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In
his State of the Union speech, Jan. 27, President Obama
did his best to repair the tarnished image of his administration and
the Democratic Party. Following last month’s “disaster” in Massachusetts, in which Democrats lost a
key Senate seat to a Republican newcomer, Obama
had the task of recapturing disillusioned voters who a year ago had
been enticed by his campaign promises of “change we can believe in.”
“Right
now,” Obama admitted in his speech, “I know
that there are many Americans who aren’t sure if they still believe we
can change—or at least that I can deliver it.”
Obama identified many of the problems that the American
people care about. In regard to the current economic morass, he said:“One in 10
Americans still cannot find work. Many businesses have shuttered. Home
values have declined. Small towns and rural communities have been hit
especially hard. And for those who'd already known poverty, life has
become that much harder.”
In
fact, the Federal Reserve and many economists say that hard times will
continue, with economic growth slowing
and unemployment rising this year. Moody’s Economy.com predicts that
today’s (official) 10 percent unemployment rate will hit 11 percent by
next summer, and over 17 percent for African Americans.
Some
of Obama’s observations in regard to the
capitalist system were not off the mark: “We can't afford another
so-called economic ‘expansion’ like the one from the last decade—what
some call the ‘lost decade’—where jobs grew more slowly than during any
prior expansion, where the income of the average American household
declined while the cost of health care and tuition reached record
highs, where prosperity was built on a housing bubble and financial
speculation.”
Who
is to blame for the bursting of the bubble, the current economic
doldrums, and the frustration and anger felt by most Americans?
Marxists point out that economic crises are a logical and recurring
feature of the capitalist system, rooted in its cycles of
overproduction.
But
Obama, for his part, gently shunts the blame
onto a single portion of the U.S. capitalist class and onto
the Republican Party. Republicans are portrayed as troglodytes who find
it difficult to understand the need for “change.”
On
Jan. 29, for example, Obama chided a meeting
of congressional Republicans for stalling on the health-care bill: “If
you were to listen to the debate,” he teased them, “You’d think this
thing was some sort of Bolshevik plot! That’s how some of you guys
presented this.”
Obama brought his case to the Republicans to reassure
Congress members on both sides of the aisle that the watered-down
health-care bill should present no dangers for the insurance,
pharmaceutical, and other big corporations that their parties represent.
But
he also got the chance to set the stage for the next round of national
elections, encouraging the Democratic Party’s supporters who lead the
unions and other social organizations, and in the media, to counsel
their constituents to defeat the “backward” Republicans by voting for
the Democratic Party.
Yet
the Republicans have not been the sole target of Obama’s
recent criticisms. He hinted in his State of the Union address that a
large share of the blame for the economic crisis rests with “Wall
Street” and “the banks.” And similarly, during
a Dec. 7 interview on the CBS News “60 Minutes” program, Obama asserted, “I did not run for office to be
helping out a bunch of, you know, fat cat bankers on Wall Street.”
“Nothing
has been more frustrating to me this year,” he added, “than having to
salvage a financial system at great expense to
taxpayers that was precipitated, that was caused in part by completely
irresponsible actions on Wall Street. And I’ve spoken out repeatedly
about this. The people on Wall Street still don’t get it.”
With
this, the president was attempting to divert people’s anger toward a
very handy target, as his predecessor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, did in a more dire situation. Blame it on the banks! But
instead of nationalizing the banks, Obama
simply hands them the keys to the Treasury.
Business as usual
Of
course, despite his calls for “change,” Obama
has been unable to offer any course for U.S. capitalism that is markedly
different from what was done in the past. How could he?
As
before, capitalists will feel compelled to bolster their profit rates
by any means necessary—including financial and real estate speculation,
polluting the environment, shutting down factories, making workers pay
more for health care, and wage cuts. And they can count on the
government to help them along in all these endeavors.
Accordingly,
in his State of the Union speech, Obama’s new
proposals for the domestic agenda were extremely timid (as most of the
media were quick to point out)—and hardly likely to have much effect on
the economy.
