National

John Bolton delivered the Bush administration’s bellicose, arrogant war-first policy to the UN, and U.S. voters took him out.

Bernie Hayes’ career as a radio disc jockey has spanned over 50 years. An African American radio pioneer, he has participated in historic civil rights and union battles to break down racism within the industry, and he is the author of “The Death of Black Radio.”

WASHINGTON — As the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments Dec. 4 on two lawsuits seeking to terminate voluntary desegregation programs in public schools, a thousand protesters, mostly Black, Latino and white college students, marched outside chanting “Equal education, not segregation” and “They say Jim Crow, we say hell no!”

A majority of voters rejected Karl Rove’s use of “wedge issues” to split and weaken the movement against the Republican right in the Nov. 7 elections. But other headline news proves that racism is alive and continues to pose a grave threat to that unity.

Anger is spreading across Florida that once again, as in the 2000 election, vote theft has put the wrong candidate in office in Washington.

BOSTON — Newspapers headlines throughout the Commonwealth of Massachusetts unanimously proclaimed the Nov. 7 electoral victory of Deval Patrick as “historic.” And right they were. Patrick, a former assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Clinton administration, became only the second African American elected governor of a U.S. state.

Folks were still eating turkey sandwiches when the AFL-CIO issued its call for a Dec. 8-9 labor summit and march in Washington, D.C., to pass the Employee Free Choice Act, a top legislative priority for labor. Among the summit’s goals is training 250,000 “trusted messengers,” worksite-based labor activists, to force veto-proof enactment of EFCA.

Since last December the Republican right has tried to use undocumented immigrants as a collective “Willie Horton” to distract voters’ attention from the massive failures of GOP policy, including the Iraq war, Hurricane Katrina, declining working-class living standards and the scandals about Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff.

El desafío que enfrentaba al movimiento sindical en estas elecciones era la de proporcionar la fuerza organizadora que hacía falta para transformar la frustración y la ira de los trabajadores en poder político, declaró John Sweeney, presidente de la AFL-CIO, en una rueda de prensa pos-electoral el 8 de noviembre.

CHICAGO — Hacen dos meses y medio desde que Elvira Arellano tomó refugio en una iglesia del noroeste de Chicago, desafiando a los esfuerzos del gobierno que quiere deportarla a México. No obstante, Arellano se siente optimista de su futuro y dice que su lucha de resistir la deportación para quedarse en el país junto con su hijo de siete años, Saúl, que nació en Estados Unidos y es ciudadano del país, vale la pena.