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Over 50 years ago, the TV documentary Harvest of Shame brought a national spotlight on the town of Immokalee, Florida and the exploitation of migrant farm laborers across the U.S. In the years that followed, the work of Cesar Chávez and the United Farm Workers brought some incremental improvements, but agricultural laborers have still been “exempted” from most of the protections in the Fair Labor Standards Act.

In the past five years, the lives of Florida farmworkers and their families have taken a dramatic turn for the better, thanks to the Fair Food Program, an organizing strategy developed by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a group of Florida farmworkers who have been fighting for human rights in the tomato industry since 1993.

From its opening words of dedication, Janet Phelan’s EXILE hooks the reader with her intuitive grasp of the work’s place in history as she warns those of us awake enough to question the American Dream:

“To the ones who came before, in gratitude And to the ones who will come after, so that you may know the magnitude.”

From this point on Phelan takes the reader on a terrifying early millennium roller-coaster ride through a series of bizarre, seemingly coordinated attacks in some five countries - a ride she barely manages to survive.

I have been hoisted on my own petard. For decades now, I have assiduously ignored ninety-nine percent of all the rap music–an oxymoron if ever there was one–out there. And then came the publication of Notorious RBG. I immediately knew it was a tongue-in-cheek reference to the late rapper, Notorious B.I.G., but what I didn’t know was if he and Biggie Smalls were the same person. For those readers uninitiated in rap music, they were.

Went to our gloriously funky Columbus Symphony's Latin Fiesta (Homage To Tango) at the Southern Theatre, Saturday May 21, and man, was it muy tremendeso (please forgive my pidgen Argentinian language problems, I mean, they do speak Espanol down there, don't they or is it Portuguese; Doris, hon', google dat for me, wouldja, babe? Thanks so much!).

Back in my record store days, I never listened to tango all that much and when I did, I didn't listen to a lot of it. It was--if you can believe this--actually too moody for a guy like me. Which is nuts. Because even I know I'm musically at least one of the moodiest sonsabitches on the planet. Chuck Berry's got nothin' on me.

City Council must have been in a generous mood earlier this week during its Monday meeting at City Hall when it handed out two 10 year 75% tax abatements worth $680,710 to Hubbard Park Place LLC and Brunner Building LLC for two separate building projects in the Short North with a total investment cost of approximately $46 million. Both projects will create eight full-time permanent jobs in the economically depressed area of the Short North.

Then came Ball Metal Food Containers turn. According to the Department of Development, Ball Corp along with its subsidiaries is “the world’s leading supplier of metal packaging to the beverage, food, personal care and household industries, aerospace and other technology industries servicing both the commercial and government sectors.” Council members felt justified in handing out another 75% 10 year tax abatement totaling $1,684,430 for Ball Corp’s $15 million investment into their existing facility on the West side of Columbus and the promise of 50 new jobs.

Dear Mr. Holland: After studying and assessing your work this semester, it is with deep regret that I have to inform you that you failed Social Science Statistics 101.

As you know, you have characterized us as “conspiracy theorists” because in our STRIP & FLIP SELECTION OF 2016: FIVE JIM CROWS & ELECTRONIC ELECTION THEFT, Harvey Wasserman and I have suggested that exit polls matter. You have also publicly denounced our colleague Richard Charnin, who has two separate Master’s degrees in Applied Mathematics, for his analysis of this year’s primary exit poll results versus election results.

Since you show so little interest in statistical analysis, let me briefly go over what you should know:

On May 19 demonstrators gathered at the Ohio Statehouse and the North Market to raise awareness of the forms of violence experienced by black women, girls, and transgender women. They called for an end to criminalization of black victims of sexual violence, gender discriminatory legislation, and narrow social standards of black womanhood and femininity.

“We’re here today to join a national day of action lifting up the names of black women, girls, and femmes who have been killed in the past two years,” said Rev. Lane Campbell, minister of religious education at the First Unitarian Universalist Church. “These are just the cases that we know about. There are many other names that we don’t know.”

The protesters unfurled a large scroll of names and read them aloud, chanting “Say Her Name” after each victim’s name.

In so many ways, Dr. Damon Tweedy was fortunate. He grew up in an intact home with loving, strict, and steeped-in-the-church parents who were gainfully employed and taught him to aim high. Tweedy’s parents did not even finish high school. His father worked all his life as a butcher in a grocery store; Tweedy’s mother spent forty years working for the federal government. Tweedy also had a great example in his older brother who graduated from college. He had done well in high school and college, but he arrived at Duke University School of Medicine full of apprehension and doubt. Could he cut it? He was from a working class family, attended a middling, state-supported public university, and would be one of a few black scholarship students, recruited in part to diversify the student body, in his classes. His classmates would primarily be middle- and upper-class white students who had attended prominent universities and could afford to be at Duke. Tweedy studied his tail off that first half of the semester. When he received his midterm grades, he was in the top half of all of his classes, and his doubts began to recede.

Just because a crisis situation seems impossible to address effectively, there is no reason to give up, but every reason to keep wheels turning--inside out, as does this masterful dissection of elections and voting as a system between the Civil War and today.

Quite a time period to cover in less than 100 pages, but authors Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman face this challenge, prefaced and introduced by the famed author and investigative reporter Greg Palast and actress and activist (head of Progressive Democrats of America) Mimi Kennedy.

Like a violent storm the US Army sought to squash any signs of expression when a group of graduating black female West Point cadets took a photo with raised fists. Their raised fists a sign of solidarity with Black Lives Matter.

Military insiders have reported the black female cadets have complained to senior officers the racism within the mostly white and male-dominated academy is too much to take. The military would never allow these cadets to speak publicly, however, so it may never be known whether they meant the picture to go viral.