The Real Reason Obama Has Let Us All Down

Is Barack Obama a politician whose actions should be judged soberly, or a
figure from a feel-good fairytale to be revered from afar?

For two years now, most of the good and honorable people who desperately
wanted him to beat John McCain - as I did -have watched his actions through
a distorting haze of hoping for the best. So when Obama set us all up for
another global crash by refusing to reregulate the banks or stop even their
riskiest practices, we looked away. When Obama set us all up for more terror
attacks by trebling the troops in Afghanistan and launching a vicious air
war on Pakistan that is swelling the ranks of jihadis, we didn't want to
hear it. When Obama set us all up for environmental disaster by refusing to
put the brakes on his country's unprecedented and unmatched emissions of
climate-destabilizing gases, we switched over to watch will.i.am's YouTube
rejig of the President's "yes, we can" speech. And when a week from now he
is beaten at the mid-term elections - after having so little to show the
American people - by a group of even more irrational Republicans, we will
weep for him.

As Rober D. Hodge writes in his excellent new book 'The Mendacity of Hope',
"Obama is judged not as a man but as a fable, a tale of moral uplift that
redeems the sins of America's shameful past." Our longing for him to be
Martin Luther King reborn has meant good people have not pushed and
pressured and opposed him, even as he endangered us.

But if you choose to see this as another fairytale - of how one man who seemed
like a Good Prince turned out to be a Traitor - you will miss the point, and
the real need for change. This is not primary a question of individual
failings, but of the endemic corruption at the core of American politics.
The facts are not hidden. If you want to run for national office in the US,
you have to raise huge sums of money from corporations and very rich people
to pay for the adverts and the mailings that get you on the ballot and into
office. These corporations will only give you money if you persuade them
that you will serve their interests once you are in power. If you say
instead that you want to prevent anything destructive they are doing to
ordinary people, or tax and regulate them, you will get no money, and can't
run.

As the Wisconsin politician Ed Garvey puts it: "Even candidates who get into
politics with the best of intentions start thinking they can't get
re-elected without money. Senators get so reliant on the money that they
reflect it; they stop thinking for themselves, stop thinking like the people
who elected them. They just worry about getting the money."

Barack Obama knows this. In 2006, he said that taking money from the rich is
"the original sin of anyone who's ever run for office" in the US, and it
ensures that "Washington is only open to those with the most cash." There's
a term for this: legalized bribery. It is so naked that corporations
routinely give to both sides in an election: Goldman Sachs, to name just
one, gave to both Obama and McCain to ensure whoever became President was
indebted to them.

In the Land of the Fee, Obama was brought to power by the "donations" -
actually investments - of Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, IBM,
Morgan Stanley, General Electric, and others. So it is unsurprising that his
Presidency has largely served their interests, which are very different from
our interests. His first act after the election was to appoint an economics
team headed by the people who caused the crash: the Clinton-era deregulators
and the former heads of Goldman. They proceeded to ensure that any
reregulation to prevent another crash was gutted, while the bankers' bonuses
continued to flow. In his official report to Congress, Treasury Department
Inspector General Neil Barofsky warned this year: "It is hard to see how any
of the fundamental problems in the system have been addressed to date? We
are still driving on the same winding mountain road, but this time in a
faster car."

The corporations are getting massive returns on their investment in Obama.
Two-thirds of them pay no federal tax on their income. These corporations
get to veto any law that would eat into their short-term profits, like a
freeze on kicking Americans out of their homes while the banks' dodgy and
probably illegal boom-time mortgages contracts are clarified, or a
transition away from climate-destabilizing oil and coal. And they rake in a
fortune from the reality that 44 percent of the entire federal budget is
spent on a largely unnecessary war machine - a figure that is growing
rapidly on Obama's watch.

The fact that corporations have this power over what the US government can do
means Obama - or any other President - is unable to approach a problem by
asking: how do I fix this? Instead he has to ask: how can we get
corporations to consent to a small cosmetic gesture that will, for a while,
appease public anxiety and anger about this problem?

