[Peace-discuss] Street's updated take on Obama.

[Brussel Morton K.]

Has Obama done anything praiseworthy? Paul doesn't mention any, which  
I think is the only criticism I would make of his devastating analysis  
of Obama's first days in Office. Street tries to convey the essence of  
the Obama Presidency so far. --mkb

 From http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/20702

Obama's Violin: Calibrating Hope Since the Election

February 27, 2009

By Paul Street

"What's the Dollar Value of a Starry-Eyed Idealist?"



This article reviews Barack Obama's record since the day of his  
election.  That record, we shall see, is deeply consistent with his  
record-setting corporate election funding, including more than  
$900,000 from Goldman Sachs and $37.5 million from "FIRE" (the  
finance, real estate, and insurance industries), and with the fact  
that like, George W, Bush in 2004, small donors (people giving a total  
of $200 or less) accounted for just a quarter of his total campaign  
finance haul.



It matches former Clinton administration official David Rothkopf's  
early post-election observation that Obama was following the "violin  
model: you hold power with the left hand and you play the music with  
the right."



It fits New Yorker writer Larissa MacFarquhar's description (in May of  
2007) of Obama as a "deeply conservative" individual who "values  
continuity and stability for their own sake, sometimes even more than  
he values change for the good" and Ryan Lizza's portrait (also in The  
New Yorker, in July of 2008) of Obama as someone who has been "marked"  
at "every stage of his political career" by "an eagerness to  
accommodate himself to existing institutions."



If reflects well on the left black political scientist Adolph Reed  
Jr.'s following description of Obama at the very beginning of the  
future president's political career in 1996: "a smooth Harvard lawyer  
with impeccable credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal  
politics."



It  fits the comment by a leading Washington lobbyist, who told  
journalist Ken Silverstein in 2006 that big donors would not be  
helping out Obama if they didn't see him as a "player" for "What's the  
dollar value of a starry-eyed idealist?'" (Ken Silverstein, "Barack  
Obama, Inc.: The Birth of a Washington Machine," Harper's, November  
2006).



It jibes nicely with the formerly left Christopher Hitchens' onetime  
description of "essence of American politics" as "the manipulation of  
populism by elitism" and with Edward S. Herman's observation (in an  
article titled "Democratic Betrayal") that Democratic presidential  
candidates make "populist and peace-stressing promises and gestures  
that are betrayed instantly on the assumption of power" (Edward S.  
Herman, "Democratic Betrayal," Z Magazine, January 2007).



It speaks favorably to Laurence Shoup's argument that U.S. politics  
are structured so that "electable" candidates are vetted in advance by  
"the hidden primary of the ruling class" so that the rich and  
privileged Few continue to be the leading beneficiaries of the  
American system." (Laurence H. Shoup, "The Presidential Election  
2008," Z Magazine, February 2008).



It matches Sheldon Wolin's recent description (in his haunting book  
"Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted  
Totalitarianism") of U.S. culture as a form of incipiently  
totalitarian "corporate-managed democracy" wherein both wings of the  
"one-and-a-half party system" operate within a profoundly narrow  
spectrum that prohibits relevant substantive criticism of business and  
militarist rule.



It fits former Richard Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips' description of  
the Democratic Party as "history second-most enthusiastic capitalist  
party" and with the Marxist author Lance Selfa's recent historical  
depiction) of the Democratic Party as "one of the chief pillars of the  
[capitalist] system that perpetuates oppression and exploitation" (The  
Democrats: A Critical History [Chicago: Haymarket, 2008], p.198).



It is consistent with the following judgment in a report issued by  
research analysts with the leading Wall Street investment firm Morgan  
Stanley one day after Obama's presidential election victory: "As we  
understand it, Obama has been advised and agrees that there is no  
peace dividend."



It is in harmony with former Obama advisor Samantha Power's  
description (in an interview in February of 2008 with television talk  
show host Charlie Rose) of one of Obama's key tasks once he attained  
the highest office: "expectation calibration and expectation  
management" (something Power said "is essential at home and  
internationally"). As The New York Times candidly noted on February  
12, "since Election Night, when he warned of 'setbacks' and 'false  
starts,'" Obama "has assiduously managed the politics of the moment  
with an eye toward tempering [popular] expectations."



And it fits the following observation recently sent to me by a friend  
who works as a substitute teacher in an inner-city public school system:



"Today, I asked a class for which I was subbing (high-school English  
students, about a dozen, all-black, at one of the system's actually  
nice high-school facilities) what they thought of Obama.  Their  
initial reaction was one of, for lack of a better way to say it, pride  
and joy."



"But upon closer inspection, this turned out to be a rather shallow  
sentiment.  For when I asked them if they expected any real changes  
under Obama, they all said no."



"So while they are (currently) happy he is in the White House, they  
know full well that he will be no different from any other president  
-- and it's not something they only know 'deep down.'  They know it  
pretty close to the surface."





