Barak Obama - No Real Change in the Whitehouse

Judging by the ubiquitous media-generated euphoria that greeted the Barak Obama victory in the US presidential election, you could be forgiven for thinking that the class struggle had ended in the USA. Across the globe, the world’s media intimated that this was the dawn of a new age and hundreds of millions of workers breathed a sigh of relief, convinced President Obama will now undo all the wrongdoing carried out by President Bush and generally improve the quality of their lives and the safety of the planet.

The first thing to note, however, is that this had been the most expensive American election so far. The pooled cost of the Republican and Democratic campaigns was a cool $1 billion. The McCain camp raised $340 million whereas the Obama team secured $640 million.While Obama’s team boasted that most of their money came from small $100 and $200 donors, in truth the great bulk of his financial support came from Wall Street and the US corporate elite and was way in advance of that given to John McCain, suggesting the US capitalism plc feels its profits are best protected via Obama. The US power elite bankrolled the Obama campaign and for no other reason than that they know he will have to repay their loyalty.

An estimated 64 percent of the US electorate turned out to vote – a record by all accounts - 62.3 million votes. The majority of the extra voters were Blacks and Latino, not only drawn to the ballot box by the longing to oust a reactionary Republican regime, or by Obama’s promise of ‘change’ but, moreover, because Obama was non–white. Socialists could only watch on and comment that this election was not a race issue, but a class issue and lament their selective amnesia. One time Secretary of State Collin Powell rose through the ranks covering up the My Lai massacre and famously presented false evidence to the UN in furtherance of the US justification for the invasion of Iraq. Consider too his successor Condoleezza Rice, the zealous maid-servant to Bush’s imperialist strategy.

To be sure, Obama was not breaking any mould, despite his hope-fused rhetoric. The vast majority of voters, indeed workers the world over, were heartily fed up with Bush’s wars, his imperialist conquests, the US disregard for international law and the increasing pariah status this had earned America and sincerely wanted to see the back of it. The signs, however, that Obama was more of a wolf in sheep’s clothing were already there, not least in the Senate where he sanctioned every increase in funding for the Iraq war that George Bush requested.

Furthermore, like Bush, Obama is a supporter of the death penalty. He is pro-pollutant nuclear and coal industries and, whilst the Guardian could optimistically run a headline “Obama will move to veto Bush laws” (10 November), has not mentioned eradicating repressive legislation such as the Patriot Act, homeland security, the Military Commissions Act, internet control, and wiretapping and spying on the US populace.

It certainly looks like the Bush administration’s imperial ambitions will continue under Obama. He has already spoken about building up US military power by 20,000 troops and has declared his intention to cut troop numbers in Iraq and transfer them to a surge in Afghanistan and indeed spread war to nuclear armed Pakistan. All of this will be, as under Bush, carried out to further the interests of a profit-hungry corporate elite and veiled in pompous patriotic oratory about spreading democracy and American values and fighting the “war on terror.” Undoubtedly, Obama will soon be using the hackneyed theme of social unity to wage the class war internally and abroad on behalf of a small power elite.

He also undertaken, to “isolate Hamas”, elected in democratic elections that were verified by an international team of observers and, picking up the baton from Bush, used his first press conference as president-elect to likewise cock a snook at the US National Intelligence Estimate and evidence presented by the IAEA on Iran’s nuclear intentions, and accused Iran of the "development of a nuclear weapon" and vowed "to prevent that from happening."

If Obama apologists think President Obama will put a halt to the blood letting they are going to be sorely disappointed. Make no mistake; whilst the left are fond of castigating Republicans as the masters of war, the truth is that historically the Democrats have started far more wars than the GOP. More recently, under the last Democrat to hold office, President Clinton, one million Iraqis are said to have died under US enforced sanctions, 500, 000 of them children. Sorties over Iraq were flown every single day Clinton was in power. Yugoslavia was mercilessly bombed and a much needed pharmaceutical plant in Sudan was bombed on the pretext that it was manufacturing Chemical weapons, and villages in Afghanistan were flattened because Bin-Laden was presumed to be living there. And who could forget the US invasion of Somalia, with troops storming the beaches live on prime time TV!

