December 20, 2004

By David Swanson, ILCA Media Coordinator
Part of the Media Blackout series on underreported labor stories

The AFL-CIO will be 50 years old in 2005. Its leaders have sat down and met with every U.S. President during those 50 years, except one, George W. Bush.

The compassionate conservative will not talk to the representatives of organized workers. AFL-CIO President John Sweeney made this point in a speech on Labor Day of 2003, in which he called Bush’s refusal to meet “a read more

By David Swanson, ILCA Media Coordinator
Part of the ILCA’s Building Labor Media series

The Problems We Face

Two major problems face the United States that in combination seriously impede any large-scale attempts to better the lives of working people.

The first is the ongoing decline of the labor movement, which is shrinking our organized force of political activism. The second is the increasing failure of the corporate media to serve as a source of honest and useful information for citizens. read more

By David Swanson, ILCA
Part of the Media Blackout series on underreported labor stories
A shorter version of this article, for easy reading between commercial interruptions, is available at http://ilcaonline.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=… [1].

January 3, 2005 — The Cleveland Federation of Labor is sending busloads of demonstrators to a rally in Columbus, Ohio, today to take part in a protest of election fraud in the 2004 presidential election.

As read more

Jan. 6, 2005

Thirty-three Members of the US House of Representatives, and one all-important Senator — one more than four years ago — voted not to accept Ohio’s 20 electoral votes for George Bush.

The votes were 33 to 260 and 1 to 72. The protesters lost. What does it mean?

First, it’s worth noting that more than one Senator took action. Barbara Boxer announced her intention to challenge the election on Thursday morning. By midday Senators Chris Dodd, Hillary Clinton, Harry read more

January 19, 2005
Should Democratic leaders who want to defeat Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security go along with the pretense that there are serious problems in Social Security and focus on telling people that Bush’s proposal would make the problems worse? That’s what some people are advising Democratic leaders to do. They are also advising that the Dems should avoid proposing any plan of their own to address the “problems.” Doing so, they say, would allow read more

Jan. 20, 2005
“Any revolutionary movement cannot succeed if the power of that movement is not in the hands of the poor.” – James Forman

Jim Forman died last week at age 76, the same age Martin Luther King Jr. would have been this week if he had not been assassinated. These two allies and rivals in the most dramatic and effective social movement of this country’s last century still have much to teach us. And, although Forman is much less well known, he in particular may read more

Feb. 14, 2005
During the week leading up to Bush’s lavish inauguration party last month, members of the union called UNITE HERE threatened to strike during the inauguration at 14 expensive hotels in Washington, D.C. They were working without a contract, and the hotels were stonewalling. The hotels were also about to be packed with fur coats, jewelry, and cowboy boots – all of it covering wealthy well-manicured white people. The workers won a contract with an increase in pay, read more

February 21, 2005

If George W. Bush finishes a second term and avoids adjusting the federal minimum wage, we will have completed an 11-year record stretch without any adjustment. The previous record of nine years was brought to us by Ronald Reagan. The current federal minimum wage of $5.15 per hour is over 40 percent below the 1968 level adjusted for inflation. A fulltime worker taking no vacation or holidays and earning the federal minimum wage earns 55 percent of the federal poverty line for read more

Feb. 23, 2005
“Why are we still here?” radio host Joe Madison asked a panel of speakers
gathered in a church basement around the corner from the Washington Post
Feb. 10 to discuss hiring and other forms of discrimination at that
newspaper.

And “What are YOU going to do?” he asked the 40 or so members and staff of
the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild, CWA, gathered yet again to discuss
the decades-old dilemma of how to get the Washington Post newsroom to read more

Feb. 28, 2005

A case can be made that the left in the United States is too eager to compromise, that because we have no far left, our moderate left is more easily dismissed as extreme. This contrasts with a far right that advocates — for decades if necessary — for extremely unpopular positions (such as eliminating Social Security), thus rendering the right’s goals (such as partially dismantling Social Security) respectable, moderate, and middle of the road.

