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LA Sheriff Lee Baca ran some of the worst prisons in America, right here in LA; a year ago it seemed like there was no way to get rid of him. Then last month he resigned. CELESTE FREMON explains how we did it: she writes the indispensable WitnessLA blog, and reported on the sheriff for LA Magazine.
TOM FRANK: Why Democrats are scared of “class”: “’Inequality’ is what we say when we mean to describe the ruined downtown of your city, or your constant fear that the next round of layoffs will include you.” Tom, author of the classic What’s the Matter with Kansas, recently moved his column from Harper’s to Salon.com, where it is free.
The politics of grapes in Chile and the US: after seizing power in 1973, Augusto Pinochet made Chile the world’s leading grape exporter. Fruit workers, mostly women, started to buy appliances, clothing, and cosmetics, and consumerism changed gender relations as well as pro-democracy movements. Meanwhile, back in the US, the United Farm Workers and Chilean solidarity activists boycotted grapes. HEIDI TINSMAN will explain – she teaches history at UC Irvine; her new book is Buying into the Regime: Grapes and Consumption in Cold War Chile and the United States.
