Excerpts from “Racist Fundamentalists Take White House, Again”

From Workers Vanguard No. 836, 12 November 2004

“I earned capital in the campaign—political capital—and now I intend to spend it” was the chilling message from George W. Bush following his election victory on November 2. The relatively high turnout for the elections was supposed to be good for the Democrats, but the “family values,” “born-again” religious types also mobilized heavily for the oddly demented Bush administration, helped along by the continued attempts to disenfranchise black voters and no-paper-trail computers. Whipping up “war on terror” fear and religious and sexual hysteria was key, as referendums to ban gay marriage in eleven states, which all passed, helped to bring out the forces of deep reaction. The Republican consolidation of the White House and both houses of Congress is bad news for working people, blacks, women, gays and immigrants—all in the gun sights of the social reactionaries in power. One of the propositions that passed in Arizona denies government benefits to non-citizens. The Bush cabal now feels it has a mandate to intensify its war on working people at home and abroad.

And the first targets are the peoples of Iraq… [In the invasion of Falluja] one of the first targets taken by the American occupiers was Falluja’s main hospital, a calculated move to mute any news about civilian casualties… The New York Times (8 November) noted: “The hospital was selected as an early target because the American military believed that it was the source of rumors about heavy casualties.” A recent report from Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore concluded that between March 2003 and September 2004, some 100,000 civilians had died in Iraq.

The very same ruling class that is raping the peoples of Iraq is also looting, fleecing and attacking the rights of workers and the oppressed at home. Working people in the U.S. must take a side against U.S. imperialism’s occupation of Iraq and demand the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. forces from the country…

While Bush’s victory is bad news, a Kerry victory would not have been good news. Kerry promised to continue the Iraq occupation, to increase the American military by 40,000 new recruits, and to get “tougher” with North Korea. The Democrats, no less than the Republicans, are a ruling-class party dedicated to upholding the interests of the American capitalists, interests directly counterposed to those of the working class. U.S. elections, a limited form of bourgeois democracy in any case, serve as a deception whereby the bourgeoisie cloaks its class dictatorship with a veneer of popular approval. As Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin put it in The State and Revolution: “To decide once every few years which member of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people through parliament—this is the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarism….”