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

V. I. Lenin 

Economic & Philosophic Science Review 

No 1165  December 17 2002

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No EPSR Christmas Eve or New Years Eve.

Establishing the philosophical and emotional poverty of the lying clique of Blairism (political stooges for the imperialist system )could be crucial indicators at any time of how the bourgeois capitalist exploitation racket has, after 800 years, degenerated beyond all use and repair, and is fast running out of any credibility. But with insoluble world slump and international warmongering holocaust on the agenda, - and British 'democratic' government a key part of imperialism's insane and destructive last stand, putting the boot into this ludicrous Downing Street circus as hard and long as possible on ANY issue makes every sense. Destroy this crap historical relic of 'imperialist democracy' before it destroys us. This war by 'the West' is crumbling into barbaric confusion even as it starts.

It is the hard-to-fathom systemic philosophical decay, which forms part of US imperialism's chaotic warmongering thrashing around in pain and humiliation as global economic collapse looms, which makes it difficult to analyse the semi-fascist mania for blitzkrieg militarism now gripping the American bourgeoisie.

The fear of tiny terrorism blows on the USA, which 'might' imply far bigger terrorism blows to come, and which 'might' imply a whole 'evil axis' of powers eventually getting together for 'terrorism' with 'weapons of mass destruction', etc, - is logical enough as far as the explanation goes; - but what it leaves out is the timing of this Washington armageddon fever in the context of the general 'victory' theory (following the Cold War) that the 'free market' success and influence would henceforth solve "all the problems of history".

Why, suddenly, is the long-running post-1945 pattern of short sharp local wars or coups (to sort out the odd regime or two in the 'free world' refusing to be bribed or bullied out of any anti-imperialist gesturing), - being abandoned???

Why is the American imperialist regime politically and militarily weighing up the possibility that the punitive exemplary destruction (without cause) of Iraq might entail all-out warmongering devastation, eventually, not only throughout the rest of the Arab Middle East, or even not only throughout the entire Muslim world, which might be up in arms, - but even, via a chain of 'evil axis' powers, all the way to East Africa and North Korea, and beyond?????

And why simultaneously is there an utterly cynical widespread discussion around the business and financial press about the possible "economic good" to come out of this monstrous perspective of the quite horrific waste in gargantuan military costs of this worldwide blitzkrieg, plus the inconceivable devastation that could totally wreck the economies of a dozen or more nations, some of them very large??????

The answer, obviously, is the economic crisis of 'overproduction' after the greatest boom in history which is leading to the most paralysing and damaging slump in history, - all plainly threatening all sorts of possible disruption to US imperialist world-domination which has given the American bourgeois nation a lavish lifestyle and global political power and influence, unprecedented in the whole record of civilisation.

There is less agreement about the precise 'philosophy' or 'thinking' driving the American imperialist regime to war, and about how much it matters whether the exact Washington motives are understood or not, or even if they could ever be accurately ascertained.

Historical guidelines, however, do seem frequently to reveal wars as acts of longstanding conscious policy, well prepared for, - with the arms-race momentum towards World War One's inter-imperialist sortout being the obvious example, - a warmongering consciousness which was universal again in World War II (although massively distorted in Western history books to blame German, Italian, and Japanese military expansionism only, ignoring the Versailles Treaty victors' policy of first humiliating Germany but later knowingly letting it re-arm again "to stop the threat of Bolshevism").

The vast majority of economic colonial-domination wars were of course also consciously prepared-for with often open philosophical justification.

Thus it is easy to dismiss the polite diplomatic fiction which is always used at the time of warmongering, and is very much currently in use again, claiming: "Of course, no one wants war".

It is also possible to dismiss the fake-'left' delusion of "routine" imperialist bullying for oil domination in the Middle East, (which lets these frauds off the hook of revolutionary perspectives which challenge their wretched Stalinist or Trotskyist Revisionist pasts in different ways).

Bourgeois economic science itself has, while not remotely denouncing the war or raising 'moral' objections to it, explained in detail why a blitzkrieg on Iraq could not possibly be "all about oil": 

Iraq is a very big oil country. Its reserves are the second largest in the world behind only those of Saudi Arabia. But when you look at Iraq in terms of its production capacity, the picture is different. It represents just 3 per cent of the world's total. Its oil exports are at about the same level as Nigeria's. Physically, Iraq could double its current capacity. But that could well take a decade or more. In the meantime, growth in production elsewhere would limit Iraq's eventual share of world production capacity to perhaps 5 per cent - still significant, but still also in the second tier of oil nations.

But it requires several leaps of logic - as well as inattention to developments in the rest of the world, notably in Russia, the Caspian region and West Africa - to conclude that the current Iraq crisis is "all about oil".  No US administration nor any British government would launch so momentous a campaign - and take such risks - just to facilitate a handful of oil development contracts and a moderate increase in supply half a decade from now.

What would be the future of Iraqi oil without a Saddam Hussein? The discussion now under way - which takes place under the rubric of "the day after" - is much more dominated by the uncertainties and risks than by the benefits. The most immediate question involves a possible war and the damage that might result for Iraq's output at the very moment when a new regime would desperately need oil revenues to secure its own stability.

There is also much apprehension that Saddam would torch Iraq's oil facilities in a pyrrhic defeat After all, that is exactly what Iraqi forces did on their way out of Kuwait in 1991. It took eight months to extinguish the fires in the Kuwaiti oilfields.

Security would certainly be an immediate and central focus, including the security of the oil facilities. After all, the country earns the bulk of its living - $15 billion (£9.5 billion) in 2001 -  by exporting oil. For that reason, any temporary military authority would be keen to see the "new" Iraq maximise its oil earnings. But a military authority would be loath to get much involved in the decision making about the future of the industry. Rather, it would try to push the responsibility into the hands of a new Iraqi government - or an interim group of technocrats.

For its part, any new Iraqi government will be intent on getting its arms around its number one economic resource so that it can generate as much revenue for reconstruction and development as quickly as possible. Iraq is not Afghanistan. It has the means, through oil, to pay for rebuilding the country. But a new government will also have another priority. It will be determined to bolster its sovereignty, legitimacy and nationalist credentials  - all of which will be essential requirements for holding the country together. This ensures that when the time comes to sit down with the oil companies, Iraq will be a tough negotiator.

One of the reasons that the "It's all about oil" discussion gets off on the wrong track is that it makes the assumption, often without realising it, that Iraq would turn over its current 2.8 million barrels per day of production capacity to international companies. In this view, that is the new "prize" that is supposedly up for grabs. But that's a misleading assumption. Why would a new Iraqi government want to do that? If it brings in foreign companies, it will have to split revenue - keeping perhaps 88 cents of every $1 of earnings for itself, but with 12 cents or so going to the companies. Yet the new Iraq does not need the international companies' investment for fields that are already developed. It's much more sensible for Iraq to keep the whole dollar for itself and simply purchase what it needs in terms of technology and equipment for the existing fields.

