Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested.

-V. I. Lenin 

Economic & Philosophic Science Review 

No 1130  Apr 2 2002

Subscriptions (£25 p a.) & circulation:  078679 96074  
[P&P Bulletin Publications PO B0X 50, London SW 17 9NL] [ Post Office Regd.]                    25p

www.epsr-marx-lenin.co.uk 

Zionism's fascist slaughter of Palestinian prisoners and shooting-up of peace protesters confirms this colonial disaster as part of the wider total warmongering degeneracy of the imperialist system in crisis. 'Compromise solutions' are deliberately canvassed to confuse the issue and divert people's minds from capitalist collapse to permanent reformist class-collaboration. To join imperialist bourgeois hypocrisy in 'condemning violence' is the same as voting credits for US imperialism's warmongering smokescreen to hide economic collapse.

The warmongering disaster inevitable for Zionist colonialism will continue to correctly hog the headlines, but for full understanding of this mess on the plate of the Western imperialist system, governing all world developments, it is crucial to grasp the catastrophic economic crisis's  fraught implications for every country on Earth and for all international relations. 

Relentless capitalist-media propaganda is being deliberately engineered (masterminded by the global reach of the American CIA intelligence agency network) to keep on drumming the "economic recovery" message in the crazy anti-science delusion that mere confidence-boosting will make it happen.

Certainly, the effects of consumer confidence and shares-investment confidence can be influential factors in specific limited circumstances; but eliminating monopoly-capitalism's global 'over-production' crisis is not remotely within the power of such marketing trivia.

The international 'free-market' system is careering towards the most cataclysmic crash and worldwide slump in its entire history, and not a single major event now in world politics, economics, trade, and diplomacy can be made sense of if the prospects of this devastating collapse are not constantly borne in  mind.

And the implications for how expectations of 'normal international behaviour'  should henceforth be seen are all captured in this remarkable capitalist-press admission from the Sunday Times:

Ministers are glowing with satisfaction because a carefully engineered rise in the stockmarket has averted a potential disaster for Japanese banks at the end of the financial year. Policy makers around the world are also relieved to escape a crunch that would have had dire effects on global markets.

Yet bankers admit that a short-term fix in stock prices has merely postponed the moment of truth. At some time the banks will have to deal with their unrecoverable loans and the inflated asset values on their balance sheets.

An eerie silence reigns in most of the Japanese press, but economists warn that Japan's problems will soon return to haunt the markets.

The authorities were prompted to act only after the Nikkei-225 index slid to an 18-year low on February 6. The slump threatened the solvency of Japan's banks because from tomorrow new accounting rules force them to count shareholdings on their balance sheets at market value instead of notional values listed years ago,

Japan's ministries reverted to tried and tested methods. Regulators imposed tight restriction; on short selling, forcing up share prices as investors hurries to cover short positions. Officials murmured influential words in the ears of Japanese financial institutions, which began buying shares out of patriotic duty.

The result was a 22% rally in the Nikkei which lifted balance-sheet values and, by some estimates, allowed banks to cut paper losses on their share portfolios by 50%. It will be very helpful for the book-keeping on April 1, but a rally of this kind could be as fleeting as the rain soaked cherry blossom that wilted in Tokyo's wet spring weather last week.

JAPAN's prime minister, Tunichiro Koizurni, has just confided to The New York Times that he is puzzled why the world's second-largest economy is showing no sign of revival.

Investors, meanwhile, are puzzling how Koizunu's government managed to rig the markets to avoid a financial crisis that looked all too likely a few weeks ago. 	

Koizumi's satisfaction may be short-lived. His political authority appears to be fading  by the week and he may be forced into a cabinet reshuffle. His credentials as an economic reformer, much admired by Tony Blair and George Bush, appear increasingly threadbare.

Meanwhile, the government's bid to avert a meltdown at the big banks exposed its reliance on traditional intervention and its inability to forge hard policy decisions. Factional strife, added to arguments over taxation, the yen and public-sector debt, have paralysed the cabinet.

The banks also face a potential problem of confidence after tomorrow, when the government removes its guarantee on deposits over Y1Om (£52,860). Savers have been shuffling their money around individual accounts and funds have flowed into large banks from smaller provincial institutions deemed to be at greater risk of failure.

The governor of the central bank said last week that no bank was in immediate danger of failure. However, officials will be holding their breath over the next few days.

One foreign banker says: "Even by Japanese standards, this has been one of the biggest exercises ever in rigging a market and fixing the books."

Japan's most influential business newspaper, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, put it rather more politely last week: "As March passes without the much feared financial panic," it said, "the sense of crisis in  the government is receding. The crisis, however, is far from over."'

It urged Koizumi to enact tax reforms, cutting top rates and raising thresholds to spur consumption, and argued against the prime minister's pledge to cap government bond issuance this year at £160 billion. 

It concluded: "If the modest rise in stock prices and some other good news have dulled the sense of crisis, policymakers are probably in for a big shock."

