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The Angelika Theatre at Mockingbird & Central Expressway in Dallas has graciously allowed Jobs with Justice 30 minutes after the 7 PM showing of the new movie "Battle in Seattle." The film is in very limited showing. Progressive movies do not show very long in North Texas!
I think I was the only North Texas labor representative attending the "Battle in Seattle" in 1999 to oppose the World Trade Organization. I did it because it was apparent that America's unions were breaking out of their 50-year isolation from progressives in peace, religious, community, environmental, and civil rights organizations. Seattle was a monumental turning point in progressive cooperation. Effective coalition-building has been on everyone's agenda since then.
The Battle in Seattle made history as it brought "world trade" issues into consciousness.
It makes sense that corporate America is hoping to limit the viewers of the new Hollywood movie, "Battle in Seattle." They scheduled it for a tiny few theaters, then they expected to dump it to the back row of somebody's dusty DVD collection. The AFL-CIO set up a special web site to try to get more Americans to demand the movie in their own area theaters:
http://blog.aflcio.org/2008/09/16/battle-in-seattletell-hollywood-to-keep-it-in-the-movie-theaters/
The union federation says, "Hollywood made a movie the big moguls don't want you to see -- at least not in movie theaters. Instead, the big producers would love for it to go straight to DVD -- maybe because the events it depicts show how union members and activists in the peace, environmental, human rights and religious communities can successfully join together to challenge a bottom-line-only global economy."
The film was scheduled for a short run at the Plano Angelica Theater, but they closed it after one week. The North Texas Jobs with Justice group, led by Dr. Isabel DoCampo and Rosemarie Rieger, led the fight to get the film to Dallas. We have a particular advantage here because the President of the Dallas AFL-CIO, Nancy Hall, just returned from a fact-finding trip to Colombia and is eager to tell what they think about "World Trade Gobblelization."
Since unions created the Jobs with Justice coalition, it has
worked to bring union people together with the rest of the progressive movement.
It's an easy way, although not the only way, that progressive Texans can ally
themselves with the most powerful sector of the progressive movement - organized
labor. Those who oppose NAFTA and the other so-called "free trade"
or "neo-liberal" treaties, whether they are unionists or peace activists,
have a great deal in common because greedy transnational corporations who do
not get what they want in commercial treaties demand that their lust for profits
be satisfied by armed invasions!