May 19, 2007

Art Shields was the Daily Worker’s greatest labor reporter. I got to know Art and his wife Esther, herself a labor journalist, soon after I joined the staff of the Worker in January 1967. Art helped me hone my writing skills. He was a role model in his loyalty to workers and their struggles.

With the purchase this week of Chrysler Group by Cerberus Capital Management, the proverb “Let the buyer beware” should be replaced with one that reads, “Let the workers beware.”

Former Deputy Attorney General James Comey told the Senate Judiciary Committee May 15 that he, as well as then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI Director Robert Mueller and other senior Justice Department officials, threatened to resign en masse in 2004 to protest the National Security Agency’s domestic spying program which they viewed as illegal and unconstitutional.

Explaining true cost of the war
Terrorizing communities
High stakes in Abu-Jamal case
Re: Forget the meat!
Reader request

In this historic center of African American cultural life, Harlem, the main issue today is the lack of affordable housing. Right now in Harlem, the prices of all forms of housing — from public projects to affordable rental and coop apartments for middle-income families under the city-state-federal Mitchell-Lama program, to condos — are going sky high.

The most recent round of exorbitant gasoline price hikes is hurting working Americans directly in the pocketbook and indirectly by feeding inflation. It is high time to seek alternatives.

Before the ’06 elections, more than a few skeptical voices asked what substantial progress could be achieved through the peoples’ massive get-out-the-vote campaign. We had tried before and failed. Yet after the ballots were counted, even the most cynical admitted that an uncommon opportunity was at hand. There comes a time — when we must seize the opportunity to plant the seeds of real change.

With Iraq, Hurricane Katrina and the Walter Reed hospital scandal — maybe you thought that the incompetence of the White House had bottomed out.

The Republicans, the neocons, the fundamentalist right wing, all make a god of “the market.” The market is the be-all and end-all, the ultimate trump card. The market is the solution they propose for everything — oops, wait a moment, not quite everything.