Socialist Worker 516

www.socialist.ca

LOSER

no. 516 March 2010

WINNER

LOSER

Workers

Corporations

The environment

Spending freezes and deregulation mean the delivery of economic and social programs people count on will suffer

Over the next five years, corporations will receive $55 billion in tax cuts

Through the elimination of environmental assessments and slashing millions of dollars from environmental protection

HARPER’S SHAME ON WOMEN’S HEALTH Pages 6&7

Workers pay to balance budget Banks and corporations win big in Tory budget

by JESSE McLAREN TO PAY down a deficit created by military spending, tax cuts for the rich and corporate bailouts, Harper is joining governments around the world to slash public spending and attack public sector workers.

The corporate press has become hysterical about how to pay down the budget deficit, which has grown to $56 billion for 2009-10.

But much of this deficit came about by massive tax cuts for the rich: between 2008 and 2013, corporate tax cuts will cost the government $60 billion, GST cuts will cost $76 billion and personal income tax cuts will cost $83 billion. Military spending over the next 20 years will cost a colossal $490 billion. And around the world, governments that preached the “free-market” for a generation provided multi-billion bailouts to banks and corporations.

But they are caught in a capitalist quagmire

from which they have no exit strategy. The economic booms of the 1990s and mid-2000s floated on a sea of private debt and when the bubble burst a depression was only averted by massive transfer of wealth from public to private. But this extra spending is running out and driving up government budget deficits to the point that some countries like Greece are at risk of defaulting.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) released a text Exiting from Crisis Intervention outlining their dilemma: “Unwinding public intervention too early could jeopardize progress, while maintaining intervention for too long could distort private investment.”

With no way out, the capitalist class is determined to make ordinary people pay for the crisis. Governments created a deficit by transferring public funds to the military and corporations, and now plan on reducing the deficit by slashing public spending and attacking workers. It is not only Tory

governments doing this: in Greece, Portugal, and Britain, Labour governments are doing the cutting, having bought into the logic of the market that puts profits over people.

But working people are fighting back. In Greece, 2 million workers took part in a series of general strikes at the end of February, chanting “no sacrifices! Make the rich pay for the crisis!” (see page 12). In Britain, 270,000 civil servants went on strike in early March. Public sector workers have also gone on strike from Portugal to Zimbabwe.

In Canada, Harper has had to prorogue Parliament twice in two years to escape opposition to his policies, in 2008 when he did nothing to help Canadians deal with the recession, and in 2009 to avoid questions about torture, climate change and jobs. Opposition to Harper has not gone away, and could explode again, but many fights are also happening at the provincial and municipal level.

>>page 2

Great Canadian mortgage heist Page 5 P.R. Wright on the bank bailout and possiblity of a housing bubble

Greek workers fight back Page 12 Panos Garganas on the massive generals strike that shook Greece

Let’s go Dutch Page 3 Bradley Hughes on the collapse of the Dutch government over the war in Afghanistan

Venezuelan oil Page 4 John Bell on the new environmentally devastating oil development

Solidarity matters Page 6 Carolyn Egan on the inspiring fight against mining giant Vale Inco

Africville Page 2 Stephen Ellis on the long-awaited apology

CPMA No. 58554253-99 ISSN No. 0836-7094 $1 or $2 at newsstands

Racist incident in York Region

HASSAN DIAB CASE

Intelligence as evidence

by JESSICA SQUIRES LAST YEAR, France accused Canadian citizen Hassan Diab, a part-time university professor in Ottawa, of terrorism in an attack in France 29 years ago.

He was arrested in Ottawa and later released on bail, with a tracking bracelet and severe restrictions.

During evidentiary hearings late last year, Hassan had to fight for the right to present evidence challenging the French case against him. The French courts do not allow defence lawyers to call expert witnesses.

Hassan’s experts are highly critical of the handwriting analysis performed by two French analysts, who compared five words written on a Paris hotel registration card with other documents.

The French case makes extensive use of statements derived from unsourced intelligence, compiled under completely unknown circumstances.

Hassan’s experts on intelligence warn that it is collected for fundamentally different purposes and under different rules than is evidence. French law makes no distinction between evidence and intelligence.

The Crown lawyer stated that because “intelligence sometimes gets it right,” it should be allowed as evidence, and arguing that extradition does not operate on the principle of the presumption of innocence.

Recently, the Crown has attempted to sanitize translated French evidence by instructing the translator to replace the word “intelligence” with “information”.

The Crown started doing this after the Judge ruled that the defence may call evidence showing the inherent unreliability of using intelligence as evidence.

The Judge ruled that the Crown must provide a list of all changes that have been made to the English translation.

On February 12, the court determined that the actual extradition hearing will begin on June 14, 2010. However, the date is contingent on whether France submits any “new” evidence.

Meanwhile, Hassan must continue to pay for the GPS monitoring at $2,500 per month.

Canada exports deadly asbestos IN SPITE of wide-spread research demonstrating the link between asbestos exposure and cancer, and in spite of a billion dollar renovation of the Parliament buildings to remove asbestos, Canada continues to aggressively export the fibre.

Despite warnings that asbestos was the cause of 500,000 cancer deaths in Western Europe alone last year, Canada continues to pursue overseas market opportunities.

Seven of the top ten markets are developing countries, meaning that the poorest countries will bear the brunt of the health consequences over the coming years.

Critics of Canada’s asbestos exports say the country is exporting death to protect the profits of a handful of companies.

2 Socialist Worker March 2010

Members of the Okanagan Indian Band on the blockade of Tolko Industrial’s entrance to the watershed

BC band blockades logging industry

by AMELIA MURPHY-BEAUDOIN

The Okanagan Indian Band is fighting to protect the Browns Creek watershed, which contains archeological sites and the community’s water supply.

On February 22, the Band began a blockade of Tolko Industrial’s entrance to the watershed following an emergency meeting in which 100 Band members in attendance voted unanimously to blockade.

The Band maintains that Tolko doesn’t have a right

to log while land claims are unresolved.

A BC court ruled that the company could work in the area following an archeological consultation, but the Band points out that the consultation was not legitimate since it’s impossible to conduct with four feet of snow on the ground.

This issue has an impact beyond First Nations people.

The community of non-native people living in the area has an interest in protecting the water supply, and supports the Band in their block-

Former premier Bouchard calls for increase to fees

by AMELIA MURPHY-BEAUDOIN

After a 14-year tuition fee freeze initiated by the PQ, former PQ premier Lucien Bouchard has declared that tuition fees should be raised to relieve university under-funding.

University fees in Québec are the lowest in North America, largely as a result of Québec students mobilizing whenever the government has attempted to increase fees. There have been eight separate province-wide student strikes in Québec since 1968.

This activism has compelled successive governments to preserve funding for post-secondary education in the province, which Bouchard did while he was premier. Apparently, his views have changed, and his comments clash with official PQ policy. The PQ publicly continues to support low tuition fees.

Bouchard’s decision to oppose the PQ has been welcome news to Liberal Premier Jean Charest and other politicians who promote higher fees. Bouchard’s comments were even displayed on the Québec Liberal Party website.

These remarks coincide with a report released by a government-appointed advisory group which calls for a major increase in tuition fees—a hike of more than $4,000 a year, based on the program.

The Québec University Students Federation plans to oppose any initiative to raise fees, demanding public consultations into the matter and pointing out that there

are other ways to cut costs and increase revenues, such as making universities more accountable in how they use public funds.

Provincial party Québec solidaire continues to advocate for the provision of free, public, secular, quality education to every Québec student, and has a commitment to eliminate student debt and reduce the number of students per classroom at all levels of education.

These are all steps in the right direction. However, in the past, it has been the activism of Québec students themselves, organizing major protests and strikes against tuition fee hikes, that has preserved accessibility to education.

This sort of activism can again defeat the plans of Charest to introduce higher fees.

ade; some have joined them at the checkpoint.

Okanagan Indian Band Chief Fabian Alexis explains the impact decades of unsustainable logging has had on their area: “The result has been fish-bearing creeks that flood in the spring and go dry in the summer because the forest ecosystem that used to absorb and then slowly release that water has been largely wiped out.”

Tolko is trying to blame the Band for the closure of their Armstrong Plant, but the world knows that this

closure had nothing to do with the blockade. In January, Tolko put out a press release announcing it was curtailing lumber production due to poor market conditions.

The Band knows that the financial interests of Tolko are a greater concern to the government than the health and safety of the people who rely on the Browns Creek watershed for their drinking water.

The situation is expected to escalate, and the world needs to bear witness to ensure that this community’s water, history and rights are protected.

Jason Kenney deletes gay rights in new guide CITIZENSHIP AND IMMIGRATION Minister Jason Kenney continues to abuse his position by imposing his own views on immigration in Canada.

Kenney, who zealously opposed same-sex marriage when it was being debated in Parliament, shamefully deleted any reference to gay rights in a new study guide for immigrants to Canada, entitled Discover Canada: The Rights and Responsibilities of Citizenship.

Before heading to the printers, a text box detailing the decriminalization of homosexuality and Canada’s recognition of same-sex marriage was excluded, and sexual orientation was omitted under the list of equality rights. The section on Canada’s Armed

Forces was, however, was expanded.

As reported by the Canadian Press, “last year, Kenney appointed a longtime Conservative who opposes same-sex marriage to the Immigration and Refugee Board, which among other things make decisions about whether gays can be given refugee status in Canada.”

Kenney has come under a great deal of criticism for abusing his authority after he barred British MP and Palestinian solidarity activist George Galloway from entering Canada and describing Iraq War resisters as “bogus refugees”.

There is no place in the Immigration and Refugee Ministry for biased, homophobic bigots like Jason Kenney—he should resign!

Africville residents finally receive apology for destruction of community

by STEPHEN ELLIS At the end of February, Halifax’s mayor apologized to the former residents and descendents of Africville— a black community that was razed 40 years ago— and city council approved a $3 million payout and a chunk of municipal land as compensation.

For over four decades, Africville has remained a symbol of systemic racism.

Former slaves established the community in the early 1800s on the shore overlooking the Bedford

Basin. Since its foundation, Africville residents were denied basic services freely available to other Halifax residents.

When its expansion plans were set in motion in the mid-1960s to make way for the A. Murray MacKay Bridge, the City of Halifax decided it would demolish the community with little consultation or concern for the people who lived there.

Africville land is now called Seaview Park and in 2002 it was declared a national heritage site.

More recently, the United Nations urged respective governments to give serious consideration to reparations.

For decades, the destruction of Africville was a blight, an open wound that spoke to the horrific nature of racism in Nova Scotian history.

The recent apology and settlement discussions reflect the tenacity of the former residents and descendents of Africville in their struggle for recognition of the injustice done to them.

ON FEBRUARY 14, the Islamic Society of York Region hosted an event challenging media distortions of Islam.

Ironically, the National Post and the right-wing blogosphere used the event as an opportunity for even more distortion and attacks on Muslims in Canada.

The Post’s attacks were typical—all quotes from guest speakers were described as propaganda and were dismissed as suspect, but the “two dozen” protesters that showed up to oppose the meeting were given ample time on the blogs to get their message across.

The rise of Islamophobia is one of the most pressing concerns for socialists in Canada and throughout the world.

Fascist groups in Europe are using Islamophobia as the sharp end of the spear to build a movement of racist thugs.

While there isn’t a movement of that sort on the streets in Canada, Islamophobia is still on the rise. Before the event, a protester burnt a copy of the Qu’ran and left the charred remains for the event organizers to find. We need to defend Muslim Canadians against these racist attacks.

>>page 1

In Ontario, the McGuinty government claims there’s no funding for public transit, while implementing a 28.5 per cent corporate tax cut that will deplete Ontario of $10 billion in tax revenue. At the same time there is a private members bill that threatens to outlaw strikes by transit workers.

In Quebec, the Charest government is heading towards confrontation with its 500,000 public sector workers. And in Nova Scotia, where 200 public sector contracts are up for renewal, the year began with strikes or near strikes by thousands of hospital and school support workers.

