Feature Archives

John Malkin speaks with Mark Hosler, founding member of Negativland, the art, music, film, activist, culture jamming collective established in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1970's. Mixing original materials and original music with things taken from corporately owned mass culture and the world around them, Negativland surreally re-arrange these found bits and pieces to make them say and suggest things that they never intended to. In 2004 Negativland worked with Creative Commons to write the Creative Commons Sampling License, an alternative to existing copyrights that is now widely used by many artists, writers, musicians, film makers, and websites.

On March 5, graduate student workers at UC Santa Cruz and their undergraduate allies participated in a UC system wide day of action in solidarity with their fellow workers whom university administration fired. Large demonstrations took place simultaneously at other UC campuses, including UC Berkeley, UC Santa Barbara, UC Irvine and UC Riverside. Striking graduate students explain, "The strike began because there was a crisis that demanded to be acknowledged, that had been swept under the rug for too long."

On February 28, the Westlands Water District signed a permanent water repayment contract with the Bureau of Reclamation to provide Central Valley Water Project water in perpetuity to the growers in the powerful, politically-connected water district on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley. Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, executive director of Restore the Delta, stated, “At a time of unprecedented climate changes and droughts we should not be circumventing the law and promising by federal contract far more water than actually exists to one large irrigation group at the expense of others.”

Approximately 300 protesters descended on the Chase branch in Santa Cruz on February 28 to demand an end to the bank's financing of the fossil fuel industry. Five people stood in front of the teller windows to stop all banking transactions. Protesters successfully shut down the bank for the remainder of the day. Meanwhile, outside the bank, demonstrators sang and danced while offering water, cookies, chair massages, blankets and throw pillows. As rush hour traffic drove by, motorists honked their horns in support while creative participants chalked the walkways outside the bank with many messages.

At least eighty-two graduate student teaching assistants at UC Santa Cruz withheld Fall grades in protest of low pay. As of February 28, they are out of a job next quarter. Fifty-four who had already received Spring appointments were dismissed by the university in retaliation for the strike. But the movement has declared that the fight isn't over, and "Together, we win!" Graduate students are calling for the cancellation of classes on Monday, March 2, and for everyone to join them on the picket line for a press conference.

In a two-day action, demonstrators called on Big Oil’s largest lender, Wells Fargo, to halt its financing of fossil fuels and invest instead in clean energy solutions to the climate crisis. They took their protests to bank branches in San Jose and Mountain View. On February 20 in San Jose, about twenty demonstrators marched into the Wells Fargo branch. They quickly deployed banners and signs throughout the bank’s customer area, then sang and chanted the message that Wells Fargo’s $172 billion a year financial support of the fossil fuel industry is destroying our environment. The following day, protesters targeted a Mountain View branch.

Mike Rhodes reports: My first history lesson about Fresno’s corrupt underbelly was in the late 1990s when I read Mark Arax’s book "In My Father’s Name." It is a great book about Arax’s search for the killer of his father, which dives deep into Fresno’s interesting but corrupt past. Arax, writing for the Los Angeles Times, quoted Larry Miller, a retired federal agent who busted numerous Fresno bookies with connections to the Fresno Police Department in the 1960s. “It was a rotten town with a rotten police force and the citizens didn’t mind. Their indifference was practically suffocating.”