Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 225 February/March 2012
‘I must note that, going by what everyone is saying, that the selection of a Republican candidate to aspire to the presidency of this globalised and far-reaching empire is, in its turn – I am serious – the greatest competition of idiocy and ignorance that I have ever heard.’ (Fidel Castro, 24 January 2012)
If anything, Fidel is understating the truth. Since Barack Obama, as incumbent President, is the Democratic Party candidate in this November’s election, the stage has been occupied by the Republican Party race for its presidential nomination. It has been a pantomime for all seasons, overstuffed with buffoons and very poor jokes. The production opened last March with the entire cast of candidates denouncing Sharia law, something apparently threatening the USA (24% of the population believe that Barack Hussein Obama, a Christian, is actually a Muslim). One of the features of the race has been the rapid rise and fall of candidates or potential candidates. In April 2011, billionaire businessman Donald Trump briefly bounced on stage as a possible candidate, but almost as swiftly bounced back off. In August Texas Governor Rick Perry announced he was running for the nomination. In October, it emerged that the Perry family leases a hunting camp once called ‘Niggerhead’. Herman (‘If you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself’) Cain appeared to roars of applause…only to be yanked briskly off when his mistress went public.
Mitt Romney, former Governor of Massachusetts, is clearly the candidate of finance capital. Romney himself helped found private equity firm Bain Capital, and has a net worth of $250m. A list of his donors reads like a Who’s Who of Wall Street: Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, UBS, Wells Fargo and Citigroup. His Republican opponents have attacked him for his speaking fees, for destroying jobs, for paying low taxes, for being a ‘Vulture Capitalist’. Democrats are gleeful that they can run these criticisms as part of their ads in the general election. Indeed, finance capital is so concerned about these populist anti-capitalist, anti-elitist attacks that the Wall Street Journal criticised Romney’s opponents ‘for their crude and damaging caricatures of modern business and capitalism… Politics isn’t subtle, and these candidates are desperate, but do they have to sound like Michael Moore?’ and sniffed that Gingrich’s backing comes ‘from a billionaire who made his money in the casino business, which Mr. Gingrich apparently considers morally superior to investing in companies in the hope of making a profit’ (13 January 2012).
Although Mitt Romney has been heavily critical of Obama’s policy toward Israel, Newt Gingrich is the prime Zionist candidate. In November, he claimed that the Palestinians were an ‘invented people’ who ‘had the chance to go many places’ and should have left Palestine. Days later, he received $5m from arch-Zionist casino billionaire, Sheldon Adelson, the eighth richest man in the US. He subsequently promised to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. In January Adelson’s Israeli-born wife gave Gingrich a further $5m. The mercurial former Speaker of the House, who on one famous occasion shut down the US government, has been attacking Romney’s business background. The Republican establishment has become deeply disturbed and big guns are being rolled out to stop the Newt. Former Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole has released a stinging statement which begins: ‘I have not been critical of Newt Gingrich, but it is now time to take a stand before it is too late.’ It continues unrelentingly: ‘a one-man-band who rarely took advice. It was his way or the highway…a number of House members wanted to throw him out as speaker…mounting ethics problems caused him to resign in early 1999… Gingrich had a new idea every minute and most of them were off the wall’, and on and on.
Who is going to win the Republican nomination? Given the party’s current fit of right-wing petit-bourgeois hysteria, it is premature to write Gingrich completely out of the picture. But in the battle of the bankrolls, which is largely what determines the outcome of these supposedly ‘democratic’ elections, Romney is the likely victor.
Steve Palmer, US correspondent