Like the green shoots of recovery, Japan's cherry blossoms appeared early this year as unseasonable warmth ended the country's long winter. But last week gales and lashing rain returned to dash the delicate buds from the trees, disappointing millions of Japanese who planned to spend this weekend celebrating spring.

To many investors, it was a perfect metaphor for the Japanese economy.

Foreign investors have recently become net sellers on the Tokyo stock market, and the Nikkei failed to sustain its gains ahead of this weekend.

Yet the writhings of the Nikkei seem less significant than the profound sense of public malaise that is voiced in the Japanese media, and which shows up in statistics.

Official figures released last Friday showed that spending by wage earners fell 2.9% in February, much more steeply than expected. The message is that despite deflation - the consumer price index fell by 1.62% in February - consumers are keeping their wallets in their pockets.

Since consumer consumption accounts for 55% of gross domestic product, the figures showed confidence to be in a dismal state. Surveys reveal that Japanese voters are deeply disappointed with a prime minister who promised change but has delivered stagnation.

Most conventional economic tools have been exhausted by the Japanese establishment. The government has spent about £530 billion in the past 10 years on packages to stimulate growth, but all have failed because the funds have simply been funnelled to traditional clients of the ruling party, such as construction companies.

Japan now has a public debt equivalent to more than 130% of GDP, the highest of any industrialised nation. There is no room to cut interest rates, which hover just above zero.

Koizumi radiated optimism last week, but observers in Nagatacho, Tokyo's government quarter, sense he has lost the initiative for radical change. A series of internal party scandals has also weakened his position.

None of this augurs well for change in Japan. Just fixing the banking system is an intricate task: banks must preserve their capital base, dispose of a mountain of bad loans and consolidate to improve efficiency.

Masaru Hayami, governor of the Bank of Japan, says: "The financial system remains in a fragile state. The disposal issue [of bad loans] is the most urgent one."

These -non-performing capital accumulations have now been the 'urgent' problem for more than 10 years of chronic stagnation by what was formerly easily the world's most dynamic imperialist economy, a huge global engine dragging the whole, world into ever-new product innovations, trade expansion, and 'free-market' investment opportunities.

And as far as that giant Japanese international trade dynamo is concerned, all development has now stagnated.

But being an 'urgent' problem is just a trivial irrelevance. The real issue is that THERE IS NO 'SOLUTION' , -  apart from the unthinkable which has been the only way out in all previous great 'over-production' rises in capitalism's history, - namely the DESTRUCTION of all the so-called 'surpluses' ('too much' investment capital seeking profitable outlets; 'too many' multi-national monopoly giants trying to all keep profitable, selling cars to the world; 'too much' farm production causing 'surplus food' mountains or wrecking the market prices for beef, sheep farmers, coffee, wheat, etc, etc; 'too many' workers in industry after industry (unemployment will soon be rocketing); 'too much' competition to keep everyone profitable in the televising of football; etc; etc; etc).

This anarchy of speculative investment has undoubtedly been historically remarkably innovative; and its regular wasteful disaster when 'enterprise' goes wrong (often criminally or farcically so, and always cruelly exploitative of all the livelihoods, career hopes, or other aspirations destroyed) is maybe accepted as tolerable in boom periods when other opportunities often come along, but at a time of major worldwide slump-crisis for capitalism, such a ludicrous SYSTEM of economic anarchy becomes intolerable political dynamite, which starts to totally poison all international relationships, and all human relationships within every country.

In the circumstances of a global markets crash, the systematic DESTRUCTION of the 'over-production' consequences of this international speculative anarchy way of running the planet becomes the deliberately nasty and totally dominant feature of all social, economic, and political developments on Earth. 

Warmongering diplomacy and cut-throat trade competition become the essential survival kit of every bourgeois-imperialist ruling class in the world. 

The real issue about the Japanese stockmarket-rigging stunt is not whether it succeeds temporarily or not (not impossible) or that even the capitalist-press commentary admits it will fail in the end, (this particular stunt). The astonishing thing is the casual way in which the absolute crookedness and vicious irresponsibility (of a major G7 world imperialist power) is calmly accepted as an obvious trick to try to pull by the other leading 'democracies'. Total deception and potential total-mayhem is put forward as state policy by the second greatest economic power in world history, one of the proudest 'miracles' of capitalism, - and nobody bats an eyelid.

Why? Because the entire imperialist system is busy at the same racket, - trying to con the world about an imminent 'economic recovery' for the bourgeoisie's 'free-market' planet.

What workers everywhere need to concentrate on is the irrefutable Marxist science explaining warmongering destruction in the modern era as the ultimate inevitable expression of this only capitalist 'solution' to unavoidable periodic 'overproduction' economic crises; and on the utterly, cynical savagery with which the capitalist class universally will lie or cheat about ANYTHING and EVERYTHING just in order to stay in power in any country and in order to keep the 'free-market' profiteering and exploitation racket as the dominant order internationally.

