Dec 10, 2005

BRONX, N.Y. — Residents of the Fordham-Bedford cooperative housing project, home to thousands of working-class people, were facing desperate times. Many were unable to pay their electric bills, and their lights were shut off. A desperate mother had lost her job and could not afford to pay the rent. This holiday season promised to be hard for the parents: they weren’t going to be able to afford gifts for their children.

Then Citgo stepped in.

HOUSTON — In what union leaders called one of the largest organizing victories ever in Texas, a majority of nearly 5,000 Houston janitors have signed to become members of the Service Employees union and initiated a process to bargain their first contract.

CHICAGO — Amid exclamations of “Opa!” over flaming Greek saganaki, Puerto Rican ballads and “Solidarity Forever,” a packed Parthenon Restaurant hall rocked at the 18th Annual People’s Weekly World Banquet here, Dec. 4.

Grassroots leaders in Texas reacted angrily to new evidence that Tom DeLay’s redistricting plan rammed through the Texas Legislature violated the Voting Rights Act in carving up the state to insure five additional Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives.

President George W. Bush made his first political speech on home soil, Nov. 28, after two weeks of travel abroad and a Thanksgiving retreat at his Texas ranch. The speech followed tumultuous and bitter struggle between Republicans and Democrats in both houses of Congress over the war in Iraq, budget cuts in social programs and tax breaks for the rich, with opinion polls showing Bush’s disapproval rating around 60 percent.

The aggressive White House campaign to re-sell the Iraq war to the American public appears to be dead on arrival. As President Bush delivered his Nov. 30 “strategy for victory in Iraq” speech, a Time poll showed 60 percent disapproved of his handling of the situation in Iraq, and the same percent said the war was wrong in the first place. The latest polls continued months of unfavorable ratings of Bush’s war policy.

NEW YORK — A coalition of labor, political leaders and community organizations gathered Dec. 5 in front of New York University’s Bobst Library, where the school’s administration is located, in support of the approximately 1,000 graduate teaching assistants (TAs) who have been on strike since Nov. 9.

WASHINGTON: Bill to protect immigrant children; HAMPTON, Va.: Antiwar students rebuff expulsion threat; WASHINGTON: GOP medical plan lands with thud; MONTGOMERY, Ala.: Thousands march to honor Rosa Parks

SAN FRANCISCO — The most impressive words of the evening came not from the podium, moving as the speakers were, but from a cell phone, barely audible in the Victoria Theater’s packed auditorium.

Lawless landlords stopped on evictions; Residents to mayor: ‘Don’t shut us out!’; Katrina survivors charge racism