http://www.uslaboragainstwar.org/article.php?id=17801&printsafe=1
Paul Street's ZSpace Page
"RE-MISSIONING" AHEAD?
Recently The New York Times reported an alleged evolution in President-Elect Obama's position on the invasion of Iraq. Having run for the president partly on a vow to "end the war" in Iraq, Obama, Times reporter Thom Shanker wrote, "is making clearer than ever that tens of thousands of American troops will be left behind in Iraq, even if he can make good on his campaign promise to pull all combat troops out within sixteen months." As Shanker notes, Obama's "withdrawal" could well "see the number of American [troops remaining in Iraq] hovering between 30,000 and 50,000 - and some [Pentagon planners] say as high as 70,000 - for a substantial time even beyond 2011"
Obama's claim to end the invasion without ending it may, some "defense" authorities report, include "re-labeling some units, so that those currently counted as combat troops could be ‘re-missioned,' their efforts redefined as training and support for Iraqis" (NYT, December 4, 2008, A31).
Orwell, Kafka, and Vonnegut would be impressed.
The Times gave an interesting title to Shanker's report: "Campaign Promise on Ending the War in Iraq Now Muted By Reality." Here is a useful translation for the Times' meaning of "reality": whatever the Pentagon and incoming administration say about life and policy, the serious questioning of which from beyond centrist frameworks is left to dangerous and dysfunctional "ideologues."
NO CHANGE IN OBAMA'S IRAQ POSITION
The Times was wrong to suggest a significant change in Obama's concept of "reality" in regard to Iraq. Those willing to look seriously beneath the "antiwar" campaign imagery his marketers crafted for liberal and progressive voters can easily determine that there is no fundamental discontinuity. Obama voted to fund the illegal occupation without conditions in 2005 and 2006. He worked to support pro-war over antiwar Democrats in the 2006 congressional primaries. He distanced himself from U.S. Congressman Jack Murtha's (D-PA) early and courageous call for withdrawal from Iraq in 2005. He lectured progressives on the alleged need to not be seen as "working against the president" on Iraq (after the Democrats' 2006 congressional victories) and on how Democrats shouldn't "play chicken with the troops" (a preposterous conservative smear) by calling for immediate withdrawal from Iraq. He voted against a troop withdrawal proposal by Senators John Kerry and Russ Feingold in June 2006, arguing that setting a firm date for retreat would "hamstring" diplomats and military commanders. .
In the fall of 2006, Obama told the Chicago Council on Global Affairs that "The American people have been extraordinarily resolved [in support of the Iraq occupation]...They have seen their sons and daughters killed or wounded in the streets of Fallujah." This was a remarkable comment in light of the two massive assaults (notorious across the Middle East and Muslim world) the Pentagon launched (indiscriminately slaughtering civilians in large numbers) on that Iraqi city in April and November of 2004.
Obama's heralded "antiwar speech" of October 2002 (given when he was still a state senator) opposed the planned invasion of Iraq on pragmatic, not principled grounds. It criticized the imminent invasion as a strategic mistake (a "dumb war"), neglecting to mention its criminal and immoral nature, its petro-imperial motivations, and the large number of Iraqis it would kill and maim.
Consistent with those omissions, Obama has never criticized the ethics or legality of Operation Iraqi Liberation (O.I.L.). He has always refused to significantly note Iraqi casualties (including more than 1 million civilian dead) and he denies the broader Holocaust the U.S, has imposed on Iraq. He told CNN's Candy Crowely last July that the United States should not apologize to anyone for any of its foreign policies under Bush and he has repeatedly claimed that the U.S. invaded the Iraq with "the best of intentions" (democracy- and freedom-promotion). He even told Wisconsin autoworkers last February that that the U.S. must "stop spending billions of dollars a week trying to put Iraq back together."
Obama's 2002 "antiwar speech" came down from his Web site in 2003 because he decided to run for the U.S. Senate that year. He was nowhere to be seen around downtown Chicago when two nights of massive demonstrations took place there against Bush's invasion in March of 2003. And during the 2004 Democratic Convention, where he made the Keynote Address that made him an overnight celebrity (a "BaRockstar"), Obama told the New York Times that he might have voted (like Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and John Edwards) to authorize Bush to invade Iraq if he had been in the U.S Senate and had access to the same "intelligence" as other U.S. Senators in the fall of 2002.
Obama's spokespersons have been consistently mushy and deceptive about his Iraq withdrawal plans, making it clear to serious investigators that Obama will continue the occupation indefinitely. He told FOX News thug Bill O'Reilly this summer that "the Surge" had "succeeded beyond our wildest imaginations" and he has refused to sign on to legislation seeking to ban private "security" contractors like Blackwater from Iraq and Afghanistan.
A remarkable record, indeed, for someone who, in Times reporter David Sanger's words, excited "the left wing of his party" with "vehement opposition to the decision to invade Iraq"(NYT, November 22, 2008).
"EXPECTATION CALIBRATION"
Noting that President Bush had been swamped by cries of "O-ba-ma" during a state visit to Africa, "Public" Broadcasting System talk show host Charlie Rose asked then Obama foreign policy advisor Samantha Power last February if she was concerned about the "sky-high expectations" much of the world seemed to have for peaceful change under an Obama presidency. There was "some danger" in popular hopes, Rose worried.
"Right," Power said, noting that Obama is "acutely aware of this." And "that," Power said, "is why expectation calibration and expectation management is essential at home and internationally." (The Charlie Rose Show, PBS, February 21, 2008: www.charlierose.com/shows/2008/02/21/2/a-conversation-with-samantha-power)
Earlier in the interview Power told Rose that a president Obama would not be bound by mere "campaign rhetoric" when it came to Iraq once he entered the White House. Upon the assumption of power, Power knew, Obama would take much of his cure from those all-knowing "commanders on the ground."
Behind Power's disturbing application of elitist and technocratic language to the managerial coordination of domestic and global hopes and dreams there lurked an obvious (for those willing to detect it) admission: Obama was as attached to the U.S. imperial project as Bush and this could dangerously disappoint expectant masses at home and abroad in the event of an Obama ascendancy. Unenlightened humanity's naïve faith in "change we can believe in" would have to be downwardly "calibrated" as we made an imperial transition into the post-Bush era of U.S. global rule.
Power was later removed from the Obama team because of her excessive public candor.
A REASON TO FORGIVE PROGRESSIVE OBAMA SUPPORTERS
Carried away with the false notion of Obama as "an antiwar candidate," many left and liberal Americans should have paid closer attention to Obama's longstanding centrist and imperial commitments and world view. Obama has said as much himself, admonishing his more progressive supporters for projecting excessively leftward expectations on to his record and trajectory.
Still, it is hard not to agree with Shanker that "supporters who keyed [Obama's] language of ending the war might be forgiven if they thought that would mean bringing home all the troops." Among other things, the Obama campaign has been a brilliant sales operation. It's not for nothing that Obama was hailed as "Marketer of the Year" by the leading advertising and public relations trade journal Advertising Age ("Obama Wins Ad Age's Marketer of the Year," Advertising Age [October 17, 2008], read at http://adage.com/print?article_id=131810 ).
A critical part of "Brand Obama's" marketing genius has included telling a diverse and often contradictory amalgam of groups and interests that he is one of them. The liberal and progressive community was smartly targeted for seduction by Obama's skilled and remarkably well-funded - largely by the privileged and corporate Few - small donors accounted for just a quarter of his record-setting campaign finance war chest (the same percentage as George W. Bush in 2004!) - image makers. And a critical hook in that powerful bit of electoral "micro-targeting" was of course the claim that Obama would honor majority U.S., Iraqi, and world opinion by bringing a rapid end to the Iraq War.
Eager to put a "new," hopeful, and cooptive face on the American System after the long national and global Cheney-Bush nightmare, dominant U.S. media played along pricelessly with the fake-progressive sales job. It eagerly and powerfully transmitted the liberal-left and related antiwar Obama illusions.
