US elections: Corruption, bribery and a book signing here and there.

President Gingrich and VP Trump?

It is no wonder only 40% of registered voters turned out in the US elections last year.  The circus is beginning to heat up as the clowns come out in force to entertain the dwindling crowds before the final act in November 2012.  Obama has an advantage as far as he presidency is concerned as he is the incumbent and is expected to raiser a $1 billion war chest.

The low voter turnouts don’t worry the politicians in the two Wall Street parties mind you as the elections still mean an opportunity to make some money and, if elected, paves the way to the legal plundering of society’s resources.  The capitalist party out of the White House at the moment is the Republicans and they are squabbling among themselves over which of their candidates is best qualified, or more accurately, the one who has the best chance of defeating Obama in 2012.

Whoever it might be, the campaign trail is a good way to make some extra cash.  Newt Gingrich, Michelle Bachman, Herman Cain, who has pulled out and Ron Paul of the Libertarian wing of the party all have books out and have combined campaign appearances with book signing or sales.

Gingrich’s wife accompanies him on the campaign trail and the pair sign copies of her new children’s book.  “Mr. Gingrich’s commercial endeavors are so enmeshed with his candidacy that Gingrich productions works with the campaign to coordinate his schedule”, says Anna Haberlein, a company spokeswoman.  On her campaign trail, Michele Bachman included appearances at numerous bookstores, a tour that was organized and paid for by her publisher.

The US Congress is one of the most despised and distrusted institutions in US society and faith in politicians and the government is at an all time high. A recent New York Times/CBS poll found that 89 percent of Americans say they distrust government to do the right thing, 74 percent say the country is heading in the wrong direction and 84 percent disapprove of the U.S. Congress.

The economic and political system is broken. A tragic aside to this is that the heads of organized Labor will throw the resources under their control, both human and financial, behind the war monger Obama and the Democratic Party helping to decrease the electorate participation further.  The millions of dollars of their members’ hard earned dues money that they have wasted on Wall Street candidates over the years is a tragedy.

Alongside this campaign circus there is no attempt whatsoever to obscure the marriage between politics and big business.  AT&T, a major US corporation spent $11.7 million on lobbying the first six months of this year; bribing politicians that is.  Last year as the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was attempting to introduce rules on “net neutrality” affecting internet service providers ability to restrict traffic over their networks, AT&T lobbied Congress and 245 House members, 233 beneficiaries of AT&T’s political action committee contacted the FCC to get the agency to back off according to Business Week.

The chairman of the FCC made it clear that the issue brought together the “broadest possible array of stakeholders” Business Week writes.  Business Week is very open about what this language means, It’s DC speak for “business got a seat at the table”. The head of AT&T met with the FCC chairman six times in the months before the rules were released and low and behold, the rules contained clauses that gave AT&T what it wanted.

In a bizarre sort of twist, AT&T sent 133 boxes of cup cakes to the commission as a Christmas gift instead of the usual December cookies. 

They start campaigning early here, some two years before the election and, as readers are well aware, US elections cost billions of dollars.  It is indeed the best democracy money can buy.  It is hard to predict what will happen in the elections as the unfortunate thing about having to concede the vote to the majority of the population is that the capitalist class cannot always determine what the electorate will do.  What we do know is that in the absence of a mass working people’ party and the refusal of the Labor leadership to offer one, it leaves the discontented with no hope and generally abstinence and allows the capitalists monopoly of the political arena to continue unabated.

The wild card in many ways is the increasing discontent that is being expressed though direct action, the Occupy Wall Street movement, home occupations and the like.  Never having a political party of our own, US working class history has been made primarily in the streets, the great strikes and occupations of the thirties, the civil rights movement of the 50's and the pitched battles fought against the police, hired thugs and Pinkertons in the struggle for the right to organize in to Unions.

As the previous blog also shows, the bourgeois can make some serious mistakes, not so much out of overconfidence which is often the case but in these times more out of desperation as US capitalism is under assault from all sides, losing influence on the world stage, a broken economic and political system and faced with a revolt festering at home.

There’s a lot to be optimistic about.