Obama or Romney’s Goal: War and Corporate Profits

“If you’re looking for a bumper sticker to sum up how President Obama has handled what we inherited, it’s pretty simple: Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive.” — Vice-President Joseph Biden, April 26.

Biden’s boasting of his boss’s supposed triumphs shouldn’t lure a single worker to the polls. 

Murderer bin Laden is dead. But Obama’s war crusade on behalf of U.S. imperialism is killing millions of our sisters and brothers in widening U.S. war zones, from Iraq to Afghanistan to Africa. And preparations for armed conflict with China’s ruling class — a foe far deadlier than al Qaeda, the Taliban, or Saddam Hussein’s army — looms large on the bosses’ 2013-2017 agenda, whether Obama or Romney is fronting for them.

As for General Motors, Obama’s usefulness to U.S. corporate rulers hinges on his ability to slash wages to boost profits. His auto bailout, in reality, is part of a massive assault on workers’ living standards, enforced by sky-high racist unemployment and sharpening racist police terror. At $14 per hour — what’s left after a 50 percent wage cut— newly hired GM workers can’t afford to buy the cars they make. This is the model the bosses hope to impose on the entire working class.

Think Tanks Say ‘Armed Clash’ with China Possible Soon

U.S. capitalists’ sole-superpower status depends as much on their shaky control of Middle East oil as it does on their still dominant war machine. Obama’s bogeyman bin Laden, though capable of killing civilians en masse, posed a relatively minor threat to fuel routes from Saudi Arabia to Asia. Bin Laden hailed from a billionaire but non-royal Saudi family that the king and his kin had systematically excluded from their trillion-dollar oil racket. He got his start and training in President Carter’s CIA-organized, $40-billion jihad to topple Russian control of Afghanistan.

But later, lacking an army, bin Laden resorted to terrorism. He hoped to seize for himself the Saudi-owned oil giant Aramco, ExxonMobil’s longtime primary energy source, by creating fundamentalist Islamic rule that stretched to Indonesia. While bin Laden and his jihadist thugs failed to wrest control of oil from U.S. hands, nuclear-armed China, with its growing blue-water navy, may well succeed.

Every move that Beijing’s naval strategists make is aimed at curtailing U.S. dominance of oil flowing from the Middle East to the Far East. China is building bases in Pakistan and Myanmar, as well as aircraft carriers, anti-ship missiles and submarines. It is assembling Pacific “island chains” designed to deny U.S. Navy access to the region.

Obama understands the threat. That’s why he’s putting 2,500 Marines in northern Australia. It’s why he has staged invasion exercises on Philippines beaches facing China, and why Hillary Clinton was sent on an Asia tour to reaffirm mutual “defense” pacts with U.S. allies. 

All this saber-rattling suggests a near-term use of force by Obama (or Romney) while the Pentagon still holds an advantage in weaponry. The Council on Foreign Relations think tank, which speaks for the main Rockefeller-led faction of U.S. imperialists, entitled its latest (April 2012) “contingency planning memo” as “Armed Clashes in the South China Sea.” Tellingly, one “possible scenario” has Rockefeller-owned ExxonMobil itself serving as the tripwire: “[A]n attack by China on vessels or rigs operated by an American company exploring or drilling for hydrocarbons could quickly involve the United States, especially if American lives were endangered or lost. ExxonMobil has plans to conduct exploratory drilling off Vietnam, making this an existential danger.”

‘Warrior-in-Chief’ Obama Is No Roosevelt in Mobilizing for War

Mouthpieces for U.S. rulers speak openly of limited “clashes” with China but dare not mention too loudly any plan for all-out confrontation. Given their inadequate military ground force, they are far from being ready for World War III against China’s huge army. On the other hand, they can still compensate using their advantage in nuclear weapons in any all-out confrontation.

Despite 9/11, imperialist U.S. bosses have yet to put either their fellow capitalists or the working class on a wartime footing. Warren Buffett is still begging for World War II-style “shared sacrifice.” He advocates higher taxes on the rich to help pay for the Pentagon’s war machine, a measure that President Roosevelt so successfully organized in 1941, which helped end the Great Depression. Meanwhile, the New York Times printed a mixed assessment of war-maker Obama from another imperialist, Rockefeller-funded policy factory, the New America Foundation.

Under the headline “Warrior-in-Chief,” NAF director Peter Bergen wrote, “[Obama] has completely shaken the ‘Vietnam syndrome’ that provided a lens through which a generation of Democratic leaders viewed military action. Still, the American public and [mass media pundits]… continue to regard the president as….a negotiator, not a fighter” (4/29/12). In other words, hacks in his party embrace Obama as a war leader, but he has yet to win the mainly working-class rank and file or even so-called intellectuals to the need for economic “discipline” to prepare for looming large-scale war.

In the U.S., however, Obama has proved a reliable suppressor of the working class. He presides over the world’s largest racist prison system, which now holds 2.4 million inmates. The Obama administration has presided over more racist jailings, stop-and-frisk detentions, and immigrant deportations than Bush ever dreamed of. 

Racist cops kill workers as freely as if slavery were still in force. Pay, pensions, health care, schools and housing are all on the chopping block. Racist police terror, compounded by massive unemployment and under-employment, acts as a brake on workers’ fight-back. But voting Obama in or out obviously can’t change anything for workers.

The electoral system established by the capitalists’ laws has always been a heads-they-win, tails-we-lose proposition for the working class. The rulers’ favorite ploy is to trick workers into voting for “the lesser evil.” The results: Lyndon Johnson expanded the Vietnam War; Jimmy Carter initiated the CIA-financed attack on Afghanistan; Bill Clinton killed a million Iraqis with sanctions and bombings; Obama attacked workers in the U.S. in the guise of saving their jobs. In each case, the bosses’ deception produced a Democratic victor who carried out the same policies advocated by the “hated Republicans.” Regardless of who gets the most votes, the bosses never lose.

Workers will get nowhere by kicking out one millionaire servant of the bosses or electing another. It’s the war-making, impoverishing, job-destroying racist profit system that has to go. Only the building of a mass, international Progressive Labor Party, woven into every class struggle, can achieve that goal. Only a communist revolution can erect a worker-run society without bosses and profits. Join us!