Who will make up the Obama administration is at the time of writing speculation, though we do know his Chief of Staff is Israeli army veteran Rahm Emanuel, popularly viewed as Likudist hawk and that his National Securtiy Adviser will be architect of the Mujahedeen Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Not only is Obama incapable of ushering in significant change, bar a few miserly reforms, but neither is there anyone he can bring to his administration capable of bringing the change that was so promised in his election campaign for no other reason that changers do not get confirmed by the Senate. There exist quite influential interest groups – the AIPAC, the military security complex, Wall Street etc to hinder the advancement of such undesirables

The hope many have in Obama to implement policies that will benefit the class that matters is misplaced. His political rawness means he will be manipulated by more experienced advisers, little different from the neo-cons, maybe even key figures from the Bush administration, and pressured by a corporate elite who funded his victory to execute policies that fit in with their own agenda.

The outcome of US elections carries one truth: namely that whichever candidate becomes president, he has but one remit once in office – to further the interests of the US corporate elite. It’s just not a feasible option for any newly elected president to entertain any idea other than guaranteeing a safe playing field for the domestic profit machine and doing what’s needed to try to ensure the US maintains its global hegemonic status.

In Laughter, Truth?

Introducing the next US president. Why wait until November? It's probably the most accurate portrayal of elections in the USA, and funny too.

The US Elections - F**k their morality

This time last week, Ira Chernus was reporting on Alternet: “It's a presidential campaign like no other. The candidates have been falling all over each other in their rush to declare the depth and sincerity of their religious faith.”

The piece cites TV adverts produced by the Republican candidate Mike Huckabee team, full of nauseating and reassuring religious messages, which aim, as Chernus observes “to create an image - in this case, of a good Christian with a steady moral compass who sticks to his principles.”

At a time of uncertainty, when money is tight, your job on the line, with your country at war, about war and life in the rate race becoming more and more difficult, such ads “speak reassuringly to such fears, which haunt millions of Americans.” This is one of the keys to the success for the religious right in recent years.

Thus: “[Republican] Mitt Romney was courting the evangelical-swinging-toward-Huckabee vote when he, too, went out of his way to link religion with moral absolutes in his big Iowa speech on faith. Our ‘common creed of moral convictions, the firm ground on which Americans of different faiths meet’ turned out, utterly unsurprisingly, to be none other than religious soil: ‘We believe that every single human being is a child of God? liberty is a gift of God.’ “

Of course, the repukes have not got the monopoly when it comes to capturing the religious vote. Democrat John Edwards, for example, comforted American god botherers, when he declared "the hand of God today is in every step of what happens with me and every human being that exists on this planet." Echoes, then, of Hillary Clinton’s claim that she "had a grounding in faith that gave me the courage and the strength to do what I thought was right, regardless of what the world thought. And that's all one can expect or hope for."

Chernus concludes: “Voters reward faith talk because they want candidates to offer them symbols of immutable moral order. The root of the problem lies in the underlying insecurities of voters, in a sense of powerlessness that makes change seem so frightening, and control - especially of others - so necessary.

“The only way to alter that condition is to transform our society so that voters will feel empowered enough to take the risks, and tolerate the freedom that democracy requires. That would be genuine change. It's a political problem with a political solution. Until that solution begins to emerge, there is no way to take the conservative symbolic message of faith talk out of American politics.”

Today, on Counterpunch, in a piece entitled The Presidential Candidates and the Politics of Sex, David Rosen, notes that whilst sex issues, "hot-button issues", have more or less disappeared from this campaign’s agenda, replaced largely with issues over Iraq, health care, the economy and immigration, they …

“…nevertheless, continue as unspoken litmus-tests of what's been dubbed ‘electability.’ Abortion rights remains the principal issue, while AIDS, adolescent sex, homosexuality, pornography, sex predators and even adultery hover over the primaries like unholy ghosts…. While little will probably differ among the final candidates' stands on the Iraq occupation, voters will decide whether to continue or to reject the current draconian faith-based initiatives on sex pushed by Bush & company.”

Rosen continues: “The Bush administration, backed by Republicans and a good number of Democratic congresspersons, promoted fundamentally failed domestic and international sex-related programs based on abstinence-only. It filled the federal bureaucracy with innumerable Christian true-believers who revised every program to restrict (and sometimes criminalize) sexual pleasure. If a Democrat, however moderate, wins the presidency, one can only wonder how long it will take a new administration to dislodge this cadre of regressives from their positions of influence.”

