Obama prepares re-election bid by posing as antiwar candidate

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Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AFP / Getty Images “Ladies and gentleman, the horses are arriving at the starting gate,” says the announcer at the Kentucky Derby, the first of three famous races that rivet the attention of racing fans around the country in the spring of every year. The “Sport of Kings,” which Congress funds with $128 million yearly in tax breaks, is indeed a spectacle to behold, as crowds gather to watch “pure-blooded” three-year-olds, often pumped up with a variety of steroids, run for the money.

The race for the U.S. presidency is only a slightly different matter. Here, poor millionaires run for the money, virtually year round, while their billionaire and approaching trillionaire ruling-class backers stoke their treasuries with ever-increasing campaign contributions. The corporate elite orchestrate this charade with the full force of their kept media, daily promoting their horse for the top post in the “democratically elected” executive committee of the richest ruling families in the country.

The race is on and it matters not if their candidate is a blundering reactionary or racist fool, like most of the present Republican crop of race entrants, or the former Chicago Black community organizer and Harvard graduate, Barack Obama. The rules, as with any good horse race, hold that the people’s choice, the best participant, wins. In both cases, of course, the house wins—the racetrack owners when the race is between animals, and the U.S. ruling class when the race is between multiple candidates put up for the sake of appearances.

In U.S. politics, there are some premises aimed at guiding our choices, the main one being that it is intelligent and proper to vote for the “lesser evil.” Lesser-evil politics are based on the notion that capitalism can be reformed, that virtually all the evils attendant to it—racism, poverty, never-ending imperialist wars, and occupations, environmental destruction, global warming, massive unemployment, plant closures, foreclosures, and all the rest— can be changed with the election of the lesser evil. The alternative, it is often argued, is fascism!

Of course, in playing the lesser-evil game it takes some effort to view the Democratic Party as a force for reform of any sort. That’s why, as the June 28 New York Times reported, “Despite ‘fat cat’ talk, many bankers still support Obama. … His bark has been worse than his bite.”

The same article noted the banking community’s approval of Obama’s appointment of former JP Morgan Chase senior executive William Daley as his chief of staff. JP Morgan Chase (the Morgan and Rockefeller interests)

The illusions of many Americans that Obama would turn out to be an “antiwar president” were definitively shattered early last year when he sent 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. Since that time, the Obama administration’s attempts to convince the public that the war would soon wind down have proven hollow.

Instead, Washington is expanding its war effort onto a much wider front—as the daily bombing missions over Libya show clearly.

On June 27, Obama argued that he was winding down the war in Afghanistan by withdrawing up to 30,000 ground troops over the course of the next year and a half. But all the while the U.S. has been planning to drive forward with a so-called “counter-terrorism”

strategy that will put more civilians in the path of drone-fired missiles and covert special operations forces.

Sal Mastriano / Socialist Action (Top) New Jersey union rally outside state capitol on June 23 against austerity bill requiring state workers to pay more for benefits and pensions. Many Democratic politicians joined Republicans in backing the bill.

(Left) President Obama announces plans to withdraw some troops from Afghanistan, June 22.

are perhaps the richest capitalist families in the world. The Times, the ruling class’s newspaper of record and an ardent Obama supporter, neglected to add that Obama bailed out the banks, insurance interests, and related private financial institutions to the tune of $17 trillion, (continued on page 5, in “Toronto: Stonewall is reborn”)

On June 8, Mark Mazzetti reported in The New York Times that the United States, after a halt of a year due to fallout from civilian casualties, had restarted and intensified a campaign of drone aircraft strikes in Yemen. And on July 1, Mazzetti wrote that the U.S. was expanding the drone war commanded from a base in Yemen to Somalia.

For the last several years, the U.S. efforts to prevent the establishment of a Somali government independent of the White House was primarily a proxy war, funded and directed by the U.S. but carried out by Ethiopia and Uganda. Now, the U.S. government is openly and directly engaged once again.

Counting Somalia, the U.S. is now waging at least seven wars in a nearly contiguous region involving parts of South and Central Asia, the Middle East and Northern Africa, and the Horn of Africa. And while the expansion of the drone wars is supposed to be a (continued on page 4, in “Toronto: Stonewall is reborn”)

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Tony Savino / Socialist Action

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INSIDE SOCIALIST ACTION: Bring war dollars home! — 2 No recovery for jobless — 3 Slutwalks / Stonewall — 4

Ocean’s mass extinctions — 6 Greece in revolt! — 7 Student upsurge in Chile — 8

NDP ranks: no turn to right — 9 Film: The Last Mountain — 10 Books: Reviving the Strike — 11