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Can Obama See the Grand Canyon?
On Presidential Blindness and Economic Catastrophe
Let me begin, very obliquely, with the Grand Canyon and the paradox of trying to see beyond cultural or historical precedent.
The first European to look into the depths of the great gorge was the conquistador Garcia Lopez de Cardenas in 1540. He was horrified by the sight and quickly retreated from the South Rim. More than three centuries passed before Lieutenant Joseph Christmas Ives of the U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers led the second major expedition to the rim. Like Garcia Lopez, he recorded an "awe that was almost painful to behold." Ives's expedition included a well-known German artist, but his sketch of the Canyon was wildly distorted, almost hysterical.
Neither the conquistadors nor the Army engineers, in other words, could make sense of what they saw; they were simply overwhelmed by unexpected revelation. In a fundamental sense, they were blind because they lacked the concepts necessary to organize a coherent vision of an utterly new landscape.
Accurate portrayal of the Canyon only arrived a generation later when the Colorado River became the obsession of the one-armed Civil War hero John Wesley Powell and his celebrated teams of geologists and artists. They were like Victorian astronauts reconnoitering another planet. It took years of brilliant fieldwork to construct a conceptual framework for taking in the canyon. With "deep time" added as the critical dimension, it was finally possible for raw perception to be transformed into consistent vision.
The result of their work, The Tertiary History of the Grand Canyon District, published in 1882, is illustrated by masterpieces of draftsmanship that, as Powell's biographer Wallace Stegner once pointed out, "are more accurate than any photograph." That is because they reproduce details of stratigraphy usually obscured in camera images. When we visit one of the famous viewpoints today, most of us are oblivious to how profoundly our eyes have been trained by these iconic images or how much we have been influenced by the idea, popularized by Powell, of the Canyon as a museum of geological time.
But why am I talking about geology? Because, like the Grand Canyon's first explorers, we are looking into an unprecedented abyss of economic and social turmoil that confounds our previous perceptions of historical risk. Our vertigo is intensified by our ignorance of the depth of the crisis or any sense of how far we might ultimately fall.
Weimar Returns in Limbaughland
Let me confess that, as an aging socialist, I suddenly find myself like the Jehovah's Witness who opens his window to see the stars actually falling out of the sky. Although I've been studying Marxist crisis theory for decades, I never believed I'd actually live to see financial capitalism commit suicide. Or hear the International Monetary Fund warn of imminent "systemic meltdown."
Thus, my initial reaction to Wall Street's infamous 777.7 point plunge a few weeks ago was a very sixties retro elation. "Right on, Karl!" I shouted. "Eat your derivatives and die, Wall Street swine!" Like the Grand Canyon, the fall of the banks can be a terrifying but sublime spectacle.
But the real culprits, of course, are not being trundled off to the guillotine; they're gently floating to earth in golden parachutes. The rest of us may be trapped on the burning plane without a pilot, but the despicable Richard Fuld, who used Lehman Brothers to loot pension funds and retirement accounts, merely sulks on his yacht.
Out in the stucco deserts of Limbaughland, moreover, fear is already being distilled into a good ol' boy version of the "stab in the back" myth that rallied the ruined German petite bourgeoisie to the swastika. If you listen to the rage on commute AM, you'll know that ‘socialism' has already taken a lien on America, Barack Hussein Obama is terrorism's Manchurian candidate, the collapse of Wall Street was caused by elderly black people with Fannie Mae loans, and ACORN in its voter registration drives has long been padding the voting rolls with illegal brown hordes.
In other times, Sarah Palin's imitation of Father Charles Coughlin -- the priest who preached an American Reich in the 1930s -- in drag might be hilarious camp, but with the American way of life in sudden freefall, the specter of star-spangled fascism doesn't seem quite so far-fetched. The Right may lose the election, but it already possesses a sinister, historically-proven blueprint for rapid recovery.
Progressives have no time to waste. In the face of a new depression that promises folks from Wasilla to Timbuktu an unknown world of pain, how do we reconstruct our understanding of the globalized economy? To what extent can we look to either Obama or any of the Democrats to help us analyze the crisis and then act effectively to resolve it?
Is Obama FDR?
If the Nashville "town hall" debate is any guide, we will soon have another blind president. Neither candidate had the guts or information to answer the simple questions posed by the anxious audience: What will happen to our jobs? How bad will it get? What urgent steps should be taken?
Instead, the candidates stuck like flypaper to their obsolete talking points. McCain's only surprise was yet another innovation in deceit: a mortgage relief plan that would reward banks and investors without necessarily saving homeowners.
Obama recited his four-point program, infinitely better in principle than his opponent's preferential option for the rich, but abstract and lacking in detail. It remains more a rhetorical promise than the blueprint for the actual machinery of reform. He made only passing reference to the next phase of the crisis: the slump of the real economy and likely mass unemployment on a scale not seen for 70 years.
With baffling courtesy to the Bush administration, he failed to highlight any of the other weak links in the economic system: the dangerous overhang of credit-default swap obligations left over from the fall of Lehman Brothers; the trillion-dollar black hole of consumer credit-card debt that may threaten the solvency of JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America; the implacable decline of General Motors and the American auto industry; the crumbling foundations of municipal and state finance; the massacre of tech equity and venture capital in Silicon Valley; and, most unexpectedly, sudden fissures in the financial solidity of even General Electric.
In addition, both Obama and his vice presidential partner Joe Biden, in their support for Secretary of the Treasury Paulson's plan, avoid any discussion of the inevitable result of cataclysmic restructuring and government bailouts: not "socialism," but ultra-capitalism -- one that is likely to concentrate control of credit in a few leviathan banks, controlled in large part by sovereign wealth funds but subsidized by generations of public debt and domestic austerity.
