ON THE LINE
Gershon, Livia & Weiss, Lynne & Stycos, Steven & Foley, Dylan & METZ, HOLLY & WOLFE, KATHI
ON_T_H_E_L_I_N_E Art for Freedom York, Pennsylvania In 1993, when the Golden Venture ran aground off New York's Rockaway Peninsula, 300 refugees from the Fujian Province of China jumped overboard...
...The imprisonment of the Golden Venture refugees was unusual...
...Survival ^International, a worldwide organization that supports ^tribal peoples, is organizing to demand that the Peru-Niteri government prevent Mobil from disrupting the indigenous societies...
...Some of the galli-nazo tree seeds Leopold planted three years ago now stand forty-two feet tall...
...Lynne Weiss Disabled Activists Fight Assisted Suicide Oak Park, Illinois "The voluntary self-elimination of individual mortally diseased or crippled lives, taken collectively, can only enhance the preservation of public health and welfare," Dr...
...If you're disabled," says Matzik, "people often tell you it costs too much to care for you...
...Fried's supporters have been slipping labor-information flyers into books at Philadelphia-area Borders stores, though this tactic is not sanctioned by the IWW...
...The ingenuity and intricacy of their work astonished their attorneys and paralegals, who received the creations as gifts: eagle wings made of hundreds of interlocking paper triangles: bird bodies and feet formed out of small, torn pieces of toilet paper mixed with water and glue, then shaped and carved with plastic spoons...
...Contributors receive a semi-annual newsletter...
...To promote environmentally sound forestry, the Tropical Forestry Initiative has helped twenty-two small landowners form a local forestry association...
...Last year they planted 3,500 seedlings supplied by the Initiative's nursery...
...Not suicide...
...Address letters to: H.E...
...Determined to reverse some of the ecological damage of the last fifty years, he and other Ithaca residents purchased a 181-acre farm in a wet tropical forest in mountainous Costa Rica...
...military aid...
...Boston, Honolulu, Los Angeles, and San Francisco...
...But when Americans shifted to less fatty foods in the 1980s, the cattle market collapsed, leaving the farm idle...
...The presence of 600 Mobil employees in the area Would also mean direct contact between Westerners and the indigenous peoples...
...Despite a glowing performance evaluation...
...We're going to keep taking our case to the streets," Coleman says...
...At one point, the red union card of the IWW virtually guaranteed deportation for immigrant workers...
...When I said I wouldn't sign the DNR, they said it didn't matter...
...Some detainees were deported...
...Isn't something wrong when a society has a constitutional 'right to die' but no right to health care...
...Some 250 pieces were displayed this past spring in a remarkable whole-room cage at New York's Museum of Chinese in the Americas...
...On June 22 and 23, Not Dead Yet members from across the country protested two Michigan State University ethics conferences...
...According to Daren Marys-daughter of the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee, events like this are important for getting the word out about war taxes...
...With no mail-order companies to supply cocobolo seeds and no nurseries to sell cenizaro saplings, local nursery manager Memo Fallas and Initiative volunteers started, literally on their knees, collecting seeds...
...The nurses kept asking me to sign a 'do-not-resuscitate' order," she says...
...Rainforest restoration is nearly unknown in Costa Rica...
...Whether people are willing to lose their home or whether they feel they have to pay up or have a friendly bidder buy their house doesn't matter," she says...
...Many landowners are already interested in reforestation...
...They were surprised when a dozen people, many of whom had to drive two hours or more to reach their town of Hartford, Maine, began meeting with them to help them decide what to do...
...Many are involved with one of forty-nine alternative funds that give away refused taxes to local groups working to end militarism, racism, poverty, and other forms of violence...
...Because I used a vent, nothing would be done if I had a cardiac arrest...
...http://www.survival.org.uk...
...Some of the refugees began making folded paper objects, a variation of a Fujianese folk-art form...
...KathiWolfe...
...Lobach joined with a small group of local church activists to form a support group they called "People of the Golden Vision...
...During two and a half years in prison...
...They feel there's not much hope left," says Lobach...
...Borders then sought to deny Fried unemployment payments...
...The group hopes to broker a deal with the government to restore the rainforest and increase local logging income: If the government will exempt local landowners from regulations, they promise to plant 100 rainforest seedlings for every tree they cut...
...or, Mr...
...In dozens of small, crowded cells at the York County Prison, the men waited out the asylum process...
...The artworks often used Chinese and American symbols to comment on imprisonment...
...In the meantime, their artwork has taken on a life of its own...
...Risking our house is nothing compared to what has been done to people in Guatemala" with U.S...
...A few York detainees have been released on bail or humanitarian parole...
...Then they must return, as the seeds fall, to gather and plant them before they die or are eaten by animals...
...In the early 1990s, immigration officials detained fewer than 5 percent of asylum seekers from the People's Republic of China...
...Survival International urges people to write to both Peru's president and Mobil's president/chairman, requesting that Mobil not enter indigenous territory...
...We want health care and community-based services so we can live...
...the vast majority of the detainees were pro-democracy activists, persecuted Christians, or individuals who had violated their homeland's one-child policy...
