Socialists Upset With Obama

Presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama has been attracting plenty of support from the left, but that enthusiasm doesn’t extend to many on the far left — the socialists.

“A more careful examination of [Obama’s] politics reveals a mainstream corporate politician who behind skillful rhetoric about ‘change’ and ‘vision’ makes a calculated effort to appeal to the corporate elite, the media, and the Hollywood liberals,” Alan Jones writes for the Web site SocialistAlternative.org.

Jones notes that Obama opposed the invasion of Iraq when he was a state senator in Illinois. But after his election to the Senate in 2004, Obama voted along with the Democratic Party leadership for all military appropriation bills to fund the war.

Jones also charged Obama with endorsing cuts in welfare spending that “have devastated entire poor communities, especially predominantly black and Latino urban centers.”

And Obama’s call for a “phased redeployment” of U.S. troops in Iraq is a strategy that “will lead to more war, death, and destruction” in Iraq, said Jones, who concludes: “Iraq is a quagmire, the trade deficit and foreign debt are exploding, good jobs are getting destroyed, the environment is faced with a colossal disaster, and the private system of health care is bankrupting both working people and the country.

“On all the key issues, the policies promoted by Barack Obama — behind a façade of ‘new ideas’ — do not in any way represent anything more than a skillful repackaging of the kind of policies that have caused the crisis working people face.”