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No. 532, August 2, 1991 25¢ WfJRIlERI ".'(J'R'~X-523 No. 532 2 August 1991 30 Million Blacks Still Can't Vote, Endure Abject Poverty South Africa: ANe Pushes "Post-Apartheid" Swindle Gamma Photos While Nelson Mandela and South African president De Klerk shake on "deal," blacks are still victims of apartheid terror. Government Unleashes Inkatha Killers "The new South Africa .is on the up segregated living areas, and the Land looked to the imperialists to clean up regime of white supremacy remains and march," crowed President EW. De Klerk Act, guaranteeing white ownership of the South African racist regime, George the hopes of the impoverished black after the segregated parliament voted in 87 percent of the land, are now officially Bush issued an executive order lifting majority are being dashed. In the "new June to repeal the remaining key pillars abolished. Thereupon, the European U.S. sanctions on trade,' irrvestment and South Africa," thousands are slaugh­ of "grand apartheid." The Population Common Market voted to lift sanctions, banking. tered by government-instigated terror, Registration Act, which classified every­ and the 21-year ban on South African Now the formal statutes of apartheid millions are disenfranchised and con­ one born in South Africa into four racial participation in Olympic competition have been eliminated (the pass laws and demned to abject poverty. There can categories (white, African, "coloured," was removed. To the chagrin of those Separate Amenities Act were scrapped be no democracy for the toilers who Indian), the Group Areas Act.which set leftists and would-be radicals who earlier), but the cruel oppression of the continued on page 7 Gorbachev Puts Soviet Union .on the Auction Block They called it the "grand bargain." they're demanding that capitalist res­ It was cooked up by economic advisers toration be in place before Gorbachev of Gorbachev and Yeltsin along with sees any real money. They want proof, Harvard's Kennedy School. The seven Soviet Wo'rkers Must Defeat as the New York Times (18 July) put it, richest capitalist countries (the G-7) that "the Soviet Union really planned would give Moscow, say, $30 billion a to undo the Bolshevik Revolution." year. In return, the Soviet Union would Capitalist Counterrevolution! And even that is not enough. Japan, be transformed into a full-fledged mar­ Inc. will give no yen to Moscow until ket economy within five years. munist Party to drop all remaining lip fifths of one percent of the gross the Soviet Union gives up the strategi­ As an entry fee for Gorbachev to service to Marxism, Leninism and even national product of the industrialized cally vital Kuril Islands, which the Red make his pitch to the G-7 meeting the working class. capitalist countries. The proposed U.S. Army occupied at the end of World War in London in mid-July, the Supreme Harvard's Jeffrey Sachs, the man share, $3 billion, is one percent of the II. And if the Japanese zaibatsu want Soviet passed a law allowing for who designed the electrodes for the Pentagon budget. to get back the Kurils, the American privatization\ of 70 percent of the economic "shock treatment" in Poland, But the masters of the G-7 didn't buy rulers lust to take back Cuba, before USSR's industrial enterprises. And argues that the "grand bargain" is a the "grand bargain." Despite entreaties the revolution a playground for the now, on the eve of Bush's visit to Mos­ steal for Wall Street and Washington. from German chancellor Kohl for mafia and sugar plantation for United cow, Gorbachev is calling on the CQm- Thirty billion dollars is a mere two- massive aid to the Soviet Union now, continued on page 5 resentment and resistance to their presence. Blacks, surely among those who received the rawest From Death Row, of receptions (and the only people who did not come here willingly), can ill afford to continue this cycle, This Is Mumia Abu-Jamal for among all America's peoples, we have the least hope of fading into the fiction of a so-called "melting pot" (nor should we wish to!). Though Black faces sit in high places, they still possess no true power, only the curious "option" of ARage in the District continuing "business as usual." The politics of exclusion, of distinction, of high & Fires dance upon the upturned metallic corpses of People riot when other methods of redress are low, must give way to the commonality of human;for police cars cooking in twilight. foreclosed, and when despair reaches intolerable it is precisely "business as usual" that has brought us Sirens wail in electronic alarm, as strobe lights depths of the soul. Many of the peoples of the riot to this hour of alienation, of bubbling hatreds, of sweep in a maddening circular arc. areas of D.C. came to El Norte when government riotous anger, of social and psychic discontent. America's capital city experiences one of