The 27 Social Centre Secret Cafe

Come enjoy a delicious brunch that benefits the space Denver ABC calls home: The 27 Social Centre!

What? The 27 Social Centre Secret Cafe Brunch

When? Saturday, February 4th, 11:30am-2:30pm

Where? 27 Social Centre (2727 W. 27th avenue, Unit D)

Food? $5-$12  a plate. The brunch-tatstic menu includes: Egg and Veggie Quiche, Biscuits and Gravy, Waffles, Oatmeal with Topping Bar, and Banana Breakfast Sundaes. Gluten Free and Vegan options available, yummy drinks will be provided for additional donations!

The 27 Social Centre is radical cultural space that houses great people like The Denver Zine Library, Sent(a)mental Studios, P&L Printing, The Denver Community Health Collective, Build Up Books, Bread & Roses, Denver ABC, and the Colorado Street Medics.

 

 

Feeling death at our heels: An update from the frontlines of the struggle

The BayView, 1/25

from the NCTT Corcoran SHU

“Death is impossible for us to fathom; it is so immense, so frightening that we will do almost anything to keep from thinking about it. Society is organized to make death invisible, to keep it several steps removed. That distance may seem necessary for our comfort, but it comes with a terrible price: the illusion of limitless time, and a consequent lack of seriousness about daily life. As a warrior in life, you must turn this dynamic around: Make the thought of death something not to escape but to embrace. Your days are numbered. Will you pass them halfhearted or will you live with a sense of urgency? Cruel theaters staged by a czar are unnecessary; death will come to you without them. Imagine it pressing in on you, leaving you no escape, for there is no escape. Feeling death at your heels will make all your actions more certain, more forceful. This could be your last throw of the dice: Make it count.” – Robert Greene, bestselling author of “The 48 Laws of Power”

Greetings, brothers and sisters: A firm, warm and solid embrace of revolutionary love and solidarity is extended to each of you from each of us.

Since the last hunger strike ended, we have weathered wave after wave of retaliation from the state’s prison administrators that continues unabated to this day. But before I catalog these manifestations of weakness on the part of state prison administrators, we feel it’s necessary to recount why this struggle began and the nature of our resolve to see the five core demands realized.

We have been consigned to ever more aggressive sensory deprivation torture units for 10, 20, 30 and in some cases 40 years, based on an administrative determination that we are members or associates of a “gang” – a term that encompasses leftist ideologies, political and politicized prisoners, jailhouse lawyers and most anyone who in the opinion of Institutional Gang Investigations (IGI) is not passively accepting his role as a commodity in the prison industrial complex.

These administrative determinations are not due to some overt act of misconduct or pattern of rules violations. No, these “validations” are based most often on the reforms, words or accounts of debriefers, rats, informants and other broken men who will say and do ‘most anything their IGI and ISU (Investigative Services Unit) handlers instruct them to, to avoid confinement in the SHU (Security Housing Unit) or carry some other favor from their masters.

After decades of fruitless legal challenges, after years of suffering the deprivations of conditions so inherently evil, inhumane and psychologically torturous that most of you simply cannot comprehend the reality behind these words, most of us came to realize an immutable truth: that the state’s mantra of “the only way out of the SHU is to parole, debrief or die” was something that they not only meant, but was in fact a key feature in developing a subservient and passive pool of prisoner commodities upon which the orderly fleecing of taxpayer dollars could be based.

Thirty years of successful propaganda, of dehumanizing underclass communities and the imprisoned, of lobbying that’s led to the dominance of the CCPOA (California Correctional Peace Officers Association) in judicial and political elections and appointments – all to mislead an ill-informed public into submitting greater control of their lives and society to an industrial interest that runs counter to the public safety concerns they were vested to protect. Many of us watched this state of affairs progress unchallenged as our protestations fell on deaf ears, year after year, decade after decade, until advanced age and the decimation of our communities forced us onto “death ground,” where you may survive if you can resist, but you will most surely perish if you do not.

Read the rest here.

Shit the FBI Says

From Green is the New Red

Judith Clark’s Radical Transformation

By TOM ROBBINS, NY Times Magazine

On Oct. 20, 1981, a band of militant zealots armed with automatic weapons tried to rob a Brink’s truck in a shopping mall in Nanuet in Rockland County, N.Y. Before it was over, two armored-car guards were shot and two police officers — one black and one white — were gunned down at a roadblock. The crime was one of the last spasms of ’60s-style, left-wing violence. To the militants, it was an “expropriation” for something they called the Republic of New Afrika, a place that existed mainly in their fevered dreams.