It will have no shortage of suitors. Once things are clear, companies will be eager to get in line to sign contracts with a country that has 11 per cent of the world's proven reserves. (Saudi Arabia, the highest, has 25 per cent; the North Sea has just 1.7 per cent.) But they will be cautious when it comes to spending billions of dollars until they are pretty confident about security and stability. And, for the companies, "stability" applies both to the new regime itself and also to the contracts they sign with it.

Companies from several countries - Russia, France, Italy and China, among others - already hold contracts, but they are not operational because of UN sanctions still in place. Companies without contracts, including the British and American ones will have to assess how much time and trouble they are willing to bear. For the oil companies, the big issue, wherever they operate in the world, is how to manage the range of risks from the geological to the fiscal to the political. In response, they often work together in consortiums and partnerships. This approach enables them to hedge their bets, spreads their investments and diversifies their portfolios.

A lot has to happen and none of this will take place swiftly. It might take a new regime a year or so just to get things organised and begin to negotiate contracts. When it does, it will have to face the stark reality - the deteriorating condition of the Iraqi oil industry. Production capacity has dropped from its peak of 3.5 million barrels a day in 1980, before the Iran-Iraq War, to about 2.8 million barrels per day. It continues to fall. Reservoirs have been damaged by years of mismanagement. The infrastructure - whether wells, pipelines, pumping stations or ports - is in poor shape. Equipment is rusting and malfunctioning. Environmental considerations are widely ignored. To get back to 3.5 million barrels a day could take three years or more, at an estimated cost of at least $7 billion. 

This would put Iraq back into the leagues of Norway, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Mexico and Venezuela. The next hurdle is to increase production above that. Another two million barrels per day would require a major push and would still leave Iraq several rungs below the capacity of the big three producers - Saudi Arabia, the United States and Russia. Unless almost everything worked almost perfectly, making that leap to 5.5 million barrels a day would come some time after 2010 - at a cost of upwards of $20 billion.

As its output increased, Iraq would begin jostling its Gulf neighbours for market share. Some assume that this would turn Iraq into an Opec-buster. But its likely growth in output would not give Iraq that kind of clout. It would not have the ability to "flood" the market. Nor would it have the desire. Its intense need for revenues would make it much more interested in selling oil at $20 or $25 a barrel, rather than at a bargain basement rate such as $10.

The outlines of a larger competition are already starting to become clear. On one side are Russia and the Caspian countries, primarily Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan. Standing on the other side is the Middle East, including Iraq. Over the past three years, spurred by what has been called "the miracle in the Russian oilfields" Russian output has increased by almost 25 per cent to eight million barrels a day. The race heated up with the recent announcement by four Russian oil companies of their intention to build a new Arctic port to export directly to the United States.

Right now, Russia and the Caspian nations seem to have the edge in this race. They look likely to score the bigger gain. All that, however, is subject to change. The outcome will be determined not only by geology and the balancing of opportunity and risk by companies, but also by political and economic stability and the decisions governments make.

Other capitalist press admissions confirm the manic degree to which warmongering as such has become the required mentality in Washington, plus how the scale and style of the military aggression planned has continued to give rise to unusual nervousness, as the EPSR has noted before, not obviously to be expected for a "routine" neo-colonial zapping:

Colombia seemed an odd place for Colin Powell to be 11 days ago, when America was fretting about Saddam Hussein's chemical and biological weapons. Yet there was the secretary of state in Bogota, chatting about cocaine trafficking.

Only four days later, when Iraq's declaration of its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programmes arrived at United Nations headquarters in New York, the significance of jaunt finally dawned on a dazed diplomatic world Powell's.

The Colombians, current holders of the rotating presidency of the security council, were supposed to pass Saddam's poisonous parcel straight to the UN weapons inspectorate. Instead, they handed it to a waiting American delegation.

The manoeuvre speaks volumes about Washington's diplomatic muscle. It helped to preserve at least a measure of American influence over a weapons inspection process that threatens to spiral out of Bush's reach. On December 6, the security council's 15 members unanimously accepted Blix's offer to supervise a preliminary study and remove any references that might either encourage nuclear proliferation or compromise intelligence gathering.

That evening, according to administration sources, Powell and Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser, had second thoughts. They had little regard for Blix, whom Washington dismisses as untrustworthy and ineffective. They decided it was a mistake to allow him first look at a document so crucial to American policy.

Next day, hours before Iraq handed over its declarations, Powell began sounding out allies about a change of procedure. At least one call went to Bogota and Alfonso Valdivieso, Colombia's man at the UN, approved a startling reversal.

	Lest Valdivieso have second thoughts, two American diplomats 	accompanied him to Blix's office on Sunday to inform him of the new plan. Blix had no choice but to comply. By midnight piles of  documents were being fed into CIA scanners and put on computer 	disks. Britain and France received copies on Monday; Russia and China a day later. 	

Powell and Rice had ignited a firestorm. UN diplomats complained of US arrogance. Anonymous UN sources claimed Powell had threatened Colombia with the loss of American aid if Valdivieso had not co-operated. A gleeful Baghdad said the Americans were guilty of "unparalleled banditry".

But it scarcely seemed likely that ruffled diplomatic feathers would distract attention from the central issue of Saddam's big lie. In 11,807 pages of detail, the Iraqis were not admitting to a single banned weapon. Surely it was only a matter of time before Washington opened fire on Baghdad?

Yet as the week unfolded, clean-cut confrontation grew more remote. Even Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman, insisted that Iraq's documents would be reviewed "in a very thoughtful, thorough and complete way".

The muting of the hawks was palpable at a Washington seminar on the Iraqi declaration last week. David Kay, a former weapons inspector, has little doubt about Saddam's capacity for evil. He once interviewed an Iraqi scientist who let slip crucial information that led inspectors to a nuclear site.

Yet Kay now declares himself "impressed at the growing sophistication of the Iraqis in handling the external world and getting their message across". The presentation of their declaration enabled the Iraqis to look as if they were cooperating, Kay added.

An even more startling admission came from Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA analyst and author of The Threatening Storm: the Case for Invading Iraq. "We've got ourselves into a bit of a jam," he admitted. Iraq had switched the burden of proof from Baghdad to the UN inspectors, "and they seem absolutely confident they can handle the inspectors in a way that they will never find WMD".

Pollack worried that "every time inspectors go to a site and find it clean, it reinforces the notion around the world that maybe Iraq doesn't have anything to hide". The longer Washington allows inspections to go on, the more difficult it is to establish a casus belli.