BETRAYAL IN ADVANCE
Now, nearly a year after I watched hundreds of excited liberal and progressive voters flood the Democratic presidential Caucus for Obama at Iowa City High School, the New York Times' relatively elite readership is told candidly that Obama and his militantly corporate-imperial cabinet picks epitomize what former Clinton administration official and Kissinger Associates Managing Director David J. Rothkopf calls "the violin model: Hold power with the left hand, and play the music with your right" (NYT, November 22, 2008, A1). Wall Street Journal editorial board member Matthew Kaminski notes that "the Obama camp says the future president, who won running from the left, intends to govern from the center" (WSJ, December 6/7, 2008, A8). The Washington Post's Web site links to a Morgan Stanley research report issued the day after Obama's election. "As we understand it," the report said, "Obama has been advised and agrees that there is no peace dividend...In addition, we believe, based on discussions with industry sources, that Obama has agreed not to cut the defense budget at least until the first 18 months of his term as the national security situation becomes better understood...The Democrats," Morgan Stanley's researchers note, "are sensitive about appearing weak on defense, and we don't expect strong cuts" (see www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/business/governmentinc/documents/ObamaDefense.pdf)
Reading that report the other day, I thought back to a brief conversation I had with a progressive young woman in City High right after Obama scored his historic triumph in Iowa. Like me, she had caucused for the semi-progressive and remarkably pro-labor John Edwards candidacy. "But he [Obama] can't win," she said when I asked her what she thought about the Obamaist tsunami that had just unfolded before our eyes. "Sure he can," I said. "The problem is what's going to get lost along the way. He's probably going to the White House but he's going to do in it in a way that might not strike us as all that much of a ‘democratic' victory."
Eleven months later as Obama continues to win praise and publicity from the likes of William Kristol and Rupert Murdoch, I am reminded also of the once-left Christopher Hitchens' description of "the essence of American politics" as "the manipulation of populism by elitism." I am further struck by the relevance of Edward S. Herman's observation last year that the Democrats' "populist and peace-stressing promises and gestures...are [always] betrayed instantly on the assumption of power" (Edward S. Herman, "Democratic Betrayal," Z Magazine, January 2007). In Obama's case, the predictable betrayal seems well underway even before the formal taking of office.
Paul Street's latest book is Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (http://www.paradigmpublishers.com/books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=186987)Paul can be reached at paulstreet99@yahoo.com
Is the Revolution in sight?
looks like the barge may be lifting off a sand bar...
December 19, 2008
The “Wait ‘Til He Gets In” Delusion: The President Elect is Not a Latent Lefty, by Paul L. Street
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/12/the-%E2%80%9Cwait-%E2%80%98til-he-gets-in%E2%80%9D-delusion/
Wednesday, 17 December 2008
Despite all the evidence to the contrary, there are still those who think that Barack Obama "is a ‘true progressive' whose left and democratic orientation has been ‘squandered' or carefully hidden thanks to his national political ambitions and/or the influence of his political handlers." In reality, "Obama came to the political game with an already advanced and highly cultivated bourgeois taste for incremental change and compromise with concentrated power." Obama is tricky. "He posed for the liberal base as an ‘antiwar candidate' even while he signaled clearly to the foreign policy establishment that he would continue the Iraq occupation for an indefinite period."
The "Wait ‘Til He Gets In" Delusion: The President Elect is Not a Latent Lefty
by Paul Street
"It is hard to end up on the left turn ramp while driving in the center and right lanes."
One of the more recurrent refrains I heard from many of Barack Obama's progressive supporters in late 2007 and through the recent election went like this: "Oh, he has to say and do that stuff to get elected. The corporate and military powers that be will sink him if he acts as left as he really is. Just wait until he gets in: then you'll see the real progressive deal."
"That stuff" included Obama declaring his readiness to bomb Iran, saying that black Americans had come "90 percent" of the way to equality, treating Jeremiah Wright's anger over American racism as inappropriate for the current era, proclaiming that the U.S. invaded Iraq with noble intentions, and saying that "the Surge" was "succeeding beyond our wildest imagination." Other parts of the Obama campaign package: advancing nuclear power and Ethanol, claiming that leading Wall Street firms and other large corporations were as interested as anyone else in "American renewal" (they "just hadn't been asked" to help the country, Obama said last year), supporting the unilateral use of military power even in "situations beyond self-defense" (in a 2007 Foreign Affairs essay), and calling for an expansion of U.S.-imperial armed forces.
Neoliberal from the Start
There were four key problems with this alternatively naïve and cynical defense of candidate Obama's centrism. First, it neglected Obama's history as a deeply conciliatory and conservative, privilege-friendly politician. From his Harvard Law School days through his state legislative career and his brief stint in the U.S. Senate, Obama has exhibited what liberal journalist Ryan Lizza rightly calls "an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions."
Those who think Obama is a "true progressive" whose left and democratic orientation has been "squandered" or carefully hidden thanks to his national political ambitions and/or the influence of his political handlers might want to consider an interesting description of the young phenomenon penned by the veteran black political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. just as Obama's political career began. By Reed's account, Obama came to the political game with an already advanced and highly cultivated bourgeois taste for incremental change and compromise with concentrated power. Alternately praised (by moderates) as "pragmatism" and "realism" and reviled (by left progressives and radicals) as "selling out" and "cooptation," his finely honed centrism was a habit of thought that flowed naturally from his elite socialization in a corporate-neoliberal post-Civil Rights era at privileged private institutions like Columbia, Harvard, and the metropolitan foundations (including the Woods Fund of Chicago and the Joyce Foundation) on whose boards he sat and in whose circles he moved (a rarely noted aspect of Obama's biography) while he worked as a Chicago lawyer.
"Obama came to the political game with an already advanced and highly cultivated bourgeois taste for incremental change and compromise with concentrated power."
This is how Reed described the 30-something Obama in early 1996, shortly after the latter won his first election to the Illinois legislature and more than eight years before the world beyond Springfield and the Chicago and Washington money-politics elite discovered the "Obama phenomenon":
"In Chicago, for instance, we've gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices: one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program - the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle class reform in favoring form over substances. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics here, as in Haiti and wherever the International Monetary Fund has sway." [1]
There's little basis for many progressives' desire to share some right-wingers' picture of Obama as a closeted true-progressive waiting for the White House ascendancy to unveil his left agenda.
Path Confusion
Second, to quote a Buddhist maxim, "the path is the goal." The point can be exaggerated, but it is hard to end up on the left turn ramp while driving in the center and right lanes. It is difficult (thought not impossible) to rally the troops for progressive change while steering again and again - however stealthily (see my next point) - to the corporate and imperial right.
Third, the bigger truth is that candidate Obama tended to run to the rhetorical left of his actual policy agenda. Especially during the primary campaign, he sounded far more progressive than he actually was. He posed for the liberal base as an "antiwar candidate" even while he signaled clearly to the foreign policy establishment that he would continue the Iraq occupation for an indefinite period. He ran as an advocate of universal heath insurance even while he advanced a plan that left critical cost-driving power in the hands of the big insurance and pharmaceutical corporations.
Things He Didn't "Have" to Say and Do
Last but not least, U.S. Senator and presidential candidate Obama repeatedly said and did things more reactionary than actually required to make a viable presidential run and still pass muster with concentrated power. The imperial plutocracy didn't require Obama to vote for the expansion of federal domestic wiretapping powers with retroactive immunity to the big telecommunications corporations last spring.
Harsh political power realities did not mean that Obama "had" to tell CNN's Candy Crowley last summer that the U.S. should never apologize for any of its actions abroad. A supposedly great and benevolent empire can and probably should occasionally apologize for such "occasional" "mistakes" as the recurrent indiscriminate bombing of Afghan wedding parties.
Obama did not "have" (to stay viable in the presidential race) to tell the Chicago Council on Global Affairs that the American people were "resolved" in support of the Iraq War since "they have seen their sons and daughters killed in the streets of Fallujah" (a city that suffered massive U.S. imperial assaults, with a giant civilian death toll, in April and November of 2004).
Obama didn't "have" to blow up the public presidential election financing system once and for all, though he would have been crazy (from an "in it to win it" perspective) not to given his remarkable private funding advantage over John McCain.
"Obama got just a quarter off his campaign finance haul from small donors."
In the process of torpedoing federal election funding, moreover, Obama didn't "have "to create the dark deception that his fundraising operation constituted "a parallel system of public financing." The truth of the matter, reported on ABC's evening news last week, is that Obama got just a quarter off his campaign finance haul from small donors. That was the same share small donors contributed to George W. Bush's funding take in 2004 - a telling little detail that gets lost in Obama' recurrent trumpeting of the fact that he received 91 percent of his contributions from small givers. Too bad those small givers comprised just a fourth of his total money.
And Obama hasn't "had" to go to the remarkable lengths he has gone to deny the depth and degree of U.S. racial disparities and continuing relevance of racism in explaining those inequalities.
