December 4, 1995
FORT MADISON, Iowa — “This is a tremendous victory,” said Mark Curtis following the decision by the Iowa Board of Parole to release him from prison. “I always knew this day would come, but it wouldn’t have happened without all the people who wrote letters, showed up for parole hearings, sold pamphlets about my case, and campaigned for my release.”
The frame-up of Curtis began in March 1988. In the midst of a fight against the arrest of 17 immigrant workers at the meatpacking plant where he worked, Curtis was arrested by the Des Moines, Iowa, police. A longtime union activist and member of the Socialist Workers Party, Curtis was beaten and falsely accused of attempting to rape a Black teenager. He was railroaded to jail in a September 1988 trial. Curtis has won broad support among unionists, farmers, fighters for social justice.
December 4, 1970
The renewed bombing of North Vietnam adds to the long list of barbaric crimes committed by U.S. imperialism against the Vietnamese people and confirms that Washington has been guilty of perpetrating one more cruel hoax on the American people.
The escalation was being mapped at the very time all the preelection talk about “peace,” “phased withdrawal” and “Vietnamization” was going on. The very notion that Washington has any other perspective than to try to wrest some kind of military victory constitutes the essential feature of the hoax.
What is involved is a course of action determined by the imperialist character of the U.S. that drives its efforts to crush the Vietnamese liberation forces, to seek to contain and roll back the revolutionary process throughout Southeast Asia.
Now more than ever: Bring the Gls home!
December 1, 1945
DETROIT, Nov. 21 — The biggest industrial strike in the nation’s history started at 11 o’clock this morning when 225,000 members of the CIO United Automobile Workers poured out of 102 General Motors plants to fight for a 30 percent wage increase.
Angered by the refusal of the corporation to negotiate in good faith and goaded beyond endurance by company provocations, the GM workers have met the corporation’s union-busting tactics with the grim determination to fight it out on the picket lines.
Beneath the strikers’ determination to win their wage increase and settle accounts on grievances, lies the moral general concern for preservation of their union. The GM workers feel that they are banner-bearers for all labor, that their strike is a gigantic test of strength which both Big Business and organized labor everywhere are watching carefully.