BARACK OBAMA, United States President-elect, announced the latest appointments to his White House cabinet on Monday.
He made Hillary Clinton Secretary of State, confirmed that Robert Gates, President George Bush’s Defense Secretary, will remain in his post and appointed retired General Jim Jones as his National Security Adviser.
Obama had already named the Zionist Rahm Emanuel as his White House Chief of Staff; Timothy Geithner, the Chairman of New York’s Federal Reserve Bank, as Treasury Secretary; and Tom Daschle will be the new Health Secretary.
After the latest appointments, even the bourgeois media described his team as composed of ‘hawks’, or noted that ‘the team . . . has a far more hawkish world view than Obama does’.
Yet it is Obama, the proponent of ‘change’, who has brought in figures prominent in former President Bill Clinton’s administration and Gates from Bush’s White House.
Hillary Clinton was in the White House, while US imperialism was engaged in military attacks on Iraq, like Operation Desert Fox and more than half a million Iraqi children died as a result of the US/British-inspired, 11-year, sanctions regime.
She was ‘First Lady’ when NATO went to war against Yugoslavia, in 1999, in imperialism’s drive to break up the deformed workers’ state.
Hillary Clinton is an ardent supporter of Israel, voted for Bush’s war against Iraq in 2003 and advocated that the Iranian Revolutionary Guards be classified as ‘a terrorist organisation’ last year.
Gates, former head of the Central Intelligence Agency, was appointed as Defense Secretary by Bush two years ago. He has been forced to acknowledge that the US has suffered a major defeat in Iraq as a result of the revolutionary national resistance of the mass of the Iraqi people.
However, in carrying forward US imperialism’s militarist agenda in the Middle East and Asia, Gates is redeploying tens of thousands of US troops to Afghanistan, and demanding NATO supply thousands more.
US imperialism and its NATO allies want to set up a permanent occupation of Afghanistan, as a base of operation against neighbouring countries – Iran, Pakistan, and the oil and gas-rich former Soviet republics.
National Security Adviser, General Jones, is a friend of Republican Presidential candidate John McCain, a one-time Middle East adviser to Bush and a former head of NATO, who participated in the war on Iraq.
It is clear that Obama has appointed a war cabinet.
The peoples of Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Palestine and Russia must be warned that US imperialism has still got them in its gun sights.
Despite Obama’s rhetoric of ‘change’, the US working class must also be forewarned by the appointment of this coalition of former Clinton and Bush functionaries to top posts in his new administration.
This gang will demand billions more for US imperalism’s wars in the Middle East and anywhere, so healthcare reforms will be declared ‘unaffordable at the moment’.
Geithner, who Obama has appointed as his Treasury Secretary, served under President Clinton when he was engaged in setting up North American Free Trade Agreement and jobs were ‘outsourced’ to low-wage countries in Latin America.
Recently he was involved in negotiations to bail out the Wall Street banks with billions of taxpayers’ dollars.
It is clear that, under Obama’s administration, the working class will pay for the crisis of US imperialism with their jobs, homes, wage cuts, taxes and the lives of thousands of youth used as cannon fodder.
Workers determined to defend themselves must demand their trade unions break links with the parties of US imperialism, the Republicans and Democrats, and form a Labor Party to fight for their interests.
The election of Obama, with his message of ‘change’, heralded the fact that millions are on the move in a struggle to defend themselves from the catastrophe of the crisis of capitalism in its death agony.
It is time to build a US section of the International Committee of the Fourth International to lead the working class in a new American Revolution, a socialist revolution.
