at the ready. Kill or be killed.

Had the federal judge in Arizona, Congresswoman Giffords, and her aides all been armed, what would have been the purpose of having a sincere meeting with constituents in a supermarket parking lot?

The nutcase young shooter would have still had the drop on all of them because he did not come there to talk about good government with Ms. Giffords. He came there to shoot her in the head, and all the folks around her for good measure.

Maybe someone in the crowd armed with their concealed weapon would have shot back at him, and maybe that scared shitless shooter blasting away wildly at the nutcase shooter would have killed lots of other folks as well.

What the hell happened to the American dream, Harry, and folks getting together to take part in it? Do we all want to be potential killers if we think someone is lurking out there with a shootin' iron to kill us? Are we all walking out of that 1950's Saturday double feature Western where the white hats always shoot and kill the black hats... has that become a movie in an endless loop in our scared collective psyche?

Ain't like the craziness of the early 60's at UT in Austin is it, Harry? What is really scary is that voters actually elected these whacko folks to represent them... and this is out in California, not Texas where the Governor packs a gun and shoots coyotes that get too close!

Peace and love, etc.

Larry

[Retired journalist Larry Ray is a Texas native and former Austin television news anchor who now lives in Gulfport, Mississippi. He also posts at The iHandbill.]

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Harvey Wasserman : California Quake Hit Could Irradiate Entire Country

The Fukushima No. 1 power plant of Tokyo Electric Power at Okuma, Fukushima Prefecture, northern Japan, shown in a photograph from October 2008. Japan has issued a state of emergency at the nuclear power plant after its cooling system failed. Photo from AP.
Had it hit off the California coast:
Japan's quake could have
irradiated the entire United States

By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / March 11, 2011

Had the massive 8.9 Richter-scale earthquake that has just savaged Japan hit off the California coast, it could have ripped apart at least four coastal reactors and sent a lethal cloud of radiation across the entire United States.

The two huge reactors each at San Onofre and Diablo Canyon are not designed to withstand such powerful shocks. All four are extremely close to major faults.

All four reactors are located relatively low to the coast. They are vulnerable to tsunamis like those now expected to hit as many as 50 countries.

San Onofre sits between San Diego and Los Angeles. A radioactive cloud spewing from one or both reactors there would do incalculable damage to either or both urban areas before carrying over the rest of southern and central California.

Diablo Canyon is at Avila Beach, on the coast just west of San Luis Obispo, between Los Angeles and San Francisco. A radioactive eruption there would pour into central California and, depending on the winds, up to the Bay Area or southeast into Santa Barbara and then to Los Angeles. The cloud would at very least permanently destroy much of the region on which most Americans rely for their winter supply of fresh vegetables.

By the federal Price-Anderson Act of 1957, the owners of the destroyed reactors -- including Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison -- would be covered by private insurance only up to $11 billion, a tiny fraction of the trillions of dollars worth of damage that would be done. The rest would become the responsibility of the federal taxpayer and the fallout victims. Virtually all homeowner insurance policies in the United States exempt the insurers from liability from a reactor disaster.

The most definitive recent study of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster puts the death toll at 985,000. The accident irradiated a remote rural area. The nearest city, Kiev, is 80 kilometers away.

But San Luis Obispo is some ten miles directly downwind from Diablo Canyon. The region around San Onofre has become heavily suburbanized.

Heavy radioactive fallout spread from Chernobyl blanketed all of Europe within a matter of days. It covered an area far larger than the United States.

Fallout did hit the jet stream and then the coast of California, thousands of miles away, within 10 days. It then carried all the way across the northern tier of the United States.

Chernobyl Unit Four was of comparable size to the two reactors at Diablo Canyon, and somewhat larger than the two at San Onofre.

But it was very new when it exploded. California's four coastal reactors have been operating since the 1970s and 1980s. Their accumulated internal radioactive burdens could exceed what was spewed at Chernobyl.

Japanese officials say all affected reactors automatically shut, with no radiation releases. But they are not reliable. In 2007 a smaller earthquake rocked the seven-reactor Kashiwazaki site and forced its lengthy shutdown.

Preliminary reports indicate at least one fire at a Japanese reactor hit by this quake and tsunami.

In 1986 the Perry nuclear plant, east of Cleveland, was rocked by a 5.5 Richter-scale shock, many orders of magnitude weaker than this one. That quake broke pipes and other key equipment within the plant. It took out nearby roads and bridges.

Thankfully, Perry had not yet opened. An official Ohio commission later warned that evacuation during such a quake would be impossible.

Numerous other American reactors sit on or near earthquake faults.

The Obama Administration is now asking Congress for $36 billion in new loan guarantees to build more commercial reactors.

It has yet to reveal its exact plans for dealing with a major reactor disaster. Nor has it identified the cash or human reserves needed to cover the death and destruction imposed by the reactors' owners.

[Harvey Wasserman edits NukeFree.org. He is Senior Advisor to Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information and Resource Service. He co-authored Killing Our Own: the Disaster of America's Experience with Atomic Radiation.]

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Jonah Raskin : Prop 19 Up in Smoke

Photo by Lucretious / stock.xchng.
Up in smoke:
Cannabis initiative post mortem

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / November 7, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO -- I spent Election Day at Prop 19 Headquarters in Oakland, California, and witnessed the final, tumultuous hours of the campaign to legalize marijuana. Not legalize it once and for all. To be precise, legalize possession of one ounce or less by a person over the age of 21, and cultivation in a 25-square-foot area.