Others in Washington believe that precisely those concerns will drive the administration to declare Saddam's obfuscation a material breach of UN resolutions and grounds for war, even if it cannot produce conclusive evidence that he has lied.

"I think the administration will make a decision after the Christmas holidays to go to war, and there will be war this winter," said Michael O'Hanlon, a defence specialist at the Brookings Institution think tank. He previously rated the chance of war at no more than 50% but now puts it at 75-80%.

If evidence truly existed of indisputable Iraqi outrage, would Powell really have had to pull so many Colombian strings to secure control of a document he would have known was fatally flawed? Washington won a battle at the UN last weekend, but it has not yet figured out how to win the war.

There are also other remarkable bourgeois warnings against the scale and character of the planned imperialist onslaught, implying a Western wish to impose another whole re-make of the Middle East, as flawed and dangerous as the rotten peak of colonial-era 'nation-making' itself:

Now we are going nation-building in Arabia once again. No one in the present US administration seems to have any useful memory of our earlier adventures in this department, and no one appears able to clearly distinguish between the two crucially different bad-hats with sallow complexions, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. No one seems to have noticed that toppling Saddam, though it ranks a good deal lower on the agenda than toppling the Sauds, is a necessary part of Osama's larger game plan. We are on the brink of an intervention that will rank in Arabian history beside the Sykes-Picot agreement and the Balfour declaration, and we are bringing to that intervention a terrifying mixture of ignorance and amnesia.

Mesopotamian desert in 1918 or 1919. Bell trails a walking stick in the sand. Behind her, Arab boys erect cairns to mark the future boundary between what will eventually become the states of Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

Bell was one of the many British and  French nation builders who carved up Arabia in the years following the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916.  The lines they drew in the sand rarely corresponded to any preexistent historical, tribal, cultural or geographical reality. The nations they invented were arbitrary agglomerations, their borders thrown up around dozens of warring local sheikdoms. These fictional states were given kings (the British loved to create monarchies in their own image) and elegant written constitutions, as if the right sort of ceremonial language and regular 21-gun salutes could somehow transform the chaos of post-Ottoman Arabia into a neat patchwork of Denmarks, Hollands and Swedens with date palms and minarets.

A nation so fancifully constructed does not easily lend itself to governance. You need a warlord, with a loyal standing army and a far-flung force of secret policemen, to prevent the country from falling into the turmoil that is the natural state to which it is perpetually tending. The systems of government that have evolved in Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia are paranoid family dictatorships with ancestral roots in a single city or village. Thus the Assad family of Qurdaha, an Alawite village up in the hills behind Latakia, Syria's Mediterranean port. Thus the Saud famly of Riyadh, an oasis-town in the Nejd desert, now the capital of Saudi Arabia. Thus the Husseins of Tikrit, a town 90 miles north of Baghdad, and the birthplace of Saladin. (Saddam's full name is Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti.)

If the European inventors of these countries believed that generously drawn borders would encourage a commensurate enlarging of national as opposed to local consciousness, the effects have been quite the reverse. To be an army general, a security chief or a government minister in Arabia, it is necessary to come from Qurdaha, Riyadh or Tikrit, and better still to bear the name of Assad, Saud or Hussein. So the village, and the family, supply a tyrannical ruling class which treats the rest of the country as an unruly empire, to be held in place, as empires are, by regular shows of military and terroristic power. In the case of Syria and Iraq, the reigning families belong to religious minorities: the Assads are members of the eccentric Alawi sect, though most Syrians are Sunni Muslims; the Husseins are Sunnis, and Tikrit is a Sunni enclave in Shiite Iraq.

The least unstable states in the Arab world are emirates that have survived intact from long before Picot and Sykes arrived on the scene. They too are family businesses. The al-Sabahs of Kuwait, the al-Khaleifas of Bahrain, the al-Thanis of Qatar, the al-Nahyans of Abu Dhabi, and the al-Maktoums of Dubai have been in power for around 200 years. But these functioning political entities are tiny Qatar, for instance, is roughly the size of Devon and Cornwall combined, with a third of their population; its neighbour Saudi Arabia, by contrast, is nearly five times the size of France.

The Sauds, Assads and Husseins practice a form of rule that works well enough in a tiny country such as Qatar, but is a disaster when applied on a larger scale. It fills prisons and graveyards and breeds among its subjugated peoples the kind of impotent despair and fury that makes them natural candidates for conversion to Islamist totalitarianism.

Consider the case of Hama in Syria. It is a centre of Sunni conservative puritanism, always hostile to the secular Ba'athist regime of Hafiz alAssad. In 1982, a group of Sunni militiamen ambushed an army patrol in the heart of the old city, and sparked an Islamic uprising against the provincial government. Assad sent in the Syrian army under Alawite commanders. Most of Hama was flattened. Between 10,000 and 25,000 Hamaites, most of them civilians, were slaughtered.

It is an important axiom of the Bush administration that Saddam has used weapons of mass destruction "against his own people"; but the concept of "own people" in Arabia needs footnoting, as the Hama massacre illustrates. When Assad sent his army into Hama he was not moving against his "own people" so much as attacking his traditional enemies, whose base lay within his territorial jurisdiction. So it was with Saddam and the Kurds, and Saddam and the Shiites. From the perspective of Tikrit, the Kurdish city of Halabja and the floating villages of the Shiite Marsh Arabs did not contain Saddam's own people: they were, rather, insolent colonial outposts that needed to be taught a savage lesson.

In the Middle East, the concept of nationality is understandably weak: It would be hard to feel patriotic allegiance to the capricious lines in the sand traced by Bell and her kind. To say "I am a Syrian" or "I am an Iraqi" means a lot less than to say "I am a Damascene" or "I am a Baghdadi". For the ancient cities of Arabia, Cairo, Jerusalem, Damascus, Aleppo, Baghdad, Mecca, Medina and Sana'a used to have the character of Renaissance city-states, as grand or grander than Venice and Florence. Even now, when you go to, say Aleppo or Sana’a, you can feel their political self-containment as a once great centre of civilisation and commerce. A powerful sense of the civic, as it relates to people’s home towns,  is matched by something very close to indifference to the national, and no amount of enforced flag-waving and protestations of fealty to the dictator in make-believe elections is going to change or conceal that fact of Arab life.

Yet one vastly potent nationalism haunts the Arab world; the idea of the Ummah, the nation or community of believers. It is to the Ummah that Osama bin Laden addresses his calls for armed resistance to the west and its "puppet" dictators in the region. Notice that he never speaks of "Saudi Arabia", his own home country; he always refers to it as "the land of the two holy mosques," for to Bin Laden and his followers the Saud family are usurpers, kept in place by the patronage and military might of the US. In Osama's version of things, the country we know as Saudi Arabia exists only as a piece of arrogant colonial mapmaking. Notice that in his most recent audiotape he spoke of "our sons in Iraq"; meaning not Saddam and his Tikriti henchmen, whose secular Ba’athist regime has long been on his hit-list, but the faithful millions who live inside the artificial borders imposed on Mesopotamia by the western powers when they summoned Iraq into being.

