Hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways.  The point however is to change it.  Karl Marx
Economic & Philosophic Science Review 
Subscriptions (£10/3 months £30 p.a.) [P&P Bulletin Publications PO B0X 50, London SW 17 9NL] [Post Office Regd.]                               
No 0741 March 6th 1994                                                                                                                              10p

The whole system of capitalist profiteering is inherently corrupt and graft-ridden, so having another criminal in the White House is wholly appropriate, and hardly news. The middle-class public discontent with this sordidness is a more interesting phenomenon, indicating a rapidly escalating frustration with the world imperialist economy's incurable slump and descent towards murderous trade war. A revolutionary crisis of international proportions is taking shape.

The increasing exposure of the president of US imperialism as a grubby little crook and of the entire British Tory establishment as nothing but a bunch of money-grabbing spivs is hardly news.

The growing acceptance by the public of the reality of this corruption is more interesting.

Frankly acknowledging that "everyone has their hand in the till under capitalism" poses some philosophical problems for thick-skinned bourgeois idealism regardless of its unending subjective illusions.

And the development of this cynical awareness among workers that "of course all profiteering and market hyping is bent" registers an advanced stage of economic and political crisis which indicates that the immediate future is going to be even more explosive than the immediate past, which has been electrifying enough.

The free-market system is no more criminal now than it has ever been, - i.e. it is totally corrupt and hypocritical, like always.

But it has become dramatically more out of touch with the deeper aspirations of human society, and more out of place historically, than it has ever been before. It is a revolutionary crisis.

In a notorious recent intervention into the Italian election campaign, the Pope declared that while it could not be denied that "some Italian Roman Catholic leaders (i.e. Christian Democrats) were corrupt" (which is putting it mildly), they at least had "the great merit of having saved freedom and democracy", (i.e. having saved it from communism).

Just how corrupt is that, your holiness? You mean like running the entire Italian capitalist system through secret freemasonry and mafia societies, and using total murderous violence to arbitrarily resolve all 'difficulties' which threaten that system, including wholesale political assassinations, mass terror provocations carried out by the secret service of the Christian Democrat regime, endless bribery and blackmail rackets to control the entire parliamentary 'opposition', and such large-scale theft from all public institutions that it is hard to name an Italian state corporation which was not being systematically fleeced.

And that murderous insecurity, criminal mayhem, and non-stop public fraud and hypocrisy constitutes 'democracy'? Think again, Popey.

Formal balloting in Italy (and everywhere else under capitalism, once it is analysed) is just one big racket. Far from the 'democracy' being a supposed counter-balance to the 'corruption', the two are absolutely synonymous. The 'democratic' fraud was simply the crown jewels, the very summit of achievement, of the entire capitalist system. What more glittering success could bourgeois-idealist philosophical deceptions ever hope to reach than in regularly persuading the working-class throughout the world to gullibly repeatedly vote for its own exploitation and defrauding.

Even now, at this late stage, the idealist sleight-of-hand is effortlessly working full blast to continue beguiling workers into accepting more bogus 'reforms' to the capitalist system which are, yet again, meant to be 'exposing all wrongdoings and removing all injustices' and leaving behind only 'perfect fairness', etc, but which will in fact make not the slightest difference to capitalism's inherent crookedness and humbug.

The Pope's hypocritical cant is at the very heart of this newest onslaught of lies and trickery to rob the people once more. The 'democracy' fraud is just the stick-up weapon again, the same as it has always been.

What can Berlusconi, the Robert Maxwell of Italy, possibly be but the most thick-skinned, barefaced, aggressive grafter of the whole crooked Italian capitalist scene. And the Northern Leagues will surely prove to be no different from all the other corrupt parliamentary opportunists who went before them.

And it is a piece of prize Anglo-Saxon West-European great-imperialist drivel to pretend that all of this is so just because "that's Italy", etc. No, that's capitalism, and as it is now emerging, this corruption is endemic in every single country throughout the whole free-market world.

Clinton might become only the second president to be impeached for corruption, but he is just a regular routine performer as far as crooks in the White House are concerned.

The Reagan-Bush administration had more officials indicted for wrongdoing and forced to resign from office than any previous US government in history.

This cascade of sleaze, graft, and corruption was climaxed by the nauseating Irangate/Contra racketeering which financed fascist disruption of Nicaragua, illegally against the express vote of Congress, via selling arms to Iran equally illegally through secret and sordid Zionist arms profiteers.

The Carter gang before it had a southern mafia/family gravy train going more blatantly than Clinton's, only very reluctantly sacrificing his Budget Office director Bert Lance to investigation for graft after resisting for months an avalanche of accusations and innuendoes.

Prior to that, the Nixon regime became legendary for its grotesque Watergate crimes and for the monstrous cover-up, deviousness, blackmail, and interference with justice which followed to try to get the president off the hook.

The preceding Johnson and Kennedy 'Democratic' regimes were built on the worst kind of Tammany Hall racketeering, but even more notoriously left their corrupt mark on history by their infamous pursuit of murderous imperialist war on Indo-China, dropping more bombs on the peninsula than had been dropped in all the theatres throughout World War II, and poisoning the Vietnamese jungles with Agent Orange dioxin chemicals which to this day are still causing diabolical birth defects in the peasantry who have to live off the land. And much of this fascist-terror bombing which made all of Hitler's WWI efforts look like child's play, was carried out in total secret from the US Congress, and in part illegally too, especially as far as the bombing of Cambodia and Laos were concerned.

These same regimes launched the first secret subversion attacks on socialist Cuba, including the attempted Bay of Pigs nazi coup, and never ceased trying to get Fidel Castro assassinated (again illegally as far as the Congress and the US constitution are concerned) via US mafia hitmen.

Also just emerging are details of how the entire US bourgeois state collectively holds ordinary people undisguised contempt in way that forcible nuclear-radiation experiments were inflicted on wide sections of the public for decades without any legal authority obviously, without any agreement from the victims, frequently without any information at all being given to those being experimented upon, and often under the cover of completely and deliberately lying excuses so as to grotesquely manipulate people worse than any fascist regime in history.

Even the 'free' press is admitting just some of the truth of this horrific routine essence of human exploitation by the capitalist system:

A congressional report, drawing on department of energy material, disclosed this month that government scientists deliberately exploded atomic bombs in the atmosphere over the US in order to examine the spread and effects of radioactive fallout.