Fifty four percent of the voters cast ballots against 19 and 46% of the voters cast ballots for it. It’s hard to argue with those percentages and, if you believe that the number of votes cast for and against is the crucial factor, than 19 lost.

That’s what big media is saying and that’s what law enforcers are also saying. The supporters of 19 have been saying that 19 won, that the 3,350,000 or so people who voted for it shows that marijuana is here to stay, and that sooner or later marijuana will be legalized.

“Demographics, economics and principle all favor the ultimate demise of marijuana prohibition,” Ethan Nadelmann, the founder and executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, said soon after the votes were counted. He added, “Marijuana isn't going to legalize itself, but momentum is building like never before among Americans across the political spectrum who think it's time to take marijuana out of the closet and out of the criminal justice system.”

Nadelmann is absolutely right when he says that marijuana won’t legalize itself. Indeed, it will take ingenuity, organization, and new strategies to persuade some of the nearly 4 million people who voted against 19 to change their minds.

In the 1960s, momentum to legalize pot built like never before, and hippies predicted that it would be legalized very soon. But that didn’t happen. The same could happen again, unless there are profound changes in strategy by the pro-legalization movement.

By and large, law enforcers want marijuana to remain illegal. By and large, commercial marijuana growers, and their friends and neighbors in California, want it to remain illegal too. The police don’t want to lose their funding and their jobs; the growers don’t want a drop in the price of pot and a dent in their pocketbooks.

Prop 19 was poorly written; even advocates for legalization pointed to its inconsistencies, legalese, and confused wording. Prop 19 left it up to individual counties in California to decided whether to implement the measure. Citizens in one county would be able to have an ounce or less if they were 21 years of age or older, while citizens in an adjacent county would not have the same legal protections. That was a recipe for disaster.

Shortly before Election Day, former Mexican President Vicente Fox commented on 19 in a radio interview. “How great it would be for California to set this example," he said. "May God let it pass. The other U.S. states will have to follow step." His sentiments were widely appreciated in the movement to end the war on marijuana.

All around the world, the citizens of the world look to California to set a positive example, and California did set the example for medical marijuana, and 13 other states followed its lead. It might not be helpful, however, to look to California to lead the way again. Other states, such as Colorado, have implemented medical marijuana in cleaner, clearer ways that California.

American Puritanism, the American work ethic, and the American suspicion of pleasure and joy also contributed to the Prohibition of marijuana. Millions of Californians don’t like the idea of their fellow citizens smoking pot at parties, driving on pot, arriving at work stoned, having sex stoned, and eating stoned. To make marijuana legal it will also mean eroding American Puritanism -- no easy feat.

What seems especially noteworthy of the Prop 19 campaign is that many in law enforcement came out in favor of legalization. They went against the tide of law enforcers who think of marijuana as the drug of choice of the hippies, and who are still fighting the battles of the 1960s.

Meanwhile, in the wake of the defeat of 19, very little seems to have changed in California in the marijuana world. Stoners, heads, and medical marijuana patients are rolling joints and smoking them. Marijuana growers are planting seeds; dispensaries are selling pot. Doctors are recommending marijuana to their patients.

Prop 19 did profoundly change attitudes, and yet now that the election is over it’s as though 19 never happened. After so much time and effort, it’s hard to believe. Prop 19 might be a foundation to build upon, and yet given the volatile political scene and political amnesi, it seems likely that the next time a pro-marijuana measure comes along, activists will have to start all over again with a clean slate.

That might not be a bad idea.

[Jonah Raskin is the author of Field Days: A Year of Farming, Eating and Drinking Wine in California and a professor at Sonoma State University.]

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Tom Hayden : Jerry Brown's Green Vision for California

California Governor-elect Jerry Brown at Los Angeles campaign rally November 1, 2010. Photo by Justin Sullivan / Getty Images.
But it can't be just for whites...
Brown's green vision for California

Through all the political back and forth, alternative energy has been a settled idea in California, and for that we owe a large debt to Brown. He has been ahead of the curve on energy conservation and renewable resources for decades.

By Tom Hayden / November 4, 2010

LOS ANGELES -- During the campaign season, it was easy to dismiss the idea of a green energy future for California as mere campaign rhetoric. But with the second coming of Jerry Brown, the reelection of Barbara Boxer, and voter endorsement of state policies to curb global warming, California really is poised to lead the country to a greener future.

Why were California voters not carried away by the Republican wave? We have certainly had our conservative hiccups in the past. There was the 1978 election when voters passed Proposition 13, which cut property taxes but also damaged school funding and caused chronic budget crises. And in 1984, California had its Arizona moment when voters passed Proposition 187, which would have terminated many public services, including schooling, for undocumented immigrants had the courts not struck it down.

But through all the political back and forth, alternative energy has been a settled idea in California, and for that we owe a large debt to Brown. He has been ahead of the curve on energy conservation and renewable resources for decades.

During Brown's previous tenure as governor from 1975 through 1982, the nuclear industry was projecting the need for one nuclear power plant every five miles along the California coast. One of them was slated for Corral Canyon on Pacific Coast Highway near Malibu. Corporate interests also insisted on the need for a liquefied natural gas terminal at Point Conception in Santa Barbara, saying it was necessary to keep the lights from going out.

