Change We Can Believe In?

by Marty Goodman / September 2008

Barack Obama says he represents "change we can believe in." But, what difference will it really make if Obama wins in November? Not much. A careful look at his closest advisors reveals a host of Democratic Party hacks, pro-war supporters, and Wall Street promoters.

A July 4 New York Times editorial entitled, "New and Not Improved," observed that "Mr. Obama's shifts [in his platform] are striking because he was the candidate who proposed to change the face of politics, the man of passionate convictions who did not play old political games."

Even The Wall Street Journal called Obama’s campaign, "Bush’s Third Term." It asked, "Who would have thought that a Democrat would rehabilitate the much-maligned Bush agenda?"

Rather than making his historic candidacy a call for real change in this society—a society built on war, greed, racism, sexism, and homophobia—Obama’s campaign reinforces the institutions of oppression, with only minor, if any, changes.

Most of Obama’s advisors are holdovers from the Bill Clinton years. Media myths notwithstanding, the Clinton era was marked by attacks that echoed a Republican agenda. The Welfare Reform Act of 1996 threw millions of poor families off assistance.

The Effective Death Penalty and Anti-Terrorism Act of 1996 set the stage for Bush’s assaults on democratic rights, such as the use of secret evidence. It also prevents judicial review of lower court hearings when new evidence is presented, as in the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal.

In addition were Bill Clinton’s trillion-dollar tax giveaways to the rich and a series of military interventions that helped pave the road to Iraq.

Some of Obama’s advisors who formerly worked for Bill and Hillary Clinton now say that they oppose the Iraq War, but for reasons clearly within the old mindset of empire building. For them it’s a question of how best to invade and exploit sovereign nations with the smallest possible economic and political blowback for the U.S. ruling class.

"Change we can believe in?" Well, here’s some background on just a few of Obama’s closest advisors:

Foreign policy

-Madeline Albright: In 1996, CBS's Lesley Stahl asked Albright, then Clinton’s Secretary of State, about U.S-led sanctions against Iraq. "We have heard that a half million children have died," Stahl said. "I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. Is the price worth it?" Albright didn't hesitate. "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price—we think the price is worth it," said Albright.

As Clinton’s UN ambassador, then as Secretary of State during the Haiti, Somalia, and Bosnia military adventures, and later as a private citizen, Albright has promoted multi-national military intervention as a solution to crisis situations, most recently in a June 11 New York Times Op-ed essay. Perhaps Albright would like to ask the parents of the victims of the U.S.-UN embargo or the survivors of the ongoing war in Iraq what they think of "multinational intervention."

Yet The Washington Post reports that when "Sen. Barack Obama convened the first meeting of his new ‘Senior Working Group on National Security'... he put Madeleine Albright at the head of the table."

-Zbigniew Brzezinski: Formerly Jimmy Carter's national security adviser. When Brzezinski was asked in a January 1998 interview with the French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur whether he regretted "having given arms and advice to future terrorists" in Afghanistan, he replied: "What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?" Among Brzezinski’s "freedom fighters" in Afghanistan was Osama bin Laden.

Brzezinski founded the Tri-Lateral Commission in 1973, an international committee of the super-rich who discuss how to defeat insurgent movements. Extremely anti-communist and an advocate of U.S. military power, he was also a high-level advisor on security issues to Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr. Now, he will advise Obama.

-Anthony Lake: An aide to Henry Kissinger during the Vietnam War, until quitting in 1971, Lake was also Bill Clinton’s national security adviser. He was the main strategist for U.S. intervention in the Balkans, including the NATO bombings of Serbia in 1999.

In 1994, Lake was also a key player in the U.S.-led United Nations occupation of Haiti.

The Clinton administration conditioned the return of the elected Haitian President Jean Bertrand Aristide, who had been deposed by a CIA-backed coup, on his agreeing to a World Bank economic plan. Aristide accepted. The World Bank plan, nicknamed "The American Plan" by Haitians, encouraged foreign-owned sweatshops, reduced government spending, and introduced other "neoliberal" starvation policies. Last April, food riots swept Haiti—erupting again in August.

