i am sick of the banner at the top of this website - the palm treetop, the sweaty angry guy holding the red mic to his mouth. please can this banner change more often?!! i often change the "theme" setting to "chicago" just to avoid the top banner, but that is sort of a nuisance.

i miss the old picture of the toxic sunset over the dark city and the black silhouette of a child in mid-leap against that purple sky and a helicopter in the distance. does anybody have it saved anywhere? if so, please post it.

1. palm trees are a symbol of what's wrong with L.A. - people pretending that desert chaparral is really Miami. what a dumb fantasy!! a FAKE tropical world of sunny days kept alive by a billion sprinklers piping water from, well.... "for one thing, they have diverted the entire Colorado River from its natural purposes". maybe the palm treetop is supposed to be ironic? i don't think so because....

2. the angry sweaty guy looks latino/chicano/indigena - what does this mean when you go look at the people who are really active in la-imc? what does this mean when there is practically no Spanish on the site. irony? whatever it means i'm sick of it and i think it's awkward. la-imc needs to involve L.A. in a more real way - not pretend. it can happen. by the way, most imcs have no individualized person on their top banner. that works well for a lot of reasons.

3. as far as i can tell, women deserve the credit for a lot of la-imc's accomplishments. a less testosteroni banner at the top of the site would make more sense.

4. right now we are supposed to switch the "theme" if we prefer to see a black woman with a bullhorn. umm.. obviously the real theme here is supposed to be "projecting the voices of people of color". unfortunately this does not reflect the reality of the la-imc.

5. banners should change more often and users should be involved in designing and picking new banners.... more interaction. in fact, la-imc users should be treated a thousand times better in general! the attitude right now is more like you're nothing unless you go the meetings. but the political effectiveness of the site itself is very much connected with the attitude the collective has about actually using the site. as the collective retreats to listservs and meetings, the site becomes almost totally irrelevant to the radical grassroots. the collective needs to get back to basics and use the site.

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1. maybe the more that members of IMC collectives use the public IMC newswires both generally and specifically to propose , discuss, and debate developments in IMC structure, the better the IMC will be.

2. maybe improvements in the quality of interaction on the IMC website will be ongoing, hopefully for many years, through a continual process of adjustments rather than a sudden transition to a perfect solution.

3. maybe problems arising from public participation in the site will in the long run be solved by giving people more options, not fewer.

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Ward Churchill on L.A.:

"Look at LA: twenty million people where there ought to be maybe a few thousand. How do they accomplish this? Well, for one thing, they have diverted the entire Colorado River from its natural purposes. They are siphoning off the Columbia River and piping it south. They have even got a project underway to divert the Yukon River all the way down from Alaska to support southwestern urban growth and to irrigate a proposed U.S. agribusiness penetration of northern Sonora and Chihuahua. Whole regions of our ecosphere are being destabilized in the process.

Okay, in the scenario I have described, the entire Colorado watershed would be in Indian Country, under Indian control. So would the source of the Columbia. And diversion of the Yukon would have to go right through Indian Country. Now, here’s the deal. No more use of water to fill swimming pools and sprinkle golf courses in Phoenix and LA. No more watering Kentucky bluegrass lawns out on the yucca flats. No more drive-thru car washes in Tucumcari. No more “Big Surf” amusement parks in the middle of the desert. Drinking water and such for the whole population, yes.

Indians should deliver that. But water for this other insanity? No way. I guarantee that will stop the inflow of population cold. Hell, I will guarantee it will start a pretty substantial outflow. Most of these folks never wanted to live in the desert anyway. That’s why they keep trying to make it look like Florida (another delicate ecosystem which is buckling under the weight of population increases)."

anticrisis
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lynx
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