Center for the Study of Political Graphics

Community Solutions, Not Jail Expansion

Mary Sutton, Californians United for a Responsible Budget, CURB, Youth Justice Coalition

2012

Los Angeles

Los Angeles— Over two hundred community members showed an enthusiastic display of opposition to
the Board of Supervisors and Sheriff Department’s move to expand LA County’s jails. After noting much
community pressure, the Supervisors immediately backed down from the $1.4 billion dollar expansion
plan that Sheriff Baca proposed in October. While the supervisors did not decide to withdraw the
county’s application for state AB 900 Phase 2 jail construction funding, they did slow the pace on the
commissioning of a $5.7 million report on possible jail expansion.

Throughout the meeting a series of reports from the Vera Justice Institute, ACLU, and the anticipated
report form expert Jim Austin were cited, outlining countless solutions to LA’s notorious jail conditions
and overcrowding. “If the Board of Supervisors is so concerned about improving conditions in the jail then
let’s do what we know. The only solution is to reduce the jail population, not to build more cells” notes
Emily Harris, Statewide Coordinator for Californians United for a Responsible Budget. “We know the
Supervisors won’t vote for an outright $1.4 billion dollar expansion, but moving forward with the AB 900
applications shows that the Supervisors are still investing in moving forward with failed expansion policies.
We fear that in the place of a one-time massive allocation, they will try to deceive LA residents by pushing
forward a series of small expansion plans that amount to the same thing.

Outside the Kenneth Hahn administrative building, nearly a dozen LA-based organizations rallied their
people for two hours before entering the hall and giving an hour and half of public comment to the Board.
“Obviously we want the board of supervisors to align themselves with the vast majority of LA residents in
opposing any new jail cells in our county,” said David Chavez of Critical Resistance and the Youth Justice
Coalition, two lead organizers of Tuesday’s mobilization. “While the Board voted against the voices of the
people today, it is also clear that people are not going to back down from there demands that resources go
toward reentry services, educating residents of this city, toward healthcare, toward jobs, not toward locking
them up. We will certainly be back, and I am sure we will be back even stronger.”

Emily Harris
CURB Statewide Coordinator

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=850829448#!/pages/Californians-United-for-a-Responsible-Budget-CURB/171549902894327

http://www.youth4justice.org/

http://curbprisonspending.org/

E. Galeano Has Seen This Before--
The Hooded Prisoners Recognize Each Other by their Coughs
Dara Greenwald (1972-2012)
Stencil 2005
New York, New York

CSPG’s Poster of the Week is by Dara Greenwald, who died this week at age 40 after a long battle with cancer. Dara was an artist, activist, curator, and a member of the Just Seeds’ Artists Cooperative founded by her partner, Josh MacPhee. Dara and Josh were co-curators of Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures, 1960s to Now, a traveling political poster exhibition and co-editors of the accompanying book. Dara was also a PhD Candidate in the Electronic Art Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Dara and Josh visited the Center for the Study of Political Graphics while they were researching Paper Politics: An International Exhibition of Socially-Engaged Printmaking that traveled from New York to Oregon from 2008 to 2010. In reviewing Paper Politics, the Pittsburgh City Paper called Dara’s stencil “one of the exhibit's best works …with just a few dozen block letters, Greenwald summons the complex horror of such injustices [as extrajudicial detention].”

Eduardo Galeano is an Uruguayan journalist, author and novelist, who experienced the brutal military regimes in Uruguay and Argentina, was imprisoned and lived in exiled for many years. The title of Dara’s poster, “The hooded prisoners recognize one another by their coughs” comes from Galeano’s second novel, Dı́as y noches de amor y de guerra /Days and Nights of Love and War (1978). She used it in this poster to evoke many incidents of torture in prisons, but specifically refers to the U.S. military detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
As this week marks the 10th anniversary of the U.S. military detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Dara’s striking poster is even more poignant. The Cuban camp has held 779 foreign captives, and 171 remain. The prison was set up to hold and interrogate detainees suspected of links to al Qaeda, the Taliban and other groups classified by the United States as terrorist organizations.

To mark the 10th anniversary, human rights protesters dressed in orange prison-style jumpsuits and covering their heads with black bags marched past the White House on Wednesday, January 11. Protests were also planned for Miami, Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, Paris, Toronto, Madrid, Berlin, London, Brussels and other cities. The same day, detainees at the U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay also launched a hunger strike, inspired in part by U.S. activists who have called for a national day of action.

