The most horrific cuts in 30 years
The following testimony was delivered March 7 at a hearing of the Connecticut State Legislature’s Government Administration and Elections Committee on a resolution memorializing Congress to oppose budget cuts in vital domestic programs. The author offers it as an example, to encourage readers in other states to take similar initiatives.
A question of values
Ivette Gonzalez, 6 years old and the daughter of one of the “Cuban Five” imprisoned by the U.S., opened the World Social Forum Jan. 26 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. The U.S. government has not allowed Ivette and her mother to visit her father, Rene, in jail, although Ivette is a U.S. citizen. She was a tiny baby when her father last saw her.
A message from Chile: Our Gladys Marn one of the essential ones
In the wee hours of this cloudy day, March 6, 2005, a woman passed away who was one of the “essential ones,” as Bertolt Brecht said. She was one of those who struggled all her life, who fought against anything that seemed to her to be an injustice, sought untiringly after her comrades who had been arrested and “disappeared,” and finally did battle with death itself. Cancer took her away from us but was not able to take away her example, her energy, her commitment, her strength, nor her smile.
Why pick a military town as the site for an antiwar rally?
Why pick a military town as the site for an antiwar rally? As a veteran and a resident of Fayetteville, N.C., near Ft. Bragg, I can think of at least 50 reasons. Each of those reasons has a name and each were members of our community prior to their deaths in Iraq.
Racism and unity
Racism exists today but has changed its form. The right uses racism to divide the working class, and therefore our documents and literature need to focus on why Black, Brown, white unity is necessary for working-class unity.
EDITORIAL: White House invents reality
A senior White House official scornfully told a New York Times reporter last fall that “the reality-based community” believes “solutions emerge from discernible reality.” The Bush aide continued, “That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now and when we act, we create our own reality.”
EDITORIAL: Still more torture revelations
Mounting evidence is making it clear that torture and a pattern of human rights abuse is standard operating procedure for the Bush administration and its surrogates in Iraq and Afghanistan, and at the Guantanamo Bay detention center, where over 600 people of about 38 different nationalities are still being held.
Veterans and military familes say: 'Bring troops home now - and care for them'
ST. LOUIS — “Those in the armed services right now can speak the truth about Iraq because we’ve been there, we’ve seen with our own eyes the disaster we’ve created in Iraq. And we can tell you that the only way to cope with this disaster is to bring the troops home now — and care for them when they return!”
Medicaid is the heart of health care
Medicaid, a state and federal partnership forged in the 1960s, provides care for 50 million poor men, women, and children in the United States who would otherwise have no access to health care. Medicaid takes care of children whose parents work at places like Wal-Mart that don’t provide health insurance. It pays for nursing home care for our elders. It covers treatment for disabled children and buys medications the poor and elderly would otherwise have to do without.
Mother Jones, union organizer and hell-raiser
Mother Jones was born Mary Harris in Cork, Ireland, in 1836. As a child, she immigrated to North America with her family to escape the Irish famine. In her early 20s, she moved to Chicago, where she worked as a dressmaker, and then to Memphis, Tenn., where she met and married George Jones, a skilled iron molder and staunch unionist. There tragedy struck. A yellow fever epidemic in 1867 took the lives of Mary’s husband and all four of her children.