The report identified 12 such tests, including one in 1950 in New Mexico after which radiation particle levels were carefully measured in the town of Watrous, 70 miles away. At the time, scientists said there was no risk to people, even though their purpose was to develop a weapon that would kill enemy soldiers through radioactive fallout.

In fact, according to the Los Alamos national laboratory, nerve-centre of America's nuclear weapons research, there were about 250 experiments in which radiation was deliberately released into the atmosphere between 1944 and 1961, in New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Washington state, and perhaps elsewhere.

"Releasing these amounts of radiation on people in an areas in secret is a little hard to swallow," said Senator John Glenn, the former astronaut, who is pushing for the release of other government departments' records, including those of the Pentagon.

All of this has come on top of Ms O'Leary's startling announcement on December 8 that the government conducted 204 previously undisclosed underground nuclear tests in the US between 1963 and 1990.

Among this total are 18 unannounced tests undertaken during the Reagan and Bush administrations. Independent experts said they were at a loss to explain exactly what these later tests were for, or why they were kept secret.

Ms O'Leary said that between 600 and 800 people were subjected to government radiation experiments; she has set up a public telephone inquiry service called the Human Experimentation Hotline. On its first day in operation last week the hotline was swamped with calls from worried families.

The number of Americans intentionally exposed to radioactive atom test fallout, and its lasting after-effects, is unknown.

But a study of high fall-out downwind areas in Utah, for example, has found childhood leukaemia rates which are 2.5 times the national average.

Much of the macabre "evidence" of human experimentation has been preserved. About 20,000 irradiated pieces of people are kept at a national human tissue depository in Spokane, in Washington state.

And the scale of the problem is staggering. A report by the federal environmental protection agency estimated recently that more than 43,300 military and industrial sites in the US are or may be contaminated by radioactivity.

YOUR Leader (Radiation and the guinea pigs, March 7), following Anthony Tucker's science pages feature on the cynical treatment by the US government of the indigenous Marshall Island people who suffered from serious radiation exposure from atmospheric atomic weapons tests in the Pacific 40 years ago (March 3), begs the question why the world's media failed to fully investigate the scandal of secret radiation experiments conducted in the US, when the nascent details were first made public in October 1986.

I strongly concur with this quizzical stance. One of the researchers responsible for convincing US Energy Secretary Elizabeth O'Leary to lift the veil of secrecy that has long shrouded this cover-up is Bob Alvarez. Twelve years ago, Alvarez, then director of the Washington based Radiation Health Information Project, co-authored a detailed study; a chilling book Killing Our Own: the Disaster of America's Experience with Atomic Radiation, with Harvey Wasserman and Norman Soloman (Delta Books, 1982), that clearly exposed the carefully crafted cover-up.

It too was rubbished by the atomic establishment as a cri de coeur rant from anti-nuclear activists. But in September 1987 in New York, the first Global Radiation Victims Conference heard the personal testimonies of many "hidden hibakusha", named after the Japanese victims of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs in 1945.

One victim was former fanner Tom Baillie, who featured on the Panorama programme last night, whose personal and family tragedy as a resident downwind from the massive Hanford military nuclear complex in Washington state in the North West US, I wrote about in my article Hanford's Hidden Hibakusha in Environment Now in July 1988, and elaborated upon in a chapter in my co-authored book, The International Politics of Nuclear Waste published by Macmillan Press in 1991.

The Guardian similarly made public some of the details of the horrors of the US secret radiation victims in my article in Environment Guardian (September 7, 1990), following a visit made to Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August that year.

However, the scandal of radiation victims cover-up is not confined to the US.

Ten years ago you published a letter from Norman West — now an MEP — which gave details of how the UK Atomic Energy Authority, the then operators of the Sellafield site, deliberately discharged radioactive wastes into the Irish Sea in the 1950s as part of a large scale radiological experiment that used the people of the north coast of Wales, West coast of Scotland, Northern Ireland, Isle of Man and Cumbria as radiation guinea pigs (How to turn Cumbria into a radiation laboratory, Letters, February 23, 1984). Mr West's accusations were not based on flights of anti-nuclear fantasy, but cited the extraordinary paper given by Dr H J Dunster, then a UKAEA scientist, to a UN sponsored atomic energy conference in Geneva in 1958.

Dr Dunster defended the use of radiation discharges as a legitimate experiment. He later became the head of the UK National Radiological Protection Board and a delegate to the European Commission's specialist scientific group of experts on Atomic Energy Questions, that gave Thorp the green light on behalf of the EC in its assessment of predicted Thorp nuclear discharges, published in April 1992.

How much worse the real story is can only be imagined.

Thus despite appearing to be easily the most unwholesome personally of all the recent crooks in the White House, with his cheap little knock-offs, his laughable cover-ups, his tinpot Arkansas financial rackets, his small-town mafia, his Lady Macbeth of a wife demanding her own nepotistic platforms, and now the resignation sacrificing of close advisers, and the even more sordid 'suicide' of another, - Clinton's	cover-up corruption is just routine dishonesty and injustice.

Will the rapidly-growing stench of the present scandal topple him?:

Mrs Clinton has been accused of ordering the shredding of documents related to Whitewater, an Arkansas land development company in which the Clintons were investors. The company is thought to have benefited improperly from funds diverted from Madison Guaranty, a failed savings and loan bank, the American equivalent of a building society.

Addressing the old Watergate question — what did the president know and when did he know it? — Mr Clinton said he did not knew of meetings in which White House staff were briefed about the status of the Whitewater investigation by Treasury officials.

He did admit, however, that as early as last October he was told that a finding by the Resolution Trust Corporation, a financial watchdog, did relate to whether his 1984 gubernatorial campaign improperly benefitted from cheques that came from Madison.

"I didn't think that much about it," he said at a White House press conference

The scandal moved a step closer to Mr Clinton yesterday when his chief of staff, Thomas "Mack" McLarty, admitted for the first time that his office authorised and arranged one of the "improper" meetings with financial watchdogs whose disclosure forced the weekend resignation of the White House counsel, Bernard Nussbaum.
	
As the Whitewater whirlwind spun further out of the Clintons' control, the Democratic leadership in Congress caved in, saying they would no longer block Republican demands for full-fledged Watergate-style public hearings into the affair.

The accusation that Mrs Clinton ordered Whitewater documents to be shredded during the 1992 presidential campaign was made by three present or former employers of the Rose law firm, to whom she was said to have personally handed over files for destruction.

