Asheville, NC -- Just two days after the start of spring 2004, and on the heels of a recent battle between the Biltmore Estate and the Grove Park Inn, both eyeing inhabiting  this choice morsel of land, Asheville City Council unanimously approved new design plans for Pack Square. These plans insure the area, historically used for demonstrations and community festivities will be kept commercial free (except for the vendors who serve the crowds)

Asheville resident Brad Burns had a comment on the conservancy's new plan, saying it  needed design input from local experts and asked city council to form a sub- committee with local sociologists, architects, artists and citizens to evaluate the public space.

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Asheville, NC -- The largest naked event since the dawn of the textile industry takes place, on Saturday, June 11, 2004, as bicyclists in cities around the world ride naked through their town making an impactful statement about world oil and petrochemical dependency. The bare riders will be protesting involvement in Iraq, promoting peace, civil rights and their personal sovereignty. Cities already signed on include: Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, Canada; London, England, UK; Apeldoorn, Netherlands; Portugal; Pforzheim, Germany; Christchurch, New Zealand; Belgie, Belgium; Asheville, NC; Austin, TX; Burlington, VT; Chicago, IL; Los Angeles, San Francisco, CA; Portland, OR;  Seattle, WA. Many more locations worldwide are inquiring daily.

Last year In Asheville, some 46 riders left from the French Broad Food Co-op, 90 Biltmore Ave., at 11 AM, Saturday, ending at Asheville Pizza & Brewing Co. parking area (2.1 miles).  http://newfrontier.com/asheville/naked 

The World Naked Bike Ride is organized democratically through e-mail discussion lists distributed around the world, There is no leader, only volunteer organizers in various cities networking through coffee houses, health food shops, bike shops, and the world's counter culture. This is a fun, family event. Everyone is invited, with or without clothing.

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Morrow said in the late 1980s and 1990s, he earned more than $36,000 a year from a 12-acre crop of tobacco. Now, because of tighter restrictions on how much tobacco farmers can grow, he said he is lucky to make $7,000 from a two-acre crop.

So, Morrow is doing what other cash-strapped tobacco farmers in Western North Carolina have done. He's growing crops such as lettuce, beets, potatoes, winter squash and Swiss chard organically. He even grows his tobacco organically.

"Farmers like me have got to diversify," said Morrow. "If they don't, I fear they're going to find something else to do, like pumping gas."

And with the help of the Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project, more tobacco farmers like Morrow will be growing organic crops. The Madison County-based project is receiving a $347,500 grant from the North Carolina Tobacco Trust Fund Commission to help 25 burley tobacco farmers learn to grow and market organic crops.

The commission is one of three trusts set up by the General Assembly to distribute money from the 1998 Tobacco Settlement. This year, the commission gave $2.9 million to 13 projects across the state that helps tobacco farmers and workers learn new skills and reach new markets.

"Some people complain that money taken from the tobacco companies is going back into the tobacco industry," said William Upchurch, executive director of the Tobacco Trust Fund Commission. "But they're our neighbors, the foundation of our communities. We don't want them to be so financially distressed they can't survive."

Helping tobacco farmers like Jule Morrow grow and sell organic crops isn't easy, said Aubrey Raper, transition coordinator for the Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project. Farmers unfamiliar with organic crops have to learn how much to grow and then how to successfully market what they harvest. Often, they learn the hard way.

"In a perfect world, it would all go real well," said Raper, a former tobacco farmer who now primarily grows watercress. "But opportunities for things not to go well are everywhere. Sometimes farmers grow more than they can sell. Sometimes they have to plow under an entire crop."

That's why farmers like Jule Morrow join farmer-run coops like Carolina Organic Growers Inc., that help market organic crops to local restaurants, grocery stores and consumers. They also help farmers teach each other how do things, such as passing federal inspections certifying organic crops.

"I couldn't survive without Carolina Organic Growers," Morrow said. "You either have to join a coop or get out of farming."

Part of the Sustainable Agriculture Project's grant also will help promote the Mountain Tailgate Market Association, which serves about 100 farmers, including 30 tobacco farmers, from Buncombe and Madison Counties.

Next year, the project and others like it could have an even tougher time because they might not get money from the Tobacco Trust Fund Commission. Executive Director William Upchurch said the General Assembly passed legislation authorizing it to take $38 million from the commission to help balance the state budget.

"We projected that we would get about $40 million next year, which would leave us with $2 million," Upchurch said. "But we may not get that much money, and we're very concerned about it."

If that happens, the Sustainable Agriculture Project will look more closely at local sources of funding, said Charlie Jackson, projects coordinator and president of the Mountain Tailgate Market Association.

"We'll do everything we can to help these farmers," said Jackson. "The prosperity of our region is built on them. If they lose their farmland, everyone suffers."

Michael Moore Fahrenheit 9/11 
Asheville, NC -- Fahrenheit 9/11 earned more in its first day of release across North America than his Oscar-winning Bowling for Columbine did in its entire run. And 4 weeks later...

Fahrenheit 9/11, in which Moore takes aim at U.S. President George W. Bush, and the war in Iraq, opened at No. 1 after selling about $21.8 million worth of tickets in the United States and Canada on June 25.

