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By ALD. HARRY RANKIN

Vancouver Aldermen have voted
themselves a hefty salary boost,
60% in fact, increasing their
salaries from $7,920 to $13,200 a
year.

I voted against the increase.

It’s not that I’m opposed to any
increase, or that I deny that some
Aldermen work hard at their job.
But there is another point of view.

Most aldermen spend about half
their time on City Council work —
some two anda half to three days a
week. Secondly, most — if not all
aldermen, have another source of
income — a business, profession or
are the recipients of very generous
monthly grants from the federal or
provincial government. So none of
us are in dire need or going
without.

The increase aldermen voted for
themselves amounts to ap-
proximately as much as, what
people earning a minimum wage
receive in a whole year, or, the
total pension that senior citizens
receive in two years.

When so many people are going
without, when aldermen refuse to,
build low rental housing for people
in need while at the same time
giving concessions to developers
hand over fist, well — I just can’t

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justify a salary increase of 60
percent.

Surely the criteria to be applied
must take into account the totality
of the group that we represent
politically, if this is the case, then
when civic workers come to say, “‘I
have a wife and four children — my
wage of five dollars per hour is not
enough’’, we should apply the same
formula to these people.

* * *

The provincial government’s
decision to build a lake at the east
end of False Creek looks at-
tractive, but only at first glance.
Most people like water. Aside from
swimming and boating facilities, it
is always pleasant to look at.

But we must also give some
thought to the consequences.

The first one is that land values
around the lake will sky-rocket.
The developers will take over and
build fancy homes and apartments
for the wealthy. The ordinary
citizens in the area will be forced
out — by high taxes and high rents.
The lake will end up being a
recreation and living area for the
well-to-do.

Secondly, it will cost the city
many millions of dollars to change

the whole traffic pattern in this
including streets, sewers,

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Az CITY PRESS CONFERENCE

South Vietnam neutralists |
call for Thieu's ouster

Among the hated secret police of
Saigon, there is a grisly slogan,
intended for the thousands of
political prisoners and detainees
and epitomizing the brutal
repression by which the Thieu
regime daily maintains itself.

“Tf a prisoner will not confess (to
Communist affiliation),’’ the
slogan goes, ‘‘then beat him until
he does confess; if he confesses,
beat him until he recants; if he will
not recant, beat him until he is
dead.”’

The words were those of Viet-
namese lawyer Nguyen Long, one
of three former political prisoners
and representatives of the third
political force in South Vietnam —
the neutralists — who were in
Vancouver last week detailing
their prison experience and calling
for international pressure to force
the implementation of the Paris
Peace Accords, signed two years
ago.

Like his companions, Ton That
Lap and Vo Nhu Lanh, Long spent

City salary boost unjustified

lighting and so on. This cost will be
added on to your tax or rent bill.

From this standpoint the $12
million gift of a lake is one we can’t
really afford to accept.

And the whole concept is phoney.
Its purpose is to provide a show-
place for delegates who will attend
the 1976 United Nations Conference
on Human Settlement to be held in
Vancouver. I’m sure the delegates
(many of them from the third
world countries) would be a lot
more impressed if they saw us
building low-rental housing for
senior citizens and people on low
and moderate incomes. Show
places are fine for tourists, but
they add little to the quality of life
for the ordinary citizens.

HEALTH IN USSR

MOSCOW — About 1,000 million
rubles are allocated in the Soviet
Union every year for treatment of
people in sanatoria and health
resorts under the budget of state
social insurance.

Last year 31 million people in the
Soviet Union spent their vacations
in sanatoria, holiday hotels, and 20
million children and teenagers
stayed in summer camps.

several years in the infamous
Thieu prisons. First arrested in
1964 and sentenced to 10 years hard
labor for assisting in the
organization of the Movement for
Popular Self-Determination and
the Peace Committee, he was
released three years later only’ by
combined pressure of the In-
ternational Association of Lawyers
and the International Commission
of Jurists.

Although he had suffered the loss
of an eye in prison and was already
63, he was arrested again in 1972 —
this time for his courtroom defence
of several other prisoners. He was
not released until July, 1974.

Like Lanh and Lap, Long em-
phasized that the greatest need
now in South Vietnam is to rid the
country of the U.S.-supported
Thieu regime in order to guarantee
the implementation of the Paris
Accords and to lay the basis for the
election of a government of
national reconciliation.

That is the central aim of the
third force in South Vietnam and
although it is subjected to the
terror of Thieu’s police, scores of
organizations, » including the
Organization for the Im-
plementation of the Peace Accord,
the People’s Front for Peace,
Committee for the Rights of
Workers and the Committee for
Freedom of the Press. — many of
them newly-formed — support that
aim.

It is also supported by the
Provisional Revolutionary
Government of South Vietnam
which last month called for an end
to continuing U.S. military aid, the
overthrow of the Thieu regime and
the establishment of a government
dedicated to national concord and
the implementation of the Paris
Accords.

Questioned as to the role of the
PRG with regard to the peace
agreement, Long told a Vancouver
press conference that he knew
little since he was only in PRG
territory when the Saigon
government forcibly sent him
there.

He pointed out, however, that in
the PRG, thousands of copies of the
Paris Accords were widely
distributed. In Saigon, he noted,
publication of the agreement is
prohibited.

