

January 2019

January 2019

Nancy Pelosi, Icon of

Female Capitalist Power

Democrat Nancy Pelosi wields the gavel after being sworn in as Speaker of the House of Representatives on January 3.

(Photo: Mark Wilson / Getty Images)

Democrat Nancy Pelosi wields the gavel after being sworn in as Speaker of the House of Representatives on January 3.

The New York Times (3 January) today ran a puff piece on “Nancy Pelosi, Icon of Female Power.” “A generation of young feminists is taking notice” of her ascent to Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, the Times wrote. Well, she is, actually – a symbol of female capitalist power. If you push for feminism in bourgeois politics, Pelosi is what you will get, or Hillary Clinton. Pelosi is the San Francisco millionaire congresswoman (estimated net worth, $100 million) who brags about raising $728 million in campaign cash for Democrats. Together with Chuck Schumer, the “Senator from Wall Street,” she claimed she had brokered a deal for the Dreamers with racist Donald Trump by throwing their undocumented immigrant parents under the bus. Now she claims to oppose Trump’s border wall while offering billions for increased “border security.”

In her previous stint as House Speaker, Pelosi “delivered the votes” for the 2007-08 multi-trillion-dollar bailout of the banks for Republican George W. Bush, Democrat Barack Obama and the billionaire investment bankers and hedge-fund operators who financed both of them. As the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee during the Bush presidency, she knew about the torture and “extraordinary rendition” of prisoners and said nothing, as was also the case with her Senate counterpart, sister California Democrat Diane Feinstein (net worth $79 million).

Down in the second tier of female capitalist politicians you get the likes of Kirsten Gillibrand, the champion of #MeToo and of the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division, who travels to Afghanistan to praise these professional killers as they slaughter Afghans. And among the incoming rookies in the 116th Congress you get wheeler-dealers like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the “Justice Democrat” who signed up with Democratic (Party) Socialists of America to build her brand and enlist leftist-inclined millennials as she votes for Pelosi in exchange for a piece of the pie of Congressional goodies. AOC is the “progressive” with 1.38 million Twitter followers who hails Franklin D. Roosevelt, the president that led the U.S. into the imperialist Second World War and interned Japanese Americans; who calls to “abolish I.C.E.” out of one side of her mouth, while on the other side she tells CNN that she is for “secure borders.”

Like Hillary Clinton, who stole relief funds in Haiti to set up a sweatshop garment factory paying black women workers under $5 a day, who greenlighted the 2009 coup in Honduras and who has incessantly beat the war drums to bomb Syria, these feminists are enemies of the liberation of poor, immigrant and working women, and of their class brothers. That’s Democratic Party feminism for you. You want it? You can have it. We internationalists, communists, fight for socialist revolution, which is the only road to women’s liberation.

As an Internationalist sign proclaimed at the April 2017 Women in the World “summit” of female imperialist power brokers (held in the David Koch Theater in Manhattan) that honored the failed Democratic presidential candidate and the Republican U.N. ambassador, “Warmonger Hillary and Trump Rep Nikki Haley: Not My ‘Sisters’.” Making it perfectly clear, another sign declared, “You Can’t Liberate Women with Capitalism’s Democratic Party!”

Since we’re talking identity politics and efforts to cover over capitalism's sexist and racist oppression with some new faces in high places, let’s not forget black Democrat Barack Obama, who garnered immigrants’ votes with talk of immigration reform, while building up the I.C.E. juggernaut into the biggest federal police force and throwing 8+ million immigrants out of the country, more than any other president in U.S. history; who ran as a peace candidate and got a Nobel Peace Prize just as he launched the U.S. imperialist assault on Syria, brought U.S. troops back to Iraq to kill Arabs and continued the bloody U.S. occupation of Afghanistan for another eight years; who posed as an opponent of torture while keeping the Guantánamo torture center open and personally signing off on kill orders to murder thousands of Pakistani, Afghan and Yemeni civilians, including hundreds of women and children

The Wall Street-backed African American president shoveled over $16 trillion to the banksters and real-estate fraudsters who gouged millions of black families with high-interest subprime loans, then evicted them from their homes when the market crashed. The candidate of “hope” and “change” called the racist police murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri “heartbreaking” even as he loaded up kill-crazy cops with billions of dollars’ worth of BearCat armored cars, assault rifles and other Pentagon weaponry so police can kill over 1,100 civilians every year (and murder a black person every day).

Race, gender and national oppression are all rooted in class domination. This land is not our land, this land is their land (of the capitalist rulers) and will be so long as the exploiters continue to rule. The all-sided social oppression of this racist, xenophobic, misogynist, homophobic society was built on the bedrock of chattel slavery and genocide of Native American peoples. Today this self-proclaimed “indispensable” power (as Madeleine Albright called the U.S.) of an imperialist New World Order destroys agriculture in Mexico and Haiti in the name of “free trade,” props up dictators in Africa in order to get coltan for iPhones, unleashes terror on Central America and then stops thousands at the border who are trying to flee that terror.

“Female power”? MSNBC today ran a story, “The Military-Industrial Complex Is Now Run By Women,” noting that the CEOs of four of the five top contractors supplying hardware to the Pentagon (Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and Boeing’s military division) are women. While the rulers are overwhelmingly white and male, capitalist exploitation keeps poor and working women – and all wage slaves – in thrall today. It will continue to do so until a revolutionary workers party leads an international socialist revolution that throws the rotting capitalist system into the dumpster of history. Then the road will finally open to free women and all of humanity from poverty, war, racism, misogyny, xenophobia and the other plagues that prop up the rapacious rule of capital. ■