Get Free Times

SPRING FOWARD, FALL BACK DOWN

The Get Free Times is a compilation of socially conscious writings, by people that are concerned for the struggles that continue to exist throughout all nations and peoples. Stepping away from mainstream media, they are ideas from real people who remain focused on freedom, justice, and liberty for all.

Submissions are encouraged and open to all. Current or former student/worker/professor at Oswego State? Memember of the Oswego or nieghboring community?
Do you want something published or covered that is important to you? Then create an article, build a poem, draw a cartoon, construct a graph, chart a chart, visualize a ven diagram and send it to getfreetimes@gmail.com [but please, no spam, we are not robots]

The views expressed in the articles, graphics, letters, ect. published in The Get Free Times do not necessarily reflect the views of the Social Justice Club or anything else associated with the group.

Internet Security: Big Brother is not only watching us, but they are also Watching You

Here are some tips from Winston Smith, an Oswego State Student:

Hacktivismo, an international group of computer security experts and human rights workers, just released Torpark, an anonymous, fully portable Web browser based on Mozilla Firefox. Torpark comes pre-configured, requires no installation, can run off a USB memory stick, and leaves no tracks behind in the browser or computer. Torpark is a highly modified variant of Portable Firefox, that uses the TOR (The Onion Router) network to anonymize the connection between the user and the website that is being visited.

“We live in a time where acquisition technologies are cherry picking and collating every aspect of our online lives,” said Hacktivismo founder Oxblood Ruffin. “Torpark continues Hacktivismo’s commitment to expanding privacy rights on the Internet. And the best thing is, it’s free. No one should have to pay for basic human rights, especially the right of privacy.”

Torpark is being released under the GNU General Public License and is dedicated to the Panchen Lama*.

Check it out, along with other amazing software at http://www.hacktivismo.com/

like

ScatterChat is a secure instant messaging client designed for non-technical users who require secure and anonymous communications. Our typical end-users include human rights and democracy advocates operating in hostile territory. ScatterChat is also a valuable tool for anyone requiring secure communications.
http://www.scatterchat.com/

The Social Justice Club: A History

-writing from los barricados,
Subcomandante Maslauskas
maslauskas@riseup.net

Fall 2003. I was a freshman at SUNY Oswego and talked with one of my friends about forming a Socialist Club on campus - whatever “socialism” meant to me at that time was uncertain but a little reading of Lenin, Che and Marx led me to believe that the conditions the world was in were wretched and revolution was inevitable. What better way to describe the matters of the world, the squalid conditions, the poverty, the oppression and the best ways to mend these problems than to form a club. Luckily, my friend and I soon found out that a new student group was forming. That group was called the Social Justice Club.

Initially, the committed group of a dozen or so students set out on having heated weekly discussions, organizing events on campus and publishing a bimonthly - then biweekly - then bimonthly again rag - The Get Free Times. Often, I found myself more excited in attending the next Social Justice Club meeting than class. The reason for this was perhaps I found within the comforting arms of the group something called “education” - it was a sharp departure from what increasingly became known to me as the rote, dreariness of the Factory at Oswego (however, I should interject that I had quite a few memorable classes, professors and discussions with classmates).

What I found quite remarkable about the group was its diversity of ideas and thoughts which could be traced in part back to the diverse roots of those active in SJC. We were Haitian, Panamanian, Salvadoran, Ukrainian, Palestinian, Georgian, Zimbabwean, Indian, African, European, indigenous, Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish, Hindu, Christian, atheist, white, brown... We had something in common - we were students, had working class backgrounds, we had a committed thirst for justice for the suffering in every part of the world. We could easily be described as Leftist but I never saw it that way - I just saw us as social justice advocates.

While I was busy with SJC I was also active in NYPIRG. Within a year’s time however, I found myself frustrated with NYPIRG. Certainly the people working in the organization were committed activists; I just had a problem with the hierarchical structure of the organization and its bureaucratic tendencies at its upper levels. I also found my politics at odds with some of NYPIRG’s reformist and electoralist aspects, especially as my beliefs radicalized. I did however continue to work closely with the PIRGsters on a number of campaigns and projects. As for SJC, members were conscious of their autonomy and were wary of what they saw at times as the NYPIRGification of SJC. Like it or not, we did hold some more radical positions than NYPIRG, especially in regards to imperialism - we also had a different name for The System. Or so it seemed.