I could go on.
"Honeymoans" and Violins
Five weeks away from Obama's inauguration, some progressives are disturbed to learn that his corporate-imperial cabinet picks epitomize what former Clinton administration official and Kissinger Associates Managing Director David J. Rothkopf calls "the violin model: Hold power with the left hand, and play the music with your right" (NYT, November 22, 2008, A1). It bothers a growing number of Obama's liberal backers to learn that, as Wall Street Journal editorial board member Matthew Kaminski notes, "the Obama camp says the future president, who won running from the left, intends to govern from the center" (WSJ, December 6/7, 2008, A8).
"This Wasn't Quite the Change We Pictured," whines the title of a recent Washington Post editorial by leading left-liberal writer David Corn [2].
It's long past time for Corn and other "concerned" and "disappointed" Obama liberals to trade in their rose-colored campaign glasses for the demystifying shades donned by the ideology-decoding rebels in John Carpenter's classic left science fiction movie "They Live." The balmy feel-good people's rhetoric of the electoral contest has faded as always before the big chill of corporate-imperial governance.
A little more due diligence research on their candidate's longstanding centrist history and how well it matches the narrow parameters imposed by the American political tradition and party system might have prevented some of the current left and liberal "honeymoaning" (Alexander Cockburn's useful term [3]) about Obama. For all his claims to be a noble and "pragmatic" reformer "above the fray" of America's imperial plutocracy and "ideological" politics, Obama is no special exception to - and is in many ways an epitome of - what Christopher Hitchens called (in his 1999 study of the Bill and Hillary Clinton phenomenon) "the essence of American politics. This essence, when distilled," Hitchens explained, "consists of the manipulation of populism by elitism." [4]
"The balmy feel-good people's rhetoric of the electoral contest has faded as always before the big chill of corporate-imperial governance."
It's nothing new. Relying heavily on candidates' repeated promise to restore "hope" to a populace disillusioned by corporate control, corruption, and inequality - a standard claim of non-incumbent Democratic presidential candidates - this dark essence of United States political culture goes back further than the corporate-neoliberal era into which Obama came of political age. It is arguably as old the Republic itself, always torn by the rift between democratic promise and authoritarian realities of concentrated wealth and power.
Underlying systemic contradictions related to the deepening economic crisis may well drive Obama to introduce measures that will seem comparatively progressive in relation to the last thirty-five years of U.S. economic policy. For real and genuinely progressive recovery to occur, however, popular agency on the model of the recent factory occupation at Chicago's Republic Door and Window plant [5] will be required, as in previous periods of reform. Today as in the 1930s and 1960s, rank and file citizens' agency will be a critical element forcing progressive change that can be reasonably believed in [6]. Obama may be left-handed but its' time to stop waiting for a mythical White House lefty and to get to the work of actual left organizing and vision from the bottom up.
Paul Street ( paulstreet99@yahoo.comThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ) is the author of Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 ( Boulder , CO : Paradigm, 2004) and Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis ( New York : Rowman & Littlefield, 2007). Hid latest book is Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (http://www.paradigmpublishers.com/books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=186987)
NOTES
1. Adolph Reed, Jr., "The Curse of Community," Village Voice (January 16, 1996), reproduced in Reed, Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene ( New York , 2000). For an (I hope) useful summary of Obama's relatively tepid and centrist career as a state legislator, please see Paul Street , "Statehouse Days: The Myth of Barack Obama's ‘True Progressive' Past," ZNet (July 20, 2008), read at http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/18224
2. David Corn, "This Wasn't Quite the Change We Pictured," Washington Post (December 5, 2008), read at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/05/AR2008120502602.html
3. Alexander Cockburn, "Honeymoans From the Left," CounterPunch (December 5/7, 2008), read at http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn12052008.html
4. Christopher Hitchens, No One Left to Lie To: The Values of the Worst Family (New York : Verso, 2000), pp. 17-18.
5. Lee Sustar, "Chicago Factory Occupied," Socialist Worker (December 6, 2008), read at http://socialistworker.org/2008/12/06/republic-window-occupation
6. Howard Zinn, "Election Madness," The Progressive (March 2008).
Wednesday, 17 December 2008
Despite all the evidence to the contrary, there are still those who think that Barack Obama "is a ‘true progressive' whose left and democratic orientation has been ‘squandered' or carefully hidden thanks to his national political ambitions and/or the influence of his political handlers." In reality, "Obama came to the political game with an already advanced and highly cultivated bourgeois taste for incremental change and compromise with concentrated power." Obama is tricky. "He posed for the liberal base as an ‘antiwar candidate' even while he signaled clearly to the foreign policy establishment that he would continue the Iraq occupation for an indefinite period."
The "Wait ‘Til He Gets In" Delusion: The President Elect is Not a Latent Lefty
by Paul Street
"It is hard to end up on the left turn ramp while driving in the center and right lanes."
One of the more recurrent refrains I heard from many of Barack Obama's progressive supporters in late 2007 and through the recent election went like this: "Oh, he has to say and do that stuff to get elected. The corporate and military powers that be will sink him if he acts as left as he really is. Just wait until he gets in: then you'll see the real progressive deal."
"That stuff" included Obama declaring his readiness to bomb Iran, saying that black Americans had come "90 percent" of the way to equality, treating Jeremiah Wright's anger over American racism as inappropriate for the current era, proclaiming that the U.S. invaded Iraq with noble intentions, and saying that "the Surge" was "succeeding beyond our wildest imagination." Other parts of the Obama campaign package: advancing nuclear power and Ethanol, claiming that leading Wall Street firms and other large corporations were as interested as anyone else in "American renewal" (they "just hadn't been asked" to help the country, Obama said last year), supporting the unilateral use of military power even in "situations beyond self-defense" (in a 2007 Foreign Affairs essay), and calling for an expansion of U.S.-imperial armed forces.
Neoliberal from the Start
There were four key problems with this alternatively naïve and cynical defense of candidate Obama's centrism. First, it neglected Obama's history as a deeply conciliatory and conservative, privilege-friendly politician. From his Harvard Law School days through his state legislative career and his brief stint in the U.S. Senate, Obama has exhibited what liberal journalist Ryan Lizza rightly calls "an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions."
Those who think Obama is a "true progressive" whose left and democratic orientation has been "squandered" or carefully hidden thanks to his national political ambitions and/or the influence of his political handlers might want to consider an interesting description of the young phenomenon penned by the veteran black political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. just as Obama's political career began. By Reed's account, Obama came to the political game with an already advanced and highly cultivated bourgeois taste for incremental change and compromise with concentrated power. Alternately praised (by moderates) as "pragmatism" and "realism" and reviled (by left progressives and radicals) as "selling out" and "cooptation," his finely honed centrism was a habit of thought that flowed naturally from his elite socialization in a corporate-neoliberal post-Civil Rights era at privileged private institutions like Columbia, Harvard, and the metropolitan foundations (including the Woods Fund of Chicago and the Joyce Foundation) on whose boards he sat and in whose circles he moved (a rarely noted aspect of Obama's biography) while he worked as a Chicago lawyer.
"Obama came to the political game with an already advanced and highly cultivated bourgeois taste for incremental change and compromise with concentrated power."
This is how Reed described the 30-something Obama in early 1996, shortly after the latter won his first election to the Illinois legislature and more than eight years before the world beyond Springfield and the Chicago and Washington money-politics elite discovered the "Obama phenomenon":
"In Chicago, for instance, we've gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices: one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program - the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle class reform in favoring form over substances. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics here, as in Haiti and wherever the International Monetary Fund has sway." [1]
There's little basis for many progressives' desire to share some right-wingers' picture of Obama as a closeted true-progressive waiting for the White House ascendancy to unveil his left agenda.
Path Confusion
Second, to quote a Buddhist maxim, "the path is the goal." The point can be exaggerated, but it is hard to end up on the left turn ramp while driving in the center and right lanes. It is difficult (thought not impossible) to rally the troops for progressive change while steering again and again - however stealthily (see my next point) - to the corporate and imperial right.
Third, the bigger truth is that candidate Obama tended to run to the rhetorical left of his actual policy agenda. Especially during the primary campaign, he sounded far more progressive than he actually was. He posed for the liberal base as an "antiwar candidate" even while he signaled clearly to the foreign policy establishment that he would continue the Iraq occupation for an indefinite period. He ran as an advocate of universal heath insurance even while he advanced a plan that left critical cost-driving power in the hands of the big insurance and pharmaceutical corporations.
