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Over the last several months of the primary
season, movement activists have increasingly funneled their hopes,
money, and energy into the Barack Obama campaign. While both
Democratic contenders have received record attention and funds, Obama
has won significantly more enthusiasm from activist groupings.
Hillary Clinton has a longer record working within the capitalist
state, which includes such inconvenient votes as the authorization for
invading Iraq. A former corporate lawyer and Wal-Mart board member, she
is associated with the crimes of her husband’s administration and has
not been very effective in winning activists to her side.
Meanwhile, many in the mainstream media and movement circles alike
paint Obama as an outsider to the establishment, who might
somehow challenge the power structure. And Obama’s website plays on
this, portraying his campaign as an “unprecedented grassroots
movement.”
But if Obama’s campaign is a social movement, does it cause
oppositional actions to grow? Has its activity inspired more
antiwar demonstrations or fewer? Does his campaign help to organize the
defense of the Jena Six, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and other political
prisoners? Does it help to organize the defense of immigrant workers?
Is it organizing a defense against home foreclosures? Does it organize
a defense of reproductive rights or of Katrina survivors?
In every case the answer is no. Obama’s campaign has not lent one ounce
of support to these activities. In fact, when a judge acquitted three
New York City police officers on April 25 for murdering Sean Bell with
a hailstorm of bullets, Obama came to the defense of the verdict,
saying, “The judge has made his ruling, and we’re a nation of laws, so
we respect the verdict that came down.” Obama then
admonished protesters: "Resorting to violence to express
displeasure over a verdict is something that is completely unacceptable
and counterproductive." But no form of violence had been used in
the protests!
Obama denounces Jeremiah Wright
Obama’s recent responses to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright throw the
relationship of forces into bold relief. "All it was, was a bunch
of rants that aren’t grounded in truth," Obama charged, in
reference to Wright’s April 28 speech at the National Press Club. Obama
said that he was offended by Wright’s stated opinions on the Iraq War,
Israel, and the source of the AIDS crisis. Obama also took distance
from Wright’s praise for Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan (who,
like Wright, sees himself as a supporter of Obama).
When Wright defended himself and the independence of the Black church
and attacked U.S. imperialism, Obama denounced Wright for giving
"comfort to those who prey on hate." Obama’s statement raises
the fear that opposition to racism only creates more racism. He puts
the onus on the oppressed to keep their needs and opinions under wraps
in order to forge "unity" with those who oppress them.
After Obama’s first denunciation of Wright, in Philadelphia on March
18, Chicago Tribune Editor Steve Chapman gleefully illuminated the deep
contradiction that critics of U.S. government policies have when
supporting candidates of the two major parties; he compared Wright’s
support for Obama to the lunatic John Birch Society’s support for
Ronald Reagan. When criticized for having such support, Reagan replied,
"If anyone chooses to vote for me, they are buying my views. I am
not buying theirs."
Said Chapman: "It's as if the Minuteman Project were to endorse a
candidate who favors more Hispanic immigration. … Obama likewise hopes
to co-opt black radicals…." (Notice that Chapman follows Obama’s
lead by comparing Black radicals to racist vigilantes and lunatic
fringe groupings.)
Much of the "progressive" media has also bent on the issue.
The Progressive’s Ruth Conniff spends her April 28 "Jeremiah’s
Bombshell" article fretting about what the press and voters will
make of Wright’s words. Conniff concedes that many of his statements
are “true” and not "terribly shocking to those of us who are quite
familiar with the U.S. government's misdeeds over time. But it's a heck
of a message to send mainstream American voters."
Obama’s firm ruling-class support
Obama has long been the darling of ruling-class institutions like the
Council on Foreign Relations and the Democratic Leadership Council,
which listed him as one of the "100 Democratic Leaders to
Watch" in 2003, when he was a mere state senator in
Illinois.
Obama’s campaign has been thriving on ruling-class support from all
corners. Over 163 mainstream newspapers have endorsed him, from the Los
Angeles Times, Boston Globe, and Chicago Tribune to Rupert Murdoch’s
New York Post. He received gushing exclusives in Rolling Stone and a
special issue in Time magazine about the marvels of his mother. Martin
Peretz praises him on the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal.
Among his formal endorsers he counts former
Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, former House Rep. Lee Hamilton
(who currently sits on Bush’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and
the Homeland Security Advisory Council), 20 U.S. senators, 82 U.S.
congressional representatives, 13 governors, 87 mayors, 21 former
presidential staff, at least 729 state and local officials (mostly
state reps and senators), an array of former politicians, military,
covert operations, and foreign policy experts (70 of whom endorsed in a
block) and such billionaire financiers as George Soros, William
Louis-Dreyfus, and Warren Buffet—the second wealthiest man in America.
His staff includes Zbigniew Brzezinski (Jimmy Carter’s national
security advisor), and Retired Air Force General Merrill McPeak. His
economic advisors are led by Austan Goolsbee, a University of Chicago
professor and long-time proponent of neoliberal policies.
