Barbara Bush. Katrina "Worked Well" For the Underprivileged.

The Architects of Death

 Barbara Bush on Katrina

Like the British Royals, the matriarchs and patriarchs of the ruling families in the US often live long lives. With the best health care, housing, and all other requirements for leading a healthy life including an absence of unhealthy working conditions while having to maintain a family as well.They generally do no productive labor at all and we could say that they have what socialism can provide but they don't want it for the rest of us.

I did not wish Barbara Bush dead. But I don't mourn for her. Why would I? She is part of a family group that has blood on its hands. She is the matriarch of one of the dominant ruling class families of US capitalism. Her husband has blood on his hands with the interventions and assassinations the CIA has carried out in South and Central America (See The Panama Deception). He bombed the tiny country of Panama when his friend Noriega got a bit too independent. Her son, the imbecile president before Obama is a mass murderer and war criminal responsible for the destruction of Iraq as a nation state, a country that never threatened the US in any way. He is responsible  for the death of some one million people. Her other offspring are crooks and wasters in one way or another. As a bourgeois woman she has a right not to be discriminated against on the basis of her sex. As a bourgeois and a willing partner in the exploitation, massacre and destruction of workers and working class lives, she is as guilty as the rest of them.

Her comments on Katrina above show how detached people from her class are.

She has not condemned the war criminal Madeline Albright who said on US television that the death of some 500,00 Iraqi's due to the US imposed sanctions was "worth it." These deaths were mostly women and children. Why should workers not have anything but contempt for a representative of the ruling class who, in an unguarded moment said ‘Why should we hear about body bags and deaths? It’s not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?’ when talking about the news and the unpleasant consequences of one of her family's wars. Yes, the news is distressing. Her son went on to kill a million or so people after that comment and eventually rounded up their old friend Saddam Hussein and had him killed too.

I remember a scene in that excellent film Gosford Park  about the British class system set in the 1930's and directed by the American Robert Aldrich. A British factory owner throws a weekend shooting party and many influential guests attend with their maids. This scene showed two of the maids rooming together and talking about their owners. The maids were often the means by which the wealthy------a mixture of industrialists and feudal aristocratic landowners with very Victorian attitudes------found out about the private lives of their equally wealthy and socially connected competitors.  The ruling class was quite conservative except when it came to impregnating working class women that worked for them and when a pregnancy arose, shipping the product of the rape off to the workhouse. But what these maids were talking about was how they lived their lives through their owners. Their lives had no meaning except when they were talking about their owners.

It was as if they had no life but work.

The maids were talking about their owners and one of them raises this, that their lives are so constructed, so controlled in a way that as maids they live their life through the people they served. This is the same with the likes of the Bush's the Obama's and even more so with celebrities whose sex lives and dress tastes dominate the media.

We can see the class solidarity from all sections of the US ruling class at the death of one of their own, the matriarch of an old Anglo Saxon ruling family, a murderous bunch if we just think for ourselves for a moment. All kissing each others asses and united when it comes to exploiting workers at home and abroad.

The Obama's were full of praise, "the rock of a family dedicated to public service." the Obama 's said according to the media, I guess they both spoke at the same time. 

"We'll always be grateful to Mrs. Bush for the generosity she showed to us throughout our time in the White House," they continued, "but we're even more grateful for the way she lived her life – as a testament to the fact that public service is an important and noble calling; as an example of the humility and decency that reflects the very best of the American spirit."

We don't need to wish the death of our most powerful enemies as individuals, we want to rid humanity of the system that produces them; that they govern. Socialists and all workers wanting to change society aren't driven by personal hatred or revenge. A friend of mine ignorant of my motivation for my political views accused me of "hating people with money" because I criticized a family member of one of the Arabian Shiekdoms who owns Manchester City football club. In the process of a workers' revolution and the struggle to build a democratic socialist society some of these people can be reformed and some will join with us; the rest, we'll fight.

Think about what Barbara Bush said above about working class people, almost entirely people of color who suffered under the market driven katrina disaster, a catastrophe that could have been avoided and her son could have avoided it. It will take great events to rehabilitate someone with that mindset.

No, we don't gloat at the death of a prominent member of the global ruling class, but we don't mourn either.