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Reflections in Black and White

Gilda Haas

Dr. Pop

With power and insight, long time organizer and popular educator Gilda Haas weaves several personal stories as mother, partner, tourist, friend and educator into the intersections of housing covenants, evolving neighborhoods, banking, economics and racism realities of Los Angeles where organizing matters and black youth speak truth to power.

The Spiritual in the Struggle: A Book Review

Peter Olney

The Stansbury Forum

Living Peace: Connecting Your Spirituality with Your Work for Justice, by Victor Narro 2014, a new book on the spiritual side of organizing, is just over 100 pages long. This little volume is broaching a topic that might raise cynical eyebrows in certain quarters in our labor movement.

South's Unique Immigration Trends Shape Region's Response to Deportation Relief

Allie Yee

The Institute for Southern Studies

With funding on the line for President Obama's deferred action programs for immigrants, recent trends in immigration are affecting the current national debates. While the immigrant population is relatively smaller in the South, changes are rapidly re-shaping communities in the region, fueling new opportunities for growth as well as anxiety and backlash over the changing complexion of towns and cities that is evident in the response from many Southern leaders.

Remembering the Watts Rebellion, Operation Chaos and the Infectious Logic of National Security

Kara Z. Dellacioppa

Truthout

Fifty years ago, Los Angeles erupted in a weeklong riot leaving dozens dead, 3,000 arrested and $40 million in property damage -- the 1965 Watts rebellion. This year also marks 40 years since the revelations of "official" investigations of US intelligence covert activity against US dissidents throughout the 1960s -- 1970s. Both events have something to teach us about the growth of the national security state and the criminalization of US dissent.

Power To The People, But Really: Participatory Democracy in El Salvador

Beverly Bell

Other Worlds

Estela Hernandez is both a member of the national assembly and a leader in the transformational social movement, La Coordinadora of the Lower Lempa and the Bay of Jiquilisco in rural El Salvador. Here, Hernandez talks about a radical vision and practice of direct, participatory democracy by the citizens in the government of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, or FMLN.

The Passion of Marion Cotillard

J. Hoberman

The New York Review of Books

Like most of the Dardennes’ previous films, Two Days, One Night traffics in suspense and is a sort of thriller. But as a search for a lost (or stolen) livelihood, it is also a descendant of The Bicycle Thief, the neo-realist classic that, as André Bazin noted, implies a world in which “the poor must steal from each other in order to survive.”