Dan Bluemel: Upset with Wells Fargo’s foreclosure practices, protesters held a demonstration on May Day that briefly shut down one of the bank’s branches in downtown Los Angeles.
Olivier Assayas Interview: Changing the World Through Cinema
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Ed Rampell: Today, people don’t think of a revolution. They think of adapting society, of making the hope of more fairness, more justice, more social justice, more generosity, which are old things . But in the 1970s it would have been called “reformist,” which was an insult.
May Day Rallies Reflect Urgency of Pending Immigration Reform
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Peter Dreier: This year’s May Day rallies will focus on issues like pushing Congress to adopt a fair budget and raise the federal minimum wage, but the central focus will be on pending legislation for immigration reform.
10 Most Read Articles This Week
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This week’s 10 most read articles leads off with Rudy Acuña’s “How Democrats Have Abandoned Their Core,” decrying that party’s propensity for selling out to pressure from the Tea Party.
Occupy Must Expand Beyond Activist Hotbeds
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Randy Shaw: Corporations and national politicians serving the interests of the 1% will not feel compelled to change course unless major protests go beyond traditional activist centers to where much of the 99% live.
May Day: From the Haymarket Massacre to the Occupy Movement
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Lawrence Wittner: It seems likely that the struggle for economic justice will heighten in coming years, with May Day continuing to serve as a potent symbol of worker discontent.
May Day Los Angeles
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May Day was observed all over the nation with marches, rallies, sit-ins and demonstrations occurring simultaneously in all of the major metropolitan areas including Los Angeles. Dick and I spent a good deal of the day in the streets of downtown Los Angeles.
Romney’s Plan to Eliminate Affordable Housing Ignites … Silence
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Randy Shaw: The United States has the most homeless persons, and the most families living in unaffordable and/or unsuitable housing in the industrialized world, and yet their plight –even when linked to a major political news hook – is not deemed newsworthy.
Obama’s Afghanistan Speech: A Guide to the Perplexed
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Tom Hayden: Obama spoke directly to public opinion when he refused to leave “immediately,” on the grounds that Afghanistan will need “an opportunity to stabilize,” an observation which the vast majority of Americans will accept, for now.
The Tinder-Box Society
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Robert Reich: Most of the gains from the productivity revolution are going to the owners of capital, while typical workers are either unemployed or underemployed, or else getting wages and benefits whose real value continues to drop.
May Day Events In Los Angeles
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ay Day Events in and around Los Angeles National Lawyers Guild/LA Executive Director Jim Lafferty wrote on Fri, 4/27/12: The protests this May 1st will be historic. This year traditional immigrant rights groups are joining with the L.A. County Federation of Labor and Occupy LA, in staging protests starting at nine different locations around the [...]
Will May Day Protests Rejuvenate the Occupy Movement?
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Randy Shaw: My chief concern about Occupy’s future is that I do not see enough resources devoted to organizing new people to get involved.
Activists Breathe New Life Into May Day
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Peter Dreier: This year, in the wake of Occupy Wall Street and the rebirth of a national movement for social justice, a wide spectrum of activist groups will be out in the streets to give voice to the growing crusade for democracy and equality.
Potent Blood
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Kathleen Peine: I hope many, especially in America, will remember the struggles and deaths of those activists in Chicago during the Haymarket riots, and consider the potent blood that is May.
May 1st: People Power: Build Progressive Alternative to the Tea Parties
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Lydia Howell: It’s high time for progressives to escalate our own mass movement, to make it loud enough it cannot be ignored. The immigrant rights movement’s recent May Day marches have gotten far more media attention than any peace rallies since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The labor movement needs a jump-start. It’s crucial to have a broad, united progressive counter to the reactionary, racist Tea Parties.
As Labor Faces Turning Point, UNITE HERE National Convention Opens
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UNITE HERE, best known for its Hotel Workers Rising campaign and successful organizing of the nation’s gaming industry, opens its national convention in Chicago today. When the event was scheduled, it seemed a perfect occasion for celebrating five years of increased union membership in its core jurisdictions, despite tough economic times. Instead, UNITE HERE’s celebration [...]
Posters Show the Labor Movement At its Best
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When I receive a book for review, I quickly skim through it before putting it aside for future reading. But when I got Lincoln Cushing & Timothy W. Drescher’s, Agitate! Educate! Organize! American Labor Posters, I became so engrossed in its collection of historic labor posters that I could not put it down. Many readers [...]
Reflections on May Day
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Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez of Democracy Now! sat down with Alex Sanchez of Homies Unidos and Janis Rosheuvel of Families for Freedom to discuss the nation’s immigration policy, its overall treatment of undocumented immigrants and the impact of the May Day protests in Los Angeles. Alex Sanchez believes the May Day movement has not [...]
Can Obama Change America’s Understanding of Class and Dissent?
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Class conflict. Political dissent. What it means to be an American. Many people assume these things are incompatible. Throughout America’s history, most U.S. citizens denied the reality of class divisions in their midst, seeing them as either European or somehow related to Soviet communism. And political dissent has not been understood to be central to [...]
Why We Need to Revitalize the Union Movement
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Sixty years ago, in the wake of Nazi genocide and World War Two’s unspeakable atrocities, Eleanor Roosevelt crafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This historic document, adopted by the United Nations on December 10, 1948, declared that rights adhered to all persons, no matter their place of birth, race, gender, or religion.
It’s Not Just McArthur Park
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Violent May Day Immigration Rights Rally rganized as a peaceful May Day March and immigration rights rally, the events held at MacArthur Park last week turned violent when members of the Los Angeles Police stormed into the mostly peaceful crowd of workers, activists, media, and immigrants at the Los Angeles rally. Today’s technology facilitated the [...]
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