Three recent White House scandals — its handling of the attack on the U.S. embassy in Libya; its use of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) against Tea Party political groups; and its spying on Associated Press reporters — reflect serious disagreements within the ruling capitalist class.
On one side is the finance capital wing, which is preparing for long-term global conflict to maintain U.S. rulers’ top-dog status. These liberal imperialists are represented by Barack Obama’s new “Defense” Secretary, Chuck Hagel, who is seeking a U.S.-led alliance to confront rivals.
In opposition is a less powerful group of capitalists, led by the billionaire Koch brothers, with a shorter-range outlook. They are seeking immediate profits from domestic investments and are less interested in paying the bills for U.S. hegemony around the world.
In addition to this fundamental split, the liberal wing has its own internal conflict. It centers on how quickly the Obama administration can move toward fascism at home as it prepares for more imperialist wars. Even as they try to round up international allies, the bosses remain a long way from the domestic unity they need for their war plans.
U.S. workers are under brutal attack from wage cuts — Obama helped General Motors slash wages in half — and from persistent mass unemployment. The bosses have accelerated their drive for maximum profits by exploiting a temporary, part-time workforce and denying them benefits. Health care costs are sky-high for workers fortunate enough to get care at all. Police terror is on the rise, with racist cops killing black and Latino youth with impunity. Expanded oil and gas pipelines destroy the environment; oil drilling contaminates water on Native American reservations. With his storm troopers from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Obama continues to set new records in his massive detention and deportation of immigrant workers.
In accord with the Democratic Party’s standard procedure, these fascist measures are being imposed behind a liberal façade. But “lesser-evil” Obama is not simply a repeat of Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter. He has moved even further to the right.
Splitting over Benghazi
Many Republicans are professing outrage that Obama failed to prevent the al Qaeda attack last September 11 that killed the U.S. ambassador and his mercenary guards in Benghazi, Libya’s second largest city. In reality, this furor stems from a long-simmering dispute over strategy. On one side stand the domestically oriented capitalist wing that ascended with former President George W. Bush and his top lieutenants, Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Cheney. This camp tilted toward on-the-cheap, quick-hitting attacks on smaller foes like Libya and Iraq. Livid at the Benghazi fiasco, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) is urging Obama’s impeachment (Business Insider, 5/12/13). He’s also proposing U.S. air strikes on Iran and North Korea and opposed Hagel’s appointment because Hagel was considered soft on Iran.
But the finance capital wing, led by Obama, wants to exercise more patience. They need more time to build a coalition for a far wider clash with a potential axis of enemies led by China and Russia. Hagel moved to the Pentagon from his chairmanship of the Atlantic Council, which is funded by the Rockefeller-JP Morgan-ExxonMobil-Pentagon forces. Shortly before Hagel left, this think tank issued a report calling for a ramping up of a U.S.-led alliance including Brazil, Turkey, Indonesia, and India to be in position to challenge U.S. enemies.
The IRS Frenzy
A different antagonism underlies Obama’s scandal within the IRS, which targeted Tea Party political groups by denying them nonprofit tax status during the 2012 elections. Here it’s the smaller bosses’ reluctance to fund the U.S. war machine, even though some of them profit mightily from its actions. Tea Party funders Charles and David Koch own an energy company that buys some Iraqi oil safeguarded by the U.S. Navy. But unlike ExxonMobil, Koch Industries does not pump from contested Iraqi soil. Moreover, Koch’s energy profits are concentrated in North America, far from U.S. imperialist war zones in Asia and Africa. As a result, the Koch camp requires less protection from the Pentagon.
Consider this statement from the Koch-controlled Cato Institute (5/15/13): “Economic interests are real but rarely warrant war. Stability may be a geopolitical virtue, but does not justify a neo-imperial American global presence.” In other words, the Koch-led bosses don’t want to pay for imperialist adventures to preserve the U.S. bosses’ international control.
Obama’s forces have attacked the Tea Party-Koch faction for their anti-Exxon heresy of opposing tax increases for war. On April 21, the New York Times, the leading mouthpiece for the arch-imperialist U.S. faction, warned of Koch efforts to buy the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, and other papers, “to shift the country toward a smaller government with less regulation and taxes.” On May 18, the Times sought to stir anti-Koch feeling among environmentalists with the story of how Koch Industries has built a toxic petroleum coke mountain in Detroit.
Spying on the ‘Free Press’
Obama’s third disgrace, his administration’s spying on Associated Press reporters covering a terrorist plot in Yemen, exposes the maneuvering within U.S. imperialism’s main liberal wing. At the heart of the scrap is just how openly fascist U.S. rulers should appear to the U.S. working class. Wiretapping Attorney General Eric Holder is allowing Obama to seize higher ground. The same farce played out in Holder’s earlier threat to summarily execute U.S. citizen “terrorists” with drones. In both cases, the object for U.S. warmakers has nothing to do with justice. Their goal is to gauge how much brutal state power they can win the working class to support.
Meanwhile, U.S. rulers are finding an international alliance to be elusive. Noah Feldman, a Harvard Law professor who advised the U.S. military in its Iraq invasion and occupation, writes: “The United States will...have to broaden its base of allies using the tools of ideology....India is the leading candidate for membership....” (Foreign Policy, 5/16/13). Feldman counts on the irresistible pull of the “American Way”: “The strongest argument that can be made...is that Chinese hegemony would threaten their democratic freedoms.”
But the current issue of Foreign Affairs, the top policy journal bankrolled by the finance capitalists, is lamenting India’s lack of readiness to mobilize its billion-plus population in a U.S.-led war. And Feldman pointed to a more probable union: “Russia may emerge as China’s most important geostrategic ally.”
Workers Have No Stake in the Bosses’ Institutions
What the bosses aren’t talking about publicly is the ultimately crucial allegiance of our working class. The international working class, including U.S. workers, has no stake in protecting U.S. diplomats around the world. U.S. embassies and consulates are essentially CIA outposts intent on protecting U.S. corporate profits and the dictators who serve them. They also organize attacks and assassinations against pro-working-class forces that fight their exploiters.
For U.S. workers, the IRS is a bosses’ institution that bankrolls the rich, allowing them to move their profits to tax-free havens while forcing our class to pay for the rulers’ wars.
Finally, the crocodile tears being shed by the Associated Press and the New York Times over “protecting” reporters’ pursuit of the facts are laughable. The main role of the boss-controlled media is to steer the working class into supporting the profit system as the “best” system devised by humankind. Any progressive ideas that emerge are those endorsing reforms to a system that can’t be reformed.
While the capitalists maneuver and factionalize, our class must take only one side: the one that organizes for revolution to overthrow a profit system that spreads misery among the international working class. No bosses serve the interests of garment workers in Bangladesh or miners in South Africa. None of them are allied with immigrants toiling in the fields or workers suffering from boss-imposed austerity throughout Europe, Asia and Latin America. None of them are the friends of tens of millions of jobless youth.
Workers Are Fighting Back
Workers are not taking their oppression lying down. Not the Bangladesh garment workers who have taken their protests to the streets. Not the platinum miners in South Africa who are wildcatting against the new apartheid’s repression. Not the Peugeot auto strikers in France, or the immigrant workers from South Asia striking in Dubai. Not the teachers in Mexico opposing the rulers’ anti-worker reforms. Not the multiracial workers and youth in New York City organizing against racist, murdering cops.
Billions of workers are now suffering capitalism’s exploitation, racism and wars. But once armed with the communist ideas of the Progressive Labor Party, they have the power to destroy the tiny class that rules us. They will erect a society without bosses and profits, run by the international working class in our class interests.