Such an understanding of capitalism's underlying ruthlessness, driving every ruling class on to ever more-despicable violence and treachery,is utterly essential in order to make any sense at all of world developments; and a fully Marxist revolutionary consciousness about civilisation's future is completely impossible without such a perspective.

Fake 'lefts' for example, continue to inflict disarming reformist daydreams on the working class about, say, the threat of international warmongering catastrophe inherent in the West's criminal collaboration with Zionist fascist colonialisn, nurtured since 1948 under United Nations auspices on the brutally stolen homeland of the Palestinian nation.

The Lalkar fake 'left' of class-collaborating Revisionist degeneracy has just used up a
quarter of its occasional (every two months) publication to merely summarise significant 	liberation-war happenings and commentaries since its last publication, merely in order
to reiterate its stock liberal-reformist whimper that Zionist tyranny and US imperialism will have to accept 	a Palestinian state sooner or later, "a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza" i.e. the wretched 22% of Palestine which was all that was left to the Arab Palestinian nation (whose homeland it is after the first series of land-grabs by warmongering Zionist colonialism, expanding on the criminal start it was given by these Revisionists' Moscow mentors in 1947-48 in agreeing to the imperialist infamous confiscation of the Palestinian homeland at the United Nations stitch-up.

But this titanic conflict is not about some temporary 'two-state compromise solution'
(which briefly may figure in inconsequential diplomacy).

What is being indirectly fought out in this national-liberation war is the whole fate of imperialist world domination, in crisis.

The US monopoly bourgeoisie's agenda is for international warmongering to secure its dominant positions within a collapsing worldwide 'free-market' system and to set-up the most huge brainwashing smokescreen-diversion in history to take the world's minds off
the obvious discussion for a planned socialist planet as capitalism degenerates yet again into crash, trade-war, and long disastrous slump.

Using the Zionland colonists from the 'free world' as the local mailed fist in the Middle East for smashing upstart Arab anti-imperialism whenever necessary has been the permanent Western strategy to continue world domination since 1945, but it is the global crisis for the imperialist system which must now be the background consideration.

Just letting the Zionists get on with local smiting could cease to be the sole concern of US imperialism's warmongering masterplan. It could even start to conflict with Washington's interests in certain circumstances.

Rival imperialist agendas, for example, could make a different approach to the-Arab oil question necessary.

Middle East nationalism itself could start playing a vastly more influential and complicating role in these stakes with such a huge global outcome.

The revolutionary toppling of backward nationalist regimes could become the most explosive new problem of all.

What is certain is that the derisory 22% of Palestine for the Palestinian nation (while the other 78% remains in the hands of aggressive Western warmongering colonialism) remains just a meaningless empty concept of brain-dead reformist-liberal blathering which is part of 'freeworld' ideology to STOP people thinking via the fake 'left', - not anything remotely intended to get Marxist-Leninist scientific understanding developing.

It is not the point that the fate of the imperialist world crisis will necessarily be DECIDED in Palestine. The outcome there may not even necessarily figure much in resolving the crisis of capitalism in favour of international socialism. A purely local compromise deal, of no interest to anyone else, could yet be worked out there (although it is highly unlikely). 

The point is to stop presenting the WORLD SITUATION in these hopelessly parochial Revisionist-Stalinist 'compromise' terms via a limited view of what the struggle in Palestine is all about. It is simply WRONG to  politically educate workers in this titanic international crisis, as reflected in this titanic anti-imperialist struggle in Palestine, to just limit people's thinking to this idiotic reformist liberal FRAUD put up by the 'free-world' reptiles themselves (Barak, Crown Prince Abdullah, Clinton, etc) of merely handing back the even-confiscated 22% itself (West Bank and Gaza) as some kind of 'solution' for colossally-aggrieved Palestinian nationhood.

It is even more wretched to present the Palestine question in the midst of the greatest crisis in capitalist history as being all about a local compromise 'solution' at all. Nearly 99% of Washington's thought and actions over this matter have only a global context and global perspectives for its main international warmongering agenda. These Lalkar fake 'lefts' continue the Revisionist-Stalinist destruction of Marxist science with this drivel about the 22% 'solution'.

This small-minded backwardness, masquerading as 'Marxism', comes close in wretchedness to the main current outrage perpetrated by Lalkar fake-'lefts' and others, still insisting (through the SLP, etc) that imperialism is right to 'condemn' Sept 11, thereby unleashing on the heads of the proletariat of the entire Third World this warmongering fascist onslaught by cornered US imperialism mired in insoluble crisis.

The stubborn stupidity of narrow-mindedly insisting that if Sept 11 was not 'wrong', therefore it must be 'right' (snigger, snigger) is the equivalent of the 'Marxist' Second International voting war credits for its 'own' separate imperialist countries at the outbreak of World War I in a spate of 'terror-atrocity' stories which the rival imperialist powers had been spreading against each other for years.

Fundamentalist Islamic nationalism can NEVER be ''solution' to any modern-world problem; only the Marxist-Leninist consciousness of communist revolution can do that.

And 'innocent' people dying gruesomely and arbitrarily is truly tragic.

