President Barack Obama – one month in, it’s still hard to ponder that reality without some tingle of wonderment – took the stage February 24 for the annual presidential address to Congress amidst considerable background noise, writes David Finkel.
Up front is the rapturous applause from Democrats and, for that matter, a large majority of the population. From the right, the braying of the Republicans who voted almost unanimously against the emergency stimulus legislation, and the really septic chorus rising from the cesspool depths of hate-mongering talk radio and the New York Post. From the left, sadly, near-silence and a few hints of muted disappointment. In the background one can hear the ominous guns of Afghanistan, now becoming Obama’s war as hopeless as Bush’s adventures were, and listen carefully – there’s that unmistakable crash of yet another investment bank…
The delivery of Obama’s message was as always superb, his grasp of facts masterful and his command of language (after eight years of Bush) brilliant. The substance is, shall we say, somewhat oracular. To some extent it has to be: The public generally and correctly despises the idea of “bailing out the bankers and Big Three fatcats,” but also knows that swift and large-scale action is needed to prevent a complete financial and manufacturing collapse. That’s why they elected Barack Obama and not John (“I don’t know much about economics”) McCain.
Because of the reality of Obama’s politics – he’s a centrist corporate Democrat, although lacking the Clintonian cynicism of politicians who have spent decades occupying that squalid space – and because of the near-vacuum on the left, the argument for the rational and democratic solution is absent. That solution is nationalization with workers’ control of basic industry, allowing for a genuine transformation of production and priorities not bound by the short-term profit imperative. Incredibly, a case for “temporary” bank nationalizations is coming forward – from people like Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, and free-market fanatic Alan Greenspan, who probably understand although they’re afraid to reveal what they know about how catastrophic the banking meltdown really is.
Ruling out the swift, decisive and massive emergency action of the “New New Deal” that the “Progressives for Obama” fantasized about, the administration and Congressional Democrats without any Republican assistance are left to a series of pragmatic attempts at injecting stimulus funding – pump, pray, repeat as necessary. This seems particularly true in the Treasury’s fumbling approach to the banking and credit debacle. The danger here is that measures like the $800 billion rescue may be too small and lacking in coherence to work – in which case there’s not only the danger of economic Depression, but deficits on a scale that ultimately cause a truly catastrophic run on the dollar.
Then there’s the “sacrifice by all” mantra. Is Barack Obama getting ready to introduce what Bush couldn’t, the shredding of Social Security (what European readers know as the government old-age pension system) in the name of preserving solvency? Will his credibility be placed at the service of a disastrous escalation of the war in Afghanistan and a confrontation with Iran? Will the promise to the unions of the Employee Free Choice Act – a law to prevent employers’ from crushing union organizing in the bud – be broken in favor of “competitive labor costs”? These are among numerous open questions surrounding this new political dispensation.
Lest the above discussion suggest serious disillusionment with Barack Obama, let me hasten to say that this writer, for one, is not disillusioned or disappointed at all. Obama is not some kind of posturing fake radical. His promise of “change” wasn’t for some sweeping transformation; it was for “overcoming partisan divisions.” Obama said in essence that he’d appoint a centrist war cabinet, and he’s done it. He said he’d appeal for bipartisan support to the stimulus and share the credit for it, and it’s not his fault the Republicans kicked him in the teeth and pulled back their own Senator Judd Gregg from taking the Commerce Secretary post.
Nor is Barack Obama’s mass support likely to evaporate anytime soon. Certainly African Americans will stand behind him even more strongly as the rightwing attacks mount. But more than that, people who poured out to vote for Obama know he inherited this disaster from the Republicans who ran the economy into the ground and lied about it. Obama gets huge credit for telling the truth about the crisis, or at least a whole lot more of the truth than his predecessor did.
What people don’t know – and it’s the job of the left, not Obama, to explain it – is that this is inherently a crisis of capitalism as a system, and cannot be resolved within its boundaries.
One other point needs to be covered here. On that historic morning of January 20, 2009, as Barack Obama took his oath of office, the sounds of Israel’s massacre in Gaza – the white phosphorus with the made-in-USA markings that burned people alive from the inside, the new “DIME” weapons that efficiently tear multiple limbs from the victims, the bombs that hit the hospitals and schools with patients and students inside and the UN food and medical warehouse – had fallen silent. No doubt the message had been sent from the Obama team, and received in Tel Aviv, that the inauguration was not to be upstaged by continuing this carnage.
Whether this may signal at least some tactical shift in U.S. Middle East policy is another one of those open questions. Obama has appointed George Mitchell as his “Middle East envoy.” What can be said of Mitchell is at least that he’s not Hillary Clinton or Dennis Ross. While readers of Socialist Resistance will be most familiar with his role in the Northern Ireland accords, Americans know him best from his more recent assignment investigating the use of performance-enhancing drugs in professional baseball – given which experience, he could undertake to test Israeli soldiers for signs of steroid rage.
