The elected officials of New York State ended their legislative session in Albany on June 2nd. They are headed home for the summer after failing to secure the rights of tenants or meeting New York state’s climate goals, refusing to pass Good Cause Eviction and the Build Public Renewables Act. What happened? To try and answer this and more, we bring on socialist organizers  to break down what happened in Albany and how New York lawmakers left tenants and the climate out to dry. Tonight, we are joined by Avi, a tenant organizer fighting for the Right to Remain, and RPM’s co-host and ecosocialist specialist, Lee Ziesche. We will assess the situation in Albany and the movement necessary, both inside and outside the halls of the State Capitol, to defeat the corporate opposition and make Good Cause and BPRA a reality in the Empire State.  

Visit right2remain.com to learn more about the ongoing campaign to pass Good Cause Eviction legislation in New York state.

On this show, Lee references the Sane Energy Project (saneenergy.org) and No NBK Pipeline Coalition (nonbkpipeline.org) as well as the NYC-DSA Ecosocialist Working Group (https://ecosocialists.nyc/).

Volume 1, Issue 8

By Seth

This playlist was the soundtrack to the first annual Janesville May Day Celebration

Download and print your own copy of our International Workers’ Day pamphlet from the first annual Janesville May Day Celebration.

Access to safe, affordable housing is a right. However, the city of Columbus insists on letting a “market” dictate this basic necessity, where only individuals who have enough wealth to participate in the system can afford housing. The city’s reliance on handouts to developers instead of directly working to solve the housing crisis leads to residents becoming displaced by rising rents, inflated property values, and an ever-dwindling supply of affordable options. Housing does not belong in a market.

To this end, we affirm and support unhoused encampments in our city, including @heertoserve and @firstcollective614 located on East Mound Street. Unhoused communities are a direct result of the city’s market-based approach to the housing crisis. As long as the city persists in this approach, our community will have residents who cannot access housing. Until we have affordable housing for all, we must stand with unhoused neighbors who deserve the dignity to live as they can.

We demand housing justice for all.

In solidarity,

Columbus Democratic Socialists of America
Housing Priority Campaign

This week marks both the 13th anniversary of the assassination of beloved abortion provider and patients’ rights advocate Dr. George Tiller by an anti-abortion extremist, and the second anniversary of the peoples’ uprising against NYPD sparked by the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many many more.

Although the official Supreme Court decision that will overturn Roe v. Wade has yet to be released, the reality on the ground in many places in the so-called United States is that abortion has been made illegal. Here in New York City, organizers are preparing for shifts in the nature of abortion care, attempting to protect providers in the face of the potential criminalization of abortion, and navigating a street landscape that lays bare the reality that organized white nationalists and fascists have thrown their lot in with the anti-abortion movement.

On this show, we're joined by NYC for Abortion Rights organizer Nix to discuss self-managed abortion and the landscape of abortion access now. We take live calls from the WBAI audience about abortion.

Continue the discussion by following NYC for Abortion Rights: abortionrights.nyc

On June 2, the legislative session will end in New York State and elected officials will head home for the summer. And in typical Albany fashion, the fight to pass the most transformational bills is coming down to the wire. Tonight, we continue our series of interviews with the DSA for the Many slate of candidates with Vanessa Agudelo, who is joining us live on RPM from Peekskill, New York. Vanessa is running for Assembly District 95 in the Lower Hudson Valley. We'll talk to her about why Peekskill and the other communities she’s running to represent need a Green New Deal, the status of the Build Public Renewables Act with one week left to pass the bill, and much more.

For more info on Vanessa follow @VanessaBAgudelo on twitter and visit her website www.vanessaforny.com

BC students left in the dark during emergency response.

Dozens of police from Newton and Boston descended onto BC’s campus last night in response to an emergency call. Now students and members of the BC community are looking for answers as to what was going on and questioning why an emergency alert was not sent out to the community.

On Saturday evening just before eleven o’clock a tweet from an account that monitors police band radios alerted members of the public that Boston Police were responding to reports of an armed individual on BC’s campus. The account monitors police radio frequencies and reports on police, fire, and EMS incidents in Boston and the surrounding area.

Obviously this is alarming information to discover on social media. Without verification it’s hard to know in the moment what is true or not, but with the prevalence of mass shootings in the United States people cannot afford to take alerts like this lightly. The author then posted that Newton police were en-route to the campus to assist with the response.

