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The Obama Illusion?
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TheBlackList CULLECTION
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Feb 09, 2007 04:47 PST
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Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2007 15:51:24 -0500 (EST)
From: ny-@olm.blythe-systems.com
Subject: [NYTr] The Obama Illusion
To: ny-@olm.blythe-systems.com (NY Transfer List)
Message-ID: <200702082051.l18KpO5b044802@viola.tamara-b.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
sent by Carol <rad-@ix.netcom.com> - activ-l
[Compare this to Amy Goodman's embarassingly insubstantial interview
(love-fest?) - almost exclusively focused on race rather than Obama's
positions on the issues - with two Obama sympathizers on Democracy Now,
2/6/2007 http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/06/1531215 (listen
&/or read transcript). -Carol]
ZNet - February, 2007
http://zmagsite.zmag.org/Feb2007/street0207.html
The Obama Illusion: Presidential ambitions from the start
By Paul Street
Long before any formal announcement (I'm writing this in early January), it
was obvious that overnight sensation Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) wanted to
be the U.S.'s next chief executive. The "charismatic" Obama was campaigning
by at least November 2005, less than a year out of the Illinois state
legislature. During 2006, Obama gave grave and "realistic" foreign policy
speeches and made appearances on the "Tonight Show," "Meet the Press," "Late
Night With Conan O'Brien," the covers and/or pages of Time, Men's Vogue,
Marie Claire, Vanity Fair, and Washington Life. He appeared at the early
political proving grounds of Iowa and New Hampshire. He reached across
political and cultural lines-making a special point of talking to the
religious right. He released a self-promotional book (deceptively titled The
Audacity of Hope) that screamed presidential ambition beneath false humility
and ponderous, power-worshipping prose. He received the praise, money,
positive media attention, and public recognition that a serious presidential
run requires. His campaign fundraising Midas touch became a factor in the
mid-term Congressional elections. The significance of his ambition and
ever-rising stature is enhanced by the fact that the Democrats' presumed
frontrunner, Hilary Clinton, is seen by many election experts and brokers as
unelectable.
If the Democrats' candidate in 2008 is Obama, we can be sure that the
right-wing Republican noise machine will denounce the nation's potential
first non-white male president as a dangerous "leftist." The charge will be
absurd, something that will hardly stop numerous people on the portside of
the narrow U.S. political spectrum from claiming Obama as a fellow
"progressive" Certain to be encouraged by Obama and his handlers, this
confusion will reflect the desperation and myopia that shaky thinking and
the limited choices of the U.S. electoral system regularly instill in
liberals and some squishy near leftists.
So what sorts of policies and values could one expect from an imagined Obama
presidency? There is quite a bit already in Obama's short national career
that has to be placed in the "never mind" category if one is to seriously to
believe his claim (cautiously advanced in The Audacity of Hope) to be a
"progressive" concerned with "social and economic justice" and global peace.
Never Mind Never mind, for example, that Obama was recently hailed as a
"Hamiltonian" believer in "limited government" and "free trade" by
Republican New York Times columnist David Brooks, who praises Obama for
having "a mentality formed by globalization, not the SDS." Or that he had to
be shamed off the "New Democrat Directory" of the corporate-right Democratic
Leadership Council (DLC) by the popular left black Internet magazine Black
Commentator (Bruce Dixon, "Obama to Have Name Removed From DLC List," Black
Commentator, June 26, 2003).
Never mind that Obama (consistent with Brooks's description of him) has lent
his support to the aptly named Hamilton Project, formed by
corporate-neoliberal Citigroup chair Robert Rubin and "other Wall Street
Democrats" to counter populist rebellion against corporatist tendencies
within the Democratic Party (David Sirota, "Mr. Obama Goes to Washington,"
the Nation, June 26). Or that he lent his politically influential and
financially rewarding assistance to neoconservative pro-war Senator Joe
Lieberman's ("D"-CT) struggle against the Democratic antiwar insurgent Ned
Lamont. Or that Obama has supported other "mainstream Democrats" fighting
antiwar progressives in primary races (see Alexander Cockburn, "Obama's
Game," the Nation, April 24, 2006). Or that he criticized efforts to enact
filibuster proceedings against reactionary Supreme Court Justice Samuel
Alito.
