No to Trudeau’s Middle East military mission creep

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There seems to be no end to the cor­ porate media’s barrage of propaganda in favour of the “war against ISIS.” It is accompanied by relentless attempts to rationalize Western imperialist inter­ ventions in the Middle East and else­ where. This presents a serious chal­ lenge to the antiwar movement—how to mobilize public opinion in a situa­ tion made to look so much more muddy than during the initial invasion of Iraq.

His Feb. 10 open letter has an air of desperation about it. And a touch of remorse. But it is severely lacking in political transparency and the identification of damaged principles. For New Democrats who con­ sider electoral prospects paramount, it is enough to know that Tom Mulcair will not lead the party to vic­ tory in the next federal election in order to conclude that he must be replaced as Leader a.s.a.p.

But there are other, better reasons that lead inexora­ bly to the same conclusion. The first is the status of the much-vaunted Interim Report of the Campaign Re­ view Working Group, chaired by party president Re­ becca Blaikie. The document remains in the shadows.

It is bad enough that the hand-picked Review group included no one to the left of the establishment. Worse is that its findings are not intended for release.

Why were they not attached to Mulcair’s Feb. 10 plaintive written plea for redemption? How can the party ranks properly appreciate the “insights” of the review if it is not unveiled well before the April con­ vention? According to Blaikie, the Report summary will go only to the incoming federal executive and council. So much for transparency and the promises from on-high to improve communication and decision making.

Core social democratic values? It might be good to make a list of these, if only just to see how close they come to meeting human needs. Sadly, the letter does not.

“We fell short.” That admission puts Mulcair in the global derby for understatement of the decade. Yet the “short”comings evidenced were not primarily due to what he cites as faults of “preparation and execution.”

The campaign content was dead wrong, and the su­ per-centralized enforcement of its pro-capitalist mes­ sage was decisively fatal.

Lapses? Cautiousness? Were those really the prob­ lems that impeded the vision—or was it the vision ... Socialists (continued from page 6: “The House Socialists and the Field Socialists”) big problems we face. Take climate change, for example. Sure, house socialists say we must do more. But they emphasize tweaking economic incentives in the hope of persuading energy monopolies to change their behavior.

House socialists support keeping the energy industry in the hands of private, profit-mad corporations. But gentle persuasion hasn’t changed corporate behavior up to now and we shouldn’t expect it to succeed in the future.

10 SOCIALIST ACTION MARCH 2016 That was clearly the violation of a coun­ try’s sovereignty, an invasion the vast majority in the Canadian state opposed.

People are horrified by the atrocities of ISIS and those of similar reaction­ ary gangster operations. Popular re­ vulsion is expertly manipulated by the warmongers. Still, the “war on ISIS” is a transparent fraud. The U.S. and its ac­ complices could quickly stop ISIS in its tracks simply by getting their “allies” in the region to stop funding and facilitat­ ing this monstrosity.

but minor compared to the loss of mil­ lions of lives due to the reckless “inter­ ventions” of the imperialist powers in support of their perceived geopolitical interests and resource greed. Who or what is the real “terrorist threat”? The question answers itself.

Despite all the “sunny ways” propa­ ganda, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s refusal to stop the $15 billion military contract with the murderous Saudi re­ gime may prove to be his Achilles’ heel.

Polls show majority opposition to the itself? In his public missive, Mulcair asserts that “our commitment to balancing the budget overshadowed our social democratic economic vision which saw new government revenues generated through higher taxes for corporations, closing CEO tax loopholes and a crackdown on tax havens.”

No, it was not a matter of overshadowing. It was a case of contradiction. Any attempt to balance the bud­ get with such tiny moves on the revenue side was a prescription for soft austerity—not unlike what social democratic parties have offered or have implemented in Europe for years—and which is why many of them have been superseded by populist forces of the left and right.

And what about new pipelines? Is an NDP that con­ dones, much less favours, the Energy East line com­ patible with a vision of a rapid shift to green, sustain­ able, public energy—the last hope of a civilization now at the brink?

While socialism is increasingly the watchword in Britain, even in the USA, why does Mulcair try to rewarm the leftover soup of the 2015 campaign, regur­ gitating the vague “goal of a fairer, more progressive Canada”?

