[D66] One week to Election Day in America: The real choice for workers

[Antid Oto]

One week to Election Day in America: The real choice for workers
By Andre Damon
30 October 2012

As the 2012 presidential election campaign heads toward its conclusion 
next Tuesday, its right-wing and anti-democratic character becomes ever 
more clear.

The American population is presented with a “choice” between two 
multi-millionaires. One, the Republican candidate Mitt Romney, 
personifies the financial speculators whose criminality and greed 
triggered the financial crisis that erupted in 2008. The other, 
President Obama, has devoted his entire administration to protecting and 
expanding the wealth of the financial elite, destroying the democratic 
rights of the American people, and escalating military aggression 
internationally.

The post-election political agenda has already been set, regardless 
which of the two big business candidates wins. There is bipartisan 
agreement on policies set by the corporate-financial elite that controls 
both parties. Those policies can be summed up as (1) new military 
interventions and wars, (2) further attacks on democratic rights, (3) 
unprecedented cuts in basic social programs.

Rather than the campaign being used to openly discuss these policies 
before the American people, it is being staged managed to camouflage and 
conceal the reactionary agenda that will be implemented once the 
formality of a vote is out of the way.

Perhaps the most striking demonstration of this conspiracy of silence is 
the response—or lack of a response—by the media and the political 
establishment to last week’s Washington Post report that the Obama 
administration is systematizing its assassination program and 
integrating it into the day-to-day functioning of the state.

Under the leadership of National Security Advisor John O. Brennan, the 
White House has created a hit list with the Orwellian designation 
“disposition matrix” to coordinate between the military and intelligence 
agencies the carrying out of extrajudicial assassinations. Going even 
further than the Bush administration, the Obama White House has declared 
the right of the president to kill anyone, including US citizens, 
without judicial review.

The Post noted: “Targeted killing is now so routine that the Obama 
administration has spent much of the past year codifying and 
streamlining the processes that sustain it… transforming ad-hoc elements 
into a counterterrorism infrastructure capable of sustaining a seemingly 
permanent war.”

This unconstitutional and illegal assumption of dictatorial power over 
life and death by the executive branch has been met with near total 
silence by the major newspapers, including in editorials endorsing 
Obama’s reelection. Neither the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the 
Boston Globe or the Washington Post itself mentioned the drone 
assassination program or other attacks on democratic rights in their 
pro-Obama editorials.

When confronted with questions about the legality its of extrajudicial 
killings, the administration has responded with language appropriate to 
mafia dons. Asked about the drone killing of the 16-year-old US citizen 
Abdulrahman al-Awlaki in Yemen last year, Obama campaign advisor Robert 
Gibbs said he “should have [had] a far more responsible father,” 
referring to Anwar al-Awlaki, likewise a US citizen, who was killed by a 
US drone strike two weeks before his son.

In the last presidential debate, Romney declared his full support to an 
expansion of the drone killing program, making it clear that no matter 
who is elected, extrajudicial state murders will be expanded.

The same methods being used to kill opponents of American imperialism 
abroad will ultimately be directed against political opponents of the 
ruling class at home. Drones are already flying surveillance missions 
over the United States under the aegis of the Department of Homeland 
Security.

The assault on democratic rights is bound up with the expansion of war 
abroad and the intensification of class war at home. There is no 
discussion in the election campaign of the advanced state of 
preparations for war against Iran. Such a war could quickly develop into 
a regional conflagration enveloping the entire Middle East and sparking 
a confrontation between the US and Russia and/or China, with 
incalculable consequences.

Last week, the British Guardian newspaper reported that the US has 
requested permission to use British military bases as staging areas for 
a war against Iran. Britain has, according to the newspaper, rebuffed 
the proposal, “citing secret legal advice which states that any 
pre-emptive strike on Iran could be in breach of international law.”

Meanwhile, the US and Israel have been conducting joint military 
exercises in preparation for a military conflict with Iran. More than 
3,500 US personnel have joined 1,000 Israeli troops in what is being 
called a test of US-Israeli missile defense systems.

Within the United States, the ruling class is preparing a ferocious 
attack on social programs, including trillions of dollars in cuts to 
Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Such measures are deeply 
unpopular, but are supported by both Obama and Romney.

In an interview with MSNBC Monday morning, Obama spelled out his 
priorities after Election Day. “There’s no doubt that our first order of 
business is going to be to get our deficits and debt under control,” he 
said. “We’ve already made a trillion dollars worth of cuts. We can do 
some more cuts. We can look at how we deal with the health care costs in 
particular under Medicaid and Medicare in a serious way, but we are also 
going to need some revenue.”

Obama’s statement came after 80 CEOs of major US companies, including 
Steve Balmer of Microsoft, Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, Jeffrey 
Immelt of General Electric and Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, sent a 
letter to Romney and Obama urging whoever wins the election to proceed 
to cut social spending and carry out tax “reform,” i.e., lower taxes for 
the rich and raise them for everyone else.

The program of the corporate executives is identical to that proposed by 
Obama and conforms to the proposals for over $4 trillion in austerity 
and tax “reform” advanced by the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles commission.

The elections one week from today are a conspiracy against the American 
people. On all the issues of central concern to the ruling class, the 
two candidates are united. Whoever is elected, the same basic policy 
will be pursued.

The real decision in the 2012 election is not which millionaire tool of 
Wall Street to vote for. The real decision facing workers, youth and 
students is to take up the challenge of building a political movement of 
the working class independent of both big business parties to fight for 
socialism.

The Socialist Equality Party is holding regional conferences in Detroit 
and New York City to discuss the strategy for this struggle. For more 
information and to register, visit socialequality.com/conferences.

http://wsws.org/articles/2012/oct2012/elec-o30.shtml