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

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!”

(more…)

This wonderful video features art, photographs and animation documenting the draconian police state conditions in Oaxaca during the famous Teachers Strike. There’s great music and the gorgeously macabre imagery may give you chills-it does it for me.

Enjoy!

Hapless tourists travel through southern Belize toward Punta Gorda, the “forgotten district”, often over unpaved roads and log causeways. Bridges have been damaged or destroyed in flooding caused by unregulated development. Andy Laties is very funny! Interview with barrier reef park ranger Oliver Garbutt, about oil drilling, and the new road being built by Kuwait. A film by Rebecca Migdal. Two parts, about 5 minutes each.

Part 2 features awesome footage of cars being towed across stream by bulldozer, and getting stuck. Then Andy does a very funny Monty Python style political comedy monologue. Just watch it!

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.