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About Eugene weekly. (Eugene, Oregon) 1993-current | View Entire Issue (June 12, 2003)
UNION SUPPORT FOR MOTHER KALI’S Mother Kali’s Books and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) labor union will collaborate on The Black Cat Review benefit, 9 pm to midnight Friday, June 13. This benefit, celebrating the full moon and Friday the 13th, will include live music, po- etry, and late night treats of champagne and chocolate. Proceeds will support both the local chapter of the union and the bookstore. IWW and Mother Kali’s connected two months ago, when Mother Kali’s current staff of four part-time employees and one full- time manager decided to unionize. Teri Ciacchi, manager since last December, ex- plains that there have been “labor concerns and the [Mother Kali’s] board has not ad- dressed those concerns.” Employees have run into problems such as freezes on hiring and raises, and lack of employment perfor- mance evaluations. Ciacchi also explains, “It’s unusual for the manager to join the union, but it seemed the only way for the em- ployees to have any power here.” Since unionizing, Ciacchi and the four workers have agreed to do hiring and performance re- views on a collective basis. This move to unionize follows in the wake of last fall’s wildcat strike, where Mother Kali’s former staff refused to work during the height of the September text book rush, again because the board would not ad- dress labor concerns. Restitution for these former employees remains a concern for the newly unionized workers. According to IWW General Meeting Minutes, 5/17, “…unionization may be the opportunity to start afresh and heal the wounds of old…” Ciacchi says that this happens, where “people agree because of personal values, be- cause of idealism” to work for nonprofits such as Mother Kali’s, but that nonprofits often have an unclear understanding of ad- ministration, policies and procedures, and labor rights. “We hope,” she says, “that this will get more people who work for nonprofits to ask for their labor rights to be addressed.” Foolscap Books is located at 780 Blair Blvd. For more information about the bene- fit, contact Mother Kali’s Books at 343-4864. — Bobbie Willis FREE HEMP FESTIVAL PLANNED FOR JULY Will our area see another hemp festival this summer? The big annual for-profit cele- bration in Linn County discontinued after embattled cannabis activist Bill Conde exiled himself to Central America a couple of years ago, but local activists are planning a free Emerald Empire HempFest 2003 to be held July 19 at Alton Baker Park. The focus of the event will be to promote education and awareness of “hemp- based products and processes,” and to “neutralize and eradicate govern- ment propaganda regarding the plant cannabis sativa,” ac- cording to the group’s mission statement. Not all the key arrange- ments have been worked out, according to Dan Koozer, one of the organizers. Parks of- ficials are cooperating and local businesses are supportive, he says. But local police offi- BY PAUL NEEVEL Jacoby Black and I’Esha Henderson Churchill High stu- dents Jacoby Black, a senior, and I’Esha Henderson, a junior, will join five other local teenagers in Miami, Fla., to com- pete in the NAACP’s Afro- Academic, Cultural, Technological and Scientific Olympics (ACT-SO) in July. ACT-SO is a year-long mentoring program for African-American high school students. Winners of local contests in 25 separate categories of science, humanities, performing and visual arts, and entrepreneurship will compete for gold, silver, and bronze scholarship awards of up to $500 during the annual NAACP conference. “I kind of froze up last time at nationals,” admits Black, who competed in the drawing category in New Orleans as a sophomore. An experienced actor and public speaker, he is entered in dramatics this time around. “I have a good feeling about this year,” he says. Next fall, Black will enter LCC or the UO to study towards a career in sports journalism. A two-time veteran of ACT-SO nationals, Henderson will compete in oratory with a reading of Sojourner Truth’s 1851 speech “And Ain’t I A Woman?” A basketball player since first grade, she plans to major in criminal justice on her way to a career in the WNBA. 12 JUNE 12, 2003 cials are making it difficult. “The EPD and county are really down on pot,” says Koozer. “They don’t seem to get so excited about meth or heroin. ... They want us to hire six to 10 off-duty police officers at $60 an hour each for every hour we are open.” Koozer says the festival has a $10,000 budget, but that does not include hiring cops. “We’re running out of time,” he says. “We can’t sell vendor sites” at the last minute. “We may not have much of an event, but we’ll have an event of some kind,” he says. “We expect this year to be a little rough, and next year better.” Organizers are meeting at 7 pm Mondays in the Umpqua Room at the EMU on campus. For more information, e- mail dankoozer@yahoo.com — TJT SPELLBINDING STARHAWK Starhawk, activist and the author of The Spiral Dance, The Fifth Sacred Thing, and other books that link spirituality to activism, recently visited the Eugene area. Her sched- ule included a talk on “War, Peace, Terror and Global Justice — Where do we go now?” at the EMU on campus May 22. In her speech, Starhawk used an analogy of a “spell” of government and media mes- sages being cast onto the populace regarding the U.S. economy, the WTO, the World Bank and the war in Iraq. Just as a spell in a fairy tale may put the castle inhabitants to sleep, this spell tricks people into thinking that the forces they face are too much for them, that they’re the only ones who are opposed to war, for instance, and that they might as well give up — they’ve already lost. Starhawk outlined one aspect of the spell being cast as economic promises by the IMF and the World Bank. Their promise to the Third World is in the form of an economic blueprint for success that, she says, if fol- lowed, would lead to a “vast amount of wealth that will make everybody’s life better; doesn’t matter if you’re in a yacht or a little leaky rowboat but a ‘rising tide lifts all boats.’” This has not happened in places like Argentina, Starhawk pointed out. “In the Third World I think it has been clear for a long, long time that the [economic] promise is false and the fear is: ‘You step out of line and we will smash you,’ and ‘We have so much power that we can do it no matter what you do or what anybody else does’ and that’s the real message of the war in Iraq: We have so much power that nobody can stand against us.” Starhawk encouraged people to look deeper into these issues. Comparing the war in Iraq to a mushroom, she described how a mushroom is actually just the fruiting body of the organism that primarily exists under- ground and can be much larger than the mushroom itself; the whole organism is that plus the mycelium threads that connect un- derground. She perceives the war as merely a fruiting body of the mycelium of a larger sys- tem she refers to as “global corporate capital- ism.” And since the global corporate capital- ist system is everywhere, the opportunities to confront it are everywhere — in our pesti- cides and toxins in our food and in our envi- ronment. Starhawk told her audience that since a spell weaves an illusion, despair is an illu- sion. And just as a poison may have an anti- dote, a spell may have a counterspell. She said, “The counterspell is simple: Tell a dif- ferent story. Pull back the curtain, expose their story for the false tale it is. Act ‘as if.’ Act as if we weren’t doomed, as if what we did in the next weeks and months could shift the balance of fate. … Act as if we were going to win.” — Paula Hoemann PROCESS BEGINS TO REPLACE LININGER The Board of County Commissioners in- vites East Lane County citizens’ input on possible applica- Who’s tion questions for Next? the district’s re- placement com- missioner. This position will be- come vacant Aug. 16, when current Commissioner Tom Lininger will leave to teach at the UO Law School. Lininger’s resignation triggers a replace- ment appointment process, which will be overseen by the BCC. The replacement will serve from the time of appointment through
