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The Bullet

	Date	Author	Title ISSN 1923-7871
409.	August 29, 2010	Jordy Cummings	The Class Struggle in Vaughan: The Sears Lockout and USW
In the last week of July 2010, workers of United Steelworkers Local 9537, who have been locked out of their workplace and on the picket-lines for nearly five months, found a big pile of shit sitting right smack-dab by their picket-line outside of a warehouse in Vaughan, just north of Toronto.
408.	August 26, 2010	Ryan Katz-Rosene	Whatever It Takes: Protecting the Tar Sands, Protecting Capitalism
Something is rotten in the province of Alberta! And it's not just the tar sands. It's the way political and corporate elites do whatever it takes to extinguish potential threats to the bituminous megaproject. The attempt to protect the tar sands from criticism can be framed as a part of a broader effort to protect the 'rights' of private interests to profit from bitumen production.
407.	August 25, 2010	Tim Kennelly	Afghanistan Crisis Deepens: U.S., Canada and NATO Threaten to Extend War
On March 13, 2008, Canada's Parliament voted to extend the country's military 'mission' in Afghanistan to July 2011. The motion by the minority Conservative government was supported by the opposition Liberals. The warmakers correctly estimated that fixing an exit date would deflect mounting opposition to the war among the Canadian public and buy time for Canada's continued participation.
406.	August 24, 2010	Roger Rashi	After A Highly Successful Year, Quebec Solidaire Starts Debate On Program
In the past year Amir Khadir, Québec Solidaire's first elected MNA, has become one of Quebec's most popular personalities. He has won plaudits from all observers and more importantly, from the public for his performance in and out of the Quebec parliament.
405.	August 23, 2010	Patrick Bond	South African Public Sector Strike Highlights Society's Contradictions
The two major civil service unions on strike against the South African government vow to intensify pressure in coming days, in a struggle pitting a million members of the middle and lower ranks of society against a confident government leadership fresh from hosting the FIFA World Cup.
404.	August 20, 2010	Federico Fuentes; Jeffery R. Webber	Two Takes on the Bolivian Uprising in Potosi
The Andean countries in Latin America have been at the centre of attempts to form anti-neoliberal political alliances and put on the agenda a 21st century socialism. Bolivia has formed an important crucible for these struggles.
403.	August 19, 2010		France Must Repay Historic Debt to Haiti!
Below is an English translation of an open letter to the French government published in the August 16 French daily Libération, concerning the $21-billion (current dollar equivalent) extorted by France from Haiti from 1825 to 1944. This was the 'independence debt' that France imposed on Haiti as a condition for diplomatic and trade relations, under threat of military intervention.
402.	August 17, 2010	Snehal Shingavi	Pakistan: From Natural Disaster to Social Catastrophe
The floods which have devastated huge areas of Pakistan may be an act of nature, but the worsening humanitarian crisis that followed is a direct result of the failures of Pakistan's venal leaders -- and the impact of the U.S. 'war on terror.'
401.	August 8, 2010	Roger Annis	Canada's Failed Aid to Haiti
The six month mark after Haiti's January 12 earthquake saw a flurry of news reports in Canada and around the world. The depictions of the harsh conditions still prevailing for most earthquake victims took many people by surprise.
400.	August 6, 2010	Herman Rosenfeld and Carlo Fanelli	A New Type of Political Organization?: The Greater Toronto Workers' Assembly
At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Left around the world is undergoing reformation. As the Great Recession has vividly demonstrated, more than three decades of neoliberal capitalism have eroded many of the significant gains won in the immediate decades following World War II.
399.	August 5, 2010	Jeffery R. Webber	Colombia and Venezuela Rattle Their Sabres: Uribe's Parting Shot
Outgoing Colombian President, Álvaro Uribe, dropped a figurative bomb in the Andes on Thursday, July 22, just weeks before the scheduled inauguration of President-elect Juan Manuel Santos, Uribe's former Defence Minister. At the behest of Bogotá, an extraordinary session of the Permanent Council of the Organization of American States (OAS) was convened to hear Colombia's accusations.
398.	August 3, 2010	An Interview with Leo Panitch, Sam Gindin, and Greg Albo	Capitalist Crisis, Radical Renewal?
The cause of the crisis was certainly related to competition in the financial sector. But that competition was to some extent the product of state regulation. The American financial system is certainly the most regulated financial system in the world, and probably in history, if you measure it in terms of the number of pieces of legislation, the number of regulatory agencies, and the massive amounts of regulation to which finance is subject.