Never have so many ordinary Americans been nailed to a cross of gold (or derivatives), yet Obama is the most mild-mannered William Jennings Bryan imaginable. Unlike Sarah Palin who masticates the phrase "the working class" with defiant glee, he hews to a party line that acknowledges only the needs of an amorphous "middle class" living on a largely mythical "Main Street."
If we are especially concerned about the fate of the poor or unemployed, we are left to read between the lines, with no help from his talking points that espouse clean coal technology, nuclear power, and a bigger military, but elide the urgency of a renewed war on poverty as championed by John Edwards in his tragically self-destructed primary campaign. But perhaps inside the cautious candidate is a man whose humane passions transcend his own nearsighted centrist campaign. As a close friend, exasperated by my chronic pessimism, chided me the other day, "don't be so unfair. FDR didn't have a nuts and bolts program either in 1933. Nobody did."
What Franklin D. Roosevelt did possess in that year of breadlines and bank failures, according to my friend, was enormous empathy for the common people and a willingness to experiment with government intervention, even in the face of the monolithic hostility of the wealthy classes. In this view, Obama is MoveOn.org's re-imagining of our 32nd president: calm, strong, deeply in touch with ordinary needs, and willing to accept the advice of the country's best and brightest.
The Death of Keynesianism
But even if we concede to the Illinois senator a truly Rooseveltian or, even better, Lincolnian strength of character, this hopeful analogy is flawed in at least three principal ways:
First, we can't rely on the Great Depression as analog to the current crisis, nor upon the New Deal as the template for its solution. Certainly, there is a great deal of déjà vu in the frantic attempts to quiet panic and reassure the public that the worst has passed. Many of Paulson's statements, indeed, could have been directly plagiarized from Herbert Hoover's Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon, and both presidential campaigns are frantically cribbing heroic rhetoric from the early New Deal. But just as the business press has been insisting for years, this is not the Old American Economy, but an entirely new-fangled contraption built from outsourced parts and supercharged by instantaneous world markets in everything from dollars and defaults to hog bellies and disaster futures.
We are seeing the consequences of a perverse restructuring that began with the presidency of Ronald Reagan and which has inverted the national income shares of manufacturing (21% in 1980; 12% in 2005) and those of financial services (15% in 1980; 21% in 2005). In 1930, the factories may have been shuttered but the machinery was still intact; it hadn't been auctioned off at five cents on the dollar to China.
On the other hand, we shouldn't disparage the miracles of contemporary market technology. Casino capitalism has proven its mettle by transmitting the deadly virus of Wall Street at unprecedented velocity to every financial center on the planet. What took three years at the beginning of the 1930s -- that is, the full globalization of the crisis -- has taken only three weeks this time around. God help us, if, as seems to be happening, unemployment tops the levees at anything like the same speed.
Second, Obama won't inherit Roosevelt's ultimate situational advantage -- having emergent tools of state intervention and demand management (later to be called "Keynesianism") empowered by an epochal uprising of industrial workers in the world's most productive factories.
If you've been watching the sad parade of economic gurus on McNeil-Lehrer, you know that the intellectual shelves in Washington are now almost bare. Neither major party retains more than a few enigmatic shards of policy traditions different from the neo-liberal consensus on trade and privatization. Indeed, posturing pseudo-populists aside, it is unclear whether anyone inside the Beltway, including Obama's economic advisors, can think clearly beyond the indoctrinated mindset of Goldman Sachs, the source of the two most prominent secretaries of the treasury over the last decade.
Keynes, now suddenly mourned, is actually quite dead. More importantly, the New Deal did not arise spontaneously from the goodwill or imagination of the White House. On the contrary, the social contract for the post-1935 Second New Deal was a complex, adaptive response to the greatest working-class movement in our history, in a period when powerful third parties still roamed the political landscape and Marxism exercised extraordinary influence on American intellectual life.
Even with the greatest optimism of the will, it is difficult to imagine the American labor movement recovering from defeat as dramatically as it did in 1934-1937. The decisive difference is structural rather than ideological. (Indeed, today's union movement is much more progressive than the decrepit, nativist American Federation of Labor in 1930.) The power of labor within a Walmart-ized service economy is simply more dispersed and difficult to mobilize than in the era of giant urban-industrial concentrations and ubiquitous factory neighborhoods.
Is War the Answer?
The third problem with the New Deal analogy is perhaps the most important. Military Keynesianism is no longer an available deus ex machina. Let me explain.
In 1933, when FDR was inaugurated, the United States was in full retreat from foreign entanglements, and there was little controversy about bringing a few hundred Marines home from the occupations of Haiti and Nicaragua. It took two years of world war, the defeat of France, and the near collapse of England to finally win a majority in Congress for rearmament, but when war production finally started up in late 1940 it became a huge engine for the reemployment of the American work force, the real cure for the depressed job markets of the 1930s. Subsequently, American world power and full employment would align in a way that won the loyalty of several generations of working-class voters.
Today, of course, the situation is radically different. A bigger Pentagon budget no longer creates hundreds of thousands of stable factory jobs, since significant parts of its weapons production is now actually outsourced, and the ideological link between high-wage employment and intervention -- good jobs and Old Glory on a foreign shore -- while hardly extinct is structurally weaker than at any time since the early 1940s. Even in the new military (largely a hereditary caste of poor whites, blacks, and Latinos) demoralization is reaching the stage of active discontent and opening up new spaces for alternative ideas.
Although both candidates have endorsed programs, including expansion of Army and Marine combat strength, missile defense (aka "Star Wars"), and an intensified war in Afghanistan, that will enlarge the military-industrial complex, none of this will replenish the supply of decent jobs nor prime a broken national pump. However, in the midst of a deep slump, what a huge military budget can do is obliterate the modest but essential reforms that make up Obama's plans for healthcare, alternative energy, and education.