Never mind that Obama "dismissively" referred-in a "tone laced with
contempt"-to the late progressive and populist U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone
as "something of a gadfly." Or that he chose the neoconservative Lieberman
to be his "assigned" mentor in the U.S. Senate. Or that "he posted a long
article on the liberal blog Daily Kos criticizing attacks against lawmakers
who voted for right-wing Supreme Court nominee John Roberts." Or that he
opposed an amendment to the Bankruptcy Act that would have capped credit
card interest rates at 30 percent. Or that he told Time Magazine's Joe Klein
last year that he'd never given any thought to Al Gore's widely discussed
proposal to link a "carbon tax" on fossil fuels to targeted tax relief for
the nation's millions of working poor (Joe Klein, "The Fresh Face," Time,
October 17,2006).
Never mind that Obama voted for a business-friendly "tort reform" bill that
rolls back working peoples' ability to obtain reasonable redress and
compensation from misbehaving corporations (Cockburn; Sirota). Or that Obama
claims to oppose the introduction of single-payer national health insurance
on the grounds that such a widely supported social-democratic change would
lead to employment difficulties for workers in the private insurance
industry-at places like Kaiser and Blue Cross Blue Shield (Sirota). Does
Obama support the American scourge of racially disparate mass incarceration
on the grounds that it provides work for tens of thousands of prison guards?
Should the U.S. maintain the illegal operation of Iraq and pour half its
federal budget into "defense" because of all the soldiers and other workers
that find employment in imperial wars and the military-industrial complex?
Does the "progressive" senator really need to be reminded of the large
number of socially useful and healthy alternatives that exist for the
investment of human labor power at home and abroad-wetlands preservation,
urban ecological retrofitting, drug counseling, teaching, infrastructure
building and repair, safe and affordable housing construction, the building
of windmills and solar power facilities, etc. ?
In an interview with Klein, Obama expressed reservations about a universal
health insurance plan recently enacted in Massachusetts, stating his
preference for "voluntary" solutions over "government mandates." The former,
he said, is "more consonant with" what he called "the American character"-a
position contradicted by regular polling data showing that most Americans
support Canadian-style single-payer health insurance.
Never mind that Obama voted to re-authorize the repressive PATRIOT Act. Or
that he voted for the appointment of the war criminal Condaleeza Rice to (of
all things) Secretary of State. Or that he opposed Senator Russ Feingold's
(D-WI) move to censure the Bush administration after the president was found
to have illegally wiretapped U.S. citizens. Or that he shamefully distanced
himself from fellow Illinois Democratic Senator Dick Durbin's forthright
criticism of U.S. torture practices at Guantanamo. Or that he refuses to
foreswear the use of first-strike nuclear weapons against Iran.
Never mind that Obama makes a big point of respectfully listening to key
parts of the right wing agenda even though that agenda is well outside
majority sentiment (Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Off Center: the
Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy). Or that he
joins victim-blaming Republicans in pointing to poor blacks' "cultural"
issues as the cause of concentrated black poverty (Obama, The Audacity of
Hope)-not the multiple, well-documented, and interrelated structures,
practices and consequences of externally imposed white supremacy and
corporate-state capitalism. Or that he claims that blacks have joined the
American "socioeconomic mainstream" even as median black household net worth
falls to less than eight cents on the median white household dollar. Or that
he had this to say on the night after the Congressional mid-term elections,
when the criminal and reactionary Cheney-Bush administration's unpopularity
with the American people cost the Republicans their majority in Congress:
"If the Democrats don't show a willingness to work with the president, I
think they could be punished in '08" (Jeff Zeleni, "Democrats Fight to Say,
'You're Welcome,'" New York Times, Novembers, 2006).