397.	July 29, 2010	Doug Henwood	Jonesing for a Slump? Austerity in the Face of Weakness
Having successfully avoided depression through a massive, largely coordinated, stimulus program, the world bourgeoisie now looks ready to reverse it - some because they think it a success, and others because they think it was a failure. This is a very dangerous business.
396.	July 25, 2010	David Mandel	Fighting Austerity? The Public Sector and the Common Front in Quebec
The previous round of negotiations in Quebec between the rightwing provincial Liberal government of Jean Charest and the public sector unions in 2005 was ended abruptly by the adoption of a special law that unilaterally imposed wages and conditions on the workers, while providing draconian penalties for any disturbance to the normal functioning of public institutions.
395.	July 23, 2010	Scott Neigh	One Day Longer? The Vale-Inco Strike Comes to a Close
On July 7 and 8, 2010, striking members of United Steel Workers Local 6500 in Sudbury, Ontario, voted 75% in favour of a contract that ended a bitter strike against transnational mining giant Vale Inco. The 3300 strikers had been on the picket lines for almost one year.
394.	July 22, 2010	Interview with Pedro Eusse	The Labour Movement and Socialist Struggle in Venezuela Today
In mid-June, 2010, we met with Pedro Eusse, National Secretary of the Venezuelan Communist Party (PCV) and part of the provisional executive committee of the labour confederation, UNT. Revolutionary figures from times past stared down at us from the paintings hung on the walls in the office of the PCV in central Caracas.
393.	July 20, 2010	Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin	No Time for Public Sector Austerity
The 2007-08 financial crash was, in terms of its global impact, the greatest in history. It was only prevented from immediately triggering another Great Depression by governments in so many countries taking on the enormous private debt of their banks.
392.	July 17, 2010	Carl Davidson	Envisioning the Future, Fanning the Flames
15,000 Attend Detroit Social Forum: High-Energy Gathering Fires Up A New Generation of Activists in U.S. Left and Social Movements
391.	July 13, 2010	Interview with Marlon Santi	Indigenous Struggle, Ecology, and Capitalist Resource Extraction in Ecuador
On July 5, I sat down with Marlon Santi, President of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), in his office in Quito. We discussed the increasing contradictions between the demands of the indigenous movement, on the one hand, around water rights and anti-mining resistance, and the positions of the government of Rafael Correa, on the other, which has labelled indigenous resistance to large-scale mining and oil exploitation as 'terrorism and sabotage.'
390.	July 12, 2010	Pablo Solon	From Water Wars to the Fight for Climate Justice
Bolivia's UN ambassador, Pablo Solon, gave this talk to the Shout Out for Global Justice, sponsored by the Council of Canadians and attended by nearly 3,000 people on June 25 in Toronto, during the ten days of protests against the G20 meeting.
389.	July 11, 2010	John S. Saul	Mozambique: Not Then But Now
I first knew Mozambique through close contact in Dar es Salaam with FRELIMO in the early and difficult years -- the 1960s and the first-half of 1970s -- of its armed liberation struggle. Then Mozambique was seeking both to unite itself and to find political and military purchase against an intransigent and arrogant Portuguese colonialism.
388.	July 10, 2010		The Right to Dissent: Day of Action For Civil Liberties
During the G20 Summit in Toronto on June 26 and 27, 2010, more than $1.2-billion was spent on a reported 20,000 police and security officers, a 5-metre fence, and new weapons designed to stifle dissent and silence public opposition.
387.	July 9, 2010	Roger Annis	Tax Revolt Destabilizes Government in British Columbia
What were they thinking? Mere days after its re-election in May 2009, the Liberal Party government of British Columbia announced a new consumption tax that took effect on July 1, 2010 and will fleece an estimated $1.9-billion from taxpayer pockets in the first year. It hadn't breathed a word of the tax during the election campaign, except to deny it was considering it.
386.	July 8, 2010	Paul Jay	Who Commanded the G20 Commander?
It's time for the Prime Minister to take responsibility for the G20 fiasco. -- A room filled with police officers stare at pulsing screens; feeds from 85 cameras cover most of Toronto's downtown core. This was the command centre for the G20 Integrated Security Unit (there was another ISU command centre in Barrie). In charge was the RCMP Chief Supt. Alphonse MacNeil.
