>From: John Clancy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Subject: CPA: Zimbabwe, US Steel war, Greek Elections
>Subject: GUARDIAN ROUNDUP. MAY 3RD. SEE INDEX
>
>GUARDIAN ROUNDUP -- MAY 3RD. SEE INDEX BELOW
>
>The following articles were published in "The Guardian", newspaper
>of the Communist Party of Australia in its issue of Wednesday,
>May 3rd, 2000. Contact address: 65 Campbell Street, Surry Hills.
>Sydney. 2010 Australia. Phone: (612) 9212 6855 Fax: (612) 9281 5795.
>CPA Central Committee: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>"The Guardian": <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Webpage: http://www.cpa.org.au>
>Subscription rates on request.
>
>******************************
>
>8. Zimbabwe: demonising Mugabe to protect white farmers
>9. Walking the land <197> for our ancient right
>12. USA: Fighting the steel war
>13. The longest US economic expansion
>14. Greek elections: two-party system dominates
>
>8. Zimbabwe: demonising Mugabe to protect white farmers
>
>Zimbabwe, only occasionally newsworthy for the last two decades, has
>suddenly become a top destination for foreign correspondents. Almost
>every day extremely critical stories from Zimbabwe are given
>prominent space in the Western world's media, including in Australia.
>
>by Rob Gowland
>
>The country's President, Robert Mugabe, was profiled in an article in
>the "Sydney Morning Herald" with an unflattering photo and the
>insulting headline "Last kicks of a dying donkey".
>
>Last week, the ABC's "Foreign Correspondent" joined the chorus with
>an attack on Mugabe, blaming him and his party, ZANU, for the
>country's very real economic woes.
>
>Zimbabwe was colonised by the British South Africa Company in 1895
>under the name of South Rhodesia. White settlers moved in under the
>protection of British guns. By 1960 they accounted for only five per
>cent of the total population but occupied 70 per cent of the land --
>and the most productive land at that.
>
>In the 1960s and '70s the national liberation movements that
>were sweeping away the political control of the colonialists in
>many of the African states arose in Rhodesia as well. The
>white colonial regime was forced to manoeuvre and attempted to
>install a native puppet but his rule was short.
>
>The armed liberation struggle was waged by Mugabe's ZANU and Joshua
>Nkomo's ZAPU.
>
>ZANU won a landslide electoral victory in 1980 and later joined with
>Nkuomo's ZAPU to form a coalition government. However, the white
>settlers maintained their control of the farming land and hence, the
>main economy of Zimbabwe.
>
>There had been a political revolution but not an economic one. The
>native population continued to live in poverty.
>
>With the breakup of the Soviet Union, which had backed and
>given support to the national liberation movements on the
>African continent, the ruling coalition of the Zimbabwe African
>National Union -- Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) decided to relinquish
>its Marxist-Leninist and socialist commitment and eliminated
>any reference to "scientific socialism" in its program.
>
>Mugabe made an appeal to set aside "pure socialism" and opted
>for social democracy and a mixed economy.
>
>Reliance on the IMF
>
>This policy, in effect, meant reliance on the IMF and acceptance of
>the economic and political demands of the IMF and the World Bank.
>
>IMF loans were granted to the Zimbabwe Government but they
>only intensified the poverty of most of the Zimbabwean
>people. Servicing the national debt accounts for over 25 per cent
>of exports.Today, half the population is unemployed.
>Inflation reached 25 per cent in 1991.
>
>ZANU's principal support is in the countryside, but Zimbabwe
>is ravaged by AIDS. About 25 percent of the total population is
>HIV positive, and many people in country areas are simply
>too exhausted by disease to work -- or to vote.
>
>Corn production fell by over 60 percent last year and this
>was contributed to by the AIDS epidemic.
>
>The 4,500 white farmers predominantly grow cash crops, and
>the Africans -- whose land the whites thieved from the
>indigenous population in the first place -- live in squalid villages
>or slum suburbs of the towns and work for the white "planters". This,
>or they starve.
>
>Opposition
>
>It is not surprising that in these circumstances opposition to the
>Mugabe Government should arise. It comes from two directions.
>
>On the one hand, from workers and peasants, from the unemployed, from
>trade unions and other progressive organisations disappointed and
>frustrated with their continued poverty.
>
>On the other hand, it comes from the white farmers and the
>former colonial powers that dream of regaining their complete
>control over this potentially rich land.
>
>The present campaign is being whipped up as revolutionary changes are
>taking place on the African continent.
>
>Apartheid has been overthrown in South Africa, Namibia has won and
>consolidated its independence, the imperialist backed UNITA forces
>have been defeated in Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo is
>breaking free from its long colonial status, Libya has retained its
>independence.
