More austerity for all

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10 SOCIALIST ACTION APRIL 2013 decessors, Flaherty chooses to keep the corporate tax rate low (less than half the U.S. rate), which costs Ottawa some $14 billion in revenue annually. This would not change under Justin Trudeau, who is set to be crowned Liberal Party lead­ er on April 14, if he follows past busi­ ness-tax-chopping Liberal Prime Minis­ ters Jean Chretien and Paul Martin. Low tax revenue from corporations and the rich, and continuing high expenditures on the military, bolster the deficit, and fuel the argument for austerity.

Flaherty is trimming the $25.9 bil­ lion deficit by another $7 billion next year through more federal service cuts and job losses. That will only dampen growth. Instead, the government should boost demand by investing heavily in infrastructure, poverty reduction, child care, and the like.

and depriving mi­ grant workers of health benefits and civil rights.

Diana Aviles Her­ nandez, the wife of one of the detained men, said her hus­ band was working to support their fam­ ily in Honduras and their daughter living with them in Van­ couver: “Our family’s suffering is a private matter and should not be broadcast as entertainment.”

After the raid, a petition garnered 2600 signatures in 48 hours de­ manding National Geographic ditch the show. Coincidentally, in Ontario, Students Against Migrant Exploi­ tation (SAME), which has 10 local chapters, released a documentary series, titled “Permanently Tem­ porary,” to kick off Migrant Worker Awareness Week on March 18.

Migrant workers, from Chinese miners and Filipino caregivers to Mexican fruit-pickers, are brought into the country to temporarily fill jobs, often with low pay and poor living conditions, and little oppor­ tunity to apply for permanent resi­ dence status.

That, too, is a feature of the neolib­ eral agenda that increasingly liber­ ates capital and constrains labour.

— BARRY WEISLEDER As the social democratic Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives argued, “Canada has a growth problem, not a deficit problem.” The CCPA urged a $40 billion-plus program to create 300,000 jobs, to be paid for, in part, by tax hikes on the wealthiest.

A Workers’ Agenda would challenge corporate control decisively. It poses the need for public ownership under workers’ control, starting with the banks and giant resource corporations.

But even the CCPA’s timid demands are in stark contrast to the actual direction of capitalist governments, like Harper’s.

As NDP Leader Tom Mulcair said about the budget, the Tories are playing a “shell game” by moving around previ­ ously committed funds (e.g. for transit, roads, bridges, ports, etc.) and gambling on a business-led “recovery.” More tax ... Chavez (continued from page 3: “After the death of Hugo Chavez: Which way for socialism?”) genuine independent representative of the workers. Among the members of the CSBT are former leaders of the UNT, the union formed after the CTV had discredited it­ self in the 2003 oil strike. It too shattered in many pieces before the CSBT absorbed some of its remaining parts.

Lessons of Cuba, Guatemala U.S. imperialism finally met its match in 1961 when it attacked revolutionary Cuba, which soundly defeated the invasion of the island by mobilizing a politically conscious and armed population. Cuban leaders un­ derstood that rallying the people for victo­ ry would largely depend on economic and political measures; the revolution had led to the total expropriation of the capitalists, while the rural poor gained land, jobs, and basic social services.

Moreover, the Cuban revolutionary lead­ ership had absorbed the lessons of Guate­ mala, whose president, Jacobo Arbenz, was overthrown by a U.S.-backed invasion in 1954 after he had expropriated over 70% of United Fruit’s (a U.S. corporation) land and distributed it to the peasants. Arbenz rose to power with backing by the army and took for granted that he could rely on it to defend the land reform. Although the workers and peasants were prepared to defend the country, Arbenz failed to mo­ bilize them against the U.S.-backed coup, while the military just stood by.

The military that overthrew Chavez was backed by U.S. imperialism; it remains largely intact. The military officers who led the coup were freed a few months later when the Supreme Court refused to relief for Ontario manufacturers, a job training fund that relies on provincial matching monies, and a crack-down on tax cheats just won’t cut it—unemploy­ ment, that is.

Neither will folding the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) into the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, which wasn’t mentioned in the budget speech. That policy move nonetheless exposes the government’s “aid” agenda as being totally subservient to promoting Cana­ dian business interests abroad, espe­ cially the labour-abusive, environmen­ tally destructive mining sector.

Finally, the deepening crisis in Europe shows that austerity isn’t working—un­ less its purpose is to slash the wages, job security, benefits and pensions of working people. And that purpose is reason enough to oppose this federal budget with militant mass political ac­ tion. n indict them. Meanwhile, no popular mili­ tias of workers have been created to de­ fend the country against imperialism and the armed bodies of the Venezuelan state, who have more than once fired upon radi­ cal mobilizations of workers at the point of capitalist production.

Even poor peasants, who have demanded that the state give them arms to stand up against the mercenaries of the landlords (at least 170 peasant leaders have been killed), remain largely defenseless. Mean­ while, 75% of the most fertile land is still in the hands of the rich landlords, while Venezuela imports up to 76% of all of its food. If Chavez had even hinted at a mas­ sive land-expropriation (some landown­ ers did accept Chavez’s payments at the market rate for limited amounts of less valuable land), the military would have mobilized against him once again.

The emergency general election is sched­ uled for April 14. Meanwhile, Chavez’s vice president and current president, a former bus driver, is predicted to be the “new ‘driver’ of the Bolivarian revolution.” Ac­ cording to La Jornada, Nicolas Maduro has a 14% advantage over the right-wing gov­ ernor, Henrique Capriles.

Should Maduro defeat Capriles, he will inherit the rule over a capitalist state and capitalist economy, defended by a capital­ ist army. The allies of imperialism inside Venezuela will never content themselves with the relationship of forces created un­ der Chavez’s rule. Until the capitalist insti­ tutions within Venezuela are smashed and a revolutionary process based entirely on the workers and dispossessed is widened throughout the region, imperialism will always remain a threat to radical regimes, and capitalism will remain a yoke on the masses. n