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World Wide Work - May 2008
This edition of the free bulletin, World Wide Work, is published by the American Labor Education Center, an independent nonprofit founded in 1979.
WORLD WIDE WORK
New and worth noting…
FILMS
*Outsourced ( www.outsourcedthemovie.com). This romantic comedy follows a young “fulfillment executive” in Seattle who is sent to India to train workers who will be taking over the work the team he supervised used to do. In the process, he falls in love, learns something about Indian culture as well as his own, and finds out that Indians too are subject to the whims of global capital.
*Freeheld (www.freeheld.com). The 38-minute Oscar winner for short documentary is a powerful tool for provoking discussion about the rights of partners of the same sex. As a woman who has served for 25 years as a police officer in Ocean County, New Jersey, is dying of cancer, county politicians refuse to exercise their power to pass her pension on to her female partner, as it would be to a male husband. The male officers she has worked with lead a community movement that forces change.
*August Evening (www.augustevening.com). This gorgeous independent feature about cross-generational relationships in a Mexican family in Texas has the authentic emotion and subtlety that is missing from most Hollywood blockbusters. Key roles are played powerfully by people from the area who never acted before.
*War Made Easy ( www.warmadeeasythemovie.org). This 73-minute documentary collects in one place virtually all of the key video clips from U.S. presidents from Lyndon Johnson through Bush the Second that show Republicans and Democrats alike lying to the public to justify the launching and prolonging of wars. By juxtaposing nearly identical clips from media coverage of war after war, the film exposes a pattern of government-media collaboration to mislead, cheerlead, attack or ignore critics, and then insist that withdrawal would cause more damage than continuing the war indefinitely.
*Superheroes ( www.superheroesthemovie.com). This feature film takes the viewer inside the head of a returning Iraq war veteran whose wounds – physical and psychological – dominate his life even as he tries to make a new friend back home.
*Secrecy (www.secrecyfilm.com). An 87-minute, dispassionate documentary interviews intelligence and military insiders as well as outside watchdogs on the question of how to balance the public’s need for information to make democratic decisions and agencies’ desire to maintain secrecy.
*Young@Heart (foxsearchlight.com/youngatheart). A documentary that is both warm and poignant about a musical performing group of people in their 70s and 80s whose repertoire includes hard-driving punk rock songs as well as favorites from the 1960s.
*My Effortless Brilliance ( www.lynnshelton.net). A rare movie that explores male friendship as a young writer tries to reconnect with a buddy he lost touch with after achieving some commercial success.
*7,500 Miles to Redemption (www.7500miles.com). This half-hour documentary about Asian-American inmates in an Oregon prison who raise money to build a school in rural Vietnam underscores the waste of human potential when millions of Americans are warehoused behind bars.
BOOKS
*Unafraid by Jeff Golden ( www.Unafraidthebook.com). At a time when a new national figure is leading for his party’s presidential nomination by tapping into many Americans’ yearning for a break from conventional politics, this novel evokes the author’s vision of what is possible. His starting point – what if the bullet fired at John F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963 only wounded him, and in the process gave him a new willingness to take risks for progressive policies and an intense sense of urgency? How might the years since then have been different?
*Swim Against the Current by Jim Hightower with Susan DeMarco (Wiley). The populist with a sense of humor chronicles grassroots activists across the U.S. who have
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