Obama – Napoleon with a Weak Personality

Barack Obama has become president of the United States surrounded by a press montage never seen in the electoral history of the country.

This has served to renew the momentum of the current stylish policy to make capitalism and imperialism not an economic system (a brutal social policy), but rather an abstract political definition. A personality, or whatever other factor, can randomly transform capitalism and imperialism into a just, democratic, and humane system. Consequently, ridiculous speeches have emerged referring to the new American president as a “ray of hope for all humanity”, or to Barack Obama’s victory as a “hopeful song that another world is possible”.

The proponents of these beliefs deny that the far-right criminal essence of the global imperial system directly causes hunger and misery for the majority of the global population. The idea that American imperialism, with Obama as its representative, can travel on a path of reforms that favor humanity is expressed by bourgeoisie intellectuals, by vulgar revisionists, by a range of public personalities, and various news media. Chavez himself, just as imperialistic in his discourse, described Obama’s presidential election as historic and in a public communication (November 11, 2008) announced that this was a “day of hope for Americans”. Rafael Correa, another Latin American “imperialist” sent a letter to the new president of the United States (November 6, 2008) to congratulate him for his triumph and to express that it “confirms the will of the American people to follow a new leader that represents the need for change and hope in his own country and around the world”. Evo Morales reiterated the discourse and described Barack Obama’s electoral triumph as historic for the United States. Others, like the Sandinista Daniel Ortega, have resorted to old tales in order to cover up the true political essence of the new American presidential designation. For Ortega, Obama is good. But “if he tries to promote change, they will kill him! He is a prisoner of the empire”. (Daniel Ortega. III Cumbre Extraordinaria de la Alternativa Bolivariana de las Américas, ALBA, 10 de diciembre de 2008).

The fundamental aspect of Obama’s presidential election that needs to be taken into account in is that Obama has come to the White House with the consent and support of great American transnational corporations. He is the president of Yankee imperialism. For these groups in power, the skin color or the ethnic racial origin of its political representatives, is a triviality. For American transnationals, selecting a president is the same thing as making investments in oil, mining, finance, and other branches of commerce and production. What is important is that the politician – whether he is black, white, Muslim, Catholic Buddhist, atheistic, civil, or military – defends their economic interests and is disposed to igniting the world so that they can achieve great economic gains and control global wealth. It is not by accident that the three biggest American newspapers-the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and the Chicago Tribune, linked to the gigantic transnationals of the country, since the beginning supported his presidential candidacy and were against the Republican John McCain.

In a release (September 2008) of the Federal Electoral Commission of the United States, it is noted that Obama’s presidential campaign has been the most expensive in the electoral history of the country. Obama collected 471 million dollars for his personal campaign – much more than John McCain who reached the sum of 230 million dollars. Most of this money came from transnationals like Microsoft, the gigantic investment company Citigroup Inc., Goldman Sachs which is considered the biggest company on Wall Street, JP Morgan Chase and Co., and Time Warner, a media empire of the United States.

Ralph Nader, American attorney known for being in active opposition to transnationals, denounced the immorality of the electoral campaign and the collection of funds. In a letter sent to Barack Obama and published November 3, 2008, he makes it known that the current black president of the United States received “economic contributions so enormous that they are without comparison, much more than Senator McCain, pertinent to corporate interests, interests of Wall Street, and what is most peculiar, large corporate law firms. Never before has a democratic candidate for the presidency achieved such superiority over his adversary”.

In the current American and global economic crisis, a Black president creates fantasies and false expectations in the poor sectors. There are millions of people, politicized or not, who believe that the election of Obama historically vindicates America of teh slavery of Africans, captured like animals in their distant country and brought to American soil like merchandise. Political farces don’t revise human history nor do they change the truth of actual acts. It doesn’t work this way for the simple reason that Obama is not a part of nor friend of the American people. He comes from the political and bureaucratic elite of the country and his election doesn’t change the situation of public dishonor and misery of the majority of the African American population. A black president in the White House gives a new veneer to the political system of the decomposing United States whose representatives are despised and hated in the entire world. This also creates an illusion of a solid bourgeoisie democracy where the black and the white, the poor and the rich, have the same rights and the same opportunities, including being able to become to the the most powerful man in the land.

An imperialist state such as America isn’t transformed from bad to good only because its president has dark skin. Social classes have nothing to do with ethnicity or social status. You can be white, blonde, black, Chinese, etc. but this does not define your political position within the state or within society. The history of social struggle records hundreds and thousands of cases of people of poor social origin that have been worse off than the prominent classic rulers who come from the heart of elite powerful groups. Latin America is a good social laboratory where it is verified that skin color and social origin do not influence the decisions of politicians.

