Tucson shooting and America's crisis

The attempted assassination of US Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, Arizona, has inescapable links to extreme right-wing vitriol from radio talk shows and the mouthing of populist politicians like Sarah Palin. It marks a new stage in America’s unfolding political crisis.

Only last March, Palin – who has eyes on the Republican nomination for the presidency – posted on Facebook: “The crossfire is intense, so penetrate through enemy territory by bombing through the press, and use your strong weapons – your Big Guns – to drive to the hole. Shoot with accuracy; aim high and remember it takes blood, sweat and tears to win.”

Then, in the run-up to last November’s mid-term elections, she published a map of political targets with crosshairs which looked very much like gun sights over Giffords' district, along with the districts of 19 other Democrats who voted for president Obama’s health-care bill. After posting the map on her Facebook page, Palin told her Twitter followers to go there with the message "Don't Retreat – Instead RELOAD!"

Jared Lee Loughner, 22, who is to be charged with six counts of murder – including a nine-year-old child, a federal judge and the attempted killing of Giffords – was known to share some of the fantasy views encouraged by Palin and the Tea Party movement. These include the notion that Obama is an illegitimate president, that the US currency is a fraud and that federal government in general is unconstitutional. Asked if she had any enemies, Giffords’ father said: "Yeah, the whole Tea Party."

Giffords, a former Republican turned Democrat, had been holding a public meeting in a shopping precinct when the gunman opened fire. When Giffords held a similar meeting last year, someone dropped a gun. Loughner is described by the authorities as mentally unstable. Yet he was able to purchase a semi-automatic pistol.

It’s got that bad that even the sheriff conducting the investigation, Clarence Dupnik, did not hold back: "When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government – the anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country, is getting to be outrageous. And unfortunately, Arizona, I think, has become the capital. We have become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry."

Add in the widespread belief that Obama’s modest health care changes are the first step to socialism together with the historic catastrophe that is the American economy, and you can see where paranoia among the dispossessed and disenfranchised is coming from. While Wall Street is booming, deliberately fuelled by the Federal Reserve’s programme of printing money, the rest of the country is going to the dogs.

Even the Daily Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is disturbed by the latest data. “The numbers of people on food stamps have reached 43.2m, an all time-high of 14% of the population …. The US Conference of Mayors said visits to soup kitchens are up 24% this year. There are 643,000 people needing shelter each night."

The long-term unemployed (more than six months) have reached 42% of the total, twice the peak of the early 1990s The “labour participation rate” for working-age men over 20 has dropped to 73.6%, which he says is the lowest figure since 1948. “My guess is that this figure exceeds the average for the Great Depression … It is no surprise that America’s armed dissident movement has resurfaced.”

As Evans-Pritchard acknowledges, there is no “easy solution” to “creeping depression” in America and elsewhere which has left “very large numbers of people in the West trapped on the wrong side of globalisation, and nobody doing much about it.” Though, of course, he doesn’t put in so bluntly, the capitalist system is visibly in meltdown – socially, economically and politically. The events in Tuccon are a sign of the times.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Tea Party brews up a political crisis

Only in America could a woman like Christine O’Donnell become, in the words of New York Times columnist Frank Rich, “the brightest all-American media meteor since Balloon Boy”.

Rich views “I am not a witch” O’Donnell as a possible godsend for the Republican party as the US mid-term elections loom on November 2. He could not resist adding that the 41-year-old senatorial candidate for the state of Delaware, who is an evangelical Christian, is perhaps best known “for taking a fearless stand against masturbation, the one national pastime with more fans than baseball”.

Laughable as people like O’Donnell and their primitive right wing views might appear, her meteoric rise, like that of Sarah Palin before her, is an indication of the growing hold of the anti-state, anti-government Tea Party movement within the Republican Party (GOP).

O’Donnell provides the GOP with a symbolic figure – a small-town struggler on low-pay with “proletarian cred”. The reality about the Tea Party, though, is that it is bankrolled by the billionaire Koch family who first made their fortune in dealings with the dictator Joseph Stalin. It is making political capital out of the pain being suffered by millions of Americans as unemployment stands at 10% and repossessions leave whole areas of US towns and cities lifeless.

Behind its populist façade, the Tea Party is actually a plaything of massive corporate interests. Amongst its backers are many from the Forbes list of the super-rich. They include oil barons Robert Rowling and Trevor Rees-Jones, and not least, Rupert Murdoch and his News Corporation. Through Fox television, Murdoch provides constant favourable news coverage for the Tea Party. Clearly the interests of these super-rich are nothing to do with the Tea Party’s supposed support for small town and impoverished Americans.

The new breed of Republican leaders also include people such as Nevada candidate Sharron Angle. Angle is another Christian fundamentalist who opposes abortion, no matter what, even for incest and rape. She wants to abolish the following: the Department of Education, Social Security, the Department of Energy, Environmental Protection Agency, National Endowment of the Arts, housing agencies Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and Planned Parenthood funding. Perhaps surprisingly, Angle is standing against a Tea Party backed candidate.

So where does this leave President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party? Despite their success in passing healthcare, financial legislation and the Recovery Act, the administration’s “Big State” efforts to rescue the economy from meltdown have not stopped the jobs and homes haemorrhage.

While things have taken a slight turn for the better in the latest popularity ratings, the administration confronts a massive melt-down of confidence in a presidency. It began with the highest of hopes and tears of joy when the first-ever African-American was elected only two years ago.

But as the recession turns towards another Great Depression, that euphoria has turned into disappointment and shock. Obama admitted in a recent interview with Rolling Stone magazine: “We've seen an increase in poverty, and an increase in unemployment, and people's wages and incomes have stagnated.”

Not only is there a distinct possibility that the Republicans will gain control over both Senate and House of Representatives on November 2. Obama is also weathering a major changeover of White House staff.

Behind these harsh realities facing a president hailed for his skills as the great communicator is the historic weakness of the US economy in the face of ruthless competition from China. What we are seeing is a crisis not only for the Democrats but America’s political system as a whole. Some suggest that America is already “ungovernable” and that is likely to be even more the case after the mid-term elections.

Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward has revealed that last November Obama was virtually threatened with mutiny when he tried to overrule the military brass on withdrawal from Afghanistan. A disgruntled military, a possibly lame-duck president and a populist Tea Party working with big business, is a heady cocktail with unpredictable side-effects.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary