On a trip to visit family in Seoul in April, I was approached by a man and a woman who claimed to be North Korean defectors. They presented me with a DVD that recently came into their possession and asked me to translate it. They also asked me to post the completed film on the Internet so that it could reach a worldwide audience.
As many as 75 Occupy the Farm farmers and activists preempted Saturday an Albany Council invite-only harvest of crops planted by the group in April at the Gill Tract, a 5-acre plot of class 1 agricultural land owned by UC Berkeley and used for crop research, and delivered to the UC Berkeley Chancellor a barrow’s-full of bolted lettuce in a symbolic gesture.
It should be no surprise that the mainstream media is eager to report on Occupy’s supposed demise. Even ignoring the fact that the corporate-owned media has a strong desire to never see social movements such as Occupy succeed, the media, as a rule, generally needs to put a dramatic narrative to everything it reports. To them, every story ought to have a captivating story arch with a beginning, middle, and an end.
We urge the administration and campus police to drop all charges against the farmers and protesters, and to engage in good-faith negotiations to ensure that the Gill Tract is reserved for community-based agricultural use to be governed as a form of commons in conjunction with the farmers and local community.
Without food, we cannot survive and without local farms to grow and supply food in a post-peak oil world, the costs associated with traditional long-distance, oil-reliant food production will continue to soar and become unsustainable.
But May Day was also one in which thousands attended mostly peaceful, non-violent protests in support of immigrants, workers and others who comprise the 99 percent of Americans who feel they are at the mercy of an unregulated capitalist system run amok by unfettered greed and political corruption, a system that benefits the few over the expense of the many.
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