http://www.justtalk.blog/index.php/2021/01/11/got-covid-get-punished/

“Thank you , it is SO good to have books”

Its amazing what a simple used $5 novel can do.  For its desperate times in our COVID hotspot jail.  Most sections are locked down, meaning women and men often spend 20 hours or more locked in their cages.  Its mass solitary confinement endangering everyone’s health and sanity.  After freedom now, persons inside most often ask for books.  Science fiction, novels of every description,  history books, dictionaries, large print bibles and Korans.  The joy they bring is incalculable:

“Having crossword books is wonderful… I get to actually engage my brain and think! It is a mindless sad existence here… thank you again”

Please help us respond to these requests.  The requests are numerous, and for $15 we can often send three $5 used novels from discount bookstores. 

Donate via our paypal/credit card button

or by check paid to “Justice and Unity for the Southern Tier”, JUST, POB 93, Bible School Park, NY 13737

Press Sun Bulletin 12 11 20 article

 

 

 

JUST Senate Testimony Sept 22 2020

and the story is here

In response to requests, posts on COVID from the JUST pages are here, and with some overlap posts from www.justtalk.blog are here.

Bill Martin

July 4th, 2020

On the eve of the declaration of independence in 1776 twenty-four-year-old William Bingham set sail from Delaware Bay.  His destination?  Martinique, the brightest jewel in the French colonial crown, more valuable to the royal treasury than all of French Canada for which it was exchanged in a settlement with Great Britain.  Third son of a deceased Philadelphia merchant, Bingham would return to the United States as one of the richest men of the newly independent United States, becoming a founder of the nation’s first bank, a land speculator on a grand scale, and a host to every important personage in nation.

Yet Bingham is dimly remembered today. In the city named after him there is no statue or plaque to mark his place in history.  In the mid-1960s his name reappeared briefly when Harpur College was recast as the State University of New York at Binghamton. More recently a new student residence was named Bingham Hall.  These are small footnotes to a personage known only to older biographers and local historians who write his history as a far-sighted and vigorous supporter of the American revolution.

What might constitute the meaning and value of Bingham’s achievements depends very much on where one stands.  For many, Bingham is the glorious history of a man whose wealth supported the struggle for independence from Great Britain and the principles celebrated in the Declaration of Independence. For others, Bingham and July 4^th are marred by the limits of independence and whom it benefited:  rich and wealthy slaveowners, eager to shelter their position and wealth from a predatory colonial power.

And Binghamtonians should make no mistake here:  William Bingham was an owner, trader and exploiter of enslaved Africans as were his more famous friends General Washington and Thomas Jefferson. When he walked the streets of Martinique, he was preceded by an African who held an umbrella over his head.[1] When he left the island, he took a young African with him as a personal servant.  When he paid taxes on his property at home, before and after independence, he duly reported his personal slaves:[2]

Bingham’s wealth did not however come from running a plantation with hundreds of slaves like his compatriots.  He was more predatory:  his head-turning prosperity derived from four short years in Martinique spent capturing and selling Africans and the products produced with slave labor.

This was his charge from the Continental Congress:  to buy and dispatch war supplies for General Washington’s army, to win France over to the colonial rebels’ cause, and to harry and disrupt Britain’s lucrative Caribbean trades.  It was the last that provided him a golden opportunity as piracy was legitimized as privateering on behalf of the new nation.

Just how lucrative privateering could be was demonstrated on his passage to Martinique, when his  sloop-of-war Reprisal captured a merchant ship flying the Union Jack. Its cargo of rum, cocoa, coffee and sugar were the free fruits of war to be sold and the proceeds shared among officers and seamen. Two more captures followed shortly before the Reprisal reached port. 

