If All the People Are Banded Together : The Naugatuck Valley project

[Excerpt] The Naugatuck Valley in western Connecticut was once the center of the American brass industry and one of the most intensely industrialized areas on earth. From its center in Waterbury, the region\u27s major city, with a population of 100,000, the Valley runs north through the towns of Thomaston and Torrington and south through Naugatuck, Seymour, Derby and Ansonia. Like so many industrial areas of the Northeast and Midwest, its workers are primarily the descendants of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, with more recent additions of Blacks from the South and Puerto Ricans. During the 1960s and \u2770s it could have been renamed deindustrial valley, as dozens of plants were sold or closed. Like those in similar areas elsewhere, the people of the Naugatuck Valley have found that their established approaches have given them little leverage over deindustrialization. Conventional union tactics have exerted little influence over companies prepared to close up or sell the shop. Legislation to affect plant closings has been difficult to pass, and when passed has had limited impact. Local communities have felt powerless in the face of decisions made in distant board rooms; until recently, few efforts have been made to affect those decisions, even when they threatened the lifeblood of Naugatuck Valley communities. Over the past three years, the Valley has developed a regional organization of more than 50 religious, labor, community and small business organizations. Called the Naugatuck Valley Project, its purpose is to give workers and communities more influence over their economic destiny

A New Labor Movement in the Shell of the Old?

[Excerpt] A lot has changed since the formation of the AFL-CIO 40 years ago. A regulated national economy has been transformed into a global economy — one in which American workers can be put into competition with others anywhere in the world. Corporations have decentralized their activities, downsized their in-house operations, and outsourced their production even while concentrating their power around the globe. Large urban industrial complexes like Detroit and Pittsburgh have been replaced by small, highly mobile production units, which can easily be relocated. White men have become the minority of the U.S. workforce and women and people of color the majority

A pp-Wave With 26 Supercharges

A pp-wave solution to 11-dimensional supergravity is given with precisely 26 supercharges. Its uniqueness and the absence of 11-dimensional pp-waves which preserve (precisely) 28 or 30 supercharges is discussed. Compactification on a spacelike circle gives a IIA configuration with all 26 of the supercharges. For this compactification, D0 brane charge does not appear in the supersymmetry algebra. Indeed, the 26 supercharge IIA background does not admit any supersymmetric D-branes. In an appendix, a 28 supercharge IIB pp-wave is presented along with its supersymmetry algebra.Comment: 18 pages REVTeX 4 and AMSLaTeX. v3: Equations (III.17) and (III.18) corrected. Reference added. v4: more typos corrected and references adde

Fuzzy Spheres in pp Wave Matrix String Theory

The behaviour of matrix string theory in the background of a type IIA pp wave at small string coupling, g_s << 1, is determined by the combination M g_s where M is a dimensionless parameter proportional to the strength of the Ramond-Ramond background. For M g_s << 1, the matrix string theory is conventional; only the degrees of freedom in the Cartan subalgebra contribute, and the theory reduces to copies of the perturbative string. For M g_s >> 1, the theory admits degenerate vacua representing fundamental strings blown up into fuzzy spheres with nonzero lightcone momenta. We determine the spectrum of small fluctuations around these vacua. Around such a vacuum all N-squared degrees of freedom are excited with comparable energies. The spectrum of masses has a spacing which is independent of the radius of the fuzzy sphere, in agreement with expected behaviour of continuum giant gravitons. Furthermore, for fuzzy spheres characterized by reducible representations of SU(2) and vanishing Wilson lines, the boundary conditions on the field are characterized by a set of continuous angles which shows that generically the blown up strings do not ``close''.Comment: 45 pages REVTeX 4 and AMSLaTeX. 1 figure. v2: references added. Figure redrawn using LaTe