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That’s How It Is

Jared Smith Chiron Review
From the beginning of a day, any day, writes Colorado poet Jared Smith, taking a continental view of people at work, we all go through “the motions” and “the same work has to start and be filled each day…”

Congress Must End American Support for Saudi War in Yemen

Mark Weisbrot The Hill
It is important for as many people as possible to get involved in this next phase of the fight to end U.S. support for the Saudi war in Yemen, because this is the world's best chance of ending this nightmare, as United Nations aid chief Mark Lowcock warned of Yemen experiencing "the largest famine the world has seen for many decades with millions of victims."

NAFTA, The Cross-Border Disaster

David Bacon The American Prospect
The trade treaty, now up for renegotiation, has displaced millions of Mexican workers, and many thousands of U.S. workers as well. A U.S. autoworker earns $21.50 an hour, and a Mexican autoworker $3, but a gallon of milk costs more in Mexico than it does here. People were migrating from Mexico to the U.S. long before NAFTA, but the treaty put migration on steroids.

John Steinbeck, The Dust Bowl, and Farm-Worker Organizing

Harry Targ Portside
John Steinbeck was one of the most prolific and, in my view, significant American novelists of the twentieth century. He was influenced by and synthesized his own politics and personal experience with the political culture and movements of the 1930s.

A Novelist Revisits a Deadly Textile Union Strike From 1929

Amy Rowland The New York Times
A novel set in the context of the historic Gastonia strike of textile workers in 1929 and featuring labor songwriter and indigenous strike leader Ella May Wiggins, the book, based as it is on an actual struggle uniting black and white workers, speaks to contemporary concerns through a vivid portrayal of struggle against historical injustice.

This Thanksgiving, Break the Colonial Mold and Have an Earth Dinner

Jim Hightower Alternet
When joined by family and friends for Thanksgiving, ask guests to tell stories about their very first food memory, or to recall any family member who was a farmer or a jolly cook. Invite people of diverse backgrounds and all ages. Ask a farm family to join you, or a cheesemaker or others involved in producing food. Then eat, talk, enjoy!

700,000 Women Farmworkers Say They Stand With Hollywood Actors Against Sexual Assault

Alianza Nacional de Campesinas TIME
In the lead up to “The Take Back the Workplace” march in Los Angeles on Nov. 12, Latina farmworkers have written a letter of solidarity to the brave women and men in Hollywood who have come forward with their experiences of sexual harassment and assault in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal.

The F.B.I.'s Dangerous Crackdown on 'Black Identity Extremists'

Khaled A. Beydoun and Justin Hansford The New York Times
The 12-page report, prepared by the F.B.I. Domestic Terrorism Analysis Unit in August, and later made public by foreignpolicy.org, both announces the existence of the “Black Identity Extremist” movement and deems it a violent threat, asserting that black activists’ grievances about racialized police violence and inequities in the criminal justice system have spurred retaliatory violence against law enforcement officers.