June 5, 2000
NEW YORK — Republican mayor Rudolph Giuliani will not run for U.S. Senate. Giuliani’s resignation came some two weeks after a swirl of exposés about his personal life began dominating media coverage.
Prior to the public frenzy around the mayor’s intimate life, there have been an increased number of strikes and rallies by workers, protests against police brutality and killings, and demonstrations in defense of democratic rights.
The collapse of the Giuliani bid is another example of what has repeatedly emerged in recent years with the pornographication and soap-operatization of politics. It is marked by the attempt to draw working people and middle-class layers into becoming “riveted” to gossip, sexual innuendo and “exposures” of the dissoluteness and corruption of the “elites,” and to suck them into the morass of the politics of resentment.
June 6, 1975
Outlines of the White House planned assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, organized by the CIA and carried out by the Mafia, are beginning to take shape. There have been charges for years that the CIA organized plots to kill Castro. The Cuban government repeatedly offered proof, which Washington always flatly denied. Now, files have come to light on the CIA’s contract with two gangsters to murder the Cuban leader.
The American rulers hoped to snuff out the Cuban workers state because it was proving that American imperialism could be taken on and defeated. The rulers feared the growing identification among young people and Blacks with the advances being made in Cuba.
The CIA had hoped to incite a rebellion against the Castro regime from within Cuba, but this was a miserable failure. The efforts of organized crime were also unsuccessful.
June 5, 1950
PEACE. Peace is not a pipe dream. It is necessary only to end the rule of America’s billionaire cliques to transform our economy from a breeder of wars to a source of limitless benefit for everyone.
This is the promise of socialism. But socialism cannot be had without a price. The price is willingness to join in the struggle for a better world, to add your weight to the thinking minority of today who will become the majority of tomorrow that will open up the bright new epoch of enduring peace.
Do your part now by getting your friends to read the Militant, America’s outstanding socialist weekly. Ask them to make sure they get the Militant regularly by taking out a subscription.
It’s a handy way to put the hopeful message of socialism in your friends’ mailbox week by week throughout the year.