Brown turned these powerful interests down, siding instead with the no-nukes movement and the early dreamers of a solar future. Thirty years later, as a direct result of his vision, California is the most energy-efficient state in America, with an estimated 1.5 million clean-energy jobs and accumulated savings of $50 billion to $60 billion to California consumers. Two-thirds of venture-capital investments in American clean energy are in California.

American leadership on global warming has been derailed by a relentless campaign from oil companies and energy interests. "Remember Renewable Energy?" asked a New York Times editorial last week. Here in California we do remember, and the vote Tuesday reaffirmed our commitment to it.

The Obama administration still can wield regulatory power for energy conservation, and Boxer will continue to chair the Senate's environmental policy committee. But it is Brown's California that is poised to implement a vision of putting people to work at green jobs that will reduce air pollution and carbon emissions. Brown's promise is to create 500,000 new green jobs in the next eight years, and we voters should hold him to -- and help him realize -- that pledge.

Brown faces two main challenges. The first is how to pay for a cleaner energy future. He has expressed hope that setting a requirement that one-third of the state's energy needs come from renewable sources by 2020 will jump-start private investment.

Brown cites the example of the aerospace industry as a model. But he downplays the billions in federal investment that made that industry possible. He needs to recognize that some combination of rate hikes and tax revenues will be necessary to get the electricity-based transit revolution he envisions up and running.

The other challenge is to ensure that all Californians benefit from the state's green energy push. Brown has succeeded in portraying his energy vision as good for the economy, but he has not explained how it will benefit the black and brown voters at the core of his support.

Put bluntly, the green future cannot be purely white. This is a great opportunity to put people to work who are now locked out of the job market. And in the end, it makes far more sense to employ at-risk youth weatherizing homes and installing solar collectors than locking them up in the largest mass incarceration system in the world.

That incarceration system could be Brown's Achilles' heel. If his energy policies are an example of his "paddling on the left," his law-and-order legacy is an example of "paddling on the right." In 1976, when then-Gov. Brown was supporting punishment rather than rehabilitation as state policy, the state prison population was slightly above 20,000. Today, the system holds 165,000 inmates and creates a massive drain on the state budget.

With Brown's longtime support, California leads America and America leads every country in the world in incarceration rates. The state prison budget currently exceeds the combined budgets of the University of California and the California State University systems.

Brown may find that a greener future is incompatible with the state's massive spending on incarceration at the expense of education. African Americans are 3% of UC students and Latinos are 11%. At the same time, those groups are 30% and 40%, respectively, of the state's inmates.

While the state was building 33 new prisons in recent decades, its school funding has been stagnant. Prioritizing education and rehabilitation over prisons in state budgets could both save money and supply a steady and well-trained workforce for a green economy.

[Tom Hayden was chairman of Gov. Jerry Brown's SolarCal Council in 1979 and a state legislator from 1982 to 2000. A founder of SDS and a leader of the Sixties New Left, Tom's latest book is The Long Sixties.]

Source / LA Times / Progressive America Rising

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Harvey Wasserman : It's High Time to End Marijuana Prohibition

Brian and Stewie campaign to legalize marijuana. Image from Family Guy.
It's time to end prohibition:
Legal marijuana or bust!!!

By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / November 1, 2010

The simple truth about America's marijuana prohibition: any law that allows the easy incarceration of any citizen any time those in power want to do it is the ultimate enemy of democracy. With 800,000 annual arrests over an herb used by tens of millions of Americans, it is the cornerstone of a police state.

The newly energized movement to end prohibition in California -- home to more than 10% of the nation -- is one of the few healthy developments in this otherwise horrific election.

To help pass Proposition 19, go here and sign up to make phone calls in these last crucial hours.

Part of the battle has already been won. By all accounts the California campaign has thrust the issue to a new level. The terms of repeal are not perfect. But the acceptance of marijuana use has taken a giant leap forward. When joints are openly lit and smoked on national television, it's clear that sooner rather than later, this travesty will fall.

The California campaign has drawn the sides clearly. Demanding continued prohibition first and foremost are the drug dealers who profit directly. As Dan Okrent has shown in Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, organized crime booms around such bans.

With them are the prison builders and operators, plus the lawyers, judges, guards, and street cops who make their livings off the human agony of this endless stream of meaningless arrests. To their credit, some of these -- especially cops who actually care about controlling actual crime -- have come out for legalization.

Then come the alcohol and tobacco pushers who don't want the competition from a recreational substance that -- like renewable energy -- can be raised and controlled locally. Ditto Big Pharma, which fears marijuana as a superior anti-depressant with healing capabilities far beyond a whole multi-billlion-dollar arsenal of prescription drugs with deadly side effects. They fear an herbal medicine whose warning labels will be limited to statements like: "Caution -- use of this healing herb may lead to excessive desire for chocolate cup cakes."

Ultimately it's the politicians who cling to a prohibition that enhances their power. One after the other, they endorse more arrests and fiscal insanity.

Never mind that virtually every farmer in Revolutionary America -- including Washington, Jefferson, and Madison -- raised marijuana's kissing cousin, hemp, and profited handsomely from it. Never mind that Ben Franklin made his best paper from hemp. Forget that the last three presidents of the United States and the current governor of California (among so many others) have smoked marijuana, and may still do so.

