April 22, 2006

The Communications Workers of America has embarked on an extraordinary venture in union democracy. It is providing all members with a detailed picture of the union’s current status and inviting them to offer suggestions and opinions, no matter how critical, on how best to strengthen the union and its mission in the years ahead.

Give Arkansas a Raise Now (GARN), a broad coalition of labor, religious and community groups, succeeded in getting a minimum wage bill signed into law on April 10.

‘We’re the early warning system for the rest of the world,’ says Arctic resident. When she was growing up in an Inuit community in northern Quebec, Sheila Watt-Cloutier never rode anything faster than a dog sled.

It’s no secret that mercury pollution in our environment is a global health problem. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has warned women of childbearing age and children to limit the amount and types of fish they eat, due to mercury contamination.

Everybody seems to agree that the Bush administration has lost much of its political support. No longer does it speak with the same authority. But it is not yet on its deathbed. In fact, there is no evidence that it is ready to make even a tactical retreat.

The European Union’s decision to join the U.S. and Canada in halting funding to the Palestinian National Authority is greatly sharpening the ongoing crisis Palestinian people face in the Occupied Territories.

Sixty years ago, the African American poet Langston Hughes wrote, “Lenin walks around the world, Frontiers cannot bar him … Lenin walks around the world, Black, brown and white receive him.”

To see thousands of immigrants and their supporters marching, rallying and standing up for their rights is inspiring. Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) was correct when she called immigration the civil rights issue of our time.

It is simply amazing that all the newspapers and all the electronic news can be so full of information about undocumented workers while the real issue is never mentioned.