The three told the Washington Times that the shredding began after the first press reports on Whitewater in March of that year. The allegations are known to figure in the grand jury investigation launched by the independent special counsel, Robert Fiske.

The intensity of the Whitewater affair is imperilling all other political business. Forgotten for the moment are the health care, welfare and crime reform bills, the highlights of Mr Clinton's buoyant State of the Union address only six weeks ago.

The most relentless Republican tormentor, Congressman Jim Leach, a former US diplomat and much-respected centrist, yesterday began shifting his target from financial wheelings and dealings long ago in Arkansas, to the far more dangerous area for the president of a White House cover-up. 

"I will say that what has occurred in recent weeks, that cannot be underestimated, are implications of the obstruction of justice," Mr Leach told NBC's Today show yesterday. 

The shredded files were alleged to relate to the three other partners of the Rose law firm's "Famous Four" who joined Mrs Clinton in Washington — Webster Hubbell, Associate Attorney-General; the late Vince Foster; and William Kennedy, White House associate counsel.

Mr Kennedy was the unhappy recipient on Friday night of the FBI's subpoena demanding the testimony on oath of six senior White House aides, including Mr Nussbaum and Mrs Clinton's chief of staff.

As events moved at a giddying pace yesterday, Mr McLarty confirmed that one of the three sessions in which Treasury and banking regulators had briefed the president's staff had been arranged and approved by his office.

These briefings, which Mr Clinton ordered to be stopped because of the "appearance of impropriety", led to Mr Nussbaum's resignation and provoked Mr Fiske to serve subpoenas on White House staff who took part in them.

Mr McLarty's admission now lays him open to a similar subpoena, and exposes him to the charge that he too has concealed the level of his involvement. On Friday, Mr McLarty warned all White House staff against contacts with any federal agency engaged in the Whitewater inquiries.

After months of loyal stonewalling, the Democratic majority in Congress is crumbling. The breach in the Democratic dam against public hearings began to open with Dan Rostenkowski, chairman of the powerful Ways and Means committee, saying that he was now prepared to give way to the Republicans. Other Democrats quickly joined the surrender. 

But in a letter to the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, Mr Fiske said a congressional inquiry would "pose a severe risk" to the integrity of his investigation. He urged Congress not to hold hearings on the issue.

IN THE supercharged atmosphere of Washington, the Whitewater affair has overwhelmed the national agenda. These are the issues and the personalities involved in a scandal that is closing in on the Clintons:

Madison and Whitewater: Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan was a building society based in Little Rock, the state capital of Arkansas, which grew rapidly in the 1980s. It was owned by James McDougal a friend of the then governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, and his wife Hillary. 

Like many other US building societies during the property boom of the 1980s, Madison used its depositors' funds to engage in speculative land ventures and high-risk loans. It became overextended and went bankrupt in 1989. Madison's estimated debts totalled $60 million (£40 million), for which the US taxpayer was liable.

The Whitewater Development Corporation was a company formed in 1969 to develop luxury homes in the Ozark mountains of Arkansas. It was jointly owned by Mr McDougal, his wife Susan, and the Clintons. The Clintons took out loans with Arkansas banks to finance their share. According to the Clintons and McDougals, Whitewater never made a profit.

Some of the principal allegations concerning Madison, Whitewater and the Clintons are that:
□ Madison depositors' funds were improperly used to help finance Whitewater,
□ Madison and/or Whitewater funds were improperly used to finance Mr Clinton's gubernatorial campaigns and pay off his campaign debts;
□ The Clintons falsely claimed, during the 1992 election campaign, to have lost $69,000 (£46,000) on their Whitewater investment. Subsequent examination of their tax returns suggests they made a slight profit.

Hillary Clinton: Mrs Clinton's role in the Whitewater scandal is considered central. She was a partner and investor in the Whitewater corporation, and was the lawyer who defended Madison, and her friends the McDougals, against inquiries in the mid-1980s by Arkansas state regulators concerned about Madison's finances.

It is alleged that Mrs Clinton ignored a conflict of interest arising from her personal and business connections with the McDougals and her professional obligations as a lawyer.

It is also alleged that she used her influential position as the governor's wife to intercede with state regulators on Madison's behalf. The regulators were answerable to Mr Clinton, and in some cases, were appointed by him.

David Hale, a Little Rock businessman and formerly a Clinton-appointed municipal judge, has claimed the Clintons put pressure on him to make a government-financed loan worth $300,000 (£200,000) to Mrs McDougal and that this money disappeared into Whitewater's accounts.

Other questions have arisen concerning Mrs Clinton's work as a partner in the Rose law firm in Little Rock, in particular relating to another Arkansas friend and Clinton fund-raiser, Daniel Lasater (who is now in jail) and Mr Clinton's half-brother, Roger Clinton, a recovering cocaine addict.

The central point is that Mrs Clinton handled the Whitewater investment that she and her husband had made. She also took responsibility for the couple's personal finances and tax returns. Any tax or other irregularities will be laid at her door and could lead, at least to her disbarment.

The Rose law firm: Mrs Clinton's legal partners were Vince Foster, the White House deputy counsel who died last year, and Webster Hubbell, who is number three in the justice department.

Despite Mrs Clinton's defence of Madison before state regulators, Mr Hubbell and Mr Foster worked for federal government regulators who moved in to clean up the Madison mess in 1988-89 — after Arkansas state had failed to take action.

The three Rose partners were therefore suing a former Rose client — which has brought further conflict-of-interest charges.

The Whitewater special counsel appointed in January, Robert Fiske, has now empanelled a grand jury to investigate the charges, and allegations that Whitewater documents, some belonging to Mr Foster, were shredded by Rose employees.

Mr Hubbell faces separate allegations that he over-billed clients, including a government agency, as a Rose partner and that he did extensive legal work for his father-in-law, Seth Ward, for which Rose was not paid. Mr Ward received large loans from Madison in the 1980s, $500,000 (£330,000) of which has not been repaid.

Vince Foster: Mr Foster, a close friend of the Clintons, was appointed deputy White House legal counsel in January 1993. He was found dead of a single gunshot wound to the head in a Virginia park last July.

Police investigators said Mr Foster had taken his own life. But factual questions about the circumstances of his death and the thoroughness of the police investigation have prompted speculation that he may have been murdered.

