“You look at the labels and you see farmer this, farmer that. It’s really just three or four companies that are controlling the meat. We’ve never had food companies this big and this powerful in our history.”

– Eric Schlosser, author of “Fast Food Nation.”

Most of the widely publicized undercover work into meat processing plants has been done by animal rights groups. While Americans should certainly be concerned about the way their food is treated, there has been little to no focus on the workers in these plants who are often treated no better than the animals put up for slaughter. Thankfully, the creators of Food, Inc. took the time to explain the devastating effects of NAFTA and how immigrants to our country are cooperatively used up by food corporations and spit back out by ICE agents. It is a sick and twisted relationship our government has with food corporations in order to maximize profit. Scary, smart, and relevant; I’m recommending it to everyone.

But this isn’t just a movie, it’s a campaign. Learn more at www.takepart.com.

When is a boundary not a boundary? The 2008 movie Frozen River takes place on and near the Mohawk Indian Reservation, which sits astride the US-Canada boundary between upstate New York and Quebec. But the St. Lawrence River, which is an international boundary both upstream and downstream from the Rez, is not a boundary to the Mohawk nation.

Not only is the river not a boundary, but many of the laws that apply in the US and in Canada, hold no force on the reservation. In addition, the poverty and isolation that are rampant here and on other reservations in both countries mean that there’s no need to try to exclude opportunity-seekers, because few see opportunity on reservations. And thereby hangs an interesting and cautionary tale of two women, one Mohawk and one white, trying to earn a living in an unpromising environment. Haunted by need, they turn to smuggling Chinese and Pakistani immigrants from Canada to the US across this icy boundary that isn’t guarded because it isn’t a boundary.

But the people they bring in are undocumented, and the New York State Police can stop cars suspected of carrying them once they’re off of Mohawk territory; the risk is high and Ray Eddy (played by Melissa Leo in an Oscar-nominated performance) and Lila Littlewolf (played by Misty Upham in an equally compelling but more understated way) carry a lot of baggage from their pasts.

There’s a stark contrast between the support systems surrounding the two women: Ray is raising her two sons totally alone since the disappearance of her gambler husband – she seems to have no relatives or even friends nearby. Lila, on the other hand, is surrounded by tribal elders who try to get her to be more responsible – they’re in her face and sometimes cruelly so, but at least they care. The heartbreak of separation from her child is written on Lila’s face, and is mirrored in a chilling incident during a river crossing.

Frozen River is a challenging movie; it’s not easy to watch (although there is no violence). It does not argue for stricter immigration enforcement or more lenient; it simply illustrates the fact that boundaries are created by us and that not everyone sees them in the same way.

Tom Coburn, Chuck Grassley, and Susan Collins. They’re the ones responsible for the way this bill looks.

And fricking Coburn and Grassley won’t even have the decency to vote for their own handiwork. That’s the new definition of “bipartisan”: three Republicans screw with a bill, and in the end, only one of them even votes for it.

Despite the shenanigans of the above-mentioned, not everything got screwed up. The E-Verify mandate was noticeably absent from the bill. E-Verify is an error-riddled database that employers can use to verify an employees immigration status. It has long been touted by the Department of Homeland Security and rabid anti-immigrant groups as the golden ticket that will protect the American worker. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

The New York Times says it well in Saturday’s editorial Helping Workers in Hard Times.

Undocumented immigrants make up only about one-twentieth of the work force but are overwhelmingly represented in the most dangerous, dirty and low-paying jobs. Driving out every undocumented worker, a temptation in hard times, clears the way for laid-off Americans to pick lettuce, wash dishes and cars, and wait all morning outside Home Depot for a contractor to drive up.

That doesn’t sound terribly smart. Nor were the efforts by tough-talkers in Congress to slip into the stimulus package a ban on any illegal worker receiving a penny of recovery money. They wanted to require every business receiving that money to use an error-plagued employment-verification system, E-Verify.

That idea crashes on the rocks of common sense. It is impossible to know how many undocumented workers might get hired through the stimulus, but the Congressional Budget Office has already quantified the cost — in thousands of lost jobs and billions in lost tax revenue — of the mandatory mass expansion of E-Verify. That is from all the workers who would be fired because of database errors or simply moved off the books.