The municipalities are continuing the attack. Last summer, Toronto mayor David Miller blamed the recession on city workers and ignited a media backlash against them.

This year, after the Toronto Transit Commission hiked fares, the media launched an offensive against transit workers, paving the way for mayoral candidate George Smitherman to publicly call for privatization.

There are two possible outcomes for the public sector as recent events show. The Ontario teachers were bullied into accepting a concessions contract that seriously erodes their working conditions and students’ learning conditions.

But last summer Toronto city workers fought back, and with solidarity from the rest of the labour movement, defended their conditions and the idea that ordinary people shouldn’t pay for capitalism’s crisis. Only struggle and solidarity can get us out of capitalism’s quagmire.

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CSIS actions led to torture

INTERNATIONAL

by JAMES CLARK THE ACTIONS of CSIS agents in the case of Canadian citizen Ahmad Elmaati contributed to his torture in Egypt and Syria, a new report shows.

US sabre rattling continues on the anniversary of the Iranian Revolution

by NINA TAGHADDOSI & BRADLEY HUGHES FEBRUARY 11 is the anniversary of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which deposed the much-loathed and brutal reign of the Shah. This year, Iran’s citizens gathered to celebrate the revolution.

This meant that all possible efforts were made to stifle the voices of any opposition or protest. Police reported earlier in the day that opposition figures were arrested in order to prevent any incidents. However, that did not stop the opposition demonstrators from showing up in cities across the country to speak out against the dictatorship of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

During his speech in front of the

thousands of supporters who showed up he took the opportunity to defend his decision to further enrich some of the country’s uranium stockpile, despite pressure from the U.S. not to do so: “The Iranian nation is brave enough that if one day we wanted to build nuclear bombs we would announce it publicly without being afraid of you.”

The following week, American Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was on a tour of the Middle East and on several occasions raised the issue of Iran’s nuclear program. She told an audience in Saudi Arabia, “Iran has consistently failed to live up to its responsibilities. It has refused to demonstrate to the international community that its nuclear programme is

entirely peaceful.” later she said, “We will not stand idly by while you [Iran] pursue a nuclear program that can be used to threaten your neighbour, and even beyond.”

Earlier on the same tour Clinton was speaking before a women’s college in the town of Jeddah. A student pointed out that the US was the first country to develop nuclear weapons and the only country to use them. If the US is opposed to an Iranian nuclear program what have they not insisted Israel abandon its nuclear weapons, she asked. Clinton did not respond to the question about Israel, she instead attacked Iran describing it as a threat to other countries in the region, claiming “Iran is the largest supporter of terrorism in the world to-

day.” She also commented that Iran might allow al Qaeda to get nuclear weapons.

Clinton denied that the US was planning to attack Iran but her comments were very similar to George Bush’s comments in the lead up to the war on Iraq. In October of 2002 Bush said, “Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists.” He described the regime as a military dictatorship, that colluded with al Qaeda, and that was a danger to the countries around it. All of which were used as reason for the war.

Solidarity with the people of Iran means opposition to any plans for an invasion.

Civilian casualties mount in NATO offensive

by PAUL STEVENSON WHILE THE media’s attention was diverted by the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games, NATO launched the largest offensive in Afghanistan since 2001.

The assault on Marjah in Helmand province is designed to give audiences in NATO countries some sense that there is finally progress in the war in Afghanistan.

For nine years, we have been told of the great strides being made against the Taliban in the south of the country, yet much of Afghanistan is still in the hands of the resistance.

The surge of 30,000 more US troops is supposed to gain some of that lost ground.

NATO took great pains to convince us that civilians were being protected in the attack, even going to the unprecedented step of announcing the attack more than a week before it started. They were trying to convince people in NATO countries that they did everything possible to spare civilian life.

Yet, within the first few days numerous air strikes and gun battles had left dozens of civilians dead and more than 3,000 people were displaced from their homes.

Within 24 hours of the start of the attack, a NATO rocket had missed its target and killed 12 civilians. Over the next few days, there were numerous civilian deaths and on February 21, another NATO air strike killed 33 civilians in Uruzgan.

The government of Hamid Karzai condemned the attacks and called for NATO to try and avoid civilian casualties. This follows the same pattern we have seen for years. NATO kills civilians and then “regrets” its “error,” followed soon by Karzai speaking against the NATO operations. Of course, Karzai doesn’t ever call for NATO to stop its military operations, which are the cause of the civilian deaths.

It all rings a bit hollow to the Afghan people who, with every attack, turn more against the NATO operations.

NATO will talk of the great success of the Marjah operation saying that few NATO soldiers were killed and the enemy has been routed. This is a false boast. The fighters in the

resistance will not stand “toe to toe” with 15,000 heavily armed soldiers.

Instead, they will regroup and continue to be a thorn in the side of the Western forces.

The Marjah operation is the beginning of an attempt to control the two biggest and most hostile provinces in southern Afghanistan. The real prize for NATO will be to capture Kandahar province, where Canada will be, in the words of Canadian BrigadierGeneral Craig King, the “tip of the spear”.

Marjah has a population of 80,000 people while Kandahar City has one million.

The anti-war movement in Canada needs to mobilize to stop this new attack and the inevitable civilian casualties that will result.

Dutch government collapses over Afghanistan war

by BRADLEY HUGHES

THE DUTCH coalition government collapsed in the last week of February when the Labour Party refused to support an extension of the mission in Afghanistan.

The 1,900 Dutch troops are scheduled to come home this August. The largest party in the coalition, the Christian Demo-

crats, proposed extending the mission by another year. The second largest party in the government, the Labour party, left the government in response.

The Netherlands first sent troops to join NATO’s occupation in 2006, since then 21 Dutch soldiers have been killed.

The Labour Party supported sending troops to join the oc-

cupation in 2006. Widespread opposition to the war has forced them to withdraw their support.

These troops are located in Uruzgan province, right beside Helmand province, where 15,000 NATO troops are involved in the biggest offensive since the 2001 invasion.

This is an important setback for US president Obama’s

plans to increase the violence against the people of Afghanistan. His surge of 30,000 more US troops was supposed to be accompanied by 10,000 more troops from other NATO countries—only 1,000 have been promised.

The departure of the Dutch means that the other country’s commitment has decreased, not risen.

Former Supreme Court Justice Frank Iacobucci released a supplementary report in mid-February, after months of legal wrangling with federal government lawyers who wanted to censor it.

Iacobucci headed the “Internal Inquiry into the Actions of Canadian Officials in Relation to Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad Abou-Elmaati and Muayyed Nureddin”—three Canadian citizens who were detained and tortured abroad, without any assistance from the Canadian government—that later condemned the role of Canadian agencies in the matter.

Iacobucci’s most recent report shows that CSIS agents abroad released unfounded information to two foreign intelligence agencies which resulted in Almaati’s torture.

According to Iacobucci: “Several witnesses, from both CSIS and the RCMP, told the Inquiry that it was not the responsibility of intelligence or law enforcement officials to be concerned about the human rights of a Canadian detainee, which were for Department of Foreign Affairs alone to consider.”

Iacobucci condemned the “don’t ask” attitude of CSIS agents, saying “No Canadian officials should consider themselves exempt from this responsibility.”

Elmaati, Almalki and Nureddin are currently seeking compensation from the Canadian government for their years in detention and torture. The Harper government has so far rebuffed the men’s demands.

Civil liberties advocates have criticized the government for years now, saying that Canada has long been complicit in the extraordinary rendition, detention and torture of Canadian citizens abroad. Iacobucci’s report vindicates those claims.

Omar Khadr denied justice

by JESSICA SQUIRES STEPHEN HARPER’S government continues to ignore the January Supreme Court ruling that Omar Khadr’s rights were violated.

The Supreme Court ruled that a Canadian official who gave information to the US violated Khadr’s rights.

The Canadian government knew that Khadr had been subjected to torture and that Canadian officials questioned him without a lawyer present.

Although the Court stopped short of ordering repatriation, holding that to do so would be to trespass on parliamentary authority, it did leave the door open if the government does nothing.

The Tories haven’t done nothing, they have sent a “diplomatic note” to the US asking that information gleaned from Canadian interrogations not be used as evidence—essentially stating tacit agreement with using any other information yielded through torturing Khadr.

Only the hands of Canadian officials will be wiped clean.

March 2010 Socialist Worker 3

TALKING MARXISM

INTERNATIONAL

Abbie Bakan

Historically speaking

CHILE

The aim of socialist theory and practice is to achieve influence among the millions who suffer from the consequences of capitalist exploitation and oppression.

This is a challenging task for which understanding the history of those who have come before is crucial.

Antonio Gramsci—the Italian Marxist theorist, journalist, and leader of the Italian Communist Party in the 1920s—offered important contributions about how to advance revolutionary politics from the margins to the centre of working class life.

He considered the movement for socialism in a period of capitalist hegemony as a type of “war”. The lines of battle, Gramsci understood, were between the ruling class that benefited from capitalism, and the mass of workers and oppressed, the “subaltern”, who paid for the bosses’ profits but had no control over the process of accumulation or the outcome of their labour.

Bridging the gap between the ideas of Marxist intellectuals and the mass of workers and the poor was the challenge that Gramsci tried to explain during his long years in Mussolini’s prison (from 1926 until his death in 1937).

He looked to battles not fought with guns and standard military tactics. In a period of liberal democratic capitalism, Gramsci considered the battles of socialists to be fought on the terrain of ideas. He wrote extensively about the role of language, conversation, the printed word, and the labour of intellectuals as essential elements in this battle.

There were, in Gramsci’s view, two types of ways to struggle against capitalist domination: the “war of maneuver”, which is sudden and sharp; and the “war of position” which unfolds over decades and involves a long term view.

The most useful contributions in socialist history can be read with a view to understanding the war of position and how it changes in different contexts.

Reasoning otherwise

A new contribution by Ian McKay represents a model of informed, accessible history, presented in a careful framing from a Gramscian perspective.

In a radical exposé of decades of capitalist hegemony in Canada, McKay’s first of three volumes, Reasoning Otherwise: Leftists and the People’s Enlightenment in Canada (1890—1929), is essential reading for Marxists involved in the long war of position in challenging capitalist hegemony.

For McKay, the work of the radical historian is an exercise in “reconnaissance”.

“The point of reconnaissance, both in real life and in metaphor, is to awaken us to the little-explored realities, in an age when—philosophically and politically—the quest for rock-solid foundations seem more and more quixotic.”

McKay steers clear of two errors common in Marxist historical writing. He neither attempts to judge or categorize past movements; nor does he pretend to avoid theorization with purely descriptive accounts.

Instead, carefully framed in the context of the period, McKay sees the early working class radicals as “first formationists” using the theoretical tools on hand to challenge an oppressive new period of modernity and rising liberalism.

McKay situates the socialist movement of the day— including the leading intellectuals and the articles and speeches they composed, the political, social and faith organizations, and the emergent trade unions—in the context of the influence of ideas that were perceived to be radical in challenging the age-old notions of the Victorian era.

Influences

Three principal theorists in this period have proven to be deeply influential: Karl Marx (1818-83); Charles Darwin (1809-82); and Herbert Spencer (1820-1903).

According to McKay, historians of today might not be surprised to see the names of Marx and Darwin, but Spencer’s view of society as an “organism” that could change and evolve needs to be highlighted in the period.

According to McKay, the “first formation socialists” who “reasoned otherwise” in turn-of-the-last-century Canada, “[E]verywhere and everything can be understood in terms of a great massive force—evolution. This big new word—revealingly, it had no synonym—would be at once scientific explanation of change, the process of change, and the political practices predicated on the awareness of this change…. The point of socialism is to understand society’s patterns of evolution, to accelerate those that are beneficial and fight those that are not.”

Relying on Gramsci’s attention to the significance of the battle of ideas, the chapters of Reasoning Otherwise reveal a series of debates and dialogues that developed over this period in the workers’ movement.

Stories, songs, newspaper clippings, mass upheavals and small gatherings at church meetings or funerals, come alive in the context of these debates. Chapters are devoted to the “questions” of class, religion, women and race, revealing both progressive and stubbornly reactionary moments of working class consciousness.

