Dear friend,
As a reader of the People’s Weekly World and Nuestro Mundo, you, like tens of thousands of ordinary, decent people throughout our country, are taking heart that for the first time since the Sept. 11 attacks, the reactionary Bush administration is on the defensive and its support in the polls is falling.
The close ties of this gang with corporate crime, the deepening economic decline and the administration’s total inability to provide any credible way out are the basic causes for its crumbling support.
The desperate efforts to use “national security” as a cover for a massive, right-wing assault on labor, immigrants, minorities and democratic rights are unraveling. Deep splits have emerged in the Republican Party over punishing corporate crime, the threat to invade Iraq and the embargo of Cuba. The rats are beginning to desert their sinking ship. But they will always need a push.
Most significantly, labor and its allies are showing a renewed spirit of defiance, resistance and rebellion.
Tens of thousands of West Coast longshore workers and their supporters have taken to the streets to defy Bush’s threat to use troops to break a possible strike. They have won the support of the mayors and Congress people in every major city from Los Angeles to Seattle.
The steelworkers are pressing a broad-based campaign for federal guarantees of health and pension benefits lost by 600,000 retirees from companies that have gone bankrupt. Their agenda calls for national health care.
A “Coalition of Conscience” including major African-American, Latino, Arab-American, women’s organizations and labor unions, led by Rev. Jesse Jackson, called a national demonstration in front of the U.S. Justice Department to challenge the Bush-Ashcroft assault on democratic and civil rights.
A new peace movement was re-born on April 20, when 100,000 people went to D.C. to say no war at home and abroad. The PWW/Mundo is working to fortify the peace sentiments and concern for saving the world from military and environmental destruction.
We are working especially hard to help turn the November elections into the most decisive setback possible to the ultra-right power bloc in Congress and the state governments.
The People’s Weekly World/Nuestro Mundo is proud to be part of this growing, grassroots, labor-led fightback movement. All of these stories and more have been under-reported or ignored in the corporate media. We are proud to give these struggles and movements voice and, through the process of reporting, to help it expand and be more effective. And it is a known fact that in order to complete that process the PWW/Mundo has to be more widely read.
The PWW/Mundo is part of a growing movement of independent and anti- corporate media willing to challenge the monopolies’ spin and control of information. Many of our stories are utilized by other publications and organizations to this end. Pro-worker, pro-people advocacy journalism has always been an important part of social change and we are working to uphold this tradition into the 21st century.
We know you also want to help make this happen. And you can. Through your financial support, you can personally guarantee the expansion of freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press. It is one of the most powerful ways you can help turn the tide against the ultra-right and build the historic fightback movement to preserve our country’s basic democratic and social rights.
So, please, give generously to the People’s Weekly World/Nuestro Mundo Fund Drive.
Thank you.
Sincerely,
Tim Wheeler
Editor
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