But this is a world RUN BY the imperialist system, and run into insoluble crisis by that system. Civilisation has now only one interest: The destruction as soon as possible of that imperialist system. It is racist voodoo to pretend that a spasmodic retaliation against imperialist humiliation by Islamic terrorist individualism represents a serious threat of "even worse world control than that by US imperialism". It is utter nonsense. All that anyone, rebelling against imperialism in any way, can do is possibly help bring down imperialism. By all means let organised communist revolution do a far better job than fundamentalist terrorism. But let it get on with it. 
Wringing hands in this pointless sentimental 'moral' piety about Sept 11 'being not nice' is simply playing the hypocritical game of bourgeois-imperialist ideology.

Part of imperialist warmongering is losing the battle in Occupied Palestine to incipient REVOLUTIONARY rejection of Western world domination. Individual Islamic terrorism is not a 'solution' to anything there either.

But the point about the priority need to DEFEAT imperialism, by any and every means possible,  before civilisation can begin to move forward again, is more easily understood in these circumstances.

But it. is a universal lesson, and it is the CRISIS of the capitalist system which is basically creating ever-more powerful and determined anti-imperialist resistance, and ever-worsening turmoil and demoralisation for the imperialist camp.

Japanese imperialism can still get away with uncomfortably stagnating for a while. It is not ruling the world like US imperialism. The American monopoly-bourgeoisie cannot afford to stagnate,  in every sense. It has always been steadily bankrupting its own currency while nevertheless still continuing to impose its use on the whole world. Its only option, short of ruling-class collective suicide, is to drive on with domineering the world, and polluting it ever-more-certainly with more and more credit-created (and ultimately useless) dollars.

What has brought the fraudulent exploitative racket to a standstill today in Japan will inevitably do it to US imperialism tomorrow. Build Leninism. EPSR

World Revolutionary Socialist Review 
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).

The doomed world colonial policeman Bush pours-out his best. Goebbels garbage to spread more paramilitary SS killings against anti-imperialists in Colombia.

As has become the fashion in Washington, Bush is trying to use drugs as the pretext for an anti-insurgency campaign in Colombia.

U.S. President George Bush has increased next year's budget by $500 million-USD, an amount he considers to be extremely, necessary to stamp out Colombian drug trafficking.

He has also promised some $98 million dollars more, wish the marked intention of training and equipping the elite army brigades stationed in territories controlled by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

In his "you're either with me or against me" campaign, on more than one occasion Bush has identified Colombian armed
groups as being on the White House blacklist, giving that as his reason for generously opening national coffers. for the sake of providing more logistical support for government troops.

Some 100 U.S. military instructors are holding daily classes for Colombian troops,  last month they received 14 Black Hawk helicopters and 33 UH 1 N Hueys.

The Washington Post published Bush's statement to the effect that the limitations contained in current laws would be respected, and military support would only be used to fight drug trafficking. But Colombian public opinion has voiced real concern over a possible foreign military intervention. 		

• EVENTS in Colombia resemble a congested highway ruled by flashing traffic lights, where the green light of U.S. military aid persists in sending out dangerous signals, endangering the stability of. the country as welt as all the hemisphere.

Since peace talks between the government and the FARC broke down on February 20, Colombia has been: left to
contemplate the high probability of total war. There may be no symptoms at present, but there has been an upsurge in confrontation.

Because of the crisis, some 60 southwestern municipalities were left without communications and have been experiencing long blackouts. The lack of electricity is a result of renewed fighting that could last for six months, according to- government predictions. Government troops are trying to regain control of southern Colombia's demilitarized zone, formerly occupied by the FARO.

Hector Fabio Velasco, an army general stationed in San Vicente de Caguan, felt it necessary to provide information about his operations in that area, and to reply to public accusations that he used excessive military force against the guerrillas, leaving a two-year-old boy dead after indiscriminate bombing.

"During these operations aimed at insurgent targets and drug trafficking, accidents can happen," he emphasized.

The contradictions between the FARC and the government are currently being used as proselytizing arguments in the election campaigns of some right-wing political sectors that .are trying to get into Washington's good books.

Alvaro Uribe, presidential candidate far the right-wing Colombia First Movement, very recently stated, "Our country needs to ask for foreign military aid in order to fight terrorism."

THE AXIS PANDEMIC 

Bush warmongering interestingly seen as just a joke in China

• BEIJING (SatireWire.com).  Bitter after being snubbed for membership in the "Axis of Evil," Libya, China; and Syria today announced they had formed the "Axis of Just as Evil," which they said would be way eviler than that stupid Iran-Iraq-North Korea axis President Bush warned of in his State of the Union address.

Axis of Evil members, however, immediately dismissed the new axis as having, for starters, a really, dumb name. "Right. They are Just as Evil... in their dreams!" declared North Korean leader Kim Nor Dil. "Everybody knows we're the best evils..: best at being evil... we're the best."

Diplomats from Syria denied they were jealous over being excluded, although they conceded they did ask if they could join the Axis of Evil.