It is hard for us to understand the intoxicating appeal of pan-Arab Islamic nationalism; the dream of an Arabia without borders, united under a restored Caliphate, answerable only to Koranic law, the Sharia. To western eyes, Sharia law, with its public stonings, beheadings, amputations, its male triumphalism, appears tyrannical in the extreme. How could anyone see in it the promise of liberation?

The answer lies in the despotic tyranny under which most Arabs now live. President Bush said, "They hate us for our freedoms", but that is not true: freedom is a rare commodity that Arabs would dearly like a lot more of. They hate us, rather, for the condition of humiliating subjection in which they find themselves, and for which, rightly or wrongly, they hold us responsible. They hate us for Sir Mark Sykes, for Georges Picot, for Gertrude Bell, for Arthur James Balfour (whose 1917 "declaration" was the basis of the movement to create a Jewish state in Palestine); for America's steadfast support of what they perceive as corrupt and cruel regimes (like that of the Saud family in its glittering hi-tech fortress of modern Riyadh) and for its bland indifference to the injustice suffered by the Palestinians.

All this may be unreasonable of them, but that is why they hate us, and that is why, in the poorest parts of Arabia, the favourite name to give a boy at present is Osama; the latest folk hero of an impossible, idealised "Islamic nation" that will transcend the petty frontiers of the hopelessly divided and despotic Middle East. This is not meant to sound soft on Bin Laden: he is a monster, but a monster born of desperate dreams that are widely shared across an immense and unhappy tract of land.

The defeat of 'Islamic terrorism' is a plausible enough-sounding reason for Washington’s warmongering turn, and vague-enough to justify an almost limitless scope of prepared actions.

But the ever-changing specific objectives throw enormous doubt on such reasoning.

First Osama is the target. Then Mullah Omar is made the scapegoat. Fairly soon, occupying the whole of Afghanistan becomes the objective, just for 'security'. Now, the aim of complete 'nation re-building' in Afghanistan is on the cards. Now Iraq.

And none of it is going well. This is not a test run into Somalia just to give the imperialist superpower a bit of real war experience, to be pulled out of if things get messy.

Things are already vastly messy on ever declared object of US warmongering so far. Yet still the blitzkrieg hyping builds up and up.

Further tests of how this war is really best to be understood may come from further spillovers.

Will it all be over if Iraq is crushed? Or if Saddam is exiled? 0r if Osama is caught? Or Mullah Omar killed?

Will stooges like Musharraf get US military protection to prevent his dictatorship being overthrown in Pakistan?

Will the Zionists be left to founder should the Palestian national liberation struggle start to get the upper hand but cannot be accused of being any 'threat' to the rest of the region?

Will Colombia, Venezuela, or Argentina, for example, be safe from US counter-revolutionary military intervention while the “anti-terrorist axis of Islamic evil" war goes on because they are not part of it???

It would of course be possible to see the US warmongering blitz not stopping at any of these points, yet still not proving that generalised imperialist war is brewing because of insoluble economic crisis.

All such tasks to prolong American imperialist world domination could just as easily be motivated as extensions of routine neo-colonial counter-revolutionary zapping with no extra explanations called for or being any help.

But the Blairite role raises a few more suspicions.

If the American war aim is essentially the shoring-up of the USA's worldwide neo-colonial spread in the face of heightened Islamic/nationalist anti-imperialist resistance in general, then why is maintaining this spread (which has a much greater history of direct conflict with British interests than harmony with them in the colonies) a hazardous military escapade worth Britain's while getting caught up in?

It might be asked in return why, if the wars object is to cement Western imperialist world ECONOMIC domination in the face of insoluble economic crisis, Germany and France, etc, are NOT keener on helping slaughter Iraq?

To which one answer could be that the Europowers have ALREADY made the break to imperialist economic independence away from the USA whereas Britain precisely HAS NOT.

One other curious factor suggesting that a broader definition is needed for American warmongering preparations than routine (or extended) neo-colonial anti-national-liberation zapping, - is the ever widening hatred of US military bullying that is bubbling up everywhere, even in countries which have depended greatly on close relations with the USA, and which could have good reason to fall for America's "we-are-targetting-axis-of-evil-regimes" excuses for aggressive muscle-flexing:

THE deaths of Shin Hyo Sun and Shim Mi Son could hardly have been more devastating for USKorean relations. The two teenage girls were run over by an American tank as they walked to a friend's birthday party on a narrow country road dose to the border with North Korea.

The deaths have become a sore in the already raw relationship between the US military and the South Korean people who host them. The dismissal of court martial charges against two US soldiers has caused the worst bout of anti-American sentiment in the country in decades.

Photographs of their injuries are a common sight in South Korea, on websites and even street placards. In the six months since they died the girls have become political martyrs.

Koreans from all over the country yesterday rallied to protest at the deaths of the girls and demand punishment for those who killed them.

There have been attacks on military bases, restaurants have banned Americans, millions of people have signed petitions, and in Seoul a group of Catholic priests has begun a week-long hunger strike. The candidates in this month's presidential election have all promised changes to the military arrangement between South Korea and America.

Since war left the peninsula divided, the country has prospered under the protection of the United States and its 37,000 troops there. US support for the military dictators who ruled South Korea until 1988 left lingering bitterness but, by and large, active protest has been limited.

But the girls' deaths have pitted anti-US sentiment in the mainstream. Student organisations and trade unions have been joined by nuns, schoolchildren, women's groups and conservative politicians.

More fundamental is resentment about the space that the Americans occupy. There are 93 bases in the country; Yongsan, the centre of the military administration, covers 800 acres in the middle of the overcrowded capital. There are plans to cut the bases by half, but no intention of reducing the number of troops.

The Americans say that they have done all they can to make amends for the deaths which were, after all, a tragic accident. But there is a lingering sense among Koreans that their pain is being treated with insufficient seriousness: an apology from George Bush that was read out by the US Ambassador provoked only anger that it had not been uttered by the President himself.

With 12 million North Korean troops across the border, almost no one in the South is demanding that the US forces leave, but many Koreans will never be able to see them in the same way again.

"I loved America when I was younger” Sister Agnes Kim, a Catholic nun who attended a protest in Seoul this week, said. "I felt that they were here to protect us. But what I have seen the US do to us, and to the rest of the world, makes me feel betrayed."

America's global image has deteriorated sharply, says a survey. "Images of the US have been tarnished in all types of nations: among long-time Nato allies, in developing countries and, most dramatically, in Muslim societies," the Pew Research Centre for the People & the Press said. It questioned more than 38,000 people in 44 countries.

