Feb 14, 2004

Which is worse, a president who doesn’t know what’s going on and is manipulated by others, or a president who launches a war knowingly using false or misleading information to sell it to the American people? click here for Spanish text

ANNAPOLIS, Md. – Holding neon light sticks in the chill darkness and placards that read “Fund Public Schools,” parents, students, teachers and other school workers marched on the State House Feb. 9 to demand that Gov. Robert Ehrlich and the Legislature deliver on their promise of $1.3 billion in state aid to Maryland’s schools.

Fred Gaboury, a logger from the Pacific Northwest, had Paul Bunyan-sized hands so big he couldn’t make his fingers hit the right typewriter keys. Yet in 30 years as a peerless labor writer, he interviewed hundreds of workers – first as editor of Labor Today and then as a writer for People’s Weekly World. His stories from the front lines of the class struggle prompted many to call him the “Dean of American Labor Journalists.”

WASHINGTON – You know you’re at a great conference when, before the first speaker can finish even one paragraph, 3,000 screaming workers jump to their feet, whooping and hollering to beat George Bush.

PHILADELPHIA – While Iraqi workers currently face daunting conditions such as spiraling inflation and 70 percent unemployment, they are refusing to let restrictive, anti-labor laws stop their organizing work.

Conservation groups accused the Bush administration of singling out environmental spending for larger cuts than other domestic programs in the year 2005 budget, putting at risk environmental and public health protections under the guise of fiscal constraints.

PORTLAND – Doug Wall attended his first-ever Democratic nominating caucus on Feb 8. Politics has never been his thing, he says. He had grown up believing that his government does the right thing, but now he is shocked. His country has become a bully

YPSILANTI, Mich. – Disappearing jobs. That is the issue that primarily motivated nearly 150,000 Michigan voters to participate in the Democratic presidential caucus.

NEW YORK CITY: ‘Don’t use our name’ for Patriot Act / PITTSBURGH, Penn.: ‘Raging Grannies’ take on Wal-Mart / DES MOINES, Iowa: The ghost of McCarthy at Drake / JACKSON, Miss.: Reopening the Emmett Till lynching case

NEW YORK – The fighting spirit and determination of the overflow crowd was unmistakable.

“Are we going to allow George Bush to rule our country for another four years?” asked Jarvis Tyner, executive vice-chair of Communist Party USA.

“No!” the crowd roared back. click here for Spanish text