Remember the workers
The plight of workers around the world is easily forgotten but the People’s Weekly World does not let fighting workers go unnoticed.
Keep up the good work.
Kenneth SmallwoodSouthfield MI
Searching for news
Day and night, week after week, I watch news programs for information about what people like me, who are trying to make a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” are doing, thinking and planning to do. Today, all I got were stories about people who are planning for endless war, arguing about the difference between diplomacy and military might. What I actually heard from most of this Sunday’s commentators was “we have to establish our military supremacy before we can trust our State Department’s judgment even in working with our allies.”
I need to hear more from working-class thinkers and activists. I need to see and hear about what Congress is going to do about our budget, the deficit, our health care or our employment situation. If my city becomes a one newspaper town, or has a few less radio or TV stations, this will deprive us of the opportunity to hear different points of view. (This could be a deliberate ploy to keep us in ignorance.) I will not be able to tell my congresspeople, president or government agencies what I (as part of the governed) want them to do. Advertisers take the most time and space in the news media, but I feel that we, who “own the government,” should have a bit more of the time and space in our information media.
The Federal Communications Commission is duty bound to protect my right to information about what is going on and what I need to do about it.
Irene B. HullSeattle, WA
Revisionist history?
George W. Bush, speaking in New Jersey to cheerlead for his tax cuts, called those who continue to raise questions about “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq “revisionist historians.” As an historian myself, I don’t see the current events in Iraq as “history,” or the Bush administration’s proclamations as historical interpretation, for which he continues to say documentation will eventually be found. That would be like accepting the Emperor Nero’s view that the Christians were behind the great fire of Rome and continuing to search the catacombs until evidence was either found or manufactured. Or perhaps, as Groucho Marx put it in the movie “Horsefeathers” when he was caught in a woman’s bedroom by her outraged husband, “Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?”
More importantly, challenging and revising official interpretations of anything is the basis of intellectual freedom. For Bush, history is His Story, regardless of the evidence, and “freedom” means believing him uncritically.
Norman MarkowitzNew Brunswick, NJ
Looking for farm contacts
I am connected with various small farm groups that have suffered serious setbacks from U.S. agribusiness.
I would be interested in finding contacts who can help to prevent this happening to Third World countries. And perhaps revitalizing our farms here. Please let me know who to write to. The U.S. Farm Bureau does not seem to be much help in this regard. Thanks.
Carol DaviesVia e-mail
Editor’s note: Try the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, www.iatp.org
Déjà vu
For years we have wondered how the Germans in the 1930s let a group of hoodlums take over their government – Hitler, Hess, Himmler, Goering to name a few.
Now we understand; it has happened here. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfield, Rice, Ashcroft, and assorted crypto-fascists have taken over the reigns of government. We have a president on an aircraft carrier strutting around in military garb. A president who was AWOL most of the time while assigned to the Air National Guard – an assignment to avoid military service and perhaps combat duty in Vietnam. President Dwight Eisenhower, a five-star general, never saw fit to wear his uniform as a civilian Commander-in-Chief.
What could the Germans have done, what can we do? Little, only hope in the future for a change of events as in Germany.
Jesse BaileyBirmingham, AL
Editor’s note: We hope the many struggles reported in our pages show some things we can do. For starters, let’s work to show Bush the door in 2004!
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