On February 25, the high court ruled 8 to 0 that the California Court of Appeals had been in error when it struck down the Arnett Law, named after Assemblyman Dixon Arnett, who sponsored the reactionary measure in the California legislature.

The law is designed to increase the victimization and exploitation of workers without citizenship papers, not to provide additional jobs for U.S. workers as its backers claim. It will also contribute to further discrimination against Chicanos and anyone else in California who may look Mexican.

The Arnett Law is simply one more regulator to better control the flow across the border and increase even further the vulnerability of the cruelly abused workers without citizenship papers.

When there is a shortage of low-paid labor, the border cops will still look the other way as undocumented workers slip across the border. And when there is a surplus--as there is now, with California unemployment officially estimated at 10 percent--the border controls will be tightened and the deportations stepped up.

One particularly invidious aim of the Arnett Law is to further pit "legal" workers against "illegals." Hopefully, this will not be as easily achieved as was thought when the bill was approved in 1971.  
 
March 12, 1951
The walkout of the labor representatives from all government war agencies has ushered in a new stage in the crisis of American capitalism. This crisis, beginning with the reverses of the imperialist adventure in Korea, became aggravated in the "Great Debate" over foreign policy and has now reached its sharpest expression in the rift between the labor leadership and the Truman administration.

The labor bureaucracy did not want this crisis. These "labor lieutenants of the capitalist class" did everything to avoid a political showdown with their capitalist superiors. But the break came despite their wishes, and it has drawn a sharp line between labor and capital on the political field. Only the most compelling pressure of working class discontent forced them to challenge the exclusive domination of Big Business in the war mobilization set-up.

The last question the labor officials want to raise is the right of Big Business to dominate the capitalist state apparatus; what they are objecting to is exclusive domination. The most striking feature of the labor officials' statements is their demand for "real partnership." The bureaucracy demands a "real" coalition on the model of the Social-Democratic governments that used to flourish in Europe in the heyday of capitalism, with security for labor officials, stable unionism, and a "real" partnership between capital and "labor," that is with the labor bureaucrats.

But this is no longer the heyday of capitalism, but the epoch of its death agony.  
 
 
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