A widening split within the U.S. ruling class is intensifying between two groups of capitalists. The dominant wing is led by the Rockefeller interests — which includes such giant corporations as Exxon-Mobil and JP Morgan Chase — and which champions the long-range interests of U.S. capitalism. They promote imperialist wars internationally, attempting to maintain U.S. top-dog status in their drive to control the world’s resources (especially oil and gas), markets and the ability to exploit impoverished workers. They must, sooner or later, mobilize the nation to confront rivals Iran, China and Russia which are bent on expanding their own access to these resources. China has now become the world’s number one energy user.
To accomplish this they must impose wartime discipline on a challenging anti-Rockefeller faction, basically capitalists more focused on immediate, short-range profits — the quarterly bottom line — than on the long-term needs of U.S. imperialism. It is these domestically-oriented bosses who have been bankrolling and organizing a mass, anti-tax, predominantly Republican faction known as the Tea Party (“Taxed Enough Already”).
This fight between these two capitalist wings is nothing new. As PLP has been exposing for decades, the Rockefeller group, long identified as “old money” — centered in the East and in the big Wall Street banks and investment houses — has dominated U.S. capitalism for much of the last century. The domestically-oriented group, identified as “new money,” emerged in the post-Kennedy era, backing Nixon, and has been centered in the South and West.
The destruction of the Nixon presidency in the early 1970s marked the victory of “old money” over “new money.” But the fight continues.
Now along comes Charles Kupchan and Peter Trubowitz, writing in “International Security” (Summer, 2010) to confirm what PLP has been saying: “[P]olitical polarization has been shaking the domestic foundations of U.S. grand strategy, sorely testing bipartisan support for liberal internationalism — the grand strategy that guided the United States from World War II through the end of the Cold War….” There, in a nutshell, lies one of the gravest challenges facing Obama and the U.S. imperialists he serves.
Kupchan-Trubowitz “define the liberal internationalist compact as the combination of heavy investment in military force with a commitment to international institutions.” Kupchan and Trubovitz’s remarks appeared in a Harvard publication. The Rockefeller-led Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) circulated them. Harvard and the CFR are top policy factories for the Rockefeller wing.
Big Bosses Need Ever Wider Wars
The only road for the biggest U.S. capitalists to maintain their international domination is through ever wider wars. But imposing wartime discipline on the entire U.S. capitalist class, a necessity for its Rockefeller imperialist faction, is proving difficult for Obama amid an economic crisis. Wars require taxes, while a bitter fight seethes over ending or extending massive Bush, Jr.-era tax cuts, set to expire on January 1. November’s Congressional elections revolve largely around this question. And this is the reason that anti-Rockefeller capitalists have been organizing and financing the mass, anti-tax Tea Party.
Its chief intellectual and organizational assistance comes from Americans for Prosperity, funded by Koch Industries and FreedomWorks, headed by Koch-protégé Dick Armey. Koch Industries is a huge, family-held, domestically-oriented energy and timber company. The Kochs have long railed against money-burning U.S. overseas wars that gain them nothing. Recent articles on the Koch-funded Cato Institute website include: “Time to Leave Iraq,”; “The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan”; and “U.S. Out of South Korea.”
Armey — after retiring from Congress, where he antagonized the Clinton regime — joined the Koch’s anti-tax Citizens for a Sound Economy as co-chairman. He then toiled for the Washington lobbying firm DLA Piper, seeking to neutralize Iran “on the cheap,” without the costly U.S.-led attack/embargo/invasion the imperialist wing foresees. From 2005 to 2009 at DLA Piper, Armey promoted the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran, a group (labeled terrorist by the State Department) that was supposed to overthrow the anti-U.S. ayatollahs in Teheran.
Tea Partyism makes U.S. imperialists very afraid. Kupchan and Trubowitz fear that “the partisan gap that widened during George W. Bush’s administration has continued during the presidency of Barack Obama, confirming that a structural change has taken place in the domestic bases of U.S. foreign policy.” From the imperialists’ viewpoint, that gap has spelled frustration and disaster: half-baked invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan followed by undermanned occupations that can’t get oil pumped or pipelines built.
Troops, Public Don’t Back Liberals’ War Plans
Leslie Gelb, ex-CFR chairman, noted a more ominous partisan gap among the troops U.S. rulers must rely on. He boiled General McChrystal’s attack on the Obama gang to a plain, simple fact: “The U.S. military, officers and enlisted ranks don’t like and don’t trust Democrats and liberals. The bad feelings are mainly about values, style and constancy more than policy.” (“Daily Beast,” 6/22) Gelb feared an ensuing “firestorm of criticism [within the armed forces] about the White House, perhaps reaching Tea Party proportions.”
In addition to questionable loyalty to the liberal war agenda amid the military, there is the general population’s waning support for armed intervention. A December 2009 Pew poll revealed that 49% of the public believed that the United States “should mind its own business” — the highest response to that question ever recorded, far surpassing the 32% in 1972, at the height of opposition to the U.S. imperialist invasion of Vietnam.
Tea Partiers Open Racists; Liberal Imperialists Genocidal and Racist Butchers
So, to steer opinion their way, liberals, such as the NAACP, attack Tea Partiers (TP) as racist for their overwhelmingly-white composition and anti-immigrant stance. The TP movement is indeed racist. But its liberal imperialist opponents stand guilty of racist genocide.
For over two decades they have slaughtered over a million Iraqis for oil and regularly kill Afghan civilians over a gas pipeline. Over decades of war after war — Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Guatemala, Chile, Grenada, Panama, Nicaragua, not to mention the CIA-trained death squads in Latin America and the deaths due to U.S. corporate exploitation of the world’s oil and minerals — U.S. “liberal internationalists” have murdered more workers than Hitler’s sadists could ever have dreamed of. Atrocities like the quarter-million slaughtered by atom-bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the tortures and killings at My Lai, and Abu Ghraib, punctuate their unceasing deadly search for profits through military conquest.
The Tea Party and its capitalist backers deserve the wrath of the working class. We must continue to attack both the racist Tea Party and the far more murderous liberal killers that Obama represents. They remain our class’s greatest enemy because they have the ability to deceive many by posing as a lesser evil.
It is the task of a mass, working-class party to organize in every area of the world in which our Party fights — in every factory, union, barracks, school, church, community and mass organization — to turn all working-class struggles into “schools for communism,” and build the only force than can destroy the capitalist beasts. Such is the goal of the revolutionary communist PLP. Join us!