Most of all, it's urgent that you oppose war on Iran, defend voter rights, plan for 2014 races now, oppose austerity, support the 'Moral Mondays' in North Carolina, the Congressional Progressive Caucus' 'Back to Work Budget'! We're doing more than ever, and have big plans. So pay your dues, make a donation and become a sustainer. Do it Now! Check the link at the bottom...

Nov 18m 2013 - Last week, following the midterm elections, pundits burned up the airwaves discussing the implications of Chris Christie's landslide reelection as governor of New Jersey, Terry McAuliffe's narrow win in the Virginia gubernatorial race and Bill de Blasio's capture of City Hall in New York.

But what happened in Boston was as important as any of these.

Marty Walsh, for many years an officer of Laborers' Local 223, won the Boston mayoral race by putting together a coalition of groups that hardly spoke to one another a generation ago: blue-collar workers, African Americans and Hispanics. He did it with a lot of outside help from other unions around the country, including a big influx of campaign funds, and a powerful ground game from local unions.

His win represents a dramatic break from labor's recent history of political futility. Much of labor's muscle has been focused on the state and national level, where its impact is far less than it was in the days of George Meany and Walter Reuther. A smaller percentage of the work force are union members; many of them are public employees; many union members work for relatively low wages; some are not even American citizens. But with a labor leader taking over in the city of Puritans and Brahmins, analysts are rubbing their eyes and asking if labor's success in Boston might be repeatable in other cities.

A look at how Walsh did it suggests that the answer could be yes. Walsh is a member of the Laborers' Union, an official of Local 223, a former head of the Building Trades Council of Greater Boston and a longtime state representative known for building bridges across his racially and culturally diverse district. He is also immensely popular among his colleagues and other people in public life, and perhaps most importantly, has a compelling life story including surviving cancer at a young age and being a recovering alcoholic for over 20 years.

Taking advantage of a vacancy in the mayor's seat, labor stepped up big time, funding advertisements and paid organizers through America's Working Families and other groups.

The Citizens United decision impacts more than the Tea Party. It liberates groups and individuals on the left just as it affects Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers. It may also make traditional campaign finance laws almost irrelevant. Labor spent at an unprecedented level and put 4,000 to 5,000 people on the street on Election Day in a city where approximately 140,000 people voted. Neither current mayor Tom Menino nor former mayor Kevin White ever assembled such an army. Marty Walsh prevailed by a margin of under 5,000. If each campaign worker on Election Day delivered one vote, that constituted the margin of victory.

Without organized labor's financial backing and ground troops, Walsh probably wouldn't have won. His district encompasses only about 6 percent of the city, and he was one of 12 candidates in a very large field in a preliminary election in September. Without all those bodies and all that money, he may not have even won the primary.

Walsh's coalition included blue-collar voters of almost every possible background. Those who have been on opposite teams in the electoral battles for which Boston has been famous for at least the last 50 years were united in supporting his candidacy, which arguably, has now created a new political map for the city....(Click title for more)

Nov 16, 2013 - After Volkswagen issued a letter in September saying the company would not oppose an attempt by the United Auto Workers (UAW) to unionize its 1,600-worker Chattanooga, Tenn., facility, Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) was flabbergasted.

"For management to invite the UAW in is almost beyond belief," Corker, who campaigned heavily for the plant's construction during his tenure as mayor of Chattanooga, told the Associated Press. "They will become the object of many business school studies - and I'm a little worried could become a laughingstock in many ways - if they inflict this wound."

Corker isn't the only right-winger out to halt UAW's campaign. In the absence of any overt anti-union offensive by Volkswagen, conservative political operatives worried about the UAW getting a foothold in the South have stepped into the fray.

Leaked documents obtained by In These Times, as well as interviews with a veteran anti-union consultant, indicate that a conservative group, Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform, appears to be pumping hundred of thousands of dollars into media and grassroots organizing in an effort to stop the union drive. In addition, the National Right-to-Work Legal Defense Foundation helped four anti-union workers in October file a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board claiming that Volkswagen was forcing a union on them.

"Everyone is definitely looking at this fight," the anti-union consultant, Martin (not his real name), told In These Times. "This is the union fight going on right now and everybody [in the anti-union world] is looking to play their part and get compensated for playing their part."

As the only major VW plant in the United States, Chattanooga is also the only plant whose workers have no opportunity to join German-style "works councils" - committees of hourly and salaried employees who discuss management decisions, like which plant will make specific car models, on a local and global scale.

