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FREEDOMWAYS   FIRST QUARTER 1973

remains in the hands of the big corporations. And with the plunderous taxes, chronic inflation and permanent unemployment for millions a large section of the people of our country are being returned to the bread lines. Of course eighty million people are employed in civilian jobs, but who today feels secure in his job and what of the millions of families that are barely making ends meet even with two breadwinners working every day? The re-election of Richard Nixon last November was a backward, retrogressive step for the 70% of the population who live by wages and salaries and it is going to take a mass movement to reverse the present ruinous policies of this Administration. 

That's why the recent action taken by the leaders of Operation PUSH, SCLC and the National Welfare Rights Organization in coming together for united action is a most welcome development. These three organizations enjoy the kind of national respect needed to serve as a nucleus for developing a broad coalition of organizations to get into the fight for Jobs and Tax Reform, and for the restoration of the People's needs to their proper place, as the Number one priority on the political agenda. Such a mass mobilization, or Spring Offensive as they call it, is urgently necessary to shake the Congress out of its present state of paralysis and insist that it exercise its constitutional powers in the face of this Presidential dictatorship. Any congressman who votes for the Nixon budget, with its cutbacks in needed social services and inflationary character, should himself be made unemployed by the voters at the next possible opportunity.

We should have no illusions that bringing to a halt the backward motion of this society is going to be an easy thing to accomplish. The crisis in this society is deep and many dimensional, and transforming it in the direction of continued progress is going to take sustained mass mobilization on a scale not seen in this country since the 1930's. Yet it must be also underscored that the social forces for change are present in this situation. They include the millions of the unemployed, the students, the Peace Movement, the returning Vietnam veterans, the millions of underemployed workers who can only find part-time jobs and can't make ends meet, and the millions of workers in industrial trade unions whose jobs are disappearing as the corporations relocate to other parts of the U.S. Empire.

The time to act is NOW if the decade of the 70's is to be one of hope and fulfillment rather than one of continued despair and deprivation. 

The Editors

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Transcription Notes:
---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-21 02:40:58