Students hungry for justice for campus workers
WASHINGTON — Georgetown University is the new battleground for social justice in our nation. Twenty-two student activists, members of the Living Wage Coalition, took the heroic step of declaring a hunger strike here March 15. They vowed to continue their protest until the university president, John DeGioia, agrees to a “living wage” for all workers on campus.
Grassroots defense of Social Security deepens
Bush got a rocky welcome to Denver, March 21, in the 17th stop on his 60-city, election-style campaign to sell the privatization of Social Security.
Ex-soldier says he was asked to kill Haitian leader
Anel Belizaire, an ex-soldier in Haiti who recently escaped from the National Penitentiary in Port-au-Prince, says that someone from interim Prime Minister Gerard Latortue’s office asked him last month to murder fellow inmate Yvon Neptune. Neptune is the deposed prime minister who served under exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. He has been jailed for nearly a year without trial.
From Selma to Ohio
The 1965 Selma, Ala., events were a milestone in the great struggle for liberation. With the overthrow of Reconstruction in 1877, it had been a long, bloody road of struggle against the system of Jim Crow and Klan rule. The South was a haven for corporate profits because of its apartheid system, which also kept unions out and wages low. The Klan, the ultimate organized terrorist group, was the enforcer of this fascist-like system. Those who did resist were subjected to the murderous activity of the Klan.
Ownership society but who really owns it?
The New Deal of the 1930s can be seen as a response to the reality of socialism born in 1917, when the Russian Revolution thrust on the world’s action agenda the vision of a society based on collective ownership and working class empowerment to meet human needs. Seventy years later, the Bush/Republican far-right advocacy of an “ownership society” can be seen as an effort to turn the clock back to the world before socialism came on the scene — a world of untrammeled power for a few “captains of society,” and crumbs for those who do the work.
Breaking the shackles: Cote d'Ivoire struggles against neocolonialism
Jean-Baptiste Gomont Diagou wants to set the record straight about the conflict besetting Côte d’Ivoire, his home country.
Price indexing and Social Security: A time bomb
Private accounts have been the center of controversy in the Social Security debate, but the hidden time bomb is Bush’s proposal to change the way retirees’ starting benefits are determined. “Price indexing” is really a cumulative benefit reduction plan which would spell the death of Social Security.
Clergy and laity criticize GOP hypocrisy
WASHINGTON — “Culture of life” has become one of President George W. Bush’s clichés even as he sows death and destruction here and abroad.
They are killing people for money
TEXAS CITY, Texas — “They are killing people for money,” a retired union carpenter told me as I was standing in front of the British Petroleum refinery plant here, March 26.
Eyes Wide Open dramatizes human cost of Iraq war
SAN FRANCISCO — It was billed as a press conference. But what really happened in Civic Center Plaza on the morning of March 25 was an hour-long, intensely moving memorial tribute to the 1,525 U.S. soldiers who have died in Iraq, and to the estimated 100,000 Iraqi civilians who have died as a result of the war.
