John Funiciello

From the moment that PFC Bradley Manning was taken into custody by military law enforcement officers, he has been subjected to what is widely described as torture: solidarity confinement with nearly total isolation from other human beings, possible sleep deprivation, and deprivation of most mental stimuli that would be considered necessary for a normal life.…

With the seating of a Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives this week, the slim prospects for passage of the Employee Free Choice Act became a virtual impossibility. EFCA was designed to provide a way for workers to organize unions without the likelihood of a full-blown assault on their efforts by their employers…

The livelihoods of America’s working men and women have been under assault for a long time—measured in decades, not just years—and the unions which have represented those workers have been fighting a rear guard action to salvage something of a decent life. As a bit of a retrospective of 2010 and a prognostication of what…

With the stroke of his pen, New York Governor David Patterson signed into law the Wage Theft Prevention Act (WTPA) this week, greatly increasing the penalties for withholding pay or other compensation from workers. This piece of legislation came with the usual opposition from some of the most powerful forces in the U.S. For example,…

In what has been described as the largest civil rights settlement in American history, the U.S. Senate unanimously approved a bill on Nov. 19 and the House approved the bill on Dec. 1 that will provide $1.15 billion in compensation to black farmers and landowners who had suffered discrimination for the past three decades. That…

It was couched in terms of rural economic development, but the prison-building frenzy of the 1970s and 1980s carried a hidden cost – social disruption of urban families and a gross distortion of rural economies. As the prison-industrial complex began to take on form at the planning tables of Corporate America and its political allies…

Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of General Electric, has been in the news recently because he suggested that “outsourcing” most of American manufacturing to other countries in the past several decades was done without much thought to the long-term consequences. We could have told him that. It was about 30 years ago that rank-and-file union members were…

If facing the broad array of problems – some of them monumental – that America and the world face were to be described in military terms, the people on Tuesday sent in not the crack troops needed to win, but sent in civilians who have not completed their basic training. The past two years of…

World Food Day has come and gone this month and not many noticed that nearly 1 billion are hungry around the world. The day is observed each year on October 16 and, this year, as usual, most Americans went about their business – including eating two or three complete meals – without too much thought…