Organizing with the UAW, workers say, would help them to both form new works councils and gain representation at existing ones - which, in turn, would attract more jobs to the area.

"I personally feel like not having a union and not participating in a works council is going to do more damage for future expansion and new product development in Chattanooga than any unionization would do," says Volkswagen employee Justin King. "The way VW works on the international level, [management] almost expects to work with a union. Now, we aren't able to say, `Hey we would like to build that new SUV, or we would like to hire some new workers.' We are only hurting ourselves by not going union."

Workers also say having a union would help the plant be more efficient. "On the assembly line, the process changes each year because [of] new models," says worker Chris Brown. "A voice in the company would help smooth the process from year to year."

Beyond this, VW employees feel that organizing could help address their problems with corporate policy, including the fact that nearly one-fifth of workers at peak times in auto production have been temporary employees. Temporary employees' starting wages are more than two dollars an hour lower than full-time employees', and their healthcare and retirement benefits are much less robust, says the UAW.

According to Brown, approximately 200-300 "temps" are currently employed in the VW factory - and the UAW says they can remain classified as temporary even if they work at VW for years.

"I am friends with these people, and they want a job. Some of these people have been there for 18 months as a temp and that's just ... wrong," says Brown. "If this is a job that I do, they should be making the pay that I make. [They] should have the same job security that I have as an employee."

Fellow employee Lauren Feinauer agrees that a union would improve workers' communication with management. "We heard a lot in the beginning about how VW works with their employees: close relationships and a lot of communication. I know there is a lot of that going on, but I think some of the VW way got lost in translation," she says. "This is why we want a union."

This September, the UAW announced that a majority of VW workers have signed up to join the union. But according to the UAW, it and VW still have yet to agree on a process for recognizing the union. That has left time for outside anti-union forces to try to dissuade workers from joining the UAW - time that many of those groups have capitalized upon.

In a proposal dated Aug. 23, 2013, which was presented to a prominent anti-union group before being leaked to In These Times, Washington, D.C.-based consultant Matt Patterson outlined a vision of how anti-union forces can work with community groups to persuade VW workers that organizing is not in their long-term economic interest.

In the report, Patterson explained his approach thus far to laying the groundwork for an anti-union campaign, which he calls the "Keep Tennessee Free Project," in Chattanooga. From last May to August, he said, he "leveraged a $4,000 budget into a deep and effective anti-UAW campaign that received national media attention, pressured politicians to issue public statements against unionization, forced the union to expend resources to counter our efforts, developed an extensive intelligence network that stretched from Chattanooga to Germany to Detroit and brought the terrible economic legacy of the UAW to the forefront of the debate."

Patterson claimed that during the summer, he generated 63 stories denouncing the UAW effort in Chattanooga. In three months, he said, he was able to build a media echo chamber that now hammers Chattanooga with anti-union messaging on a regular basis.

And such remarks aren't idle boasting. The fruits of Patterson's anti-organizing crusade have appeared in the National Review, Forbes and local Chattanooga TV station WDEF 12, in addition to a host of smaller conservative talk radio shows.

But he didn't stop there - he also gathered grassroots support. "Within a few weeks," he wrote, "I had organized a coalition consisting of members of the Tea Party, Students for Liberty, former VW employees, politician and businessmen to craft and deliver a consistent message that has shaped public opinion."

It's clear that Patterson's proposal was intended for an audience worried that a victory at Volkswagen could fuel UAW unionization campaigns at the Nissan plant in Canton, Miss., and at Mercedes-Benz in Vance, Ala. "Based on the successes my coalition has already achieved, I am confident that with the request[ed] resources, significant impact can made be over the next year in Tennessee, Alabama, and throughout the South to keep the UAW from organizing the foreign-owned auto facilities that are the source of so many badly-needed jobs," he assured possible funders.

According to veteran anti-union consultant Martin, Patterson originally asked for $160,000 in the proposal, which he sent to a variety of anti-union groups, including Martin's. This, however, was before Patterson found a backer for his project: Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), the pet project of Republican mastermind Grover Norquist. Martin says that after Patterson decided to work with Americans for Tax Reform, his proposed budget rose "significantly."