Obama is no stranger to corporate dough. The Center for Responsive
Politics reported that 80 percent of Obama’s campaign funds came from
business sources. Though he claims over a million small donors, much of
this number comes from a simple book-keeping trick. While corporations
avoid sending money directly, they manage to send hundreds of thousands
of dollars through their employees in bundled donations of up to $2500
each. That’s not too surprising, considering he’s raised over $200
million.
Obama and the Iraq War
Obama’s stated policies on the Iraq War differ very little from that of
his main opponents in the elections. All the Democratic and Republican
candidates maintain the right to keep troops in Iraq as long as U.S.
capitalist interests dictate.
Both Clinton and Obama discuss withdrawals of U.S. combat troops, but
never discuss the 180,000 mercenary forces that the U.S. pays to occupy
that country—while they allow for maintaining a presence of
"non-combat" troops of up to 75,000. Even their withdrawal of
combat troops is contingent upon completion of their objectives,
including (but not necessarily limited to) the defeat of al-Queda in
Iraq and the extinguishing of the insurgency.
Obama states that he reserves the right to deploy troops in case of an
ethnic genocide, (which, according to the UN definition, is already
occurring in Iraq) or to protect sacred "American interests."
When asked if they could commit to withdrawing all U.S. troops by the
end of their first term in 2013, both Clinton and Obama said they could
not.
The Democrats are aiming to rehabilitate the justifications for
occupying Iraq. While McCain says, "I will not leave until our
objectives are met," Obama and Clinton say, "I will leave
after our objectives are met!" They have the same program, worded
differently. For the warmakers it is necessary to employ both
phrasings. One statement builds the confidence of openly pro-war
forces, while the other wins antiwar forces to a pro-war position.
Obama and Clinton have both maintained that the U.S. should be prepared
to take military action against Iran (leaving even nuclear strikes on
the table), and Obama says that the U.S. must be ready to engage in
military operations inside Pakistan. A country with nuclear weapons!
Obama avoided voting against the resolution to define Iran’s
revolutionary National Guard as an international terrorist
organization, voted to confirm Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state,
voted to re-authorize the PATRIOT act and, just like Clinton, has voted
for every bill to fund the war in Iraq for which he was present.
Both Obama and Clinton promise to increase the size of the armed
forces; Clinton by about 80,000, Obama by about 100,000. They intend to
expand the use of U.S. military force abroad. They are concerned about
the war in Iraq only to the extent that it hampers broader imperialist objectives.
Obama is there to convince working people that while Bush may have lied
about why they went to war in Iraq, he is going to continue the war for
the right reasons. He’s there to let us hope for a little bit longer
that the end is just around the corner.
In this, Obama’s campaign promises much to a ruling class badly in need
of obedient soldiers. During the Vietnam War it nearly lost its
military to mass mutiny. Desertion and refusal to fight—often
accompanied by violent attacks on officers—grew to such a height that
the Pentagon considered its own troops a liability by 1971. Only then
was it forced to withdraw.
Since the Vietnam War, the draft has ceased to be an option, and the
military has relied more than ever on drawing men and women into its ranks
by advertising veterans’ benefits that include increased opportunities
for those who are otherwise denied them. This strategy, of course,
makes systematically oppressed groups like African Americans an
essential component of the military.
However, precisely because African Americans and Latinos are
systematically oppressed in this country, it is more difficult to
maintain their loyalty when slaughtering oppressed peoples abroad.
Indeed, the soldier rebellion during the Vietnam War grew on a wave of
Black Nationalism that identified the struggle of African Americans
with the struggles of oppressed peoples around the world and not with
the racist, imperialist U.S. state.
Black Americans are already withdrawing their support from the Iraq
war. Before September 2001, Blacks composed 20 percent of military
enrollment. By 2006 that figure had dropped to 13 percent. Meanwhile,
the military’s desertion rate has grown by 80 percent since the Iraq
War began.
Support to a politician who calls for phased withdrawal undercuts the
kind of opposition capable of ending the war. Soldiers will
increasingly speak out against the war effort—and even refuse to
fight—when they decide that they have no good reason to continue to
fight, and that a mass movement in the United States supports their
efforts to return home immediately. And the same is true for possible
workers’ strikes against the war.
Meanwhile, immigrant communities are demonstrating a strong ability to
fight the bosses, including a wave of marches in 2006 that culminated
in a political general strike of between 5 million and 7 million
workers. The war effort not only requires an obedient military, it
requires an obedient workforce. Both of these movements threaten the
capitalists’ grip on the economy and the war machine. Either could
completely overturn the political landscape in this country.
On the key issues facing working people in the United States—the war,
factory closures, high food prices, home foreclosures, rising costs of
health care and education, women’s reproductive rights, environmental
pollution, etc.—Obama’s campaign has been designed by the ruling elite
to disorient and absorb activist movements, not build them. His
campaign is fixated on a "we" that somehow includes both the
war-driving capitalists and the workers who sweat and bleed for them.
To be fully effective, workers in the United States need to form their
own independent party. This party would fight for economic and social
justice—and not just at election time. It would strive to bring
together the unions and other movements around demands that can openly
challenge this criminal system that puts capitalist profits before
people’s needs.
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