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   Vol. 69/No. 42           October 31, 2005  
 
 
25, 50 and 75 years ago
 
October 31, 1980
WASHINGTON, D.C.—The trial here of former FBI officials W. Mark Felt and Edward S. Miller is supposed to show that the government has cleaned up its act. The “new FBI” and the Justice Department don’t spy, wiretap, burglarize, and harass people the way they used to. To prove it, they’re prosecuting people for doing just that.

Felt and Miller are on trial for violating the civil rights of relatives, lawyers, and friends of people in the Weather Underground by authorizing break-ins of their homes in 1972-1973. The Justice Department, in prosecuting the two, has cast itself in the role of defender of the Bill of Rights and opponent of illegal FBI spying.

Numerous FBI documents refer to the break-ins, or bag jobs, as “illegal” and “clearly unlawful.” But the defense claims that this just meant that any evidence obtained on a break-in could not be used in court—otherwise they were completely legal!  
 
October 31, 1955
Exultant over the freeing of Emmett Till’s lynchers, white supremacists throughout the South are engaging in ever bolder assaults on Negroes and unions. In Florida, union-hating racists donned their Ku Klux Klan-type hoods and broke up a CIO Packinghouse Workers union meeting with shotgun fire.

The attack on the Packinghouse Workers meeting took place on the night of Oct. 19 in the central Florida town of Umatilla. As the meeting was beginning, a car with covered license plates circled the hall four times. Then it stopped and four white men got out and put on hoods. They fired their shotguns four times through the windows of the Negro Masonic Hall, where the union meeting was being held. According to the UPWA, twelve unionists were wounded, five severely; three were hospitalized.

The meeting was part of a drive to organize the thousands of underpaid Negro citrus fruit workers.  
 
November 1, 1930
The socialist fatherland is thirteen years old this week. It is worth reminding those who have come to take it for granted, that the first stormy days of the Russian revolution were the days of those false prophets in the camp of the capitalists and their “socialist” assistants who predicted that the “Russian chaos” would dissolve in a few weeks into a peaceful capitalist democracy.

The capitalist class, so firmly convinced that their services as masters are indispensable to society, could not imagine the working class not only taking the state power into its own hands, but running it successfully for more than a decade and organizing a classless society. The social democrats, steeped in their parliamentary-democratic prejudices, and reflecting the hopes of the master class they really serve, refused and still refuse to give sanction to a proletariat that came to power by any means other than that of the MacDonalds, the Hillquists, the Vanderveldes, the Noskes and Muellers.  
 
 
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