September 20, 1999
CHICAGO — Eleven Puerto Rican political prisoners, most of whom have spent two decades in U.S. prisons because of their pro-independence actions, are due to be released soon. This victory is the result of an international campaign that has won broad backing.
The 11 are Elizam Escobar, Ricardo Jiménez, Adolfo Matos, Dylcia Pagán, Alicia Rodríguez, Ida Luz Rodríguez, Luis Rosa, Carmen Valentín, Alberto Rodríguez, Alejandrina Torres and Edwin Cortés. Two prisoners, Oscar López and Antonio Camacho, rejected conditions the government sought to impose on the independence activists in order to win release.
“We don’t agree with the conditions, but we want them home,” declared Josefina Rodríguez, mother of Ida Luz and Alicia Rodríguez. “It has to be clear we are not asking them to renounce their fight for independence.”
September 20, 1974
On Sept. 6 in Zambia, Frelimo (Front for the Liberation of Mozambique) and the Portuguese government signed an accord on independence for Mozambique. The East African country has been a colony of Portugal for hundreds of years. The deterioration of stability forced the colonialists to come to terms with Frelimo.
Tony Hodges, in Intercontinental Press, gives this description of the sharpening class struggle in the middle of August:
“More than seventy ships have been paralyzed by a strike of thousands of dockers. Railway workers, public workers, gravediggers, garbage collectors, iron workers, and newspaper staffs have participated in the rash of strikes. On Aug. 11 thousands of Africans, driven to despair by starvation wages, inflation, and scarcities of essential goods, rose in revolt.”
September 19, 1949
The government’s steel “fact-finding” board, which did the bidding of the corporations by rejecting any wage increases for the steel workers and proposing a wage freeze for all industry, was [President] Truman’s baby.
Since Truman’s re-election, the labor movement has taken one blow after another. The Taft-Hartley Law remains in full force. The upward revision of the minimum wage has been converted to deprive millions of even the protection they now have. The rent ceilings have been broken through. Civil rights legislation has been scuttled. In the witch-hunt atmosphere fostered by the government, the corporations and police have been emboldened to ride herd with violence over picket lines.
Truman stands exposed for what he is — a conscious agent of Big Business who has masked himself as a “ friend of labor” the better to betray labor.