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The AFL-CIO, Change to Win, and virtually every
individual union in the country is supporting Barack Obama for
President. Yet as we’ll show below, he’s just another pro-corporate,
pro-ruling class politician.
First, a word about McCain’s economic
platform, whose pro-corporate, pro-ruling class planks are so obvious
that they need little exposure (it’s the job of the Democratic Party,
after all, to do the heavy lifting in trying to fool workers into
staying within the two-party charade).
Until the ruling class and its politicians
and media forged a consensus around the Wall Street Bailout, McCain
adamantly opposed any and all forms of regulation.
He supports privatization of Social Security,
tax breaks for corporations, and granting even more tax breaks to the
wealthy than Bush.
In recent months in its daily email alerts to
members, the AFL-CIO has proudly announced that it has taken action
around jobs, or inflation, or healthcare or housing costs – and
inevitably what that means is that they’ve held a rally or gone
door-knocking for Obama.
So let’s look at the credentials of this
supposed working class hero.
Obama’s true colors were shown in his rush to
endorse the Paulson Plan to bail out Wall Street (see accompanying
article). The Washington Post reported that “Obama's decision to join
his rival at the White House in a show of bipartisanship appeared to
set the stage for a final deal.” Obama had even called McCain to
propose a joint statement supporting the bailout.
The Post added that “McCain and Obama have
laid out conditions [for their support] that are largely in sync: more
transparency, more oversight, a taxpayer stake so that a successful
turnaround would recoup federal money, and limits on compensation for
executives whose firms get help.” None of which change the basic
function of the bill: to transfer hundreds of billions to Wall Street
crooks.
In addition, “Obama dropped his insistence
that the plan include a stimulus package for the broader economy.” And
he even contradicted members of his own party by saying the package
should not allow judges to restructure mortgages for people facing
foreclosure.
Furthermore, the cost of the bailout, said
Obama, would likely mean that his plans to spend more on needed
services would be delayed and/or cut back (and as we’ll see below those
plans never amounted to much anyway).
An article by David Leonhardt in the August
20th New York Times Magazine describes the ideology behind
Obama’s economic stances, and paints Obama as above all a pragmatist.
He describes an incident this summer “after Obama named Jason Furman, a
protégé of Robert Rubin, as lead economic adviser. AFL-CIO head John
Sweeney worried aloud about ‘corporate influence on the Democratic
Party.’"
Says Leonhardt, “The campaign has come out
with a series of small-bore, populist energy plans,” with predictably
minimal impact, compared especially to the outrage over his comment
this spring about bitter rural voters clinging to guns and religion. It
was an admission that his own message about the economy hadn't yet
broken through.”
Obama had said: "You go into these small
towns, the jobs have been gone for 25 years. It's not surprising they
get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people
who aren't like them." Later Obama added that poor white small
town Americans "don't vote on economic issues."
Of course workers ARE bitter – not just about
our economic woes, but also about rich politicians like Obama who think
we’re too stupid to know when a politician is currying favor with the
ruling class by insulting our intelligence.
Leonhardt reports that Obama spent 12 years
teaching at the University of Chicago, home of free market fetishist
Milton Friedman and his followers. While there Obama became friendly
with liberals who had been won over to many of Friedman’s ideas.
In his second book, "The Audacity of
Hope," Obama wrote: "Reagan's central insight — that the
liberal welfare state had grown complacent and overly bureaucratic,
with Democrats more obsessed with slicing the economic pie than growing
it — contained a good deal of truth."
A typical example of the “incremental,
market-based solutions” Obama prefers is his plan to require companies
to automatically set aside a portion of their workers' salary in a 401k
plan, forcing workers to opt out of the plan if they want a traditional
pension. His healthcare plan also depends on market solutions, as does
his support for the cap-and-trade “solution” to global warming.
"The market is the best mechanism ever
invented for efficiently allocating resources to maximize
production," Obama told Leonhardt. "There is a connection
between the freedom of the marketplace and freedom more
generally."
Andrew Leonard noted in Salon that while
Obama’s tax cuts would give $700 more a year to those in the bottom 80%
of the population, because the wealthy have done so well over the past
few decades, this “would leave the gap between the rich and everyone
else far wider than it was 15 or 30 years ago.”
