Prison Records
March 3, 2008
CORI Reform and Why It’s Important by Jon Barry, Boston SDS
Criminal offender record information (CORI) is a pillar of racism in Massachusetts. For over 2 ½ years, a diverse coalition of community groups has been organizing a movement to demand change in the current system of criminal records… a system that members of Governer Deval Patrick’s office have described as “broken”. In particular, this coalition supports House Bill #1416 (also known as The Public Safety Act of 2007) to make the changes to reform it.
On September 18, more than 600 people rallied in front of the Statehouse in favor of the Public Safety Act prior to giving testimony in front of a judiciary committee about how their lives have been adversely affected by CORI and why change is necessary. The committee will decide which bills will go in front of the State Legislature for a vote later this year.
CORI is a statewide database of criminal records that lists the number of times an individual has been before a court and the charges against them. Every year in Massachusetts approximately 20,000 people are discharged from correctional facilities with CORIs. Many more people have CORIs but have not been convicted or incarcerated.
People Power
March 3, 2008
Review: “Giving More Power to the People” by Daniel Tasripin, Hunter SDS
What We Want, What We Believe: The Black Panther Party Library
Roz Payne Archives / Newsreel (AK Press)
The Black Panther Intercommunal News Service: 1967-1980
David Hilliard (Atria)
When SDS relaunched, I must admit that the initial reaction I felt (as did a number of people of color comrades from the circles I travel in), was one of skepticism. For myself and many others, the organizations that launched us into our trajectory were not those that were descended from SDS, or for that matter the mostly white anti-war movement. We were instead, more interested in the organizations of the 1960’s that had formed the original Rainbow Coalition: the Black Panther Party mostly, but also the Puerto Rican Young Lords Party, the American Indian Movement, the Chican@ Brown Berets, the Chinese and Asian-American organizations like the Red Guards and I Wor Kuen.
That skepticism was, in retrospect, born out of a frustration many from my generation of “movement” people of color. Perusing the predominant historians of the Sixties – the “Boomerologists” as I call them – there’s a clear narrative: there’s the “Good Sixties”, when the terms of the Civil Rights and anti-war struggle were defined by attempts to compromise rather than settle the underlying questions decisively; then there’s the “Bad Sixties” in which first the black youth of the Civil Rights movement stopped being conciliatory, and then the white youth of the anti-war movement started to wonder whether the Vietnam War was worth winning in the first place.
Palestine
March 1, 2008
Break the Siege of Gaza, an interview with Baha Abu Hussein by Kosta HarlanIn March 2007, I had the honor of meeting Baha Abu Hussein at a conference in solidarity with the Iraqi, Palestinian and Lebanese resistance movements, “With the Resistance, for a Just Peace in the Middle East” (www.iraqiresistance.info). Baha was a delegate from Gaza representing the Palestinian Progressive Youth Union (http://www.ppyu.net/ppyuEn.htm). This January, protests around the world demanded that Israel end its siege and collective punishment of Gaza, which had resulted in numerous deaths and great suffering due to massive shortages of food, fuel, medicine, and other basic necessities of life. I want to thank Baha for making this interview happen despite the extremely difficult conditions in Gaza resulting from intensified Israeli aggression in recent months. His words offer great insight into the current crisis and must compel us, on the eve of the 60th anniversary of the occupation of Palestine, to take action. Now more than ever, solidarity with the Palestinian people is urgently needed.-Kosta Harlan, February 11, 2008 Read the rest of this entry »
Autonomy
March 1, 2008
Book Review: Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life by Daniel Meltzer, DC SDS
Delving into movement theory, philosophy, and cultural criticism as well as providing a case study in autonomous politics in post-industrial Europe, Georgy Katsiaficas has written an important book for emerging movements in the 21st century. Katsiaficas excoriates Marxist Leninist models, criticises the New Left for self-marginalizing into covert guerilla action, and embraces the autonomous movements of Western Europe from the late 70s to today. He doesn’t shy from pointing out the movement’s weaknesses, eccentricities and outright alienating factors, but finds their models of resistance to be promising breakthroughs in resistance to capitalism, imperialism, and the state.Marxist-Leninists are portrayed as stodgy and prudish across Europe. Discouraging the working class from self-organization, they consistently made themselves arbiters between classes or between movements and the state. When pressed for opinions on emerging squatting movements in Italy, they declared “[real] workers don’t break the law.” Their stale “revolution” was dowdy and full of antiquated modernist thinking, preaching uniformity and the “new” ideas of a century before. Katsiaficas blames the death of the New Left era in countries like the United States in part on the ill-fitting adoption of modernist Leninist forms in the post-modern era. In contrast, continuing revolutionary movements in West Germany after the New Left era could be attributed to East Germany, which “provided ample daily evidence of the bankruptcy” (215) of Soviet bureaucracy.
Communist Youth
March 1, 2008
Thoughts on My Experience in the RCYB by Freddy Bastone, Hunter College SDS
“Seize Power, Create Public Opinion,” was the mantra of the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade, an organization which I dedicated almost all my years in high school to developing in NYC. I remember walking one day with my father past a Revolution Bookstore (bookstore of the Revolutionary Communist Party). My father made the comment to me “This is a Communist bookstore” in a manner that was approving, almost to the testament to the kind of city he remembered NYC to be. I was impressed by it and scared, I never in my life saw such an open front for Communism. I was intrigued to know more about it. A few times I went in and browsed around, but was so petrified about being in it. I might as well have been a painfully shy teen in a sex shop, but instead I was a painfully shy teen in a communist bookstore.
Prisons
March 1, 2008
The Real Intent of the American Prison System by D. Chasse Gunter – Olympia SDS
The American justice system has strayed from its apparent intent of both rehabilitating offenders and preventing crime. Instead, it’s a system that specializes in creating criminals and arresting more of them longer for the purpose of generating revenue. The American Prison system has its roots in slavery. In 1865, after the Civil War, prisons started hiring our prisoners for private use, thus continuing America’s proud tradition of slavery. Slavery is alive today.
The American Justice system has become a thriving business. The prison industry now makes up 4% of the workforce in the United States. That is 4% of the workforce in the United States who can’t receive any benefits, strike, start or join a union, receive no vacations or comp time, and work full time with no brakes. They are paid as little as 17 cents an hour and as much as 2 dollars an hour on the high end. Almost all assemble line jobs, once dependent on third world country labor, have been imported to prisons. The prison industry produces 100% of all military helmets, bullet-proof vests, ammunition belts, tents, bags, dog tags, and canteens, and 93% of paints and paint brushes, 92% of stove assembly, 46% of all body armor, 36% of home appliances, and 30% of all headphones and speakers . Prison labor makes up 98% of the equipment assembly market. Since the increased legalization of private contracting of prisoner labor, corporations responsible have seen a significant profit jump of 392 million dollars to 1.31 billion dollars in just 14 years.
Read the rest of this entry »
Issue 3
March 1, 2008
PRINT and DISTRIBUTE to your CHAPTER, CAMPUS and COMMUNITY! The SDS News Bulletin working group is proud to bring you our third issue, much improved over the first two issues in our humble opinion. We amped up the articles, poetry, art and layout from Issue 1 & 2, and you made it all possible by sending in your work, thoughts, ideas and love.
Here is the result:
(You will need to have Adobe Acrobat Reader installed on your computer to view the PDF file, which is FREE software you can download Here)
Enjoy! and Distribute widely!
Send us your stuff to be published in Issue 4:sds.bulletin@gmail.com
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-The SDS News Bulletin Working Group
