time once again for community form and we are very late lucky to have with us live in the studio this morning are you sure jim on i should you mind is the founder and president of the yemen relief and reconstruction foundation we're be talking about yemen this morning and he said thank you very much for coming and spending time with us this morning thank you for inviting me i'm glad to be here so give us some some history of how you came to creating fifteen when saudi arabia and a group of father nations that started an air campaign against a group in yemen that over the government and in addition to the air campaign they also had a block still ongoing which made life very difficult for people because access to food became very scarce they allow about twenty percent of what should be in into yemen each year and with six every successive years we can see that the amount of food and essential goods including medicine becomes very little in the country so initially when that happened two thousand and fifteen i use my own funds and called people i know in yemen and in the different areas that were heavily targeted and gave them the funds and i said please buy food basket and distribute it to people so that was two thousand and fifteen and i really didn't think sixteen we raised about seventy thousand dollars just from close friends and from my own funds and again we sent it to yemen and so people can buy food baskets to the most needy we reach places then nobody can reach because our volunteers are from yemen and are from these communities so they're able to get to every single village and i also get three ports from the you and you know on the status of money tradition in yemen and se since then so we were able to get just between august and december of from our when we established over about sixty thousand dollars in donations just in the four five months tianmen and this year to date we've raised about two hundred thousand dollars just again from people who know about our work and who reached out to us we haven't done any campaigns to get and one is in atlanta georgia and those organizations also accept donations for us for people who want to have a tax break from those donations we average about six hundred cost was about thirty dollars and now it's thirty five dollars because again fuel and everything is getting very expensive and we buy locally so if we are distributing let's say in a day that we buy from the data because we don't want to have to worry about shipping to the place where we are distributing and when placed inside there where we distributed their farmers had a lot of lentils that they wanted to sell so we purchased the lentils from them and at a fraction of a price that was in the city for example and we were able to add lentils to our distribution and had just for example there was a chicken farm and the farmer came and said he has  purchased eggs and distributed eggs so we have the you know basic items that we distribute in there and the basket that includes flour rice sugar oil and then we use with ever is locally some medicine for them and the reason it's important to purchase locally because again the ports are closed and for any items to go to yemen it takes months if not years we get a donation from wat filters for in yemen and these because of the cholera outbreak we had a million cases and they sent it to yemen through water for life through you know a shipping company to yemen in december of two thousand and sixteen it didn't get to yemen until august or september of two thousand and seven so that it takes that long and then when it gets there you still have to clear it which also is very expensive to clear and then you need to transported from the poor it to where every new need to distribute it and fuel right now is you know scarce in yemen then you and says there are only about four days worth of fuels in the country and so for us to be to move these items from one place to another is very challenging we also got a donation from americans of medications for yemen based on the most acute needs a lot of it is for chronic diseases specially cancer and kidney and we had hoped to send it to had they that america has put it on a ship to go to  and then they were told that the saudi would not allow that ship to get into data so we had to actually change it to a ship that goes by then and that was very expensive for america because they had to pay a penalty to now move it tried them and once it gets tied then we need to be able to transport it to a lot of different places i just came back from yemen the only airport that ten hours on a private car for me to get there and there are four different groups that control the checkpoints the first one is a separatist group that are very hostile to the north they are supported by the united arab emirates the second group is actually muslim extremists or al qaida and they're also supported by the emirates and for them it was very scary to go through that there are checkpoints because first of all yes it likely they didn't realize that and i don't i only have an american passport i do not have a yemeni passport to show them to pass through but luckily i did have an id a yemeni id although expired santa on my way out of yemen we were told that they were going to be very angry with us and that would not work so we had to drive through the desert to be avoid those checkpoints it took us longer but we also found another car that had got stuck in the desert likely we had the big car we were able to get through the desert had we had the smaller car not a four wheel car we had we'd have run the prefer to buy locally because this way we don't have to worry about all these issues and you grew up in yemen right yes i was born and raised in yemen i came to the and they would have an old school and i go and visit and i'm like i grew up in a home that's all there event this is very old yet many believe that it was built by sam at the and that's the old name of santa actually it's the city of all right and just to put some more perspective on the current situation two thousand and eleven was arab spring specifically