7PM @ 2640 St. Paul St.

Join us for the first of a monthly series of public media interventions brought to you by Indymedia Baltimore. We'll be joined this month by Brazillian filmmaker and media activist Miguel, who is touring the US with his recently completed documentary tribute to Brad Will , the American anarchist and Indymedia filmmaker who was shot dead by paramilitaries in the employ of the state while documenting the popular revolt in Oaxaca in 2006.

Dear supporters of the Algebra Project:

We mourn the loss of Zachariah Hallback, a wonderful young man who had participated in many Algebra Project events, and who was helping to organize for the action below. Zach was shot Wednesday, Jan. 9 during a robbery while he waited with other Algebra Project youth for a bus across the street from City College High School. He was pronounced dead on Friday, Jan. 11. The students have decided to continue with this action in his memory.

STUDENT ACTION –CSI ANNAPOLIS– NOW SCHEDULED FOR FEB. 6
Please join them, Silent March to the State House begins at 1:00 p.m., Wednesday, Feb 6, from Asbury United Methodist Church, 87 West Street, Annapolis.
RIDES NEEDED FOR PARENTS–PLEASE CALL 410-338-0679 TO HELP.

DEMANDS INCLUDE:

Reverse cuts to Thornton Funding — school system must currently cut $50 million to balance 2009 budget

Jobs in the knowledge-based economy for all youth
$800 million for Baltimore schools as ordered by court
Arts for all students; Buildings repaired, not closed; Class sizes capped at 20.

Quality Education as a Constitutional Right.

Some students will perform a die-in to dramatize the cost of inadequate education, and the Governor’s Mansion will be wrapped in crime-scene tape.

For more information, Call 410-338-0679

Jay

This Wednesday Dec 19, 7PM @ 2640 (2640 St. Paul St.) Kids on the Hill and the Indypendent Reader are co-sponsoring an event that was recently snowed-out. The evening will benefit the up-coming Civil Rights Trip, a sojourn for youth leaders from Baltimore City. This six day road trip includes meetings with civil rights leaders and visits to Atlanta, Birmingham, Memphis, Montgomery, Selma and Little Rock to engage and educate young people about civil rights and social change history first-hand. Youth leaders journal throughout the trip, and video tape their experiences to engage other young people on the trip and upon their return to Baltimore.

While Mayor Sheila Dixon promises to end homelessness in Baltimore over the next ten years, recent events point towards a "solution" of displacement and criminalization. This morning (12/14), the city fire department evicted the tents and shacks along Guilford Ave. near I-83 which had been serving as makeshift homes for dozens of Baltimore residents. Told only the night before that remaining in their homes would be cause for arrest the next morning, today's incident is the latest in a string of similiar incidents in the Baltimore area. In September of this year, the ACLU won a partial victory against the city of Elkton, which had bulldozed, without a warning or warrant, a homeless encampment there. This summer, the ACLU also registered objections against the Baltimore Downtown Partnership, a semi-public agency whose security forces, threatening to throw away their possessions, cleared a group of homeless people from under I83 along Guilford Ave. Many eating at the Our Daily Bread soup kitchen this afternoon felt that Baltimore was indeed trying to clear the homeless from the city rather than offer any permanent solutions, with some deciding to leave the city for Baltimore county.

Meanwhile, advocates for the homeless in Baltimore claim that the city's policies risk criminalizing the homeless rather than helping them. Health Care for the Homeless, which is holding vigil for those who died homeless in 2007 on December 21 at 4:30 PM at the Washington Monument in Mt. Vernon, held a forum on the criminalization of the homeless on Dec. 5th - you can watch the video from the event here. Even more troubling, a September 2007 report by the Abell Foundation details how Baltimore is systematically eliminating the kind of public housing that might actually help get homeless people off the street, with a 42% reduction in available public housing over 15 years, and planning to eliminate another 2400 homes, with no plans for replacement, in the immediate future.

With the failure of the Democratic Congress to meaningfully challenge the Bush administration's agenda painfully apparent, renewed interest in direct action against the spectacular machinations of the political process itself has been growing across the country. Activists in Denver and Minneapolis/St. Paul are busy preparing for mass mobilizations against the 2008 Democratic and Republican National Conventions. In the Baltimore area, a few signs expressing support for protest against the RNC have been spotted, including this one at MICA and this banner off I-83, which has stayed up for more than a week. More substantial regional activity against both conventions will be happening on January 26th and 27th in Frederick, MD, during a regional Anti-RNC/DNC consulta.

Related news: Unconventional Action publishes free Unconventional Strategies tabloid | Twin Cities Indymedia: TransFolk and Queers to Blockade RNC | Colorado Indymedia:Democratic National Convention Media Walk Through at the Pepsi Center

A look at crime, community-based approaches to intervention and mediation, Baltimore police history, 'stop snitching' in historical perspective, civil resistance activism, and a contribution by political prisoner Marshall Eddie Conway….Updates on the struggles of stadium cleaning workers, hotel workers, and residents in East Baltimore. Know your rights! Click here to read the latest issue

Every once in a while, a movie comes along which captures, as a metaphor, the times that we are living through. That film is “No Country for Old Men.” It’s based on a novel by Cormac McCarthy. The flick is the creation of the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan. It is a gem of a movie--grim in effect and dark in vision. In it, the villain, a sociopath, (think “Bush-Cheney Gang”) is winning; and the good guy, the Sheriff, (read “The People”), is ready to call it quits!

Today, my old neighborhood of Locust Point, on Baltimore’s south end, is going through some radical changes. It is being yuppified! When I was a kid, during WWII, however, it was a working class bastion. The picture of John L. Lewis of the United Miner Workers could be found on the walls of some of the 24 taverns in the area. The stevedores dominated the community and the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) was its primary anchor.