The last chapters attend to war, revolution, general strike, and the “showtime” period of 1920.

This volume of socialist history reads more like a novel than a chronicle, but it is grounded in anything but fiction. The method of Antonio Gramsci and McKay’s artful scholarly skill combine to make history alive for socialists in the 21st century.

This is the type of research that can help situate socialists today in the long war of position against capitalist hegemony, hopefully serving to move radical ideas a little closer to the light of mass politics.

4 Socialist Worker March 2010

Within the span of six weeks, devastating earthquakes struck both Haiti and Chile. Though the magnitude 8.8 quake that struck Chile on February 27 was 500 times as powerful as the 7.5 magnitude quake that devastated Haiti in early January, the damage it caused was nowhere near as severe. Well over

200,000 people have died in Haiti as a result of the quake, and over one million have been displaced. In Chile, casualties were estimated at 800 by March 4.

The reason for the disparity is simple.

Chile is the richest country in Latin America and enforces one of the strict-

est building codes in the entire world.

Haiti is the poorest state in the Western hemisphere, its buildings are made cheaply with no reinforcement and it’s government does little to meet the needs of its’ own people. The disparity is caused by politics and poverty, not by the seismic vagaries of the Earth.

The exploitation of Haiti

by SALMAAN ABDUL HAMID KHAN Much of Port-au-Prince still remains under mountains of rubble. Officials predict it will take years to clear the city before any real reconstruction can begin.

Describing the magnitude of the task, Haiti’s current president, René Préval, is quoted as saying “it will take 1,000 trucks, moving rubble for 1,000 days.”

For now, the rubble remains, alongside a blanket of tent cities and legions of foreign troops. Haiti now has more foreign soldiers per square kilometre than Iraq or Afghanistan.

Military occupation is just one of the many obstacles facing autonomous Haitian reconstruction. Decades of imposed neo-liberal policies and privatization have left the government incapable of rebuilding its own future, and unable to supply much-needed resources. Naturally, multinational corporations and big business have taken the task of reconstruction to heart.

Aside from the influx of foreign contractors, foreign loans, and foreign resources, a continuation of the “HOPE Act” has been proposed in the US. The HOPE Act was passed in 2006 as a poverty reduction strategy whereby garments made in Haiti were to be given tariff free access to US markets, ostensibly to aid development of a system of apparel factories in Haiti, thus spurring job creation.

Sweat shops

The US government and the International Monetary Fund stress the need for rapid job creation, but unacknowledged in these plans is the facts that under the HOPE Act, apparel factories operate as sweatshops. Haitians working long hours for barely $3 per day, and are “cursed and beaten” if they did not meet their quotas.

To reintroduce exploitative sweatshops today will not aid in reconstruction. Such enterprises would continue to encourage large scale migration of workers to city centres to work with-

out decent wages. Such sweatshops are allowed to operate without putting any resources, in the form of taxation, into developing the country’s services and infrastructure.

The overcrowding of a city like Portau-Prince, which lacked the proper infrastructure and housing for such a large number of people, was one of the main reasons why the casualty rate was so high.

To avoid such risks, strengthening Haiti’s once-thriving agricultural sector—and building decent roads to get good to the capital—would perhaps be a better solution for redevelopment. But that is a plan of action that will not sit well with multinational corporations looking for cheap labour.

Nor will it be desireable for highly-subsidized US agriculture, whose penetration of the Haitian market has been a prime reason for growing rural unemployment and a flooding of unemployed into the ghettos and shanty towns of Port-au-Prince.

Venezuela ‘heavy oil’ development at the mercy of the market

by JOHN BELL Venezuela has taken a massive step back from nationalizing its oil reserves and entered into a $80 billion deal that will see it create an environmental disaster rivaling the Alberta tar sands.

Development will centre in the Carabobo region of the Orinoco River basin. Like the tar sands, the “extra heavy oil” in the Carabobo is difficult and expensive to extract and refine.

In the process a vast area of rain forest will destroyed, and indigenous peoples will face devastating consequences to their cultural and physical health.

Investment will come from major oil corporations from China (CNPC), Russia (Gazprom and Lukoil), Italy (ENI), Spain (Repsol) and the US (Chevron).

“Venezuela put itself at the mercy of the markets to test how much real interest there was in the Orinoco reserves. The results are

positive but not overwhelming,” Patrick Esteruelas, an oil industry analyst at Eurasia Group told the Financial Times. The note of caution refers to the fact that many oil majors, like BP, Shell and Total don’t want to invest in the country led by President Hugo Chavez.

In the past, the populist Chavez demanded that multinational oil corporations exploiting Venezuela’s oil leave a much bigger share of their profits for the government, to finance national development and help raise the majority of the population out of poverty. When the corporations tried to call his bluff, Chavez threw most of them out and nationalized the oil fields.

Facing down the multinationals was easier to do when oil was at record high prices. Now, facing lower commodity prices and isolation born in retribution from a section of the world’s corporate elite, Chavez has to dramatically increase oil production.

That means securing massive amounts of foreign investment, and that means rolling back the project of nationalization.

There are cruel contradictions at work in Venezuela. At the recent Copenhagen climate change talks, Chavez was brutally critical of governments in the Global Nnorth for devastating the environment and blocking progress away from fossil fuel addiction. Now he is backing a project that is environmentally every bit as bad as Stephen Harper’s beloved tar sands.

In the past, Chavez has wrapped his nationalist aspirations in the rhetoric of socialism, and the fact that the impoverished majority have seen tangible improvements in health, education and other areas has given him credibility.

This new project, no matter how Chavez and his officials try to spin it, undermines that credibility.

At the mercy of the markets indeed.

The great Canadian mortgage heist P.R. Wright looks at Harper’s ‘pre-emptive’ bank bailout to deal with a possible housing bubble FOR MONTHS, a chorus of voices has been warning Ottawa that Canada is in the midst of a housing bubble, not unlike the housing bubble that preceded the US mortgage meltdown, and triggered the near-collapse of the global financial system.

In response, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty announced new measures to “prevent Canadian households from getting overextended and to prevent some lenders from facilitating it.” But some critics argue that the measures are akin to splashing a glass of water onto a fire after you poured gasoline over tinder and set it ablaze.

Worries about a housing bubble stem from the seemingly unstoppable rise in housing prices, coupled with record low interest rates. Growing numbers of homebuyers and speculators are purchasing homes with as little as five per cent down, variable interests rates, and mortgage payments spread out over 35 years. As the buyers surpass sellers, home prices are bid upward.

Rising home prices are prompting cash-strapped households to refinance—with banks lending up to 95 per cent of the now inflated value of the property. Given a jobless “recovery”, wage stagnation, and widely expected interest rate hikes, some analysts worry that the risk of mortgage-defaults is growing. Others worry that once the housing bubble bursts, prices will fall, leaving borrowers with debtloads much greater than the dropping value of their home.

Flaherty’s three basic modifications—to take effect April 19 this year—are too little, too late.

First, to be eligible for a 35-year mortgage, borrowers must be able to qualify for a more standard, fiveyear fixed-rate loan. If borrowers qualify, they can still opt for the 35year, variable-rate mortgage.

Second, those re-financing can borrow 90 per cent of the appraised value of their home—down from 95 per cent.

And finally, if the residence being purchased is not a primary dwelling (meaning you don’t actually plan on living in it), then the down payment must be 20 per cent. Ostensibly, this latter measure is to temper speculation—or flipping.

The real estate sector and the banks all breathed a sigh of relief when Flaherty unveiled his changes, finding them to be “about right.”

But this isn’t the whole story.

In 2006, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC, a Crown corporation) was the first to insure loans with extended amortization periods of up to 30 years.

Within months, it announced it would insure mortgages paid over 35 years. And by 2007, CMHC was insuring 40-year mortgages.

Extending the amortization period means borrowers pay less on a monthly basis, but pay for a longer period of time. Some say extending the repayment period from 25 to 40 years triples the amount of interest paid to the bank. (This is the same phenomenon that students decry when it comes to income-contingent student loan repayment schemes— those with the most modest incomes pay the most in interest.)

And while the monthly payment is lower, banks can still maintain— and expand—their monthly revenue stream by getting even more people into the scheme. The drive to

increase the numbers of borrowers explains why the CMHC also introduced a new “mortgage product” in mid-2006: the interest-only loan.

In this scheme, borrowers pay only interest on their loan for the first ten years, at which point the payments on the principal kicks in.

As a result, more and more people flooded into home-ownership as a more affordable alternative to renting. New entrants to the housing market kept housing prices soaring at a rate of nearly 10 per cent per year. According to Canadian Business Online, house prices increased nearly three times faster than did income and nearly five times faster than employment.

The Canadian Real Estate Association predicts that in 2010 house prices will hit a record average price of $337,500.

Mortgage debts

‘Total mortgage debts swelled from $431 billion in 2000 to $871 billion in 2008’

Total mortgage debts swelled from $431 billion in 2000 to $871 billion in 2008—just as the waves of the global financial crisis were lapping at Canadian shores. Nervous Canadian banks reduced the maximum mortgage-repayment period from 40 to 35 years.

And in the fall of 2008—just as Stephen Harper was proclaiming that “Canada’s fundamentals are solid”—Jim Flaherty was quietly helping Canadian banks unload billions of dollars worth of risky mortgages from their books under Canada’s new “Insured Mortgage Purchase Program” (IMPP).

Under this scheme, Canadian banks could choose to auction their risky mortgage packages to the CMHC in exchange for cash, proffered up by the public purse. Simply put: Harper and Flaherty engineered a pre-emptive bank bailout.

Here’s how a March 2009 parliamentary research paper (International Affairs, Trade and Finance Division) explained the IMPP: “Under the IMPP, the govern-

ment proposes to purchase these mortgages from financial institutions. More specifically, through CMHC, the government intends to buy National Housing Act Mortgage-Backed Securities (NHA MBS), a kind of bond for which the underlying asset is a pool of mortgage loans guaranteed by CMHC. In exchange, financial institutions will receive a cash payment that they may use to make new loans to consumers and businesses…

“The NHA MBS bonds purchased by the CMHC consist of pools of mortgages already guaranteed by CMHC against default.

As a result, the risk of default by a mortgage holder is already borne by CMHC, whether the mortgage appears on the balance sheet of a financial institution or that of the government of Canada.”

In other words, the debt no longer appears on the banks’ balance sheets—but rather, the government of Canada’s. It makes the banks’ financial statements look better, and the public’s financial situation worse. This sleight of hand allowed Canadian banks to reward themselves with hefty bonuses and continue with reckless lending practices without fear.

When Flaherty first announced the IMPP in October 2008, the “program envelope” was $25 billion; in November, it was $75 billion. By the time the 2009 Federal Budget was tabled, the funding envelope had ballooned to $125 billion and the program was expanded until March 31, 2010.

Thanks to such business acumen, Canada’s top six banks reported record profits in each of the years 2005, 2006, and 2007. And while records weren’t set in 2008, Canada’s top six banks still reported total profit in excess of $14 billion—despite the global recession. Already in 2010, so great were the first quarter profits for the Royal Bank of Canada that president and CEO Gordon M. Nix-

on was prompted to state: “These results reflect the strength of our Canadian businesses and demonstrate the value of our diversified business model. We earned over $1 billion this quarter for our shareholders, notwithstanding market impacts.”

Personal debt

In the meantime, a new report by the Vanier Institute on Family Finances shows Canada’s families have been hit hard by the economic crisis and jobless recovery. According to the report, aggregate wages shrank in 2009 and bankruptcies climbed. The debt-to-income ratio (which includes mortgage and credit card debt) hit an all-time high of 145 per cent. In other words, people owe nearly fifty per cent more than what they bring in, suggesting that 1.3 million households could have a vulnerable or dangerously high debt service load by the end of 2011.

To make matters worse, Andrew Jackson, an economist with the Canadian Labour Congress, predicts that half a million workers will exhaust their Employment Insurance (EI) benefits in 2010.

