The March Free Press Second Saturday Cyber-Salon was hosted by Simply Living, with Chuck Lynd, director of Support Ohio Local Economies (SOLE) as the moderator. Simply Living is a local membership organization that offers the community a way to live simply and sustainably in cooperation with others and with nature. They offer workshops,events, a marketplace and partnerships with businesses and organizations.

See the salon video here.

The Undergraduate Student Government (USG) earlier this week unanimously voted to urge the Ohio State University administration not to renew its lease agreement for an on-campus Wendy’s due to the company’s failure to commit to the Fair Food Program, which provides verifiable human rights protections to farmworkers in its supply chain.

The Fair Food Program is “the gold standard for enforcing human rights in the U.S. agricultural system,” declared the USG.

Pioneered by the Florida-based Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), the social responsibility program has been adopted by some of the biggest fast-food chains and supermarkets in the world, including McDonald’s and Walmart, and has a track record second-to-none for eliminating longstanding farm labor abuses ranging from forced labor to sexual assault. 

Wendy’s is the last fast-food giant to reject the Fair Food Program. during a pandemic no less. According to the CIW nearly 90,000 meatpacking workers, food processing workers, and farmworkers have tested positive for COVID-19, as food and agricultural workers have suffered the highest COVID-19 death rates of workers in any occupation. 

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The weather in Philadelphia can be bad. If it rained more, they could call it the Schuylkill Bay instead of the Schuylkill River. Though the nearby Delaware River is bigger, the Schuylkill has its own history, some yet to be made.

A distance from the river, centered at the bubble end of a lane, Anton Evers’ home stood as a kind of beacon. The builders of the houses on the lane used red bricks for every house except Evers’. His are white.

Evers opened the second-floor front door and peered out into the morning rain, which produced a pleasant cadence on the lids of the cans on the sidewalk below. Rain made it a bad day to collect trash, or deliver the newspaper.

But Toby Wallace didn’t mind, because today was his last day throwing the paper as he walked. A boy turns 16 only once, and that was today. Tonight, he’d pilot a car that used to belong to someone else. After tonight, it belonged to him.

He was most excited to show his new wheels to his two friends, his only friends, B-drop and Tick. But the trio rarely saw each other, because B-drop and Tick were in a gang known as the Front Street Boyz.

Many Palestinian intellectuals and political analysts find themselves in the unenviable position of having to declare a stance on whether they support or reject upcoming Palestinian elections which are scheduled for May 22 and July 30. But there are no easy answers.

The long-awaited decree by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas last January to hold legislative and presidential elections in the coming months was widely welcomed,  not as a triumph for democracy but as the first tangible positive outcome of dialogue between rival Palestinian factions, mainly Abbas’ Fatah party and Hamas. 

As far as inner Palestinian dialogue is concerned, the elections, if held unobstructed, could present a ray of hope that, finally, Palestinians in the Occupied Territories will enjoy a degree of democratic representation, a first step towards a more comprehensive representation that could include millions of Palestinians outside the Occupied Territories. 

“The United States of America has open wounds.”

Ever since its founding, the United States has been attempting to build a society around those wounds, on the belief that hyped-up language — “all men are created equal,” and so forth — can paper over deep wrongs. If you put the ideal in writing, you can ignore its absence in real life.