Young people demand public jobs program, march on City Hall

By Vidya Sankar
Raleigh, N.C.

A spirited group of several dozen demonstrators, overwhelmingly youths and students, marched through downtown Raleigh, N.C., on Jan. 15, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. The march began at the Walnut Terrace Community Center, progressed to City Hall and then to the Office of Economic Recovery and Investment, the state office which oversees allocation of stimulus money.

Marching for jobs, Jan. 15. FIST photo: Ben Carroll

Demonstrators chanted, “A job is a right, we gotta fight, fight, fight” and, “Give us a job, stop locking us up,” reiterating the key point that all people have a right to a job.

The march, organized by the Peoples’ Empowerment Movement and Raleigh Fight Imperialism, Stand Together, demanded a city-run, federally funded jobs program that puts Raleigh’s unemployed back to work and provides for a living wage, full benefits and pensions, in line with Dr. King’s lifelong demand for full employment.

Alicia Sidney, Peoples’ Empowerment Movement organizer: “Every human being has the right to work, to provide for their family. When that right is taken away, actions must be taken. If we don’t demand fair treatment, we will be overlooked and end up worse off.”

Due to its pressure, the group was met at City Hall by Charles Meeker, Raleigh’s mayor since 2001. A formal letter had been sent in advance to both Meeker and members of the Raleigh City Council listing the specific jobs that the contingent wanted to see included in a public program. These include but are not limited to: accessible child care and after-school programs; food co-operatives in South and East Raleigh, predominantly Black areas where there are no grocery stores; public health care and mental health facilities; increased staffing at community facilities; and “green” jobs such as improved public transportation and community gardens.

Sky’s the limit on monopoly drug prices

By David Hoskins

NYC FIST

The U.S. Government Accountability Office released a December report highlighting the extraordinary price increases for many brand-name prescription drugs. According to the GAO, prices for many widely used drugs more than doubled between the years 2000 and 2008.

The report identified the growth of drug company monopolies and the drug repackaging process — buying drugs wholesale and repacking them in smaller packages — as the main culprits of the hyperinflation of pharmaceutical prices.

The GAO report identified more than 400 examples of extreme price hikes for brand-name drugs. Most price increases ranged from 100 percent to 499 percent, but increases in excess of 1,000 percent were common. Nine of the drugs evaluated actually experienced a price increase of more than 2,000 percent — that’s 21 times the original price. All these increases occurred from one day to the next.

Women’s struggle for choice continues

By Julie Fry

NYC FIST

Jan. 22 is the 37th anniversary of the landmark Roe v. Wade U.S. Supreme Court decision that guaranteed the constitutional right of women to have abortions. The decision came after decades of struggle by women in the U.S. for access to birth control and safe abortions. Roe was decided during the height of the modern women’s movement when millions of women were demanding liberation from all forms of patriarchy and sexism, including the crucial right to decide if and when to bear children.

Roe v. Wade was an incredible victory for women. No longer would women in the U.S. have to suffer through medically unsafe abortions, from which thousands of women died or were seriously injured every year. Women at last had won the right to control their own bodies, opening up an enormous array of freedoms for women who could at last control their destiny in a significant way.

This freedom for women was a tremendous blow to the sexist structure of this country, and the ruling class recognized this fact immediately. From the day Roe v. Wade was decided, it has been under attack. One of the two major bourgeois political parties, the Republican Party, made defeating Roe v. Wade one of the pillars of its political platform. Misogynists everywhere have targeted abortion clinics across the country, subjecting women and their doctors to the most heinous violence and threats. These murderers, aided and protected by the state, have closed clinics all over the country. Today, 88 percent of counties in the United States have no identifiable abortion provider. In non-urban areas, the figure increases to 97 percent.

Building a fightback movement against racism, cutbacks, intervention & war

David Hoskins, National leader of FIST and an editor of Left Hook newspaper, Jan 16