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    Vol.62/No.45           December 14, 1998 
 
 
25 And 50 Years Ago  
December 14, 1973
BROOKSIDE, Ky. - "They ain't going to scab this mine. They can close it down, but they ain't going to scab it." It is in this spirit that members of the Brookside Women's Club gather every morning on the picket line outside the Eastover Mining Company here.

The club is a determined group of wives, daughters, aunts, and friends of miners who are in their fourth month of a strike against Eastover.

Last summer, the men voted by more than 2 to 1 to be represented by the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), rejecting the Southern Labor Union, a company union that had been installed by the coal operators. The vote was 113 to 55.

But Eastover - which is owned by Duke Power Company - has refused to accept the UMWA contract terms. These include a tripling of payments for miners' health and retirement funds, improved safety, and the right to strike.

As a result of the women's activities several have been arrested for so-called violations of the court order limiting picketing. The judge fined the women $500 each and then sent them to jail because they couldn't afford to pay this exorbitant sum.

A few of the women, whose husbands were also arrested, had to bring their children to jail too, since there was no other way to care for them. Dorothy Johnson, for example, brought her three daughters, age seven, six, and two, into the cell with her.

Johnson told The Militant that a man from the child welfare department had the nerve to try to take away the children because a jail was not a "fit" place for them to live! "We run him out of the jail," she added.

December 13, 1948
Costa Rica having signed the Treaty of Rio de Janeiro, this military pact drawn up 15 months ago at the Brazil Conference under General Marshall's guidance became binding upon all Latin America and the United States Dec. 3.

If the United States now engages in war against the Soviet Union, or any other country... every Latin American country is obligated to take the following measures outlined in the Chapultepec Act. "Recall of chiefs of diplomatic missions; breaking of diplomatic relations; breaking of consular relations; breaking of postal, telegraphic, telephonic, radio- telephonic relations; interruption of economic, commercial and financial relations."

Ratification of the pact thus places the official stamp upon Washington's effort to commit all Latin America in advance to give up neutrality in the projected World War III.

In addition to armed attack, the pact becomes operative if "any American state should be affected by an aggression which is not an armed attack or by an intra-continental or extra- continental conflict, or by any other fact or situation that might endanger the peace of America." Any squabble anywhere in the world could be interpreted as "aggression" under this sweeping clause.

 
 
 
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