the first repressions at home left few options; leave or die­ It is past time for fundamental change. riots of the season, but this burst comes with a and so, they came, by the tens of thousands, drawn difference. Recent history, since the 1960s, reflects by promises of peace, of freedom, of a better life Blacks in riot, enraged at a system of total economic, north of home. political exclusion. The recent unrest in Washington, Many found crippling, poisonous toil in the fields D.C. was marked by brown faces, not Black ones, and of the nation's hotlands; grapes, oranges, and indeed, was directed at a political system headed and tomatoes picked in a daily grind of survival. Some faced by Blacks. fled to U.S. cities and, when they sought government Recent immigrants from Central America, flee­ help, were stunned to find Black faces in civil service, ing America's deadly policies of low intensity Blacks who, like their predecessors before them, warfare against workers, peasants in lands like El viewed the newcomers with suspicion, for "they were Salvador, found, upon arrival, not the promised foreigners," "they talked funny," or "they can't even land of milk and honey, but of menial jobs, ethnic speak English!" alienation, and hostility born of the eternal con­ America has historically been hard on its new­ flict between the newly-arrived and those who came comers, as evidenced by the Kensington Riots of before. May 1844 Philadelphia, where Protestants attacked The reported genesis of the riot, that a Black female (predominantly Irish) Catholics, destroying neighbor­ police officer ordered a Latino drinker to cease his hoods; and in 1902, when Irish, aided by a predomi­ open, public drinking, is, as always, insufficient. nantly Irish police force, attacked N.Y. Jews; also It may have been a spark, but even a spark when Wyoming whites in summer 1885 massacred needs kindling to catch, to expand, to explode into Chinese miners. LustigIWashington Post flame. To every people who arrive in America.is given D.C. cops block street, May 6. Imperialist Rivalry Urgent Appeal for Jamal: and World War With the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914, the capitalist great powers $$$ Needed' Now turned Europe into a slaughterhouse. In response to the "patriotic" betrayal of the Mumia Abu-Jamal writes his eloquent preme Court rulings and the Senate's official "socialist" leaders (signaled by the defense of the oppressed from Pennsyl­ death penalty crime bill are pushing German Social Democrats' votefor war cred­ vania's Huntingdon state prison, where toward an escalation in state-sanctioned itson August 4), Lenin called for anew Com­ he sits on death row because of a vindic­ murder. Recent cases which have sue­ munistlnternational. Its watchword: turn the tive frame-up against this former Black ceeded in overturning death sentellces TROTSKY imperialist war into a civil war. The contin- LENIN Panther Party spokesman. This Philadel­ and. freeing innocent defendants have ued survivalofcapitalism, propped up by the phia MOVE supporter and courageous cost at least $1 million in legal fees and social-democratic andlater.Stalinist bureaucracies, led a generation later to the second journalist achieved prominence as the expenses. imperialist world war marke4 by the Nazi extermination of the Jews and American "voice of the voiceless." His columns Mumia Abu-Jamal will not be saved i-bombing ofHiroshima and Nagasaki. In the "postwar" era U.S. world domination has appear periodically in Workers Vanguard by courtroom battles alone. Like the meant more war and mass terror from Korea to Vietnam to Iraq. As Lenin wrote in 1915, and other newspapers. Scottsboro case in the '30s, it will take capitalism in the imperialist epoch is inseparable from wars over markets and spheres Now Jamal and attorneys are preparing mass protest and publicity to Win his ofcolonialist exploitation. an important legal challenge to expose freedom. 'At their national convention in the frame-up and prove his innocence. May, the Coalition of Black Trade Imperialism is the highest stage in the development of capitalism, reached only in Contributions for this legal action are Unionists voted to support Jamal, as have the twentieth century. Capitalism now finds that the old national states, without whose tax-deductible and can be sent'to the BiU a number of union locals across the formation it could not have overthrown feudalism, are too cramped for it. Capitalism of Rights Foundation, earmarked Mumia country. To support the growing 'cam­ has developed concentration to such a degree that entire branches of industry are Abu-Jamal Legal Defense, c/o Rabino­ paign to save Mumia Abu-Jamal, contact controlled by syndicates, trusts and associations of capitalist multi-millionaires and witz, Boudin, Standard, Krinsky and the Partisan Defense Committee.
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