Pax 1995-1996 compiled by Aaron Kreider on November 30th, 1996 Unfortunately there wasn't too much member involvement and I ended up doing a lot of the work on an issue by issue basis. We still got some stuff done, with the crowning achievement being all those people who went to ICPF. Financial Aid It was still a big issue. The Federal Government had just gone through a series of shutdowns over the summer. With help from Senate and Pax we got 349 signatures and sent the following letter to Roemer: email: Aaronlk@goshen.edu Aaron Kreider Goshen College Goshen, IN 46526 Hon. Tim Roemer Washington, D.C. Dear Hon. Tim Roemer, Students at Goshen College are very concerned with the potential impact of the proposed cuts to financial aid. Our Committee to Save Financial Aid has collected 349 signatures from students, faculty, and community members. The overwhelming consensus at Goshen College is that financial aid provides opportunity for Americans to be their most, and that Congress should not take this opportunity away! The $10 billion of aid cuts proposed by the Senate would cost our college and its students $100,000 per year, while we are currently facing an enrollment crunch and potential downsizing. The cuts would hurt the quality of education provided by our college and the ability of students to afford it. We have also enclosed twenty-one personal letters from students explaining the beneficial impact that financial aid has on their life. We trust that you will represent the concerns of the 349 people who signed our petition and vote against any cuts to financial aid, Aaron Kreider, Committee to Save Financial Aid I had forgotten that the KKK still existed, but... The first Saturday in January, less than a week after getting back to GC, it was off to Columbus to protest the KKK. There was so much hate on both sides at the protest that it was educational and important for us to be there, but still deeply depressing. You cannot confront the hate of the Klan with hate for racism, it'll just turn violent (and would have except for that there was the largest number of police I'd ever seen at a rally). In late April, the KKK came to LaGrange (IN). Some students went to protest, supposedly it wasn't nearly as confrontational (I was on SST in Ivory Coast at the time). Even wilder, the KKK came to Goshen in the middle of August. There was an alternative event organized for Shanklin Park that was an excellent idea. Unfortunately there were people who came out to support the Klan on the steps of the courthouse (I was in DC at this time). I wrote this a bit after the protest: Sometime in the middle of December, while scanning and deleting my email, I ran into this announcement of a KKK rally in Columbus, Ohio and a corresponding anti-KKK demo. Bang! The far right is still out there, always recruiting, spewing out racist thoughts, and they are big in the mid-west. I mentioned the anti-Klan event to some people, and it caught on well. I mean who could refrain from opposing the Klan? Well somewhere around 20 people were interested in going, and 10 went (kudos to them). On Jan. 6, 1996 we set out at 8am for the rally at 1:30pm. I had expected that there would be a lot of police and enough to avoid any risks of confrontation between the two groups. But as we (the car I was in) neared the state building, we saw a ton of commotion of officers and we most certainly were not turning left! We caught lunch and then went back to the rally site. We made the banner that appeared on the front of the Record. "Goshen College (Indiana) Students Against Racism". A couple minutes after we took that picture, a squad of cops were several feet behind us in riot gear (that would have made a superb picture). Riot gear consists of those shields, a baton, and some had tear gas guns. I got busy with my tape recorder and camera. I got a picture of at least 30 cops all standing in a line with their gear on. I taped a couple speeches from anti-racists which happened before the KKK got started. If anyone wants to borrow a tape of the protest (about 20 minutes) ask me, its really neat! I still remember the man hosting the speakout repeating, "(____ Governor) Did you tell the Klan to stay home?" (in reference to the governor telling the protestors to stay home in a public announcement). There was a guy going around with his own amp system chanting,"Who's behind the hood? The mayor! Who's behind the hood? The governor? Who's behind the hood? The cops!". One woman gave a good explication of the purpose of the rally: shutting down the Klan, discrediting them, and stopping them from recruiting. Perhaps the person who I agree the most with was the man who had taken advantage of the crowd to do some street corner preaching when he said, "God loves you whether you are white, black or ..." The demonstration needed more positivity and more attempts at tacking the roots of racism, instead of targetting the racists (and probably making them even worse). At around 2:10pm or so, the Klan started their rally. Now to get even close to them, we had to go into the "pig pen" (as the anarchists called it). We had to pass through a metal detector and there was a big fence and cops between us and the state capitol steps (where the Klan were). In a sad, but typical lack of unity there was a "don't go in the pig pen" faction that wanted us to stay on the sidewalks (where we would have less chance of getting arrested and be more independant of police control). Someone said, "You're mice, it's cheese. It's a trap!" Most people went in. My scissors, two people got frisked The two metal detectors set-up gave us a fair share of trouble. I was the first to test the waters. To make sure that I wouldn't set off the detector (and having been experienced with numerous airport detectors), I handed over my wallet, my keys, my camera, and my tape