April 26, 2008

LOS ANGELES — More than 5,000 union activists and supporters rallied at the harbor here, April 17, roaring their approval of an assertive, one-for-all and all-for-one strategy to change the national and local direction this year.

Hillary Clinton kept alive her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination by winning Pennsylvania’s April 22 primary. National attention now turns to the Indiana and North Carolina primaries on May 6. Polls show Obama leading in North Carolina and a dead heat in Indiana.

Egypt: Protest food shortages

Brazil: Continent-wide defense proposed

Nepal: Maoists win election victory

Italy: Rightist back in power

Iraq: Short term oil pacts OK’d

CHICAGO — Last month 80,000 jobs were lost throughout the country and the unemployment rate jumped from 4.8 to 5.1 percent. It was the third consecutive month of job loss. The private sector alone lost 98,000 jobs in March, the fourth consecutive decline. The number of unemployed people in the U.S. grew by 434,000 to 7.8 million.

Despite strong resistance from labor and civic organizations in both the United States and South Korea, President Bush and South Korean President Lee Myung-bak vowed to push through the stalled Korea-United States Free Trade Agreement (KORUS FTA).

Dueling ballot initiatives dealing with the same subject — reforming the government’s ability to take private property under eminent domain — will share center stage in California’s June 3 statewide primary election. Though the official titles given propositions. 98 and 99 by the state attorney general are very similar, their intentions and effects couldn’t be farther apart.

The workers at American Axle are doing all they can. Their cause is just, they are united in battle and unions from all over are coming to this plant on the Detroit-Hamtramck border to lend support. For seven weeks now, 3,650 workers have been on strike, resisting a very profitable company’s efforts to drastically reduce their wages (by as much as 50 percent) and benefits. However, the balance of forces in this fight is anything but even and they sure could use some help from high places.

Food prices are soaring around the world. Long lines for rations of rice or wheat flour snake through cities and towns across Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas. Food protests have rocked Haiti, Egypt, Senegal, Bangladesh and the Philippines. A United Nations report last December listed Haiti and Bangladesh among 37 countries who face “food crises” and need external assistance to stave off mass starvation and famine. The capitalist “free market” economy has helped to create this crisis.

Workers of the world unite! That visionary call, issued 160 years ago, is being answered today in new and powerful ways.

A disturbing study released last week by the RAND Corporation says about 300,000 service members and veterans — nearly one in five of the 1.6 million U.S. troops who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan — acknowledge experiencing major depression or post-traumatic stress disorder. The study also says some 320,000 troops have returned with signs of traumatic brain injury, or TBI, which may be hard to recognize or to distinguish from psychological injury.