And while workers have contributed at least $57 billion more in EI contributions than they have received in benefits, the Harper government has refused to make meaningful changes in the system that would extend the duration of benefits and improve access to the program, claiming Canada’s finances could ill afford such expenditure.

No wonder. Harper and Flaherty have given it all to the banks!

Finance department data shows that so far, the Harper government has handed the banks $66 billion under the Insured Mortgage Purchasing Program between October 2008 and February 2010. The financial sector continues to lobby intensively for the government to extend the life of the IMPP until March 2011, just to be sure the banks will be “okay”.

March 2010 Socialist Worker 5

STICKING WITH THE UNION

Carolyn Egan

Vale picked the wrong union, the wrong town

W

e left Saturday morning in a light snowfall, heading north from Toronto to Sudbury. A vanload of Steelworkers had decided to extend our solidarity to the striking workers at Vale Inco.

They have been walking the line since last summer, when the multinational demanded significant concessions. They had no alternative but to strike.

The company wants to do away with the defined pension plan for new hires and cut the nickel bonus. This bonus shares the company’s profits with the men and women who dig the nickel out of the ground and process it in the smelters. Mining families had worked for generations in the mines and smelters of Sudbury and have suffered through long strikes before.

One of the most memorable was the strike of 1978 when a group called Wives Supporting the Strikers was formed. The employer then was Inco, and earlier it had tried to divide wives and families from those who struck, and undercut the job action. This time the women were not going to allow that to happen and they became ambassadors for the strike all over the country building a strong solidarity network. In Toronto they led the International Women’s Day march through the streets of the city. In the end they won and it showed the importance of building broad support.

HARPER’S SHAME ON WOMEN’S HEALTH

Picket support

We had taken busloads up to Sudbury earlier in the strike and had done a number of solidarity actions in Toronto as well. Chants such as “Who makes the wealth? We make the wealth! Fair Settlement Now!” rang out on Bay Street, where Vale Inco has its headquarters. They also provided picket line support for the locked out CEP workers at the TD Centre.

That night there was a Solidarity and Fundraising event at Laurentian University. It was an incredibly moving evening with striking workers and their families, students and other trade unionists from the area.

It started off with rank-and-file workers telling their stories of the strike, and then a clip from “A Wives Tale”, which chronicled the story of the Wives Supporting the Strikers in 1978-79. Arja Lane, who was one of the founders of the group, spoke to the circumstances over 30 years ago and the role women took in defeating the company.

She spoke of the importance of unity and not allowing the company to divide them and also recognizing the role and needs of women.

There were also two Steelworkers and a member of the family support group that was formed during Ravenswood lock out in West Virginia in the 1990s who spoke. They are now retired and drove 14 hours to be in Sudbury. They told of how they picketed and rallied for 20 months building support everywhere they could before they finally won. It was very inspiring and was greeted by long applause.

‘One day longer’

Local musicians, both Francophone and Anglophone, entertained the crowd with songs of resistance. Tracy Chapman’s “Revolution” never had more resonance then when sung by a miner’s son.

The shout of “One Day Longer” rang out all night long and the strikers kept saying that Vale Inco picked the wrong union and the wrong town.

These workers have been through tremendous suffering, both themselves and their families, but they are still strong and confident. They do not intend to give in or give up. Thousands of dollars were raised and the rank-and-file Building Power group and Families Supporting the Strike are very active. There are signs all over the city supporting the strike.

On March 6, after the International Women’s Day rally and march in Toronto, an action will be taking place in support of the striking workers of Vale Inco, harkening back to 1978. Two busloads of miners will be coming down to protest at a conference featuring the company. We will be joining them, keeping the momentum going. It is our role to build strong solidarity and make sure that they know they are not alone. Their victory will be our victory.

6 Socialist Worker March 2010

At the World Economic Forum, Harper announced a newfound concern for women and children’s health. Ayesha Adhami exposes Harper’s real record on women’s health.

Valerie Lannon looks at the level of poverty for Aboriginals in Canada under Harper.

Christeen Thornton and John Bell look at the decreasing funding for child care.

T

he closest I can figure is that Conservative spin doctors—struggling with Stephen Harper’s falling popularity since proroguing the Parliament and quashing questions on the Afghanistan mission—decided it was time for a mini-political makeover to put out a kinder, gentler face of the PM and the party to the nation.

In a finger-wagging and hypocritical speech that was high on rhetoric and low on substance, Harper addressed the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, and Canadians in an oped piece for the Toronto Star, by proclaiming this country’s leadership role and commitment to women and children’s rights and health care.

Clearly, control of women’s sexual and reproductive health in developing nations is absolutely part of the antichoice Conservative agenda, much like it was in George W. Bush’s first year of office when he not only stopped US funding of family planning initiatives in developing countries, but banned federal aid to any international family planning programs that offer abortion counselling with other independent funds.

And while the anti-abortion lobby that supports the Harper government is cheering its victory, the real loss is for the women around the globe who will contract AIDS and other STIs, resort to back-alley abortions or be forced to carry through unwanted pregnancies to produce larger and larger families that cannot be sustained.

Safe abortions

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the Conservative government quietly cut funding programs supporting access to safe abortions and contraceptives for women in developing nations.

Manitoba Conservative MP Shelly Glover told CBCNN that there were much more important things that money should be put to such as “… clean water, nutrition, inoculations, trained health care officials…” and stated straightfaced that the cuts had “… nothing to do with abortion.”

She went on to state that “education and prevention were being considered as a means to save women and children’s lives,” but by cutting access to contraceptives and related education, this was proven to be yet another lie.

Omission

‘Control of women’s sexual and reproductive health in developing nations is absolutely part of the anti-choice Conservative agenda’

It was no mistake that when Harper talked about the estimated 500,000 women who die globally during pregnancy and childbirth, he failed to mention that over 10 per cent of them were estimated to be due to unsafe abortions.

By separating “maternal” health from women’s sexual and reproductive health and by deliberately ignoring the tremendous need for health services that educate and empower women, the self-proclaimed champions of the vulnerable are doing nothing more than keeping women of the developing world poor, uninformed and pregnant, with a pat on the head and a “we know what’s best for you.”

It’s no surprise, really.

Harper’s government has been laying the foundation to

enforce its anti-women, antichoice position here in our own country since its installation, and has only been prevented from implementing it due to progressive movements across Canada.

Two years ago in 2008, pro-choice activists, progressive individuals and political allies fought the introduction of Bill C-484 in Parliament— a bill that would criminalize the murder of a pregnant woman by charging the accused with two counts of murder—thus defining the fetus as a “person”.

Had that bill passed, it would have opened the door for a legal battle to overturn abortion rights.

While Conservatives loudly denied allegations of ulterior motives in that fight, a year later, on November 2, 2009, Saskatchewan MP Brad Trost initiated a petition in the House of Commons to defund the International Planned Parenthood Federation which “…promotes the establishment of abortion as an international human right and lobbies aggressively to impose permissive abortion laws on developing nations…” thereby proving that the antichoice agenda of this government stretches far beyond the boundaries of Canada.

It is critical for women’s rights and health supporters in this country to stand in support of our sisters across the globe and send a strong message to the Conservative government in this country.

Women are autonomous persons with the right to determine the course of their lives and the fate of their bodies.

Get out of women’s bedrooms and stay out!

Catastrophic cuts to child care

by CHRISTEEN THORNTON

LESS IS not more in the case of $63.5 million dollars in federal child care funding running out as of April 1. Harper’s Tories and their Ontario Liberal counterparts are trying balance their books on the backs of the most vulnerable.

Instead of investing much-needed funds into child care, the provincial government has chosen to divert funds into full-day, school-operated programs for 4 and 5-year-olds. The McGuinty government has calculated that by doing so, they can reap $119 million worth of savings in public child care costs as the full school day programs are initialized.

January 3, 2010, Crab Park, Vancouver, BC—Over 300 women and a handful of men attended the “How Many is 520?” call out by APTN filmmaker, Tina H., who is making a 30-minute film on the missing and murdered Aboriginal women across Canada. PHOTO: HONEYMAE

First Nations children–third world conditions

by VALERIE LANNON

IN 1989, the United Nations adopted, by consensus, a Convention on the Rights of the Child. Canada ratified this decision in 1991.

But what has this meant for the rights of indigenous children in Canada to have health and well-being at least on par with other children here? And because of the link between the health of infants and their mothers, what has Harper’s government done to support Aboriginal women’s maternal health?

The information presented below is shocking enough regarding all indigenous people in Canada, but is especially appalling for those in Canada’s far north.

And to put these statistics below into context, it is useful to point out that while Canada ranks third out of 177 countries in the Human Development Index, Canadian First Nations communities rank 68th.

In terms of the indicators of health, the numbers speak for themselves.

Though rates of Aboriginal infant mortality are declining, Aboriginal children on reserve are seven times more likely to die in infancy than nonAboriginals. This is on par with Chile. But the rate in Nunavut is more than three times the national average and is on par with Sri Lanka and Fiji.

In 2003, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child noted its concerns for Aboriginal children in Canada, citing the lack

of accessible health care, high rate of fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, and rates of youth suicide and diabetes that are among the highest in the world.

All those who are concerned about health and well-being, particularly those in indigenous communities, point to the pivotal importance of the contributors to health and well-being, often referred to as the determinants of health. These include such factors as income, educational achievement, cultural belonging, food security, environment, housing and access to health services.

Education

In terms of educational achievement, only half of Aboriginal children complete high school. It is estimated there are 22,500 First Nations children in government care today, a higher number than at the height of the residential schools era. At the same time, First Nations child welfare agencies are funded 22 per cent lower than their provincial government counterparts.

Self-government is a key contributor to cultural survival, yet Canada is one of the few countries that has not signed the UN Convention on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

The number of children in First Nations communities living in poverty is one in four, compared to one in nine in the rest of Canadian communities.

The majority of Inuit make $13,600 annually.

A closer look at Inuit maternal and child health

issues shows that, in terms of access to medical care, 46 per cent of Inuit children saw a doctor in 2001 versus 85 per cent of all Canadian children.

There is a decreasing lack of food security because of climate change—as ice floes decrease, animals change their migration patterns or ice breaks up so fast that hunters are stranded and have to be rescued. Younger people wonder if it’s safe to go out hunting.

Hunting and survival on the land is not only essential for putting food on the table, but an essential part of Inuit cultural survival.

Meanwhile, the cost of

buying food in the North is staggering; what costs $260 at a store in Ottawa costs $450 in Nunavut.

So, in view of all these appalling facts, you would think that Harper would be outraged and doing whatever he could to work with indigenous communities to swiftly bring about the changes needed to make a sea change in the health and well-being of indigenous mothers and children.

The only change in the sea we have with Harper is more melting ice.

Inaction

There is no action on climate change, no

Toronto child care centres threatened by budget cuts

by JOHN BELL THE CHILDREN’S services department at Toronto City Hall has recommended cutting a rent-control mechanism aimed at keeping child care facilities affordable.

The 12-year old program has targeted child care housed in public school buildings. And it has indirectly helped keep rent increases at other locations down too. The budget proposal, which has yet to go before Toronto City Council, would save an estimated $3.2 million dollars by 2011.

Child care advocates warn that already cash-strapped school boards, mandated by the

provincial government to balance their budgets, will jack up child care rent and download the problem on parents.

School-based child care rates are already sky high.

Rates begin at about $60 per day per child. If the rent-control provision is cut, rates will go up $2 per day, and possibly more.

One Toronto mother of twin boys, paying $57 a week for each of them to attend school-based child care, said it was like “paying another mortgage.”

She and her husband earn too much to qualify for subsidies, but three quarters of her wages go to daycare.

“We’re basically living month to month.”

meaningful action on settling treaties or other land use decisions that would provide some form of economic security, no place in the “stimulus” package that would have enabled indigenous communities to get a leg up on health services, proper housing, cultural retention programs and other services to support families.

All of us, indigenous and non-indigenous, need to take our distress and anger over this unjust situation into actions of solidarity and action that will force the hypocritical hands of Harper and his corporate buddies.

