Capitalist politicians of all stripes are falling all over themselves to capitalize on the Tucson shootings and boost their popularity. Obama responded to the sickening massacre with sickening hypocrisy. At a memorial service there, he called for “more civility in our public discourse.” Meanwhile, Obama commits barbaric mass murder for the benefit of his liberal, imperialist bosses. As Obama spoke of “healing,” the U.S. war machine he heads was busy maiming and killing. Since Inauguration Day, Obama’s escalating Afghan war has slaughtered 2,002 civilians, most along a U.S.-planned pipeline route.
Jared Loughner murdered six people. But Obama & Co. perpetuate atrocities far more deadly against workers in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Millions have died so that Exxon Mobil could gain access to Iraq’s biggest oilfield. Pilotless drones, Obama’s preferred instrument of terror, target villages in Pakistan and Yemen.
Obama commands secret U.S. death squads called Special Operations forces “in 75 countries, compared with about 60 at the beginning of last year....Plans exist for preemptive or retaliatory strikes in numerous places around the world” (Washington Post, 6/4/10). So it was particularly stomach-turning when assassin-in-chief Obama exploited the innocence of nine-year-old Tucson victim Christina Green.
To sugar-coat his imperialist masters’ widening war agenda, Obama talked of “forging a country...worthy of her gentle, happy spirit.” In other countries, however, U.S. attacks regularly incinerate and dismember children Christina’s age.
Mad Loner or Tea Partier; Capitalist Ideas Prodded Gunman
Shooter Loughner’s motivation may have been influenced by the Tea Party side of the deepening split among U.S. capitalists. It pits bosses who profit directly from U.S. imperialist wars against those who don’t. The former need higher taxes and greater regulation, centralized in Washington, to wage coming, larger conflicts with Iran, China and Russia. Globally-focused, and mainly Rockefeller-related, banks like JP Morgan and oil giants like Exxon Mobil and Chevron lead this faction.
Increasingly violent Tea Party rhetoric could well have enlisted Loughner as an anti-big government foot-soldier after his rejection by the imperialist U.S. Army.Then again, he may be out of his mind.
In either case, the fault lies with the profit system. And both factors are probably at play here. Domestic capitalists engender Tea Partyism among smaller bosses and workers who see themselves as allies. But in a larger sphere, capitalism’s “every-man-for-himself,” “dog-eat-dog” competition promotes an ideology of profound individualism. Especially among unemployed workers like Loughner, individualism can quickly become social isolation, a breeding ground for mental illness.
War-Making Liberals, Needing G.O.P Support, Shift Tucson Guilt From Palinites to Psychosis
At first liberals openly blamed Tucson on Tea Partyism. Ex-senator Gary Hart co-authored the Clinton-era Hart-Rudman reports that predicted 9/11 and urged full U.S. mobilization for world war. Hart whined:
“Political rhetoric used by politicians and the media has become more inflammatory....Today we have seen the results of this rhetoric” (Huffington Post, 1/8/11).
But a week later, Frank Rich, the top Obama-watcher at the liberal rulers’ New York Times, said (1/16/11), “Let’s stipulate that Loughner was a ‘lone nutjob.’” The war-making liberals’ back-tracking stems from their need to win over, not alienate, Republicans who made big Congressional gains in November.
Yet, despite calls for civilized debate by the dominant U.S. capitalists, their crimes justify working-class anger that goes far beyond rhetoric. On top of their murderous assaults of workers overseas, U.S. rulers enforce 30-million-plus unemployment, wage-cuts for those still employed, reductions in every form of social service, and the highest rates of arrest and imprisonment in the world.
Racism enables and worsens this onslaught. Black and Latino workers and youth suffer double the jobless rates; lower wages and incomes; the worst social service cuts in healthcare and schools. Because of racist discrimination, such as racial profiling and stop-and-frisk laws, blacks and Latinos also comprise 70% of the 2.4 million in prisons. They are forced into slave labor, which nets hundreds of billions in super-profits for the bosses.
Many have pointed out that there is little done in this society to prevent mentally-ill people from killing, even when they are widely recognized as dangerous to themselves and others, as Loughner was. He easily bought the automatic pistol two months earlier and the ammunition on the morning of the shooting.
There was no help available for his mental illness or for thousands of others in similar straits, largely because of the legislature’s cuts in mental health benefits. And these cuts flow from the hundreds of billions the ruling class spends on the imperialist wars in the Middle East and to maintain over 700 bases worldwide, including13 floating aircraft carrier bases.
If anyone is to blame for the Tucson killings, it’s the entire state apparatus and the capitalist class that owns it, lock, stock and barrel.
Workers Need to Take Aim at the Capitalist System
Shooting individual politicians, let alone innocent bystanders, can never help the working class in any way, let alone gain workers’ power. Such acts only serve to help the rulers justify a much stronger police state.
The various capitalist camps want us to take sides over Tucson. We should support our own side, the working class. Our best hope lies in organizing for the ultimate destruction of capitalists of all stripes. That is the revolutionary, communist Progressive Labor Party’s ultimate goal. These are the ideas that PLP members and friends must advance in every mass organization and in every class struggle in which we are immersed.
Giffords No Friend of the Working Class
When a crazed gunman shot Gabrielle Giffords, a third-term Democratic Congresswoman from Arizona — amid capitalism’s global wars and economic catastrophes — what should a worker think? Is Giffords “one of us”? She has a reputation of being a liberal and is hated by her more obviously right-wing opponents. But she is an honorary co-chair of Third Way, a think-tank that seeks a middle-policy ground between “left and right,” essentially seeking to unify the ruling class. In fact, Third Way is run by Wall Street financiers and is no friend of the working class (http://thirdway.org/trustees).
Giffords is not on our side in the class struggle. She has been complicit in crimes against the working class. She has voted for every funding bill for the wars in the Middle East and has supported the escalations. She has contributed to the racist atmosphere against Latinos by fighting to secure the border with Mexico (but not with Canada!) against immigrant workers under the guise of preventing drug smuggling. She has added to the racism that is implicit in blaming all immigrant Latino workers for drug criminality, though only a few percent of those who cross the border are involved in drug dealing.
When one of Arizona’s other two liberal Democratic Congressmen, Raul Grijalva, called for a boycott against Arizona in response to the legislature’s passage of S.B. 1070 — the racist bill that requires that all cops profile Latino workers and demand their documentation — Giffords opposed doing anything to hurt Arizona business profits. She is, herself, a small-business owner.
Remember the ‘Hinckley-Jodie Foster’ Farce?
The current Tucson shooting resembles the media dance that followed John Hinckley’s failed assassination attempt on Reagan in March 1981. Initial reports pointed to political and economic motives. Hinckley had neo-Nazi ties, and his family owned an oil and gas company that had begun to suffer severely from Reagan’s recent abolition of energy price controls. But U.S. mainstream media soon broadcast Hinckley’s deranged obsession with the actress Jodie Foster. Then, as now, the main U.S. rulers sought to paper over serious disputes at home in order to appear united in the face of global imperialist rivalry. Reagan’s oil price drop aimed at reducing profits for, and impoverishing, the oil-exporting Soviet Union.
Today, the U.S.’s ruling Obama-Rockefeller crew needs to show internal unity against rising external foes like Iran and China. Thus the press now tends to portray Loughner as a madman rather than forerunner of an armed insurrection.