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A union certification drive at a second Quebec Wal-Mart store has succeeded, according to the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW). The union said on Jan. 19 that workers at a Wal-Mart in Saint-Hyacinthe have been certified as a bargaining unit after a majority of its 200 workers signed UFCW membership cards.
“We'll be sending a letter to Wal-Mart tomorrow to set dates to begin bargaining,” said UFCW Canada local president Yvon Bellemare in a release. “We expect to deliver our contract proposal to Wal-Mart sometime in the next two to three weeks.”
The Saint-Hyacinthe location joins the Wal-Mart in Jonquiere, Quebec as the only other unionized Wal-Marts in North America. UFCW Canada is currently attempting to negotiate a contract covering workers at the Jonquiere store.
Wal-Mart, which has conducted a vicious battle against unions for many years, also faces certification applications at about a dozen other locations in Quebec, Saskatchewan and British Columbia, including applications representing workers at seven Wal-Mart Tire & Lube Express departments in B.C.
“The momentum is picking up,” said UFCW Canada's national director, Michael Fraser. “Wal-Mart workers now realize that if they want a union in their store, Wal-Mart can't stop them.”
The U.S.-based transnational has 235 stores in Canada, employing more than 60,000 people. World-wide, the company has 4,600 stores and about 1.5 million employees. Wal-Mart racked up $9,054 billion US in profits for 2004, which works out to over $6,000 US profit per employee. These profit figures do not include enormous salaries paid to top Wal-Mart bosses.
CUPE has received major recognition for its activism in Canada and around the world on the rights of sexual minorities.
The University of Toronto's Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies has chosen Canada's largest union for its first-ever “Citizenship Award” for its equity work. The award honours “an individual, group or organization that has made substantial contributions to public understanding of sexual diversity in Canada.”
The “pioneering activism” of CUPE's Pink Triangle Committee, which organizes, educates and mobilizes for equal rights for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered persons, was specifically praised.
“I am proud of the efforts CUPE members and staff have made over the years to lessen the hurtful impacts of discrimination and prejudice that too many people experience just for being who they are,” said CUPE President Paul Moist. “Receiving this award is a real honour and I hope that all of us within CUPE can share the pride I feel for our leadership.”
Honouring CUPE gives credit to the remarkable work of activists working for equity inside the labour movement and in the public domain, said David Rayside, director of Sexual Diversity Studies, in a news release.
“For well over a decade,” said Rayside, “CUPE has been among those unions that have taken the most assertive steps to challenge inequities in the workplace, to support employees in taking their cases through grievance and court procedures, and to challenge prejudice where it exists.”
Achievements include the union's 1998 successful Charter challenge of the Income Tax Act that extended survivor benefits in the union's staff pension plan to lesbian and gay employees.
CUPE was the first Canadian union to establish a gay and lesbian committee, and was among the first to enshrine transgender rights in its constitution. CUPE participation in Pride marches across the country were also noted.
CUPE formed its Pink Triangle Committee in 1991, to better organize its fight for full labour and human rights for all people regardless of their sexuality or sexual orientation.
By Darrell Rankin
Marking the second anniversary of the U.S. Invasion of Iraq, global peace movements are preparing protests from March 19 to 21 against the continuing U.S. Occupation. The protests also coincide with the International Day for the Elimination of Racism (March 21).
Organizers from at least eight cities reported at a recent meeting of the Canadian Peace Alliance that efforts are being made to ensure large mobilizations. Many more communities are expected to participate in the cross-Canada action (these are listed at http://www.acp-cpa.ca).
The CPA meeting, the first since the Alliance's November convention, discussed how to maintain the political initiative in efforts to keep Canada out of the dangerous U.S. Missile Defence scheme. Participants supported the No-War Paix group's initiative for a March 8 protest at the Liberal Party convention in Ottawa.
Despite recent statements by Prime Minister Paul Martin, the peace movement cannot declare victory on Missile Defence. Large protests against George Bush during his visit to Canada helped to galvanize opposition to U.S. Foreign policy, making Missile Defence a key political issue for the minority Liberal government.
It was agreed to continue gathering CPA petitions against Missile Defence until the issue is decided in Parliament, and Quebec participants reported that “daily” completed petitions were being sent to Parliament. Efforts will continue to urge provincial and municipal governments to oppose Missile Defence.
Ralph Klein has declared war against Medicare. Maybe it's time to declare war against his government, which is on the cutting edge of the corporate assault on public health care.
