It can happen here

Bush’s appointee to be the new head of the CIA, Air Force Gen. Michael V. Hayden, is exactly what one would expect of this president. He fits in well with John D. Negroponte, who was chosen by Bush to fill the newly created post of director of national intelligence and is reported to have forced the resignation of the previous CIA head, Porter Goss, in order to replace him with Hayden.

Negroponte came to his job with a most sinister resumé, having been a principal figure in facilitating the death-squad governments in Central America in the 1980s that massacred hundreds of thousands of peasants, trade unionists, students and even church workers in order to keep the area secure for super-exploitation by U.S. corporations.

The many immigrants from that region who today risk all for below-minimum-wage jobs in the U.S. are fleeing the takeover of their land by agribusiness and the entrenched poverty that followed the bloody suppression of those popular movements. And in Latin American countries, the miserable conditions created by the triumph of imperialist globalization in the 1980s and 1990s are fueling a great swing to the left, inspired by the proud, independent stands taken by Cuba and Venezuela.

Hayden has another connection that endears him to the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld crowd. He’s Air Force, and he’s for taking more hundreds of billions out of general tax revenues and spending them on expensive high-tech war machines and gadgets that are supposed to keep the U.S. military unbeatable all over the world.

He also likes the kinds of gadgets that spy on people here. As director of the National Security Agency from 1999 until last year, when he was appointed Negroponte’s deputy, he approved Bush’s program to secretly eavesdrop on 5,000 people in the U.S. without getting court approval, as required by the FISA law. Even though 9/11 was on his watch as head of national security, he seems to have the old Reagan Teflon coating: nothing sticks to this spy chief.

Bush’s approval rating has been steadily dropping in the polls, and is now his lowest ever: 32 percent. The economy has soured for tens of millions of workers and quite a few middle class people, too, and the future looks even bleaker with rising energy prices and more layoffs. Bush can’t drum up much support for his occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Yet he goes on with his right-wing agenda, as the appointment of Hayden shows.

In fact, the one thing the clique in the White House has going for them is the utter spinelessness of the Democratic Party leadership, which refuses to unambiguously embrace such popular positions as end the occupation, bring the troops home, tax the rich and restore gutted social services.

Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat who is House minority leader, brushed off suggestions by Tim Russert of NBC’s Meet the Press on May 7 that if the Democrats get a majority in the mid-term election, they might be for getting out of Iraq or for investigating the false assertions of the Bush administration that Iraq had WMDs. She emphatically distanced herself from Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, asserting her party had no intention of taking any steps that might lead to Bush’s impeachment. “I’m the leader” in the House, she said testily.

But while the charade of democracy goes on up above, in which the “people’s” party reveals it is just as beholden to big business as the Republicans, there is true movement from below. Both the instability of the capitalist economy, and the sacrifices demanded of the workers and oppressed so that U.S. imperialism can keep trying to reassert its weakening grip over the world, are breaking up the decades of “class peace” at home. Most dramatic, of course, was the great upsurge on May Day, when millions of Latin@s took the lead in demonstrations for immigrant rights that also attracted many other nationalities and support from home-grown progressives.

Yes, the intent of those who wield state power is alarming. They have already shown their ugly fangs to much of the world, and anyone expecting them to be swayed by moral arguments must wait in vain.

But this whole period since the invasion of Iraq has shown that not even the most sophisticated and expensive technology can prevail over a determined people’s resistance. If in other countries, why not here?