From the Belly of the Beast

The 2012 U.S. Election Results: The U.S. Empire Wins and We Lose

-Statement of the Revolutionary Organization of Labor, USA   November 10, 2012-

The results are now in on the 2012 U.S. Election. Imperialist apologist George Will accurately summed it up, as follows: “A nation vocally disgusted with the status quo has reinforced it by ratifying existing control of the executive branch and both halves of the legislative branch.” (“And the winner is: The status quo,” Washington Post, 11-7-12)

Will pointed out that the voters are worse off than they were when Obama entered office, they have less net worth, they have less income and official unemployment has been more than eight percent in forty-three months under Obama, more months than the total under all eleven previous presidents over the past sixty years combined. “Yet voters preferred the president who presided over this to a Republican who …made his economic expertise his presidential credential,” said Will. (Will could have added many other seemingly contradictory facts, including: that Obama beat Romney, the supposed candidate of the rich, in eight of the ten wealthiest counties in the USA, and that, compared to his 2008 election contest with John McCain, there was a sharp increase in Obama’s share of the important Latino vote which climbed to 70% against Romney, despite the fact that the Obama Regime more than doubled the deportations of Latino immigrants from the Bush years!) Will points out, compellingly, that the voters in this same election “ratified Republican control of the House, keeping in place those excoriated as obstructionists by the president the voters retained.”(ibid)

Will, the reactionary, appears baffled by the seeming contradictions in the 2012 voters decision—making. This is because he, like all the U.S. imperialist-sponsored pundits, frames the political scene in the USA as a “battle” between the Republicans and Democrats.

These election results become quite understandable, however, when we take into account two important facts: First, political rule on behalf of Wall Street finance capital, the ruling class of the USA, is carried out by the “Republicrats.” The Democratic and Republican Parties (some tea party forces excluded) operate, they fight and cooperate, as a dialectically intertwined single force in defense of the U.S. Empire at home and abroad. The clearest indication of this fact in the 2012 campaign was the content of the third televised presidential debate between Obama and Romney in which their political unity on virtually every foreign policy issue regarding war and diplomacy, and the strategic military and economic interests of U.S. imperialism was unmistakable.

Secondly, this was the first U.S. election conducted during the Citizens United era of unlimited, untraceable corporate cash. A whopping six billion dollars was spent, mostly by Corporate America and Wall Street finance capital, the U.S. monopoly capitalist and imperialist ruling class. And they got what they paid for. For there was no political fall-out, no sweeping out of either the incumbent Congress, with its record low popularity, or the incumbent president, presiding over the ongoing economic crisis plaguing the 99%, because of their “Republicrat” bail-outs of Wall Street, their failure to provide any relief for Main Street, and their ongoing efforts to increase their austerity measures aimed against the 99% of us, and especially against the U.S. working class and oppressed nationalities. Watch out for the “fiscal cliff” negotiations and revival and implementation of Obama’s bi-partisan (i.e. Republicrat) Simpson-Bowles Commission austerity plan recommendations in 2013!

From these election results it should be crystal clear that New Jersey’s Larry Hamm, leader of Peoples Organization for Progress (POP), had it right when he said six months ago, “The most important day of the 2012 election season will be the day after the election. We’ll need to be out in the streets demanding decent jobs and homes, etc. …” On the eve of the 2012 election, brother Hamm and POP announced: “On November 13th we will march to demand a national jobs program, a moratorium on home foreclosures, universal health care for all, an end to student debt, and the immediate return of all U.S. troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.” According to brother Hamm, the November 13th New Jersey demonstration will make a call for a National March for Jobs in Washington, DC.

Across the USA, we should follow the good example of New Jersey POP in the days ahead as well as respond to their call. Mass protest actions against the “Republicrat” austerity measures through which the Wall Street finance capitalists want to permanently place the burden of their capitalist economic crisis on the shoulders of the workers and oppressed nationalities of the USA are vital to our survival.

---- But they are not sufficient. Short run resistance to the monopoly capitalist and imperialist offensive, to its unrelenting effort to place and keep the burden of the world-wide capitalist economic crisis on the shoulders of the workers and oppressed, can only be effective when it is dialectically interconnected with the long run aim of socialist revolution. We need only recall the rich revolutionary experience of the workers throughout the USA and the world during the 1930’s and the last great capitalist economic depression to recognize this truth. On this 95th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution in Russia let us reclaim the marvelous legacy of the Soviet Union that grew, flourished and prospered while surrounded by a hostile capitalist world engulfed in and paralyzed by the economic crisis in the Great Depression, the Soviet Union whose legendary heroism played the decisive role in the defeat of fascism in World War II. For this Soviet legacy contains the path forward for the working people of the USA and the world out of the jungle of capitalist enslavement.

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