“Whatever you do, just don’t get stuck in a dead-end job.” These words had a powerful effect on me and have occupied my consciousness over the past seven years. It was the summer after my high school graduation and this advice was given to me while I was working in the mechanized bakery of a large grocery store chain. My coworker had been there for over 20 years and now, in the midst of back problems and middle-age, she was unhappy with her life and urged me not to make the same mistake.

Breaking ranks with every former president, Republican and Democratic alike, President George W. Bush is engaged in a high-profile campaign to undo Social Security. He hopes to accomplish what has eluded his ideological brethren who fought for similar ends over the last 70 years. Like Representative Carl Curtis in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Bush seeks to curtail the benefits of all but the lowest-paid workers, so that all beneficiaries would receive meager, basically flat benefits, largely unrelated to earnings.

"This is love: to fly toward a secret sky, to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment. First to let go of life. Finally, to take a step without feet." – Iranian Born Poet, Rumi

Nine centuries after Rumi penned these words, young Iranians post blogs to express themselves in a nation where drinking liquor and wearing lipstick warrants public flogging. The modern day "secret sky" is the world wide web, the veils have not fallen and though Rumi was speaking of love, it is, in today’s Iran, interchangeable with freedom.

Coretta Scott King sadly passed away on January 31. As a public figure, both before and after the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s murder in April 1968, she took part in and led countless battles for human rights, peace, and racial, gender and sexual equality.

Most people in the United States would like to have seen the 140,000-plus U.S. troops who are still occupying Iraqi soil (in support of special U.S. corporate interests) to be finally withdrawn from Iraq by Christmas 2005. Yet neither Bush Administration officials nor Democratic Party establishment politicians appeared willing to bring U.S. troops in Iraq back to the U.S. any time soon. They still apparently do not want to admit that the demand by U.S. anti-war movement demonstrators that no U.S. troops be sent to Iraq was a wiser foreign policy option to implement than their bipartisan foreign policy of "authorizing the use of United States Armed Force against Iraq."

Political Prisoners*

These words, spoken by political prisoner Marcelino Miranda, reflect the unshakeable hope and courage that three years in jail have not been able to tarnish. Last Monday marked the three-year anniversary of the violent police attack on the remote Lenca descendent community of Montaña Verde, in southwestern Honduras, which led to the unjust imprisonment of Marcelino and his brother Leonardo.