Also in 1994, genocide erupted in Rwanda, claiming some 800,000 lives, mostly ethnic Tutsis. The year before some 10,000 Rwandans were murdered in similar violence. Rwanda, a country without a significant émigré community in the U.S., was virtually ignored by Washington bureaucrats like Lake, who acknowledges that he and others in the Clinton administration knew of the ongoing massacre.

Newly released classified documents reveal how the Clinton administration, including Lake and Secretary of State Warren Christopher, now also on the Obama team, refused to use the word "genocide" to describe events in Rwanda, which would require action under the Geneva Convention. Susan Rice, on Clinton’s National Security Council and now working as another top Obama advisor, told officials, "If we use the word 'genocide' and are seen as doing nothing, what will be the effect on the November [congressional] election?" (Atlantic Monthly, June 2008.)

-Sarah Sewall: Was deputy assistant secretary of defense for peacekeeping and humanitarian assistance during the Clinton administration. Sewall collaborated with Gen. David Petraeus, who commands U.S. troops in Iraq, to rewrite the Army and Marine Corps counterinsurgency field guide. In a Foreign Service Journal article in 2007, Sewall called for a national doctrine that clearly delineates civilian and military responsibilities in nation building during a counterinsurgency campaign.

Domestic economic policy

-Jason Furman: Obama’s lead economic advisor and protégé of Robert Rubin, Clinton’s centrist former Treasury secretary. Furman is a champion of "free trade" and wrote a paper in 2005 praising Wal-Mart’s low-wage business strategies as good for working people. After Furman joined the Obama team, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney expressed his worries over "corporate influence on the Democratic Party."

-Austan Goolsbe: A senior Obama economic advisor, Goolsbe is a free-trade advocate who has criticized the Bush administration for failing to enforce the rules of existing trade agreements and for not bringing enough cases before the World Trade Organization.

Goolsbe made headlines in March 2008 over his meeting with the Canadian consulate general in Chicago to discuss Obama's critical stance toward Bill Clinton’s NAFTA "free trade" agreement, which has destroyed hundreds of thousands of U.S. jobs and destroyed farming for a million Mexicans.

Reports said Goolsbe assured Canadian officials that Obama did not really intend to renegotiate NAFTA, as he has often claimed while campaigning. The Obama campaign denied these reports, but his subsequent waffling on modifying NAFTA makes it likely that the reports were true.

-Michael Froman: An Obama friend and Citigroup bank executive who is identified by the Chicago Tribune as part of Obama’s "free market team." Froman was a chief of staff to Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, the cabinet member most closely identified with the Clinton administration's pro-free-trade, business-friendly policies.

Workers need their own party!

Neither of the twin parties of big business and their Wall Street backers can offer working people any hope that they will end the war in Iraq and Afghanistan or stop the prospect of financial ruin faced by millions of U.S. workers today, especially in the Black, Hispanic, and immigrant communities.

Obama’s call to increase the size of the U.S. military with working-class bodies will take even more billions of dollars away from needed social programs and jobs. Obama’s threats of war against Iran and Pakistan are little different than those of the war-mongering Republicans, with whom the Democrats differ only in tactics.

A big part of the hype by the media and the Democrats is the claim that being Black in the U.S. just doesn’t matter much anymore. While Obama’s candidacy is indeed historic, what about African Americans like Sean Bell or Amadu Diallo (and many others), murdered by racist cops just in New York City alone?

As if to disprove the Democrats’ own absurd claims about race, vice presidential candidate Joe Biden has described Obama in racist terms as "the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy." With a resume like Biden’s, he could have been Bush’s running mate as well.

"Change we can believe in?" Working people need a party of their own—a fighting labor party! In this election, Socialist Action’s slogan is "Vote Socialist!" We urge our readers to vote for the presidential candidates of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (Gloria La Riva), Socialist Workers Party (Roger Calero), or Socialist Party USA (Brian Moore).