The healthcare "reform" trumpeted as Obama's greatest achievement illustrates
how this works. The biggest problem with US healthcare is that squatting
between a doctor and his patient are the bloated insurance companies whose
job is to turn down any claim from a sick person they possibly can, in order
to maximize their profits. Some 45,000 Americans die every year as a result.
Obama had within his grasp a way of taming these corporations and saving the
lives of all these people. It was called the public option: a government-run
healthcare insurance program that would guarantee affordable care to all
American citizens. It was supported by 61 percent of Americans. But it would
cut into corporate profits - so Obama's outgoing chief of staff, Rahm
Emmanuel, said its defenders were "fucking retards," and the administration
killed it.

Instead, Obama pursued the polar opposite approach. He guaranteed the
healthcare companies that he would never use the bargaining power of the
government to force their prices down. His "reform" has been simply to force
millions more Americans to buy from the insurance companies - without any
mechanism for making that care more affordable. There were a few brilliant
tweaks, like making it illegal for the corporations to refuse insurance to
people with "pre-existing conditions" - but their share-prices jumped after
the package was announced for a reason: Obama overwhelmingly served their
interests, not the patients'. At the end of this, millions will be still
left uncovered, and others financially broken, so a tiny number of
corporations can profit. If Obama can't stand up to corporations in a
situation where Americans are demonstrably being killed in huge numbers and
a majority is behind him, isn't his subservience almost complete?

All this corruption means Obama has very few achievements to show the American
people. He is left presenting pitiful corporate-fattening tweaks as the best
he could do. They aren't nothing - but they aren't much. His inadequate
stimulus was slightly bigger than McCain's would have been, so unemployment
is about 2 percent lower. He has restored federal funding for stem cell
research, and for abortions abroad. He hasn't bombed Iran. These make a real
difference: they're reason enough to vote Democratic over Republican. But we
have to be honest: the continuities with Bush are far more pronounced than
the differences.

There are Democrats who refuse to be corporate shills - and they deserve to be
defended with every ounce of your energy. If you're an American and you have
time over the next week, phone bank or donate to Representative Alan
Grayson, or Senator Russ Feingold, to name two of the best who do it the
hard way, run their campaigns by collecting small donations, and actually
defend the American people. But they are, alas, a minority in the Democratic
Party.

Contrary to the glib stereotype, Americans aren't stupid, and they can see
what is happening: a recent CNN poll found 60 percent of Americans said
Obama "has paid more attention to the problems faced by banks and other
financial institutions than to the problems faced by middle class
Americans." They're right. It's not that they want him to be "more liberal"
or "more conservative": few think in these terms. No. They are asking - is
my job more secure? Is my home more secure? Is my healthcare more
affordable? And the answer is no, not really. They know the people who
caused the crash are fatter than ever, while the people who had nothing to
do with it take the pain, and Obama is left calling this farce progress. In
the absence of a liberal populism that would have actually fixed these
problems, all the oxygen goes to the fake populism of the Tea Party. US
politics has ended up as a battle between the mostly corrupt and the
entirely corrupt.

I'm sure Obama believes he is doing the best he can in a corrupt system - but
it's not true. There is another way. Imagine if, when he came to office, he
had articulated the real solutions - and, when he was blocked, named the
corrupt corporations and the corrupt Senators stopping him getting
healthcare for sick children or preventing another crash. Explain that it is
time to drive the money-lenders out of the temple of American democracy.
Tell the American people they will always be screwed over until they end
this corruption and pay for the democratic process themselves, and propose
serious measures to achieve it. Call for a mass movement to back him, just
as Franklin Roosevelt did - and succeeded. At least then there would be a
possibility of real progress. Would the outcome conceivably have been worse
than this - being beaten by the foaming Tea Party Republicans with almost
nothing to show for it?

At moments, there have been flickers of what this alternative Obama Presidency
would have looked like. His huge government bailout of the auto industry
kept millions of people in work, was hugely popular - and is already making
a profit for the government. In the final days of this election campaign, he
is railing against the massive corporate donations to the Republicans - a
hypocrisy, for sure, but a popular one, pointing to a better path he might
have chosen, and still could, if enough sane Americans shake themselves
awake and pressure him hard.

Yes, on the night Obama won, I too felt that great global ripple of hope, and
shed a little tear - but the people weeping today are those having their
homes repossessed in the Rust Belt and their homes blown to pieces in the
SWAT Valley as a direct result of Obama's decisions. They are the ones who
deserve our empathy now, not the most powerful man in the world, who has
chosen to settle into and defend a profoundly corrupt system, rather than
challenge and change it. It's long past time to put away your Obama t-shirt
that and take out your protest banner.