James Petras on US elections

[ken hanly <northsunm@xxxxxxxxx>]

Elections In The USA: Justice And The Perversion of
Justice

By James Petras

10/10/06 "Information Clearing House" -- -- In a month
in which the US Congress voted to legalize torture,
discard the US Constitution by abolishing habeas
corpus and increase the military budget to prolong the
daily slaughter of hundreds of Iraqis and Afghanis,
the big controversy among the mass media and elected
officials is the sexual overtures of a Republican
Congressman to adolescent boys employed by Congress.

Millions of fundamentalist Christians, who blindly
supported the Republican Congress? deadly War on
Terror are in revolt against their Party because of
its tolerance toward a single pervert -- overlooking
the torture at Abu Ghraib, Israel?s massive bombing of
Lebanon and the Bush Administration?s criminal
abandonment of the hundreds of thousands of poor
(mostly black) citizens in New Orleans after Hurricane
Katrina.

Why do US Congress members and the mass media go into
a political feeding frenzy over personal sexual
transgressions like Congressman Foley?s nasty e-mail
flirtations with teenage boys or former President
Clinton?s office adventures in extramarital sex with a
White House intern and not over issues of great
consequence for peace or war, democracy or
authoritarianism, torture or human rights?

Superficial commentators trot out our Anglo-American
?Puritan heritage?: a pseudo-explanation, which
overlooks the US democratic-constitutional heritage,
our recent history of opposing the Vietnam War, and
our signing of the United Nation Charter on Human
Rights. Since there are numerous historical pasts,
there is no single ?heritage? that dominates others,
especially when the so-called ?Puritan? past is
overlain with a highly sexualized mass culture over
the last 50 years.

We should leave aside dubious psycho-cultural
explanations because they fail to explain political
behavior. Specifically, even if ?Puritan morality?
were such a dominant aspect of US political life, it
cannot explain why one should focus only on sexual
misdeeds of individual politicians and not the
immorality of the widespread, systematic use of sexual
torture practiced by US interrogators in Iraq,
Afghanistan and at the Guantanamo prison camp and
specifically approved by the Bush Administration.

To understand the perversity of US politics, where
great crimes are approved by Congress and the
President and minor sexual misdemeanors become an
obsession, one has to turn away from the amorphous
notion of the ?US public? and examine what the mass
media and opinion leaders find acceptable as the basis
for electoral competition.

The political elite of both parties and the leadership
and minority in Congress do not differ on substantive
questions of war and peace: both supported the 2003
invasion and occupation of Iraq from the beginning and
have just approved over $400 billion in war spending
for 2006-2007. Both parties, Congress and the
President supported Israel?s invasion of Lebanon, its
deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure and
the dropping of one million cluster bomblets as well
as the blockade and rape of Gaza. Both parties
supported the extension of the Patriot Act, which
suspends the democratic guarantees and personal
freedoms protected under the Bill of Rights and
Constitution. Neither Congress nor the White House
differ in opposing a National Health Policy, since
both parties receive millions in election financing
from the big pharmaceutical and private health
insurance companies and their lobbies. Since there is
a consensus between the two official parties on the
issues of war, authoritarianism and big business, the
political parties can compete only on ?personality?
and issues of private morality. The parties justify
their separate existence and compete for office by
avoiding the issues which antagonize the economic
elites, the civilian militarists and the powerful
pro-Israel lobbies and focus on ?antagonizing? ? other
politicians, which is considered ?fair game? in the
highly constricted US political system.

In the first week of October, 30 US soldiers were
killed in Iraq and scores were wounded, 580 Iraqi
civilians were murdered, 20 Lebanese civilians were
killed or wounded by leftover Israeli cluster bombs,
tens of thousands of US telephones, faxes and e-mails
were intercepted without judicial order, thousands of
Argentine rightists marched in Buenos Aires in defense
of the former military dictators, thousands of
peaceful striking school teachers in Oaxaca, Mexico
were threatened with massive military repression, 13
Bolivian miners and Indian peasants were killed by the
government and its supporters in a possible lead up to
a civil war, and a beloved bishop in the Philippines
was killed by death squads for his human rights work
joining the hundreds of murdered and disappeared
activists there? and yet none of these reports appear
anywhere in the major US television and radio programs
and are barely mentioned by the principal newspapers.
Instead we hear and read daily and even hourly reports
revealing the lewd e-mails of Republican Congressman
Foley with the Democratic Party leadership issuing
press releases and denunciations and calls for
investigations and resignations.

?Corruption, depravity, perversion?, the Democrats
tell us, ?in high places is unacceptable?. And the
Republicans, so bold in defense of torture and secret
abductions, and so audacious in signing hundreds of
millions of dollars in additional military aid to
Israel ? are shirking, cowering, stuttering and
stammering that they have ?cleaned house? with the
resignation of their Congressional pervert; they need
to press on with the ?war against international and
domestic terror? unmolested.

What is essential in perpetuating the charade of
basically a ?one party? system, dedicated to defending
imperial wars abroad and overseeing decay and
authoritarianism at home, is the illusion of ?party
competition.? To maintain this illusion of choice in
the face of a wide elite consensus, a ?sideshow? is
needed; preferably a show in which the minor perverts
of one party can be paraded and denounced by the
puffed-up moralists of the opposing party. Without
this show of moral indignation and a dose of salacious
titillation, voter abstention might even exceed the
usual 65% for US Congressional elections.

James Petras, a former Professor of Sociology at
Binghamton University, New York, owns a 50-year
membership in the class struggle, is an adviser to the
landless and jobless in Brazil and Argentina, and is
co-author of Globalization Unmasked (Zed Books). His
latest book is The Power of Israel in the United
States (Clarity Press, 2006). He can be reached at:
jpetras@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx