Posted by John, January 9th, 2011 - under Tea Party, United States.



There is a sickness at the heart of American society. That sickness is the American ruling class, that one per cent who make 24 percent of the country’s income; the same one percent who have received 4/5ths of the total increase in US income since 1980. The level of inequality in America puts the country on a par with Russia and Turkey.

The elite in America will do anything to protect their privileged position. Their strategy is twofold – to subdue enemies abroad and to attack those at home who might resist and so make the world safe for US capital.

The main external threat is China. The war on terror is the elite’s attempts to contain and control China in ways that further their interests.

The US ruling class co-opts allies. Israel is the armed wing of the US in the Middle East – the most vital and strategic area for US imperialism. Israel, and the US dictators who rule the Arab nations in the region, are there to ensure the American Empire controls the flow of oil, in particular to its major long term competitor, China. $3 billion in aid to Israel is a cheap price to pay for that military watchdog.

Vanquishing or controlling the ‘enemy’ internationally involves invading country after country and killing and brutalising their inhabitants, spending as much on their killing machine as the next 16 countries combined, supporting Israel to the hilt and having bases in 134 countries around the world. In short the American elite terrorise the world to protect their privilege and profit.

As Thomas Friedman, a journalist with close connections to the US warmongers wrote:

The hidden hand of the market will never work without the hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without [giant arms company] McDonnell Douglas. The hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the US army, air force, navy and Marine Corps.

The hidden fist is turning inwards. The violence of the imperial terrorists is reverberating throughout its own society. If US imperialism stopped killing foreigners it might have some chance of creating a more peaceful society in America. Americans opposing their rulers’ wars are supporting a just society in their own country.

For years the ‘enemy’ within US borders has been black men. The solution? Imprison them. This keeps angry young men off the streets, and perhaps stops them organising politically. Demonising them reinforces the dominant white profits ideology.

Nearly half of the more than 2 million US prisoners are black. More black men are in jail than in college. With five per cent of the world’s population the US has nearly 25 per cent of the world’s death row prisoners.

Prison is a deliberate divide and rule tactic the US ruling class employs to create fear among significant sections of the working class – fear of jail and fear of those over-represented in jail. It pushes many white workers to see white bosses as their ally, not their enemy.

Now the ruling class are moving the targets of their brutality openly beyond race to class. And among themselves.

Profit rates in the US are low. Although last year there was a big increase in profits this was built on the back of the devalorisation the Global Financial Crisis produced and increased exploitation of American workers.

According to Andrew Sum in a recent article in The Huffington Post called Ringing Out the Lost Economic Decade of 2000-2010: Part Two ‘between 2000 and 2010 (through the 3rd quarter), real output per hour of work in the non-farm business sector increased by slightly more than 29%, its best record since the decade of the 1960s.’

The productivity rewards went overwhelmingly to capital. As Sum puts it: ‘the median real weekly earnings of the nation’s full-time wage and salary workers rose by only slightly more than 2% over the decade.’

The productivity gains weren’t spread to workers through increased employment either. The number of people employed fell. ‘Total payroll employment in 2010 was below its level in 2000 for the first time since the Great Depression.’

All of these changes depressed household incomes. Sum again::

The declines in payroll employment, the steep rise in unemployment and underemployment, and limited wage gains for those in the bottom and middle of the weekly wage distribution helped push down the real annual incomes of nearly all U.S. households. The median real annual income of U.S. households declined over the decade by $2,600 or 5%. This was the first time since the end of World War II that median household income failed to grow over an entire decade.

The stagnating profit rates over the last decades – up and down but on a steady downward trend – will require more and more brutal attacks on American workers.

The American political system is a battle between two wings of the elite. They argue over how best to preserve the position of the ruling class. That is why Obama continues the Bush heritage rather than challenging it and the elite for whom he governs. This conscious continuity gives credibility to the lies of the right.

The Global Financial Crisis was a crisis of profitability, especially US profitability.

