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August 31, 2001 | Issue 376

FRONT AND BACK PAGES

IMF squeezes Argentina
Stop these global loan sharks!
Marta Bongiorno stood in a line of 300 women that ran around the block in Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina. They were answering a newspaper ad for a single job. And the global loan sharks at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) want more of the same.

Walkout by UAW sends a message to Mitsubishi
"This is solidarity"
The 2,600 workers at Mitsubishi Motor Corp.'s plant in Normal, Ill., stunned their new hard-line management in August with a victory in a two-day strike.

Keep the Dream Alive rally in NYC:
"We're going to mobilize"
Some 2,000 people gathered outside United Nations headquarters August 25 at a demonstration for racial and economic justice across the world.

SPECIAL FEATURES

The IMF and World Bank exposed
Global loan sharks
When the Mafia does it, it's called "loan sharking" and "extortion"--lending money to desperate people and attaching outrageous and dangerous conditions as part of the payback scheme. But when the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank do it...well, then it's sound international economic policy. Here, Socialist Worker explains the facts you need to know about the IMF and World Bank.

The growing fight for the Charleston Five
"We're going to turn the tide in South Carolina"
With the campaign to defend the Charleston Five gathering momentum throughout the labor movement, ILA Local 1422 President Ken Riley talks about the fight of South Carolina dockworkers and the fight ahead.

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WHAT WE THINK

Bush's gang is ready to boycott UN conference on racism
The racists who won't show their faces
The first United Nations World Conference Against Racism is scheduled to begin August 28 in Durban, South Africa. But the country that has the most to answer for won't be sending a delegation.

Democrats and Republicans bicker over who's to blame
Pop goes the surplus
The Bush administration's announcement that the federal government budget surplus is disappearing fast set off the usual partisan fight in Washington over who was to blame.

The new weekly Socialist Worker
Socialist Worker is going weekly. Starting in October, we'll give you everything you've come to expect from SW--twice as often.

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NATIONAL NEWS

Anti-Star Wars activists face felony charges
A crackdown on protesters
More than a dozen people arrested at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California are facing a trial on felony charges of conspiracy. The federal government is going after nonviolent protesters who want to stop George W. Bush's Star Wars madness.

Victory in the death penalty capital
Texas halts execution of juvenile offender
Opponents of the death penalty won an important victory last month when Texas' highest court halted the execution of Napolean Beazley.

The raving bigot from North Carolina retires
Good riddance!
In August, Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) announced that he'll retire when his term ends in 2003. The only better outcome would be his timely death.

Arrested in NYC for opposing sanctions on Iraq
A dozen people were arrested on the steps of the U.S. mission to the United Nations in August for protesting deadly sanctions against Iraq.

THE DIRT ON DUBYA
White House tries to pull a fast one
George W. Bush Bush said that there were 60 existing "cell lines" for researchers to obtain stem cells from--enough for experiments that scientists hope will lead to new treatments for illnesses like Alzheimer's. One problem. Scientists who actually work with stem cells say the number of cell lines is nowhere near 60.

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INTERNATIONAL NEWS

ISRAEL/PALESTINE
Israeli military storms into Palestinian city in latest offensive
Terror in Hebron
Israel's aggression against the 11-month-old Palestinian Intifada has reached a new peak, as Israeli tanks, armored personnel carriers and military jeeps stormed Palestinian-ruled areas of Hebron August 24.

MACEDONIA
"Peacekeepers" go into Macedonia
NATO soldiers won't solve crisis
NATO troops moved into Macedonia in August to try to stop the latest Balkans conflict from spinning into an all-out civil war between ethnic Albanians and the country's Slavic majority.

ZIMBABWE
Behind the uproar over arrest of white farmers
Health workers were on strike in Zimbabwe throughout August in a battle over the terrible state of the country's health care system. But when Zimbabwe caught the attention of the Western media, the focus was on the arrest of 21 white farmers.

MEXICO
Volkswagen workers strike for wage hike
Some 12,500 workers at Volkswagen's crucial assembly plant in Puebla, Mexico, went on strike August 18 to demand better wages and working conditions.

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COLUMNS AND REGULAR FEATURES

WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?
"Tough-on-crime" policies exposed
The drug war fraud
Recent statistical evidence gives the lie to the presumption underlying the "war on drugs"--that higher prison sentencing is a deterrent to crime. It's about two decades overdue.

WHAT DO SOCIALISTS SAY?
Why the economy is headed for recession
The pundits swing between moods of great optimism and pessimism--with their day-by-day pronouncements resting on evidence as flimsy as yesterday's Dow Jones stock price index. Though he wrote more than a century ago, Karl Marx's description of the workings of capitalism is steadier--because it explains both today's slump and yesterday's boom.

THE MEANING OF MARXISM
Should we go back to a simpler way of life?
There have always been people who, in their rejection of the horrors of the profit system, hark back to a simpler, freer and more egalitarian past.

When the Socialist Party was formed 100 years ago
Birth of the socialist tradition in the U.S.
When the Socialist Party was established 100 years ago, socialism was a growing and popular alternative to the robber-baron greed that shaped the world at the turn of the 20th century.

INSIDE THE SYSTEM
It's the cheesiest
Philip Morris has raised self-promotion to new heights. To film its new television ad about its relief efforts for Kosovar refugees, Philip Morris hired the swank Leo Burnett advertising firm.

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ON THE PICKET LINE

Teamsters win two-year strike at Basic Vegetable
After two long years, 750 International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 890 members are celebrating an amazing victory in their fight for a new contract at Basic Vegetable.

Build support for the Charleston Five
About 250 trade unionists and other activists crowded into a union hall in New York August 23 to show their support for the Charleston Five.

ISSUES IN THE LABOR MOVEMENT
Class-war prisoners: Haymarket to today
In South Carolina, five longshoremen--members of ILA locals 1422 and 1771--are under house arrest, awaiting trial for picketing a nonunion shipping company in January 2000. But this kind of legal repression--or criminalization of dissent--is not new.

Labor in Brief

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NEWS AND REPORTS

Activists prepare for protests against IMF/World Bank
Mobilize for global justice
Socialist Worker rounds up the activities organized in the run-up to the protests against the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank meetings in late September in Washington, D.C.

Activists block Italian ship to support jailed G8 protesters
Bay Area global justice activists delayed the unloading of an Italian ship in August to protest police violence against protesters at the July G8 protests in Genoa.

Reports in Brief

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LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

As union workers fight to defend their gains...
Verizon gets nasty
I am a technician at Verizon, one of 140,000 who went on strike a year ago to win a decent contract. But life at Verizon has gotten ugly since our victory.

A man who was central to the welfare rights movement
I was saddened to read about the death of Richard Cloward on August 23. Cloward, along with his wife, Francis Fox Piven, not only wrote some excellent books about poor peoples' struggles, but they were instrumental in helping to build the welfare rights movement in the 1960s.

Letters in Brief

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REVIEWS

Final word on the Vietnam War?
Apocalypse Then and Now
Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now is back in theaters, in an expanded and reedited version. Just as it was 22 years ago, the film is being hyped as Hollywood's "definitive statement" on the Vietnam War.

A PEOPLE'S VACATION GUIDE
How women fought for the right to vote
If you're ever in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, you should stop by the National Women's Suffrage Museum in Seneca Falls, where the first Women's Rights Convention was held in 1848.

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