In other words, Rooseveltian guns and butter have become a contradiction in terms, which means that the Obama campaign is engineering a catastrophic collision between its national security priorities and its domestic policy goals.
The Fate of Obama-ism
Why don't such smart people see the Grand Canyon?
Maybe they do, in which case deception is truly the mother's milk of American politics; or perhaps Obama has become the reluctant prisoner, intellectually as well as politically, of Clintonism: that is say, of a culturally permissive neo-liberalism whose New Deal rhetoric masks the policy spirit of Richard Nixon.
It's worth asking, for instance, what in the actual substance of his foreign policy agenda differentiates the Democratic candidate from the radioactive legacy of the Bush Doctrine? Yes, he would close Guantanamo, talk to the Iranians, and thrill hearts in Europe. He also promises to renew the Global War on Terror (in much the same way that Bush senior and Clinton sustained the core policies of Reaganism, albeit with a "more human face").
In case anyone has missed the debates, let me remind you that the Democratic candidate has chained himself, come hell or high water, to a global strategy in which "victory" in the Middle East (and Central Asia) remains the chief premise of foreign policy, with the Iraqi-style nation-building hubris of Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz repackaged as a "realist" faith in global "stabilization."
True, the enormity of the economic crisis may compel President Obama to renege on some of candidate Obama's ringing promises to support an idiotic missile defense system or provocative NATO memberships for Georgia and Ukraine. Nonetheless, as he emphasizes in almost every speech and in each debate, defeating the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, together with a robust defense of Israel, constitute the keystone of his national security agenda.
Under huge pressure from Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats alike to cut the budget and reduce the exponential increase in the national debt, what choices would President Obama be forced to make early in his administration? More than likely comprehensive health-care will be whittled down to a barebones plan, "alternative energy" will simply mean the fraud of "clean coal," and anything that remains in the Treasury, after Wall Street's finished its looting spree, will buy bombs to pulverize more Pashtun villages, ensuring yet more generations of embittered mujahideen and jihadis.
Am I unduly cynical? Perhaps, but I lived through the Lyndon Johnson years and watched the War on Poverty, the last true New Deal program, destroyed to pay for slaughter in Vietnam.
It is bitterly ironic, but, I suppose, historically predictable that a presidential campaign millions of voters have supported for its promise to end the war in Iraq has now mortgaged itself to a "tougher than McCain" escalation of a hopeless conflict in Afghanistan and the Pakistani tribal frontier. In the best of outcomes, the Democrats will merely trade one brutal, losing war for another. In the worst case, their failed policies may set the stage for the return of Cheney and Rove, or their even more sinister avatars.
- Posted in
44 Comments so far
Show AllNice article!
Did you ever get the feeling you are in a minority on this site?
Great points, if depressing.
I still say, let's get Obama elected.
There's nothing wrong with "thrilling the hearts" of overseas nations.
Yes, he is far from ideal.
But, if Obama is President, the international disgust and hatred of Bush and his corporate cronies and by association, the rest of the U.S.- will turn around.
There will be a chance (however small, we HAVE to take it), a chance to push Obama toward better foreign policies. Once in the White House, he will have the benefit of more advisors and a bit of freedom to listen to other voices (ours).
That is a benefit he does not enjoy now- where any HINT of Obama listening to a "socialist" (whoever they are) spells rage & vile spitting, hatred from the Limbaugh crowd.
I see that Obama's strategy is a moderate one, but we have our own work to do.
This is a historic moment, we can't let it go to waste.
VOTE!!
Obama '08
Penelope
I simply fail to grasp what you are basing this amorphous hope that Obama will somehow change his ways if and when he is elected president. By an almost 100 to 1 ratio, Americans urged their leaders not to bail out Wall Street. Not only did this [alleged] populist defy the will of the people, he also lobbied quite hard to make sure that his fellow Democrats followed his example. Obama voted to grant the telecom companies immunity, giving them unfettered poser to spy on Americans and tap their telephone calls. Obama will in all likelihood follow a long line of Democrats who have promised one thing but done another in order to satisfy their corporate masters.
I'm perplexed by this too, Erroll.
And it recently occurred to me that I've heard fervent Obama supporters offer explanations that are not only different, but exclusive.
Some supporters allege that Obama's stolid centrist stances, and his essential acceptance of the Global War on Terror Newspeak invented by the present criminal maladministration are mere camouflage-- he's simply "doing what he has to do" in order to win. Afterwards, the "true" progressive Obama will emerge.
There's a middle position, which suggests that Obama may actually BE a stolid centrist at heart. But, supporters claim, his superior intellect, good heart, and open mind will make him receptive to "pressure" from progressive voices-- albeit the same progressive voices that vainly "pressured" him to reject the atrocious FISA legislation and "bailout" scam.
And then there's another position, offered by people who've read The Book, which is that Obama is indeed a "new" kind of politician, who rejects the conventional notion that ideas and constructive change come from the top (of the political power food chain) down. It seems that his experience as a community organizer convinced him that ideas and change come from "the people" up.
This explanation seems to satisfy those who are already supporters, but it remains elusive to me. Because it suggests that Obama doesn't think that "his" positions are particularly significant; rather, he intends to let We the People make up his mind for him once he's in office.
The claim that Obama must be elected so that he can actually Transform Amerikan Politics is intriguing, but suspiciously mystical-- especially since he's every bit the accomplished realpolitik hack as his colleagues. It would be like Lieberman supporters in the last campaign argue that Joe needs to be elected to Transform Connecticut Politics, and that sensible, pragmatic, "realists" need to cut Joe some slack during the campaign, because he's a REAL maverick who's trying to tiptoe through a minefield so he can have the political power to do the right thing.