"They told us it was full," said Syrian President Sala Malekun:

"An Axis can't have more than three countries," explained Iraqi President Hussein Bashar. "This is not my rule, it's tradition. In World War II you had Germany, Italy, and Japan in the evil Axis. So you can only have three. And a secret handshake: Ours is wicked cool"

International reaction to Bush's Axis of Evil declaration was  swift, as within minutes, France surrendered. 	y

Elsewhere, peer-conscious nations rushed to gain triumvirate status in what became a game of geopolitical chairs. Cuba, Sudan, and Serbia said they had formed the Axis of Somewhat Evil, forcing Somalia to join with Uganda and Myanmar in the Axis of Occasionally Evil, while Bulgaria, Indonesia and Russia established the Axis of Not So Much EviI, ReaIly, As Just Generally Disagreeable.

With the criteria suddenly expanded and all the desirable clubs filling up Sierra Leone, El Salvador, and Rwanda applied to be called the Axis of Countries That Aren't the Worst But Certainly Won't Be Asked to Host the Olympics; Canada, Mexico, and Australia formed the Axis of Nations That Are Actually Quite Nice But Secretly Have Nasty Thoughts About America, while Spain, Scotland, and. New Zealand established the Axis of Countries That Be Allowed to Ask Sheep to Wear Lipstick.

"That's not a threat, really, just something we like to do," said Scottish Executive First Minister Jack McCoces.
 
While wondering if the other nations of the world weren't perhaps making fun of him, a cautious Bush granted approval for most axes, although he rejected the establishment of the Axis of Countries Whose Names End in "Guay," accusing one of its members of filing a false application. Officials from Paraguay,. Uruguay, and Chadguay denied the charges.

Israel, meanwhile, insisted it didn't want to join any Axis, but privately, world leaders said that's only because no one asked them. •.

World Revolutionary Socialist Review
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).

The 'free-enterprise' capitalist system's fundamental mechanism is anarchic gambling.  It can never not be subject to periodic crash and slump disaster.

• THE stock market has become a true casino, as the finance economy has an ever greater influence on the real economy.

Francisco Soberon, president of the Central Bank of Cuba, gave a master class attended by President Fidel Castro, dealing with the intricacies of the virtual economy and the disintegration of the real economy, under the conditions of neoliberal globalization.

Soberon supplied revealing information about how the speculative spiral has become detached from the behavior of companies in the real economy. The Standard and Poor's index (which reflects the values of shares from a group of companies quoted on U.S. markets) increased 570% from 1981 to 1999, while real company profits for the same companies only increased 61 % in the same period.

INSTITUTIONAL INVESTORS

So-called "institutional investors," such as mutual funds, insurance companies, pension funds and others, the highest volume of stock market investment, and elements unrelated to the real behavior of the companies often influence the decisions of these investors.

As an example, he mentioned that these investors controlled approximately 20% of the shares available on the London stock exchange in the 1950s, and by the 1990s they owned two thirds. It is estimated that on a global level, the "financial management industry," as it is known, controls assets of more than $35 trillion USD, more than the world's GDP.

Conclusion: the most important decisions regarding stock exchange transactions are currently made by a small minority of alleged "financial geniuses," based on criteria that are not necessarily related to the behavior of the real economy.

This "virtual economy" is based on institutions whose activities depend in large part on the wishes of the elite speculators and manipulators, managing the savings of millions of people who may not even have a clear notion of the risks they run. What's worse, the decision of these small groups can have devastating effects on the lives of millions of people and even entire nations.

He noted that a former European president, referring to this subject, labeled increases in the value of stocks as "virtual savings," while "real debts" are contracted. That European president pointed out that in his country, investing in the stock market has become fashionable for millions of people with little capacity for analysis, who trust in a market that does not offer transparency nor the information needed for consistent decision-making. 

SPECULATIVE FRENZY

In 1935, economist John Maynard Keynes made a very lucid analysis of this phenomenon, asserting that the objective of most stock market investors was "to beat the gun" - i.e., to buy up stock before everyone else. In other words, we dedicate our intelligence to anticipating what the average opinion hopes will be the average opinion.

However, Keynes could have hardly imagined where capitalism would take this speculative frenzy, with the appearance of spectacular inventions such as semiconductors, satellites and fiber optics.

In the world's most important stock exchanges, the well-known trading floor is no longer the center of the action. Sales are made on computerized equipment programmed to make transactions within certain parameters, and therefore "hunches" are increasingly widespread and systematic.

The greatest volume of stock exchange capitalization takes place in the wealthiest countries, although the underdeveloped nations, anxious to attract foreign investors or simply be considered modern and "reformist," have created corresponding stock markets, which together barely represent 8% of the world's capitalization levels. In all, there are 110 countries with stock exchanges, obviously due to the pressures of liberalization.

U.S. stock values, the highest in the world, total $13.4 trillion USD, seven times greater than Latin America's GDP and 3.1 times that of Africa's.