As the Clintons' confidant, personal lawyer and later a senior White House aide, Mr Foster knew more than any outsider about the First Couple's Whitewater investment, their dealings with Mr McDougal and Madison, their tax returns and Mr Clinton's campaign finances, and the Clintons' tax returns.

Last week, Mr Fiske formally reopened the Foster case — effectively suspending the suicide verdict — and appointed a New York prosecutor who specialises in homicide to investigate.

According to allegations by two Arkansas state troopers who provided security for Governor Clinton, Mr Foster was Mrs Clinton's former lover.

The White House "cover-up": The conventional wisdom is that the Whitewater scandal centres not on supposed financial improprieties in Arkansas, but on alleged attempts by senior White House staff to cover up wrongdoing.

A number of White House actions have encouraged this assessment. Mr Foster's office was searched hours after he died by Bernard Nussbaum, the then White House legal counsel, accompanied by Mrs Clinton's chief of staff.

Mr Nussbaum has said in writing that nothing was removed during this search, but police investigators have complained that he obstructed their inquiries. It emerged last December that boxes of Mr Foster's files, some relating to Whitewater, were removed from his office by White House staff shortly after he died.

Mr Nussbaum also participated in meetings last autumn with treasury department officials who were privy to criminal referrals relating to Whitewater which were about to be passed to the justice department for investigation. The referrals named both Bill and Hillary Clinton.

These meetings appeared to have breached ethical guidelines for federal employees, if not criminal law. Last Saturday, Mr Nussbaum said he had done nothing wrong but bowed to Mr Clinton's request that he resign. Meanwhile, Mr Fiske has subpoenaed six senior White House staff, including Mr Nussbaum and Mrs Clinton's chief of staff, to appear before the grand jury.

Roger Altman, the deputy treasury secretary and old Clinton friend, has also been ordered to testify after admitting to "bad judgment" in briefing the White House on the progress of Whitewater investigations. A separate internal inquiry by the office of professional ethics has been ordered by the treasury secretary, Lloyd Bentsen.

White House staff admit their actions were incompetent and counter-productive, but they reject suggestions of a conspiracy. Yet charges of a cover-up have been encouraged by the refusal of the Democratic majority in Congress to hold full hearings on Whitewater.

The Watergate question has re-arisen: what did the president and Mrs Clinton know, and when, of these actions by senior staff and political appointees?

The "other scandal": Hovering above Mr Clinton's head, meanwhile, is the spectre of more "bimbo eruptions". Gennifer Flowers is only one of many women alleged to have had adulterous affairs with him when he was governor. The case is unfolding of Paula Jones, an Arkansas state government employee who has claimed she was sexually harassed by Mr Clinton.

The allegations of Mr Clinton's philandering play directly into the central issue of trust in his leadership, which ultimately could undermine his presidency.

That mostly depends on how the economic crisis works out henceforth.

The farcical latest lurches in the trade-war/markets-crash hysteria are described elsewhere in the Bulletin. Any stability at all in the 'free world' system now seems to be hanging by a thread. But whatever mysterious bourgeois-idealist 'confidence' still manages to keep the circus on the road, the essential cut-throat anarchy of all capitalist history will soon put paid to that thread as well.

But what happens to the Clinton regime depends on how the all-out trade war leading towards inter-imperialist World War III goes in its early stages.

Before long, all of the major protagonists in the trade war will have suffered some economic decline or other, and possibly even a few economic catastrophes as well.

It is difficult to predict which of the great free-market powers will be the first to get well organised with a siege economy, with a nationally-united chauvinistic will to win, and with a well-bribed or well-intimidated coalition of stooge 'allies' to guarantee lines of communication, raw-material supplies, and manpower enough to win the trade war and build up a formidable position for winning the subsequent shooting war.

The newer imperialist powers have tended to make the early running in the past (like Germany, Japan, Italy, etc) with the better-established Anglo-Saxon & West European colonial might being slower to reach their full warmongering potential. But the pattern may be totally different in the approach to World War III.

All that is clear, as the subsequent article explains, is that the iron laws of capitalist economic crisis mean that trade-war explosiveness is the only serious future left to the 'free' market.

The system of profiteering anarchy is now choked with seemingly 'surplus' investment capital after a long credit-created boom, as Marxist science has alone ever been able to explain; and the class-political forces represented by that capital must shortly move beyond the market place to try to destroy their rivals all battling for the remaining places in the lifeboat.

Not a day goes by without new evidence, from the capitalist press itself, that the world slump is now deep and incurable:

ARE we in the middle of a sustained recovery? Judging by yesterday's figures from BBA Group, life at the sharp end of industry is as tough as ever, and shows little sign of a rapid climb out of recession.

BBA can fairly claim to be a standard-bearer of Britain's traditional manufacturing skills, with businesses in the automotive industry, engineering and aviation services. It is an exporter of some note, with much more of its product going to continental Europe and North America than staying in the UK. So, when BBA announces a collapse from last year's pre-tax profits of £47.4 million to a deficit of £12.8 million, a sharp cut in dividends, and a gloomy statement on the trading outlook, it deserves to be taken seriously.

Roberto Quarta, with just four months as chief executive, reported "yet another year of extremely difficult trading conditions, particularly in the European automotive industry... significant decline in the second half... extreme pressure on prices ... continuing overcapacity and intense competition in aviation components and engineering".

He sees little chance that things will change quickly. "We expect no favours from 1994. The recovery, where it is apparent, remains extremely fragile and we anticipate no meaningful improvement in Europe for some time," he said.

The market had been warned at the half-way stage to expect a retrenchement, hut yesterday's announcement went far beyond that. No doubt there is an element of "kitchen sinkism" in Mr Quarto's gloomy prognosis and in the financial statements.

But he also knows how to make an industrial grouping work, and if he says it will take a £76 million write-off for rationalisation, the loss of perhaps 2,000 of the company's 19,000 workforce, and a 3p cut in the dividend to an expected 4.5p this year, we should believe him.

And the evidence is also growing that a large section of imperialist-establishment opinion full knows that there is no answer to the slump but trade war, and political attitudes are being transformed with new priorities accordingly.

The capitalist press provides this evidence. The actual line of the stories may always be totally unreliable, - an anarchic stupidity inherent in the nature of all bourgeois propaganda.