Mostly, supporters seem to think that Obama is wonderful because he's wonderful.
Maybe Hegelian dialectics may force the hand of Obama towards reform? What is the alternative? Wait for the Repugs to destroy USA and then rebuild? The potential to transfrom works both ways. The persistent one wins.
"Less for self, more for others, enough for all"- Gawad Kalinga
And, that reminds me of part of a verse from the Tao Te Ching (which I think clearly describes the folks who run our government and the rest of the leaders who are screwing up the world):
"Those who do not know when enough is enough, can never have enough."
Its really rather simple to understand.
Democrats lie.
That's all you need to know. In fact, the modern Democratic party is built on lies. It has to be. It bases its campaigns on large fundraising from corporate money. And of course, to get that money it has to promise to serve corporate money.
But, they still need the votes of people who aren't corporate CEO's and lobbyists. So, the Democrats lie. They pretend to be our friend. They pretend to be on our side. Even if in the midst of all that pretending they have to run back to DC to vote to give $800 billion of our money away to their rich friends, they then come right back to us and start lying some more about how they are our friends.
The Democrats simply can not run on reality. They can not run by telling the truth about what they'll do in office. We certainly know what they'll do. We have the track record of this Congress to look at. How many times have they 'disappointed' the left on everything from health care to the economy to taxes to ending the wars to bankruptcy bills to impeachment? They have a clear record. They just lie about it and try to ignore it.
And, what's left for the Dems is litterally to create a fantasy candidate in their minds. They ignore Obama's record and even his words and create this fantasy that he's somehow the secret hero that is going to come to the rescue.
Its all crap. The Democrats lie. To deal with this, the Democrats create delusions in their heads. Its all crap.
----------------------------
"To know, and not to do, is not to know"
www.samsonsworld.blogspot.com
You are right on that point.
And they are childish and want to believe their own lies themselves, therefore they don't have to face the harder choices of reality.
Obama has hardly any experience as a community organizer when compared to real organizers, or when compared to Nader.
He once raise a million for a community center. That, as far as I know is his claim to fame. However the average school costs over 20 million to build, usually much more than that. So he hasn't really come close to making much of an effect on any community. He was too busy promoting himself at Harvard, etc.
I was amazed to find out the other day Obama hasn't even been a US Senator for 3 years. Talk about being a lightweight! But I guess it doesn't matter. Hope! Change! Yes we can!
Erroll: I agree with your comment regarding Obama supporting and rallying for the Wall St Bailout, and his vote for grantingthe telecoms immunity. Does anyone really think the US is going to pull out of Iraq? We're going to be occupying that non-nation land 50 years from now. And yes, Obama is going to ratchet up the wars in Afganistan and Pakistan. It's going to get way more uglier than it already is. This is why is supported, campaigned for, and contributited to Dennis Kucinich's primary campaign.
I was going to make the point about the difference between Bush and Obama on foreign policy and I saw you already covered it.
RichM: -The short answer is that it's no different, except for the window dressing. That's basically what Davis is saying.
Thanks RichM.
Let's elect Obama and then raise holy hell to make him move to the left.
Let's not and say we did.
"To what extent can we look to either Obama or any of the Democrats to help us analyze the crisis and then act effectively to resolve it? "
Absolutely none whatsoever. They, just as much as the Republicans, are the enemy. To be fought on all fronts as fiercely as possible.
Of course Obama can see the Grand Canyon. The problem is that he operating in a system that has lost its mechanacism to make change. As Dylan said, “The pump don’t work cuz the vandals took the handles”. Corporate America now dictates change in America. The Constitution, the people’s vehicle to make change, is now in the hands of the vandals, corporate America. America has to change the whole kingdom, not just the king.
Hoa binh
This would be correct; I had to scroll down a long way on this thread to find someone who actually makes sense. Many Americans have not yet figured out that our government/country is really controlled by the global big money interests: those who own the huge global banks that comprise the Federal Reserve (and other central banks), the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Bank for International Settlement (BIS), along with those who run the global corporations.
For many years, it has been the heads of these institutions who have been dictating the policies and indeed the laws of our land: in other words, the government (all three branches) follows the lead of the corporations who tell the government what policies/laws they would like enacted in order to ensure the continuing dominance of their monied-interests. This is a textbook definition of Fascism. It is alive and well in the US, and our electoral system (which requires large sums of money from corporations to fund the campaigns) and our legislative process (which is pretty much run by lobbyists representing the corporations - some of whom have actually written bills) is completely corrupted by it.
So, Americans need to wake up and recoginize that this economic "crisis" is just another engineered process to ensure the "trickle up" of more of our wealth to the
cabal of evil people who control the aforementioned entities.
Though Obama is relatively young and has been involved in politics for a shorter period of time, he has attracted a lot of "old" cabalists as advisors, yet I still have hope that once he becomes President Obama, he may very well try to get the people behind him to take a different tack - away from corporate fascism. I clearly understand why, if he actually has such ideas, that he would not be talking about his plans during campaign debates - as he would never get elected. We'll have to work for a few more weeks to get him elected and then see if we can help him to help us to take back our country.
People who will vote for Obama are the same people who would go to Hooters looking for a soul mate.
Have a nice day.
Nietzsche
What's wrong with that?
One has to ask... what choice do we have? Vote for the "mavericks" and wind up with a doddering old man who most likely won't survive his first term... leaving us with someone who has as big an ego of, but isn't even as bright as Bush?
At least Obama is highly intelligent, his magna cum laude from Harvard Law School tells us that much... and he has quietly built a brain-trust of experts from all aspects of academia.
The current regime has been highly effective in DIGGING us a new Grand Canyon in the past decade or so... I think it is possible that Obama and his brain trust might put us on the path to recovery.
