Anna Simonton

If you wanted to change the policies of the Washington State Department of Corrections (DOC), it would help to be Andrea Robbins. No, she isn’t a high-power ceo with a politician in her pocket, nor does she hold an official government position. She graduated from Evergreen last year and now works at the school’s Center for Community Based Learning and Action (CCBLA) through AmeriCorps vista. She is also one of the “key holders” (volunteer coordinators) for Olympia Books to Prisoners, an organization that fills requests for books from incarcerated people all over the country.

In the Nov. 2009 issue of the CxPJ, we briefly covered the events surrounding the controversial audit of the Labor Center. For those who aren’t up to date on what’s been going on, here is a quick run-down of events:

For years Pacific Rim, a mining company based in Vancouver, Canada, has been pushing to reopen the El Doardo mine in El Salvador against the will of the people and their government. Now the company is suing the Salvadoran government for $77 million.
On October 21st, the Committee In Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (cispes) hosted Miguel Rivera, an activist from El Salvador, who spoke about the struggle to assert the rights of the people over those of the corporation. Rivera is the founder and current vice president of the Association of Friends of San Isidro (asic).

Rivera is from the town of San Isidro in the region called the Cabañas, where Pacific Rim acquired the El Dorado mine site in 2002 and began an intrusive exploration process to determine the amount of gold and silver in the hills.

In 2004, the company applied to the Salvadoran government to have their exploration license converted to an exploitation license (yes, it’s actually called an exploitation license) but was denied because of widespread opposition to the mining project.

The SEM II lecture room was packed with students, faculty, and Evergreen community members. Every seat was taken; people stood against the walls and sat in the aisles. Everyone waited with excited apprehension for a speaker whose name they did not know.

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.

Most students know by now that, as a result of the global economic recession and Washington’s $8 billion deficit, Evergreen is facing the likelihood of a significant tuition hike, faculty, staff, and student employee layoffs, and other drastic measures to reduce expenses.
However, until May, it wasn’t clear where cuts would be felt the most. Even now, a lot of students are unaware of the impact budget cuts are going to have on their education, how the decisions are being made, and what alternatives we might envision as we begin to deal with the failure of a systemically flawed economy.