Date: Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Time: 7:00pm – 9:00pm
Location: Universalist Unitarian Church of Riverside, 3525 Mission Inn Avenue, Riverside, CA
Join Mike Davis, Victor Valle and representatives from seven organizations fighting for justice in the Inland Empire in a public forum about what’s gone wrong and how we can join together to fight for a just and sustainable future.
Just four years ago, you couldn’t find a better symbol of the economic boom than California’s Inland Empire—subdivisions, malls and warehouses were going up everywhere, filling in nearly every last empty spot on the map between LA and the desert. Today it’s hard to find a better symbol of what went wrong. Official unemployment is 15 percent, more than three times what it was in 2006. In the jobs that remain, wages are low and the future uncertain. State and local budgets are in tatters. Students are struggling to stay in school, while families wonder if they can keep their homes. And after a decade of explosive growth, the air quality is as bad as the foreclosure rate. But all over Southern California—from Boron to Fontana to Riverside—people are fighting back and organizing for a just and sane economy in the Inland Empire and beyond.
Speakers will include UC Riverside Professor MIKE DAVIS, author of City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear and Planet of Slums; Pulitzer Prize winner and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo Professor VICTOR VALLE, author of City of Industry: Genealogies of Power in Southern California; and representatives of the INLAND EMPIRE DAY LABORERS CONGRESS, the LABORERS INTERNATIONAL UNION OF NORTH AMERICA, the SOCIAL JUSTICE ALLIANCE of UC Riverside, DOMESTIC WORKERS UNITED, the WAREHOUSE WORKERS UNITED of Fontana, and the locked-out mine-workers from Boron, CA.
Emceed by UC Riverside Professor ELLEN REESE and author and journalist BEN EHRENREICH.
organized by Ben Ehrenreich, Ken Rogers & Michael Wilson