“It’s time to hit the streets again,” says Bill Worthington, a disabled miner and president of the Black Lung Association.

The rally proposal was unanimously adopted by a July 19 planning meeting attended by more than eighty working miners, black lung victims, and other activists. They came from Kentucky, Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Illinois as well as West Virginia.

The right of retired miners—their lungs scarred or destroyed by coal dust—to receive compensation has come under new attack in recent months.

The coal companies, which are responsible for paying the compensation, routinely contest whether a miner has black lung. Their stalling means it can take years to qualify.  
 
August 1, 1955
The U.S. government is no neutral in the struggle between the Algerian nationalist movement and French imperialism. U.S. aid is going to the French.

The July-August issue of Toward Freedom, a newsletter on colonial affairs, published in Chicago gives the following information: The Air Force press desk in Washington on Feb. 21 confirmed that an American plane and pilot dropped French paratroopers over Algeria on Feb. 4 in an operation against revolutionary forces.

On June 23, the French government announced that Washington granted priorities for helicopters to be used by the French army in Algeria. The “whirlybirds” are of crucial importance in guerilla warfare.

“On precisely the same day,” says Toward Freedom, “the House of Representatives without opposition called for a foreign policy ‘to support other peoples to achieve self-government or independence.”

That resolution was aimed solely against the Kremlin and conveniently overlooked Eisenhower’s aid to French imperialism.  
 
August 15, 1930
Hardly had the stock market collapse and the mass unemployment that followed right on its heels had time to sink into the minds of the working class than that ever faithful footman of the American capitalist class William Green rushed to the Hoover employers’ conference to pledge that he would do all in his power to prevent any strikes in the coming period.

America’s industrialists winkingly assured Green, without smiling, that on their part they would not undertake to cut labor’s wages.

The costs of the crisis must be shifted to the shoulders of those who profited by the prosperity, the capitalists, and who now want the workers to suffer from the decline. The demand must be raised everywhere for recognition of the Soviet Union and long-term credits to it so that it can commence the purchase of machinery here on a large scale. The demand for social insurance to be paid by the state and the boss, must be developed until the force behind it cannot be resisted.  
 
 
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