Things He Didn't "Have" to Say and Do
Last but not least, U.S. Senator and presidential candidate Obama repeatedly said and did things more reactionary than actually required to make a viable presidential run and still pass muster with concentrated power. The imperial plutocracy didn't require Obama to vote for the expansion of federal domestic wiretapping powers with retroactive immunity to the big telecommunications corporations last spring.
Harsh political power realities did not mean that Obama "had" to tell CNN's Candy Crowley last summer that the U.S. should never apologize for any of its actions abroad. A supposedly great and benevolent empire can and probably should occasionally apologize for such "occasional" "mistakes" as the recurrent indiscriminate bombing of Afghan wedding parties.
Obama did not "have" (to stay viable in the presidential race) to tell the Chicago Council on Global Affairs that the American people were "resolved" in support of the Iraq War since "they have seen their sons and daughters killed in the streets of Fallujah" (a city that suffered massive U.S. imperial assaults, with a giant civilian death toll, in April and November of 2004).
Obama didn't "have" to blow up the public presidential election financing system once and for all, though he would have been crazy (from an "in it to win it" perspective) not to given his remarkable private funding advantage over John McCain.
"Obama got just a quarter off his campaign finance haul from small donors."
In the process of torpedoing federal election funding, moreover, Obama didn't "have "to create the dark deception that his fundraising operation constituted "a parallel system of public financing." The truth of the matter, reported on ABC's evening news last week, is that Obama got just a quarter off his campaign finance haul from small donors. That was the same share small donors contributed to George W. Bush's funding take in 2004 - a telling little detail that gets lost in Obama' recurrent trumpeting of the fact that he received 91 percent of his contributions from small givers. Too bad those small givers comprised just a fourth of his total money.
And Obama hasn't "had" to go to the remarkable lengths he has gone to deny the depth and degree of U.S. racial disparities and continuing relevance of racism in explaining those inequalities.
I could go on.
"Honeymoans" and Violins
Five weeks away from Obama's inauguration, some progressives are disturbed to learn that his corporate-imperial cabinet picks epitomize what former Clinton administration official and Kissinger Associates Managing Director David J. Rothkopf calls "the violin model: Hold power with the left hand, and play the music with your right" (NYT, November 22, 2008, A1). It bothers a growing number of Obama's liberal backers to learn that, as Wall Street Journal editorial board member Matthew Kaminski notes, "the Obama camp says the future president, who won running from the left, intends to govern from the center" (WSJ, December 6/7, 2008, A8).
"This Wasn't Quite the Change We Pictured," whines the title of a recent Washington Post editorial by leading left-liberal writer David Corn [2].
It's long past time for Corn and other "concerned" and "disappointed" Obama liberals to trade in their rose-colored campaign glasses for the demystifying shades donned by the ideology-decoding rebels in John Carpenter's classic left science fiction movie "They Live." The balmy feel-good people's rhetoric of the electoral contest has faded as always before the big chill of corporate-imperial governance.
A little more due diligence research on their candidate's longstanding centrist history and how well it matches the narrow parameters imposed by the American political tradition and party system might have prevented some of the current left and liberal "honeymoaning" (Alexander Cockburn's useful term [3]) about Obama. For all his claims to be a noble and "pragmatic" reformer "above the fray" of America's imperial plutocracy and "ideological" politics, Obama is no special exception to - and is in many ways an epitome of - what Christopher Hitchens called (in his 1999 study of the Bill and Hillary Clinton phenomenon) "the essence of American politics. This essence, when distilled," Hitchens explained, "consists of the manipulation of populism by elitism." [4]
"The balmy feel-good people's rhetoric of the electoral contest has faded as always before the big chill of corporate-imperial governance."
It's nothing new. Relying heavily on candidates' repeated promise to restore "hope" to a populace disillusioned by corporate control, corruption, and inequality - a standard claim of non-incumbent Democratic presidential candidates - this dark essence of United States political culture goes back further than the corporate-neoliberal era into which Obama came of political age. It is arguably as old the Republic itself, always torn by the rift between democratic promise and authoritarian realities of concentrated wealth and power.
Underlying systemic contradictions related to the deepening economic crisis may well drive Obama to introduce measures that will seem comparatively progressive in relation to the last thirty-five years of U.S. economic policy. For real and genuinely progressive recovery to occur, however, popular agency on the model of the recent factory occupation at Chicago's Republic Door and Window plant [5] will be required, as in previous periods of reform. Today as in the 1930s and 1960s, rank and file citizens' agency will be a critical element forcing progressive change that can be reasonably believed in [6]. Obama may be left-handed but its' time to stop waiting for a mythical White House lefty and to get to the work of actual left organizing and vision from the bottom up.
Paul Street ( paulstreet99@yahoo.comThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ) is the author of Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 ( Boulder , CO : Paradigm, 2004) and Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis ( New York : Rowman & Littlefield, 2007). Hid latest book is Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (http://www.paradigmpublishers.com/books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=186987)
NOTES
1. Adolph Reed, Jr., "The Curse of Community," Village Voice (January 16, 1996), reproduced in Reed, Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene ( New York , 2000). For an (I hope) useful summary of Obama's relatively tepid and centrist career as a state legislator, please see Paul Street , "Statehouse Days: The Myth of Barack Obama's ‘True Progressive' Past," ZNet (July 20, 2008), read at http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/18224
2. David Corn, "This Wasn't Quite the Change We Pictured," Washington Post (December 5, 2008), read at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/05/AR2008120502602.html
3. Alexander Cockburn, "Honeymoans From the Left," CounterPunch (December 5/7, 2008), read at http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn12052008.html
4. Christopher Hitchens, No One Left to Lie To: The Values of the Worst Family (New York : Verso, 2000), pp. 17-18.
5. Lee Sustar, "Chicago Factory Occupied," Socialist Worker (December 6, 2008), read at http://socialistworker.org/2008/12/06/republic-window-occupation
6. Howard Zinn, "Election Madness," The Progressive (March 2008).
December 17, 2008
"Comparing pro-life struggle to slavery may be 'high risk, high reward' move for Catholic Church" John L Allen Jr.
Posted on Dec 12, 2008 08:11am CST.
By John L Allen Jr., New Catholic Review
http://ncrcafe.org/node/2328
In a stroke of pro-life rhetoric that may have particular resonance in the United States, senior church officials are increasingly comparing the defense of unborn life today, including opposition to abortion and the destruction of human embryos, to the struggle against slavery and racism in earlier historical periods.
That argument comes at a moment when the United States is celebrating the election of the first African American to the presidency, and thus the country’s progress in race relations since the era of slavery.
Yet in making that comparison, officials may also have to come terms with the church’s own checkered past, since prior to the late 19th century official Catholic teaching did not generally regard slavery as an “intrinsic evil.”
Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, President of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, linked the struggle against slavery to the church’s opposition to abortion during his presidential address at the Nov. 10-13 fall meeting of the U.S. bishops in Baltimore.
“Symbolically, it is a moment that touches more than our history when a country that once enshrined race slavery in its very constitutional order should come to elect an African American to the presidency,” George said. “In this, I believe, we must all rejoice.”
“We can rejoice today with those who, following heroic figures like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, were part of a movement to bring our country’s civil rights into better accord with universal human rights. Among so many people of good will, dutiful priests and loving religious women, bishops and lay people of the Catholic church who took our social doctrine to heart then can feel vindicated now.”
George then explicitly made the parallel between racism and abortion.
“The common good can never be adequately incarnated in any society when those waiting to be born can be legally killed at choice,” he said. “If the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision that African Americans were other people’s property and somehow less than persons were still settled constitutional law, Mr. Obama would not be President of the United States. Today, as was the case a hundred and fifty years ago, common ground cannot be found by destroying the common good.”
Also during the Baltimore meeting, Bishop Joseph Martino of Scranton, Pennsylvania, called for a more muscular posture from the conference on denying communion to pro-choice politicians. He explicitly compared doing so to “canonical measures” taken by bishops in earlier periods against Catholic politicians who espoused racism.
(Church historians say that Martino may have had in mind, at least in part, the actions of the late Archbishop Joseph Rummel in New Orleans, who publicly excommunicated three local Catholic politicians and activists who opposed the desegregation of Catholic schools in the archdiocese in 1962.)
