|
H O M E
|
|
November, 2002
|
US midterm elections 2002
Bush and the crisis get vote of no confidence: 66% of registered voters stay at home.
|
US Department of Homeland Security
The banks and the bosses plan ahead for the war at home against the US working class and people.
|
|
Fake elections, in which only 33% of registered voters cast a ballot, are no mandate for an "endless war" against the working class and the people of the US and of the whole world
Vicente Balvanera
Even before the general elections of 11/5, it was already clear that the elections were not going to offer any solution to any of the problems facing the US working class and people: the downturn in the economy, job-cuts, unemployment, the attacks against the unions, the squeezing of more and more work for less pay ("productivity" has risen recently to "unexpectedly" high levels), the high cost of health care and medical attention, the expropriation of pensions, the rise in the number of homeless, police brutality in the neighborhoods, the attacks against democratic rights. Two days before the elections, the New York Times editorialized on the difficulty in "explaining to people why… the results will make any difference."
Really, the Republicans only obtained 18% of the registered voters, of which only 35% votes, nationally. As Julian Bond of the NAACP explained, "With issues of high unemployment, failing pensions, stock crash…Democrats offered pale shadows of what the Republicans offered, that just wasn't good enough." And Maynard Jackson added, on the same NPR program "When you have Democrats trying to out-Republican Republicans, it confuses the voters and they say if there is no difference why bother going to vote?"
Even though the bourgeois press made a gala presentation, internationally and not just nationally, of a great "victory" for Bush and for the Republican Party, and a supposed "mandate" for his plans, the reality is that the immense majority of the US people have shown, passively, but in black and white, their total rejection of both parties of the big imperialist bourgeoisie.
The key has been the absence of an independent political alternative for the working class. The miniscule Labor Party, dead in its cradle as it was controlled by bureaucrats close to the interests associated with the Democrat Party, have sealed their own demise when they decided at their recent (and probably the last) Congress not to offer any candidacies, and to vote a pro-war resolution. But the workers and the people never cease to search for an alternative: it is very significant the 5% of the vote that the Greens obtained in the State of California, and it is significant the fact that in the County of San Francisco, the candidate for governor of California for the Greens, Peter Camejo (former member in other times of the SWP which in 1972 got the not insignificant vote of 1.2% of the vote as candidate for the presidency) beat, with 16% of the vote, the Republican candidate (15.2%), coming in second to the incumbent Democrat victor, Gray Davis (66%).
As Clarence Thomas, Secretary-Treasurer of the combative and fighting ILWU (who have still not been defeated by Bush, big capital and the maritime conglomerates) said only two days after the elections at a rally of all the unions of Oakland in struggle, on 11/7: "This was the best election money can buy. It just ain't right. We are going to have to win back our democracy. We are going to have to take to the streets. Hands off the docks! Out of Iraq!" The rally was small, may a few hundred workers and activists from the health, telephone, dockworkers, hotels and janitor unions, those who could make it lunchtime to downtown Oakland. But they answered spontaneously, but militantly, "Hands off the docks! Out of Iraq!", making "Iroq" rhyme with "docks". And then, softly, but then louder and more firmly, a presage for the future, they added a decided "General strike! General strike! (See internet video at http://sf.indymedia.org/news/2002/11/1542098.php).
|
Monday, November 11, 2002
|
|
|
