The New Left Manifesto

The campaign focus for both parties has been the war against Iraq. Saddam Hussein, a brutal and violent dictator by the accounts of virtually all articulate opinion, succeeded in "hoist(ing) half the country's population into the middle class..." This is something neither of our political parties is able to accomplish domestically. Saddam accomplished this feat before economic sanctions, largely imposed by the U.S., destroyed his country and caused the child mortality rate to double. What does this mean? This means that U.S. leaders are likely responsible for the deaths of more Iraqi children than Saddam ever was.

Saddam, the tyrant, did make concerted efforts to make sure that his population was fed in the face of these devastating sanctions, and the Iraqi system of food distribution was described by a UN World Food Program official as "the best distribution system that he had every seen in his life, as a World Food Program official." This is analogous to Cuba's excellent system of healthcare, and it demonstrates that nations that are devastated by U.S. imposed economic terrorism are catalyzed into making remarkable achievements in domestic policy in response to unchecked U.S. aggression.

The Shia numerical majority did greet the U.S. as liberators, in spite of the fact that many of them were surely aware of the horrors that they have faced as a result of U.S. foreign policy. This was because with the toppling of Saddam, the Sunni minority would no longer remain in control. These are people loyal to their religious agenda over their own social welfare. However, as the bitter taste of U.S. occupation remains in their collective mouths, they no longer support our presence, as polls of the Iraqi people have indicated. I have written about this before, so I will not go into detail.

Some may say that, in spite of my criticisms of U.S. foreign policy, I have offered no solutions. This is false. The solutions I am offering are clear: if the U.S. wants their to be less terrorism in the world, it can make a significant decrease in the amount of world terrorism by no longer terrorizing the world.

I would like, however, to identify a deeper problem, the fact that there is so much concern about Iraq and foreign policy by the major political parties and mass media, but so little concern about domestic policy. This is sure to serve the interests of the establishment. But there are obvious and considerable domestic problems. For example, we Americans live in the only first-world nation on the planet without a system of socialized healthcare (other than the quasi-socialized emergency room system). One in nine of America's children do not have any healthcare coverage at all, while we perennially flirt with having the highest infant mortality in the first world. So, not only are our leaders responsible for the deaths of large numbers of Iraqi children, but they are responsible for the deaths of large numbers of our own children.

There is a fundamental issue at the heart of all of our domestic problems, the concentration of wealth into the hands of a few private sector elites. The era of corporate governance is upon us, and while the government assists large multinational corporations in the concentration of wealth to the detriment of the vast numerical majority of the population, the legitimacy of that government derives largely from the consent of the disaffected majority. This tenuous hold on power by the elites is only possible because of the public relations campaign by the corporate mass media, which hold at the very least ideological connections to those with political power, to "engineer consent" of the masses that elitist President Alexander Hamilton called "the great beast."

The neo-Reaganites are simply the newest iteration of American political leaders who aid in the concentration of wealth. Just like the original Reagan Presidency, the neo-Reagan Bush II administration has used its economic policies of military Keynesianism to create growth that overwhelmingly benefits the wealthiest portions of the private sector and undermines social welfare programs and institutions of public control like labor unions.

Furthermore, the Bush II administration's use of domestic power to discipline the American population into subservience, with programs such as the Orwellian-titled USA Patriot Act, are reminiscent of historical parallels such as Wilson's "Red Scare" and the actions of Cointelpro during the Kennedy-Johnson-Nixon administrations.

It simply has to be the agenda of any legitimate left wing organizations to combat this by supporting socialist programs and the redistribution of wealth. The system of corporate mercantilism fraudulently identified as capitalism has failed. It is time for the true leftists to stand up and support labor and socialism. The legitimacy of the government derives from the consent of the governed, a Lockean ideal upon which the foundations of our Constitution are purported to by lain. Progressives need to be about domestic progress - an increase in the health, welfare, and standard of living of the majority of the population, not about finding solutions to the right wing's illegal war of aggression in Iraq.

Half-cocked programs for social welfare are not the answers; our government should literally rob from the rich to give to the poor and middle class. The concentration of economic resources in America is too extreme, and rivals that of nations like China, which are controlled by overtly totalitarian regimes. Since the American government only uses institutional violence to discipline ethnic minorities, it must use a system of deception and coercion to control most of the domestic population, which it does with the aid of the corporate media's public relations apparatus and the intelligence community's disinformation campaign.

We are the last line of defense, and we can combat disinformation with truth. The truth is on our side in this fight. American laborers need to control the means, method, and results of production. All Americans deserve socialized health care. All Americans deserve adequate food, clothing, and shelter. The government needs to stop using Executive power to discipline the people, and spend trillions of our money fighting wars for hegemony abroad. These are the policies for which we should be campaigning.

To give an example of how insidious disinformation is in the U.S., America is commonly described as having a problem of voter apathy. Sociologist Walter Dean Burnham in studies like "The Eclipse of the Democratic Party, has demonstrated that the segment of so-called "apathetic voters" in the U.S. population is proportional to the amount of votes Socialist and Labor parties would receive in other industrialized countries with free elections. This is an indicator that the Democratic Party in the U.S. is no longer a politically legitimate "party of the people." Voters in America are not apathetic; instead they are “antipathetic.”

This means that a large enough segment of the American people will be on our side if we try to help them, and ourselves, live in a better world. With a history of near-catastrophes like the Cuban Missile Crisis, which is but one example of policies of the American government that almost sparked a terminal nuclear war, our leaders in Washington has brought the human species to the brink of extinction too many times to remain in power legitimately. Our economic system is purported to be designed around self-interest. So, we should act in our self-interest, our right for self-preservation, and campaign for a change in the power structure of American political institutions. If humanity is to have a future, the American population, the freest people in the world, must stand up to the institutions of power in our nation - and we must be successful in our endeavors.

Nathan Jaco
24 December 2006