Obama’s election victory: The corporate choice to handle capitalist crisis

Scan page 1

(Above) New Yorkers line up for gasoline in wake of Hurricane Sandy. Capitalism has been shown incapable of combatting climate change — responsible for increased storms, floods, and droughts worldwide. Despite his rhetoric on global warming, Obama plans to boost the use of fossil fuels. (Left) Harlem protesters in January 2012 against indefinite detention of political prisoners — a INSIDE SOCIALIST ACTION The $6 billion U.S. election extrava­ ganza—conducted virtually year round in the modern era to consciously dull the senses of capitalism’s working masses with an unending torrent of myths, half truths, and lies—is over. The mask of a progressive, humanistic, caring, environ­ mentally concerned, if not antiwar presi­ dent, Barak Obama, has been carefully fitted over the white racist, warmonger­ ing, corporate ruling-class elite. The one percent—or better, the one thousandth of one percent ruling-class elite—who employ the world’s best minds to create a “Truman Show” or “Potemkin Village” fantasy-world reality aimed at convinc­ ing its victims that their “choice” is sig­ nificant, emerged victorious—as was expected.

In the absence of a serious working-class alternative, the Big Lie school of politics prevailed yet again, and the vast destruction wreaked on tens of millions of people, stemming from a crisis-ridden U.S. and world capitalism, went unchal­ lenged. Anger was channeled, as intend­ ed, into the two-party “lesser-evil” shell game that U.S. politics is designed to be.

President Obama’s victory speech to Tony Savino / Socialist Action some 10,000 cheering and flag-waving campaign workers at Chicago’s McCor­ mick Place was a staged performance of a fairy-tale America. The highly skilled and tutored head of the executive commit­ tee of the ruling rich proclaimed without shame that the strength of the nation was “not in its military might”—the world’s greatest, he felt compelled to note—but rather in the “unity of its people,” in the promise of “equality and justice for all, including Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, gays, straights, rich and poor.”

We want a nation, he asserted, “that isn’t threatened by the destructive pow­ er of a warming planet.” We need to “fix our tax code,” and to “reform our immi­ gration system,” he pledged. Obama de­ clared that our “economy is recovering” and that “a decade of war is ending.” The president repeatedly insisted during his campaign that his bailout had “saved the U.S. auto industry” and tens of thousands of jobs, that he was a champion of women and abortion rights, of America’s teach­ ers and education.

The tragedy of our times—which are rapidly changing to be sure—is that there was no working-class-based, fight­ ing-union candidate or party to challenge Obama’s ruling-class party and its real policy flagrantly promoted by Obama’s White House.

bipartisan agenda. There was no oppo­ sition, except the modest, courageous, and unintimidated band of socialists, un­ swerving mass-movement antiwar and social-justice campaigners and radical activists to tell the truth that under the Obama’s watch:

• Racism is on the rise in capitalist America, with an ever-expanding and increasingly privatized near slave-labor prison-industrial complex that incarcer­ ates 3.5 million of the nation’s poor and oppressed—the majority Black and La­ tino. In total, 7.1 million are under the jurisdiction of the criminal “justice sys­ tem.” Unemployment among Blacks and Latinos is double the rate of whites and increasing.

• A record 400,000 immigrants have been deported in each of the past two years.

• Military spending for new and ex­ panding wars has reached an historic high, with the U.S. accounting for close to the entire world combined.

• Civil liberties are under unprecedent­ ed attack. Some 700,000 Muslims have been interviewed by the government in regard to “suspected” terrorist activity. Islamophobia and the associated “war on terrorism” have become the vehicles to Tony Savino / Socialist Action justify the heinous presidential “kill list,” indefinite detentions, drone bombings, grand jury/FBI persecution of political activists, extension of the Bush-era Patri­ ot Act and imprisonment of leaders of in­ nocent Muslim charitable organizations.

• The use of privatized mercenary death-squad armies in Afghanistan and around the world is on the rise, and now comprises close to a majority of the U.S. fighting forces in Afghanistan.

• The U.S. government, which bailed out the banks and corporations to the tune of more than $20 trillion, oversees and im­ plements the greatest disparity of wealth since the years preceding the Great De­ pression. The rich are richer than ever while the 99 percent have suffered the brunt of a failing U.S. capitalism.

• New wars, overt and covert, in Libya and across Africa, and threatened wars, sanctions and blockades against Iran and Syria are today top government priori­ ties.

• Massive deterioration of social servic­ es and public education: Next on the leg­ islative agenda are “grand compromise” bipartisan agreements to reduce expen­ ditures for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and public education.

(continued on page 11, in “Revolutionary socialist politics in the era of world capitalist crisis W ent the first of a series of resolutions on”)

----- pull-quotes -----

Pakistan delegation — 2 Hurricane Sandy — 3 Chicago teachers — 4

Walmart workers 5 Hell that is Haiti — 6 politics — 10 Canada News — 8

Canada unions — 9 Revolutionary socialist

Israel’s credibility unravels — See page 12 .