by Richard Mellor in California
[Ed: The American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is a powerful pro-Israel lobbying organisation in Washington DC, with large numbers of supporters and sponsors in both of the main parties, Republicans and Democrats. It spends tens of millions of dollars in every election cycle to get candidates elected who support the policies of the Israeli state. It is expected to spend $100m in the 2024 elections.
AIPAC, therefore, represents a huge force in the suppressing any criticism of the Israeli state – even from ‘moderate’ American Jews – within the US political establishment. This is the subject of the video posted below, and the starting point of Richard Mellor’s comments].
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Look at the cost of the 2022 primaries cited in this video: $8billion. How can that be a democracy of the people? It is, but only certain people. Athenian democracy, that historians champion so much, was a democracy for slave owners; it was a slaveocracy. Slaves didn’t get to vote. The US is a bourgeois-democracy, the working class gets to vote, but only for candidates from one of the two bourgeois (capitalist) parties.
Beyond that, you have to have the money. This is why the trade union bureaucracy, which is a political arm of the Democratic Party in the workers’ organisations, wasting hundreds of millions of dollars, billions over decades, (workers hard earned dues money) getting Democrats in to office is criminal; we can’t beat capitalists with money, they have more of it; that’s why we call them capitalists.
The money and resources that the labour hierarchy controls – structure, an army of full timers – could be used to build a workers’ political alternative that could challenge the bourgeois parties in Congress, but also in society, by , at the very least questioning the validity and ideology of the so-called free market and capitalism.
The main reason the trade union hierarchy refuses to do this is because the mood in society cries out for change. The two parties of big business are pretty much despised as workers’ living standards decline, no matter which party is in power.
The environmental crisis alone is threatening our very existence. Palestine Ohio comes to mind, or the huge explosion in West, Texas (who would allow a fertiliser plant next to a school?) or the near collapse of the Oroville Dam in California that forced the evacuation of some 200,000 people, or the horrific deep water drilling spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
These weren’t accidents, they were market driven. In the case of the last one, the writing of the rules for deepwater drilling was handed over from government regulators to energy industry personnel, who wrote them in pencil according to the New York Times. There are too many examples to cite here and notice that they disappear from the media once the smoke clears. They want us to forget these events, not think about them, why they happen or what the long term consequences are.
Trade union leaders have a ‘stop in the mind’
The trade union hierarchy has no solution to this, other than to elect a Democrat into office and plead with Wall Street and its political representatives to be less aggressive, to not be greedy, but nice. They’re not in the driver’s seat, and can always blame the Democrats or politics in general, eg all politicians are bad.
To build an alternative, or take the lead in building one, would mean they would have to produce the goods and respond to the increasing desire for change that exists in US society, but they can’t. To use a phrase the great English historian Christopher Hill used when referring to the heroic figures that led the reform movement against the feudal aristocracy in the English Revolution, the labour leaders to a “t” cannot overcome “the stop in the mind”.
They believe that capitalism is the only form of social organisation and capitalists (Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Buffett, etc.) are the rightful Lords of the Universe and the system has to be upheld. We know where that leads.
Their refusal to offer an alternative is a major reason for the rise of the right and the emergence and appeal of Trump.
From the US socialist website, Facts for Working People. The original can be found here.