As President Elect (November 4, 2008-January 19, 2009)



The highlights of Obama's violin performance as President-elect  
included the following:



  * A conservative Election Night speech that said nothing about  
rampant and rising poverty and economic (or racial or gender)  
inequality and made a point of dampening down popular expectations  
with warnings of "setbacks and false starts." Obama's victory oration  
claimed that "change has come to America" because of "this election"  
and that his ascendancy proved that "democracy" was still "strong" in  
the U.S.



* A many-sided slew of highly conservative corporate- and military- 
friendly Cabinet appointments, including noted war Hawk Hillary  
Clinton as Secretary of State and Iraq invasion Surge architect Robert  
Gates (carried over from the arch-criminal Bush administration) atop  
the "Defense" (empire) Department.  As top economic advisor Obama gave  
the nod to Lawrence Summers, a leading neoliberal corporatist and the  
onetime leading architect (under Bill Clinton and Clinton's Treasury  
Secretary Robert Rubin) of the financial deregulation that has  
recently blown up in the world's economic face - a pick that leading  
progressive economist Dean Baker likened to "putting Osama bin Laden  
in charge of the [so-called, P.S.] war on terror."



* An economics speech (at George Mason University) claiming that  
"everyone is going to have to give" - a fascinating comment in a  
nation where the top 1 percent owns 40 percent of the wealth, 57  
percent of all paper claims on wealth (along with a probably larger  
share of the nation's leading policymakers and politicians)  while  
tens of millions of Americans live beneath the notoriously inadequate  
federal poverty level and go without health insurance and as the real  
unemployment rate (including involuntarily part-time workers and those  
who have quit trying for jobs) climbs toward 20 percent.



* Hypocritical silence on the U.S.-Israel slaughter of innocents  
trapped in the Gaza strip.  Obama tried to justify this silence of  
complicity with claims that "institutional constraints" and the need  
to have just "one president at a time" even as he made regular proto- 
presidential statements on the economy and wasted no time denouncing  
the terrorist attacks in Mumbai.



* A "blacklisting of progressives" (as veteran liberal Washington- and  
Obama-watcher David Sirota noted in Open Left) like Joseph Stiglitz,  
Paul Krugman, James Gailbraith, and Dean Baker from top economic posts  
and advisory positions in preference for neoliberal, Wall Street- 
approved corporate Democrats like Summers (who as chief World Bank  
economist once argued that Africa was under-polluted since people  
didn't live very long on that continent) and Summers' unimpressive  
protégé Timothy Geithner (the new Secretary of the Treasury).



* A threat, issued "right before he came into office," to "veto any  
bill that Congress passed rejecting or limiting more bailout funds  
from going to Wall Street" (Sirota, speaking on the Public  
Broadcasting System's "Bill Moyers' Journal" on January 23, 2009).





As President (January 20-February 27, 2009)



The highlights of Obama's violin performance as President have  
included the following:



* An uninspiring and conservative Inaugural Address that avoided the  
critical and rising problems of poverty, inequality, and the urgent  
need (consistent with the 1965-68 counsel of Obama's purported hero  
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.) to transfer resources from the  
"defense" (war and empire) budget to the meeting social needs. This  
speech claimed that the current economic crisis is a product of "our  
collective failure," failing to acknowledge the culpability of the  
financial industry and (for advancing financial deregulation) elite  
policymakers including top Democrats like Bill Clinton, Rubin (a  
leading Obama advisor during the campaign and transition), and  
Summers.  It said that America "will not apologize for our [heavily  
imperial, militarist, unequal, mass-consumerist, plutocratic, and  
ecologically disastrous - P.S.] way of life;"  trumpeted "unity "over  
"discord" (a profoundly authoritarian sentiment since democracy  
depends on open public and political conflict); argued that the  
"goodness of the market" is an issue beyond serious question; claimed  
that the U.S. was "ready to lead [the world] once more" (with Obama at  
the helm); and praised the U.S. War on Vietnam as an effort to advance  
American "liberty" and "prosperity."  Last but not least, Obama's  
first presidential oration cynically called for (certain unnamed)  
global others (primarily Iran and Hamas and those violently resisting  
illegal U.S. occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan) to "unclench their  
fist[s]" while coldly he ignored Israel's murder of Palestinian  
civilians and praised "those brave souls who patrol distant deserts  
and forests" - that is, the Armed Forces engaged in the colonial  
invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.



* A rapid launching of U.S. attacks that have killed a large number of  
civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan, helping build support for the  
Taliban and terrorist activities in both countries - this in defiance  
of Afghan President Karzai's repeated pleas for the U.S. not to hurt  
innocents and of various calls and opportunities for a peaceful  
settlement.  These provocations are extremely dangerous when it comes  
to nuclear-equipped Pakistan, which is now, Noam Chomsky notes,  
"partially under the control of the radical Islamist elements that  
[Ronald] Reagan helped install there" (ZNet, February 16, 2009).



