Here in Clatsop County, Oregon, we are just starting to fight a Wal-Mart super store from invading our beautiful area. Astoria is on the mouth of the Columbia River with a population of 10,000. The next town, about 3 miles south of Astoria, is Warrenton, population 4,600. There is wetlands all around Warrenton. Unfortunately, the City of Warrenton in enthralled with “Big Box” stores. There is a new super-sized Costco (the old one was too small) and a Home Depot. All this is along side a designated scenic by-way!
Now Wal-Mart is planning to grab their share of the wetlands, with the blessing of the city and most of the residents. Astoria will be hurt the most if this assault is accomplished. In the beginning of October, when the local newspaper finally announced that Wal-Mart was coming and it was a “done deal,” I was interviewed in the Daily Astorian about Wal-Mart and before I knew it, I said I would fight it. So to put my money where my mouth is, I enlisted help to fight it. It has been barely a month and we have come up with a name, Clatsop County Citizens for Responsible Development – CRD for short – distributed the Wal-Mart movie and did presentations to all three Chambers of Commerce, Warrenton City council and Astoria City Council, showed the movie for free at our locally owned movie theater, had a public meeting, formed a group with committees, got an experienced lawyer, an organizer who has experience with fighting Wal-Mart, and have an ever-evolving plan to beat them.
Now the hard part begins. Quite a few of us have been involved with recalling our county commissioners and fighting for over 5 years to stop liquefied natural gas (LNG). Some of the high stakes in these fights are the endangered Columbia River salmon that LNG import terminals and tankers will destroy. The experience of these other struggles will come in handy for keeping Wal-Mart out.
By Lori Durheim of Clatsop County Citizens for Responsible Development. For more information, you can email Lori at nolng@charter.net
An interview with a man with his children in an Internally Displaced Person (refugee) camp quickly devolves into a father desperately trying to sell his smallest child to the cameraman. “For God’s sake, I want to sell this child but nobody wants her. What can I do?… For God’s sake, I am poor, otherwise I wouldn’t give her for one million. I know nobody wants to sell their daughter, but I have to. She is innocent, but I am poor. I have nothing.”
An old woman with amputated feet sits in a small mud hut, surrounded by five doe-eyed, dirty grandchildren. She is wailing about how their parents, her children, were killed in the bombings and now she is tasked with feeding, clothing, and providing water and shelter for these orphans in this camp. “They’re hungry, they’re thirsty, and I don’t know what to do with them… I ask my God, kill me and put me under the dirt, or change our lives.”
This is the kind of footage we saw, over and over again, as we cut and shaped the Rethink Afghanistan: Civilian Casualties segment. The first time I saw it, I was shocked. As a taxpayer, I was filled shame that these Afghans have to choose between living in fear of U.S. airstrikes in the rural areas or dying of hunger and cold in urban refugee camps. As a person of faith, my heart broke for the men who constantly fingered their prayer beads as they recalled the loved ones they had lost, and the parents and grandparents who cried out to God on behalf of their children and grandchildren.
When Robert Greenwald first told us that our next campaign was going to be about Starbucks, a lot of us here at Brave New Films were very surprised. We’ve all had the “Starbucks experience;” smooth folksy music, leather couches, community book shelves, luxury drinks, and cheerful barista service. It just feels good to be inside a Starbucks, and why shouldn’t it? All around the store are signals that coffee makers and drinkers are part of a blissful, ethical community where everyone is taken care of with health care and dignity on the job. Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz says that workers should “believe in their hearts that management trusted them and treated them with respect…If they had faith in me and my motives, they wouldn’t need a union.”
I’m not naive enough to believe that a transnational mega corporation truly is all that it claims to be, but when our production teams started investigating Starbucks’ corporate response to coffee roaster and barista unions, I was shocked. Starbucks has forced store managers to work overtime without pay, fired people for talking about a union, discriminated in hiring against people with a past union affiliation, and is lobbying hard against the passage of EFCA. Oh, and those health benefits for “partners” they make a big deal about? You need to work 240 hours a quarter to be eligible – and anyone who has worked retail or service jobs part-time know that we have almost no control over the amount of hours that are set for us. Just to put it in perspective, Starbucks insures less than 42% of its workers – while Wal-Mart insures 47%.
Did you have a good Easter weekend? If you were in Washington D.C. for the holiday, you may have noticed a different kind of Easter Bunny hanging around the Gallery Place/Chinatown metro. Instead of handing out jellybeans and chocolate, this bunny was handing out plastic eggs filled with a little toy soldier and a question about the war in Afghanistan. Here are a few examples of those questions:
“Without a clear mission, is escalating Afghanistan like escalating Vietnam?”
“What is the impact of the war in Afghanistan on the U.S. economy?”
“Should the United States stop using predator drones and assassination teams?”
“Has anybody tried to find out what the people of Afghanistan want?”
These are just some of the questions that the Rethink Afghanistancampaign is asking about the war in Afghanistan. Robert Greenwald, president of Brave New Foundation, is directing and producing a documentary on the war and releasing it in “real-time” segments over YouTube. In a New York Times article describing the time-sensitive nature of public policy (especially when it comes to the war in Afghanistan), Robert says, “It didn’t seem to make sense to make a film that would come out even six months from now.”
Instead, Robert plans to release several segments over YouTube as they are created and then eventually string them together for a full-length feature. In honor of tax day this week, Brave New Foundation has just released the third segment of the Rethink Afghanistan documentary, titled Cost of War. (To see the first two segments, click on Troops and Pakistan; Women’s Rights and Refugees are still in production and will be released on YouTube as they are completed.)
