Barack Obama is not Jesus Christ

The United States currently has a military presence in 130 countries. Obama will not change that.

What he will do is adopt George Bush’s timetable for withdrawal from Iraq if conditions permit (forget his 16 months out of there pledge) and increase troops massively in Afghanistan. Yet Afghanistan is on the path to being lost to western imperialism. More troops won’t solve that.

Obama’s silence on the Israeli slaughter in Palestine shows to me that he will follow the usual ruling class strategy of supporting Israel as an outpost of American imperialism in the oil rich Middle East. He might pressure Israel about a two-state solution (that is, legalising the Palestinian bantustans) but the dispossession, poverty and destruction wreaked on the Palestinians will continue under Obama.

Obama has made much of a green energy revolution in the US. This is a good goal. It is unlikely the chains of capitalism will allow him to do anything substantial. Addressing climate change will challenge the powerful and entrenched polluting industries and ostensibly create job losses (or at least that is the argument the sackers from the polluting industries will assert). It could be that in the guise of environmental protection Obama imposes green tariffs on polluting nations while developing minor cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.

Again I look to Kevin Rudd as the exemplar here. During his election campaign he promised to ratify the Kyoto treaty. He has done that. Nothing has changed, other than the effects of global warming becoming more pronounced.

Rudd’s emission trading schemes is a sick joke. Its 5 per cent reduction target by 2020 is a sop to big business and ineffectual. It exempts many big polluters from paying for the schemes

All in all, like the HowRuddistas here, the new President may end up as OBushama.

The gap between expectations and reality creates an opportunity for the revolutionary left in the US and elsewhere. If at least some don’t become disillusioned with politics when the Obama gap becomes clearer to all - that change is continuity - then they may be receptive to our ideas of democracy and planning and production to satisfy human need.

Couple that with the questioning about capitalism that is going on among more and more people around the world because of the crisis, and there may be a shift among some Americans and other citizens of the world to the revolutionary Left. Our task is to patiently explain, and support those fightbacks against capitalism and imperialism that do and will occur around the world and in the US and Australia.