Visit with Roger Warren
On July 2, I visited framed-up gold miner Roger Warren
in Stony Mountain Institution just outside of Winnipeg,
Manitoba. Stony Mountain is a federal maximum security
penitentiary with over 500 inmates. The majority of inmates
are Native.
I brought several issues of the Militant, The Second Declaration of Havana, some material on the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, and some material on the Cuba Lives International Youth Festival. The material was greatly appreciated. Roger is an avid reader. He enjoys reading the Militant and passes it along to other inmates in the prison.
Warren recently won payment for his lawyers from the government. "I feel pretty upbeat about the government funding being granted for the legal appeal," he explained.
We jumped from topic to topic. "The case of Mumia Abu- Jamal is an obvious frame-up. The courts suppressed evidence from people who saw another person at the scene of where the policeman was shot," said Warren.
On hearing that I was going to the Cuba Lives Festival in August, Roger gave his view that "the U.S. has never forgiven Cuba for kicking out the multinationals and the international banks and going their own way...."
"I just don't believe that Cuba has been ruled for over 35 years with an iron fist....I think Cubans have a better life than people living in so-called democracies like Mexico. If Fidel Castro hadn't done what he did in Cuba the people there would be as bad off as people in Mexico today," he explained.
Ned Dmytryshyn Vancouver, British Columbia
`Smart business'
Recently Labor Secretary Reich released the Labor
Department's annual review of what capitalists spend on
wages and benefits for the average worker.
According to the figures, calculated by the nonpartisan Bureau of Labor Statistics, average wages and salaries for all U.S. workers fell 2.3 percent, which is the largest decline since they began recording this data.
While wages and benefits continue downward, the stock market is at an all-time high!
And how does the Big Business news media cover all this? For the most part they either ignore it or bury it. In an L.A. Times article it was buried on page 26. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post relegated one story each to their respective business sections.
Since they are capitalists of course, that's just "smart business."
H. S. Cazadero, California
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