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Kick Nixon Out!

By VVAW

As the crisis surrounding President Nixon rages on, the question on the minds of all Americans today is -- will he be impeached? Increasingly, the vast majority of the American people are openly demanding that the crook be thrown out of office. While the courts and Congress focus on the comparatively minor crimes revealed through the Watergate scandal, the people must try Nixon for his crimes against humanity: the continuing war in Indochina, the Christmas bombings of Hanoi and Haiphong, complicity in ordering the fascist coup in Chile, the systematic robbery and impoverishment of 3rd World nations, and the domestic economic attack on the working people of the USA. More than the simple liar and thief that Nixon has been proven to be by Watergate, he must now be convicted for his larger crimes -- as the exploiter of the poor, mass murderer, and war criminal that he truly is.

Nixon is obviously in serious trouble -- he has gone too far this time! This has left his economic and political rivals impaled on the horns of a dilemma. On one hand, Nixon has messed-up so badly in the public's eye that he has discredited the system. On the other hand, since they are also part of the system, they hesitate to actually impeach Nixon because of the dangerous discrediting that it would cause the system. This hesitation can be viewed in the acceptance by these rival forces of the so-called "energy crisis" and the recent phoney military alert called by Nixon during the Middle East War. These crises are purely diversionary tactics aimed a relieving the pressures that are mounting against President Nixon. The only point that the political and economic rivals of Nixon are in agreement on is that they must ultimately protect the system that has given both themselves and President Nixon special privilege.

The average American is not part of this privileged elite. And as such, is concerned not with protecting the vested interests of the rich, but rather with the day-to-day struggle of economic survival and living in this inflationary country. The American people agree that Nixon is a thief and a liar and must be kicked out of office.

It is important to understand exactly why we must impeach Nixon, for we realize that the system would not really be changed one iota by his removal. While it is not necessarily true that all politicians, as individuals, are crooked, taking bribes and graft as did Nixon and Agnew, the point is that the system is crooked to the core. The way things are run in the United States, the courts, the laws, the police are all set up to serve the interests of the few at the expense of the poor and working people of this country. Our government's military and foreign policy are similarly set up to aid US business interests as they systemmatically rob the people of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. While it is important to understand the minor crimes revealed through the Watergate scandal, these larger crimes are the ones that we must now force Nixon to stand accountable for. This is not to imply that these "minor" crimes don't provide us with more than enough ammunition to justify his removal from office. A listing of the more flagrant of these is very educational.

There is the ITT Scandal where former Attorney General Richard Kleindeinst disclosed that Nixon stopped an anti-trust suit against ITT in return for some $400,000 in campaign "contributions." There is the Town House Project, disclosing that Nixon's pimp, Charles Colson, collected some $400 million through shady deals to finance the campaigns of Nixon hacks running for office. There is the $100,000 campaign "contribution" given by Howard Hughes to Nixon's buddy, Bebe Robozo, that ended up in Bebe's safety deposit box and was reluctantly returned only when things got too hot. There is the Dairy Deal, that Nixon tried to excuse away at his recent press conference, where import quotas and price ceilings on dairy products were altered and enabled the dairy industry to earn an additional $500-$700 million a year. In exchange for this, Nixon picked up a cool two million dollar campaign "contribution."

Perhaps one of the most galling scandals to the average American suffering under heavy tax burdens is the revelation that President Nixon, with an annual salary of $200,000 only paid about $800 on his personal income tax in 1970 and 1971. Nixon got away with this by using a $500,000 tax write-off for his personal Vice-Presidential notes on the advice of the nation's second biggest criminal, Democrat Lyndon Johnson. Indeed, there is no scarcity of such "penny ante" crimes to tag Dick with.

The larger crimes, the ones that Congress and the courts are not trying to tag Nixon with, are so much more vicious and insidious as to totally overshadow the relatively petty-thievery and graft brought to light by Watergate. These crimes are the programmatic attacks on the poor and working people of the United States. Nixon's Phases I, II, III, and IV are classic examples of this economic attack on the people of this country. What he did was to utilize the weapon of wage controls, of keeping wages down and prices up, to allow the rich to maintain their profits and rob the American people. It is no accident that wages have so miserably failed to keep pace with the ever-rising cost of food, housing and transportation.

Politically, Nixon was trying to lead the United States down the path of fascism in an attempt to consolidate his administration's political and economic strangle-hold on the American people. It is Dick Nixon we must thank for the fascistic Stop and Frisk laws, the No-Knock laws, the thousands of undercover spies and agent-provocateurs who have infiltrated everything from VVAW/WSO to Senator Muskie's campaign staff. He is the one who masterminded the Hitleresque new Criminal Code Reform Bill, the LEAA programs and the Pavlovian behavior modification systems now used in our prisons and schools. In short, he is the one that is responsible for the "law and order campaign" waged against the American people for the past five years; the results of which can be measured in the burgeoning number of political trials, the dead students at Kent and Jackson States, and the murdering of political activists such as George Jackson and Fred Hampton.

Internationally, the enormity of Nixon's crimes, the crimes of US imperialism, can be measured in the hundreds of thousands of tons of bombs dropped on the peoples of Indochina, and of the six million victims created as a result. It can be measured in the 200,000 political prisoners kept in Thieu's prisons. It can be seen in the fascistic governments put into power and maintained by the Nixon administration as in Saigon, Cambodia, Chile, Uruguay, and Bolivia. It can be seen in the support of racism and apartheid in Rhodesia and South Africa. It has resulted in the miserable lives of hundreds of millions of people living in the Third World countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America -- lives that have been systemmatically ruined by the impoverishment forced on them by the economic exploitation of their countries by US business interests.

Kicking Nixon out of office will strike a blow against these crimes of imperialism. It will slow down the move to fascism that Nixon's policies were leading to. It will emphatically tell the bosses of this country that the American people do not favor their policies of war, racism, oppression, and exploitation both at home and abroad. It will make clear to the Rockefellers, Fords and Du Ponts that the American people are going to fight back against their corrupt system. They will not be allowed to ride rough-shod over us any longer.

Nixon and his gang of thieves are totally on the defensive now, as witnessed by the PR junkets into "safe" Nixon territory of the South, and the incredible "I'm no crook" TV press conference. The public has had it with Nixon. Two days after Nixon was forced to back down and hand over the doctored tapes, the House Judiciary Committee received some 10,000 "impeach him anyway" telegrams. Now is the time for the American people to fight back. We cannot depend on Congress to do it for us, we must do it ourselves. We must band together and rise up in unison and scream "Kick Nixon Out!"