Judith Clark was one of four people arrested that day for armed robbery and murder. She was 31, a veteran of the white left who traveled the radical arc from student protest to the Weathermen to the fringes beyond. A new single mother, she kissed her infant daughter goodbye that morning, promising to be home soon.

No one ever accused Clark of holding or firing a gun that deadly afternoon. But she was there, a willing participant, at the wheel of a tan Honda getaway car. Over the next two years while she awaited trial in jail, Clark became a fiercer warrior than she was on the day of the robbery. During court hearings, she told the judge she was a “freedom fighter” who didn’t recognize the right of imperialist courts to try her. She called court officers “fascist dogs!” when they clashed with her supporters.

Read the rest here.

Call for Donations to Support Occupy Denver Legal Defense

In continuing its support of Occupy Denver’s legal defense of its almost 100 arrestees, we making a call out for donations to Occupy Denver.  Due to the choices of several arrestees, the financial state of the bail fund and several individuals has been extremely precarious.

So please support the movement to defend Occupy arrestees by making a donation here. PLEASE MAKE SURE TO EARMARK THE DONATION FOR “BAIL FUND.”

In solidarity, Denver ABC

 

Free School Denver Class: “Know Your Enemy: State Repression in the US”

This discussion based class investigates the various tactics used by the state to neutralize social movements and subordinate targeted populations.  We will also include discussion on how to minimize state infiltration.

Meetings will be Mondays starting January 23rd at the Colorado Progressive Coalition (1029 Santa Fe Drive), 6pm.

 

Mumia Update from the MOVE Organization and ICFFMAJ

As most of you already know, Mumia was transferred to SCI-Mahanoy in upstate PA. more than a month ago, directly after Phila. prosecutor Seth Williams announced that he wasn’t pursuing the death penalty in Mumia’s case.  This meant that Mumia’s sentence went from death to life in prison without parole.

Since arriving at SCI-Mahanoy, Mumia has been in the hole, on AC (administrative custody) status, solitary confinement, even though there is no valid reason for him to be in the hole.  The conditions are torturous
and much worse than the conditions on death row.  These conditions have been condemned by the United Nations as torturous.

Since arriving at Mahanoy, Superintendent John Kerestes and his staff have gone from one thing to the next to vent their fury and racism on Mumia.  First they claimed to be waiting on paperwork that Mumia’s sentence is a life sentence and not death, but Mahanoy has no death chamber, so Mumia would
never be sent there if he still had a death sentence.

Upping the Anti interviews Mandy Hiscocks about her incarceration on G20 charges

One week before she began serving a 16th month sentence related to her participation in organizing the G20 protests, UTA sat down with Amanda Hiscocks for a wide ranging discussion about her situation as a political prisoner and her analysis of the fallout of state repression against those organizing against the G20 summit in Toronto in 2010. This interview will be published in a forthcoming issue of UTA, but we are making the raw audio available here so that activists can get a better a sense of Mandy’s assessment of the features of state repression and what needs to be done to support the G20 political prisoners.

Listen to the audio here.

Outlawing dissent: Rahm Emanuel’s new regime

Bernard Harcourt, The Guardian

It’s almost as if Rahm Emanuel was lifting a page from Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine – as if he was reading her account of Milton Friedman’s “Chicago Boys” as a cookbook recipe, rather than as the ominous episode that it was. In record time, Emanuel successfully exploited the fact that Chicago will host the upcoming G8 and Nato summit meetings to increase his police powers and extend police surveillance, to outsource city services and privatize financial gains, and to make permanent new limitations on political dissent. It all happened – very rapidly and without time for dissent – with the passage of rushed security and anti-protest measures adopted by the city council on 18 January 2012.

Sadly, we are all too familiar with the recipe by now: first, hype up and blow out of proportion a crisis (and if there isn’t a real crisis, as in Chicago, then create one), call in the heavy artillery and rapidly seize the opportunity to expand executive power, to redistribute wealth for private gain and to suppress political dissent. As Friedman wrote in Capitalism and Freedom in 1982 – and as Klein so eloquently describes in her book:

“Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When the crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function … until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”

Today, it’s more than mere ideas that are lying around; for several decades now, and especially since 9/11, there are blueprints scattered all around us.

Miguel Balderos Added to DABC Prisoner Listing

Miguel Balderos is an anarchist sentenced to 10 years and 8 months for the arson of the Santa Cruz, CA city prosecutor’s office. When apprehended, he allegedly told police that he was a homeless anarchist protesting the city’s ban on camping.

Miguel Balderos, S# 126145
Santa Cruz Main Jail
259 Water Street
Santa Cruz, CA 95060