The greater the proportion of the population linked to the "virtual economy," the more intense the interaction between the stock exchange economy and the real economy. Approximately 50% of the families in the United States are linked in one way or another to stocks, Soberon specified.

In mid-2000, the capitalization of the developed countries' stocks totaled $31.2 trillion USD, practically' the same as the world's gross domestic product of $31.3 trillion USD. Compared to past periods, this confirms that growth of the "virtual economy" has exceeded that of the "real economy."

THE IRRATIONALITY OF FINANCING THE WEALTHY

Soberon pointed out in order to stop the spiraling of the developing countries' debt, the foreign debt must be canceled. In the current state of affairs, emerging economies are obliged to turn to the financial markets in order to obtain resources for paying, their debts, which creates a perverse market dynamic. On occasion, due to high levels of activity, the markets give a false impression of prosperity totally unrelated to what is happening in the real economy.

Soberon argued that the only valid framework for discussing these subjects is the United Nations General Assembly and that institution's agencies. It would be naive to believe that the IMF could serve as a basis for finding solutions to the problems of humanity that were actually created by that body's fanatic neoliberal doctrine. 

He recommended the creation of a global organization that regulates the international monetary supply, just as a central bank does on the national level. Of course, this organization should not be affiliated with the International Monetary Fund, which responds to the interests of a single country, the United States.

He also suggested an increase in development aid, which would reduce the need of emerging economies to depend on markets in order to meet their financial necessities.

Another possible action is to organize an international mutual benefit society, in which central bank reserves would be deposited. Part of these funds could be used to finance development, while maintaining assets to offset temporary imbalances. This would end the irrational situation in which the majority of countries, including underdeveloped ones, provide about $1.5 trillion USD in financing to the wealthiest country in the world, through the investments they have in U.S. stocks.

Soberon indicated that given this situation, each country should decide, without external interference, on the exchange regulations suitable for its level of development and the characteristics of its economy, without the imposition of a capitalist doctrine of liberalization.
World Revolutionary Socialist Review

Zimbabwe election is a class issue requiring a clearcut stand against colonial imperialist interference and subversion, and continuing old national-liberation war contradictions, class-war contradictions, and ethnic war contradictions into the confused period of the international counter-revolutionary slump-crisis of capitalism. ZANU understanding is limited, but MDC stooging for the West is pure counter-revolutionary betrayal.

]

The international media has not reported violence suffered by people committed to the Zanu PF. In the last two weeks I have been at the receiving end of threats, abuse, racist literature and my family had to go into protection as result of the threats that I have received. And that is in Britain, and not in Zimbabwe.

The majority of the people of Zimbabwe have lived their lives in an atmosphere of violence that dehumanises, oppresses, tortures and terrifies the black population of the Southern African developing region in order to keep them in their subservient place.

In its current new form colonialism is the enforcement of western capitalism. In the eyes of many Zimbabweans and Zanu PF supporters, Britain's colonial policies comprise part of a global network of interests and it is shaped by transitional considerations  -   the policies of the IMF, World Bank and World Trade Organisation which translate into MDC's policies.

Some of the MDC leaders not only benefited from the spoils of the Rhodesian regime, but were members of its army and police service. Ian Smith, who is also a supporter of the MDC, was for Zimbabweans what Ariel Sharon is to many Palestinians in the West Bank today.

It is not just the fact that there are these remnants of Rhodesia's repressive machinery inside the MDC that I have a problem with:-  The MDC has to face up to the links and support they have with very right-wing organisations in Britain. They are supported by the Zimbabwe Development Trust; which is made up of people who used to run Mrs Thatcher's government. If you want to know how a right-wing regime looks like, you have to know that lot at least.

In my view, they could not care less who governs Zimbabwe as long as they can keep the land and continue to live like emperors and kings. Everyone who knows that region will know that in the first ten years of the history of Zimbabwe, South Africa was at the gates of Zimbabwe and Apartheid was still raging in the southern region. It would have been absurd for anybody to commence a fast-track land resettlement programme when South Africa, which had corporations that own land in the country, could have invaded the country as they were doing in Mozambique.

Also, any speedier process of resettlement of indigenous landless people would have come across the intricate networks that link farmers, produces of agricultural inputs and implements, markets, banks and insurance houses - all dominated by the same people.

It is my view that any interest of this sophisticated network, which is white, have been allowed to overshadow the morally legitimate cry of impoverish and landless majority in post-colonial Zimbabwe. The government of Zimbabwe has faced a range of constraints in trying to address the area of land acquisition; one of them has been the shortage of financial resources for land acquisition.

The withdrawal of the international donor community from the land reform and resettlement programme and farm occupations have forced the Zimbabwean Government to embark on this fast track settlement.

MDC want to mortgage Zimbabwe for the third time around. What they have put on offer would make the situation worse economically.

For two thirds of the last 20 years, Zimbabwe was everybody's best customer. In 1995, the IMF was giving it ten out of ten. And then the question of land changes everything, including the policies of Zanu PF. The people who have been orchestrating the policies of land occupations had been a thorn in Zanu's side. They are not controlled by the party, but the other way around.