But what happens when read more

March 13, 2005
The majority of Americans, even according to polls conducted by corporations with an interest in war, think that attacking Iraq was a mistake and that continuing to occupy it is a mistake. But the will of a majority of Americans means very little without a substantial minority of Americans willing to struggle and suffer for a goal. If majority opinion mattered on its own, we’d have clean elections, democratic media, a serious effort to slow global warming, major investment read more

Published in “The Wealth Inequality Reader” by Dollars and Sense and United for a Fair Economy

Flame-Broiled Shark
May 2005 By David Swanson

If someone told you that a bunch of low-income people, most of them African-American or Latino, most of them women, most of them elderly, had been victimized by a predatory mortgage lender that stripped them of much of their equity or of their entire homes, you might not be surprised. But if I told you that these women and men had gotten together read more

March 16, 2005

Dear Italy, forgive us. Bring your dear soldiers home from Iraq. Teach them about peace. Teach us in the United States about peace. We need to learn from you.

I spent some terrific years of my life in your bel paese, and one of the first things that caught my attention was your humility and your cosmopolitanism. When I was a young exchange student in Italy I had the pleasure of making myself liked, of making myself almost a movie star, simply by telling people that I was an American. read more

See Photo Album on This Site.

“They want the rubber stamp of dictatorship,” said Senator Chuck Schumer.

“They want one-party rule,” said Senator Patrick Leahy.

“An ill wind blows through this country. Your freedom of speech is in jeopardy,” said Senator Bob Byrd. “The opponents of the filibuster, the opponents of free speech say we don’t need 217 years of American history.”

Senators Harry Reid, Dick Durbin, Ted Kennedy, Barbara Boxer, and Hillary read more

PHOTOS HERE

March 18, 2005

March 18, 2005 — Twenty-two students at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., stopped eating four days ago. They have resorted to a hunger strike after years of less drastic attempts to persuade the university to pay all of its workers a living wage. How long will they go without food? “As long as it takes,” is the answer that at least some of them give.

Mary Nagle is one of a half dozen students organizing events every day to assist the hunger strikers. read more

March 20, 2005

Listen to audio

In an attempt to call the attention of the United States Congress to the plight of poorer countries, a coalition of anti-poverty organizations has launched a new campaign called “Feeding Tubes for the Third World.”

The member organizations of the FTTW, http://www.fttw.com, have each attempted for years to gain the attention of an uninterested US government. Staff members of more than one of them read more

March 22, 2005
Has anyone noticed that the more the Bush Administration and its corporate allies promote their plan to partially privatize Social Security, the more the public opposes it? Is it any wonder the President kept his proposals vague until after the election?

A Harris poll released this week found the Bush proposal for Social Security opposed by 58 percent and approved by 35, while proposals on five less-talked-about issues had support or mixed results. Newsweek’s findings are read more

March 25. 2005
I think Progressive Democrats of America owes a thanks to Lance Selfa for his March 25th article in Socialist Worker predicting that we in PDA will not manage to move the Democratic Party to the left.
http://www.socialistworker.org/2005-1/536/536_07_PDA.shtml

The warning of the difficulty, and of where we can easily go wrong, is helpful.

Selfa began his article with these words: “In a recent fundraising appeal on behalf of Progressive Democrats of America (PDA), Global Exchange read more

March 25, 2005

See Photo Album on This Site

It’s safe to say that more useful information was conveyed to those hungry for it Thursday night in the Jack Morton Auditorium at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., than has been conveyed in the entire oeuvre of CNN’s Crossfire, which is filmed in the same location.

On the 40th anniversary of the first teach-in on the Vietnam War, the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) hosted a teach-in on the War on Iraq. C-Span aired it live. read more

March 31, 2005
By David Swanson, Published by the Black Commentator
The U.S. Senate has passed a dream bill for credit card and financial service companies that, if passed by the House, will land millions of American families in debt slavery. Rather than being able to file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy and make a difficult new start, families and individuals will be placed on long-term payment plans to credit card companies, companies that will take their houses, their cars, their child-support read more