This is a battle that can be won. The labour movement mobilized supporters to pick Tommy Douglas as the CBC's “greatest Canadian” for his role in the movement to win Medicare. Our choice would have been Norman Bethune, the Communist surgeon who initiated the first public campaign for universal health care. In any case, Canadians can obviously be engaged in the movement to defend Medicare against profiteers. Working people (are) appalled by the declining state of the health care system, by rising medical costs, and by plans to rip the principles of Medicare to shreds. The labour movement and its allies in the various health care coalitions have a golden opportunity to tap into this anger, turning it into a powerful movement which can influence the outcome of the next federal election.
It would not be difficult to rouse public opinion against Klein, Even in Alberta, support is fading for this political dinosaur. In other province, Klein is viewed as a menace to social programs and equality rights. Since he wants to be the point man for deeper corporate intrusion into health care, it should be easy to make Klein the poster boy for this right-wing attack. From there, the struggle could be expanded to target every other politician pushing the “public-private partnership” agenda. After all, Stephen Harper's Tories are Klein's soulmates, and Paul Martin's liberals have utterly failed to punish provinces for violating the Canada Health Act. Defence of public health care can become a key issue whenever martin has to take his vulnerable minority government back to the polls. We can start by protesting Ralph wherever he takes his road show.
The CBC reported on Jan. 13 that documents from late 2003 and early 2004 show that Canada was close to signing a deal to join the U.S. “Star Wars” missile defence program before last June's federal election. The Documents were obtained under the Access to Information Act.
The CBC said that officials from the departments of national Defence and Foreign Affairs expected an agreement to be signed, likely in spring or summer of 2004.
The National Defence documents lay out many reasons why military officials favoured joining the project, but few counter-arguments. One strategy paper prepared by Defence and Foreign Affairs says that while Canada is not threatened by incoming missiles now, the risk is likely to increase over the next 15 to 20 years. Another document notes that U.S. foreign policy has become much more unilateralist, end that support for “the war on terror” will remain a litmus test of allied loyalty.
The CBC said that the June 28 election, which left Martin's Liberals with a minority government, stalled the growing momentum to reach a deal. Both the Bloc Québécois and the NDP oppose the ballistic missile defence shield, calling it a step towards the weaponization of space. The Conservatives have not definitively said whether they would support joining the U.S. In setting up a network of military installations.
With only 133 Mps in a 308-seat Parliament, Martin needs the support of at least 22 opposition members to have motions pass in the House of Commons. Voters elected 135 Liberal MPs, but one has died, and Martin expelled Ontario MP Carolyn Parrish from the party's caucus. Parrish has called supporters of the Pentagon plan “a coalition of the idiots.”
The most recent poll on the issue, released last November, found that 52% of Canadians were opposed to joining the program, even though the survey's wording encouraged respondents to favour the proposal.
In our last issue, this column reported that Paul Krugman, one of the leading lights of bourgeois economic theory, warned recently in the New York Times that the Bush administration's policies are making a deep economic crisis more likely.
Now the chief economist of one of the world's most prestigious banks says much the same. Stephen Roach, chief economist for Morgan Stanley & Co., one of the 50 largest companies in the world, says we are on “the economic brink.”
Writing in Foreign Policy, Roach says that when Alan Greenspan steps down as chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve, he will leave a record foreign deficit and a generation of Americans with little savings and mountains of debt. Americans, he says, depend on the value of their assets, especially their homes, rather than on income-based saving; they are running a huge current-account deficit; and much of the resulting debt is now held by foreign countries, especially in Asia, which permit low interest rates and entices Americans into more debt.
“This is no way to run the global economy,” Roach says. After the Asian financial storm of the late 1990s, he points to “increasingly dangerous waters in the years that followed,” noting that "global economic imbalances have intensified dramatically since 1999.”
What does he mean? “Asian countries holding enormous stocks of U.S. Dollars recycle this cash back into the United States by buying U.S. Treasury bills. This process effectively subsidizes U.S. interest rates, thus propping up U.S. Asset markets and enticing American consumers into even more debt. Awash in newfound purchasing power, Americans then turn around and buy everything from Chinese-made DVD players to Japanese cars.... Asia and Europe are increasingly dependent on overly indebted U.S. Consumers, while those consumers are increasingly dependent on Asia's interest-rate subsidy. The longer these imbalances persist, the greater the likelihood of a sharp adjustment. A safer world? Not on your life.”
Policies such as tax cuts, Roach warns, “could make the endgame all the more treacherous.”
