Revolution #279, September 2, 2012


Obama Has No Future for the People.
THE REVOLUTION DOES.

It is time for anyone who wants a better world to shake off the deadly illusion that supporting Obama is somehow “the best we can do.”

Barack Obama came into office promising “hope.” Millions of people in this country were eager for a change from the nightmare of the Bush years—its brutal wars; its torture and rendition; the spying; the vicious assaults upon the right to abortion; the mass criminalization and incarceration of Black and Latino youth; the worship of obscene wealth while millions lived on the brink of homelessness and joblessness or were plunged into complete destitution. The reality is that Obama has continued, developed, and intensified the policies begun by George W. Bush.

Do you want to continue living in a world where children are destroyed by remote control bombs and called “collateral damage”…where the president and his henchmen have weekly meetings to decide who to kill this week…where tens of thousands of people suffer the torture of solitary confinement, sometimes for years?

If you do, Obama could be your guy. But if you think this isn’t the best of all possible worlds… you need to check out the movement for revolution the Revolutionary Communist Party is building.

Below is a list of some of Obama’s “achievements” in the first 3½ years of his presidency.

Mass Criminalization and Incarceration of Black and Latino Youth

The United States’ first Black president has presided over unprecedented mass incarceration, an epidemic of police brutality and murder, and relentless criminalization of Black and Latino people, especially the youth.

Massive Unemployment and Evictions

Under Obama, a bitter reality of massive unemployment, large-scale evictions and foreclosures, and homelessness has continued to plague urban, suburban, and rural areas of the country, with inner cities populated largely by Black and Latino people especially hard-hit.

Predatory Wars Around the World

In a world marked by profound class divisions and social inequality, to talk about “democracy”—without talking about the class nature of that democracy and which class it serves—is meaningless, and worse. So long as society is divided into classes, there can be no “democracy for all”: one class or another will rule, and it will uphold and promote that kind of democracy which serves its interests and goals. The question is: which class will rule and whether its rule, and its system of democracy, will serve the continuation, or the eventual abolition, of class divisions and the corresponding relations of exploitation, oppression and inequality.

Bob Avakian
BAsics 1:22

Obama has sustained and developed wars and military occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, has initiated drone bombings in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, is currently threatening war against Iran, and is developing or reestablishing a military presence in many other parts of the world.

Crimes Against the Environment

Obama promised in 2008 that his administration would mark the “moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” In reality, the devastation of our planet’s ecosystems by the U.S. and this whole imperialist system has continued and even heightened under Obama.

Attacks on Fundamental Rights

Obama has taken for himself and future presidents unprecedented and sweeping power to arrest, detain indefinitely, and even assassinate people without judicial review or oversight. He has undermined and repudiated longstanding Constitutional rights such as habeas corpus and the right to a trial. He has presided over a pervasive government spy apparatus that monitors all forms of communication.

If you try to make the Democrats be what they are not and never will be, you will end up being more like what the Democrats actually are.

Bob Avakian
BAsics 3:12

Assault on the Right to Abortion

The right to abortion has been under relentless assault by Christian fundamentalists and other right-wing fanatics who seek to ban all abortions (and even birth control) and reassert the most horrific patriarchal control of women. During the Obama years, an avalanche of laws restricting abortion has occurred in state after state. Obama speaks of finding “common ground” with these murderous fascists. In a May 2009 speech at Notre Dame University, Obama said people must “open our hearts and our minds to those who may not think like we do or believe what we do [because] that’s when we discover at least the possibility of common ground.” Three weeks later, courageous abortion provider Dr. George Tiller was murdered in a church in Wichita, Kansas by an anti-abortion fanatic. Below are some further examples of where the scramble for “common ground” has led in the Obama years.

It is a striking fact—which is starkly evident in the U.S. now—that, in comparison to what is done to women, there is no other group in society that is so systematically reviled and defiled in a way that has become acceptable (or widely accepted in any case) as a significant part of “mainstream” life and culture, as happens in a concentrated way through pornography and the extremely demeaning and degrading images and messages about women it massively and pervasively purveys (with the Internet a major focus and vehicle for this), including pornography’s extensive portrayal of sadistic and violent sexual domination of women...

I began the “Revolution” talk with “They’re Selling Postcards of the Hanging,” reviewing the ugly history of the lynching of Black people in America and the way in which celebration of this became a cultural phenomenon in the U.S., with the selling of picture postcards of these lynchings a major expression of this—often including smiling and leering crowds of white people surrounding the murdered and mutilated body of a Black man. In a recent exchange, a comrade emphasized this profoundly important and compelling point: Today, the way in which pornography depicts women—the displaying of women in a degraded state for the titillation of viewers—including the grotesque brutality and violence against women which is involved in much of this, is the equivalent of those “Postcards of the Hanging.” It is a means through which all women are demeaned and degraded. 

Bob Avakian
Unresolved Contradictions,
Driving Forces for Revolution

War on Immigrants

Making the U.S./Mexico border a completely militarized war zone and waging vicious, massive assaults upon immigrants within the U.S. began prior to Obama’s presidency. But both have reached levels of pervasive mass terror beyond everything that preceded him.

There is nothing more unrealistic than the idea of reforming this system into something that would come anywhere near being in the interests of the great majority of people and ultimately of humanity as a whole.

Bob Avakian
BAsics 3:2

 

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