John Funiciello

One example of the way people are being sickened is to study the statistics of ground water and the pollution of that water and the water that is taken from lakes and rivers. There is little to drink that has not been tainted by various chemicals, most of which are there without the peoples' knowledge.

If rehabilitation truly is the goal, a good first step would be to treat prisoner-workers as any other worker. When private prison corporations can shave the cost of $69,000 per inmate in their prisons, it's easy to see why they would be reluctant to give up those profits. Paying inmates a minimum wage is the last thing on their minds.

in his State of the Union speech, he made no mention of the state of large segments of our population, namely the marginalized: black citizens and native Americans, schools in the poorer (minority) communities, substandard housing in cities across the country, rural poverty that could be compared to Third World countries, mass incarceration, environmental destruction, and a list of other ills that should be addressed by the president and Congress. No mention.

Oil was the main economic driver for Chavez' Bolivarian Revolution. Some of the difficulty with the oil economy has something to do with Saudi Arabia's overproduction of oil that has driven down the prices of oil from around $100 a barrel, to less than $30 a barrel. Saudi Arabia is an “ally” of the U.S. and has been largely protected from international criticism by Trump.

We have seen the devastation of the American government in the past two years. Now is the time for American workers to stand up for themselves and demand a decent living standard. The way to do that is for each to learn union history and join the union. It's called solidarity. When 100 million workers can speak with one voice, the powerful will begin to listen.

The right-wing's dream is rapidly turning into a national nightmare. No services for the people is truly what Trump sees as his role and he even hinted that that's what furloughed federal workers should do: tighten their belts and those of their children and wait out this difficult time. He has yet to see a difficult time, since he was born into wealth and never has had to tighten his belt.

My definition of working class is: Regardless of your income, if you are unable to live for three months without any money coming into the house, you are in the working class. That example cuts across most workers in cities across the nation, but somehow, the significance of that does not penetrate the thinking of Americans. Until it does and until workers act on it in solidarity, all of the small wins will be just that, small wins.

In the U.S., it has not been so much outright censorship of news, but the powers that be have been involved in a broad range of policies that tamp down dissent. It has happened in the suppression of the union movement, Black Lives Matter, and any other entity that makes the rulers uncomfortable.

With every cut in government programs that provide for the most vulnerable among us, Trump and his Republicans will continue to move the wealth of the nation upward, toward the top 10 percent. Already, the disparity in wealth between the top 10 percent and the bottom 90 percent is alarming even those at the top of the income scale.