Why Did Obama Promise Change And Expand Bush Programs?

Obama’s protection of Bush administration officials and his continuation of its basic policies—whatever the change in rhetoric and tone—shows that these illegal and anti-democratic methods are the consensus policies of the US ruling elite.

The liberal and “left” groups that continue to claim that Obama can be pressured into defending democratic rights and enacting social reforms are only serving to cover up Washington’s crimes.

It is not only a matter of justice that those who carried out torture be brought to justice. It is also a political necessity. Unless the crimes of the CIA and military are brought to light, the US ruling elite will eventually use these methods against its political opponents at home as well as abroad.

The inability and refusal of any section of the US political and media establishment to forthrightly oppose torture and the panoply of related police-state methods openly employed in the Bush years testifies to the political and moral collapse of American democracy and the demise of American liberalism.

The only social force that can put an end to such crimes and defend democratic rights is the working class, which must exert its independent political and social interests in a struggle against both parties of the corporate-financial elite and the capitalist system they defend. This struggle must include the demand for a full and public investigation into the crimes of the Bush administration and the criminal prosecution of all those, beginning with Bush himself, who authorized torture, illegal detention, abductions and similar violations of international law.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/apr2009/pers-a11...

Obama's policies demonstrate that his election campaign for "change" was a political fraud, aimed at setting the stage for a tactical shift in the violent assertion of US imperialist interests. War and social reaction cannot be opposed through appeals to the Democratic Party, but only through the mobilization of the working class in struggle against capitalism.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/mar2009/pers-m30...