* A January 22nd State Department address in which Obama praised "the  
Arab peace initiative" for containing "constructive elements" that  
could help facilitate peace between Israel and the Palestinians,  
called for Arab states to "support the Palestinian government under  
President Abbas and Prime Minister Fayyad," and stated that "America  
is committed to Israel's security.  And we will always support  
Israel's right to defend itself." Obama knowingly deleted the  
inconvenient facts that The Arab League proposal calls for  
normalization of relations with Israel only in the context of a two- 
state solution (with an independent Palestinian nation), consistent  
with "an international consensus, which the U.S. and Israel have  
blocked for over 30 years, in international isolation, and still do  
so." Obama said nothing about the Palestinians' right to defend  
themselves against the significantly greater threats posed by Israel  
on a regular basis in the occupied territories. He ignored the actual  
and democratically elected Palestinian government led by the Islamist  
party's Hamas (Abbas and Fayyad are with the defeated Fatah Party),  
lecturing that party on its failure to renounce violence and recognize  
Israel's right to exist.  He said nothing about Israel's regular and  
savage use of violence against Palestinians and its refusal to  
consider a two-state settlement including a Palestinian state. As  
Chomsky has noted, the "carefully framed deceit" in Obama's State  
Department statement "surpasses cynicism." (N. Chomsky, "Obama on  
Israel-Palestine: Carefully Framed Deceit," Z Magazine, March, 2009)



* The sending of tens of thousands of U.S. troops to that famous  
"graveyard of empires" Afghanistan ("Obama's Vietnam"), where the new  
administration is more committed to violence than the last one but  
still no clear plan.  The cost of Obama's "good war" (equivalent to  
$775,000 per U.S. troop according to The Center for Budget Analysis)  
promises to undermine Obama's promise to cut the national government's  
giant deficit in half over the next four years.  It will further  
hamstring his efforts to counter the current deepening and epic  
recession



* A decision to appease military commanders by (in policies to be  
announced on February 27th) maintaining "relatively high troop levels"  
in Iraq through December of 2009, keeping "combat troops" (just half  
the total U.S. force presence in occupied Iraq) in that nation for 19  
months (instead of the 16-month withdrawal promise Obama campaign on),  
and (most callously of all), leaving as many as 50,000 troops there  
after the withdrawal date of August 2010.  As anonymous administration  
and Pentagon sources told The New York Times, this considerable  
"residual" force will include "combat units reassigned as ‘Advisory  
Training Brigades'" (P. Baker and T. Shanker, "Obama's Iraq Plan Has  
December Elections as Turning Point for Pullout," New York Times,  
February 26, 2009, A10).



* The crass violation of Obama's pledge not to appoint corporate  
lobbyists through the designation of "defense" industry lobbyist  
William Lynn as Under Secretary of Defense.



* The attempted nomination of former U.S. Senator Tom Daschle to  
advocate for "health reform" as the head of the Health and Human  
Services Department (HHSD) - this despite the fact that Daschle traded  
in on his former legislative positions to "earn" $5.3 million in  
speaking and (lobbyist) consulting fees (largely paid by corporate  
interests) over the last two years



* Advancing as Surgeon General CNN's  "television doctor" Sanjay  
Gupta, a dedicated opponent of single-payer health insurance (a policy  
long supported by most Americans), a loyal servant of the  
pharmaceutical industry, and a leading figure in dominant corporate  
media's obfuscation and denial of the nation's key health care problems.



* The endorsement (through his Attorney General) of the Clinton-Bush  
rendition policy and (through his Solicitor General) of Bush's "enemy  
combatants" policy.



* An attempt to appoint a Republican (U.S. Senator Judd Gregg) as  
Commerce Secretary under an arrangement (worked out with the  
Democratic governor of New Hampshire) whereby Gregg's vacant seat  
would have been filled (via gubernatorial appointment) by a Republican  
(Gregg rescinded his acceptance of the post, citing "irreconcilable  
differences" with Obama's economic stimulus package).



* The decisions to continue the reactionary Bush policy of providing  
federal grants to community and social service programs operated by  
"faith-based" (religious) organizations and to equivocate on a  
campaign promise to condition such assistance on religious  
organization's agreement not to discriminate in hiring.



* An Obama visit (as part of his economic stimulus sales job) to the  
Illinois headquarters of Caterpillar, Inc. despite widespread protests  
over that company's knowing provision of bulldozers used by Israeli  
authorities  to crush Palestinian homes (and occasionally to kill  
activists like the U.S. peace militant Rachel Corrie)



* The placement of Vice President  Joe Biden atop a "Middle Class Task  
Force" dedicated to making sure that "the middle class is not left  
behind" by the American economy.  No equivalent task forces were  
formed or contemplated to study and attack the problems of poverty and  
economic (or related problems of racial and gender) inequality



* The holding of a carefully choreographed first press conference in  
which Obama evaded the question of whether he would press  
investigation of Bush administration crimes. The new president said  
that "people should be prosecuted if there are clear instances of  
wrongdoing" (as if there was any serious doubt that monumental crimes  
against law and morality occurred under the Bush-Cheney  
administration) and stated his preference for looking "forward" not  
"backwards" (as if prosecuting past executive crimes does not create  
progress towards more ethical presidential behavior in the present and  
future).  Another telling moment in his inaugural press conference  
came after the new president finished stating some standard U.S.- 
imperial boilerplate criticizing Iran for funding terrorist  
organizations and pursuing a nuclear weapon.  When the venerable  
reporter Helen Thomas asked him, "Do you know any nation in the Middle  
East that has nuclear weapons?" Obama said "I don't want to speculate  
about that" and then waited for his aides to silence Ms. Thomas. It is  
of course an open secret that Israel has an impressive nuclear arsenal.



