Pacific Mountain News - American Friends Service … hope that this issue of Pacific Mountain News...
Transcript of Pacific Mountain News - American Friends Service … hope that this issue of Pacific Mountain News...
AFSC Commemorates Deaths in Afghanistan
From the Interim Regional Director
On February 22, 2010, Veterans for Peace, Iraq Veterans
Against the War, local Quakers, and others joined AFSC in
marking the grim milestone of 1,000 casualties in Operation
Enduring Freedom (OEF, the Pentagon’s name for the war in
Afghanistan).
The event was held in front of the Veteran’s War Memorial
Building in San Francisco. Busloads of people stopped every
few minutes and took in the sight of rows and rows of
postcards, each one bearing the name of a fallen soldier. As
darkness descended, candles were lit, and page after page of
names was read. Local news, channel 2 – KTVU, covered the
event over the course of the evening.
We were successful in conveying our message: the cost of
war, both human and financial, is too high. Increased foreign
troop levels and increasing resistance to their presence has
escalated the violence in Afghanistan, jeopardizing the safety
of both the occupied and the occupier. Nearly one-third of
the 1,000 US deaths, 317, took place last year.
The exact number of Afghan casualties is unknown, but we
do know that civilians are increasingly caught in the crossfire.
On the back of each postcard was a letter to Speaker of
the House Nancy Pelosi asking her ―to stop funding failed
tools of military intervention.‖ Thousands of postcards
were delivered to the Speaker’s office in Washington D.C.
It is time for the U.S. to announce an immediate cease-fire,
pledge to stop sending additional troops, negotiate a
timeline for the removal of U.S. troops, support civilian-led
reconstruction, and support the building of a civil society in
Afghanistan.
Dear Friends,
Summer has arrived in the Pacific Mountain Region and the hopefulness of the season is evident
in our program work. Thousands of people turned out for AFSC co-sponsored immigration
rallies on May 1, partly as a protest of the new law in Arizona that criminalizes human
migration, and partly as a celebration of the communities who have moved here and are
contributing so much.
New life was breathed into our Middle East program as donations from supporters like you
have allowed us to keep doing this important work. The Middle East program staff are excited
to be supporting a speakers’ tour of the US returnees from the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, as well
as working to refresh the AFSC Middle East work in general.
The intersections between our four program areas—healing justice, economic justice, immigration, and peace work—keep
presenting themselves. As budget priorities are being set in Sacramento, we are demonstrating how housing over 14,000
prisoners in solitary confinement, as California does, costs the state tens of thousands more per prisoner, per year. More
information on this and on our other programs can be found in the pages of this newsletter.
I hope that this issue of Pacific Mountain News stirs your passion for the causes that are so important to us here at AFSC.
Many thanks!
Pacific Mountain News A M E R I C A N F R I E N D S S E R V I C E C O M M I T T E E
P A C I F I C M O U N T A I N R E G I O N ( N . C a l i f o r n i a , N e v a d a , U t a h )
S U M M E R 2 0 1 0
Above: Interim
Regional
Director
Laura Magnani.
Photo by Dawn
Marie Wadle.
Right:
Candles and
postcards at the
vigil for the
1,000th death in
Afghanistan.
Photo by Bill
Hackwell
AFSC Participates in March Fourth Demonstrations
On March 4th, 2010, AFSC
participated in a California-wide
protest against budget cuts to
education. On this page are
some of the photos from the
rallies we participated in.
The focus of the statewide
demonstrations was largely cuts
to education budgets, and part of
our contribution to the
messaging was the concurrent
(over decades) growth in prison
budgets, and the connection
between the two.
Middle, Bottom Middle and
Bottom Right photos by Alan
Benjamin.
Exciting Progress for Healing Justice
AFSC Helps Braceros Get The Money They Deserve
During WWII, over 4 million Mexican workers came to
the United States, as part of a government program, to
work on the railroads and in the fields. As an incentive for
the workers to come back to Mexico, 10% of their
earnings were put into a Mexican bank. Many of those
workers never saw their money again.
For over six years, AFSC staff members Luis Magaña and
Martin Cuevas have been fighting for the braceros to
receive the thousands of dollars they are owed.
When a few of the braceros finally heard that they would
be receiving payments and that they must travel to
Mexicali, Mexico to receive the funds, Martin Cuevas
traveled with them. The braceros will receive payouts over
the next ten years, but many may not be able to make the
trip each year, as most are now in their 80’s, 90’s, or 100’s.
