The Jimmy Carter Presidency

A Capitalist-Imperialist Nightmare

The Murdered Churchwomen in El Salvador

Ever since he died at age 100 last week, I’ve been hearing liberals and moderates saying that “the late Jimmy Carter is the kind of man we need in the White House.”

I cannot concur.

“The Essentially Friedmanite Character of His Economic Program”

Jimmy Carter was in the White House between January 20, 1977 and January 20, 1981, and it was not a pretty story. I’ve written previously about the oppressive capitalism and imperialism of the Carter presidency[1].

Before running my reflections down (you can buy a new hardcover copy of the book in which they appear for $232.83!), look at this useful discussion of that presidency last summer between Truthout’s C.J Polychroniou and historian David Gibbs, author of The Revolt of the Rich: How the Politics of the 1970s Widened America’s Class Divide:

‘Polychroniou: it is …widely accepted…that Carter was…a conservative Democrat, but it isn’t typically acknowledged that he ushered in the age of neoliberalism. Can you talk about the sort of neoliberal economic policies that Carter enforced…?

Gibbs: The move toward free market economics was finally implemented during the presidency of Jimmy Carter. While Nixon had laid the foundations for a later conservative transformation, it was President Carter who first set forth these policies on a large scale. He was keenly focused on removing industrial regulations inherited from the New Deal…Carter deregulated multiple industrial sectors, beginning with airlines, which had the effect of permanently reducing wages. Carter also deregulated domestic finance, intensifying the financialization begun during Nixon’s presidency, with additional negative effects on wage earners. Carter’s economic conservatism was expressed in multiple domains, including regressive taxation “reforms,” which increased the tax burden on wage earners, while it reduced taxation of investors. And Carter began the process of using monetary policy as a means of fighting inflation by reducing wages and increasing unemployment. He was no friend to the working class.

Polychroniou: Your book makes it clear that the neoliberal policies associated with Reaganomics and Thatcherism started with Carter. Why is it then that neoliberalism in the U.S. has been pinned on Ronald Reagan?

Gibbs: According to popular mythology, Carter was a relatively centrist figure, while Reagan was a right-wing ideologue; it was Reagan who inaugurated the neoliberal era in economic policy, according to this view. But the reality is that Reagan only intensified a rightward turn that was already in full swing under Carter. Why the persistence of this myth, that Carter was a political moderate? I think the reason is that Reagan used conservative, ideological language to justify his policies, proudly emphasizing his free market orientation, so he received all the credit for America’s right turn in economic policy, while Carter preferred non-ideological language, which masked the essentially Friedmanite character of his economic program. Another factor influencing public perception has been Carter’s post-presidency, which is very impressive. But Carter must also be judged on the basis of his presidency, which transformed the country in a far more inegalitarian direction than had been the case previously. We should not whitewash Carter’s record.’

“Major Crimes Against the Third World”

It was good to hear Gibbs speak up for “the working class” of the world’s leading parasitic and imperial nation but it should be added that Carter was even less of a friend of oppressed people in what in his Cold War day was called the Third World. On that note, read this useful reflection from the North Carolina progressive and peace advocate Gordon Smith 28 years ago:

‘Carter has done some benevolent things after 1981… While all of this is good, Carter presided over some serious war crimes in the Third World. Despite Carter's reputation as the President who placed human rights as the top priority for his foreign policy, any examination of the actual policies behind the public relations initiative reveals the Carter Administration's continuation of US support for monstrous Third World regimes.

· Carter secretly supported the genocidal Pol Pot government ousted by Vietnam in 1979. This secret support was essential to further punishment of Vietnam for having successfully defended her own population against the American invaders. US Indochina strategy also intended to outflank the Vietnamese, who were aligned with the Soviet Union, and to back the Pol Pot forces, aligned with China.

· Carter declared his support for the Shah of Iran-despite the rampant torture practiced by the Shah's secret police in close collaboration with the C.I.A.-more emphatically than Richard Nixon had: "There is no leader with whom I have a deeper sense of personal friendship and gratitude."

· Following the Indonesians' 1975 invasion of East Timor, Carter continued to arm Indonesia's army dictatorship as well as give diplomatic support (vetoing U.N. resolutions to end the atrocities in the former Portuguese colony). This war has killed more than 200,000 East Timorese, making it the worst genocide relative to population since World War II. Carter did nothing to pressure General Suharto (Indonesia's chief of state) to end the war. He was an ally and major supporter of the Indonesian military's repression of its own population, as well as the slaughter of the East Timorese people. The army's murderous stranglehold on East Timor will continue as long as the ruling military clique of Indonesia lets transnational oil companies have a good share of East Timorese oil profits.