The parallel between opposition to slavery and the protection of unborn life was also raised on Dec. 12 by Italian Archbishop Rino Fisichella, President of the Pontifical Academy for Life, in the presentation of a new Vatican document on biotechnology opposing human cloning, the freezing of embryos, animal/human genetic hybrids, and a number of other procedures seen as affronts to human dignity.
“The church has been committed throughout the centuries in defense of certain fundamental principles which are today the common heritage of humanity,” Fisichella said.
“Certainly, at the time the church was challenged by a fringe of forward-thinkers who, in the name of progress and the laws of the market, preferred to trample upon the fundamental rights of persons. How can we forget, for example, the commitment of missionaries against slavery in countries that had been colonized, or the defense of workers at the beginning of the 19th century? Today, the issue that will mark the coming decades and the life of society is determined by the defense of the dignity of the person from conception to natural death.”
Many analysts applaud this way of making the pro-life argument.
Theologian Charles Camosy of Fordham University, for example, said the church is too often hobbled by “unfortunate and artificial” division in the church between what he called “moral status conservatives” and “social justice liberals,” which means that both camps often fail to take “a comprehensive approach to the church’s moral resources.”
Making the case for unborn life by drawing upon the Catholic tradition of social teaching, Camosy said, could do a better job of getting social justice Catholics on board, and perhaps making the pro-life argument more persuasive to the broader world.
Yet analysts also caution that the church, if it pursues this line of argument, may face pressure to be candid about its own history. Throughout the centuries, historians note, both the Vatican and the American bishops generally upheld the morality of slavery in principle, even if they also vigorously denounced abuses in practice.
As late as 1866, in the middle of the Civil War in the United States and at a time when the abolitionist movement was fully formed, the Vatican’s doctrinal office issued an instruction stating, “Slavery itself, considered as such in its essential nature, is not at all contrary to the natural and divine law.” As is well known, ecclesiastical institutions in the United States and elsewhere often owned slaves.
To be sure, popes, bishops and theologians also frequently denounced slavery as it was actually conducted, especially racial slavery; in 1435, for example, Pope Eugene IV demanded that European colonizers stop enslaving native peoples in the Canary Islands. Those judgments were repeated in 1537 for what was then known as the “Indies,” and in 1686 for Africa.
Most theologians say the emphasis in Catholic teaching on a common human nature always pointed toward the conclusion reached by the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) in its document Gaudium et Spes, which denounced “imprisonment, deportation, slavery … the selling of women and children.”
Nonetheless, historians say, the Catholic church traveled something of a “learning curve” through the centuries on issues of slavery and racism. A clear acknowledgment of that reality, some suggest, might actually help the church push the broader society along a similar “learning curve” today with regard to new threats to human life and dignity.
By John L Allen Jr., New Catholic Review
http://ncrcafe.org/node/2328
In a stroke of pro-life rhetoric that may have particular resonance in the United States, senior church officials are increasingly comparing the defense of unborn life today, including opposition to abortion and the destruction of human embryos, to the struggle against slavery and racism in earlier historical periods.
That argument comes at a moment when the United States is celebrating the election of the first African American to the presidency, and thus the country’s progress in race relations since the era of slavery.
Yet in making that comparison, officials may also have to come terms with the church’s own checkered past, since prior to the late 19th century official Catholic teaching did not generally regard slavery as an “intrinsic evil.”
Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, President of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, linked the struggle against slavery to the church’s opposition to abortion during his presidential address at the Nov. 10-13 fall meeting of the U.S. bishops in Baltimore.
“Symbolically, it is a moment that touches more than our history when a country that once enshrined race slavery in its very constitutional order should come to elect an African American to the presidency,” George said. “In this, I believe, we must all rejoice.”
“We can rejoice today with those who, following heroic figures like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, were part of a movement to bring our country’s civil rights into better accord with universal human rights. Among so many people of good will, dutiful priests and loving religious women, bishops and lay people of the Catholic church who took our social doctrine to heart then can feel vindicated now.”
George then explicitly made the parallel between racism and abortion.
“The common good can never be adequately incarnated in any society when those waiting to be born can be legally killed at choice,” he said. “If the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision that African Americans were other people’s property and somehow less than persons were still settled constitutional law, Mr. Obama would not be President of the United States. Today, as was the case a hundred and fifty years ago, common ground cannot be found by destroying the common good.”
Also during the Baltimore meeting, Bishop Joseph Martino of Scranton, Pennsylvania, called for a more muscular posture from the conference on denying communion to pro-choice politicians. He explicitly compared doing so to “canonical measures” taken by bishops in earlier periods against Catholic politicians who espoused racism.
(Church historians say that Martino may have had in mind, at least in part, the actions of the late Archbishop Joseph Rummel in New Orleans, who publicly excommunicated three local Catholic politicians and activists who opposed the desegregation of Catholic schools in the archdiocese in 1962.)
The parallel between opposition to slavery and the protection of unborn life was also raised on Dec. 12 by Italian Archbishop Rino Fisichella, President of the Pontifical Academy for Life, in the presentation of a new Vatican document on biotechnology opposing human cloning, the freezing of embryos, animal/human genetic hybrids, and a number of other procedures seen as affronts to human dignity.
“The church has been committed throughout the centuries in defense of certain fundamental principles which are today the common heritage of humanity,” Fisichella said.
“Certainly, at the time the church was challenged by a fringe of forward-thinkers who, in the name of progress and the laws of the market, preferred to trample upon the fundamental rights of persons. How can we forget, for example, the commitment of missionaries against slavery in countries that had been colonized, or the defense of workers at the beginning of the 19th century? Today, the issue that will mark the coming decades and the life of society is determined by the defense of the dignity of the person from conception to natural death.”
Many analysts applaud this way of making the pro-life argument.
Theologian Charles Camosy of Fordham University, for example, said the church is too often hobbled by “unfortunate and artificial” division in the church between what he called “moral status conservatives” and “social justice liberals,” which means that both camps often fail to take “a comprehensive approach to the church’s moral resources.”
Making the case for unborn life by drawing upon the Catholic tradition of social teaching, Camosy said, could do a better job of getting social justice Catholics on board, and perhaps making the pro-life argument more persuasive to the broader world.
Yet analysts also caution that the church, if it pursues this line of argument, may face pressure to be candid about its own history. Throughout the centuries, historians note, both the Vatican and the American bishops generally upheld the morality of slavery in principle, even if they also vigorously denounced abuses in practice.
As late as 1866, in the middle of the Civil War in the United States and at a time when the abolitionist movement was fully formed, the Vatican’s doctrinal office issued an instruction stating, “Slavery itself, considered as such in its essential nature, is not at all contrary to the natural and divine law.” As is well known, ecclesiastical institutions in the United States and elsewhere often owned slaves.
To be sure, popes, bishops and theologians also frequently denounced slavery as it was actually conducted, especially racial slavery; in 1435, for example, Pope Eugene IV demanded that European colonizers stop enslaving native peoples in the Canary Islands. Those judgments were repeated in 1537 for what was then known as the “Indies,” and in 1686 for Africa.
Most theologians say the emphasis in Catholic teaching on a common human nature always pointed toward the conclusion reached by the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) in its document Gaudium et Spes, which denounced “imprisonment, deportation, slavery … the selling of women and children.”
Nonetheless, historians say, the Catholic church traveled something of a “learning curve” through the centuries on issues of slavery and racism. A clear acknowledgment of that reality, some suggest, might actually help the church push the broader society along a similar “learning curve” today with regard to new threats to human life and dignity.
December 16, 2008
“Memo to President Obama" by Joseph Schwartz, DSA Vice-Chair
For their January-February Tikkun magazine asked a number of liberal and left academics and activists to draft a “memo to President Obamma. Talking Union is proud to present this memo drafted by Democratic Socialist of America Vice-Chair Joseph Schwartz.
The impressive depth and breadth of your electoral victory, combined with Democratic gains in both the House and the Senate, provides the possibility of reversing three decades of growing inequality that is the primary cause of an impending depression. But to do so you will have to act boldly and quickly. As a constitutional law scholar, you realize that the system of checks and balances and separation of powers established by our founders consciously aimed to forestall rapid change. Thus, almost all the reforms we identify with the twentieth-century Democratic Party—Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act, the Civil Rights Acts, and Medicare—occurred in the periods 1935-1938 and 1964-1966, the only times when the Democrats controlled the presidency and had strong majorities in both chambers of Congress.