Now check out this prediction, written 157 years ago by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: “Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells... It is enough to mention the commercial crises that, by their periodical return, put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity – the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed. And why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.”
Better hang on – we could be in for a rough ride. Maybe it's time to think about changing to a socialist economy, one that doesn't go through devastating crises once every few years!
By Pablo Vivanco
In the summer of 2005, over 20,000 youth will descend upon the capital of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela to convene the largest gathering of progressive youth and students in the world.
The 16th World Festival of Youth and Students (WFYS) to be held August 5 to 13 in Caracas, will be an opportunity for youth to share their experiences in fighting for peace, equality and social justice and to coordinate their efforts internationally.
The WFYS is a progressive youth and students festival which takes place every few years in a country determined by the General membership of the World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY). It is also co-organized by the Iinternational Union of Students (IUS), of which the Canadian Federation of Students is an executive members.
Since 1947, when the inaugural Festival was held in Czechoslovakia, WFDY has hosted these huge festivals with a progressive political agenda, with the necessary co-operation and/or support of local and national governments to ensure security of participants. As such, most of the festivals were held in socialist nations (eastern Europe, Cuba and North Korea) with the exceptions of Austria, Finland, Algeria, and now, Venezuela.
The 16th WFYS is being coordinated in Caracas by local Venezuelan youth and student groups, including the youth wings of the Communist Party of Venezuela and the Fatherland for All party of Hugo Chavez.
Youth will participate in political workshops and sessions, as well as in various cultural programming, including sports and music. The purpose of the festival is not just to celebrate youth culture, but to provide a space for youth who are active in their communities, campuses and organizations struggling for social change to exchange experiences and work to coordinate international action.
Progressive youth organizations are being contacted and invited to help build this event by participating in the Festival Preparatory Committee, which will represent this region on the International Preparatory Committee, distribute information to interested youth and coordinate the logistics and formation of a delegation from Canada, Quebec and First Nations.
The World Festival of Youth and Students aims to bring together progressive youth to share experiences and build our international struggle for peace and justice. The increasing aggression of the United States and other military powers against people's movements and nations like Venezuela, which are striving for alternatives to war and exploitation, coupled with the precarious current climate of global capital, mean that Venezuela 2005 is surely one of the most important and timely youth gatherings in recent memory. The 16th WFYS promises to be one of the biggest festivals yet, and hopefully youth from Canada, Quebec and First nations will be well represented to continue the fight for global peace and justice!
For more information, please contact Youth Festival organizers in Canada by email at youth_venezuela_2005@yahoo.ca.
UNITE-HERE Local 25 members in Washington, DC, have ratified a strong contract, including their largest raise in 20 years and big pension increases. Other changes to the contract are designed to improve conditions in the workplace and strengthen the rights of workers. UNITE-HERE is the merged union of hospitality gaming, apparel, textile and laundry workers, representing nearly half a million workers in the U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico.
The new agreement includes a raise of 50 cents/hour in the first year, and forty cents in each of the second and third years; 100% employer-paid health care for all current and future employees who work 24 hours/week (for single coverage); a 63% increase in management's contribution to the pension fund, increasing the potential retirement benefit from $525/month to as much as $780/month by 2007; new language guaranteeing workers an 8-hour work day, assuring full time work and benefits for members who want it; strong language to protect against increases in workloads, including a requirement to discuss significant changes with the union; new language protecting workers from abusive managers by allowing them to take complaints to an independent arbitrator; housekeepers with 30 years of service and quotas above 14 rooms will get to drop one room from their quotas.
The actors who voice The Simpsons for Mexican TV are involved in a dispute over the use of non-union labour. The performers, who have worked on the show for 15 years, fear losing their jobs because the dubbing company is seeking cheaper actors.
The dubbing company, Grabaciones y Doblajes Internacionales, blames the union for using tactics that have benefitted rival employers in Venezuela and Chile. But Mexico's National Actors Association accuses the company of threatening the livelihoods of 15,000 members by using lower-paid non-union actors.
“We're not people who like to fight,” said Humberto Velez, the voice of Homer Simpson. “The only thing we know how to do is act. But we will never let people that aren't interested in agreements take away our rights for their own benefit. How am I supposed to take care of my kids?”
He says he only earns about 600 pesos ($28) per episode and felt obliged to stand up for his union, which says the company has violated its agreement to use union labour.
Nancy Mackenzie, the voice of Marge Simpson, said: “You get to the point where you care deeply for your cartoon characters. You love them. You go to bed with them at night. It's a sad state, and not because of the money. It's for love.”
