Vol. 71/No. 7      February 19, 2007

John Holdridge, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for East Asian affairs, summed up the Reagan administration's policy to an audience of American businessmen in Peking last June by saying that "we will seek ways to increase the political, economic, and, yes, military pressures on Vietnam."

Included in these pressures is a systematic attempt to starve out the Vietnamese by denying them desperately needed food aid.

To give one of the more recent examples, New York Times correspondent Bernard Weinraub quoted the testimony of Nina McCoy, an American teacher working with a Swedish aid group. "My students sit and stare and clutch their stomachs with hunger. I'm seeing people shrink before my eyes."  
 
February 18, 1957
At the tail end of the meeting of the Executive Council of the AFL-CIO in Miami last week, plans were announced for a large-scale campaign to organize 13 million white-collar workers.

The proposal is a substitute for the much-talked-of Southern organizing drive that was promised when the AFL and CIO merged in December of 1955.

The white collar workers need union organization. But the need to organize the South is far more urgent. Millions of Negro workers are already engaged in a life and death struggle for their civil rights. The militancy of the Negro people would supply a ready-made basis for an organizing campaign. On the other hand, if the labor movement permits this fight to be defeated by the White Citizens Councils, the latter, in all their labor-hating fury, will dominate the South. Union organization will be blocked for a long time to come.  
 
February 20, 1932
The terror of the boss-class in Kentucky knows no bounds. Not content with brutal repressions and beatings, they have resorted to murder. Cold, planned, premeditated murder.

On Wednesday morning, February 18, William Simms, nineteen year old organizer of the National Miners Union and member of the Young Communist League was shot down by deputy thug Orbin Miller in the employ of the Rockefeller controlled mine interests in Pineville, Kentucky. Lawson Green, a N.M.U. organizer, who was with him when the shooting took place was arrested.

Murderer Orbin Miller who went through a formal arrest was later released by county Judge Baker of Barbourville.

Lawson's testimony in the mock-trial against killer Orbin Miller was rejected because he was a miner. His testimony was rejected as invalid because he dared tell the miners of Kentucky-Tennessee to organize.  
 
 
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