Yes, it is amazing that the Republican neo-cons apparently have such effective communication that they ALL know what the slogan of the week happens to be... like some many-headed Hydra that each head speaks from the same brain... a brain which is obviously located somewhere near the rectum.
Of course the all-time over-riding slogans are "Tax and Spend Democrats" and that much-dreaded word "Liberal".
Lately, the word "Socialist" is creeping into their vocabulary more and more often... and a year or so ago they decided they could try to pull the teeth on "fascist" by tying it to "Islamo-fascist".
It wasn't easy raising kids when I did it, since most of us were very young and stupid... trying to have a real grown-up life before the machine shipped us off to the shredder in Vietnam.
I have to admit that it is probably even more difficult raising kids now than ever... at least we could find jobs if we were willing to work. My 40 year-old son has just recently started raising a child... his first kid is 2 years old and he doesn't have a clue what he will be dealing with in 15 or 16 more years!
Meanwhile, McCain and Palin are scaring everyone half to death by running around saying how bad thing are going to get if Obama returns the tax structure of those horrible economic years under Clinton.
It took us something like 230 years to run up $4 trillion in National debt... and Bush's 8 years to turn that into $10 trillion... not to mention turning the FUTURE tax commitments from $20 trillion into $53 trillion!
Our daughter was a managing economist for the Department of Labor, and she estimates that the REAL unemployment figure is closer to 11% not even counting the illegal aliens and UNDER-employed... well over double what it was under Clinton.
I pray that Obama wins... and I pray that McCain and Palin haven't aroused the lynch mobs to the fever-pitch necessary for someone to succeed in trying to kill Obama.
I think Obama is not only our BEST chance at the moment, but our ONLY chance!
Provoice asks: "what choice do we have?" This question posed by of all people liberals never fails to astonish. I realize that this may be close to a fascist state but [this may come as a shock] people in this country still have a right to vote for a candidate who is neither a Democrat or a Republican. I also remember candidate such as LBJ [a Democrat] telling America that he would not allow American boys to fight in a war that Asian boys should be fighting and broke that promise as soon as he was elected by increasingly sending more troops into a place called Vietnam. I remember Nixon proclaiming that he had a "secret plan" to end the war in Vietnam and promptly started escalating the air war in North Vietnam as well as illegally bombing Cambodia. Now we have another Democrat called Barack Obama promising to redeploy American troops from Iraq to Afghanistan where they will undoubtedly kill more innocent brown civilians and children. It should also not be forgotten that this [alleged] agent of hope and change voted to grant the telecom companies immunity as well as not only voting to bail out Wall Street instead of Main Street but also lobbied hard to get other Democrats to follow his lead. Yet people like provoice bizarrely believes that Obama is supposed to be our "BEST chance." I sincerely doubt if most Afghans whose families have been obliterated by American bombs or most Americans whose homes have been foreclosed will agree with his emotional and partisan statement.
The real threat to Obama is from within his own party probably, the Democrats who will turn and vote republican.
Superb article! The Grand Canyon analogy is a brialliant one.
Why do we only begin to hear such wisdom when we get far from the centers of power - and profoundly infantile gibberish the closer we get to power?
"But we can be thankful and tranquil and proud,
for man's been endowed with a mushroom shaped cloud,
and we know for certain that some lovely day,
someone will set the spark off, and we will all be blown away".
The Kingston Trio
Die earlier, with dignity. Vote Nader!
Mike
I am intrigued by your mention of Maynard Keynes. Keynes was a member of the British delegation at the Paris Peace Conference at the end of WW1, albeit a low one on the totem pole. However, he was one of the few economists who warned at that time that the punishment of Germany would eventually be one component of an economic meltdown which came in 1928. The current parallels of the economic/financial punishment of Germany are the numerous trade embargoes which the US and UN have imposed on many countries and the harassments of Russia and China (I presume that we socialists are not opposed to honest trade?). All of this must end. Do I hear Obama or McCain demand this? Nope!
According to Keynes the second and perhaps major ingredient of the meltdown of 1928 was that the average income of Americans and West Europeans was too low to sustain a healthy production of goods and services. Neither McCain, Obama, nor the blind main stream media have clearly identified the decline of the median income of American families as one of the major ingredients of the current crisis. This morning I heard former secretary Reich hit bull's eye when he said: "Americans have lived beyond their means because their means have declined. It is necessary that their means be restored." The so-called "job programs" of Obama and McCain, if these work at all, will merely add more semi-paupers to the work force unless wages go up substantially across the board.
I fully agree with you on the political danger of a reactionary swing in the USA following two "lost wars" (Iraq and Afghanistan) and the economic meltdown. When economic "hunger" threatens many otherwise decent people become economic and political beasts as we notice from the ugly comments at Palin's rallies.
Finally, there is no doubt in my mind that the institutions of slavery and racial discrimination which raged until the middle of the 20-th century are now "chickens coming home to roost!" Imagine what our country would look like if the "founding fathers" had abolished slavery and "blacks" had begun to participate as 100% citizens from, say, 1800 on! Our country would be infinitely more resilient!
Mike Davis writes: "True, the enormity of the economic crisis may compel President Obama to renege on some of candidate Obama's ringing promises to support an idiotic missile defense system or provocative NATO memberships for Georgia and Ukraine. Nonetheless, as he emphasizes in almost every speech and in each debate, defeating the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, together with a robust defense of Israel, constitute the keystone of his national security agenda."
I think it would be impossible at this point for a candidate to be elected while NOT espousing a "strong" national security agenda... given the national climate that has been created and fostered up until now.
With the certain continuation of economic crisis forcing policy choices, and who-knows-what in international events lurking around the corner, I believe Obama is the only electable candidate who has the capacity to evaluate alternative ideas and make changes based on reality. Though I support much of his agenda, I also agree with previous posts: elect him & then nudge, in those areas where he falls short. The "nudgeability factor" must be the greatest hope for change in this area.
