Barack Obama ran on a platform of protecting whistleblowers, instituting a universal healthcare system, and immigration reform.
In the eight years since his inauguration, precisely none of that has taken place. Whistle-blower Chelsea Manning continues to be confined in conditions that even the United Nations has called a violation of her human rights. Health care is still privatized and unaffordable to millions. And more undocumented workers have been deported under Obama than under any president in history.
So, when people act so sure that Hillary Clinton would have made things better for LGBTQ people or women or people of color, I’m not quite sure what they’re talking about. The Donald Trump bogey man that exists in people’s nightmares has already been running this country for almost a decade. Clinton has made it clear her presidency would not have marked a significant deviation from the policies pursued by Obama.
It is also clear that Democrats, just like Republicans, do not see people in the global south — victims of U.S. imperialism — as actual people. If they did, perhaps they wouldn’t have demanded that we vote for someone responsible for expanding and upholding it.
It’s not simply bombs. It’s economic policy. The United States has transformed entire countries into single-resource economies, totally reliant on Western market demands which don’t even correlate with people’s needs. The global south is a bastion of profit for Western capital. This was true under Obama and it would have been true under Clinton. Regardless of who occupies the White House, the exploitation and violence against black and brown people will continue.
The sole difference is that the Democratic Party has appropriated the social-justice language of the Left, and is using it to support policies which are as far to the right as Ronald Reagan’s were.
