Libya and Egypt, Without Dictators, Face the Future

by Anne Jaclard

Sunday, Aug. 28 – Libyan rebel forces have taken control of nearly all of the country. They seized the oil town of Ras Lanuf and are waiting for reinforcements to move further west, step by step. From both east and west, the rebel army approaches Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s home town of Sirte, where he or his family may be hiding; his representative offers to negotiate peace. It is too late for that, says the new self-declared national authority, the Transitional National Council (TNC).

Its priority today is to find 50,000 rebels who are unaccounted for and may have been taken captive by Qaddafi’s forces over the past months of warfare. Some prisoners have just been liberated, including 107 from the infamous political prison Abu Salim in Tripoli, where one inmate was held for 16 years. But fears are that tens of thousands more may still be locked in Qaddafi’s secret prisons, where they face imminent death from their loyalist keepers or, if their keepers fled when the rebels entered Tripoli a week ago, from starvation.

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Verizon Strikers Battle Phone Company and Union

New York City – After two weeks on the picket lines, the Communication Workers of America (CWA) ordered their striking members back to work at Verizon on Aug. 20—without a contract. Three members of CWA Local 1101, which covers Manhattan and the Bronx, talked about the strike at a supporters’ meeting held the same day that the union agreed for them to return to work while bargaining continued.

Discussion at the well-attended supporters’ meeting, which included workers from other New York and New Jersey unions, ranged over many issues: whether public sentiment is for or against so-called middle-class workers (those with relatively decent wages and benefits), the long-lost concept of “no contract, no work,” and whether, as a result of the massive demonstrations in Wisconsin at the beginning of this year, there is now a new dimension to “class warfare” in which private and public sector unions are linked. Private and public workers’ mutual support appears key to reversing the push to break unions and lower workers’ standard of living.

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Double-A-Plus Debt and the Double-Dip Recession Threat

by Andrew Kliman

On August 5, Standard & Poor’s (S&P), one of the three main credit-rating agencies in the U.S., downgraded Treasury debt from AAA to AA+, and it noted that a further downgrade could occur within the next two years. The unprecedented downgrade of the world’s only military and economic superpower certainly made for dramatic news. Yet it is not clear that its significance is more than symbolic.

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