After the injection of new funds, Patterson's voice in Chattanooga's anti-union debate grew even louder. Local TV station WTVC News Channel 9 included him as an anti-union panelist in a televised October 17 discussion about UAW organizing. Since September, Patterson has also been quoted by the Associated Press, Nashville Public Radio, the Chattanooga Times Free Press and even the Detroit Free Press, the UAW's home turf newspaper.

Martin says he's uncertain of where the money for Patterson's project is coming from, because Americans for Tax Reform is a 501(c)(4) that doesn't have to disclose its donors. However, he finds this secrecy to be telling.

"It is definitely corporate money. It is obviously someone who doesn't want it known who is doing this, and they have done a good job of covering it up, because I have absolutely no idea who is doing it," he says. "It could be the local Chamber [of Commerce] trying to keep their fingerprint off of it. It could be Nissan seeing this is where they go to cut [unionization] off before it makes it way down to Mississippi."

Or, as he points out, the funding could be coming from Volkswagen itself. Though it stated in September that it would not oppose the union, months later, the company has yet to announce how it will recognize the signatures the UAW has gathered from a majority of workers. Indeed, a top leader at VW recently proposed that workers should have to vote to unionize on a secret ballot in addition to signing what the UAW says are legally binding cards.

Furthermore, when speaking about VW's statement of neutrality, Corker told the Associated Press, "There was a lot of dissension within the company ... I don't think it, I know it. Candidly, one board member got very involved and forced this letter to go out. I know that it's created tremendous amounts of tension within the company."

In an email to In These Times, Volkswagen spokesperson Carsten Krebs denied that the company was giving money to Patterson, but would not expand further on Volkswagen's position on the union drive.

In his frequent comments to the press, Corker has echoed Patterson's assertion that unionization will limit job opportunities.

"If they see the UAW is building momentum in our state, other companies that are looking are not going to choose Tennessee [to settle in]; they're just not," an outraged Corker said in September.

In a high-profile interview with NPR in October, Corker continued, "I mean, look at Detroit. Look at what's happened." Referring to Chrysler and General Motors, he said, "Look at all of the businesses that have left there. I mean, it's been phenomenal. It's sad."

However, not all Republicans are as alarmed by the prospect of the UAW entering the region. Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), whose district includes many VW workers who make the short commute across the border to Chattanooga, said in an interview at the Atlanta airport, "Honestly we have got a lot of employees that work up at the Volkswagen  plant ... You know I think one reason people are attracted to the South is that we are not heavily unionized, but we have got unions ... I really had not thought too heavily about the VW plant, to tell you the truth."

When asked in a follow-up question if having "one union plant threatens all the rest of the South," Chambliss responded, "We have got a lot of union plants in the South ... No, I don't think it's a problem."

Nevertheless, the amplification of the Patterson-Corker message in the local media is putting a great deal of pressure on VW workers in Chattanooga.

"I have had a lot of friends and neighbors come up and ask about me about the union," says King. "Some of them come up and say it's really great, but I have had a lot people come up to me and say, `You guys are idiots. You guys are going to bankrupt Volkswagen and shut the plant down.' It definitely has turned into something that everyone has an opinion on."...(Click title for more)

The Chicago Reader

This is the third installment in our occasional series on poverty and segregation in Chicago's schools.

Almost half of the children in the nation's public schools are from low-income households, a new study shows. Their numbers have been growing, from 38 percent to 48 percent in the last decade, according to the Southern Education Foundation.

The national finding is disturbing, and it also serves to illuminate a much graver predicament in Chicago. The public school enrollment here is 85 percent low-income.

The rise in low-income students nationally is a long-standing trend, dating to at least 1989. The foundation attributes it to a variety of factors, including a higher birth rate among minorities and global economic changes that have led to more unemployment and greater economic inequality. The increase in low-income students is a predicament for public schools, because such students tend to do worse academically and are costlier to educate. ("Low-income" in school districts represents students eligible for free- or reduced-price lunch, because their households are within 185 percent of the poverty line.)

The Chicago Public Schools system is often disparaged, but there's little evidence that the district is worse than others at educating schoolchildren. What CPS struggles with is educating poor kids. As does everyone else. CPS just has many more of them.

In 2009, when the National Center for Education Statistics last compared low-income proportions for the 100 largest school districts in the U.S., Chicago was fourth, at 83 percent. This high concentration of low-income students-in a city where the proportion of low-income families with children under 18 is 52 percent-is attributable in part to middle- and upper-class families enrolling their kids in private schools or moving to the suburbs once their children reach school age.

