Last week’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing featuring attorney general Alberto Gonzales was fit for prime time entertainment. Full of glowering Senators, pithy exchanges, sweaty foreheads and a few contrite acts of penance by the accused, the capitalist media gleaned neat soundbites and days of headline-worthy moments from the airy proceedings.
It was high theatrics put on by the capitalist state to skewer one of its own for a relatively minor gaffe. Gonzales, Attorney
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This scandal has been played up by Congress and picked up by the bourgeois press ad nauseam for weeks. Last week reached a new fever pitch. The story vied for the media spotlight with the Virginia Tech killings. It pushed from the headlines the firing of “shock jock” Don Imus for racist, sexist comments. News about the brutal war on Iraq was deemed less important than any of the above.
Media blitz aside, what does the Gonzalez scandal mean for the U.S. working class? Very little, if anything at all.
The main value of the Gonzales scandal and its fallout—which may heighten with as calls for Gonzales’s resignation mount—is discussing the process itself and what is not being tackled by Congress and the media: torture, repression of immigrants, the gathering of secret evidence by mass spying, and so on.
The Gonzales hearings are a political farce. Senators, especially Democrats who now control the chamber, are using the hearings to show they can “get tough” on the Bush administration. Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer of New York showered typical praise on the proceedings: “All of America saw why so many of us had felt for so long that he shouldn’t be attorney general.”
Given their complete subservience to Bush regarding funding the war on Iraq and nearly all issues of consequence, the Gonzales issue has given the Democrats a chance to show some guts and throw a small bone to their constituents—the majority of whom vigorously oppose the war, torture and government spying.
Some Republican Senators also have entered the fray. Sens. Tom Colburn of Oklahoma and John Sununu of New Hampshire have called for Gonzales to resign. Higher-ups like Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania also have strongly rebuked Gonzales.
What will the bi-partisan condemnation amount to? We can’t yet know. Gonzales may be on his way out. On the other hand, he may remain Attorney General throughout Bush’s tenure. This is largely irrelevant.
Systemic crimes
Of course, Gonzales should go, as should the whole Bush administration (and Congress, for that matter). But he’s being criticized in harmless Senate hearings for the least of his many terrible crimes.
What about his energetic support for torture and endless detention of “terror” suspects? What about spearheading racist attacks on Arabs and Muslims in the United States? What about prosecuting and deporting hundreds of thousands of immigrants, largely from Mexico and Central America? What about Gonzales’s unwavering support for warrantless wiretapping and large-scale spying on millions?
These issues will remain unaddressed and, more importantly, unresolved in these hearings. Instead, we only get to hear about Gonzales’s firing of political hacks—appointed U.S. attorneys, who enforce repressive U.S. laws—and their replacement by different political hacks.
Congress should not be congratulated by anyone for this process, especially not by progressive people.
Calling hearing after hearing, grandstanding to the press and then doing little of substance is standard practice on Capitol Hill. The process provides a small, but critical safety valve for popular outrage against governmental abuses in the capitalist system.
These Senators—most are millionaires—have endorsed the Iraq war, stood staunchly behind the racist “war on terror,” supported the Patriot Act, and demanded repression of immigrant workers and their families in the name of “national security.” They aren’t talking about what’s important to the vast majority of people in the United States because it is not what is important to them and their corporate masters.
Maintaining the capitalist system is what matters. Whether they do that with Alberto Gonzales as the U.S. government’s top cop or someone else like him is less important.
Many liberal groups are excited about the Gonzales hearings, but they shouldn’t be. Before Gonzales, they focused their anger on John Ashcroft individually. He was replaced by Gonzales, who is no better.
Carlos Alvarez, a representative of the ANSWER Coalition (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), told PSLweb.org: “It is ludicrous that the Gonzales hearings are focusing on the firings of U.S. Attorneys rather than the multitude of other crimes committed by the Justice Department like torture, illegal surveillance of millions of people, and the arrest and detention of countless individuals in the Arab American and Muslim communities, including Dr. Sami Al-Arian.”
If Gonzales is fired, few will be sad to see him go, but nothing will change for the U.S. working class. He would be replaced by another capitalist politician with another name.
This real issue is the capitalist system. Understanding the machinations of Congress and the other government branches, and revealing the true character of the system they protect and serve, is what is necessary.
