The old home of the U.S. machine tool industry, producing about 13 percent of national machine tool output and employing about 15,000 workers, Cincinnati today is blighted by “deindustrialization” and has evolved into a services and financial center with large disparities in wealth and growing levels of unemployment, drug abuse and crime, as jobs have shifted into retail and related “services.”

A recent socioeconomic study by Dan La Botz of Cincinnati Studies, entitled “Who Rules Cincinnati,” has given us a vivid look at the nuts and bolts of capitalist democracy in America through the prism of that city’s politics. The study found that the political and cultural life of the city is dominated by just 7 large corporations: Procter & Gamble, Kroger, Macy’s/Federated Department Stores, Fifth Third Bancorp, Western and Southern Financial, American Financial Corp, and E.W. Scripps. These corporations have a combined revenue stream of $19,781,709.2 million.

The teachers and other professionals at Pittsburgh Public Schools, who we reported on in issue 36 of Socialist Appeal, have attained a number of concrete gains in a new three-year contract with the school district. The agreement comes after a year of hard-fought struggles by Pittsburgh’s teachers.

The Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers (PFT) first announced that a tentative agreement had been reached with the district on the evening of January 16 in a letter from the union’s president, John Tarka. Tarka’s letter is available on the the PFT website (www.pft400.org). In the letter, he notified union members that the bargaining unit had reached an agreement which would then be sent to the PFT Executive Board, which would decide whether or not to recommend ratification to the membership. The Executive Board subsequently voted unanimously in favor of ratification.

Bitter denunciations of monopolistic greed poured from the podium at a public hearing in Providence on January 17th. Subscribers in the “direct pay” class of Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Rhode Island hoped these words would block a rate-increase request filed with the state Health Insurance Commissioner in November, 2007. If the commissioner approves the request, as many fear he will, subscribers will face an average rate increase of 12.7 percent in their monthly premiums.

Rhode Islanders traveled on one of the coldest nights of the winter to attend the hearing in downtown Providence.  Following opening arguments from the Blue Cross attorney and then the assistant state Attorney General, a Blue Cross subscriber and attorney by profession was the first to speak. Testifying on the excessive costs of health care for himself and his family, as well as the rising cost of food, gasoline, and heating oil, the speaker demonstrated the hardship he and his family would suffer if rates were to increase. The men and women who followed him testified to the same troubles, and in words of desperation, disgust, and outrage, implored the commission to deny the rate increase.