Published: The Workers’ Advocate, Vol. 7, No. 5, October 1, 1977.
Reprinted in the pamphlet: Carter Bares His Fascist Fangs, 1978.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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(Edited for pamphlet publication.)
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The Carter administration is singing songs of “democracy”, “morality” and “human rights”, while in deeds it is waging a fascist offensive against the working class and people on behalf of the monopoly capitalist dictators.
Carter’s energy program was the first big exposure of the Carter administration in the eyes of the laboring masses. Just like Nixon before him, Carter called for higher prices, higher taxes and the stockpiling of oil for imperialist war – all in the name of a fake energy “shortage”. Profits for the oil kings, sky-high utility bills and gasoline prices for the laboring masses. Carter’s energy fraud has earned the bitter hatred of the American people.
And now Carter has stepped forward to bare his fascist fangs in a series of sinister bills designed to suppress the workers’ movement and step up aggression abroad.
Carter’s “welfare reform”, anti-immigrant and “labor reform” bills are nothing but an attack on the entire workers’ movement, an attempt to ensure “labor peace”, the peace of docile slaves laboring tamely for the rich money-bags.
With his “welfare reform” and “aliens” bills, Carter is stepping up the capitalist policy of singling out whole sections of the working class for attack, in particular those sections whom the capitalists have cruelly thrown on the street and out of work and those who are not born in the U.S. or who are “foreign-looking”. The unemployed and the so-called “illegal aliens” and other immigrants are to be still further converted into slave-laborers, who are forbidden any rights at all and who must work at the lowest wages and most dangerous jobs. They are to be forced to take whatever the capitalists offer, without protest, on pain of deportation or of being left to starve without even the pitiful capitalist “welfare” payments. In fact, by setting up a pool of slave-laborers and then setting them against the rest of the workers, the capitalists hope to suppress the whole workers’ movement.
With his “Labor Reform Act of 1977”, Carter is stepping up the government prohibitions against the strike movement, seeking to integrate the unions still further into the government apparatus, and increasing the government bureaucracy. This Act openly strikes at the employed workers and the entire workers’ movement. As amended in the House of Representatives on Oct. 5-6, 1977 and as endorsed by the labor traitors, this Act contains the following provisions: It tries to smash strikes by forcing unions to pay double-back pay to all those scabs who can’t get across the picket lines. If further bans wildcat strikes and roving pickets. It legalizes labor spies at union meetings. It has parts designed especially to suppress the heroic coal miners’ movement. This Act is a new fascist Taft-Hartley Act.
Carter and his cronies like to paint themselves up in gaudy colors as “pro-labor” and in favor of “jobs”. They even smile and smile and say that the government will “help” the workers to organize the unorganized. They employ an army of sold-out labor bureaucrats and top trade union big-wigs and of anti-people “poverty pimps” to sing their praises and “restore confidence” in capitalist reaction. But Carter’s proposed anti-labor legislation exposes the hatred that these phony “friends of labor” have for the workers’ movement. They expose the capitalist strategy to fight tooth and nail against the strike wave, to force South African-style ID cards on everyone, and to make the workers and oppressed nationalities bear the entire burden of the capitalist economic crisis through lower and yet lower wages, more and yet more dangerous working conditions, and a larger and larger police force and oppressive bureaucracy sucking the masses’ blood while it oppresses them. These bills show the fear and panic of the capitalist exploiters in the face of the growing revolutionary ferment among the masses.
Carter’s new Panama Canal treaty is preparation for intensified exploitation of Latin America. This treaty is an unequal treaty, a treaty that legalizes U.S. imperialist aggression in Panama “for an indefinite period of time”, “permanently”, under the guise of guaranteeing the “neutrality” of the Canal. Carter is following a neo-colonialist policy, hoping against hope that by removing a few of the most hated symbols of U.S. colonialism in Panama and doing a little window-dressing and public relations work, he can hide the existence of the vast U.S. neo-colonial empire and pacify the people of Panama and all Latin America. Vain hopes! Carter likes to deck himself out as a “peacenik”, a reasonable man, who wants a “world without nuclear weapons”, “human rights”. But Carter’s “pacifism” is nothing but imperialist pacifism–aggression under the signboard of “peace”, imperialism under the signboard of “human rights”, neo-colonialism under the signboard of “full sovereignty” and “cooperation”. Carter’s record military budgets and the new unequal treaty with Panama reveal the war-mongering and aggression behind the smiling facade.
These programs of Carter are nothing but the program of Richard Nixon without Richard Nixon; in fact, he is carrying out Nixon’s fascist legacy on a wider scale than the hated Nixon himself could. Faced with the deepening all-round crisis, the Carter administration is forced to come out with more and more reactionary measures in order to defend the rule of U.S. monopoly capitalism against the surging workers’ movement in the U.S. and the anti-imperialist struggles abroad, such as those of the Panamanian and other Latin American people. These reactionary measures are a confession of U.S. imperialism’s weakened and isolated position. In order to buy some time and hide the true nature of these measures, the U.S. monopoly capitalist dictators have installed the deceptive Carter administration, which uses the mask of “human rights” and an army of sold-out labor bureaucrats, in order to conceal and step up the all-round fascization of American society.
This is how the capitalist exploiters are baring their fangs. These are their dual tactics of fascist suppression on one hand and pious words of sweetness and light on the other.
These events show that no matter how much they talk of “democracy” and “human rights”, each presidential administration is merely the tool of the big monopolies. As the international economic crisis deepens and gloom settles on the whole capitalist world, the capitalists are throwing the facade of “liberal democracy” to the wind and revealing more and more their reactionary and fascist souls. The bourgeoisie of all the imperialist and revisionist countries is imposing fascism to suppress the working class and laboring masses, shift the burden of the economic crisis onto them, and prepare for a reactionary world war between the two big imperialist blocs led by the U.S. and the Soviet Union. In the western imperialist bloc, which is led by U.S. imperialism, the bourgeoisie is rapidly building up the police, military and bureaucracies as gigantic machines of oppression and neo-nazi groups are being organized by the governments in each country, all to fight the growing proletarian revolution. Notable examples are the militarization of the economies all throughout this bloc, the revanchist government of Federal (West) Germany refusing to extradite nazi war criminals because it itself is composed of nazi war criminals, the blessings being bestowed upon the fascist monarchy of Juan Carlos in Spain, the state-organized and protected nazi groups in Great Britain and Italy, and so forth. In the U.S. the big bourgeoisie is presently using the facade of Carterite “liberalism” to conceal and aid the development of fascism. But the forces of revolution, of socialism and freedom, are rising in each country to oppose the forces of fascism and slavery. Like a hurricane, the revolution is gathering strength and preparing to sweep the reactionaries off the face of the earth.
Carter’s Hitlerite programs will never be tolerated by the American people, who will smash them on the road to wiping out the rule of capital altogether. Today the workers’ movement is bursting forth, shattering the capitalists’ fond dreams of “labor peace”. Each new outrage by the reactionaries and the capitalists awakens new sections of the masses to indignation, to life and struggle. All the oppressed people are astir. Let the struggle break out, let the fight intensify, let the workers and oppressed people rise up in mass revolutionary struggles, in active resistance against the fascist offensive of the Carter administration, against the repression and exploitation by the big capitalists!