As the year progressed, we cranked out newsletter after newsletter, at times causing quite a stir in the aptly apathetic student population. Professors invited some of us to speak to their classes about Cuba and Latin America and many Education Studies professors were quite interested in our group. In the spring we had a panel discussion on Haiti which hosted several speakers, one of them a recent graduate and SJC alum who predicted the US invasion of Haiti months before it happened. It was an interesting event but perhaps not as well received and well attended as SJC’s kickoff event held earlier that year - the Che Guevara open mic event.

The year ended and we bid farewell to what seemed like half of the group, including our president (which was a position more by student group policy default than by choice). The departing president struggled at times because she felt like she and one or two others were doing most of the work for the group. I soon learned what that felt like.

The second year we had a number of new members who were just as committed as the original SJC members. Some leftist Catholics, queer activists, a self-proclaimed socialist, a token republican, two budding anarchists, a Naderite and a few libertarians swelled our ranks to make a very interesting group. One thing that disappointed me a little though was that SJC had become a mostly white organization and the fear of NYPIRGification, for some odd reason, appeared to surface. This perhaps led some former members to depart.

The group kept on cranking out the Get Free Times and set out on some joint projects with the Muslim Student Association and the not too far away Rochester Against War. Some SJCers took direct action against fascists in PA and the war machine at home. Some plans never surfaced like an idea for a statewide college activist conference, and some direct action at Fort Drum. Attempts were made however to build closer ties between the campus and community.

In retrospect I would have to say that some of the biggest mistakes I made had to do with the Get Free Times. The first was when, out of student government pressure and the possibility of losing funding, I published an article, on the front page, written by a right wing student senator. I published another article by a Zionist who hinted that a Jewish religious war targeting Arabs and Muslims was justified. Part of the fault is my own but if there was a more participatory process involved in the editing of the Times then perhaps it would never have happened.

We did host a heated Israeli-Palestinian debate between four members of Hillel and four members of SJC which drew a large crowd. My comrades and I, hands down, won the debate - we jokingly asserted that that was the first time Palestine ever won anything. We also hosted a mock debate on the presidential (s)election and I spent a good deal and great waste of time at student senate meetings explaining to senators the virtues of free speech and what “partisan” meant.

As the year went by, I found myself caught in the middle of legal matters, fighting to stay in school yet at the same time becoming greatly disillusioned with the whole school system in general and the Factory at Oswego in particular. I finally got the boot from a select few at Oswego and had to find another school. Like many SJC members before me I was moving on.

It was difficult for me to decipher what exactly was happening in the Social Justice Club. (I had actually ceased calling it a club long before I left however because I saw social justice as a way of life, all encompassing; it by no means could be confined to a weekly two hour slot.) There was some difficulty though in the transition. Since our group was so apposed to hierarchy and leadership positions, someone filled the position of treasurer before I left. Nobody cared too much because it was solely to please senate and to get them off our backs. However, he used his position to threaten to cancel a speaker we had arranged to come before I left but had to push it back a few months. The plane ticket was already bought and it turned out that I was going to have to pay out of my pocket. In my exile, I thought the group was going to collapse. Luckily, our guest speaker, Vermont secessionist Thomas Naylor, gave the ticket to his son who needed it anyways. The club was saved for that time.

It’s hard to judge what else happened to the club in my absence. I knew the guest speaker fiasco could have been evaded if the nature of the group was more participatory, but a combination of the school senate, bureaucracy and the roteness and mindlessness of class prevented this from happening. But there is hope. This past spring I visited Oswego and SJC’s heart was still beating. I helped distribute fliers for a SJC organized workshop put on by the radical one-hundred year old union Industrial Workers of the World. I picked up a copy of the newly released Get Free Times and I was amazed. It was no longer the rag I knew that found problems and named the System but was timid in citing ways to solve these problems. It was now FOR something - it gave alternatives to alienation, domination, oppression and capitalism. It was poetically written in every aspect. It was really something else.

Today, in my absence, SJC is still creating controversy in an otherwise apathetic and dull atmosphere. I can look back at SJC and the members involved and thank them for raising my political consciousness to new heights. I continue to organize where I am now around a plethora of issues – labor, student power, political prisoners, war, capitalism, the State… I often look back at SJC and the rabble and ruckus we created and I know I can thank my comrades in SJC for being my teachers and, in part, bringing me to where I am today.
*** [the end]

“In particular, we must guard against the myth that Flores Magón himself always warned about: that of personalismo, of identifying the struggle for human liberation with a certain leader. One can point towards the example of the authoritarian revolutionary figure Ernesto “Che” Guevara as an object lesson in the perils of a cult of personality. When one identifies a hope with a personal leader, one condemns the struggle for liberation to be something that can be easily represented and repeated; co-opting a revolutionary dream into an icon that capitalism can easily turn into a commodity to sell alcohol or pop music.” - Mitchell Cowen Verter
Persons Die, but Noble Ideals are Eternal

