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bush = (big) business as usual
The Gore/Bush election dispute's sound and fury rapidly gave way to everyday bi-partisanship as
the "president-elect," George W. Bush, made the photo-op rounds to assure his rivals and
supporters alike that not much would change with the new regime in power.
Al Gore's concession speech, calling for an end to "partisan rancor", largely calmed ruffled feathers, and ended the
escalated rhetoric of the previous month.
In the interim, on Dec. 15, Congress approved a $450 billion appropriations bill by a 292-60 margin, affirmed by a voice
vote of the Senate a few days later.
This Clinton-praised legislation included $1 billion for another 50,000 police; an additional 500 agents for the Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms; and 600 new "gun prosecutors." Clinton also promised to help local communities put
100,000 new cops on the street.
Like the Clinton administration, Bush's ruling-class team includes cabinet appointments of representatives of the
corporate elite - from Alcoa Corporation Board Chair Paul O'Neill as Secretary of the Treasury, to oil executive Donald
Evans as Secretary of Commerce - and a host of former corporate bosses from previous Republican administrations.
The right-wing anti-abortionist Senator John Ashcroft, a Republican from Missouri, is slotted for Attorney General. His
Democratic predecessors heading the Justice Department, minus the conservative rhetoric, have largely eliminated
affirmative action and access to abortion. Under Clinton 87 percent of all U.S. counties have no abortion facilities.
George Bush, more public about the matter, opened his presidency with a decree banning federal funds for U.S.
personnel working overseas on projects which provide abortion.
The Secretary of State post went to former Pentagon Joint Chief of Staff General Colin Powell, the Republican who led
the 1990 genocidal war against Iraq.
Some 250,000 virtually defenseless Iraqis were slaughtered in a matter of weeks under Powell's military reign. The
Clinton administration in turn murdered an additional million Iraqis through bombing and its criminal sanctions that
continue to this day.
Powell lost no time in proclaiming at a Texas press conference that the Bush team would press forward with its
campaign pledges to construct a so-called "Missile Defence System", in reality a multi-billion-dollar boondoggle
designed to give the United States a first-strike nuclear capacity.
Clinton's military experts had already begun work, including some dramatic publicised failures, on a lesser version of
the project, designed to both prime, Keynesian style, the falling U.S. corporate profit rates and to match the massive
arms expenditures of imperialist competitors in Europe and Japan.
Most serious scientists believe that no real "defense" system can be constructed against a multiple nuclear warhead
attack. But as in decades past, today's military experts calculate "nuclear victory" not in terms of zero losses to the
United States.
The insane logic of nuclear war is instead based on "acceptable losses," a term that includes the incineration of tens of
millions of Americans, provided the "enemy" is totally devastated while the U.S. retains the capacity to rise from the
ashes and continue!
The coming working-class mobilisations in Russia and Eastern Europe are similarly not without concern in regard to the
use of the barbaric U.S. nuclear arsenal.
Election fraud ignored
Former Vice President Gore disappointed his liberal supporters by refusing to challenge the numerous
instances of electoral fraud engineered by the Bush campaign to win the presidency.
Bush's Florida state campaign chair, Katherine Harris, for example, also Florida Secretary of State, sent a list
of 700,000 supposed felons to all 67 counties.
She ordered that these individuals be dropped from voter registration roles. Florida still enforces an 1868 law
banning felons from voting - legislation originally implemented to deny former slaves the franchise.
It now appears that Harris's list was obtained from a Texas-based private outfit associated with George W.
Bush. It has been found to include thousands of people convicted of misdemeanours, not felons. These were
also purged from the voter rolls.
In this manner, Florida bans 31 percent of all Black males from voting. The racist law applies even if the former
felons have served their time and "paid their debt to society."
Florida is one of a growing number of states that ban felons from voting. Some 4.2 million citizens are thus
denied the franchise nation wide.
Numerous instances of racist voting practices have been well-documented by the NAACP, (National
Association for the Advancement of Coloured people, a prominent civil rights organisation) whose
citations include the use of Florida state police who barred Blacks from voting, the refusal of voting officials to
assist first-time Haitian voters, the illegal early closing of voting sites in counties with large Black communities,
and many more.
In some locations, Republican officials allowed supporters to fill out incomplete absentee voter forms, garnering
additional thousands of Republican of votes. The unsupervised Republicans didn't bother to complete the forms
submitted by registered Democrats, and the Democrats were not informed of the existence of such incomplete
forms.
The Clinton Justice Department took no action on any complaints. The provisions of the 1964 Voter Rights Act,
largely instituted under pressure of a growing civil rights movement, have been ignored.
Gore's electoral challenge was limited to his demand for a recount in four counties where Democrats largely
predominated. He declined to file for a state-wide recount. Gore's position centred on the use in these four
counties of antiquated punch card voting machines, which routinely fail to register upwards of three percent of
all votes cast. By contrast, the failure rate of the more modern optical scanners is less than one percent.
