Ashcroft, Ridge and more
The rift comes home
By Deirdre Griswold
Where will the axe fall next?
The Bush administration is riven by deep contradictions--and not only
over its failed war to subjugate Iraq, which caused CIA Director
George Tenet's head to roll at the beginning of June.
There is growing tension among the government agencies that deal with
domestic policy, too--especially the many powerful organs of the
capitalist state that employ growing armies of police of various
kinds, trained to use force and violence to protect the status quo.
The rift that appears to have opened up between Attorney General John
Ashcroft and Homeland Security czar Tom Ridge is only a symptom of it.
Both foreign and domestic policy flow from the same source: the class
relations of a given society. And those class relations are becoming
shakier every day. No one can dispute that the gap is wider than ever
in the United States between the fundamental classes--the shrinking
group of capitalists who own and control the productive wealth of
society, quite a few of whom have graduated from millionaires to
billionaires, and the millions of workers whose economic well-being
and prospects for the future become bleaker every day.
This sharp intensification of exploitation is bound to break out in a
volcanic renewal of the class struggle. The only question is how soon
it will start and how rapidly it will grow. There are already signs
that many of the most oppressed workers--especially women and people
of color--are on the march.
Armed might not enough
The thinking by the Bush administration that it could establish U.S.
domination over the whole world with its superiority in military
technology has run aground in Iraq because, in the long run, even
military strength flows from politics, and not the other way around.
And the political situation in Iraq has been fundamentally altered by
the ongoing resistance of the Iraqi people--despite cruel repression
by the well-armed occupying forces. The people's struggle let the air
out of the Bush-Rumsfeld doctrine of world domination.
So when is the same lesson going to be applied here at home?
Ashcroft and Ridge are the two most visible figures representing the
domestic structures of state repression: the Justice Department, which
controls the courts, many of the prisons and the FBI; and the newly
created Department of Homeland Security, which is supposed to bring
under its umbrella all the agencies involved in responding to an
internal crisis.
A rather bizarre incident recently showed that, despite professions of
collaboration and mutual respect, there is deep animosity between
these two.
On May 26, Ashcroft, with FBI Director John Mueller at his side,
dramatically stepped before the television cameras to declare that
"credible intelligence, from multiple sources, indicates that al-Qaeda
plans to attempt an attack on the United States in the next few
months." It was the type of announcement deliberately calculated to
bolster George W. Bush's standing in the polls, which had been
dropping with the Abu Ghraib torture scandal. The thinking undoubtedly
was that a population made to feel they are in imminent danger will be
more likely to accept brutality and criminal abuse inflicted by the
authorities on presumed "suspects."
But, almost immediately, Ashcroft's announcement was challenged.
Ridge's Department of Homeland Security didn't elevate the national
"threat warning" to red, or even orange. Instead, it remained at
yellow, where it had been for months. And Ridge "seemed to downplay
the warning in a series of interviews," said CBS News the next day.
"There's not a consensus within the administration that we need to
raise the threat level," Ridge said.
The powerful corporate media--which in many ways functions as an arm
of the capitalist state, just as the church did in relation to the
feudal state--more or less ridiculed Ash croft's grandstanding. It
pointed out that local law enforcement hadn't been informed of any new
threat and were shaking their heads in wonder.
Almost two weeks later, on June 8, Ashcroft testified before the
Senate Judiciary Committee, which wanted to know about "a cascade of
recently disclosed memorandums in which lawyers from his department as
well as those from the Defense Department and other agencies provided
legal arguments that inflicting pain in interrogating people detained
in the fight against terrorism did not always constitute torture,"
wrote the New York Times on June 9.
When Ashcroft refused to hand over several of these memorandums, he
was warned by two of the senators that he could be in contempt of
Congress. One of them, Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware, gave a pragmatic
rather than moral or principled reason for not using torture. He said
prohibitions on torture are intended to "protect my son in the
military. That's why we have these treaties. So when Americans are
captured, they are not tortured. That's the reason, in case anybody
forgets it." Not a word about the suffering of the Iraqis and other
people held in U.S. interrogation camps.
There is always rivalry among government bureaucracies competing for
hegemony and funding. Capitalist politics is very largely a fight for
spoils among factions competing to be blessed by the ruling class as
its loyal servants. But they are supposed to keep the struggle out of
sight, especially in "times of war"--or what the president and others
deem to be war. They're not supposed to let the poisoned daggers out
of their sheaths when cameras are grinding.
The war at home
Of course, none in the political establishment will ever point to the
predatory ruling class as the real threat to the workers and oppressed
peoples living in this country. More people die every day from
preventable conditions--lack of health care, industrial pollution,
accidents on the job, food contamination, and the chaotic and
stressful personal and family relations that accompany economic
insecurity and the objectification of women as property--than have
died in all the so-called terrorist attacks. But no super-agency like
the Department of Homeland Security has been created to deal with this
very real terrorism of rampaging capitalism. The existing government
agencies supposed to deal with these problems are woefully underfunded
and virtually toothless.
It is also noteworthy that in this recent period a number of judges
around the country have ruled as unconstitutional executive orders
that allowed various police and military agencies to hold "suspects"
indefinitely, without any due process of law.
The widening rifts in the Bush administration--first over foreign
policy, now over domestic repression--are partly political in nature,
using the narrow definition of that word. A national election is
coming up and the party out of office sees the opportunity to take
hold of the huge machinery of government, with its many opportunities
for patronage and influence. Schemes and maneuvers to line up votes,
like Ashcroft's move, are more likely to be exposed.
But that doesn't explain the struggles among Republican
appointees--like Rums feld versus Powell, or Ashcroft versus Ridge.
These struggles reflect the much deeper angst within the ruling class
itself that its long ideological hold over the masses is
loosening--both abroad and here at home.
Under it all are the involuntary economic processes by which
capitalism generates profit--processes that are undermining the social
stability of the system. The globalization of the labor market is
bringing back home the wretched conditions of exploitation that a
century ago generated a robust labor movement in this country, but
were then exported as U.S. capital moved abroad. It is also bringing
to these shores workers whose political awareness and militancy was
shaped in countries oppressed and super-exploited by imperialism.
Politics, as Marx explained, is concentrated economics. The ruling
class that is conducting a war for profit abroad is conducting the
same war at home against the workers. There is no reason to think that
the repressive machinery in the hands of Ashcroft and Ridge will be
any more effective against the resistance of the workers than the
Pentagon has been against the resistance of the Iraqi people. Quite
the opposite.
Reprinted from the June 17, 2004, issue of Workers World newspaper
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