Bush, capitalism, and the war crisis
By Fred Goldstein
As the people in the United States try to recover from the
horrendous destruction of thousands of lives in the Sept. 11
attacks, the Bush administration is working overtime. It is
using the suffering of the victims as a pretext to drum up war
fever and prepare the groundwork for thousands more deaths in
the Middle East--and probably among the workers in this
country.
Bush and the Pentagon are using so-called war powers to
mobilize aircraft carriers, cruise missile destroyers and B-52
bombers and to call up thousands of reservists for military
intervention. Only Barbara Lee, a Black woman representing the
district that includes Oakland, Calif., cast a heroic "no" vote
in Congress.
They are carrying out the war drive in the name of rooting
out terrorism and protecting the people of the U.S. But, in
truth, this leap toward militarism is doing precisely the
opposite.
Washington is preparing a civil war and air strikes in
Afghanistan that will kill untold numbers of civilians. Already
a million and a half impoverished Afghani people have been
converted into refugees, desperately fleeing the anticipated
U.S. air attacks.
The bombing of Afghanistan will not bring back the victims
of the Sept. 11 attack.
High officials in Washington and former government officials
regard this bombing as the first step in a much broader
military campaign. Those who prepare the public for what the
Pentagon may do talk about "getting" Iraq, Sudan and Syria.
It is likely that the vast majority of the people of the
Middle East were horrified by the Sept. 11 attack. Either they
opposed the death of so many innocent civilians, a fate with
which they are very familiar, or they could see that the U.S.
government would use this as a way to threaten all Arab people,
or both.
But as much as they may have opposed the attack, they are
even more opposed to the U.S., the British, the French and all
the NATO imperialist countries coming into the area and causing
even more death and suffering. These world powers have
dominated the countries of the region for over a century, and
it is already too long.
They know of the thousands of Palestinians who have been
killed resisting Israeli occupation. They know of the
million-plus Iraqis who have died because of U.S.-imposed UN
sanctions. They know Washington supported an Israeli invasion
of Lebanon in 1982 that killed 17,500 people in Beirut
alone.
Indeed, the history of the Middle East is one of being
tortured by Western powers. This slaughter goes all the way
back to the mid-19th Century, when 125,000 Egyptian workers
died building the Suez Canal under the whip of French
colonialism.
The people of the region may not endorse the Sept. 11
attack. But they will surely resist a new wave of Western
military intervention aimed at all the states in the region
that displease Washington, London, Paris and Berlin.
They will eventually oppose the local regimes imposed on
them, such as the feudal Saudi oil monarchy. This clique sits
on vast petroleum reserves tapped by U.S. oil companies for
super-profits. They have turned the land into an outpost of the
Pentagon.
The people will eventually resist the conservative pro-U.S.
Cairo regime that has protected Western corporations and
capitalism in Egypt. And they will continue the struggle
against the oppressive, colonial Israeli occupation.
Oil--the prize
Such a situation has the potential to lead to a vast war in
the Middle East. In such a war, workers from the U.S. will
eventually be called on to kill and be killed. This war will
not be against "terrorism" but to protect the financial
interests of the rich in the Western imperialist countries.
Bush's latest war moves are just the beginning of a process
that has no end.
There is only one way to secure peace and protect the
genuine interests of the U.S. workers. That is to withdraw U.S.
forces from the Middle East and let the peoples of the region
control their own resources and determine their own destiny.
The other way leads to endless war and death for capitalist
profit.
The Bush administration's response to the Sept. 11 attack
can only be understood in terms of the long-standing interests
and strategy of the U.S. and European corporate oil and banking
elite that dominates the region-Exxon/Mobil, Texaco, British
Petroleum, French oil companies and Royal Dutch Shell.
Oil is not only the lifeblood of industrial society. It is
the source of super-profits and military strength. The oil
magnates have forced this situation upon society. They have
blocked all alternative forms of energy.
They cannot own the sun, the wind, nor the hydrogen in the
air-all technologically possible alternatives to fossil fuels.
But none of these alternative fuels lend themselves to private
ownership and super-profits. As long as they can have a
stranglehold on oil--until they are forced out--the oil
magnates will never let the Middle East be in peace.
