John Tarleton, Author at Toward Freedom

Small Town, Big Fracking Victory

John Tarleton August 12, 2014 John Tarleton

When Deborah Cipolla-Dennis moved to Dryden, New York, she and her wife built a house on the 32 acres of land they had purchased. They looked forward to putting down roots in a small, tight-knit rural community that shares the tolerant values of the nearby college town of Ithaca where she works.

However, Cipolla-Dennis soon started receiving visits and phone calls from a representative of the Colorado-based Anschutz Exploration Corporation who urged her to lease her land. He said nothing of fracking — the controversial drilling technique that requires injecting millions of gallons of chemical-laced water and sand deep into the earth to tap hard-to-reach deposits — but Cipolla-Dennis was wary and shooed him away. read more

The Brecht Forum, 1975–2014

John Tarleton May 8, 2014 John Tarleton

Source: The Indypendent

Faced with hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and finding itself in the legal crosshairs of its former landlord, the Brecht Forum announced April 12 that it will close after 39 years. The decision marks the end of an era for the Marxist education and community center, which will hold its final public forum on May 8 and will cease all business operations as of May 30. After that, it will move to dissolve itself as a non-profit corporation.

“It has become clear,” Brecht’s board of directors wrote in a public statement, “that in a rapidly gentrifying city, we have been living on borrowed time, and that despite the strong support of our community, this configuration of our project is unsustainable.” read more

Rebranding New York City: How the 1% Created a Tale of Two Cities

John Tarleton November 5, 2013 John Tarleton

In this interview, Miriam Greenberg, author of Branding New York: How a City in Crisis was Sold to the World, makes sense of the origins of New York’s vast inequalities and what the prospects are for changing them.

“We Have to Think About the Alternative”: Grace Lee Boggs and Life After Capitalism

John Tarleton April 18, 2012 John Tarleton

Source: The Indypendent

Author, activist and feminist, Grace Lee Boggs has been a witness to and a participant in almost every major social movement in this country going back to the early 1940s. A resident of Detroit since 1953, she has seen the Motor City’s long decline and has been involved in various campaigns to reinvent the city as a space that serves the needs of its residents. In 2011, she published The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century. She will appear at Cooper Union this Friday at 7pm with Amy Goodman to kick off a weekend of panels and discussions on how to create living alternatives to failing status quo institutions in a variety of fields. read more