Labor Update
Methodists support EFCA; Bulls Eye on FMLA; Public support for United Airlines workers; Rutgers students won’t choke on Coke; NLRB give OK to nurses’ firing
OAS stands up to U.S., supports Venezuela
“Madam Secretary, democracy cannot be imposed,” said Celso Amorim, Brazil’s foreign minister, in reply to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at the 35th General Assembly of the Organization of the American States (OAS). “Latin America has its own identity,” he said. “It has recuperated its dignity — not to confront the United States, but to confront imperialist politics.”
Harilaos Florakis, Greek leader, dies
The Communist Party of Greece announced that its honorary chairman, Harilaos Florakis, died May 22 at the age of nearly 91.
Crash into racism
In the beginning of “Crash,” the directorial debut of Paul Haggis (he won the Oscar for writing the screenplay for “Million Dollar Baby”), you hear what you think is going to be a long narration by Don Cheadle. Outside, it’s smoky and steamy, and it’s night. He’s just been rear-ended. His voice is soft, slow and clear. He’s expressing the explosion that humans need to have happen every now and then, so we don’t live our whole lives inside the bubble of the glass and metal of a car.
Letters
Good work; Job programs needed; Harmful books?; We said it first; History lesson
S. African Communists eye next steps
When the African National Congress of South Africa won a popular mandate of 70 percent of the vote in a landslide victory in 1994, following the overthrow of the racist, U.S.-supported apartheid regime, popular expectations ran high. The inauguration of Nelson Mandela as the first president of a new, nonracialist South Africa symbolized a historic turning point.
No party, no socialism
The right wing has attacked historian Moshe Lewin’s new book, “The Soviet Century,” which covers the Soviet Union from the early 1920s through its implosion in 1991, for its sympathetic treatment of Lenin. His principal conclusion, backed by newly available archival materials, is that Stalin subverted the Bolshevik Party’s Leninist tradition of democratic centralism and assumed Czar-like dictatorial powers. The Communist Party (CPSU) consequently lost its character as a political party. It became an administrative appendage of the unwieldy bureaucratic state structures created by Stalin’s precipitous and premature introduction of an overcentralized planned economy.
Letters
Myths still guide policy; The French vote; Treating mental illness; Egypt: Great state, criminal regime; Educators refuse Wal-Mart
Labor Update
Retreating in order to advance; Continental Tire runs over laid-off workers; Keeping passenger rail on track; A fair minimum wage; UAW endorses Sweeney
Black trade unionists urge labor unity
PHOENIX — “There are no more common allies than the broad community and organized labor, and there are no more natural allies than organized labor and the African American community,” Coalition of Black Trade Unionists President Bill Lucy told the estimated 1,500 delegates at the 34th annual CBTU convention here May 26. click here for Spanish text
