Arts For Social Justice Holiday Party and Sale

Click here to EXHIBIT, PERFORM or VOLUNTEER

Schedule of events:

Saturday December 13th, 11-8

11 AM - 8 PM
-Art for Darfur -art show and sale benefiting Doctors Without Borders
-Amnesty International Write-A-Thon - write letters to free prisoners of conscience
-Bake Sale
-Organic candy, Fair trade costumes and accessories

11:30 AM - 2:30 PM
-Stationery Printing Workshop

3 PM - 6 PM
-Christmas Ornament-Making
-Face Painting

6 PM - 8 PM
-Music, Poetry and Performance open mic
-Silent Auction

Click here to EXHIBIT, PERFORM or VOLUNTEER

-make art, have fun and save lives

The event is taking place at:

Rebecca Migdal Studio,
Paper City Studios, 80 Race St. Floor 3, Holyoke

Feel the Love! Send the Love!

***OPEN CALL***

Please pass this on to all artists, craftspeople and musicians, and anyone else who might be interested in participating in the event.

Tidings of Joy-
Arts For Social Justice Holiday Party and Sale
-make art, have fun and save lives!

Saturday December 13th, 11-7
at Rebecca Migdal Studio, Paper City Studios, 80 Race St. Floor 3, Holyoke

FEATURING

-Art for Darfur -art show and sale benefiting Doctors Without Borders
-Amnesty International Write-A-Thon - write letters to free prisoners of conscience
-Stationery Printing Workshop
-Christmas Ornament-Making
-Bake Sale; Coffee, Tea, Hot Spiced Cider
-Organic candy, Fair trade costumes and accessories
-Music, Poetry and Performance open mic

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Amazing links to the YES MEN, Bureaucrash and more!

Everybody’s talking about the spoof New York Times (this link is to a pdf) distributed last week, announcing the end of the Iraq war. The major entity involved in the spoof was a media activist group called the Yes Men. They also created a spoof NY Times web site.

I had the privilege of meeting Yes Man extraordinaire Andy Bichlbaum last night at a screening of their documentary film.

Andy Bichlbaum demonstrates the “Employee Visualization Appendage” in Helsinki

After my heady indoctrination into the world of Yes-Manigans I did some research, and I found out that the Yes Men did a spoof involving “Captain Euro“ - a strangely naziesque comic/cartoon action hero, created by PR firm Twelve Stars Corporate Vision Strategists, advocating Eurofederalism to children.

The mission of Captain Euro is to "successfully eradicate any possibility for divergence from the common vision" of the European Union.

Apparently the Yes Men dressed up as Captain Euro characters and interviewed real children in London. Then they showed up at the offices of the PR agency, were welcomed, and asked the questions (without revealing their source.) Twelve Star’s Eduardo DeSantis was delighted to answer, and finally proclaimed “This is what I like about America. Any idea is accepted - without discussion!”

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How many countries have to suffer from the blindness of the World Bank and the cupidity of the big oil companies before oil drilling adventurism ceases? In today’s New York Times it’s reported that Chad’s great dreams of poverty alleviation through oil riches have collapsed under the weight of government corruption. Billions of dollars have been stolen, and the poor are still poor. (What this article doesn’t even touch on are the appalling oil spills in Cameroon due to poor people hacking at the 650-mile long pipeline as it snakes through the rainforest — the people just want to get some free oil.)

From the New York Times:

“Civic groups and opposition political parties had opposed the pipeline, saying Chad was too corrupt and poorly governed to manage the gusher of oil money.

“We knew from the very beginning how this would end,” said Antoine Berilengar, a Roman Catholic priest and anticorruption activist in Chad who served on the oversight panel. “Chad is a corrupt country with no real democracy. The government has simply enriched itself.”

Ian Gary, an Oxfam America specialist in managing mineral resources, said it was no surprise that the experiment had failed.

“The World Bank made a gamble,” he said. “It knew the situation in Chad going in, but it argued it could build the capacity of the Chadian government and the governance situation would improve alongside the oil boom. But what we have seen in Chad and in so many other places, it is that boom and that flow of revenue that undermines governance rather than improving it.”

We’ve heard that the Maya are opposed in their land rights battle by the many other ethnic groups in Belize, since supposedly offering communal tenancy in the Toledo rainforest means that non-Maya would be denied the right to equal opportunity of utilizing that land via leasing it from the government. However in this article from the newspaper Amandala, the basis for mutual aid among the various Belizean ethnicities is drawn based on a common history of European oppression.

