October 2009

As mentioned in several of our articles and editorial statements, the Counter Point is partly a direct challenge to the Cooper Point Journal’s lack of reporting on Evergreens administration in a responsible way.
However, it turns out the Counter Point Collective was not the first group of students that has noticed a resonance between the Cooper Point Journal and our ever diligent administrators. A trip to the archives turns up three alternative student papers, The Crapper Point Journal, The Evergreen Free Press, and The Paper, that were sparked, at least partly in response to the CPJ.

“Do you think John Lennon would have liked Glenn Beck?”

My mom, who’s been a Beatles fan ever since she heard them live as a teenager, thought about this for a moment.

“I don’t know.”

Evergreen tends to run in about three year activist cycles. It’s a fairly observable phenomenon that a group of students will show up either as fresh persons or transfers, learn about issues together, start to work on common projects and then form a cadre, affinity group, collective or whatever you’d like to call it.

Those people come to their own after a while of learning about the issues, seeing how Evergreen works and developing organizing skills. But at some point, that group will phase out and take their knowledge with them. A new group will start at the beginning and there’ll be a gap of time where activism reaches a low point.

The school year has started and Evergreen students have returned to Olympia. It’s easy to get caught up in your classes, seeing old friends and settling into new homes, but we can’t forget that we belong to a greater community. This November, Olympia city council elections and state wide ballots are coming out. The Olympia city council affects Evergreen students and the greater community Evergreen is a part of which makes it important to research candidates and vote. There are a number of initiatives on this year’s ballot to watch out for.

Econvergence, a conference adressing the current political, economical, and environmental problems, brought together Pacific Northwest activists in Portland, from Oct. 2–4. The keynote speaker was the ubiquitous Noam Chomsky, his presence exciting the sold-out audience and even bringing the man who introduced him, American University economics professor Robin Hahnel, to tears. For a man who is eight decades old, Chomsky resonated with authority during his speech, though he used humor to ease the density of information he presented.

I wanted to adress this issue in spring 2009, back when this incident occurred, but in contacting the Cooper Point Journal, I found I would be given 800 words to relate the event and the official proceedings (which involved letters addressed to Vice Presidents Art Costantino and John Hurley, and which had gone without a response for over two months by the time I decided to write this article in late May). It was not enough space for the article, and I knew I couldn’t trim it down and still explain things adequately. The other choice offered was to break the article in two and publish it in consecutive issues. I was also unwilling to do this. It’s been a very busy year, so it’s taken me until now to get this article published for the start of fall quarter.

If you were gone over the summer or if you’re new to Evergreen, you may not have heard about the biggest scandal to hit the activist community this year: a military spy was discovered to have infiltrated Olympia Port Militarization Resistance (PMR) as well as other organizations that are comprised largely of Evergreen students. News outlets have already covered this story, but this article will attempt to catch up the folks who haven’t heard, and also place our spy in the broader context of the burgeoning Surveillance-Industrial Complex.

The student body is a diverse community, so who has the right to speak on their behalf?

With a new school year just beginning each student must find their place at Evergreen, their power in the community and figure out what Evergreen needs to do for them. After all Evergreen, like any college, is there for the students.
With classes just starting up and people settling back into their lives, it is easy forget about community issues. However, if we let things slip away ourcommunity will be formed without student voice.

When the Counter Point Journal (CxPJ) began publication in spring 2009, the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. However, we did get some negative responses. Some people thought we shouldn’t criticize the Cooper Point Journal (CPJ). Some questioned whether the college needed another newspaper. Some people demanded we justify ourselves. One pedant scolded us that “Counter Point” is one word. (Sure, and “Newsweek” is really two words. The point is?)

In July, a local discovery made national news when “John Jacob,” a participant in Olympia and Tacoma activists groups, was revealed to be John J. Towery II, an infiltrator employed by the US Army. Brendan Dunn, a former member of Olympia’s Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), had made a public records request to the City of Olympia for communications concerning SDS, anarchists, and the IWW. The resultant records, coupled with investigative work, led to Towery’s outing, which in turn raised issues about a likely violaton of the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the US military from engaging in civilian law enforcement actions. What has been less publicized, however, are the portions of the records that deal with The Evergreen State College.