* A diplomatic trip to Canada in which Obama reassured that nation's  
conservative "leadership" that he had little intention of acting on  
faux-populist campaign rhetoric meant to garner working class votes by  
calling for significant adjustment of the regressive, corporate- 
friendly North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).



* Repeated and continued statements (carried over from the campaign  
and the President-Elect period) attributing the current economic  
crisis to "the failed economic policies of the last eight years,"  
ignoring the critical role of corporate-Democratic Clinton-era  
financial deregulation led by Rubin and Summers.



* An inadequate economic stimulus plan that even The New York Times  
called "considerably leaner that what is now needed." The scale of the  
plan and its promised job creation (3 million) comes nowhere close to  
meeting the real job creation and needs of the American people (of  
whom 13 million are now officially unemployed, with joblessness rising  
by a half-million per month). The plan is loaded with regressive tax  
cuts (mostly directed at business interests and spread across a  
decade) that will do little to stimulate recovery but plenty to  
appease the arch-plutocratic Republicans and reward the affluent.  
According to the left economist Jack Rasmus notes, "Not only is the  
magnitude of the Obama program insufficient, not only is too large a  
portion of the program wasted on tax cuts, but even the composition of  
the spending proposals are not structured to retain or create  
jobs" (J. Rasmus, "Obama's Economic Plan vs. An Alternative," Z  
Magazine, March 2009, p. 28).



* An anti-home foreclosure program that falls far short of real need  
given the dire state of the economy. This plan "does not," even the  
Times' editors note, "forcefully address the fact that 13.6 million  
homeowners - and counting - are stuck in mortgages that have balances  
that are higher than the [deflated] values of their properties" (New  
York Times, February 19, 2009, A22),



* Essential continuation of the Bush-Paulson policy (which Obama voted  
for as a U.S. Senator in the late summer of 2008) of bailing out the  
giant financial institutions (the same entities that triggered the  
current economic crisis and led the way when it came to financing  
Obama's campaign) and denying citizens meaningful input into and  
oversight of the massive resulting Wall Street Welfare package. The  
New York Times candidly reported that Obama's corporate-Democratic  
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's bailout plan (still to be fully  
detailed as of this writing) reflected a triumph for unfettered  
capitalist prerogatives inside the new White House. Times reporters  
Stephen Labaton and Edmund Andrews noted that Geithner "prevailed in  
opposing tougher conditions on financial institutions that were sought  
by presidential aides, including [top Obama political advisor and  
media expert] David Axelrod."  Geithner fought successfully "against  
more severe limits on executive pay for companies receiving government  
aid."  He overcame "those who wanted to dictate how banks would spend  
their money."  And he "prevailed over top administration aides who  
wanted to replace bank executives and wipe out shareholders at  
institutions receiving aid." The new Treasury chief (whose nomination  
was heartily applauded by Wall Street) "expressed concern that too  
many government controls would discourage private investors from  
participating."  According to administration and congressional  
officials, Geithner told Obama that his government assistance (for the  
rich) plan "would not work" if it was burdened with "too much  
government involvement in the affairs of the companies" - corporations  
whose reckless behavior has undermined the basic economic and social  
security sought by ordinary citizens whose needs supposedly (under  
democratic theory) guide the actions of government. (S. Labaton and E.  
Andrews "Geithner Said to Have Prevailed on the Bailout," New York  
Times, February 10, 2000, A1, A16).



Geithner's trepidation over the negative impact of the allegedly  
popular government was apparently shared by Obama.  It won out over  
more image-sensitive Obama aides (including even Axelrod, to whom  
Obama owes his office) who worries, The Times reported that "rising  
joblessness, populist outrage over Wall Street bonuses and expensive  
perks, and the poor management of last year's bailouts could feed a  
potent political reaction" if the new White House failed to "demand  
sacrifices from the companies that receive federal money."



"For all its boldness," Labaton and Andrews observed, the Obama  
bailout "largely repeat[s] the Bush administration's approach of  
deferring to many of the same companies and executives who had peddled  
risky loans and investments at the heart of the crisis and failed to  
foresee many of the problems plaguing the markets."





