In the same week, statistics showing the dramatic rise in child poverty in Canada were reported in editorials in the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail.

One in four children, about 1.3 million, live in families with income below the government established poverty line. The majority of poor children have both a mother and father at home. Nearly 60 percent of poor families had one parent work during the year, half of those at a full-time job. In metropolitan Toronto alone, children make up nearly half of food bank users. Each day in Toronto 13 families are evicted from their homes.

The simultaneous reporting of these developments underscore once again that we live in a society divided into classes, each with diametrically opposed interests, where the class of wealthy capitalists lives by the exploitation of the labor of the working class.

Al Cappe

Toronto, Ontario Irish activist arrested
Roisin McAliskey, the 25-year-old daughter of Bernadette Devlin McAliskey was arrested last week and held in Casterleagh Interrogation center for seven days under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. Roisin is now in London, where she was remanded in court for one week in Holloway prison because Germany has issued an extradition warrant for her. She is wanted in connection with the IRA attack last June in a British army base in Germany.

The evidence against Roisin is a photograph which a German doorman said "could" be a woman he saw thought to be a member of the IRA active service unit which had carried out the attack and a piece of trash found in a hotel room which may have fingerprints on it.

Roisin is four and one-half months pregnant and her lawyer, Gareth Pierce, said October 26 that doctor's have ordered that Roisin must have obstetrics specialist facilities available at all times, which would not be available in prison.Another man, also a suspect in the IRA attack in Germany, was arrested in Dublin and an extradition warrant has also been issued for him.

Please call the German Consulates and ask that the German authorities drop the extradition request against Roisin McAliskey.

Irish American Unity Conference

Washington, D.C. Consumer price index
Every union member, retired person or just plain worker should be aware of a nefarious plan in the works to recalculate the consumer price index. A commission is about to recommend to Congress a new method of looking at price increases that would use the following logic.

For example, if the price of hard-cover books rises too high, more people turn to paperbacks or use the library.

The (old) price index would register an increase in this case while a consumer, assuming roughly equal satisfaction, would have spent less. The new plan would register this situation not as a price increase, but perhaps even as a price decrease or no price increase at all.

After all, the consumer with a paperback is still reading, right? So if you can't afford steak any more and buy chicken, since you are getting "roughly equal satisfaction", no price increase is involved. If subsequently you can no longer afford chicken and turn to macaroni and cheese, again, since you have "roughly equal satisfaction" the CPI would not necessarily register an increase. So it would go, right down to bread and water.

In a related article, the New York Times estimates that using this index, rather than real wages showing a ten percent loss in the last 20 years, a THIRTY-FIVE percent gain is registered. Geez, maybe we should give back some of those 2 percent wage increases we got recently!

This plan is headed for Congress with bi-partisan support. It is nothing less than a plot to pick the pocket of the entire working class. Labor and its allies better get moving on this one!

Jon Flanders

Albany, New York  
 
 
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