До alhimika:
Why Obama Is Just As Bad As McCain
Pardon the interruption, but as I see it, the primary issues of this
Presidential election are the wars, the economy and our civil
liberties, and on all three counts Obama is really no different than
McCain - and we all know what disaster the latter is.
Obama is not an antiwar candidate as many of his supporters mistakenly
believe. Quite the opposite. He doesn't have a plan to end the war
in Iraq, rather he has a plan to downsize it. He is committed to
keeping enough soldiers in Iraq to "carry out our counter-terrorism
activities there" which includes "striking at al Qaeda in Iraq." This
continued warfare will require an estimated 60,000 troops to remain in
Iraq according to a May 2006 report prepared by the Center for
American Progress.
He wants to pull troops from Iraq and send them to Afghanistan, which
means there will be no reduction in the number of American men and
women who will die fighting senseless imperialist wars. Please note
that Obama is actually calling for an expansion of the war in
Afghanistan despite the fact that UK Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith
said the war against the Taliban could not be won, and UK ambassador
Sherard Cowper-Coles said an "acceptable dictator" would be the best
political solution for Afghanistan. Keep in mind that war with
Afghanistan was one of the factors that brought down the Soviet Union
- that and faulty economic policies.
He said will do "everything, and I mean everything" to stop Iran from
going nuclear. Really? How about preemptive nuclear attack? On
March 22, 2007, he voted for voted for S. 970: "The Secretary of State
should designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guards as a Foreign
Terrorist Organization," which could be used as a justification for
war with Iran.
He is more aggressive than Bush or McCain when it comes to attacking
Pakistan, which is twice the size of Iran and has nuclear weapons. At
a press conference on Sunday, October 26, 2008, Pakistani Prime
Minister Yousef Raza Gilani publicly condemned the unilateral US drone
strikes launched in North and South Waziristan that have been going on
for the past two months. Gilani has called for an end to the attacks,
saying they are a violation of Pakistan's national sovereignty and
would not be tolerated.
He is an interventionist, who wants the bankrupt, militarily
overstretched U.S. to send troops to Darfur.
He goes along with the lie that Russia initiated the conflict with
Georgia, which is an inversion of the facts. He is in complete denial
of what happened in Tskhinvali, the Ossetian capital city, where the
Georgians preemptively attacked and slaughtered hundreds of innocent
civilians. He also wants our tax money to go to rebuilding the
Georgian economy!
He panders to Israel. He told AIPAC that Jerusalem will remain the
capital of Israel and that it "must remain undivided." This pledge
undermines the two-state solution, which is the international
consensus for how that situation should be dealt with. He's not
talking about Israel's blockade of Gaza's 1.5 million people. He was
pro-Palestinian when he was in Illinois before he ran for the state
Senate.
He also voted to confirm Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State
despite her complicity in the Bush Administration's various false
justifications for going to war in Iraq. Voting to make one of the
architects of "Operation Iraqi Liberation" the head of US foreign
policy sounds like bad judgment to me.
He voted to reauthorize the Patriot Act, and he's a former professor
of constitutional law?! When it was signed into law in October 2001,
the Patriot Act, like the Iraq War resolution and the $850 billion
bail out, was hurried through the legislature in the wake of a crisis
and passed with very little debate. (See Naomi Klein's The Shock
Doctrine) Most Senators never even read the bill that granted the
government unprecedented surveillance and detention powers. By the
time it was up for reauthorization in 2005, however, the
constitutional lawyer and Senator from Illinois had plenty of time to
read over it and discern that it is unconstitutional.
He voted for telecom immunity. He also said he wouldn't support
Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold's effort to censure the Bush
administration for illegally wiretapping American citizens in
violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. In
Feingold's words "I'm amazed at Democrats cowering with this
president's number's so low."
He voted give $850 billion of tax payer money with no oversight to the
very criminals who were responsible for the financial crisis. He has
received three times as much Wall Street money as McCain, and four
times as much $ from Goldman Sachs. The new financial dictator of
America, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, is a former head of Goldman
Sachs so they money invested in Obama has already paid off.
He is the face lift for imperialism. For example, he made his speech
at the Democratic National Convention in front of Roman columns at a
time when we're fighting racist, imperialist wars to control the
natural resources and people of Eurasia. McCain could never pull that
off. Obama can carry out imperialist foreign policy under
"left-cover," i.e. people will believe he's carrying out a liberal
humanitarian crusade when he's actually crushing the people and
seizing their land in the name of U.S. financial interests.
Joe Biden is a big supporter of the truly racist War on Drugs, which
should more appropriately be called the War on People of Color.
According to a 2006 report by the American Civil Liberties Union,
African Americans make up an estimated 15% of drug users, but they
account for 37% of those arrested on drug charges, 59% of those
convicted and 74% of all drug offenders sentenced to prison. Or
consider this: The U.S. has 260,000 people in state prisons on
nonviolent drug charges; 183,200 (more than 70%) of them are black or
Latino.
His health care plan has been widely criticized for leaving health
care industry administrative costs in place and for allowing millions
of people to remain uninsured. "Sicko" filmmaker Michael Moore
ridiculed it saying, "Obama wants the insurance companies to help us
develop a new health care plan-the same companies who have created the
mess in the first place."
He will not address the corporate takeover of our constitutional
republic or corporate crime, fraud and abuse. He collected more money
from corporations and corporate attorneys than McCain.
He said it was "not acceptable" to impeach either George W. Bush or
Dick Cheney, two war criminals who intentionally misled the nation
into a war that's resulted in the murder of thousands of people.
He's made no pledge to criminally prosecution the Bush administration
war criminals once they leave office for violating wiretap laws,
systemic torture, criminal invasion of Iraq, incarcerating people
without charges and denying them Habeas Corpus.
He speaks at a high level of generality and abstraction which makes
him essentially a blank slate upon which people project empty
platitudes like "hope" and "change," whereas McCain is obviously a
corrupt war-mongering idiot who's not fooling anybody.
Hence, Third Party is the only way to go if we are going to stop the
two party dictatorship from carrying out more genocidal wars, more
transference of wealth from the working class to the bankers and more
build up of the domestic police state. These are the vital issues ...
you may now resume the interminable debates on abortion and income
taxes.
