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We have reached the beginning.

After much hard work with lots of help we have created the Eureka Fair Wage Act. Now the work begins in earnest. We will need all of you to take this idea from the basement of the Labor Temple to the pocket books of working people in Eureka. We need people to help gather signatures and to publicize the goals of the initiative. This will be important to counter the power structure that is already lining up against us. The city right from the start has chosen to weaken our position by giving us the uninspired official ballot title of, “ Minimum Wage Ordinance”.

Before we can go much further though we need Money. We need $400 to pay for the publishing of the ordinance in the paper and we need to raise money to pay for the printing. We meet at the Labor Temple Tuesdays at 6:15 in the basement. Come by with your Ideas, your Energy and your Money.

The place we love is under attack by corporate rapaciousness. They have come to take more of our resources. They want to log some of the oldest living trees on the planet to speed the destruction of our culture. The “Big Boxes” want to turn us into the company town With Walmart the company store. We are not going to go gentle into that good night. By forcing the large employers to check their exploitation of labor at the edge of town we can regain the momentum to protect what we value and strengthen the community in which we live.

If you can't make the meeting Email me, we will find a way for you to help.

Saturday in the Bark

One of the nicest days of the summer it coincided with the woofstock party at Halverson Park.

Rode for an hour along the bay.

The Park was full of puppies and everywhere I went I ran into a friendly face.

Cotton Day Concert

The 9th August 2012 The 5th anniversary of the murder of Martin Cotton by the Eureka Police. 4 cops beat him to a pulp outside the mission in old town, threw him in a cell and left him to die in the Humboldt County Jail. The lies and cover-ups followed and in the end his family got millions of dollars from the taxpayers but the killers still walk among us with guns and clubs.

What I would have, will say

I am here today to speak about the state of law enforcement in this county and the lack of accountability.

Last Thursday was Cotton day here in Humboldt County. It has been 5 years since 4 members of EPD beat a man to death while other cops stood silently by. The city lost a multimillion dollar law suit but not one of the killers have been fired.

When you allow killers to go unpunished you create a climate of lawlessness in the institution that rots it at its core. In a free society it is imperative that the integrity of the law enforcement agencies be above reproach. That and the presumption of innocence are the cornerstones of our system of justice. The police are allowed to carry weapons even in places a member of the larger society cannot. In this day and age the police are armed more in the manner of an invading army. When a few people protested outside the court house with tents the police arrived in riot gear with military style weaponry and attacked peaceful protestors exercising their rights granted in both the United States and State of California Constitutions.

We have not purged our departments of those that have disgraced the members that wish to honorably serve their community. By not doing so we have weakened the community. When we erode the faith people place in the institutions we turn those institutions into oppressive forces.
The policeman on the beat unbound by the law in his own mind oversteps his authority and people that have done no harm to society spends weeks in jail for protesting the destruction of our environment or the corruption in our financial sector. People are arrested for riding a bicycle while having an accent.

The making of bad laws undermines that faith as well. When your Board chose to ignore the first amendment and volumes of case law in an effort to remove the right to redress grievances from the people of Humboldt county it made a mistake. The overwhelming public sentiment against that action was ignored and a bad law was passed. A law that many people feel compelled to break because it is an affront to free people in a constitutional republic.

The jurors as part of the system of checks and balances has rejected that law and you are planning to try and amend it. I would like to see that that process is done in a manner open to the public. Repeal the Urgency Ordinance in total, Either abandon the idea that you should try to regulate protesting or Schedule well publicized public hearings in all parts of the county rather then the sham process that has been followed so far.

I would also ask that the Board of Supervisors join members of the community in condemning the Arcata Police department overstepping their authority and acting as an ICE agent, profiling people with accents. It is bad enough that local police would issue citations to obvious tourists that were not causing any harm but simply made a wrong turn while riding their bicycles rather then just give them some directions and help them on their way. To demand papers from someone based on obvious profiling should be grounds for dismissal. That is probably too much to hope for in a county where the police regularly kill with impunity.