Jan. 28, 2006

The Emergency Campaign for America’s Priorities (ECAP), uniting labor, community and low-income advocacy groups, is staging vigils at congressional offices, telling lawmakers to reject a Budget Reconciliation Act that inflicts $42 billion in Medicaid cuts and slashes billions more from other social programs over the next decade.

Under the slogan “A better world is necessary, with you it’s possible!” tens of thousands of Venezuelans joined activists from 160 countries to take part in a giant “March against war and imperialism” here Jan. 24. The march opened the sixth World Social Forum, which is being held in the Venezuelan capital through Jan. 29.

There’s something highly infectious about the “can-do,” positive spirit of People’s Weekly World supporters in St. Louis. You can’t help but feel it when you’re around them, and it puts a little extra lift in your walk for several days afterward.

President Bush’s Mine Safety and Health chief David Dye shocked senators from both parties when he got up and left in the middle of a Jan. 23 Senate hearing on the West Virginia mining disaster. The message his action sent was clear: mine safety is not his priority. C-SPAN caught the scene for all Americans to see. Click for Spanish text

The White House has unleashed a hard-line defense of the Bush administration’s spying on Americans without a warrant, claiming that only “credible threats” linked to al-Qaeda have been under surveillance and the snooping is necessary to protect “national security.”

By a margin of seven votes, city transit workers rejected a tentative contract between their union, Transport Workers Union Local 100, and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. The main reason cited for the “no” vote was the provision that workers would for the first time have to pay for health coverage, but union leaders, members and elected officials point to disinformation in the media and interference by Gov. George Pataki.

For the last year and a half, efforts by over 600 almond workers at Blue Diamond Growers’ Sacramento plant to join Local 17 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) and gain the respect, raises and benefits they deserve have been stonewalled by what the company itself calls “an aggressive union avoidance campaign.”

Teachers here are encouraged by a long-awaited arbitrator’s report, released Jan. 23, bolstering their contention that the Oakland Unified School District can afford to raise salaries by up to 2.5 percent and that new health care costs to teachers can be minimized.