Jason Pramas

Jason Pramas is an American writer, media consultant, and political strategist. He was born in 1966 in Boston, MA to a family of Greek extraction. He has been in regional and national leadership of a number of movements for democracy and social justice in the United States -- including the labor, peace, immigrant, environmental, anti-racist, anti-poverty, and alternative media movements. He is best known as the editor/publisher of New Liberation News Service, editor/publisher of As We Are ("the magazine for working young people"), director of the Boston Local of the National Writers Union/UAW Local 1981, national policy advisor to the Gray Panthers and later the Democratic Socialists of America, director of the Campaign on Contingent Work (which he later refounded as Massachusetts Global Action), and as the architect and lead organizer of the 2004 Boston Social Forum. As a student activist, he was expelled from Boston University in 1986 for protesting the college's investments in the then-apartheid state of South Africa, and was a defendant in the "Northampton 15" trial in 1987 against recruitment by the Central Intelligence Agency at the University of Massachusetts Amherst after his arrest for a campus building occupation along with Amy Carter, Abbie Hoffman and 12 other activists (they were acquitted on all charges after a dramatic trial -- with a defense team led by Leonard Weinglass, and a number of luminary witnesses including Daniel Ellsberg and Howard Zinn -- that was heavily covered in the global media). [http://www.cia-on-campus.org/umass.edu/trial.html] As a journalist and essayist, he has been published in hundreds of newspapers, magazines and journals in over a dozen countries. Pramas is currently a doctoral student in Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts Boston -- specializing in media policy and higher education policy -- and editor/publisher of [http://www.openmediaboston.org Open Media Boston] , a progressive news, views and arts portal for the Boston, MA area.