Obama Sheds Fake Tears Over Penn State…
Hypocrisy drenches Barack Obama’s denunciation of “heartbreaking” child sex abuse at Penn State: “Our number-one priority has to be protecting our kids.” This phony concern comes from the commander of a United States war machine that routinely slaughters children and other civilians abroad, and whose system consigns millions of children in the U.S. to lives of poverty, hunger and premature death (see box).
What the U.S. president really seeks to protect is the far-flung sources of profit for his capitalist masters. Even as he calls for national “soul searching” over Penn State, Obama gives the go-ahead to atrocities against children in the oil-rich Middle East. While Yemen, for one example, is running out of oil, it borders Saudi Arabia’s unmatched reserves and harbors anti-U.S. Islamic movements — enough to make its people a target. As Salon.com reported, “Slightly more than two months after he was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, President Obama secretly ordered a cruise missile attack on Yemen, using cluster bombs, which killed 44 innocent civilians, including 14 women and 21 children, as well as 14 people alleged to be ‘militants’” (11/12/11).
…While U.S. Drones Kill Kids
Naturally, capitalist rulers don’t want us to know how many children they murder in their profit-driven wars. “We may never know how many,” the government-owned British Broadcasting Corporation reported last month in reference to civilian casualties in the U.S.-led Libyan oil grab that ousted dictator Qaddaffi. But some damning figures do emerge. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism at London’s City University “has identified 56 children reported killed in drone strikes during [Obama’s] presidency” (8/11/11). And these were in Pakistan, a U.S.-bankrolled “ally.”
Young people face even more horrific conditions in Obama & Co.’s declared war zones. UNICEF, the United Nations’ children’s agency, calculates that Afghanistan is the worst place in the world to be a child. One in five does not live to see a sixth birthday. (The death rate for young children there is 199 per thousand, as compared to 2.5 in Singapore.) Most of those deaths are from curable childhood diseases and malnutrition, compounded by war, which makes proper health care inaccessible.
Children, so dear to Obama, freeze and starve in Afghan gutters while well-fed U.S. contractors survey pipeline routes and mineral sources. UNICEF regional communications chief Sarah Crowe told CNN last January, “It is very hard to put a hard-and-fast figure to the number of children dying from hypothermia alone on Kabul’s streets.
“Extreme poverty, having lost a parent, being trafficked or displaced … may have forced them on to the streets where they would be deprived of their most basic needs (decent food, health, immunization, protection) and exposed to the extreme cold of Afghan winters.” In one incident, airborne U.S. “liberators” didn’t bother to distinguish boys gathering firewood from arms-toting insurgents. They killed nine innocents in a single raid last spring.
Targeting of Children Is Genocide
Obama’s fellow liberal and predecessor, Bill Clinton, followed Bush Sr.’s invasion of oil-rich Iraq with something far more deadly: embargoes on food and medicine. UNICEF estimates that these embargoes “killed 500,000 children under five years of age...from malnutrition, diseases for which cures were available but medicine in Iraq was not and poor health at birth due to prenatal effects on mothers” (John Tirman, The Deaths of Others, Oxford University Press, 2010). Denis Halliday, the UN’s assistant secretary general at the time, accused Clinton of “a policy that satisfies the definition of genocide.” Bush Jr.’s Iraq re-invasion, sustained by Obama, added live fire as a major cause of Iraqi child mortality. And despite Obama’s recent withdrawal claims, U.S. troops are by no means abandoning Iraq, not after Exxon Mobil recently bet the ranch there with a $50-billion investment in the vast West Qurna oil field. In a Pentagon-backed, “just-try-and-stop-us” move, the company is now drilling in Kurdistan without approval from Baghdad. On top of that, Exxon has seized control of the water infrastructure needed to pump out Iraqi crude.
Last month it was revealed that Obama is aiming his indiscriminate, terrorizing drones at strategic Somalia at the Horn of Africa, the command point for major Middle East energy export routes. Somali girls and boys may very well be subsidizing Exxon’s bottom line with their lives. The slaughter will end only with the demise of the capitalist system that perpetuates it — and with the communist revolution that our Party is building.J
Obama’s Racist Profit System Also Murders Youth in U.S.
Capitalism’s domestic war on children means:
• The U.S. infant mortality rate ranks 34th in the world in infant mortality, behind Cuba, Croatia, Greece, Portugal, Spain, and the Czech Republic (2011 UN World Population Prospects Report);
• Black children are twice as likely to be born premature, and more likely to die in infancy (UCLA Prof. of Obstetrics and Public Health Michael Liu);
• In 2010, 22% of U.S. children, more than 16 million, lived in poverty (U.S. Agriculture Dept.);
• In 2009, 33% of black children lived below the poverty line, as compared to 11.9% of white children;
• Fourteen million children face hunger or the risk of hunger;
• Three million children experience hunger on a regular basis, forced to skip meals and go without food for entire days;
• Clinton’s racist welfare “reform” makes black women three to four times as likely to die in childbirth as white women;
• The profit-induced, racist “true” unemployment rate of 22% (and far higher than that for black and Latino workers) has tens of millions of children living in jobless families, many of them ousted from homes with unpaid mortgages.
Obama’s “number-one priority” doesn’t seem to be protecting these kids.
From Hitler’s Nuremburg to Penn State Rallies,
Bosses Pervert Sports for Fascist Ends
Hitler publicist Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl must be smiling in his grave at the most visible reactions to the rape of working-class boys by a Penn State football coach. A former Harvard football cheerleader, Putzi returned to his native Germany and helped the Nazis to use sports’ crowd-steering potential as a deadly political weapon. Fresh from the Harvard gridiron, Hanfstaengl helped Hitler orchestrate the 1930’s Nuremburg rallies that brainwashed masses of German workers.
As Putzi’s Boston cousin John Sedgwick wrote, “When Putzi played some of the rousing football marches from his Harvard days, he had Hitler fairly shouting with enthusiasm. ‘That is it, Hanfstaengl, that is what we need for the movement, marvelous,’ and he pranced up and down the room like a drum majorette” (Boston Magazine, 2005). Putzi wrote fresh marches for Hitler and credited triumphal Harvard football fight songs for inspiring his invention of the Nazi “Sieg Heil” chant. It translates to “Hail Victory,” not far from “Ten thousand men of Harvard gained victory today.”
More recently, Putzi’s beloved “team spirit” motivated Hitlerite Penn State student demonstrations in support of pedophile protector and on-field Fuhrer Joe Paterno, who essentially ignored the rape of a 10-year-old. Penn State has been billed as a “super college,” an institution that produces exceptionally educated students. But from recent evidence, it is turning out people with blind loyalty to a football program that amasses $50 million a year with a win-at-all-costs philosophy—and which sheltered a predator of children since the late 1990s. For many students, the chief concern was that Penn State not be labeled a “child-molester” school, a stigma that might damage the value of their degrees after graduation.
At the same time, the capitalist rulers used sport-oriented school loyalty to organize a football game-day stadium prayer fest on November 12, when Penn State lost to Nebraska. Authorities seized the opportunity to preach a pro-government, “call-the-cops-and-trust-the-courts” mentality. But the capitalist U.S. government is not in the business of saving children. It kills them ceaselessly, in vast numbers.
We have a better response to Paterno-gate—one that supports our real team, the working class. Our touchdowns will come in exposing and attacking the service of universities like Penn State to U.S. imperialism through ROTC and war research, two agents of child abuse on a global scale.