Sarcasm aside, to some degree the international wave of revulsion against the Israeli state’s crimes against humanity, and the groundswell of support even in the USA for sanctions and divestment, may make a difference. Again it’s our job to organize that sentiment from the ground up. Waiting for the Obama honeymoon to end – which may be quite some time – is neither constructive nor an affordable luxury.
David Finkel is managing editor of Against the Current, published in the crisis-ridden city of Detroit and sponsored by the U.S. socialist organization Solidarity (www.solidarity-us.org).
5 Comments
Rather than unwarranted potshots at ‘Progressives for Obama’, it seems, as an eco-socialist, you’d do better to take stock of the green industrial policy Obama has outlined, with its Green Jobs component, point our its weaknesses, obvious and not-so-obvious, then lay out the battle we need to wage to get it implemented at the base so it does the most good for the right folks.
That’s what the left, green and otherwise, has on its plate. Time to take up the task
Hi Carl, your suggestion is that we should lay out how to get Obama’s plan implemented. Is there no space for the viewpoint that Obama’s plan is in the interests of profiteering capitalists, rather than those of working people and the planet? A real green plan would involve stopping the US war machine, withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, and turning unneeded auto plants over to the production of socially-needed things like insulation and triple-glazed windows to help reduce the soaring energy bills of the poorest people. Obama’s plan focuses on how to produce more energy, but of the renewable type. In fact we need to reduce the consumption of energy – and most of that means rolling out already-known solutions rather than developing new technologies.
Frankly, any viewpoint can be put out, but the one you capsulize here is mostly useless. It’s fine on ending the wars and cutting defense spending, but we need to create millions of Green Jobs. There’s no way to do that without allying with Green businesses–small, medium and large–in the short run, for sure, and in the mid-range as well. We can work for worker-owned coops within that effort, but to bring this to scale, we also need some green capitalists. The main immediate enemy remains low-road speculative capital that created this mess, but there’s a segment of the business community we need to work with and grow. There’s no other serious way to expand employment of the scale required. And don’t say ‘government’ should hire, because government simply finds a local contracting business to do the work, and you’re back to square one. The military engages in construction projects, but I don’t think we want to go that direction. As for growth, we need to curb and reduce the production of junk, but we need real growth in real wealth production to meet the needs of people here and elsewhere. Unless you’re a ‘deep ecologist’ who wants to shrink the human population, but I wouldn’t advise going there either.
Hi Carl,
The planet is, perhaps, 100 months away from irreversible climate change (according to, amongst others, the New Economics Foundation). Our task is more complex than avoiding recession in the US by creating green jobs; we have to dramatically alter production and consumption on the whole planet. Looking at the world economy as a whole, we need to produce less CO2. The priority isn’t ‘wealth production’; creating more wealthy people won’t reduce the production of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. We need the rapid transformation of the energy, housing, health and military systems in the US and elsewhere.
Small businesses and market mechanism cannot do that quickly enough. In particular, businesses won’t do anything that’s less profitable than putting the money in the bank. Activities with a long time to ‘return on investment’ or a low rate of return cannot be done by small businesses. In particular, in the US there’s a massively ineffective system for the generation and distribution of electricity. However, it is far, far cheaper for a quarter of energy to be lost in distribution than it is for the rebuilding of a new network. Outside of a huge population centre with a strong Green party (California) we don’t see anywhere in the US with renewable energy levels. In California, it’s only government action – through grass-roots struggles to enforce quotas for renewables – that has produced that.
Curbing the US military has to be central to a green plan. Half of the world’s military spending is by the US, and much of the other half is made in competition with the US. In constant dollars, US military spending is now higher than in the cold war, even higher than when the Vietnam war was at its peak. That machine consumes huge amounts of fossil fuels, and US military strategy is focussed on oil-producing countries. If you look at where US military spending is increasing the most – amphibious docks, carriers, the Growler, the Littoral – the emphasis is on asserting ‘hands-on’ control.
We cannot continue to grow the GDP; we have to reallocate resources on a massive scale. In the US, where 70% of electricity comes from gas and coal, we need to turn power into a public good because only a single national plan can have enough resources to dramatically turn the economy in a green direction.
Your idea of generating wealth is mistaken.
It’s converting old mills to build wind turbines
It’s modernizing locks and dams so wind turbines can be shipped on water rather than mainly on highways
It’s hiring an army of unemployed youth to use a million caulking guns with new green job skills to green energize homes and businesses.
It’s any number of ‘high design’ alternative products that use fewer resources, both it their production and in their consumption.
If you don’t harness the dynamism of the market, whether private or public ownership, or both, you’ll accomplish little that would help in 200 months, like alone 100, even it you posit a draconian fastasy with a Pol Pot-Chiang Ching-Kim Il Sung form or rule.
If your plan is politically impossible in this time frame, what good is it? Better to tell us to buy our guns, get our survivalist gear and head for the hills.