Fw:Capitalism's 'unacceptable' aspect

[Michael Pugliese <debsian@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Message: 4
   Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2001 16:14:56 -0400
   From: portsideMod@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Capitalism's 'unacceptable' aspect

(If John Negroponte shows up center stage all of a sudden and
evedently some one has pulled the stake from Richard Perle's heart,
can Arnaud de Borchgrave not be far behind. Well, he's back and seems
upset about something. c.b.)


Capitalism's 'unacceptable' aspect

Arnaud de Borchgrave

THE WASHINGTON TIMES
August 23, 2001

     The post-Cold War mantra holds that democracy has triumphed and with it
market economics. Marxism is dead and buried, socialism is moribund and so
forth. A couple of exceptions like Cuba and North Korea prove the rule. Even
China has given up Marxism, though not yet Leninism. The benefits of
globalization, argue free market theologians, would soon reach the
impoverished
masses of the developing world. The digital revolution would narrow the gap
between rich and poor, both within and between nations, in the blink of a
historic eye. To point out that the Internet had done no such thing makes
one
the skunk at the garden party.
     A neo-Marxist revival in parts of Latin America was a temporary
aberration, according to Washington's conventional wisdom. Besides,
democratically elected governments had replaced authoritarian regimes.
NAFTA, Mercosur, hemispheric free trade, all had drowned out anti-Yankee
imperialist slogans.
     But the anti-globalization protest riots in Seattle, Davos, Prague,
Nice,
Stockholm and Genoa have now spawned a global leftist movement, albeit
inchoate, that has garnered the support of AFL-CIO. America's principal
labor unions have even sponsored the Global Justice Week of Action to train
the agitators who are planning another happening for next month's meetings
of the IMF and World Bank in Washington.
     The global left is coalescing again around the Mobilization for Global
Justice, the umbrella organization planning the Washington protests. Some
100,000 anti-globalists are expected to descend on the nation's capital from
North America and Europe.
     The Washington left-wing think tank Institute for Policy Studies (IPS)
is
also back in action. IPS was a major conduit for major Soviet disinformation
themes throughout the Cold War and spent most of the past decade licking its
wounds and biding its time pending the next global anti-capitalist
opportunity.
It is now at hand.
     What Britain's former Prime Minister Ted Heath once called "the
unacceptable face of capitalism" has once again reared its ugly head. First
there was the easy-dot-com-easy-dot-go rip-off that made a few people very
rich
and impoverished millions of others. Next came tens of thousands of
layoffs --
most of them in overseas operations -- while top corporate executives went
on
paying themselves obscene amounts of money, even in companies whose stock
had
plummeted. Those who didn't make the cut still received lavish settlements.
Richard McGinn, who presided over Lucent during its nosedive, received $13
million.
     Ronald Reagan was once accused of presiding over the Age of Greed. Bill
Clinton's eight years was the Age of Gluttony.
     The same phenomenon was taking place all over the newly democratic
countries of Latin America. Democratic capitalism bred more corruption while
making the rich richer and the poor poorer. In Russia, the majority of the
country's dwindling population with its shrinking life span is worse off
under
capitalism than under communism.
     This set the stage for the comeback of a man consigned to the trash
heap of Marxist history at the end of the Cold War. Daniel Ortega, the
55-year-old
former Sandinista president, is now leading the polls to win back the
Nicaraguan presidency in November.
     Celebrating the 22nd anniversary of the Sandinista revolution, which
the
Reagan and the first Bush administrations spent the decade of the 1980s
defeating, Mr. Ortega is once again being hailed as a liberator of the poor
campesinos. Wearing his trademark red-and-black bandanna, Mr. Ortega
appealed to over half of all Nicaraguans subsisting on less than $1 a day
"who are nothing more than slaves and servants of the rich."
     Nicaragua is back to Square One, when the Sandinista revolutionaries
overthrew the hated Somoza dictatorship in 1979. With the pell-mell collapse
of
the Soviet empire and its colonies, Mr. Ortega agreed to free elections in
1990
-- and a graceful exit. He lost.
     The fact that the Sandinista Marxist puppets of Fidel Castro ruined
Nicaragua's economy is irrelevant among the rural masses today. Even some
former U.S.-backed anti-Sandinista Contra guerrillas have cast their lot
with resurgent Sandinistas.
     Widespread government corruption under Arnoldo Aleman, the 5'6",
300-pound
president, and growing economic inequality, were Mr. Ortega's booster
rockets.
The same solid fuel is already in plentiful supply in Argentina and Brazil.
     Fidel Castro recently cut his 75th birthday cake in Venezuela, where he
anointed President Hugo Chavez as his ideological successor. Mr. Chavez, in
turn, has been facilitating arms shipments to FARC (the Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia), the Marxist narco-guerrillas who have been fighting for
37
years to collapse Colombian democracy.
     In early August, tens of thousands of peasants flooded into Mexico City
to
protest low produce prices while the small but noisy People's Armed
Revolutionary Front (FARP) exploded bombs outside three branches of BENAMEX,
the Mexican banking conglomerate that was recently purchased by New York's
Citigroup.
     Shown but unmentioned in network coverage of last month's riots during
the
G-8 summit in Genoa were the thousands of red-and-black flags and the
portraits
of Che Guevara and Mexico's Subcomandante Marcos of Zapatista fame. The
various
human strands that came together from Seattle to Genoa merge on the left and
far-left.
     The double standard has also resurfaced in force. In France, Prime
Minister (and presidential candidate) Lionel Jospin has confirmed that while
he was feigning allegiance to the democratic left, he was a secret member of
the
anti-democratic Trotskyist sect known as the IVth International. For more
than
30 years, Mr. Jospin kept denying any such membership while infiltrating
first
the Foreign Ministry and later the Socialist Party. He even managed to rise
to
the top of the party and became a minister while still a member of a secret
Marxist organization dedicated to the violent overthrow of democratic
government. This has not cost Mr. Jospin's presidential ambitions a single
point drop in his ratings.
     If his opponent for the presidency, President Jacques Chirac, had been
exposed as a secret member of a neo-fascist sect, his ratings would not only
have sunk like a stone, but he would have been out of the race.
     From Oslo to Oporto, the no-enemies-on-the-left syndrome was quick to
blame "fascist elements in the Italian security forces" for the Genoa riots.
CNN International jumped on the bandwagon, ladling out generous air time to
those who denounced an imaginary fascist plot designed to discredit
"peaceful
demonstrators."
     What about the extremists who torched vehicles, smashed storefront
windows
and banks and then hurled gasoline bombs at Italian security forces? The
left
had an answer for that, too. These were neo-Nazi skinheads who had come from
Germany to cause mayhem. The extreme left was thus exculpated.
     The global recession that is a growing black cloud on the international
horizon also signals a neo-Marxist revival -- unless democratic capitalism
straightens out and flies right.
     After embracing democratic capitalism following decades of lip service
during the Cold War, the European Union's left-of-center governments (with
the
exception of Spain and Italy, which are governed by the center-right) are
beginning to take the anti-capitalist threat seriously. Police and
intelligence
agencies have been authorized to coordinate efforts to identify and track
anti-capitalist demonstrators. Key to the new measures is a secretive
committee
known as "Article 36 Committee," once known as the "K4 Committee." The
Schengen
Information System, designed for extensive data sharing between police
forces to combat transnational crime, has also been wheeled into the
anti-capitalist
breach in EU's defenses.

Copyright © 2001 News World Communications, Inc. All rights reserved.