Crisis bites US car firms

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Fraser (centre) with fellow UAW bureaucrats: now he is on the board of Chrysler As British Leyland, Chrysler/Talbot and Vaux. hall managements lead an offensive against shop floor working conditions in Britain; US car manufacturers also face a mounting crisis of profitability.

A slump in car sales as a result of this year's US energy crisis has coincided with longer-term financial problems for the major car firms.

Cutbacks in production have now brought a staggering 140,000 permanent or temporary lay offs of auto workers in car and lorry plants.

. This week 15 whole factories will close down until existing surplus stocks have been sold.

And, though the main casualties in the sales slump have been the large US "gas guzzlers", General Motors have now closed two plants making smaller vehicles.

Indeed GM only scraped a profit in the last quarter through government tax credits.

American Ford, meanwhile, has announced a $1 billion anticipated loss on its 1979 operation, oliset to a certain extent by improved profits from Britain and Europe.

Ford management predict however that 1980, too, will see them in deficit in the US, and do not expect figures to climb back into the black until the following year.

Prospect of But they do not face the immediate prospect of collapse that hangs over the head of the Chrysler Corporation.

Chrysler Chairman Lee Iacocca has received an ominous mixture of good news and bad news in his bid to stave öff bankruptcy.

Bad news: the Carter administration turned down his initial request for $1.2 billion in Federal loan guarantees.

Good news: two months later the administration changed its mind-and offered $1.5 billion.

Bad news: the $1.5 billion is only available if manages to raise another $1.5 billion to match it on the private market.

Good news: Iacocca received an immediate cash bonus from. the United Auto Workers union boss Douglas Fraser, who "volunteered" his members for a $200 million pay cut over the next year, and "volunteered" his retired members for a cancel lation of a scheduled penston increase worth another $200 million.

Fraser, in exchange, is to receive a seat on the board of Chrysler!

Bad news: despite this demonstration of abject servility by the trade union bureaucracy in Chrysler, bankers still don't want to touch the Corporation with a barge pole. Chrysler's own bankers, Manufacturers Hanover maleed have publicly stated that they have say not had ma on on the Corporation "We lend money circumstances in which we don't expect to be repaid.

Other leading US bankers and bourgeois politicians with the aid of course, of lobbyists reflecting the interests of ford and General Motors, have also spoken out against any federal loan to Chrysler As lacocci warns more and more stridently that • cash is which likely that read tost $12 The arrest of the mayor of Nablus in the West Bank area occupied by Zionist military forces in the 1967 war has provoked a huge crisis in the area itself and throughout the complex world of international diplomacy whose purpose is to deprive the Palestinian people of their national rights.

Mayor Bassam Al-Shaqa was alleged in the Israeli. newspaper Ha'aretz to have said that he would justify and identify' with the PLO coastal raid in March 1978 during which over 20 people were killed.

The Mayor denies this, saying that he merely said such raids were inevitable as long as Zionist occupation of the area continued.

Like virtually all Palestinians he of course identifies himself with the PLO and this in itself is probably enough to provoke the wrath of the occupation authorities.

Deportation

However, Mr Al-Shaqa is not in a position to confirm this personally since he has been incarcerated near Tel Aviv pending a probable court decision to deport him to Jordan.

Meanwhile, in the West Bank area itself, the entire town council of Nablus has resigned, together with up to 200 other councillors and all 25 mayors in the area.

Strike action in Nablus has been continuous since the arrest and demonstrations or sporadic violence are being reported every day from the area. million this year, will close down at the cost of 158,000 Chrysler Jobs-and hundreds of thousands more in related industries.

Thus in the land of unfettered free enterprise the anarchy of the capitalist crisis is wreaking havoc in a fundamental section of the engineering industry.

And the treachery of union leaders-a common factor in every facet of the struggle in the capitalist countries is also having its reflection in the privately owned US steel industry.

Workers in US Steel's American Bridge division last week voted to resist a company plan to freeze their wages, despite threats that the alternative was closure.

Steel workers union leader Lloyd McBride had recommended acceptance of a three-year standstill on wages which would further the attempt by US Steel to impose lower pay rates for the 100,000 workers in fabricating steel plants than for the 400,000 employed in basic steel.

The lesson-whether in the US or in Britain -is the same.

The anarchy of the system is The Zionists have also decided to prosecute two more of the mayors, Kasim Khalef of Ramallah and Ibrahim Tavil of El-Bira, for 'assaulting police' during a trial over land seizures in the area.

Why is it that the Zionists have risked all the consequences of thesé actions, including the radicalisation of the Palestinians on the West Bank following the mass actions developing there, and even condemnation by the entire General Assembly of the United Nations?

Autonomy

Mayor Khalef explained it as 'part of an Israeli drive to eliminate the West Bank leaders most opposed to the criminal concept of autonomy'.

"Autonomy" is the proposal from the Camp David agreements between the Zionists and Egyptian President Sadat for a bantustan-style state in the West Bank area, of Palestinians under Israeli patronage.

But Lionist motives go bevond this.

The crisis-ridden Begin government, with numerous resignations in recent weeks and strong pressure from extreme right wing forces determined to expand land seizures, has been compelled to take action to make itself appear ready to adapt to such forces.

All the UN governments, including those who have supported every form of Zionist plunder in the past, are prepared to condemn Israel at this point in order to prepare the way for possible agreement with the Zionists to set up an independent West Bank state as a sop to the Palestinians.

Some such imperialist carve-up, which may even be forced now destroying the forces of production, and throwing thous ands of workers out oi a job at a time when poverty and social need are rampant on a world scale.

The struggle must be to open the books of capitalist industry to elected workers committees, to expose to the working class the futility of seeking a way out down the capitalist road.

Instead the fight must be for occupations and mass strike action to force the nationalisation of basic industry and the banks without compensation under workers' management.

Only a planned socialist economy can provide secure jobs and living standards.

And ony a party of the working class, independent of the Democratic and Republican machines in the US, and offering a socialist perspective, can lead the vital struggle for a workers' government in the The fight in the UAW, and every other union in the coming period must be for a political break from Carter, Kennedy and the Democrats, and for the unions to take the lead in building a Labour Party in the USA.

Carter.

on the Zionists, is the greatest danger to the Palestinian liberation movement at this time.

• There can be no compromise on the demand for the withdrawal of Zionist forces from all occupied territory by the ending of the state of Israel itself, and the establishment of a secular state of Palestine, in which rights of majority and minorities alike are guaranteed.

Turkey's new right wing Prime Minister, Suleyman Demirel, received a substantial (229-208) vote of confidence in the National Assembly last weekend.

The programme he has put forward to resolve the political and economic crisis confronting Turkish capitalism includes the imposition of a new state of emergency Act, the institution of special courts to try 'terrorists' , and new restrictions on Turkish trade unions and assoc¡ations.

While these moves are cloaked in rhetorical denunciatians of "terrorism" every previous repressive measure taken by the Turkish capitalist state has been directed almost exclusively against the left wing and the trade unions, while the toll of murders carried out by fascist " gangs continues unchecked.

It is more urgent than ever that the Turkish workers movement break from the political alliance with the bourgeois RPP, led by former PM Ecevit, and turn instead to büilding a united working class front to bring down Demirel and create conditions for a workers and peasants government in Turkey.

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Demirel wins vote