Sign onto the “I am a Witness” campaign (www. fncfcs.com) to support the complaint filed in 2007 by the Assembly of First Natios and the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada with the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal.

The complaint points out the discriminatory treatment of First Nations children caused by the government’s inequitable funding of child and family services on reserve.

Sources: Unicef, Aboriginal Children’s health: Leaving no child behind (Canadian Supplement to “The State of the World’s Children 2009”) Pathways to Health and Healing, 2nd Report on the Health and Well-being of Aboriginal People in British Columbia, Provincial Health Officer’s Annual Report 2007 Mapping the Healing Journey: The final report of a First Nation Research Project on Healing in Canadian Aboriginal Communities, 2002 Wen:De We are coming to the light of day and other research by the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada

Pleas from the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care to advance the funds and invest them instead into much needed child care for low-income families are going unheard.

More sobering are the plans to amend the Day Nurseries Act to compensate for the projected 1,800 child care related job losses, with aims to save the province some funding.

Currently, child care facilities are required to have one caregiver per every three infants, and this will be changed to one per every four. This means that there will be less time focused on one child at a time; and their caregivers, who are already overworked and underpaid, will become even more so.

Waiting list

To date, there are approximately 16,000 children waiting to receive subsidies in and around the Greater Toronto Area.

As the funding runs out, we will see 7,600 spaces eliminated, leaving a total of 23,600 children and their families without adequate child care.

This will result in 3,600 or so parents being forced to leave the workforce as there are few viable, affordable child care alternatives.

This catastrophic cut to child care is one more example of everyday families carrying the brunt of a recession not caused by them.

March 2010 Socialist Worker 7

OPINION FREE SPEECH

Israeli apartheid: what else would you call it?

A TORY resolution condemning Israeli Apartheid Week, received unanimous support from the 30 members of the Ontario legislature who showed up for work on February 25. Shamefully, one of those who voted for this attack on Palestinian solidarity was Toronto NDP MPP Cheri DiNovo.

In the context of the concentrated attack on Palestinian solidarity coming from all levels of government, DiNovo’s backing of this reactionary motion is very damaging.

DiNovo said that the word “apartheid” is “inflammatory” and “used inappropriately in the case of Israel.”

Apartheid, according to a widely available definition, is “the policy of racial separation used in South Africa from 1948 to 1990” and “by extension, any similar policy of racial separation”.

If you are Palestinian and your parents were expelled from their homes in 1948—you cannot go home, take up residence in Palestine, and vote as a full citizen.

But if you are defined as “Jewish” by the Israeli state and live outside Israel, you have the right to travel to Palestine and become a full citizen of the state of Israel.

Israel occupies the West Bank and Gaza. The latter is an open-air prison—its residents hemmed in on three sides by one of the world’s most powerful military machines.

The West Bank is riddled with illegal Israeli settlements, crisscrossed with roads, which can be used by Israeli nationals, but not by the Palestinian majority on the West Bank. On the roads Palestinians can use, there are repeated and humiliating checkpoints, and the “separateness” of the Israeli nationals from the Palestinians is being completed by the construction of a hideous wall that the United Nations agrees is illegal.

ONDP leader Andrea Horwath—in distancing herself from the Ontario attack on IAW (but staying silent on DiNovo’s role)—said that New Democrats “believe in finding avenues towards a peaceful solution in the Middle East.”

The vote in the Ontario legislature has triggered a carnival of reaction. Citing the fact that “the Government of Ontario and the opposition parties have unanimously adopted a resolution condemning ‘Israeli Apartheid Week,’” the Toronto District School Board jumped on the bandwagon to do the same. Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff added his name to the assault on March 1, with a press release “condemning Israeli Apartheid Week.”

Smiling in the background to this are the federal Tories who have been stoking anti-Palestinian politics for years. They intend to add their voice to the hysteria when Tory MP Tim Uppal introduces an attack on Israeli Apartheid Week in the House of Commons.

New Democrats, federally and provincially, have a responsibility to openly denounce all these attacks on Palestinian solidarity, and to openly challenge DiNovo’s position. Silence and sitting on the fence simply feeds the reactionary witch-hunt.

HUMAN RIGHTS

Harper’s Tories trample Rights and Democracy SINCE ITS inception in 1988, the government-funded organization Rights and Democracy has hardly earned a reputation for radicalism. Rather, along with CIDA, it reflected the “kinder, gentler” side of Canadian foreign policy.

But there is nothing kind or gentle about Stephen Harper’s Tory government. Their record on human rights is woeful, epitomized by their opposition to an almost unanimous UN resolution to respect rights of aboriginal peoples. As for democracy, proroguing parliament twice in one year speaks for itself.

Nothing exposes the reactionary spirit of the Harper regime more than their treatment of Rights and Democracy.

In the past R&D had offered cautious support for only the most non-threatening human rights groups in Palestine, in line with long standing foreign policy. That was too much for Harper’s gang. They began to parachute their own appointees to R&D’s board, creating so much tension and strife at the organization that president Rémy Beauregard died of a heart attack after a meeting.

More Tory appointments followed, a rogues gallery of right-wing fundamentalists and pro-Zionist sycophants: David Matas, legal counsel for B’Nai Brith; Michael van Pelt, head of a Christian think-tank called Cardus who once declared, “Canada’s new debate and that of the world will be one of faith and belief. It will be one of a religious character”; Jacques Gauthier, who wrote a doctoral thesis arguing that Jerusalem belonged exclusively to Israeli Jews; right-wing academic Aurel Braun.

Following Beauregard’s death, R&D staffers unanimously demanded the firing of Harper’s plants.

Since then a witch-hunt has been conducted to drive out or silence anyone who dared to speak out.

Now comes the final straw: the latest Harper appointment to R&D is Gérard Latulippe. A failed Canadian Alliance candidate from Quebec, Latulippe has been an outspoken anti-Muslim bigot, warning that allowing Muslim immigrants in would lead to “home grown terrorism”.

So we are left with a federally funded organization called Rights and Democracy led by bigots and people contemptuous of any meaningful democracy–in other words, a true mirror of Harper’s government.

8 Socialist Worker March 2010

Strategy, tactics and debates Derrick O’Keefe critiques diversity of tactics during the Vancouver Olympics AFTER YEARS of organizing work, the protest movement around the Vancouver Winter Olympics can proudly claim a number of important victories. A vibrant demonstration of thousands met the corporate spectacle head-on, marching to within metres of the Opening Ceremonies at BC Place on February 12.

The “Welcoming Committee” that organized this mass protest was representative of the range of groups challenging the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the Vancouver Games conveners (VANOC). The achievements of this movement include: pushing back hard against attempts to restrict free assembly and speech, exposing the “greenwashing” of the Games, and raising awareness of homelessness and indigenous rights issues. The IOC brand was successfully dented and the longer-term impact of the Games illuminated.

However, there were also missed opportunities, and some acrimonious debate in the activist community. On February 13, a protest action billed as a Heart Attack (“to clog the arteries of capitalism”) marched through Vancouver’s downtown core. In a crowd of 200 or 300, dozens employed the Black Bloc tactic, and a number of people engaged in property destruction.

The windows of TD Bank and the Hudson’s Bay Company were smashed, newspaper boxes were overturned and private vehicles vandalized. Confrontations with the police and angry members of the general public ensued.

Criticism

The Olympic Resistance Network and some other activists declared this action a success, while many others of us questioned its effectiveness. Some initially told us that to raise concerns about the action was to “break solidarity”. This is a major tenet of the notion of “respect for diversity of tactics”, wherein no tactics are ruled out ahead of time and criticism remains internal. In practice, this can mean suppression of open debate in the activist community, especially since, in this case, the groups that had signed on to “diversity of tactics” represented only a part of those groups organizing around the Games.

Writing in Rabble.ca, Alex Hundert claims that all participants in the “Heart

Attack” knew what was going to happen, despite the fact that uncertainty is a central tenet of diversity of tactics: “Anyone who says that they didn’t know what was going to happen is lying. There were 200 people in black with masks on, and ‘Riot 2010’ has been a rallying call for the movement for more than two years now. Everyone knew what was going to happen, and they all marched anyway.”

This statement is provably false.

Many of those who went along on the Heart Attack did not know what was going to take place—and the actions did not even communicate clearly with some of them. One activist, a woman of colour who grew up under a military dictatorship, explained: “Some of those who engaged in property destruction appeared not to have solidarity with other protesters, displaying a hostile attitude towards some other participants and even independent media members, as well as the general public. This looked like kids playing at street fighting and mocks the struggles of Third World people who have at times had to use violent tactics to liberate themselves.”

Eric Doherty, a long-time environmental activist in Vancouver, put it this way: “I was at the Heart Attack, and I expected strategic and targeted property destruction. I worried that there might be ‘trashing’ at random; unfortunately that is a lot of what happened. Some of it just looked dumb, like the plastic garbage bin dumped out on the quiet side road—littering does not block traffic… This is not a condemnation of the black block tactic. It is a critique of what was done by people in black on one particular day.”

Movement building

And on this basis, a critique of particular actions can still be done in the framework of movement building and solidarity. The same vigorous critique needs to be applied to all tactics and to all sectors of the progressive movements, from electoral politics, to NGOs and the labour movement.

No matter the radical and no doubt commendable motivations of many of those who used the Black Bloc tactic, and of those who engaged in property destruction at the Vancouver action, the result was a big

setback for the broad movement. In the rabble article, Hundert asserts, “The Black Bloc is a wrecking ball tactic that makes space for more mainstream or creative tactics.”

But part of making space involves the receptiveness of the public to your overall message. The action failed to communicate clearly with that public, whose reaction was overwhelmingly one of disgust, confusion or even fear.

This was evident from hundreds of letters to the editor, and hundreds and thousands of conversations with ordinary people, even those predisposed to be critical of the Games.

The action didn’t create political space; it shut it down. And it served up a PR coup for the Vancouver Police and the Olympic organizers. No doubt the corporate media in part whipped this up, but that was an entirely predictable outcome. As author and Olympics critic Chris Shaw put it, it was VANOC’s “wet dream” because it helped justify the $1 billion dollar security budget.

There are times and places where property destruction, sabotage and even armed resistance are necessary and effective. But the use of any tactic has to flow from a coherent strategy, and must be part of an effort to mobilize as broad a movement as possible.

Che Guevara wrote that a revolutionary movement must “exhaust the legal means” before taking up arms. This too was all about communicating with the people you are trying to win over. If the tactic you employ is not understandable to them, it’s counter-productive.

“Respect for diversity of tactics”, it must be frankly put, has become something of a shibboleth in parts of the Left today. A healthy Left shouldn’t let any shibboleth go unquestioned. In Vancouver, it was invoked to tell some of us to shut-up. We didn’t. On this basis, I hope that we can count the debate around diversity of tactics as one positive outcome of the events in Vancouver.

With the G8/G20 looming and authorities promising to impose a “fortress Toronto”, we all need to be able to debate fully and frankly, and not be afraid, if necessary, to democratically decide to exclude certain tactics.

Derrick O’Keefe is a Vancouver-based writer, activist and a member of StopWar.ca, one of the groups that organized protests related to the 2010 Winter Games.

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LEFT JAB

REVIEWS

John Bell Selma to Montgomery march onlookers.

PHOTO: NATIONAL ARCHIVES

Film beautifully depicts civil rights movement of the 1960s through the music of the time Film H Soundtrack for a Revolution H Written and directed by Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman H Reviewed by Jesse McLaren

BY COMBINING archival footage, interviews with participants and music performances by contemporary artists, Soundtrack for a Revolution provides a brief experience of the inspiring civil rights movement—and has well earned its Oscar nomination.

The movie bills itself as “the music behind the civil rights movement” and features performances of freedom songs by famous artists—such as John Legend, Wyclef Jean, Joss Stone and the Roots.

These performances might provide the initial attraction, but the true star of the film is shown in the footage and interviews between performances: a mass movement of ordinary people who fought long and hard for civil rights.

