Oct 5, 2002

NEWARK, N.J. – Ras Baraka, former people’s candidate for Councilman at Large here, was sworn in Sept. 27 as one of the city’s four Deputy Mayors. Jeannette Ramos, Ronald R. Rice and Evelyn Williams were the other three Deputies appointed by Mayor Sharpe James.

Worker’s correspondence


Sept. 20, 2002, was a tragic day for the working people of Cincinnati, Ohio. The local leadership of the AFL-CIO labor council held its Committee on Political Education dinner in a unionized hotel located inside the area of downtown businesses being boycotted by civil rights organizations to protest injustices that touched off recent rioting here.

Silence. There’s not much of it this summer at my office. The thunderous sounds of heavy machinery dominate, as a huge apartment building rises from an empty lot next door. In this formerly marginal neighborhood, the poor are being pushed farther away to make room for the powerful elite in new luxury apartments. So as the windows of our old office rattle, we long for moments of silence.

PITTSBURGH – On Sept. 20, two-and-a-half years before contracts covering hundreds of thousands of active and retired steelworkers expire, local union officers who are members of the United Steelworkers of America (USWA) Basic Steel Industry Conference (BSIC) met and produced a position paper in which they outlined an innovative approach to the 35 steel companies that have filed for bankruptcy protection in recent years.

WASHINGTON – For four days last week, the capital echoed with marching feet and chants of “corporate greed has got to go” and “No war for oil!”

July 26 marked the 49th anniversary of the beginning of the Cuban Revolution. On this, our first trip to Cuba, my sister and I celebrated this holiday by visiting Lugano to meet the parents of one of our hosts.

Thirty-three years after Lillie Belle Allen was shot down in cold blood in York, Pa., three men will go on trial for her murder – former mayor Charles H. Robertson, Robert Messersmith and Gregory Neff. Seven others, who admitted shooting at the car Allen was in, pled guilty to lesser charges in return for their testimony against the three defendants.

I. F. Stone had been unable to find a publisher for his 1952 book, The Hidden History of the Korean War. until he met Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman. Thus his book became the first published by Monthly Review Press. A perusal of a friend’s recollections as an infantryman during that war prompted me to read the book.