He
vowed to keep nudging Congress to enact some sort of health-care
“reform” and to pass the paltry jobs bill now stalled in the Senate. He
mentioned tax-relief measures for small businesses and the “middle
class,” additional funding for high-speed passenger railroads ($8
billion, which won’t go very far), and a few other promises.
And
while Obama is seeking an across-the-board
spending freeze on governmental programs for next year, the White House
says that money for the military would continue to rise, as it would
for programs to “secure our borders” against undocumented immigrants.
In
foreign policy, Obama affirmed—using
diplomatic language, of course—that he would continue to pursue
“free-trade” policies in the neo-colonial world that are favorable to
U.S. imperialism at the expense of its major competitors (like China)
as well as local economies:
“We
have to seek new markets aggressively, just as our competitors are. If
America sits on the sidelines while other nations sign trade deals, we
will lose the chance to create jobs on our shores. But realizing those
benefits also means enforcing those agreements so our trading partners
play by the rules.
“And
that's why we'll continue to shape a Doha [World Trade Organization]
trade agreement that opens global markets, and why we will strengthen
our trade relations in Asia and with key partners like South Korea and
Panama and Colombia.“
And
how does the White House intend to “enforce” such agreements? The Obama administration’s support of repressive client
regimes like that of Colombia has ominous implications for Latin
America and beyond. The Obama White House is
expanding Plan Colombia (a military campaign begun
under President Clinton and ostensibly used as part of the “War on
Drugs”), and now plans to establish seven military bases in Colombia.
The
scale of repression already wreaked on
Colombia, with U.S. backing, was glimpsed on
Jan. 28, when a mass grave containing about 2000 bodies was found in La
Macarena. For years, the U.S. government has advised and supported the
Colombian army in its sweeps against so-called guerrillas in the area.
Residents told the Miami Nuevo Herald that family members and local political leaders, who
were non-combatants, had disappeared, and they thought their bodies
were in the graves.
The “lesser-evil” syndrome
With
the election of Barack Obama
as president, U.S. capitalism had no
alternative but to try to match and exceed the reactionary policies of
George Bush.
The
ruling-class decision to choose Obama to lead
its offensive against working people in these troubled times was
carefully calculated. Without doubt the selection of the intelligent,
well-spoken Black Democrat, who campaigned with a light touch against
the crudities of his predecessor, struck a responsive chord among
millions of Americans looking for change—especially when the system was
in crisis under Bush’s watch.
It
is now becoming clear to many that no such change is forthcoming. But
such realities have never deterred leaders in the labor movement and
elsewhere from portraying the Democratic Party as a vehicle for
progressive reform. These forces see no option but to paint Obama’s failures as partial successes—as with the
present health-care bill and his decision to match the sending of
30,000 troops to Afghanistan with a vague promise to
begin to remove them in 18 months.
These
manufactured illusions were certainly evident in a recent exchange on
the pages of The
Nation magazine (Feb. 1), in which
political commentators had been asked to list what they considered the
highlights of the Obama presidency, as well
as their greatest disappointments with it. The most refreshing response
was submitted by the late historian Howard Zinn,
who had given Obama’s candidacy “critical
support” a year ago.
In
the recent Nation article,
Zinn said: “I’ve been searching for a
highlight. The only thing that comes close is some of Obama’s rhetoric; I don’t see any kind of a
highlight in his actions and policies.”
“As
far as disappointments,” Zinn wrote, “I
wasn’t terribly disappointed because I didn’t expect that much. I
expected him to be a typical Democratic president. On foreign policy,
that’s hardly any different from a Republican—as nationalist, ex- pansionist, imperial and warlike.”
Zinn concluded, “I think people are dazzled by Obama’s rhetoric, and that people ought to begin to
understand that Obama is going to be a
mediocre president—which means, in our time, a dangerous
president—unless there is some national movement to push him in a
better direction.”
There
is no doubt that determined social movements that are independent of
the Democrats and Republicans can push the government to enact basic
reforms. But the political arena
should not be left to the two parties of the capitalist class. A key
step toward abolishing the “lesser-evil” syndrome in U.S. politics
would be taken with the construction of a mass working-class political
party, armed with a clear program of how to achieve real change.
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