The film provides a brief overview of major events of the movement— the Montgomery bus boycott, lunch counter sit-ins, Freedom Rides, the March on Washington, the march from Selma to Montgomery, and the murder of Martin Luther King.

Restored archival footage shows what brutal obstacles people had to

overcome—with scenes of attack dogs, billy clubs, fire hoses, and fire bombings, as well as a long and moving tribute to non-violent protesters killed in a myriad of painful ways.

This backdrop reinforces the courage and inspiration of those who fought for civil rights, and the film depicts the youth and breadth of this movement.

There is footage of King and interviews with other known figures like Harry Belafonte and Congressman John Lewis.

And there are interviews with many more unknowns, including mug shots of countless people—black and white— who went to jail for justice. Participants recall in vivid detail—half a century later—the development of the movement, the organizing challenges, and the combination of fear and determination that gripped them.

‘We shall overcome’

This context helps explain the significance and radicalism of people standing shoulder-to-shoulder, singing “we shall not be moved” and “we shall overcome”. Borrowed from the slave chant, the labour movement, and the black

church, freedom songs emerged organically from the movement, and provided the armour for non-violent tactics—uniting and giving confidence to a mass movement in the face of state violence.

It’s clear seeing Lyndon Johnson finally passing the Civil Rights Act that this legislation was not granted from above but won from below, and that its implementation required further struggle.

Being less than 90 minutes, the film does not have time to deal with the evolution of the movement—of King’s developing views against war and economic injustice, and the rise of black power—and instead jumps ahead to Obama’s inauguration.

This highlights the victory of the civil rights movement—which began with blacks risking their lives registering to vote, and ended with Americans electing a black man president—and also the ongoing need to fight against what King described as the “triple evils” of poverty, racism, and war. And for this fight, Soundtrack for a Revolution inspires us to link arms and sing, “We shall overcome”.

Lakehead’ers of the world, unite Video H My home town H Song by Jordan Burnell H Video by Matt Popowich H Reviewed by Valerie Lannon HAVING READ Bradley Hughes’ article in the last SW regarding a novel about his Vancouver neighbourhood, I am inspired to share with SW readers a new, catchy song and short video about my home town of Thunder Bay, Ontario.

On the one hand, the film suffers from the one-dimensional characterization of Thunder Bay residents as exclusively young, white, male, beer-swilling hockey players, sexual orientation unknown.

On the other hand, Thunder Bay, being the quintessential working class city that it is, means that the songwriter Jordan Burnell can’t avoid the portrayal of the gritty reality faced by many: “When people rely on paper mills to pay their bills Work their whole life And their jobs aren’t stable still.

I know it isn’t fair

But start givin’ cheers ‘Cause we still livin’ here” These lyrics are complimented by the great choice of visual shots of really popular places, none of them glamorous, and all of them refreshingly real.

He refers to “Across the bridge we got a reservation” and much of the singer’s walk outside is on the highway by Mount McKay, located on traditional territory of the Fort William First Nation.

Another shot is of the extremely popular Hoito restaurant (I have the both the souvenir mug and t-shirt).

Erected in 1910, the building that houses the restaurant is known as the Finnish Labour Temple. The structure originally accommodated Finnish men who came into town from the nearby logging camps, many of whom were members of the One Big Union and

then the Industrial Worker’s of the World (the IWW, or Wobblies as they were popularly known).

Like every other resource town in this country, Thunder Bay has undergone tremendous job losses in the last 30 years. Thousands of well-paying, unionized jobs in paper mills, huge grain elevators (that have virtually all been ripped down), shipping on the Great Lakes, and railways have all disappeared.

This is poignantly captured in one of the closing scenes, which shows a jet plane taking off, viewed from the perspective of someone looking from behind barbed wire; a fitting image in these times of budget attacks and the demonizing of unionized workers. It’s worth a long look, even if you’ve never been that far north.

To watch the video, visit www.tinyurl.com/ygy2597.

No nukes is good nukes OKAY, SO that headline isn’t funny. There’s nothing funny about nuclear power.

How’s this for not-funny: in November 2009, Canada experienced its worst ever nuclear accident when over 200 workers at Bruce Nuclear were exposed to potentially fatal alpha radiation during a retrofit of one of the reactors. Almost as un-amusing is the fact that the event was covered up for months, finally being reported on February 16.

The story broke in the midst of the Olympic hoopla, guaranteeing that almost no one noticed. The Globe and Mail, which purports to be Canada’s newspaper of record, ran the story on page 16.

There is absolutely nothing funny in the safety record at the Bruce Nuclear power station on the shores of Lake Huron. Bruce Nuclear is the largest nuclear power plant in North America.

The aging CANDU reactors there are a “private-public partnership”: owned by Ontario Power Generation, but run by Bruce Power.

Bruce Power in turn is a consortium of Cameco (a mining corporation primarily involved in uranium, but with investments as far away as Kazakhstan), TransCanada Corporation (a gas pipeline giant) and BCP Generation Infrastructure Trust (an arm of the huge OMERS investment fund).

Sadly, a five per cent stake in ownership is split between the Power Workers Union and the Society of Energy Professionals. This explains why the Power Workers routinely purchase advertising extolling the virtues of nuclear power.

When the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) finally released the news about the Bruce Nuclear accident, it described the potentially deadly event in befuddling language: “Preliminary dose calculations were conservatively interpreted as a potential indication that an action level for inhalation of airborne radioactivity may have been exceeded.”

Translation: over 200 Canadian workers are likely dead men walking.

In fact, the CNSC has a long history of being less concerned about potential safety hazards to workers and the public than it is with protecting the reputation of the nuclear industry.

Refurbishment

The accident occurred in the midst of a massive refurbishment of the A and B reactors, which had long ago outlived their best-before date. The price tag of this massive construction project, described as one of the biggest projects in Canada outside of the tar sands, is $5.25 billion and counting. It is currently two years behind schedule.

The workers who were exposed to the deadly radiation were trying to restart a reactor that has been in mothballs since 1997.

John Peevers, a spokesperson for Bruce Power, was quick to point out that the damage that released the radiation occurred back in the day when the plant was still a public utility. Hey, don’t blame privatization for this one, seems to be the subtext.

I’ll toss Mr. Peevers a bone on that one: publicly owned

nuclear power is as stupid, expensive and dangerous as privately owned nuclear power.

It would be bad enough if this were an isolated incident in the nuclear industry or even at Bruce Nuclear. It isn’t.

Back in June 2009, the Toronto Star featured this reassuring headline: “Bruce nuclear plant unsafe, workers say”.

A crane load of massive steel girders was dropped 20 metres, narrowly missing a group of workers. They were working on the same outdated CANDU reactor. A crane operator had earlier noted a problem with the crane in his safety log, but no follow up and management kept the crane in operation. Did I mention that the job was already two years behind schedule?

Once again the accident story only surfaced well over a month after it happened.

And the workers who leaked the story spoke under conditions of anonymity.

One told the Star: “Nobody has ever seen anything like this and I’ve been in the trade 20 years. It’s a systemic failure, a complete breakdown of procedural barriers.”

Another worker said: “The place is old. Things are falling apart. It does jeopardize safety at times. In a nuclear plant, it’s a huge thing.”

Unsafe, massively expensive, inefficient, and we haven’t got down to the issue of nuclear waste disposal. Nuclear power: what’s not to like?

Nuke renaissance

All this would be bad enough if nuclear power was some old, obsolete relic of the past that was being phased out. Sadly, we are entering a “nuclear renaissance” that has uranium companies, and nuclear industry insiders dancing with joy. The dancers include the federal government and provincial regimes from across the country: billions of our tax dollars have been sunk in exploiting this deadly commodity.

It is bad (and misguided) enough when people tout nuclear as a “clean” alternative to fossil fuels. Nuclear power, along with the non-existent “clean coal” is the backbone of Barack Obama’s plans to address climate change.

Naturally Stephen Harper is a fan.

It is worse when nuclear energy is built to power the greater exploitation of hard to develop fossil fuel reserves like the Alberta tar sands.

The Alberta government has tossed out a moratorium on nuclear power and says it will consider such projects on a case-by-case basis.

One company has proposed building and operating a nuclear power plant in the Peace River area of Alberta.

The stated price tag is $6.2 billion, but in an industry legendary for cost over-runs, that amount will soar higher.

The proposed nuke will be used to power expanding tar sand extraction and processing.

The very idea of spending billions on nuclear power, billions that would largely come from taxpayer subsidies, to gouge out more synthetic crude is jaw-dropping. This is gross stupidity topped-off with sheer madness.

The corporation behind the proposal is Bruce Power.

March 2010 Socialist Worker 9

WHERE WE STAND

international socialist events

The dead-end of capitalism

TORONTO

The capitalist system is based on violence, oppression and brutal exploitation. It creates hunger beside plenty. It kills the earth itself with pollution and unsustainable extraction of natural resources. Capitalism leads to imperialism and war. Saving ourselves and the planet depends on finding an alternative.

Harper’s Canada: Women and children first?

Tues, March 9, 7pm Speakers: Andrea Calver, Rhonda Roffey & Michelle Robidoux Bahen Centre 40 St. George Sreet Info: 414-972-6391

Socialism and workers’ power

Any alternative to capitalism must involve replacing the system from the bottom up through radical collective action. Central to that struggle is the workplace, where capitalism reaps its profits off our backs.

Capitalist monopolies control the earth’s resources, but workers everywhere actually create the wealth. A new socialist society can only be constructed when workers collectively seize control of that wealth and plan its production and distribution to satisfy human needs, not corporate profits—to respect the environment, not pollute and destroy it.

Why we defend a woman’s right to choose Wed, March 10, 2pm Speaker: Pam Johnson 40 St. George St Room 4010

What do we mean by class?

Wed, March 17, 2pm Speaker: Jonathon Hodge 40 St. George St Room 4010

Reform and revolution

Every day, there are battles between exploited and exploiter, oppressor and oppressed, to reform the system—to improve living conditions. These struggles are crucial in the fight for a new world. To further these struggles, we work within the trade unions and orient to building a rank and file movement that strengthens workers’ unity and solidarity.

But the fight for reforms will not, in itself, bring about fundamental social change. The present system cannot be fixed or reformed as NDP and many trade union leaders say. It has to be overthrown. That will require the mass action of workers themselves.

Elections and democracy

Elections can be an opportunity to give voice to the struggle for social change. But under capitalism, they can’t change the system. The structures of the present parliament, army, police and judiciary developed under capitalism and are designed to protect the ruling class against the workers. These structures cannot be simply taken over and used by the working class. The working class needs real democracy, and that requires an entirely different kind of state—a workers’ state based upon councils of workers’ delegates.

Internationalism

The struggle for socialism is part of a worldwide struggle. We campaign for solidarity with workers in other countries. We oppose everything which turns workers from one country against those from other countries.

We support all genuine national liberation movements.

The 1917 revolution in Russia was an inspiration for the oppressed everywhere. But it was defeated when workers’ revolutions elsewhere were defeated. A Stalinist counterrevolution which killed millions created a new form of capitalist exploitation based on state ownership and control. In Eastern Europe, China and other countries a similar system was later established by Stalinist, not socialist parties. We support the struggle of workers in these countries against both private and state capitalism.

Canada, Quebec, Aboriginal Peoples

Canada is not a “colony” of the United States, but an imperialist country in its own right that participates in the exploitation of much of the world. The Canadian state was founded through the repression of the Aboriginal peoples and the people of Quebec.

We support the struggles for self-determination of Quebec and Aboriginal peoples up to and including the right to independence.

Socialists in Quebec, and in all oppressed nations, work towards giving the struggle against national oppression an internationalist and working class content.

Oppression

Within capitalist society different groups suffer from specific forms of oppression. Attacks on oppressed groups are used to divide workers and weaken solidarity. We oppose racism and imperialism. We oppose all immigration controls. We support the right of people of colour and other oppressed groups to organize in their own defence. We are for real social, economic and political equality for women.

We are for an end to all forms of discrimination and homophobia against lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgendered people. We oppose discrimination on the basis of religion, ability and age.