I like the turn to the left of Zanu politics. That is precisely why I joined the armed struggle. I did not join the armed struggle so I could become another bureaucrat or an academic. I joined because my land was taken away from me, and I am glad that Zanu is going back to make possible that my land is returned to me.

The announcement of the EU sanctions on Zimbabwe is one of the most regressive steps in the development in Zimbabwean politics. Nine countries - France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Greece, Luxemburg, Ireland, Portugal and Austria - were invited to come and observe the elections by the legitimate government of Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe did not extend invitations to Britain, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands.

	Zimbabwe does not accept 	that anyone should come and monitor its elections. You monitor an election where there is no legitimate
	government and monitoring is 	a Western imposition on the Third World. 

World Socialist Review

(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).

US fascist propaganda will get away with its warmongering lies until its blitzkriegs fail, just as with Hitler.

• WHEN he returned from Japan, Bush found himself caught between irritation and displeasure, searching for an escape from the notorious Office of Strategic Influence (OSI), which, according to White House spokesperson Ari Fleischer, the president himself was not aware existed until The New York Times published a report on the subject.

Statements from Pentagon officials who asked to remain anonymous indicated that the OSI developed ideas for a broader campaign aimed at influencing international opinion in the war against terrorism, and would not discard the notion of spreading false information to foreign press if it was convenient at any given moment.

A week before the public learned of Bush's opposition to the initiative,  Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told NBC that he wanted the role of the office to be reviewed, adding that one of the issues to be considered is whether it should exist, given its adverse publicity and the many questions and concerns it has generated.

After Rumsfeld stated that the Pentagon does not lie to its people nor to the foreign press, Fleischer stated that it was fair to say that the president would have a problem with any office which, as part of its public policy, did not publish the truth.  

Has he forgotten about the censorship imposed on war correspondents or the social and human cost to Afghanistan, whose opinion the U.S. public barely heard, induced by all the media to support the vengeance finally planned by the United States?

Censoring journalists in times of conflict dates back to the Crimean War in 1854. It is a mechanism which can be resorted to without opposition, especially when it is used in the name of patriotism. Another issue is the spreading of false or biased information as the OSI's creators intended, although they apparently planned to keep that possibility in reserve.

The least probable scenario, logically speaking, is that the president found out about the issue after it had been leaked to the public, and the credibility of the information distributed by the Pentagon, as well as the State Department, was called into question.

STRATEGY FOR SECURITY OR DESTABILIZATION?

The United States created the Office of War Information (OWI) and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in 1941, when it entered World War II. In 1948, the OWI became the Office of International Information and later the U.S. Information Agency (USIA). The previous year, the OSS became the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

The USIA, closed in 1999, can be considered the predecessor to the new Office of Strategic influence; it was the governmental organization that controlled information and propaganda for the world's number one power. Among its very many missions was distributing psychological warfare material aimed at discrediting Grenada's revolutionary government: This cleared the way for a U.S. military intervention. 

The CIA and the State Department relied on the USIA for destabilizing those considered as threats to U.S  national security. The disinformation propagated by the USIA about Cuba is well known. .

Now, the new substitute OSI has entered the ring.  Although there is talk of eliminating or restructuring it, who knows if the recently created office will become another "secret."

Why doesn't this include the publication of the government's true plans to neutralize rebel movements in those countries where the United States has strategic interests, under the pretext of fighting -the war against terrorism?

The main news media of the country have complied with the censorship policy imposed by the Pentagon and White House after September 11, as was seen after ABC television network announced a 13-part series following U.S. troops around in their war against terrorism.

Bertram Van Munster, one of the show's producers, told Variety newspaper that, having received top-level U..S.  government approval,  the program will not be any different from the model adopted by the nation's mass media since the anti-terrorist campaign began. He stated that the program will have a pro-military, proU.S. view and will not criticize anything.

According to experts, there is also an attempt to take advantage of the value of the news, as if it were entertainment for commercial benefit. Jim Naurekas, editor of the magazine published by Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), a U.S. media watchdog organization, gave the example of an NBC logo which uses Bush's expression of "axis of evil" in reference to Iraq, North Korea, and Iran. It's almost like a logo for a new action film, said Naurekas.

Beyond the mechanisms for grabbing viewers, however, is the selling of "new enemies" to the U.S. citizenry, along with the announcement of a future war against those countries. 

It's interesting that, in addition to pretexts for sending troops and war materiel to countries like Colombia, where propaganda tirelessly uses the term "narco-guerrillas," the crusade is also used for the domestic battle. President 	Bush recently said that everyone who buys drugs is collaborating with people like Osama bin Laden. According to the White House's new campaign, announced on the web page of the White House's 	National Drug Control Office,  if you give up drugs you are joining the war against terrorism in the United States.

The way  things are going,  no-one knows how much longer we'll be watching the spectacle or hearing their sophistry-laden speeches, attempting to make us believe things that are far from the truth.  

