The ruling class crisis deepens

The signs of political and economic crisis for U.S. imperialism keep multiplying.

The Bush administration is under siege, its ratings having tanked. Former members of the government like I. Lewis Libby, once Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, are turning against it to save their own necks.

Tom DeLay (R-Texas), until recently the powerful majority leader in the House, has announced he will be resigning from his congressional seat. One of his closest allies, Jack Abramoff, was recently sentenced to six years in prison for large-scale corruption. DeLay, whose corporate connections bought him 11 terms in Congress, knows where a lot of the administration’s bodies are buried.

The administration’s troubles are of course directly linked to the military occupation of Iraq and Washington’s attempts to cobble together a government there that will be subservient to U.S. economic and geopolitical interests.

Despite all the deaths and destruction inflicted by the Pentagon, the expansionist Rumsfeld Doctrine of military victory through the application of expensive high-tech weaponry hasn’t worked. Not only is the Iraqi resistance as active and determined as ever to get the U.S. and British out, but the political fallout from this bloody debacle is eating away at the Bush administration.

Even though to this day the Democratic Party leadership won’t take a clear anti-war stand—its major standard-bearers even want to expand the number of boots on the ground in the Middle East!—Bush’s dismal showing in the polls and the pro spect of the war escalating to Iran have multiplied his critics and broken the wall of silence in his own party.

There are few in the capitalist political establishment who want to oppose the war directly. None, certainly, who will call it what it is: an attempt to control the richest oil area in the world for the benefit especially of those corporations and banks whose lifeblood has been oil profits—and who are closely connected to the present ruling group in Washington.

The critics mostly focus on the process by which George W. Bush and his neo-con clique took the U.S. to war and got other imperialists and a few dependent countries—the much-touted “coalition of the willing”—to sign on to it. They appear surprised that the administration engaged in lying and other skullduggery, even though the history of imperialist interventions is replete with such deception.

What was the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution, by which Congress gave the Johnson administration a blank check to fund the deployment of hundreds of thousands of troops to Vietnam, but a blatant pretext for war? It was based on a supposed “attack” by a courageous Vietnam ese PT boat that was sunk approaching huge U.S. warships after they violated North Vietnam’s territorial waters. Maybe the public at large was bamboozled for a time by the media outcry, but the cynical leaders of Congress certainly knew better. As the saying goes, truth is the first casualty in wartime.

Eventually, with the publication of the Pentagon Papers, the details came out—but not until after the Vietnamese resistance had stalled the U.S. offensive and there was a militant, mass anti-war movement here at home and within the U.S. armed forces themselves.

This time the focus of criticism is on retaliation by Bush and Vice President Cheney against high-level government professionals—CIA agent Valerie Plame and her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson—who refused to endorse false administration claims that Iraq had tried to buy yellowcake uranium needed for a nuclear arsenal.

The latest news is that “Scooter” Libby, the who has been cooperating with the investigation headed by special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald, has named Bush and Cheney as the high officials who personally authorized the leak of classified information to the press that “outed” Plame, an undercover agent.

A Specter enters the arena

The most recent Republican to call on the White House for an explanation of all this is Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, who has remained silent until now. Spec ter is no liberal. He gave his powerful support to the war and the Patriot Act.

He first became nationally known when he was chief counsel to the Warren Com mission. In this sensitive position—one that required his total loyalty to the over-riding interests and political stability of the U.S. ruling class—he helped concoct the “single bullet theory” that denied any conspiracy in the assassination of Presi dent John F. Kennedy, despite all the evidence to the contrary. The commission especially repressed evidence that powerful right-wingers in and out of the government had the motive and the access to direct the killings of Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald.

Specter also harshly grilled Anita Hill on the witness stand when the African-American law professor bravely stood up and opposed the nomination of Judge Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, alleging consistent sexual harassment.

Specter’s intervention in “Leakgate,” therefore, implies a new level of disaffection with the Bush grouping by ruling-class forces who feel its handling of foreign policy has contributed to the decline of U.S. power over the rest of the world, when it was supposed to do just the opposite.

Iran and the nuclear threat

The administration had used the phony nuclear weapons story, even though its own intelligence agents rejected it, in making its case to the UN and the world that Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” justified an invasion.

At first the invasion appeared successful. The initial “shock and awe” bombing of Baghdad quickly overcame Iraq’s defenses, so that six weeks later Bush could boastfully proclaim, “Mission Accom plished.” But it soon became obvious that the Iraqi people would not bow down to foreign domination—not half a century after they had fought for and won their independence.

Now, the administration is once again trying to use the same scare tactics to arouse public opinion against Iran, which is openly developing facilities for peaceful nuclear energy. This time, authoritative voices of the ruling class like the New York Times are voicing apprehension over where the administration is going with its campaign. While the Bush administration is making light of them, an April 11 Times editorial takes seriously the allegations of investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who wrote in the issue of the New Yorker magazine dated April 17 that the Pentagon is working on plans to attack Iran, possibly with nuclear weapons.

The nuclear threat has been part of the U.S. arsenal ever since the bomb was drop ped on Japan in 1945, and this threat was used countless times against the USSR, Vietnam, China, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and even Cuba. The fear of the ruling class, however, is that it will boomerang today and put U.S. imperialism in an even worse position.

The disgust of the masses around the world for the U.S. war in Iraq affects other capitalist governments, too, where figures associated with the Bush policies, like right-wing media magnate Silvio Berlus coni in Italy, have suffered political setbacks.

Big leap in class struggle at home

This struggle over foreign policy is playing out at the same time that the class struggle in the U.S. has suddenly taken a dramatic leap.

Even threats of lost income, firing and deportation aren’t enough anymore to silence the many millions of underpaid, overworked immigrants whose super-exploitation has swollen the profits of bosses large and small across the United States.

In a shock to the capitalists who are used to taking them for granted—and to the politicians who had thought that pending legislation to turn every undocument ed person into a felon would club them down even further—they are pouring into the streets in a countrywide movement for full rights that continues to broaden and pick up steam.

The impact of this sudden rising of the most oppressed will be enormous. It is bound to accelerate the awakening of millions of other workers—organized and unor ganized—who desperately need a way to fight back against the looting of their jobs, pensions, health care and wages by the rapacious class of multi-billionaires.

It has also opened a rift in Bush’s own ranks. His avowed support of a “guest worker” program pleases employers who want a steady supply of low-wage workers stripped of their rights, but it turns off the rabid, xenophobic racists who blame immi grants for everything that’s going wrong and want to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. It’s another case, like the Dubai port fiasco, of Bush’s reactionary policies coming back to bite him.

Finally, a piece of economic news confirms that many of the people with money to invest are afraid of the stock market, which generally anticipates what the economy is going to do. The price of gold just reached $600 an ounce—a sure sign that investors fear rocky times ahead.

Instability in the center of world imperialism should be a signal to the movement to politically prepare for a serious struggle against this racist, imperialist government, which is prone to creating military crises, as well as the vile system of capitalist exploitation that is bringing chaos into the lives of so many millions of workers.