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For Immediate Release
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Major Occupy Organizers to Kick off Left Forum 2012

NEW YORK

A unique phenomenon in the U.S. and the world, Left Forum convenes the largest annual conference of a broad spectrum of left and progressive intellectuals, activists, academics, organizations and the interested public. Conference participants come together to engage a wide range of critical perspectives on the world, to discuss differences, commonalities, and alternatives to current predicaments, and to share ideas for understanding and transforming the world. The conference is held each spring in New York City. The following speakers have just been announced for the 2012 conference:

RoseAnn DeMorois executive director of the National Nurses United, the nation's largest union of nurses. DeMoro is also executive director of the California Nurses Association, which is well known for igniting the campaign that upended one of the world's most famous celebrity politicians, Arnold Schwarzenegger, dropping his public approval from 70% to 35% in the polls. Under DeMoro's stewardship, NNU and CNA is also renown as the leading national advocates of single payer/Medicare for all healthcare reform. Over the past year, NNU has led a national campaign calling for a tax on Wall Street also known as the Robin Hood tax and has supported the Occupy Wall Street movement with nurses first aid stations from New York to San Francisco.

Marina Sitrinhas been active in occupy movements worldwide. She is the editor ofHorizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentinaand author ofEveryday Revolutions: Horizontalism and Autonomy in Argentina(forthcoming). She is a lawyer and postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Globalization and Social Change at the City University of New York. She is also a student, teacher, dreamer and militant. Her books touch upon issues of state practices of cooptation and repression in relation to social movement mobilizations to build autonomy and direct democracy.

William Stricklandspent his early years of political activism working as the Executive Director of the Northern Student Movement, the northern analogue of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee; working for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party; and working on the Harlem rent strikes in the 1960s. During this time, Strickland also worked with Malcolm X, whom he knew from his childhood days. A graduate of Boston Latin School, Harvard College, Harvard University, he currently is the Director of the Du Bois Papers Collection at W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst where he also teaches political science.

William Tabb is the author of The Restructuring of Capitalism in Our Time (Columbia University Press, 2012), Economic Governance in the Age of Globalization (Columbia University Press, 2004), and The Amoral Elephant: Globalization and the Struggle for Social Justice in the Twenty-First Century (Monthly Review Press, 2001). He taught economics at Queens College and economics, political science and sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. He was the Visiting Scholar at Kansai University Osaka, Japan and the Visiting Professor Economics at University of California, Berkeley. He was also founding host and for many years did the "Behind the Economic News" program at WBAI Pacifica Radio.