Never mind that hemp looms behind marijuana as a far greater cash crop, with huge profits to be made from ecologically superior paper, clothing, shoes, textiles, rope, sails, food, fuel, and more. A core agricultural mainstay throughout human history, hemp requires no chemical pesticides, herbicides, or fertilizers. A nitrogen-fixing weed, it replenishes the soil in which it grows. As the stock for cellulosic ethanol, fuel pellets, and seed-based diesel oil, it is the key to a green revolution in sustainable biofuels. As such, hemp is legal in virtually every country on Earth except the United States.

Many believe the decentralizing economic power of hemp is the real reason its corporate industrial competitors want marijuana to stay illegal. The literature on both is deep and wide.

This ghastly 2010 mid-term election is like a horrendous death spasm for a dying empire. The cancerous flood of corporate money pouring through the process has taken the corruption of what's left of our democratic process to new post-imperial depths.

But nature always provides a healing herb that grows near a poisonous one. We work and hope for repeal in California. But we know the issue has already gone to a new level.

The accelerated corporate rape and pillage of what's left of our nation is all too evident. Sending this tool of official repression up in smoke will help mitigate the disaster.

Vote YES on California's Prop. 19, and make sure to call those you know who might.

[Harvey Wasserman's History of the United States is at www.harveywasserman.com, along with Passions of the Potsmoking Patriots by "Thomas Paine." His “George Washington Was America’s First Stoner...” is in the December issue of Hustler Magazine.]

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David Bacon : California's Perfect Storm

Students and teachers march in Oakland, California,
to protest the termination of adult education programs. Photo by David Bacon.
Fighting to save public education:
California's perfect storm

Across California, new alliances of teachers, students, state workers, communities of color, and working-class communities in general took on the challenge.

By David Bacon / The Rag Blog / October 25, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO, California -- The United States today faces an economic crisis worse than any since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Nowhere is it sharper than in the nation's schools. It's no wonder that last year saw strikes, student walkouts, and uprisings in states across the country, aimed at priorities that put banks and stockbrokers ahead of children.

California was no exception. In fact, other states looked on in horror simply at the size of its budget deficit -- at one point more than $34 billion. The quality of the public schools plummeted as class sizes ballooned and resources disappeared in blizzards of pink slips. Fee increases drove tens of thousands from community colleges and university campuses.

But California wasn't just a victim. Last year it saw a perfect storm of protest in virtually every part of its education system. K-12 teachers built coalitions with parents and students to fight for their jobs and their schools. Students poured out of community colleges and traveled to huge demonstrations at the capitol. Building occupations and strikes rocked the University of California (UC) and the California State University (CSU) campuses.

Together, they challenged the way the cost of the state's economic crisis is being shifted onto education, with a particularly bitter impact on communities of color. Activists questioned everything from the structural barriers to raising new taxes to the skewed budget priorities favoring prisons over schools.


Rise and fall of the Master Plan

When the current recession hit, California had already fallen from one of the country's leaders in per-pupil education funding in the 1950's to 49th among the 50 states in the last decade. That fall was more than just a decline in dollars. It was the end of a commitment to its young people that started in 1960, when a wave of populist enthusiasm put liberals in control of the California Legislature and governor's mansion.

Together, they issued a Master Plan for Higher Education that promised every student access to some degree of post-secondary schooling. Community colleges were free, omnipresent, and accepted everyone. UCs had no tuition and charged only nominal "fees" for university services. Strikes led by Third World students and civil rights demonstrations opened the doors wider to people of color and youth of working-class families generally. The state's reputation as an economic and technological powerhouse owed much to the students who passed through the system in the decades that followed.

By last year, that era wasn't even a memory for students who have grown up in an age of shrinking expectations. Yet on paper, at least, the promise remained. In urging students and teachers on UC campuses to fight instead of giving up, noted radical sociologist Mike Davis called it an epic challenge. "Equity and justice are endangered at every level of the Master Plan for Education," he argued.

Davis called on his fellow faculty members to look out of their office windows. "Obscene wealth still sprawls across the coastal hills, but flatland inner cities and blue-collar interior valleys face the death of the California dream. Their children -- let's not beat around the bush -- are being pushed out of higher education. Their future is being cut off at its knees."

Strike! he urged them. "A strike," he said, "by matching actions to words, is the highest form of teach-in. The 24th [the date last September for the first walkout] is the beginning of learning how to shout in unison."


Strike!

Davis' letter came just as the perfect storm began to build. Lightning struck first at the universities, scenes of the sharpest confrontations in California last year. California's university system includes 10 UC and 23 CSU campuses. Organizing started even before students were back in their fall classes.

"I was involved in previous campaigns against budget cuts when they were more modest," recalls Ricardo Gomez, a UC Berkeley student leader. "We knew the state's $34 billion budget shortfall would be used to slash money for education, and that the regents would put a big fee increase on the table. This time around we resolved to do something different, to move out of the channels of student government."

Students and university workers created a joint strike committee that from the beginning sought to build an alliance with faculty on every campus. "The structure on each campus was open to everyone," Gomez says. "From the first day of classes, people who'd never been involved before were turned on. . . We wanted a mass organization to plan demonstrations. At the same time we formed committees to set up websites, make posters and flyers, and put together the marches."

In late August, the strike committee set a date for the first demonstrations -- the walkout planned for Sept. 24.

One reason for what became an unprecedented level of faculty involvement was the move away from tenured positions to the widespread employment of contingent instructors, with much lower pay and little security. UC has about 19,400 faculty members, but only about 9,000 today have tenure.

