Winter Soldier on the Hill: Veterans testify before Congress while House debates funding for Iraq occupation

On May 1st, International Workers’ Day, ten peace activists in Burlington, Vermont entered General Dynamics and locked themselves together in the main lobby of the building in protest against the company’s weapons manufacturing and war profiteering.

Brattleboro, Vermont— Today Vermont became the seventh “sweatfree” state in the United States when Governor Jim Douglas signed a sweatshop-free purchasing policy into law.

The Governor's signing ceremony was held at Brattleboro Union High School. Members of the student organization Child Labor Education and Action (CLEA) had initiated and led the campaign to pass the law.

As the war in Iraq shifts into its sixth year, the executive board of the Vermont AFL-CIO, which represents thousands of workers in Vermont, has unanimously passed a historic resolution expressing their “unequivocal” support for the first US labor strike against the war in Iraq. Vermont union members will be in solidarity with of the International Longshore & Warehouse Union (ILWU), which will seek to shutdown all west coast ports for a period of 24 hours on May 1st 2008. This will be the first US labor strike against the war in Iraq.

In a major step for the U.S. labor movement, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) has announced that it will shut down West Coast ports on May 1, to demand an immediate end to the war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Middle East. In a February 22 letter to AFL-CIO president John Sweeney, ILWU International president Robert McEllrath reported that at a recent coast-wide union meeting, “One of the resolutions adopted by caucus delegates called on longshore workers to stop work during the day shift on May 1, 2008 to express their opposition to the war in Iraq.”

Catamount Tavern News Service, Chicago, IL

While in my mid-twenties, “I had an abortion,” joining the statistical thirty-six percent of women in the United States who have terminated pregnancies. Unlike many who share in this statistic, I was fortunate to be surrounded by a supportive group of friends but, initially, it felt as if I didn’t or couldn’t share my experience with anyone else - even the thirty-six percent.

At the time, I stood at a loss: alone and uncertain of an experience that seemed to be lacking in meaning. Without sure footing, I could not have foreseen how a few common seeds, securely planted in the soil beneath my feet, would connect me to the cycle of life as well as the countless women before me who had cultivated herbs in the rows of their gardens or gathered errant growing plants of forest and field to terminate unfortunate pregnancies.

On Wednesday, March 19, 2008, on the eve of the sixth year of the “war on terror” and war in Iraq, hundreds and thousands of people in the US organized to take the streets in protest. However, on the same day most news media headlined the message by US president George Bush of a “strategic victory” in Iraq. Even in the midst of a media messaging campaign by the Bush administration and dominant news media, there were thousands who were thinking critically for themselves and who were about to take action even if their president spoke otherwise.

Protest the 5th anniversary of the Iraq War
7:30 am Wed. March 19
Pine St and Lakeside Ave
Burlington, VT