June 25, 2005

WASHINGTON — “Let Conyers in!” the crowd chanted at the White House gate the evening of June 16. Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) and a dozen other lawmakers had come to deliver petitions signed by 566,000 people demanding that President George W. Bush answer for the so-called Downing Street Memo proving that he “fixed” intelligence to justify war on Iraq.

Six Iraqi union leaders touring the U.S. this week called for an end to the U.S. occupation and expressed hope that American workers would support their efforts to protect Iraqi workers’ rights and defeat privatization. U.S. Labor Against the War sponsored the 17-day, 25-city tour by the representatives of three major labor organizations in Iraq.
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CHICAGO — The Communist Party USA returns to its birthplace this week as 500 labor, peace, civil rights and community activists, and international guests converge here for the party’s 28th national convention, July 1-3.

CHICAGO — The campaign to raise money for three working-class centers of unity, action and education reached $330,000 last week, just $70,000 shy of its $400,000 goal. With two weeks left in the campaign, spokespeople for the New York-based Chelsea Fund for Education and Chicago-based Workers Education Society — the co-sponsoring, nonprofit entities — are cautiously optimistic about reaching the goal by the July 1 deadline.

On June 21 a jury of nine whites and three Blacks in Philadelphia, Miss., convicted octogenarian and former Ku Klux Klan leader Edgar Ray Killen of manslaughter, exactly 41 years after the triple slaying of young civil rights workers James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner.
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Violence in Iraq has escalated sharply since a new government was named in early May, with an average of 30 Iraqi civilians killed every day. Joblessness, power cuts and lack of sanitation and health care remain at crisis levels and in some areas have worsened, with cholera and tuberculosis on the rise.

Conventional wisdom says a conference of 1,400 members of the Future Farmers of America (FAA) at Penn State University in rural State College would be a safe bet for President Bush to sell his plan to privatize Social Security.

NEW HAVEN, Conn. — A congressional forum here on reforming the labor laws that govern union organizing drives spotlighted the obstacles employers put in the way of workers seeking to join a union.

WASHINGTON: House chips away at Patriot Act; DES MOINES, Iowa: State restores voting rights to ex-offenders; CHICAGO: Defend the right to vote; LEXINGTON, Ky.: Save the mountains

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Northern California and the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights have filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to get records related to the arrest of five Lodi, Calif., men on terrorism charges.