The Democratic Party and the Republican Party, the two political monopolies of the country, take part in the political structure that controls the power centers that control the American State. The party of Obama is said to be Democratic, but from its bosom have come some of the worst governments of the United States. Harry Truman’s is one of them, and he was made famous for being responsible for the Atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He inaugurated the “Truman Doctrine” whose political essence was the ferocious 40 years of anticommunism known as the Cold War.

John Kennedy is another Democratic president of the United States whose official history falsely presents him as a leader and lover of peace and prosperity for the world, but he was partly responsible for the bloody war in Vietnam and he was the one who ordered the invasion of Cuba in 1961. Lyndon Johnson (1963-1969), also coming from the Democratic Party, was responsible for continuing the Yankee invasion in Vietnam. Bill Clinton (1993-2001) was presented as an exemplary Democratic American but he didn’t vacillate in ordering the military intervention in Haiti to sustain the puppet Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Under Clinton’s presidential mandate, the troops of the United States and those of NATO intervened in Africa, in Yugoslavia, and various attacks in Iraq. For James Petras (November 28, 2008) it is important “to convince the oppressed immigrant people that the Democratic Party is not the solution. It is a hypocritical party that calls itself the party of the people but receives 70% of its financing from the big multinationals. It is also the party of big capital”.

Imperialism is Unalterable

If someone thinks that Obama will change the nature of the political system in the United States, he is completely wrong. It suffices to say that imperialism is not a subjective concept in politics, economy, ideology, or morality. It is first and foremost, a system of great industrial and financial monopolies that perform, on a global scale, acts of colonization and oppression of poor countries and its own citizens. Obama and his party are part of the political superstructure of imperialism whose economic base is the system of exploitation imposed by gigantic monopolies rooted in the United States, Europe, Japan, Canada, and other rich countries.

Imperialism, as Lenin said, is the high phase of capitalism, the fusion of banking capital and industry, the epic of the great international monopolist unions that continue to share the global wealth, and of territorial division of the world among major capitalist powers. As an example, it suffices to point to the petroleum wealth robbed from Iraq by war and crime. It has been divided principally among the American and European transnationals. These groups don’t have limits in their voracity and are capable of destroying human beings and the world using such methods to obtain wealth. Waging brutal wars and committing genocide, such as was just practiced with impunity in Gaza, is part of the nature of imperialism. It is its reason for being, and neither a Hollywood-ish electoral process nor the election of Obama will change this situation.

One of the fundamental particularities of imperialism, as Lenin said, is that in order to extend its domination and subjugate the people, it cannot dispense with wars and militarization. Towards this end, the powers militarize and use gigantic quantities of money to strengthen their repressive military apparatus. The United States with an army of more than two million soldiers and 823 military bases outside its territory, in addition to a million civil employees on its military installations, is without a doubt the most voluminous apparatus of military aggression in the history of humanity, and it grows in reaction to the demands of imperialist wars.

According to the BBC, at the end of 2003, the United States had a military budget of $401,300,000 – the greatest military expense in history. But the military budget of the U.S.A. in 2005 increased to $417,500,000 and as Bush announced, “No enemy or friend can doubt that the United States has the resources to prevail, and we shall prevail” (Xornal.com). In the year 2007, the American budget increased to $532,800,000 and in 2008 the sum went up to $700,000,000. As the Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, pointed out, this shall serve “to confront global security challenges”, meaning to assault, make war, and commit brutal genocide in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and other regions.

Those who think that Obama is going to change the aggressive criminal course of the United States have no foundation. The closure of Guantanamo prison and other acts of the American president serve as artificial fires but do not affect the core of the imperialist policy of the American state. Under the pretext of the international antiterrorist struggle, new aggressions are being prepared and Obama will continue imperialist wars of different form but not of different nature. These wars, with the objective of empowering the USA in the world, will continue to be semi colonial actions against poor countries, and especially those that have considerable riches in petroleum, minerals, water, and fertile land. To this end, the new president of the USA has announced that he shall continue waging the “antiterrorist” war in countries not yet invaded, but that in the immediate future shall be victims of the war policy of this country. Some lords of the Yankee war, like General Colin Powell (Ex Secretary of State for Bush and Chief of the war in Iraq), have supported the election of the current American president. Barack Obama was not impartial in the Gaza genocide and comforted the government of Israel. He supported the supposed right of the Israeli state to “defend itself from the Hamas terrorists”. Similarly, he has spoken of pulling troops from Iraq, but he wants to make a greater military impact in Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan. Regarding Iran, he has called for their being prevented from having a nuclear weapon and has not ruled out military action to prevent it. But worst of all is that he has considered increasing the gigantic military budget of the United States, which means militarizing the planet even more. With just cause, James Petras has pointed out that with the presidential election of Barack Obama, “there is not any break in military policy. There is even a danger of taking more extreme measures in order to show the soldiers and the militants that he [Obama] is also a hard man, a strong man, capable of confronting those that call themselves “the enemies of the United States”.” This is the danger of a weak personality that wants to present himself as a new American Napoleon with more aggressive methods.