...The oil-prospecting process means setting off explosives that would seriously disrupt the local plant and animal life that the ' indigenous groups depend on...
...For more information, contact Diane Coleman at (708) 524-0600...
...ON_T_H_E_L_I_N_E Art for Freedom York, Pennsylvania In 1993, when the Golden Venture ran aground off New York's Rockaway Peninsula, 300 refugees from the Fujian Province of China jumped overboard in a desperate attempt to reach sanctuary...
...During the week following Fried's firing, pickets sprang up in Philadelphia...
...With an annual budget of $25,000, the group depends on volunteers...
...The firing has touched off pickets and boycotts at Borders Book Shops in six cities across the country...
...be home to at least nineteen indigenous tribes, including three groups that have never had any contact with non-indigenous societies...
...We had an impact...
...Pennsylvania, one of the major immigrant-detention centers in the United States...
...Please indicate that your contribution is to go to the Golden Venture refugees...
...They said that meant nothing drastic would be done if I had a cardiac arrest...
...Like many disabled people, Maria Matzik of the Access Center for Independent Living in Dayton, Ohio, fears that the "right to die" may become an obligation for the disabled, poor people, and others who are marginalized...
...Headed by retired Cornell University professor Carl Leopold, the Tropical Forestry Initiative has had spectacular success...
...It took the IRS two auctions to sell the Gravalos-Harvey properties...
...tree-trunk stands fashioned from threads carefully pulled from prison towels, hardened with glue, and decorated with green markers...
...When people stand up, other people stand up with them," says supporter Ellen Daye of Cambridge, Massachusetts...
...Legal avenues for the remaining fifty-eight have been nearly exhausted...
...This is nothing," said Elizabeth Gravalos the following day...
...In some ways, the reforestation project resembles that of Leopold's father, Aldo, a pioneer American environmentalist...
...During the 1930s and 1940s, the elder Leopold bought an abandoned Wisconsin farm and, with the help of his wife and children, replanted it with the trees and rare prairie grasses he discovered on railroad sidings and in cemeteries...
...In January 1994, with the permission of the warden and the artists, Lobach carried more than 100 pieces out of the prison...
...At first, Gravalos and Harvey were unsure how to respond to the seizure...
...Holly Metz O_H_I_H_E_L_I_N_E Restoring the Rainforest Costa Rica As chainsaw-wield-ing loggers continue to level rainforests, a volunteer organization is trying to prove that the world's most diverse ecosystem can be restored, one seed at a time...
...The IWW's boycott of Borders has received the support of the Philadelphia municipal-workers' union and the National Writer's Union, as well as the endorsement of Noam Chomsky...
...This type of contact re-sulted in the transmission of deadly diseases to the Nahua tribe during the 1980s...
...Lucio Noto, President and Chairman, The Mobil Corporation, 3225 Gallows Road, Fairfax, VA 22037-0001, Fax: (703) 846-1114...
...Miriam Fried has a very strong case with the National Labor Relations Board...
...LIVIA GERSHON O n_T_H_E_L_I_N__E Family Risks House to Defy IRS Hartford, Maine Elizabeth Gravalos and Arthur Harvey are subsistence blueberry farmers who, with their two children, live on about $18,000 a year...
...The men have stopped making art...
...130 men made nearh 14,000 works of art...
...The pieces increasingly began to reflect the refugees' frustration and despair...
...Although assisted suicide was a topic at both events, the university had invited no disabled people to speak...
...We believe some of the uncontacted indigenous people face the prospect of death if Mobil's workers enter their territory," says Aidan Rankin, press officer for Survival International...
...For more information, contact Survival International, 11-15 Emerald St., London WSIN 3QL, United Kingdom...
...On March 26, Peru's state oil company gave Mobil permission to look for oil in an area that is believed tx...
...The group was organized in May "to resist the legalization of assisted suicide," says Diane Coleman, one of Not Dead Yet's leaders...
...Marysdaughter estimates that there are at least 8,000 war-tax resisters in the United States...
...Today, fifty-eight of the survivors remain in a maximum-secu-ritv prison in York...
...What matters is that we tell people about it...
...York County Bar Foundation, 1975 High Rock Lane, York, PA 17402...
...They saw in the Golden Venture artwork a way to call attention to the unjust imprisonment...
...So the Initiative workers must locate the desired species in ravines and other pockets of uncut land...
...a few dozen voluntarily returned to China...
...The longer they were there, the sharper the beaks, the angrier the eyes...
...Don't expect Not Dead Yet—a new coalition of disabled individuals—to be among the "volunteers...
...Mobil plans to start a particularly 'destructive operation...
...Borders Group, Inc., has threatened to sue the IWW if it does not stop distributing pamphlets that say Fried was fired for her union activity...
...Her attempt failed...
...The store claims that it dismissed Fried because of a confrontation over store check-cashing policy...
...five were granted asylum...
...To be deported to China, the immigrants protested, would mean imprisonment, beatings, fines, even forced sterilization...
...Jack Kevorkian told a Michigan court in 1990...