>
>These and other developments are not acceptable to the
>former European colonial powers and to the US.
>
>While the Mugabe Government has not fulfilled the aspirations of the
>Zimbabwean people, his Government sent troops to help maintain the
>independence of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and provided
>assistance to the ANC during its struggle against apartheid.
>
>The one-time guerrilla leader against British colonialism is being
>demonised as a megalomaniac whose time has passed and who needs to
>hand over leadership to people more acceptable to the former colonial
>masters.
>
>The leader of the country or the country as a whole is vilified in
>the media, with the political leaders of the Western powers playing a
>prominent part.
>
>The process is familiar. It has been used against Panama's Noriega,
>Libya's Gaddafi, and most recently Yugoslavia's Milosevic. It was
>used against the Soviet Union, Cuba, Iraq, Iran and now against
>China.
>
>When President Mugabe warned white farmers in Zimbabwe not to
>use force against the landless African peasants who were squatting
>on the whites' farms -- saying it would only cause greater violence
>"and none of us want that" -- the media asserted that Mugabe had
>started encouraging Africans to launch violent attacks on white
>farmers.
>
>Murdoch's Sydney tabloid "The Daily Telegraph" on April 11 regaled
>readers with a succession of horror stories of white farmers and
>their wives being terrorised by "drunken mobs of squatters howling
>war cries and brandishing axes".
>
>In another story, a white farmer was "beaten and whipped in front of
>his wife and children" until he agreed to sign over half his farm to
>the squatters. Significantly, this article is datelined from London,
>not Zimbabwe.
>
>When Mugabe was elected President in a landslide victory over
>the white settlers in 1980, it was (in the words of "The
>Washington Post") "celebrated by Zimbabwe's black majority and
>greeted with aid and goodwill from Western governments".
>
>But two decades of the West's "aid and goodwill" has inevitably left
>Zimbabwe in a mess.
>
>Landless peasants
>
>The country is faced with the impossibility of reconciling
>the demands of the World Bank and IMF (representing
>transnational corporations and Western "investors") on the one hand,
>and the aspirations of the landless peasants, who fought the
>independence struggle against British colonialism, on the other.
>
>"The Washington Post" in an editorial on February 1 complains that
>Mugabe "balks at reforming his unproductive state-dominated economy".
>
>Mugabe and ZANU, on the other hand, have apparently decided that the
>ravages caused by globalisation and the World Bank's structural
>adjustment programs demand the implementation of another sort of
>reform, one that is long overdue in Zimbabwe: land reform.
>
>The white planters are using their wealth and position to fight the
>Government every inch of the way, using the courts (another hangover
>from British colonialism) to block land reform.
>
>Destabilisation, economic disruption, "pro-democracy" demonstrations,
>the fostering of black against black and ethnic separatist strife are
>all part of the campaign.
>
>Guerrilla campaigns and terrorism can all follow, until a government
>acceptable to the US and British replaces ZANU and Mugabe.
>
>At the Congress of the Socialist Party of Serbia in Belgrade
>in March, the ZANU delegation told me that their border patrols
>had only recently stopped a "very large" truck that was attempting
>to enter the country with a full load of "the most
>sophisticated weapons -- enough for a small war".
>
>West's formula
>
>"The Washington Post" has spelt out a formula for
>outside interference: "Now Western governments must keep pressing
>for economic reforms, help Zimbabwe's growing democratic
>opposition maintain its new-found unity and do whatever is possible
>to prevent Mr Mugabe from manipulating the parliamentary vote
>in April. If all goes well, Mr Mugabe will have a chance
>to graciously concede after that election."
>
>Already committees of support for "democracy" in Zimbabwe
>are springing up which will echo the media campaign of the
>western powers. Such a committee is being formed in Australia.
>
>While the white planters are resolutely opposing land
>reform, determined to hold onto the plundered African land that they
>now "own" by right of British conquest, rumours are circulated
>(and then reported as fact) that land compulsorily acquired from
>white farmers last year for distribution to landless Africans had
>been given to "members of ZANU and government officials".
>
>Many landless Zimbabweans are members of ZANU, but such assertions
>are part of the deceptions and aim to soften up public opinion to lay
>the groundwork for overt or covert intervention in Zimbabwe.
>
>Britain's Tories are calling for "strong action" from
>their government to stop what they are predictably calling
>Mugabe's "ethnic cleansing".
>
>Britain's Labour Government, an ardent supporter of colonialism and
>aggression against smaller states, has urged the Government of
>Zimbabwe to "send a delegation to London to open negotiations".
>
>Zimbabwe is now an independent country but the British Foreign Office
>still thinks Zimbabwe is a colony.
