Revolution #279, September 2, 2012
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.
- The “New Jim Crow” in the Obama years means more people imprisoned in the United States than any other country in the world (more than 2.4 million), the highest incarceration rate in the world, and in fact the highest incarceration rate in world history.
- More than six million people in the U.S. are under “correctional supervision”—in prison, on probation, or on parole.
- Black people make up about 13 percent of the U.S. population—but Black men are imprisoned at over six times the rate of men.
- Every day in this country, 50,000 male prisoners live in solitary confinement. Prolonged solitary confinement is recognized internationally as a form of torture.
- Stop-and-frisk policies begun in New York and spreading throughout the country have overwhelmingly and overtly targeted Black and Latino youth—Obama has never spoken against these policies. In the first six months of 2012, New Yorkers were stopped by police under stop-and-frisk 337,434 times; 53 percent of those people were Black, 32 percent Latino—89 percent were released, with the cops not able to come up with any reason to hold them.
- National statistics on people killed by police are not compiled by the federal government. But indications are that more people have been shot down and otherwise murdered by police in the Obama years than preceding years—again without a word of protest from Obama. In Los Angeles, the number of people shot by police jumped 60 percent in 2011; in Chicago, through the first half of 2011, 43 people were shot and 16 killed by Chicago police.
Massive Unemployment and Evictions