That ban on the publication of the
peace agreement is only one of
several acts of sabotage against

peace in Vietnam committed by

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“Composers

Thieu and his U.S. backers. Mass |
arrests continue to take place, U.S. —
military personnel is still present |
in Saigon and American military | _
aid poursin — all in violation of the ~
peace accords. |

Vo Nhu Lanh, a 26-year-old ©
student and former president of the —
National Union of South Viet- —
namese Students, knew the ©
American military personnel — he ©
estimated that there are 25,000 in |
South Vietnam disguised as |
civilians — first hand. Arrested in |
1972 following a protest against the |
militarization of the university, he |
was thrown into prison and sub- |
jected to more than eight months of |
torture, much of it under the —
direction of American personnel |
who called the procedure |
“strategic interrogation.” 7

He also detailed one of many q
forms of torture carried out by the |
police in the inevitable attempt to _
force a confession of Communist |
affiliation. a

“T would be stretched out on a ~
bench, with my hands and feet tied: |

to it while four people stood round | —

me. One would gag my nose and ©
mouth while a second would pour —
cold and often soapy water down |

them. The third would stick his | ~

fingers into my ribs and stomach |
— they called this ‘turning the —
chicken’s stomach’ — while the
fourth would threaten me in a loud ~
voice in order to get me to ‘con- |
fess. When my stomach was —
swollen with water, my torturers —
would siton me, so that all the food —
I had eaten streamed out through —
my mouth and nostrils. Then I _
would fall into a coma ... they |
called this the ‘submarine’.”’

Ton That Lap, arrested three
times since 1970, also underwent —
brutal torture at the hands of the —
police. A former president of the
National Association of Student
in Saigon, he is
remembered by hundreds of fellow
prisoners for a short song he
composed in prison — for which he
received renewed torture —_
dedicated to what he called ‘‘the
extraordinary courage of the |
prisoners.”’ 7

The three representatives em-
phasized, however, that Thieu |
cannot long maintain himself in the
face of mounting opposition — | —
despite huge amounts of US. aid; |

He added, ‘‘we ask for peace and
the democratic rights of the people ©
to elect their own government. And |
I think our struggle will soon be |
successful.” : :

TOM
McEWEN

ith every crisis of capitalism, two inherent evils are

immediately manifest: a steadily rising total of
destitute and jobless workers, and an alarming increase
in the frequency of crime. It has been that way since
Confederation and before, to a greater or lesser degree.
But today our social system is recording higher totals of
these twin evils than ever before.

When a Liberal or Tory Establishment tackles the
problem of mass unemployment (if it tackles it at all), it is
generally to set up a horde of like-minded bureaucrats,
never to help out a growing army of jobless workers and
their families, but to draft ‘“laws’’ and other belly-robbing
schemes designed to deprive the unemployed of what little
the law allows. In other words, to whittle down a now
totally inadequate unemployment insurance scheme.
Capitalist Establishments are nothing if not truly super-
pecksniffian, as far as peoples’ needs are concerned!

In the wider area of crime however, the problem is not
so easily and readily solved. There are no “‘pat”’ answers,
despite the fact that most of the ‘‘solutions’”’ they do turn.
out to curtail crime are mostly “‘pat,”’ intended always to:
concentrate upon the effect rather than the cause. A.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—FRIDAY, JANUARY 24, 1975—Page 2

society which produces mass unemployment with
unerring cyclical timing, also produces a built-in in-.
cubator for crime in all its manifestations.

Some five years ago Parliament voted a moratorium on
capital punishment, viz, that hanging would be abolished
for a given period, the only exception being the killers of
police officers and prison guards.

Since Parliament voted along non-partisan lines in
accordance with the. dictates of its so-called “‘con-
science,” one must wonder why that alleged “conscience”’
doesn’t seem to be in evidence when voting approval of
U.S.-Canada war pacts, such as NATO or NORAD, or the
blood money Canadian monopolies pocket annually from
U.S. aggression in Vietnam and elsewhere, where mass
murder is the rule rather than the exception. Obviously
“conscience” in this as in similar cases becomes a very
minor factor.

Because of the high incidence of murder during recent
months, of police officers, prison guards and large
numbers of other citizens, the clamor is growing louder
for a restoration of the hanging ‘‘deterrent,” which,
whatever else it may achieve, does not deter a tem-
porarily insane killer from taking the life of his fellow
human. (The City of Vancouver alone is getting close to
chalking up a killing or attempted killing every day of the
week, and the end is not yet in sight.) :

Now we have a petition to be circulated throughout
Canada; a petition sponsored in Greater Vancouver and
led by some “conscience-stricken” Tory troglodite,

urging the Trudeau government to cancel its no-hanging 4
moratorium, reinstate this worthless deterrent and |
provide ample allowances for more rope. |
With all due respect for and sympathy with those who |
suffer loss and sorrow because of acts of temporary
madness, the author of this column appeals to all decent
Canadians of every faith and creed not to append their
signatures to such a petition — a petition which does
nothing to solve the problem of crime except compound it |
with an additional crime. 7
No state has the moral, ethical or legal right to take
what it cannot return, and least of all a capitalist state, —
since exploitation, profit; plunder and killing of the |
world’s poor has been and is its prime stock in trade every
since its origin. Again one need only cite U.S. mass
murder in Vietnam alone to confirm that contention.
Effective deterrents to crime are very much on the
agenda of today, deterrents that will halt the crime of
dispossessing millions of workers from their jobs and —
livelihood; deterrents that will end the use of deadly —
drugs, first by eliminating the gigantic profiteering in the
trade, and secondly, by humane treatment of the drug
victim, rather than by throwing him (or her) in prison. |
Deterrents to financial-industrial profiteering and
racketeering; to gambling and trafficking in human life —
to every evil (and they are as numerous as the stars) —
which capitalism in its rotting decline produces!
More deterrents by all means — to curb the real
criminal of this era — capitalism itself, together with its —
dubious ‘‘conscience”’! |