Beyond Euphoria

Published on November 15, 2008

The Obama camp understood this quite well and avoided the race card as a defining issue of the campaign. For after all, without the support of a hefty section of that same elite that brought Mr. Bush to power, Mr. Obama could not have survived a long, bruising campaign to win the Democratic nomination and then the US presidency.

It will forever be a part of the Obama myth that his campaign was financed by ordinary Americans contributing $10 or $20 to the cause but the records show that McCain and Obama shared a common list of corporate and banking sponsors. The only difference is that, in the 2008 election, the Democratic candidate received more of the big money donations than the Republican did.

A closer look at the US President-elect’s declared foreign policy reveals how fundamentally unchanged US policy will be on certain crucial issues such as counter terrorism or the use of the “war on terror” as pretext for wars of aggression and intervention; the continuing projection and use of US military power globally to protect and promote US interests; building and relying on multilateral alliances and coalitions and the use of surrogate forces such as the local military, police and paramilitary forces of client regimes while reserving the right to unilateral action; combined military and non-military means (econ development, humanitarian, etc.) to undergird counter-insurgency/counter-terrorist programs; an unabashedly pro-Israel position while obscuring the real economic and geopolitical reasons for the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and incursions into Pakistan.

Thus what we Filipinos should know well from our own experience is that the few who are the real kingmakers and ultimate wielders of power always conceal their real interests or package these as the interests of the greater majority of the people. Consequently, the media hype and euphoria created necessarily raise expectations way above what is realistically and objectively possible.

The American people may have had a much longer experience with democracy, and they have reason to take pride in having fought for and achieved this. But US elections, as with its other democratic processes, are no less free from manipulation and control of the finance oligarchs, the same banking and industrial monopolists that dominate not only the economy but the entire state machinery, and seek to tighten their control not only over the US but over the entire globe. Business World/Posted byBulatlat.com

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