ROOT CONTRADICTIONS IN THE TEA PARTY

clipped from: www.commondreams.org

• 1. Can you be against Big Government and not press for reductions in the vast military budgets,

• 2. Can you believe in the free market and not condemn hundreds of billions of dollars of corporate welfare-bailouts, subsidies, handouts, and giveaways?

• 3. Can you want to preserve the legitimate sovereignty of our country and not reject the trade agreements known as NAFTA and GATT

• 4. Can you be for law and order and not support a bigger and faster crackdown on the corporate crime wave for every dollar for prosecution, seventeen to twenty dollars are returned.
  

• 5. Can you be against invasions of privacy by government and business without rejecting the provisions of the Patriot Act that leave you defenseless to constant unlawful snooping,

• 6. Can you be against regulation of serious medical malpractice, unsafe drugs, contaminated food from China, Mexico and domestic processors?

• 7. Can you keep calling for Freedom and yet tolerate control of your credit and other economic rights by hidden and arbitrary credit ratings and credit scores?

• 8. Can you be for a new, clean system of politics and elections and still accept the Republican and Democratic Two Party dictatorship that is propped up by complex state laws

• 9. If you want a return to our Constitution—its principles of limited and separation of power and its emphasis on “We the People” in its preamble—can you still support Washington’s wars that have not been declared or giving corporations equal rights with humans
  

• 10. You want less taxation and lower deficits. How can you succeed unless you stop big corporations from escaping their fair share of taxes by manipulating foreign jurisdictions against our tax laws,

Exclusive: British Novelist John le Carré on the Iraq War, Corporate Power, the Exploitation of Africa and His New Novel, "Our Kind of Traitor"

The author of "The Spy Who Came In From the Cold".

IMPERIALISM AND THEN FASCISM

Ever wondered why our country always seems to be at war with the world. Ever wondered why our government and mass media promote the view that the world outside our borders is a corrupt, chaotic, frightening place. Ever shocked to realize that many people in our society think the best thing that can happen to a foreign country is for the U.S. to invade. Can you even think of a time when our country was truly at peace with the world?

IMPERIALISM

Imperialism is capitalism at its most virulent stage, astride the world; exploitation on a global scale. It is the creation of a grotesquely unequal world. The constant wars and its astonishing waste of resources and human lives ultimately weakens imperialism. Workers of the world are driven to rebel against it and replace it with socialism, the last stage of capitalism before its revolutionary transformation. Imperialism is the result of capitalism’s inexorable tendency towards globalization.

Capitalism exists to maximize profit, and capitalists do this by stealing as much surplus value as possible from the working class. Eventually, national capitalism develops to a point where production is concentrated in giant monopolies that are controlled by the huge banks that finance them. The finance capitalists who control these banks take state power as well, and they use their economic, political, and military power to take capitalist exploitation to a whole new level. The dominance of finance capital is the key component of imperialism because finance capital begins to look abroad for even greater returns on investment.

Like any other criminal enterprise, capitalism starts out small. The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie [the capitalists—D.P.] over the whole surface of the globe. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls.

Marx and Engels are talking about an earlier stage of capitalism that emphasized the production and export of physical commodities, whereas imperialism focuses on the export of finance capital. Under imperialism, investment capital itself is used to “batter down all Chinese walls” and when this doesn’t work it uses naked political and military aggression to open up a country to capital investment. They want a world in which finance capital based in the powerful developed countries is totally free to move around the globe and make investments that subject workers in the weaker developing countries to forms of super-exploitation even more brutal than “national capitalism. Capitalism is fundamentally a criminal enterprise; it will stop at nothing to extend their global dominance. Resistance against imperialism by the global working class has been a major factor shaping world history since at least the latter part of the nineteenth century. The Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions were all victories in the struggle against.

At the end of the Second World War, the United States took on the role. Some major defeats have been Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba. A tremendous victory was the break-up of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe but the dividends of that victory were squandered on financial scandals and military adventurism.

The U.S has been weakened by the growing economies of China and India, the economic depression of 2008 and the huge costs of and poor performance by the U.S. military in the two imperialist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

When imperialists fight for survival they always resort to fascism. Fascism has been defined as “the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital.” The movement toward fascism is a sign that imperialism is on its death bed, which in turn opens up opportunities for socialist revolution. This brings us to the subjects of working-class unity and internationalism, the united front against fascism, and the fight for international socialism, all of which will be discussed in later articles.

Correa, aguanta, el pueblo se levanta!

The conditions for the permanent overthrow of the Correa government will remain. Three wagers, three clashing sectors. Will matter more popular masses

The Golpista Wager

Government cuts to the public sector, immediately accompanied by an attack on the media, and the radical TeleSur network in particular. Opposition leader Pablo Guerrero was spotted by eyewitnesses participating in a physical attack on public TV reporters attempting simply to report on the coup.

Correa’s Wager

Pointing the finger of guilt squarely at ex-president Lucio Gutiérrez, who came to power in 2003 with the support of Ecuador’s poorest masses, his right-wing populism call for early elections. Correa due to serve until 2013). Foreign minister Ricardo Patiño urged the gathered crowds to descend on the hospital to rescue their leader... soldiers finally rushing in to rescue the president. Correa was betting on the Ecuadorean people

The Radical Wager?

Some ostensibly radical sectors of the Ecuadorean population, not journalist turned political activist Carlos Vera, nor clearly irrelevant Communist Party of Ecuador (MLM). The radicals in question come from what is ostensibly his support base. The Pachacutik Movement, a leftist electoral alliance bringing together indigenous and non-indigenous Ecuadoreans declaring its “frontal opposition to Rafael Correa’s government and its fake revolution. Cléver Jiménez accusing the president of having a “dictatorial attitude” and “violating the rights of public servants and the society as a whole.” Pachacutik Movement called for the formation of a broad Popular Resistance Front to demand Correa’s resignation through a constitutional motion. What occurred, a justifiable response to the neoliberal policies of the Correa government, the police in fact represented popular demands against a neoliberal state. An open secret, Correa’s government is the weakest among the radical leftist projects in the region. There is a tense character of the relations with the social movements that brought him to power.

ex-president Lucio Gutiérrez was supported by Pachacutik), their willingness to remove leaders as quickly as they bring them to power. Without this powerful foundation, Correa is and has been in danger. Those radicals on the left who are demanding Correa’s resignation are making a wager of their own: that it will be they, rather than the far right, who will control the outcome of the chain of events sparked by the police strike
A statement released by the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE).

Losing the Masses, Losing the Revolution

In The Black Jacobins, C.L.R. James seeks to explain the tragic fate of Toussaint L’Ouverture. He lost the support of the masses. “Toussaint destroyed his own Left-wing, and with it sealed his doom.” Without the masses, Hugo Chávez would never have been returned to power on April 14th 2002. Honduran president Manuel Zelaya’s lack of support from an established and organized mass movement that facilitated his removal in 2009. Chávez’s return guaranteed by the existence of revolutionary networks of armed militants which predated his presidency, emerging from a history of nearly 50 years of struggle against corrupt democracy and neoliberalism.

Popular masses are not behind the coup despite analogy between the salary demands of the police involved and popular struggles against neoliberal structural adjustment. The danger is not that Ecuadoreans might join a coup but that they might not resist it vigorously enough... Correa’s luck seems to have held. But then again, this is not a question of luck at all.