The Democrats and the Republican parties are choosing their presidential candidates. The battle for the White House is on, as the race heats up to decide the Democrat and Republican candidates for this November’s elections for the US Presidency. For the Democrats, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are running each other close for the party’s nomination, each with more than $100 million in their campaign war chest; 2008 promises to be the most expensive campaign in history.
The background to the race is the unpopular presidency of George Bush limping through its last year, beset by military quagmire in Iraq and Afghanistan and a domestic economy slowing down and heading for recession. Furthermore, US workers have experienced decades of falling real wages, factory closures, pension cuts, welfare being turned into workfare, and a rising numbers living in poverty or without healthcare.
Bush has handed out massive tax cuts for the rich, boosted corporate profits and is promising the banks even greater handouts to prevent recession. Meanwhile 37 million – one out of eight Americans – lives below the poverty line; a recent BBC report on the Democratic primaries found that one in nine people in Michigan were receiving food handouts.
The latest figures released show the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan costing $15 billion per month, a sum that could raise millions of US families out of poverty. Now with the sub-prime mortgage meltdown, thousands of working class families will lose even the roof over their head. So with the Bush government discredited and the Republicans on the back foot, will the Democrats be able to change the country for the better?
Neither Obama’s rhetoric of “change” nor Clinton, with her claim to be an insider with the “experience” to get things done in Washington, will provide a radical change of direction. The US working class will need a different party from the Democrats to reverse 30 years of neoliberal attacks on their wages, jobs and living standards, and end the escalating military adventures abroad that have killed more than 4,500 young soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Super Tuesday
The primaries build up to “Super Tuesday” on 5 February where the Democrats in 24 states vote all on one day for their nomination. The candidate that racks up the most nominations will almost certainly become the party’s candidate at the Democratic Convention in August, kicking off the two month period of campaigning up to the election on November 6.
Obama surprisingly won the Iowa primary despite the media declaring for Clinton after the polls closed. Since then Hillary Clinton has retaken the lead with 3 primaries, won by a well-organised campaign machine and helped by the high profile support of ex-President Bill Clinton. But Obama won again in the South Carolina primary trouncing Clinton, winning 55% of the vote against her 27%. This included Obama winning 78% of the black vote, more than half the Democrat vote, but doing poorly among white voters, leaving the race still uncertain nationally. John Edwards, the vice presidential running mate of John Kerry’s failed campaign for the presidency in 2004, trails behind a distant third even in his home state of South Carolina, and his campaign is fading.
2006 Democrat win: little change
The Democrats have controlled Congress since the November 2006 elections saw a 12-year Republican reign in Congress overturned. But in power in Congress, the Democrats have broken their promises, voting at least three times for funding requests from the White House to continue the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, and dropping a deadline for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq under Bush’s threat of a veto. Under leaders like Nancy Pelosi the Democrats have failed to fight against Bush and the Republicans, preferring to express concern over the war shilst funding it and refusing to stop it.
This is because the Democrats are in support of the War on Terror. Hillary Clinton voted in favour of the Iraq war in 2002, although she “regrets” it now and thinks that most of the troops should be withdrawn (by 2013!). Senator Obama said in 2005 that the US would have to “slog it out in Iraq”, then the Democrat’s 2006 landslide into Congress made him realise the opposition to the war on Iraq, so he now emphasises that he was always against the war and calls for most troops to be withdrawn within 16 months. The “populist” John Edwards voted for the Iraq war too.
All of them are united on other key points: keep the “military option” open for an attack on Iran; maintain troops and bases in Iraq in order to fight “terrorism”; transfer troops from Iraq (the “wrong war” in Obama’s words) to ramp up the fight in Afghanistan; all voting for the Patriot Act that has slashed civil liberties and enabled repression of those opposing the war. Obama’s voting record on the War on Terror since he joined the Senate in 2004 is the same as Clinton’s (www.factcheck.org).
There are some differences of opinion. Obama threatens to escalate Afghanistan by using military force to go after terrorists in Pakistan, even without the Pakistan government’s permission, while Clinton stated will not rule out using nuclear weapons in the “lawless areas” of Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Democratic candidates are all loyal to the strategic aims of US imperialism: maintaining its economic and military hegemony in the strategic energy regions of the Middle East and Central Asia.
Obama: what kind of ‘change’?
Obama has tried to paint himself as untainted by the system, trying to tap the mass desperation for relief from war and poverty with his slogans for “change”, “united for the future” and the “fierce urgency of now”. With rhetoric about uniting the country, his strategy is to bring in new voters while making open appeals to independents and disenchanted Republicans, the strategy that won in Iowa.
