The fallacy of the 'anybody but Bush' movement
By Fred Goldstein
All those gripped by the "anybody but Bush"
fever should pause to reflect on the actual situation, stripped
of fraudulent hype and false hopes.
To be sure, the Bush administration is one of the most
reactionary regimes in recent years. Under the false slogan of
the "war against terrorism," Bush has invaded Afghanistan and
Iraq; expanded U.S. military bases in Central Asia, sent troops
to the Philippines, Yemen, Africa and now Haiti; and given the
Sharon government the go-ahead to step up its aggression
against the Palestinian national movement. Bush pushed passage
of the Patriot Act and engaged in wide-ranging repression
against peoples of the Middle East and south Asia. Bush has
threatened Iran, Syria, North Korea and Cuba. This is only a
partial list.
But wait a minute. Who is the leading candidate to take
Bush's place? John Kerry. What is Kerry's actual record? He is
trying to out do Bush in his promotion of the so-called "war
against terrorism"--the ideological premise for all the
international aggression and repression of the Bush
administration--and it has been adopted whole by Kerry.
Kerry voted for the war against Afghanistan and fully
supports the present occupation of that country. Kerry voted
for and fully supported the war in Iraq. His homepage declares,
"Whatever we thought of the Bush administration's decisions and
mistakes--especially in Iraq--we now have a solemn obligation
to complete the mission, in that country and in Afghanistan.
Iraq is now a major magnet and center for terror ... we must
stay in Iraq until the job is finished." Thus he is for the
occupation of both countries--the crimes begun by George W.
Bush are fully supported by Kerry.
Kerry voted for the Patriot Act. While he might trim a
provision or two here or there, he has not denounced John
Ashcroft's witch-hunt or demanded the release of thousands
being held in detention or facing deportation for manufactured
or petty charges simply because they have been caught in the
massive "homeland security" dragnet. He has not denounced the
arbitrary search, seizure and prosecution of Muslim
organizations on trumped-up charges across the country.
Kerry is a staunch supporter of Israel--and for the same
reason that he is a supporter of the "mission" in Iraq. That
"mission" is to seize the second-largest oil reserves in the
world, set up strategic bases in the center of the Arab world,
and guard the oil-rich Persian Gulf for the oil companies, U.S.
capitalist industry and the Pentagon. On this question there is
not a ray of daylight between Kerry and Bush, style and
rhetoric aside.
Bush, of course, is the darling of Wall Street, the oil
industry and all the corporate benefactors who have thrown
money at him for his campaign--$150 million and still
rising.
However, it should be remembered that the U.S. Senate has
long been known as the "millionaires' club" and Kerry is among
the richest members of the club. Kerry and his wife Teresa
Heinz Kerry have a combined fortune, according to the Center
for Public Integrity, of anywhere between $200 million and $840
million, depending upon the valuation of their portfolio. And
it is not all Heinz money. Kerry comes from a wealthy
background.
Kerry is a trusted agent of the ruling class, having been in
the Senate for 19 years. He serves on the prestigious Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, Intelli gence Committee and
Committee on Commerce, Science and Trans por ta tion. This
latter committee regulates the auto industry and the
communications industry. Kerry has been involved in the growing
centralization of monopoly power in the media.
In these committees Kerry rubs shoulders day-in and day-out
with many of the 50,000 corporate lobbyists who have a lock on
Washington. He deals with representatives of finance and
industry, with the CIA, the DIA, State Department officials and
military officials, and in general has been groomed as a
guardian of ruling-class interests.
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, he has been
the largest recipient of corporate donations in the Senate. In
the last election cycle alone, he got large contributions from
the health care, automobile and airlines industries, among
others. His rhetoric against special corporate interests is
pure demagogy.
Kerry to Wall Street:
'I'm pro business'
A Feb. 17 Wall Street Journal article entitled "Kerry Gets a
Lifeline from Wall Street" described house meetings with
financial big-wigs, including top executives from such firms as
Blackstone Group, UBS bank, Citibank and others. Louis Susman,
vice-chairperson of investment banking for Citigroup, is
Kerry's national finance chair. Citigroup is one of the largest
globalizing exploiters in the world and is the bank that helped
finance the schemes of Enron, WorldCom and Parmalac, among
others.
The article noted Kerry's problem of having to bash
corporations in order to gain popular support at the same time
that he seeks corporate money. "Kerry is using populist
corporate-bashing rhetoric to woo the party's liberal base,
even as a campaign adviser privately sends the reassuring
message that the senator is really 'pro-business' and will be
'more nuanced going forward.'" Such is the cynicism of
capitalist politics--and in particular Democratic Party
politics, whose leadership is loyal to the imperialist ruling
class but whose voting base is largely among the workers, the
oppressed and progressive sections of the middle class.
What stands out clearly under a close examination of the
politics, the finances and the history of Kerry is that the
entire presidential election, as it is projected by the
anybody-but-Bush ideology--as a race between progressivism,
liberalism or whatever sanitized label is used to justify
voting for Kerry and the Democratic Party--is dangerously false
and misleading.
Are there differences between Bush and Kerry, between the
Republican and Democratic Party leaderships? Of course there
are differences. Is the Bush administration further to the
right than a Kerry administration might be? Yes. But what does
this mean for the workers and the oppressed and all genuine
opponents of reaction?
