Kellogg’s takes the money

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Ban on talking about job action The assault on labour in Canada intensified re­ cently with new legislation rushed through the Alberta legislature. It targets the actions of public sector unions prior to collective bargaining.

The ruling Progressive Conservatives, under Pre­ mier Alison Redford, passed Bills 45 and 46, the Public Sector Services Continuation Act and the Public Service Salary Restraint Act. They came into effect on Dec. 11. Both bills were introduced only a week earlier, and without warning.

The law applies to the province’s negotiations with the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees, which represents 22,000 public sector employees. Many are furious at the Redford Government for its plans to gut their pensions in a scheme announced in mid-September. The union has been without a collective agreement since late March 2013.

The law eliminates AUPE’s option of going to binding arbitration. Instead, there is a negotiation deadline of Jan. 31. After that, a legislated fouryear deal with no increases over the first two years and one-per-cent increases in each of the next two would come into effect.

This law significantly increases fines for illegal strikes or strike threats. Specifically, discussion of labour actions, such as an “illegal strike,” by the union or by union activists will be deemed illegal. There are heavy fines to be imposed on the union if rank-and-file members even raise job action in public or at union meetings. Punishment ranges from fines of $500 to $1 million per day.

Bill 45 includes a prohibition on “strike threats,” vaguely defined in the bill as “an act or threat to act that could reasonably be perceived as preparation for an employees’ strike.” Also:

(1) No employee and no trade union or officer or representative of a trade union shall cause or con­ sent to a strike.

(2) No employee and no officer or representative of a trade union shall engage in or continue to en­ gage in any conduct that constitutes a strike threat or a strike.

8 SOCIALIST ACTION FEBRUARY 2014

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(continued from page 1: “Ukraine: What’s at stake?”) of George Bush” in Iraq must not be re­ peated, wherein Bush’s invading army wiped Iraq’s political and economic slate clean by removing and banning all of Saddam Hussein’s Bath Party leaders from office and installing an essentially all-Shiite government. It would have been better to have included some of Hussein’s experienced Bath Party lead­ ers and/or some Sunni militia chiefs, the new realpolitik presidential advis­ ers reasoned, than to risk their becom­ ing the core opposition to any U.S. pup­ pet government.

Indeed, U.S.-funded Sunni militias have recently been employed to smash the latest Fallujah insurgency in Iraq.

This Machiavellian “strategy,” in sev­ eral variants, has since become U.S. pol­ icy following its removal of Muammar Gadhafi in Libya and with regard to Af­ ghanistan and Syria today. In Libya, the U.S. effort to give a piece of the action in that conquered and devastated nation to various militias, each seeking a share of the oil and territory, has resulted in near anarchy. A few months ago, some of these “democratically minded” mili­ tias stormed the hotel housing the new president, kidnapped him, and in es­ sence held him for ransom—that is, for an agreement for a bit more control of Libya’s oil.

It was only when these “rebels” got the word that the United States was prepared to launch a few drones to con­ vince these kidnappers to do the right thing that the president was released. In the aftermath, the U.S. announced that it was assembling and training a military force of 5000 troops to help maintain the “peace” and “order” in Libya’s disintegrating state, so that the right people would have more exclusive access to the oil booty.

In Syria, where the U.S. arms and funds, directly or indirectly (through its proxies in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Tur­ key), practically all “rebel” forces, from the Free Syrian Army to al-Qaida-linked militias, the similar objective is “regime change” of a special type—remove the dictator but keep in place his well-established repressive capitalist state apparatus. The present shaky Geneva negotiations are aimed at a temporary transition government with or without Assad, to be followed by another with­ out Assad and inclusive of more com­ pliant capitalist elites agreeable to U.S. dictates.

Egypt in 2011 was a prime example of imperialist flexibility, where the 30year U.S.-backed Mubarak dictatorship became an obstacle to maintaining U.S. interests in the region. Mubarak’s re­ moval by his subordinates was private­ ly given the nod by the Obama admin­ istration, and the Tahrir Square mass mobilizations were eventually praised as “revolutionary” by U.S. mouthpieces. Shifting U.S. political loyalties from one dictator to another has never been a problem and is often quite helpful to better serve imperial interests and dis­ orient mass rebellions.

