[Peace-discuss] Empire has not altered under Obama: Hedges

[C. G. Estabrook]

"...all the well-meaning groups and individuals ... were once again suckered by 
the Democratic Party ... 'the whole liberal-progressive constituency is going 
nowhere.'"

	Published on Monday, August 10, 2009 by TruthDig.com
	Nader Was Right: Liberals are Going Nowhere With Obama
	by Chris Hedges

The American empire has not altered under Barack Obama. It kills as brutally and 
indiscriminately in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan as it did under George W. 
Bush. It steals from the U.S. treasury to enrich the corporate elite as 
rapaciously. It will not give us universal health care, abolish the Bush secrecy 
laws, end torture or “extraordinary rendition,” restore habeas corpus or halt 
the warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of citizens. It will not push through 
significant environmental reform, regulate Wall Street or end our relationship 
with private contractors that provide mercenary armies to fight our imperial 
wars and produce useless and costly weapons systems.

The sad reality is that all the well-meaning groups and individuals who 
challenge our permanent war economy and the doctrine of pre-emptive war, who 
care about sustainable energy, fight for civil liberties and want corporate 
malfeasance to end, were once again suckered by the Democratic Party. They were 
had. It is not a new story. The Democrats have been doing this to us since Bill 
Clinton. It is the same old merry-go-round, only with Obama branding. And if we 
have not learned by now that the system is broken, that as citizens we do not 
matter to our political elite, that we live in a corporate state where our 
welfare and our interests are irrelevant, we are in serious trouble. Our last 
hope is to step outside of the two-party system and build movements that defy 
the Democrats and the Republicans. If we fail to do this we will continue to 
undergo a corporate coup d’etat in slow motion that will end in feudalism.

We owe Ralph Nader, Cynthia McKinney and the Green Party an apology. They were 
right. If a few million of us had had the temerity to stand behind our ideals 
rather than our illusions and the empty slogans peddled by the Obama campaign we 
would have a platform. We forgot that social reform never comes from 
accommodating the power structure but from frightening it. The Liberty Party, 
which fought slavery, the suffragists who battled for women’s rights, the labor 
movement, and the civil rights movement knew that the question was not how do we 
get good people to rule—those attracted to power tend to be venal 
mediocrities—but how do we limit the damage the powerful do to us. These mass 
movements were the engines for social reform, the correctives to our democracy 
and the true protectors of the rights of citizens. We have surrendered this 
power. It is vital to reclaim it. Where is the foreclosure movement? Where is 
the robust universal health care or anti-war movement? Where is the militant 
movement for sustainable energy?

“Something is broken,” Nader said when I reached him at his family home in 
Connecticut. “We are not at the Bangladesh level in terms of passivity, but we 
are getting there. No one sees anything changing. There is no new political 
party to give people a choice. The progressive forces have no hammer. When they 
abandoned our campaign they told the Democrats we have nowhere to go and will 
take whatever you give us. The Democrats are under no heat in the electoral 
arena from the left.

“There comes a point when the public imbibes the ultimatum of the plutocracy,” 
Nader said when asked about public apathy. “They have bought into the belief 
that if it protests it will be brutalized by the police. If they have Muslim 
names they will be subjected to Patriot Act treatment. This has scared the hell 
out of the underclass. They will be called terrorists.

“This is the third television generation,” Nader said. “They have grown up 
watching screens. They have not gone to rallies. Those are history now. They 
hear their parents and grandparents talk about marches and rallies. They have 
little toys and gizmos that they hold in their hands. They have no idea of any 
public protest or activity. It is a tapestry of passivity.

“They have been broken,” Nader said of the working class. “How many times have 
their employers threatened them with going abroad? How many times have they 
threatened the workers with outsourcing? The polls on job insecurity are 
record-high by those who have employment. And the liberal intelligentsia have 
failed them. They [the intellectuals] have bought into carping and making 
lecture fees as the senior fellow at the institute of so-and-so. Look at the top 
50 intelligentsia—not one of them supported our campaign, not one of them has 
urged for street action and marches.”