Hitting the Right (Wing) Keynotes
Never mind that Obama's famous 2004 Democratic Convention Keynote Address -
widely credited for catapulting him to national prominence-expressed
numerous reactionary and incorrect notions that make the praise it received
from the far right National Review (who called Obama's oration "simple and
powerful") less than mysterious on close examination. This speech claimed
that the U.S. is the ultimate "beacon for freedom and opportunity," the
"only country on earth" where his supposedly "rags to riches" is "even
possible." This despite the fact that the U.S. is actually the most rigidly
hierarchical nation in the industrialized world, home to a stultifying
corporate plutocracy, persistent and highly racialized poverty, astonishing
incarceration rates (also quite racially disparate), and low mobility from
lower to upper segments in its steep socioeconomic pyramid.
Obama the Keynoter proclaimed that "every child in America" should "have a
decent shot at life," not that every kid deserves a full and decent life now
and thereafter. He told Americans they should be ecstatic over the "miracle"
that they don't live under the iron heel of state repression (he made no
exceptions for the nation's two million prisoners), as if democracy is just
the absence of a police state and not the power of the people to run their
own society in an egalitarian fashion-talk about low expectations for
freedom. He praised a Marine enlisted in the occupation of Iraq for
"defending the United States of America" and for (supposedly) expressing
"absolute faith in the country and its leaders." Never mind that such
chilling "faith" is the stuff of the very police state whose absence in the
U.S. Obama called a "miracle."
Never mind that Obama's speech scaled new heights of cringing,
pseudo-patriotic nausea-inducement by making disturbing "hope" parallels
between: "the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs,"
"the hope of a young naval lieutenant bravely patrolling the Mekong Delta,"
and the "hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America
has a place for him." The lieutenant referred to in his speech was
Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry whose government's imperial
right to "patrol" great rivers on the other side of the world during the
1960s Obama took as axiomatic. The "skinny kid" referred to a young Obama,
grooming himself for a Harvard education while attending an elite private
school and living with his white grandparents in sunny Hawaii. The
connection with singing slaves? A shared belief in what Obama called "God's
greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation-a belief that there are
better days ahead," Yes, the brutalized black slaves of racist antebellum
America were looking forward to the glorious white-imperialist rape of
Southeast Asia when their faith in "better days" would find glorious
realization in the napalming of Vietnamese children, the images of which
shocked Martin Luther King, Jr. into denouncing the Vietnam war in strident
and forceful terms.
Embracing Imperial Criminality
Never mind Obama's "mush-mouthed" (Glen Ford and Peter Gamble, "Obama Mouths
Mush on War," Black Commentator, December 1, 2005) pronouncements on the
illegal, racist, and imperialist invasion and occupation of Iraq. Obama's
handlers and supporters place considerable emphasis on the claim that the
junior senator from Illinois has voiced a "consistent position against the
war" and (by extension) the Middle East. The assertion has some technical
accuracy; Obama has publicly questioned the Bush administration's case for
war since the fall of 2002. But serious scrutiny of his "antiwar position"
shows that the supposedly "pragmatic" and "non-ideological" Obama speaks in
deferential accord with the doctrine of empire. In Obama's carefully crafted
rhetoric, Operation Iraqi Liberation (OIL) has been a "strategic blunder" on
the part of an essentially benevolent nation state. Given his presidential
ambitions, it is unthinkable for him to acknowledge the invasion's status as
a great international transgression that is consistent with the United
States' long record of imperial criminality. It is equally unimaginable for
him to acknowledge that the war expressed Washington's drive to deepen its
control of strategic petroleum resources-an ambition in direct opposition to
the alleged U.S. goals of encouraging Iraqi freedom and exporting democracy.
