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   Vol. 67/No. 20           June 16, 2003  
 
 
25 and 50 years ago
 
June 16, 1978
The campaign by federal, state, and city officials to slash the real wages and union rights of more than 200,000 New York municipal workers reached a new peak June 5 when negotiations were completed on a proposed new two-year contract.

“There is no question that I had hoped to do better,” complained Mayor Edward Koch about the new pact.

But the city’s labor-hating media could barely suppress its delight with the agreement. “The fact is,” a New York Times editorial gloated, the city “has negotiated its workers into a gradual reduction of their real income while persuading them to invest significant portions of it in bonds that banks and private citizens would not buy.”

And Sen. William Proxmire, at June 6 hearings on federal loan guarantees, agreed that the increases in the pact were “modest.” Proxmire added, “It is cruel that it has to come out of the hides of the workers, but that’s the way it is.”

With inflation soaring at the rate of 10 percent this year alone, the new agreement offers city workers a misery wage increase of 5.5 percent over the next two years!

This is far below the national average increases now being negotiated. It is way under even the tight-fisted 5.5 percent ceiling on annual wage increases President Carter is demanding from federal employees.

City workers have not yet accepted the “meager” contract. But a propaganda barrage by the big-business media, Democratic and Republican politicians, and union politicians, is underway to convince them that they should.  
 
June 15, 1953
U.S. bombs and napalm have burned and blasted Korea to cinders and left millions of civilians—men, women, and children—corpses or mangled cripples.

“How much more ‘liberation’ can the people of Korea stand?” asked Charles Moore, United Press correspondent, on Jan. 8, 1951, when the war has been in progress less than six months.

“The Korean equivalent of John Q. Public is taking a terrific beating because of the war. His home has been destroyed. His job has disappeared because factories were destroyed. He and his family have become ragged, cold, hungry wanderers. It is a hard fact but true fact that most of the destruction was done by the Americans….”

The massive destruction of every city, town and village in the area occupied by the north Korean and Chinese armies—which in the first stage of the war included most of south Korea—was the result of a deliberate policy of U.S. “strategic bombing.”

U.S. “liberation” has meant death to more than two million Korean civilians—hundreds of thousands of them from that most terrible of all weapons, napalm—flaming jellied gasoline that literally fries its victims to death.

A recent survey made in Korea by Dr. Howard A. Rusk, of the New York University Bellevue Medical Center and an associate editor of the New York Times, tells of ten million homeless in Korea; a hundred thousand war orphans in need of homes and medical care; 300,000 needy war widows.

This is what has made the word “liberation” as mouthed by American leaders a word of horror to the world.  
 
 
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