A "Reaganesque Exhortation to American Resilience"



On February 24th, Obama gave a nationally televised speech to a Joint  
Session of Congress.  Interrupted by frequent and loud Democratic  
applause and standing ovations, this de facto "State of the Union  
Address" tried to restore hope in the failing U.S. profits system.  It  
also aimed to sell the president's tepid recovery scheme and his  
escalated bankers' bailout plan while promising to cut the federal  
deficit in half by 2013 and recommitting the U.S. to an aggressive and  
(though he did not say so) expensive posture in the war against  
"terrorists" (and unmentionable civilians) in Afghanistan and Pakistan.



Described by The Times as "a Reaganesque exhortation to American  
resilience," Obama's speech failed to advance or mention numerous  
basic parts of any reasonably or genuinely progressive responses to  
the economic crisis. Among many policies and ideas deleted, ignored,   
and unmentioned: a poverty and/or inequality task force; the urgent  
need for universal health care on the superior single-payer model  
(required to eliminate the more than $1 trillion Americans pay each  
year to non-health care providers including above all insurance  
companies); the need to re-legalize unions (starting with passage of  
the EFCA); a commission to investigate the causes of the current epic  
financial and economic crisis; a moratorium on home foreclosures; a  
call for the rollback of usurious credit-card interest rates; the need  
to restructure global trade agreements in accord with principles of  
economic and environmental justice; the need to adequately and fairly  
fund (and thereby easily protect) Social Security; an infrastructure  
bank to adequately focus rebuilding investments; the urgent need to  
drastically reduce carbon emission with a goal of reducing them 90  
percent by 2030; major campaign finance reform (including significant  
new public financing measures) to rollback the wildly excessive  
influence of big private money on public elections and policy; the  
need to nationalize leading financial institutions and place them  
under real citizen control; the need to fire (not simply shame and  
admonish) leading bank and investment executives; the restructuring of  
corporate charters to re-direct the nation's leading economic  
institutions in accord with democratic principles and service to the  
common good; the need to undo the vicious and regressive (Bill)  
Clinton-(Newt) Gingrich welfare "reform" (elimination); immediate  
large-scale and socially useful public works/jobs programs on the  
model of the New Deal Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works  
Progress Administration; the rapid withdrawal of ALL U.S. military  
forces (including so-called "residual" divisions) from illegally  
occupied Iraq AND Afghanistan; a massive reduction of the nation's  
gigantic "defense" (empire) budget (more than $1 trillion per year),  
which maintains more than 760 military bases in more than 130  
"sovereign" nations and accounts for nearly half the military spending  
on Earth; the fatal ecological limits of "economic growth" on the  
capitalist (private profit-oriented) model.



Throughout, Obama has remained amazingly silent on his campaign  
promise to advance the critical and overdue labor law reform - the  
Employee Free Choice Act (the EFCA) - that is required to re-legalize  
unions and restore strength to the labor movement (aptly described by  
John Edwards during the primary campaign as "the single greatest anti- 
poverty program in American history"). The EFCA is loathed by key  
segments of the business class and is therefore not currently on the  
table of recovery policy



Jack Rasmus has recently proposed a superior alternative recovery plan  
properly sized and progressively calibrated to meet the current epic  
recession.  This plan includes: the resetting of mortgage rates and  
housing loan balances; direct federal lending to homeowners and small  
businesses; a 1-year moratorium on foreclosures and defaults; an  
optional program for monthly mortgage payment reduction; the  
restoration of previous federal ceilings on monthly interest rates  
charged by credit card lenders; $300 billion for infrastructure jobs  
with an early emphasis on labor-intensive projects; $200 billion for  
healthcare and related services and for manufacturing; $300 billion  
for government jobs; $125 billion a union- and ecology-friendly  
bailout of the auto industry; $125 billion for emergency unemployment  
assistance; retroactive windfall taxes on oil and energy companies;  
capital income tax rate rollbacks to 1981 (not 1993) levels;  
repatriation of $2 trillion from offshore tax havens; a 6.25 FICA tax  
on all forms of income reported by the wealthiest 1 percent;  
nationalization and pooling of employer-provided 401K retirement  
plans; de-privatization of student loans; and the introduction of a  
single-payer health plan for the 91 million U.S. households earning  
less than $160;000 per year (Rasmus, "Obama's Economic Plan).



Obama's address insisted that his bailout plan (likely to require many  
hundreds of billions more tax dollars) is "not about helping banks,  
it's about helping people."  This claim is likely to face considerable  
justified skepticism as long as he and his neoliberal economic team  
refuse to fire top financial executives and place the nation's  
commanding financial heights under some reasonable measure of popular  
control and as long as they continue to advance a recovery plan that  
is not correctly scaled or progressively structured to meet popular  
needs.



In the current moment of crisis, Obama said during his February 24th  
address, "we cannot afford to govern out of anger, or yield to the  
politics of the moment." This comment deserves a useful translation:  
"policy- and opinion-makers must not act in accord with widespread  
majority progressive sentiment for reducing the dangerous and undue  
wealth and power of the financially privileged Few and for  
transferring resources from the military to the meeting social needs."  
This was a key hidden message behind his February 24th speech's  
progressive-sounding shaming of bank executives' excessive salaries  
and perks and the Charles Dickens-like praise (in that address) he  
gave to a wealthy banking executive who recently gave away much of his  
most recent bonus to his employees.