Bingham learned his lesson quickly. He was soon buying and selling goods on his private account across the war zone while outfitting privateers of his own. Men of his standing were well-prepared by temperament, training and the merchant’s instinct.  Bingham’s friend, confidant, and fellow-banker Alexander Hamilton learned his comparably keen skills at King’s college (renamed Columbia College after independence) where his math professor, Robert Harpur of Harpur College fame, set his students the problem of calculating in multiple currencies the value of sugar for the East Indies trade.[3]

Once in Martinique Bingham turned privateering into a commercial operation:  he would buy a ship, sign up a captain and crew, and deploy them to attack and seize British shipping.  Proceeds from the sale of captured ships and their contents were shared among the captain, the crew, and the outfitter, in this case Bingham. These were extremely lucrative operations, and soon hundreds of British vessels were captured by privateers. The capture of two slave ships in one operation alone in 1777 made Bingham part owner of a cargo of ivory and 284 enslaved men, 45 enslaved women, and 146 enslaved boys and girls. All were auctioned off to great profit.[4]

From such profits came the monies to fund Bingham’s life after his return home, from founding the first national bank to the 1786 purchase of the 36,000 acres that would constitute the town of Binghamton,  the buying of 340,000 acres in central Pennsylvania in 1792, and eventually the control over 3,000,000 acres in Maine.[5] His mansions and luxurious lifestyle were legendary.

William Bingham never set foot in Binghamton.  His land agent in the area, Joshua Whitney, would name the new town in his honor.  It was a slave-holding community. Whitney, no less than Bingham, fully believed and profited from slavery:  he bought and owned Black men and women, including a young woman Elinor, his coachman James Patterson, and George and Phoebe Dorsey.[6]  

 

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On July 4^th 2020 flags celebrating the founding of a new nation fly proudly all over the city.  On my block they include a militia flag and a Black Lives Matter flag. In this contested climate we might pause and ponder the meaning of freedom embodied in the historic and celebrated names of our cities, towns, schools, and streets. To paraphrase Frederick Douglass we might ask, as we struggle to realize that Black Lives Matter: what to a Black person is the 4th of July? Douglass’ challenge remains in front of us: “a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.”[7]

Endnotes

* Note: this essay will be updated and extended after libraries and archives reopen.

[1] Robert Alberts, The Golden Voyage: The Life and Times of William Bingham, 1752-1804 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), 39.

[2] Brooke Krancer, “Miscellaneous Trustees, Slave Ownership, William Bingham,” Penn & Slavery Project, Slave Ownership, accessed June 23, 2020, http://pennandslaveryproject.org/exhibits/show/slaveownership/earlytrustees/misctrustees.

[3] Sharon Liao, ““A Merchants’ College:” King’s College (1754-1784) and Slavery,” Columbia University and Slavery, accessed July 4, 2020, https://columbiaandslavery.columbia.edu/content/merchants-college-kings-college-1754-1784-and-slavery.

[4] Alberts, The Golden Voyage: The Life and Times of William Bingham, 1752-1804, 52, 485.

[5] Alberts, 228–29.

[6] Marjory Barnum Hinman, Bingham’s Land: Whitney’s Town (Binghamton NY: Broome County Historical Society, 1996), 112.

[7] “Frederick Douglass Speech,” accessed July 4, 2020, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h2927.html.

Link to Justtalk article

 

Defunding the Police and Sheriff June 10 2020 post

Mayor Richard David, State Senator Frederick Akshar
and the BPD Swat team with their new “Bearcat”

 

 

For Broome County, its been quite simple: year after year, by Republicans and Democrats alike, funding for the county sheriff has been aggressively expanded particularly for the massive jail complex.  Year after year the number of guards and the sheriff’s and jail budget has grown.

In 2014 county legislators voted for a $7million expansion of the jail despite protests.  They built a jail and staffed it with officers to incarcerate 600 persons daily. 

Yet despite the best efforts of city and county police, district attorneys, and local judges to arrest and incarcerate as many local residents and especially as many Black men as possible, the official crime rate has been falling.  Propelled in part by growing pressure by community organizations, the number of incarcerated persons is falling. In recent months the jail has held fewer than 300 persons. It’s half empty.

