[Peace-discuss] "Democrats and Obama prepare platform of war and reaction"

[C. G. Estabrook]

[As an anarchist/libertarian socialist (OK, a yellow-dog Chomskyan), I have some 
doubts about the positive program of the Socialist Equality Party, but this 
analysis from their "World Socialist Web Site" seems to me one of the best I've 
seen.  Bill Van Auken (born 1950) is a regular writer for that site and has run 
for office as the SEP's presidential candidate in 2004 and for the Senate seat 
held by Hillary Clinton. --CGE]

	Democrats and Obama prepare platform of war and reaction
	By Bill Van Auken
	22 August 2008

With the Democratic National Convention set to convene in Denver, Colorado next 
week for the formal nomination of Senator Barack Obama, the party and its 
presidential candidate have made it clear that they will present no genuine 
alternative to the politics of aggressive war and social reaction that have 
prevailed in America over the whole past period.

Having won the Democratic primaries through an amorphous appeal to the desire 
for change and a disingenuous attempt to cast himself as an antiwar candidate, 
Obama has over the past few months voted in favor of police-state spying, fully 
embraced militarism, and given assurances to Wall Street that its profits will 
remain sacrosanct, no matter how severe the crisis confronting millions of 
working people.

The Democratic convention itself—a carefully scripted and corporate-funded media 
extravaganza—is to be the culmination of a systematic shift to the right by the 
Obama campaign.

The convention will include an entire day on Wednesday devoted to “national 
security,” under the slogan of “Securing America’s Future.” According to the 
party, this segment of the convention is to highlight Obama’s “tough foreign 
policy that is neither Republican nor Democratic, but is a strong, smart 
American foreign policy to make our country more secure and advance our 
interests in the world.”

In the course of his campaign, Obama has pledged his fealty to the US Zionist 
lobby, while echoing the Bush administration’s threats to launch military 
strikes against Iran. He has called for US military strikes in Pakistan.

He has spelled out the real significance of his primary campaign rhetoric about 
an end to the war in Iraq, making it clear that his call for withdrawing “combat 
troops”—16 months after taking office—envisions leaving a “residual force” 
consisting of tens of thousands of US military personnel and mercenaries to 
continue the colonial-style occupation.

Moreover, those troops that are “redeployed” from Iraq, under Obama’s plan, are 
to be dispatched to Afghanistan in order to escalate the brutal campaign to 
suppress the resistance of the Afghan people to foreign occupation.

He has likewise called for the augmenting of America’s bloated war machine with 
an additional 100,000 soldiers and Marines, as well as for increased military 
spending.

Finally, over the past two weeks, Obama has thrown himself fully into the 
aggressive US campaign against Russia, competing with his Republican rival 
Senator John McCain in belligerent denunciations of Moscow and demands for 
retribution over the events in Georgia.

This is a calculated policy. As the Washington Post reported earlier this week, 
a substantial section of the Democratic Party had urged Obama to oppose McCain 
on Georgia and cast him as a trigger-happy militarist bent on plunging the US 
into yet another war. Obama rejected this advice, choosing instead to solidarize 
himself with the aggressive campaign against Russia.

This last development is the most ominous. Those who have managed to delude 
themselves into believing that Obama represents some means of countering the 
policy of aggressive war implemented by the Bush administration should consider 
it carefully.

What is unfolding in the confrontation over Georgia and its extension in the 
form of the agreement signed Wednesday to deploy a new US missile system in 
Poland is the bipartisan buildup to a potential third world war, posing the 
threat of nuclear annihilation.

As in every election since George W. Bush took control of the White House, the 
Democratic Party has facilitated the war drive and systematically defused and 
suppressed the mass opposition to war among the American people.

In 2002, on the eve of the mid-term election, the Democrats voted to grant Bush 
authorization to launch the unprovoked war on Iraq, thereby getting the issue 
“off the table” before the vote was held. Its cowardly attempt to contest the 
election solely on domestic issues failed badly, ensuring Republican control of 
both houses of Congress.

In 2004, mass antiwar sentiment was diverted into the Democratic Party via the 
primary campaign of Howard Dean, only to have Dean’s candidacy aborted and the 
party nominate Senator John Kerry, who had voted for the war and who vowed to 
escalate it.

Finally, in 2006, the overwhelming hostility to the war yielded a Democratic 
victory in the mid-term election, securing the party’s control over both the 
House of Representatives and the Senate. Nonetheless, the Democratic leadership 
ensured that funding for the war and its escalation in the so-called “surge” 
continued unabated, while it categorically ruled out any attempt to impeach Bush 
or Cheney for dragging the American people into a criminal war based on lies.

In this election, once again, the vast majority of the American people who 
oppose the war in Iraq and the global escalation of American militarism are to 
be politically disenfranchised.

This was a central purpose of the Obama campaign from the outset. While Obama 
secured his primary victory largely thanks to criticism of the vote cast in 2002 
by his principal rival, Senator Hillary Clinton, to authorize the Iraq war, his 
campaign never represented an anti-war insurgency from below. Indeed, given his 
record of voting repeatedly to fund the slaughter in Iraq, there is every reason 
to believe that Obama would have joined in issuing Bush the blank check for war, 
had he been a member of the US Senate at the time.