· During his watch, Carter aided and supported Nicaragua's then-dictator Anastasio Somoza, who murdered and repressed tens of thousands of his own people. When Somoza's forces were about to lose control of the main cities, Carter attempted to launch an invasion under the fig leaf of an intervention by the Organization of American States (OAS). The OAS refused and Carter then planned to send the US military to salvage Somoza's army, which was established by and beholden to the US government-but it was too late. Carter made sure that Somoza was ferried out of the country on a Red Cross-painted US aircraft. The C.I.A. under Carter helped to re-establish Somoza's army as a terrorist force against the people of Nicaragua. These "contras" assassinated social workers, doctors and civilians, burned crops, and tried to exterminate any possibility of social reform that the Sandinistas created.

These major crimes against the Third World warrant attention.’

Indeed they did and do, but so do two crimes Smith did not mention:

· the Carter administration’s disastrous sponsorship of the deeply reactionary Islamo-fascist Mujahideen (forerunner of al Qaeda, Islamic State, and the Taliban) in Afghanistan.

· Carter’s horrific resumption of US military and financial assistance to the Third World Fascist El Salvadoran government just three weeks after three American nuns -- Maura Clarke, Ita Ford and Dorothy Kazel, and layperson Jean Donovan – were raped and murdered by soldiers with the Salvadoran National Guard.

Jimmy Mujahideen Carter

Regarding Carter’s Afghan policy, Glenn Sacks wrote this in The Progressive in March of 2023:

‘[Carter] today is known for having prioritized human rights during his term. Yet, this view forgets that in Afghanistan, Carter launched an unnecessarily aggressive effort against the USSR that flew in the face of his rhetoric. That policy’s cost has been enormous: the rise of Al-Qaeda, America’s twenty-year war against the Taliban, and decades of civil war in Afghanistan.

Conflict began in 1978 when the left-wing People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, or PDPA, seized power. The PDPA expanded women’s rights by banning forced marriages and reducing the oppressive bride price to a nominal fee, among other measures. Facing an exceptionally low female literacy rate, they made education compulsory for girls.The party also distributed land to the poor, albeit clumsily, and restrained the power of the Muslim clergy, who responded by rallying the peasantry against the government’s reforms.

While unpopular in the countryside, the regime had many urban supporters who had seen that, in the adjoining Muslim-majority regions of the Soviet Union, there had been tremendous progress in eliminating illiteracy, reducing infant mortality, improving living standards and life expectancy, and uplifting women.

As scholar Valentine Moghadam observed in Afghanistan in 1989, women had taken up prominent positions in urban areas and in the PDPA government, as well as becoming “chief surgeons in military hospitals, and construction workers and electrical engineers who often supervised male staff.”

Carter covertly armed the rural opposition, believing that the Soviets, faced with the possibility of a Muslim extremist regime on their border, would intervene. Over the next decade, the Central Intelligence Agency dispensed $3 billion to the various anti-PDPA groups, which were known collectively as the Mujahideen.

Many of America’s later enemies came from the Mujahideen, including Al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden, Taliban leader Mullah Omar, 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and the “Butcher of Fallujah,” Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

The PDPA, struggling to survive, repressed opposition, often brutally, and asked the USSR to intervene. When the USSR sent in 80,000 troops in 1979, they had walked into the Carter Administration’s “Bear Trap” — designed to ensnare them in a long, costly war. The Soviet-Afghan War was a brutal conflict with atrocities on all sides, but the Soviet-backed regime, for all its faults, sought to build a comparatively modern, egalitarian society. Carter then vilified the Soviet invasion he helped create, instituting draft registration, scuttling SALT II, sharply increasing military spending, and boycotting the 1980 Moscow Olympics.

In 1989, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who had labeled the war a “bleeding wound,” removed Soviet troops from Afghanistan. It was assumed in the West that the PDPA regime would quickly collapse. Instead, unlike in 2021 when the Afghan Army collapsed as soon as the United States withdrew, the PDPA regime held on following the Soviet withdrawal. At key battles like the siege of Jalalabad, the Afghan Army dealt the Mujahideen humiliating defeats. Aid was cut off after the USSR’s collapse, but the PDPA lasted until 1992, when the Mujahideen finally seized Kabul. The Taliban, constituted from Mujahideen veterans along with Afghan refugees from Pakistan, took over the country in 1996.’