As Howard Zinn pointed out (in an interview reprinted here about 6 weeks ago -- http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2008/09/09-0?page=9)
"If there is any hope, the hope lies in the American people.
[It] lies in American people becoming resentful enough and indignant enough over what has happened to their country, over the loss of dignity in the world, over the starving of human resources in the United States, the starving of education and health, the takeover of the political mechanism by corporate power and the result this has on the everyday lives of the American people.
[There is also] the higher and higher food prices, the more and more insecurity, the sending of the young people to war.
I think all of this may very well build up into a movement of rebellion.
We have seen movements of rebellion in the past: The labour movement, the civil rights movement, the movement against the war in Vietnam.
I think we may well see, if the United States keeps heading in the same direction, a new popular movement. That is the only hope for the United States.>>
At this particular time in history, many are impelled by a sense of urgency towards greater activism who may not have been particularly active before. (Frankly, I fall in that category myself.) What also gives me hope is seeing the combination of older and younger generations together trying to carry a new agenda to the fore.
The only way a new, broad popular movement can have an effect is if a candidate (Obama) is in place who would be able to see and respond to it...
There are less than 3 weeks until the election. I couldn't vote for a smaller party because such a vote at this point would merely strengthen the relative position of the Republican vote-count ... A wishful thought? Imagining a post-election world following an ignominious Republican defeat: if the Republican party disintegrates, other parties with valid and varied positions to contribute could gain more support without jeopardizing the submission of our country's welfare to "four more years".
That broad popular movement is certainly needed. The mistake is thinking that Obama will support it.
We've seen two examples during this campaign. The latest was the bailout\theft bill in the Senate. The people were screaming NO as loud as they could. Obama, with his Wall Street millions in his campaign accounts ignored this and was pushing the bill to give billions to his Wall Street backers.
It always amazing to watch Democrats ignore obvious facts while they promote their delusions. The basic fact that Obama supported this theft of public money just like Bush and McCain is quickly ignored by the deluded Obama faithful.
And, if you can't pressure Obama into supporting something that 80% of the American people wanted even when he really needs our votes during the election, why on earth would anyone believe that he'll be easy to pressure once he has your vote and needs nothing else from you? Right now is when you have leverage. And Obama has already given you the finger.
Don't have any illusions that this will be any easier if McCain or Obama is in the White House. Either will be our enemy. Either will need to be fought and overcome to have any real change in this country.
----------------------------
"To know, and not to do, is not to know"
www.samsonsworld.blogspot.com
Thank you for this post, Mike.
"It remains more a rhetorical promise than the blueprint for the actual machinery of reform."
As in all of his "promises"... plenty of wriggle room to "adjust his position" when it serves his political purposes. His highest concern is "Obama".
"don't be so unfair. FDR didn't have a nuts and bolts program either in 1933. Nobody did."
That may be true, but neither did FDR champion the disaster. Obama not only got on the bandwagon for this travesty, but we all may as well just stamp his name at the top of the historical tailspin... as no other one individual acted as a complete cheerleader, than did Obama. I fault a great number of people... especially those who "set up" the framework... but I point directly at one individual who had the opportunity to listen to 80% of the US population and echo our sentiment with a resounding: "NO!". He chose instead, to side with the corporatists who would protect his political future. He is an opportunistic coward.
"In this view, Obama is MoveOn.org's re-imagining of our 32nd president: calm, strong, deeply in touch with ordinary needs, and willing to accept the advice of the country's best and brightest."
This is little more than delusion on the part of those within the organization who control the MoveOn talking points.
"Certainly, there is a great deal of déjà vu in the frantic attempts to quiet panic and reassure the public that the worst has passed."
I have never seen so many people spin so many lies since the first "Shock and Awe".
"...this is not the Old American Economy, but an entirely new-fangled contraption built from outsourced parts and supercharged by instantaneous world markets in everything from dollars and defaults to hog bellies and disaster futures."
...all borne on the back of the American taxpayer. It is quite simply a guarantee that taxation without representation will provide the corporatists with the tool they need to take the next step in this class warfare.
"God help us, if, as seems to be happening, unemployment tops the levees at anything like the same speed."
IF!!! Give us one reason why you possibly see "IF" in this equation? Santa has been knee-capped and his reindeer have been field-dressed and set out to dry for jerky... and that's just the "good" news.
"Second, Obama won't inherit Roosevelt's ultimate situational advantage..."
He has stated his pro-war positions on a number of occasions. As he will not have a manufacturing wellspring from which to draw, he has only the one choice remaining. War. His stated military positions were not just political rhetoric designed to placate those who pointed to his complete lack of experience. To believe military Keynesianism is dead is a mistake. Obama has no choice now but to turn to it as a diversion, as there are no funds for social programs. It is less expensive to make war. We will have so many new millions out of work and seeking basic survival needs, WITH NO PERSONAL, STATE OR FEDERAL SAFETY NETS, that next government will be overwhelmed. It is THE plan. War is the fallback as a tool to dampen civil unrest.
We are now dependent upon a US service-based economy that is funded by taxpayers, who in turn will not be able to meet the payroll, as they are out of the workforce.... the ultimate positive feedback loop. Millions fighting for a hamburger-flipping job that serves people who can not afford the product. Perfect.
"the Obama campaign is engineering a catastrophic collision between its national security priorities and its domestic policy goals."
"...deception is truly the mother's milk of American politics."
I have never seen such a hasty retreat in the name of "position adjustment". He knows what is ahead... and is being completely dishonest about his "promises".
"It's worth asking, for instance, what in the actual substance of his foreign policy agenda differentiates the Democratic candidate from the radioactive legacy of the Bush Doctrine?"
