Fault Lines, the bi-monthly newsmagazine of Indybay, has just released another issue of radical political analysis and social commentary. A PDF is available online, but we need help with printing costs to get Fault Lines out on the streets. Donate via Paypal on this page. Fault Lines #21 focuses on local control of housing, land, communication, and other resources, in the Bay Area and beyond. The issue includes exclusive first-hand coverage of the G8 protests in Germany, interviews of Josh Wolf and Gabe Meyers about past anti-G8 actions in San Francisco, and articles about guerrilla gardening, housing rights, microradio, biodiesel hotrods, biojustice, indigenous resurgence, and more.

Download a Copy of Fault Lines #21

This year’s meeting of the Group of 8 (G8, the 7 richest nations in the world: Great Britain, United States, Germany, France, Japan, Italy, and Canada, plus Russia) was held in the resort of Heiligendamm, Germany from June 6-8. In response, tens of thousands of demonstrators arrived in the area in an effort to shut down the summit. The reasons for such a confrontation include the G8’s policies on aid to Africa, the propagation of neoliberal economic globalization, the neglect of the fight against AIDS, the inherent and rabidly undemocratic nature of the G8 itself, among many others. Read More

Fault Lines interviewed Josh Wolf and Gabe Meyers, the two people targeted by the federal and local authorities after the July 8, 2005 Anarchist Action Anti-G8 demonstration in San Francisco. Anti-capitalist protests and demonstrations against the G8, WTO, and other institutions that represent neo-colonial domination and corporate globalization have always been met with more aggression and hostility than normal marches for peace. Granted, these demonstrators are often much more militant. With a police officer injured and a police car damaged, the authorities felt a need to subpoena and prosecute. Read More

Fault Lines interviewed Josh Wolf and Gabe Meyers, the two people targeted by the federal and local authorities after the July 8, 2005 Anarchist Action Anti-G8 demonstration in San Francisco. Anti-capitalist protests and demonstrations against the G8, WTO, and other institutions that represent neo-colonial domination and corporate globalization have always been met with more aggression and hostility than normal marches for peace. Granted, these demonstrators are often much more militant. With a police officer injured and a police car damaged, the authorities felt a need to subpoena and prosecute. Read More

Guatemala City had never seen anything like it: thousands of Indigenous people from almost every country of the Americas coming together, celebrating their culture, and organizing resistance. This is the grand finale march on Guatemala City to top off the successful weeklong summit at nearby Iximché. The grey, suffocating streets are filled for once not with smog and gridlock, but with a blaze of color from the forest of rainbow colored flags and banners, and the sound of drums and pipes and maracas and the multitude of voices each with their own distinct language uniting to chant and sing together. Like the march of an army of the dispossessed—the invisibles—reclaiming the city of fear where once, not so long ago, they were hunted down, disappeared, and murdered with impunity by the state security forces.

“After more than 500 years of oppression and domination,” proclaimed the Bolivian speaker from the stage before the cheering crowd, “they have not been able to eliminate us. Here we are alive and united with nature. Today we recuperate together our sovereignty...Our task is to begin to govern ourselves.” Read More

From the uselessness of the final product to the dramatic environmental and social impacts of its excavation, modern-day gold mining serves as an absurd illustration of the dangers and complexity of our global economy.

In spite of the threat of repression, people are wising up to the toxic legacy of gold mining and these global operations are increasingly met with resistance. All throughout Latin America, communities with experience in mining are traveling to those considering it, sharing their stories of environmental devastation, economic depression, and struggle so that others can avoid a similar path. Read more

On April 19, City College of San Francisco celebrated Earth Day by showcasing alternative fuel and electrically powered vehicles on the school’s Ram Plaza. Among the line-up of vehicles was a biodiesel hot rod that some fellow CCSF students and I built in the school’s Automotive Department. The hotrod is a 1974 El Camino Super Sport that was originally gas powered with a 350 Chevy engine. We pulled the engine and replaced it with 6.2 liter GMC diesel engine and filled the tank with biodiesel.