and yemen a lot of the people who led their protests were women and that was very impressive for yemen and also because yemen is a tribal society and everybody is armed and so to have the women lead the protest meant that they are going to be peaceful protests they're not going to have you know hot headed men who are who have weapons and get into fights and so when i look at the list who is the president of yemen for over thirty years stepped down and had he took over and he was supposed to take over only for two years during which three they had a war with the local with the national government six was actually between two thousand and three and two thousand and ten and they were part of the youth movement that was protesting also for our democracy in ye population of twenty nine million people that is a war crime and we all know that it's a war crime you cannot use hunger and starvation as attack there for and that is exactly what the  support are doing there is government and fortunately is supporting the saudis in multiple ways their air feeling their jets when they're bombing yemen they're also giving them targets to hit which really is mind boggling because they have had markets they have heard things that even funeral homes even and orphanages and so about sixty percent of the saudi targets a civilian targets again so how is the u s government giving them a target list when we know and this is documented by rights groups that sixty percent of the saudi targets are civilian targets that puts in the u s government in a place of you know assisting and war crimes in yemen and as i said also we have this siege that's preventing food and medicine and essential goods coming into yemen the end of this year there are going to be five million children in yemen who are starving currently there are twenty one million people in yemen out of twenty nine a population of yemen who are in need of some assistance in yemen came out recently that says the saudi are starving to sub to make them submit the saudi when they entered this war in yemen they thought it's going to be a two month thing because i heard the saudi foreign minister in a t v interview early on and he said oh in two months we will you know be done we are now three and a half years and ongoing and it's not that and the more they not able to win militarily they're more barbaric and inhumane they become in terms of not allowing food and medicine to get into yemen they also targeting hospitals oh yes they have targeted multiple hospitals and we're not going to talk about the yemeni hospitals about forty eight to fifty percent of them in hospitals had been targeted by saudi airstrikes by the way including schools as bombed it before they even used it just days before they were going to start using it again because the saudi targeted the water supplies in yemen they also targeted electricity so yemen has been without electricity for over three years now because of human experience the largest break color ad break in the wall with over a million cases we i when i was in yemen this summer august and july  wave of cholera was starting to take place because we have the rains in yemen in the summer and that is when you know the contamination of water becomes very prevalent and we know that now we are in the th wave of cholera and that's you know a direct impact of the saudis targeting the water and electricity as i said there is there isn't anything there is no there is no  afterwards so that just shows you their determination to burn yemen to the ground in order to win militarily and fortunately it's going to be very difficult for them to win militarily yemen is the yemenis they're a very fierce fighters they're very strong and independent and yemen have never been conquered in its history and all those saudi have you know the best weapons they actually now in terms of spending they are the second to the u s in terms of spending for arms it's more than russia and china if you if you can imagine that it can three a smaller saudi arabia and it was always at redline during the obama administration and all the international agency has had agreed that the saudis would not target the city of they were the port of data because if they do that then nothing is going to be able seventy to eighty percent of human population so they we have a poor that serves up to eighty percent of their many population however in june of this year the saudis in the emeritus decided that they're going to target had ada and i don't know how they convince this administration in this country that they are to get within a week that they are going to be able to capture the data and now it's been since june until now and they are there daily bombing on for many fisherman who are trying to get food on the table for their families they've also time after targeting the fish market immediately they targeted the hops hospital where people where you know moving the injured and that to that hospital i just don't understand just really not clear to me why you would target a hospital as people were moving people into the hospital you know place where they store a storage where they store food and they burned food that would have served millions in yemen and this is the first time this is i think the second or the third time who own chicken had trees they had to chicken had trees both were bombed and had been not working since i think early two thousand and seventeen they have farms anything anything this purposefully because they think if they starve the population then the local population is going to have they would be angry with the who theories and then they will side with them in fighting with the hope these they don't understand that the more they do these atrocities against their many people there many people are actually now supporting the whole fees too because they feel they have been drawn and that they have been punished because the saudis are angry account or you can that donate through noor foundation and that is a tax deductible foundation and they give us one hundred percent of the donation that goes to them they actually even donate more