Highlighting the impact at UC Santa Cruz was the dismissal of Susanne Jonas and Guillermo Delgado, instructors in Latin American and Latino Studies with more than two decades of seniority each, and the end of the celebrated Community Studies program. Lecturers were the first faculty victims of the cuts on every campus.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and UC administrators ensured the involvement of another constituency with their war on campus unions. Blue-collar UC members of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) had just won a good contract after years of fighting. They saw their gains evaporate in furloughs and layoffs. The University Professional and Technical Employees (UPTE) still didn't have a contract, and voted to strike Sept. 24.

Stoking the anger further, a series of media exposés documented high salary increases for top UC executives. At the Sept. 15-17 regents meeting, some received increases of up to 30 percent (up to $52,000 per year) on salaries in the $200,000 to $400,000 range.

UC Santa Cruz Feminist Studies professor Bettina Aptheker called the Sept. 24 strike "the largest unified action, perhaps, in the history of the UCs. It is first and foremost in defense of public education, and then in support of shared governance, in which faculty and students, but especially faculty, are allowed to actually influence policy and decisions. Third, it is in support of all union demands for negotiations and contracts."

Nevertheless, UC President Mark Yudof proposed a 32 percent fee increase spread over the following two years. That proposal virtually guaranteed that the November regents meeting, scheduled to vote on it, would be greeted by further walkouts. As the regents met, students occupied buildings in Los Angeles, Berkeley, Santa Cruz, and Davis. Demonstrations shook the other five campuses.

Yudof dismissed the protests in a snide commentary in The New York Times. Schwarzenegger did too. "They're all screaming," he said. "Everyone has to tighten their belts." But on the campuses, the chancellors were forced to react. First they punished the students who occupied buildings. A second building occupation in Berkeley in December led to the arrests of 65 students. By then, occupations had spread into the state university system as well, over similar tuition increases and budget cuts. In both Berkeley and San Francisco, police stormed the occupied buildings rather than negotiate the exit of students, as they'd done previously.

Yet some cutbacks were reversed. Library hours that had been cut in Berkeley and Santa Cruz, for instance, were restored. In Los Angeles, protests won the chancellor's support for more aid to undocumented students. And under the pressure of strikes and protests, UPTE finally won a contract.


Crisis hides restructuring plans

Schwarzenegger and the regents were using the state's budget crisis to move forward a much broader agenda -- a shift in the way education in California is funded, what the money is used for, and who can afford higher education.

"The 32 percent fee increase not only undermines the access of students to the system, especially students of color from working families, but it's also part of the privatization program," explains Liz Hall, director of the UC Student Association and a UC Berkeley alumna. "Unlike the money from the state, which is restricted in the way the university can use it, the money from fees can be used any way the administration wants."

She points out that a proposal to build a UC supercomputer by Yudof's predecessor, Robert Dynes, failed because the Legislature wouldn't fund it. "With fee money, UC administrators can launch whatever research and pet projects they like, and grant high salaries to their cronies. The growth of those unrestricted funds is one reason we have an executive pay scandal every few years. The regents run UC like a for-profit corporation."

(In California higher ed, "fees" actually means tuition. The 1960 Master Plan outlawed tuition for higher education. A critical aspect of the disintegration of the plan has been raising "student fees," originally meant to cover minor expenses, to amounts that can only be seen as billing for tuition.)

Shifting the funding of California's higher education system from the state, through taxes, onto students themselves, isn't just a program for the UC system. The state's community college system is many times larger and the impact even more severe.

For the first time, student fee increases are now used to directly fund community colleges, which are experiencing the same trend toward tuition increases. Cesar Cota, a student at Los Angeles City College, was the first in his family to attend college. "Now it's hard to achieve my dream," he says, "because the state put higher fees on us, and cut services and classes."

Monica Mejia, a single mom, wants to get out of the low-wage trap. "Without community college," she says, "I'll end up getting paid minimum wage. I can't afford the fee hikes. I can barely make ends meet now."

According to Marty Hittelman, president of the California Federation of Teachers (CFT) and a former community college instructor, the system turned away more than 250,000 students in 2009-10 alone. "Where can they go?" he asks.

UC? CSU? The workforce? California has a 12.6 percent unemployment rate, one of the nation's highest. The state universities dropped 40,000 students this year. UC fees have gone up 215 percent since 2000, and CSU fees 280 percent. Community college fees, once nonexistent, rose 30 percent just last year.

Hundreds of thousands of students enrolled in California community colleges are unable to get the classes they need and thousands of temporary faculty are without classes to teach. So, as in the universities, the student returns for paying higher fees are increased class size and fewer available classes.

Those cuts have an extra impact on students of color. The Los Angeles Community College District educates almost three times as many Latino students and nearly four times as many African American students as all of the UC campuses combined.


Rallies, protests, and sit-ins

Police confront students during the occupation of Wheeler Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. Photo by David Bacon.
In protest, students, teachers, parents, union members, and community activists staged rallies at the end of November throughout California (as well as in other parts of the United States). There were large rallies in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Oakland.

At CSU Fullerton, students took control of the humanities building, saying they were "putting ourselves in direct solidarity with the 'occupations' that have been occurring the world over from universities to factories to foreclosed homes; from Asia to Europe to Africa to Central and South America and, now, here in the United States."

