By Gerry Bates
Vast numbers of Americans and millions of American workers feel the same way about Bush as we do.
They did not vote for him - his opponent in the Presidential election, the Democrat Al Gore, got more votes than Bush did. It was dirty-dealing and chicanery by his brother Jeb, Governor of Florida, that put George Bush in the White House, not a majority of those who voted in the 2000 election.
The majority who voted, voted against Bush. Millions did not vote at all!
Despite the Blairite and Tory press which accuses us of being driven by a gut-level anti-Americanism, there is nothing necessarily anti-American in condemning the world policy of the US hyper-power and its "chief executive", George W Bush.
But when we demonstrate against Bush it is important to say loud and clear that we know there is a big distinction between being anti-Bush and being anti-American.
The question for us is who, which political force, we see as the progressive alternative to Bush.
For sure it is not the forces of political Islam. These - the reactionary religious bigots of al-Qaida, the fascistic butchers of the overthrown Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq, etc - are not progressive opponents of the system Bush represents.
Only the working class and the labour movement in the first place, necessarily the working class of the US, can ultimately provide a progressive alternative to Bush.
They are the over 16 million trade unionists of the US. They are wage slaves of the USA - the Detroit car workers, the black women who leave their children in the middle of the night to clean the offices on Wall Street, the Mexicans who pick oranges in Arnold Swarzenegger's California.
These are the people who make the profits for the mega-corporations.
It is the workers who have toiled to keep a thin layer of people obscenely rich - people like Bill Gates who is "worth" more than many countries in Africa.
It is the rich who put George Bush in power, and are now pouring dollars into his re-election fund.
There are more than 120 million workers in the US. Those that voted against Bush voted, unfortunately, for the candidate of the other capitalist political party, Al Gore's Democrats.
They were mistaken in that but many of them saw Gore as some sort of "left" or "left-faced" alternative to Bush.
This is the other America. The America with a history of struggles to change the world: like the struggle to create unions in the first half of the 20th century, or the mass strikes after the Second World War.
An America that continues to struggle and which has a huge potential power to change the world - despite the lack of strong trade union leadership, or its own party.
And so in 2002 American dockers struck for higher wages even as George W Bush prepared to use anti-union legislation to stop them.
As we denounce George Bush we must never lose sight of this America. We must reject the idea - it is now widespread on the left - that we should be on the side of any enemy of the hyper-power.
That opposition to Bush's USA implies support for, or tolerance and "softness" towards such abominations as the Saddam regime in Iraq or the forces of political Islam, those who last week set off bombs in the two synagogues in Istanbul.
In the last reckoning it will be the working class within the belly of the hyper-power which will settle accounts with the George Bushes and the capitalist ruling class they represent and serve. The American working class.
No to Bush? No to Bush! Yes to the American working class!
