Posted by John, December 14th, 2009 - under War.

Tags: Banks, Barack Obama, Capitalism

Apparently Barack Obama wasn’t elected to shovel money into the banks’ bottomless pit.

How do we know? Well, the most deceitful politician since Nixon told us so.

The destroyer of dreams said, disingenuously, on CBS that he wasn’t elected “to be helping out a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street”.

Actually, that is precisely what he was elected for, at least from the point of view of the ruling elite who had grown tired of Bush’s incompetence and divisiveness. They wanted a healing and competent Bush at a time of economic crisis. In Obama they got their man.

Obama and Bush before him have given somewhere over US $1 trillion to prop up the very people who invented sub-prime loans and started the global financial crisis.

How have the banks responded? By stuffing themselves with ‘success’ bonuses for their ability to play the system.

Bonuses of twenty million while the crisis they unleashed sees unemployment at over ten percent has rightly angered workers. Obama is attempting to corral that anger while continuing to pump workers’ money into the cadavers of capital.

What has Obama done in office? By his actions shall ye know him. He has transferred workers’ wealth to the bankers’ bottom lines.

He might have given the impression before he was elected that he would tackle the fat cats, but of course that was never going to be case.

There is no social movement in the US yet strong enough to push Obama to the left.

Indeed the failure to build such a movement, coupled with Obama’s rapid move to openly ruling for the rich, has opened up a space for the birthers, deathers and teabaggers to organise and gain ground.

Obama also gave the impression he was a president of peace. With one hundred and fifty thousand troops still in Iraq, with a planned increase of troops in Afghanistan to 100,000 troops, and with an expansion of the war of terror into Pakistan, the reality is very different.

Obama is a president of war. The ruling class interests he represents require it of the commander in chief of the war system.

This smooth talker, this advertisement for capitalism, did his job.

Obama gave the impression of change and hoodwinked millions to vote for him. Yet he has delivered only continuity, continuity with Bush and his conservative principles.

From God and Afghanistan to the Middle East and global warming, from Guantanamo and a failed health care plan to unemployment and poverty, Obama has continued the Bush legacy.

Nothing substantive has changed. Obama is not prepared to attack the political elites or the ruling class who run the economy. He is one of them.

Apart from shoveling $ 1 trillion from American workers’ into the banks, the United States spends $569 billion each year on its military.

That money could help address global warming and poverty around the world, as well as provide free health care for all Americans.

Obama is a child of the system. He won’t challenge it in any fundamental way.

His change is that of the chameleon. The beast remains the same.

We were dazzled by his array of colours, but now he is permanently blue.

The illusions in Obama are as dead as the kids he has killed in his drone attacks.

The left in the United States and the rank and file labour movement are beginning the long slow process of building a force to fight against the war the ruling class are waging at home and abroad. It will be hard, but if there is any hope it lies with the proles.