Vol. 74/No. 9      March 8, 2010

The rally was part of a major defense campaign fighting a broadside attack on Black political rights conducted by the state and federal governments.

Berean Baptist Church was packed with more than 300 Blacks protesting the indictment of Albert Turner, Evelyn Turner, and Spencer Hogue, Jr.—now known as the “Perry County Three.” The three are veterans of the civil rights movement and led the fight for voting rights in this small town and throughout Perry County.

The U.S. Department of Justice, the FBI, and the State of Alabama are framing up and locking up Black leaders in order to halt and roll back the fight for Black political representation.  
 
March 7, 1960
The Cuban government took another progressive step of possibly far-reaching consequences Feb. 20 when it passed a law setting up a Central Planning Board.

Speaking for the new board, which is headed by Premier Fidel Castro, Major Ernesto “Che” Guevara, president of the National Bank of Cuba, told the Wall Street Journal last week, “We desire to employ our limited resources to greatest advantage.”

Guevara cited Cuba’s one-crop economy as responsible for 700,000 unemployed in Batista’s days. Seizures of land and industry continue to be reported daily in the Cuban press, but Guevara assured an assembly of cane planters that they have the right to keep their “tiny pieces of land” and work them “as they wish.”  
 
March 9, 1935
The National Recovery Administration, by official administration figures, has served to increase capitalists’ profits and lower workers’ living standards. The recent report by the Division of Research and Planning on the “Operation of the National Industrial Recovery Act” blows to bits the fantastic pretense that the NRA codes have acted to transfer purchasing power from the capitalists, the haves, to the workers, the have-nots.

So damning is the evidence uncovered by investigators working on the report that the whole intent of the NRA—as announced originally—is twisted to make an apology for the results. The codes, we now learn, were by no means intended to augment the wages and shorten the hours of wage earners in general.

True or false, the argument indicates the ingenuity of the “new deal” apologists.  
 
 
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