Month: May 2015

Nat Winthrop

Toward Freedom May 18, 2015 Toward Freedom

Nat Winthrop is an independent film producer living in Montpelier. He is former publisher of theVanguard Press andVermont Timesin Chittenden County, and he has had feature articles published in theRutland Herald/Times Argus Sunday Magazine, Seven Days, Boston Phoenix, Boston Globe,andVermont Magazine. He studied documentary filmmaking at MIT and Goddard College in the 1970s. He was executive producer of the collaborative six-part Freedom & Unity: The Vermont Movie (2013) and he co-produced two documentaries –Rookies at The Road (about Thunder Road in Barre) and Act of Faith, The Making of Disappearances– that aired on Vermont Public Television. read more

Dorie Wilsnack

Toward Freedom May 18, 2015 Toward Freedom

Dorie Wilsnack has worked with international and US peace and human rights organizations as an organizer, nonviolence trainer and fundraiser. Her work has included Balkan Peace Team, International Fellowship of Reconciliation, War Resisters League, American Friends Service Committee, and ACLU of Vermont. Her newest endeavor is Radical Roots Genealogy, a project that helps people research and learn about their ancestors though a social change and social justice lens. She serves on the Advisory Committee for the International Nonviolence Training Fund. She’s appreciates Toward Freedom for the wide variety of international stories that it shares, and for the links it builds between people in Vermont and supporters of social justice around the world.  read more

Sam Mayfield

Toward Freedom May 18, 2015 Toward Freedom

Sam Mayfield is a video journalist and documentary filmmaker. Her work has taken her to India, West Africa, Palestine, and Mexico. Since 2004, Mayfield has documented stories that remain largely untold in commercial media. Her video reports have been filed with Democracy Now!, Free Speech TV, PBS and other media outlets. In 2011, Mayfield traveled to Wisconsin to cover the popular uprising against legislation gutting basic worker’s rights. She stayed for seven months, covering the story as it unfolded, ultimately producing from her footage the 56-minute feature documentary film Wisconsin Rising. Wisconsin Rising is Mayfield’s second documentary. Twitter: @samayfield read more

No Picture

Vermont: Will Ben and Jerry’s Help Improve Conditions for Dairy Workers?

Vera Liang Chang May 18, 2015 Vera Liang Chang

Source: Civil Eats

In 2009, José Obeth Santiz Cruz, a 20 year-old farmworker from Chiapas, Mexico, had a fatal accident on a small dairy farm in Vermont. Cruz was working on his knees near a gutter scraper–a conveyor belt that pushes manure into a pit–when his clothing got caught, and he was strangled.

Later that year, a group of Vermont farmworkers created Migrant Justice. Enrique Balcazar, a dairy worker and organizer for the group, says he personally knows two farmworkers who have lost fingers in the same type of gutter scraper in which Cruz died. His father still suffers from a serious injury he sustained while working through the night at a dairy six years ago, and Balcazar considers himself lucky to have never been injured at work. read more

No Picture

The media’s reaction to Seymour Hersh’s bin Laden scoop has been disgraceful

Trevor Timm May 18, 2015 Trevor Timm

Source: Columbia Journalism Review

Seymour Hersh has done the public a great service by breathing life into questions surrounding the official narrative of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Yet instead of trying to build off the details of his story, or to disprove his assertions with additional reporting, journalists have largely attempted to tear down the messenger.

Barrels of ink have been spilled ripping apart Hersh’s character, while barely any follow-up reporting has been done to corroborate or refute his claims—even though there’s no doubt that the Obama administration has repeatedly misinformed and misled the public about the incident. Even less attention has been paid to the little follow-up reporting that we did get, which revealed that the CIA likely lied about its role in finding bin Laden, which it used to justify torture to the public. read more