The employer claims that other dubbing companies in Latin America have cut wages, forcing it to do the same. A government arbitrator had been appointed to try to resolve the dispute.
(With files from BBC)
The Communist Party of the Russian Federation has mounted a campaign to oust the government following weeks of nationwide protests sparked by drastic cuts in social welfare benefits. The CPRF said on Jan. 18 it would collect the 90 signatures required in the 450-seat State Duma lower house of parliament to hold a confidence vote on the year-old government of Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov and President Vladimir Putin.
The benefit cuts require pensioners, veterans, and other disadvantaged groups to pay for pubic transport and basic medicines. They would be compensated by cash payments that are far less than the costs imposed by the change.
Demonstrations have seen shouting pensioners bundled against the cold while blocking traffic in towns and cities across the huge country. This prompted Putin to appear on national television pm Jan. 17 to berate his government and the Duma for poorly thinking through the “reforms.”
The biggest protests since the days of Boris Yeltsin may force Putin to fire top ministers or the entire government, and the Communists fanned this speculation by launching their signature drive.
“We want this government replaced. It has placed a plastic bag over the heads of all veterans,” CPRF Gennady Zyuganov told Moscow Echo radio. “Putin has just been elected. People placed their trust in him but we are seeing this trust melt before our very eyes.”
To succeed, the Communists will need support in the Duma from liberal and centrist forces who opposed the hasty way in which the reforms were drafted. Analysts speculate that the vote may take place in early February, but predict that the pro-Putin United Russia party that runs the chamber's floor would never vote against measures that they themselves introduced.
But the very idea of a no-confidence vote has sparked great excitement, since sharp debate is rarely heard in Russian politics under Putin.
Many observers predict a cabinet shuffle because the ruling pro-capitalist forces in the Kremlin will need to regain public support before Putin's successor is chosen in 2008. Even some in the United Russia group say that with discontent spreading across 11 time zones, the dismissal of a few ministers may not be a bad idea.
“The voluntary retirement of some minister who pushed through these reforms could ease the social situation in our country,” senior United Russia member Lyubov Slitska told the Kommersant business daily.
(With files from Agence-France Presse and other sources.)
With files from People's Weekly World
The Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions, which represents over 200,000 workers in Iraq's main industries, is urging its members to vote in the Jan. 30 elections for parties which advocate labour rights and social policies that benefit working people. Those elected will draft a permanent Iraqi constitution, which the IFTU says should be secular and contain guarantees for the rights of workers.
Over 100 groups are running national lists containing more than 7,000 candidates for 275 seats in a transitional assembly. The seats will be filled by proportional representation.
The Iraqi Communist Party has fielded a slate of 275 including non-Communists and 91 women.
While there are real concerns about security and participation, a new elected government will have more legitimacy than the present U.S.-handpicked one, says Salam Ali, a member of the ICP Central Committee. The election is part of the political process unanimously approved by the United Nations Security Council.
The new government, if it is really independent, unified and backed by the people, can tell the Americans to leave, Ali told the People's Weekly World in a phone interview from London. “Otherwise, we go down the path of internal strife and further bloodshed,” where the people “will pay the price.”
Most Iraqis are sick of the violence by both the U.S. and those carrying out terrorist acts, Ali said. However, attacks on the occupying military forces, he told the British Morning Star in December, are “considered acceptable, although the overwhelming majority of political forces in Iraq are against resorting to armed means so long as political means aren't yet exhausted.”
At the same time, a wave of deadly car bombings, kidnappings and murders is widely seen as an effort by Baathists to sow chaos, block elections and strong-arm their way back to power.
“If they have a role in the new government,” Ali said, “it will be with the connivance of the U.S. Government,” which may be aiming at a kind of “Vietnamization” to maintain its presence while reducing U.S. Casualties.
“Let us not forget that the Americans always had the aim of containing, destabilizing and overthrowing the [Hussein] regime, but maintaining the Baathist establishment,” Ali said.
In recent months, some 16 ICP members have been assassinated, but the party held its first national conference in three decades on Dec. 23-24. More than 250 delegates came to Baghdad to attend the meeting, which was organized in great secrecy. The ICP also held an election rally on Dec. 17 in a stadium in the center of Baghdad, drawing 3,000 people.
(See our next issue for analysis of the Iraqi election results.)
Mos Def, The New Danger,
Geffen Records, 2004
Review by Pablo Vivanco
“Beef is not what Jay said to Nas
Beef is when working folks can't find jobs
beef is oil prices and geopolitics
beef is Iraq, West Bank and Gaza Strip”
- Mos Def, “What is Beef?”