The Fullerton students chose the humanities building to protest the corporatization scheme envisioned by the campus strategic planner, Michael Parker, who called humanities "socially irrelevant" and favored courses useful for preparing student for corporate employment. Humanities, the students said, has become "politically dangerous to the established economic order... We are not surprised because we are dangerous."

"The L.A. rally was spectacular," enthuses Jim Miller, who teaches at San Diego City College. "The church holds a thousand, and there were hundreds more trying to get in." He counted 565 people who came from San Diego to the Los Angeles event, including three buses of students from San Diego City College.

The protests continued into the spring. More than 8,000 students from Los Angeles and other community college districts rallied at the state capitol in Sacramento on March 22. State university campuses also sent hundreds of marchers.


'We can't fit on the rug anymore'

The most dramatic demonstrations were at the university level, but the crux of California's education crisis lies in the K-12 public school system, especially in poor urban communities, and neighborhoods of immigrants and people of color. Some 22,000 pink slips were given out to public school teachers across the state in the 2009-10 academic year.

"In Watsonville they're overcrowding classes," charges Manny Ballesteros, a youth organizer. "They're building more prisons in California than schools, and there are more blacks and Mexicans inside those prisons. For young people like me, instead of being able to get a job, and achieving our goals, that tells you, 'You're not going to make it.'"

Watsonville now only has seven school nurses for 19,000 students, and has cut school psychologists and counselors, music, and art. "Sports have become pay to play," says Jenn Laskin, a humanities and English teacher at Watsonville's Renaissance Continuation High School. "That means students who are talented and don't have the money lose the opportunity. That cuts off yet another pathway to college."

The state's limit of 20 students for K-3 classes was modified in the Legislature's recent budget deals, so next year K-2 classes will have 28 students. "We're loading to the max. Kindergarten classes are super crowded, and one student told me, 'We can't even fit on the rug anymore.'

"Combined with the emphasis on test scores, it all affects children's ability to learn," she laments. "We have 2nd-grade students who don't even know how to use scissors, because they've been taught to the test. They can bubble in letters and numbers, but they can't cut a circle in a piece of paper."

In Los Angeles, one of the world's largest school districts, more than 6,300 teachers were originally set to lose their jobs before the beginning of the fall 2010 term. After unsuccessful attempts to get the Los Angeles Unified School District administration to reduce the number, teachers mounted a wave of successively more militant demonstrations.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge James Chalfant ruled that a planned one-day strike was illegal because it would "endanger student health and safety," and threatened educators with $1,000 fines and the loss of their teaching credential if they struck. So hundreds of teachers picketed their own schools before classes started, and parents and students walked with them.

One mother, Maria Gutierrez, said the one-day strike was a good idea. "What does it matter if children lose one day of class? If we lose our teachers, they're going to lose a lot more." And while the district claimed poverty was forcing layoffs, it found the money to hire more than 3,000 substitute teachers to take classes in case the teachers stuck.

At the beginning of May, thousands of teachers filled the street in front of the district's offices, and 40 were arrested for blocking it in an act of civil disobedience.

Like so many other schools districts across the country, Los Angeles has used the crisis to escalate its plans to turn public schools over to charter groups. By the end of May, a total of 20 existing schools and 27 new campuses had been put up for bid. So teachers and communities organized around that, too. After months of planning and packed meetings, many of those bids went to groups led by teachers.


Education or incarceration?

With headlines focused on Los Angeles and the Bay Area, it's easy to forget that California is an agricultural state. But it may be in poor agricultural communities, especially those in the San Joaquin Valley, where the state's twisted priorities are the clearest. In the middle of a budget crisis, what will the state fund -- schools or prisons?

Unemployment in California's rural counties is often twice as high as on the coast. The economic crisis in small valley towns like Delano and McFarland was a fact of life long before California's current budget woes.

In Delano, historic home of Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers, 30 percent of the residents live below the poverty line. Desperate for employment, many were sold the idea that prisons would provide a source of jobs beyond low-wage farm labor. As a result, the area has become home to giant institutions whose budgets dwarf those of local school districts. Valley teenagers today see those prisons in their future, whether as guards or inmates, rather than college.

Every day in Delano 3,176 people go to work in the Kern Valley State Prison and North Kern State Prison. Almost as many of the town's families now depend on prison jobs as those supported by year-round field labor. Thousands of former farmworkers now guard other Latinos and blacks -- inmates just as poor, but mostly from the urban centers of Los Angeles or San Jose rather than the rural communities of the Central Valley. The two prisons have a combined annual budget of $294 million. By comparison, the town's 2010 general fund was a tenth of that, and the budget of its public schools a twentieth.

Following the March 4 Day to Save Education, a group of teachers and home care workers began a march from Bakersfield to Sacramento to mobilize opposition to the cuts. One marcher, retired teacher Gavin Riley, describes the social cost as he saw it walking through the valley:

We've seen boarded-up homes everywhere. Coming into Fresno we walked through a skid row area where people were living in cardboard and wood shacks underneath a freeway, sleeping on the sidewalks. We've seen farms where the land is fallow and the trees have been allowed to die.

About the only thing we've seen great growth in is prisons... I look at that and say, what a waste, not only of land but also of people. I can't help but think that California, a state that's now down near the bottom in what it spends on education, is far and away the biggest spender on prisons. It doesn't take a brain surgeon to connect the dots.

