English for Activists

Dear All,

Hello. I hope you are well there.
I'm sorry to delay delivering E-news letter.

We had a class on Apr. 6th 2010, we did four activities.

1) Correction
We corrected Seika's E-newsletter which delivered last week.
It was almost perfect, but there are some uncommon phrases for native speakers,
we interchanged some words common expression.

2 )Discussion about the new meeting room
We have to find the new meeting room, which is used, from May 11th,
we discussed about it.
Some people propose some places.
For example, "Yotsuya Hiroba", "YWCA", "Cafe Renoir",

Hi, everyone. This is an e-news letter for the last class on 30th March. I will briefly describe the activities in the class and make small notes of what appeared remarkable to me.

We did three things in the class.

Firstly, we did the correction of the last e-news letter written by Yasu-san. There, Yasu-san detailed the process of Monopoly we played in the class. I thought it amazing that he could represent the process so meticulously, none of which I could recall (perhaps I did not know what was going on, even when I was playing!).

A report discussed on Democracy Now! on March 12, 2010 has this shocking statistic: "nearly half of all single black and Hispanic women have zero or negative wealth, meaning their debts exceed all of their assets. The median wealth for single black women is only $100; for single Hispanic women, $120. This compares to just over $41,000 for single white women."

These graphs are from a great article by G. William Domhoff called Wealth, Income, and Power on his "Who Rules America?" website. http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html

I wonder if anyone has made such charts about the Japanese economy?

From Yasu-san:

Good evening everybody ! I try to write my home work.

Learning Plan of 3/23
Practice making the sounds and rhythms of English -- It had not done.
Talking about some topics and news -- May be it had not done, too.
Play monopoly -- So good!
Write a short report for the EFA e-newsletter -- Too severe for me, but is fun for me.

Go to dinner and drink -- It warmed up. We wanted to talk each other, but we must roll dice in class, so at tha restaulant we talked and talked, I think.

This video is based on a "manga" called A People's History of the American Empire by Howard Zinn, a great historian and activist who died this year.

Would you like to read or listen to news about activism in the US and other countries? Here are some useful resources:

http://www.labornet.org/ -- "Global online communication since 1991 for a democratic, independent labor movement"

http://www.labourstart.org/ -- "Where trade unionists start their day on the net."

http://www.democracynow.org/ -- "A daily TV/radio news program, hosted by Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez, airing on over 800 stations, pioneering the largest community media collaboration in the U.S."

Hi everyone,
Here is the report of the EFA class on March 13th.

1) Memorizing the members' names
12 people got together including new members. So at first, we repeated each
member's name one by one, and memorized them.

2) Chanting in English.
"Education under attack" "What do you do?" "Stand up! Fight back!"
The key point was to shorten between "do?" and "Stand", like "What do you
dostand up! Fight back"

3) Know each other
In order to know each member's interest and to find out who have the similar
interest of his own, we exchanged own ideas with each other.

Pete Seeger -- long time peace activist, labor activist, and singer -- singing his famous song, "bring them home." (Words follow)

Chie Matsumoto explaining the efforts to organize dispatch workers.