[Peace-discuss] The Odd Acidity of Hope

[C. G. Estabrook]

	Team Obama is a slap in the face to his own base
	Alexander Cockburn

	There is precious little among the President-elect’s choices
	to reward the progressives who worked their hearts out
	to put him in office
	
	FIRST POSTED JANUARY 8, 2009

As far the progressive Obama base is concerned, the President-elect's 
appointments have offered one bitter pill after another, starting with Rahm 
Emanuel (the only man in the Illinois Congressional delegation to vote Yes to 
the war on Iraq), moving on to Hillary Clinton (another Yes on the war), defence 
secretary Robert Gates (who stays on from the Bush era) and the whole economic team.

There was a brief ray of hope when Larry Summers didn't return to Treasury. Then 
he bobbed up as director of Obama's economic recovery team, formally known as 
the National Economic Council, based in the White House.

What is Obama's progressive base getting by way of reward? The pickings are very 
slim. The whole raison d'etre of Obama's campaign in the primary phase – the 
period when the progressive constituency has to be allured - was to turn the 
page not only on Bush time but on Clinton time, to move on.

So... here comes Hillary Clinton, given the extra privilege of staffing the 
lower positions at State with her own people; here come Clinton's economic team 
of Summers and Robert Rubin (informal advisor) plus Summers's former deputy 
Timothy Geithner, now installed as Treasury secretary.

Nowhere has business-as-usual been more glaringly given the green light than at 
the Department of Defence. Anyone looking for change in America's political 
economy has to take on the Pentagon, a vast and steadily widening crater of 
corruption and Augean waste.

Obama has simply kept on Gates, who first made his name faking intelligence 
estimates at the CIA in Bush Snr's day. Nominated as Gates's number two, 
presumptively as Gates's successor, is William Lynn.

Appointed by Clinton as a Pentagon reformer in 1998, Lynn - in the words of 
famed Pentagon employee/assailant Chuck Spinney - "managed to construct a 
logically inconsistent and morally indefensible strategy to protect the 
unworkable status quo".

Dashed by the disasters at State and Treasury, the progressives look for comfort 
to the Departments of Agriculture and Interior, which supervise vast slabs of 
the homeland.

At Ag they get the former governor of Iowa, Tom Vilsack, who opposed Obama in 
the primaries and who is best known as being a fanatic lobbyist for genetically 
engineered biocrops and ethanol. He's Monsanto's pin-up boy and comes 
factory-guaranteed as a will-do guy for the agro-chemical complex.

For a moment hope glowed from the transition team's office in Chicago as the 
panel listened attentively to those lobbying for Raul Grijalva for Interior. 
Grijalva is a US rep from Arizona who is first-rate and has done more than 
anyone in recent years to root out scandal in Bush's scandal-sodden sojourn as 
custodian of the nation's forests, energy reserves and public waters.

In the end, however, Interior went to Colorado's senior senator, Ken Salazar. 
He's a born heel-clicker to the Money Power, always hatching deals with the coal 
industry and big ranching interests.

Are there any encouraging Obama picks? Certainly California congresswoman Hilda 
Solis is a promising pick as Labour Secretary. Solis is the daughter of poor 
Latin American immigrants; her father, a Mexican, was a shop steward with the 
International Brotherhood of Teamsters in Mexico, and her mother, a Nicaraguan, 
was a former assembly line worker.

A good left economist, Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute, is 
scheduled to be chief economist for vice-president Joe Biden.

At the Justice Department, now destined to be ruled virtually 100 per cent by 
graduates of the Harvard Law School, the Office of Legal Counsel has been given 
to Dawn Johnsen, most recently at the University of Indiana Law School, Bloomington.

This was the position held by the execrable John Yoo, friend of the thumb-screw 
and the water-board. Johnsen has been a fierce assailant of Yoo's constitutional 
abuses, writing at one point, "Where is the outrage, the public outcry?! The 
shockingly flawed content of this memo, the deficient processes that led to its 
issuance, the horrific acts it encouraged, the fact that it was kept secret for 
years and that the Bush administration continues to withhold other memos like it 
- all demand our outrage."

Johnsen has also attacked the Cheney-style "theory of a unified executive", 
otherwise known as untrammeled presidential power.

He's no radical, but the choice of Leon Panetta as CIA chief puts a relatively 
honest man not stained with blood in this position. The pick is already arousing 
criticism from all the right quarters, like Senator Dianne Feinstein.

Panetta, from Monterey on California's central coast, bailed out the Clintons by 
becoming chief of staff after the organisational and political disasters of 
1993. Panetta may turn out to be a good choice along the same lines as 
Stansfield Turner, back in Carter time.

The other national security appointments are bad. Towering at Obama's other 
elbow from Emanuel looms National Security Advisor Jim Jones, a Marine, 
mustard-keen on Nato expansion.

As his special assistant on the Middle East, Obama has selected Dan Kurtzer, 
Ambassador to Egypt under Clinton and Israel under George Bush. Kurtzer 
allegedly helped write Obama's notorious piece of groveling to the Israeli 
lobbying organisation AIPAC in June 2008.

As National Intelligence Director we're scheduled to get Admiral Dennis Blair, 
recently exposed on the CounterPunch site as abetting the Indonesian generals in 
the infamous butchery known as the Church Killings in East Timor.

After he retired from the Navy, Blair joined the board of directors of the EDO 
Corporation which was a contractor for the scandal-scarred F-22. At the same 
time he was serving as head of a Pentagon board - the Institute for Defence 
Analyses - which was evaluating the F-22 contract, and endorsed another three 
years of subsidies for the programme.

Blair did not disclose his board membership and got publicly reprimanded by the 
Pentagon's Inspector General.

At almost every level, Obama's choices have been calibrated to appease the 
establishment, from the financial markets (or what's left of them), to the press 
(or what's left of it) to the think tanks and lobbyists of Washington (as strong 
as ever).

As an agent of change - we do not even mention hope - the age of Obama seems 
over before it begins, unless worsening economic circumstances force Obama 
pell-mell into uncharted territory. For the left, in other words, hope may 
flower only among the ruins.

This column was written with Jeffrey St Clair, coeditor with Cockburn of 
CounterPunch.

FIRST POSTED JANUARY 8, 2009

http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/46256,opinion,alexander-cockburn-team-obama-a-slap-in-the-face-to-obamas-base