According to the Oil and Gas Journal and World Oil, two
principal industry research organs, the proven oil reserves in
the world came to approximately 1 trillion barrels as of Jan.
1, 2000. This doesn't include future discoveries that are
expected to be much larger. Of these 1 trillion barrels,
anywhere from 630 to 675 billion barrels are in the
Persian/Arabian Gulf.
Add to that the 30 billion barrels in Libya and the oil
reserves in this area of U.S. military, political and economic
domination come close to 70 percent of the world's total.
In addition, the earth has 5 quadrillion cubic feet of
natural gas reserves, of which 2 quadrillion are in the same
region. This is significant because of technological leaps made
recently in the use of natural gas.
Pentagon in the Persian Gulf
The frenzy of the Bush administration and the capitalist
establishment about a war on terrorism has to be seen in the
light of their historic political and military objectives.
Consider the military terror that the peoples in the Persian
Gulf have been under.
According to the New York Times, there were extensive U.S.
forces in the region prior to Sept. 11. The Navy had 20,000
personnel and two aircraft carrier battle groups with 70
aircraft. In Saudi Arabia there are 5,200 U.S. troops, mainly
from the Air Force, with Patriot missiles, F-15, F-16 and F-117
fighter planes, U-2 spy planes and AWACS flying command
posts.
In Kuwait there are 4,800 troops from the Army and Air Force
plus a prepositioned, reinforced brigade with two tank
battalions, a mechanized infantry battalion and an artillery
battalion.
Bahrain houses 1,000 personnel, mostly naval, and is the
headquarters of the Fifth Fleet.
In Turkey, 2,000 troops, mostly from the Air Force, are
stationed at a base used to fly over Iraq with F-15 and F-16
fighters.
Other U.S. forces are spread around the United Arab
Emirates, Oman, Qatar and, in the Indian Ocean, Diego
Garcia.
Altogether the U.S. has 30,000 troops, massive numbers of
aircraft, missiles, artillery and bases for rapid deployment in
the region.
These forces were already there before the current crisis.
They threatened the people on a 24-hour-a-day basis lest anyone
in the region did anything to jeopardize the vast oil,
financial and militarily strategic interests of the U.S. Now
they are being vastly increased.
Kissinger on ruling-class aims
The dangers of the Bush adventure were made clear by Henry
Kissinger, Nixon's secretary of state, who appeared on a
special panel on Fox TV at 10 p.m. on Sept. 21, along with a
number of other former government officials.
Kissinger summed up his thinking about the present
situation. This "could be a turning point," he said, comparable
to the "defeat of communism in the Soviet Union," in that it
held out the prospect of the "defeat of terrorism on a global
basis."
During the Vietnam War, Kissinger threatened the Vietnamese
numerous times with nuclear annihilation. He was the architect
of the Chilean military coup d'etat by General Augusto Pinochet
on Sept. 11, 1973. In that coup, thousands of revolutionaries,
progressives and liberals were summarily killed or
"disappeared."
To Kissinger, as to his colleagues in the capitalist
government hierarchy, "terror" and "anarchy" apply to any force
that resists the domination of the U.S. multinational
corporations and banks and the Pentagon.
Such a definition could easily be extended to the
Palestinian struggle against Israeli occupation. It could be
extended to the liberation fighters in Colombia trying to rid
the people of a reactionary government that countenances death
squads. It could be extended to the people of Puerto Rico,
should they escalate their struggle to get the U.S. military
out of Vieques or to gain national independence. Cuba, the
Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Syria, Iran, Iraq and
Libya are also included on the U.S. government's official
"terrorist" list.
All the claims of the Bush administration and the capitalist
establishment about fighting "a war against terrorism" must be
understood in the context of the multi-trillion-dollar
interests of the rich corporate ruling class in controlling the
world.
Who will help the workers?
If the workers watch carefully what Washington is doing
instead of just what it is saying, they will get a truer
picture of how the bosses are handling the economic dislocation
that coincides with this capitalist war crisis.
