EDITORIAL
Both Parties Swindle Us—Build Our Own Party!

Oct 25, 2010

Almost two years ago, on November 4, election night, when the returns came in, many workers felt that the country had turned a corner, that the Bush years were being left behind. Large numbers of workers had voted for Obama, and for his party, with hopes that a new administration would find the way out of the morass linked to Bush’s eight years in office.

As a reminder, here is what we had been living through: An economy producing little but growing unemployment. A million homes lost to the mortgage scam pushed by the big banks. Two very deadly wars, which were even then spilling out into other parts of the globe, creating more terrorists, eager to take revenge on the U.S. for the destruction it wreaked in their countries.

Two years later, this is what we face: An economy producing high profits for the big banks but worsening unemployment–with fewer people working than in 2008. Two million more homes lost to mortgage foreclosure since the last election, with the banks revving up to rush four or five million more homes through their repo mill. Two still very deadly wars. The one in Iraq continues, with more than 50,000 U.S. troops, with dozens of bases, and with a government put in place by the U.S. military, ignoring last March’s Iraqi election. The other war in Afghanistan has spread into Pakistan, with U.S. troops numbering more than 100,000, with reports of civilian casualties commonplace, producing more people desiring vengeance on the U.S.

How could it be more clear? BOTH parties serve the interests of the capitalist ruling class and their big banks. We may shift from one to the other, but we get the same deadly policy, the same willingness to reduce the living standard of working people in order to increase the profits on which the wealthiest people in this country feed.

Voting for Democrat or Republican gives our stamp of approval to the policies they have both carried out.

Voting for Democrat or Republican gives them both a blank check to attack us–with our own name signed to the check.

We are stuck in a swamp–created by the capitalist class and their banks, made worse by the policies of both the Bush and the Obama administrations. To get ourselves unstuck, we need to turn to our own source of strength: our numbers and our position in the economy. Our class, the working class, has the power to make things run–or to make them stop running.

Around the globe, the working class is beginning to stir: in France, in Italy, in Spain, in Mozambique, in Korea, in China, in Russia. Even in the United States, where the working class has long been less conscious of its real power, some workers have made the decision to resist, and in so doing have begun to pull other workers after them.

There is no way out of the swamp unless we build a road out by starting to fight. In fighting, we can also create what is so sorely lacking in this country: a political party of the working class, one whose goal is to enable working people to fight for our own interests and take control of our own destiny.