Vol. 77/No. 2 January 21, 2013
January 22, 1988
After 21 years, 19 of them in prison, Rubin “Hurricane” Carter is free. On January 11 the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear a motion by Acting Passaic County Prosecutor John Goceljak to reinstate triple-murder convictions against Carter and his codefendant John Artis. The decision deals an important blow to racist police frame-ups.The long road to freedom for Carter and Artis has been filled with deliberate injustices. They were convicted twice, once in 1967 and in a retrial in 1976, for the murder of three whites in a Paterson, New Jersey, bar.
The prosecution relied heavily on the testimony of two whites who were caught by police committing a burglary near the bar at the time. The “witnesses” later recanted their testimony and stated that police had pressured them to falsely incriminate the defendants in return for favors in their own criminal cases.
January 21, 1963
One thousand miners of U.S. Steel Corporation’s huge Robena coal fields at Carmichaels, Pa., are standing fast in their refusal to return to work pending further investigation of two explosions that killed 39 men.A public hearing into the latest disaster has begun. That was the blast which ripped through the Robena No. 3 mine at the Frosty Run shaft Dec. 6, killing 37 men. Two months earlier two other miners died in an explosion at this same Robena mine.
James Kelly, recording secretary of United Mine Workers Local 6321, said the miners wanted to know what caused the explosions, what has been done to correct the explosive conditions, and what guarantees there are that there will be no more explosions.
The steel corporation ordered the men back to work, but the miners are ignoring that order on the grounds that adequate safety measures have not been taken.
January 22, 1938
The breathing space offered French capitalism by the People’s Front has come to an end. The fall of the Chautemps government last Friday ushered in a new period of instability which, unless war intervenes, will not be terminated until the workers either take power or are beaten into submission by a frontal attack on their organizations.After 19 months of the People’s Front the workers face the same alternative, which has been before them ever since the Fascist rising in February 1934.
The power that was in their grasp during the great strikes of June 1936 was saved for the bourgeoisie by the People’s Front.
The workers were headed off by the joint and strenuous efforts of the Socialist and Stalinist parties. Through them, the bourgeoisie dispersed the titanic energies of the aroused masses far more efficiently than it ever could have done by using the weapon of Fascism.
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