And what America is "doing to the rest of the world" is not just curbing the spread of anti-imperialist stroppiness any more (which could still go down well in South Korea vis-a-vis North Korea) but readying to slap the WHOLE WORLD very hard in the context of GLOBAL economic tradewar, where the choice facing all countries on Earth is either TOTAL subservience to the US imperialist agenda, or else face 'enemy status' and a total economic zapping. "Either you are with us, or you are against us", as the Texan bar-thug mouthed it.

Only Blairism remains unappalled by, and unsuspicious of, the threat to everyone from Washington's consciously open-ended warmongering plans in consequence of a worldwide imperialist-system economic crisis (for which there is no solution, only disaster for the recent status-quo in the world in which the USA would be by far the biggest loser (from lost domination, wealth, power, and influence) if just a steady free-market collapse was the sole outcome).

How appropriate that the only person left speaking up publicly for the Blairs is the dodgy friend that Downing Street itself keeps insisting is "just a conman", - Peter Foster, in his latest public apology for "the mess got into through a little help from your friends", - the £69,000 off the price of a pair of luxury flats, gained by the conman for the Blairs' investment in Bristol "via the art of negotiation".

Even the most reactionary, pro-American bourgeois press, including its feminist writers, could find nothing but contempt and ridicule for this wretched, posturing B1airism, - summarising British imperialist lameness and ignorance covered-up only by the Blairs’ jumped-up petty bourgeois posturing, the keystone of "dynamic" government by "New" Labour which is just 100% meaningless glitz and PR gimmickry, and 0% real policy change in how ageing imperialist Britain just carries on steadily declining, unaltered in any real way from decades and decades of previous relentless decline:

Yes, of course it's funny. A rebirthing ceremony, a topless model peddling magic pendants and nude scrubdowns! A New Age guru with big hair and indecent leggings, licensed to go through the Downing Street larder throwing out additives, yet herself accumulating toxic men - one of whom, fresh from a fraudulent slimming tea business, smarms up to a credulous QC with emails saying "Your pleasure is my purpose", and involves her with an accountant charged with moneylaundering! Yet all this tatty nonsense is not encrusting some dopey showbiz couple, but the squeaky-clean, eamest, churchgoing, ineffably self-righteous Blairs! You would need a heart of stone not to giggle.

The trouble is that the laughing stops with a choke when you realise just how much harm has been done, not only to the Prime Minister's reputation but also to the useful and decent side of Cherie Blair's public work. Even if you discount the violent hostility of the Mail newspapers, the bare facts turn Mrs Blair into a laughing-stock of almost Fergie proportions. The lie which she made the Downing Street press office tell us was bad enough - and it was a lie, frankly, not a "misapprehension", because if a man negotiating a half-million-pound purchase, discussing family trusts and giving warnings on stamp duty is not a "financial adviser", who the hell is?

But beyond that, the whole affair reveals dreadfully Fergoid characteristics, upsetting in a lawyer. There is naive credulity, a mistaken conviction that people simply adore to do her little services without favours in return, and on top of it all that distressing tendency of many rich people to cheesepare as if they were broke. For me, as a former natural supporter of Mrs Blair, the worst bit of those terrible e-mails was where the shyster tells her that his company will pick up the accountancy bill, and is not immediately sent a rocket saying "you will do no such thing!". Even a reputable journalist, for God's sake, wouldn't accept a £4,000 freebie service from a relative stranger without suspecting that there was no free lunch. But an aspiring judge? A PM's wife? God save us!

What on earth did Mrs Blair think the creep Foster was doing it for? Love and respect of her personal qualities? Her husband is Prime Minister, and this man is fighting deportation. Today's revelation about the phone call to his lawyer makes it clear that she knew his status. Moreover, it turns out that Foster was planning to set up some scammy schoolchildrens health project which he boasted to an associate would be supported by the Blairs and their eldest son, "Ewen". It is alleged that he raised money on this premise. His claim to have that much pull is transparent nonsense, but it does make it additionally clear how useful he found his affair with Carole Caplin, a paid but extremely cosy hanger-on at court. This woman cannot be portrayed as being associated merely with the PM's wife: she shared a family holiday and another undenied story tells that Tony Blair got her round to massage ex-President Clinton in a black catsuit. Of course Foster thought the Blairs would be assets in his dodgy ploys - a small, retarded child could spot that. How a lifelong lawyer married to a lifelong politician failed to do so is a mystery. The only credible answer is vanity.

But what this debacle makes clear is that they have allowed the altitude of power and fame to addle their brains where human relationships and normal life are concerned, and have also fatally ignored the need to separate public office from private life. They have never quite grasped that people suck up to them not because they are lovely human beings, but because Mr Blair is the most personally powerful Prime Minister ever. At Downing Street they live amid quasi-royal trappings and deference; they accept free holidays, fly on private jets, and in her case have reached the stage of celebrity lunacy where you think you no longer have to attend personally to anything unless you want to. In celebworld you not only have someone else to choose and maintain your clothes, but a psychic to fax with questions about life decisions, and a handy little man to organise the future accommodation plans of your children.

Moreover, mixing with the rich, they have transparently grown to resent not being as rich as they feel they deserve to be. Much is made of their bad luck in losing half a million's worth of growth on the London property market by selling their Islington house early in the premiership; but we've all made duff decisions in our time, and many people (notably Maxwell pensioners, endowment-holders and Equitable Life victims) are staring at a chilly old age thanks to governmental failure to regulate financial institutions. The Blairs start from a far higher financial base than most professional people anyway, and he has an index-linked pension coming. If they are irritated about losing a theoretical profit, they must live with it. Like the rest of us. 

But no: they get into bed with a snakeoil salesman, accept utterly irregular "help" with a £500,000 property deal instead of spending a few thousand on a proper agent, and expose their grimy underbelly. A YouGov poll at the weekend finds 58 per cent thinking that new Labour is "sleazy and disreputable". Only 51 per cent see the PM as "honest', while a mere 47 per rent think it of Mrs Blair.

	It's a disaster. It needn't have happened. One of the ways it could have been avoided is by junking once and for all the use of  spouses as political figureheads and ever-present appendages.

Instead she has chummed up with Hillary Clinton on public matters, chaired debates with ministers at Downing Street, used a civil servant as her personal PR adviser, spoken through the No 10 press office, held meetings with clients in that prestigious residence, and at one stage sent out notepaper saying "Office of Cherie Blair, 10 Downing Street" when she actually lives at No 11.

