The Coalition of Immokalee Workers campaign against Taco Bell picked up a big moral boost as Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta’s United Farm Workers passed a resolution endorsing the boycott of Taco Bell [IMC]. The solidarity from UFW is inspiring, given UFW’s historical role as a spearhead of organizing for the human dignity of migrant farmworkers and their near-legendary inspiration for low-wage laborers and Chicanos across the nation.

CIW launched its boycott of Taco Bell in April, 2001, in response to repeated stonewalling from Taco Bell management. CIW had asked Taco Bell to take responsibility for the abysmal working conditions of Florida tomato pickers (the average farmworking family lives on about $7,000/year; farmworkers have no labor rights under US law; the piece rate paid for tomatos picked has not increased since the 1970s). Taco Bell claims that it is not responsible for the contracts made by its suppliers — an excuse just as phony as Nike’s excuses that it is not responsible for its outsourced sweatshops in Indonesia or Mexico. If Taco Bell would pay just one penny extra per pound of tomatoes, it could double the income of tomato pickers. But they will not take any responsibility or make any moves to bring their suppliers to the bargaining table with the CIW. So the CIW has launched a dynamic and creative campaign to speak truth to Taco Bell and hold them accountable.

The campaign is surging forward as the Taco Bell Truth Tour begins. We had a Taco Bell protest here in Auburn during the Southern Girls Convention, and, who knows, we may work on some more later.

For further reading:

• GT 7/27/2001 reports on Southern Girls Convention, including the Taco Bell protest
• Also, check out the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ website

Take Action!

• CIW Taco Bell Take Action page

Whew! After half a year of hard work, Southern Girls Convention 2001 finally happened this past weekend in Auburn, Alabama. As you may have noticed from my extended absence, it was absolutely exhausting, long, hard work, but it was totally worth it. Over FIVE HUNDRED totally rad feminist women and boys came from all over the country (and Canada too!) for over 60 information-filled workshops, tables with all kinds of information, four music shows (including an outstanding hardcore show at Olde Auburn Ale House), and an amazing chance for community, networking, and meeting lots of rad kids from the South. Although as organizers we were constantly running around exhausted and dealing with crises, everyone told us that they had an amazing time and the positive feedback was more than enough to keep us going on vicarious great experiences.

Auburn hasn’t seen so much diversity or political consciousness in a long time. Queer punk girls were lounging outside of Foy Union, everyone from PIRG to SURGE to Planned Parenthood were hosting tables, and a group of Radical Cheerleaders coordinated a spontaneous march and took over the downtown Taco Bell in support of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ campaign for tomato pickers.

I can’t write here how challenging, exhausting, uniting, empowering, and wonderful the experience of organizing SGC2001 and carrying it through have been. But it’s been all that and more. I don’t want to organize any more conventions for a long time, but I am super-psyched about going to next year’s SGC and experiencing it from a participant’s-eye-view. I hope, I pray that SGC will be an on-going, transformative presence in the South for a long time to come.

A coalition of stakeholders has joined forces to ensure communication and coordination between seven of the organizations that voted No Confidence in the Board of Trustees recently. This is one of the most positive developments I’ve seen in a long time. Hear Hear! award goes to Martin Olliff: When you speak with a united voice … people aren’t able to say it’s just a few malcontents. Indeed. Building a powerful network of information and self-defense between University shareholders, is the only way that the Board is ever going to be taken down.

Reading Salon.com News: Who’s afraid of the big bad Horowitz? brings back memories of, well, just a few weeks ago, actually. Since I have myself protested an advertisement in our campus newspaper, it strikes me that many of the people writing on this topic seem to have no idea of what the real issue is here (although those who note that David Horowitz is a self-aggrandizing pig making publicity for himself on the backs of young journalists, are not far off).

This is simply not a free press issue. Horowitz was not being censored by some evil cabal of thuggish p.c. mavens, and if the so-called Human Life Alliance’s pamphlet had not been distributed in The Plainsman, they would not have been censored either. Student newspapers are incapable of denying them a forum for their views, since David Horowitz and the HLA are rather rich national figures, and Horowitz is himself a columnist in Salon. The point of a campus newspaper, however, is not to give a voice to well-positioned outsiders who have enough money to buy their way in. The whole point is to give students an open forum.

This doesn’t mean that all political advertisements from outside sources should be banned, since I recognize that student newspapers do need to make money somehow. However, it is extremely hypocritical for Horowitz to pose as some kind of martyr to censorship. Particularly when he and his colleagues are doing it in the pages of a webzine which reaches literally millions more readers than campus newspapers could ever hope to reach.

If Horowitz and the HLA really want to make their voices heard, they ought to write a damn Letter to the Editor like everyone else, or else take their commercial advertisement where it belongs: a commercial newspaper.

I’m not one to continue picking on Bill Clinton, but this one was too good to pass up: our OWN Bobby Lowder has been unearthed in an old SALON Daily Clicks | Newsreal report of Clinton fund-raising scandals! Read on…

… If the most recent list of party contributors — issued in the last week of the campaign only after intense pressure — is any measure, the Feds, and the rest of us, have a lot to think about.

Most immediately noticeable is that about half of the more than 1,000 individual contributors are not properly identified. Under the law, big-money donors are supposed to list their names, addresses, and, more importantly, their occupation and employer. Disclosing such affiliations is supposed to allow the public to see what interests are backing the candidates and make it harder for businesses, trade associations and unions to use individuals as a curtain to hide behind.

So, who are Bobby and Charlotte Lowder from Montgomery, Alabama? They each gave $50,000 to the DNC. No information other than their address is provided. When I called the phone number listed for them, no one picked up, and there was no answering machine. …