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