sometimes ninety dollars they will send this attack up for one hundred dollars because they don't want to just give us what is received so i hope that people would support has to make sure that we continued support the people in yemen i also want people to call their congresspeople and their senators to insist that the you as stop supporting saudi arabia representative adam smith and twenty nine other congress people just introduced on the twenty sixth of this month resolution eighty one all right well unfortunately that we're out of time i want to thank you very much for coming and spending time with us today thank you for the chance to speak to people and let them know about what's going on  time once again for community farm and we are very lucky to have with us live in the studio this morning philip will stagger fillable stutter is a are a writer curator an art worker who has lived in seattle for over forty years he is best known as  founder of invisible seattle the art group that guided the first novel ever written by an entire city and also read may a one month vacation from capitalism he is past president of allied arts and former director of the cinema at teak at the grand illusion theatre philip thank you very much for coming and spending time with us this morning happy to be here my goodness so start invisible cities and we just thought invisible seattle sounded poetically good and then we started to come up with all sorts of mythologies about invisible so there was visible seattle where people were  repertory theater and poet named david wagner for impersonating a poet and eventually we put tom robbins on trial for cultural reaganism that was the one that was most successful but we also did things like the novel project where we dressed up in white overalls and a hard hats and went around with clipboards stopping people in the street and asking for their words which we said we were going to assemble into the first novel ever written by an entire together the novel and we would ask people questions like what's disappearing in seattle and its interest thing at the the list subtext of the novel was about the first wave of development in seattle at the time  there was the famous scandal with the assessor was harley hobby and people were discovering that the assessments were very business friendly like long eggers was assessed as the racetrack was assessed as agricultural land so we built up this whole plot about the assessor and and building and development and we've asked people what was disappearing a development was not going away so we had this whole list of things like there used to be this restaurant called the dog house which was open all night and you know in the dog house was a part of the plot and all sorts of other things that were in seattle but we're going and now of course we're in this even more intense wave of development since amazon came so not only are the places this appearing with the people who live here are being disappeared out of the city so time comes around again and with their disappearance the history and the knowledge that r wright i mean capitalism and if i may use that phrase tends to reduce everybody down to living in the present moment the past and the future almost don't exist the past is quickly gobbled up and you become so someone fixated in the moment and i think we have to even when we look at cities you have to think that someone else will be living here in a hundred years who are your descendants so that are the development proposal or so what their interests are and we are the beneficiaries of the sessions that involve having the whole oem stead's build a park system like volunteer park that was for people hundred years down the road you know what are we doing for the people one hundred years after us you know pretty sure my descendants won't be here in a hundred years you know where you are what we're doing is we're publishing articles seattle times that say things like you know what here are some great places to retire to because you won't be you won't be able to afford living here even if you've been here for four years but hey cleveland is great it's half price why don't you move there this is what our civic establishment is doing to the rest of us and although it's just a matter of time before the same entities that are snapping up land here and developing and find us find those survivors and descendants in cleveland unless one deals with the problem of that mobile capital floating around the world it seems to follow us i mean before nine hundred seventy three before they went to war in the seventy's when they lifted the bretton woods system where there were capital controls this sort of thing never happened but if you can think of all the volatility there's been in markets since then you know a crash every four years somewhere a huge depression and so it's because capital can just float in and be withdrawn instantly and sit there and wait in this little offshore pens before an opportunity comes up again that opportunity might be your life or your city you know good luck to duck when it's coming so that was back in late seventy's early eighty's that was in the late seventy's early eighty's after we did that novel or see our project we had discovered computers the personal computer just come out and there used to be things called bulletin boards which you called up with a if you had a problem with your i was born or your kaypro or your compaq or your eagle i mean all of these disappeared computer terms there would be someone who have a board about it who would tell you how to do  whatever you needed to get the fix you're on it would provide essentially free support that we saw other possibilities so we created a literary bulletin board called insomnia and we put public writing console's in  tablets or you know smartphones and stuff so we gave them the possibility of participating in structured writing experiments and so we did that for about ten years and we are now looked upon as precursors of electronic literature so that was that was one project think every arts group has about ten years to hang together before