385.	July 7, 2010	Hugo Radice	Britain's Austerity Budget: A Class Act
Following the inconclusive outcome of the British general election on May 6th, the 'centrist' Liberal Democratic Party decided to turn sharply to the right by agreeing to join the Tories in a coalition government. In the run-up to the election, the Tories had argued strongly that Britain faced the prospect of a fiscal crisis unless the government's deficit was brought down further and faster than the outgoing Labour government intended.
384.	July 6, 2010	Alan Sears	G20 Protests: Fighting Back Against the Police State
On Monday, June 28, a large and boisterous demonstration of about 2500 people that snaked through the streets of Toronto continued the movement to rid this city of the police state regime that took over during the G20 summit. The leaders of the G20 had gone. As expected, their gathering had focussed on finding new ways to restore corporate profits by taking it out of the workers and the poor. But the movement against the police state regime and the G8/G20 agenda is continuing.
383.	July 5, 2010	Euan Gibb	Massey Workers Fight for Their Rights
Now that the G20 has left town, let's get down to talking about the reality of maternal health in the City of Toronto. Workers at the Massey Centre for Women are entering their 11th week on a picket line. Throughout this strike, the 66 members of Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 1 Canada have proved themselves to be courageous, dedicated and clear-minded. They are also passionate advocates for the young women that they work with.
382.	July 4, 2010	Interview with Wilder Marcano	Communal Power in Caracas
We caught up with Wilder Marcano, director of the network of Comunas in Caracas, on the morning of June 18, 2010. He talked with us just before addressing a crowd of a few hundred representatives of different comunas from around the capital who had gathered in the offices of the Ministry of Popular Power for the Communes and Social Welfare to discuss a whole series of issues related to building popular power from below in the poorest barrios.
381.	July 3, 2010	Ritch Whyman	In the Aftermath of the G20: Reflections on Strategy, Tactics and Militancy
The events at the Saturday G20 demonstration in Toronto last week have provoked a series of responses already. This article is not meant to review the events of the day itself, but to look at the questions raised by the demonstrations and tactics used for the left.
380.	July 2, 2010	Justin Podur	The G20 Debacle
Hosting the G20 in Toronto was the first of a series of political gambles by the Conservative Canadian government led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper. At a time when U.S. President Barack Obama, leader of the world's greatest debtor nation, was seeking additional stimulus money and therefore deficit financing, Harper's Conservative Finance Minister and delegate to the G20, Jim Flaherty, was advocating austerity.
379.	June 30, 2010	Interview with Lidice Navas	'To Have and To Be': Building a Socialist-Feminist Economy in Venezuela
A long-time revolutionary activist, Lidice Navas is an important socialist-feminist leader within the PSUV and a candidate for the Latin American parliament, among her many other responsibilities. We met her at the Women's Development Bank in Caracas on June 18, 2010 to talk about her vision of socialism, the accomplishments of the Bolivarian process so far, and what remains to be done.
378.	June 29, 2010	Anita Ogurlu	"A Taste of South in the Global North" - Demonizing Democracy in Canada
They never 'opened fire' but by Canadian standards the public got a shock - a well-thought out theatrical performance - Southern style! 'This only happens in places like Mexico,' one protester told me. Helicopters circling the city 24 hours a day, snipers on roof tops, the liberal use of pepper gas...
377.	June 27, 2010	Socialist Project	The Mass Arrests, the Security State and the Toronto G20 Summit
The massive police presence in Toronto over this week has been officially justified on the basis of protecting the leaders of the G8 and G20 countries meeting in Huntsville and Toronto. We were told that the creation of the fenced-in fortress, the massive mobilization of police (estimates ranging from 10-20,000) from across Canada, and even the passing of a secret law on policing...
376.	June 26, 2010	Roger Annis	British Columbia's Fossil Fuel Superpower Ambitions
The province of Alberta is well known as a climate-destroying behemoth. The tar sands developments in the north of that province are the single largest source of greenhouse gas emissions on the planet.
375.	June 23, 2010	Vijay Prashad	Global Bonapartism: The G20 and the Planet
When the Finance Ministers of the Advanced States set up the G7 in 1974-75, their tongues quivered with the taste of centuries of power. The Soviet Union had begun its plummet into obsolescence.
374.	June 21, 2010	Interview with Gustavo Martinez	Workers' Control and the Contradictions of the Bolivarian Process
On June 10, 2010 we caught up with Gustavo Martinez, a union leader in the worker-controlled, nationalized coffee company, Fama de America, in Caracas, Venezuela. The company has 350 workers at the national level, with two separate plants...
