Attempting to counteract US imperialism’s decline, Barack Obama has launched a new round of aggression, including both wars and coups. Wall Street’s drive for global domination also has another champion this year, Mitt Romney, who seeks to continue the Bush-Obama agenda for another four years. Class conscious workers must lead the opposition against the monopolists’ two-party system, by rejecting both Obama and Romney.
“You Will Hear of Wars and Rumors of Wars”
“Nobel Laureate” Obama continued the Iraq War, expanded the Afghan War into Pakistan, and launched new wars against Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and a small adventure into Uganda. Coup attempts were launched against Moldova (2009), Honduras (2009), Iran (2009, defeated), Libya (2011, a precursor to the war), Syria (2011-to-present), Paraguay (2012), and oil-rich Sudan was divided into two pieces (2011). Genocide against Palestinians continued unabated. Peaceful protest movements in Washington’s absolute monarchy satellites, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, were brutally repressed. More US troops have died during Obama’s administration (1,714) than in Bush’s first term (1,535). Obama-led “humanitarian” imperialism is even more aggressive than Bush.
Obama wanted to indefinitely occupy Iraq, not withdraw. However, patriotic Sadrist parliament members expelled the occupation by preventing the passage of a “status of forces” agreement that would have made US troops immune to Iraqi law. Knowing the troops could be prosecuted for the proposed “training exercises” allowing for the US to keep at least 5,000 more soldiers in Iraq, Washington withdrew. Note that some still remain “guarding” the US embassy, which is larger than the Vatican.
Only 34,000 US troops were in Afghanistan when Obama became president, but by 2010 he increased that number to almost 100,000. 70% of all US Afghan War fatalities have died during Obama’s administration. Afghan casualties are unknown, but certainly tens of thousands have been killed. The unmanned drone campaign was used to expand the war into neighboring Pakistan. Thousands of Pakistanis have been killed. Drone-launched missiles do not discriminate between armed fighters and unarmed civilians (the latter form the vast majority of the casualties). The so-called “withdrawal plan” is a farce, Obama plans to continue the US occupation until at least 2024.
While US imperialism cynically uses the fight against al-Queda-associated groups in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia to increase its global military presence near strategic areas (Central Asia and the Gulf of Aden), it backs the exact same terrorists in Libya, Syria, “Balochistan” (in Iran and Pakistan), and Russia’s Chechnya province. In fact, the terrorists that became known as “al-Queda” have always played a pro-imperialist role since their beginnings as the CIA’s “mujahideen” in the late 1970s and 1980s against Afghanistan’s progressive government that invited a Soviet peacekeeping presence to help fight them. In the 1990s, US imperialism also supported al-Queda terrorists against Algeria, Yugoslavia, and Russia’s secular governments. Clearly, the so-called “War on Terror” is a fraud.
Obama’s criminal attack on the Libyan Jamahiriya, which stole 100,000 lives, was launched to provide an air force for the US-orchestrated monarchist/al-Queda coup that began in February 2011. Despite seven months of NATO bombing, the Western-backed “NTC” regime has never controlled the entire country of only six million people, most of whom live within easy striking range of NATO airbases. Far from being a “glorious victory” for NATO, as the Western press trumpeted after the genocidal siege of Sirte in October 2011, the war actually revealed the US-controlled military bloc’s inability to quickly overwhelm a militarily weak opponent simultaneously fighting NATO’s proxy army on the ground. Furthermore, a determined pro-Jamahiriya Green Resistance movement still fights back against the West’s puppets and liberated Bani Walid in January.
In Syria, Western-backed al-Queda terrorists have murdered Christians, forced many from their homes, and desecrated their churches. Another common tactic used by the West’s terrorist proxy-army is to massacre Syrians who support their legitimate, secular government and then blame the atrocity on the government itself. The terrorists also rape/torture civilians and then force them to claim that the government committed the crimes (often in a video “interview” that is then displayed on Western media). The same tactics were utilized in Libya: crimes committed by the West’s terrorists are used to create propaganda to drum up support for “humanitarian intervention” (i.e. more illegal, aggressive wars). However, three Russian and Chinese UN Security Council vetoes (backed up by nuclear arsenals) have prevented Obama from launching an illegal, Libya-style air war against Syria.
“Anti-war” leaders and US liberals who still support Neocon war criminal Barack Obama have the blood of large numbers of Iraqis, Afghans, Pakistanis, Palestinians, Yemenis, Somalis, Libyans, and Syrians on their hands. The US liberal-left’s silence or open support for Obama’s illegal wars and coups reveals that they only care about electing Democrats, not opposing Wall Street’s bid for world domination. Ideologically advanced forces within progressive movements (e.g. trade unions, anti-war, and “Occupy”) must struggle against all currents that back the imperialists’ Democratic Party machine.
