The 2008 U.S. Presidential Election: The Ultimate Deceit

By Ray O. Light, Revolutionary Organization of Labor, USA

Parade Magazine (2-10-08) reported that in answer to its question: Is our election process too long? 98% of readers responded, "YES"! The 2008 U.S. Presidential election campaign began in earnest immediately after the November 2006 Congressional Elections! 

WHY?

With that election the voters placed the Democratic Party into majority control of both the U. S. Senate and House of Representatives. The U.S. population had finally repudiated the Bush Regime's war policy, a good thing, and had specifically expressed their desire to bring the U.S. soldiers home as soon as possible. Based on our Leninist understanding of the nature of the U.S. imperialist state, including the Republican-Democratic political duopoly, however, we correctly projected that all signs pointed toward an expansion of U.S. forces in Iraq and the Middle East and not the withdrawal of U.S. troops and "bringing them home" that the U.S. voters desired. (See ROL Newsletter #43, "Some Revolutionary Lessons of the 2006 U.S. Congressional Election", December 2006) Ever since then, the international proletariat and the oppressed peoples, including the oppressed and exploited within the USA itself, have been the object of an epic propaganda event, a gigantic deception, the so-called "race for the presidency”: a flimflam perpetrated by the U.S. imperialist ruling class.

During this past year, in direct contradiction with the clearly expressed will of the U.S. voters, Republican President Bush and the now Democratic-controlled Congress directed a "surge" of thirty thousand more U.S. military forces in Iraq. This fact should make it clear that the USA is not a democratic country. The U.S. monopoly capitalist and imperialist ruling class will never allow any election to diminish, let alone eliminate, U.S. imperialist super-profits reaped from the exploited and oppressed of the USA and the entire globe. The interminably long 2008 Presidential primary season is aimed at convincing the proletariat and oppressed peoples of the USA and the world, in direct contradiction to our actual experience of the past year, that the monopoly capitalist and imperialist system of rule in the USA can be fundamentally altered through the ballot box and that we have no need to fight against U.S. imperialism by any means necessary.

And it is aimed to convince the imperialist partner-rivals of U.S. imperialism and other regional powers in Western Europe, Japan, Russia, China, India, Turkey, Brazil and so forth, that U.S. imperialism can still be reasoned with and negotiated with, rather than having to be united against through economic, political and military alliances.

The fact that the Iraqi peoples, the Afghani people, the peoples of the USA and the world have witnessed the continuation of the Bush-led U.S. imperialist War of Terror at home and abroad without any disruption whatsoever in the aftermath of the Democratic Party's assumption of control of both houses of the U.S. Congress is a valuable lesson on the nature of the U. S. state. It is a complement to the lesson revealed to the international proletariat and the oppressed peoples by the U.S. government's treatment of the Afro-American people of New Orleans before, during and after Hurricane Katrina.

 The Democratic Party Hoax

The collaboration of the leading Democratic Party politicians with the Bush Regime, working together in service to monopoly capitalism and imperialism, on the most important political question of the day, the war in Iraq, has been exposed by the bipartisan support for the U.S. military "surge" in the criminal occupation of Iraq. This includes the Democratic-controlled Congress continued funding of the war and additional funding for the surge. The supposed "success" of the Bush "surge" in Iraq is another "big lie"; but with the collaboration of the Democrats and the connivance of the monopolists' mass media, this lie has itself represented a success for Bush and U.S. imperialism. The alleged success of the surge has pushed the question of ending the war onto the backburner in the Presidential campaign. It has revived the Republican candidacy of Senator John McCain whose candidacy had been pronounced all but dead. McCain now boasts in his campaign that he may keep U.S. troops in Iraq for the next hundred years! The big lie of the "surge", aided and abetted by the Democratic Party leadership, may well carry McCain not only to the Republican nomination, but to the Presidency in November!

The role of Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman in U.S. electoral politics over the past decade is especially instructive in helping to reveal that the Democratic Party is merely one face of the two-faced single War Party that governs the USA on behalf of the U.S. (and global) financial and industrial monopolists. In 2000, Senator Lieberman ran as the Vice-Presidential candidate on the Democratic Party ticket with AI Gore. No doubt, his influence helped ensure that not one Democratic Senator, including Ted Kennedy, supported the more than a dozen Congressional Black Caucus House members in challenging the stolen Florida electoral-college vote. On this basis the Bush-Cheney Republican team was officially "elected" without a fight on the floor of Congress.

In 2006, based on his outspoken support for the Bush Regime's so-called war on terror, Lieberman was defeated in the Democratic primary contest for his Connecticut Senate seat by a single-issue, anti-war candidate. Lieberman, one of the top Democrats in the land, rather than respecting the Connecticut Democrats' choice, then chose to run as an Independent. In the general election, Lieberman, a key representative of the Israeli settler state alliance with U.S. imperialism, was returned to the Senate with the help of the national Democratic Party bigwigs who refused to come into Connecticut to campaign for "their" (anti-war) candidate, Lamont. Last month, Lieberman announced his support for Arizona Republican Senator John McCain, the biggest warmonger running for President. As it now appears that McCain will be the Republican candidate for President, the Democratic bigwigs who supported the Independent Lieberman (as well as the Bush "surge" that McCain is riding) may well help decide the next Presidential election in favor of the Republican Party! So much, for the differences between the "two" parties.

Collaboration with the Bush Regime by the Democratic Party Congressional leadership was also exposed by its successful prevention of any serious effort at impeachment of the Bushite war criminals or even a motion of censure. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has been a particularly valuable protector of the Bush Regime as the leading Democrat and number #3 person after the Vice President, in line of Presidential succession. The marvelous anti-war leader, Cindy Sheehan, who lives in the same Congressional District in San Francisco as Pelosi, is running against Pelosi for that Congressional seat. Every effort should be made to defeat the war criminal Pelosi and strike a big blow against the two-party one ruling class war party.

But for the Presidential nomination, the three "serious" candidates for the Democratic Party Presidential nomination (Clinton, Obama and Edwards) were there mainly on the basis of "identity" politics, with no real connection to their apparent "constituency" (women, Afro-Americans and labor respectively). Consequently, the campaign for the nomination is nothing but a charade to attract the oppressed and exploited so they remain caught up in the web of this brutal system.

Unfortunately, whether the Democratic or Republican candidate wins the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election, the international working class and the oppressed peoples, including the working class and the oppressed nationalities of New York and the USA, will be the losers. Third party campaign initiatives such as the Power to the People Campaign to elect former Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney represent the potential for a Labor-Afro-American-Latino-anti-imperialist united front. Such efforts can be a positive step in the process of smashing the two-party, one class (monopoly capitalist and imperialist) rule in the USA on the road to socialism.

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