Following Mubarak’s removal, U.S. advisers bided their time while advis­ ing the re-packaged military regime on how best to set the stage down the line for yet another coup to remove Morsi and re-establish direct military control. Morsi’s one-year presidency, as expect­ ed, proved that his MB variant of capi­ talism was incapable of significantly changing the lives of Egypt’s oppressed masses. But his demise was also pro­ moted by the military’s still intact “felool” (the deep-state apparatus left over from Mubarak’s regime), which employed subtle means to undermine the Egyptian economy, including deny­ ing Cairo access to basic food supplies, gasoline, and electricity. The aim was to blame Morsi for the endless food and gas lines that became the survival norm for millions.

The massive June 30 Cairo protests, today more accurately estimated to be one million people, demanding Morsi’s resignation and new elections, while initiated by the youthful Tamarrud (Re­ bellion) petition activists and demo­ cratic-minded supporters, undoubtedly were backed, promoted, and financed by Egypt’s bourgeois opposition—in­ cluding billionaire financiers and the thinly-disguised populist-democraticposturing old-guard military regime. Egypt’s “June 30 second revolution” in the streets was, three days later, with near-zero resistance, commandeered by Sisi’s military.

Soon afterwards, the slaughter of peaceful Muslim sit-in protesters be­ gan; and then, all others who dared to resist were punished with impunity.

The well-briefed U.S.-instructed of­ ficials, of course, decried the removal of the “democratically elected” Morsi, only to quickly give way to the new re­ ality, in which the coup was declared to have given Egypt a “second chance” at democracy.

Sisi and his ilk have declared that the mid-January 98 percent approval of the new constitution, which was certainly not unexpected, lent unquestionable legitimacy to his July 3 ouster of Morsi. Ehab Badawy, a spokesman for the of­ fice of the interim president, hailed the vote as a triumph, “another defining moment in our road map to democracy.” But U.S. Secretary of State Kerry, being careful not to stamp the official U.S. im­ primatur on the vote and still pressing for MB inclusion, remarked that “elec­ tions are not everything.”

Kerry added, perhaps with a crocodile smile, that “the brave Egyptians who stood vigil in Tahrir Square did not risk their lives in a revolution to see its his­ toric potential squandered in the tran­ (Left) Egypt’s Defense Minister, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

sition.” In difficult times, Kerry dem­ onstrated that bourgeois politicians do well by adopting “revolutionary” rheto­ ric to suit their needs.

Kerry continued with this specious praise of the Egyptian people: “They’ve weathered ups and downs, disappoint­ ment and setbacks in the years that followed [the Tahrir Square mobiliza­ tions], and they’re still searching for the promise of that revolution. They still know that the path forward to an inclusive, tolerant, and civilian-led de­ mocracy will require Egypt’s political leaders to make difficult compromises and seek a broad consensus on many divisive issues.”

Kerry said further: “Democracy is more than any one referendum or elec­ tion. It is about equal rights and protec­ tions under the law for all Egyptians, regardless of their gender, faith, ethnic­ ity, or political affiliation.”

Egypt’s new constitution now forbids “religion, race, gender, or geography” from being the basis to form a political party—a provision aimed at affirming the present ban on the MB’s Freedom and Justice Party, among others. Like most constitutions in capitalist states, Egypt’s new “law of the land” guar­ antees freedom of religion and grants Coptic Christians the right, for the first time, to build churches without permis­ sion of the president. Women are rec­ ognized as equals in Egyptians society. Would it be that words were deeds!

The Sisi coup represented a major set­ back for the Egyptian people. It dem­ onstrated once again a number of iron rules of any revolutionary process. First and foremost, the revolutionary mobi­ lization and engagement of the masses in charting society’s future social con­ figuration is a prerequisite to any fun­ damental change in the social order.

Second, is the massive participation in this unfolding process of a deeply-root­ ed revolutionary socialist party aimed at the abolition of capitalist rule in all its manifestations. The combination of these two elements, in every nation on earth, will in the future—whether it be months, years, or decades from today— is the only guarantee that the just an­ ger and hatred of capitalist oppression everywhere will not be channeled into pitiful “reformist” alternatives, whether they be “enlightened dictators,” as in Egypt, or “lesser evil” Democrats in the United States. n