Talk of Lib-Green alliance is not quite dead yet

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The strong showing of the Green Party in the Nov. 26 federal by-elections, and the words of a prominent candidate in the federal Liberal Party leadership race, have bourgeois tongues wagging again for an electoral alliance with the labourbased New Democratic Party to oppose the Tories.

The Conservative Party held its seats in Ontario’s Durham riding and in Alberta’s Calgary Centre. The NDP retained Victo­ ria constituency in British Colombia. But the increase in the Green share of the votes in all three areas has political op­ portunists pushing for run-off nomina­ tions amongst Liberal, NDP, and Green Party members to choose a single candi­ date in ridings where defeat of the ruling Tories seems within reach.

Vancouver MP Joyce Murray, one of 12 candidates for the federal leadership of the Liberal Party, has made such an elec­ toral alliance her platform. So did B.C. NDP MP Nathan Cullen when he ran to be NDP leader in 2011-12. The “orange wave” of May 2011 nearly crushed that idea. Opinion polls that boost Liber­ als and Greens, however temporarily, can sway the impressionable. But they should not prevail.

Remember, Liberals are Tories too. Just look at Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty, who prorogued the Ontario Legislature and seeks to impose austerity measures, like his anti-teacher Law 115, on hun­ dreds of thousands more workers. Also recall the ferocious federal expenditure ... Civil liberties (continued from page 7: “The new assault on civil liberties”)

sent to these and future protestors.

“Don’t challenge our system!”

This explanation, of course, is not offered in an absolute manner. There will inevitably be times when the level of outrage supersedes the level of fear, and when government repres­ sion serves a effect opposite to what is intended—as when 20,000 mobi­ lized in the streets of Oakland the day following the brutal demolition of the Frank Ogawa Plaza Occupy encamp­ ment.

An interesting May 2012 article in Minneapolis’s main daily, the Star Tri­ bune, reported on police department plans to honor in the Washington, D.C.’s national police memorial build­ ing, one C. Arthur Lyman, “a leader in the Citizens Alliance, a group of em­ ployers that squashed unions in Min­ neapolis for 30 years.”

“When police called for help in con­ trolling a truckers’ strike in May 1934,”

says the Star Tribune, “he signed on as a special deputy. He wound up getting clubbed by strikers in the Warehouse ... Pakistan (continued from page 12: “Pakistan: Wedged between bureaucracy and theocracy”)

and torture. The military also uses anti-terror laws to harass and imprison activists: in late 2011, Labor Par­ ty Pakistan organizer Baba Jan, along with four others, were imprisoned and tortured for organizing workers and peasants in Gilgit-Baltistan.

The economic structure of Pakistani society is still largely feudal. Some 14% of farms operate 56% of the country’s agricultural area, while 55% of the Pakistani population owns no land at all. Workers in rural Paki­ stan are either sharecroppers or travel to the city as day laborers; or they participate in cottage industry and simple manufacturing.

Politically, the large landowning families dominate the civilian government; the massive farms are run cuts made by the Jean Chretien and Paul Martin governments of the 1990s and early 2000s.

The capitalist parties, including the Green Party, have a common agenda— capitalist austerity to revive the profit system at workers’ expense. The working class has but one mass party, the labourbased NDP. It is not socialist, but it is the only big party in North America that can be held accountable by labour.

That labour link, which helped to win medicare, employment insurance, Cana­ da Pension, environmental standards and much more, must not be extinguished by submission to the deadly embrace of par­ ties controlled by capital.

Aid for profits Ottawa’s bid to more nakedly tie its shrinking foreign-aid budget to expand­ ing the operations of Canada’s mining, oil and gas giants abroad, has got even some liberals upset. Canada’s biggest daily newspaper, the liberal Toronto Star, took Conservative Minister for International Co-operation Julian Fantino to task for saying that the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) plans to “engage more” in private sector partner­ ship because it is “the driver of long-term economic growth globally.”

This means CIDA will fund more three-way partnerships with Canadian re­ source companies on projects—like the CIDA/IAMGOLD/Plan Canada project in Burkina Faso.

Instead of non-profit programmes that District, and died of a fractured skull.”

Our Twin Cities comrade David Jones was fortunate in the Star’s deci­ sion to print his rejoinder setting the record straight on Lyman’s role. He explained that the Citizens Alliance goons killed two strikers who fought to make Minneapolis a union town.

Our point here is only to call atten­ tion to the fact that in 1934 police au­ thorities believed it was perhaps suf­ ficient to quell a major union strike by calling on a group like the Citizens Alliance, a tiny private group of Twin Cities entrepreneurs dressed in their business and/or sportsmen’s attire, including polo uniforms and high boots in one case, with police-issued clubs, and prepared to take on union members face-to-face.

Today, the repressive apparatus at the disposal of the ruling rich qualita­ tively exceeds anything imaginable in 1934. We need not review its varied components other than to conclude that we find no better explanation than a conscious effort at the highest levels of ruling-class circles to pre­ pare for a massive working-class of­ fensive, the likes of which the world has rarely experienced. n