Obama’s War against US Workers
Like a nerdy, drone-operating CIA agent pressing a joystick’s trigger button to massacre an Afghan wedding party, Obama enacts “free trade” pacts that obliterate the USA’s last few remaining, decent-paying jobs. As a result, countless US workers will join the already long unemployment lines after their jobs have been sent to South Korea, Colombia, and Panama. Of course, anyone who remembers the Democratic Bill “NAFTA” Clinton administration is not surprised.
Attacking us from another angle, Obama conjured up the Frankenstein monster “ObamaCare,” which is Massachusetts’ RomneyCare implemented at the federal level. The individual mandate forces workers to buy overpriced, low-coverage “health insurance” from private, for-profit companies. Essentially, the scheme is just another way to transfer ever more of workers’ dwindling wealth to Wall Street’s oligarchs. As a reward for services rendered, the super-rich pour hundreds of millions of dollars into fellow multimillionaire Obama’s re-election campaign.
Obama’s War on Dissent
Obama’s regime has raided anti-war activists’ homes, entrapped politically inexperienced youth, tortured whistleblowers (e.g. Bradley Manning), repressed journalism by targeting sources (i.e. “leaks”) and reporters (e.g. Julian Assange), and launched a federally-coordinated attack on the Occupy Wall Street dissident movement. Obama also believes that he has the right to kill (or indefinitely imprison) US citizens without a trial – provided that he first accuses them of being terrorists. US bourgeois democracy continues its decay into a brutal police state under Obama.
His capitalist USA has only 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of the planet’s prisoners, which disproportionately targets oppressed nationality groups (especially African Americans and Latinos). Inside Obama’s dungeons, torture is practiced, including rape (both homosexual and heterosexual), other sexual assault, beatings, and prolonged isolation (i.e. “solitary confinement”). Western “human rights experts” are eerily silent.
“God’s Own Party”
Despite Obama’s reactionary regime, paid Democratic Party operatives are trying hard to scare and/or coerce workers into voting for more pain. The predictable bogeyman, the rival Republican Party machine, is endlessly brought up as some sort of excuse for Obama’s cruel rule (neglecting the fact that the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the White House from January 2009 until January 2011). Furthermore, the only “major party” presidential candidate that criticized US military adventures and the repressive Patriot Act was Ron Paul, a Republican.
Ron Paul’s role (like the Democrats’ Dennis Kucinich) is to keep workers trapped within Wall Street’s two-party system. Paul failed to endorse the two minor party presidential candidates that share his paleoconservative/libertarian political views, Virgil Goode (Constitution) and Gary Johnson (Libertarian), instead remaining silent on the matter. His son, Senator Rand Paul, recently endorsed Mitt Romney for president. Workers should not have any illusions about the Republicans either.
Romney and Obama have identical political positions on every important issue (i.e. economics, foreign policy, and civil liberties, which are all intertwined). They only differ on the bourgeois “culture war” issues (e.g. gay marriage) to divide and rule the working class, by making one half of the proletariat subservient to the bourgeoisie’s socially-liberal section, while the other half submit to socially-conservative capitalists. Class conscious workers must struggle against all attempts to weaken our class by unnecessary divisions, including those painted with a “progressive” or “leftist” veneer.
Fight the Two Headed Beast
Many working people only follow politics during bourgeois elections. Communists must participate in bourgeois electoral politics to reach them by running communist candidates for office. Failure to do so, in most cases, comes from right-opportunism (i.e. “support the lesser evil” bourgeois candidate instead), but in some cases ultra-leftism can also be the cause (i.e. anarchism: “boycott elections”). Of course, some instances exist where communists would not participate in bourgeois elections: under fascism (due to being banned), while leading a revolutionary war against the bourgeoisie, and during socialism.
Only the Party for Socialism & Liberation is carrying out this necessary task in 2012. Wall Street’s two parties have enacted anti-democratic ballot access restrictions that make it very hard (in some cases, almost impossible) for opposition parties to even have their candidates printed on the ballot. For this reason, workers will not be able to vote for the PSL in most states. However, the two-party system can still be rejected at the polls by voting for ideologically weak (i.e. left-liberal) Jill Stein (Green) or Rocky Anderson (Justice).
Wall Street’s degenerate oligarchs gamble away the country’s future with complex financial schemes. Their greedy nihilism – seeking only to pleasure themselves – has spawned a morally decayed society, tearing apart working families en masse. The monopoly-capitalists’ Democratic and Republican political-machines must be cast away, which requires a Marxist-Leninist party. Make November 6th the beginning of the end for the parasites’ twin parties.
