The Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair is going to be held the weekend of March 13-14 in San Francisco at Golden Gate Park. It’s a great time; it’s also one of the largest annual Anarchist community events in North America. And I’m in the process of organizing a table for A.L.L. at the bookfair.

In addition to a great lineup of speakers, panels and workshops, the main event (this is a bookfair, after all) will be the space in main hall with dozens of vendors with tables to show off their Anarchist books and materials from 10:00am–6:00pm on Saturday, March 13 and 11:00am–5:00pm on Sunday, March 14. Among them will be us — members of the Alliance of the Libertarian Left from Vegas, California, and around the Western U.S. I’ll be there, along with fellow Anarchists from Southern Nevada ALL. We’ll have books, journals, buttons, and more from the Southern Nevada ALL Distro available for sale as fundraisers, along with a lot of free pamphlets, smaller pieces to give away, and information about ALL as an organization and what we do back in our hometowns.

This will be Southern Nevada A.L.L.’s third appearance at an Anarchist bookfair (after appearances at last year’s Bay Area bookfair, and this year’s Los Angeles bookfair). These bookfairs are a real blast to work: partly because the bookfair a great opportunity to make connections with fellow Anarchists and to get the good word out about individualist anarchism, market anarchism, mutualism, counter-economics, to an audience of engaged radicals and movement anarchists. And also because, for a dispersed, Internet-coordinated network like the A.L.L., working the bookfair table is great opportunity to posse up with ALLies from many different towns, meet folks you’ve only known online, have some great conversations, and work together on some practical counter-economic outreach. (It’s also a good opportunity for local organizing on the ground — since we can put out a sign-up sheet and get contacts for people who are interested in ALLiance in the Bay Area.)

Anyway. If all this sounds like something you’re down with, interested in, excited by, here’s three things you can do:

1. If you’re in the Bay Area, or will be around March 13-14, drop on by the table and say hi and see what we’re doing.

2. If you’ll be there and you’re interested in selling books or merchandise for your hometown Alliance of the Libertarian Left local — or if you’re interested in hanging out with ALLies from other towns and helping with the table — then get in touch with me to coordinate. We’ll definitely have space for you, and it’d be great to posse up.

3. If you want to help support the A.L.L. presence at the Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair (and other bookfairs in the future), you can help us out by covering the costs of the table and the transport. Bound Together Books just recently boosted the cost of reserving a table (last year it was $100 for both days; now it’s $150). We’re doing this on as thin a shoestring as possible. With support from y’ALL, we can make the most of these opportunities to do local organizing, make connections between our locals, and put the word out and about among our fellow Anarchists.

   Here’s the shoestring, for reference.

   ALL @ Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair 2010 shoestring budget

   Cost	Description
   $150	Table reservation (Saturday and Sunday)
   $87	Car rental for transport from Vegas (driving up Friday; returning car Monday).
   $86	Cheap hotel in Bay Area (Friday and Saturday night)
   ~$0~	Gas costs will be covered by carpooling ALLies and our allies from Vegas up to the Bookfair and to the Empowering Women of Color conference, which is being held at UC Berkeley the same weekend. Food costs will be covered through Food Not Bombs.
   $333	Total costs

Hope to see y’ALL there!

We’ll be here. Will you?

Here’s the opening of a story published earlier today by Dan Ball at KVBC News 3 Las Vegas, entitled Few new City Hall obstacles remain

It looks like the city of Las Vegas may soon get a new City Hall.

No, we won’t.

Last I checked, the city government in Las Vegas will soon get a new City Hall.

The rest of us in the city of Las Vegas aren’t getting anything, except the $185,000,000 bill for Oscar Goodman’s new office.

For six years, chef John Simons has operated Firefly restaurant on Paradise and Flamingo. Four months ago he opened a second location inside the Plaza hotel downtown. Simmons says he supports a new City Hall.

I’m hoping that we can develop kind of a really cool, vital downtown scene, ya know?

Because nothing says really cool and vital in a downtown scene like municipal government office buildings.

Betsy Fretwell is the city manager for the city of Las Vegas.

