The Gulf oil spill comes at a bad time for Obama and the Rockefeller-led imperialist wing of U.S. capitalists he serves. Just when economic calamity and sharpening global rivalry force U.S. war-makers to centralize control over industry and finance, the disaster exposes White House weaknesses and growing disunity among the bosses.
Frank Rich, an Obama watcher at the liberal imperialists’ New York Times whines (6/20), “What’s also being tarred daily by the gushing oil is the very notion that government can accomplish anything.” The Times’ columnist specifically fears that the oil mess may impair Obama’s ability to lead the U.S. war machine:
“[Obama] must rebuild confidence in his government for that inevitable day when the next crisis hits the fan. That would be Afghanistan, and the day is rapidly arriving.”
Adding to U.S. imperialists’ woes in the spill’s wake, Rich warns that, “The Tea Party is at the barricades.” “Tea Party” encompasses a loose collection of capitalist-led anti-Obama phony populist movements. These forces are funded and led by bosses unconcerned with the Rockefeller wing’s long-range strategy to maintain U.S. world domination and preserve its global empire.
Bosses who oppose varying aspects of this imperialist agenda for widening wars and top-down, federal control of business are successfully backing Tea Party candidates in mid-term elections. Some want lower taxes; some want less government interference; some object to the cost of imperialist wars that don’t benefit them directly; others seek trade with U.S. imperialists’ strategic foes such as China and Iran.
Muck Muddles Rulers’ Wartime
Oil Reserve Plans
In response, U.S. imperialists, as their Times’ mouthpiece Rich reflects, demand militaristic fascism. His op-ed harangue bears the title, “Clean the Gulf, Clean House, Clean Their Clock.” Cleaning the Gulf means far more than stopping the BP gusher so that profitable exploitation can proceed at other wells there. Oil drilling in U.S.-controlled waters — a major strategic initiative Obama endorsed in an April speech but on hold since the blowout — is crucial to U.S. global war plans.
“Energy Security,” a May 2010 “working paper” by U.S. imperialists’ leading Rockefeller-led Council on Foreign Relations think-tank proposed further discussion of “security benefits from domestic oil production during a protracted military conflict.” In such a case, “global oil markets might cease to function in a way that is close to normal.”
Iran’s nuclear-arming oil barons’ threat to shut off Saudi, Iraqi and its own crude exports via the Straits of Hormuz led to Obama’s green light for drlling in the Gulf of Mexico. (It is through these Straits that tankers move perhaps one-third of the world’s oil to Western Europe, the U.S. and the Far East.)
U.S. imperialists’ want a “clean,” that is, functioning, oil-pumping, Gulf as a more reliable wartime backstop to their existing Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which would last barely two months.
Rulers Tell Obama: End Bushite
Policies, Follow Rockefeller Road
The Times’ demand to “Clean House,” refers directly to purging the White House of strategically clueless officials and indirectly to far more stringent policing of business in general. The Hart-Rudman report (see www.plp.org), prior to 9/11, demanded more centralized government control to both install a more fascist police state to quell potential working-class rebellion as well as to discipline rogue capitalists who care little about long-range strategies to preserve U.S. domination internationally.
Pro-ruling-class pundit Rich complains that Obama interior secretary Ken Salazar, “left too many long-serving lackeys of the oil industry in charge at Minerals Management Service (MMS), even as he added to their responsibilities by raising offshore drilling to record levels.” Salazar’s sin, which Obama will surely punish, lies in letting Bush-Cheney holdovers, focused only on the next quarter’s profits, be allowed to ineptly steer a crucial build-up of the U.S.’s long-term war-making capability. MMS officials rubber-stamped BP’s risky but potentially lucrative failed Gulf well.
U.S. imperialists also call for a re-regulation of Wall Street. Topping their “to-do” list for Obama is enacting anti-speculation limitations aimed at ensuring U.S. banks’ long-term survivability.
The vaunted Volcker Rule, as dictated by Paul Volcker (David Rockefeller’s chief economist at Chase Manhattan) “would curb proprietary trading by banks for their own accounts unrelated to customers’ needs; [and] bar them from sponsoring hedge funds and private equity funds.” (Reuters, 6/8)
Rulers Want to Wipe Out Tea Party Bosses Blocking U.S. Imperialism
“Clean their Clock” targets BP apologist Tea Partyites ranging from Rand Paul to Sarah Palin. The Times’ Rich, pushing for broader state power in the hands of the biggest, imperialist bosses, throws down the gauntlet: “These tribunes of the anti-government right and their Tea Party auxiliaries are clamoring for a new revolution to ‘take back America’....Let Deepwater Horizon be ground zero for a 9/11 showdown over the role of government.”
The “showdown” follows Hart-Rudman’s post-9/11 drive to streamline the federal government in the service of the main capitalist Rockefeller forces and shove the anti-government phony “populist” types down the drain.
But the only anti-Tea Party move Obama made after the spill was to appoint a liberal-environmentalist “national commission” to “investigate” it. Appointee Frances Beinecke, president of the Rockefeller-funded National Resources Defense Council, typifies the panel. It boasts well-heeled and (for the bigger bosses) supportive members but lacks teeth.
However ineffectively, Obama is striving as best he can to fulfill the imperialists’ needs. Displaying the true class allegiance of all electoral politicians, he began betraying his anti-war, pro-jobs campaign promises as soon as setting foot in Washington.
Urging Obama to “do a better” job, or voting in “better” people in November, serves only the capitalist ruling class. What’s needed is spreading PLP’s ideas among the masses in the shops, unions, schools, churches, the military and in the communities to build a mass communist party. Our long-term outlook is eradication of the billionaire war-makers through communist revolution for workers’ power. That’s the only way the needs of the working class can be served. J
(Coming: Bosses Behind the Tea Party: Dogfights old and new rage among U.S. capitalists.)