Below are the bios of the speakers featured on the panel: Transforming Social Relations. The first link with the remarks of Paul Street begins with an introduction of the speakers by Andy Thayer, chief organizer of the Gay Liberation Network in Chicago.

SPEAKER BIOS

PAUL STREET

Paul Street is an independent radical-democratic policy researcher, journalist, historian, and speaker based in Iowa City, Iowa, and Chicago, Illinois and was the Director of Research at The Chicago Urban League from 2000 through 2005. Much of Street's writing revolves around criticism and exposure of what King called "the triple evils that are interrelated": racism, economic exploitation (capitalism), and militarism-imperialism. He thinks that other and related evils, including sexism and ecocidalism (and authoritarianism more generally) deserve equal consideration.
He is author of four books to date: Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11, Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era , Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: a Living Black Chicago History and (most recently) Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics. Street's essays, articles, reviews, and commentaries have appeared in numerous outlets, from the Chicago Tribune, to ZNet and the Black Agenda Report.

CRISTOBAL CAVAZOS

Cristobal Cavazos Cardenas, described as a "rebel with a good heart" by his peers, is a co-founder of Immigrant Solidarity DuPage a group whose mission is to educate, unite and mobilize the community around the rights and struggles of Latinos in DuPage County. The son of former Mexican itinerant farm laborers from the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas and Northern Mexico, Cavazos became interested in political activism as a youth reading about the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 70s, Native American history, the Mexican and Cuban Revolutions, while listening to stories of the exploitation of Latinos in the fields and workplace by his parents. Immigrant Soldarity DuPage plans to open a Latino community and resource center in DuPage. In addition, Cavazos is also a public speaker, published journalist, musician and artist and has been active in other popular campaigns in Chicagoland in the struggle for social justice.

BARBARA KESSEL

Barbara Kessel retired from teaching at Truman College in Chicago in 2004, moved to Urbana, and became involved with Quakers Peace and Service committee and with the newly forming Books to Prisoners group. Through BtP she became committed to working with the program in the county jails and to dealing directly with Illinois Department of Corrections about state prisons, concerning mail, prison libraries and reform of Tamms C.C. (our own
Guantanamo on the Mississippi, with solitary confinement 24/7). Through CU Citizens for Peace and Justice, she grew interested in what goes on in our county courtrooms, the use of tasers, and the police (mis)use of force. Through the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, of which Quakers are members, she has been instrumental in getting them to expand their mission from the international front to include torture in our jails and prisons in the U.S.

MIKE GRIFFIN

Mike Griffin, activist member of the Carpenters Union and veteran of the Staley lockout, has been long engaged in the struggle to build international solidarity among unions and advance coalitions. A carpenter in Decatur Illinois for five years, he recently found himself working with the pipe systems that power huge turbines when the United Brotherhood of Carpenters (UBC) signed a deal with Westinghouse guaranteeing that carpenters can do pipefitters' work if they agree to work for 10 percent less than the normal pay rate. “The UBC is teaching apprentices and members that you have to compete against your brother,” Griffin said. “Well, not me.” Members protested, threatening to take action with the AFL-CIO and the contract was renegotiated for more money. Still, Griffin and other rank and file members within the carpenters' union think this is the shape of things to come.

JAMIE KALVEN

Jamie Kalven of the Invisible Institute, is a writer and human rights activist, author of Working With Available Light: A Family’s World After Violence and the editor of A Worthy Tradition: Free Speech in America by Harry Kalven, Jr. He has reported widely on public housing and police abuse issues. He is author of Working With Available Light: A Family’s World After Violence, based on his own family experience. Since the early 1990’s, he has devoted much of HIS time and energy to social initiatives in inner city Chicago neighborhoods. He was one of the founders of Vigil Against Violence and co-directed a program for the Resource Center in which volunteers from across the city joined together with residents of inner city neighborhoods to transform vacant lots into gardens, parks and playgrounds. He also works on the possibilities of job creation for ex-offenders and street gang veterans through “grassroots public works.”