Obama is a competent, charismatic George W Bush

Often the US Empire dominates countries economically and politically. In the end it will rely on military power - hence its bases around the world and its preparedness to unleash its forces as it sees fit anywhere in the globe.

It dominates weaker countries in a bloody chess game against potential imperialist rivals like China and the EU.

As Thomas Friedman (one of the most influential journalists in the US) wrote some years ago in his book The Lexus and the Olive Tree:

The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the U.S. Air Force F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.

Obama is not challenging the right of US capital to rule the world. He is its CEO.

What about the economy?

Obama is the representative of one wing of the US ruling class which sees government bailouts and restructuring of US and world capitalism as the way forwards. This faction wants a state-managed process of creative destruction.

The bailouts of financial institutions and the “nationalisations” of companies like GM are aimed at doing this. They are a structured deleveraging of employment. (That is code for sackings.)

Obama can and will do little to prevent unemployment. He is married to profit so sees solutions only in terms of the problem.

For example, a rational, democratic and planned economy would tool the GM plants up to produce buses for public transport and thus create jobs, not destroy them. A rational society would move to renewable energy immediately and abandon coal fired power plants to the dinosaur age before they send us there.

But we do not live in a rational world.

We live in a world where we are all forced to bow before the profit god and so suffer the wars and recessions that go, of necessity, with capitalism.