Publish to Newswire
Add an EventMeeting and flyer against the LRDP
Tues., Nov. 25: Meet at the Kresge Student Lounge (UCSC), 6pm (followed by potluck and screening of "Broken Rainbow," a documentary on indigenous resistance to coal mining in Arizona)
The LRDP affects everyone here. Obviously it affects the 120 acres of forest and chaparral that would be destroyed, the living beings who will be tortured and the genetic heritage tampered with in corporate-subsidiary labs, and the water supply and ecological stability of the Santa Cruz area. But the LRDP is way more than a “green,” “hippie” issue about the forest and the animals. It’s about an institution that’s run by people who care about nothing but money and power. UCSC has turned Science Hill into a police state for the benefit of pharmaceutical companies: already over half a million dollars have been spent on security to harass the Tree Sit; that's half a million dollars that didn't go towards regular workers’ wages, housing, lowering tuition, students services of any kind, or anything else useful to students and other living things. Expanding admissions (when the UC system has already cut next year’s admissions by 10,000 due to budget cuts—will not solve UCSC’s money problems, but only stretch already strained resources. The administration says the guards and cops are there to protect “public safety,” but when they intimidate, arrest, chase and assault us, all they are protecting is the flow of corporate profits into the chancellor’s and regents’ pockets. They are suppressing, not protecting, our ability to make ourselves heard, and our desire to live in a healthy landscape. The school has sued its own students and even arrested a faculty member who participated in peaceful protest. Students, faculty, trees, animals—we are all just sources of profit in their eyes, just like how the medicines developed in the new lab will be produced not to heal people, but because they make money.
Our time is short. Winter break is approaching and if the past is any indication, this is the time the school is most likely to move in and attempt to forcibly evict the Tree Sit. Five supporters have been arrested in the past few weeks, a level of repression that hasn’t been seen in almost a year. What can we do to resist the plan and put pressure on the administration? Tuesday, Nov. 25 at 7pm there will be a meeting in the Kresge Student Lounge (followed by Indigenous Film Night). We will also be gathering for a speak-out at the Tree Sit in the Science Hill Parking Lot on Dec. 7, and a large crowd there could show the administration that people care and are willing to mobilize and resist. They need their corporate sponsors to see UCSC as a nice, calm, safe investment for their schemes, and community action can threaten that. What else? Talk to people about the LRDP, make your own flyers (or download these) and put them up or hand them out, organize protests, do public art projects and creative publicity stunts, do class projects about the LRDP's potential impact, educate yourself about government and corporate power and the struggles against them, think about what you can do to draw attention and obstruct their plans!
We are the people and we can make an impact! And we must. Or else someday, the last tree is gonna fall and kill us all…
I ask, because the news is filled with stories about CA being $15billion in the hole this year. Our state is particularly susceptible to swings in revenue compared to other states because money comes from property taxes (where due to prop. 13, people who bought houses recently were paying particularly high sums in 2005-2007, but this will go down with the bubble popping), and income taxes (where less will be paid by jobless real estate agents in 2008 with the state's boom-bust economic pattern).
So there are a bunch of stories about how CSU and UC aren't going to admit thousands of eligible students. $15 billion might be larger than the entire university portion of the budget. I somehow remember figures of 4yr higher ed. being about $10 billion and the prison system being about $11billion of the budget. If the upper campus stuff comes from this fund, to any significant extent, rather than donors or bonds paid in the future, are they really about to go through with this soon? Intuitively, it seems like they'll be cancelling a lot of extra projects. But most of what they specifically cite is not hiring new faculty and cutting enrollments. It's more like, I'd like to see some political action on this front (or books-not-bombs in general) because when this set of high school students graduating in '07-'10 comes out, they'll be last hired and will really have a lot of shit to deal with if they can't even gain access to education and vocational training. I had a discussion with a friend who graduated during the last recession around '91-94, and the fact that people couldn't get their foot into the door for a first good jobs in the area they trained in really changed their trajectory of the rest of their life. Like they had to turn to doing other things and make certain choices in their early 20s that would hyave been totally different during a more prosperous time.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/11/20/BADS1483JN.DTL
http://www.mercurynews.com/centralcoast/ci_11057331
For example: every time Monsanto sells a dose of recombinant bovine growth hormone, the stuff that makes cow's udders swell and increase their milk output (plus microbial pus, and/or extra antibotics to keep the infections under control), the UC system gets fifteen cents. For some reason, there's not a whole lot of research into any risks associated with that... couldn't be a conflict of interest there? There are literally hundreds of similarly questionable relationships in U.S. academics today.
It's a recipe for disaster.
http://www.campusprogress.org/features/121/university-inc-10-things-you-should-know-about-corporate-corruption-on-campus
Santa Cruz is the FEATURED CITY for the Amgen Tour of California. The Santa Cruz date is February 16, 2009. Let's take a look at the corporate spin, and read through the lines, shall we...
http://www.amgentourofcalifornia.com/
http://cityonahillpress.com/article.php?id=716
"The race is estimated to cost the city of Santa Cruz approximately $75,000, covering costs such as police protection and traffic control."
http://www.amgentourofcalifornia.com/Route/cities/santa-cruz.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amgen
"Amgen Inc. (NASDAQ: AMGN, SEHK: 4332) is an international biotechnology company headquartered in Thousand Oaks, California. Located in the Conejo Valley, it is one of the top corporations in the Tech Coast area. Amgen is the largest independent biotech firm, with approx. 14,000 staff members including the 150 Allied-Barton Security staff and A-post personnel in 2007. Its products include EPOGEN, ARANESP, ENBREL, Kineret, Neulasta, NEUPOGEN, and Sensipar / Mimpara. EPOGEN and NEUPOGEN (the company's first products on the market) were the two most successful biopharmaceutical products at the time of their respective releases."