In a recent address designed to display his foreign policy bona fides, Obama
showed his continuing willingness to take seriously the claim that OIL was
an effort to "impose democracy" on Iraq, even faulting the Bush
administration for acting in Iraq on the basis of unrealistic "dreams of
democracy and hopes for a perfect government" (Obama, "A Way Forward in
Iraq," speech to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs [CCGA], November 22,
2006).
Consistent with his denial and embrace of Washington's imperial ambitions,
Obama has refused to join genuinely antiwar forces in calling for a rapid
and thorough withdrawal of troops and an end to the occupation of Iraq. In a
critical November 2005 speech to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR),
Obama rejected Rep. John Murtha's (D-PA) call for a rapid redeployment and
any notion of a timetable for withdrawal. Obama's call for "a pragmatic
solution to the real war we're facing in Iraq" included repeated references
to the need to "defeat" the "insurgency"- a goal that means continuation of
the war. As commentators Ford and Gamble noted in a critical analysis of
Obama's CFR address: "In essence all Obama wants from the Bush regime is
that it fess up to having launched the war based on false information and to
henceforth come clean with the Senate on how it plans to proceed in the
future. Those Democrats who want to dwell on the past-the actual genesis and
rationale for the war and the real reasons for its continuation-should be
quiet. Obama and many of his colleagues are more interested in consulting
the Bush men on the best way to 'win' the war than in effecting an American
withdrawal at any foreseeable time."
Obama's November speech to the CCGA advocates a vaguely timed Iraq
"scenario" in which "U.S. forces" might remain in the occupied state for an
"extended period of time." Obama advances a "reduced but active [U.S.
military] presence" that "protect[s] logistical supply points" and "American
enclaves like the Green Zone" (site of one of the largest and most heavily
militarized imperial "embassies" in history) while "send[ing] a clear
message to hostile countries like Iran and Syria that we intend to remain a
key player in the region." U.S. troops "remaining in Iraq" will "act as
rapid reaction forces to respond to emergencies and go after terrorists."
This is part of what Obama meant when he told a fawning David Brooks that
(in Brooks's approving language) "the U.S. may have no choice but to slog it
out in Iraq" (David Brooks, "Run, Barack, Run," New York Times, October 19,
2006). Never mind that the recent mid-term elections and a mountain of
polling data show that the majority of Americans support rapid U.S.
withdrawal, as do the vast majority of the Iraqi people - the purported
beneficiaries of Cheney's "dreams of democracy."
The only polling data that Obama referenced in his CCGA speech and in the
foreign policy chapter of his recent book is meant to illustrate what he
considers to be the real danger in the wake of the OIL fiasco: that
Americans are leaning dangerously towards "isolationism" and thus turning
their backs on the noble superpower's global "responsibilities."
At one point in his CCGA oration, Obama had the audacity to say the
following in support of his claim that U.S. citizens support "victory" in
Iraq: "The American people have been extraordinarily resolved. They have
seen their sons and daughters killed or wounded in the streets of Fallujah."
This was a spine-chilling selection of locales. Fallujah was the site for a
colossal U.S. war atrocity. Crimes included the indiscriminate slaughter of
civilians, the targeting of ambulances and hospitals, and the practical
leveling of an entire city - in April and November 2004. The town was
designated for destruction as an example of the awesome state terror
promised to those who dared to resist U.S. power. Not surprisingly, Fallujah
is a leading symbol of U.S. imperialism in the Arab and Muslim worlds. It is
a deeply provocative and insulting place for Obama to choose to highlight
American sacrifice and "resolve" in the occupation of Iraq.
Likewise, Obama also praised U.S. occupation soldiers for "performing their
duty with bravery, with brilliance, and without question" (CCGA speech).
It's hard to determine which is more disturbing in this comment: Obama's
blindness (intentional or not) to the important and welcome fact that many
troops do in fact strongly question the war or his upholding of the
unquestioning execution of frankly criminal military orders as a good thing.
