2003 was a year of tragedy and disaster for poor and working people globally. The American government's imperial projects have impacted the future power relations of global capitalist accumulation and policing in ways which are not yet even entirely apparent. With the Patriot Act II and VISIT, the racialized construction of nationality and nationhood enters frightening new territory. The violent repression visited on those who fought the ftaa in miami (and brooklyn), and those who marched against war in Manhattan and Baghdad bespeaks this new phase of imperial power. It was a grim year indeed.

And yet, in New Haven, it was also a year when working people united in the streets and won concrete victories from corporate giants bent on exploiting, displacing, and/or excluding. Paul Bass writes that this was the "Year Street Heat Paid Off." For Bass, "a city with street heat is a city with heart and soul." The last year's explosion of strikes at Yale, the Project Orange movement that has formed to ensure the passage of Domestic Partnership legislation in this city, the unprecedented successes in the continuing battle to hold Yale's hospital and medical school accountable for placing tens of thousands in debt bondage, the continuing pressure on (Yale) New Haven Savings Bank's avaricious trustees, the defeat of the plan to bulldoze dozens of independent businesses to build a fancy school and make yale look generous, and the latino community's stunning victories in its fight for justice from the city's largest employer and private landowner suggest the other world possible we strive to create together.

It would be a liberal colonialist gesture either to underestimate the power of the forces of capital and the state against which we're mobilizing or to ignore the presence of other forms and strategies of resistance outside of the labor movement and outside of the Global North. But this doesn't make what took place in New Haven this year - and what is by no means over yet - any less important. The unfinished business we are pursuing in New Haven does not end there.  ¶ 7:52 PM