I also hoped that the children would be kept out of it. But they had their pre-election breakfast photographed by a women's magazine (with the clock, mysteriously, set at 3am), posed on the doorstep at Downing Street after the victory, and were frequently referred to when the PM wanted to show himself as a caring parent. Baby Leo was trained up to give Jacques Chirac a birthday present (aaah!) and photo-opportunities on holiday are choreographed to create a "first family" image unmatched since JFK paraded Jackie, Caroline and John-John in the Sixties.

So now, when the press office tries to hit us with disdainful snubs about "private" family matters, they just look silly and shifty and unreliable. And even though it's funny, it matters. If you're going to be a figurehead, you must keep your paint fresh. Mrs Blair's friends say she is a lovely person who has committed no actionable crime: true. But there are times when stupidity and hubris can do just as much damage.

Still, as a mother, you take Cherie's point, don't you? "I am not superwoman". Me neither. 

"Sometimes some of the balls get dropped". They do, the little devils. Mothers everywhere, from Jordan to Mrs Thatcher, from the Queen to Courtney Love, must have twinkled rueful smiles of maternal recognition at that one. Balls, eh? Can't live with'em, can't live without'em. 

She was right, too, about wanting to protect your family, an instinct that as Cherie says, "any mother would have". So yes, agreed: Cherie's a mother, an awful lot of women are mothers, ditto busy ones, and some of them value their children's privacy so much that they even keep their faces off their Christmas cards.

Quite what this load of balls has to do with Cherie's crooked amanuensis, Peter Foster, and her lamentable decision to conceal from everyone the true nature of their association, is something that escapes me. Had she appealed to me as a lawyer, perhaps, I might have sympathised with the evasiveness that made her say he had not acted as her financial adviser, when he actually had. Or had she appealed to me as a politician. Or as a convicted burglar. But since when did being a busy working mother become, in itself, synonymous with a tendency to fib?

Confession, blubbing, a protracted show of vulnerability the kind of display which would not, presumably, be allowed to sway Cherie Booth QC in her more austere moments as a recorder served to push aside all reasonable doubts about her conduct and to force her inquisitors themselves on to the defensive. They had made her cry.  Were they happy now? Or will nothing satisfy them until she is driven to run away with only -  finances permitting - Carole Caplin for company?

As a mother, or maybe as a human being, I find myself very susceptible to other people's tears. Cherie's distress was most affecting. But much less so, I feel, than the recent death of Mog the Forgetful cat. The loss of this dim and blameless creature afflicts me each time I am reminded of her Big Thing, or visit to the VET. Whereas the more I think about Cherie's tears and what prompted them, the more I am
inclined to think that they are just as disappointing, in their way, as her original inability to tell the truth.

For although she is not actress enough - is she? - to have set out to cry, there is no doubt that Cherie intended to stir up compassion for her womanly vulnerability, rather than to give a plain account of her actions. 

That's why her speech contained all the motherhood stuff, the dragooning of her eldest son, the demand that we feel her pain when one of her wretched balls falls on her foot. For a woman who probably feels, quite rightly, that raging misogyny fuelled many of the Daily Mail's pre-Foster attacks on her character, this dramatised recourse to feminine victimhood is as abject as it is bogus.	

And if you doubt it, consider this: could Tuesdays performance conceivably have worked for a man? What response might Stephen Byers have got, for instance, with the tearful admission "I am not superman": Cherie did not get where she is today by crying. She got there through diligence, shrewdness, self-control, force of character.

You may be sure these qualities did not desert her in her hour of need. They merely informed her, correctly, that if she wished to save her professional and personal reputation she must act helpless and throw herself on the mercy of the public. 

Though we should perhaps credit Alastair Campbell with her speech's headiest, most Diana-like line in which she confessed her occasional desire to "crawl away and hide”. Adding defiantly, "But I will not!" It was the spirt of to be or not to be, "uneasy lies the head" and "I will fight them on the beaches" all rolled into a phrase that could elicit only one response - "We're sorry Cherie, please, please don't go!” Smarting from the reproach, her listeners were unlikely to reflect whether there might not be a sensible third way, somewhere between the life of an anchoress and that of a full-on roving consort. Maybe get someone in to do the juggling? I'm sure people would understand. As a mother, I hate to think I am, in Tessa Jowell's phrase, "a pretty warped human being" for not responding, in full, to Cherie's cry for help. After all, someone might tell the social services. But try as I may, warped or not, I just don't think it's adequate.

Imagine the reaction if a highly paid male barrister and part-time judge tried to explain why he had become embroiled with a sleazy Aussie conman by saying: "Sorry I messed up, but sometimes the pressure of trying to be a good daddy gets too much, and I feel that I would like to crawl away and hide." He would be laughed out of his own court.

Playing the "high-powered legal eagle trying to be a good mother" card has an awful smack of desperation about it, and it doesn't wash anyway. After all, this affair seems to reveal that Cherie spent as much time worrying about Carole Caplin's feelings, Peter Foster's deportation and her own potential profit from property speculation as she did about Euan's accommodation. Did Cherie really imagine she was doing her son a favour at Bristol University by sticking him in a hoity-toity penthouse?

And to excuse her private life from scrutiny on the grounds that she is "only a wife, not a politician" is disingenuous piffle. Like hundreds of other people, I have attended one of those 10 Downing Street seminars organised and hosted by Cherie, and blatantly devised to influence movers and shakers. If she is using No 10 to further her private interests, her private interests are a public matter.

Mrs Blair also speaks daily to "my friend Carole" insisting that the last fortnight will neither harm their friendship nor the £4,000 a month contract under which Ms Caplin and her mystic mother Sylvia advised the Blairs on everything from shirts to spiritualism.

Caplin and Foster went to view flats in Bristol on behalf of Cherie. Foster, according to a former driver, believed that securing a discount would make Cherie "think the world" of him.

He began sending Cherie chatty e-mails as they discussed the transaction. In early November Cherie met Foster in person. She, too, fell for his charm. "I was very glad to meet you face to face at last and hope we can see each other again soon," she wrote. 

Later that month Foster found an ideal opportunity to ingratiate himself further. Problems arose over the mortgage for the flats because the Blairs were keen to hide their identity by buying the properties through a trust.

On November 19 the lenders, C&G, part of Lloyds TSB, decided it would not deal with such a mysterious entity. According to sources at the bank, it was Foster who saved the day. On November 20 he told C&G that the people behind the trust were the Blairs.

IT DID not take long for a special deal to be arranged: on November 21 a business associate of Foster called Andrew Axelman e-mailed Cherie: "Looks like all matters have now been dealt with and exchange should happen tomorrow." The bank agreed that it could provide a loan at a discretionary rate. Foster had further gained Cherie's confidence: in fact she was in his debt as he had offered to pay the costs of obtaining the loan.

But Foster, who had got Caplin pregnant, was in need of all the friends in high places he could get. He was facing deportation - and Cherie was about to make one of her worst misjudgments by helping him.

