*buzzkill* -for the net- s a l t l a k e ' s o c c a s i o n a l a n a r c h i s t r a g > this publication is anti-copyright, distribute it with abandon! Big Mountain Update From Tucson B.M.S.G. on Monday 11/23/92 the Navajo Tribe approved the Agreement in Principle for Resolving issues in Connection with the Navajo-Hopi Settlement Act. Members of the Tucson Big Mtn Support Group travelled to Forest Lake on a fact-finding mission 11/15-17 to learn more about developments in the Navajo-Hopi settlement issue. The Navajo-Hopi proposed settlement has stirred controversy among the people affected. Hopi traditionals, Navajo 1st-amendment plaintiffs and non- plaintiff resisters on HPL. Tom Bedonie, Daniel Zapata, Tracy Riley and jack Strasburg met with Kee Shea and other Elders who said that all Dine Elders disagree with the proposed settlement. The settlement allows for each plaintiff family a three-acre homesite and ten-acre agricultural plot (13 acre total). There are less than 50 plaintiff families who will receive 1300 acres total. Elder Kee Shea asked, in response to the explanation about the settlement, How much is 3 acres? The concept of the smallness of 3 acres was difficult for him. The size will result in further economic hardship forcing them to go to the reservation or to Peabody for work. This small amount will not allow for livestock as a livelihood. Kee Shea called the settlement a lie I don't believe this 13 acres thing. Will we be able to graze outside those 3? Who will pay the lease money? (To the Hopi Tribal Council, anti-traditional, which is $1600 annual per each family). This is ludicrous! If the family chooses not to pay this amount under the agreement that will constitute terminating the lease. Under the proposed agreement, all land of Dine resisters will come under jurisdiction of the Hopi Tribal council. This agreement would create dilemnas. For instance, how would the leaseholders be represented in the Hopi Council? Would they have dual status in the Navajo and Hopi nations? Hopi Tribal Council rangers have been harassing Navajo Elders and young people. Incidents have occurred at sites of winter wood collection where many of you know by now there has been a so-called agreement between the Navajo Tribal Council and the Hopi Tribal Council over the area that was once known as the Joint Use Area (JUA). A number of people have been misled to believe that this now ends the long struggle at Big Mountain. Unfortunately this is not true. The agreement has only changed it. A few background facts will help you understand why it is not over. First, the reason the Hopi reservation was made so big was that the Mormons wanted to force traditional Hopis from their mesas and out into the lower lands to become individual farmers and ranchers. It was felt that as long as the Hopis were on their mesas they would keep to their traditional ways. They were unable to force the Hopis off their mesas so the Navajo, who were forced onto a reservation that was too small used the unused land. This land became the JUA. When coal was found under this land then the government created a dispute. The fact remains it does not matter whose land you call it, anybody on it would face relocation. And once the JUA is dug up then comes Hopiland. So what we have now is an agreement forced by the government on tow tribal councils, both of which want to sell coal. The agreement forces the Dine living at Big Mountain to lease their land from the Hopi Tribal Council and they are only allowed 25 sheep. This is not enough to live on let alone pay rent. If they do not pay their rent, or do not sign the lease or break any of a number of rules they are then to be evicted and the land will be ready for Peabody. This is only an illusion of an agreement. The real solution is simple, both the traditional Hopis and Dine just want to be left alone. <------------------------------------------------------------------> Gangs and Graffiti from an Anarchist perspctive Lately I having been paying rather close attention to news coverage by conservative, moderate, and even "radical" sources--regarding "gangs" and "graffiti" problems in the Salt Lake valley. From the avenues to Sandy, white folks are trembling in the fears that gangs are encroaching upon their sacred homefronts. As a result of this anti-gang bias, Salt Lake City police chief Ruben Ortega has had little difficulty (to say the least) in instituting anti- graffiti measures and in suggesting that the answer to the "gang" problem is the elimination of gangs (and, by extension, gang members) from Happy Valley. These programs are racist, insensitive, and do not address any real problems at the root of gangs or gang violence. The sentiments expressed in these news reports and manifested in these anti-gang programs reflect a belief that gang members join gangs for the express purpose of committing crime. While crime may indeed be something in which some gang members do engage, it would be a hasty generalization to assume that crime is the prime motivator for gang activity. Rather, gangs are groups of (usually) minority youths that face any amount of oppression every day of their lives. Gang membership is a way to identify with other people who have similar life experiences. Like other organizations, like the Boy Scouts, Fraternities, and church youth groups, gangs are means by which minority youths can understand and affect the conditions of their lives. As with gang membership, people seem to have the impression that graffiti is primarily intended to "terrorize" white, middle-class folks. As the above suggests, graffiti is a means by which gangs and gang members can