An international one-day strike by fast-food workers is something new, and also something old.  People without a union are organizing and acting in solidarity.  Others are joining in support of their moral demand for a living wage.  They're holding rallies.  They're shutting down restaurants.  They're using Occupy's people's microphone.  They're targeting the one-percenter CEO of McDonald's who apparently is paid $9,002 per hour for the public service of ruining our health with horrible tasting processed imitation food.

Jeremy Brecher has released a revised, expanded, and updated edition of his 40-year-old book, Strike, that includes the origins of these fast-food worker strikes and puts them in the context of a history of the strike in the United States dating back to 1877. This opening passage of Chapter 1 sets the context beautifully:

You don’t often hear the phrase “feminist anime”, but Sailor Moon was one of the most girl-positive cartoons to ever air in any part of the world. With a main cast of five teenage girls with magical powers fighting evil in modern-day Japan, the show was as much about friendship and acceptance as it was about stopping the bad guys. This year, Toei Animation is revisiting the series with a new show called Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon Crystal, but just as important to adults who watched the original show, Viz Media is releasing a new translation that embraces some of the more revolutionary aspects of Sailor Moon.

Neighborhoods are small communities. Communities have bonds. They also have rivalries. They also have gossip and intrigue, albeit on a petty scale. Through the efforts of Mayor Jean Quan and NextDoor.com, the intelligence community and the Oakland Police Department (OPD) are now privy to these tiny pieces of personal information and the larger patters they reveal. Under the auspices of community building and public safety, the public's participation is can now be freely enlisted in the creation of a database of that information.

Through the new partnership, the OPD and the CIA now know what Oakland residents had for breakfast, who their children have a playdate with, and if their dog wanders around the block. NextDoor.com is Oakland's social media surveillance experiment.

Time will tell what the results of that experiment will be. A metropolitan police department can easily fail at social media as the New York Police Department recently showed with their social media debacle with the #myNYPD twitter campaign.