Vol. 81/No. 11 March 20, 2017
25, 50, and 75 Years Ago
March 20, 1992
“You should draw a mushroom cloud and put underneath it, ‘Made in America by lazy and illiterate Americans and tested in Japan,’” said U.S. senator Ernest Hollings March 2. He was addressing workers at the Roller Bearing Company of America plant in Hartsville, South Carolina.Hollings said his remarks on the nuclear bombing of Japan by Washington during World War II were in response to Japanese legislator Yoshio Sakurauchi, who had said that American workers are “lazy” and that a third of them “cannot even write.”
Remarks directed against Japan have become the stock-in-trade of many Democratic and Republican politicians and spokespeople of some corporations recently. They have helped to fuel a wave of attacks against Asian-Americans, including the 850,000 people in this country of Japanese origin.
March 20,1967
Walter Reuther has ganged up with General Motors to break a second walkout by UAW Local 549 in Mansfield, Ohio. The latest strike followed a February tieup over the issue of GM farming out work to other plants, in which 17 workers were suspended from their jobs. When Reuther threatened to take over the local, the membership voted to end the earlier strike. International union representatives were then to sit in on local talks with GM over the disciplinary layoffs and the job issue that touched off the dispute.Only 12 of the workers given disciplinary layoffs were put back to work and it soon became apparent that the other five were to be fired. This led to the second walkout. When Reuther again issued a back-to-work order, a majority of the local union members voted to defy his order and continue their protest action.
March 21, 1942
Eight workers were killed and 21 seriously wounded when the British-controlled police in Madras, India, opened fire on strikers at two textile mills on Wednesday, March 11, according to Reuters, the British news agency.Most textile mills in India are owned by Hindu and Moslem capitalists. These native exploiters of the masses of India are as ruthless as the British imperialists. The kind of “independence” they want is merely a better share of the booty that the three parasitic classes of India — the British imperialists, the native capitalists, and the landlords and landlord-princes — squeeze from the masses.
But against the masses, the Indian capitalists join with the British imperialists. British bullets shoot down Indian workers with the warm approval of Indian capitalists.