Read This Before You Tear It Down
A Message from one of Social Justice’s Founding Sisters
[the following article can be found in the Spring issue #4 of the year 2004, published on may 7 in The Get Free Times]

When we first started Social Justice in the Fall of 2003 the whole premise was that we would provide a different and more progressive viewpoint on international issues. But more importantly we would be a voice for all oppressed peoples across the world, people whose lack of power has caused them too many times to be the victim. People, who because of their religion, skin color, or gender have been oppressed, hated and killed worldwide. These are the voices that we wanted the Oswego campus to hear, hoping that the hearing of these voices would ignite concern and that concern would bring forth activism. Never was the goal of the Social Justice group to be a dogmatic group with no true principles, but just a belief in anything that sounded "left wing."

Someone once said to me that the left never knows whose side they are on until they find out who is losing. There is much truth in that statement. Do we just blindly throw our support behind anyone? I feel that every member of our group is educated and every member of our group is deeply involved in critical thinking. And believe it or not, we all don't agree. When the issue of Reparation was raised in out groups, it got hot, some were adamantly for it and others looked down upon it. When it comes to the issue of socialism, some may embrace it and others see themselves as practicing capitalists. Recently, we showed a film called "Gaza Strip." Many came out to see it and many enjoyed it. "Gaza Strip" told the story of Palestinians living under the brutality of occupation; living under the gun of Israeli force. Does anyone, whether white, black, Jewish, or Muslim deserve to live in a land where they are a few steps up from slaves, unable to go throughout the land without checkpoints and harrassment? No. Just as no one deserves to walk on a bus and not know it it will be blown up by a suicide bomber. Is blood that is shed from an Israeli girl on her way to school by a suicide bomber less saddening than the blood shed by a little Palestinian boy from an Israeli attack. No. To me, the lost of innocent human life is equally disheartening, frustrating, and condemnable. This is something we all should be able to agree on, whether we are white, black, Muslim, Jewish.....

We are not looking for someone who wants us to give them a belief system. Sorry we are not passing those out. Rather, we love to converse and have dialogue and debates with whomever, even with people who may disagree with our programming or with an article in "The Get Free Times." Please feel free to intellectually challenge us, this will make our campus more interesting, it will make our campus more educated because college is about critical thinking. Social Justice has not always been perfect; however, we are a new group that is learning from our experiences. We are also learning about what it means to be a group of our nature on a conservative campus. Things that we have been attacked for either saying, or doing, would have easily recieved no backlash on campuses such as NYU or Columbia, where there is an aprreciation for diversity of thought and of cultures. It confuses me to see someone rip down a poster that simply says "Gaza Strip." In what ways is this effective? And what does that say about our campus? So when you question, when you fear, when you hate, don't tear down a poster; do something effective like coming to a Social Justice event and telling the audience what your beliefs are. And besides, tearing down the poster only wastes your time and makes our programs look more interesting and controversial, therefore giving us a bigger audience. But nevertheless, college is about intellectual sharing and expressing our views, freedom of speech and all that good stuff. So don't hate, participate.

-peace, one love
Danielle Ponder

Oh yes, you did not read the title wrong.
We're back, and yes - we are better than ever.

So, this is a call out - if for some strange and random chance anybody actually reads this.

If you are currantly or former State University of New York at Oswego student/professor/worker/visitor or resisdent of the Oswego and neighboring communities you can now submit your articles for consideration of publication in our semi-occuring newsletter, The Get Free Times!!

To busy playing videogames to write anything? Well, that is okay because we are also real people, with real lives and if you would like to come to one of our future events and talk with us in real time than feel free.

Peace and Love yall.


version 2.0
-an editor of social justice

In the Time of Youth Spent in Jail: [Dispatches from la isla]
by Re-edumakation Summertyme Squardron

A young man sites in class looking blankly down at the prescribed text book. The teacher hums on, giving the lecture of why this culture is so great, yet inside the teacher's head he knows that these students are smart enough to take his lecture and in one second forget it while walking out the door. A young womyn sits towards the back of the room and immediately begins looking out the window, overlooking the city and all it's stories.

A question is asked of the students and the heads of some look down into their papers trying to avoid the teachers glare, while others raise their hands preparing to answer the question as the teacher expects - without critical thought, selt-thought, or flare. The unwritten rule comes up again and the rhetoric of the government reaches far into the class room as the students are afraid to speak their true mind in fear of landing themselves in jail. The thought police have once again prevailed.

