The air controllers went on strike Monday, August 3, after 95 percent voted against a contract proposed by Reagan’s Secretary of Transportation, Drew Lewis.

When they walked off the job, Reagan denounced them. He described as “patriotic” the scabs crossing the picket lines. He gave the workers forty-eight hours to return to work or be fired and “barred for life” from federal jobs.  
 
August 13, 1956
The tremendous rallying throughout the Arab world and Asia in defense of Egypt’s right to nationalize the Suez Canal Company is causing U.S., British and French imperialism to have second thoughts about invasion of Egypt and seizure of the canal.

Whether these second thoughts will restrain the imperialists from naked military aggression against Egypt that could convert the whole Middle East into a second Korean holocaust cannot yet be said. Military preparations by Great Britain and France—mobilization of reserves, hasty dispatch of paratroopers, aircraft carriers and battleships to the Mediterranean, continue. The U.S. Navy’s atom-equipped Sixth Fleet has been sent steaming to within striking distance of Egypt. High-placed officials—from members of Parliament in Britain and the government in France to Senator [Joseph] McCarthy in this country are calling for the sending of battleships to the canal to provoke the Egyptians into firing the first shot.  
 
August 15, 1931
Confronted with no serious break in the ranks of the Paterson silk strikers, the police agents of the bosses are proceeding to the attempt at breaking the backbone of the movement by the policy of mass arrests and the clubbing of pickets. Last Tuesday alone brought about the arrest of fifty-two strikers. While most of the pickets were seized by the police in front of a Paterson dye plant, more than a dozen others were arrested at the conclusion of a sharp encounter between the police and strikers who attempted to cross the city line leading to Clifton, neighboring upon Paterson, where the strikers are attempting to get the support of the many silk workers employed. At the city line, the police threw a cordon across the street and for hours kept a mass of strikers from passing through. However, the militancy of the workers finally prevailed and despite police efforts, a number of them succeeded in breaking through the cordon of police.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home