In an article by Rebecca Plevin in Vida en el Valle, Luis
Magaña was quoted as saying: ―The former braceros are
very upset by the amount of money they are receiving and by
the fact that they must rely on others to transport them to
pick up very little money.‖ Cuevas added, ―It’s not so much
the money, it’s the principle...We have to keep demanding and
talking about this injustice. This is part of the fight.‖
AFSC’s three offices in California’s Central Valley focus on the
rights of farm workers and immigrants, often using popular
education to organize participants to represent concerns that
they identify.
Recently, the PMR Healing Justice staff has seen very
encouraging progress on two projects we’ve been deeply
involved in: creation of a Racial Justice Act in California, and
exposing prisoner abuses in California state prisons.
The California Racial Justice Act was introduced in
February by Senators Gilbert Cedillo (Los Angeles) and
Mark Leno (San Francisco), as SB 1331. It passed out of the
Senate Public Safety Committee (which Leno chairs) and is
currently being held in Senate Appropriations. Though the
bill may not get further through the process this year, it
represents many years of AFSC’s work planting the seeds
for a Racial Justice Act and finally seeing them take root.
Our next step will be to gather more co-authors and
partnering organizations.
Briefly, the bill, similar to one recently enacted in North
Carolina, allows defense attorneys in death penalty cases to
do a statistical examination of the prosecuting county’s
overall pattern of capital prosecutions regarding race, and to
present these findings on behalf of their clients, providing
another tool for challenging death sentences.
Similarly, the many years we have devoted to documenting
abuses in various forms of solitary confinement, and the
multiple times we forwarded our findings to UN
commissions, finally bore fruit in the form of some in-depth
investigative journalism conducted by Charles Piller and
published in multiple stories in the Sacramento Bee.
Piller’s articles have demonstrated how prisoner’s
human rights have been violated in the High
Desert State Prison in Susanville, California and several
other institutions. Prisoners have been subjected to
racist and abusive treatment, including refusal of
medical care, excessive use of violence, racial slurs, and
the repeated silencing of protest appeals.
AFSC worked with Piller to provide information on
prison abuses our staff had documented and witnessed.
Piller’s work has lead to a greater public awareness of
the issue, and AFSC called for a legislative panel to
investigate the claims of abuse. Public hearings will take
place later this summer, and Senator Mark Leno and
President Pro Tem of the Senate Darrell Steinberg have
pledged their support.
In addition to the hearings, two other investigations
have been initiated, one by the Department of
Corrections and Rehabilitation, and another by the
Senate Office of Research. Their findings will become
part of the hearings, and AFSC will also have an
opportunity to bring our own witnesses.
Please go to our website to learn more about the
Sacramento Bee investigation and how AFSC is involved
at http://afsc.org/office/san-francisco-ca and scroll down
to ―Read About our Work.‖ There you will also find
links to the Sacramento Bee online articles.
Right:
Martin Cuevas
and braceros
pick up
payments in
Mexicali,
Mexico
AFSC’s New Website has Launched
Visit the Pacific Mountain Region’s page at
http://afsc.org/region/pacific-
mountain-region
and please feel free to email us with your
feedback on the new site.
American Friends Service Committee Pacific Mountain Region 65 Ninth Street San Francisco, CA 94103
AFSC’s monthly newspaper, Street Spirit, is now
available on our website!
Street Spirit is focused on the issues affecting homeless
people in the Bay Area, and is created with
contributions from homeless writers and artists.
Check out the June 2010 issue, covering planned budget
cuts to services for low-income communities, the
privatization of public housing, living your convictions
and taking steps toward social change, Bay Area art
projects for low-income youth, and much more. Go to
http://afsc.org/region/pacific-mountain-region and click
on ―Homeless Organizing Project — Street Spirit‖ to
download this year’s issues.
Street Spirit Now Online Thanks to Friends Meetings
The Pacific Mountain Region would like to thank our
local Friends Meetings for all of their support over
the years. Specifically, we’d like to thank the meetings
listed below for contributing their time and money to
AFSC’s relief work in Haiti.
Thank you to:
Appleseed Friends Meeting
Berkeley Friends Meeting
Delta Monthly Meeting
Lake County Friends Worship Group
Monterey Peninsula Friends Meeting
Redding Friends Meeting
Sacramento Friends Meeting
Strawberry Creek Meeting
If your Friends Meeting raised funds for AFSC’s Haiti
relief and we have not thanked you here, please let us
know by contacting Julia Parish at [email protected].