Americas

“The space of play and the space of thought are the two theaters of freedom.”  -- Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy

Rosenstock-Huessy was a German army officer in World War I, afterward a professor of medieval law in Breslau until the Nazis acquired the franchise in 1933. Signed for the next year’s season by Harvard University to teach undergraduates the rudiments of Western civilization, he soon noticed that few of them grasped what he was trying to say, couldn’t square the lines of thought with the circle of their emotions. To overcome the difficulties the professor recast his lectures in the idiom of sports and games, the only world, he said, “in which the American student really has confidence… this world encompasses all of his virtues and experiences, affections and interests.”

Near Reedley, on the east side of the San Joaquin Valley, three men live in a camp they've built under the trees of an abandoned orchard. A blue tarp and the cardboard from an unfolded carton make up the roof. The mattresses for their beds sit on shipping pallets, or nearby under a bush. One of the men made a doll of straw, which sits in the branch of a dead tree overlooking the camp.

US intervention continues to haunt Latin America, a region overrun with brutal military dictatorships during the 1970’s and 80’s. Dictatorships coordinated torture, assassinations and disappearances under a US-backed program in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. The program, called Plan Condor, was a shared strategy in Latin America's Southern Region during the 1970s and 80s and had Washington involvement.

In this interview, author and attorney Charlotte Dennett talks about her new book, The People V. Bush: One Lawyer’s Campaign to Bring the President to Justice and the National Grassroots Movement She Encounters Along the Way, what led her to run for Vermont state attorney general on a platform to prosecute George W. Bush, the current movement to bring Bush to justice, and connections between the US accountability movement and similar movements around the world.

On a May 29th national day of action, Burlington, Vermont residents came together to protest SB 1070, a racist law in Arizona that allows and encourages racial profiling. This act requires law enforcement officials to check the documentation of any and all persons who look suspicious and or look like immigrants. Protest participants in Burlington wore signs, chanted and publicly spoke out against the Arizona law.