Crisis in California: Everything Touched by Capital Turns Toxic

The global economic crisis that started in 2007 was ignited by the collapse of the housing bubble, mostly centered on the massive real-estate boom over the last decade throughout the U.S., but especially in California. California’s Central Valley was already the birthplace of industrial chemical-intensive agribusiness, but the planet’s most productive farmland began to be paved over by subprime loan-fueled housing developments – now the Valley is home to the largest collection of empty houses on earth, many sitting side-by-side with tent cities and shantytowns occupied by the unemployed workers who built them, in towns and cities with the highest unemployment rates in the U.S. Thrown into the toxic mix are ruling class schemes to privatize California’s water, while the air in the Central Valley is the dirtiest in the U.S. This presentation is a road trip through California’s landscape of toxicity: of mortgages and ecosystems, houses, enclosure of the commons (especially education), a prison-building boom, drugs and human relations. This multimedia presentation will be followed by a participatory discussion of possible ways of fighting back.

Gifford Hartman teaches adult education and is an independent working class historian; he is a member of the Insane Dialectical Posse (see accounts of their solidarity actions at: FlyingPicket.org).

For further reading:
"Crisis in California: Everything Touched by Capital Turns Toxic": http://turbulence.org.uk/turbulence-5/california/