But what subjects the imperialist establishments are now discussing are what is revealing:

THE White House and Downing Street have launched an extraordinary joint effort to persuade one another and their publics that the special relationship is in splendid shape despite recent rows over Bosnia and Northern Ireland.

Every trick of public relations is being exploited to repair the "distorted and damaging impression" of what, in nuclear and intelligence and military affairs, is being promoted as the most intimate alliance on earth.

British journalists were whisked into the White House office of the national security adviser, Tony Lake, this week to be shown the telephone with its special button for instant access to Number 10.

"I've been on that phone to Roderick Lynes, my opposite number at Downing Street, two or three times during each of the last four or five weekends," Mr Lake said.

"I think the relationship is very strong. I truly do," he insisted. "I was there when the president talked with the Prime Minister after the Gerry Adams affair. They laughed."

The very intensity of this effort points to the strains which have emerged between London and Washington since the high point of the Thatcher-Reagan years, and their coda, during the Gulf war.

Over the past week, the French have been gleefully flaunting their new-found friendship with the US at the same time as claiming that Britain's transatlantic links are getting 'progressively weaker'.

Underlying this change is the evolution of France's defence strategy, but it was Nato's ultimatum over Sarajevo that most clearly signalled the transformation of Franco-American relations. In Paris, politicians have scarcely been able to mention Nato's ultimatum without stressing that it was a French initiative supported by the Americans, and vainly opposed by the British.

Alain Juppe, the pugnacious Foreign Minister, told the weekly magazine Nouvel Observateur that Britain was forced to back the ultimatum only after intense pressure from the Clinton administration.

For the French press, the ultimatum marked a decisive moment in Western diplomacy. 

The influential daily, Le Monde, reported American diplomats as saying that it was 'without doubt the end of the special relationship' between London and Washington.
 
Jacques Baumel, a member of Prime Minister Edouard Balladur's RPR party and vice-president of the commission on defence in the National Assembly, was more cautious. But he said last week: 'At the last Nato meeting, the English were very much opposed to the Franco-American accord. It might not stay like this, but for the moment, the English have been pushed to one side.'

For a country more used to squabbling with America, most recently over trade, this is change indeed. The French believe it is part of a trend.

Last Thursday for instance, Paris published an outline of its defence strategy for the next two decades, a document that talked of strengthening the country's ties to Nato. Since 1966, France has been a semi-detached member of the alliance, refusing to participate in Nato's integrated command structure, but it is now proposing to take a more active role.

The French proposals are complex but, in essence, amount to this: with the Americans withdrawing part of their troops from Europe, there is a need for the continent to establish its own force. But, at the same time, any such force should be tightly tied to Nato.

According to Gerard Fuchs, the opposition socialist party's head of international affairs, America largely shares the French view. Britain, however, does not, he says.

'Clinton has accepted the need for a concrete European defence identity. But, frankly, London has not followed us on this. Our position is basically that we will move if the Americans move and at the moment, both countries are moving. As for the special relationship between Britain and the US, well, I think it's becoming progressively weaker.'

The 'democracy' and 'freedom' in all this cutthroat imperialist nastiness is about as evident as the Holy Spirit tenderly watching over the fate of mankind.

And now we have Heseltine seemingly about to escalate his challenge to Major for the Tory Government leadership by hinting at some anti-federalist sentiments on Europe which could soon dominate the party, eclipsing the xenophobic stall that Portillo has clumsily set out to undermine Major with, sentiments Heseltine had let lapse during his recent 'loyal Tory' stint, performing inside Major's Cabinet.

Tarzan certainly has some swinging to do. As Trade and Industry Secretary, he has just presided over the humiliating takeover of Rover by BMW, a German wipe-out of Britain's remaining major car industry. This power-domination scene is a long way from Heseltine's renewed notion of Europe being best organised as an alliance of 'strong and independent nation states'.
It is even further from the solid British bulldog posture Heseltine was putting out only six years ago (when in the wilderness) in his political publication 'Where There's a Will':

IT IS simply not an option for the British Government to tell the country's motor industry to make its own way in the world. Already there has been a dramatic decline in its fortunes: a loss of volume, with car production almost halved in fifteen years and trucks down by two thirds in less than a decade; and an increase in assembly operations, with Vauxhall now an assembler of Opel kits and Talbot (formerly Rootes) an assembler of Peugeot kits.

An ominous development has been an increase in foreign ownership and control. Foreign investment and interest is, of course, to be welcomed, but control has its dangers. For the major parts of the British motor industry to fall entirely into foreign hands would leave it a hostage to decisions in Detroit, Paris, Turin and perhaps Tokyo. Experience shows, time and time again, that when the going gets rough, as it always will in such a cyclical industrial sector, foreign subsidiaries (which in this case means subsidiaries in Britain) will bear the brunt of the cutbacks. The skills in research and development tend to be lost. That is why the future of the sole remaining British-owned and British-controlled motor manufacturer, Rover, will continue to be a matter for the Government. Otherwise the British motor industry will find itself further down the cul-de-sac to extinction.

Heseltine has already unleashed propaganda-manipulation to try to shaft his fellow Cabinet members over the sordid 'foreign aid' blackmail forcing feeble Third World countries to guarantee commercial contracts or military orders to British firms or else receive no British government aid, - a foul racket in which the whole British capitalist system is involved, - opposition parties, trade unions, and all, - - and not merely just every Tory MP and Minister.

There are signs that Heseltine and other opportunists might be thinking that the stench from the Pergau Dam and the Scott Inquiry illegal-arms-for-Iraq scandals have now so covered the entire Tory hierarchy in dirty corruption that only some barmy man-of-action, 'let us get on with World War III' posturing will break the spell of doom now looking to strangle the Tory regime to a paralysed muddle-ridden death.

The Thatcher clan could be on its way to the Old Bailey. But personal crookedness really has nothing to do with it. The private enterprise system cannot possibly have any other commercial relations than corrupt ones. The profiteering imperialist spirit and political office are inseparable, and their motivation is just one and the same thing, - rising to the top of the professional and social ladder. The role of 'democracy' in all this is to just pretend that 'wrongdoing' will always be smoked out in the end, and that 'fairness' and 'justice' will ultimately prevail.

But the truth is that capitalism as a system of profiteering and racketeering graft has never changed one iota from its beginnings in the 12th century to the present day, and it never will be able to change. Capitalism without corruption is an impossibility:

IN THE heart of a forest in Malaysia, at the end of a dirt track, a wall of rock and earth is bulldozed across the landscape. So far, it has cost the British taxpayer £234 million. It is called the Pergau Dam.