they ever everybody  sort of it's like a rock band that breaks up and everybody gets forms together into the next band you know so how did you transition from there to mention lee starting red may well you know i'm from the sixty's originally that's where my my orientation to life was formed and people say the people in the sixty's have serial lives they do something for ten years than they do something for ten years again you know i opened up the set of attack of the grand illusion and then i got involved for a number of years in rewriting people's scripts in hollywood through my friend jeff dowd the big ski so i mean that was a very interesting experience but it took me out of seattle for a long time and i wasn't i wasn't focused and centered in what was going on here artistically and politically but then  i became president of allied arts in the early two thousands about the time we had invaded iraq and i had come up with slogans like let's photoshop our way out of iraq but  preservation and so forth and it was started in the sixty's called the beer and culture society and they did things like protest against a billboard you know and they also said the market by the way which is a very good decisions so we got involved in the waterfront planning and at the time it was only transportation projects but we arranged all of these share rats and then participate in public sure it's arranged by john ram who is a planner who work for the city to try to get people off the notion that we are just replacing a viaduct with another form of transportation and this was an opportunity for a kind of urban urban scape a waterfront for all you know and the worst that could happen is it became totally privatized and all the views were blocked like there's that one housing development north of the market looks like it's there's no the streets are blocked off there's no way of going through it it's like this huge berlin wall that separates us from the sea so to see that there were places for people to walk and things like that in to make sure that the city took in mind those particular needs of any of what it now calls what neo liberalism call stakeholders you know  generally the stakeholders means you know how much money you have a stake on the waterfront so but you know there is a certain limitation for sitting down in a room and everybody being nice and agreeing the things and then when the room leaves the people with the most power go out and do more or less what they're going to do anyway with a little cosmetic so and as that brought me back to my militant  self that's waiting to come out you know and i'm i'm looking for a new seattle general strike next year and one hundredth anniversary that the people from the rest of us in the city who are being sold out to the quote world class city that's being designed by a few well anyway i won't label them but we know who they are don't we and where we need to be more instructive i mean we have a wonderful tradition we have the seattle general strike of nine hundred nineteen we have the w t l so let's get rowdy and that leads me to read may and red mae is it's been called a lot of things it's a one month teach in a leftwing arts fast vacation from capitalism and it's all these things and it's really trying to become the one month home for public left reflection that has flared up temporarily in american cities during occupy where the great thing about occupy was it was a place in the center of the city where people could go and talk about the financial crisis that was being avoided or student debt or something that was not dominating the news as much as it should  so we talk about all those things that are left out of quote the mainstream discussion as being too far to the left so we are our rules for re may are to one refund read and to pretend for a month that the market is not the solution for the problems that the market creates we also have another slogan which is is guaranteed to raise whatever so we have great people like this weekend there is jordan t camp and christina heather ten who are the editors of a wonderful anthology called placing the planet they're going to be at dubois so that's kind of the theme this year you know every year it'll be something else we also have every saturday something called a marks the thought on it's inspired by bloomsday where people move from bar to bar reading chapters of joyce's ulysses instead of hopping with ulysses we hop with marx's capital now and we start off and i had dreamed gallery this saturday today twelve o'clock ninety with the fall of the soviet union seemed to have something interesting to say about the working day and i think it's chapter ten of capital and what he said is the working day is a struggle over time now between employees and labor employers and labor now that didn't seem to have as much relevance when the hour is that people work went down and down every year and people had won the eight hour day and they were looking for  vacation but suddenly all those conquests that labor seem to have consolidated are gone they've evaporated into air and people find them so that they have no rights at work that their work time is going  that they're limited and when they can go to the bathroom you know you hear all these horror stories you know and suddenly that chapter which starts with the horrors of victorian england which we're heading back to look somewhat more mellow relevant so our desire is to kind of open up marks from the the anti communist gaze that has kind of dominated america through the cold war and after you know  because i think what's interesting about marx is he's not the creator of religion or the notion of a doctrine that one has to believe in recite like a catechism even though there were people who followed one station we know that stuff doesn't happen and even though there was an element of that in the early marx that quickly disappeared from his work because he moved to england and he studied something that was very new in the world at the time which is capitalism his his collaborator angle's was the son of a factory owner in manchester and so marx