Anyone?
"Am I unduly cynical?"
In my opinion... not anywhere near enough. It will take a few months, but history will show that you have been "too kind".
HOPE: the bastard child of just one more lying corporatist politician.
A toast to toast!
Another piping hot and crispy piece pops up!
Actually, FDR was pretty specific during his 1932 campaign on what he wanted to do . His speech to the Dem convention of that year is when he laid out the New Deal to the nation. Its a famous speech and is available on line to any who want to read it. He clearly says he's happy to spell out his policies to the nation. And then he does so. To students of history who know what the New Deal really was, the details in that speech are very familiar because they were indeed what FDR enacted.
And, there's a striking contrast between the concrete details of that speech and the vague propaganda that is an Obama speech.
----------------------------
"To know, and not to do, is not to know"
www.samsonsworld.blogspot.com
Maybe it's easier to process the physical features of the Grand Canyon when one is lying on the bottom looking up.
As one who also "lived through the Lyndon Johnson years and watched the War on Poverty, the last New Deal program, destroyed to pay for the slaughter in Vietnam", let me toss in an optimistic footnote to Mike Davis's excellent analytical essay.
One often overlooked personal credential that Barack Obama has is the biographical fact that once upon a time, Barack the law student was editor in chief of the Harvard Law Review.
In the grandiose, hyper competitive, ego-maniacal pecking order of Ivory Tower academe, it is a singularly amazing accomplishment to weather the winnowing process ordeal and ascend to the very pinnacle of that very tall greased pole - to be selected by both one's peers and Harvard Law's own fractious faculty mentors to be the honest broker, called upon to chair the big meeting at the big table in a big room filled with a diverse, mind boggling array of super articulate people often in passionate disagreement with one another - disagreements sometimes fueled by powerful hidden agendas, recognized and unrecognized.
By all accounts, Barack Obama possessed the skill set needed to survive and thrive in that unique role.
To make coherent sense out of the Grand Canyon, John Wesley Powell synthesized the collective work of geologists, artists, surveyors, and hardy back woods explorers, teams of folks whose world views would tend to be as different as, say, Chicago school economists, Wall Street investment bankers, Silicon Valley venture capitalists, and union organizers.
I hope there is a parallel here, for I certainly don't like the looks of the abyss.
But why despair of the notion that once the big picture is gradually pieced together, the consensus view may emerge that the global economic crisis trumps the percieved need to have the Pentagon pulverize yet more Pashtun villages?
If it all ultimately does come down to guns or butter, maybe Bubba and Lurlene will finally agree to scale back the size of the family arsenal to only what's really needed to defend hearth and home - if that's what it takes (literally) to keep food on the table.
Bill from Saginaw
Mike Davis is my hero. That's all. :)
(If you want to know why he is, read Bending Cross, Planet of Slums, Buda's Wagon, Late Victorian Holocausts).
When Roosevelt gave his convention acceptance speech in 1932 it must have been clear that Hoover hadn't a chance in hell of being reelected. Likewise, the nature of the problem the country was dealing with was much clearer in 1932 than the nature of our problem is now. Barak Obama's duty is to get elected and to put the levers of power of the government firmly in the control of the Democrat party. His duty after succeeding on election day will be to lead the country at a time of crisis unlike any other previously seen or even imagined. Pardon me if I seem naive, but based on what I've seen Barak Obama accomplish up to this point, I have every bit as much faith in his ability to unite Americans and focus their efforts on the the essential priorities, as I have in the programs of Mr. Nader.
"Raptor October 15th, 2008 1:00 pm
Nice article!
Did you ever get the feeling you are in a minority on this site?"
I DO NOT think of it as a 'nice' article, but good? Yes, and for critical reasons; like, f.e., because Mike Davis presents an important portrait (say) of reality, which deniers need to stop denying, living in disneyland about, covering up, and ... etc.; and he included interesting historical analogies, which made the reading more enticing for myself.
Kitty cats are nice, until they start using your body for sharpening their nails, instead of using tree bark, say. But today's human-world realities aren't nice; virtually not at all. Oh, the cashiers working at a few grocery stores I use are nice with me, but we're not speaking of this level of society, so it's not a fitting analogy for what I'm saying about the article.
===================
"RichM October 15th, 2008 1:22 pm
...
"...Rooseveltian guns and butter have become a contradiction in terms, which means that the Obama campaign is engineering a catastrophic collision between its national security priorities and its domestic policy goals...."
- I frankly don't quite get what Davis means by the first part of that sentence, but the conclusion is right, and very important."
I THINK Mike Davis perhaps is referring to how the MIC once provided a lot of jobs and, therefore, incomes for U.S. workers, the working class or caste in the U.S.; and he does considerably (enough) compare the MIC today with that of FDR's period, but in terms of jobs and incomes created, vs not (today). I found Davis oddly speaking as if fond about how profitable the FDR period (and for some decades after) was, while speaking as if negatively about today's MIC, about it no longer providing economic relief in terms of jobs. And I nearly stopped reading the article because of this impression, but read on and found that ..., well, as follows.
He eventually provides implicit clarification, condemning both periods in terms of war being bad, wrong, ..., so, and once we read these later words of his, it then becomes evident that his real intention probably (if not surely) is to only illustrate how the working class was strong before it began to seriously decline, and then get clobbered by Pres. Reagan and his successors. When Davis speaks of the U.S. during the FDR period, that it was more Marxist in terms of Marxism having been more commonly known and respected in the U.S. than it is today, though perhaps for not much longer (hopefully not much), well, Davis seems to respectfully and praisingly speak of this aspect of that period many decades ago.
Plus, his article is based on the financial or economic crisis of the present, so with this and the above consideration, combined, I think his FDR "guns and butter" reference is meant to only refer to the mass worker movement there was in the U.S. during those yaers, vs ABSENT (and too often worse) today.