Protesters voiced anger with Obama’s failure to close the prison—which he promised to do during his 2008 presidential campaign—and with his approval last month of the National Defense Authorization Act, which codified the U.S. government's authority to detain prisoners, including U.S. citizens, indefinitely without trial.

¡Dara Greenwald PRESENTE!
For more about Dara Greenwald:
http://www.daragreenwald.com/
http://badatsports.com/2012/dara-greenwald-1972-2012/
http://never-the-same.org/interviews/dara-greenwald/

Sources for Guantanamo:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/11/us-usa-guantanamo-prison-idUSTRE80A1CN20120111
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-guantanamo-protests-20120112,0,400199.story
http://www.democracynow.org/2012/1/10/guantnamo_prisoners_launch_hunger_strike

Blowing the Whistle on a War Crime is Not a Crime

Bradley Manning Support Network

Bradleymanning.org

Couragetoresist.org

2010-2011
Private Bradley Manning in 1st Court Appearance
Alleged U.S. Army whistleblower Private Bradley Manning is scheduled to make his first court appearance December 16, 2011, after being held for more than a year and a half by the U.S. military. Manning was first held in Kuwait, then at Quantico, then at Leavenworth, and was brought to Fort Meade in Maryland for the pre-trial hearing that could last an entire week.
The 23-year-old Manning has been held by the US military since May 2010, charged with multiple counts relating to the leaking of hundreds of thousands of secret U.S. diplomatic cables to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks in the biggest leak of classified U.S. documents in history.
Manning has not been seen or heard by the public since his arrest. He was initially held on a charge of leaking a classified video to WikiLeaks that showed a 2007 helicopter attack that killed a dozen people in Iraq, including two Reuters employees—a journalist and his driver. Military prosecutors are aiming to show there is sufficient evidence to bring Manning to trial at a general court-martial on 22 criminal charges. If convicted, Manning could face life in prison.
For nearly a year, he was kept in solitary confinement at Quantico for 23 hours a day, checked every five minutes under a so-called "prevention of injury order" and stripped naked at night apart from a smock. He was moved to Leavenworth after months of public outcry that his treatment was torture.
More than 250 of America's most eminent legal scholars signed a letter protesting against Manning’s treatment in military prison, contesting that his "degrading and inhumane conditions" are illegal, unconstitutional and could even amount to torture. The list of signatories includes Laurence Tribe, a Harvard professor who is considered to be America's foremost liberal authority on constitutional law. He taught constitutional law to Barack Obama and was a key backer of his 2008 presidential campaign.
The pre-trial hearing began Friday, December 16, 2011, at Fort Meade in Maryland. the The Bradley Manning Support Network organized a protest outside the gates of Fort Meade in solidarity with the accused soldier. Manning’s court appearance coincides with the completion of the U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq after an eight-year occupation.
Kevin Zeese, an attorney for the Bradley Manning Support Network, said, “The people who should be prosecuted are not Bradley Manning. He’s accused of letting the truth out. He’s not accused of doing any criminal activity. He’s accused of letting the truth out, and he should be given an award for that, not prosecuted. He’s facing the death penalty, potentially. He’s facing the death penalty for exposing war crimes.”
Sources:
http://www.democracynow.org/seo/2011/12/16/bradley_manning_famed_whistleblower_daniel_ellsberg
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/3/3/bradley_manning_hit_with_new_charges
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/10/bradley-manning-legal-scholars-letter
http://www.politico.com/blogs/joshgerstein/0411/Army_moving_Wikileaks_suspect_Bradley_Manning_to_Leavenworth.html

CSPG’s Poster of the Week comes from Adbusters, the culture-jamming magazine that sparked the Occupy Wall Street Movement. Thanks to Mark Epstein who sent posters from Occupy Seattle which included this perfect graphic to mark “Buy Nothing Day.”

Escape Capitalism
2011, Adbusters
Vancouver, B.C.
Buy Nothing Day (BND) is an international day of protest against consumerism. It was founded in Vancouver by artist Ted Dave, and subsequently promoted by Adbusters Magazine, based in Vancouver, Canada. The first Buy Nothing Day was organized in Mexico in September 1992 "as a day for society to examine the issue of over-consumption." In 1997, it was moved to the Friday after American Thanksgiving, also called "Black Friday,” which is one of the 10 busiest shopping days in the U.S. Most other countries observe it on the following Saturday. Participation now includes more than 65 nations.