"He's a Player"
Liberal bloggers and writers at places like Daily Kos and the leftmost
sections of the corporate-neoliberal punditocracy (e.g., Frank Rich at the
New York Times) can speak and write all they wish about the "progressive"
potential of a Barockstar presidency. As David Sirota rightly observed last
summer, Obama is "interested in fighting only for those changes that fit
within the existing boundaries of what's considered mainstream in
Washington, instead of using his platform to redefine those boundaries."
"This posture," Sirota notes, "comes even as polls consistently show that
Washington's definition of mainstream is divorced from the rest of the
country's (for example, politicians' refusal to debate the war even as polls
show that Americans want the troops home)." It is because of Obama's "rare
ability to mix charisma and deference to the establishment," Sirota finds
(in an overly respectful assessment), that "Beltway publications and think
tanks have heaped praise on Obama and want him to run for President."
But then, Obama would never have risen so quickly and remarkably to his
current position of dominant media favor and national prominence if he was
anything like the egalitarian and democratic "progressive" that some
liberals and leftists imagine. In the corporate-crafted and money-dominated
swamp that passes for "representative democracy" in the U.S., concentrated
economic and imperial power open and close doors in ways that preemptively
suffocate populist potential. Big money is not in the business of promoting
genuine social justice or democracy activists (so-called "gadflies" like
Wellstone, to use Obama's description). Viewing public policy as a mechanism
for the upward distribution of wealth, it promotes empire and inequality by
underwriting what Ken Silverstein calls "the smothering K Street culture and
the revolving door that feeds it-not just lobbyists themselves but the
entire interconnected world of campaign consultants, public relations
agencies, pollsters, and media strategists"- without whose favor and
assistance serious presidential bids are next to unthinkable. "All of this,"
Silverstein notes, "has forged a political culture that is intrinsically
hostile to reform" (Ken Silverstein, "Barack Obama Inc.: The Birth of a
Washington Machine, " Harpers' Magazine, November 2006).
Obama (a former editor of the Harvard Law Review) knows this very well. He's
been "trimming his sails," as he likes to say when he's telling more
genuinely progressive interviewers (e.g. Sirota and Silverstein) why he had
to support one corporate- or militarism-friendly policy or position after
another. He's been expressing his deep deference for the national and global
politico-economic establishment in accord with harsh plutocratic realities.
He has had to make his "charismatic" way through Mammon's polyarchic vetting
rounds, impressing the critical gate-keeping powers-that-be with his
"reasonable" commitment to working within the existing dominant domestic and
imperial hierarchies. He wouldn't be where he is, practically overnight, if
he hadn't made his "Hamiltonian" (corporate-imperial) safety clear to the
masters of national policy and doctrine, who hold the keys to the kingdom.
As a Washington lobbyist recently told Silverstein, "Big donors would not be
helping out Obama if they didn't see him as a 'player'.... What's the dollar
value of a starry-eyed idealist?" (Silverstein, 2006). Consistent with his
secret identity as a corporate "player," Silverstein notes, Obama
assiduously supported the ethanol-promoting objectives of the Illinois-based
firm Archer-Daniels Midland, which has provided him with private jets on at
least two occasions. He has also defended the interests of Illinois'
gigantic electrical firm Exelon, America's leading nuclear plant operator
and a company that has given more than $74,000 to his campaigns. The slim
chance that Obama might ever choose "starry eyed idealism" - Silverstein's
lobbyist-informant's way of describing the elevation of peace and justice
over the imperatives of Empire & Inequality, Inc.-has probably become
thinner now that Obama has recently joined (thanks largely to his latest
book contract) the millionaires' club.
[Paul Street is an independent writer, speaker, historian, and social policy
researcher in Iowa. He is the author of Empire and Inequality: America and
the World Since 9/11 (Paradigm Publishers, 2004); Segregated Schools:
Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era (Routledge, 2005); and
Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: A Living Black Chicago History
(Rowman and Littlefield, 2007).]
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