recorder. I preceded to set the alarm off. I was then taken aside and asked, "What else do you have in there?" (in reference to my backpack). I said, "Well I have a pair of scissors." A cop said with urgency in his voice, "He has a pair of scissors in there! You are going to have to take that out." I mumbled ok and took the scissors out of the "pig pen" area. I discarded my pair of scissors (which was a good one and I miss it to this day) in the snow. Well it sounded better on tape (I had my recorder running while I walked through the metal detector (just by chance). Two people in our group also set off the alarm and were pulled to the side and frisked (would have made another great picture). Shouting and big speakers and hate The Klan rally only lasted around 45 minutes. We spent some time trying to line up and get in via the detectors. When we got closer we could tell that yes, they some of them were dressed for the occasion in their traditional racist garb. Most of the protestors gathered around the fence and tried to shout down the Klan. This was futile as they had a high power system which bounced off the building across the street, and I think the protestors were not allowed bullhorns past the detector (or they didn't choose to bring them which would be very strange if the purpose was to drown-out the Klan). I was able to stand right in front of the KKK rally and catch some audio on tape. There was a reporter there who remarked that it was the same rhetoric as last year, and then turned off his recorder. I also got a picture of them all doing the left hand Hitleresque White Power salute, which met an opposing right hand fist salute (the fight da' power, peoples' struggle salute). I counted either 24 or 25 Klan demonstrators on the steps of the capitol. There was some fight with the result of a racist person getting beat-up (the cops broke it up, and I think it was only one KKK person against many others). Well the Klan lived up to their reputation... Intercepting at the exit (horses) There was an attempt to intercept the KKK people by gathering around the exit to the underground parking lot and wait for them. Someone picked a fight with a mounted cop, and was jumped on (I got a picture of this as well). I don't know what happenned, but I think people just gradually left (which was better than people banging on Klan cars which could have been pretty violent). Taco Bell In the middle of January PAX had a mini-campaign to collect signatures to urge Taco Bell to refrain from using violence in further campaigns or packaging used for kid meals. A member of the community, Sher King, started the campaign and was able to talk to the CEO of Pepsico who wrote a letter to Taco Bell (its subsidiary), and the Goshen store pulled the bags after a couple days. The bags had some violent cartoon sharks on them that are in the same vein as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Karate, fighting). Anyway we got about 500 signatures. It was a good communal issue to work on. Peace Factory It came to the Union gym at GC for about a week. Lots of students volunteered to help run booths. A lot of school kids came through to view the exhibits as a field trip. It was big! It's sponsored by the MCC Peace/Justice Committee. The GC peace club should always try to make it to this conference if it is anywhere near by. It is great! The below was written as part of a letter from march 1995. Updated on Nov 20, 1996. Actual conference was feb 15-17. IPF conference Four weeks ago 19 Goshen College students ventured into the Great White North (Canada) and settled for the weekend in Waterloo, Ontario. We rented a van from the college (expensive!, but got some MCC travel subsidies that were bigger then expected) and took a car. Congrad Grebel was hosting this year's Intercollegiate Peace Fellowship conference (affiliated with MCC in some manner). There were about 70 students from Mennonite colleges all across North America. The title was "Subversions of Peace: Gathering with Intent." Despite the cold and snow (it was Canada after all), the conference was a fabulous success. The conference was a total student organized and run affair. A good example of what we did was the Bofu Bofoo (spelling?) game which separated people into different cultures, that we played on Friday night. One culture had their own language and didn't speak English and they were only interested in trading cards to get points and have a bell rung in their honour. Another culture just wanted to meet people and collect their signatures. I arrived late, so I was a foreigner who had no idea of what was going in the game. Throughout the weekend we had "Gatherings" which mixed drama, speaking, singing, and worship in a thought provoking way. On Saturday we had two workshops. Workshops were led by students out of their own experiences, knowledge and passions. I went to one on Native Issues in the morning. I was in another role playing game where I got to be a land developer. The result of that game was the residents of the land, the government, and the land developers all ganged up on the native people who had their land turned into a resort (this is what usually happens). We then had a nice discussion. In the afternoon I was "researching the corporate web" with a group of people specializing on Shell. We went through a number of directories and figured out some of the complicated structure of who owns Shell, and the layered hierarchy of its hundreds of subsidiaries. Then we had some articles from the alternative press. Shell ah yes, the nice people who almost dumped a oil platform in the North Sea, who are responsible for some of the plight of the Ogoni people of Nigeria (remember the lately executed Ken Saro-Wiwa?), who invest in Myanmar (formerly Burma) and thus help sponsor one of the world's most brutal military regimes, and