Here’s how Adbusters relates Buy Nothing Day to Occupy Wall Street.

“You’ve been sleeping on the streets for two months pleading peacefully for a new spirit in economics. And just as your camps are raided, your eyes pepper sprayed and your head’s knocked in, another group of people are preparing to camp-out. Only these people aren’t here to support occupy Wall Street, they’re here to secure their spot in line for a Black Friday bargain at Super Target and Macy’s.
Occupy gave the world a new way of thinking about the fat cats and financial pirates on Wall Street. Now let’s give them a new way of thinking about the holidays, about our own consumption habits. Let’s use the coming 20th annual Buy Nothing Day to launch an all-out offensive to unseat the corporate kings on the holiday throne.
This year’s Black Friday will be the first campaign of the holiday season where we set the tone for a new type of holiday culminating with #OCCUPYXMAS. As the global protests of the 99% against corporate greed and casino capitalism continues, lets take the opportunity to hit the empire where it really hurts…the wallet.
On Nov 25/26th we escape the mayhem and unease of the biggest shopping day in North America and put the breaks on rabid consumerism for 24 hours. Flash mobs, consumer fasts, mall sit-ins, community events, credit card-ups, whirly-marts and jams, jams, jams! We don’t camp on the sidewalk for a reduced price tag on a flat screen TV or psycho-killer video game. Instead, we occupy the very paradigm that is fueling our eco, social and political decline.
Historically, Buy Nothing Day has been about fasting from hyper consumerism – a break from the cash register and reflecting on how dependent we really are on conspicuous consumption. On this 20th anniversary of Buy Nothing Day, we take it to the next level, marrying it with the message of #occupy…

We #OCCUPYXMAS.

Shenanigans begin November 25!”

Sources:
http://www.adbusters.org/campaigns/bnd
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buy_Nothing_Day

Stop!! Wells Fargo Bank Loans to Chile
Malaquías Montoya
Silkscreen, 1979
Oakland, California
8139

The Occupy Wall Street Movement has called November 5, 2011 BANK TRANSFER DAY. It calls for everyone to take their money out of the big banks and put it into credit unions. CSPG’s Poster-of-the Week shows a similar action that took place more than 30 years ago.

On September 11, 1973, the U.S. government initiated a military coup to overthrow the democratically elected socialist government of Chile. Henry Kissinger was a key architect of this coup. The brutal military dictatorship led by General Pinochet lasted for decades, and tens of thousands were killed or disappeared. International boycotts were invoked against products from Chile and U.S. business institutions that continued to negotiate and trade with Chile. In Stop Wells Fargo Bank Loans to Chile (1979), Malaquías Montoya used the bank’s trademark stagecoach, symbol of a romanticized and heroicized U.S. past, to call attention to their unheroic financial support of the Chilean military junta. In addition to listing the atrocities committed in Chile, this poster promoted direct sanctions against the bank by announcing a “withdrawal day” when people would transfer their accounts.

In the mid 1980s, the movement against apartheid in South African used a similar “withdrawal day” tactic, but then it was to withdraw funds from banks that did business with South Africa. It is important to note that Wells Fargo was one of the few U.S. banks to refuse to do business with South Africa in the 1980s. One can but speculate that the unfavorable public attention directed towards Wells Fargo in the 1970s alerted them to the dangers of continuing to support governments whose abuses attracted wide international attention.

Poster Text:
Stop!! Wells Fargo Bank Loans to Chile
"They Have A Legend To Live Up To"
$155 million to the Chilean Military Junta to finance repression in Chile: 40,000 killed 2500 Disappeared 1 Million Exiled 1 out of 10 Chileans Forced Into Exile
Outlawed All Human & Democratic Rights
Join Us - Withdrawal Day April 17, 1979 Leaflet Wells Fargo Banks
Tranfer Your Accounts
Info: Free Chile Center, bay area 415/ 433-6698-6055. san jose 408/ 295 7349. san diego 714/ 453-9164. los angeles
1979 Malaquías Montoya


Sources: http://occupywallst.org/forum/november-5th-bank-transfer-day-pass-on/
http://money.howstuffworks.com/personal-finance/banking/credit-union.htm

CSPG's Poster of the Week pays tribute to the ongoing Occupy Wall Street Movement. This silkscreen was made in Anchorage, Alaska! Thanks to Craig Updegrove for sending it. The Center for the Study of Political Graphics would very much like to have more posters made in response to this exciting and spreading grass roots expression of protest and celebration.