RichM:
"...It's worth asking....what in the actual substance of his foreign policy agenda differentiates the Democratic candidate from the radioactive legacy of the Bush Doctrine?.."
- The short answer is that it's no different, except for the window dressing. That's basically what Davis is saying."
YES, it definitely seems to be what he's basically or essentially saying; very much, and only if not 100%, anyway. I'd say 100%, but he might prefer a little rewording.
Obama supporters must be bummed at the rash of Obama unmasking lately on CD. But they should take heart, it now seems likely their sellout will win.
Cheney & Wolfowitz never had any "nation-building hubris"; they cynically used the idea of "nation-building" to conceal nation-stripping -- hollowing out a country & pouring in foreign power with a veneer of local officials to cover the theft.
Yes, Obama has set up a collision between promised military expansion and promised domestic restoration. Will this one-time neighborhood organizer and state legislator decide to sacrifice the latter to the former? Which is his priority? A domestic agenda or a foreign one? A domestic one, obviously. Where is the weight of his sympathy? With the balance sheet of the corporations or with the person, family & town in a fix, and needing assistance?
The problem is not with bright people fooling themselves into voting for Obama, but with people overvaluing their political analyses at the expense of the human factor.
No politician that tells the truth is going to succeed in a country that believes in fantasy.
As a group Americans worship the 'success' of Donald Trump who has had keepers put him on a budget and repair his financial condition at least twice because he borrowed so much the lenders were in danger.
He is an American success like the first true American hero - Christopher Columbus who didn't know where he was going, after he got there he didn't know where he was, didn't know who he met there, didn't bother to find out, didn't know where he had been when he got back, lied about everything, promised everyone riches, enslaved and tortured people and DID IT ALL ON BORROWED MONEY HE COULD NEVER PAY BACK.
Check
www.kurzweilAI.net
for the 'supergames' to be played on Wiki. These are the game scenario's for the various castrophes possibly coming our way. Wiki is looking for the solutions from all of us.
Great article, Mike - very insightful.
We will get the ruling class's Obama and those 'progressives' who push for him now will sit back for two years before they do another damn thing. Then they'll try to find all sorts of ways to justify the reaction that he will implement, they will counsel him, and they will beg him to do different (they already are doing that now!). The DP-tied liberals are so very predictable and pathetic and The American Left will never get off the ground listening to these Do Nothing-ers but vote folk. Look at where the antiwar movement is now when led by these clucks.
I'm using a lot of venom for liberals here, but the so-called American socialist crowd is just as much to blame for this sad situation, too. They can't organize a group of themselves numbering more than a 100, let alone anything else! Trotsky, Lenin, and Marx would turn over in their grave trying to deal with their stupid shenanigans.
Amen to that.
"It is bitterly ironic, but, I suppose, historically predictable that a presidential campaign millions of voters have supported for its promise to end the war in Iraq has now mortgaged itself to a "tougher than McCain" escalation of a hopeless conflict in Afghanistan and the Pakistani tribal frontier. In the best of outcomes, the Democrats will merely trade one brutal, losing war for another. In the worst case, their failed policies may set the stage for the return of Cheney and Rove, or their even more sinister avatars."
The Democrats are in such a pitch of "hope" they see Obama as MLK. The Republicans are trying to portray him, in a racist manner, as a member of the Black Panthers. But he resides in neither of these places.
He is just a mediocre smooth talking lawyer-politican, and he abandons the high ground as soon as it is a threat to his corporate sponsorship.
The Arizona Credit Union System would be very happy if payday advance companies shriveled up and died in the Grand Canyon State, but their opinion is certainly greased by the wheels of their own commerce. The credit union is stepping up its lobbying efforts to crush the competition and absorb all the former cash advance customers into their coffers. In a massive E-mail campaign that they estimate will reach as many as 1.6 million credit union customers, System will encourage voters to give Proposition 200 an emphatic thumbs down. On the flip side of the coin, Prop. 200 supports organizations like the Arizona Community Financial Services Association that claims that Proposition 200 will indeed lower state loan fees, eliminate extensions by introducing flexible payment plans, regulate Internet lending and cull the number of total walk-in stores in Arizona. These very real reforms will not only help payday loan customers, but will keep industry employees off the breadlines past the current lending sunset year of 2010. Who wants to lose their job, particularly in our current economy?
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I think the more appropriate question is: Can Americans see the Grand Canyon? Clearly the answer is no, due to a combination of gutted cultural life and historically inadequate educational systems, an insidious collection of "experts" who've sold the Paul Gigot and John Hagee agenda ad nauseam on a thoroughly compromised media. I never cease to be amazed at how much more sophisticated your run of the mill Russian citizen is than an American and as we see in Russia, that sophistication does not translate into sane government. An absence of such sophistication as we see in the United States, nee as is CELEBRATED in the United States bodes even less well. Politicians either pander to Americans' lack of sophistication and win elections, as in most of the Republican party, and much of the Democratic party or they try to strike bold new paths, for better or for worse, like Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich in the two major parties and countless third party candidates and are rewarded with a stony silence and virtual media censorship. I don't see a short term change in this. It will take at least a generation and that only if we begin to invest in creating a better educated and intellectually curious citizenry right now. Without that we will simply need to suffer the mass extinction of human life which seemed to snap Germany back to some sanity. That is quite a terrifying prospect. I truly do not wish for such a thing but an economic meltdown doesn't seem capable of doing the trick especially since it will lead to a further erosion of the quality of our public educational system and cultural life. I wish someone had some ideas for how to fix these things without horror and bloodshed and loss, but even our candidates just promise more of the same, but for other people in -stan countries and Iraq, as a solution for our mess.