Tellingly enough, Obama mentioned creating "tax-free universal savings  
accounts" for all Americans.  As the Times' editorial board noted,  
this was "a nod to the Republican desire to create some kind of  
investment vehicles as they consider overhauling Social Security." It  
was a nod also to the Democrats' many "Blue Dog" deficit hawks, to  
whom Obama has promised "fiscal responsibility" and the bipartisan  
pursuit of "entitlement reform" (Orwellian language for the regressive  
rollback of Social Security and Medicare).



Obama's call for change and recovery through positive government  
action stood in conflict with his "Blue Dog" promise to cut the  
nation's federal deficit in half by 2013.





Guns Over Health Care



One day after his celebrated speech to Congress, Obama won praise from  
the liberal progressive economist and New York Times columnist Paul  
Krugman for advancing a "commitment of $634 billion to health care  
reform.....It's beginning," Krugman wrote on his widely read blog, "to  
look as if Obama's really going to go through with this --- and if he  
gets us to universality, his legacy will be secure" (Krugman's blog,  
"Economics and Politics," February 25, 2009, 5:45 pm).



But Obama's first budget proposal, released on February 26, spreads  
that $634 billion (less than two thirds of the annual Pentagon budget)  
over 10 years. As the Associated Press reported, the total amount  
comes to just "a little more than half the money needed to ensure that  
every American gets medical care." (R. Alfonso-Zalvidar and A. Taylor,  
"Obama Seeks $634 Billion Over 10 Years for Health Care," AP, February  
25, 2009). The new administration proposes to raise the first half of  
this relatively modest outlay by slightly scaling back an especially  
egregious and regressive tax (on itemized deduction) enjoyed by  
Americans in the nation's highest tax bracket.  The other half will  
come from "cost savings in Medicaid, Medicare, and other health  
programs," in accord to some degree with the promise of "entitlement  
reform." (J. Calmes and R. Pear, New York Times, February 26, 2009, p.  
A1).



Meanwhile, the Obama administration said it would ask Congress for an  
additional $76 billion for the two U.S. imperial wars (on top of the  
$66 already approved for the rest of the current fiscal years.  The  
Times notes that Obama "builds $130 billion in expenses for the wars  
into the 2010 fiscal plan" - a sum (the Times did not note) more than  
double his proposed annual investment for incremental progress not-so  
universal health care ($64 billion) on a highly flawed model that  
dysfunctionally (given the new administration's refusal to challenge  
corporate power by advancing the widely supported single-payer option)  
leaves critical cost-inflating power in the hands of the nation's  
leading,arch-parasitic insurance corporations. Overall, the Times  
briefly and barely reports Obama's budget outline advances an  
"increase in military spending" (J. Calmes and R. Pear, "Obama Plans  
Major Shift in Spending," New York Times, February 27, 2009),  
consistent with Morgan Stanley's report to investors last fall.



The president's long-term deficit-reduction projects are based to no  
small degree on two highly optimistic assumptions: (1) that the costs  
of the empire's Southwest Asian wars (of invasion) will fall  
significantly over the next three years (an expectation that stands in  
sharp conflict with Obama's  military escalation in Afghanistan- 
Pakistan); (2) that the recession will end next year and give way to  
impressive economic growth: 3 percent next year and 4 percent or more  
over the next three years. There is little basis for the this economic  
projection, thanks in part to the administration's refusal to embrace  
the bold sort of financial intervention - involving nationalization -  
required to restore credit at the rate that such expansion would  
require.





"None of This Should Surprise Us": OUR Challenge, Not Obama's



Mass protest would seem to be indicated as Obama's passionate promise  
of democratic "change we can believe in" translates into the escalated  
and monumental taxpayer rescue of the Few while recovery and "reform"  
plans fall far short of what is necessary and just. The gargantuan  
"defense" budget ($1 trillion a year) - set to increase under the  
supposed (according to a parade of "progressive Democrats") "antiwar  
president" - remains beyond question (since the new president "agrees  
there is no peace dividend," as Morgan Stanley reassures investors)  
while the rising problem of poverty seems stuck on the margins of  
"mainstream" political discourse. The "world's greatest democracy"  
grants its populace no meaningful control over the nation's financial  
institutions even as vast public monies are handed over to the very  
investment and banking houses whose reckless conduct in service to the  
rich and powerful Few drove the economic system off the cliff. As the  
distinguished left intellectual Noam Chomsky notes, "If the government  
- in a functioning democracy, the public - does not have a degree of  
control, the banks can put the public funds into their own pockets for  
recapitalization or acquisitions or loans to government-guaranteed  
borrowers, thus undermining the alleged purpose of the bailout.  This  
is what has happened, though details are obscure because the  
recipients refuse to say what they are doing with the gift from  
taxpayers.  Indeed, they regard the question as outrageous..." (N.  
Chomsky, "Elections 2008 and Obama's ‘Vision,'" Z Magazine, February  
2009).



