NO PROSPECT FOR IMPROVEMENT
THE US AFTER THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
By km
[This article published in Zeit-Fragen, November 8, 2004 is translated from the German
on the World Wide Web,
http://www.zeit-fragen.ch/.]
George W. Bush was re-selected as president of the United States. His competitor for the office, John Kerry, was defeated. Analyses before the election showed that the difference between the two candidates was not great. Both stood for an American world power policy and a US-empire even if Kerry during the election campaign tried to profile himself as a critic of the Iraq war. Perhaps Kerry as president would have drawn in the United Nations and the European Union for US interests more than the previous incumbent. Bush wanted to do this. He urged the world to his policy during his first term in office. This is easily forgotten.
km. Both candidates spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the election campaign. Interested circles try to gain influence with massive contributions.
If one believes surveys, “moral values” are most important for election decisions of Americans. For many Americans, this means something different than ethically-oriented politics. In the last years Bush appeared again and again as a representative and supporter of radical religious communities. This is a decisive group of voters in the US. Interested circles persuade many people that the world faces a final struggle between good and evil. In this battle something like international law is only regarded as secondary. A German representative of this religious tendency summarized this as follows: The divine law stands above all law created by humankind. At the same time these religious communities claim a monopoly on the definition and interpretation of what they describe as divine law.
George W. Bush verbally supports strengthening families and family values. At the same time he brings millions of American families into distress with his economic- and financial policy, to say nothing of the thousands of fathers, mothers and children who are victims of his wars.
American corporations, private insurance companies and banks rejoice over the re-election of the old preside3nt. Bush announced privatizing the American social system. For example, future pensioners should invest in the stock market and not pay into the state pension system. How more money is taken from people’s pockets to increase the wealth of financial circles and speculative capital is ignored. Only a few families will profit from this.
John Kerry was supported in his election campaign by pseudo-intellectual and pseudo-cultural America. This did not help him at all. The US is a fragmented society. All kinds of corporations fixated on authority including religious communities replace natural communities and a sense of community oriented in human relations. Isolated atomization and enforced conformity of community life face one another. Humane perspectives or perspectives befitting human beings are lacking. The US media contributed substantially to the erosion and irritation during the last decades.
The world cannot expect any impulses for a better world from the new president. The world must adjust to a superpower armed to the teeth in the coming years whose political and economic elites are hardly concerned with the well-being of humanity and not afraid of using their instruments of power.
Whoever can strengthen the really different America – that still exists in the US – contributes to developing alternatives. Europe must guard itself from considering its own politics as better in principle. We have no reason for self-complacency. However the election outcome in the US could be an occasion for reflecting again on how we can organize our life together that we want to leave to our children and what we can do so future generations live from different values than top and bottom, rich and poor and power and powerlessness – the values of equal rights and equality of all people.