Women s Fightback Trade union conference

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Time and again women trade unionists have come forward to fight the Tory onslaught on their rights and living standards. And each time they have run up against the limitations or outright treachery of the existing bureaucratic And they have found a movement which has for decades ignored the issues and problems faced by women. Women's Fightback is designed as a focus for a movement to change the unions and challenge their present leadership.

The conference is open to women either as individuals or as delegates from any group, workplace organisation, branch or women's group at local, regional or national There will be an all-day creche. Workshops on various topics under main groups: Pay; public sector and the cuts; jobs; fighting sexism; racism and the Third World. unwaged non-delegates). Credentials from 41 Ellington Coventry Council strikers •20s leaders.

or as level.

'The conference

fee is £3.50 (£2 for low-waged or extra £80? They can't!

Cuts in NHS abortion facilities and lack of advice on contraception add to the squeeze. The government

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REPUBLICAN Stockman addressing Republican rally ir Mid West PRESIDENT Reagan and his recently disgraced Budget Director David Stockman say that the US Frderal budget deficit is going to fall. Most forecasters say it will go through the roof.

Reagan and several influential advisers say that supply side economics (making the world more orottable for capitalists oy cutting taxes, 1s the ker to economic recovery. Vice President Bush says it is 'voodoo economics" and Stockman says it is "the wrong atmospherics"

Reagan and his Treasury Sucretary Donald Regan say that interest rates are too high and money is too tight. Paul Volcker, Reserve Buard head of the Federal ¡the US equivalent of the Bank of England) 'says I hope it's nothing serious!' tight money is the answer to everything.

CONFUSED? You won't be after you've understood THE 1T° COMMANDMENT that in only a few months THOU SHALT SPEAK NO ti Reaganomics has become almost a synonym for total confusion.

One difference between Thatcherism and ReaganPrESIDENT KON' IF AGAR omics is that its passage from authority and self-confidence to confusion and self-contradiction has been even quicker. In the last few weeks Reagan, like Thatcher, has abandoned just about every one of his stated objectives and has postponed further into the future the great economic recovery which he promised when he came to power.

What the Reagan administration has managed to do, however, again like Thatcher, is begin to implement a programme which cuts the standard of living of ordinary Americans in hundreds of ways and which benefits the rich and the capitalists.

The Reagan adminstration, like Thatcher, relieves both in the control ›i the money supply and in Cuts in government spendng to balance the state judget: it advocates videspread deregulation the dismantling of governTriumph of election not ment controls on the activities of capitalists). The objective is to reverse the fall in the rate of profit and to make a historic turnaround in the role of government in the economy:

Compared with its immediate predecessors, Reaganomics is a radical new attempt to solve the problems of capitalist crisis, clearly in the interests of the capitalist class.

Radical and new it may be - but intellectually coherent it is not. In fact, the Reagan administration consists of an alliance - or perhaps more appropriately a scrambled mish-mash of several economic ideas.

First there are the budget balancers, led until recently by Reagan nimself. Their main economic objective in the period up to 1984 is the complete elimination of the budget deficit.

423c. followed up by triumphant achievemt Given that Reagan was elected on gradiose promise to cut taxes by 30% during his term of office and at the same time to vastly increase miltary spending, this means that the policy of cutting the deficit implies huge cuts in government spending on virtually everything else other than the military.

No-one actually knows precisely how big the cuts would have to be since the figures bandied about change almost every day. Virtually every week since Reagan won his first spending cutback vote in Congress, the administration has asked Congress to cut the budget still further.

The 1982-3 budget_has still not been voted to Reagan's satisfaction, so the Federal government today is financed by short-term emergency appropriations bills.

Reagan vetoed the Congress' latest 1982-3 budget in late November because it failed to cut non-military spending by the i in government emergency budget by three weeks and meandoile set abnessenting. Federal government (i.e. that part which caters for the welfare of the citizen). This unprecedented move was another example of Reagan's technique of "shooting from the hip"

Sacrosanct

Intil lately Reagan's chief lieutenant in his pro gramme oi ruthiess cut: nas been David stockman the Office of Management and the Budget. From the OMB Stockman has in the last year conducted an obsessional drive agains every aspect of government spending.

A large proportion of Congressional time in the last few months has been devoted to committees listening to evidence from Stockman and his staff abd more mis in dederal he, Stockman, during the course of the last summer, eventually flipped and launched a kind of public delirium against the supply side economists who didn't appreciate his budgetcutting efforts anyway.

This second group of Reaganites, the supply-siders, are not enthusiastic for cuts in public spending as such. David Stockman has, however, commended the book Wealth and Poverty' by George Gilder as 'Promethean in its intellectual power and insight' and journalist Gilder once returned the compliment.

In 'Wealth and Poverty' the new radical right's latest best-seller, Gilder attributes most of the vor o' s ills to the undermining of the dominant role of men.

He also accepts the ecoobscure Southern Californian Professor of Business named Arthur Latter, and endorses the similar ideas of Wall Street Journal edit-

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Street, London N7. MARCH

a 35 year old former Con- by Reagan as Director of