who avoided the embargo against apartheid in South Africa and sent them oil anyway. It ended on Sunday (after we had shared some brown bread that we had made), and by Monday while I was sitting in class I really was wondering why college couldn't be more fun. Seriously I was affected for the next couple days, inspired, changed by the belief in something greater. Others really enjoyed it as well, and were able to meet friends who attend other Mennonite colleges. The planning was spectacular. There were wonderful meditations that used drama to make points. One was so controversial that it offended someone in the audience quite seriously (it was a spoof of taking scripture in the OT literally). There was a feeling of getting to know people and being a community that made it worthwhile. I spent a very long time trying to figure who all was going. Jessica Smucker decided at midnight on Thursday (down in the KM lab) that she would in fact like to go, and she did. This was the conference that got me believing again after a disappointing Youth in Action one, that conferences could be fun. It inspired me to go to SEAC, Bruderhof, etc, etc in the Fall of 1996. Tax The Rich! The night I came back from this, I and some others (Marija Dubrick, Chris Kennel, Stefan, myself, Kerry, Bryce, Thomas, some others who I forget) put up about 700-800 posters staying up til 4 am or so (a disaster). This was the least popular political thing I've ever done. It just would have been so great if those posters in the Union (which was totally plastered) had stayed up a little longer so students could have seen them on Monday! Physical Plant must have taken them all down by around 8am or so. I even offerred to take everything down in a couple days time. Monday was the NH primary and just also happened to be a campus open house. I never did hear from Physical Plant or get in any trouble for putting them all up. I put the following on the opinion board on Feb 23: TAX THE RICH Nationwide Saturation Postering Campaign Summary of our attempt at Saturation at GC Late Sunday night, and early Monday morning (Feb 18), 700-800 posters (and 2 large banners) were put up on the GC campus. We believe in free speech, that we have the right to bring an issue up and debate it, rather than to see it suppressed or ignored. Unfortunately most of them were taken down very quickly. This campaign is also about "STOPPING THE TAX CUTS FOR THE RICH!" (Ex. The Flat Tax). It is one thing to maintain the current system that is easy on the rich, it is another to give the rich even larger breaks, and it is even worse to pay for these breaks by cutting expenditures for poor people! Who really pays the taxes? Contrary to common belief, the overall tax rate on the rich, the poor, and on the middle class is very very close (something around 23-25%). Federal taxes are progressive (higher rates for the rich then the poor), but state and local taxes (especially sales tax) are regressive (higher rates for the poor then rich). The overall effect is that whatever your income, you are paying about the same rate of tax. A flat tax would reduce the progressivity in the federal tax structure, and could cause the overall tax rate to be regressive! TAX THE RICH: what's so controversial about this? Aren't we doing it currently? I have this strange belief in putting the community before the individual. Transferring a hundred dollars from a millionaire to a welfare recipient will benefit society. How much will a millionaire miss the hundred compared with the gains of the welfare recipient who really needs the money? (The rest of this is all excerpted from the TAX THE RICH manifesto) 1. Introduction. Remember as you read this packet that TAX THE RICH is not an "Organization" in the traditional sense. There are no committees, no board of directors, no corporate sponsors. Rather, TAX THE RICH is an idea, and it is everyone who is working to make that idea into reality. If you think it is a good idea, you need to do your part as well. No one else can do it for you. Sincerely, The members of TTR-Middletown 2. Manifesto The TAX THE RICH poster campaign aims to mobilize public opinion towards making TAX THE RICH a major force in the 1996 elections. Specifically, the campaign's goals are: --> To demonstrate to political candidates and would-be candidates that a large and vocal constituency is already in agreement with the TAX THE RICH concept; --> To educate and inform voters who are unaware of the social benefits of strongly progressive taxation, or who have been misinformed by an inherently biased, corporate-owned news media; --> To demonstrate the power of loosely organized, do-it-yourself "info-activism;" --> To empower TTR campaign participants. TAX THE RICH does not aim to implement or advocate specific legislation, but rather to have a general impact upon voting patterns, candidates' behavior, and the national consciousness. 3. Why Tax the Rich? The Growth of Inequality The percent of America's total wealth controlled by the top one percent of the population has increased from 20% to 40% between 1970 and 1990. (From Edward N. Wolff, "Top Heavy," Twentieth Century Fund Press, 1995, ISBN 0-87078-360-2). As of 1990, the wealthiest 1% controlled 40% of the nation's wealth-- twice the percentage they held just 20 years before. This means that if there were 100 people living in the U.S., with a total of $100, then one person would have $40 while the others, on average, would have 60 cents each. In fact, since the next-richest 4% of the population controls an additional 20% of wealth, it's more like one person with $40, four people with $5, and ninety-five people with just 42 cents each. Is this fair? That's for you to decide... but it sure ain't equal. America's wealth inequality is still growing, and it's already well beyond the levels found in other