World Revolutionary Socialist Review

(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).

The atrocious living conditions endured by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and how they have bone the brunt of Israel's latest military strategy.

CHILDREN ARE PLAYING on the dusty side of the road, no shoes on; they run on the banks of open sewers as they were creeks of fresh water. Old men have to wade across them. Large families live in shacks, tents, sand holes or in the ruins of their destroyed houses, having nowhere else to go. Most of them were already refugees who escaped Israeli persecution; now they can't escape from Israeli random bombings.

There are over 1,200,000 Palestinians surviving in these conditions along the Gaza Strip; 65% of them are under the age of 18. Many refugee camps erected during 53 years of- occupation have developed into small size towns with their own schools and markets, but conditions remain atrocious. Now, most of the schools have been razed to the ground by Apache helicopters and missiles from F-16s and markets are empty: the vast majority of people rely on humanitarian aid since the Israelis have destroyed plantations, harvests, factories, electricity power stations.

Palestinians are strangled by a form of military and economical apartheid that kills more people, usually children and the elderly, than the Israeli army itself. More than half of the 220 children killed since the start of this Intifada (Sept 2000) were murdered here. Craters pepper the roads, some areas look like they were hit by an earthquake, destruction and debris are everywhere; even the distant thunder of a passenger plane makes eyes search for signs of death in the sky.

This is the Gaza Strip, where human dignity ends. People are confined in the largest and overcrowded open prison on earth; a laager bordered by trenches, watch towers and sandbags, 48 km long and 7km wide, caged between the Zionist promised land and the Mediterranean. Many houses and buildings are collapsed, a carpet of debris and rubbish marking Sharon's tray o1 madness. Third class citizens on their own land, people move on carts pulled by skinny donkeys; often their only possession is a goat to provide milk for the infants and pots to save precious water. The 6,000 Jewish settlers who occupy 35% of the Strip can water their gardens and fill their swimming pools as many times as they wish; at the same time, the Israeli army has diverted rivers, streams and canals and blocked 220 water wells with sand in the rest of the Strip. In the West Bank, Sharon is denying access to the River Jordan, which is an international river system, and his forces are obstructing waterways that only run through Palestinian territory. 

Sharon had promised a week without attacks on Palestinians; it followed an apparent shift in Palestinian resistance strategy: no more strikes at civilians in Israel but the liberation of their country by hitting occupying forces soldiers and settlers. Four days after the promise, Israeli police and army shot two Palestinian civilians and, by mistake, an Israeli settler. Since then, the escalation has progressed relentlessly. Gaza City, Rafiah and many refugee camps in the Strip suffered nightly air raids for twelve days, incurring more than 25 deaths, including six children. Israeli battleships opened fire from the west while artillery was shelling from the east; in between them, for the first time in the Intifada, dozens of tanks rolled into Gaza City and others major centres; it was regarded as 'the most extensive army assault ever in the Gaza Strip'.

In the West Bank city of  Nablus, soldiers opened fire 	on the Red Cross, killing a doctor. Two pregnant women, one Palestinian and
one Israeli, were killed by army gunfire at a checkpoint.

Thirty-two people were reported dead in the first two days of March after tanks and commandos stormed refugee camps at Talaba and Jenin, totally unrelated to a previous attempted killing near the Gilo settlement, 30 miles south.

It was enough for the al-Aqsa Martyr Brigades, radical extremists from the Fatah movement: on Saturday 2 March, the day for the Sabbath prayers, the first human  bomb for nearly two months killed nine Orthodox Jews outside their Jerusalem mosque. A few hours later a lone sniper, using what was described as a World War 	Two carbine, fired 24 rounds in two minutes at a checkpoint in Ofra, West Bank, killing in quick sequence seven soldiers and three settlers before vanishing beyond the rocky hills. Sharon then told his cabinet about the need to bring "heavier losses' on the Palestinians and few hours later two cars were blown up by tank shells in Ramallah: inside were a woman and five children. 

Back in Gaza, they bombarded camps and villages, killing 12 people in a matter of hours bringing the toll for only a week to 105 deaths (73 of them Palestinian).  A UN special school for blind people was destroyed during the bombings and Palestinian pupils and teachers were injured when a bomb planted by a Jewish settler detonated outside a primary school on the outskirts of East Jerusalem.

It was too much for UN chief Kofi Annan and even for American secretary of state Colin Powell, who criticised Sharon for an actual declaration of war, "which won't work'. But Sharon's goal remains to occupy and annex the West Bank and Gaza and he's ready to perpetrate atrocities to achieve it. On the ground the siege is becoming total and permanent. Soldiers have been ordered to prevent Palestinians from walking their own streets in the West Bank and by now only ambulances can get through the checkpoints, if Israeli soldiers choose to allow them. In Gaza, tank invasions and air raids are showing the full extent of Sharon's total disregard for human rights and international law. For Israelis, all Palestinians are terrorists, from Arafat to the last child of the Gaza Strip; that's why the slaughter will go on.