[Peace-discuss] Why Obama's "not making much progress"

[C. G. Estabrook]

	Johann Hari: The real reason Obama is not making much progress
	Friday, 20 November 2009
	The Independent (UK)

Almost a year after Barack Obama ascended to the White House, many of his 
supporters are bemused. His healthcare bill is a hefty improvement but it still 
won't provide coverage for all Americans, and may not provide a public 
alternative to the over-charging insurance companies - if it passes at all. His 
environmental team is vandalising the vital Copenhagen conference by saying the 
US – the single biggest emitter of warming gases – will not sign up to any 
legally binding restrictions there. He has placed the deregulation-fanatics who 
caused the New Depression, like Lawrence Summers, in charge of the recovery ... 
many people are asking: why he is delivering so little, so slowly?

A pair of seemingly small stories about the forces warping American politics can 
help us to answer this question. At first glance, they will seem like 
preposterous caricatures, but the facts are plain. The institutions that are 
blocking progress on all these issues – Republicans in the Senate, and the 
mighty corporate lobbying machine that bankrolls both parties – have rallied 
over the past few months to defend two causes with very little popular support 
in the United States: rape and slavery. No, really. If we begin to explain how 
this came to pass, then we might see why the American political system is 
malfunctioning so badly, even after a landslide victory for change.

Let's start with rape. This story begins in Iraq in 2003. The private military 
contractors sent by the Bush administration to guard the oil pipelines didn't 
want to get bogged down in expensive legal cases if anything went wrong. When it 
came to Iraqis, the Bush team simply exempted them from all Iraqi law, in a move 
so sweeping one Senator called it "a license to kill". But what about if their 
employees attacked each other, or other Americans? The private companies 
insisted all their employees sign contracts saying that, whatever happens to 
them, they will settle it in in-house, through "arbitration". Why? While 
representing the company at a real legal trial costs hundreds of thousands of 
dollars, an arbitration panel costs a few thousand. It saves cash.

This policy came, however, with a different price tag. According to her later 
sworn testimony, Jamie Leigh Jones – a 20-year-old working for the contractor 
Halliburton/KBR – was hanging out with co-workers one night in Iraq when her 
drink was spiked. When she woke up, she was haemorraging blood from her vagina 
and her anus. Her breast implants were ripped. The damage was so severe she 
later needed reconstructive surgery on her genitalia. She surmised she had been 
gang-raped by the seven men she had been drinking with. When she approached 
Halliburton/KBR, she says they locked her in a metal container with no food or 
water for 24 hours. A doctor came to see her wounds and took DNA evidence, 
although it was later "lost." A guard took pity on her and loaned her his cell 
phone. She called her father, who called the American embassy – and only then 
was she released.

In an Iraq that was collapsing all around her, there was no chance of the Iraqi 
police investigating. Halliburton/KBR insisted that her contract required the 
alleged gang-rape to be addressed by the company's private arbitration process, 
forbidding any claim in the American courts. (If this was how they treated 
blonde English-speaking American girls, what did they do if Iraqis said they had 
been abused?) After Leigh Jones went public, many other American women came 
forward to say they had similar experiences working in Iraq. Her legal team 
argues the refusal to allow rape to be pursued through the courts created a 
climate where it was more likely to happen.

The Democratic Senator Al Franken, when he heard about this, was horrified, and 
tabled a simple amendment to the law. It demanded that no company that prevents 
rape victims from having their day in court should receive taxpayers' money any 
more. Rape is rape. A majority of Republicans in the Senate – including John 
McCain – voted against the amendment. Why? The private contractors are major 
donors to the Republican Party, but the Senators claim this didn't affect their 
judgement. No – they said that Franken's proposal was a "vendetta" against 
Halliburton/KBR with "political motives". Franken pointed out any company trying 
to stop rape victims getting justice would be treated exactly the same by this 
law. The Republicans ignored him. They voted to maintain a system where some 
rape is not pursuable in a court of law.

At the same time, a group of Democratic senators have tried to amend the latest 
customs bill to ensure that nothing produced by slaves should be sold in the 
United States. It sounds uncontroversial – as uncontroversial as punishing 
rapists, in fact. Yet corporate lobbyists are militating behind the scenes to 
oppose it. As the private subscription-only newsletter "Inside US Trade" 
reported: "Business groups are worried by the potential effects", and a source 
tells them there will be, "a push from lobbyists closer to the Finance Committee 
mark-up of the bill... US industry groups and foreign governments [ie those that 
use slave labour] could form ad hoc coalitions to help send a united message." 
They will fight for their right to use slave labour.

These examples are extreme, but they reveal a powerful undertow that is at work 
on all political issues (and both main parties) in the United States. To see 
how, you have to understand two processes. The first is the nature of corporate 
power. Corporations are structured to do one thing, and one thing only: to 
maximise profit for their shareholders. No matter how personally nice or nasty 
their CEOs are, if they put anything ahead of profit, they will be sacked, and 
replaced by somebody who doesn't. As part of a tightly regulated market, this 
can be a useful engine for growth. But if it is not strictly reigned in by the 
law and by trade unions, this pressure for profit will extend anywhere – from 
trashing the environment to rape and slavery, as these cases remind us. The 
second factor is the nature of the American political process today. If you want 
to run for elected office in the US, you have to raise a fortune from 
corporations or the super-rich to pay for TV advertising. So before you can 
appeal to the voters, you have to appeal to the corporations. You do this by 
assuring them you will serve their interests. Once you are in office, you have 
to keep pleasing them at every step, or they won't pay for your re-election 
campaign. This two-step overwhelms the positive instincts the individual 
politicians may have to do good – and drags the US government further and 
further from the will of the people.

Obama had to climb through this system, and he is currently imprisoned by it. It 
explains his relative failure so far. Healthcare is proving so hard because the 
insurance companies are paying both Republicans and right-wing Democrats in 
Senate to thwart any attempt to provide universal healthcare coverage. Yes, it 
would save the 17,000 Americans who die every year because they lack insurance 
but it would depress their profits. Reducing carbon emissions is proving so hard 
because the oil, coal and gas companies are paying Senators across the spectrum 
to crush any moves to reduce oil, coal and gas use. And on, and on.

So far, Obama has tried to co-opt the corporations into his agenda by ensuring 
they will profit from any changes, but this inevitably waters down the 
proposals, often to the point of uselessness. The Cap and Trade legislation 
before Congress, for example, will barely limit carbon emissions at all because 
it has been gutted to please the polluters.

He will only achieve significant progressive change if he reforms the political 
system itself – to make it accountable to the American people, not the 
corporations. He needs to change the rules of the game. Ban big business from 
making political donations, and replace it with state funding. Shut down the 
lobbying industry. Make a big populist speech announcing you are driving the 
money-lenders out of the temple of democracy: it'd be surprisingly popular in a 
country where people can see they're being ripped off every day. The alternative 
is to become rapidly complicit in a system where defending rape and slavery is 
seen as just another day's work in Washington DC.

j.hari at independent.co.uk

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-
the-real-reason-obama-is-not-making-much-progress-1823863.html