On March 7th, Bob Kiss, a member of the Vermont Progressive Party, defeated a heavily favored Democrat and a Republican to become Mayor of the city of Burlington. The election was the first test of the city's new instant runoff voting system. Mike Furze and Graham Forward worked on his campaign.
Benjamin Dangl: How did the Vermont Progressive party get started?
Within the last six years in
For nearly three decades, Argentina's Mothers of Plaza de Mayo have fought for the right to re-unite with their abducted children. The Mothers began their protest in 1977 to demand information about the whereabouts of their children from authorities. Some 30,000 activists were kidnapped and murdered during the military junta dictatorship, which ruled Argentina from 1976-1983. During the Dirty War in Argentina, much of the population remained silent due to the censorship imposed by the military government. Those who did not stay silent risked being disappeared themselves.
The headlines are blaring daily about another big corruption scandal that has the makings of being the mother of them all - at least for a generation or so. We won't know how big until one well-connected influence peddling lobbyist under multiple indictments involving crony capitalism and corruption begins to sing to the Justice Department after copping a plea in return for a lighter sentence. It's likely that before this ends, it may involve many Republican members of Congress and some Democrats including some high level ones from both parties as well as their aides, members of the Executive Branch and various other Republican party figures. It may even go higher than most observers now expect.
Leonida Zurita Vargas, a Bolivian coca farmer organizer and alternate Senator, was planning to be in the US right now as part of a three week speaking tour on Bolivian social movements and human rights.This tour would take her to Vermont, Harvard, Stanford and Washington DC. However, upon checking in at the airport in Santa Cruz, Bolivia on February 20th to fly to the US, she was informed her ten year visa had been revoked because of alleged links to terrorist activity.
I thought that I would die without living and knowing a revolution. I came late to the Cuban Revolution, since I was born a few years after it. I witnessed the ephemeral triumph and then the drowning in blood and fire, by the government of Ronald Reagan and his "contras," of the Sandinista Revolution. I had wanted, like John Reed, to be in the middle of the explosion of the great revolutions.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019