The U.S. ruling class needs a powerful military to carry out wars for maximum profit and control of resources and cheap labor. To that end it slaughters masses of workers and youth, from the Middle East to Bangladesh to Latin America. In particular, the military is essential to the bosses’ control of energy supplies, shipping routes, and pipelines. At stake is the rulers’ top-dog status over oil-hungry China, among others.
The Pentagon war machine must prepare for broader wars with its imperialist rivals even as it confronts the conflicts now erupting around the world. At the moment, the Middle East and South Asia are in disarray:
• Civil war and growing Russian influence in Syria;
• Warlords battling for control of Libya;
• Military coup in Egypt;
• Al Qaeda bases in Somalia, Mali, Yemen and Syria;
• Sectarian warfare in Iraq that threatens civil war and endangers oil supplies;
• Threat of Taliban control of Afghanistan after billions of dollars and thousands of troops were expended in a 12-year U.S. invasion;
• Jihadists’ challenge in nuclear Pakistan, where U.S. drone bombings are alienating much of the population.
U.S. military efficiency is undermined by the disunity that paralyzes Congress, hinders Obama’s efforts for U.S. imperialism, and divides the core of its war machine. This is a reflection of the growing division between domestic capitalists like the Koch brothers who do not profit from imperialist spending and the finance capitalists on Wall Street who do. Right-wingers are battling Obama & Co. for the loyalty of rank-and-file troops.
Racism puts U.S. rulers in a bind. On the one hand, the Tea Party forces’ open racism weakens military unity — a big problem for the liberal rulers, who depend on broad and diverse enlistment in their armed forces. On the other hand, the liberals need to infect U.S. troops with racism to motivate them to fight the black and brown populations of the Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Tea Party vs. the Pentagon
The anti-Obama Fox News indignantly reported,
Soldiers attending a pre-deployment briefing at Fort Hood say they were told that evangelical Christians and members of the Tea Party were a threat to the nation and that any soldier donating to those groups would be subjected to punishment under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (10/23/13).
A similar briefing at Mississippi’s Camp Shelby prompted Tea Party caucus member Rep. Doug Lamborn, a Colorado Republican, to pen a protest letter to the Pentagon endorsed by three of his colleagues: “This most recent mislabeling of a Christian organization [the American Family Association] reflects what appears to be a troubling trend of religious intolerance in the military” (Fox, 10/24/13). (An open racist, Lamborn has directed racist slurs against president Obama.)
The liberal forces, wearied by the Republican-led government shutdown, backed off. On October 24, Fox trumpeted, “The Secretary of the Army has ordered military leaders to halt all briefings on extremist organizations that labeled evangelical Christian groups as domestic hate groups.”
Mainstream U.S. imperialists are keeping a wary eye on Lamborn and his conversion from arms industry flunky to tax- and budget-slasher. He once ranked as one of the House’s top two dealmakers for military contracts, serving prominent death merchants like Northrup Grumman. Now, however, Lamborn backs tax cuts that would hobble the arms dealers sorely needed by U.S. imperialism. This may reflect the fight between the imperialist main wing and the domestic-
oriented capitalists.
Lamborn and his allies embolden evangelical preachers like Rick Joyner, who urges white officers and troops to forcibly oust Obama. “Our only hope is military takeover,” Joyner said during the shutdown, the latest standoff between the two major capitalist parties (Huffington Post, 10/2/13).
But for the main wing of U.S. imperialism, the most worrisome threat of the Tea Party and evangelical forces is ideological, representing a more openly racist force. Lamborn’s district, one of the most militarized in the nation, houses the U.S. Northern Command, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, Peterson Air Force Base, Schriever Air Force Base, and the Army’s Fort Carson. Right-wing Christian forces reign from top to bottom at the Air Force Academy, also in Lamborn’s district. As the Huffington Post reported two years ago, a hundred Academy cadets “were actually pretending to be fundamentalist Christians” to “maintain good standing among their peers and superiors at the Academy” (10/12/11).
ROTC Won’t Overcome Bosses’ Racism
But the U.S. bosses’ empire requires troops of all colors. Obama is relocating Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) programs from the historically racist South to the big cities, hoping to attract black and Latino youth in need of jobs. “The Army chose to close ROTC programs at 13 universities, more than half of them in the South. Tennessee alone will lose ROTC offerings at three of its public universities, the most of any state. The Army Cadet Command, which oversees ROTC and its approximately 33,000 aspiring soldiers, said that by shuttering the 13 lagging programs, it will be able to shift resources to 56 other markets, including Los Angeles, New York and Chicago” (New York Times, 10/22/13).
The Times’ piece also hailed Obama’s integration of the high command: “In 2011, about 28 percent of active duty Army officers were minorities, up from 23 percent a decade earlier.” In the same period, however, more and more black and Latino enlisted personnel shunned “combat arms” duty.
In a similar vein, the liberal rulers are seeking to remilitarize blue-state universities on the East Coast, both elite and working-class, the same institutions that once produced an officer corps in ideological lockstep with U.S. imperialism. ROTC now operates at both Harvard and New York’s City University. Not coincidentally, war criminal General David Petraeus has joined both of their faculties. At Harvard he is a fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs in the Kennedy School of Government. At City College he preaches seemingly harmless doctrines of infrastructure development and energy self-sufficiency. In fact, these are core components of the main U.S. rulers’ global war plans.
Streamlining U.S. domestic infrastructure will enable more rapid troop and arms movement across highways and rail lines nationwide, the main reason President Eisenhower developed the interstate highway system of the 1950s. Energy self-sufficiency is the bosses’ hedge against the threat of oil and gas cut-offs from Middle East sources.
Our Party’s militant actions at New York’s City College exposed Petraeus and his war pulpit. They are helping to mobilize masses of students who are outraged at the ex-general’s presence in the classroom.
Workers (both civilian and military) owe no group of bosses their allegiance, neither the racist Tea Party nor the war-bent Obama wing of U.S. capitalism. Our only loyalty is to our own class. Obama and the rulers he serves cannot hide the rampant racism that permeates the U.S. The stop-and-frisk policies of New York City’s cops, attacking innocent largely black and Latino youth, have spread nationwide. Cops are shooting indiscriminately at black and Latino workers and youth, from California to Florida to the shadow of the White House. And Obama’s agents continue to deport hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers while thousands languish in detention jails.
Only Communism Can End Centuries of Racism
For 400 years, racism has been the foundation of U.S. capitalism. It creates the bosses’ super-profits through lower wages and health benefits, slum housing and under-financed, segregated schools. Racism drags down white workers’ conditions as well, threatening them with the mass unemployment that already afflicts their black and Latino working-class sisters and brothers.
The fight against racism is indivisible from the fight against U.S. imperialist war. Building a mass Progressive Labor Party is the key to this fight. Our goal of a communist society — of, by and for the working class — is the only alternative to the profit system’s war, racism, sexism, mass unemployment and poverty. Joining PLP to organize communist revolution is the order of the day!