Hope and change

In November Americans will again give their approval to one of the capitalism’s two candidates. The Obama re-election campaign are bitterly decrying the flood of corporate money going to his opponent Mitt Romney. At the 2008 election was held, Obama’s campaign had collected and spent a staggering $745 million.  About 80% of Obama’s campaign cash came from large donors — either individuals or, in most cases, corporations. His second biggest donor, giving a total of $1,013,091, was Goldman Sachs, a company that later provided many of the leading economic and financial advisors to the Obama administration, and that, by late 2008, was already known to have been a key player in causing the 2008 financial crisis, and that also received enormous bailout funding from the government. The second biggest corporate contributor was software giant Microsoft, $852,167, a company which had serious anti-trust issues being pursued by the federal government. Third was Google, which gave $814,540, which had its own anti-trust and other issues, and fourth was JP Morgan & Chase, another mega-bank that both played a key role in causing the financial crisis, and which benefitted mightily from the federal bailout. Both Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan have subsequently played key roles in lobbying to water down any kind of serious corrective regulation of the financial industry, to block efforts to break up the too-big-to-fail banks, and to have senior banking executives criminally or even civilly prosecuted for their roles in precipitating and profiting from the global economic crisis. Obama and his backers to now cry foul because Romney, a corporate executive and member of the $100-plus millionaire club himself, is raking in even more money this election season than the Obama did when he chose to forego public funding in his first campaign and roll over his opponent who took a principled stand and limited himself to federal financing is beyond hypocritical. In 2008, even though it was well-known that Obama was soliciting and accepting huge contributions from Wall Street ($19 million), from the health care industry ($16 million), from real estate companies ($11 million), from the media industry ($16 million) and from the high-tech industry ($9 million), a huge number of voters believed his campaign theme of “hope and change.”



Americans elected Obama president expecting that he would restore the rule of law. Instead, he reinforced the Bush regime’s transgressions and added some of his own. The greatest irony about Obamacare is that it was written by the private insurance companies and diverts Medicaid and Medicare funds to their profits. It is socialized medicine, but it is "socialism" for the private insurance companies, a health care “reform” that leaves health care in the hands of the insurance industry, where it was already.  continued concentration of the media industry into the hands of a few large media conglomerates, and growing control over and limits on the diversity and freedom of the internet. Not surprisingly, though, given all that corporate cash, which amounts to legal bribes that was invested in Obama's election, what Wall St got was an industry-vetted, non-reform of the financial industry,

The current political debate is focused on how severly to cut, not whether to cut government spending. Even if Obama wins, it will end up with a kinder, gentler version of austerity economics - tax cuts that are slightly less skewed, cuts in public investment, cuts in economic security that are only slightly less draconian than those in the leading budget blueprints on the right. The Democratic Party is a gigantic fraud.  It pretends every four years to be representing those voters that it needs to keep going to the polls to elect its candidates, but time after time, once the election is over, it betrays those. Obama promised to defend Social Security and Medicare, to help make it easier legally for workers to organize unions in their workplaces, to re-regulate the banks that caused the financial crisis, to act aggressively to combat climate change, to end America’s pariah status by closing the Guantanamo prison and bring an end to torture, and to end George Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Except for winding down (but not really ending) the war in Iraq, none of those things were done over the course of the last four years. The Afghan War is bigger and more violent today than it was when Obama took office. So are the Wall Street banks. The president appointed a commission on the budget that recommended cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits. Democrats gave up on even trying pass legislation to protect labor unions. And not only was nothing done about climate change, but the Obama administration actively worked to prevent the reaching of a new international agreement on limiting carbon emissions. “Alternative” institutions such as MoveOn enable the charade of puppet candidate of “change” who continue cruel policies while spouting high-minded words that they hope will hide their unconscionable actions.

The Democratic Party is run by and in the interest of large corporate interests, but since those interests don’t bring many votes to the table on election day, has to keep pretending to be the party of the people so that it can continue to do the bidding of those corporate interests. Obama people think he is an agent of change, he is in fact ‘more of the same.’ Willfully and knowingly misrepresenting himself, Obama sought to convince people to think he was legitimately concerned with the welfare of the people of the world.

The Tea Party rhetoric claims to represent the values of the Founding Fathers, who did not believe in democracy. The oligarchs decided, long ago, that they were to permanently rule. Democracy, to the wealthy elite then (and now) meant that the property-less masses (the poor) would some day rule – if they learned to use the vote. To the oligarchs the majority are unfit to make decisions for the financially well-off. For the 1%, billionaires and their families, the idea of poorer people making decisions impacting on their wealth is called “class war.” The less the masses vote, the better for the oligarchs. Instead of responding by refusing to vote, and thus forfeiting our hard-fought for suffrage, many of us are going to cast votes that will displease those used to running things. Socialists will exercise their democratic priviledge of casting our ballot for a write-in candidate. This is used by voters to express a distaste for the listed candidates and their policies, by writing in an alternative candidate for president.

What if Barack Obama earns himself a second term as president, what are the odds that he will evolve into the kind of pro-union Democrat organized labor always hoped he would be? Given what we’ve seen so far, the odds are very very slim, indeed. Unless working people have effective unions to represent their interests, they will be subject to any draconian measures corporate capitalism wishes to enact. Without the capability to fight back and offer genuine resistance, America’s workers are not only vulnerable, they’re virtually defenseless. As bleak as it appears, there’s always hope. Things are capable of changing radically and suddenly. Consider Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring. Neither phenomenon was predicted by anyone.  Instead of continuing a downward spiral and engaging in spontaneous “street revolutions” that ultimately lead nowhere, we can embrace and transform an already existing workers' organisation — labor unions. American workers need to take care of themselves rather than rely on politicians but until workers band together, the ruling class are not going to take them seriously. Nothing important changes without mass involvement and activism. Unions gave workers a seat at the table but now our past gains have been lost. Unions today are a shadow of their former selves. They're corrupted, weak, and ineffective. Rank and file issues are marginalized. Most workers are overworked, underpaid, unemployed or underemployed. Earlier civil rights gains are entirely lost. Conditions now are worse than decades ago. Privilege ad power alone matters. Ordinary people are left out. Enough of that! We must  create and maintain a substantial people’s movement and take the world towards a genuine socialist democracy. It's up to people power to create a society worth living in. We must work together to end the control from the top and put it in the hands of those below. Bottom-up democracy is the real kind. Change for the better isn't handed to us. Change depends on us. It's our choice. Getting it involves determined struggle.