Asheville was the only place in Western North Carolina showing the film on opening day, June 25, 2004. It was the largest turnout in the history of the town's Fine Arts Theatre. Asheville Magazine publisher and editor J. Charles Banks, and his wife Dhiraja arrived at the theatre around 6 PM for the 7:30 showing and the line was almost to the end of the block. They didn't make it. All 5 shows from morning to the 12:30 AM show were sold out! Former mayor, Leni Sitnick, was first in line for the 10 PM performance waiting about 2 hours in the drizzle! The  show was also a sell-out on Saturday, Sunday and Monday!

The film opened in two theaters in New York on Wednesday, June 23 to help build even more media buzz before expanding to a relatively modest 868 theaters two days later. (In contrast, most of the other movies in the top five were playing in more than 2,500 theaters each.)

Including the sales from the head start in New York, the film's 1 day total stood at $21.96 million. Moore's previous movie, Bowling for Columbine, grossed about $21.5 million during its nine-month run, during which it peaked at about 250 theaters, according to Moore.

New York, NY - Why is author Eric Schlosser hanging around Swedish prisons? Well, drugs, black market labor, pornography, and fast food can all be ruled out. He's already written about those subjects.

In fact, he's researching a book on the American prison system -- his third book in a self-declared trilogy. The first two were the worldwide best seller Fast Food Nation and his collection of investigative essays Reefer Madness”.

”The three books are linked in many ways. And without sounding too pretentious, I view them as a trilogy. The United States has undergone some fundamental changes in my lifetime,” says Schlosser, who is 44. ”I'm trying to offer an alternative history of the last 30 years.”

Speaking in New York recently, Schlosser said that he'd been waiting since before Fast Food Nation  was published for a chance to write about the faults of the prison system, which frequently shocked him in visits he made while researching the book.

For a start, the prison population in the United States has exploded over the past 30 years, from about 250,000 in the late 1970s to the current figure of 2.1 million. That is more than any other country.

And not just any country in the world -- it's more than any country in the history of the world.

Of these prisoners, about 450,000 at most have committed violent crimes.

The other 1.6 million? ”You'll have to look at the 'war on drugs' for that answer,” he says.

People convicted of first-time, non-violent marijuana offences are frequently given longer sentences than murderers. Schlosser talks about a ”hippie biker” who was given 12 years for his first, non-violent marijuana-related crime. It is not uncommon for a murderer to get 10 years.

”It's an elaborate revolving door,” he says. ”People with drug problems go from an environment where they're exposed to drugs into prison, where they can continue to use drugs freely, and then back into an environment where they're exposed to drugs. Then if they fail one drugs test, they violate their probation order and they're thrown back in prison.”

Young black men and young white men use drugs at a similar rate, he says. But young blacks are five times more likely to be arrested, and five times more likely to be poor. ”If you can't afford rehab and a good lawyer, you'll probably go to prison.”

Three-quarters of all prisoners are African American or Latino.

There are also about 300,000 mentally ill people locked up and often poorly medicated.

Although he has never been sent to prison himself, Schlosser visited a range of them while researching the book.

”Having gone into these prisons for my reporting, I never, ever, ever want to be sent to prison for any reason, ever,” he says. ”But if I have to, I'd like it to be in Sweden.”

In one Swedish maximum security prison he visited (”the toughest of the tough”), there hadn't been a rape as long as anyone could remember.

In U.S. prisons, by comparison, one in every four prisoners is sexually assaulted each year.

Schlosser says he found in U.S. prisons a culture of sexual abuse, violence, brutality, gang and neo-Nazi recruitment.

He thinks the prison system is ineffective, misguided, over-extended and a waste of money. Alternative systems, such as drug rehab and restorative punishments, are a more effective and cheaper way to deal with many crimes.

The reason no other country in history has imprisoned more people than the modern-day United States, says Schlosser, is ”largely because no other country has been rich enough to do so.”

Each prisoner costs 18,000 to 75,000 dollars per year to keep behind bars. Altogether, the system costs U.S. taxpayers 40 billion dollars per year. ”That's more than we spend on our universities,” he adds.

In California alone, there are more prisoners than there are in France, Great Britain, Germany, Singapore and the Netherlands combined. And the prisoners are overwhelmingly poor, mentally ill, drug abusers, or non-whites.

Schlosser brought out some well-chosen, if well-worn, statistics on race in U.S. prisons. One in every four young black men is in prison, jail, on parole or on probation, he said. In Washington DC, that number is one in two.

One in eight black men in the United States have lost the right to vote because of a conviction or being in prison. ”There is no question,” says Schlosser, in an aside, ”that if they could vote, we wouldn't have this president [George W. Bush].”

The book, as yet untitled, will be published in fall 2004 or spring 2005, says a spokesman from his publisher, Houghton Mifflin. Meanwhile, high-profile black activist Angela Davis has also written a book on American prisons titled ”Are Prisons Obsolete?”

The answer to this question, as far as Schlosser is concerned, is yes.

Schlosser -- whose father Herbert Schlosser was the chairman of the NBC television network -- became famous for his book ”Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. ”

The book was a worldwide best seller and spent more than a year on the New York Times best seller list. It continues to cause controversy: Schlosser says he's awaiting a subpoena which has been issued, but not yet served, by one of the companies he mentioned in the book.

© Copyright 2003 Inter Press Service