“…It is not the view of the government that that judgment applies to all the villages….the first case…was not vigorously argued by the Government’s side….When next this matter comes to court it is going to be vigorously argued.”

Belize Attorney General Wilfred Elrington, June 13, 2008

“…The people of Golden Stream have customary rights to these lands, and the fact that the government has never recognized or respected our rights to this land, and therefore never granted any legal title to those lands to these people, should not cost them their right to those lands.”

Cristina Coc, Maya Leader, Executive Director of the Julian Cho Society, Belize, June 13, 2008

These excerpts are from a radio program on Belize Love FM radio, transcribed here.

Melissa Coc of Blue Creek, Toledo District plays with her pet parrot.

The Maya of Toledo remain at risk. Their farms are being bulldozed, in the village of Golden Stream and elsewhere, by government-sanctioned developers. Indigenous rights are being eroded; meanwhile the Kuwaiti-sponsored roads that will facilitate oil drilling in the region will be completed within the year. Most residents of the area have accepted the assurances of the government that environmental impact studies are enough to insure that the destruction of agricultural and natural resources just won’t happen, and that oil development will bring prosperity to the local economy. If only this were true! Similar cases throughout the world, from Nigeria to Ecuador, have invariably been launched with the same credulous enthusiasm. The results have not been economic security for local communities, nor the careful protection of the environment. Instead, there have been the inevitable land grabs and corruption, the theft of resources and the disempowerment of local voices. If the Maya leaders’ voices are not heard and respected, outsiders will profit while indigenous communities are forced to subsist in toxic wastelands.

The delicate loveliness of the coastal reefs and rainforests here are fragile ecosystems. Their beauty alone gives them intrinsic value, while they harbor rare and endangered species of wildlife, and provide a livelihood for the equally rare and endangered human communities that live sustainably among them. In addition, the potential value of the medicinal herbs and the historical archaeological sites that are still being discovered and explored, is unfathomably rich. And finally, so long as tourism is the primary legitimate economic engine in Belize, the choice to place at risk the natural resources that sustain the tourist trade is a shortsighted one, and can only be explained as self-interest in the short term, by those in power and by those who hope in vain to benefit.

Stay tuned for a more detailed narrative of this important struggle for indigenous rights and the environment in Belize.

Well, we have our tickets, and we return to Belize on August 23. Looking back on the past nine months of gestation that led to the launch of Gonzo Comix and Tours, there arise extraordinary, savory, warm, breathtaking and heartbreaking glimpses–memories that peek from behind the veils of the present. Glorious, curious and tender respites, and flashes of fear and anger at the injustices we encountered. As we step forward onto the deck of that bulwark, the good ship Responsible Venture, captained by legendary Robin Hood-style pirate Eth E. Cullbiz, I seem to hear the enthusiastic ringing of bells, a clamor of encouragement and support from friends and colleagues. It is truly a watershed moment in my own life. It brings pleasure beyond telling, to be sharing it with all of you now.

It seems fitting, in these ensuing days before our departure, to begin the story at the beginning. I start therefore with my journal entry from our very first day in Belize.

January 15, 2008 (Tues) Belize - Punta Gorda Town

A gluttonous feast of the senses. The scent of lushness as the sun’s rays dry the rain. The abundance of rainbows, full arches, vanishing with precision into gorges, double arches. We stay in a seaside villa whose floors of marbled ceramic tile ripple like cake batter with the chocolate just partly mixed in. A gecko peeks shyly from behind an oil painting in the dining room. Jazz plays softly from a thatched cabana wet bar beside a glimmering long narrow swimming pool.

Dreaming of Belize

Beyond the locked gate, cinderblock ruins and mildewed stucco hovels command the town. The poverty here is of a degree that makes American slums appear well kept by comparison. Children crowd onto rickety crumbling balconies suspended in a death-embrace around houses on rotted stilts. This is hurricane country, a wet place of daily rainstorms, and virtually everything is molded, peeling, mildewed, mossed or rotting. Still, there are signs of battle against the ever-encroaching entropy of verdant life: a brown-faced workman trowels plaster in a smooth arc; sparks grate from the edge of a circular saw glimpsed through the apertures of a cinderblock-walled workshop. Laden trucks labor, lurch down unpaved highways, flashing their lights in greeting to us, wayfarers fearing we are lost.

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