One penny more! This has been the simple demand of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), an organization which for almost 20 years has been fighting for dignity and justice for migrant farmworkers in the tomato fields of South Florida.
Source: Tom Dispatch
I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse.
— Emperor Charles V
But in which language does one speak to a machine, and what can be expected by way of response? The questions arise from the accelerating data-streams out of which we’ve learned to draw the breath of life, posed in consultation with the equipment that scans the flesh and tracks the spirit, cues the ATM, the GPS, and the EKG, arranges the assignations on Match.com and the high-frequency trades at Goldman Sachs, catalogs the pornography and drives the car, tells us how and when and where to connect the dots and thus recognize ourselves as human beings.
While the Occupy Movement has taken the world by storm, a long history of different types of social movement occupations have marked Latin America for decades. What follows is an audio recording of a Left Forum panel dealing with this topic.
Mali was the first major victim of Nato's Libyan intervention. It is now a staple in world news and headlines such as "The mess in Mali" serve as a mere reminder of a bigger "African mess."
Many Americans facing unemployment and home foreclosures today rightly blame the excesses of unfettered Wall Street greed. They rightly see the contribution to financial chaos made by the removal of regulations by a Congress, White House, and Supreme Court bought by corporate wealth.
When I heard that my name was featured in a NewYork City Police Department report, I should have been outraged. I had followed revelations of NYPD spying, but it hadn’t occurred to me that they would come to New Orleans to watch me speakat a film festival.
However, I also knew that the NYPD, in their crusade under the guise of safety, had gone whitewater rafting with college students and aggressively monitored and infiltrated mosques and Muslim businesses. They operate in at least 9 foreign countries, so why shouldn’t they come to New Orleans, listen to me say a few words at a public event, and write a classified report about it? Perhaps the only strange thing about the case is that I don’t fit their regular profile. As a white US citizen, I feel my case is a bit of an anomaly for a department that has developed a reputation for targeting immigrants and communities of color. My privilege has given me a certain amount of security and expectation of privacy that many others simply don’t experience.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019