Locked Out
Directed by Joan Sekler
www.lockedout2010.org
Locked Out, a film by Joan Sekler, documents the struggle of workers at the Borax mine in Boron, California, against the mine's multinational owner, Rio Tinto.
The mine is integral to the towns economy, employing 570 workers ― about a quarter of the population of Boron.
In September 2009, Rio Tinto revealed it intended on scrapping the workers' contract. The pay, benefits, and conditions set out in the contract had been negotiated for with workers over the past 40 years.
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Colombian daily El Espectador reported on May 18 that the Colombian Supreme Court of Justice ruled the infamous “FARC files” as inadmissible evidence in court, as they were obtained illegally.
The ruling refers to supposed documents acquired from the laptops of Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) leader Raul Reyes who was killed in the March 2008 Colombian military bombing raid of a guerrilla camp in Ecuador.
“More African American men are in prison or jail, on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War began," Michelle Alexander told a packed meeting at the Pasadena Main Library in California on April 13.
Alexander, a law professor at Ohio State, was discussing her bestseller, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.
The following statement was released by the Socialist Alliance in Australia. For more information, visit www.socialist-alliance.org .
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Nothin’ To Lose Zennith www.zennithboyz.com.au If the Red Hot Chili Peppers had injected themselves with a few litres of truth serum instead of enough smack to kill a blue whale, they could well have ended up sounding like largely Indigenous Australian band Zennith. Both build righteous rap and rock on reggae foundations, but Zennith swap the Chilis' dreamy, stoner poetry for clear-eyed political consciousness.
Having arrived back in Caracas after more than two weeks visiting various rural communities, leaders from the National Campesino Front Ezequiel Zamora (FNCEZ) told us that the bodies of two of their comrades, missing since April 12, had been found.
Jose Joel Torres Leves and Agustin Gamboa Duran were leading land reform activists in the Comunal City Antonio Jose de Sucre, in Barinas state.
Hundreds of Australian Tamils and supporters gathered for an evening vigil in Sydney’s Martin Place on May 18 to commemorate two years since the defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
The LTTE had fought a 30-year-long battle for an independent Tamil homeland in the north-east of Sri Lanka.
In April, a leaked United Nations report said the Sri Lankan government had committed serious war crimes as the war came to a close, which led to the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians.
New Coalition premier of NSW, Barry O'Farrell, may be rethinking his decision to slash the electricity power rebate to solar power customers after some of his own Liberal Party MPs vowed to vote against it.
About 1500 angry people rallied at the plaza of Sydney’s Customs House on May 18 to protest the slashing of the rebate from 60 cents a kilowatt hour to 40c. The rally had to be moved from an overflowing indoor location
Tunisia's interim government has again been rocked by protests calling for greater democracy, transparency and for a “new revolution” to defend the gains of the protest movement that overthrew dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali on January 14.
The protests began on May 5 after Farhat Rajhi, a former interior minister in the post-Ben Ali government, claimed that military and political elites from Ben Ali's regime would carry out a coup d'etat if Islamist parties win a majority in the July 24 constituent assembly elections.
When I asked Alfredo, a dairy farmer and president of the Prolesa milk processing co-operative in Tachira state, what food sovereignty meant to him, he said: “Food sovereignty is not only about being able to produce enough food to feed ourselves, it also means getting to a point where we can export food to other countries.
The historian William Cronon has been in the news recently in the US because of assaults on his civil liberties and academic freedom by the Wisconsin Republican Party.
This story is likely to be of interest to Green Left Weekly readers because of the collision between university research and powerful corporate interests.
However, Cronon's work as an environmental historian since the 1970s means that he deserves to be read by all those who take an interest in environmental issues and ecosocialist politics.
Our society is heading in the wrong direction. According to a new “Australia’s Electricity Generation Mix 1960-2009” report commissioned by Environment Victoria, the proportion of Australia’s electricity generated by renewable energy has fallen from 19% in 1960 to 7% in 2008.
Because Australia today generates 10 times the amount of electricity as it did in 1960, coal-fired electricity generation has increased by more than 1200%.
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