If upon taking office you lead with boldness, your administration could pass major legislation in regard to universal health care, massive investment in green technology, and labor law reform that would transform United States social relations for generations to come. But as a former community organizer you know that such reforms did not come from the top down; they arose because moderate elites made concessions to the movements of the unemployed and the CIO in the 1930s and to the Civil Rights, anti-war, women’s, and welfare rights movements of the 1960s. While your office cannot conjure up mass social movements, you can call your supporters to ongoing grassroots activism.
Even before taking office, you confront the most serious breakdown in the global economy since the Great Depression. Hopefully well before you take office, you and your Treasury Secretary nominee will push the lame-duck Congress to pass a massive stimulus package of at least $500 billion or $600 billion. Remind the American public that Ronald Reagan ran deficits equal to 7 percent of the GDP in 1981 and 1982 (or the equivalent of $680 billion today), in the face of a much less severe recession. In addition, press Congress to implement a major anti-foreclosure program (similar to FDR’s Home Loan Corporation), as the income stream from homeowner payments on refinanced, affordable mortgages should significantly increase the value of the “toxic assets” of “securitized mortgages.”
The stimulus package should include major government funding of job training in the inner cities (in green technologies, for example) and of opportunities for both GIs and displaced workers to return to university as full-time students (and for women on TANF to fulfill their “workfare” requirements through secondary and higher education pursuits). While affluent suburbs provide their residents superb public education and public services, federal cutbacks in aid to states and municipalities has worsened the life opportunities of inner city residents. Your election as the first African American president is of inestimable symbolic import; but its promise will be soured if your administration does nothing to address inner city poverty and the massive rise in the incarceration of young youth of color. Only federal funding of pre-K education and of after-school programs for vulnerable youth can begin to redress rampant educational inequalities.
We are in the midst of a global “liquidity crisis” in which banks will not lend capital out of fear that borrowers will not be able to pay them back. The mainstream media has not yet to comprehend that this crisis has everything to do with the massive growth in inequality of the past three decades. The policies of deregulation, privatization, and de-unionization (supported by both Democratic and Republican administration) led working and middle-class Americans to try to maintain their living standards by taking on massive consumer debt and borrowing against their home equity. Once the housing bubble collapsed, so did the purchasing power of American households. For three decades corporate America told our workforce that to be competitive they must compete with workers from Brazil to China. But as any Keynesian economist could have told the American public, eventually lower wages must lead to lower living standards.
The inefficient and inequitable United States health care system cries out for replacement by a universal and cost-efficient alternative. If private insurance administrative and advertising costs of 25 percent on the health care dollar could be reduced to Medicaid and Medicare’s 3 percent administrative overhead, we could achieve both universal and affordable coverage. While the power of the insurance lobby may preclude your backing a national single-payer bill, you must back progressive Democratic amendments for opt-out provisions from your “pay or play” system of private insurance. Such opt-outs would allow states to create their own single-payer systems, and allow Medicare or the federal employees health plan to market to employers as a lower-cost alternative to private group plans. But how to pay for all this? You should attempt to reverse not only the Bush tax cuts, but also the Reagan-era cuts in marginal rates on high-income earners (approximately $300 billion in revenues, each). In addition, abolishing the 15 percent tax rate on hedge fund and private equity managers’ earnings could garner another $100 billion in annual revenues. Ending the war in Iraq should save $100 billion per annum; a one-third cutback in United States military bases abroad and an end to Cold War era plans to build a next generation of fighters and an anti-ballistic missile defense could save $216 billion in federal revenue per year.
The military budget is hideously oversized for a nation that claims armaments are necessary for defense, and not defense of empire. One fights terrorism by intelligence and espionage cooperation among states and via a multilateral diplomatic strategy that provides hope for the billions who still live under authoritarian governments and in extreme poverty. Your call to send more United States troops to Afghanistan ignores the lessons of the Soviet experience. Foreign military presence only transforms the forces of Islamic fundamentalism into national resistance fighters.
When the Ponzi scheme of “securitized mortgages” collapsed with the end of the irrational run-up in housing prices, the federal government had to bail out Bear Stearns, then Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and then AIG. American capitalism has privatized gain, but socialized risk. Yet if risk is to be socialized, then so should investments. Your administration should not only demand equity shares in the banks and corporations that are bailed out by the public treasury, but should also require that consumer, worker, and government representatives be added to the board of directors of corporations receiving government aid. And you must stick to your goal of re-regulating the finance industry so that it serves the interest of the productive economy and not those of unrestrained speculators.
A “new New Deal” would have to restructure international economic institutions so that they raise up international labor, living, human rights, and environmental standards. In large part you owe your victory in the key battleground states of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and Pennsylvania to the efforts of one of the few integrated institutions in the United States—the American labor movement. Restoring the right to organize unions (which de facto no longer exists in the United States) is a key policy component in the battle against economic inequality. Given the already massive corporate and media offensive already launched against the Employee Free Choice Act, you will have to place the entire prestige of your office behind the legislation. You must explain to the American public that NLRB elections are not “free”—not when management requires workers to attend anti-union meetings and when management fires pro-union workers with impunity.
Your victory by no means guarantees the bold policy initiatives necessary to restoring equity with growth to the United States economy. Your campaign did not advocate major defense cuts, progressive tax reform, and significant expansion of public provision. But FDR did not campaign on bold solutions in 1932. It was pressure from below that forced FDR’s hand. Similarly your victory may provide space for social movements to agitate in favor of economic justice and a democratic foreign policy. But as a president who understands the process of social change, I trust that you will understand that those demanding the most from your administration are those who can best help you succeed in office.
Joseph M. Schwartz teaches politics at Temple University and is the author, most recently, of The Future of Democratic Equality. He is a national vice-chair of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
The impressive depth and breadth of your electoral victory, combined with Democratic gains in both the House and the Senate, provides the possibility of reversing three decades of growing inequality that is the primary cause of an impending depression. But to do so you will have to act boldly and quickly. As a constitutional law scholar, you realize that the system of checks and balances and separation of powers established by our founders consciously aimed to forestall rapid change. Thus, almost all the reforms we identify with the twentieth-century Democratic Party—Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act, the Civil Rights Acts, and Medicare—occurred in the periods 1935-1938 and 1964-1966, the only times when the Democrats controlled the presidency and had strong majorities in both chambers of Congress.
If upon taking office you lead with boldness, your administration could pass major legislation in regard to universal health care, massive investment in green technology, and labor law reform that would transform United States social relations for generations to come. But as a former community organizer you know that such reforms did not come from the top down; they arose because moderate elites made concessions to the movements of the unemployed and the CIO in the 1930s and to the Civil Rights, anti-war, women’s, and welfare rights movements of the 1960s. While your office cannot conjure up mass social movements, you can call your supporters to ongoing grassroots activism.
Even before taking office, you confront the most serious breakdown in the global economy since the Great Depression. Hopefully well before you take office, you and your Treasury Secretary nominee will push the lame-duck Congress to pass a massive stimulus package of at least $500 billion or $600 billion. Remind the American public that Ronald Reagan ran deficits equal to 7 percent of the GDP in 1981 and 1982 (or the equivalent of $680 billion today), in the face of a much less severe recession. In addition, press Congress to implement a major anti-foreclosure program (similar to FDR’s Home Loan Corporation), as the income stream from homeowner payments on refinanced, affordable mortgages should significantly increase the value of the “toxic assets” of “securitized mortgages.”
The stimulus package should include major government funding of job training in the inner cities (in green technologies, for example) and of opportunities for both GIs and displaced workers to return to university as full-time students (and for women on TANF to fulfill their “workfare” requirements through secondary and higher education pursuits). While affluent suburbs provide their residents superb public education and public services, federal cutbacks in aid to states and municipalities has worsened the life opportunities of inner city residents. Your election as the first African American president is of inestimable symbolic import; but its promise will be soured if your administration does nothing to address inner city poverty and the massive rise in the incarceration of young youth of color. Only federal funding of pre-K education and of after-school programs for vulnerable youth can begin to redress rampant educational inequalities.
We are in the midst of a global “liquidity crisis” in which banks will not lend capital out of fear that borrowers will not be able to pay them back. The mainstream media has not yet to comprehend that this crisis has everything to do with the massive growth in inequality of the past three decades. The policies of deregulation, privatization, and de-unionization (supported by both Democratic and Republican administration) led working and middle-class Americans to try to maintain their living standards by taking on massive consumer debt and borrowing against their home equity. Once the housing bubble collapsed, so did the purchasing power of American households. For three decades corporate America told our workforce that to be competitive they must compete with workers from Brazil to China. But as any Keynesian economist could have told the American public, eventually lower wages must lead to lower living standards.
