PSS oY GE ALS PL n “My junta colleagues and | have conducted a humane search for the 2,500 Chileans supposedly missing in our jails. However .. .” 25 years ago... U.S. CAPITAL INVADES S. AFRICA U.S. capital is invading South Africa on a growing scale, ac- cording to a detailed survey made by the Council on African Affairs, New York. Morgan in- terests “occupy a dominant posi- tion in gold and copper mining” and are now exploiting uranium mines supplementing Belgian production. The following are also active: International Nickel Corp., Kennecott Copper, Standard Oil, Ford, General Motors, Chrysler, Studebaker, Good Year, Firestone, General Tire, U.S. Rubber, International Harvester, General Electric, General Foods and Coca-Cola. U.S. loans have also increased. A loan of $10-million was pro- vided in 1950 and eight U.S. banks gave one of $30-million in Tribune, Sept. 22, 1952 ES5T. FLASHBACKS FROM THE COMMUNIST PRESS 50 years ago. & MACHINERY REPLACING HARVEST WORKERS It is going to be harder than ever for unskilled migratory workers to find a master. Thousands of harvest workers are due to be supplanted by the machine which has invaded their field — the automative harvester thresher. One of these machines will do the work of five or six men in the old way. While it has been in use in some portions west of the Rockies; it is only recently that it has found increasing favor on the big wheat farms east of the Rockies. The smallest of the new types of machines can be oper- ated by one man and goes over the field at two or three miles per hour cutting the grain to a swath of from eight to twenty feet. The Worker, Sept. 24, 1927 SIDIWORIALL COMIMUBINT Unity and the task force With good reason, the crisis of con- fidence both in the federal government and in the economic policies of the sys- tem it represents is growing. The game of musical chairs in the fed- eral Cabinet contributes nothing to solv- ing the problems swamping the economy. Where there should be work- able solutions there is an increasing vacuum. . The working-class movement, or- ganized labor and people of democratic convictions are challenged to fill that vacuum with their own policies to secure the living standards and the future of working people. As an alternative, fascist and racist ideas stand ready to expand into every area left open to them. Organized labor’s job conferences, moves to cope with organizing the un- employed, all its responses to worsening conditions, are welcome and need to be stepped up, expanded. — To be successful, labor will have to hammer out tough, realistic economic and social policies which come to grips with the disastrous arms program of the big business. government. Ottiiwa is not eager to report its total military commitment to the Pentagon, t NATO, to NORAD and to the mono polies and multi-nationals who reap enormous arms and components profits. Since the last published figure of over $3-billion a year, Canada’s arms budget has been swelled by huge commitments to new war equipment. — Underlying both the boom in arms squandering and the stagnation of the socially useful sector of the economy 18 Canada’s domination by the USA and its powerful corporations. Canadian inde- pendence is at the core of any battle for rising living standards and for the right to expect a fulfilling life. In seeing the real nature of the crisis; fighting for new policies, as well as a neW Budget, the labor movement will meet the responsibilities of our demanding times. Policies to fill a vacuum The task force on Canadian unity, set up by the federal government in July, has the opportunity to be remembered for a genuine contribution to Canadian unity. Or it can win for itself the dis- respect due a fraud. The task force is headed jointly by John Robarts, former Tory premier of Ontario, who served monopoly well for many years, and by Jean-Luc Pepin, the agent of mono ly in charge of the notorious wage freeze legislation — the so-called Anti-Inflation Board. Are they, with their five colleagues, going to look for the real basis for unity, © or are they going to seek ways for monopoly capitalism to make the best of the crisis of confederation? And if monopoly capitalism makes the best of it, will it not be an extension of the attacks by the system on the working class of both nations? The task of defining a third option — something other than either the status quo, or Quebec separation from the rest of Canada — can hardly be unaffected by the conclusion in more and more | quarters that steps must be taken toward a Canadian constitution. We say that recognition in Canada of two nations — French and English- speaking — demands a new made-in- Canada constitution, or as the Com- munist Party Program, The Road tO Socialism in Canada, put it in Nov. 1971: “_.a freely-negotiated new confederal pact between the two nations, a neW Canadian constitution, based on the vol- untary, equal partnership of the two na- tions in a bi-national, sovereign and democratic state.” 4 This is the direction in which many seekers after Canadian unity are noW moving. Will the Robarts-Pepin mission serve as a means of enriching both the concepts and means of their application, as its mandate permits? The government is accustomed to playing with a number of task forces for its own reasons, but it this case there must be no sidetracking of the main issues because the future of - Canada is at stake. Another apartheid murder The murder of biack student leader Steve Biko, at the hands of South A frica’s Prisons Minister James Kruger is ignit- ing protests throughout the world. The 30-year-old Biko is the 45th person known to have died in detention under the racist apartheid rule of the Vorster government. Memorial meetings, vigils, and protest demonstrations are taking place around the world as, in justified anger, with hatred for the racist rulers and their foreign supporters, millions are de- manding a break in all trade and assis- tance to South Africa. The Canadian Government has paid lip service to the human rights of South Africa’s 18 million Blacks, but it closes its eyes to millions of dollars from Canadian corporations invested in the racist system to reap profits from the sweated labor of Black people. It can’t even bring itself to agree to a mandatory arms embargo against the racists. Ottawa maintains dip- lomatic relations over, the bleeding: bodies of apartheid’s victims. If it takes protest on a mass scale to teat the Trudeau Liberals from their em brace of the Pretoria regime, then that iS the kind of protest we must guarantee-_ Let Steve Biko’s murder be a source 0 more than mourning. Let it be a sourcé of strength and determination to fight apartheid to its early death.