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We have a five digit figure of radical books and magazines that in some cases we must give or in most cases
should give to prisoners. Although we have the largest prison operation of its kind, we need more large prisoner lists--from any English-speaking
country. If you can assemble a list of prisoners who would read radical literature, please send it to us.
We plan to unload this material this year.
Likewise, if you can assemble money for the postage to mail books & magazines, contact us. We're looking for people who are new to MIM to step forward, not people who have worked with us before. We aren't trying to tire out or bankrupt all our supporters, which is why this message goes into the public. Contrary to what many people believe and expect, the major bourgeois foundations have never been any use in assisting us with prison literacy projects. We've even had proposals that we can say contain a design of self-defeat for funding this activity. By encouraging people to dream of manna from heaven instead of getting the economics of activism from the ground up, the imperialists accomplish much more than their piddling donations to a few controlled "progressive" foundations could ever accomplish. To those who would say they can donate to non-profit organizations for a tax deduction, I would say you have a point, but not really. If you give $1000 to a tax deductible charity and manage to get $400 back from the government in taxes for argument's sake, then you have given $600. The question is whether your money actually went further than if you gave MIM $600. Since MIM has no paid staff, the answer is no, your money does not go further with one of those non-profit organizations paying for staff, office-space, phones etc. I have to warn people that we are not good at "have it your way" like Burger King. We get people writing to us with specific requests as if we are going to go to a bookstore and buy every individual item they ask for. That's not possible. We are looking for people who want to read radical literature in prison. Unfortunately, it is literature with a disproportionate share of material about the united $tates, but we do have some variety. So the first question is whether we can find prisoners who want to read radical literature--with a range from progressive to revolutionary and Maoist. The second question is what the prisoner, organization organizing the prisoner or group inside a prison wants. We do not have enough of Marx, Lenin, Mao, Black Panthers or Malcolm X or anything else to be able to promise people that they would get exactly the books they want, but we will try as best we can to take into consideration general requests--political economy, Black or whatever topic/fill in the blank. We can pretty much guarantee that prisoners will NOT get exactly what they want. On other subjects--we see a lot of backlog cleared for the web page. That's good news. We've added help from some new people, but we need still a few more. There are also plans in the works to make it easier for more people to participate in discussion and MIM work. So again, we know people are frustrated, but there is a backlog of stuff we've had to get done and we do think about how to make it easier to work with us.
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