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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the July 11, 1996
issue of Workers World newspaper
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Editorial

G7: Smiles And Daggers

When the heads of state of the richest imperialist countries--the U.S., Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Canada, and Italy, known collectively as the G7--meet each year, you can expect images of all seven suits lined up and smiling. They go to restaurants, stroll in rose gardens-every photo opportunity calculated to radiate peace and harmony.

Peace and harmony? The in-the-know columns say that at this year's summit in Lyon, France, relations between the United States and the Europeans were especially rancorous.

First, there was the question of economic espionage. U.S. officials--off the record, of course--told reporters that French intelligence bugged all the places where commercial deals might be discussed, including the hotel rooms of the U.S. trade representative.

But what's so surprising about that? Last July 14, President Clinton used a speech at CIA headquarters to emphasize the need for that spy agency to concentrate more resources on economic espionage in order to advance the interests of U.S. corporations abroad. And a Washington Post article on Feb. 26, 1995, bragged that the CIA had foiled a bid by France's Airbus to win a $6-billion deal to modernize the Saudi Arabian airline. The contract instead went to McDonnell Douglas and Boeing.

French and Canadian representatives got Clinton aside at the summit to heatedly protest the U.S. Helms-Burton Act that he signed. It seeks to punish foreign firms that do business with Cuba. No country can accept such an arrogant intrusion into its sovereign affairs.

But at the bottom of the growing world trade war is not a particular law or laws, not bad chemistry between leaders, not even chauvinism and arrogance per se. It is the growing malaise of the capitalist system. The old cancer of overproduction is sapping the vitality of the capitalist economies once again, and pitting nations against one another.

It can be seen in Europe's unemployment figures. Massive layoffs in industry brought them up to double-digit levels some time ago. They are now on the rise again because of a wave of white-collar layoffs.

It can be seen in the political assault on workers' rights and social benefits. In Europe, that has unleashed a strike wave. Last December, workers in France went out in the most vigorous struggle against the government since 1968. Last month in Germany the largest trade union demonstration ever-350,000--took place in Bonn.

The United States and Britain, of course, started the offensive against workers' standard of living. Ronald Reagan and then Margaret Thatcher launched an ideological crusade aimed at tearing down all the liberal reforms that had been conceded to the working class in another era, when the rulers were scared silly that mass communist and socialist movements might sweep them out of power.

Reagan and Thatcher may be history, but the right-wing offensive continues without them. The U.S. Census Bureau just reported that the gap in income between rich and poor has widened even faster under the Democrat Clinton than during the Reagan-Bush years. And over 5 million people are either in jail, on parole or on probation in the United States--a sure sign of instability.

The workings of capitalism are polarizing society and politics. And this affects the whole world. Many of the struggles raging in poorer nations today are stimulated by rival groups of capital--just as the conflicts in the Balkans before 1914 reflected and foreshadowed the greater war brewing among the imperialist countries. The G7 leaders may well know all this, and fear the consequences--but that doesn't prevent them from acting like imperialists.

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