The school report cards issued two weeks ago by the Illinois Board of Education once again showed dreadful performance by CPS students. On the Prairie State Achievement Exam, given to 11th graders, 55 percent of Illinois students met or exceeded state standards in reading, while only 36 percent of CPS students did.

But the statewide low-income proportion is 50 percent-35 points lower than Chicago's. And when the test scores of only the low-income students are compared, the gap is much narrower: statewide, 35 percent met or exceeded standards in reading, compared with 31 percent in Chicago....(Click title for more)

Nov 19, 2013 - Public education should be free. If it isn't free, it isn't public education.

This should not be a controversial assertion. This should be common sense. But Americans have forgotten what the "public" in "public education" actually means (or used to mean). The problem is that the word no longer has anything to refer to: This country's public universities have been radically transformed. The change has happened so slowly and so gradually - bit by bit, cut by cut over half a century - that it can be seen really only in retrospect. But with just a small amount of historical perspective, the change is dramatic: public universities that once charged themselves to open their doors to all who could benefit by attending - that were, by definition, the public property of the entire state - have become something entirely different.

What we still call public universities would be more accurately described as state-controlled private universities - corporate entities that think and behave like businesses. Whereas there once was a public mission to educate the republic's citizens, there is now the goal of satisfying the educational needs of the market, aided by PR departments that brand degrees as commodities and build consumer interest, always with an eye to the bottom line. And while public universities once sought to advance the industry of the state as a whole, with an eye to the common good, shortfalls in public funding have led to universities' treating their research capacity as a source of primary fundraising, developing new technologies and products for the private sector, explicitly to raise the money they need to operate. Conflicts of interest are now commonplace.

Should public universities be free? Only because our public universities have been so fundamentally privatized over the last 40 years does the sentence "Public universities should be free" even make sense. Of course they should be free! If an education is available only to those who can afford it - if an education is a commodity to be purchased in the marketplace - in what sense can it really be called public?

In the early 1960s, California formulated a master plan for higher education - a single name for a set of interlocking policies developed by University of California president Clark Kerr. The idea was that any Californian who wanted a postsecondary education would have a place to go in the state's three-tiered system. Students could go to a community college for free, and from there they could transfer to a California State University or a University of California - where no tuition was charged, only course fees that were intended to be nominal. New universities were swiftly planned and built to meet the dramatic increase in demand expected from baby boomers and the state's growing population; as more and more citizens aspired to higher education, California opened more and more classrooms and universities to give them that opportunity. The master plan was not a blank check, but it was a commitment: any Californian who wanted a postsecondary education could get one.

Today that is simply not true. For one thing, institutions like the University of California have not grown to meet the rising demand; year by year, bit by bit, as the state's population has continued to grow, a larger percentage of California students have been turned away or replaced by out-of-state students (who pay much higher tuition). In fact, university officials are quite explicit about the fact that they are admitting more out-of-state and international students (and fewer Californians) in order to raise money. Historically, about 10 percent of the U.C.'s student population was  from out of state, but that number has more than doubled since the 2008 financial crisis. (In Michigan, which has been hit even harder than California, out-of-state enrollment in the University of Michigan system is closer to 40 percent.)

If this country can build the world's largest military and fight open-ended wars in multiple theaters across the globe, it can find a way to pay for public education.

Most important, as tuition steadily rises to the level of comparable private universities, the word "public" comes to mean less and less. Indeed, when Mark Yudof was appointed president of the University of California in 2008, he was known as an advocate of what he had called in 2002 the hybrid university: an institution that retained some of the characteristics of a public university but would draw the bulk of its revenue from student tuition.

Yudof's vision of the "public" university would have been unrecognizable to the architects of the master plan: instead of providing the tools for the state's citizens to better themselves, state universities are to survive by thinking like a business, selling their product for as much as the market will bear. From the point of view of higher-education consumers - which are what its students have effectively become - the claim that the U.C. system is public rings increasingly false with every passing year.

For my parents, by contrast, distinction between public and private was very clear. Both baby boomers and the first in their families to get college degrees, they went to public universities because they were affordable and private universities were not. By that definition, are there any public universities left? Schools that are at least partially funded and controlled by elected officials, usually at the state level, are nominally public, and the broad range of universities that are not owned by the government - from nonprofit corporations like Harvard to explicitly for-profit corporations like the University of Phoenix or Udacity - truly inhabit the private sector. But if the price tag is the same, if the product is the same and if the experience is the same, what difference does a university's tax status make? A university that thinks and behaves like a private-sector corporation - charging its consumers what the market will bear, cutting costs wherever it can and using competition with its peers as its measure of success - is a public university in name only.

