On Monday, April 26, at Capital University, we might be willing to give the shirts off of our backs after meeting a Bangladeshi garment worker and a Pakistani who works in a factory that produces some of the balls soccer moms watch their kids kick around.

“The conditions are very bad in some of these factories. In fact, in Bangladesh, very recently there was a fire in a garment factory. The same factory had a fire six months ago and people died in both of those fires,” said Karen Hansen, an activist who works with Ohio Conference on Fair Trade, one of the groups sponsoring the event locally, along with some labor unions and the Ohio Sweat-Free Campaign.

Hansen said she disagrees with those who say sweatshops are justified in that people working in them would be worse off if the industries left their countries.

“That's one story they like to tell, especially those who profit off of those conditions. But there are plenty of places where they are creating fair-trade soccer balls and fair-trade garments. So, we know that it can be done,” Hansen said.

If the Democrats don't get the youth vote, they're toast. That happened in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, where young Obama voters stayed home in droves. It's an ugly conceivable future portended by a new Harvard poll that shows forty-one percent of young Republicans planning on voting in November, compared to 35 percent of young Democrats and 13 percent of independents. A recent Pew poll showed a similarly disturbing pattern: Young voters still prefer the Democrats, but their margin is slipping and their enthusiasm level is worse.

Some reasons and some solutions:

I sat down seven years ago this month with my son Adam and told him about the tragic death of a brave American woman named Rachel Corrie. As I informed him who she was, where and how she died, he stared at her two photographs in the paper and said, “Daddy, I will name my first daughter Rachel.” Adam was only nine years old, and I couldn’t have been more proud of him.

Rachel Corrie had a heart bigger than Texas. She paid the ultimate price fighting to uphold the international law that bans collective punishment.

Rachel was a 23 year-old Evergreen State College student from Olympia, WA. Rachel responded to the U.S. and Israeli rejection of a UN Resolution recommending an International Peace Keeping Force be sent into Palestine to serve as a human rights monitor there by enlisting in the International Solidarity Movement (ISM).

ISM is a group of international volunteers who partake in non-violent direct action resistance to the Israeli occupation. Members of the group live in Palestinian communities and experience first-hand the violence to which Palestinians are subjected every day by the Israeli military.

WCRSFM.ORG