The despair and anger of many in the overwhelmingly white American middle class at their declining living standards has found expression in the TEA Party. But we need to be careful here. Workers are angry too. As Lance Selfa put it in the US magazine Socialist Worker:

when working people devastated by the economic crisis look for explanations for the conditions they face, they are more likely to hear the right’s echo chamber blaming immigrants, Muslims or “big government” than a consistent case for solidarity against the banksters and corporate crooks.

Their system isn’t working. There can be explosions to the left as well as the right. The lack of a social democratic left in the US and its dead hand on the labour movement means that the shift to radicalism could be swift.

However the crisis of profitability means sections of the rulign class and their politicians are adopting an even more hard-line position against the working class to restore their profits.

The TEA Party and the other sections of the hard-line right like Fox News are the preemptive grouping of those forces that could smash any working class resistance to driving down labour’s living standards to restore profit rates.

There is a split in the ruling class over the way forward. The TEA Party have been viciously attacking the ‘softer’ elements of the ruling class to toughen up the elite for these inevitable brutal attacks on workers. Thus Sarah Palin and her cross-hairs advertisement targeting Democrat politicians (including Gabrielle Giffords) and tweet saying to Americans “Don’t retreat, reload.”

Jesse Kelly, the TEA Party candidate against Giffords, ran on a campaign slogan of sending a real warrior to Congress. He advertised a pre-election meeting with the words ‘Get on target for victory in November. Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office. Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly.’

Other TEA Party candidates have talked of second amendment remedies including against senior Democrats. The second amendment is about the right to bear arms. In other words the remedy is to kill their political opponents.

None of this should surprise us. After all there is bipartisan support for the imprisonment of Julian Assange and no one on either side has condemned calls for his assassination. That’s because those calls come from the heartland of American politics.

Americans are rightly horrified about this political assassination attempt, an attempt for which Sarah Palin has clear responsibility. As Clarence Dupnik, sheriff of Pima County put it:

When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government. The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous. And, unfortunately, Arizona, I think, has become sort of the capital. We have become the Mecca for prejudice and bigotry… People tend to pooh-pooh this business about the vitriol that inflames American public opinion by the people who make a living off of that. That may be free speech, but it’s not without consequences.

Gabrielle Giffords foreshadowed the very attack herself some time ago after presumably right wing thugs had vandalised her office when she voted for health care reform. She told MSNBC at the time:

We’re on Sarah Palin’s targeted list. But the thing is, the way she has it depicted it has the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district. And when people do that, they’ve got to realize there are consequences to that action.

Imagine if this assassination attempt had been carried out by an illegal immigrant, or a black man or a Muslim? As Michael Moore asked on Twitter: “If a Detroit Muslim put a map on the web w/crosshairs on 20 pols, then 1 of them got shot, where would he b sitting right now? Just asking.”

Christina Taylor Green died in the attack. She was 9 years old. The outrage across America is rightly tremendous. But Americans need to udnerstand that for the people of Iraq and Afghanistan children dying as a consequence of your invasions is an every day occurrence. Your soldiers, drone bombs and politicians are killing innocents every day.

On top of all this is the open racism of the right, some of them calling for example Barack Obama a nigger or more subtly talking about Kenya, Muslims and socialists in some bizarre concoction of nonsense akin to blaming Jews for the ills of the world. The fact that many Republicans and others believe this nonsense shows a mentally unstable society, made mad by the ruling class’s frantic and more desparate attempts to protect its profits.

The frightening thing is that the rhetoric of reaction and racism is small beer to what might be when the needs of the American ruling class for more wealth from workers become greater and they ramp up further attacks on workers in the name of their profits.

Their side is organising. Ours needs to as well.

If we don’t, the sickness will spread and destroy the body politic and the organised working class. Only revolution – the vast majority democratically deciding what will be produced to satisfy human need – can defeat the murderers of the right and the privileged elite who are parasites on our labour and terrorise the world to protect their stolen gains.

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For those interested in resisting capital’s onslaught, click here for information about the International Socialist Organization in America. Or go to their magazine Socialist Worker for their views on the latest events globally and in the US. For their analysis of the shootings, see Hatred strikes in the capital of bigotry.

Readers might also like to have a look at another of my articles Is the TEA Party a fascist movement?