Vol. 77/No. 4 February 4, 2013
February 5, 1988
Building on the broad, national movement that finally gave the U.S.-backed Duvalier dynasty the boot in February 1986, Haiti’s toilers emerged from decades of tyrannical rule determined to continue the fight to win basic democratic rights and to begin tackling the social and economic devastation they face.Haiti is one of the world’s poorest countries—in 1985, 90 percent of the population earned less than $150 a year. Some 90 percent of the children suffer from malnutrition, and life expectancy is just 53 years.
At the center of the struggle has been the fight for a popularly elected, civilian government to replace the military-dominated National Council of Government that followed Duvalier. This is connected to the fight for the right to organize unions, form political associations, and hold demonstrations, free from harassment and repression.
February 4, 1963
NEW YORK—For those of us to whom the 1930s are not a memory, history came alive last Thursday night when over 700 people attended a rally here supporting the southeastern Kentucky miners in the sixth month of their heroic strike. The meeting was sponsored by the New York Trade Union Solidarity Committee to Aid the Hazard Miners.Berman Gibson, a blunt speaking and courageous leader of the strike, told of the poverty of the miners who—as pickets—are now cut off from receiving government surplus food and are receiving no support from their national union, the United Mine Workers.
But he spoke mostly of the determination of these men. They will not allow their union to be broken, he said. They have been shot at and their homes have been dynamited, but they fought to organize their union in 1932 and they are fighting now.
February 5, 1938
In both his annual budget message and his special message to Congress on naval appropriations, President Roosevelt has proposed the biggest armaments program the United States has ever had in its peace-time history.Why? To “protect the coast-lines” of the United States from attack? No man in his right senses believes that the territory of the United States is liable to attack from a foreign power.
The fact is that the unprecedented increase in armaments proposed by President Roosevelt is for the defense and expansion of American interests abroad. The bigger army and the bigger navy are meant for war!
What do they need a war to protect? The billions of dollars invested by Wall Street in all parts of the world? The collection of war debts to American financiers in Europe? That’s what the army and the navy are being built for.
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