A better way to compare public and private would be to consider the difference between public roads and toll roads. Some toll roads are owned and operated by state governments and some by the private sector. But does the driver care who owns the road? I doubt it; the important thing is whether the road is free and open to all or whether it can be used only by those who can afford to drive on it. The same is true of public and private universities: A university is public only if those who need to use it can do so.

In this sense, it seems to me that the malaise that afflicts our public universities is not really about about dollars and cents. If this country can build the world's largest military and fight open-ended wars in multiple theaters across the globe, it can find a way to pay for public education, as it once did in living memory. But doing so has ceased to be a real priority. Affordable public education is no longer something we expect, demand or take for granted; to argue that public education should be free makes you sound like an absurd and unrealistic utopian. Meanwhile, we take it for granted that roads should be free to drive on, a toll road here or there not withstanding. You provide the car and the gas; the state provides the road.

This used to be how we thought about our public universities, before they became exorbitant toll roads. If you had the grades and the ambition, there was a classroom open to you. But if every road were a toll road, no one would expect to drive for free. If every road were a toll road, the very idea that the government would build and maintain a massive system of roads and highways - and then let anyone use it (for free!) - would seem fantastical, ridiculous, even perverse. People expecting the right to drive anywhere they pleased, for free, would be branded utopian, socialist and deluded, soft-hearted liberals demanding a free lunch. That's the world we live in when it comes to highways. When the roads that drive our economy and make modern life possible get too crowded or too congested, we expect the state to build new roads. When the old roads wear out, they are repaved. When a tree or a landslide obstructs a thoroughfare, the state clears the way. When there are not enough classrooms, on the other hand, the state no longer builds new universities; it simply charges more.

For most of the 20th century, when the overwhelming majority of this country's public universities were built, it was simply common sense that a growing college-age population had to be matched by a growing system of accessible higher education, something that - as everyone agreed - only the government could provide and that only the government did provide. They were explicitly chartered to bring a college degree within the reach of as many citizens as possible and to advance the greater good by disseminating knowledge as widely as possible. Without that common sense, that bipartisan consensus, our public universities would never have been built in the first place. And judged by that original standard, there are few, if any, public universities left.

Aaron Bady is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas and formerly a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also an editor and blogger at the New Inquiry....(Click title for more)

The Observer, UK

Oct 19, 2013 - Ai Aoyama is a sex and relationship counsellor who works out of her narrow three-storey home on a Tokyo back street. Her first name means "love" in Japanese, and is a keepsake from her earlier days as a professional dominatrix. Back then, about 15 years ago, she was Queen Ai, or Queen Love, and she did "all the usual things" like tying people up and dripping hot wax on their nipples. Her work today, she says, is far more challenging. Aoyama, 52, is trying to cure what Japan's media calls sekkusu shinai shokogun, or "celibacy syndrome".

Japan's under-40s appear to be losing interest in conventional relationships. Millions aren't even dating, and increasing numbers can't be bothered with sex. For their government, "celibacy syndrome" is part of a looming national catastrophe. Japan already has one of the world's lowest birth rates. Its population of 126 million, which has been shrinking for the past decade, is projected to plunge a further one-third by 2060. Aoyama believes the country is experiencing "a flight from human intimacy" - and it's partly the government's fault.

The sign outside her building says "Clinic". She greets me in yoga pants and fluffy animal slippers, cradling a Pekingese dog whom she introduces as Marilyn Monroe. In her business pamphlet, she offers up the gloriously random confidence that she visited North Korea in the 1990s and squeezed the testicles of a top army general. It doesn't say whether she was invited there specifically for that purpose, but the message to her clients is clear: she doesn't judge.

Inside, she takes me upstairs to her "relaxation room" - a bedroom with no furniture except a double futon. "It will be quiet in here," she says. Aoyama's first task with most of her clients is encouraging them "to stop apologising for their own physical existence".

The number of single people has reached a record high. A survey in 2011 found that 61% of unmarried men and 49% of women aged 18-34 were not in any kind of romantic relationship, a rise of almost 10% from five years earlier. Another study found that a third of people under 30 had never dated at all. (There are no figures for same-sex relationships.) Although there has long been a pragmatic separation of love and sex in Japan - a country mostly free of religious morals - sex fares no better. A survey earlier this year by the Japan Family Planning Association (JFPA) found that 45% of women aged 16-24 "were not interested in or despised sexual contact". More than a quarter of men felt the same way.