2009 Amgen Tour of California Education Curriculum Released to California Educators for 4th-6th Grade Instruction
http://www.amgentourofcalifornia.com/news/press/2009-education-curriculum.html
"We are proud to work with the Amgen Tour of California in bringing you an educational booklet for students in grades four through six," said Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in his opening note to teachers. “This informative handbook – which includes valuable lessons in bike safety and maintenance, history, geography, science and math – can help make our kids safer, smarter and healthier.”
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/stories/2007/08/13/story1.html
Amgen slows its Bay Area expansion
Biotech giant seeks to shed large part of South S.F. campus
"The largest biotech company in the world, Amgen had signed a long-term deal to occupy three buildings that could have added as many as 1,000 new employees to its growing 550-person campus in South City. The growth there was seen as a clear message to local powerhouse Genentech that the Thousand Oaks company would compete aggressively for Bay Area talent, including researchers coming out of University of California and Stanford University."
http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/article/8589
UCLA Receives $1 Million Grant from Amgen Foundation
"At Amgen, we believe we have an important responsibility to inspire and prepare the next generation of scientists," said Jean Lim, president, Amgen Foundation. "We believe our partnership with UCLA will provide students with a pivotal experience that will encourage them to pursue further education and training in the sciences. In California alone, we are partnering with six of the state's top universities, committing a total of $6 million over the next four years."
Amgen Scholars
Division of Biological Sciences, University of California, Berkeley
An Undergraduate Summer Research Program in Sciences and Biotechnology
http://mcb.berkeley.edu/amgen/
Other Amgen Scholars Programs
* Amgen Scholars National Program - http://www.amgenscholars.com/
* California Institute of Technology - http://www.amgenscholars.caltech.edu/
* Columbia University/Barnard College - http://www.columbia.edu/cu/biology/ug/amgen/
* Howard University - http://www.howard.edu/amgenscholars/
* Massachusetts Institute of Technology - http://mit.edu/urop/amgenscholars/
* Stanford University - http://ssrp.stanford.edu/
* University of California, Los Angeles - http://college.ucla.edu/urc-care/AmgenScholars.htm
* University of California, San Diego - http://sea.ucsd.edu/summer_research/
* University of California, San Francisco - http://saa.ucsf.edu/summerprogram/
* University of Washington - http://www.washington.edu/research/urp/amgen/
FOLLOW THE MONEY...
.....conspiracy tripe.
"We are proud to work with the Amgen Tour of California in bringing you an educational booklet for students in grades four through six," said Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in his opening note to teachers. “This informative handbook – which includes valuable lessons in bike safety and maintenance, history, geography, science and math – can help make our kids safer, smarter and healthier.”
Stop AMGEN!
AMGEN Out of Our Schools!
Publication: Los Angeles Business Journal
Date: Monday, October 30 2000
A worker at Thousand Oaks-based biotech giant Amgen Inc. has filed a lawsuit against her employer, claiming she was exposed to toxic mold that made her sick, that the company knew about the mold but covered up its findings and failed to alleviate the hazard.
Thousand Oaks resident Darcy Jensen, 31, is currently on disability as a result of claimed respiratory distress, headaches, dizziness, sinus infections, and other allergic-type reactions from alleged toxic mold contamination in one of the Amgen buildings in which she used to work.
The lawsuit, filed at the Ventura County Superior Court in Simi Valley, accuses Amgen of fraud and concealment, negligence, battery and other "unfair business practices."
Among court documents filed is an internal Amgen report indicating that the building where Jensen worked "appears to have problems" and that "mold is showing up in too many places."
The mold was found in a facility used to test Epogen, one of three drugs that Amgen makes to treat anemia in kidney dialysis patients.
The suit claims that Amgen has concealed from its employees, customers and the U.S. Food & Drug Administration the discovery of microbial contamination in rooms used in the research and development of Epogen and other products being used in clinical trails by Amgen.
Jensen, a full-time Amgen employee for nearly nine years, was a facility supervisor for several laboratory buildings, including Building No. 5 (the primary building in question), said Alex Robertson, Jensen's attorney. Beginning in March 1999, Jensen began experiencing allergic-type reactions for reasons unknown to her, Robertson said.
Jensen discovered that environmental consultants who had been hired by Amgen concluded that in August of this year Building No. 5 was contaminated with toxic mold known to produce mycotoxins poisonous to humans, Robertson said. The mold allegedly found included a toxic variety known as Stachybotrys, which can cause allergic reactions, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
Stachybotrys is a fungus found worldwide. It produces toxins that can affect the immune system, according to Indoor Air Solutions Inc., a firm that tests indoor air quality. It can have adverse effects on the central nervous system, eyes, skin arid upper and lower respiratory tract.
Amgen spokesman David Kaye said company officials would have no comment.
"As a matter of company policy, we don't comment on litigation," Kaye said.
Attorney David Walsh of Paul Hastings, Janofsky & Walker, the firm representing Amgen, also declined to comment.
"Amgen does not comment on pending litigation," Walsh said.
"The people who work in these rooms wear moonsuits," Robertson explained. "(These rooms) are supposed to be antiseptically clean. To think you have toxic mold growing on the ceiling and walls from leaks is just astounding. The fact that it has been allowed to exist for several years is amazing."
Since Jensen has come forward, other Amgen employees have contacted her attorney, saying that they, too, have experienced similar allergic reactions, Robertson said. He would not reveal their names.
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