The Militant (logo)  
   Vol. 68/No. 15           April 20, 2004  
 
 
25 and 50 years ago
 
April 20, 1979
After 10 days of a strike by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters against seventy-three trucking firms, and an employer lockout of truck drivers at hundreds of other companies, agreement was announced April 10 on a three-year Master Freight Agreement covering 300,000 drivers and warehouse workers.

The April 11 Wall Street Journal touted the agreement as providing a 30 percent pay increase over three years, a significant stretching of Carter’s 7 percent ceiling on wage increases.

But the Journal’s own figures tell a different story.

Initial reports gave no inkling of how other union demands—which weighted heavier for many Teamsters than the dispute over basic wage rates—fared in the settlement. These included:

 
April 19, 1954
By the time you read this, American troops may be killing and dying once more in Asia. Wall Street’s government is whipping up sentiment for direct U.S. military intervention against the Indo-Chinese people, who have fought heroically for eight years for independence from French imperialism.

“The showdown may come within a week,” warned the Scripps-Howard Washington staff on April 10. It reports the Eisenhower regime is committed to “saving” Indo-China “at all costs.” Similarly the March 31 Wall Street Journal states ominously that “Indo-China will not be allowed to fall into Communists hands—whatever the cost.” It adds: “If the cost is no longer a factor, there is no stopping place.”

No stopping place! That can mean only one thing—another Korea. It means more hundreds of thousands of casualties, broken homes, grief for American families. It means millions of Indo-Chinese men, women, and children burned to death with napalm bombs and blasted to bits by U.S. “strategic bombing” and another country wrecked from end to end as Korea was.

This country has actually been warring against Indo-Chinese independence from the start—since the end of World War II in 1945.  
 
 
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