Rather, the Obama campaign is the creation and instrument of a definite layer 
within the American political and foreign policy establishment that has viewed 
the policies of the Bush administration, particularly in the Middle East, as 
increasingly detrimental to US global interests.

These layers saw Obama’s candidacy as an ideal means of giving a new face to an 
internationally discredited American imperialism, while effecting definite 
changes—albeit of a tactical character—in US foreign policy.

Those closest to the campaign include such figures as Zbigniew Brzezinski, the 
Carter administration national security advisor who played a key role in 
organizing the CIA-backed war in Afghanistan, and his successor under Bill 
Clinton, Anthony Lake, who played a similar role in relation to the US 
interventions in the former Yugoslavia.

These elements are by no means opponents of war—Brzezinski has been among the 
most bellicose in denouncing Russia over the Georgian events, comparing Vladimir 
Putin to Hitler and Stalin. Rather, they see the Iraq war and occupation as a 
debacle that has “distracted” Washington and made it impossible to carry out 
other more strategically important interventions elsewhere, including the 
regions in the Caucasus and Central Asia that were formerly part of the Soviet 
sphere of influence.

One of the reasons Obama has rejected calls to disassociate himself from the 
saber-rattling of Bush and McCain over Georgia is the fear that he would lose 
the support of backers such as Brzezinski. In the current issue of Time 
magazine, Brzezinski attacks Democrats who have criticized McCain’s anti-Russian 
agitation. “Presidential candidates Barack Obama (whom I support),” he writes, 
“and John McCain should endorse President Bush’s efforts to oppose Russia’s 
actions and form a bipartisan stand on this issue. It is unfortunate that some 
of the candidates’ supporters are engaging in pointless criticism of each 
other’s public statements on the Georgia crisis.”

Obama’s call for a partial drawdown of US troops from Iraq and their 
redeployment to Afghanistan has emerged as a consensus policy within the 
predominant layers of the American foreign policy establishment. Indeed, the 
Bush administration itself is in the midst of negotiating a withdrawal schedule 
with the Iraqi regime, while announcing its intention to send another 15,000 
American troops to Afghanistan.

While promising only continued US wars of aggression abroad, Obama and the 
Democrats are incapable of advancing any policy to ameliorate the deepening 
crisis confronting millions of working class Americans as a result of spiraling 
prices, growing unemployment and continuing home foreclosures.

Nothing could make it clearer that the Democratic Party is a political 
instrument of the corporations and banks that run America than the Denver 
convention itself. The event is being funded to the tune of tens, if not 
hundreds of millions of dollars by corporate sponsors ranging from the 
ConocoPhillips oil company to Lockheed, Motorola, the EDS Corporation and Coca-Cola.

Delegates will be given bags carrying the logo of AT&T, one of the major 
corporate benefactors of the convention, as well as a key beneficiary of Obama’s 
vote in the Senate providing blanket retroactive immunity for telecommunications 
companies that collaborated in the Bush administration’s massive domestic 
wiretapping operations.

Obama has reciprocated Wall Street’s support for his campaign by putting forward 
a tax policy that is far more favorable towards multi-millionaire and 
billionaire investors than had been anticipated.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal on August 14, Obama’s principal economic 
advisors presented a plan that would hike capital gains and dividend taxes for 
those making more than $200,000 a year to only 20 percent, from the current 15 
percent. The Democratic candidate had been expected to nearly double the capital 
gains tax—returning it to the rate that existed under Reagan and Bush as well as 
during the first term of the Clinton administration—and increase the tax on 
dividends to 40 percent.

By ruling out any materially significant increase in taxes on finance capital, 
Obama and the Democrats have effectively precluded any measures to improve 
living standards, increase public spending or boost employment. A Democratic 
administration in 2009 will spell a continuation and deepening of the attacks on 
living standards as American capitalism continues to confront its deepest crisis 
since the great depression of the 1930s.

Obama has repeatedly made it clear that the real thrust of his domestic policy 
will be the demand for fiscal responsibility. Under conditions in which the 
budget deficit will be approaching $500 billion by next year and with continued 
massive military spending, this can only mean stepped up attacks on working people.

As for democratic rights, Obama’s vote last month to vastly expand government 
power to conduct warrantless wiretapping and electronic surveillance represents 
a pledge that the buildup of a police state apparatus under the Bush 
administration will continue.

It is worth noting the extraordinary security preparations surrounding the 
Democratic convention. These have included the leasing of warehouses on Denver’s 
northeast side to facilitate the mass jailing of demonstrators. The warehouses 
have been fitted with dozens of metal cages crowned by concertina wire. Nothing 
could more clearly sum up the Democratic Party’s real attitude towards 
democratic rights.

There is little expectation that Denver will be the scene of massive 
demonstrations. The leaderships of the main protest organizations have largely 
lined up behind Obama and have helped curtail demonstrations against the war in 
the run-up to the November election.

Rather, the resort to police state measures is a reflection of the gulf 
separating the Democratic Party and its interests from the vast majority of the 
American people. This is a party that represents, no less than the Republicans, 
the financial oligarchy that rules America. The politics of repression and fear 
have become the norm for the entire two-party system in a society torn by 
intense class divisions and vast social inequality...

Copyright 1998-2008
World Socialist Web Site

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/aug2008/obam-a22.shtml