Unionist Killed in Guatemala, Unemployment Claims Up and More

by Tula Connell, Oct 18, 2007

A few items to gnaw on this morning as we wait to see if a handful of Republicans in the U.S. House will do the right thing and vote to override President Bush’s veto of a bill that would ensure millions of America’s kids have health insurance.

The press, at least in Britain, has picked upon on the murder of the Guatemalan trade unionist we noted last month. From Reuters:

Masked gunmen dumped a Guatemalan banana picker’s bullet-ridden corpse yards from fields of fruit bound for the United States, a grim reminder of the risks of organizing labor in the Central American country.  

Marco Tulio Ramirez, killed last month, was the fifth Guatemalan labor leader murdered this year. Activists say the deaths show promises to protect labor rights under a U.S. trade pact have changed little at a time President George W. Bush is pressing for similar deals in other Latin American nations with bad labor records. 

As David Sirota comments on his blog about the event:             

This is what a trade policy with unenforceable labor protections looks like.  

The number of U.S. workers filing for unemployment benefits “shot up by the largest amount since early February,” reports The New York Times.

The Labor Department reported Thursday that applications for jobless benefits hit 337,000 last week, an increase of 28,000 from the previous week. That was the biggest one-week surge since jobless claims jumped 42,000 the week of Feb. 10. 

The news follows a worsening of the U.S. unemployment rate to 4.7 percent in August and comes the same day we heard more bad news about the tanking housing market (Reuters again):

Housing starts tumbled 10.2 percent to a 1.191 million unit annual rate, the slowest since March 1993, the Commerce Department said on Wednesday. Economists had expected starts to slip, but the sharpness of the downturn took them by surprise. 

The government’s response to homeowners: Too bad. Its response to big banking and investment firms that helped create the mess? We’ll help bail you out.

Zogby released a poll yesterday showing Bush at his lowest approval rating ever—an item that got almost no attention in the U.S. press. Again, we have to turn to Britain to get our news:

Bush’s job approval rating fell to 24 percent from last month’s record low for a Zogby poll of 29 percent.

This is what a failed presidency looks like.

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