Rosen notes that while little separates the candidates over issues on Iraq, health care, the divide between rich and poor, “the differences over sex are fundamental and profoundly consequential.” And to prove it he cites the ongoing debate over abortion, teen sex and the rights of homosexuals, criticising the utter failure of Bush administration campaign that spends $176 million annually on faith-based programmess encouraging teen abstinence (latest date, for instance, data shows that after seven years of Bush administration campaigning, the birth rate among girls aged 15 to 19 years increased in 2006, the first such increase since 1991).

Republicans Mike Huckabee, Duncan Hunter, John McCain, Ron Paul, Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson, all favour abstinence-only, as does Democrat Hillary Clinton, while her fellow democrats John Edwards, Mike Gravel, Dennis Kucinich and Barack Obama, support, comprehensive sex education and the promotion of condom use.

Says Rosen, concluding, “Issues like the economy, Iraq and health care are at the top of the voting public's laundry list of concerns. However, sex-related issues set the moral agenda of each presidential administration. The moral hypocrisy that defines the Bush administration is expressed not only in the innumerable sex-related scandals that have taken place, but the repressive domestic and international policies it has pursued. Voters need to remember this as they go to the poles during the primary season.”

Morality, sexual or religious, then seems to galvanise this election campaign, and to the detriment of class issues that should be on the political agenda. And workers should dismiss this moralising from on high as the thought control it is, seeing it as just another weapon in the hands of our masters and used to further their class interests. When it comes to commenting on ways to regulate human behaviour, this corrupt shower of decadents, who continually promote the advantages of a system based on class and privilege, in which the golden rule is “can’t pay, can’t have” are the last people who should be lecturing us.

What all of these candidates are doing with their perverse cant is tightening our collective moral strait-jacket of compliance with our place as wage slaves – as unquestioning, profit-producing members of the subservient class in society. We are taught to hold our social betters in awe, to look on royalty and aristocracy as super people, to grovel in gratitude and admiration of rich and powerful capitalists without whose wisdom, we are taught, the world would be little better than a wilderness. We are instructed that capitalism’s family represents the true and immutable human morality, even if it entails a huge distortion of human drives. Happiness within capitalism, then, is an assured place in the exploitation process until death do us part, a mortgaged home where the curtains are neat and the hedges trim, an average family – and it is all to end in an uncomplaining, unmessy death in a poverty untroubled by ambitions about a more humane and satisfying existence. And when its all over, there is pie in the sky.

Meanwhile, the acceptance of capitalism’s profit orientated morality leads workers into the most extraordinary acts of self-damage. They willingly place themselves into the police and the armed forces, undergoing training in the most advanced methods of coercion or of destroying homes and killing their fellow workers. They come to this through something called discipline – which capitalism prizes highly – but which is really a form of controlled insanity.

And that is how capitalism will historically be regarded, when the world’s workers have come to consciousness and have overthrown the society which keeps them in subservience and which deprives them of the fruits of their labours. The establishment of socialism will see a new morality in the world, based on the assurance that wealth is to be produced for free human access and full human benefit. Socialism will be a society in which human interests take first place; only in an unavoidable extremity will anything be considered, let alone carried out, which would go against those interests.

We can have that society now. For one thing is abundantly clear. The 21^st Century so far has proved it can offer little more than the previous one – endless war, widespread fear and insecurity. The working class have only their chains to lose and a world to win.

Here’s class warfare urging the workers of America to sling the morality of their masters back in their ugly faces.

Hail to the Thief

It’s got to that stage now where I’ve just switched off listening to news and reports of the US primaries and the coming battle for the presidency. After all, what the hell difference does the victory of one candidate over another really make to the ordinary American? The short answer must be very little.

In truth, this election, like every preceding election, is little more than a public relations exercise where those Americans ‘fortunate’ to vote (and the news is that many more will be disenfranchised this time round) are given their ‘sixty seconds of democracy’ to select an ambassador of the master class to safeguard and, if possible, to expand its class interests over the next four years.

