In November 2008, I begrudgingly surrendered to the relentless marketing of the Obama brand. My impetus wasn’t deep stirring from Obama’s vaguely soaring oratory. Or the deeply misguided suspicion that Obama was actually a closet progressive temporarily cloaked in safe, electable centrism. It was habit and more importantly fear that drove my vote down Donkey Way. Fear of reactionaries. Fear of a Palin Planet. Of offshore drilling. Of eroded reproductive rights. Of further market entrenchment of health care. Fear of a McCain’s proposed century of Iraqi occupation. Fear of a overcooked, boiling planet. Fear of the crazies. However this strategic, cowering approach to electoral politics emboldens our representatives to cater exclusively to interests of the powerful and influential, and not to those who willingly put them in power.
I was at the very least unclouded by common liberal illusions. Prior to the election you’d often hear young democrats note that Obama’s gestures towards the center or the right were merely campaign posturings to be later discarded for the “true,” much more progressive Obama come inauguration time. But closer scrutiny would unravel such positions even then. As Naomi Klein pointed out, during his campaign, Obama identified himself “a pro-growth, free-market guy” on CNBC, and solidified himself as a subscriber to the Rubinite shade of the Washington Consensus, appointing Robert Rubin acolyte, and unapologetically pro-Wal Mart Jason Furman as masthead of his economic policy team. Similarly his foreign policy was firmly rooted in the paradigm of a permanent War on Terror established by George Bush, opting to divert our energy from Iraq to Afghanistan by committing “at least two additional brigades to Afghanistan to re-enforce our counter-terrorism operations.” Economically and militarily, Obama made clear on the campaign trail his commitment to established Beltway centrism. So his imperialistic, plutocratic policies should be a surprise no one.
And of course the most apparent point of tension between Obama and his progressive base is his continued Military presence in Afghanistan, most specifically the recent Iraq-style surge of 30,000 troops. Along with frequent civilian deaths from unmanned predator drones in South Waziristan — the rural, tribal region spanning across the Afghanistan and Pakistan Border, a confirmed collaborative assassination campaign between the CIA and Blackwater in Pakistan, and the irredeemably corrupt Karzai administration, Obama’s contentious position on Afghanistan is quickly becoming his least popular. Like Iraq, Afghanistan has emerged as its own black hole of a quagmire. The quagmire in Iraq was the continual clashing the ethnic, paramilitary groups, be they Sunni, Shia, or Kurds approaching incomprehensibility. It often wasn’t clear who was “us” and who was “them.” This blurring of divisions coupled with the nebulous, continually shifting justification for war (Al Qaeda/WMD’s/democrotization/whatever) leaves one with the conclusion that War In The 21st Century isn’t about ushering in democracy to the depraved natives or ensuring our security in a violent and uncertain new world, but rather sustaining the Permanent War Economy, a grotesquely pervasive mutation of Eisenhower’s envisioned “Military Industrial Complex.”
Keeping this in mind, Afghanistan follows the template perfectly. Our sense of purpose is entirely skewed. Who is on our side? Is it the corrupt, illegitimately elected, and Narco-entangled Karzai? Is it his CIA-bankrolled warlord brother? We assume it’s not the increasingly popular Taliban insurgency, whose support can be explained by representing autonomy against the US and NATO occupying forces. And since there is an official estimation from the CIA that only about 100 Al-Qaida operatives are actually fighting in Afghanistan, then what’s the real point of continuing a vast military presence that’s only empowering a corrupt and repressive regime, financing warlords, and terrorizing innocent civilians? Could it be that Obama and our Democrat-controlled congress, in line with the rest of post WWII US foreign policy, really have no intention of disrupting this vulgar and immensely profitable war machine that ensures endless misery for the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan?