E-Verify is just another hurdle in the road to economic recovery. That it was stripped away is a huge victory not just for immigrant rights advocates seeking more humane treatment of immigrant workers, but for every American. Republicans will still have chances to slip it into legislation however. The fight to defeat E-Verify is not over yet.

Now comes one of the most sobering and inspiring documentaries of our day, a chronicle of the amazing and successful struggle of Liberian Christian and Muslim women to bring the nation’s warring factions to their well-earned demise.

The provocative title of the work—Pray the Devil Back to Hell—grabbed us even before it hit the screen at a recent national leadership meeting of the Women’s Division of the United Methodist Church.

The content of the work—the shocking footage, the even more shocking narratives, and the unbelievable courage of women whose commitment and faith brought an end to war, toppled a government, sent a rogue president to international trial for crimes against humanity, and helped elect the first female head of state—is stunning. Throughout this moving story of horror and hope few eyes were dry, and total, inspired silence marked its conclusion. It is one of the finest documentaries I have ever seen.

And it is more. It is a teaching narrative for U.S. communities living into the demographic, religious, racial, and ethnic changes in this still-emerging nation. It is an open invitation to women of diverse faith traditions to consider anew their own possibilities; it is an open invitation to all to consider anew the depths and heights of our shared humanity, and to reconsider the unleashed power of organized, nonviolent, mass action.

Imagine 2050? See Pray the Devil Back to Hell and be encouraged for the journey ahead by the amazing struggle of Liberian women who sat down and stood up to violence and power, toppled it, and brought in a new day and a renewed nation.

So much was wrong with this movie that it’s hard to know where to begin, though the biggest blunder perhaps, is that it just wasn’t very entertaining. Hard to believe that the current President of the United States’ life isn’t intriguing enough to fill a two hour biopic, but he as the central character was the least engaging. Which begs to question, how accurate is Oliver Stone’s Bush? Stone seemed more intent on portraying Bush’s bad personal habits, see the repeated close-ups of Bush eating with his mouth open, than developing a deeper character. Was the movie meant to be a farce or a serious biopic? That was never made clear unfortunately. Either one would have been acceptable; if it was a farce then we could have all had a good laugh and gone home. If it was made in earnest it would have had to take much more brutal blows at the judgement and character of Bush and his current administration.

Josh Brolin as Bush does manage to lose himself in his character, which is commendable considering the material he had to work with. The rest of the cast for the most part does a brilliant job impersonating their characters. Thandie Newton is obviously a talented actor, and I wouldn’t have opposed her as Condoleeza Rice, if only Rice was indeed emaciated and had a twitchy eye.

The movie redeems itself during its administration meeting and war room scenes when the tense interactions of the other characters lend a much needed spark. Karl Rove (Toby Jones) and Dick Cheney (Richard Dreyfuss) practically coil themselves around Bush’s neck throughout the movie, and Cheney’s and Colin Powell’s (Jeffrey Wright) hatred for one another is delightfully palpable.

Where Stone really missed the mark, was not accounting for most viewers already intimate knowledge of Bush - most of us unfortunately have his annoying mannerisms already seared into our memories. The guy has been in the public eye for 10 years now after all, and we’ve been watching this horror flick play out for 8 of them. A two hour rerun of the whole thing seemed a mite torturous.

Have your voting rights been violated or did you witness discrimination or harassment at the polls? Tell your story and get help at VoterStory.org or call one of these hotlines: 1-866-MYVOTE1, 1-866-OUR-VOTE or 1-888-VE-Y-VOTA (en Español).

You can learn more about Social Contract Press’ relationships with the Federation for American Immigration Reform and other anti-immigrant groups by visiting the Campaign for a United America. The Campaign is exposing the truth behind these groups and their troubling associations with white supremacy.

I have probably seen John Sayles’ The Brother From Another Planet (1984) almost a dozen times. I first saw it when I was in high school, bored, flipping through our cable channels. I was skeptical at first, given the low budget special effects, but the film quickly sucked me in. Last year I taught in a college course my co-instructor and I put together called Race and Gender in Science Fiction Film. Through all my viewings, that was my first experience watching it with a large group of people and I fell in love with the film al over again for its uncompromising politics, its connections between people of color, and its biting wit.

