For two years straight, my husband and I took care of my elderly parents, thinking we’d be doing that for years. My mother was always sickly, since I was in kindergarten. So, my father spent my entire life taking care of my mother. She had many illnesses, including osteomyelitis, an infection that could have been controlled with antibiotics, but, at the time, when she was a child, it hadn’t been invented it.

So, the infection spread throughout her body and ate away at her hip bones. The total hip replacement wasn’t invented until I was in college. So my mother waddled through life, partially with a cane, partially in a wheelchair. The first hip replacement wasn’t that great, so it didn’t last long. By then I was in college. Over time, my mother had about eight hip replacements. All that surgery weakened the surrounding bones. In addition, she had other health problems along the way. I had friends and a social life, so I could block out her problems for most of my life, as did my older brother.

Tragedy happened when my father turned 76. I had never seen my father sick, ever! The worst he had was a cold or the flu. Suddenly, he had many things all at once. He had prostate cancer, colon cancer, pneumonia and a debilitating stroke. He ended up in intensive care.
 

An action plan for protest, strikes, and monitoring of la migra.

Operation Wagon Train." It sounds like a bad Western movie, or a school project for second-graders. In fact, it's one of the many programs of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that make life miserable for undocumented workers. During its sweep through six states in December 2006, ICE arrested 1,250 people. Half of them were deported! Este articulo en español.

Part of the Department of Homeland Security, ICE turned more than 190,000 immigrants into displaced people in 2006, a 13 percent increase over the number ejected from the U.S. in 2005. Its Gestapo-style raids at workplaces and in neighborhoods are appalling. ICE agents even used fire shelters in San Diego to entrap and deport Latinas and Latinos without papers during the recent devastation.

Why is this happening? Because big business wants cheap, helpless labor and the government is happy to help quash rising immigrant activism - especially union organizing. After all, it's contagious.
 

Government invasions of privacy are big news. Exposure of the Bush admin’s vast and warrantless domestic wiretapping and data mining was followed by the vote in the Democrat-controlled Congress endorsing them. This led a Newsweek columnist to announce that the government had “shredded the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution,” which prohibits unreasonable search and seizure.

But little is said about employer spying on workers, which in the electronic age is running amok.

Pervasive surveillance on the job. A 2005 American Management Association study found employees’ website visits were reviewed by 76 percent of the businesses surveyed, email by 55 percent, and computer files by 50 percent. Some companies even track all computer keystrokes.