EDITORIAL
Impeachment Distraction

Jan 20, 2020

The impeachment drama in Washington, for many, is riveting. A TV production, a spy movie with underworld characters who tell “true” stories about Bad Guys, complete with back stories from exotic places like Kiev, Ukraine and Russia.

If you are a Trump supporter, you watch the “other” TV station and get to see the daily Apprentice show combined with Bad Billy, “I-shot-the-sheriff” routines at election rallies.

Then there are the Super Heroes, the Democrats, in procession to serve the charges of impeachment. Pomp and Circumstance like the British Royal Family (exit Megxit) with the Senate ducks in a row. Republicans swearing to be impartial and unbiased in the trial (how corny is that)?

The entire new year will be filled with these same performances.

Does it take all this excitement to prove that Trump is corrupt? Hell no. So what is up with the daily high drama?

The chances that Trump will be forced out by impeachment are slim. It is clear that the Democrats don’t expect it or even think it possible. Their best-case scenario in any event is to replace Trump with Pence (notice how they didn’t move to impeach him), a man equally or more reactionary than Trump, a man clearly up to his neck in the current scandal.

So how can any of this correct the pressing problems the working class is facing today?

What will it mean to accept this level of theft, gangsterism, political corruption for nine more months, hoping for a new president to be elected (really eleven months before a new president is seated)?

One more year of global warming? Of stock market gouging by the big bourgeois in spite of crash warnings? Past tipping point.

One more year of threats and counter-threats against other nations. Iran invaded? New wars? Again, way past the tipping point.

This system is broken beyond repair, imposed from above. An imperial machine to keep the working class quiet.

But this is how the two-party system functions. The Administration may be Republican, may be Democratic. But being elected every two to four years leaves politicians unreachable, non-removable by a system created to benefit the wealthy. We might as well have kings and queens.

Workers get up every day, go to work and produce, making the society run, raising children, producing the heat, light, shelter and food and transportation that provide for society.

Buying into the two-party voting process reduces to nothing the role that the workers can and should play.

There is no way within this supposedly democratic “of the people, by the people, and for the people” system for working people to exercise control directly, to affect decisions on war, on spending of public money, on wage rates or prices of goods.

We don’t need the politicians, the lawmakers, the bosses and the bankers! They are parasites living off our labor.

We need a different organization to run the country. We need representatives from our own class, chosen from the workplaces, to represent us in decision-making. These representatives need to be subject to immediate recall.

We need road and infrastructure repair, higher wages and price controls. Good schools for our kids and health care, decent and affordable shelter for our families.

These are the things that representatives from our class would take on.

It is only by building our own working class organizations to fight and to impose what we need, that we will be able to move forward into a better society.

All the rest is a side-show.