Why does today’s criminal White House face no similar challenge?
By Patrick Martin
3 June 2005
http://wsws.org/articles/2005/jun2005/deep-j03.shtmlexcerpt:
The Watergate crisis has enormous relevance to the current state of affairs in American political life. By any objective standard, the administration of George W. Bush is guilty of far more flagrant crimes than even those of Richard Nixon, yet it faces virtually no comparable opposition within official political and media circles.
Like Nixon’s, the Bush administration is engaged in a criminal war of aggression, launched under false pretenses (the 9/11 attacks, which had nothing to do with Iraq, playing the role of the Gulf of Tonkin “incident” used by Lyndon Johnson to obtain congressional authorization for war). Like Nixon’s, but on a much greater scale, the Bush administration presides over a deteriorating US position in the world economy, which threatens, sooner rather than later, to trigger socioeconomic convulsions within the United States.
The great difference is that unlike Nixon, George W. Bush does not yet confront a mass social and political movement from below, in opposition to his reactionary policies. The American labor movement has collapsed, as globalization has undermined its perspective of pressuring corporate employers within a national labor market, and a bureaucracy comprised of gangsters and parasites has sabotaged all efforts by workers to defend their living standards and jobs.
The protest movements of the 1960s were ultimately absorbed into the Democratic Party, that graveyard of political opposition to American capitalism. The former antiwar protester, Bill Clinton, personifies the drastic swing to the right in American liberalism and the abandonment of even the slightest criticism of the capitalist market and imperialist war. John Kerry, who made his start in politics as an impassioned opponent of the Vietnam War, based his presidential campaign last year on his war record, not his antiwar record, and vowed to achieve victory for the American occupation of Iraq.