Feb. 16, 2008

One more unemployment check to a worker without a job might keep him or her in an apartment or a house. A $400 rebate check to a senior citizen or a disabled veteran might mean a meal tonight instead of nothing to eat.

For the second time in two months, America has witnessed a catastrophic industrial explosion involving multiple fatalities. On Dec. 19, 2007, the small T2 Laboratories in Jacksonville, Fla., detonated in a towering mushroom cloud, killing four workers.

Iraq: Food shortages loom

Cuba: Guantanamo gets new prison

Bangladesh: Garment workers fight crackdown

Eritrea: No fuel for UN troops

Venezuela: Courts favor Exxon Mobil

Germany: Steelworkers out on warning strike

Against enormous odds and with television and film writers united behind them, leaders of the Writers Guild of America have negotiated a contract with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers that amounts to a significant win for labor.

Unexpectedly, voters in Ohio, Texas and Pennsylvania could be the decision-makers in the tight Democratic presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Landslide victories by Obama in a series of caucuses and primaries in the past week set the stage for all-out contests in the March 4 primaries in Ohio, Texas, Rhode Island and Vermont, and the April 22 Pennsylvania primary.

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva visited Cuba in mid-January. He and his ministers signed agreements with their Cuban counterparts relating to credit, technical exchanges, trade and energy. On Jan. 15 Lula spent almost three hours with Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

Puerto Rican teachers and their allies took to the streets of San Juan on Feb. 8 to protest the decertification of their union. The decertification happened in reaction to the union’s recent strike vote over the conditions of public schools and low wages. The Puerto Rican Federation of Teachers (FMPR) picketed the Public Sector Labor Relations Commission under the slogan, “You cannot decertify our fight!”

There is a consistent, if not conscious, effort to make it appear as if the African American people have become a sea of dehumanized barrenness in the desolate ghettoes of inner cities.

Many analysts say the United States is already in a recession. Whatever it’s called, economic crisis is a grim and grinding daily reality for the millions who are jobless, underemployed, struggling with soaring health care costs, losing their homes to foreclosure or already homeless.

Bringing to justice the perpetrators of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack is something everyone in our country would like to see.