The film follows an escaped alien slave, played by Joe Morton (who never gets a name in the film), who crash lands on Earth. But not only Earth, but Harlem, baby! Morton’s character, who is black and mute, has to learn to navigate Harlem circa early 1980s, before gentrification and upwardly mobile white faces replaced all black, in the grips of drug epidemic, crushed under the weight of Reaganomics, shaped by the factors of benign and not so benign neglect.

Morton’s character also has to contend with two slave catchers on his trail for his planet, Men in Black, played by director Sayles and David Strathaim, intent on recapturing him and taking him back. There is a hilarious and touching scene when the Men in Black come looking for Morton at a bar he has hung out at, and all the black people there defend and protect him. They know he is strange, they don’t know exactly what he is running from, but they know he is lost, he is black, and he needs protection. This look at community shows the beauty and the humanity breathing underneath the layer of grim dumped on the ghetto. It is an understanding that communities of color are places of strength and support, not just monstrous nightmarish landscapes as they are portrayed in mainstream culture.

Brother is clearly a critique and comment both about the history of black folks in this country, and the realities of immigration, and it is the film’s deft ability to show the connections and commonalities between the two that makes it a monumental film. When Morton’s character first crashes here, he lands in Ellis Island, now empty and derelict. One of his special powers is to be able to touch an object and sense the emotions, the history associated with it. Everywhere he touches in Ellis Island, we see him writhe in pain from the collective history there. We here the voices of immigrants crying, yelling, pleading in different languages. And we see Morton, voiceless (a powerful commentary on the state of black people and immigrants in this country), scream wordlessly as he falls to his knees with the historic pain of the American dream, a dream deferred.

The film is rife with humor, like the old black saying, “You gotta laugh to keep from crying.” In one scene, Morton’s character is riding the subway. A white card hustler comes up to him and asked if he wants to see a card trick, and takes him through a complicated set up. He asks if Morton wants to see another trick, “Want to see me make all the white people disappear?” the train stops at Columbia Circle, the stop right before Harlem, and the train empties of white faces. The white hustler looks back at him, winks, and says, “See? What’d I tell ya?” A deceptively simple and yet burning commentary on gentrification and red-lining.

But for me, the most important aspect of this film is that we see the world through the eyes of the alien, the other. In most films, we are looking at the outsider as foreign, strange, horrific, dangerous – which is much the same way our immigration policy goes today. When we speak of “Americans,” we are often using code words for white native born citizens. Anyone not of that category is foreign and alien. Brother flips it, shows us how truly nightmarish American society is from an outside perspective, especially in relationship to the experiences of people of color.

In the end of Brother From Another Planet, it is through the solidarity of the other runaway slaves, the immigrants and the refugees, in conjunction with the solidarity of the black community in Harlem, that Morton’s character achieves his freedom, defeats the Men in Black and begins to understand that though this place called Harlem is not his home, it can be a home for him, and that that, in the end, is enough.

How do you make a movie that relies entirely on America’s sordid racial history, without ever talking about race? Ask the makers of Hancock, they seem to have it down pat.

John Hancock [Will Smith] is a superhero that protects Los Angeles, begrudgingly. Drunk, foul mouthed, bedraggled, sexist, homophobic and ethnically insensitive, he’s about as far from a Superman as you’re ever going to get. But we find out that all Hancock needs is a little TLC.

A blow to the head 80 years ago erased his memory, so he lives in isolation from society, saving it without being of it. But all that changes when he meets Ray Embrey read more

Why am I so jittery? Do I subconsciously mistrust what’s unknowingly familiar? And if so, what am I so uncertain about?

Do we crave fear, or do politicians campaign on behalf of trepidation?

Science fiction and horror movie reels are no longer a past-time fave. They’re here and each show is filled with wide-eyed anxious moviegoers: But why?

Recently a friend of mine urged me to see what the fuss was all about.

My nerves were loose and as read more

“As a struggle for the rights of immigrants and against discrimination emerged, Haitians and Dominicans began to coalesce, but the Irish were a bit stand-offish. Immigrant rights activists were at first perplexed until they uncovered that the Irish were being encouraged by Irish American politicians to keep themselves separate from other immigrant groups because it was likely read more

If you are reading this post through blogger.com and don’t see the audio player, you may download this weeks program by here. read more