His rhetoric, while not explicitly anti-racist, are pitched to win black voters to the possibility of the first black president rather making appeals based on class, though they have been hurt the hardest by declining wages and the sub-prime crisis, with black and Latino workers twice as likely as whites to receive sub-prime mortgages. There is massive hopes being stored up in Obama, especially among younger voters – in both Iowa and even in South Carolina, young white voters flocked to him.
But the Clinton campaign has exposed Obama’s story about coming up from the grass roots and organising on the “streets” in Chicago as covering up his funding from slumlords in his early days as a politician! And beyond this embarrassing story, Obama has been a paid-up “Wall Street” Democrat for years now, with his key economic advisor’s from Bill Clinton’s neoliberal administration, just like Hillary. Obama has received contributions from Illinois-based firms in ethanol and nuclear power for services rendered as a Senator, and nearly $10 million in contributions from the finance, insurance and real estate sector. He ranks second among all presidential candidates in money raised from commercial banks (Clinton is the first) and with Goldman Sachs as his top contributor. As a result, Obama has refused so far to call for a moratorium on foreclosures, interest rate restrictions or even tighter regulation of lenders other than for fraud in the current sub-prime crisis – he wouldn’t want to bite the hand that feeds him.
Build a New Workers Party
The democrats are not an alternative for the US working class, but a second capitalist party that is no less controlled and run by corporate interests than the Republicans. This identification of whole sections of US workers with the Democrats is a shackle that must be broken if workers are not to witness another neoliberal, imperialist Democratic presidency like that of Bill Clinton in the 1990’s, and one taking place with the backdrop of an economic recession.
But many in the US including key antiwar organisations and the trade unions insist on funding, campaigning and voting for the Democrats as a “lesser evil” to the Republicans. They argue that activists would have more influence and gain a hearing from a Democrat president, forgetting the key role the Clinton presidency played in the 1990’s in developing free trade agreements such as NAFTA and the boom in inequality, ended the federal welfare system for imposing workfare, and the sanctions and bombing of Iraq that led to Bush’s war drive. The US union bureaucracy in both the AFL-CIO and the Change to Win federations have also been pouring millions into Iowa and other primaries to support their preferred candidate. Despite the decline in union membership, still around 60% of American citizens support labor unions, and 35% said they would like to see unions have more of a say in their country. This shows that despite years of union bashing and neo liberalism a larg part of the US working class is willing to organise – unfortunately only 9% of workers are in unions and politically the unions are committed to either ‘non political’ economic issues or support for the Democrats.
What the US workers desperately need is to break with the Democrats, US capitalism’s second party of big business, and form a workers party. The campaign for such a party should focus on three key areas:
• Opposition to the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. For the immediate withdrawal of all US troops and an end to war funding. No threats on Iraq. A campaign for a workers’ party should organise protests, demonstrations, sit-ins and strikes against the war effort to drive home the message that the Democrats and Republicans agree on the fundamentals of the war on terror. Not a soldier overseas or a cent on the war budget. Spend the money on welfare not warfare.
• Abolish all immigration controls and full citizenship rights for migrants. No to racist scaremongering about Latino workers coming over the border. Oppose the racist migrant laws in the Congress and the Senate. Activists should launch unionisation drives among migrant labour and win unions to anti racist positions. Re-energise the mass mobilisations of 2006 under the leadership of the migrants and unions; not the democratic party machine.
• No cuts to jobs or pay. US labour has suffered over the past 30 years worsening conditions: pay cuts, job outsourcing, increased taxes, cuts in welfare and benefits. Don’t let the working classes pay for the bosses’ crisis. Tax the rich. Nationalise the banks and finance houses to pay for decent wages, good unemployment benefits and a building programme of affordable homes.
Such a party is an urgent necessity as both Republicans and Democrats will make the workers pay for the recession through lay-offs, wage cuts, slashing welfare, poorer health and more wars where working class men and women will be killed. The campaign for such a party must go among the working classes, the unions, the unorganised, migrant workers, black and Latino communities to offer a break from the bosses’ parties and real “change”. But such a party should not end up being reformist; reformist parties throughout Europe are implementing cuts and neo-liberal policies, a US reformist party will soon be cajoled and coerced by Wall Street and big business into attacking the working class and migrants, just like the British Labour Party is.
The campaign for a US workers party must be democratic and have a debate about its goal. We in the League for a Fifth International believe that such a party must be a revolutionary party, committed to the overthrow of capitalism and private property. The US working class and its allies live and struggle in the most powerful economy on the planet, we have every confidence that they can deal capitalism the death blow it so richly deserves and open the road to socialism in the USA and the world.