The inefficient and inequitable United States health care system cries out for replacement by a universal and cost-efficient alternative. If private insurance administrative and advertising costs of 25 percent on the health care dollar could be reduced to Medicaid and Medicare’s 3 percent administrative overhead, we could achieve both universal and affordable coverage. While the power of the insurance lobby may preclude your backing a national single-payer bill, you must back progressive Democratic amendments for opt-out provisions from your “pay or play” system of private insurance. Such opt-outs would allow states to create their own single-payer systems, and allow Medicare or the federal employees health plan to market to employers as a lower-cost alternative to private group plans. But how to pay for all this? You should attempt to reverse not only the Bush tax cuts, but also the Reagan-era cuts in marginal rates on high-income earners (approximately $300 billion in revenues, each). In addition, abolishing the 15 percent tax rate on hedge fund and private equity managers’ earnings could garner another $100 billion in annual revenues. Ending the war in Iraq should save $100 billion per annum; a one-third cutback in United States military bases abroad and an end to Cold War era plans to build a next generation of fighters and an anti-ballistic missile defense could save $216 billion in federal revenue per year.
The military budget is hideously oversized for a nation that claims armaments are necessary for defense, and not defense of empire. One fights terrorism by intelligence and espionage cooperation among states and via a multilateral diplomatic strategy that provides hope for the billions who still live under authoritarian governments and in extreme poverty. Your call to send more United States troops to Afghanistan ignores the lessons of the Soviet experience. Foreign military presence only transforms the forces of Islamic fundamentalism into national resistance fighters.
When the Ponzi scheme of “securitized mortgages” collapsed with the end of the irrational run-up in housing prices, the federal government had to bail out Bear Stearns, then Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and then AIG. American capitalism has privatized gain, but socialized risk. Yet if risk is to be socialized, then so should investments. Your administration should not only demand equity shares in the banks and corporations that are bailed out by the public treasury, but should also require that consumer, worker, and government representatives be added to the board of directors of corporations receiving government aid. And you must stick to your goal of re-regulating the finance industry so that it serves the interest of the productive economy and not those of unrestrained speculators.
A “new New Deal” would have to restructure international economic institutions so that they raise up international labor, living, human rights, and environmental standards. In large part you owe your victory in the key battleground states of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and Pennsylvania to the efforts of one of the few integrated institutions in the United States—the American labor movement. Restoring the right to organize unions (which de facto no longer exists in the United States) is a key policy component in the battle against economic inequality. Given the already massive corporate and media offensive already launched against the Employee Free Choice Act, you will have to place the entire prestige of your office behind the legislation. You must explain to the American public that NLRB elections are not “free”—not when management requires workers to attend anti-union meetings and when management fires pro-union workers with impunity.
Your victory by no means guarantees the bold policy initiatives necessary to restoring equity with growth to the United States economy. Your campaign did not advocate major defense cuts, progressive tax reform, and significant expansion of public provision. But FDR did not campaign on bold solutions in 1932. It was pressure from below that forced FDR’s hand. Similarly your victory may provide space for social movements to agitate in favor of economic justice and a democratic foreign policy. But as a president who understands the process of social change, I trust that you will understand that those demanding the most from your administration are those who can best help you succeed in office.
Joseph M. Schwartz teaches politics at Temple University and is the author, most recently, of The Future of Democratic Equality. He is a national vice-chair of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
A Letter to a Comrade:Religion for the Mature, by Andrew W Taylor
Dear S.,
There is no doubt much religion is at the fetishistic and infantile level, but some religion penetrates to the deepest inward level of self-purification and a call to action,-- for example, Winstanley The Digger's communist 'Reason Mysticism' which unfolded in the English Revolution. This type of "experimental" [experiential] religion, included a detailed theoretical illumination, and caused Gerrard Winstanley to believe that private property was exploitative, was "the curse of Adam".
A problem I encounter in teaching Religion and Cultural Topics is that I often have a room full of students who having dispensed with/or retained their Sunday School/Catechism religiosity lack a passionate curiousity about the field of study.
With both the irreligious and religious student it is very tempting to "smash the religious idols" and suggest that a period of atheism might cleanse the kids minds and permit them to truly accept or reject religion for ever! I understand the "away with all gods" call: In Buddhism, there is the saying "if you meet the Buddha kill him" and St. Benedict the Founder of Western Monasticism commanded his monks to destroy their images(because no one and no thing is the Ultimate).
Are not socialism and communism themselves a kind of horizon that are currently a "thing unseen", a dialectical breakthrough which we glimpse? The world we see and suffer under is not good enough: we must make it better! The pathetic human imaginings and certainties we won't let go are our Golden Calf!
Thanks for writing,
Andrew W Taylor
There is no doubt much religion is at the fetishistic and infantile level, but some religion penetrates to the deepest inward level of self-purification and a call to action,-- for example, Winstanley The Digger's communist 'Reason Mysticism' which unfolded in the English Revolution. This type of "experimental" [experiential] religion, included a detailed theoretical illumination, and caused Gerrard Winstanley to believe that private property was exploitative, was "the curse of Adam".
A problem I encounter in teaching Religion and Cultural Topics is that I often have a room full of students who having dispensed with/or retained their Sunday School/Catechism religiosity lack a passionate curiousity about the field of study.
With both the irreligious and religious student it is very tempting to "smash the religious idols" and suggest that a period of atheism might cleanse the kids minds and permit them to truly accept or reject religion for ever! I understand the "away with all gods" call: In Buddhism, there is the saying "if you meet the Buddha kill him" and St. Benedict the Founder of Western Monasticism commanded his monks to destroy their images(because no one and no thing is the Ultimate).
Are not socialism and communism themselves a kind of horizon that are currently a "thing unseen", a dialectical breakthrough which we glimpse? The world we see and suffer under is not good enough: we must make it better! The pathetic human imaginings and certainties we won't let go are our Golden Calf!
Thanks for writing,
Andrew W Taylor
Old Man's Song (Ian Campbell)
At the turning of the century I was a boy of five
My father went to fight the Boers and never came back alive
My mother left to bring us up no charity would seek
So she washed and scrubbed and brought us up on 7/6 a week
When I was twelve I left the school and went to find a job
With growin' kids my ma was glad of the extra couple of bob
I know that better schooling would have stood me in good stead
But you can't afford refinements when you're struggling for your bread
And when the Great War came along I didn't hesitate
I took the royal shilling and went off to do my bit
I fought in mud and tears and blood three years or thereabout
Then I copped some gas in Flanders and was invalided out
And when the war was over and we'd finished with the guns
I got back into civvies and I thought the fighting done
I'd won the right to live in peace but I didn't have no luck
For soon I found I had to fight for the right to go to work
In 'twenty-six the General Strike found me out on the street
For I'd a wife and kids by then and their needs I couldn't meet
But a brave new world was coming and the brotherhood of man
But when the strike was over we were back where we began
I struggled through the 'Thirties out of work now and again
I saw the Black Shirts marching and the things they did in Spain
But I raised my children decent and I taught them wrong from right
Then Hitler was the lad that came and showed them how to fight
My daughter was a land girl, she got married tae a Yank
They gave my son a gong for stopping one of Rommel's tanks
He was wounded just before the end and convalesced in Rome
Married an Eyetye nurse and never bothered to come home
My daughter writes me once a month a cheerful little note
About their colour telly and the other things they've got
She has a son, a likely lad, he's nearly twenty-one
Now she says they've called him up to fight in Vietnam
We're living on the Pension now and it doesn't go too far
Not much to show for a life that seems like one long bloody war
When you think of all the wasted lives it makes you want to cry
I don't know how to change things but by Christ we'll have tae try
(as sung by Iain MacKintosh)
Tune: Nicky Tams
My father went to fight the Boers and never came back alive
My mother left to bring us up no charity would seek
So she washed and scrubbed and brought us up on 7/6 a week
When I was twelve I left the school and went to find a job
With growin' kids my ma was glad of the extra couple of bob
I know that better schooling would have stood me in good stead
But you can't afford refinements when you're struggling for your bread
And when the Great War came along I didn't hesitate
I took the royal shilling and went off to do my bit
I fought in mud and tears and blood three years or thereabout
Then I copped some gas in Flanders and was invalided out
And when the war was over and we'd finished with the guns
I got back into civvies and I thought the fighting done
I'd won the right to live in peace but I didn't have no luck
For soon I found I had to fight for the right to go to work
In 'twenty-six the General Strike found me out on the street
For I'd a wife and kids by then and their needs I couldn't meet
But a brave new world was coming and the brotherhood of man
But when the strike was over we were back where we began
I struggled through the 'Thirties out of work now and again
I saw the Black Shirts marching and the things they did in Spain
But I raised my children decent and I taught them wrong from right
Then Hitler was the lad that came and showed them how to fight
My daughter was a land girl, she got married tae a Yank
They gave my son a gong for stopping one of Rommel's tanks
He was wounded just before the end and convalesced in Rome
Married an Eyetye nurse and never bothered to come home
My daughter writes me once a month a cheerful little note
About their colour telly and the other things they've got
She has a son, a likely lad, he's nearly twenty-one
Now she says they've called him up to fight in Vietnam
We're living on the Pension now and it doesn't go too far
Not much to show for a life that seems like one long bloody war
When you think of all the wasted lives it makes you want to cry
I don't know how to change things but by Christ we'll have tae try
(as sung by Iain MacKintosh)