industrialized nations. (Graph 2: wealth controlled by top 1% in 1989/90: England, 18%; Sweden, 21%; France, 26%; USA, 40%. Also from "Top Heavy"). In fact, the more you look at the numbers on inequality, the less the U.S. looks like a first-world democracy... and the more it looks like some underdeveloped third-world oligarchy. Divided We Fall... But you don't have to look at graphs and statistics to see what's happening. A look through the newspaper or a bus ride across town is proof enough. As wealth has grown more concentrated, our cities have crumbled. Once-proud neighborhoods have decayed into vast wastelands of crime and poverty, their streets filled with potholes, their sidewalks lined with uncollected garbage, their people miserable and hungry. Meanwhile, the wealthy have retreated into 20th-century castles: stately suburbs and soaring office towers, guarded by armies of private security guards, served and maintained by millions of underpaid gardeners, nannies and clerical assistants. If the growing gap between rich and poor isn't outrageous enough, take a look at its direct consequence: the ongoing elimination of social programs which provide basic services to rich, poor and middle-class alike. (Graph 3: Declines in three areas of Federal spending, 1980-1990: Transportation Infrastructure, down 32%; Education and Training, down 40%; Law Enforcement and Government, down 42%. From Harper's Magazine, June 1995, page 46). It's no coincidence that as the rich become richer, public services become fewer and farther between. After all, if the rich can afford private schools, private police, and even (seriously-- there are currently plans in the works in 12 states) private highways, then why should they pay for everyone else's education, security and transportation? 4. Why Posters? Social spending cuts, poverty, environmental degradation... these can all be seen as the direct results of spiraling economic inequality. But inequality has another consequence, more subtle and potentially much more dangerous. By consolidating their control over our cultural communication networks (television, newspapers, and other mass media), a small number of wealthy corporations are rapidly gaining the power to influence entire belief systems to suit their economic best interest. Corporate Media and the Death of Democracy Big money has always had a corrupting effect on political systems of all kinds. But in the last half century, with the growth of electronic mass media, the political effects of money have leapfrogged out of control. And in a modern democracy, where proper political functioning depends on the informed self-interest of every citizen, wealth and media concentration are more than corrupting-- they are deadly to the democratic system itself. Nowadays, the fat cats don't buy politicians-- they buy politics. In the modern electoral race, local meetings and personal discussion take a back seat to the corporate-owned broadcast media: network newscasts, nationally-televised debates and syndicated talk shows. Even the local papers are mostly just branches of some merger- bloated media conglomerate. And big money doesn't just buy advertising; it buys editors and columnists, reporters and anchorpeople. In the end, it owns the airwaves themselves-- the neural channels of the American brain. If big money doesn't like a candidate, it serves up a Willie Horton or an orgy in the governor's mansion. And if big money doesn't like an issue... well then it just ain't news. Needless to say, big money doesn't like to talk about inequality. So it's no surprise that the issue is usually blown off or ignored by the corporate-owned media, leaving readers and viewers just the way the fat cats like them: uninformed and helpless. So-called "alternative media" (mostly in the form of small leftist magazines and community radio stations) have done their best to fill in the gaps left by their corporate counterparts. But without the rocketpower of advertising behind them, existing alternative media are incapable of reaching beyond an extremely limited, highly- educated liberal audience. For twenty years the American left has been screaming-- but it's screaming through its own headphones. Saturation Postering Saturation Postering is an equal opportunity, high-volume megaphone designed specifically to cut through the stifling loops of traditional closed-circuit communication. Saturation Postering is cheap and easy to organize; yet properly done, it can be an extremely powerful political tool. It is important to keep in mind that the TAX THE RICH poster campaign is not "just a bunch of people putting up posters." Like a march, rally, or boycott, political postering is an "action." Like all other political actions, it makes its statement in two different ways: directly, to those who witness it firsthand; and indirectly, by attracting news coverage. At the same time, however, the TAX THE RICH poster campaign differs from more traditional actions in several important respects: --> Longevity of Effect. Marches and rallies last only a few hours. Even if they attract significant news coverage, their effect on the public rarely lasts more than a few days. Postering, on the other hand, lasts until every poster is physically removed-- often up to a month or more. --> Shock Value. Marches and rallies are nothing new. They have become so commonplace that many people who should be interested-- both those in power and the participants themselves -- have stopped taking them seriously. Nationwide Saturation Postering, on the other hand, is novel enough to attract significant interest from an often oblivious public. Congratulations on reading all the way to the end of this message! If you're ready to participate in the TAX THE RICH N.S.P.C., email: ttr@webcom.com or http://www.webcom.com/~ttr/ posted Feb. 23, by Aaron Kreider