Jimmy Carter:
A Saint, or an Attack Dog for the Ruling Class?

Jan 6, 2025

After Jimmy Carter died on December 29 at age 100, Joe and Jill Biden praised Carter as a man of “compassion and moral clarity.” The entire news media and political establishment followed suit in a massive public relations campaign, claiming that Carter was a champion of the underdog and the poor, and an advocate for worldwide peace and justice.

But the opposite is true.

When Jimmy Carter was elected president in 1976, he promised to drain the Washington swamp after the Watergate scandals. He promised to heal the deep wounds from the disastrous, decades-long Viet Nam War. He promised to alleviate urban decay and expand the social safety net.

But the capitalist economy was mired in its worst recession in decades. Factories and other workplaces slammed shut. Fake energy shortages caused long lines at gas stations. Energy prices spiked. Major cities, beset by decay and crime, went broke. Unemployment and inflation skyrocketed at the same time.

So, Carter moved to rescue the profits of big business and their capitalist owners from the crisis caused by their own economic system. Carter enacted big tax cuts and subsidies—for the rich. To pay for them, Carter slashed vital benefits, including for retirees on Social Security and the unemployed. He even made unemployment benefits taxable for the first time—a further cut.

Carter also slashed vital social spending across the board. For example, funding for public housing and housing subsidies for the poor were reduced from 517,000 units per year in 1976 down to less than 150,000 units in 1981 per year—a cut of 60%! (Habitat for Humanity, which Carter joined afterwards, built a few thousand units total, a drop in the bucket compared to the cuts that Carter carried out during his presidency.)

To boost corporate profits still further, the Carter administration supported the capitalist push to force down wages and jettison benefits, including pensions and health care. In 1978, for example, Carter invoked Taft-Hartley against the miners’ strikes, making the strikes illegal and arresting the strike leaders. In this case, the miners’ strikes were strong enough to beat back these attacks. But in 1979, the Carter administration successfully attacked auto workers, even getting Congress to pass a law dictating big wage and benefit cuts. When the UAW leadership, considered one of the most powerful unions at the time, completely caved in to these demands, the rest of the capitalist class generalized this push for big concessions.

Neither is Carter the advocate for peace that the news media and politicians claim. Carter might be credited with the Camp David Accords, in which the Israeli and Egyptian governments ended their state of war with each other. Obviously, this did not at all end the wars in the Middle East. All it did was realign the powers in Israel’s favor in these wars.

In a few cases, such as in Nicaragua and Iran, vicious dictatorships, which were clients of the U.S. government, because they catered to and defended U.S. business interests and investments, were overthrown by enormous social uprisings and revolutions. So, the Carter administration quickly moved to isolate, undermine and attack those new governments.

At the same time, the Carter administration secretly supported religious fundamentalists in Afghanistan in order to provoke the disastrous invasion and occupation by the Soviet Union, Afghanistan’s neighbor. In this war, the Carter administration considered the lives of the Afghan people as mere pawns in order to weaken and bleed the Soviet Union, in other words, to give the Soviet Union its own “Viet Nam,” as a Carter advisor later admitted.

Thus, the Carter administration’s foreign policy was marked by more wars, increased military budgets, and support of dictatorships. And they helped pave the way for the much bigger wars and rivalries that plague so much of the world today.

Given all the hardships that the Carter administration helped impose on big parts of the working population, he was booted out of office during the following election in a landslide defeat. But many of the attacks that Reagan, his successor, is blamed for, were actually initiated under Carter and the Democrats.

In reality, Jimmy Carter was simply doing his job. The man whom the politicians and news media today try to make it seem like a saint, was a run of the mill politician in the service of the American ruling class, against workers and poor people in this country and around the world.