And on television that night after classes are finished a message goes out to the world informing them that "our educational system is amazing, by far their is no comparison insight."

The next day the students once again file into their classes and once again are indoctrinated with the rhetoric of newspeak until it is time to graduate and join the working masses.

The Last Three Years of the Social Justice Club: Success and Failure

During the fall semester of 2003, a group of students attending the State University of New York (SUNY) at Oswego decided it was time to put some action behind their ideas. Towards the middle of the semester the interested individuals were able to draft up a proposal for the student senate to vote on. This proposal mapped out the creation of what came to be known as the Oswego Social Justice Club. Soon afterwards the proposal was passed and the Social Justice Club began receiving official student association funds to publish newsletters, create posters, invite guest speakers, hold public discussions, put on movies, and generally stir up the opinion of the mass. This is the story of my experience with the Social Justice Club from its founding days up to now in its virtual disappearance.

I had been a student at SUNY Oswego for one year and was involved with other organizations on campus such as the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG) and People Opposing War (POW), the latter now extinct. With NYPIRG I was involved in the anti-sweatshop campaign holding some events along with meetings to raise the awareness of the surrounding community on the subject of sweatshops. I enjoyed working with NYPIRG and think of the organization in high regard, however I felt strangely out of place. Perhaps it was the lack of support and interest amongst the student population on campus, disillusionment from never attempting something like this before, or a need for a more autonomous movement, but soon I began distancing myself from NYPIRG. Although, as I look back on the situation I think about the possibilities of working with a larger community of individuals and hope that future projects attempt to include the widest possible array of movements, working together and sharing resources. In the depths of this disillusionment came various individuals, who brought forth the idea of creating a more critical organization on campus. From this rubble, the Social Justice Club was birthed.

I welcomed the change and the refreshing outlooks of the other individuals involved in forming the Social Justice Club (SJC). In these early moments the SJC had a rough bunch of 10, give or take, individuals keen on participating. Finally I was connecting with people who cared enough to do something, instead of just thinking, but never acting – or worse, betraying their ideas like rallying against sweatshops, only to go out and buy a pair of Nike Shoes. The folks involved with the SJC were not like the white activists I’d experienced in other groups, these people were from all over the world, an international assembly of ideas who all brought different ideas to the operating table. I believe that because of this diverse collective of minds, the amount of critical thinking that went on in situations the SJC was often thought of as a “leftist” organization – more over a “club” of vanguard revolutionaries. This however, is not true. The SJC has never had an actual membership, although we have had presidents (some good, some bad) it is only because this is required in order for the group to receive student association funds. The group has been open to all students and those who wish to participate have and those who wish not to have also, however many of the latter have critiqued the SJC with straw man like arguments.

The group started holding weekly meetings with a loosely planed agenda in order to stimulate critical thinking about a topic, usually to do with current events. Week to week the attendance varied, but for the most part new faces kept appearing and the core group of 10 or so were usually present. At the start of the club we would discuss our semi-weekly publication “The Get Free Times” during the weekly meetings, however we quickly found that this was taking away from having an open community discussion with the folks who came, who might not be as closely involved with the internal workings of the group. Therefore, later on we realized that instead of boring the folks at these meetings with internal matters, we would hold a separate meeting for such issues, such as the creation of “The Get Free Times” and leave the general meeting completely open for general debate/discussion of a chosen topic. I believe this worked out well and allowed us to work on things more closely, but it did also take up more time, amongst our busy college student lives of love and romance.

At the start of the spring semester of 2004, we found ourselves as a group coming together with our publication “The Get Free Times” coming out semi-weekly and causing a large ruckus. Every Friday the core members of the SJC could be found in the Student Union at our booth dishing out the newest publications from various organizations and open to chat with the community about what we were doing. We called this “Get Free Fridays” and I think it worked out very well because Fridays in general rule and on top of that we were letting the public know we existed and not afraid to point out the injustice of any system. Yet, as we know, all things in life are not easy and the SJC soon found itself lacking in funds for its various projects. It was somewhat disappointing to see this happen, but I think we all knew that we were making an impact, or at least had been trying really hard. Eventually, the spring semester of 2004 came to an end and summer recess began.