Long-term strategies

K-12 teachers, students, home care workers, and community activists on a 260-mile, 48-day march from Bakersfield to Sacramento to protest cuts to education and social services. Photo by David Bacon.

The Central Valley march arrived in Sacramento on April 21, when more than 7,000 CFT and AFSCME members marched down to the capitol building to confront the Legislature and Schwarzenegger in a huge rally. They focused on one of the main demands that emerged in the sit-ins and demonstrations throughout the school year -- a change in the way the state budget is adopted.

The state has a requirement that two-thirds of the Legislature approve any budget. Even more important, any tax increase takes a two-thirds vote as well. So even though Democrats have had a majority for years in both chambers, a solid Republican block can keep the state in a total economic crisis every year until Democrats agree to slash spending.

Teachers' unions, students, other labor organizations, and community groups got an initiative (Proposition 25) onto the November ballot that would remove the two-thirds requirement, so that budgets and tax increases can be adopted by simple majority.

The state also needs new sources of revenue. Assemblyman Alberto Torrico authored a bill to charge oil companies a royalty for the petroleum they pull from under California's soil. California is the only oil-producing state that doesn't charge the oil giants for what they take.

As the school year drew to a close, students and teachers won some partial victories. Assembly Speaker John Perez introduced the California Jobs Budget, an alternative budget proposal that would reinstate much of the education money cut over the last year. He also promised to roll back the UC and CSU student fee increases by 50 percent.

Meanwhile, Gov. Schwarzenegger's revised budget reinstated Cal Grants program funding, although it cut money for the poorest recipients of state aid at the same time. (By press time in September, the state legislature had still not passed a budget for the current fiscal year.)

"I don't feel good that we saved Cal Grants at the expense of single mothers and children," says Claudia Magaña, a student leader at UC Santa Cruz. "It's great to know that students had some power this year, but not that we won at the expense of the neediest people. We have to look at who has power in this system and how to get it."

Coming out of the year's actions, Magaña voices the conclusion of many student leaders and teachers -- that education activists need a strategy for the long haul. "We need [a strategy] to win long-term reinvestment in the system," says Liz Hall.

We need a power analysis that will help us to build our movement. Preserving the public nature of education will take large-scale changes. This was a year of crisis for us, spurred by fee increases and furloughs. Now our bigger problem is how to get mobilization and commitment for much larger goals. To begin with, we have to get our students to turn out in November.

But giving more power to Democrats, and a better system for arriving at a budget deal, won't automatically reverse the state's priorities. Democrats vote for prisons, too.

Jim Miller says the demonstrations, and especially the Central Valley march, show that "we can fight for an economy and a government that work for everybody. We're not saying save education by throwing old people out of their home care, by getting rid of health care for poor kids, by closing down state parks, or privatizing prisons. This is about the future of the state of California."

Without unity, he says, "we'll see a scarcity model, where people say take someone else's piece of the pie, not mine. That's a race to the bottom."

Perhaps fighting itself was the year's biggest achievement. Across California, new alliances of teachers, students, state workers, communities of color, and working-class communities in general took on the challenge. Their strategic ideas ranged from student strikes and walkouts to alliances between communities and unions, a sophisticated agenda of legislative solutions, and mass mobilizations in rallies and marches.

Although there was a broad variety of activity, a common thread highlighted the special impact education cuts have on communities of color and working-class families. A social movement is growing across the country to defend public education. California's perfect storm was at its leading edge, and contributed a new repertoire of strategy and tactics for building it.

San Diego students protest racist attacks

At UC San Diego, the storm took on a particular character due to a series of racist events on campus. The string of incidents began in February, Black History Month, when white fraternity students organized a "ghetto-themed" party called a "Compton Cookout." It was followed by a campus television show that mocked Black History Month. A few days later, a student hung a noose in the UCSD school library. Anti-hate rallies were organized at other campuses in response, and students sat in at Yudof's Sacramento office.

As students geared up for March 4, a KKK-style hood was found with a hand-drawn circle and cross on the statue of Dr. Seuss outside the UCSD library. At a rally organized at UCLA in protest, student Corey Matthews asked: "What kind of campus promotes an environment that allows people to think it's acceptable to target people for their ethnicity, gender, or sexuality? It's something about the tone of the environment that allows this."

A month later, UCSD administrators took action against Ricardo Dominguez, an art professor who developed a project to help migrants crossing the desert between Mexico and the United States use their cell phones to orient themselves, and find help in an emergency. Hundreds of migrants die in the U.S. desert each year because they cannot locate water or find shelter from the heat.

Conservative Republican Congressman Brian Bilbray objected to university administrators, who placed Dominguez's tenure under review.

According to Graceland West, a San Diego student leader: "We need more resources for immigrants and people of color on this campus. Instead, a professor with a long history of support for us is being punished for taking a pro-immigrant position. When we have cuts to enrollment and student services, and a lack of financial aid, students of color are the hardest hit. Many now see UCSD as a racist campus. At the same time, higher fees hit high school students thinking about coming here. All this basically deters students of color from applying."

-- David Bacon

This article was first published in the Fall, 2010 issue of Rethinking Public Schools.

[David Bacon is a writer and photojournalist based in Oakland and Berkeley, California. He is an associate editor at Pacific News Service, and writes for Truthout, The Nation, The American Prospect, The Progressive, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among other publications. His documentary photography has been exhibited widely. His latest book is Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants.]

