NYMAA - Local News

BURN THE PRISONS!

Sun, 09 Mar 2008 15:06:34 -0400

...or in this case, use a broad, grassroots coalition to force Mayor Bloomby to cancel his bid for a new one in the Bronx.

That's right: the Community In Unity coalition, which fought a tooth-and-nail battle against the city, has prevented a new 2,040-bed jail from being built in the South Bronx! CIU includes groups like the Bronx Defenders, the Point, Mothers on the Move, Rights for Imprisoned People with Psychiatric Disabilities and Critical Resistance (a national, non-hierarchical prison abolition organization.) Also opposing the jail were the folks at Sustainable South Bronx, who flung a timely lawsuit at the city's construction plans.

The defeat of the Oak Point Detention Center is a huge victory for communities in New York seeking alternatives to mass incarceration and racist policing. The ill-fated jail was to have been erected just across the water from Rikers, and would've expanded a bloated prison system that already includes (in the Bronx alone) two youth detention facilities and a jail barge docked in the East River--with 800 people on board in cages, much like the slaveships of old.

Naturally, the vanquished plan fits into a larger pattern of shoveling unwanted projects on Manhattan's darker boroughs. Alongside the jails that disproportionately intern its citizens, the Bronx also plays unwilling host to 15 waste transfer stations, a Con Ed plant and a sewage treatment facility--just like Harlem endures most of New York's asthma-inducing bus depots. And the Bronx experience is only a small taste of the soaring incarceration trends across the country.

The Battle for the Block—And Another World

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 17:32:28 -0400

A Dispatch from the First Ever Encuentro for Dignity and Against Gentrification

By Michael Gould-Wartofsky

In East Harlem, they have organized building by building to reclaim El Barrio from those who would “develop” them out of it. In Chinatown, they’ve rolled out a rent strike to win the repairs needed for tenants suffering from landlord neglect on Delancey Street. In the West Village, they’ve mobilized LGBT young people of color to stand up for their right to gather on the Christopher Street Pier. And on the Lower East Side, they’ve built a tenants’ union to defend “what is most beautiful about New York, the city that welcomed everyone…[that’s now] welcoming only money.”

Vicente Fox disrupted in NYC by questions about Oaxaca and Brad Will

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 10:56:41 -0400

A book signing at Barnes and Noble turned tense when audience members
asked about Brad Will…

October 10th, 2007 - Friend of Brad Will writes: Former Mexican
President Vicente Fox faced a skeptical, if not hostile crowd on

Notes From the Third Foundation Meeting of the North East Anarchist Network (NEAN)

Mon, 18 Jun 2007 08:52:44 -0400

North East Anarchist Network
Third Network-wide Assembly
June 2-3, 2007 - Syracuse, NY

Saturday, June 2nd 2007

Welcome/Intro (10:00 am)

CAUCUS MEETINGS:
People of Color, Queer, Trans, WIFB (Women Identified, Female Bodied), Working Class

URGENT!!! Pace University Denies SDSers Lauren Giaccone and John Cronan Degrees

Wed, 30 May 2007 19:12:24 -0400

After walking at the Pace University undergraduate commencement on May 23rd, 2007, Pace University adminstration officials have decided to withhold Lauren Giaccone's and John Cronan's degrees pending the resolution of criminal and disciplinary charges stemming from their arrests at a protest in November 2006.

IWW Hits Giant Big Apple with Daily Pickets

Mon, 02 Apr 2007 11:40:45 -0400

Members from the NYC Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) put up daily picket lines this past week in front of Giant Big Apple Beer Ltd, a beer and soda distributor in Woodside, Queens. Wobblies, workers, and supporters were out there every day starting Monday, March 26, through Saturday, from about 8:00 am until 2:00 pm. The pickets were held in response to the vandalism of union workers’ cars. The goal of the pickets was to hurt the company by preventing trucks from making deliveries to the company.

City Settles Case Against the Brooklyn 7!

Thu, 08 Mar 2007 00:09:11 -0500

Dear Folks,

After 3 years and nearly 4 months, the NYC government finally decided to end this charade and pay reparations to the Brooklyn 7. We were poised to go to trial again, but the city lawyers and specifically the NYC Comptroller's office decided they did not want to do so.

Theater and Bookstore [Mayday] Divorce, Not Amicably

Sun, 18 Feb 2007 01:47:46 -0500

NY Times:

By COLIN MOYNIHAN Published: February 18, 2007

When visitors enter Mayday Books, a small anarchist bookstore in the lobby of the Theater for the New City in the East Village, the ideological leanings of the shop are quickly apparent.

NYC’s immigrant food warehouse workers unionize w/IWW

Sat, 27 Jan 2007 10:36:30 -0500

NYC’s immigrant food warehouse workers unionize w/IWW

Not Without a Fight: NYC’s food warehouse workers unionize

by Diane Krauthamer & David Graeber

For every restaurant and every shop in New York there is a backbone—the workers who make sure ingredients reach those restaurants and their staff. No one is supposed to think about them. Certainly not the diners. But they exist, because they have to: behind the closed doors of dank and often filthy wholesale and distribution warehouses in Brooklyn and Queens’ industrial areas, suffering under sweatshop-like conditions, pulling shifts that begin before dawn and end well after dusk. Owners regularly take advantage of these immigrant workers' lack of familiarity with United States labor laws by pushing the envelope of exploitation, refusing overtime and paying far less than minimum wage.