The Taliban, hatched in no small part by Carter’s Cold War imperialism, has recently returned to power and proven by to a complete nightmare for Afghan women and girls. As The Independent reported one month ago, “women in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan are currently barred from most of the ordinary activities their counterparts elsewhere in the world see as their natural right – studying, working, going to a salon or the gym, midwifery, and even speaking or praying in public.” Carter bears no small moral responsibility for this atrocity.

“Military Aid to the Salvadoran Butchers Flowed Once Again”

Regarding Carter’s sickening El Salvador decision, Lawrence Reichard wrote this on CounterPunch three days ago:

…1980, was a bloody year in El Salvador. On March 3 Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero was murdered. The day before he was murdered, Romero presided over a mass in a Carmelite chapel and made remarks that later proved haunting. Romero called on Salvadoran soldiers to, “in the name of God”, lay down their weapons and stop the slaughter of Salvadoran civilians. And the next day he was shot and killed in a hit ordered by Salvadoran Colonel Roberto D’Aubuisson.

On May 13 the Salvadoran military slaughtered 600 peasants in the Sumpul River, on the Honduras border. The peasants were fleeing a civil war that saw the FMLN control a third of the country.

And on December 2, three American churchwomen – nuns Maura Clarke, Ita Ford and Dorothy Kazel, and layperson Jean Donovan – were raped and murdered by five members of the Salvadoran National Guard. The churchwomen had dedicated their lives to helping refugees displaced by civil war in the second-poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.

It didn’t take long for Carter’s decision on resuming military aid to El Salvador. Three weeks after the rape and murder of the four U.S. churchwomen – and only four weeks before Carter left office – military aid to the Salvadoran butchers flowed once again.

Three weeks doesn’t sound like much, but it was at the time. Much of the country waited to see what Carter would do. Would Carter’s human rights pronouncements hold up under what was likely withering pressure from the domestic forces of empire?

Carter’s decision to resume military aid lay the groundwork for the United States’ disastrous Central America interventions of the 1980s, which almost brought down Ronald Reagan, the man who beat Carter in 1980.

“Our Vital National Interest” in Other Nation’s Oil

Also meriting critical recollection is the 39^th US president’s proclamation of the arch-imperialist Carter Doctrine during his 1980 State of the Union Address. The Carter Doctrine stated that the United States would use military force, if necessary, to defend the “the vital interests of the United States of America” in the Persian Gulf. Carter’s proclamation amounted to an update of the Western hemispheric Monroe Doctrine for the global petro-capitalist era to include the oil-rich Middle East. “The vital interests of the United States” was code language for the massive fossil fuel resources beneath the soils and sands of the Middle East. The Carter Doctrine has since helped provide “official rationale” for the US oppression and murder of masses of Arab and Muslim people across the Middle East.

Carter was a pivotal player not only in the onset of the domestic “neoliberal” era but in the re-escalation/resurrection of American Cold War imperialism after Washington’s humiliations in Vietnam and Iran.

The Job Description

Jimmy Carter’s presidency was a capitalist-imperialist nightmare, consistent with the basic job description of the US presidency, described as follows by the revolutionary communist leader Bob Avakian: “head of the American empire of exploitation, degradation, oppression, and massive destruction.” As Avakian explained last summer:

“This system forces the people who rise to the top of it, and rule it, to be literally—without any exaggeration—cut-throat exploiters, murderous oppressors on a massive scale, and relentless plunderers of people and the environment, regardless of the suffering this causes for masses of human beings. For individual capitalists, and for the ruling classes of capitalist countries, if they do not beat out and beat down others, by whatever means, no matter how monstrous, they will go under. This cannot be ‘reformed away,’ and it cannot be changed by changing the people who rule in this system—they will all be bound by the very nature, the ‘logic’ and dynamics, and the demands of this system. By running for President, I would only contribute to reinforcing the illusion that all this could, somehow, be ‘reformed away’ or ‘changed by changing the people who rule in this system.’ But…this can only be changed with a revolution—to overthrow and abolish this system and replace it with a fundamentally different and much better system, which does not rest on, does not require, and aims to fully do away with ruthless exploitation and monstrous mass murder and destruction.”

I am unaware of any indication that post-presidency Carter ever came remotely close to understanding and proclaiming the need for a popular socialist revolution to overthrow the capitalist-imperialist nightmare – the system that will destroy all prospects for a decent future if it is not “abolsih[ed] and replace[d] with a fundamentally different and much better system” beyond “ruthless exploitation and monstrous mass murder and destruction.”

Notes

+1. See “Jimmy Carter: ‘Protecting Corporate Wealth and Power,;” pp. 4-5 in Paul Street, Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (New York: Routledge, 2008). See also pages 76-77, 128, and 159.