Fault Lines, the bi-monthly newsmagazine of Indybay, has just released another issue of radical political analysis and social commentary. A PDF is available online, but help with printing costs is needed in order to get Fault Lines out on the streets. Donate via Paypal. Fault Lines #21 focuses on local control of housing, land, communication, and other resources, in the Bay Area and beyond.

This year’s meeting of the Group of 8 (G8, the 7 richest nations in the world: Great Britain, United States, Germany, France, Japan, Italy, and Canada, plus Russia) was held in the resort of Heiligendamm, Germany from June 6-8. In response, tens of thousands of demonstrators arrived in the area in an effort to shut down the summit.

Fault Lines interviewed Josh Wolf and Gabe Meyers, the two people targeted by the federal and local authorities after the July 8, 2005 Anarchist Action Anti-G8 demonstration in San Francisco. Anti-capitalist protests and demonstrations against the G8, WTO, and other institutions that represent neo-colonial domination and corporate globalization have always been met with more aggression and hostility than normal marches for peace. Granted, these demonstrators are often much more militant. With a police officer injured and a police car damaged, the authorities felt a need to subpoena and prosecute.

Fault Lines interviewed Josh Wolf and Gabe Meyers, the two people targeted by the federal and local authorities after the July 8, 2005 Anarchist Action Anti-G8 demonstration in San Francisco. Anti-capitalist protests and demonstrations against the G8, WTO, and other institutions that represent neo-colonial domination and corporate globalization have always been met with more aggression and hostility than normal marches for peace. Granted, these demonstrators are often much more militant. With a police officer injured and a police car damaged, the authorities felt a need to subpoena and prosecute.

Guatemala City had never seen anything like it: thousands of Indigenous people from almost every country of the Americas coming together, celebrating their culture, and organizing resistance. This is the grand finale march on Guatemala City to top off the successful weeklong summit at nearby Iximché. The grey, suffocating streets are filled for once not with smog and gridlock, but with a blaze of color from the forest of rainbow colored flags and banners, and the sound of drums and pipes and maracas and the multitude of voices each with their own distinct language uniting to chant and sing together. Like the march of an army of the dispossessed—the invisibles—reclaiming the city of fear where once, not so long ago, they were hunted down, disappeared, and murdered with impunity by the state security forces.

From the uselessness of the final product to the dramatic environmental and social impacts of its excavation, modern-day gold mining serves as an absurd illustration of the dangers and complexity of our global economy.

In Fault Lines #21, Chris Avilla writes....

On April 19, City College of San Francisco celebrated Earth Day by showcasing alternative fuel and electrically powered vehicles on the school’s Ram Plaza. Among the line-up of vehicles was a biodesiel 1974 El Camino Super Sport that some fellow CCSF students and I built in the school's Automotive Department. The EPA saw what we did with the El Camino and decided to give the garage a $200,000 biodiesel grant. In the end the grant money was put in the pockets of the administrators, with a small portion to go toward a biodiesel workshop that CCSF students are not allowed to attend.

For those of us living in our modern cities land is a foreign concept. Stories of land conjure romantic images of countrysides far from our crowded neighborhoods, images that seem irrelevant to our lives. Even though we inhabit a landscape smothered with buildings and concrete, the struggles for land fought by rural people hold many important lessons for us as we strive for control over our lives and communities. When we consider the landless state of most poor people the world round and how most of us own no land, we realize we are all perpetually inhabiting someone else’s space. Our lives and communities as well as our food supply are controlled by people in far away places whose main motivation is profit. When we start to reclaim some of this space we begin to take back our lives.

The housing situation in San Francisco is a prime example of the greatest evil of capitalism. Only those who can afford it get to be housed. Everyone else lives on the streets. They get trash talked by neighbors and politicians alike for the sin of being homeless. They are arrested or cited with “quality of life” citations.