The Kerry forces would like to point to the domestic arena
to differentiate Kerry from Bush. While it is true that Kerry
is not as far to the right on social issues, it must not be
forgotten that he voted for the joint effort by Clinton and
Newt Gingrich to destroy welfare--the so-called Welfare Reform
Act, which plunged millions of women, children and single men
into the deepest poverty. Nor should his support for Clinton's
Effective Death Penalty Act be forgotten--which set up a vast
acceleration of executions across the country. Of course, Kerry
is also firmly against same-sex marriage.
Just because Bush is a reactionary, that does not make Kerry
a progressive. In fact Kerry, or whoever might have been chosen
by the Democratic Party as a candidate to take over the running
of the capitalist state, would be a solid representative of
U.S. imperialism whose goal would be to strengthen and expand
its domination on the world arena.
Kerry's attitude towards the Pentagon, U.S. militarism and
the domestic repressive apparatus of the state is firm and
unyielding. In his major "anti-terrorism" speech in Los
Angeles, reported in the Feb. 27 Washington Post, Kerry
denounced Bush for "doing too little" in the "war on
terrorism." He attacked the "doctrine of unilateral preemption"
as having "driven away our allies and cost us the support of
other nations." He said Iraq is "in disarray," with U.S. troops
"bogged down in a deadly guerrilla war with no exit in
sight."
Kerry is not opposed to the Iraq War. He is opposed to the
fact that the Bush group underestimated the Iraqi people's
capacity for resistance and hatred of colonial occupation.
Kerry has no intention of putting a stop to the drive towards
world domination. Kerry and his faction in the ruling class
feel that U.S. domination through multilateralism is preferable
because it's more effective. He and his co-thinkers feel that
the Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz grouping, by breaking up
the old alliances with the imperialist rivals in Germany and
France--by refusing to share the loot with the other thieves
and derisively calling them the "Old Europe"--and by their
failures in Iraq and Afghanistan have actually demonstrated the
weakness and dependence of U.S. imperialism, not its
omnipotence.
The factions of the ruling class around Kerry feel that the
U.S. military is overstretched; that the aggressive policies of
the Bush administration have not been thought out; that the
implications of trampling on alliances were disregarded, and
that Washington had to humiliate itself when it sent its
emissaries to try to raise funds for the occupation of Iraq and
the Europeans sent them home empty-handed. They feel that
vilifying the United Nations, such a historically and
potentially useful tool for U.S. imperialism, was another
blunder, because Bush now has to beg and cajole the UN Security
Council to pull its irons out of the fire in Iraq.
Kerry to Spain: 'Don't pull out'
To show his dedication to the occupation of Iraq, Kerry
criticized the newly elected Prime Minister of Spain, Luiz
Rodriguez Zapatero, for declaring that he would pull Spanish
troops out of Iraq. What Zapatero should have said, according
to Kerry, is to declare "This increases our determination to
stay until the job is done." So Kerry wants the Spanish
imperialists to stay and help U.S. imperialism complete its
"mission" of recolonizing the Iraqi people.
Kerry accused the Bush administration of stretching the
military thin. Is his answer to pull the troops out? Not at
all. He proposes adding 40,000 troops to the Army for "the
remainder of the decade" so that he, Kerry, "would be prepared
to use military force to protect out security, our people and
our vital interests."
Kerry's criticism boils down to this: Bush's policies have
weakened U.S. imperialism. And his program can be summed up in
this: He will reverse Bush's mistakes and strengthen U.S.
imperialism.
The ruling-class opposition to Bush has the view that
alliances are essential to expanding Washington and Wall
Street's global domination. Careful orchestration is necessary.
The Bush experiment with openly declared "preemption" has
failed. Better to follow the Clinton model in the war against
Yugoslavia, or the Bush Sr. model in the first Gulf War of
1991. Round up the imperialist allies. Give them something for
their efforts. Be dominant but not so openly arrogant that you
engage in a policy of self-encirclement, self-isolation from
your fellow bandits.
The masses of the world are too numerous and too formidable
for U.S. imperialism to confront them all alone. Iraq and
Afghanistan are early proof of that. Kerry proposes a renewed
leadership which will return to the cunning of old.
The workers, the union movement, all the people who suffer
from one or another form of oppression in U.S. capitalist
society have absolutely no stake in rushing to prop up Kerry in
the hope that this will somehow bring them salvation. Right now
moves are afoot in the labor movement, women's movement, the
lesbian, gay, bi and trans movement, and in many progressive
circles to raise huge funds to pour into the Kerry
campaign.
Kerry has reportedly already accumulated a $70-million fund,
more than $40 million of it from the labor movement alone. The
progressive, anti-Bush forces, instead of turning it over to a
demagogic politician from the very establishment that is
carrying out war, oppression and exploitation, could make use
of even a small fraction of that money to mobilize the mass of
the people into a militant fightback movement that could take
to the streets, in Washington and cities across the country.
That is the way to answer the Bush reaction.
This war drive has nothing to do with Bush versus Kerry. It
has to do with the profit system that they both serve. The
capitalist system is in a constant state of crisis worldwide.
Every day the financial managers of Wall Street study the
economic numbers, hoping they will bring them some news of job
growth. They are confounded by their own system, which drives
them more and more to exploit workers, expand production,
increase productivity and lower wages to bolster profits. This
contradiction drives them to every corner of the globe, and
that requires war, intervention and occupation.
Only an independent, mass working-class struggle against the
evils of the system and against the system itself can push back
capitalist reaction and war.
Reprinted from the March 25, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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