Letters

Tax the rich
The Washington district of the Communist Party has just finished putting together a tax reform brochure to help change the horrible tax structure we have here. It is the most regressive in the country.

It’s up now at www.cpusa.org/article/articleview/438/.

It calls for eliminating the sales tax on everything except luxury goods, instituting a progressive tax plan putting the burden on corporations, exempting income of under $50,000 a year from individual income tax and eliminating property taxes for home owners and renters on property under $1 million.

Todd TollefsonSeattle WA

No Cuba on map
On page 2 you have a map of the world, but there’s no Cuba!
Can’t you get one of your artists to ink in this very important country?

Eric GordonLos Angeles CA

Editor’s note: Such are the limitations of “Clip Art.” We’ll try to amend it.

Crisis in Israel and Palestine
I’d like to hear more about what is going on among young people in this crisis region. The articles on the young people who have refused to serve in the occupied areas of Palestine have been great but we need more to know how the young people, both Israeli and Palestinian, are not only coping but finding hope in what seems like a very hopeless situation. The PWW has to keep hope alive!

Simon HeflerBrooklyn NY

Support longshore workers
The following is an abridged letter sent to Congressmen Frank LoBiondo (R-N.J.) with copies sent to the PWW:

Captain Rick Nelson, sailing on an American Presidents Lines ship, was fired when he refused to haul down the American flag and run up a “foreign flag of convenience.” Now these crooks that trash-canned the American flag refuse to negotiate with the American longshoremen who are asking for a piece of the American pie.

Instead, these Enron-type crooks want to wave the flag in our face and claim it would be unpatriotic to not agree to work on their terms. I use the term “our” because an “Injury to one is an injury to all.”

I remember the refrain used during the Cold War: “If you look like a duck, walk like a duck, quack like a duck, then you must be a duck.”

Well, there are a lot of Enron ducks in Washington D.C.!

Remember when President Nixon was on the ropes and pleading that he was “not a crook,” he wanted to seek out a man of honesty. So, he threw his arms around Harry Bridges, president of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union.

America needs the full support of the working class. Make sure they get a piece of the American pie. Support the longshore workers in their negotiations.

Richard D. Neill
Cape May County Organizer,
Alliance for Retired Americans
Cape May NJ

Russian metalworkers
Your readers should know protest actions of workers of the “Zlatoust metallurgical enterprise” have begun. It was caused by bi-monthly debts on their wages. Workers of the rolling mill number 350 were the first who declared the strike, they were joined by metallurgists of rolling mill number 4 on July 15.

As agency “Uralinformbureau” informs, the managers of the enterprise can constrain the mass actions of metallurgists just by a threat of dismissal.

A readerChelyabinsk, Russia

You get what you pay for!
Fred Gaboury’s People Before Profits column (7/27) makes you think twice every time you take a pill! These companies make money hand over fist and then rob us on Capital Hill. I think the system needs to be changed so that all elections are publicly financed so none of the candidates get paid to carry out the plans of the big money people. Keep up the good work!

Gretchen FelderStillwater OK