Who wins — and who votes — in November’s elections are crucial questions for the imperialist, Rockefeller-led faction of U.S. capitalists served by Barack Obama and the Democratic Party. The segment of the latter’s base — trade unions, environmentalists, civil libertarians, advocates of government regulation, etc., who might stay home out of disenchantment with Obama’s broken promises — have the latter worried over Tea Party candidates. They threaten the liberals’ agenda of widening war, war taxes, and wartime regulatory powers consolidated in the White House.
Rulers’ Push for Two-Party Voting a Dead End for Workers’ Anger
Electoral politics are the capitalist class’s ace-in-the-hole as their most effective weapon for stifling working-class rebellion against the imperialists’ genocidal warfare abroad and racist attacks at home. It clouds the need for workers’ revolution. “You can vote the good guys in and the bad guys out” runs the bosses’ deadly lie to workers.
But, in fact, all politicians front for one group or another of capitalist enemies of our class. The anti-tax, small-government Tea Partiers represent a variety of capitalists whose profits don’t directly depend on U.S. military operations overseas.
Poverty, unemployment, and cuts in education, housing and health care are soaring because of trillion-dollar war layouts. This is especially true for black and Latino workers who suffer double the jobless rates, the worst housing, health care and schools. On September 16, the Census Bureau revealed that while overall, one family in seven lives in poverty, for black workers it’s one in four.
Two days later, Obama urged black members of Congress “to go back to your neighborhoods,…your workplaces,… [your] churches” to get their constituents to the polls.
So the liberal imperialists are striving mightily to defeat potential obstructionists like Tea Party Senate hopefuls Rand Paul and Sharron Angle. And just as urgent for war-bent, globally-focused U.S. rulers is luring workers to view voting, rather than militant action, as the solution to their worsening misery.
Tea Partiers Won’t Go Away, So Liberals Try to Co-opt Them
Voting proves so powerful in misleading the working class that liberal capitalists see a silver lining even in the Tea Party movement: it draws angry workers to the harmless polling booth rather than to either the strike picket line or to right-wing fringe movements and gun-toting terrorist groups.
The NY Times, the liberal imperialists’ top mouthpiece, has anointed its scribe Kate Zernike as official Tea-Party watcher and just published her new book, “Boiling Mad — Inside Tea Party America.” Zernike hopes the Republican Party’s dwindling imperialist establishment wing can somehow co-opt the Tea Party’s voter-boosting energy. These are the descendents of the old, arch-imperialist Nelson Rockefeller wing of the G.O.P. which at one time was its backbone when President Gerald Ford appointed Nelson Vice-President in the wake of Nixon’s ouster. It includes the likes of Maine’s two Republican Senators, Rhode Island’s Chafee, and others who have sometime cooperated with the Kennedy liberals.
Assuming the role of all-knowing, pro-imperialist advisor to such establishment Republicans, Zernike wrote (NYT, 9/18/10): “[T]he Tea Party has brought a swell of new participants to the political process, and historical and economic trends are working in favor of the party out of power — that would be you, G.O.P. The trick is to take advantage of the Tea Party passion and stay away from its extremes.”
Split Congress Makes U.S. Strike on Iran More Likely
But, however effective the voting system may be in misdirecting workers’ rage, it poses real problems for the bigger bosses. In Congress, differences among capitalists can cause deadlock, especially over domestic issues, such as the current, growing tax battle. The 220-year-old U.S. Constitution, itself the product of deadly competition between camps of U.S. capitalists, in fact enshrines legislative stalemates of the kind that Tea Partiers foment. The Brookings Institution, a top liberal imperialist think-tank, calls Congress the “broken branch” of ruling-class state power.
Consequently, legislatively-embattled presidents like Obama, resort more to foreign policy, where commander-in-chief status allows them freer rein to create lasting benefits for their masters. One leading strategy-analyzing firm, Strategic Forecasting (Stratfor, 9/14/10), betraying the rulers’ utter disregard for human life, can’t decide whether Obama’s next big move will be to attack Iran or make a peace deal with it:
“Obama will come out of the November election having to turn over his cards on the only area where he can have traction — Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan.…One option is to solve the Iraq problem by attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities.…That leaves another option….: ‘pulling a Nixon.’ In 1971, Richard Nixon reached out to [then enemy] China” because it was in the rulers’ interest to overlook China’s backing of Vietnamese fighters in order to take advantage of the potential for U.S. entry into that vast market.
But Stratfor’s crystal-ball gazers aren’t banking on such a “peace” move. “What the settlement with Iran might look like is murky at best. Whether Iran has any interest in such a settlement is murkier still.” Stratfor says that for Obama, “far safer is a generalized air campaign against both Iran’s nuclear and conventional capability” — which his Republican rivals would be hard-pressed to oppose (especially its pro-Israel wing).
Non-stop news coverage, from both the liberals’ newspapers and networks and Rupert Murdoch’s pro-Tea Party media empire, underscores the importance of elections to the bosses. This campaign circus should have the opposite effect on our class, steering us away from the dead-end voting booth and towards militant fight-back against all capitalists.
For workers, organizing strikes, demonstrations and anti-imperialist, anti-racist forums, in the very areas Obama targets, would prove a far better strategy than tailing the liberal-controlled unions, churches and other mass organizations. A good place to start would be to challenge them at their mobilization of thousands of workers in Washington, D.C. on October 2, which the Democrats plan to use to bring the working class to the polls, not into militant action.
PLP’ers and friends must organize now to expose and combat the openly-racist Tea Party and the deadlier genocidal liberals and use October 2 to build the Party as indispensable steps on the road to a capitalist-crushing communist revolution.