It was not surprising that, only weeks after the Vermont legislature voted to close the state’s 40 years old nuclear power plant, Vermont Yankee, Vermont’s largest utilities announced that they were in negotiation with the utility giant Hydro Quebec over a new long-term power contract.
In Creative Community Organizing: A Guide for Rabble-Rousers, Activists and Quiet Lovers of Justice (Berrett-Koehler, February), Si Kahn argues that culture must be integrated into organizing, but he does not always succeed in showing how to do so. He discourages an “add culture and stir” approach, yet the stories he tells—singing to maintain hope while being arrested, designing an organization’s logo to communicate mission, values and inclusivity—are little more than that. And Kahn’s examples of “creative” organizing—such as forming alliances with the faith leaders of a campaign target—strike me as simply good organizing.
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.
The recent arrest of an American lawyer by the heavy-handed Rwandan government has human rights implications for the resource war in neighboring eastern Congo. Eve Ensler, who wrote "The Vagina Monologues" and is now a major advocate for Congolese women suffering sexual violence, says the Rwandan government is part of the problem when it comes to ending the violence against women.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019