Corporations will compete to buy next American president
From the International Report delivered to the CPGB-ML’s central committee on 4 March.
The current US presidential race leading up to elections in November is set to be the most expensive that there has ever been, with campaign expenditure expected to reach $2-3bn.
Provided no public funding is accepted for campaigning purposes, there is no limit to what each candidate’s backers can spend in order to get their favoured candidate elected. Money is raised from the wealthy through the medium of a Political Action Committee (PAC) and, following a ruling of the Supreme Court last year, so long as there is no direct contact with the candidate being supported, there is no limit on how much money a given PAC (or ‘Superpac’) is permitted to raise and spend.
19. March 2012 at 11:55 pm :
Excellent analysis of the context. A few thoughts occur:
All bourgeois candidates are pre-selected to run for office during a career-long winnowing process that is both conscious and unconscious.
The campaigns themselves are useful in several ways to the ruling class, and to the maintenance of its rule:
Show the workers that there are candidates who could represent their point of view or concerns about current conditions, and that thus there is no reason to reject the 2-party system in favor of independent labor political action;
Candidates can demonstrate their abilities to the ruling class as men who can think on their feet, confront challenges and emergencies, and recover from foot-in-mouth moments or public scandals.
Revisionists and social democrats in the US [like the CPUSA, Committees of Correspondence, and Progressive America Rising], as well as the AFL-CIO and Change to Win labor tops, use the campaign period to set about fundraising and herding the skeptical left, who are horrified and demoralized by Obama’s rule, into a pro-Obama stampede. This consists of a lot of different bits of rhetoric to becloud good sense:
that without Obama and the Democrats, union power would be gutted;
wars abroad would be initiated or prolonged;
womens rights, including abortion rights, would be curtailed or eliminated;
the welfare state [Social Security, food stamps] would be reduced and/or eliminated;
right-wing bigots and the most narrow-minded Christian fundamentalists would be emboldened.
Obama is so far to the right in bourgeois politics that his Republican opponents, in order to differentiate themselves from him and differentiate between themselves, are pushed further and further to the lunatic fringe of rightwing politics. This is the reason they have had so many miscalculations over the last two months around the question of contraception. It is also the reason, for example, Santorum lost the Puerto Rico primary yesterday, after declaring last week that Puerto Rico could not be considered for statehood until its citizens acknowledged the importance of the English language.
I’m glad to see a note about the US elections here among all the other useful information.
Comradely,
Jay
20. March 2012 at 10:38 am :
@jay: Thanks for this, Jay. Very interesting. You’re absolutely right about the way that social democracy herds people back towards the Democrats, just as they do with Labour over here.
Think the campaigns serve another purpose too – to make sure that the elected candidate is under no illusions about what the ruling class’s priorities are at any particular time, and to make triply sure that s/he is completely in hoc to the rulers that have paid for the election campaign. No funny ideas about acting in the interests of the people at any point!