The Revolutionary Party

To achieve socialism the leading activists in the working class have to be organized into a revolutionary socialist party. The party must be a party of action, and it must be democratic. We are an organization of activists committed to helping in the construction of such a party through ongoing activity in the mass organizations of the working class and in the daily struggles of workers and the oppressed.

If these ideas make sense to you, help us in this project, and join the International Socialists.

10 Socialist Worker March 2010

Crisis, recession & resistance: An introduction to Marxist economics Wed, March 24, 2pm Speaker: Joe Kelly 40 St. George St Room 4010

Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg, 1910

INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY

Women for liberation, women against war

OTTAWA

From Vietnam to Palestine: Students & free speech

Tues, March 16 Speaker: Giles Hodge Cafe Alternatif (basement of Simard Hall University of Ottawa info: gosocialists@yahoo.ca

VANCOUVER

by ABBIE BAKAN NEXT YEAR will be the 100th anniversary of the first International Women’s Day (IWD), now widely celebrated on March 8 in countries around the world.

Launched first by socialist workingwomen, it wasn’t until December 1977 that IWD was able to force itself into the mainstream. That was the year the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution proclaiming a global day for Women’s Rights and International Peace, and international attention to March 8 events has continued since.

But an examination of IWD’s origins shows that its founders knew that global peace would be won, not by resolutions from an international body, but by mass movements on the streets and in the workplaces. In the years following the launch of IWD, these kinds of movements challenged imperialist war and shook the system to its roots.

A striking example of this is the epochal event of the Russian revolution of 1917—which began on International Women’s Day. It was during World War I, and food was in short supply. Women organized bread riots in the city of Petrograd. On International Women’s Day, by the old calendar February 17, 1917, women textile workers decided to celebrate their day by striking in demand for bread, and calling on all workers to strike in solidarity.

The socialist men of all parties thought this was too radical.

But thousands of factory workers, mostly men, followed the women strikers and came out on sympathy strike. Women, coming from their homes, joined them. They were eventually joined, at first by all counts in total surprise, by the members of the left parties, including the Bolshevik socialist party.

As the struggle spread, so did solidarity among women and men workers. They faced repression from the Tsarist state, and there were arguments about how to move forward in a united way. In this process, the most advanced male workers came over to

the defense of the women workers.

But women were in the lead. Here is an example from Chanie Rosenberg’s Women and Perestroika, about how the women workers “negotiated” for their rights: “The women strikers’ favourite method was carting the boss out in a wheelbarrow, a magnificent symbolic gesture—the humiliation of the humiliators. For example, the director of the Vyborg Spinning Mill tried to explain to a general meeting of workers why he was unable to consider their demand for a wage increase. The women unceremoniously seized him, shoved him in a wheelbarrow and carted him to the canal where, poised perilously on the edge of the bank, he shakily signed a piece of paper agreeing to an increase.”

Clara Zetkin

Despite the gains of the Russian Revolution, including the massive victory in ending the barbarism of World War I, the revolutionary wave was halted and the 1920s saw a holding period for international socialism.

One of the most significant socialist leaders of this time was the German revolutionary, Clara Zetkin, who had also been a leader of the women workers’ movement.

Clara Zetkin was a close friend and ally of Rosa Luxemburg, the PolishGerman theoretician and leader of the international socialist movement.

Rosa Luxemburg was murdered

‘In this period, women were almost completely excluded from political life. Zetkin and Luxemburg were the first women to fight their way into the central leadership of socialist parties’

in 1919, a victim of counter-revolution in Germany. This was a tremendous loss, and Zetkin was alone as a woman leader to carry on the movement.

Zetkin was a leading Marxist of her generation, and an active participant in the Fourth Congress of the Comintern in 1922—the proceedings of which will be published in English for the first time this year by Brill Press, translated and edited by John Riddell.

What should democracy look like?

Barriers

TORONTO

As an exceptional woman leader in the international socialist movement, Zetkin faced numerous barriers. As John Riddell summarizes in his work on Zetkin (ISR, Nov/Dec 2009): “When the Communist International (Comintern) adopted the united front policy, Zetkin, at 64, was more than a dozen years older than any other of its main leaders. She had joined the German Social Democratic party in its early, heroic days. A friend of Engels, she later formed a close partnership with Rosa Luxemburg to defend this party’s revolutionary heritage and oppose its right-wing current, which sought to make peace with Germany’s capitalist state. In this period, women were almost completely excluded from political life. Zetkin and Luxemburg were the first women to fight their way into the central leadership of socialist parties.”

Zetkin’s approach to building the international women’s movement was largely framed by her development of the tactic of the united front, a method she learned and helped to establish from the experience of the workers’ resistance in the Stuttgart district of Germany.

Clara Zetkin was the key figure in the establishment of IWD as an international workingwomen’s day of struggle and celebration.

While much has changed since the early 20th century, imperialism, war and women’s oppression is remarkably tenacious. The contributions of the early women’s socialist women’s movement continue to be relevant today.

OPEN SATURDAYS, 12-3pm

RESISTANCE PRESS BOOK ROOM

427 Bloor Street West, suite 202, Toronto | 416.972.6391

Wed, March 31, 5pm Speaker: Giles Hodge Langara College Room A218

Branch meetings

Wednesdays, 4:30pm Langara College Info: 604-765-2580

peace & justice events IWD benefit concert for Toronto Women’s Bookstore Mon, March 8, 7:30pm Performers: Evalyn Parry; Raging Asian Women; Belladonna; George Hewison; Sara Marlowe & the Program Tranzac Club 292 Brunswick Ave

Wargasm: A comedy show - A fundraiser for the Toronto Coalition to Stop the War Mon, March 8, 8pm Comedy Bar 945 Bloor St W Info: www.nowar.ca

Gaza Freedom March: Reportback from Cairo

Fri, March 12, 7pm Speaker: Sarah Mahmoud Bloor Street United Church 300 Bloor St W Info: events@gazafreedom march.ca

Iraq War resisters in Canada: Why this fight matters

Fri, March 19, 6:30pm United Steelworkers Hall 25 Cecil St Suggested donation: $20 Info: www.resisters.ca

March & rally for Grassy Narrows

Wed, April 7, 12pm Grange Park (Beverley St south of Dundas)

You can find the I.S. in: Toronto, Ottawa, Gatineau, Vancouver, Victoria, Montreal, London, St. Catharines, Mississauga, Scarborough, Halifax, Belleville & Kingston e: iscanada@on.aibn.com t: 416.972.6391 w: www.socialist.ca For more event listings, visit www.socialist.ca.

reports@socialist.ca COLLEGE TEACHERS VOTE

SOLIDARITY AGAINST VALE INCO’S SCAB LABOUR

by LAURA MURRAY & PAM JOHNSON

AS VALE INCO turns to scab labour in an attempt to break the eight-month strike, workers are fighting back with solidarity.

ON FEBRUARY 10, college teachers in Ontario voted by a thin majority in favour of a concessions contract put forward by the colleges, wiping out 25 years of gains on job security and workload.

On the table during this round of negotiations were recommendations by an independent Workload Task Force, agreed to by both the college and the union, which would put a cap on class size and give teachers more time with students.

But after months of stalling at the bargaining table, the colleges refused to honour the recommendations and instead imposed a contract that attacked decades of gains for teachers and quality education for students.

The union was forced to seek a strike mandate knowing support for a strike at this time would not be strong, and only 57 per cent of faculty voted for the mandate. The colleges still refused to bargain in good faith, so the union called for arbitration.

The colleges again refused and forced teachers to vote on a nearly identical contract.

Continual pressure on the teachers—including college claims that teachers were forcing a strike—eroded the support for the union’s position. The final vote ended with 51.25 per cent voting in favour of accepting the college’s concessions contract that had previously been rejected.

The colleges used the cover of the economic crisis as the reason for their harsh behavior, claiming in these tough economic times everybody has to be willing to make sacrifices. Yet college management approved raises for themselves of 5 per cent annually, three times what they offered teachers.

The idea that people deserve a decent job, with a decent wage and benefits is under attack. Through cutthroat negotiating and media distortion, the colleges were able to force teachers to accept an appalling contract.

But, as Toronto city workers showed last summer, it does not have to be this way. Those workers stood their ground and pushed back attacks.

COLONEL ANN WRIGHT

by JESSE McLAREN US COLONEL Ann Wright, who quit over the Iraq War and has become an outspoken peace activist, spoke in Toronto on March 2 to almost 100 people.

The Bush administration put Wright on a FBI watch list for protesting the Iraq War, and Harper made Canada the only country in the world to obey the list and ban listed individuals. But this time she made it across the border, and spoke out against wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Gaza.

Along with Wright, Council of Canadian organizer Stewart Threw spoke about increasing border restrictions by the Canadian government.

And US Iraq War resister Patrick Hart spoke about why he left the war, and the importance of the upcoming war resister Bill C-440.

More than 3,000 Steelworkers in Sudbury have been on strike against mining giant Vale Inco since July 13 to protect pensions, wages and job security. In an

attempt to break the strike, Vale is pitting worker against worker.

Locally, Vale is using scab labour. Vale has then shipped scab-produced “matte” (processed nickel concentrate) to its nickel refinery in Swansea, Wales.

But international solidarity is building against these

COMMENT

tactics.

The United Steelworkers are part of the international union Workers Uniting. Its British affiliate is the Unite union, which has members at the Swansea plant. Unite has called for solidarity with Vale Inco workers, calling on workers to refuse to handle scab nickel.

RALLY CHALLENGES RBC’S SUPPORT OF THE TAR SANDS

by PETER HOGARTH ON MARCH 4, nearly two hundred people rallied outside the Royal Bank of Canada’s (RBC) annual general shareholder meeting calling on RBC to stop financing oil extraction from the Alberta Tar Sands.

Since 2007, RBC has furnished more than US $16.7 billion in loans to companies operating in the tar-sands.

RBC is the largest financer of the environmentally disastrous project, greater than any other bank.

First Nation’s Chiefs and community representatives from four different Nations were inside, urging the shareholders to divest and recognize the right to free, prior, and informed consent for Indigenous communities; citing the incredible damage to health and Indigenous rights

caused by the “most destructive project on Earth.”

Outside, school children, bank customers, First Nations community representatives and environmental activists voiced opposition to the continued funding of the toxic project.

The rally was a show of grassroots opposition and ups the pressure on RBC, who spent half their meeting addressing the issue.

NAOMI KLEIN ON ‘CLIMATE DEBT’

by JOHN BELL FEBRUARY 25—Speaking before a standing room only crowd in Toronto, writer and activist Naomi Klein inaugurated an annual lecture series commemorating NDP stalwart David Lewis with a call for global climate justice.

The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives organized the talk, which focused on climate change and climate debt. Klein began by defin-

CF61 FIGHTBACK

by STEVE CRAIG The CF61 (61 Cadillac Fairview workers lockedout and terminated from their jobs at TD Centre last summer) have continued their presence at the TD Centre picket line despite the removal of their winter shelter.

This cruel and calculated complaint by Cadillac Fairview to the city was obviously timed to coincide with the beginning of winter and have maximum impact upon the picketing. Still, after nine months, the picket line continues every day from 6am to 11am.

The workers who had previously manned the picket line 24/7 in the off hours have been redeployed. This group has travelled across Ontario to spread the message of the mistreatment of the TD Centre workers to other CF shopping malls— to raise awareness about the injustice served out to the long term, loyal and dedicated workers.

The shopkeepers are angry and embarrassed about the activities of their landlord and mall managers are overwhelmed with the extra work they have to do trying to collect the leaflets and distance themselves from the misconduct that has occurred at the TD Centre.

The public exposure of these wrongdoings at the upcoming Ontario Labour Relations Board hearings is of great concern to the stakeholders of this company. At this point the workers are looking forward to a full and fair examination of the CF bargaining tactics by the labour board.

ing the term: “Climate debt is the idea that poor countries are owed various types of reparations by rich countries for the climate crisis.”

