Pacific Views

The Strange Case involving the City of Santa Cruz Mayor

On my way back to Portland this afternoon, I was sitting next to a Santa Cruzian on the plane that told me a very strange story involving the Santa Cruz City mayor. Santa Cruz has long been a bastian of leftist thought and protest, and during the Reagan days was known as a Nuclear Free Zone. Just like New Zealand, we Santa Cruzians (as I was living there during that time) put out signs declaring our position on the Nuclear Weapons Freeze.

On September 9th, the Santa Cruz City Council voted to request the Judiciary Committee to investigate starting impeachment proceedings against George W Bush. Mayor Emily Reilly signed the letter and forwarded it on. Four days later, her bakery (a really good Westside bakery for any of you that find yourself in Santa Cruz) had a burglary where the only things that were stolen were an old hard drive and it's backup. (hum....) Then on September 17th, her bakery was visited by an agent of the FDA. Athough the spokesperson for the FDA says it is common for agents to visit businesses under their control, a number of other long time bakers in Santa Cruz say they have never been visited by the FDA.

Mayor Emily asks people to not make too much of these incidents because it isn't good to always go around seeing conspiracies.

Normally, I would agree. All of these events could be unrelated, yet, the timing is suspect and yesterday I had just written up a story about how the DOJ is targetting Greenpeace for the actions of a couple of their members concerning a peaceful, civil disobedience action last year.

... when looking at how the expanded polic[e] powers [have been] used since 9/11, it seems that often the government is more interested in stopping dissent than stopping terrorism.

Santa Cruz has been a thorn in Bush's side for awhile. Just before this vote, the Justice Department lost its attempt to criminalize the medical marijuana policy in force in California, and for this case, the city weighed in against the federal government :

This case is historic in that it represents the first time a public entity (the City and County of Santa Cruz) has ever joined a petitioner in suing the federal government over a medical marijuana issue.

Knowing Karl Rove and seeing how Ashcroft spent a half a year finding a law to persecute Greenpeace, it seems likely that the Bushies have to be looking at Santa Cruz and thinking they have to "discipline" it and make an example of it, or else some other communities could be tempted into following the bad behavior of that community. After all, all they have to do is to intimidate one community and one mayor to effectively stop others from trying the same thing.

Personally, I don't think this is any more innocent than the leaking of Valerie Plame's name by some senior WH administrators. They looking for ways to shut us up. Let's not let them do that.

Posted by Mary at October 20, 2003 01:59 AM | TrackBack