Gore was attacked for his "selectivity" in choosing just a few predominantly Democratic Party counties for a
recount. And his supporters neglected to mention that the antiquated machines were placed there by
Democratic Party officials, who routinely provide the minimum of public services to the communities of
oppressed nationalities.
Nevertheless, an unofficial post-election recount conducted by the Miami Herald indicated that in at least the
contested counties Gore did pick up enough votes to have won the state-and thus the presidency. But no
information has come forward of a recount in the other 63 counties, including those in which Bush might have
picked up votes.
In truth, voter fraud, racist or otherwise, is the norm in capitalist America, regularly practised by both parties
when it suits their needs. In the current situation the Democratic Party representatives of the ruling rich made it
clear that they had no intention of making racial discrimination an issue in regard to the outcome of a
presidential election.
Even before Gore's campaign team had time to contemplate the importance of the Supreme Court decision
that sealed the Vice President's fate, Ed Rendell, National Chair of the Democratic Party, joined with other top
Democrats to call on Gore to end the matter and concede.
This Pandora's Box of overt racism was too hot to handle. Both parties, of course, will continue their racist
practices, but in more subtle ways, like the criminal "justice" system and so-called welfare reform.
Fraud of U.S. "democracy"
In the end, the Republican-dominated U.S. Supreme Court, in a decision that will be laughed at for decades,
cited the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to admonish the Florida
Supreme Court for supposedly allowing different standards for counting votes with disputed chads.
Widely divergent standards have been and remain the rule throughout Florida and likely in every other state.
Were the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling to be applied nationally, the country's electoral system would be reduced
to a bad joke.
But when the chips were down, the historic "states' rights" Republicans in the nation's top court used federal
intervention against the state of Florida when it suited their partisan needs.
Fraud is also the rule with the Electoral College system, originally implemented to allot a disproportionate vote
to the Southern slave states where Blacks were denied the franchise but were nevertheless partially counted in
terms of Electoral College vote determinations.
While Gore won the final popular vote by a margin of over a half million, he lost the decisive vote in the Electoral
College. An example of how this system can work is helpful. In 12 small states where Bush won, he received a
total of 73 electoral votes. In the single state of California, where Gore received more popular votes than the
combined total of Bush in these 12 states, Gore received an Electoral College vote of 54.
But it is not just the undemocratic Electoral College, or even racist and corrupt voting practices that mark U.S.
"democracy" as a fraud. Elections in the United States are the property of the ruling rich, whose representatives
own and control literally every key institution of the capitalist state.
From the expenditure of billions of corporate dollars to promote their candidates, to the direct ownership of the
vast proportion of the media, to reactionary laws that ban working-class opposition parties from the ballot, U.S.
elections are a charade played out among the élites who vie among one another for power to better promote
their corporate interests at the expense of the vast majority.
In truth, working people have no say within the electoral system in regard to the critical decisions that affect our
lives. The great mass of voters are relegated to a choice between their oppressors and exploiters.
Any and all significant social and political change has always been a product of mass social movements rooted
in the daily struggles of working people who challenge the status quo.
From the winning of the franchise by the general population (it was originally restricted to white, male property
owners), to the right of unions to organise and bargain collectively, to the gains of the mass civil rights
movement including the ending of legal segregation, to the stopping of the murderous Vietnam War, working
people broke with the policies of the ruling-class parties and took to the streets to win in practice what the law
and the ruling-class parties denied.
George Bush's first days in the White House have gone beyond the usual "honeymoon" period accorded all
new presidents. He has courted leading Democrats, who in return have signed up to his early proposals,
including a further gutting of funds to public education.
Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan, the guru of the staggered U.S. economy, gave Bush the go-ahead for
a massive tax cut for the rich. Greenspan, in his nationally televised speech last week, broke new ground in
advocating the very policies that Bush's Republicans are planning.
Some 90 percent of the so-called tax cut planned is earmarked for the ruling rich, while working people will
receive little or nothing.
Citing the state of California's just revealed energy crisis, Bush announced plans to "end America's
dependency on foreign oil" by introducing legislation to begin oil exploration in the now protected Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge: Bush's new environmental chief won her spurs as a lobbyist for the lead industry!
Thus the Bush team plans to do in public view what the Clinton team did without the hoopla and fanfare.
Clinton cut more social services and engineered more corporate welfare than the combined presidencies of
Nixon, Reagan and George Bush Senior.
The new president, like Clinton before him, is far from a rogue individual with a conservative agenda. He is the
U.S. ruling class answer to increasing capitalist competition and declining U.S. corporate rates.
The transparency of Bush's agenda and the expected support of his Democratic Party "critics" may well result
in a renewed fightback by today's workers and allies in U.S. society.
The mass national protests on January 20, Bush's inauguration day, brought tens of thousands into the streets.
The battle has begun.
The article above was written by Jeff Mackler, the National Secretary of Socialist Action.