The EPA saw what we did with the El Camino and decided to give the garage a $200,000 biodiesel grant. They considered it cutting edge, and the administration acted as though they were supporting our project. The Biodiesel Club was led to believe that the grant money would benefit the students, and we were asked to get the car ready for a press conference. Spending money out of pocket and backtracking on the project, both club members and faculty made the car picture-worthy. In the end the grant money was put in the pockets of the administrators, with a small portion to go toward a biodiesel workshop that CCSF students are not allowed to attend. Read More

For those of us living in our modern cities land is a foreign concept. Stories of land conjure romantic images of countrysides far from our crowded neighborhoods, images that seem irrelevant to our lives. Even though we inhabit a landscape smothered with buildings and concrete, the struggles for land fought by rural people hold many important lessons for us as we strive for control over our lives and communities. When we consider the landless state of most poor people the world round and how most of us own no land, we realize we are all perpetually inhabiting someone else’s space. Our lives and communities as well as our food supply are controlled by people in far away places whose main motivation is profit. When we start to reclaim some of this space we begin to take back our lives.

Managed by hired agencies and city employees, our streets and parks feel like they belong to no one. In reality this is the common land that we all share and it has the potential to change our lives and the ways that we relate to the space around us. When a group of gardeners in San Francisco turned an abandoned lot near my house into a guerrilla community garden this spring, it transformed our street full of strangers into a community with the common goal of improving the neighborhood. All over the world landless people have made bold stands to control unused land and challenge the very notion of land ownership. Read More

Past coverage: Guerrilla Gardens in San Francisco

The housing situation in San Francisco is a prime example of the greatest evil of capitalism. Only those who can afford it get to be housed. Everyone else lives on the streets. They get trash talked by neighbors and politicians alike for the sin of being homeless. They are arrested or cited with “quality of life” citations.

This issue on Fault Lines includes a spread on housing rights and housings justice in San Francisco. The following short articles outline the housing crisis in San Francisco, tenants' rights, attempts to fight back against evictions, the evils of new condos in the Mission, and an explanation of the most important housing legislation.

Rent is Theft, Housing is a Human Right by Tommi Avicolli Mecca
In San Francisco, Tenants Have Rights! by the SF Tenants Union
Former Tenant Pickets as Realtors Tries to Sell House by Susan
What Do More Condos Mean for the Mission? by Emma Gerould
The Ellis Act Defined from the SF Tenants Union website

On February 15, 2007, three years after its demise, San Francisco Liberation Radio’s (SFLR) case against the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) finally reached the Ninth Circuit Court. This was the station’s third appearance in court, and it unfortunately reached the same conclusion as the previous two: a decision overwhelmingly in favor of the FCC. A victory would have done nothing in regard to the station’s ability to broadcast, but would have made it more difficult for the FCC to raid and shut down unlicensed microradio stations.

With so few options for the public to make its voice heard through the media, many see unlicensed broadcasting as an act of civil disobedience. A look at the FCC’s role in radio raises many questions and contradictions. Read More

Chinatown - 5.03.07

Up a dusty flight of stairs in the heart of Boston’s Chinatown lies the arterial lining of the Boston anti-biotech movement. Banners for the US Social Forum line the walls, stacks of the Bioustice 2007 underground newspaper sit prepared for distribution, and various flyers await eager hands. Amidst these tools of resistance, there is a murmur of activity as a motley crew of committed individuals plot and laugh heartily. These are not your typical anti-authoritarians.

Although over the course of the next six days they will be met by armed oppressors, today the afternoon sun shines through the 5th floor windows into a space ripe with expectation. This is the BioJustice Convergence Center.

BioJustice 2007 is a direct challenge to the annual B.I.O. (Biotechnology Industry Organization) International Convention. BioJustice participants celebrate sustainable food and healthcare alternatives, and resist the tools of corporate domination: genetically engineered foods, drug monopolies, and biological weapons. Read More

The story of Niccolo Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti was one so powerful that it is still lamented almost 90 years later. In 1920, the two Italian-American anarchists were convicted of murder outside of Boston and held for seven years before their execution in 1927. To the authorities’ chagrin, the execution resounded as an electric shock heard ‘round the world, as the two had garnered support from the far-reaching corners of the planet. Everyone knew the names Sacco and Vanzetti, and nearly everyone resented their deaths. Read More

State police, often serving as the order-preserving arms of global capitalism, have a simple formula for dissolving groups that pose a threat to that order. This formula has been documented for decades in the US and has even been applied against completely nonviolent groups. According to Ward Churchill in Pacifism as Pathology, reissued this year by AK press, the existence of such a formula brings up an inherent flaw in the logic of American Liberals and other totally ineffectual leftist groups that remain stridently critical of the use of violence in resisting the state. Churchill makes light of the absurdity of assuming that as long as dissent remains nonviolent, the state will be forced to follow suit. He then unveils the harsh truth that within nation-states that can mobilize violent use of force to protect ruling-class interests, the stance of absolute nonviolence has become a placebo for the progressive class, quelling their woes but changing nothing. Read More