Since Inauguration Day, the Obama regime has ruthlessly enforced working-class “sacrifices” to protect embattled U.S. capitalists. Workers — suffering Depression-level job, wage and service cuts — bear the multi-trillion-dollar costs of Obama & Co.’s bank bailouts and ever-expanding Middle East energy wars. And on these killing fields, working-class soldiers and civilians unwillingly pay with their lives as Team Obama defends the profits of oil giants like Exxon Mobil, as well as U.S. rulers’ attempt to control energy supplies and pipeline routes to maintain their shaky global supremacy.
Now, with six million U.S. workers whose only income is food stamps and over 30 million unemployed or underemployed, Obama has opened a new war front in Yemen. It reinforces his Afghan surge, Pakistan raids, and non-existent Iraqi withdrawal.
Oil and mineral resources and geography drive U.S. rulers’ Yemen offensive. Significantly, Yemen borders Saudi Arabia, which holds the world’s largest oil reserves. It has been the cornerstone of U.S. geostrategic dominance since World War II when President Roosevelt made a pact with Saudi rulers to defend their dictatorship in exchange for exclusive U.S. access to Saudi oil. And Yemen’s extensive Red Sea and Gulf of Aden coastlines command the export routes for Saudi crude to Europe, Africa and the Americas.
Death Toll Mounts as U.S.-led Oil Wars
Widen to Yemen and Somalia
U.S. rulers have two major foes in Yemen. Al Qaeda forces there represent non-royal Saudi capitalists, led by Osama bin Laden, who, long excluded from it, seek to cut in on that kingdom’s fabulous oil wealth, at Exxon Mobil’s expense. In addition, Iranian-backed Houthi insurgents in Yemen, like Hamas in Palestine and Hezbollah in Lebanon, comprise yet another proxy anti-U.S. army. They serve not only Iran’s ayatollahs seeking regional power but also far larger, long-term U.S. imperialist rivals China and Russia. China already has deals for Iran’s oil while Russia supplies Iran’s nuclear needs.
Obama hit Yemen long before the unsuccessful Christmas Day plane bombing. “The United States provided firepower, intelligence and other support to the government of Yemen as it carried out raids this week to strike at suspected hide-outs of al Qaeda.” (NY Times, 12/18/09) And BBC reported (12/21/09), “The town of al-Nadeer [a Houthi stronghold] was targeted by air-strikes [killing] 54 civilians, including women and children,” via Saudi Arabian planes piloted by Saudi royal princes in U.S.-supplied jets — part of the afore-mentioned U.S. deal with the Saudi ruling family.
Bloomberg News (1/3/10) repeats the cause-and-effect lie: “The U.S. and U.K. governments will increase counter-terrorism efforts in Yemen and Somalia as they respond to a failed attempt to blow up an airplane over Detroit.”
Why Somalia and why the Brits? It’s all about oil. Somalia, itself beset by anti-U.S. Islamic forces, mirrors Yemen in bordering Saudi export routes. Pirates based in Somalia have already seized a few Saudi oil shipments. A future, anti-U.S. Somali government could curtail these shipments far more severely.
Obama Uses Fascism to
Stifle Fight-Back
For some time now, step by step, U.S. rulers have tightened the screws on workers’ daily lives:
• Obama’s bailout of GM forced mass layoffs and cutoffs of retiree benefits to make the company financially “solvent” at workers’ expense;
• Racist stop-and-frisk policies in big cities;
• “Random” searches in mass transit, airports and train stations;
• Encouraging informing on fellow citizens (“if you see something, say something”);
• Police and metal detectors in public schools;
• Anti-immigrant raids, harassment and jailings.
All of this is becoming accepted practice in Obama’s “land of the free,” using fear to get the working class to gradually accept fascistic control of their daily lives in a militaristic society. Obama’s targeting of the Yemeni source of a Nigerian rich kid’s “underwear bomb” is merely a pretext to intensify these policies. Now U.S. rulers are using the December 25 airline incident to advance their plans for a police state, of which stepped-up screening of air passengers is only a part. They mean to make Israeli-style racial profiling widely accepted, along with Gestapo-like treatment of the general public.
Under orders from Obama’s authorities, pillows, laptops and blankets will be barred from fliers’ laps in the last hour of flight, along with trips to the bathroom, not to mention snatching blankets covering babies (yes, it’s happened). Such moves coincide with recent Obama administration legalistic jockeying towards open fascism.
In November, Obama’s federal court reaffirmed Bush, Jr.’s abolition of lawyer-client privilege in the Lynne Stewart case, a militant lawyer convicted of supporting terrorism by relaying a message for a client accused of terrorism. In December, another Obama panel enforced federal cop terror by refusing to prosecute the owners of the Pilgrim Pride poultry company for exploiting immigrants after hundreds of these workers underwent jail time, deportation, or both. His immigration agents worked with LA garment manufacturer American Apparel to fire half its immigrant workforce. Obama presides over a vast racist prison system with over 2.4 million inmates, 70% black and Latino. But all workers are its potential victims.
Why The Rulers Need Fascism
As the layoffs, wage-cuts, two-tier wage systems, racist police attacks, billion-dollar gifts to bankers, home foreclosures, millions “living” on food stamps and on the streets — as all this mounts, the ruling class fears workers may begin to rebel, especially if led by communists. They want fascistic controls in place to ward off any attempts to fight this oppression.
Candidate Obama won more than 60 million voters — mainly working-class — to promises of jobs and peace, and advancement for black and Latino workers. President Obama now delivers the opposite. His election, in fact, proves that workers never win by “voting the rascals out.” The problem is not that a “weak” Obama has opportunistically embraced the “special interests,” as some of his disappointed liberal former supporters claim. The problem is the profit system itself. Under it, every politician represents one faction or another of capitalists who gain from exploiting workers in one fashion or another.
Obama serves the dominant, imperialist Rockefeller-led wing of U.S. bosses. These are the biggest capitalists who, in defending the long-range interests of their system, use fascist control to discipline those rivals concerned only with their immediate short-term profits, at the risk of producing, or aggravating, crises like the current one.
So fascism serves many purposes for the rulers: to discipline the working class; make it pay for the capitalists’ periodic crises; combat potential rebellion; and also discipline the “Enron” types in their own class.
The only solution for the working class lies beyond the ballot box, in building a revolutionary, communist party, the PLP, with the long-term outlook of establishing true workers’ power — communism. Then we workers will control our lives and collectively distribute the fruits of our labors, free of bosses’ exploitation, racism, sexism and endless imperialist wars.