March 18, 2006

Secretary of the Interior Gail Norton announced her resignation March 10, saying that there was “no more environment left to wreck” after five years at her Cabinet-level job.

Equality has become an unmentionable word in Congress. It doesn’t come even once in the 300-page omnibus immigration bill introduced last week by Senator Arlen Specter, nor in any of the others Congress is considering. They all deny equality to millions of people. In the testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which Specter chairs, no one even dares to advocate it.

Peace-loving, working-class, progressive and left-minded people are commemorating the third anniversary of an illegal, immoral war this weekend. While mourning the thousands of dead and war-wounded Americans and Iraqis and worrying about attacks on democratic rights, everyday people are organizing and uniting to take the country back from the mean-fisted grip of the ultra-right and its corporate partners in crime.

As marchers call this weekend for an end to the Iraq war, signs are growing that the U.S. will attack Iran. Some of the Bush administration’s charges sound eerily familiar: a covert nuclear weapons program, support for al-Qaeda, a menace to peace. An underlying motive is also familiar — oil

War profiteering has always ranked as the most obscene form of capitalist appropriation, soaked in the gore of the dead and wounded.

I recently lost my mother to cancer. My experience of caring for her was something that I would not have believed. From the moment we were informed of her terminal illness, she was so accepting of it, saying simply that she had lived her life and she was ready to go. She said she was not afraid to die; her near-death experience had taught her it was nothing to fear.

In the early months of 2004 I read the Black Commentator’s analysis of the corporate-Republican campaign to create the perception of an alternative, conservative Black leadership. At first I thought this laughable. But such a campaign was taking place in my own hometown, Philadelphia.

Q: Obviously you oppose terrorism, but what position do American Communists take toward the homegrown (non-al-Qaeda) resistance to the U.S./British occupation? Do you support the armed resistance?

It is a truism that knowledge is power. It is also true that ruling classes seek to hoard knowledge and use mass media to distribute propaganda. Not all propaganda though is disconnected from real knowledge.