The Rockefeller-led U.S. imperialist wing which Obama serves couldn’t have asked for more timely delivery from UPS and FedEx. Arriving the weekend before Election Day, the Yemeni parcel bombs helped shift attention, for a while at least, back to widening U.S. wars.
Until recently, this year’s election had centered almost entirely on the domestic, economic crisis facing U.S. rulers. It reflected a sharpening battle among various U.S. capitalists, waged between the Tea Partiers and the liberal politicians serving the dominant, imperialist faction.
Those forces financing the Tea party, especially the Texas billionaire Koch brothers, are focused on short-run, immediate profits, favoring tax cuts for the rich and little or no financial regulation. The Rockefeller-led group represents the long-range interests of U.S. capitalism, more dependent for profits from, and control of, foreign oil, making imperialist wars abroad vital for their system’s survival. The Tea Party election struggle has been overshadowing the main wing’s most urgent efforts overseas.
The owners of U.S.-based giants like ExxonMobil and JP Morgan Chase seek to secure the greater Middle East by force, both for its geostrategic energy supplies and to counter rival Iranian, Chinese and Russian expansion.
The bomb-plot headlines about stepping up U.S. attacks in Yemen — which borders Big Oil’s crown jewel in neighboring Saudi Arabia — edged out the latest election-related blurbs from Sarah Palin or the Daily Show. And just a week before the latest Yemeni threat broke, Wikileaks’ dumping of 400,000 incriminating war documents had turned the spotlight on Iraq, and indirectly on Iran.
Wikileaks Helps Brass Write Manual for the Next War
A seething Iraqi civil war, arising in large part from the U.S. missteps Wikileaks highlights, prevents oil companies like Exxon from realizing the six billion barrels per day (bbd) U.S. rulers hoped for when they invaded Iraq in 2003. Production has hardly reached 2.5 bbd.
Masquerading as anti-war and anti-establishment, Wikileaks actually furnishes a self-critical “what-not-to-do” guide for the Pentagon’s coming U.S. clash with Iran. Lacking any legitimate incentive, U.S. brass must rely on anti-Islamic racism to motivate troops to kill. But continued racist mass civilian “collateral-damage” deaths and torturing and murdering prisoners could spark a widespread anti-U.S. Islamic rebellion, reversing any or all U.S. military gains. Exxon could lose its top source of oil in Saudi Arabia.
Main U.S. Rulers Bent on War
Despite Tea Party Gains
Wikileaks and the Yemen plot inject a war focus into the often distracting electoral system that history has saddled on otherwise dominant imperialist U.S. rulers. Every two years just about anybody with enough money can buy a seat in Congress. The main Rockefeller faction worries that Koch brothers-type U.S. capitalists will rally an anti-tax Tea Party voter base to elect representatives that would hinder capitalism’s long-range need for its war machine.
The leading U.S. imperialist think-tank, the liberal, Rockefeller-funded Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), has been running a lengthy series titled “Foreign Policy and the 2010 Midterms,” highlighting, in the case of Afghanistan, “Doubts Over the Mission” and “Funding the War.”
And the Wall Street Journal, owned by Republican, but imperialist, Rupert Murdoch, worries, “At issue is whether candidates backed by Tea-party activists may force a shift in the terms of debate over the war in Afghanistan. While Republicans are traditionally hawkish on defense — and foreign policy hasn’t emerged as a major campaign issue — some GOP candidates have expressed skepticism about the scale of U.S. military involvement in the region.” (10/27/10)
On Election Eve, liberal imperialist thinkers were wishing that the incoming Tea Partiers would prove ultimately more imperialist-minded. Stephen Biddle, a CFR fellow, hopes for a GOP split: “One of the divides in the Tea Party is between hard-core libertarians who just plain believe in smaller government, and are basically isolationist in their foreign policy, versus more traditionally conservative Republican Tea Partiers who tend to believe that the non-defense parts of the government are what needs cutting.” (Public Radio International, 10/19)
Frank Rich, the liberal New York Times top Obama watcher, also foresaw a similar pro-imperialist silver lining in Republican election gains:
“Trent Lott, the former Senate leader and current top-dog lobbyist, gave away the game in July. ‘We don’t need a lot of Jim DeMint disciples,’ he said, referring to the South Carolina senator who is the Tea Party’s Capitol Hill patron saint. ‘As soon as they get here, we need to co-opt them.’ It’s the players who wrote the checks for the G.O.P. surge [a la Koch brothers’ types], not those earnest folk in tri-corner hats, who plan to run the table in the next corporate takeover of Washington. Though Tom DeLay may now be on trial for corruption in Texas, the spirit of his K Street lives on in a Lott client list that includes Northrop Grumman and Goldman Sachs.”
Arms merchant Grumman and arch-imperialist financier Goldman-Sachs have similar interests as Exxon’s and JP Morgan’s war-making goals.
After an expected setback at the polls, the liberal imperialists’ message to the masses is to rally for Obama in 2012. The ballot box, however, is a dead end; every candidate fronts for one capitalist faction or another. PLP strives to build our revolutionary communist party through militant action in the factories and unions, on the campuses and among working-class GI’s, in the churches and other community mass organizations, against the imperialist billionaires and their politician stooges.
Such action will hasten the revolution to obliterate the profit-driven war-makers and establish the working class in state power. J
Wikileaks: Another Liberal Rulers’ Mouthpiece
Wikileaks didn’t fall from the sky. Its mastermind Julian Assange sports a lengthening liberal imperialist pedigree. In June, a profile in the ultra-liberal, Establishment New Yorker magazine canonized him as a quirky but supremely well-intentioned truth seeker. Assange and pals were front-runners for a $500,000 grant from the Knight Foundation whose president, Alberto Ibarguen, sits on the board of the Council on Foreign Relations, the top U.S. imperialist think-tank. Knight eventually turned Assange down, but only when dealing with the Times proved far more lucrative to liberal rulers in terms of public opinion. The Rockefeller-led liberal cabal of National Public Radio, Public Broadcasting System, and Corporation for Public Broadcasting have become, through their grantees Radio Pacifica and its “Democracy Now” program, the main media defenders of Assange and his Army intelligence mole Private Bradley Manning.
Would Iran Invasion Solve Capitol Gridlock?
The brightest glimpse of imperialist light through the dark Tea Party tunnel comes from Strategic Forecasting, Inc. Widely-cited Stratfor analysts provide U.S. corporations with global political insights they can use to boost profits. On October 27, Stratfor’s founder George Freidman predicted Congressional “gridlock” on domestic issues in the wake of November’s elections but said:
“If Obama were to use foreign policy to enhance his political standing through decisive action, and achieve some positive results in relations with foreign governments, the one place he could do it would be Iran.” Freidman combines the same warning of risks and wishful thinking that accompanied Washington’s initial forays into the endless Iraqi and Afghan conflicts:
“An attack on Iran would not be an invasion, nor would it be a short war. Like Yugoslavia in 1999, it would be an extended air war lasting an unknown number of months. There would be American POWs from aircraft that were shot down or suffered mechanical failure over Iranian territory. There would be many civilian casualties, which the international media would focus on. It would not be an antiseptic campaign, but it would likely (though it is important to reiterate not certainly) destroy Iran’s nuclear capability and profoundly weaken its conventional forces.”
As drastic as its proposal sounds, Stratfor in no way sits on the lunatic fringe. The ultra-establishment CFR immediately posted the piece on its own website, billing it a “Must Read.”