Listen to Thorne Dreyer's September 7 interview with David Bacon on Rag Radio on KOOP 91.7 FM in Austin, here. To listen to other shows on Rag Radio, go here.

• For more articles and images, go to David Bacon, Photographs and Stories.

Also see:

• David Bacon: Life in an Immigrant Labor Camp / The Rag Blog / September 5, 2010.
• Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants (Beacon Press, 2008).
• The photodocumentary on indigenous migration to the U.S., Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press, 2006).
• The Children of NAFTA, Labor Wars on the U.S./Mexico Border (University of California, 2004).

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Harvey Wasserman : Hemp Is no Paper Tiger

Image from Hemp & Chocolat.
California's Prop. 19:
With legal pot comes legal hemp,
history's most profitable industrial crop

By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / October 18, 2010

Hemp is the far bigger economic issue hiding behind legal marijuana.

If the upcoming pot legalization ballot in California were decided by hemp farmers like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, it would be no contest. For purely economic reasons, if you told the Constitutional Convention in 1787 that the nation they were founding would someday make hemp illegal, they would have laughed you out of the room.

If California legalizes pot, it will save the state millions in avoided legal and imprisonment costs, while raising it millions in taxes.

But with legal marijuana will come legal hemp. That will open up the Golden State to a multi-billion-dollar crop that has been a staple of human agriculture for thousands of years, and that could save the farms of thousands of American families.

Hemp is currently legal in Canada, Germany, Holland, Rumania, Japan, and China, among many other countries. It is illegal here largely because of marijuana prohibition. Ask any sane person why HEMP is illegal and you will get a blank stare.

For paper, clothing, textiles, rope, sails, fuel, and food, hemp has been a core crop since the founding of ancient China, India, and Arabia. It's easy to plant, grow, and harvest, and farmers -- including Washington and Jefferson -- have sung its praises throughout history. It was the number one or two cash crop on virtually all American family farms from the colonial era on.

If the American Farm Bureaus and Farmers Unions were truly serving their constituents, they would be pushing hard for legal pot so that its far more profitable (but essentially unsmokable) cousin could again bring prosperity to American farmers.

Hemp may be the real reason marijuana is illegal. In the 1930s, the Hearst family set out to protect their vast timber holdings, much of which were being used to make paper.

But hemp produces five times as much paper per acre as do trees. Hemp paper is stronger and easier to make. The Declaration of Independence was written on hemp paper, and one of Benjamin Franklin’s primary paper mills ran on it.

But the Hearsts used their newspapers to incite enough reefer madness to get marijuana banned in 1937. With that ban came complex laws that killed off the growing of hemp. The ecological devastation that’s followed with continued use of trees for paper has been epic.

As canvas, hemp has long been essential for shoes, clothing, rope, sails, textiles, building materials and much more. It’s far more durable than cotton and ecologically benign compared to virtually any other industrial crop. Hemp needs no pesticides, herbicides or chemical fertilizers, and can grow well without much water.

Hemp’s use for rope was so critical to the U.S. war effort that in the 1940s, the U.S. military lifted the bans and blanketed virtually the entire state of Kansas with it. The War Department’s “Hemp for Victory” is the core film on how to grow it.

Henry Ford produced an entire automobile made from hemp fiber stiffened with resin. Like the original diesel engine, it was designed to run on hemp fuel .

Powder from hemp seeds is extremely high in protein and in omega-3 oils, now mostly gotten from fish.

Hemp could be key to the future of bio-fuels. Growing food crops like corn and soy to make ethanol and diesel is extremely inefficient and expensive. They force hungry people to compete with cars for fuel.

Fast-growing hemp stalks and leaves are well-suited for cheap fermentation into ethanol, and for compression into fuel pellets. The seeds produce a bio-diesel that’s far superior to what comes from soy.

Alcohol, tobacco, pharmaceutical, and law enforcement/prison-industrial industries -- not to mention entrenched narco-terrorists -- are leading the fight against legal pot.

But the industrial production of hemp would also transform the industries for paper, cotton, textiles, plastics, fuel, fish oi, and more. The economic, ecological, and employment benefits would be incalculable.

When Californians go to the polls November 2, they may end a marijuana prohibition that’s had devastating impacts on states' public health and civil liberties, while costing it billions.

They’ll also decide whether California -- and, ultimately, the U.S. -- will resume production of history’s most powerful, versatile, and profitable industrial crop, one ultimately certain to be worth far more than marijuana.

One that was essential to this nation’s founding -- and that could be central to its economic, ecological, and agricultural revival.

[Harvey Wasserman's History of the United States is at www.harveywasserman.com, along with Passions of the Potsmoking Patriots by "Thomas Paine." His “George Washington Was America’s First Stoner...” is in the December issue of Hustler Magazine.]

Former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders. Image from El Porvenir.

Joycelyn Elders supports legal pot

Former U.S. Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders told CNN Sunday she supports legalizing marijuana.

The trend-setting state of California is voting next month on a ballot initiative to legalize pot, also known as Proposition 19. The measure would legalize recreational use in the state, though federal officials have said they would continue to enforce drug laws in California if the initiative is approved.

"What I think is horrible about all of this, is that we criminalize young people. And we use so many of our excellent resources ... for things that aren't really causing any problems," said Elders. "It's not a toxic substance."

Supporters of California's Prop. 19 say it would raise revenue and cut the cost of enforcement, while opponents point to drug's harmful side-effects....

-- CNN

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