Meanwhile, destitution is expanding as (a Times headline reported)  
"Newly Poor Swell Lines at Nation's Food Pantries," visited now on a  
regular basis by "a rapidly expanding roster of child-care workers,  
nurse's aids, real estate agents and secretaries facing a financial  
crisis for the first time."  Demand at food banks rose by nearly a  
third in 2008 and "instead of seeing their usual drop in customers  
after the holidays, many pantries in upscale suburbs this year are  
seeing the opposite." (New York Times, February 20, 2009, A1). Badly  
damaged by a vicious 1990s welfare "reform" (elimination) that Obama  
has repeatedly praised as a great policy success, the nation's public  
family cash assistance system has not matched the rising destitution  
across America  even as the new chief executive and the rest of the  
liberal Washington establishment advances a new level of Wall Street  
Welfare.



The liberal economist Robert Kuttner, who hoped passionately for a  
progressive and "transformative" Obama presidency, is sorely  
disappointed, noting that the new chief executive is advancing  
"conservative solutions to radical problems." Kuttner's thwarted  
dreams for Obama summarized in a rapidly written book published before  
the election under the title "Obama's Challenge"

Progressive citizens and activists are right to be angered about the  
new president's short but already clear hope-"calibrating" record of  
centrist imperial and state-capitalist governance and "expectation  
management." Still, Obama's post-election trajectory is unsurprising  
given well-known limits in the dominant U.S. political culture and  
"tradition" and in light of numerous warnings about the Obama  
phenomenon that various Left activists and intellectuals (see  
especially the excellent writers at the weekly black-left weekly Black  
Agenda Report) over recent years (please see my own officially  
invisible but readily available book "Barack Obama and the Future of  
American Politics" [Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008]).  Furthermore, all  
on the progressive Left (however and whenever we came or come to a  
realistic assessment of the new presidential administration's  
captivity to Empire and Inequality, Inc.) need to take a certain  
reasonable degree of responsibility for Obama's behavior to date. Real  
progressive change is our challenge, not Obama's. The esteemed radical  
historian Howard Zinn reminded us of a basic point in an essay titled  
"Election Madness" last March:



"Let's remember that even when there is a "better" candidate (yes,  
better Roosevelt than Hoover, better anyone than George Bush), that  
difference will not mean anything unless the power of the people  
asserts itself in ways that the occupant of the White House will find  
it dangerous to ignore.....Today, we can be sure that the Democratic  
Party, unless it faces a popular upsurge, will not move off center.  
The two leading Presidential candidates have made it clear that if  
elected, they will not bring an immediate end to the Iraq War, or  
institute a system of free health care for all."



"They offer no radical change from the status quo. They do not propose  
what the present desperation of people cries out for: a government  
guarantee of jobs to everyone who needs one, a minimum income for  
every household, housing relief to everyone who faces eviction or  
foreclosure. They do not suggest the deep cuts in the military budget  
or the radical changes in the tax system that would free billions,  
even trillions, for social programs to transform the way we live."



"None of this should surprise us. The Democratic Party has broken with  
its historic conservatism, its pandering to the rich, its predilection  
for war, only when it has encountered rebellion from below, as in the  
Thirties and the Sixties."



As John Judis (no "far leftist," as Obama's radical critics are  
commonly described by his "progressive" supporters) recently argued in  
the liberal-centrist journal The New Republic (in an essay titled "End  
the Honeymoon"), a major reason that Obama has gone forward with a  
conservative and inadequate economic plan "is that there is not a  
popular left movement that is agitating for him to go well beyond  
where he would even ideally like to go. Sure, there are leftwing  
intellectuals like Paul Krugman who are beating the drums for  
nationalizing the banks and for a $1 trillion-plus stimulus. But I am  
not referring to intellectuals, but to movements that stir up trouble  
among voters and get people really angry. Instead, what exists of a  
popular left is either incapable of action or in Obama's pocket." By  
Judis' analysis, the U.S. labor movement and groups like "Moveon.Org"  
are repeating the same "mistake that political groups often make:  
subordinating their concern about issues to their support for the  
party and its leading politician."  Consistent with Judis's critique,  
Moveon.Org's Executive Director Justin Duben responded to Obama's  
recently qualified Iraq "withdrawal" plans by telling the Times that  
"activists are willing to give Obama the benefit of the doubt."  Duben  
docilely says that "people have confidence that the president is  
committed to ending the war...this is what he promised" (Baker and  
Shanker).