Tune: Nicky Tams
December 15, 2008
"Middle-Man - 1400 A.D". By Peter Maurin
1. Around 1400 A.D.
appears the middle-man.
2. He offers to buy the goods
and to find a market.
3. The guild's man
thinks about the money
offered for his goods
and forgets the Common Good.
4. And the middle-man
is not interested
in selling useful goods
but in making money
on any kind of goods.
5. And the consumer
never meets the producer
and the producer
ceases to think
in terms of service
and begins to think
in terms of profits.
appears the middle-man.
2. He offers to buy the goods
and to find a market.
3. The guild's man
thinks about the money
offered for his goods
and forgets the Common Good.
4. And the middle-man
is not interested
in selling useful goods
but in making money
on any kind of goods.
5. And the consumer
never meets the producer
and the producer
ceases to think
in terms of service
and begins to think
in terms of profits.
The Logic of Keynes in Today's World, by Robert Reich
Monday, December 15, 2008
Not long ago I was talking to someone who once had been a deficit hawk but the current recession had turned into a full-blooded Keynesian. He wanted a stimulus package in the range of $500 to $700 billion. "Consumers are dead in the water," he said, fervently, "so government has to step in." I agreed. But I didn’t tell him his traditional Keynesianism is based on two highly-questionable assumptions in today’s world, and the underlying logic of Keyenes leads us toward something bigger and more permanent than he has in mind.
The first assumption is that American consumers will eventually regain the purchasing power needed to keep the economy going full tilt. That seems doubtful. Median incomes dropped during the last recovery, adjusted for inflation, and even at the start weren’t much higher than they were in the 1970s. Middle-class families continued to spend at a healthy clip over the last thirty years despite this because women went into paid work, everyone started working longer hours, and then, when these tactics gave out, went deeper and deeper into debt. This indebtedness, in turn, depended on rising home values, which generated hundreds of billions of dollars in home equity loans and refinanced mortgages. But now that the housing bubble has burst, the spending has ended. Families cannot work more hours than they did before, and won’t be able to borrow as much, either.
The second assumption is that, even if Americans had the money to keep spending as before, they could do so forever. Yet only the most myopic adherent of free-market capitalism could believe this to be true. The social and environmental costs would soon overwhelm us. Even if climate change were not an imminent threat to the planet, the rest of the world will not allow American consumers to continue to use up a quarter of the planet’s natural resources and generate an even larger share of its toxic wastes and pollutants.
This would be a problem if most of what we consumed during our big-spending years were bare necessities. But much was just stuff. And surely there are limits to how many furnishings and appliances can be crammed into a home, how many hours can be filled manipulating digital devices, and how much happiness can be wrung out of commercial entertainment.
The current recession is a nightmare for people who have lost their jobs, homes, and savings; and it’s part of a continuing nightmare for the poor. That’s why we have to do all we can to get the economy back on track. But most other Americans are now discovering they can exist surprisingly well buying fewer of the things they never really needed to begin with.
What we most lack, or are in danger of losing, are the things we use in common – clean air, clean water, public parks, good schools, and public transportation, as well as social safety nets to catch those of us who fall. Common goods like these don’t necessarily use up scarce resources; often, they conserve and protect them.
Yet they have been declining for many years. Some have been broken up and sold as more expensive private goods, especially for the well-to do – bottled water, private schools, security guards, and health clubs, for example. Others, like clean air, have fallen prey to deregulation. Others have been wacked by budget axes; the current recession is forcing states and locales to axe even more. Still others, such as universal health care and pre-schools, never fully emerged to begin with.
Where does this logic lead? Given the implausibility of consumers being able to return to the same level of personal spending as before, along with the undesirability of our doing so even if we could, and the growing scarcity of common goods, there would seem only one sensible way to restore and maintain aggregate demand. That would be through government expenditure on the commons. Rather than a temporary stimulus, government would permanently fill the gap left by consumers who cannot and should not be expected to resume their old spending ways. This wouldn’t require permanent deficits as long as, once economic growth returns, revenues from a progressive income tax refill the coffers.
My friend the born-again Keynesian might not like where the logic of Keynesianism leads in today’s world, but the rest of us might take heart.
Not long ago I was talking to someone who once had been a deficit hawk but the current recession had turned into a full-blooded Keynesian. He wanted a stimulus package in the range of $500 to $700 billion. "Consumers are dead in the water," he said, fervently, "so government has to step in." I agreed. But I didn’t tell him his traditional Keynesianism is based on two highly-questionable assumptions in today’s world, and the underlying logic of Keyenes leads us toward something bigger and more permanent than he has in mind.
The first assumption is that American consumers will eventually regain the purchasing power needed to keep the economy going full tilt. That seems doubtful. Median incomes dropped during the last recovery, adjusted for inflation, and even at the start weren’t much higher than they were in the 1970s. Middle-class families continued to spend at a healthy clip over the last thirty years despite this because women went into paid work, everyone started working longer hours, and then, when these tactics gave out, went deeper and deeper into debt. This indebtedness, in turn, depended on rising home values, which generated hundreds of billions of dollars in home equity loans and refinanced mortgages. But now that the housing bubble has burst, the spending has ended. Families cannot work more hours than they did before, and won’t be able to borrow as much, either.
The second assumption is that, even if Americans had the money to keep spending as before, they could do so forever. Yet only the most myopic adherent of free-market capitalism could believe this to be true. The social and environmental costs would soon overwhelm us. Even if climate change were not an imminent threat to the planet, the rest of the world will not allow American consumers to continue to use up a quarter of the planet’s natural resources and generate an even larger share of its toxic wastes and pollutants.
This would be a problem if most of what we consumed during our big-spending years were bare necessities. But much was just stuff. And surely there are limits to how many furnishings and appliances can be crammed into a home, how many hours can be filled manipulating digital devices, and how much happiness can be wrung out of commercial entertainment.
The current recession is a nightmare for people who have lost their jobs, homes, and savings; and it’s part of a continuing nightmare for the poor. That’s why we have to do all we can to get the economy back on track. But most other Americans are now discovering they can exist surprisingly well buying fewer of the things they never really needed to begin with.
What we most lack, or are in danger of losing, are the things we use in common – clean air, clean water, public parks, good schools, and public transportation, as well as social safety nets to catch those of us who fall. Common goods like these don’t necessarily use up scarce resources; often, they conserve and protect them.
Yet they have been declining for many years. Some have been broken up and sold as more expensive private goods, especially for the well-to do – bottled water, private schools, security guards, and health clubs, for example. Others, like clean air, have fallen prey to deregulation. Others have been wacked by budget axes; the current recession is forcing states and locales to axe even more. Still others, such as universal health care and pre-schools, never fully emerged to begin with.
Where does this logic lead? Given the implausibility of consumers being able to return to the same level of personal spending as before, along with the undesirability of our doing so even if we could, and the growing scarcity of common goods, there would seem only one sensible way to restore and maintain aggregate demand. That would be through government expenditure on the commons. Rather than a temporary stimulus, government would permanently fill the gap left by consumers who cannot and should not be expected to resume their old spending ways. This wouldn’t require permanent deficits as long as, once economic growth returns, revenues from a progressive income tax refill the coffers.
My friend the born-again Keynesian might not like where the logic of Keynesianism leads in today’s world, but the rest of us might take heart.
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