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   Vol. 70/No. 2           January 16, 2006  
 
 
25, 50 and 75 years ago
 
January 16, 1981
The Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialist Alliance have initiated a nationwide campaign to win back the jobs of nine of their members fired last month by Lockheed aircraft in Marietta, Georgia. Lockheed insists that the nine were terminated because of “falsifications” on their job applications.

But sworn testimony of Lockheed security cop Robert Lang, and internal company documents obtained by the SWP and YSA, show conclusively that the socialists were singled out for their political ideas and activities.

This evidence also shows that the FBI aided Lockheed in fingering the workers to be fired. Misstatements in their job applications were simply the pretext.

Lang’s testimony revealed that Lockheed maintains a network of informers inside the plant whose activities include spying on union meetings. Lang followed workers he suspected of being socialists to their homes, to restaurants, stores, and laundries, and to political events. He reported at length on their participation in an anti-Klan demonstration.  
 
January 16, 1956
The attempt to rob James Kutcher of the disability pension that was his due when he lost both legs in the Second World War has been defeated. The Veterans Administration, after its “I-make-the-rules” hearing, decided that it didn’t have enough grounds for picking the pocket of the Socialist veteran.

The fight for justice that Kutcher has waged for nearly eight years scored a victory. But Kutcher’s civil liberties will not be restored until he gets his job back.

In addition to Kutcher’s means of subsistence—an absolute minimum that had to be won—what gains have been made in this fight against the witch hunt? In 1955 the government, for the first time, began to invade the impartial and non-political administration of social security legislation.

The attempt of the VA to take Kutcher’s pension away was part of a political decision by the witch hunters to tighten the economic squeeze on political dissidents even to the extent of depriving them of what was legally and specifically theirs.  
 
January 1, 1931
After two months of heroic struggle, the strike of the 4,000 textile workers of Danville and Schoolfield, Va., is continuing militantly in spite of the “pacific” policy of the United Textile Workers.

At the present the strike of the Virginia workers is the only major industrial conflict taking place in the United States and what it will lead to is of paramount importance to all workers, especially insofar as the future of the National Textile Workers Union is concerned.

A little over a year ago, the N.T.W.U. led the historic strike in Gastonia which we were told was the beginning of a series of mighty struggles south of the Mason-Dixie line. At that time, the U.T.W. had a base only at Elizabethton, Tenn. and Marion, N.C. Today, it has support in many textile centers of the South while the N.T.W.U. is all but liquidated everywhere, including Gastonia. The Danville workers are feeling the heavy club of the capitalist class just as their comrades did in Gastonia in 1929.  
 
 
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