In Memoriam Erica Rae (Erica Sufritz) 1958-2024

February 8, 2024

As youth, woman, and educator, Erica Rae (Erica Sufritz) made many contributions to News and Letters Committees since she was a teenager. We will miss the comrade who loved music passionately and sang with the North Shore Choral Society and who cheerfully worked alongside us for revolution for her whole life.

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Readers’ Views: May-June 2023

June 15, 2023

Readers’ Views on: Violence and Racism Still Put U.S. in the Dock; American Civilization on Trial; Critical Race Theory; Critical Thinking and Education; 2SLGBTQIA+ Good and Bad News; Is Covid Over?; Remembering the Vietnam War; Syria Genocide Whitewashed; Fanaticism of Reactionaries

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An atrocity: Assad welcomed back

June 7, 2023

It is an atrocity that Bashar al-Assad was welcomed back to the Arab League Summit on May 19. This is one more attempt to bury the Syrian Revolution, which has heard its obituary pronounced again and again since the first mass demonstrations of Arab Spring, March 15, 2011.

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Cyclone spotlights disasters in Burma, China

June 5, 2023

After Cyclone Mocha devastated Rakhine State in Myanmar (Burma) on May 14, the National Unity Group representing civilian opposition and armed resistance reported 200 Rohingya Muslims had been killed as the storm hit with 130-mile-per-hour winds.

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School workers strike across Canada

School support workers in Halifax with Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 5047 have been out on strike for three weeks as of May 26. They are demanding more than the retrogressive 6.5% raise over three years they have been offered.

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Teachers Union on ballot in mayoral race

March 19, 2023

The race for mayor of Chicago is now between Brandon Johnson, a teacher endorsed by the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), and Paul Vallas, a former boss of the Chicago Public Schools who trashes the CTU at every opportunity. The runoff election on April 4 will be in part a referendum on rank-and-file unionism.

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Drive for profit derails lives in Ohio

The Norfolk Southern train that derailed on Feb. 3, 2023, in East Palestine, Ohio, threatening the health and lives of thousands of residents, can’t be called an accident. Not when railroad workers were cut out of negotiating over safety, and not when decisions by the railroad made this and other ecological disasters predictable rather than surprising.

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Editorial: Earthquake deaths are not a natural disaster

March 17, 2023

Twin earthquakes on Feb. 6 decimated a vast area of Turkey and Syria. They produced a catastrophe with human tragedies over hundreds of square miles. But it was the man-made disaster on top of the natural one that killed more than half of the over 50,000 victims accounted for so far.

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Propping up fascists

To avoid Russia’s outright defeat in its brutal war against Ukrainians, the alliance of nations–Russia, Iran, and China, now with North Korea–that for 12 years has united to suppress the Syrian Revolution for freedom and dignity seems to be firming up again.

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Readers’ Views: Azadkar (Tooraj Haji Moradi), 1952-2022

From the January-February 2023 issue of News & Letters

It hurts to hear that Azadkar has passed. He was slightly built, but a giant in making the Iranian Revolution indigenous to Marxist-Humanism, and Marxist-Humanism indigenous to the Iranian Revolution. He and I participated in an international summit of farmers in Ottawa, the capital of Canada, [=>]

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School workers defy anti-union law to win

January 24, 2023

School support workers in Ontario, members of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, ratified a four-year contract on Dec. 6, after weeks of defying both school administrators and provincial politicians.

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Congress breaks railroad workers’ strike

December 3, 2022

Congress has done its best to become the nation’s strikebreaker by forcing a five-year contract on railroad workers who had been set to go on strike on Dec. 12.  Union members in four of the 12 unions had voted to reject a tentative agreement that negotiators had reached with six major rail carriers in September.

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National Costco pact

November 12, 2022

Unionized Costco workers achieved their first national master contract. This needs to form the basis for reaching out and organizing the majority of Costco warehouses that remain non-union.

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Xi Jinping’s precarious hold on China

November 11, 2022

The coup that Xi Jinping had long planned to cement his control of the Communist Party of China went according to script: Xi was re-elected to a third five-year term as leader at the Party Congress that ended on Oct. 23.

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Fired for going grey

September 25, 2022

Privately owned Canadian TV network CTV and its corporate parent Bell Media abruptly fired long-time news anchor Lisa LaFlamme. The reason? She let her hair go grey.

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Will China make war on Taiwan?

September 13, 2022

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan provoked controversy. Times may have changed since Nixon met Mao but then as now, look to internal reasons in both nations for their foreign policy stances.

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Iowa workers strike

September 11, 2022

Workers on strike at the Ingredion plant in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, rallied on Sept. 1, marking one month since the strike began. Ingredion demanded the right to charge as much as $500 more for health insurance, freeze the two tiers of workers in place, and eliminate jobs.