Our task is to build movements that can act as a counterweight to the corporate 
rape of America. We must opt out of the mainstream. We must articulate and stand 
behind a viable and uncompromising socialism, one that is firmly and 
unequivocally on the side of working men and women. We must give up the 
self-delusion that we can influence the power elite from the inside. We must 
become as militant as those who are seeking our enslavement. If we remain 
passive as we undergo the largest transference of wealth upward in American 
history, our open society will die. The working class is being plunged into 
desperation that will soon rival the misery endured by the working class in 
China and India. And the Democratic Party, including Obama, is a willing accomplice.

“Obama is squandering his positive response around the world,” Nader said. “In 
terms of foreign and military policy it is a distinct continuity with Bush. 
Iraq, Afghanistan, the militarization of foreign policy, the continued expansion 
of the Pentagon budget and pursuing more globalized trade agreements are the same.”

This is an assessment that neoconservatives now gleefully share. Eliot A. Cohen, 
writing in The Wall Street Journal, made the same pronouncement.

“Mostly, though, the underlying structure of the policy remains the same,” Cohen 
wrote in an Aug. 2 opinion piece titled “What’s Different About the Obama 
Foreign Policy.” “Nor should this surprise us: The United States has interests 
dictated by its physical location, its economy, its alliances, and above all, 
its values. Naive realists, a large tribe, fail to understand that ideals will 
inevitably guide American foreign policy, even if they do not always determine 
it. Moreover, because the Obama foreign and defense policy senior team consists 
of centrist experts from the Democratic Party, it is unlikely to make radically 
different judgments about the world, and about American interests in it, than 
its predecessors.”

Nader said that Obama should gradually steer the country away from imperial and 
corporate tyranny.

“You don’t just put out policy statements of congeniality but statements of 
gradual redirection,” Nader said. “You incorporate in that statement not just 
demilitarization, not just ascension of smart diplomacy, but the enlargement of 
the U.S. as a humanitarian superpower, and cut out these Soviet-era weapons 
systems and start rapid response for disaster like earthquakes and tsunamis. You 
expand infectious disease programs which the U.N. Developmental Commission says 
can be done for $50 billion a year in Third World countries on nutrition, 
minimal health care and minimal shelter.”

Obama has expanded the assistance to our class of Wall Street extortionists 
through subsidies, loan guarantees and backup declarations to banks such as 
Citigroup. His stimulus package does not address the crisis in our public works 
infrastructure; instead it doles out funds to Medicaid and unemployment 
compensation. There will be no huge public works program to remodel the country. 
The president refuses to acknowledge the obvious—we can no longer afford our empire.

“Obama could raise a call to come home, America, from the military budget 
abroad,” Nader suggested. “He could create a new constituency that does not 
exist because everything is so fragmented, scattered, haphazard and slapdash 
with the stimulus. He could get the local labor unions, the local Chambers of 
Commerce and the mayors to say the more we cut the military budget the more you 
get in terms of public works.”

“They [administration leaders] don’t see the distinction between public power 
and corporate power,” Nader said. “This is their time in history to reassert 
public values represented by workers, consumers, taxpayers and communities. They 
are creating a jobless recovery, the worst of the worst, with the clear specter 
of inflation on the horizon. We are heading for deep water.”

The massive borrowing acts as an anesthetic. It prevents us from facing the new 
limitations we must learn to cope with domestically and abroad. It allows us to 
live in the illusion that we are not in a state of irrevocable crisis, that our 
decline is not real and that catastrophe has been averted. But running the 
national debt can work only so long.

“No one can predict the future,” Nader added hopefully. “No one knows the 
variables. No one predicted the move on tobacco. No one predicted gay rights. No 
one predicted the Berkeley student rebellion. The students were supine. You 
never know what will light the fire. You have to keep the pressure on. I know 
only one thing for sure, the whole liberal-progressive constituency is going 
nowhere.”

Copyright © 2009 Truthdig, L.L.C.
Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from 
Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent 
for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A 
Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and 
American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.  His most recent 
book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.