transformingpower

Judy recently did a talk as part of the Social Science Speaker's Series at Fanshawe College. Her focus was the relevance of the struggles in Egypt and Wisconsin for social change in Canada . See the presentation in four parts below:

The P2P Foundation, which highlights books that recognize how technology reflects a change of consciousness towards participation and in turn strengthens it, has just announced that "Transfroming Power" is its current Book of the Week.

To read the Foundation's review of the book, click here.

See below for the entire video from Judy's talk on the Allan Gregg Show. Judy discusses "Transforming Power", and how globalization and communications technology are changing democracy.
 

"Martin Luther King didn't become famous saying I have a complaint," said Van Jones speaking to the Network of Spiritual Activists.  As you have probably heard one of the most eloquent environmental justice activists in the U.S. has resigned from Obama's White House under a relentless right-wing assault of what he calls "lies and distortions."  You will get some idea of what a visionary he is by watching this short video from Fierce Light

Every once in a while the act of an individual can make a big difference to a struggle.  Yesterday, Toronto film maker and long-time gay activist John Greyson wrote an open letter to the directors of the Toronto International Film Festival pulling his short film Covered out of TIFF in protest of their spotlight on Tel Aviv.  His courageous action and eloquent letter, reproduced below, is a significant contribution to the Palestinian solidarity movement and the Boycott Divestment and Sanction strategy that it has adopted to shine a light on the inexcusable aggression of Israel against the Palestinian people.  Please read the letter below, watch the film and write to TIFF in protest of their decision tiffg@tiff.net

On the left are Sam McKay and Chief Donny Morris at last Spring's rally for KI and Ardoch at Queen's Park

The sun is slowly coming down in this northern West Bank village. We are really a few kilometers from Galilee just outside the green line. Around the city of Jenin and the nearby villages, a cluster of Israeli settlements remind us of the occupation, as well as numerous checkpoints controlled by Israeli soldiers.

Today in Tehran from #iranelection on twitter

Sunday evening I spent almost an entire train ride from Ottawa to Toronto glued to Twitter following the posts from #iranelections, which is a way to get all the posts about the elections in Iran and following a twitterer with the handle Change for Iran who was posting from his roof top every few minutes and then going down to join the protests and coming back.  It was an amazing experience to directly follow what was happening on the streets of Tehran as it was happening.  More important, though, Twitter became a major source of information for those opposed to Ahmadinejad's government and protesting what they consider to be fraudelant election results. 

Last night I spoke at a fundraising event for the legendary Highlander Center that was part of a three day gathering of labour and community activists organized by the Labour Education Centre.  It was an amazing event.  Incredible diversity, majority people of colour, lots of poor people, many young people.  It was politically diverse from people who have just gotten active to veteran activists, from service workers to anti-capitalist activists, from union, community, and even academia.  And on top of that it was a US/Canada collaboration beginning an 8 month project to build connections between labour and community in Toronto.