“Old white men, is running this rap shit
corporate forces, running this rap shit
watch out, we run the World.
-Mos Def, “The Rape Over”
Almost five years since his groundbreaking debut solo album, Black on Both Sides, Brooklyn local Mos Def hits the streets with his sophomore Album, The New Danger.
Mos is not new to the rap scene, however. This hip-hop veteran is the other half of the dynamic tandem of Black Star along with fellow BK resident Talib Kweli. Mos has also appeared on numerous mix tapes and compilations, including the popular Rawkus Soundbombing's 1-3. He has also performed alongside the likes of Common, the Roots and Kanye West.
Mos is also no stranger to social commentary and political engagement. Since the release of his debut album, Mos hasn't just been getting Emmy nominations and doing Spike Lee joints. He was active in anti-war efforts, playing at several New York City demonstrations against attacks on Iraq.
In The New Danger, Mos picks up where he left off in his previous album, continuing his lyrical assault on the commercialization of hip-hop, systemic racism and poverty. A new theme touched upon in this album, is the denunciation of war as a brutal tool of tool of unrepentant corporations and rich people to get “the loot”. This point is illustrated nicely on songs such as “The Rape Over” and “War.” All over the album there are defiant references to the Palestinian struggle and plight of the urban poor.
However, one shouldn't view this as a purely political album. A number of songs feature Mos' band, Black Jack Johnson, named after the famed first Black heavyweight champ. Black Jack Johnson's hard rock chops on “Zimzallabim” and “Freaky Black,” the bluesy riffs of “Blue Black Jack,” ambient melodies of “Modern Marvel” and dirty hip hop of “Grown Man Business,” make this one of the most innovative albums of the year.
If you love hip hop, you gotta get this album.
If you like the agitational/propaganda type music though, you may want to stick with Dead Prez and your old Public Enemy tapes (no offense to either one of those amazing artists).
By Kimball Cariou
Ellen Klaver, a journalist at KGNU radio in Colorado, who has followed the Anna Mae [Pictou-Aquash] case for three decades, says, “AIM may have been involved, but regardless of who killed Anna Mae, the FBI is the architect of this murder. They either had her killed or they tricked AIM into killing her.”
That's the conclusion to a 5,000-word article by Rex Weyler, who received a Pulitzer Prize nomination for his 1982 book Blood of the Land, recounting the clash between native groups and law enforcement throughout the western hemisphere. The article, “Who Killed Anna Mae,” filled three pages of the Vancouver Sun on Jan. 8. (For some reason, the text posted on several websites does not include the above paragraph from the Sun's print version.)
Weyler's piece, probably the most detailed account of the case to appear in the mainstream Canadian media, tells the story of “two First Nations youths, John Graham from Yukon and Anna Mae Pictou from Nova Scotia, (who) set out to help win native rights. They stumbled into a violent American maelstrom that cost Pictou her life and left Graham facing a murder charge.”
Anna Mae's body was found on February 24, 1976, by a rancher walking his fence line on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, in South Dakota. A second autopsy was required to find the real cause of death: a .32 calibre bullet fired into the back of her head.
Weyler examines the prosecution's evidence that John Graham executed Anna Mae as a suspected informer. “On first appearance, the evidence against Graham does indeed seem compelling,” he writes, including a video confession from 50-years-old Arlo Looking Cloud, who admitted being present when John Graham allegedly shot Aquash.
But upon closer study, a different picture emerged. Weyler interviewed Graham and other Native leaders, and went through FBI memos, court transcripts, sworn affidavits, public statements and other evidence compiled over thirty years.
The results are startling. One alleged witness against Graham, Al Gates, had been dead for nine months when U.S. Prosecutors told Canadian authorities that he was available for trial. Witness Frank Dillon, to whom Graham allegedly confessed, claims he did not make such a comment. That just leaves Arlo Looking Cloud, who now says that detectives “plied him with alcohol and drugs, coerced the testimony from him, and denied him the right to have a lawyer of his choice.”
Terry Gilbert from the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, says “Looking Cloud was a homeless alcoholic for more than 20 years, vulnerable to manipulation by the detective in Denver.”
It wouldn't be the first time. In 1976, Canada extradited AIM leader Leonard Peltier with evidence coerced from Myrtle Poor Bear, who later testified that FBI agent David Price frightened her into making false statements. That's ancient history, according to U.S. Authorities, but the FBI's war against the American Indian Movement has never ended since it was launched over 30 years ago.