Regardless of what the eventual outcome of the incident was, and we don’t know what happened because neither BC nor BCPD has released any information at this point, the fact is there was a massive deployment of police in response to the threat of an armed individual on BC’s campus. If the individual wasn’t armed, or wasn’t even on campus, or if the entire thing turned out to be a prank, it doesn’t matter. If it was a serious enough threat that Boston and Newton police mobilized that many officers to respond, it was a serious enough threat that members of the BC community should have been alerted and advised what to do. The eventual outcome doesn’t validate the actions that were not taken while incident was taking place.

While the initial twee indicated the individual claimed to have a gun, a member of a local news team on the sight last night across from 66 informed us he heard reports it was a knife.

Over forty minutes after the initial tweet about the armed individual police still had residents of the dormitory gathered outside on the lawn. Witnesses that crossed the street to talk to us let us know that at least one student wanted to leave and was not allowed. At around 11:40 pm we witnessed officers patting down several male students among the group of people gathered on the lawn, so it appeared even at that late time officers were still looking for something or someone.

Video of the police presence outside BC can be seen here. Video of the students gathered outside with police can be seen here and here. Just before midnight, almost an hour after the initial tweet was posted, police began to depart and allowed students to return to the dormitory, video of which can be seen here.

Around midnight the account that monitors the police frequencies posted that the situation was all clear and the call may have been a prank. Without confirmation from BC, Boston, or Newton police it is impossible to know what really happened.

One interesting thing to note here is that we assume the person or people who run the account monitoring police radios heard the calls about the incident on Boston or Newton’s radio frequency and not BC’s. That is because as far as we know Boston College police use an encrypted radio frequency that cannot be heard on police scanners that members of the public use to listen to radio traffic. This is not common among police departments or university police from what we can gather. Members of the public can use police scanners, radio scanner apps on mobile devices, or websites to listen to first responders’ frequencies including the Boston and Newton police and fire departments. It is unclear why a college police department would need encrypted radios.

A forum on a site dedicated to radio topics from a decade ago discussed BCPD’s use of encrypted radios. Another poster on the site shared the same information. Several years ago NPR published a piece on encryption and police radios and reported the vast majority of real police departments do not use encrypted frequencies. Lindsay Blanton, the CEO of Broadcastify.com, a site dedicated to providing access to police frequencies, said only ten to fifteen percent of police communications are hidden by encryption. He explained that encryption can inhibit a departments ability to communicate with surrounding departments.

“Encryption costs money, especially when it means buying new radios, which can cost thousands of dollars per unit. There’s also a technical challenge in figuring out ‘interoperability’ — how to stay in touch with other departments and agencies, especially if they’re using different systems.”

Former police chief and former head of the National Police Foundation Jim Bueermann spoke in support of publicly accessible police communications. He said “he almost never encountered a situation in which open radio communications put him in danger or compromised the work during his three decades as a police officer. He says officers already have more secure ways of sharing sensitive information — cellphones and group texts — and he thinks there’s value in keeping a police department’s broader communications out in the open.”

Regardless of whether BCPD uses encrypted radios or not the issue at hand is as of late Sunday afternoon members of the BC community still have no official account of what happened last night. Information about an armed individual being on BC’s campus was apparently relayed to a crisis or support line, and the threat was serious enough that a large number of Boston and Newton police were dispatched to BC’s campus. It’s hard to understand how an emergency alert or some sort of information was not sent out to BC students. If it eventually turned out that police discovered the individual was not armed or the call was fake and there was no threat everyone should be relieved. But before that was confirmed and the possibility of an armed individual was real, how could BC not send out an alert? In the future if there were an active threat are people confidant that BC or BCPD would handle it correctly and do everything possible to keep the BC community safe?

A number of questions need to be answered. Students and members of the community need to know exactly what happened over the course of the hour in question and need to know why as of late Sunday afternoon there still has been know official communication informing everyone what happened.

For more of our reporting, including a 5 part series on BC’s police chief, check out our blog here!

https://ydsofbc.wordpress.com/blog/

Like many members and chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) nationally we have been disturbed and disappointed with the recent decision by the National Political Committee (NPC) to... Read more »

The post Statement from DSA Long Beach on the recent troubles with the initial decertification of the national BDS-Palestine Solidarity Working Group. appeared first on DSA-LB.