If we can move the City Hall from its current location we will be able to create about $4 billion in private investment in the downtown area and create over 13,000 jobs over the period of time and over four projects.

Well, hell, why don’t we just move the City Hall every year? Why not build a new one every month? Just imagine how much private investment and how many jobs all that new construction could create.

The project is estimated at about $185 million. Fretwell says the city can afford to pay for it.

You do have to evaluate what you can afford. We’ve done that, we’ve done a full feasibility report for the City Council. …

Actually, what’s happening here is that she does the evaluating. We do the affording. Whether we want to or not.

Betsy Fretwell doesn’t have to afford a damned thing; she evaluates, and we’re forced to pay up whether we reckon we can afford it or not.

Hence, this massive screwjob against Las Vegas workers, in order to fund a ridiculous and obviously self-serving local government boondoggle.

See also:

• GT 2009-04-13: The grammar of war
• GT 2007-05-13: Cry havoc! and let slip the pronouns of war...
• GT 2006-12-21: In ten words or fewer (personal pronouns edition): George W. Bush on the next year of the Iraq War

November 6–8, 2009

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Sponsored by U.C.I.R.

Register to attend!

livingwithoutborders.org

The 2nd Annual Living Without Borders / Viviendo Sin Fronteras encuentro will be held the weekend of November 6-9, 2009, in Las Vegas, Nevada. Spread the word to anyone you think might be interested! Register to attend if one of the folks who might be interested is you yourself!

Living Without Borders is an activist and community meeting devoted to freedom and dignity for all immigrants, to the struggle against international apartheid, to envisioning and working to build a world without government borders, and to radical social transformation that tears down all the walls, including both the coercively-imposed boundaries of nation-states and also all the other, interconnected forms of oppression, exploitation and domination that confine and constrain us. The encuentro is organized by the United Coalition for Im/migrant Rights in Las Vegas; after the success of the first conference in August of 2008, we decided to make it an annual event, in the hopes that it will bring folks together, start conversations, make connections, and establish itself as an ongoing, transformative presence in our communities.

Here’s what the organizers* have to say about this year’s goings-on in Vegas:

This year’s encuentro will be devoted to the theme of Building Autonomous Communities y Celebrando Cambio Social.

We’ll be starting conversations, sharing knowledge, meeting, connecting.

There’ll be keynote addresses by author Rinku Sen (The Accidental American: Immigration and Citizenship in the Age of Globalization), and by Hilda Garcia from La Mujer Obrera (an autonomous women’s community in El Paso, Texas).

There’ll be workshops on immigration freedom, the criminalization of immigrants, the interconnection of struggles, community organizing, activist skill-shares, defending social justice through language, and more.

There’ll be tabling space for participants to connect with artists and organizations in the community.

There’ll be meals to share, with a free breakfast and lunch for registered participants.

And there’ll be cultura, entertainment, and engagement — art, music, a bit of teatro rascuache, and hands-on activism for social justice.

We welcome anyone interested in freedom, equality and dignity for immigrants — in a discussion of how borders limit consciousness and how to break through them — in building autonomous communities and activism for social transformation. We hope to see you there!

Sound good? Then register and come on down. Consider signing up to table for your project or your organization. I think it’d be great to see a strong left-libertarian and anarchist presence at the encuentro.

Radicals, ALLies, agitators, Anarchists, left-libertarians, border-crossers, counter-economists, and everyone committed to tearing down the walls — see you there!

