Water shutoffs in Detroit and mass repression in Ferguson expose the true face of the American ruling class. In the aftermath of the urban rebellions in the 1960s, along with brutal state repression, the ruling elite responded with a program of limited social reforms. The phrase “guns and butter” was coined to describe the policy, stillborn from the beginning, of simultaneously funding the imperialist war in Vietnam and anti-poverty programs in the US.
Today there is no section of the American political establishment that is calling for measures to alleviate the social crisis. In all of the official declamations on the police killing in Ferguson, there was barely a mention of the underlying social conditions of unemployment, poverty and inequality. The representatives of corporate America stand united in the drive to take back every social concession ever extracted by the working class.
Petrified by the specter of working class resistance, the oligarchy that rules America responds to any sign of social opposition by seeking to crush it. It has no reforms to offer, only more repression.