Vol. 77/No. 1 January 14, 2013
January 15, 1988
A U.S. fleet of about 30 warships, backed up by warplanes and 20,000 U.S. troops and other military personnel, is steadily expanding its operations against Iran in the Persian Gulf region. The U.S. forces are backed by warships and personnel from Belgium, Britain, France, Italy, and the Netherlands.The buildup, the biggest U.S. naval armada put into action since the Korean War in the early 1950s, has already resulted in dozens of deaths and seen clashes involving U.S. and Iranian forces.
Although supposedly sent to the Persian Gulf to protect convoys of U.S.-flagged Kuwaiti oil tankers, the actual goal has been to help the Iraqi regime fend off defeat in the war it began in 1980 by invading Iran. The Kuwaiti emirate has strongly supported Iraq in the war—providing Iraq with its only ports for receiving arms shipments and other matériel.
January 14, 1963
Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and the federal government have failed to uphold the court order desegregating the University of Mississippi. They have allowed racist harassment to continue against Negro student James Meredith. They have allowed attacks by racist night-riders to take place—and go unpunished—against Meredith’s family. They have allowed racist persecution and intimidation of those white students and faculty members of the university who were friendly to Meredith or who extended ordinary courtesies to him.This brought about the situation in which Meredith announced on Jan. 7 that he would skip the next semester at the University of Mississippi unless “positive changes are made to make my situation more conducive to learning.”
It is the power—indeed, it is the duty—of the Attorney General and the federal government to make these changes.
January 13, 1938
The Socialist Workers Party could not have been founded at a more crucial moment. The American working class is face to face with a heavy employers’ onslaught upon its standard of living, already badly undermined by years of crisis and depression. The only solution that the wisest of the capitalist statesmen, Roosevelt, has been able to offer to the problem of hunger is to cut down the production of food. Now, with a new depression leading towards a sharper crisis, the capitalists, whose rule Roosevelt has been bent on preserving, are proceeding to throw new hundreds of thousands out of work and to cut wages of those they continue to employ.The most powerful capitalist nation of the earth has proved incapable of feeding, clothing and housing the masses of the population. The existing social system is bankrupt and awaits only the revolutionary action of the working class.
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