creatively produce and express their own identities and connect those identities to the public spaces in which they live. In this respect, they are not much different from the publishers of this and other news publications. One significant difference is that many urban and minority youths do not have access to these means of expression. Access to the public sphere, rather than being "free," is heavily determined by access to certain resources (money, leisure, credibility). Because many people who become involved with gangs do not have those resources (and because nobody with those resources seems to have a great deal of respect for those without), they come up with creative strategies for using the resources at hand: paint, walls, imagination. Quite frankly, given what they are up against, I have a lot of respect for gang members who creatively appropriate language and public property, creatively inscribing them on the urban semiotic landscape. Indeed, I find most gang-graffiti much less offensive than the billboards, forcing capitalist discourses upon retinal nerves, that the cops protect with guns and badges. Many of these corporations are, at least indirectly, implicated in the deaths of millions more than all gangs members combined have or will threaten. I am not really sure what I find more offensive, the racism or the hypocricy. If I tended toward paramnoimic conspiracy mongering, I would doubt these two simultaneos police missions (protecting corporate property and mounting large-scale campaigns against groups of mostly urban, mostly minority, mostly poor youths) were entirely unrelated. <----------------------------------------------------------------> HARD FACTS ABOUT THE DRUG WAR The war on drugs is a costly, unwinnable war, resulting in racial discrimination, loss of privacy and civil liberties, and monumental government waste. 1. The number of drug deaths in the U.S. in a typical year is as follows: Tobacco kills about 390,000, Alcohol kills about 80,000, Second-hand smoke from tobacco kills about 50,000, Cocaine kills about 2,200, Heroin kills about 2,000, Aspirin kills about 2,000, Marijuana kills 0. There has never been a recorded death due to marijuana at any time in U.S. history. All illegal drugs combined kill about 4,500 people per year, or about one percent of the number killed by alcohol and tobacco. 2. According to former Surgeon-General C. Everett Koop, tobacco is the most addictive drug, at least equally addictive to crack cocaine. Heroin and cocaine addicts commonly report that it is easier to kick heroin or cocaine than it is to kick tobacco. One of the reasons is that physical craving for tobacco may be felt up to six months after the drug has been discontinued, while cravings for heroin and cocaine are usually over within the first month. 3. All major authorities agree that the vast majority of drug-related violent crime is caused by the prohibition against drugs, rather than the drugs themselves. This was the same situation that was true during alcohol prohibition. Alcohol prohibition gave rise to a violent criminal organization which is still with us six decades later. The War on Drugs will do the same. There are about 25,000 homicides in the U.S. each year. A study of 414 homicides in New York City at the height of the crack epidemic showed that only three murders, less than one percent, could be attributed to the behavioral effects of cocaine or crack. The drug with the clearest connection to violence is alcohol. By some authorities estimates, about two thirds of all homicides, and seventy percent of all sexual assaults on children are alcohol-related. 4. The biggest single cause of crime in the inner-city is the fact that most black men cannot find jobs. According to federal government figures, about half of all the black men in america are chronically unemployed. The biggest single reason is that most of the chronically unemployed black men have prison records and nobody will hire a black man with a prison record. The biggest single reason that black men have prison records is that, over the last twelve years, millions of black men have been thrown into prison on non-violent drug charges. 5. At the present rate, by the year 2000, about half of all black men in amerikkka will have gone to prison, most for non-violent drug charges. Most of them will be released into society again. Because they are black men with a prison record, they will be permanently unemployable. 6. By the U.S. Federal Government's own estimates, the entire U.S. consumption of illegal drugs could be supplied by approximately one percent of the worldwide drug crop. In their best year, U.S. Drug Enforcement Agents, working together with foreign governments, seized about one percent of the worldwide drug crop, leaving 99 percent free to supply the U.S. The U.S. government also states that, in the unlikely event that drug production was stopped in South America, several countries would suffer a major economic collapse. There is no credible evidence anywhere to suggest that there is any possibility that drug production can be eliminated in other countries. 