>
>Foreign Office Minister Peter Hain offered spurious financial support
>for "a program of genuine land reform" but was careful to stipulate
>that "we wouldn't give the money to the Government [of Zimbabwe]".
>
>The British Government's "land reform" would leave the white settlers
>in control -- it would be no reform at all.
>
>A serious, dangerous situation is developing in southern Africa which
>could destabilise the region and provide an opportunity for Western
>meddling, not only in Zimbabwe but in southern Africa as a whole.
>
> ***********
>
>13. The longest US economic expansion
>
>The monopoly media has been celebrating the longest
>economic expansion in US history -- almost nine years. And yet the
>US Government estimates 9.6 million people are unemployed or
>want work; 55 million US residents are so poor and housing costs
>so high that mass homelessness and chronic hunger rose during
>the expansion.
>
> by Wadi'h Halabi
>
>Two million US citizens are in prison, 44 million lack
>health insurance. If this is "as good as it gets", that tells us
>about capitalism today. By one count, of the eight worst economic
>crises since the 1930s, seven have occurred since 1990 -- all in
>other countries. Why has the US economy been relatively stable?
>
>The first thing to keep in mind is that the world economy is
>not entirely capitalist. States created by socialist revolutions,
>including China, Vietnam and Cuba, account today for more than 10
>percent of world production. The economies of these states are not
>cyclical, because planning predominates, even after capitalist
>inroads.
>
>1990-91 and 1997 marked global turns for the worse in
>capitalist overproduction. Normally such turns would have led to all-
>out crisis. But China continued to grow, at the fastest rate of any
>major economy. Its purchases from capitalist countries tripled
>between 1990 and 1999 and could exceed $200 billion in 2000. China's
>purchases can act like powerful "anti-clotting agents" that help keep
>the capitalist system from congealing in crisis.
>
>In 1993, the chief international economist for a Wall Street
>bank even admitted that without China's purchases, "there would
>be world chaos".
>
>Bourgeois explanations for US economic stability include regulation
>of interest rates by the Federal Reserve; government expenditures
>("Keynesian mechanisms"); advances in technology; and bank-deposit
>insurance.
>
>All imply that capitalism has learned to regulate if not overcome its
>cycles. Nothing could be further from the truth.
>
>The Japanese economy has been stagnant or in recession for a decade.
>In efforts to revive it, the Japanese Government has been making
>capital available at no interest. It has spent hundreds of billions
>of dollars on stimulative packages. The economy remains in recession.
>Now the Japanese Government is neck-deep in debt and Moody's just
>placed it on credit watch.
>
>It is impossible to understand the US stability in
>national isolation. A stunning statistic, revealed in "Business
>Week", is that the US economy is using 72 percent of the world's
>savings. Capital has been flooding into the US since the Gulf War and
>US capitalists use this at effectively no cost to themselves.
>
>The net US debt to the rest of the world tripled between 1992
>and 1999. It exceeds $1.6 trillion, but net payments on that debt
>in 1999 came to less than one percent of that sum. In addition,
>unequal exchange -- whereby US monopolies sell their commodities
>above value while buying from weaker parties below value -- almost
>invisibly draws tens of billions to Wall Street.
>
>Speculation, currency manipulation and other Wall Street maneouvres
>draw billions more. US industry has grown since 1990. But at least 25
>percent of the rest of the capitalist world's industrial production
>has been idled or destroyed in the same period.
>
>Much of this has taken place under Wall Street/International Monetary
>Fund "guidance" in Warsaw Pact states now under capitalist rule,
>including the USSR.
>
>But the US has also overseen the "enforced destruction" of Iraq's and
>Yugoslavia's economies, with devastating regional impact. And use of
>industrial capacity in Japan has fallen from 90 percent to 70 percent
>in the face of global gluts.
>
>Headlines blare that the current "boom" is taking place in peacetime,
>unlike previous long expansions. But US imperialism has been the main
>force in two major (and by no means concluded) wars, in the Gulf and
>the Balkans, and countless less-publicised conflicts in Latin
>America, Africa and Asia.
>
>The Pentagon budget is at wartime levels.
>
>All that capital flowing into the US is trying to escape
>wars, instability and losses abroad. In the three months after the
>US started bombing Yugoslavia last year, capital flooded into the
>US at a US$1.1 trillion annual rate.
>
>Wall Street is using its position of economic and military dominance,
>and the improvements in communications and transport, to push off
>capitalism's toxins -- starting with unemployment -- onto weaker
>countries, while looting them, cheapening their labour and destroying
>or idling their production facilities.
>
>In a sense, the "Great American Depression" has been pushed off onto
>Africa, onto Iraq and Yugoslavia, onto the Ukraine and Romania, i.e.