Detective Jeremy Hendricks. Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. Las Vegas, Nevada. Here in Vegas, Jeremy Hendricks, a cop working for the Las Vegas city government’s police force, shot John Paul Hambleton in the back while Hambleton was running away. Hendricks was questioning Hambleton (who was 32) about an alleged sexual relationship with a 16-year-old girl; Hambleton decided to leave. Hambleton was not under arrest; he was not accused of a violent crime; he also was completely unarmed. But Detective Jeremy Hendricks wasn’t done with him, and, seeing how running away from a cop is apparently treated as a capital offense in this country, Hendricks started out by tasering Hambleton twice. Then he tried to force Hambleton down on the ground. Hambleton managed to get away Hendricks’ taser, and then started to run away again, so Detective Jeremy Hendricks shot him in the back. Hendricks claimed in court that Hambleton turned around and pointed the taser at him. If so, nobody else who saw what happened — not Hendricks’s own partner, not four non-cop witnesses who watched what was happening — ever saw Hambleton turn around or point the taser at Detective Jeremy Hendricks. But thanks to the magic split second, which absolves all sins and justifies all cop shootings in the eyes of the Law, somehow, this supposedly belligerent Suspect Individual who supposedly was threatening Detective Jeremy Hendricks’ sacred hide with a taser shock, ended up getting shot in the back anyway. Oops.

If you tore off chasing after someone, and then shot him in the back and killed him, allegedly in order to avoid the alleged threat of a less lethal taser shock, which threat, if it even existed, was solely the product of a confrontation that you yourself had created and escalated, then you would probably be in jail for years. Of course, Detective Jeremy Hendricks is a cop, working for the local government’s police force, so the local government’s coroner’s inquest ruled last month that he was justified in shooting a fleeing suspect in the back.

ALLies,

In honor of the first anniversary of the weekly Vegas Anarchist Cafe, and in connection with the opening of a new school year on UNLV’s campus, Southern Nevada ALL has helped organize a line-up of special programming for the A-Cafe’s Free Speech Soapbox Series.

This week — specifically, TOMORROW, Thursday, 3 September 2009 — Anarchist Cafe will feature the second event, during the first hour of the meeting, from 6:00–7:00pm. I will be hosting a freewheeling Q&A session, called Ask An Anarchist!, which will give A-Cafers, guests, and random looky-loos the chance to fire away with any question they may have about Anarchy, Anarchism, or Anarchists. As our advertising handbill puts it:

Are you curious to learn more about Anarchy, Anarchism, or Anarchists? Have you got questions about Anarchist ideas, the history of Anarchism, how Anarchism has affected mainstream culture, Anarchist solutions to contemporary social problems, or how Anarchists believe that a free society would work without government? Want to know whether the picture of Anarchism that you’ve gotten from the mainstream culture is accurate or based on misconceptions? Want to try and stump an Anarchist? Bring all your burning questions this Thursday, and our speaker will do his best to answer any question you care to ask. Come on in and fire away!

This event is for anyone curious about the ideas of philosophical Anarchism, or interested in conversation. All are welcome to attend.

The Soapbox event will run from 6:00–7:00pm. An informal meet-up and discussion will follow from 7:00–8:00pm. If you're in the Vegas area (or even if you're not), it'd be great to see you there. If you know anyone around abouts who might be interested in a talk about Anarchism, then please do forward the announcement on to them.

• WHAT: Ask An Anarchist! Q&A with Vegas ALLy Charles Johnson.

• WHERE: Weekly Anarchist Cafe at the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, Running Rebel Plaza (4550 S. Maryland Pkwy, right across the street from UNLV), Las Vegas, Nevada

• WHEN: This Thursday, 3 September 2009, 6:00pm – 7:00pm. The regular A-Cafe informal meet-up and discussion will continue after the talk, from about 7:00pm to 8:00pm.

• WHO: Anyone curious about the ideas of Anarchism, or interested in conversation.

Hope to see y’ALL there!

See also:

• GT 2009-08-26: Rad Geek Speaks: a talk on Anarchism and its ideas
• GT 2009-05-19: Rad Geek Speaks: Motorhome Diaries interviews me on agorism and counter-economics
• GT 2009-03-04: Rad Geek Speaks: Ask An Anarchist!
• GT 2009-01-27: Rad Geek Speaks: a talk on Anarchism and its ideas
• GT 2009-02-03: Southern Nevada ALLy Kelly Patterson speaks at Las Vegas Anarchist Cafe: We Need The Wobblies Now More Than Ever! A Brief History of the Industrial Workers of the World.
• GT 2009-02-11: Rad Geek Speaks: a recording of my talk What Is Anarchism? at the 28 January 2009 Las Vegas Anarchist Cafe