April 22, 1996
The Clinton administration is leading the bosses’ assault on immigrant workers. Clinton has pushed for increases in border cops and use of U.S. armed forces to aid them. Under his Democratic tutelage raids, arrests, and deportations of immigrant workers have shot up.
Much of the big business debate seeks to convince immigrants who have papers to identify as “American” and pit themselves against undocumented workers — “illegal aliens” scapegoated as the cause of unemployment, crime and drug trafficking.
Washington’s and Wall Street’s real aim is to drive a wedge into the working class and justify greater use of repressive measures, and the wholesale denial of rights to a growing number of those who toil on the land and in thousands of U.S. factories. The key to taking on the bosses is unity of the workers.
April 23, 1971
The last two months have seen important new developments in the attitude of the American people to the war in Southeast Asia. With the fiasco of the Laotian invasion and the revelations about U.S. war crimes in Indochina, public opposition has reached an all-time high.
Meanwhile, the antiwar movement is preparing for demonstrations in Washington and San Francisco on April 24, and they could be the largest ever held.
The answer to all of the “peace offensives,” phased withdrawals, partial withdrawals, “neutralizations,” bombing halts, and other phony plans of the ruling class is the continued mobilization of the masses of the American people in the streets until every last soldier, sailor, airman, advisor, CIA operative, and U.S. AID person is out of Indochina. That is what the demonstrations on April 24 represent.
April 20, 1946
The 400,000 soft coal miners on strike since April 1 mean business about securing their precedent-setting social demands before they will even consider the question of wages.
These are directed at eliminating the terrible toll of accidents in American mines; providing adequate health, medical and sanitation facilities in the filthy, decrepit company towns; ensuring the welfare of miners’ widows and orphans; compensating the injured and their families; restricting the price-gouging in the monopoly country stores and rent-gouging on company-owned dwellings.
The mine operators dismissed the demands as “trivia.” This “trivia” includes the slaughter of 28,000 miners and injury of more than a million in the past 14 years. If they win they will set an example for the rest of American labor that may have far-reaching consequences.