Cherie admitted almost nothing about her dealings with Foster. "She was so protective it was hard work," said the insider. Downing Street press spokesmen duly dismissed the allegations with contempt.

But they refused to go away and days later e-mails proved Foster had helped her to buy the flats. Cherie adopted the role of contrite lawyer. She made a statement accepting that if there had been any "misunderstanding" it was her fault, but maintained she had done nothing "improper".

Still more information about her dealings with Foster emerged: she had held a conference cell with Foster's lawyers about his appeal against deportation. As the controversy rolled on, it was time for Cherie to adopt yet another role: that of the vulnerable but defiant mother.

At about 5pm last Tuesday two figures walked down Whitehall and ducked into No 10, the reception of the Cabinet Office. Peter Mandelson and Lord Falconer, two of Tony Blair's closest friends and confidants, did not want to be seen entering Downing Street. So they used the traditional "back door" route, through the Cabinet Office building and the security doors that connect into No 10.

Mandelson, who has twice resigned from government, has maintained his links with Blair and still gives him advice. Falconer, Blair's old flatmate and now a Home Office minister, is close to the family. Both had been summoned to help to draft a new statement for Cherie and they gathered round a computer where Alastair Campbell, the prime minister's spokesman, sat at the keyboard. Cherie composed herself and rehearsed phrases as she prepared to fulfil an existing engagement at an awards ceremony at a Westminster restaurant.

Mr Campbell has been accused of briefing against Mrs Blair to protect his own reputation and detailed accounts appeared at the weekend outlining how she was forced to hand over embarrassing e-mails with Mr Foster, boyfriend of Mrs Blair's lifestyle guru, Carole Caplin.

Mrs Blair, who spent the afternoon hosting one of her monthly children's tea parties, was told at 6pm that night that she must publicly explain her role in an attempt to defuse the row after the PM endorsed the strategy. But crucially, it emerged last night that when the statement was being constructed none of those key advisers knew of the three-page fax about the case that had been sent to Mrs Blair's office on November 22 and would later form the essence of the Scotsman case against Mrs Blair.

With No 10 under siege from the media, the statement was intended to draw a line under an affair said by a well-placed source to have "consumed" Tony Blair for more than a week.

Mr Campbell's fingers are understood to have been on the keyboard, with the director of communications and strategy typing many of the 1,128 words she was to speak, including apologies for misleading his Downing Street press office and allowing conman Peter Foster to become entangled in her family's affairs.

Fiona Millar, Mrs Blair's spokeswoman and long-term partner of Mr Campbell, helped to craft the appeal to Daily Mail-reading women such as the "I am not superwoman" declaration.

Ms Millar, director of events and visits in No 10, also appeared at the weekend to distance herself from the incorrect statements issued by the Downing Street press office last week before the explosive emails were published.

Mrs Blair, who on Tuesday morning had discussed with Ms Millar the possibility of giving a TV interview or writing a piece for a national newspaper, consented to the statement after her husband agreed with the strategy.

Mrs Blair was told of the decision at 6pm and found herself delivering the address at 7.l0pm to a Department for Education awards ceremony barely half a mile from Downing Street.

Mr Campbell and No 10 official spokesman Tom Kelly rang political editors shortly before 6pm, advising them that Mrs Blair would make a personal statement at 6.30pm.

Government spin doctors blamed the 40-minute delay on Mrs Blair needing to compose herself and seek reassurance from the prime minister. In fact, admitted Downing Street insiders, she was reading some of the phrases and explanations for the first time.

Shortly after 7pm, as she rose to speak at the event, she announced that she would "say a few words" about the controversy.

Caplin had told her Foster had "been in trouble in the past, but was a reformed character"; that she barely knew him; that there had been nothing improper in the purchase of the flats; and, most importantly, that she "emphatically did not try to influence" his deportation case when she had spoken to his lawyers. 

She had just been trying to help her friend, she said. If the aim was to draw a line under the affair, then it failed miserably.

In the tabloid frenzy surrounding "Cheriegate", everyone seemed to hove a spin doctor to hand. Cherie had Campbell and his team; disgruntled business associates of Foster had turned to Max Clifford, the publicist; Caplin was being advised by Ian Monk, a former executive at the Daily Mail. Foster, too, may have benefited from Monk's advice.

THOUGH Caplin has been Cherie's friend for -a long time, she has largely kept out of the limelight, despite a colourful background that has long been a worry to Campbell. He had early experience of the potential problems.

In the mid-1990s, as Blair and Cherie were becoming prominent, Stuart Higgins, then editor of The Sun, rang Campbell during a Labour party conference. Did Campbell know that Cherie's friend had been a topless model?

Campbell said he would check. Having spoken to Caplin, he rang Higgins to say it was not true. "Then why am I sitting here looking at a Picture of her tits?" said Higgins. 

Now there was another embarrassment for Caplin to try to sort out. As the new allegations hit the streets, Caplin issued a statement to the Press Association. It said that she, not Cherie, had asked for the deportation papers to be faxed to Downing Street, and that Cherie had not read them.

That was the No 10 line,  however unlikely it sounded. At Campbell's morning meeting with government communication chiefs on Thursday, he grumpily flicked through the newspapers but said little about Cherie. He tried instead to concentrate on other issues, such as Iraq.

In a tale involving a serial conman all allegations must be suspect. But some events are now clear, confirmed by statements from Cherie, Downing Street and Caplin, or in e-mails.

They reveal that Foster did advise Cherie on buying the flats and did help her to obtain finance. Caplin did go to see Cherie in Downing Street on November 22, taking with her papers about Foster's deportation; other papers relating to the case were faxed to Cherie's office.

Cherie did speak by telephone to Foster's solicitors; Foster's solicitors did subsequently contact Matrix chambers, of which Cherie is a member, seeking a potential counsel: Cherie also did try to check the name of the judge who would hear Foster's case.

What would a jury make of all this? 

Cherie is said to be "shellshocked". Downing Street feels duped. One government whip, frustrated at grappling with the deluge of questions about the prime minister's wife rather than government policy, summed up the most extraordinary saga to engulf a prime ministerial spouse.

"We feel impotent on this one," he said. "Unlike with a minister, where there is a resignation or some closure, this one isn't going away. The wife of the prime minister can't resign."

Foster, who has large property interests in Fiji, has also written 300,000 words of an autobiography. He is believed to have approached three publishers already. He now wants to add more about Cheriegate.

Cherie will find it hard to distance herself from her ‘friend'. But what sort of friend is it who expects to be paid £3,000 a month for her friendship?

Caplin is said to have acted as 'a sentry' for Exegesis, by which, I imagine, is meant that she was one of those people paid to encourage those who were having a bad time not to leave the indoctrination session.

