Vol. 71/No. 16      April 23, 2007

On April 9 American Airways Charter, Inc. (AAC) was ordered to halt its flights. The company is the principal carrier between the United States and Cuba.

Shutdown of AAC comes after persistent harassment of the company and a February 25 grand jury indictment of several of its officials on charges of violating the Trading With the Enemy Act.

The new move comes during a time when Washington has been escalating its acts of hostility against Cuba, Nicaragua, and Grenada, as well as deepening its intervention in El Salvador.

In 1960, President Eisenhower banned travel to Cuba by decree. Under challenge, the Supreme Court finally ruled this a violation of constitutional rights.  
 
April 22, 1957
The two main features of the 16th constitutional convention of the United Auto Workers, held April 7-12 in Atlantic City, were the victory of the Reuther machine in pushing through all its proposals, and the evidence of a growing opposition within the ranks to Reuther's policies. The opposition was unorganized, however, and lacked a clear program. It was composed largely of delegates attending their first convention. The result was that the administration machine—having adopted the slogan of a shorter work week and higher pay and having more recently adopted a militant phraseology on speed-up—rolled through the convention like a well-oiled steamroller.

The convention was arranged to avoid discussion of most of the pressing economic and political problems now facing the workers in the auto union and the labor movement in general.  
 
April 23, 1932
Many credulous workers have suffered from the illusion, and possibly still do, that wage reductions bring an increase of jobs. To those there have been a number of decisive and hard hitting answers given in the rounds of wage cutting which have followed one another in rapid succession during the crisis and with the unemployment figures still mounting.

The most recent wage reductions actual or contemplated, are symptomatic of the fact that the formerly more privileged strata of the working class are now ever more becoming the victims, the same as the lower paid, unskilled ones. In New York City the printers and the building trades are having their scales "adjusted." Intimations are made in no uncertain terms by the United States Steel Corporation directors that their several hundred thousand workers are due for another cut.  
 
 
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