And now big budget cuts are coming to the state and county. 

Here is one place to start: defund the jail.  It is a threat to public safety.

Last month only 34 persons of the 277 housed in the jail were convicted of any crime.  And for this we pay $30 million a year? 

The vast majority inside are arrested for misdemeanors.  And by all accounts a majority have been criminalized for substance use and mental health diseases.  Many more have disabilities.  Instead of treatment they get locked down and punished, and come home to us in much worse health.  And now the jail is a local hotspot to incubate the coronavirus among not just the incarcerated, but also the hundreds of guards, medical, and food staff, who daily move into and out of the sheriff’s complex and then into the community.

It is really quite simple:  defund the jail and use the funds for community-based and controlled health and education services that have been so severely cut by successive county administrations.

From Justtalk.blog by Bill Martin, June 6 2020

From Justtalk

http://www.justtalk.blog/index.php/2020/04/21/covid-denialism-and-media-complicity/

April 15 2020 Bill Martin from www.justtalk.blog   Activists from three community organizations rallied in public on April 14^th to demand that local officials release as many persons as possible from the Broome County jail.  Filling the parking lot outside the Taste New York store where County Executive Jason Garnar was holding a press conference, members from Justice and Unity for the Southern Tier, Citizen Action, and Truth Pharm called on the County Executive Jason Garnar, Sheriff David Harder, and District Attorney Michael Korchak to prevent further COVID infection and death in the jail and across the county.

The county Sheriff responded by deploying a phalanx of officers and patrol cars, with multiple officers demanding protestors leave the site as it was “private property.”  Protestors stood their ground, pointing out that this was state property, with the store still open to the public, and the parking lot and sidewalks unimpeded.  The protest proceeded surrounded by officers and their vehicles.

  The groups’ demands are straightforward, and have been repeated for months:

• Provide daily counts of tests, positives, quarantine and deaths in the jail
• Immediately release anyone at high risk for infection
• Release anyone held on non-violent charges
• Provide testing, sanitation supplies, medical treatment, and adequate nutrition
• Make phone/video calls free and end predatory commissary pricing
• Ensure those coming home have a discharge and treatment plan, including medical and housing resources that enable self-isolation

In reply County Executive Garnar stated, in a line taken from his Sheriff’s public statements: “I don’t have anything to do with it…. I can’t let people out of jail.” The county DA Korchak says the same.  As one reporter pointed out at Garnar’s press conference, this is not the case in other counties where Sheriffs, DAs, and County Executives have all acted, individually and often together, to release persons with short sentences, those at high risk for infection and death due to medical conditions, and those incarcerated on technical parole violations like smoking weed or missing a parole meeting. Cases of these conditions were all recounted by family members at the rally. When pressed on this at the press conference, Garnar said he couldn’t agree with the groups’ demand to “release all prisoners.” This too was a blatant fabrication, as the longstanding list of demands shows –and as a reporter quickly pointed out. Meanwhile COVID-19 continues its march through the jail, with the Sheriff recently reporting 11 officers and 11 incarcerated persons testing positive. This would be over 20% of existing cases in the county, where little testing has been done.  No one has been able to confirm these numbers, much less answer questions on how many tests in the jail have been done, how many persons have been discharged or hospitalized with the virus, and how many current or recently released persons have died (the Sheriff and local judges have the habit of releasing persons from the jail just prior to hospitalization and death as in the case of Rob Card).  When asked for this information by reporters, Garnar said, as he has when asked for information other county COVID “hotspots” like local nursing homes:  “I don’t know.”  The car rally is just one of recent protests pressing the County Executive, the District Attorney (who suffered a phone zap/call in on Monday) and the Sheriff, and the organizations promise to continue their work in the coming weeks.

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A sample of local media coverage may be found here, here, and  here.