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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>" In the process, Rich reveals his own perplexity
and the intellectual and political impoverishment of his outlook and that of
American liberalism in general. He is unable to understand or explain why Obama
is not behaving as he thinks he should. "</FONT></DIV>
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<DIV><FONT face=Arial>It's the corporate money and control of our
; political process, media and elected officials stupid !</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial">----- Original Message -----
<DIV style="BACKGROUND: #e4e4e4; font-color: black"><B>From:</B> <A
title=tanstl@aol.com href="mailto:tanstl@aol.com">David Sladky</A> </DIV>
<DIV><B>To:</B> <A title=undisclosed-recipients:
href="mailto:undisclosed-recipients:">undisclosed-recipients:</A> </DIV>
<DIV><B>Sent:</B> Tuesday, June 08, 2010 3:20 PM</DIV>
<DIV><B>Subject:</B> Frank Rich on Obama: Liberal fears and
illusions</DIV></DIV>
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<H2>Frank Rich on Obama: Liberal fears and illusions</H2>
<H5>By Barry Grey <BR>8 June 2010</H5>In a column published Sunday (“Don’t Get
Mad, Mr. President. Get Even”), <EM>New York Times </EM>commentator Frank Rich
expresses the mounting frustration and concern of Obama’s liberal supporters
over the president’s response to the BP oil spill. Obama’s extraordinary
deference to BP, his inability to articulate in any way the anger of millions of
Americans, has, warns Rich, raised “serious doubts about his leadership.”<BR>The
column is significant, not for any insights it provides into the crisis of the
Obama administration, but rather as an indication of the sense within the
left-liberal constituency of the Democratic Party that the public mood is
shifting against the White House. Among American pundits, Rich is one of the
most prominent torch-bearers for Obama. He has written dozens of columns
denouncing the right-wing policies of the Republican Party and extolling the
supposedly progressive character of the Obama administration.<BR>This political
layer fears the growth of public disillusionment and anger toward the
administration and Obama’s inability to respond. What is particularly striking
about Rich’s column is the degree to which it is addressed directly to Obama,
rather than to the public. Rich is offering advice in an attempt to save the
administration.<BR>In the process, Rich reveals his own perplexity and the
intellectual and political impoverishment of his outlook and that of American
liberalism in general. He is unable to understand or explain why Obama is not
behaving as he thinks he should.<BR>Rich acknowledges that Obama’s prostration
before the oil giant is not an aberration. “But the credulous attitude toward BP
is no anomaly for the administration,” he writes. “Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman
Sachs was praised by the president as a ‘savvy’ businessman two months before
the Securities and Exchange Commission sued Goldman.”<BR>He goes on to draw out
the parallel between Wall Street’s crashing of the financial system and BP’s
poisoning of the Gulf. He notes: “BP’s reliance on bought-off politicians and
lax, industry-captured regulators at the MMS mirrors Wall Street’s cozy
relationship with its indulgent overseers at the SEC, Federal Reserve and New
York Fed.” He fails to mention that Obama appointed the president of the New
York Fed as his treasury secretary and nominated the Fed chairman for a second
term.<BR>Indeed, Rich avoids drawing any conclusions as to what Obama’s role
says about the objective social and class character of his administration.
Instead, he attributes Obama’s political difficulties to unfortunate character
traits, a flawed management style, bad advisers and a failure to present a
convincing “narrative” of the oil spill to the public.<BR>In essence, Rich wants
Obama to do a better job of convincing the American people that he is on their
side and opposed to BP. He does not propose any concrete policies to deal with
the Gulf disaster and evades the issue of private ownership of BP and the rest
of the oil industry.<BR>The basic premise of his piece is that—despite the facts
Rich himself acknowledges—Obama is at heart a progressive reformer and his
government is, potentially at least, a progressive reform administration. “It’s
this misplaced trust in elites both outside the White House and within it that
seems to prevent Obama from realizing the moment that history has handed him,”
Rich writes.<BR>Obama is part of the “elite.” He is doing today—in regard to the
oil spill as well as the bank bailout, the restructuring of the auto industry,
health care “reform,” the assault on teachers and public education, and the
demand for cuts in basic social programs—precisely what he was groomed to do by
corporate backers from the start of his political career in Chicago.<BR>His
entire administration has been single-mindedly devoted to protecting the wealth
of the financial elite, while he has refused to take any serious measures to
provide jobs or relief for millions falling into poverty and social
desperation.<BR>Obama is striving to carry out his role as the chief political
representative of the American ruling class. Rich evades these class issues as
well as any consideration of the economic structure of American society.<BR>He
concludes his piece by invoking the example of Theodore Roosevelt as a model for
Obama in dealing with the oil spill. “If Obama is to have a truly transformative
presidency,” he writes, “there could be no better catalyst than oil. Standard
Oil jump-started Progressive Era trust-busting…<BR>“This all adds up to a Teddy
Roosevelt pivot point for Obama. … If he is to wield the big stick of reform
against BP and the other powerful interests that have ripped us off, he will
have to tell the big story with no holds barred.”<BR>Here Rich evokes an image
of American liberalism as the moving force for social progress that is more myth
than historical fact. The major social reforms in the US were the result of the
struggles of the working class against the most bitter and violent resistance of
the bourgeoisie. The predominant role of liberalism was to hold back these
struggles and block them from assuming revolutionary forms. In the first
two-thirds of the last century, the major means for doing this was the
implementation of limited social reforms and concessions to the working class.
But over the past 40 years, there have been no such reforms.<BR>The invocation
of Roosevelt ignores the vast differences historically between that period and
today. Roosevelt’s trust-busting occurred in the midst of immense working class
struggles and the growing influence of socialist and revolutionary tendencies
within the working class. Eugene Debs won 1 million votes as the Socialist Party
candidate for US president in 1912, one year after the antitrust suit brought by
the federal Department of Justice was upheld by the US Supreme Court, forcing
the breakup of Standard Oil.<BR>Rich, who has written numerous columns warning
against the growth of social opposition from the working class, has no desire
for a return to such conditions.<BR>The political domination of big business and
Wall Street has grown far beyond even what it was in the heyday of the robber
barons, along with a staggering growth of social inequality.<BR>Moreover, the
middle-class intelligentsia at the turn of the 20<SUP>th</SUP> century was far
more oriented to the working class and sympathetic to socialist and
revolutionary ideas than its counterpart today. Within radical and even certain
liberal circles it was taken for granted a century ago that social justice,
equality and genuine democracy were incompatible with capitalism.<BR>Via a long
historical process since then the political and moral makeup of the middle-class
intelligentsia has undergone a profound change—overwhelmingly for the
worse.<BR>The embrace by most of the American liberal intelligentsia of
anti-communism after World War II, which signified its lining up behind the
hegemonic aims of American imperialism, did immense damage to the political life
of the country and irrevocably compromised American liberalism.<BR>Over the past
three decades, substantial sections of American liberals have seen their incomes
rise as a result of the reactionary, anti-working class policies of Reagan and
his successors, including Obama. As a result, their political views have shifted
further to the right, with the open embrace of “free market” nostrums and
repudiation of any social reform program.<BR>Rich is very much an expression of
this process. He is an example of contemporary American liberalism, fixated on
questions of identity and life-style, indifferent to the fate of the working
class. The intellectual and political impotence of his analysis, and its
elements of cover-up and evasion, are an expression of the bankruptcy of liberal
thought as a whole.<BR><BR>
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