Hope: Real and Fake



Depressing? Perhaps, but we must always start with harsh truths, which  
cannot be transcended if they are not first acknowledged and  
understood. And there is real inspiration to be found in interesting  
developments suggesting real movement toward progressive change  
beneath and beyond the false "Hope" (a master keyword in Bill  
Clinton's successful 1992 presidential campaign as well as Obama's in  
2008) propagated for self-interested purposes by politicians: a daring  
and largely successful workplace occupation (to secure severance  
benefits and wages from an absconding employer)on Chicago's North Side  
(at the Republic Window and Door plant on Goose Island) last December,  
rising popular resistance to rampant foreclosures and evictions;   
student occupations at the New School and New York University, plans  
for a major antiwar march, calling Obama out on his rehashed  
imperialism and "defense"(empire) budget and on his deadly escalation  
of the United States' criminal war on Afghanistan (and, more fatefully  
perhaps, Pakistan) in Washington this March.



Obama has long been riding a wave of popular anger and excitement that  
goes far beyond his "deeply conservative" world view and agenda.  He  
has done his best to contain and co-opt that popular and progressive  
energy but he can't help but also dangerously feed citizen excitement  
for goals that transcend his commitment to "existing institutions."   
His lofty political rhetoric, containing occasional populist slivers  
and strident calls for democratic change, channels popular  
expectations that may go beyond the political class's capacity for top- 
down management and control.



Obama can surf the people but the inverse is true as well. Progressive  
activists and citizens can escape the clutches of Obamanist  
"repressive de-sublimation" - the containment and exploitation of  
their hope and anger to re-legitimize dominant oppression structures  
and - by riding and steering the Obama wave into places (both within  
and beyond or beneath electoral politics) closer to true progressive  
ideals.



Left progressives might productively think of "the Obama phenomenon"  
as a sort of (watered down and strictly electoralist) bourgeois  
revolution: it will fail to deliver on democratic promises made to a  
populace it had to rally to defeat the old regime. Now that populace  
is supposed to return quietly (and hopefully) to remote and divided  
private realms, doing their little jobs and buying stuff and watching  
their Telescreens while the new system-maintaining coordinators do  
their serious work, consistent with the absurdly arrogant Lawrence  
Summers' comment (last January) to NBC's David Gregory on how ordinary  
Americans should think about the economic crisis and the new  
administration:  "President Obama [‘s]...call for an age of  
responsibility in what government does for all of us as we manage our  
own finances, as we do our own jobs is, is so very important.  People  
need to work hard, they need to play by the rules, and those of us  
with responsibility for economic policy need to do everything we can  
to make the economy work. And I've got no doubt that our economy's  
best days are ahead of us...."



Interesting commentary from an "Osama bin Laden" of the neoliberal  
financial deregulation that has born such fine economic fruit in the  
last two years!



There is left-progressive potential in Obama's false promises and in  
his ongoing and impending failures. The energy and hopes he rode and  
channelled will need more genuinely democratic, liberating, and anti- 
authoritarian outlets than an Obama (or a Hillary Clinton or a John  
Edwards) presidency could ever have been expected to provide. As David  
Harvey has recently argued, the new team's economic plan is doomed to  
broad failure thanks to the conservative constraints of the dominant  
U.S. political culture and to related "deep tectonic shifts in the  
spatio-temporal disposition of capitalist development" (D. Harvey,  
‘Why the U.S. Stimulus is Bound to Fail," The Bullet: Social Project E- 
Bulletin, February 12, 2009, read at http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/bullet184.html) 
.



It's up to citizens and activists, not politicians, to carry through  
on progressive promises Obama is unable and/or willing to fulfill and  
then to move forward (as we must) to what Dr, Martin Luther King Jr.  
called (in a posthumously published essay titled "A Testament of  
Hope") the "real issue to be faced" beyond "superficial" questions:  
"the radical reconstruction of society itself."  As Obama himself  
noted (along with John Edwards) repeatedly noted during the campaign,  
in a comment that has not fallen from his lips since he reached the  
White House, "change doesn't happen from the top down.  Change happens  
from the bottom up."



Among the many reasons we don't hear that very much any more from  
Obama or other top Democratic politicians, one deserves special  
mention amidst the current remarkable capitalist breakdown. People  
engaging in change from the bottom up are often wont to imagine and  
act on their often previously hidden desires g for "a world turned  
upside down" - for a life beyond pre-historic oppression structures  
(race, class, gender, political authority, ethnic and eco-hierarchy  
and domination) any new head-of-state is bound to support. Long live  
the permanent revolution.



Paul Street (paulstreet99 at yahoo.com) is a veteran radical ex-historian  
in Iowa City, IA.  Street's books include Empire and Inequality:  
America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2004); Racial  
Oppression in the Global Metropolis (New York: Rowman & Littlefield,  
2007); Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil  
Rights Era (New York: Routledge, 2005); and Barack Obama and the  
Future of American Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, September 2008),  
which can be ordered at: www.paradigmpublishers.com/Books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=186987 
.

Street will speak (along with three other panelists) on "The Left and  
Obama" on Saturday, February 28, 2009 in Chicago at UNITE-HERE Hall,  
Auditorium, 333 S. Ashland, 6 PM. 
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