Mar 26, 2005

Garment industry workers in Dhaka, Bangladesh, March 18th, protest a government edict adding four hours to their eight-hour shifts.

Mexican workers headed to the fields of North Carolina under the H-2A visa program can now stop by the Farm Labor Organizing Committee’s office in Monterrey, Mexico, to find out about their newly won rights. Opening the office was the first concrete step in implementing a groundbreaking agreement signed last fall between FLOC and the North Carolina Growers Association. The agreement covers 7,500 Mexican guest workers who cultivate and harvest cucumbers and other crops in North Carolina. This is the first time immigrant farm workers in the U.S. government’s existing H-2A guest worker program have been unionized.

ST. LOUIS — “Hurting Missouri’s most vulnerable citizens is not the way to fix our state’s budget problems,” said Cathy Martarella at a March 21 press conference announcing the formation of Missourians for Health. The new coalition includes health care providers, mental health advocates, Medicaid recipients, trade unionists and parents of children in the state’s First Steps program, which serves developmentally disabled toddlers.

Review: "The Truth about the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It." The U.S. health care system means misery for many, abundance for others. Parts of the story are easily told: low life expectancy and high infant mortality for the poor and racially oppressed, and millions who are uninsured or have poor coverage...

Marisselle Quinones, 11, who has spina bifida, testifies before a Florida Legislative committee on Medicaid reform, March 14 in Jacksonville.

Upon leaving Grenada after a visit during the U.S. invasion and occupation in October 1983, then-Secretary of State George Schultz looked out of his official jet at the lush greenery below and proclaimed, “What a lovely piece of real estate!”

Refuse a medical procedure or undergo one? Matters of life or death. These are difficult, painful and deeply personal issues, which individuals and families confront daily. Who makes such stressful decisions? If not the individual, then the closest family member empowered by law? Or should it be the U.S. Congress?

While GOP House leader Tom DeLay, who faces his own legal and ethics problems, pontificated on saving Terri Schiavo and George W. lectured about a “culture of life,” their actions spoke louder than their hollow words. [This is a companion editorial to A dangerous precedent...]

Anderson and Amistad. Confused about class? Baseball and politics. ‘Taxation without representation.’

The following is a response to the Republican ramrodding of a bill giving a federal court jurisdiction over the case of brain-damaged Terri Schiavo. The Senate, operating under unanimous-consent rules, passed the legislation March 19 with no debate and with only three members present. The House voted 203-58 at 12:42 a.m. March 20 to approve the measure, and rushed it to President Bush. He signed the bill into law at 1:11 a.m.