Weyler traces Anna Mae's origins in Nova Scotia and her work with AIM in Boston, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles. In 1973, the 28-year old went to Pine Ridge, where traditional Lakota leaders, struggling to recover the 160,000-square-mile territory promised in an 1868 treaty, asked AIM for defence against a brutal police gang controlled by the Tribal Council. For 71 days, AIM activists held off against vigilantes, police, SWAT teams and U.S. Marshals. During the siege, Anna Mae married Nogeeshik Aquash in a traditional Sioux ceremony.
Later, a terrifying string of violent murders against traditional leaders and AIM members. John Graham, then just 19, arrived in South Dakota in 1974 as an AIM member with security responsibilities.
On June 26, 1975, two FBI agents and Lakota member Joe Stuntz died during a police raid on a property where Leonard Peltier was staying. Anna Mae and John Graham drove from Iowa to help Peltier and others escape. On Sept. 5, she was captured, but rejected the FBI offer of lenient treatment in exchange for testifying against the alleged killers of the two agents.
By this time, the FBI had thoroughly infiltrated AIM. For example, AIM leaders had discovered that their own security chief, Douglass Durham, worked for the FBI. Weyler's article tells how the Bureau worked “to create the impression that leaders are informants.”
Such tactics led some to suspect that Aquash had become an informer. She was last heard from on Dec. 20, 1975. The prosecution claims that Graham executed her on orders from AIM, while the defense theory is that the FBI killed Aquash, and that David Price, Douglass Durham, or someone from the Pine Ridge goon squad pulled the trigger. Given the lack of witnesses, it seems hard to understand how the prosecution could prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt. But justice for AIM members is in short supply in the United States, where Leonard Peltier recently marked his 28th year as one of the world's longest-serving political prisoners.
Wyler notes that “AIM is sharply divided over blame for Aquash's death.” Peltier, Vernon Bellecourt, and Dennis Banks say that the FBI has intimidated witnesses, fabricated evidence, and planted media stories to create the impression that Graham might have carried out an execution.
Another problem with the “execution” theory is that there is no record of such tactics. When AIM exposed Durham, for example, they held a public press conference. Nor did they execute or harm Bernie Morning Gun, Virginia 'Blue Dove' DeLuce, or any of the dozens of informers they uncovered.
On the other hand, there is a long record of abuses of the legal process in AIM cases, such as prosecutors counseling witnesses to commit perjury, suppressing evidence, infiltrating defense teams, and lying to the courts. In 1976, a U.S. Commission on Civil Rights examined Lakota complaints and found the FBI guilty of “threats, harassment, and search procedures conducted without due process of law.”
Bob Newbrook, a retired RCMP officer who now regrets participating in the 1976 arrest of Leonard Peltier, says “I'm afraid that Canada will get duped again with the same sort of trumped-up evidence that the U.S. used to get Mr. Peltier.”
If that happens, Anna Mae's family will be no closer to achieving their goal of long-delayed justice for her murder.
PV Vancouver Bureau
A powerful and detailed article on John Graham's legal case, written by a prominent journalist, appeared in the Jan. 8 edition of the Vancouver Sun, giving hundreds of thousands of readers a comprehensive background to the murder of Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash. Graham is battling against extradition to the United States, where he is accused of the murder.
Just three days later, on Jan. 11, Graham appeared in BC Supreme Court, to hear Judge Elizabeth Bennett's rulings on two motions filed by his attorneys.
One motion questioned the constitutional validity of the extradition, but Bennett ruled that sine she was bound by existing case law, there was nothing she could do at the BC Supreme Court level. However, two other cases waiting to be heard by the Supreme Court of Canada raise similar questions about the validity of Canada's Extradition act. The outcome of these cases could have an impact on the possible extradition of John Graham.
The John Graham Defense Committee argues that Canada's sovereignty is reduced by this new Extradition Act. Under the previous Extradition Act, the requesting state needed to submit first-hand evidence and affidavits. With the implementation of the post-9/11 Extradition Act, only a simple summary which can include second-and third-hand evidence is necessary.
Graham's lawyers also tried to exclude a booking photo which somehow was sent to the US to show a prosecution witness for identification purposes, as well as the entire summary of evidence, which they say includes a number of falsehoods. But the judge again ruled that the Extradition Act does not allow her to exclude the summary of evidence.
The extradition hearing is scheduled to commence again on Jan. 25, after this edition of People's Voice goes to the printshop.