Herein, lays one of the main problems I’ve found amongst student movements, especially the SJC. These summer breaks find everyone going in different directions creating a high degree of separation from what we’ve come to work so hard to create. This is where things began to fall apart, on our vacations, how ironic. Imagine, a group of construction workers work for months on end, creating a house, yet then out of now where they take three months off, only to come back and find that the house fell down due to lack of support – to me this is what summer time does. We need to work harder in the future to keep the movement for social justice (yes, I know that is ambiguous) going at all moments in time, not just when we are in school. It seems strange in a way because while in school, everyone has piles of work to do, while outside of school this can also be true, but what kind? We need to find the balance or we all need to quit our jobs, some things are more important than others. Indeed, I myself would find myself spending almost an entire year outside of Oswego during this time, while the semesters rolled on, to only come back and find the SJC in pieces.

It seems that as much as we may have been successful in publishing a semi-weekly newsletter and organizing events for the community, the group wasn’t successful in opening up the doors of its possibilities to other students in the community who may have liked to contribute. Therefore, in the end, eventually all of the founding members who were full of energy and ideas moved on, leaving SJC alone and by itself. Why was this?

I know for a fact that I’m not the only student on campus interested in doing something about sweatshops or activism in general, yet it seemed that outside of a few individuals no one wished to take action. This is one of the gravest problems facing the youth of America today, their apathy towards accepting things the way they are and thinking that they can’t make a positive change, or simply don’t care since they are well off and away at college. Indeed, many individuals, including myself have been sucked into the everyday bump and grind of college life lurking with loads of reading and writing, friends, survival, or just plain old drinking constant 30 packs of Pabst Blue beer. This much has always been obvious to me, some people just don’t care, call it being American, call it being stupid and lazy, just don’t call these people and ask them to make a change. They don’t need your help watching television, filling up their gas tanks, struggling for daily wages, partying at the bar, playing golf and videogames because they’ve everything they desire – drugs, television, and sex (okay, so not everyone drinks beer and has sex). I guess this is what growing up American teaches people – to behave like mindless robots.

Eventually, in the spring of 2006 I made it back to Oswego and looked up the Social Justice Club. Unsurprisingly, the club was on its way to the dustbins of time. However, what is even more disappointing is that the club now had even more money to spend on bringing guest speakers to campus, publish semi-weekly newsletters, and stir the muck of the stagnant scene in Oswego. From its uncertain beginnings, to its growth in the community at causing controversy and debate, the SJC had reached rock bottom. At anyone moment during the last semester the core group of SJC numbered as low as one to as many as three, never seeing a new face. The elected members of the group vanished and responsibility was placed into the hands of an outside few, who surprisingly enough had just moved back to Oswego week’s prior. This meant that absolutely no one out of the 8,000+ students in the college community prior to these few individuals, who hadn’t even lived in Oswego the past year, cared enough to take advantage of such an opportunity. This amazing lack of interest can be explained by a number of reasons including the communities general lack of knowledge that the group exists, the conservative nature of Oswego, the amount of time spent partying compared to the amount of time spent working, and the overall apathy of our American youth. Why is the Youth of America so apathetic?

Thus, dwindling into the summer of 2006 the SJC ran, as steam was slowly lost, hard work through time traded over for a party, which never seemed to end. Here the Social Justice Club stands, unknown of its future – yet certain of its past.

by Us We Go

Ecovillage at Ithaca

"EcoVillage at Ithaca, located in the beautiful Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, is part of a growing global movement for a saner, more sustainable human culture. Comprising an intentional community and a non-profit educational organization, the project aims to develop an alternative model for suburban living which provides a satisfying, healthy, socially rich lifestyle, while minimizing ecological impacts.

Our village currently includes two 30-home cohousing neighborhoods, an organic CSA vegetable farm, an organic berry farm, office spaces for cottage industry, an education office, a warm-season grasses ecosystem restoration project, a sheep pasture, and varied natural areas. Over 80% of the 175 acre site is planned to remain green space, including 55 acres in a conservation easement held by the Finger Lakes Land Trust.

Future elements include more accessible and affordable housing, an education center, a charter school, village-scale wind power, organic orchards, a roadside farm stand, on-site biological wastewater treatment, greywater recycling, biomass energy crops, onsite biodiesel/vegetable-oil fuel production, carshare, shuttle van, a natural cemetery, and an expanding portfolio of educational programs. And more fun!"

find out more by visiting their website at:
http://www.ecovillage.ithaca.ny.us/default.html

Silly stuff... Does anyone know if this place actually exists?

The City of Crumm Mountain
http://crummmountain.tripod.com/


The Social Justice Club gets silly and forgets to come to their summer time meetings, due to previous obligations.

It is summer now, the winter has passed and we are all on vacation somewhere, drinking lots of water and eating hot dogs from our local street venders, see yall next fall!

-much love,
your oswego social justice club

ps. perhaps we will have some summer time updates, such as - what do students do during the summer in order to pay the bills?