Some years ago a BBC TV programme showed how gullible young people were lured to a posh London hotel where they would be virtually incarcerated over a weekend while D'Aubigny shouted abuse at them, telling them how weak and inadequate they were. At the conclusion many were persuaded to part with large sums of money in order to allow D'Aubigny to help them become more worthwhile human beings.

After his exposure on the BBC, D'Aubigny changed his tactics and, with the help of a record producer, Tony Visconti, set up Roar Academy which purported to be a training school for young would-be pop stars.

But those who applied found themselves being subjected to remarkably similar treatment to the Exegesis recruits: being shouted at and told they were useless human beings.

By this time Caplin had gone on to other things, such as posing for glamour magazines. But she had no doubt learnt a valuable lesson from her experiences at Exegesis, namely that there are quite a lot of people in the world - not just the gullible young - who can be persuaded into parting with very large sums of money in exchange for the gifts selfconfidence, self-assertiveness and other form of self-love. The trouble from the beneficiaries' point of view is that they tend to surrender not only money but their independence to their life coaches, or whatever you like to call them.

Martin Paisner, a leading tax lawyer, is one of two trustees of the Manchester Trust - the blind trust set up by the prime minister and his wife to protect them from conflicts of interest in their private financial affairs.

Paisner's law firm, Berwin-Leighton Paisnet (BLP), has recently worked on the sale of the Millennium Dome and Wembley stadium. It has been involved in more than 100 government contracts, more than any other law firm. As a partner in it, Paisner can expect to benefit from fees that it receives from government.

Downing Street has until now refused to reveal Paisner's name as one of the trustees, saying only that he was "independent". The disclosure that the trustee is, in fact, a senior partner in a law firm with lucrative government contracts raises the prospect of a possible conflict of interest.

Paisner is close to Lord Levy, Blair's key party fundraiser, a member of the prime minister's inner circle and his unofficial envoy to the Middle East. It is believed that Paisner and Levy, who helped raise money for Blair's blind trust in opposition, knew Blair through the charity Jewish Care. 

Paisner's law film specialises in the private finance initiative (PFI) - the scheme under which private firms finance government projects. Blair has frequently trumpeted the scheme, most recently at the Labour party conference.

Its government clients include the Ministry of Defence, where it has advised on the sale of barracks; the Highways Agency, where it has advised on contracts worth £765m a year on trunk road maintenance; and the environment, transport and regions department which it advised on a legal dispute and the purchase of its new London headquarters.

There will still be pro-New Labour feminist lunatics like P. Toynbee defending all this revealed, calculated plunder, - and the lies that go with it, as just innocent scatterbrained womanliness, thus: 

She has an least one odd friend: but so do most people. She was casually absent-minded about how she bought the properties, and fell into the deadly trap of a master-conman, only just escaping a far worse Sophie Wessex sting from the News of the World. 

Embarrassed and indignant when the Mail sprung on her, in a fluster she made a bad mistake by trying to fudge it and hide the whole bad Foster connection. But how bad is that?

As bad at least as the other feminist and rational bourgeois critics above made of it. But indescribably worse from the point of view of ordinary real people who face an economic disaster from capitalist slump of unimaginable proportions while Blairism is just busy getting its hand in the till; and war devastation on an even more catastrophic scale due in part to the small-minded, New Labour posturing, which this couple typify, in thrall to a warmongering imperialist stampede they can scarcely understand. Build Leninism. EPSR

World Revolutionary Socialist Review

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

• Growth rates fall, unemployment increases, consumption decreases and corporate scandals continue, while the U.S. president disguises his fears with optimistic speeches for internal consumption

FORCING himself to be convincing, President George W. Bush has confirmed that the U.S. economy is recovering. He has stated this unblushingly while news of layoffs, corporate setbacks and fraudulent operations appears daily in U.S. and international newspapers-

Retail sales did not register changes in October in comparison to the previous month, after incentives for automobile purchases were halted. Consumers remain cautious in the face of the U.S. economy's vulnerability:

WITHOUT EMPLOYMENT THERE IS NO CONSUMPTION

More than 1.5 million jobs have been lost since economic decline began in the United States in March 2001. 

The golden arcs of the McDonald's logo, visible in 30,000 restaurants in 121 countries, are losing their former gleam. Faced with saturation in the market for food sales, complaints of bad service and depressed share prices, the company decided to reduce its expansion rate and established other measures in order to escape from an unprecedented low. 

Reduced prices on the menu and additional offers are part of the attraction for consumers. Experts doubt whether this restructuring can completely restore the splendor of that empire. Since 1998, its bonds have dropped almost 70% in value, reported AP from Chicago. Fear of Mad Cow Disease in Europe drove McDonalds to a second year of lower profits.

CHAIN REACTI0N

However. adjustments and job cuts are extending to many sectors. The Wall Street Journal assured that the IBM computer giant is considering cutting jobs after acquiring the Price Waterhouse Coopers Consulting group (PWC) for a sum of $3.5 billion dollars. By the second quarter of this year, IBM had already laid off more than 5,500 workers, the company's most dramatic cut for a three-month period.

American Airlines, the United States' largest flight company, has already presented a restructuring plan that includes firing 10,000 workers. United Airlines, the second corporation in that sector, announced its incapability to repay debts totaling $875 million dollars and is preparing to declare bankruptcy. The third, Delta Airlines, announced the possibility of eliminating nearly 1,500 flight attendant positions in upcoming months, given anticipated losses of $225 million USD. Delta has already laid off 11,000 of its staff, who accepted voluntary retirement packages starting last year. Leo Mullin, president of Delta, and other executives requested more financial aid for the industry from a congressional committee.

Eastman Kodak recently informed that it is to cut its staff by 2% (1,300-1,700 ernployees) as part of announced efforts to reduce costs, Reuters informed.

Even the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has admitted that the recovery will be weaker than calculated. The first interest rate cuts in 2002 - there were 11 last year - occurred the day after the legislative elections.

The U.S. Federal Reserve (FED) lowered interest rates by half a point, bringing them to the lowest level in the last 40 years.

Nonetheless, the problems are persisting. Even the man selected by Bush to bring order to company accounting has just resigned. The head of the Value Commission - the principal agency for the supervision of U.S. financial institutions - was accused of being weak, but the central detonator of his exit was the appointment of William Webster as director of a commission to reform auditing systems when it was known that he had links to a company under investigation for fraud.

While Bush is reiterating that fear will not be allowed to undermine the economy, panic has become the new White House tenant. The empire is facing a world increasingly harder to control and is resorting to an overblown military strategy, a sign of its own internal weakness.

The U.S. economy is suffering from recession, as is the case in all capitalist crises. The enemy does not have to be sought in the mountains of Afghanistan or in Iraq, it is alive and well at home.