When
Barack Obama was still a candidate in the Democratic primaries, he
promised a new era if he were elected. Among his promises for
“change,” he said his future administration would be one of the
most transparent in history: “an unprecedented level of openness in
government".
Well,
we’re still waiting, and will most likely be left waiting for a
very, very long time. Just months into his presidency, series of
minor scandals involving the lack of Obama’s transparency have hit
various newspapers, mostly in Europe, such as the Guardian. That
outlet reported on the Obama administration’s refusal to reveal the
locations of 44 coal ash dumps across the United States, which
contain arsenic and various toxic heavy metals. These dumps have been
deemed “highly hazardous” to local populations by the
Environmental Protection Agency. After a retaining wall on a similar
ash dump failed and unleashed a wave of one billion gallons of toxic
waste in Tennessee last year, a list of highly hazardous coal dumps
was commissioned. Now the “open administration” refuses to
publicly reveal the list, stating that “terrorists” could use the
information for an attack. This is particularly sickening, since
rates for serious health problems like cancer in former industrial
areas and places near similar toxic dumps are extremely high. So much
for openness and accountability. But this is just one example.
Obama
has also flatly refused to release the list of visitors to the White
House. Following 9/11, exactly the same policy was adopted by George
W. Bush. His argument, identical to Obama’s today, was that the
visitor logs to the White House (known in previous eras as the
“peoples’ house”) are strictly presidential records and not
agency records, which are public. It should come as no surprise that
some of the suspected visitors include the presidents and CEOs of
major coal companies, which reveals the crux of the whole problem.
Barack
Obama is not truly the president of the majority of US society. He is
the representative of the capitalists, just like the representatives
in the legislative and judicial wings of government. He ran for a
capitalist party, with funding from the major multinational
corporations and banks, with the endorsements of the major business
associations in the country and was given the duty of protecting
their interests while in office. The problem is not only
administrative accountability, but the accountability of the entire
capitalist system for the crimes it has committed over the last
centuries. Secret toxic waste dumps is only the tip of the iceberg.
Only the working class can hold these people accountable for the
horrors they have caused to humanity and the planet.