Summer Meeting report back

Hello friends of CCAD:

Clair and I have met twice in the last two weeks to discuss re-organizing CCAD. We went through the massively awesome CCAD archives for inspiration. Here are some of the ideas we came up with:

1. We should re-write the liberator (or whatever it's going to be called) constitution to. I have drafted one loosely based on the AnimaLife constitution from the archive. Major changes include:

a. the Liberator will be a newsletter will be a outlet for the political expression of the Cornell Coalition for Animal Defense as opposed to "a forum for the rights of animals."
b. the editorial board of the Liberator will be defined by the active membership of CCAD as opposed to a single editor who selects the next editor, as is the case in the old constitution.
c. the Liberator will be distributed every other week at locations that have yet to be decided. Liberator distribution will be included in the definition of CCAD "active membership."
d. the Liberator will be produced (1 or 2?) times a semester, with an "updates" insert when necessary.
e. Contributions are still open, but anonymous contributions will not be accepted.
f. Liberator should include a "where we stand" section in every issue; this section will reflect to-be-established points of unity within the group.

The main idea is to make the Liberator more credible and more central to our group's activites

2. We will be producing a new member's packet for incoming members. This will include the current contitution, the best of the literature we have, and a document that Clair and I are in the process of creating. If two of the group's members having complete control over the production of the new member's packet strikes you as a little un-democratic, you can think of it as "bootstrap democracy" heh... or call me with your ideas. I sent my phone number out in the first "summer meeting" email. As soon as everyone gets back in town, we will review the packet and vote on ammendments to it. And also we will get rid of all end of sentence prepositions and loose conjunctions from it.

3. We have set aside some of the better literature for a CCAD re-write. We will do some independent fact checking and updating to our collection of literature.

4. We discussed the somewhat lofty idea of a upstate NY conference of animal rights and animal welfare groups to help coordinate our efforts. The end goal of such a conference would be to establish a wider representative coalition of animal welfare and animal rights groups that could mobilize more effictively than individual groups.

5. We discussed sending out statements of solidarity to various (to be decided) progressive groups on campus indicating our willingness to collaborate on events that are in keeping with the animal rights/animal welfare. I've also been considering the idea of formal alliances to be defined

6. We briefly talked about meeting with David Skorton to discuss dining issues, animal research issues, and more generally about the aims of our group.

7. We talked again about the importance of internal education in our group; we also talked about the importance of structured meetings and documentation for achival.

This is going to be a great semester; we intend to make CCAD a more democratic and more effective group by getting MAD ORGANIZED, which in fact, is our new name. It's an acronym. Just kidding. Anyway... I look forward to seeing all of you soon. Be excited!

EDITORIAL CONTENT:
What I would like to see is a fusion of working class struggle and animal welfare work. Agricultural workers are some of the most downtrodden laborers in the United States. We have had racist guest worker programs since the beginning of World War I to give us a steady supply of cheap labor to produce cheap food. Industrial farming is a hazard to the health of most working class people. Whether it takes the form of run-off, dangerous jobs, or unhealthy food, the working class is selectively burdened. The need for cheap food does not justify guest worker programs, low wages, union busting, slavery, animal oppression, or the strip mining of the environment. As activists we must do more than distance ourselves from the blame for these evils; we must build a class oriented comprehensive struggle to fight all of the above. In saying this, I do not intend to alienate middle class elements from the struggle; I'm merely making the point that consumer politics is only half the battle, and that labor struggles and the fight against animal oppression are not opposed, but one and the same.

Nathan