And on Healthcare, Dear Leader reveals himself as a self-serving opportunist. Obama’s myopic insistence on brokering a deal, any deal, despite a 2003 verbal endorsement of “single payer universal health care program,” is motivated by his prospects for reelection and the security of his executive legacy. The initial compromise was the nonsensical cohabitation of a public option and the traditional privatized coverage. Insurance companies (the main beneficiaries of this “reform”) found the competition and price-setting from the public option unacceptable. So the next compromise was Montana Senator and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus’s brazen elimination of the public option all together, saddled with a lot of circuitous and vague prattle about “insurance co-ops.” The shedding continued with the unbelievable proposal to contract the mandatory coverage to private providers, and the insulting, Lieberman-fueled rejection of the extended Medicare buy-in. What remains is a shredded rag of a reform bill that will essentially generate mandatory demand and revenue for private insurance companies, and reform nearly nothing. At each reactionary-initiated impasse, Obama concedes. And he continues, as he did in a recent joint session of Congress, to herald the passing of this paltry and offensive bill as a “historic opportunity.” And so the priority is never the principled stand for public healthcare or reform, but to preserve and pass the bill for Obama’s sake, as its benefit continually dwindles with each obscene gutting.
And of course there’s 2008′s financial collapse, a bubbled mess of shaky derivatives and toxic assets that’s still reverberating throughout our economy today. The stage was for the collapse was set by both Senator Phil Gramm (R)-sponsored repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, the Depression era antitrust legislation dedicated to clearly dividing investment banks and personal banks into separate, unblurrable categories and Clinton Treasury Secretary and Citigroup chairman Robert Rubin’s deregulation of financial derivatives — those now infamous mortgage-backed securites, collateralized debt obligations, and credit default swaps that led to our precipitous financial decline. The conventional Friedmanite market wisdom is that Glass Steagall is an outmoded and clumsy Keynesian vestige, proven irrelevant by Greenspan’s theorem of “irrational exuberance” and the self-correcting free market; of course until that irrational exuberance resulted in an anemic marketplace with no means of correcting itself at all. As Matt Taibbi points out in his excellent, absolutely essential Rolling Stone Article “Obama’s Big Sellout,” Obama’s financial team is populated with many of those responsible for the lethal derivative deregulation, namely acolytes of Robert Rubin and revolving doorsmen from gargantuan financial firms like Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. And it goes without saying that their approaches have not changed. Taibbi’s article goes on to detail the Geithner-engineered, Obama approved Citigroup bailout of the staggering sum of 306 billion dollars. Also noted is proposed legislation giving the White House unchecked authority to issue routine, formalized, treasury-financed bailouts (taxpayer dividends absent) at their own discretion and provide derivative prohibition exemption for the Too-Big-Too-Fails. With the heavily assisted Dow recently cracking 10,000 along with unemployment cracking 10%, it’s clear where our leaders’ emphasis lies. Also clear is the unlikelihood of any of the Wall Street riches trickling down to the Great Unwashed. As Wall Street gets a cushy windfall, our manufacturing sector is hollowed out (because it’s more economically expedient in our NAFTA nation) and our drinking water is polluted with radium and arsenic (because regulation is just too costly).
Democrats’ hearts are in the wrong place on almost every issue. But, lo, every four years, progressives tribally rally around whatever the most electable blue-striped candidate is pedaling whatever pseudo-populist platitudes, without any acknowledgment that the same regressive, pro-corporate, pro-military industrial complex, pro-Wall Street policies will inevitably be enacted. And elected democrats have no intention of pursuing meaningful human progress, because they know they will have the votes of those who lean to the left no matter what they do. No leftward concessions really need be made if on every election season the votes of progressives rattling with fear over the possibility of a republican candidate are guaranteed. And as long as we vote towards the center, we’ll have instances where Barack Obama will pledge a pathetic 17% in CO2 cuts by 2020 instead of the 40% percent we need to ensure the survival of the planet. This is because democrats are part and parcel with a systemic problem of US governance, that, thanks to corporate personhood, nearly all of our elected representatives act upon the interests of banks and corporations. We can either continue to support candidates who are marginally less opposed to our direct interests, or we can seize our country back and stop providing Democrats the assured guarantee of votes.
