Bankers screw more from Brazil

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Labour Party Young Socialists summe camp 1983: July 30 to August 6. All Young Socialists should come: a week of YS workshops, Class Fighter meetings, and very much more debate than transport. Bring sleeping bags and tent 46% of the capital of the USA's nine biggest banks is accounted for by loans to Brazil.

On the other side of the negotiating table, Brazil's economy depends heavily on world trade. About 70% of its imports come from the USA, the EEC, or the MIDDLE East — mostly equipment and oil. Nearly half of its exports go to the USA and EEC, the home countries of the banks that are squeezing it.

Those are the powerful pressures that drove the IMF and Brazil to a deal last Friday and will form the background to negotiations now due to follow between Brazil and the commercial banks.

Neither the world's bankers you were ranking the proinperialist regimes in Northern Africa, that of King Hassan of Morocco should be at the top of your list. If you were looking for likely allies of Libya, it would have to be near the bottom.

Some will remember that under President Carter in 1977 and 1978 it was Moroccan troops - (battle tested in the regime's long war against the Saharan Polisario guerrillas fighting for their right to self-determination) - who were dispatched in US planes to help Zaire's dictator Mobutu crush armed rebellions.

Since Reagan took office, however, Morocco's relationship with US imperialism has drawn even closer, with the red carpet being rolled out almost incessantly to greet a never-ending succession of top US military brass, diplomatic staff and government ministers.

As a chosen base for the Sixth Fleet and hopefully also the planned Rapid Deployment Force for use in the Middle Bast, Morocco is a crucial element in US strategic planning.

And, with its own desert war running since 1975, Morocco itself has — with the assistance of a $1 billion a year handout from the Saudi royal family and extensive loans from the IMF -expanded its army from 70,000 to 180,000 in the last eight years. It is second only to Egypt as a recipient of US aid in Africa.

In reply King Hassan there is at YS conference.

Martin nor Brazil's bosses can afford to see Brazil go bust - so they agreed on a deal at the expense of Brazil's workers. The wage indexation system, already inadequate, has been revised to give only 80% compensation for rișing prices.

With inflation running at 130% a year, that means a cut in living standards of over 10%, even on official figures.

ed by the slump and made confident by the growing political weakness of the military regime. proved amenable to every imperialist plan. He was a prime mover in procuring the agreement between Begin and Sadat; his armed forces provide training and arms for the South African-backed counter-revolutionary UNITA guerrillas fighting to destabilise Angola. And he has been keen to, see the US strengthen its grip over more wayward elements. In January 1982, for instance, he told the Senegal daily paper 'Ie Soleil' that:

"I would close my eyes and turn elsewhere if the US tried to oust Gaddati."

But if it is bizarre to see these two old adversiaries embrace at Rabat airport, how much more bizarre still to find a supposedly 'left' newspaper — the Newsline — enthusiastically hailing the meeting between King and Colonel as an establishment of 'fraternal [1] relations" between 'the two brotherly peoples"

Previous Newsline coverage of its benefactor Gaddafi had falsely painted him as some kind of "progressive" or 'revolutionary' figure, whose "Green Book" spells out an , "anti-imperialist" path and carries mass popular support.

A general strike against the IMF-ordered austerity measures has been called for this Thursday, July 21.

Urchins

As David Lipsey put it in the Sunday Times on July 17, ''the shiny offices of the multinational banks line the streets of Sao Paulo... Between them, run Yet here is this same Colonel embracing one of Reagan's main stooges, a monarch whose rule has been backed up by brutal repression of the Moroccan masses la General Strike and uprising in 1981 was met, by army violence that left 1,000 dead) and who is central to imperialist military plans to contain or crush the struggles of the Arab masses.

While Gaddafi postures as perhaps the most hardline 'rejectionist' of imperialist plans on the Palestinian question, he embraces the architect of the Camp David agreement. While US jets menace Libyan air space, and American forces rehearse possible invasions of his country, Gaddati cements "fraternal" links with the King who provides them, with port facilities.

Presumably Gaddafi in a show of "brotherly" goodwill has now closed down the Libyan radio station which secured a wide Moroccan audience for its broadcasts of opposition to Hassan each night.

Gaddafi and his new-found friend apparently "reviewed their adherence to the non-aligned (!!) policy of preserving national sovereignty and territorial unity" • But the "territorial unity" of Morocco is at the expense of the Saharan people, who Gaddafi has now agreed should be fobbed off with a rigged "referendum" on their future. Sign of the times: a closing-down sale in Brazil the ragged-trousered urchins in a city where one million children are officially estimated to have been abandoned by their parents."

The anger of the people who have to go hungry in order to feed the greed for profit of those shiny offices chould shake not only Brazil's generals but also the world's bankers.