She argued that the dangerous concentration of carbon in the atmosphere, the source of our climate crisis, has been caused by the industrialized nations of the global north.

Meanwhile the sharpest effects—extreme weather events, shrinking glaciers, droughts and declining food production—are felt in the poorer nations of the global south.

Klein argued for the rights of the earth, of nature, to re-

create itself; and she called on us to see a clean atmosphere as a common and essential resource to which all humanity has a rightful and equal share.

“Using the atmosphere as a sink to absorb our emissions benefits countries, it has allowed us to build our profitable industrial economies over the years. By using so much more than our share, we have robbed billions of people of their rightful share,” she said.

Her powerful argument for international climate justice was streamed live on Rabble.ca, and can be viewed in its entirety on YouTube.

REMEMBRANCE

Rally for missing Aboriginal women

by AMELIA MURPHY-BEAUDOIN

FEBRUARY 14 was the annual rally and march for Missing and Murdered Aboriginal women.

There were events in Toronto, Vancouver, Victoria, Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton and London.

People came together to honour the lives of the 520 Aboriginal women who have been murdered or gone missing in the past 30 years, and to demonstrate the complicity of the state and its institutions in the ongoing genocide of Indigenous peoples.

In Vancouver, in the midst of the Olympics, security officials op-

posed holding the march.

Organizers of the march and rally told police that they would push through whether police liked it or not, and thousands of people attended, demonstrating that Canadians will not allow this issue to be brushed aside.

Our task is to join with and support the struggles led by Aboriginal women in their own communities as they resist these massacres. We must continue to work to build solidarity between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people so that we may collectively stop the tragedies and create genuine justice for Aboriginal women.

DEBRO FIGHTBACK CONTINUES

by PETER VOTSCH MEMBERS OF the Canadian Auto Workers Local 252 are entering week 15 of their strike against Debro Steel.

The employer has tried to keep the plant going with management and office staff, but picket lines are solid and little is being produced. They have also been outsourcing some production to Brannon Steel, to which the workers have responded with secondary picketing and distributing union cards at the non-union company.

Debro has not taken the concessions off the table around sick days, and has

added new concessions allowing the employer to recall workers without respect to seniority in case of a layoff, and laying off drivers through outsourcing.

However, workers have not taken this lying down.

They are continuing to build their strike and are visiting non-unionized sister companies urging workers there to join the union.

Solidarity from the rest of the labour movement will also be needed to win this fight. March will be a crucial month for the strike, as orders will start coming in from National Steel Car in Hamilton.

Join the picket lines 7-9 am and 2-4 pm, at 7 Blair Dr., Brampton.

Alex Callinicos

Greece’s fight sheds light on a wider crisis in Europe AT ONE LEVEL, the Greek crisis is a familiar tale of market blackmail and bullying. Through giving up its own currency and joining the euro, Greece attached itself to one of the world’s major economies, Germany.

This allowed the Greek state to borrow money through issuing government bonds at lower interest rates.

So Greece in the mid-2000s enjoyed a credit boom. Then came the bust.

The banks that precipitated this crisis were, of course, rescued at great expense by their governments. Now they are outraged at the resulting increase in government borrowing and demanding austerity measures and cuts in services.

Greece is particularly vulnerable because it is a relatively small and weak economy—and because the financial markets don’t have much confidence in its political elite’s capacity or inclination to impose the cuts they are demanding.

They should know. The US Federal Reserve Board is investigating the role played by Goldman Sachs, probably the most hated Wall Street bank, in helping Greece to massage its debt figures at the time of the euro’s launch in 2001.

The present Greek government under George Papandreou is in a tight bind. It has to raise about $31 billion in the next three months to replace expiring bonds. It had hoped that cuts announced last month would keep the markets happy.

But on February 25, Greek bond prices fell sharply.

Papandreou is reported to be feeding the beast with a new round of cuts demanded by the European Union. These would be the equivalent of 1.5 per cent of national income, three times the size of the previous package.

But the Greek crisis is also about Germany, the giant of the eurozone. Under the “Red-Green coalition” between 1998 and 2005, Germany experienced a harsh economic reorganization that forced down wages and increased the competitiveness of its firms.

Germany, like China, is an economy geared towards exporting manufactured goods. The comparison goes further, as last Sunday’s Washington Post newspaper

pointed out: “As a result of lopsided trade, Germany now enjoys a relationship with its partners in the euro not unlike that of China and the United States, with one acting as supplier and financier and the other as an overextended buyer.

“Over the past decade, Germany—which now has the world’s largest trade surplus after Saudi Arabia—saw sales to Greece, Spain and Portugal soar 66 per cent, 59 per cent and 30 per cent, respectively.

“German banks have also invested heavily in Greek, Spanish and Portuguese debt. But Germany imported relatively little from those nations in return.”

Privileges

The smaller European economies are shackled through their membership of the eurozone to an economy that their firms can’t compete against. Moreover, because they participate in the euro, they can’t devalue their own currencies and thereby cheapen their exports.

Hence the growing pressure on Germany to bail Greece out. So far chancellor Angela Merkel has ruled this out. The German media is full of ridiculous stories about the privileges of Greek public sector workers.

Greek workers are probably the most militant in Europe.

After February’s general strike, the Greek ruling class is worried about a “workers’ December”—a working class version of the youth revolt that shook Greece in December 2008.

So it’s not surprising that Josef Ackerman, boss of Deutsche Bank, met Papandreou in Athens on February 26, apparently to discuss a possible deal.

But Greece itself represents only 2 to 3 per cent of the eurozone’s output. Spain, however, accounts for nearly 12 per cent.

An article in the Financial Times newspaper on February 28 headlined “Markets Poised to Punish Spain” warned, “Whatever happens in Athens, it is all but certain that the markets will soon turn their icy gaze once more on the other vulnerable economies of the eurozone.”

The beast wants to be fed again. © Socialist Worker (UK)

Join the International Socialists Name: Address: City/Province: Phone: E-mail: Mail: P.O. Box 339, Station E, Toronto, ON M6H 4E3 E-mail: membership@socialist.ca / Tel: 416.972.6391 March 2010 Socialist Worker 11

GREEK WORKERS LEAD FIGHT AGAINST CUTS

by PANOS GARGANAS A MASSIVE general strike shook Greece on February 24. There were no flights as striking air traffic controllers shut down airports and striking seamen paralyzed seaports.

No papers appeared in kiosks and TV stations carried no news bulletins as printers and technicians joined journalists on strike.

Schools, local authorities and the civil service were shut and hospitals had to deal only with emergency cases.

The only action in most cities was that of strikers taking to the streets.

The strike rallies were huge and, in Athens, it was the newest and supposedly the weakest sectors of the working class that made the most impressive showing of strength.

Immigrants from Bangladesh and Senegal joined the demonstrations chanting “Liberté” and “Solidarité avec les immigrés”. Fellow strikers greeted them with enthusiasm.

Ordinary people in Greece are fighting back against the coordinated attempt to make them pay for the economic crisis. The government in Athens has agreed with the European Union Commission in Brussels on a “Stabilization Plan” that imposes wage cuts, tens of thousands of job losses and an increase in the retirement age.

Workers are responding angrily with a strike wave even though this government was recently elected with a comfortable majority in Parliament.

Firefighters in Greece are not allowed to strike because the Fire Brigade is organized along military lines, yet roughly five thousand of them joined a march in the center of

February general strike in Athens

Athens on January 30 to demonstrate against wage cuts and the imposition of longer working hours.

This revolt was followed by workers in the Tax Department and the Customs Service going on strike on February 4 and 5. This movement came to a head on February 10 with a comprehensive strike in the public sector involving civil servants, teachers, hospital workers, university staff and workers employed by local authorities.

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The unions in the private sector then announced a strike for February 24, which turned into a General Strike. Greek workers are set to strike for three hours on March 5 and another public sector strike on March 16 in response to the governments intensification of its austerity meansures.

European newspapers keep

repeating that the country is in danger of going bankrupt, but workers in Greece continue to resist. Why all the anger?

First of all the ruling party, PASOK, a social democratic party, won the election just four months ago by promising there would be no wage cuts and the economy would recover by simply getting rid of

the previous Conservative government and its hated policies.

Betrayal

These promises were betrayed from the very first day.

PASOK had said they would renegotiate the privatization of the Piraeus Port Authority after the Conservative government sold it off

to a Chinese company against a bitter strike by dockworkers. Instead, the new government of George Papandreou is negotiating with the Chinese government, begging that Chinese banks will buy Greek bonds. This government has betrayed dockworkes so as not to upset Chinese bankers.

Even worse is the U-turn of the PASOK government in the face of pressure from European bankers. Many people had illusions that the European Union would help Greece overcome its financial difficulties. They are now shocked to discover that the EU is treating Greece, one of its original ten member states, in a manner worse than the International Monetary Fund (IMF) treats Third World countries.

The European Central Bank insists that there will be no special loans to Greece because that would undermine the credibility of the Euro.

Instead, Greece is forced to borrow from the European banks at huge interest rates and workers in Greece have to pay for this with wage cuts and privatizations.

It must be clear that once people in Greece get angry they have the experience and the radicalization to show their anger in an organized way through strikes and mass movements. It has happened before in 1974, 1985, 1993, 1998-99, 2001-03 and more recently in the December 2008 uprising. It is up to the Left to make sure this time round all this energy and experience is channeled against the system that breeds crises.

Broad resistance meets Vancouver Olympics

by IAN BEECHING THE 2010 Winter Olympic Games have inspired the largest wave of social justice rallies seen in Vancouver in years.

A plethora of messages were made loud and clear to sports spectators and corporate sponsors as over 5,000 protesters marched along downtown Robson Street in Vancouver on February 12.

The messages were as diverse as the participants.

Families with small children demanded “homes for all,” Native elders led chants of “No Olympics on stolen native land”. The march resembled more of a carnival than anything else, with a marching band accompanying the rally along with large puppets and stilt walkers. The protests ended peacefully with participants facing the stadium housing the 60,000 spectators who’d come for the Olympic opening ceremonies.

The Olympic torch relay

was successfully rerouted at several locations as hundreds of protesters stood firm against the flame. Most notable were the disruptions in the downtown east side and Commercial Drive routes, both low income areas of Vancouver.

Shortly after the Games began, a tent city was erected by housing activists on an Olympics parking lot in the impoverished downtown east side. It drew attention to the nearly 10,000 people homeless in British Columbia. With around a hundred tents, this camp has been staffed by volunteers from many of Vancouver’s activist community coming together in solidarity.

The morning following the opening ceremonies, Saturday February 13, saw several hundred protesters attempt to shut down Olympic traffic in downtown Vancouver.

So-called “Black bloc” protesters—demonstrators wearing face masks and black clothing—smashed a

window of the Hudson’s Bay Company and threw mail boxes into the street. This drew a brutal reaction from police, who beat activists and arrested seven.

The action was further met by a flurry of negative press reports across the country, which overshadowed the previous day’s march. In the wake of the window-breaking, much of the corporate press was able to frame all protest against the Olympics as mindless property destruction. A lively debate about the most effective protest tactics has since ensued, both in local activist circles and on the web.

This did not stop the demonstrations, however.

On February 14, over 5,000 people came to the streets for the 19th annual Women’s Memorial March to remember the women who have gone missing from Vancouver’s downtown east side. Although no explicit link to the Olympics was made, with over 64 women missing,

some participants asked why some of the $1 billion being used for Olympics security could not have gone to investigate these cases.

The following day, February 15, brought anti-war activists to the streets in the hundreds to give Harper a gold medal for war, occupation and torture. The energetic crowd marched from the Vancouver Art Gallery to tent city were it was met by a cheering crowd.

A rally was then held on February 20 to highlight poverty in Vancouver, with hundreds in attendance.

A banner was dropped off the east side of the Cambie Street Bridge reading “Homes For All”.

Between the ongoing tent city and the thousands who marched together in the streets, the movement that emerged against the Winter Olympics shows the possibilities that exist for building a mass movement that can win real justice for the poor, the exploited and the oppressed.