Ashcroft, Ridge and more
The rift comes home
By Deirdre Griswold
Where will the axe fall next?
The Bush administration is riven by deep contradictions--and
not only over its failed war to subjugate Iraq, which caused
CIA Director George Tenet's head to roll at the beginning of
June.
There is growing tension among the government agencies that
deal with domestic policy, too--especially the many powerful
organs of the capitalist state that employ growing armies of
police of various kinds, trained to use force and violence to
protect the status quo. The rift that appears to have opened up
between Attorney General John Ashcroft and Homeland Security
czar Tom Ridge is only a symptom of it.
Both foreign and domestic policy flow from the same source:
the class relations of a given society. And those class
relations are becoming shakier every day. No one can dispute
that the gap is wider than ever in the United States between
the fundamental classes--the shrinking group of capitalists who
own and control the productive wealth of society, quite a few
of whom have graduated from millionaires to billionaires, and
the millions of workers whose economic well-being and prospects
for the future become bleaker every day.
This sharp intensification of exploitation is bound to break
out in a volcanic renewal of the class struggle. The only
question is how soon it will start and how rapidly it will
grow. There are already signs that many of the most oppressed
workers--especially women and people of color--are on the
march.
Armed might not enough
The thinking by the Bush administration that it could
establish U.S. domination over the whole world with its
superiority in military technology has run aground in Iraq
because, in the long run, even military strength flows from
politics, and not the other way around. And the political
situation in Iraq has been fundamentally altered by the ongoing
resistance of the Iraqi people--despite cruel repression by the
well-armed occupying forces. The people's struggle let the air
out of the Bush-Rumsfeld doctrine of world domination.
So when is the same lesson going to be applied here at
home?
Ashcroft and Ridge are the two most visible figures
representing the domestic structures of state repression: the
Justice Department, which controls the courts, many of the
prisons and the FBI; and the newly created Department of
Homeland Security, which is supposed to bring under its
umbrella all the agencies involved in responding to an internal
crisis.
A rather bizarre incident recently showed that, despite
professions of collaboration and mutual respect, there is deep
animosity between these two.
On May 26, Ashcroft, with FBI Director John Mueller at his
side, dramatically stepped before the television cameras to
declare that "credible intelligence, from multiple sources,
indicates that al-Qaeda plans to attempt an attack on the
United States in the next few months." It was the type of
announcement deliberately calculated to bolster George W.
Bush's standing in the polls, which had been dropping with the
Abu Ghraib torture scandal. The thinking undoubtedly was that a
population made to feel they are in imminent danger will be
more likely to accept brutality and criminal abuse inflicted by
the authorities on presumed "suspects."
But, almost immediately, Ashcroft's announcement was
challenged.
Ridge's Department of Homeland Security didn't elevate the
national "threat warning" to red, or even orange. Instead, it
remained at yellow, where it had been for months. And Ridge
"seemed to downplay the warning in a series of interviews,"
said CBS News the next day. "There's not a consensus within the
administration that we need to raise the threat level," Ridge
said.
The powerful corporate media--which in many ways functions
as an arm of the capitalist state, just as the church did in
relation to the feudal state--more or less ridiculed Ash
croft's grandstanding. It pointed out that local law
enforcement hadn't been informed of any new threat and were
shaking their heads in wonder.
Almost two weeks later, on June 8, Ashcroft testified before
the Senate Judiciary Committee, which wanted to know about "a
cascade of recently disclosed memorandums in which lawyers from
his department as well as those from the Defense Department and
other agencies provided legal arguments that inflicting pain in
interrogating people detained in the fight against terrorism
did not always constitute torture," wrote the New York Times on
June 9.
When Ashcroft refused to hand over several of these
memorandums, he was warned by two of the senators that he could
be in contempt of Congress. One of them, Sen. Joseph Biden of
Delaware, gave a pragmatic rather than moral or principled
reason for not using torture. He said prohibitions on torture
are intended to "protect my son in the military. That's why we
have these treaties. So when Americans are captured, they are
not tortured. That's the reason, in case anybody forgets it."
Not a word about the suffering of the Iraqis and other people
held in U.S. interrogation camps.
There is always rivalry among government bureaucracies
competing for hegemony and funding. Capitalist politics is very
largely a fight for spoils among factions competing to be
blessed by the ruling class as its loyal servants. But they are
supposed to keep the struggle out of sight, especially in
"times of war"--or what the president and others deem to be
war. They're not supposed to let the poisoned daggers out of
their sheaths when cameras are grinding.
The war at home
Of course, none in the political establishment will ever
point to the predatory ruling class as the real threat to the
workers and oppressed peoples living in this country. More
people die every day from preventable conditions--lack of
health care, industrial pollution, accidents on the job, food
contamination, and the chaotic and stressful personal and
family relations that accompany economic insecurity and the
objectification of women as property--than have died in all the
so-called terrorist attacks. But no super-agency like the
Department of Homeland Security has been created to deal with
this very real terrorism of rampaging capitalism. The existing
government agencies supposed to deal with these problems are
woefully underfunded and virtually toothless.
It is also noteworthy that in this recent period a number of
judges around the country have ruled as unconstitutional
executive orders that allowed various police and military
agencies to hold "suspects" indefinitely, without any due
process of law.
The widening rifts in the Bush administration--first over
foreign policy, now over domestic repression--are partly
political in nature, using the narrow definition of that word.
A national election is coming up and the party out of office
sees the opportunity to take hold of the huge machinery of
government, with its many opportunities for patronage and
influence. Schemes and maneuvers to line up votes, like
Ashcroft's move, are more likely to be exposed.
But that doesn't explain the struggles among Republican
appointees--like Rums feld versus Powell, or Ashcroft versus
Ridge. These struggles reflect the much deeper angst within the
ruling class itself that its long ideological hold over the
masses is loosening--both abroad and here at home.
Under it all are the involuntary economic processes by which
capitalism generates profit--processes that are undermining the
social stability of the system. The globalization of the labor
market is bringing back home the wretched conditions of
exploitation that a century ago generated a robust labor
movement in this country, but were then exported as U.S.
capital moved abroad. It is also bringing to these shores
workers whose political awareness and militancy was shaped in
countries oppressed and super-exploited by imperialism.
Politics, as Marx explained, is concentrated economics. The
ruling class that is conducting a war for profit abroad is
conducting the same war at home against the workers. There is
no reason to think that the repressive machinery in the hands
of Ashcroft and Ridge will be any more effective against the
resistance of the workers than the Pentagon has been against
the resistance of the Iraqi people. Quite the opposite.
Reprinted from the June 17, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
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