In 1991, the head of the Overseas Development Administration, Sir Timothy Lankester, described it as 'an abuse of the aid programme'. He was overruled by John Major, who said it would benefit British firms.

But the Pergau Dam affair is the most recent of a list of aid projects which, while of immense value to Mr Major's friends in business, turned out to be of doubtful value to third world countries.

Inquiries by The Observer have revealed that at least a further £250m of taxpayers' money has been spent on doubtful projects — channelled largely through firms loyal to the Conservative Party. At least eight foreign aid projects in the past 15 years have been officially panned as unviable, inadequately assessed, badly built or poor value for money in reports by the National Audit Office or the Overseas Development Administration (ODA).

They include:

■ The Rihand power station in Uttar Pradesh, India, built in 1982-90 by NEI, now part of Rolls-Royce. British aid amounted to £120m. In January, 1990, the National Audit Office complained its development value had been inadequately assessed before being built, and identified 'serious and persistent' problems. 
■ Two power stations at Burri and North Khartoum, Sudan, built by NEI in 1980-85 with the aid of a £78m British government grant. Part of the technology was criticised in an ODA internal report as 'inadequate'.
■ The Ashuganj gas-fired power station in Bangladesh, built in the 1980s by GEC, with the help of a £4.6m grant. The ODA said it was seriously unreliable and local staff were reportedly unable to run the equipment.
■ Two gas turbine power stations built in Burma in 1979 and 1982 by John Brown Engineering, with British aid of £5.4m. Also described by the ODA as 'seriously unreliable'.

Other projects where reservations have been expressed include the Samanalawewa Dam in Sri Lanka, built in 1985-91 by Balfour Beatty, one of the builders of the Pergau Dam. It received a grant of £19m. The most controversial aspect of Government overseas aid is the Aid and Trade Provision (ATP), under which funding is explicitly tied to involvement by British firms and which has cost British taxpayers more than £1,300m since 1978.

The Government says the ATP programme has boosted British jobs and exports. Critics say it is open to abuse, in Britain and abroad, and that projects have sometimes been rushed through without proper study of their value to receiving countries. They point out that most British companies to benefit have contributed directly or indirectly to Conservative Party funds. They include GEC (which received £129.8m), NEI (£46.9m), Davy McKee (£58.7m), Balfour Beatty (£63.4m), Biwater (£59.5m) and John Brown Engineering (£49m).

Firms are known to lobby Whitehall for ATP cash and John Toye, head of the Development Studies Department at Sussex University, said: 'Over the years, a small number of firms has scooped up most of the money. You could call it a vested interest.'

The ODA has tightened up the rules governing ATP following the negative reports. But lobby groups say more could be done to target British aid on the poorest countries and local schemes, instead of spending money to benefit British firms.

Ben Jackson, of the pressure group World Development Movement, said: 'ATP tends to skew the emphasis to large scale developments like power stations and dams, which do not necessarily benefit local people.'

It makes no sense to separate out this personal grafting from the vicious exploitation of the imperialist system as a whole. The free market is one big domineering racket, as the capitalist press itself explains in its quieter less-guarded moments:

FOR middle-income countries in Latin America and East Asia, the 1980s debt crisis may be over, but the world's poorest nations are still getting poorer, the World Bank said yesterday.

The World Bank Debt Tables for 1993-94 show that the debt of all developing countries reached $1,662 billion at the end of 1992, a 3.5 per cent increase on the previous year. By the end of 1993, the World Bank estimates that this will have risen a further 6.5 per cent to $1,770 billion.

The problem is that private resources flow into comparatively few developing countries. As countries in East Asia and Latin America have opened up their economies to trade and implemented extensive privatisation programmes, private finance has poured in. The irony is that the most severely-indebted poorest countries (Silics) are forced to rely heavily on official financing, which has been stagnant in real terms over the past three years.

Over the past decade, the debt stock of these poorest, mainly African, nations has tripled, and for most, the increasing burden of arrears and interest repayments on existing debt has outweighed any benefit they have obtained from debt forgiveness.

With the notable exceptions of China, India and Indonesia, the report says low-income countries have not been able to access international capital markets and, in some instances, have suffered a net disinvestment by the private sector — for example, commercial banks in sub-Saharan Africa.

In fact, the World Bank says that the end of the cold war added to the numbers of aid claimants, while, at the same time, made many donors more selective in providing concessional finance. Excluding China — which accounts for a third of the estimated growth of net flows to developing countries in 1991-93 — all of the recent net increase in flows has gone to middle-income countries, at the expense of most low-income countries, which have lost out in real terms.

In its report, the World Bank acknowledges the need for a partial debt write-off for many of these sub-Saharan African countries, to allow them scope to pull out of the crippling cycle.

"For some Silics progress is dependent on the adoption of sound policies of macroeconomic stabilisation and structural reform. For others, the full benefits of reforms already underway are being hampered by their debt overhang".

Some argue that a rise in international interest rates will reverse flows of capital and thrust the developing world back into debt.

THE seven-year search for the Holy Grail of a Uruguay Round agreement has been concluded and neatly packaged as a triumph for liberal values, multilateral co-operation and global prosperity. Sadly, the packaging seriously misrepresents the product. In reality, the Gatt deal has created a new world trade order geared to the interests of the industrial countries and powerful transnational companies, consigning the world's poorest countries to a future of deepening poverty in the process.

Sub-Saharan Africa will actually lose income, thanks to a loss of preferences in the European market. Meanwhile, the EU, the US and Japan will absorb the lion's share of the gains.

This distribution of benefits reflects the failure of Gatt to address two of the central problems facing the world's poorest countries, especially those in Africa, in the world trading system — and debt. The former has wiped almost 10 per cent off sub-Saharan Africa's income since 1980, and the latter drains the region of more than a quarter of its trade earnings. But the marginal gains for the south also reflect the refusal of the industrial countries to apply their free trade principles at home.

Defenders of Gatt have argued that, despite the warts, the agreement is better than the only alternative on offer: a 1930s-style protectionist Armageddon as individual countries pursue beggar-your-neighbour policies.

