Mike Tait

In the United States, the Democratic party (and its big business backers) is choosing whether Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama will get the chance to run for president. After two disastrous terms under George Bush, a Democrat presidency looks increasingly likely. For the first time, the US may have either a woman or a black president. Barack Obama is only the fourth black Senator in US history. But past changing faces at the top, neither Obama nor Clinton have a plan to extricate the US from war in Iraq or Afghanistan or deliver better living standards to working people in the US.

What a Democratic president might be able to do is introduce even more anti-democratic measures that the Bush regime cannot get away with – such as bringing back conscription – and repair some of the diplomatic damage that Bush’s arrogant approach has caused to US alliances.
As an editorial in the Los Angeles Times, the most widely read newspaper in California, argued: “An Obama presidency would present, as a distinctly American face, a man of African descent, born in the nation’s youngest state [Hawaii], with a childhood spent partly in Asia, among Muslims. No public relations campaign could do more than Obama’s mere presence in the White House to defuse anti-American passion around the world...”

New Zealand’s election “choice”

In New Zealand we are also facing an election “choice” between the openly pro-business National Party, which is increasingly lurching right, with law and order proposals (sending young offenders to boot camp) that are designed only to push an already overloaded prison system into chaos and a Labour Party that unleashed anti-terror police on children and old people in the Ureweras.
The Green Party, to their credit, opposed Labour’s terror raids and call for a moratorium on Labour’s massive prison building programme, which is like building factories to train drug dealers. But although the Greens initially opposed NZ support for the invasion of Afghanistan, the Greens' website lists policies on industrial hemp and gambling, you will search a long time for unambiguous opposition to the military presence in Afghanistan, not to mention East Timor, the Solomon Islands and Tonga. Indeed, when the Australians first occupied East Timor in 1999, then co-leader Rod Donald was ‘intensely angry’ that NZ troops were not immediately available to join them.
For the Greens, the test of a good war is whether the UN has approved it or not. Socialist Review argues that this only provides a veneer of legitimacy to the predatory interests of world powers, which effectively control the UN through the Security Council.
On economics, the Greens' policy “Thinking beyond tomorrow” betrays woefully unrealistic thinking: “Much paid work no longer occurs in large enterprises; self-employment, small businesses and community enterprises all create work in a less structured way than the big workplaces of the industrial age.”
The idea that we have somehow moved past the ‘industrial age’ to a new age of a service or knowledge-based small businesses is driven more by wishful thinking than empirical reality. Concentration of capital continues apace in New Zealand. Knowledge-based workplaces like universities and service industries like telemarketing increasingly operate along factory lines.
This idealisation of small business plays well with any Green members and also opens up the possibility – mooted two years ago by co-leader Russell Norman – of a coalition with the National Party. Indeed, the Business Council for Sustainable Development released a survey data last month that purportedly showed that the Greens were the top choice for coalition partner with either National or Labour voters and that a flat tax policy could be the basis of a deal with National.
"A betting person would say John Key will need to stitch up a deal with the Greens,” claimed Peter Neilsen, the council’s chief executive.
A sobering thought for anyone considering voting Green and another sign of the decay of liberal democracy.