I once wrote an article about former President George W. Bush saying that he was a perfect
Manchurian candidate. That is, if his missing year when he was supposed
to have been flying fighter jets with the Texas Air National Guard was
actually spent in the former Soviet Union being reprogrammed as a
covert KGB agent whose job it was to go back to America, win election
to the White House, and proceed to destroy the US, he couldn't have
done a better job than he actually did.
Now I wonder whether President Obama might not be a perfect Manchurian
Candidate of the Republican Party, or perhaps of some nefarious foreign
entity-perhaps the China or the always-enigmatic Al Qaeda. How else to
explain policies that have wreaked such destruction on the Democratic
Party in Washington and on the nation at large.
Consider for a moment the history of this new president in whom so many invested so much hope and enthusiasm:
Almost immediately upon taking office President Obama announced that he
was appointing Timothy Geithner, part of the Bush/Cheney financial
team, to head up his Treasury Department. This is the same Timothy
Geithner who, as head of the New York Federal Reserve, engineered the
initial give-away of $85 billion to AIG, and the subsequent
pass-through of tens of billions of dollars to a handful of the
nation's largest banks and investment banks-surely the largest theft of
public assets by private billionaires in the history of mankind. Obama
went on to name a whole gang of Wall Street crooks to run his economic
policy, assuring that the recession would be not an opportunity to
restore long neglected and undermined New Deal programs, but rather to
crush workers and the middle class while shifting staggering sums to
the wealthy.
This was followed by a deliberate policy of dropping the ball on health
reform, which a vast majority of Americans was clamoring for, and
allowing it to be turned into a giant wet kiss for the insurance
industry, whose stocks have leapt up with each advance of the massive
and massively corrupt health "reform" legislation in Congress. (The
ball drop took the form of Obama simply leaving the whole task of
"reforming" health care up to the Congress, staying on the sidelines
while Congress blew the job.)
Then there is the military. Here Obama kicked things off by insuring
that there would be no real change from the Bush/Cheney imperialist
scheme by reappointing to the post of secretary of defense the same
guy, Robert Gates, who was secretary of defense under President Bush.
He put the general formerly in charge of the Iraq War, David Petraeus,
in charge of overall Middle East military operations, and took another
Bush-era general, Stanley McCrystal, who had run special ops in Iraq,
in charge of the Afghanistan War. And since then he has proceeded to
ramp up the Afghanistan War from a small-scale operation to a
full-fledged war, with no prospect of ending it, and every sign
pointing to an ever wider and bigger war in that region, possibly
sucking in Pakistan and Iran.
And as for the biggest crisis facing mankind, climate change, this new
president, who because of the collapse of the US auto industry had a
unique opportunity to compel one of the industries most responsible for
the looming global ecological catastrophe to start to fix it by
beginning a massive conversion to development and production of
electric vehicles and mass transit, instead dropped the ball and just
provided a taxpayer bailout with the goal of getting the domestic auto
industry back into the business of cranking out gas guzzlers. The
president has provided no leadership on climate change at all,
effectively sabotaging the global effort to reach a new treaty to limit
and cut back on greenhouse gas emissions this December.
Think about this. If the Republicans had created and inserted into the
Democratic Party a secret candidate designed to trick Democrats into
electing him, so that he could then enact Republican policies of
robbing from the poor to enrich the rich, expanding the military budget
to a level not seen since World War II, putting the nation deeper into
a global war against Islam, sabotaging efforts to combat climate
change, and further deregulating the financial sector, could they have
come up with anything better than Barack Obama?
If Al Qaeda had wanted to insinuate someone into the White House to
further undermine American empire, already on shaky legs during the
Bush/Cheney years, by getting the US to further overextend its
military, further bankrupt its already creaky economy, and further
demoralize its citizens by boosting unemployment and undermining its
Constitution, could Bin Laden & Co. have come up with a better
Manchurian Candidate than Barack Obama?
If China had wanted a candidate to destroy the American currency,
bankrupt the US and its remaining industrial base and leave it helpless
and begging to be bought out by Chinese interests (there is now serious
talk of China buying General Motors), could the country's Communist
rulers have done better than Barack Obama?
Now don't get me wrong. I don't think for a second that Obama is a
secret Republican or a secret Al Qaeda or Chinese operative, though I
know that there are right-wing Tea Baggers out there who sincerely
believe the latter two scenarios (often at the same time!). I think
Obama is simply another slick politician with a giant ego and a
shriveled sense of principle and ethics-a man that is, not unlike most
of our political class, though with better diction and smile, whose
interests include himself, his family, and those who bankroll him, but
certainly not you, me and the country as a whole.
But it might help if we started to think of him in these terms, because
objectively what we have right now in the White House is a president
who is steering the nation towards disaster as surely as if it were his
goal in life.
Because he is a Democrat, and because he talked a good line during the
campaign last year, progressives are disoriented and don't know how to
respond to his massive betrayal of all things progressive. At this
rate, by next fall, we could have a raging full-scale war going on in
Afghanistan, Pakistan in a state of chaos, Iran under attack by Israel
or perhaps by Israel and the US, health reform a forgotten issue, real
unemployment at over 20 percent, the dollar at half the value of the
British pound, and negotiations for a global climate treaty in
collapse. And progressives still will not be mounting any effective
protest or political action.
I'm not sure what the answer is to this crisis. Many people on the left
are arguing that it is essential to abandon the Democrats and move to a
third party. I think that's a great idea. The Democratic Party has
proved to be absolutely corrupt and beyond salvation--useful only as a
sump pump whose purpose is to suck the life out of the progressive
movement, such as it is. But I also can't help noticing that the vast
majority of the middle class seems still content enough to struggle on
with the jobs they still have -- the 80-85 percent of them who still have
jobs -- ignoring the plight of those who do not and of the poor. It was an
observation made by the late John Kenneth Galbraith that the problem
with modern post-industrial democracies is that the vast majority of
people do well enough that they no longer care about the suffering of
the minority of the population.
As long as the ruling elites are able to keep the majority at least
employed and in their homes, they can tighten the screws on the rest
with impunity, and that is the situation we are in today. It is hard to
see a new progressive party succeeding under such circumstances.
What is undeniable is that we are witnessing the systemic and probably
terminal decline of the US as an economic power, and as a military
power, and that is certainly a good thing, if not for Americans, then
surely for the larger world. What is remarkable is watching President
Obama, who was elected by Americans who were hoping he would turn
things around, again and again act to hasten that decline.