>the states that have fallen to counter-revolution since 1989. Of
>course, "prosperity" from looting and destruction cannot go
>on indefinitely.
>
>And world capitalism's unfolding crisis of overproduction is bound to
>affect the states created by socialist revolutions -- currently
>China, Vietnam, Laos, North Korea and Cuba.
>
>Crisis is an inevitable part of capitalism. The working class-
>led struggle for good jobs and against war and racism, privation
>and inequality, points the way to taking power to meet human needs.
>
>"People's Weekly World",<B> paper of Communist Party, USA.
>
> *************
>
>14. Greek elections: two-party system dominates
>
>In Greece's parliamentary elections held on April 9, the
>social democrat Pan-Hellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) increased
>its vote by 2.3 per cent and won an outright majority of 158 (162
>in 1996) out of 300 seats.
>
>The conservative New Democracy (ND) party won 125 (108 in
>1996) seats, increasing its vote by 4.6 percent. The Greek
>Communist Party (CPG) won 11 seats (11 in 1996), with a slight drop
>in its vote of less than 0.1 per cent. The remaining six seats were
>won by the Coalition of the Left and Progress of Greece (SYN) (9
>in 1996).
>
>The following is a preliminary statement (abridged) on the election
>results by the General Secretary of the CC of the CPG, Aleka
>Paparigha:
>
>We believe that the overall election results that have emerged
>with high percentages going to the two main parties -- New
>Democracy and PASOK, and with PASOK having a marginal majority -- for
>the first time perhaps in modern history, clearly do not
>correspond to the Greek people's stance before the elections in terms
>of the popular dissatisfaction and anger ...
>
>Indeed, these results are unrepresentative.
>
>Thus the issue arises which the CPG had raised before the elections,
>of how freely our people vote.
>
>We say this, of course, not in the sense that the voter goes to the
>ballot box literally in chains, but because we believe that in recent
>years our people have sustained a multiple offensive against their
>living and working conditions and an unprecedented effort to
>manipulate and intimidate them, which has made it difficult for them
>to see that there is another road they should follow.
>
>A significant segment of our people voted with the thought that there
>are no immediate prospects, but that they had to choose between the
>two main parties.
>
>Without ... steadfastness in its policy, without the effort it made
>to support the people's struggles, to create fronts and to rally
>other forces, the CPG too would almost certainly have followed the
>downward course of other parties.
>
>We have the dynamic of CPG action.
>
>For us, this dynamic is a quality factor in Party policy, through the
>forces with whom it collaborated, through the broader support it
>encountered, and primarily through its very broad communication with
>and permeation of broad segments of the people, since in fact,
>throughout the entire election campaign, we kept hearing everywhere
>that we are a party that struggles; and we found a high degree of
>acceptance of our more general positions.
>
>We are certain the government that will emerge from PASOK's marginal
>majority, which one way and another will be a minority government,
>will not have its hands free, but will meet resistance even from
>those who voted for it.
>
>This new government will not have an easy time and of course we do
>not expect the ND party to exercise opposition.
>
>The ND will continue to give its assent to the PASOK Government on
>basic issues, as it has done in the past.
>
>Opposition will once again spring up from among the efforts of the
>CPG and of the forces with which we cooperated, and we are sure that
>in the period ahead and the years to come there will be ferment and
>realignments.
>
>We are certain that even those forces among the people who voted for
>one of the two main parties will eventually pour out onto the streets
>and into the struggle, because harsh measures are on the way which we
>do not believe the people will stand for.
>
>And new conclusions will emerge, new forces among the people
>will discuss and reflect on about what we've been talking about,
>i.e. that there must be a break with the two-party system, and
>above all a front rallying forces against European Monetary Union,
>its effects, and the new NATO doctrine.
>
>The PASOK leadership has a serious responsibility. Of course we do
>not expect them to assume it, precisely because the progressive
>people of the Left have been trapped in dilemmas, and it can be
>proved that the service provided by the PASOK leadership is to give
>blood to the ND.
>
>Nor can PASOK play the role it says it plays, i.e. to act as
>a barrier to conservatism.
>
>On the contrary it actually nourishes this trend. And it can be shown
>that the policy which could constitute the hope for radicalising the
>masses of the people lies in the CPG's proposal for a popular front.
>There is no other hope, no other outlet.
>
>As we promised, we are continuing the struggle.
>
>What is very important is that people joined us in the
>[election] struggle who were not communists. They worked hard beside
>us. And this leaven that was created will certainly produce results
>from here on.
>
>Quality elements have been gained by the CPG, through their allies in
>the election campaign. They will remain as a legacy and will be
>utilised in the best possible way. " JC
>
>
>
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