French government evacuates homeless Africans had a good response to a subscription
SINCE May 21, 1992, more than 300 African families have been camping on the drive launched over the summer. Per-
Esplanade de Vincennes, just outside Paris' inner city, demanding decent housing.
haps to reflect the mass anti-Maas-
They stayed there for more than five months in very difficult material conditions and tricht, pro-decentralization sentiment at the outset, under a strict police blockade aimed at preventing any improvement in in their country, they have even taken over the work of handling the payment
Over the past three years the Paris Region has seen an increasing number of and subscriber complaints departsuch occupations, a reflection of the French capital's mounting housing crisis. Rents ments. This is a great help for both the have been rising sharply since 1981, there have been big cutbacks in the construc-
/V team and Danish readers alike - a tion of public housing while property speculation has flourished. In the Paris Region model which bears emulation the alone more than 300,000 people are homeless or without decent accomodation, world over. Thanks, Copenhagen!
while there are more than 300,000 recorded empty properties. A 1945 law allowing
We are renewing our call for spethe requisitioning of empty properties remains a dead letter.
cial donations to safeguard the future
In September 1992 an "agreement" was of International Viewpoint and the conflict which the families rejected since it gave no guarantees for the majority of
Fourth International's theoretical jourcases, and required that the camp be immediately abandoned. Since then the authonal, International Marxist Review.
And remember the old watchword:
The neo-fascist National Front (FN) has been agitating for the camp to be broken if each current subscriber could find up and its appeal seems to have caught the ear of the authorities. On October 29, another, our objective of financial stathe police brutally evacuated the camp giving spurious "humanitarian" reasons, and bility could easily be met.
pretending that the families would be temporarily rehoused. In fact hundreds of
The special introductory subscripthose from the camp have not been rehoused and are wandering the streets of Paris tion offer is still good. First-time subeach evening looking for somewhere to sleep.
scribers can receive /V for three
The offers made to the families are often indecent - for example a filthy abandomonths for only $11/£6/60FF.
ned hospital with 75 beds was offered as a home to 205 people who have preferred
Please send subscriptions and to camp outside. Hostels supposedly booked by the authorities are often not ready donations to /V, 2 rue Richard Lenoir, to receive the arrivals. A united committee has been organizing support for this
93108 Montreuil, France. Cheques struggle. Alongside housing campaigns it is continuing to demand the urgent rehouand money orders should be made out to "PEC". And please indicate that you are contributing to the fund drive. Further payment details can be found on page 2. * stantive risk to her life.
defend and vindicate that right."
(telephone: 1 746113; Fax: 745186). * sanitary conditions.
rities have broken off all negotiations.
signed concerning the Vincennes
27
November 23, 1992
The Reagan years saw a record-breaking build-up, which had several consequences. The United
States fitted itself out with a have sent any other economy to the bottom. The US is the ultimate example of the great debtor without recoverable property who the creditors cannot declare bankrupt because that would be the end of to Los Angeles highly sophisticated array of means of destruction. Its superiority in military technology reached levels never seen before as its great power rival
Spendthrift on weaponry, but penny pinching cuts on social spending in the name of primitive social Darwinism. "Get rich", cried Reagan to an America already
THE most significant result of the American presidential election is not the victory of Bill Clinton - even if he is being promoted as the new Kennedy for the 1990s (and the legend of Kennedy was largely a posthumous creation). It is the shattering defeat of George Bush, who just a year ago, was riding high in the polls.
After his victory in the Gulf War the outgoing president basked in imperial grandeur. The Battle of began to falter.
This was itself to some extent one of the consequences of Reaganite militarism: the debacle that Gorbachev presided over in the USSR was hastened by the exhaustion of the bureaucratic economy in the arms race imposed on it. The pursuit by the USSR of military parity with the US meant a much higher burden relative to its own national product than that borne by its rival.
characterized by big inequalities. The result was that the gulf between the two Americas, that of the rich and that of the poor became vaster and more dizzying than ever. Enrichment at the top was less the result of economic growth than of redistribution at the expense of the most disadvantaged and of a policy of easy money for the privileged.
The Reagan legacy
This was the America that Bush inherited and which he was to perpetuate. On the foreign policy front it was easy to
Kuwait was his Austerlitz, but a year later he met his Waterloo - in Los
Angeles.
SALAH JABER
P
RESIDENT BUSH inherited the mantle of Ronald Reagan, whose vice-president he had been. When the former actor took the helm of state, the American empire was in profound crisis. Nothing had gone right for the imperial United
States; in the wake of the sharp blow to the prestige of the executive dealt by
Nixon's Watergate scandals, Jimmy Carter took office on the "Mr.
Clean" ticket to inaugurate a presidency that, in 1979, saw both the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua and the overthrow of the Shah of Iran by
Islamic fundamentalists. The same year saw the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan
- Moscow's first military adventure outside its accepted sphere of influence since the
Second World War.
This was the background
> a when Reagan took control, dressed as an anti-Communist crusader.
Drawing on his cinematic experience, he employed powerful Made in Hollywood images: cowboy, western, star wars, Evil
Empire. The "Great Communicator" knew how to give his fellow Americans the illusion of restored glory. He had no trouble getting re-elected. His second term came at the same time as the beginning of the end of the Soviet empire, the very objecti-
28 ve in whose name he had come to power.
International Viewpoint # 239
From this point of view Clinton was not wholly right when he compared the triumphalism of the Republican administration over the collapse of the Soviet Union to the pretensions of a cock who believes daybreak to be the result of its crowing. Reaganite militarism, supported by the interests of the famous "militaryindustrial complex" was certainly not the ultimate cause of the collapse of the Soviet empire, but it certainly speeded up its coming to fruition.
However, there was a less shiny side to the Reagan medal. Republican prodigality in arms spending did not only stretch Moscow to breaking point; it was also beyond the means of Washington. The Reagan administration saw the culmination of a mechanism at work since the Vietnam War whereby the US would get its imperialist partners to finance its wars, be they hot or cold.
Taking advantage of their privileged position as the keystone of the world capitalist market, the US ran up a colossal debt which, even in relative terms, would flourish the super-sophisticated arsenal built up by Reagan in the face of an increasingly decrepit Soviet Union. Firstly on a small scale, with the invasion of Panama in December 1989 and then on the grand scale against Iraq in JanuaryFebruary 1991 — the biggest US military intervention since Indochina. That year was rounded off by the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Paradoxically, the fall of the USSR deprived Reagan's successor of his main argument. A world without the Evil Empire no longer needed "hawks" at the controls in Washington. Furthermore, the Gulf operation disappointed those who had believed in the mystification about the crusade against a new Hitler. Saddam
Hussein is now able to draw consolation - albeit a very meagre one for the suffering Iraqi people — from having survived to see his conqueror's downfall. In the United States, economic and social issues were again the centre of attention. This time Bush's luck was out. Starting in 1990, recession succeeded the largely artificial growth of the Reagan years. In this context, the consequences of the latter's anti-social policies have become immediately explosive. And so the victor of Kuwait lost the battle of Los Angeles last April, before losing office in November.