7. We can not stop drug smuggling at the borders. Any examination of the statistics regarding border interdiction shows quite clearly that border interdiction is an expensive failure. In 1990, the General Accounting Office completed a major study on border interdiction. They reported that border interdiction was a waste of money and that no conceivable increase in funding or effort would make it any better. In 1988, Stirling Johnson, the Federal Prosecutor for New York, stated that the police would have to increase drug seizures by at lest 1,400 percent to have any impact at all on the drug market, assuming there were no corresponding increases in production. The best Federal Government evidence has concluded that there is no way to stop, or even greatly reduce, either production of drugs in foreign countries or the smuggling of drugs into the U.S. 8. We cannot arrest all the drug dealers in the U.S. Most of the prisons and jails in the U.S. are already far in excess of their planned capacity and correctional institutions in 24 states are under federal court order to release prisoners. Arresting all of the drug dealers would require construction of at least five new prison beds for every one which now exists, assuming that no new drug dealers come along to fill the gap. In September, 1992 Sheriff Sherman Block announced that he would release 4,000 prisoners, about twenty percent of the total Los Angeles County jail population, because there was no room to keep them and no more tax dollars to build more jails. For every person who goes to jail from now on, another one will be released. tough drug laws have done all they can do and they have not solved the problem. The 'get-tough' policy is over. 9. Drug enforcement costs escalated tenfold to $30 billion per year since 1980, with the result that crime, violence and drug abuse all intensified. The cost to put a single drug dealer in jail is about $450,000. The same $450,000 can provide treatment or education for about 200 people. In addition, putting a person in prison produces about fifteen dollars in related welfare costs, for every dollar spent on incarceration. Every dollar spent on treatment and education saves about five dollars in related welfare costs. 10. Compare the U.S. drug policy with the policies of other countries. Europe is beginning to form uniform drug laws as a result of European unification. Europe is decriminalizing drugs along the lines of the programs used in England and the Netherlands. In the U.S., drug use is illegal and the police hunt down drug users to throw them in prison. Four thousand people died from the use of illegal drugs in the U.S. last year and we now have more than 600,000 people in prison on drug charges. In the Netherlands the police do not arrest drug users anymore. Instead, health care workers seek them out and encourage them to come in for counseling and medical treatment. Both counseling and medical treatment are provided on demand. The medical treatment often includes maintenance doses of narcotics under the management of a physician. Liverpool, England, has adopted the same approach as the Netherlands and has had substantially the same results. They both chose decriminalization. 11. The overwhelming weight of the scholarly evidence on drug policy supports decriminalization. Every major study of drug policy in history has recommended a non-criminal approach. This is irrefutable. <---------------------------------------------------------------> Before the fascist invasion of Spain, anarchist peasants did not believe that efficient agricultural production required hierarcical management or structures of dominations and subordination which characterized feudal and capitalist production modes. . . . Anarchist decentralism was based upon an entirely new philosophy of life. Its characteristics--self management, integration of economic and social activities, smallness of scale, and federalism--were aimed at developing positive human qualities. That Spanish anarchists succeeded in doing this is indicated by the personal traits of its adherents--people who were anxious to cooperate with others at all levels, who seemed to understand the needs of others and want to respond, who maintained interest and enthusiasm in their work in spite of long hours, who lived close to and respected nature, and who managed their complex lives responsibly without entrenched forms of authority. --Myrna Margulies Breitbart <------------------------------------------------------------------> from the propaganda department... the editor of buzzkill will soon be leaving town, before he goes we would like to get together with anyone interested in working on the paper, talk about where the paper is going (straight downhill) and maybe look into publishing a third issue of bootleg...we will be getting together every sunday afternoon, from 2 til around 5...anyone is welcome to come...call 486-7657 for more information <------------------------------------------------------------------> buzzkill classifieds - - buzzkill meetings are now and then, call 486-7657 for more information. send donations, letters, poetry, submissions etc. to\: buzzkill, 360 E Edith Ave., SLC, UT 84111 - - Utah Activist Network meets every monday, 7 p.m. at Cafe Mediterranean (542 E 400 S). call 534-3322 - - Wild Utah Earth First! meets every monday, 7 p.m., at Cafe Mediterranean (542 E 400 S). 262-0128, p.o. box 510442, SLC, UT 84151 - - salt lake IWW meets on the third saturday of each month. call 485- 1969 for more info. p.o. box 520514, SLC, UT 84152-0514 - - Utah Peace Test meets on the third thursday of each motnh, 7\:00, at the Quaker meeting house (161 E 2nd Ave) call 534-8638 for more info, p.o. box 11416, SLC, UT 84147 - - for more information about Food Not Bombs call 535-1852 - - Leonard Peltier Support Group/SPIRIT meets on the first and third monday of each month, 7 p.m., at Cafe Mediterranean (542 E 400 S) call 272-9128 for more info, p.o. box 9401, SLC, UT 84124 - - Queer Nation and ACT-UP meetings are every tuesday, 7 p.m., at the Stonewall Center (450 S 900 E) } > >For more information on buzzkill e-mail: >msbenefi@cadehp0.eng.utah.edu, or phone the editor @ (801)-486-7657. >