373.	June 18, 2010	Socialist Project; Sean Smith	The G20, Capitalism and Austerity
The Group of Eight (G8) is an annual forum for the leadership of the leading capitalist countries. It was first created in 1975, at the instigation of the U.S. and France to deal with the economic crisis that had broken out in 1973.
372.	June 18, 2010	Liisa Schofield and A.J. Withers	Their Crisis, Our Misery: OCAP Versus the G20
On June 26th, the G20 meetings will bring together the leaders of the world's richest 20 states in Toronto, following right on meetings of the G8 in Huntsville, in Northern Ontario. The G20 wants to talk about stabilizing the global economy and Harper wants to celebrate Canada as an economic success story.
371.	June 17, 2010	Roger Annis	Gangs and Violence in Jamaica and Haiti
When police in Jamaica launched a bloody assault in May on poor neighbourhoods in the country's capital city, news outlets in Canada responded with an ignorance and insensitivity that is all too common in their coverage of the Caribbean islands. As with Haiti, Jamaica is portrayed as incomprehensibly violent and not quite civilized.
370.	June 15, 2010	Toronto Workers' Assembly	Bargaining in an Era of Wage Restraint
With the Great Financial Crisis apparently over, economic and political elites across the developed countries have cynically ignored who caused the crisis and turned, as their solution, to cutting back social services and attacking the wages and conditions of public sector workers.
369.	June 14, 2010	Sungur Savran	The Other Fateful Triangle: Israel, Iran and Turkey
The thunderous events set in motion by Israel's storming of the Mavi Marmara, the lead ship in the peace flotilla challenging the blockade of Gaza, have thrown important light on the overall situation in the Middle East. Turkey has emerged as the major protagonist among the forces that support the Palestinian cause.
368.	June 13, 2010	Interview with Antenea Jimenez	Building Socialism from Below: The Role of the Communes in Venezuela
We met with Antenea Jimenez, a former militant with the student movement who is now working with a national network of activists who are trying to build and strengthen the comunas. The comunas are community organizations promoted since 2006 by the Chavez government as a way to consolidate a new form of state ...
367.	June 11, 2010	Roger Rashi	From Cochabamba to Cancun: Building a Climate Justice Movement in Quebec
The recent Cochabamba Conference on Climate Change has issued a call to build 'a global peoples movement for climate justice.' A novel feature of this call is that it is supported by progressive countries, mainly those of the ALBA Alliance, as well as by social movements, primarily but not exclusively, from Latin America.
366.	June 8, 2010	Dimitris Fasfalis	Class Struggles Heat Up in Greece
Workers in Greece today stand in the forefront of the converging European class struggles against big capital's attempt to make working people pay the costs of its crisis.
365.	June 7, 2010	Colin Leys	The Dictatorship of the Market
Edward Lewis, of New Left Project, spoke to Colin about some of the themes from his recent books and their relationship to contemporary developments. Colin's recent book is Market-Driven Politics, a close examination of neoliberalism and state policy.
364.	June 5, 2010	Rafeef Ziadah	What Next? The Freedom Flotilla and the Struggle to Break the Siege of Gaza
While people around the world are still in shock at the killing by Israeli commandos of innocent human rights activists on board the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, those who have been following Israeli state actions for some time are not surprised.
363.	June 1, 2010	Dan Freeman-Maloy	The Massacre and the Cover-Up
Only days after Amnesty International issued a report condemning Western powers for their record of blocking international diplomatic action against Israel, the results of this criminal facilitation were once again on dramatic display.
362.	May 29, 2010	Federico Fuentes	Bolivia: When Fantasy Trumps Reality
Under the presidency of Evo Morales, Bolivia has achieved a new constitution incorporating the rights of indigenous peoples, the beginning of land reform, the nationalization of important natural resources and increased state social spending to the poor.
361.	May 28, 2010	Katie Mazer and Patrick Vitale	City Under Siege: The University of Toronto Joins the G20 Security Ring
On Friday afternoon, right before the May 24th holiday weekend, Cheryl Misak, Provost of the University of Toronto quietly released a memo to departmental administrators. The memo, entitled "G20 Summit: Restricted Access on St. George Campus," describes a "series of restricted access measures" for the University's main campus.
360.	May 27, 2010	Syed Hussan	Toronto's Communities Prepare for the G8 and G20 Summits
The leaders of the G20 countries, as well as their central bank governors, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank and the European Union (EU) will be in Toronto on June 26-27, 2010. Nearly 20,000 delegates, 15,000 armed police and 5,000 media personnel will descend on Toronto to make it a very hot June weekend indeed.