Fiatch

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The IHT reports “Chavez sends troops to Venezuelan rice companies.”

Highlights:

President Hugo Chavez on Saturday ordered troops to temporarily seize control of all Venezuelan rice processing plants to ensure they produce at full capacity amid soaring inflation and persisting reports of food shortages.

Chavez told the National Guard to “take control of and intervene in all of these businesses that process rice in Venezuela,” including at least a half-dozen local and foreign private companies.

Agriculture Minister Elias Jaua said troops would occupy company installations as “the first measure” in an unspecified takeover process, beginning with a rice plant owned by Empresas Polar, the country’s largest food producer.

Other major rice producers operating in Venezuela include Minneapolis-based Cargill, which owns the Santa Ana Rice Plant in Portuguesa state. Jaua said Caracas-based Corporacion Mary, which produces four types of rice under the brand name “Arroz Mary,” will be affected.

On Saturday, Chavez warned that any rice processing company that threatened to halt output would be permanently seized by the government.

In the past two years, Chavez has nationalized four major oil projects and some of the country’s biggest electricity, telecommunications, steel and cement companies.

President Chavez is a thief and a thug, which is to say, a Communist leader.  Nationalization is a menace. His tyranny threatens us all.

Always and especially as such crooks are on the rampage, it is irresponsible of the United States government to attempt to scapegoat capitalism for the failings of state policies.

Do not lose heart.  Not all are fooled, and thus not all is lost.  Let’s do what we can.

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You also believe in “redistributive change” if you support:

• progressive income taxes;
• a tax structure that already (i.) sees a third of the US paying no income tax and (ii.) has both major-party candidates advocating moving this figure to above 43%;
• a central bank that controls rates of interest and the supply of money;
• farm and other subsidies;
• tax incentives of any kind from local, state, and federal governments;
• the view that The Constitution is malleable and fluid based on current political intentions;
• the rolling and ever-expanding tsunami of bailouts and rescue schemes; or
• any of the other myriad tools of this interventionist, inflationist system that takes from the competent to give to the incompetent.

If you support these programs:

• you believe in redistributive change by government edict;
• you differ with the above clip only in degree, not in kind;
• you can only quibble with the above clip over the details, over the nature of the redistribution;
• you distrust the market and free trade in favor of government bureaucracy and command;
• you’ve opened the door to inevitable centralization, coercion, and the attendant destruction of value to the detriment of all.

If you support these programs, please reconsider.

We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of the ruling class, to win the battle of democracy.

The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e. of the proletariat organized as the ruling class, and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.

Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production.

These measures will of course be different in different countries.

Nevertheless, in the most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable:

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.

2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.

3. Abolition of all right of inheritance.

4. Confiscation of the property of emigrants and rebels.

5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.

6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.

7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.

8. Equal liability of all to labour.  Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.

9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of the population over the country.

10. Free education for all children in public schools.  Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form.  Combination of education with industrial production, etc.

via The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

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