Sex counsellor Ai Aoyama with a client and her dog Learning to love: sex counsellor Ai Aoyama, with one of her clients and her dog Marilyn. Photograph: Eric Rechsteiner/Panos Picture

Many people who seek her out, says Aoyama, are deeply confused. "Some want a partner, some prefer being single, but few relate to normal love and marriage." However, the pressure to conform to Japan's anachronistic family model of salaryman husband and stay-at-home wife remains. "People don't know where to turn. They're coming to me because they think that, by wanting something different, there's something wrong with them."

Official alarmism doesn't help. Fewer babies were born here in 2012 than any year on record. (This was also the year, as the number of elderly people shoots up, that adult incontinence pants outsold baby nappies in Japan for the first time.) Kunio Kitamura, head of the JFPA, claims the demographic crisis is so serious that Japan "might eventually perish into extinction"....(Click title for more)

Nov 19 2013 - Looking at Page for some 90 minutes is a pleasure unto itself.

The big problem with pinup queen Bettie Page - maybe the only problem - is that her image inspires so many easy bromides about how she made sex seem fun and playful, and how she's a great role model for modern women who want to feel comfortable with their sexuality. It's not that any of those observations are wrong. It's just that they reduce Page to a Post-it-sized affirmation for our own causes.

In 2013, in the Western world, at least, it's not such a big deal to own your sexuality. In the 1950s, when Page's career was flowering - and before she mysteriously walked away from that career in 1957 - owning your sexuality could get you arrested. Page stands for joy and fun and freedom, absolutely, but for her that was perilous. It wasn't her willingness to appear nude, or semi-nude, that made her revolutionary. What made her dangerous was the one thing she almost always wore: a smile.

Mark Mori's documentary Bettie Page Reveals All understands that, celebrating Page's verve and beauty while placing it squarely in its social and historical context. Much of the movie consists of footage and stills from Page's life and career, and face it: Looking at Page for some 90 minutes is a pleasure unto itself. But her actual voice gives the movie its richness. Mori has constructed the movie around a series of audio-only interviews he conducted with Page in the 1990s. There are no photos of the older Page - she said that she wanted people to remember her as she was in the pictures. But the sound of her reveals more than she may have realized. Page never smoked or drank, but the drawling rasp of her older voice bears the marks of a not-so-easy life.

Page, as she tells it, was born into an impoverished Tennessee family of six. Her mother, she says, didn't want her; her father sexually abused her and several of her siblings. But what you don't hear in Page's voice is self-pity. She describes a brief, early, unhappy marriage as a roadblock she had to blast through before she could really start having fun. And she did have fun, making her way to New York, where she found work as a secretary, though she soon discovered she could make more money modeling for amateur photography enthusiasts. Eventually, she appeared in photos and films made by Irving and Paula Klaw, the brother-sister duo behind New York's mail-order photo business Movie Star News, and in magazines like Wink, Titter, Flirt and Beauty Parade, all published by nudie-cutie and fetish impresario Robert Harrison.

Page assures us she was having fun in those photographs, not that we need to be told. Through her pinups, Page became famous for her saucy, athletic curves, her wardrobe of flirty bikinis (most of which she designed and sewed herself), and her blunt shortie bangs. In one of the movie's most delightful interludes, she tells the story of that 'do, explaining that one of those amateur photography enthusiasts suggested they might look good on her. "So I went home and cut me some, and I've been wearing them ever since!" she says with a cackle. Youth may leave us, but bangs endure.

Mori - director of the 1991 documentary Building Bombs - assembles the information here with clarity and sensitivity, particularly in dealing with the unhappier episodes of the 10 years Page spent, later in her life, in a California mental institution. ...(Click title for more)

Become a CCDS member today!

The time is long past for 'Lone Rangers'. Being a socialist by your self is no fun and doesn't help much. Join CCDS today--$36 regular, $48 household and $18 youth.

Better yet, beome a sustainer at $20 per month, and we'll send you a copy of Jack O'Dell's new book, 'Climbing Jacobs Ladder,' drawing on the lessons of the movement in the South in the 1950s and 1960s.

Solidarity, Carl Davidson, CCDS