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UN documents Uyghur forced labor, torture

September 10, 2022

The pretext for China’s genocidal campaign against Uyghurs was “Countering Religious Extremism.” Under China’s “anti-terrorism law system” a new UN report states, “acts of legitimate protest, dissent and other human rights activities or of genuine religious activity fall within terrorism.”

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Apple workers unionize

July 19, 2022

Workers at the Apple Store in Towson, Md., outside Baltimore voted in June to unionize. Organizers of the successful union drive have reached out to employees at other Apple locations.

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Editorial: Trump’s continuing coup

July 8, 2022

Trump set in motion a formula for ending meaningful elections that, if not stopped, raises the threat of 2024 as an empty ceremony for Trump or DeSantis or [Insert Name Here] before a coronation.

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Where’s the solidarity with Syria?

May 19, 2022

Free Syria areas have repeatedly demonstrated solidarity with Ukrainians fighting their common enemy, but have had to carry on their fight, for freedom and to avert extermination, without the international support their struggle has deserved.

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Alabama coal miners keep strike alive

May 14, 2022

By May Day 2022 coal miners at Warrior Met in Brookwood, Ala., had been on strike for a year and a month since they walked out April 1, 2021, to demand restoration of their wages, benefits and work rules. Strikers rejected a tentative contract as an insult. The company offered to restore just $1 more in wages.

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World in View: Iron fist at Olympics

March 16, 2022

It is no accident that Olympic gold medal winner Nils van der Poel felt compelled to wait until he was out of the grasp of China before he gave away his Olympic gold medal to the daughter of a political prisoner jailed in China: Gui Minhai.

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Canadian convoy fuels fascism, not freedom

February 11, 2022

Despite 90% of Canadian truckers being vaccinated, organizers counted on a couple hundred semis to mask the fascist movements and money propelling this “freedom convoy.” The mask came off quickly, as participants paraded Nazi and Confederate flags, and even TRUMP 2024 banners, while others desecrated national memorials.

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Readers’ Views: January-February 2022, Part Two

February 5, 2022

Readers’ Views on: Racist Censorship; Learning from 1619; Backlash to Women, Blacks; Racism and the Far Right; Censorship in Prison; The 13th Amendment and Slave Labor; Incarcerated Immigrants Face Racism; Trans Women Abused in Prison; Prison Activist Resource Center (Parc)

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Jonathan Spence (1936-2021)

February 3, 2022

Remembering Jonathan Spence, a noted China scholar at Yale and the author of more than a dozen books on Chinese history spanning centuries and social classes.

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Volvo workers defy UAW to resume strike

July 5, 2021

UAW workers on June 7 resumed their strike at the Volvo Truck Plant in Dublin, Va., the day after rejecting for the second time the tentative agreement that Local 2069 Bargaining Committee presented to them. The vote to reject, like the vote on May 16 to strike, was by more than 90%.

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Forcing workers back to unlivable wages

July 4, 2021

Missouri is one of 25 states on track to reject by July 2021 the $300 a week federal supplemental unemployment insurance. The payments issued to shore up the economy in response to the pandemic, and in fear of unrest that unemployment levels unseen since the Great Depression of the 1930s might create, were not scheduled to end until September.

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Free Hong Kong rally

Activists from Hong Kong along with emigres from Tibet and the China mainland joined supporters of freedom for Myanmar and Thailand in Chicago, Ill., on June 12 to mark two years since millions filled the streets to protest a threatened extradition law.

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The people of Myanmar unite against the military coup

May 8, 2021

Defying Burma’s coup has provided time for the forces of old revolutionaries, youth, workers and women to work out what they are fighting for, beyond deposing the military caste that has ruled them, and an opportunity to bridge long-time divisions between the Burmese-speaking majority and the peoples long fighting for self-determination.

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Karen Lewis, 1953-2021

The City of Chicago lost a powerful voice for teachers, and for workers in general, with the death of Karen Lewis, former President of the Chicago Teachers Union.

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Hong Kong arrests

Massive marches in Hong Kong that continued until COVID-19 crowd restrictions and the National Security Law , combined with more violent arrests, drove protests underground.

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The USPS is a continuing crime scene

Postal workers find themselves on the frontlines of three fronts: saving their jobs under attack from the United States Postal Service under Postmaster Louis DeJoy; saving the USPS from the sabotage of DeJoy and Trump, and saving the integrity of U.S. elections.

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Hong Kong: Year two of revolt

July 1, 2020

Tens of thousands of people in Hong Kong defied a ban on demonstrations to commemorate the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre. Thousands came out to oppose the Beijing government’s intention to impose a National Security Law directly on Hong Kong.

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