...Along with their hope, their desire to create has died, too...
...Today the Amazon oil rush is on again, with Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia all welcoming oil companies "into the rainforest...
...The exhibition, "Fly to Freedom: The Art of the Golden Venture Refugees," later traveled to Philadelphia...
...Bob Listen, a wheelchair user and a Not Dead Yet organizer, says, "They let us talk...
...Geoffrey Fieger, Kevorkian's attorney, said of the protesters: "They sound like they're mentally disabled and one of their disabilities includes paranoia...
...Much of the farm was pasture, cleared after World War II to raise beef for the North American export market...
...Using paper carefully torn from magazines, writing pads, and newspapers, they became prison artists...
...And the Ninth and Second Circuit Courts of Appeals ruled that assisted suicide was legal...
...In April 1996, they received notice that the government intended to seize their house and three parcels of land...
...Leopold's project started in 1992...
...the funds went toward the artists' legal defense and into their prison accounts...
...In March, Fried had attempted to unionize Borders workers at the City Center branch...
...Ann Arbor...
...They hadn't thought assisted suicide could be a matter of coercion to us...
...says Lobach, "the eagles were kind of cutesy and happy-looking...
...According to the Philadelphia branch of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), which represents Fried, the firing occurred in retaliation for union organizing...
...Repression and mass arrests of IWW members after World War I virtually destroyed the union...
...Dylan Foley MOBIL THREATENS INDIGENOUS PEOPLES During the 1980s, the Shell Oil Company moved into the Peruvian Amazon...
...People need to let others know that they're not paying, or that they're paying under protest, and why...
...The next day, more than forty Not Dead Yet members protested outside Kevorkian's home...
...On June 20, Kevorkian helped Bette Lou Hamilton, a sixty-seven-year-old woman with non-terminal degenerative spinal disease, end her life...
...Unlike the seeds of most temperate trees, rainforest seeds are fertile for only a short time after they fall from the parent tree...
...When the IRS lowered the minimum bid to $7,900 at the second auction, a friendly bidder bought the house on behalf of the displaced family...
...In the process, the company spread whooping cough and pneumonia to the Nahua tribe living in the area, killing fifty to 100 people— more than half of the band it encountered...
...For more information or to contribute to the Golden Venture refugees' legal fund, contact Cindy Lobach, care of the Pennsylvania Immigration Resource Center...
...At the first auction, which took place in June, the IRS set a minimum bid of $21,000 for the house...
...We urge people to boycott Borders...
...Early on...
...Some marched...
...Steven Stycos O-N_T_H_E_LINE IWW Boycotts Borders Books Philadelphia On June 15, Borders Book Shop in Philadelphia fired Miriam Fried...
...A month later, she had sold them all...
...But when the Golden Venture shipwrecked in New York, the Bush Administration "made no secret of the fact that they were going to send a message to China," says Cindy Lobach, one of the founders of a York-based group dedicated to helping Golden Venture refugees gain political asylum...
...In five years, Leopold expects the Initiative's hand-planted mixed forest to achieve "crown closure," a key event marking elimination of direct sunlight to the forest floor...
...We have kept up pickets in front of the City Center store...
...Since 1993, the nonprofit group has gathered the seeds of seventy different trees, planted them in a nursery, and then transplanted 15,000 seedlings...
...This year Kevorkian was acquitted on as-sisted-suicide charges...
...According to Lobach...
...The IWW is a radical labor union, founded in 1905, which grew to hundreds of thousands of members, known as Wobblies...
...Matzik, who uses a ventilator, went to the hospital in 1993...
...For more information on war-tax resistance, contact the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee at 1-800-269-7464...
...Pineapples (a Chinese good-luck MUSEUM OF CHINESE IN THE AMERICAS symbol) were followed by eagles, often caged, with signs in English: Let me free...
...Lobach says those who reported back described savage beatings in prison...
...Fried lost her job...
...Once that happens, says Leopold, rainforest shade plants and other species will return and the trees will grow faster as they struggle for sunlight...
...To donate your tim4 or money, write Tropical Forestry Initiative, Box 285, Ithaca, NY 14851...
...Borders categorically denies the IWW's charges...
...cage bars made of tightly rolled magazine pages...
...Gravalos has been a war-tax resister since the early 1970s, Harvey since the late 1950s...
...I can absolutely state that the employee was not separated from Borders for anything related to union activity," says Marilyn Slankard, spokesperson for Borders...
...The Harakmbut Council, a local indigenous organization, opposes Mobil's entry into the area...
...Mobil should not operate on any indigenous land without the consent of indigenous people...
...Although the government managed to sell the three parcels of land, no one bid on the Gravalos-Harvey home...
...Disability isn't 'worse than death.' We don't want to die," says Coleman...
...We think she will be reinstated," says Alexis Buss of the Philadelphia IWW...
...Others rolled in wheelchairs, chanting, "It's homicide...
...Alberto Fujimori, President of Peru, Paiacio de Gobierno, Plaza de Armas, Lima I, Peru, Fax: (511) 433-1945...
Vol. 60 • September 1996 • No. 9
