[Peace-discuss] Obama Inc.

[C. G. Estabrook]

[More on our Potemkin village of a junior senator.  The excellent Ken 
Silverstein published "Barack Obama Inc.: The birth of a Washington 
Machine" in Harpers Magazine.  Selections follow. --CGE]


...it is also startling to see how quickly Obama's senatorship has been 
woven into the web of institutionalized influence-trading that afflicts 
official Washington. He quickly established a political machine funded 
and run by a standard Beltway group of lobbyists, P.R. consultants, and 
hangers-on. For the staff post of policy director he hired Karen 
Kornbluh, a senior aide to Robert Rubin when the latter, as head of the 
Treasury Department under Bill Clinton, was a chief advocate for NAFTA 
and other free-trade policies that decimated the nation's manufacturing 
sector (and the organized labor wing of the Democratic Party). Obama's 
top contributors are corporate law and lobbying firms (Kirkland & Ellis 
and Skadden, Arps, where four attorneys are fund-raisers for Obama as 
well as donors), Wall Street financial houses (Goldman Sachs and 
JPMorgan Chase), and big Chicago interests (Henry Crown and Company, an 
investment firm that has stakes in industries ranging from 
telecommunications to defense)...

...In several primaries, Obama's PAC has given to candidates that have 
been carefully culled and selected by the Democratic establishment on 
the basis of their marketability as palatable "moderates" -- even when 
they are facing more progressive and equally viable challengers. Most 
conspicuously, Obama backed Joe Lieberman over Ned Lamont, his 
Democratic primary opponent in Connecticut, endorsing him publicly in 
March and contributing $4,200 to his campaign. The Hopefund also gave 
$10,000 to Tammy Duckworth, a helicopter pilot in the National Guard who 
lost both legs in Iraq and who is running for the seat of retiring 
G.O.P. Congressman Henry Hyde in Chicago's western suburbs. Despite her 
support from the party establishment, an enormous fund-raising 
advantage, and sympathy she had due to her war record, Duckworth won the 
primary by just 1,100 votes over a vocal war opponent named Christine 
Cegelis.  [The Democrats worked hard to defeat Cegelis in the primary 
because of her antiwar position; they barely managed it; and then 
Duckworth, without the antiwar vote, lost to a Republican. --CGE]

...Since taking office, Obama has become far more measured in his 
position. After Pennsylvania Congressman John Murtha called for 
withdrawal from Iraq last fall, Obama rejected such a move in a speech 
before the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, saying the United 
States needed "to manage our exit in a responsible way--with the hope of 
leaving a stable foundation for the future." His stance won him praise 
from Washington Post columnist David Broder, the veritable weather vane 
of political conventional wisdom. Murtha's was "not a carefully reasoned 
analysis of the strategic consequences of leaving Iraq," Broder wrote, 
whereas Obama was helping his party define "a sensible common ground" 
and had "pointed the administration and the country toward a realistic 
and modestly hopeful course on Iraq."

...Although this is not the place to review the full history of ethanol, 
it's beyond dispute that it survives only because members of Congress 
from farm states, whether liberal or conservative, have for decades 
managed to win billions of dollars in federal subsidies to underwrite 
its production. It is not, of course, family farmers who primarily 
benefit from the program but rather the agribusiness giants such as 
Illinois-based Aventine Renewable Energy and Archer Daniels Midland 
(http://www.knowmore.org/index.php/Archer_Daniels_Midland_Company) (for 
which ethanol accounts for just 5 percent of its sales but an estimated 
23 percent of its profits.) Ethanol production, as Tad Patzek of UC 
Berkeley's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineeringg wrote in a 
report this year, is based on "the massive transfer of money from the 
collective pocket of the U.S. taxpayers to the transnational 
agricultural cartel."

Since arriving on Capitol Hill, Obama has been as assiduous as any 
member of Congress in promoting ethanol. He has introduced a number of 
measures that benefit the industry--such as the "Obama Amendment" that 
offered oil companies a 50 percent tax credit for building stations that 
offer E85 fuel-and voted for the corporate-welfare-laden 2005 energy 
bill, which offered billions in subsidies to ethanol producers as well 
as lavish incentives for developing cars that run on alternative fuels.

Meanwhile, Obama, Durbin, and three other farm-state senators opposed a 
proposal this year by the Bush administration to lower stiff tariffs on 
cheaper sugarcane-based ethanol from Brazil and other countries. To 
lower such tariffs, the senators suggested, would leave the nation 
dangerously dependent on foreign ethanol. "Our focus must be on building 
energy security through domestically produced renewable fuels," wrote 
the senators in a letter to Bush. That Obama would lend his name to such 
an argument -- with its dubious implication that Brazilians ethanol is a 
national-security liability comparable to Saudi crude -- indicates that 
he is at least as interested in protecting domestic producers of ethanol 
as he is in weaning America from imported petroleum.

[For the rest of the article, see
<http://www.knowmore.org/index.php/Senator_Barack_H._Obama_(D-IL)>.]