The airline industry has announced 100,000 layoffs. What did
Congress do about it? It held a hearing on Sept. 18 where the
companies demanded $24 billion in direct aid and loan
guarantees. So Congress bailed out the airline bosses, not the
laid-off workers.
There was not a word about who is going to help the laid-off
workers pay their home and credit card loans, keep food on the
table, and maintain some semblance of normal economic life.
Congress has not yet decided how much to give, but the latest
number is $15 billion.
Many of these layoffs were planned before Sept. 11, as the
recession deepened. But the best the government will do for the
workers is to possibly speed up their unemployment insurance.
We'd like to see the bosses live on unemployment insurance
instead of the millions of dollars they all saved up during
this last boom.
In addition, no one in the capitalist establishment has
called for emergency aid to the untold hundreds of thousands
laid off in the wake of this crisis. Boeing alone has announced
30,000 layoffs. Many thousands more worked in medium and small
businesses that were already in trouble and went over the edge
after Sept. 11.
In a $10-trillion economy, the government has found no room
for instant, massive emergency aid to the masses of people to
keep them afloat. But Alan Greenspan, chair of the Federal
Reserve Bank, stepped in within days to aid the bankers and
Wall Street traders.
According to the Oct. 1 edition of Business Week, "the Fed
pumped tens of billions into the money markets. ... The cash
deluge peaked on Sept. 14, when the Fed flooded the banking
system with $81.25 billion-many times the $5 billion or so it
normally adds."
Several hundred billion dollars were made available to the
bankers, but the more than 7 million people officially
unemployed as the result of the already existing recession and
those additional workers unemployed because of the attack do
not qualify for emergency aid.
Military awash with funds
According to the Sept. 22 New York Times, even as the
attacks have "sent the stock market plummeting and caused havoc
for much of American business, prospects for the military
industrial complex are looking stronger than ever.
"Overnight," continued the Times, "political opposition in
Congress to huge increases in Pentagon spending has vanished,
along with concerns about dipping into the surplus of Social
Security funds."
Congress gave the Pentagon a quick $33 billion with promises
of more. This clearly was aimed at grabbing funds from the
people's pensions to line the pockets of the military
contractors. "The service chiefs and senior lawmakers," said
the Times, "will probably want to spend those funds on favored
weapons programs, like Boeing's F-18 E and F fighters, United
Defense's Crusader artillery system, and Northrop Grumman and
General Dynamic's DD-21 stealth destroyer. It will not matter
if those systems are not clearly useful in the war on
terrorism."
Bush has said he is going to wage war to "save our way of
life." But this society is a divided society. It is divided
into oppressor and oppressed peoples. It is also divided into
classes--workers and bosses, exploiters and exploited.
National, class divisions prevail
There is no one way of life. If you are Black, Latino,
Asian, Native or, especially now, Middle Eastern, you suffer
racism, police brutality, incarceration, discrimination of all
types. If you are one of the 50 million people who live in
poverty or at the near-poverty level, you have a way of life
that means just trying to survive.
But if you are one of the tiny minority of the super rich, a
Wall Street speculator, a banker or a major stockholder or CEO,
your hardships are different. You might have to postpone buying
another Mercedes or toning down a renovation on a mansion. You
might even have to sell a few million shares of stock to cover
your losses.
This crisis has brought out the capitalist nature of this
society. It has underlined capitalism's warlike nature abroad
and its cruelty at home. The people want and need peace. Peace
can only be won if U.S. forces get out of the Middle East.
The workers and the oppressed communities need an immediate
end to their growing economic crisis at home. That can't be
done by using the vast wealth and resources at the disposal of
society to bail out the airline bosses. It can't be done by
handing over hundreds of billions behind closed doors to the
bankers and money managers, or by giving it to the Pentagon and
the military corporations for more profits and more instruments
of death.
The bosses will tell you that they must come first,
otherwise businesses will fail and no one will have a job. But
that is only true when the capitalist profit system is forced
on society. The profit system is what stands in the way of
keeping everyone on the job, working and producing the wealth
of society, and distributing the products to those who need it.
That is what the workers need, and it's called socialism.
Needless to say, the capitalists don't like it.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
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