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Imperialists play on gasoline issue:Labor aristocracy sends children to die for the SUV
by mim3@mim.org On April 12th, the campaign to elect George W. Bush president ran ads on network television in New Hampshire pointing out that opponent Senator Kerry voted to raise taxes on gasoline in the past. A number of papers reported that Bush ran the same ad in 19 states. The ad showed quaint footage of someone pushing a car without gasoline. This is very significant. Bush is obviously worried that the labor aristocracy is going to blame him for the obvious rise in price of gasoline at the pump, now setting records (in nominal terms, not inflation-adjusted prices). The public will not be able to help wondering if the price rise is connected to Iraq or angering the other Arab countries. Bush's solution consistent with his ideology is to point to how his opponent supported raising gasoline taxes; even though, the price rise we see now is not connected to taxes. Meanwhile, astonishing figures show that fully one in twenty Amerikkkans mention gasoline prices as the number one issue facing Amerika today. That is what they offered in an open-ended question, when they could pick anything they wanted. Others picked "war," "terrorism" and the "economy."(1) Another poll by CNN/USA Today/Gallup "finds nearly 7 in 10 Americans saying the cost of gasoline represents a crisis or major problem for the United States."(2) That poll shows that gasoline is the biggest single issue in 2004 for Amerikans and one of the biggest overall in the last 10 years. Thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of Amerikans had died and were in the process of dying when the bourgeoisie conducted the polls, and still gas prices were the top concern out of all issues for the whole country for five percent of the public. We know that presidential campaigns do not spend their campaign money on television advertising unless they have tested the ad and believe it to work to change the minds of significant numbers of voters. This says a lot about Amerikans at this time that gasoline is such a big issue. It's a message to the voters: support the Iraq War or else you may end up pushing your car. This does succeed with rural voters who are going to have to decide if they can get their gas any other way. Arkansas for instance, "uses more gasoline per capita than all but one or two other states. That's because of the farm-to-market culture and the absence of mass transit in the population centers where people drive to work one human being per every SUV."(3) MIM is one of the few parties calling itself communist in Amerika willing to take on the pickup & SUV driving crowd of the rural areas. It is not a good idea for the communists and anti-war movement to oink with the Amerikans about gasoline prices. It's an example of how the economic demands of the petty-bourgeoisie allied with imperialism are a dead-end. Not all popular economic demands are good ideas. Even when we offer solar energy or whatever alternatives, we should not complain about gasoline prices and stir up people already in an impossible bind. Too racist to drive small cars they believe are from Japan and too practical to want cars that break down (like Amerikan ones), the rural labor aristocracy chose wholesale to buy ever-bigger vehicles that Amerikkkan manufacturers dominated in: "Six months after the assault on the World Trade Center, as American troops died closing in on yet one more al Qaeda stronghold in Paktia Province, as American emissaries traveled the Middle East trying to figure out how to keep the oil flowing while stanching the bloodshed, Detroit decided. It chose the past. "In an unprecedented blitz the auto industry set out to terrify rural America, claiming that if fuel-efficiency standards were increased, SUVs and pick-ups would vanish from their production lines. Enough voters were panicked to produce the requisite 'flood' of telephone calls to senators from rural states."(4) It's just another example of how capitalist advertising found a ready-made audience in Amerikkka. We find nothing admirable in the labor aristocracy's driving ridiculous vehicles while sending their children to die in Iraq. None of these SUV drivers can say for sure that the imperialists would have succeeded in justifying the war without the rural racist lifestyle dependent on gasoline.
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