As long as there are profits to be made by disregarding rules and incentives, corporations will do so. No incen­ tives and no amount of persuasion can induce a leopard to change its spots; you have to replace the leopard.* Few Americans realize that there are different kinds of socialists. Since house socialists are less of a threat to the powers-that-be, they tend to get a wider hearing than field socialists. In many European countries, house socialist parties have mass followings. House socialists have served as prime ministers in France, Sweden, Por­ tugal, Norway, Luxemburg and elsewhere. Yet, capital­ ism hums merrily along in Europe as in most of the rest of the world.

If electing house socialists to high office made a crucial

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BERTA CACERES, an environmental activist and indigenous leader, was murdered at her home in Esperana, Honduras, on March 3. When she received the 2015 Goldman Environmental Prize, Cáceres said: “We’re out of time. We must shake our conscience free of the rapacious capitalism, racism and patriarchy that will only assure our own self-destruction. Our mother earth, militarized, fenced in, poisoned, a place where basic rights are systematically violated, demands that we take action. ... I dedicate this award to all the rebels out there, and to my mother, and to the river, and to the martyrs ... Women (continued from page 1: “Defend reproductive justice for women!”)

crease in wait times to schedule appointments to 20-23 days in some cities. The increased wait times mean that more women will be forced to seek late-term abortions, a much more compli­ cated and even less widely available medical pro­ cedure.

In addition, there is already evidence that Texas women are increasingly turning to self-induced procedures without medical assistance. The days of death by hidden efforts to terminate preg­ nancy are once again upon us. Women in Texas are reporting being forced by lack of travel funds, the inability to take days off work for such travel, necessary due to the closure of local clinics, to at­ tempt to self-induce with herbs, teas, and medi­ cines obtained in Mexico without a prescription.

Many report failure to induce a complete abor­ tion and having to seek emergency medical help despite their fears of prosecution.

Prosecution for self-induced abortion has also reappeared, most notably in Indiana in the case of Parvi Patel. Patel, 35 years of age, is currently serving 20 years of a 46-year sentence after being convicted of two incompatible crimes, “feticide”

and child neglect. After Patel showed up in an emergency room after an incomplete miscarriage or self-induced abortion, the prosecution used ideologically tainted “medical” testimony against her, suggesting that somehow this fetus could have been saved by medical intervention.

They also argued that Patel, an immigrant dis­ connected from the U.S. health-care system, had attempted to terminate her own pregnancy with abortificants (pills legal with a prescription in other states) ordered online. She has one more possible attempt at appeal.

National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW) point out “the expansion of Indiana law to prosecute women in relation to their own pregnancies endangers public health and the civil rights of all people who are or may become pregnant.”

Patel’s conviction, it almost goes without saying, stands in ironic counter-position to the treatment of thousands of immigrant children currently being held in private and abusive detention centers around the country.

The prosecution of pregnant women is continuing apace with the attempts to restrict the termination of an unwanted pregnancy. In Wisconsin, Tamara Loertscher, an unemployed woman who had lost her health insurance and was self-medicating for depres­ sion and pain, discovered she had became pregnant based on a law that has resulted, according to NAPW, in the surveillance and investigation of more than 3000 women in the state. Federal courts have refused all efforts to have the law reviewed.

In Arkansas, thankfully, the Supreme Court reversed the conviction of Melissa McCann Arms for “introduc­ ing a controlled substance into the body of another person,” but the state attorney general is requesting that the legislature strengthen the law to specifically include pregnant women in a way that circumvents the Supreme Court ruling. In Tennessee, activists are fighting a 2014 law that permits the punishment of pregnant women whose babies were “harmed” by the mother’s use of narcotics. In Alabama, NAPW have documented the arrest of over 100 women.

The states that have begun punishing poor women in this manner are, in general, the states least likely to provide drug treatment for poor and pregnant wom­ en. These arrests have made it increasingly likely that a woman may be afraid to go to a hospital to deliver.

... Muslims (continued from page 12: “Stop the persecution of Muslims and immigrants!”) last May, charged with supporting terrorism for alleg­ edly trying to buy false passports (presumably so they could leave the country and join ISIS) and threatened with 15-plus-year jail terms if convicted.

The assembled crowd heard as well from Karen Schraufnagel of Socialist Action, the panel’s moderator, who pointed out that: “Muslim youth are not the threat. Black youth are not the threat. Immigrants and refugees are here escaping U.S. imperialist wars or fleeing the desperate poverty that capitalist global trade policies inflict on their home countries.

“The forces of capitalism and imperialism are the real who gave their lives in the struggle to defend our natural resources.”

Increasingly, low-wage women and women of color, especially in the South, are trapped in a Catch-22, in which both pregnancy and termination can entrap one in the intertwined tentacles of the racist social justice/criminal justice system.

