| Wednesday, 01 September 2010 16:23 |
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| $16 bn for Fighter Jets Reveals Gov’t Priorities |
| BASICS Issue #22 (Sep/Oct 2010) by Steve da Silva
 Less than three weeks after the Canadian government staged the G20 Summit, where world leaders pledged to half their deficits by 2013, Defence Minister Peter MacKay announced the largest single military purchase in Canadian history. On July 16, 2010, MacKay announced that the military would purchase 65 F35 Joint Strike Fighters from Lockheed Martin, amounting to $9 billion for the purchase and another $7 billion over 20 years for maintenance and repairs. While most working-class Canadians may be wondering why the government would spend record amounts on the military in the “era of austerity”, while cuts are being sustained across the board on social spending, and pensions are collapsing, the criticisms raised by the opposition parties and certain NGOs have been limited to the question of whether the military purchase was the right one, and if the procurement process was competitive enough. |
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| Wednesday, 01 September 2010 16:23 |
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| International Women’s Alliance formed in Montreal |
“For a militant global women’s movement in the 21st century”
BASICS Issue #22 (Sep/Oct 2010) by Ashley Matthew & Pet Cleto
August 16, 2010 now marks the formation of the International Women’s Alliance. On that sunny historic day in Montreal, over 300 women representing some 130 countries together declared the creation of a global anti-imperialist alliance of feminist and women’s groups. Through the International Women’s Conference workshops that were held over the course of that weekend, avenues were opened for delegates to discuss several topics, and then convened to declare the birth of the alliance, agree on its bases of unity, and form an action plan. |
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| Wednesday, 01 September 2010 16:23 |
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| Passport Dispute Robs Powerhouse Lacrosse Team of Chance to Compete |
Iroquois Nationals kept out of World Championships for a sport their ancestors invented
BASICS Issue #22 (Sep/Oct 2010) by J.D. Benjamin  The 23-member Iroquois Nationals team was forced to miss out on playing the Lacrosse World Championships in Manchester last month after British, American, and Canadian officials refused to recognize the sovereign right of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy to issue their own passports.
The Haudenosaunee Confederacy, also known as the Six Nations or Iroquois, includes the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca and Tuscarora nations and has territory on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border. The Haudenosaunee first issued their own passport in the 1920s for one of their members to attend a League of Nations conference in Geneva. In 1977, the Confederacy reached an agreement with the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and other countries to accept the passports as valid travel documents. Since then, delegations and individual members of the Haudenosaunee have traveled to various countries in Europe, Latin America, and Asia using the passports. |
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| Wednesday, 01 September 2010 16:10 |
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| Italian Maoists Beat Back Anti-Immigrant Patrols |
...and mobilize against Berlusconi regime’s attempts to criminalize their work
BASICS Issue #22 (Sep/Oct 2010) by Steve da Silva
What are people supposed to do when fascist and racist gangs are multiplying in society, at the instigation, and with the tacit approval. of the political regime? Is this not the prelude to fascism, the political regime experimenting with blends and species of racism and bigotry to see which best achieves the reactionary mobilization of the population behind war, state terror, repression, and xenophobia? This is the situation in contemporary Italy (and of course, many other countries), where the racist and reactionary political regime of Silvio Berlusconi - Italy’s billionaire Prime Minister - has utilized racist, criminal, and fascist organizations to split the ranks of working-class at a time when their interests are under serious attack. One such manifestation of this brewing fascism was the recent emergence of fascist anti-immigrant patrols throughout Italy. |
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| Wednesday, 01 September 2010 16:10 |
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| Prisons and Prison Labour, U.S. to Canada: The search for cheaper labour |
| BASICS Issue #22 (Sep/Oct 2010) by M. Lau
As a source of cheap labour, prisons are a blessing for corporations. Under the Welfare to Work legislation in the U.S., BP has been earning a tax credit of $2,400 for every prisoner they have hired to help clean up the ecological disaster it created in the Gulf. Without being required to supply health benefits or workers’ compensation, BP has been able to put prisoners to work in a most toxic setting for up to twelve hours a day, six days a week. BP has also been able to force prisoners to sign documents that prohibit them from discussing work conditions. Prison labour is a growing industry in the United States. Since the 1980s, the prison population in the U.S. has quadrupled. Why did the inmate population grow so drastically? It wasn’t because of a rise of violent crime. Instead, it was due to public policy changes, particularly, the rise of “tough-on-crime” mandatory sentencing laws. Today, the U.S. has the highest prison population in the world. |
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