Issued: n.d. [1968]
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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Even though Johnson if retiring, the joke is still on you. Because the big money still runs this country and only wants out of Vietnam to stay in everyplace else. (Such as Thailand, Laos, the Philippines, Bolivia and Guatemala, where American troops are fighting liberation movements.) And McCarthy and Kennedy are no real alternatives.
Why did he quit?
Too many people got disgusted with the war and the society. They fought in the ghettoes, got organized into the anti-war movement, resisted the draft, disrupted LBJ’s speeches, or just acted disgusted.
His policy (which JFK started) is losing in Vietnam, as the recent Viet Cong offensive proves. He had Westmoreland fired. American troops lost control of the whole countryside. It became clear that the U.S. was fighting the majority of the Vietnamese.
The big money (Eastern money, like Rockefeller’s, that has long run this country) began to see that this war is bad for business in the long run. They want to maintain their world-wide investments as gently and long as possible, because that’s where their profits come from – the cheap resources and labor of exploited poor people. But getting that cheap labor creates unemployment, low wages and high draft calls here at home. Liberation movements like the Viet Cong hurt those profits (but not you and me) by taking over American business investments and returning the benefits to the native people.
But the big money saw it was too costly to fight and lose in Vietnam, so they decided to hold the fort elsewhere, where it may not be as ugly a job. Kennedy, McCarthy, Lindsay and Rockefeller represent this Eastern money. Johnson, on the other hand, is tied to South-western (newer) money, based on armaments and aero-space industries. It profits most from a hot war, and wants to go ahead with this one. But it failed in Vietnam, and Eastern money has reasserted itself.
What does this prove?
Johnson, like all presidents, is nothing but a puppet (as Kennedy will have to be if he gets in). Everyone knows he wanted to go down in history as a great president, so clearly someone forced him to drop out.
It was done because of pressure from below – by the Vietnamese people and the American people. Just as the French cabinet fell when they lost in Vietnam, the people’s displeasure has forced Johnson out.
But the same military-industrial class will go on using us to fight its wars in other places in the underdeveloped countries and in the black ghettoes here. This class thinks it can cool us off by giving us a liberal alternative (McCarthy has said he is running to keep us off the streets), but thousands of us know that electoral politics, liberal or whatever, offers no real alternative at all. “What difference does it make if Kennedy or Johnson drafts you? And then jails you for refusing to go? After all, JFK sent our troops to Vietnam, Bobby started the Green Berets and planned the Cuban invasion, McCarthy wants to fight in Thailand instead of Vietnam, and Rockefeller would send us to defend his oil wells in Venezuela if the guerilla movement got too big there.
What is Bobby Kennedy’s real program?
Bobby looks like the strongest contender. Be looks witty, intelligent, modern. But who knows what he really stands for?
1) He doesn’t talk about getting U.S. business fingers out of the underdeveloped countries – only ox negotiating the question of military intervention in one of them. He wants to use our taxes in development programs like the Alliance for Progress, to build costly roads and railways to bettor exploit the cheap labor in those countries.
2) He believes that American business can handle the black community’s problems (which it can’t, because it’s not profitable to create jobs and dignity). In Brooklyn he has already started a development program (a tax dodge for the corporations) similar to the Alliance
for Progress. Meanwhile he doesn’t protest the wholesale militarization of the police forces of the country; he supports gun control (for private citizens, not cops) and martial powers for the mayor of New York, Like his brother, he doesn’t mind a “limited war,” even at home.
3) He was assistant counsel for Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s investigating committee in 1953, when they carried out the biggest book-burning, thought-control campaign in American history, He fears true freedom of speech.
4) As Attorney General he attacked Jimmy Hoffa harder than he ever attacked a business leader, and threatened other unions with the same. With McCarthy he ran people out of the unions who were “radical” enough to say that workers should control the speed of the assembly line.
What should we do?
Build our own movement that will fight for: 1) Getting our troops and the businessmen’s fingers out of the small underdeveloped countries. 2) Stopping the government from training and using us (both black and white) to invade the black communities. 3) A change from a programmatic, indoctrinating educational system to one where we can develop and live with people rather than learn to exploit them. 4) A strong movement of working people so that the people who work and produce and create can have control over v/hat they do and make.
Cleveland Draft Resistance Union #310, 10616 Euclid Ave. Cleveland, Ohio 721-1869