One of the campaigns for the restriction of abortion rights that is most revealing about the class and racial agenda of the anti’s has to be the increasing use of the slogan “Babies Lives Matter” by clinic protesters. This slogan is designed to purge the public mind of sym­ pathy with the real horror faced by African American mothers who begin each day praying that their chil­ dren will not suffer the fate of Cleveland’s 12-year-old Tamir Rice at the hands of the police, and redirect that sympathy to reactionary aims.

It echoes the 2010 billboard campaign that plas­ tered “Black Children are an Endangered Species” across the South, claiming “the most dangerous place for a Black child is in the womb,” and charging wom­ en of color with genocide for exercising their right to control their own body.

In response, groups like Sistersong, the Black Wom­ en’s Health Imperative, and other organizations found the Trust Black Women Partnership to educate and in­ sist that from enslavement forward, the cutting edge of the civil rights movement has included the right of African American women to resist attempts to violate their bodily integrity. The slogan, and its appearance at the exact moment when the nation is reminded that due to deliberate governmental neglect up to a fifth of the nation’s urban children may still be exposed to debilitating lead exposures and other toxins, must set the parameters of the type of movement necessary to defend reproductive justice today.

The demonstration of a few thousand demonstra­ tors for women’s choice held at the Supreme Court threat. But their crimes are not even called crime, they go by the name of “profit maximization.” Make no mis­ take, profit maximization is ecocidal, genocidal violence. Hands off the Muslim community! Prosecute the real criminals!”

During the same week an action took place in Wiscon­ sin that truly highlighted the integral role immigrants (in this case Latin@s) play in keeping the capitalist sys­ tem afloat. The STARI coalition was not involved in or­ ganizing “Un Dia Sin Latinos” (see article on page 2) but were deeply gratified to see more than 20,000 people gather in the capitol city to protest two pieces of igno­ rant anti-immigrant legislation.

Another deeply gratifying rally occurred days after the official week of action ended. At the State House in Prov­ idence, Rhode Island, a rally against Syrian refugees was completely overwhelmed by refugee supporters. The on March 2, although relatively modest in size, helped signal that a lot is at stake. But what is needed in terms of protest is of an entirely different order and magnitude.

Since the legalization of abortion in 1972, both Re­ publican and Democratic Party legislators have been whittling away at this victory. In the last five years, the tool they have begun wielding is more like an ax than a penknife. While there are differences among differ­ ent strata of the ruling elite about just how far to go in terms of gutting abortion availability, the overall impulse is in the wrong direction.

The attempt to roll back many of the gains won by the women’s movement of the 1970s in the U.S. is echoed in Europe, where the economic crisis and the corresponding popularity of rightist solutions, is con­ tributing to similar legislative initiatives. The roots of this offensive lie deep in the current crisis of capital­ ism and efforts to manage economic unrest and to maintain elite rule. Thus, it cannot be adequately tak­ en on through bourgeois elections, lobbying, or craft­ ing arguments to appeal to the judicial theories of this or that judge. Instead, we must return to struggle in the streets, to protests that unite the right to a safe abortion with the right to raise a healthy child of color, to marches that demonstrate that millions of women and their allies are truly ready to fight for reproduc­ tive justice.

Marches and protests and all the meetings and con­ ferences that it will take to mount them are the key to consolidating majority opinion and public support on our side. The Supreme Court that legalized abortion in 1972 was as unlikely as any to hand down such a ruling; the decision was a reaction to women’s power in the streets. We must begin showing that political power again. n anti-Syrian Refugee rally was sponsored by the Bostonbased Americans for Peace and Tolerance (an Orwellian name if ever there was one). Their speakers were vis­ ibly flustered facing hundreds and hundreds opposed to their message, who repeatedly interrupted and chal­ lenged them.

When the racist rally finally ended, the pro-Refugee forces took to the stage with speaker after speaker shar­ ing messages of love and solidarity with the immigrant and refugee communities. Perhaps as many as 200 stu­ dents from various organizations at Brown University worked with CAIR-MA, Rhode Island State Council of Churches, several Unitarian Universalist churches, the Refugee Dream Center and others to pull off the counter protest at the anti-Syrian Refugee event and pro-refugee rally that followed.

Stop Islamophobia! Defend the Muslim Community! n SOCIALIST ACTION MARCH 2016 11

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by her long-term boyfriend. She immediately ceased using drugs but admitted to past drug use when seeking prenatal care. She was convicted and spent time in jail