Obama’s pro-ruling class beliefs and
proposals are making it hard for him to win working class votes in an
economy which normally would lead to a landslide for the party out of
power. (It appears he’s getting a boost in the polls from hostility to
the Paulson Plan despite his support for it, simply because in the absence
of a genuine alternative, voters in such situations usually swing to
the party out of power regardless of its stated positions.) He’s
compounded this weakness by avoiding the issue of race – despite the
fact that Black and Latin@ workers are suffering disproportionately
from the economic crisis. But this pandering hasn’t won him any more
support among white workers.
In August the New York Times sent a reporter
to the once-solidly pro-Democrat Western Pennsylvania Rust Belt, who
claimed to find much hostility or at least ambivalence about Obama
among white workers there.
A typical comment was that of one retiree:
“McCain keeps talking about being a prisoner of war. Great. The economy
stinks; tell me his plan.” But this same man was “uncertain who Obama
is.”
“People around here want practical language,”
said the daughter of a steel-mill worker. “They don’t want high-flown
talk,” like she hears from Obama.
And it’s not that voters in this area prefer guns
over butter: Only 2 of 38 people interviewed favored remaining in Iraq.
One retired steelworker, whose pension had
been eliminated, said “Obama got one thing right. We are bitter here.”
Another worker said she likes Obama but
doesn’t talk about it, because “People are split between their politics
and their prejudice.”
A United Steelworkers organizer tried to
counter such statements by telling members: “Obama stands for national
health care, strong unions and preserving Social Security. “Some of you
won’t vote for him because he’s Black. Well, he’s a Democrat. Get over
it.”
And AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard
Trumka wrote: “There are a thousand good reasons for any worker to vote
for him. There is only one very bad reason not to and that is because
he is not white.”
Radical author Michael Yates notes that
despite the prevalent racism in the region, from which he hails, “Even
a nod to working-class sentiments would have made a difference. A lot
of white workers would have eaten this up.”
The Washington Post described his troubles
winning over “Wal-Mart Moms” who it categorized as “slightly older than
soccer moms and without college degrees, and are struggling to pay for
their children’s college, to take care of their parents, and face high
energy prices, rising unemployment, soaring health care costs and
housing foreclosures.”
It’s not surprising that Obama’s running
mate, Joe Biden, is a flack for the corporations who dominate his
native state, Delaware, which, thanks to tax and regulation breaks, is
a corporate haven second only to Bermuda.
In 1996, Black political scientist Adolph
Reed described the then-new state senator as representing "the new
breed of foundation-hatched black voices: a smooth Harvard lawyer with
neoliberal politics, and a base in the liberal foundation and
development worlds."
Obama promises to give tax breaks to
companies “that create good jobs right here.” Yet time after time
companies receiving tax breaks have taken the money and run, closing
plants and moving production elsewhere.
Other promises include:
“A windfall tax on excessive oil company
profits to give families an immediate $1,000 emergency energy rebate.”
But workers have lost far more than $1,000 to the oil companies.
“Provide $25 billion to prevent state and
local cuts.”
$25 billion is a tiny percentage of the funds
needed by state and local governments.
“A new tax credit of up to $500 per person.”
Again, this will do little to help families facing
foreclosure, or bankruptcy due to huge medical bills, much less recoup
the wages lost over decades.
“Obama will fight to open up foreign markets
to support good American jobs. Obama will pressure the World Trade
Organization to enforce trade agreements and stop countries from
continuing unfair government subsidies to foreign exporters and
nontariff barriers on US exports.”
This is the rhetoric of US-based
multinationals who want to continue to get subsidies from Washington
and force open, by force if need be, other countries’ markets.
“Create an Advanced Manufacturing Fund,
double funding for the Manufacturing Extension Partnership, and make
the Research and Development tax credit permanent.”
Again, more giveaways to auto and high-tech
companies.
“Invest $150 billion” in biofuels and other
alternative energy technologies.
Yet again, ax breaks for private developers
of such technologies. And note the support for biofuels, which is
worsening the climate crisis and driving up prices for starving Third
World workers.
“Put $60 billion over 10 years in a National
Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank.”
The Congressional Budget Office says $20
billion are needed right now just to maintain current levels of road
and railway service and safety. And this doesn’t say anything about the
hundreds of billions needed to rebuild the Gulf Coast or devastated
inner cities.
Obama has said: “The free market has created
a prosperity that is the envy of the world, a standard of living
unmatched in history. We are all in this together. From CEOs to
shareholders, from financiers to factory workers, we all have a stake
in each other's success.”
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