In the quest to preserve the deception that the average American has a real stake, control of public opinion is crucial. So the media functions to peddle distortions and untruths that blur this reality, to keep public opinion placid and render ordinary working people isolated and ineffective, so leaving the interests of the ruling class unchallenged and supreme. The US media add credence to the myth that the Presidential election carries real choice by eagerly analysing every minute perceived difference between the candidates (witness, if you will, the palaver over which candidate is the most religious) bombarding the electorate with patriotic oratory and fine sounding ‘promises’ while enthusiastically expounding the lie that the candidates share a common interest with ordinary working people. Their propaganda is heavily loaded with corporate and business ideology and praise for the virtues of the ‘free-market system,’ designed to perpetuate the fallacy that capitalism and democracy are inextricably linked, indeed synonymous.

The outcome of US elections carry one truth: namely that any president has but one remit once in office – to carry out the wishes of the men behind the curtains, the ones who really call the shots. Just watch vice president Dick Cheney prostrating himself in front of his master in the video below. Any newly elected president, entertaining any idea other than ensuring the US maintains its global hegemonic status, that it pursues the path of full spectrum dominance that the profits keep on coming, that dissent is kept in check, would get a bullet in the head and each and every candidate knows it.

And what is incontestable is that the outcome of the election will not be of benefit to the America’s (or the world’s) wage and salary earning class over the following four years.

Yes sir Mr. Rockefeller

By the turn of the last century, the Rockefeller family and its associates had a virtual monopoly over the oil and mineral resources of the world. Not much has changed since. Over the years, the group has created and/or taken control of a dizzying array of politicians, news media, academic institutions, think tanks and foundations to further its aims.

No one gets to be a serious candidate for President of the United States without being under their control and domination and all White Houses pick Rockefeller employees for its top slots.

Nixon had Henry Kissinger (a Rockefeller agent), Reagan had Bush Sr, and Bush Jr. has Dick Cheney. And on it goes.

Two noteworthy quotes from this video:

"The (Rockefeller) family has a long history of strengthening the bonds of friendship throughout the Americas."

In fact, the Rockefellers are despised by the people of Latin America.

There's not a Latin American dictator that the family did not have friendly relations with. If a dictator didn't exist, the family provided one. Under the direction of Rockefeller employee Henry Kissinger, the US initiated and then supported a reign of terror in Chile after organizing the violent overthrow of its democratically elected president.

"We are able to go about our business here in the Americas and throughout the world with confidence and security because we know the strength of this government stands behind us."

Our business? What business exactly is that? And why should the strength of this or any government stand behind a private commercial enterprise?

To the public and the press, Cheney is a sneering, snarling mad dog. In front of Rockefeller, he's groveling and obsequious and Rockefeller rewards him accordingly with a pat on the head: "Good boy!"

Here's the real power in the US. Just look at the body language. It could not be any plainer.

US Elections

Sent to the Shields Gazette, 13/10/04

Dear Sir,


What difference will the victory of one candidate over another in the presidential election really make to the ordinary American? The short answer must be very little. In practice the election is little more than a public relations exercise where American people are given their ‘sixty seconds of democracy’ to select an emissary of the owning class to safeguard and, if possible, to expand its class interests over the next four years. Since the function will be to represent the owning class, the victor and his government will have to pursue policies that ‘stimulate’ profit regardless of the hardships this may cause the wider population. At the same time they must appear to represent the interest and welfare of the wider population. This profit imperative is not because the election is being held in America but because the world’s dominant economic system is the profit system (capitalism) and any election to government in society as presently constituted involves choosing one of the political parties that embrace the ideology of capitalism.


In the quest to preserve the pretence that the average American has a real stake, control of public opinion is crucial. So the media functions to peddle distortions and untruths that blur this reality, to keep public opinion placid and render ordinary working people isolated and ineffective, so leaving the interests of the ruling class unchallenged and supreme. The US media add credence to the myth that the Presidential election carries real choice by eagerly analysing every minute perceived difference between the candidates, bombarding the electorate with patriotic rhetoric and fine sounding ‘promises’ while enthusiastically expounding the lie that the candidates share a common interest with ordinary working people. Their propaganda is heavily loaded with corporate and business ideology and praise for the virtues of the ‘free-market system,’ designed to perpetuate the fallacy that capitalism and democracy are inextricably linked, indeed synonymous. Whether the American electorate will choose George W. Bush or John Kerry is at this stage difficult to determine. What is incontestable is that the outcome will not be of benefit to the America’s (or the world’s) wage and salary earning class over the next four years.

Yours,

JB