But the Gatt agreement will allow for the pursuit of trade war by diplomatic means. In recent years, US trade policy has been guided more by the principles of gunboat diplomacy perfected by Palmerston, than by Gatt principles of multilateralism. More than 30 developing countries have been threatened with trade sanctions under "section 301" trade laws, which give the US administration the right unilaterally to impose sanctions. Countries refusing to open markets to US banks and insurance companies, or to implement US-style patent protection laws, have been the principal target. Most have given way.

Now the administration can dry-dock its trade gunboats. Instead, it can wave the Gatt agreement at recalcitrant foreign governments. Under the accords on services, developing country governments will be forced to deregulate their markets and remove controls on foreign investment — including controls on profit repatriation. Failure to comply will leave countries open to cross-retaliation under the rules of the World Trade Organisation, the new trade body.

The upshot of this is that the new Gatt regime will erode the ability of Third World governments to regulate foreign investment in a manner consistent with their development priorities. It will also sound the death knell for embryonic financial service industries, which will be pitched into competition with northern conglomerates.

Of course, this is good news for northern transnational corporations such as American Express and Citibank, since it will open up previously protected markets. Similarly, the intellectual property agreement will massively expand the returns on patented technology.

The deregulation of foreign investment under Gatt will doubtless create some new jobs — but at what price?

In the absence of effective minimum social, economic and environmental standards, investment and jobs will gravitate automatically to sites marked by the lowest production costs, exercising a downwards pressure on standards and the quality of life everywhere.

The crooked injustice of the 'free' market is permanent. Its sleaze and corruption is now becoming an issue because the onset of worldwide uncontrollable slump is beginning to damage everybody. Petty-bourgeois 'democratic' complacency is no longer so complacent.

But such are the realities of class power that only revolution has ever really challenged the bourgeois imperialist domination of the planet and all its anarchic tyranny and periodic nightmare catastrophes, making average human life on earth in the long term a miserable lottery.

The spontaneous revolutionary struggle will never cease building up from below relentlessly, bursting out from time to time all over the place.

The conscious problem to work on for mankind is to prepare to win the philosophical battle for Marxist-Leninist scientific leadership against the petty-bourgeois ideological rearguard activities of revisionism, centrism, anarchism, syndicalism, reformism, and the like, all trying to confuse and cover up history's clearcut lessons on the dictatorship of the proletariat as the only serious inroad to tackling international imperialist power.

A correct analysis of the worldwide class struggle and inter-imperialist conflict is the only possible basis on which to start building new Bolshevik Parties.

And developing that basis is itself impossible as an academic exercise but can only be done in a living struggle to give leadership to workers on a regular systematic basis, trying to develop an explanation of the world and how to change it, and being continuously judged by how that analysis works in practice.

What successful revolutionary overthrows of the bourgeoisie there have been plus workers-state progress towards planned socialism have always all had some relationship towards a correct world view. The retreats from socialism have always been identifiable by an abandonment of some aspect or other of a Marxist-Leninist world proletarian dictatorship philosophy.

A demented sizist obsession with party building at all costs has sorted out most claimants to 'revolutionary' leadership, laid low by their own opportunism and splits, in tandem with getting more and more things wrong about correctly interpreting international class-struggle developments, about the best way to actively play a role in that struggle, and about how to develop capable and independently-minded cadres for that fight.

Other claimants to the Marxist-Leninist party role have to be judged on their records of being able to understand what is happening in the world, and being able to produce cadres competent and convincing in that complex analysis.

Without a correct understanding of everything, such as the Bolsheviks nearly had, nothing at all can be achieved, in the long run. With a profoundly schooled party of communist understanding, in the end everything must be possible. Build Leninism. Joe Harper

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. VI Lenin
South West Bulletin
[P&P Bulletin Publications (South West), BOX 32, 82 Colstom St., Bristol BS1 5BB]
No.59 Friday March 4 1994

Markets begin to panic as the trade war drums beat louder. Inter-imperialist intrigues a prelude to inter-imperialist wars.

The sense of crisis and disarray in the ranks of the leading imperialist bourgeoisies is becoming more apparent by the day.

When Clinton has to publicly 'rule out' trade war with Japan, as part of an attempt to halt a markets crash, only days after several public interventions by G7 finance ministers have failed to 'calm the markets', then it suggests that something is going seriously wrong.

In fact, far from trade war being 'ruled out', nothing whatsoever has been resolved and every indication is that the US is moving in the direction of imposing trade sanctions through its Super 301 legislation, whatever Clinton's public announcements suggest.

The volatility on the financial markets ever wilder swings
with ever increasing frequency - is the warning indication of the financial earthquake which is coming.

The impossible-to-sustain contradiction (between the postwar US Dollar-dominated credit-fuelled boom and the rival challenging imperialist might of Germany and Japan) has resulted inevitably in a massive crisis of 'overproduction' and falling rates of profit, and now in trade war threats. These threats are bursting through now into the 'real world' and threatening in turn a massive financial crash, another major step towards inter-imperialist war.

Even the capitalist press is beginning to comment on the seriousness of the situation:

SO WHAT do all these seesaws in the world's financial markets mean to the ordinary British citizen? One day up, another day down, it all seems far away from everyday concerns.

The first point is that this volatility is a warning of the shaky foundations upon which the world's financial system is built. The market makers, international banks and speculative investment funds that constitute the system insist that the financial markets have never been so sound, efficient and flexible and that no interference is required.

They are wrong, and every bout of volatility shows the degree to which speculative activity in the future and derivative markets is now driving prices in the spot markets. The sudden turnrounds can create losses running into billions of pounds; and huge losses in the core of the financial system have knock-on effects on the availablity of credit and, ultimately, output and employment.

The volatility is like the tremor before an earthquake; the prudent take cover. Governments and central banks are concerned and know that one day there could be a credit implosion, but they are frozen into inactivity by the arrogance of the financiers who resist all such attentions.

No doubt Clinton would love to 'rule out trade war and resolve all trade negotiations peacefully' (to the US bourgeoisie's- advantage) if he could, but the problem is, he can't - which is precisely what is scaring the markets. That is why he has to 'rule out' trade war, to soothe their nerves.

King Canute tried a similar strategy to turn back the tide. Clinton will be just as effective.

In the real world, imperialists have never ultimately resolved their trade wars peacefully, hence WWI and WWII. They show no sign of starting to now.

US demands that Japan buy specified amounts of US goods are met with refusal and thinly veiled threats to use Japan's own financial muscle to damage American share values, a factor behind much of the current panic in the markets.

