Author: Dan
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The Attack on Ohio’s Working People: What’s the strategy to fight back and win?
Ohio’s working people—both those with jobs, the unemployed and their families—are under attack as they have not been for decades. And this is not just in Ohio. From Wisconsin to Florida, from California to New York, employers, the media and politicians are working 24/7 to lower our wages, reduce our benefits, postpone our retirement, cut…
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Blues on the Border: Javier Batiz plays for “My Beloved and Beautiful Tijuana”
By Dan La Botz Javier Batiz, the great Mexican rock-and-roll guitarist, played and sang last week in a concert that embodied and gave voice to everything that is most wonderful about Tijuana and the U.S.-Mexico border region. Batiz, who since he was thirteen played in the bars and nightclubs of Tijuana, performed this time with…
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Cincinnati: A Decade since the Rebellion of 2001 – What Have We Learned, Where Are We Now?
Ten years ago, after the police killing of a teenager named Timothy Thomas, Cincinnati erupted in what some called vicious riots and others a righteous rebellion. The uprising over a string of police killings of black men made Cincinnati the subject of a national discussion that took place from the pages of the NAACP’s The…
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Lessons from Ontario’s city-wide, political strikes of the late 1990s
ONTARIO’S ‘DAYS OF ACTION’: CITYWIDE POLITICAL STRIKES by Dan La Botz [In 1995-1998, unions in Ontario embarked on a series of eleven one-day citywide strikes against the policies of the Conservative provincial government. This article, published originally in The Troublemakers Handbook details the labor-community coalitions they put together; the cross-picketing they did of each other’s…
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The New American Workers Movement at the Crossroads
By Dan La Botz The new American workers movement, which has developed so rapidly in the last couple of months in the struggle against rightwing legislative proposals to abolish public employee unions, suddenly finds itself at a crossroads. Madison, Wisconsin, where rank-and-file workers, community members, and social movement activists converged to create the new movement,…
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The New American Workers Movement and the Confrontation to Come
Dan La Botz February 26, 2011
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A New American Workers Movement Has Begun
By Dan La Botz Thousands of workers demonstrated at the state capital in Madison, Wisconsin on Feb. 15 and 16 to protest plans by that state’s Republican Governor Scott Walker to take away the state workers’ union rights. Walker, cleverly attempted to divide the public workers by excluding police and firefighters from his anti-union law,…
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Food in America and the World
Today, food production in the United States and in the world is dominated by a handful of corporations that put their profits above the hunger, the health, and the well-being of America’s and the globe’s population. Tyson, Kraft, Pepsico, Nestle, Conagra, and Anheuser-Busch are generally at the top of the list, though in virtually every…
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The New Corporatism in American Politics and the Grassroots
From the Tea Party to the Coffee Party, How Political Parties Grow the Grass and Mow the Lawn Dan La BotzMay 3, 2010 There are moments in history when driven by economic and social conditions, by war, or by political problems, grassroots groups spring up from below, among rank-and-file workers or people in local urban…
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The Pope, the Catholic Church, and the Sexual Abuse Controversy in Historical and Political Perspective
News reports have revealed that Pope Benedict XVI appears to have been directly involved in the cover up of priests’ sexual abuse of children. What should be clear is that the Pope’s action is entirely consistent with the religious and political philosophy that he has promoted for decades within the Church. The Pope believes that…