Yet only weeks ago Gaddafi had led a 26-strong radical faction which threatened to boycott the OAU conference unless. a Polisario delegation were seated at it. In the event only Gaddafi stayed away.

"Mercenaries"

Hassan has made it clear that the result of the referendum will change nothing, since he will "never hand the Sahara on a golden platter to a rabble of mercenaries.

Whatever the result of the poll, he will continue to regard the Saharan area as "an integral part of Morocco."

None of these points of course were made in Newsline. Instead its story "from our own staff" on July 5 simply reprints the communique issued by the Libyan news agency JANA.

At least this method drops the pretence that Newsline has any independent line on the situation in the Middle East or North Africa. Far from offering any serious politics to the workers' movement, the Newsline and its WRP authors hang on every move of anti-working class 'leaders" in the Middle East.

After weeks of constipated silence on Gaddafi's role in the PLO crisis, Newsline can at last mention him again.

After all, Gaddafi pays the piper. And the Newsline is more than ready to play whatever tune he chooses.

IT was the worst "12th" for seven or eight years. The worst since the mid '70s in fact.

There was a rash of sectarian incidents during 12 July, the day given over to Orange celebrations of their victory at the Battle of the Boyne (1690) and on the days following.

In Donemana, Co. Tyrone, on the Derry border, 15 Catholics families were driven out after being attacked by an Orange mob. The incident was sparked, it seems, because the Catholic occupants of one of the houses played Republican songs and showed a miniature Irish tricolour as the Orange march was triumphing its way past.

Other accounts say that what really lay behind this incident was the killing of four UDR men by an IRA bomb: one of the dead men, 20 years old, was known and liked in the town.

Other incidents took place in Belfast and Derry.

At Ballinahinch, Co. Down, an Orange crowd gathered on the morning of the 12th to celebrate the 'glorious' memory of King William of Orange, the late Tith century Dutchman who, at the invitation of the English ruling class drove out Catholic King James and thus, in the words of a traditional Orange toast, "Saved us from Popery, knavery, slavery, brass money and wooden shoes.

Theirs was a traditional celebration. 500 of them rampaged through a small Catholic housing estate. The police stopped them, firing plastic bullets.

Then in the evening the RUC allowed an Orange flute band accompanied by a small 30 strong group of drunken youths to parade around the same estate!

A senior RUC officer told the Irish Times he could see no reason why the march should be stopped.

Drumaness is a small village only ten miles from Balinahinch. It was entirely Catholic except for one protestant tamily, a couple and three children aged between ten and fourteen.

Now Drumaness is entirely Catholic. The Protestant family decided it was safer to move after their home was stoned by a crowd of Catholics and an old disused Orange Hall in the village burned down.

The incidents of Catholic sectarianism were a direct response to the normal 12 July debauch of Orange Sectarian triumphalism and to Orange attacks in Balinahinch and Donemana.

Martin McGinnis, Sinn Fein Paddy Dollard scale sectarian conflict would go like that, a two-way conflict reverberating and interacting throughout the six counties with Catholic victims in some areas, Protestant in others. That's what communal conflict means on the ground - whether it be Cyprus, Lebanon or Northern Ireland.

One of Northern Ireland's three Euro MPs recently told the Buropean Parliament that in Northern Ireland 11,000 families of those in employment needed supplementary benefit "to bring them up to the breadline" and that in a population of 1.5 million, 100,000 families were on supplementary benefit.

He said that the problem of the poor and the unemployed demanded to be given first priority everywhere.

What was the name of this concerned MP? Ian Kyle Paisley!

British readers of papers like Socialist Organiser think of lan Paisley as an evil bigot, which of course he is. He is also a radical populist whose appeal to sections of Protestant workers gains from his seeming to champion their interests and because he expresses their resentments against the gentry of the old Orange establishment. taran built his Free Prestyterian church and what is now the Democratic Unionist Party not alone on anti-Catholic sectarianism but on sectarianism plus denunciations of the Unionist elite.

In turn they have sneered at him, mocking his pretensions, especially his Doctorate from the American Deep South hick fundamentalist 'Bob Jones University' . In the 1960s they put him in jail more than once.

In the early '70s a mass revolt of Protestant workers against the Orange establishment was part of the Protestant backlash against the Catholics. Confidence in the Gentry to defend their interests was shattered and organisations like the mass UDA of 1972 were born.

Given that this was a reaction against the Catholic upsurge it was inevitably • sectarian. It is nevertheless one of the great tragedies of Irish History that when the Orange masses lost confidence in the gentry and to an extent broke from them, they broke not to working class politics but to the reactionary populism of the sectarian bigot

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Brazil's working class is increasingly militant, embitter-