Oct. 8, 2005

Living wage victory at Cintas; Exhausted truck drivers; Contract at Boeing

Houston reader Pat Burnham forwarded us the letter she sent out to friends after a weekend with Hurricane Rita.

CHICAGO — The Campaign to End AIDS (C2EA) kicked off its nationwide movement on this city’s Magnificent Mile Oct. 1. Two hundred protesters emphasized the need to reauthorize the Ryan White CARE Act, which expired Sept. 30. The CARE Act provides federal funds for HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment for people with AIDS and HIV.

Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black remarked in a famous decision, Griffin v. Illinois (1956), “There can be no equal justice where the kind of trial a man gets depends on the amount of money he has.” Black’s statement can be viewed as a central argument in two uniquely different books on the American criminal justice system: “No Equal Justice,” by David Cole, law professor at George Washington University and a legal analyst for The Nation magazine, and “Courtroom 302,” by Steve Bogira, longtime writer and staff member of The Reader, a Chicago newsweekly. Cole offers an overview of the system, and Bogira relates the daily happenings in an urban criminal courtroom.

Speaking of the Bush administration’s lackadaisical response to Hurricane Katrina and the misery inflicted on the people of the Gulf Coast, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) recently commented, “The system devalues human lives.”

A collective sigh of relief must have rippled through the Pentagon and the White House Sept. 26 when 22-year old Army Private Lynndie England was convicted and sentenced for her despicable torture of detainees at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. Her superiors, including the commander in chief, were off the hook.

Acorn doesn’t fall far; Public ownership now; Paul Robeson stamp; Demand a warning ; Time has long since come

Last week, my son left the United States for Iraq. I yelled at him, I cried, and did everything I swore I would not do on our last visit. I can hardly mention the subject without floods of tears and a sense of overwhelming insanity.

After the New Orleans disaster, gas prices skyrocketed in a matter of days, shooting well over $3 a gallon everywhere in the U.S. While the prices have begun to come down somewhat, they are still substantially above what they were before the storm, and analysts are predicting that home heating oil will rise by 31 percent this winter.

In 1565, Queen Elizabeth was whisked off to Windsor Castle. The idea was to escape the plague, which was ravaging London. Understanding the contagiousness of the disease, she ordered her henchmen to hang anyone who ventured to her castle door from London. The poor were left to fend for themselves. In other words, escaping the plague was class-driven.