went to the british museum and he had he studied he spent more time studying this particular social social economic phenomenon than almost anybody has for anything else of the time it's a model of social research and so what we have what we find in marx is a a model of capitalism that's all it is you know it tells us what it's tendencies are but the tendencies don't necessarily come through they're just possibilities and what he says that's interesting that we should really think about is that capitalism is not quote a market society where someone has something to sell and someone else has something else to sell and they can exchange them somehow through the market that there are these these sellers with different things and different needs that are driving the market what mark says is that capitalism is driven by accumulation that it's to get more and more and that money is thrown into a whole process and a circuit that starts with production and goes through sales only that more money till come back and be reinvested so we have this constant spiral or this treadmill that can't be stopped and can't be shut down so now that we face the limits that the planet is telling us we have and people are trying to come up with solutions like think about marx and we try to offer a a kind of gateway drug or an entry into marx as a way of thinking finding other ways to think about one's own situation let's let's take seattle for example let's take seattle now i mean what could be more starting from what do we see we see homelessness now you can you ken treated as something that comes like a storm from nowhere you know suddenly there are more homeless people you know it's just it's just a crisis that we have to deal with that we have to come up with solutions are bandaids to put on it or something but what what causes homelessness people are being priced into the street right so what's pricing them into the street well we have the highest increase of rents in the country the rate of rent increase in seattle is higher than anywhere else look at all the construction cranes that are going on  o it's linked to rising rents but what causes rising rents well you know a conventional economics says they're just not enough housing housing units built here you know and if we listen to developers and let the market take its course instead of interfering with the market by up zoning or allowing people to keep these things out of their neighborhoods god forbid that we should have ne without without luxury condos and rising rents then everything will be alright because suddenly there be a huge housing supply and  people to go into those housings of the rate would fall but of course well there are a couple of problems with this scenario one is that the obvious problem is we're not talking about people chasing  housing we're talking about dollars chasing real estate and the dollars that are looking to get into that real estate or all around the world because there are not a lot of good markets to invest and now i know this is a small investor you  asking where is the return while there is in the stock market except nobody trusts that because it's being propped up artificially nobody wants to go in emerging markets with political instability so the financial times says you know invest in american coastal cities or in the major metropolis all that money is going in there well what's another problem with the solution really this is what one of the main problems of housing is this race that the whiteness of neighborhoods you know the fact that that real estate that there's been no mechanism to ensure that every neighborhood has a mix of poor people and people of all economic levels and of all colors you know when the market operates the market leaves behind a residue of rot white and very rich white so the way to get affordable housing is to build affordable housing the way to have affordable housing that's open to everyone is to make it open to everyone to do ensure that people of color are have opportunities to house themselves the city government that a lot of money from outside was coming in driving up the prices and they wouldn't believe it they said like any durkin said during the campaign oh no speculation is not a problem well in capitalism speculation is always a problem so maybe we should think be on capitalism or at least we should think beyond it for one month because if you want to think outside of the box right if you stay within the box of capitalism for all your solution you're not really letting your mind ro over the possible universe so what's the harm in a month going back and listening to what marx might have to say about one thing or another in our marks have fun when we have a scholar come or even trying to amazon fiasco at the moment which is the fiasco of the people who are supposed to be representing the interests of the public in the paper who keep chiding the city council members for standing up for them and for daring to tax amazon i'll say one last thing about tech companies apple is not a profitable business or we don't know what apple's profits are because they have been granted subsidies by the state of california they're allowed and by the united states they're allowed to declare that all of their creative work was done in ireland or wherever and pay no tax in california that tax which they would have h would have subsidized tuitions so instead the university of california which is a free university in the sixty's has gone up charging huge tuitions so we decided to essentially allow students to pay what should be paying in terms of tax that's not good and that's how neoliberal capitalism works and an example of one of the many things you are discussing during read may seattle yes i please go to w w w read may seattle dot org all of the panels are free we have some wonderful panels for the last three weeks conversation it's only a month you can go back to the inside the box afterwards all right so yeah just a couple weeks left of it just a couple of weeks left all right well with that we are enforcing on a time i want to thank you very much for coming and spending