------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the June 7, 2001 issue of Workers World newspaper ------------------------- JEFFORDS JUMPS SHIP: BUSH'S ATTACK VESSEL SPRINGS A FAIR-SIZED LEAK By Deirdre Griswold Anyone the least bit progressive has to be enjoying the Republican leadership's dismay and disarray over the defection of Sen. James Jeffords of Vermont. It couldn't have happened to a nicer party. The joke in Washington is "Who lost Jeffords?"--a parody on "Who lost China?," the cry that went up in ruling class political circles after the triumph of the Chinese Revolution in 1949. The strategists for U.S. capital had actually believed that their resounding victory over Japanese imperialism in World War II, bought with the blood of U.S. soldiers and capped by the incineration of a quarter million Japanese people with atomic bombs, entitled them to dominate and exploit the most populous country in the world. But hundreds of millions of Chinese people let it be known that they had another agenda when they succeeded in driving Gen. Chiang Kai-shek off the mainland, despite all his U.S.- supplied weapons and ammunition. The internal struggle in Washington over who lost China led to years of poisonous recrimination bordering on paranoia, which peaked when Sen. Joseph McCarthy included the Eisenhower administration in his list of years of treason and finally got slapped down. Nothing so earth-shaking is involved in the present case; hence the battle-scarred veterans of factional infighting can laugh about it. There may be issues of foreign policy involved in Jeffords's decision, announced May 24, to change his affiliation to Independent and caucus with the Democrats, although the Vermont senator didn't dwell on them. The Bush administration has made itself enormously unpopular in the rest of the world, even with the governments of its imperialist allies. First the president cavalierly ripped up the Kyoto Accords on global warming, which had been arrived at after almost a decade of difficult international climate conferences. Then he blithely announced the U.S. was ready to unilaterally abrogate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in order to proceed with an enormously expensive, scientifically unproven and inherently offensive attempt to neutralize everyone else's weapons systems by building a space-based missile shield. Jeffords, however, stuck closer to home in explaining why he was bolting the party that he had represented throughout his 26 years in Washington. This liberal Republican zeroed in on public education, a woman's right to choose, energy policy and the healthcare crisis. He also reached into the mists of time to explain why he had for so long viewed the Republican Party as having room for progressivism. He reiterated that it had been the party of Abraham Lincoln and the struggle against slavery, something most Republicans seem to want to forget these days. It was also, of course, the party that betrayed Black liberation after the Civil War by not distributing the land to the former slaves and by withdrawing the Union Army from the South, leaving them disarmed and at the tender mercies of the Ku Klux Klan. That was the period that launched the Republicans on their career as the premier party of big business. Jeffords's defection now tips the balance in the Senate to the Democrats, who become the majority party in that house and therefore the chairs of all the committees. Furious attempts were made at the last minute to bring him back into the fold, investing his decision to leave with more significance. When George W. Bush squeaked into the White House with a quarter-million fewer popular votes than Al Gore and anger over the rigged Florida elections ringing in his ears, many Democrats assumed he would have to nod in their direction once in a while to govern. Gore's concession speech, coming before the issue of the suppressed Florida ballots had been fully settled, gave the appearance that an understanding had been reached between the two main capitalist parties. Bush himself spoke about "bipartisanship" and cooperation with the Democrats. But once in office, he first reached into the far right for many cabinet appointments and then unveiled a deeply conservative agenda on taxes, the environment, family planning, workplace safety, energy, militarizing space and threatening to make China the target of an aggressive new Asia strategy. Had the Democratic Party wanted to put up a fight, that was the time to do it. They would have come across as heroes to disenfranchised Black voters, to the environmental movement, to women, to the peace forces, to labor, teachers, seniors and youth. But instead they hunkered down, joining the Republicans to pass the biggest tax cut for the rich ever seen--$1.3 trillion. And, like some Halloween ghoul who passes out Tootsie Rolls with razorblades inside, the authors of this crime sweetened it with a $300 check to be mailed out to everyone over the summer. So it was left to a Republican like Jeffords to become the hero, and cheering Democrats lined the State House in Vermont when he made his announcement. Will Jeffords's defection stay the rightward course of this administration? Will it put backbone into the promises of the Democrats? Not hardly. The Clinton administration kept ceding ground to the right-wing offensive, and he had both houses of Congress with him in his first term. But Jeffords's move does indicate that there is a lot of rumbling down below, among people who can't afford rent and medicine and schooling even after a decade of dramatic growth in the economy. There is deep anxiety over the violence of the state, at home and abroad, and the growing polarization of wealth as the giant corporations go ever more global. The defection of a liberal Republican may make big news today, but it will seem like small potatoes when the growing contradictions between the working class and the billionaire class start punching holes in the suffocating bag of capitalist party politics. - END - (Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but changing it is not allowed. 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