United States

In an unannounced visit to Baghdad on April 20, US Secretary Condoleezza Rice praised Nuri al Maliki, Iraq’s Shiite prime minister, for “ordering” a military offensive last month in the Iraqi seaport city of Basra against anti-occupation Shiite cleric Moqtada al Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia.
Union members and labour activists attending the Labor Notes conference dinner on April 12 were attacked by bus loads of staff and members of the Service Employees Industrial Union (SEIU) — wearing purple SEIU t-shirts — who forced their way into the conference venue in Dearborn, Michigan. In the ensuing melee a number of people were injured.
As the full severity of the mortgage crisis emerged over the past year, there were still defenders of the free-market system ready to counter every criticism of sub-prime mortgage peddlers and profit-hungry banks by pinning the blame on the real culprits.
Even from my bed on the opposite side of the room it was possible to see the gruesome surgical-steel staples bisecting Miguel’s head.
Kathy Black recently took part in a speaking tour of Australia at the invitation of Sydney’s Stop the War Coalition. Black is one of six national conveners of US Labor Against the War and is also the Philadelphia president of the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW), a group affiliated to the AFL-CIO union federation. She spoke to Green Left Weekly’s Margarita Windisch about some of the gender and race issues that US unions have to tackle.
On March 19, JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon joined Bear Stearns CEO Alan Schwartz to face a group of 400 stunned Bear executives. Five days earlier, Bear Stearns, one of Wall Street’s five largest investment banks, had lost $17 billion of wealth, triggering the biggest financial panic since the Great Depression.
More than 200 US military veterans and active-duty troops from Iraq and Afghanistan will participate in a four-day event in Washington, to shed light on the atrocities committed by US occupation forces.
The following is an abridged statement from the US-based Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) released on January 21.
Hollywood writers won gains following a 14-week strike against TV and film producers that ended with a new contract giving them a percentage of revenue for programs streamed on the internet — a demand that industry bosses had vowed to resist.
The pink slips are piling up, and jobs are getting a lot harder to find. That’s the unmistakable conclusion of the US government’s employment report for December.
During the war against Vietnam, it was not until 1970 that the US union movement took protest action in an organised manner. And even then, it was a pro-war demonstration called by New York’s Building Trades Council in support of President Richard Nixon. However anti-war unions responded to that demonstration — held on May 20 and drawing 50,000 workers (many of them paid to attend) — with a protest of their own. While it only drew half as many people, it was a significant milestone — it was the first time that US unions formally organised an anti-war demonstration.
The US Department of Energy announced January 30 that it is pulling out of the Futuregen Project in Mattoon, Illinois — the United States’ US$1.8 billion “clean coal” demonstration plant, scheduled to start construction next year. The DoE had committed to paying 74% ($1.3 billion) of Futuregen’s costs.