German acquisition of a British car company to challenge Japan in Europe is met by Japanese refusal to play the 'joint partnership' game any longer, and a declaration of future intent to meet its rival head on.

Malaysian trade sanctions against Britain are quickly taken advantage of (if not manipulated in the first place) by Japanese assertiveness regarding its regional status, challenging, through aid packages, American and British interests in Burma.

The way in which this trade rivalry can rapidly transform into vicious chauvinistic trade war is revealed, typically, by some of the 'liberal' press reaction to the Malaysian trade sanctions, under the heading "Time to Hit Back":

So far, Dr Mahathir Muhammad has been well advised in restricting his policy to public sector contracts — the trade rules for these are set out in the Gatt Tokyo protocol, which Malaysia has not signed. 

Thus, until there are signs that trade in goods is affected, Britain cannot take Malaysia to the Gatt courts.

Which is wonderful for Malaysia. It exports goods to private buyers in Britain, while in the main British companies deal with its public sector. Britain can only deal with this slight by acting unilaterally.

And why not? Have Malaysian Protons been road-tested thoroughly enough to meet new British standards (rushed through parliament tomorrow)? A new Proton-testing centre could be set up in Orkney and every import subjected to exhaustive two-year tests.

Or we could pass an American style Super 301, simply imposing punitive tariffs on all Malaysian imports until British contractors can bid for work on non-discriminatory terms.

Yet those who would make Britain a European Hong Kong in a free-trade world cannot contemplate such measures; they would rather an apology from the Sunday Times and a self-denying ordinance from the rest of the press. We can get off our knees: but will we? 

The general direction in which all this biliousness is headed couldn't be clearer. Imperialism's public attempts to deny it (echoed by the fake-"left" swamp of anti-Marxists) only serve to underline their fear at what is happening, and their inability to do much about it.

It is the crisis-driven imperialist manoeuvering for advantage in the escalating trade war conflicts which provides the only rational framework for attempting to understand the current Balkan (and other) imperialist intrigues. The attempt at a Bosnian/Croat rapprochement, put together by US imperialism in what looks like an attempt at a NATO-backed anti-Serb alliance, can only add fuel to the fire. It will solve none of imperialism's problems, and add greatly to those of Yeltsin and and the Russian 'reformers'.

As expressed last week in E&PSR 740:

The increasingly bitter conflicts in the 'free'-market world are only going to remind increasing sections of Russian opinion how much better placed they were to handle imperialist warmongering intransigence when Russia was a proletarian-dictatorship workers state.

Recent commentary in the capitalist press suggests that, whatever the motivation for Russian actions, the internal effect of in any way challenging US imperialist domination is working to undermine the pro-capitalist forces:

One of the bitterest enemies of the open door policy of the government led by the free market reformer Yegor Gaidar, was the military industrial complex, who accused Yeltsin of placing more importance on American interests than those of his own country.

Russian defence officials noted with incredulity the mysterious arrival in London of a T-80U tank which preceded a visit by Boris Yeltsin in 1992. The technical specifications of the armour plating on this tank has been so secret months before, that it had impeded the sale to a Middle Eastern country. The tank was eagerly dissected by British military experts.

The episode was only one of a number in which Russian defence industry directors saw their secrets been handed on a plate to the west by their own president.

The link between Russia's growing disquiet at American and Nato foreign policy, particularly in the former Yugoslavia, and the spy cases, was made explicit in an exceptionally strong statement made to Interfax yesterday by a source described as a high-ranking official of the Russian ministry of defence.

He said that the American downing of four Serbian warplanes after a year of numerous violations of the no-fly zone and the Ames spy case was not coincidental. "All this ballyhoo about the Ames affair, and the action in Bosnia are all links of one chain. The Americans do not want to take any other country into consideration and are behaving as if the cold war ended with their victory," the source said.

He said the bombing had been more directed against Russia than against the Serbs after its "substantial successes" in the former Yugoslavia.

The defence ministry, which runs foreign policy in the Caucacus, may be seeking to extend its influence over foreign policy.

This latest spy case was being used yesterday by Russia to justify its increasingly hawkish foreign policy line, but it is also grist to the mill of the powerful leaders of the military-industrial complex, the main losers of the period of free market changes, who now are planning their revenge on President Yeltsin and his foreign minister Andrei Kozvrev.

Similarly, for whatever reason it is that Moscow has reportedly given backing to the PLO demand for "international protection" for Palestinians in the occupied territories, it suggests, however feebly (as over Bosnia), a challenge to US domination of the region. At the same time it again brings to the surface the whole history of revisionist toadying to the Zionists (by recognizing their bogus state), while at the same time reminding everyone that, as the world's most powerful workers state, the Soviet Union represented the strongest block against imperialist aggression.

The anti-imperialist hatred of the Palestinian masses against the Zionist fascists and their US masters, echoed amongst the arab masses throughout the Middle East, will need more than a few hundred UN troops to keep it in check. If an international 'peacekeeping' force is eventually introduced, as in Bosnia, clear sides will rapidly emerge, and given the hatred for US imperialism throughout the Middle East, a clear class division looks likely, again increasing enormously the pressure on the anti-communist 'reformers' in Moscow, as well as on the cowardly bourgeois nationalist Arafat-type leaderships throughout the Middle East.

The shallow 'peace' triumphalism of Clinton, Arafat, and every other stinking bourgeois hypocrite, is now being seen in its proper perspective, as nothing but a desperate lash-up, which could only fall apart.

None of what is happening is good news for imperialism, and the extent to which it is all bad news can be seen in the crumbling disarray afflicting all the imperialist bourgeoisies' political structures.

The entertaining sight of Tory ministers opportunistically stabbing each other in the front, in public, in the most sordid attempt to hide the truth about their trade dealings, (which appear to involve massive corruption, with the personal involvement of the Thatcher family in financial gain from the Pergau Dam project now being suggested in the capitalist press), is all adding to the general public disgust with the whole bourgeois parliamentary circus, all its parties, and all its institutions.

With Labour's 'Loyal Opposition' playing its normal role (i.e. a complete irrelevant joke, with nothing to say which hasn't already been said better by disaffected Tories) and the TUC more interested in sucking up to the Tory party than even pretending to represent workers any more, the game is very nearly up for the whole 'democratic' parliamentary charade.

Build Leninism to bury it. D.Watts.