Can You Say "Obama to the Rescue"?
A hero is an infrequent, episodic thing at best. Often, like Shane (Alan Ladd in the movie), a hero does not even turn and wave to you as he rides off into the sunset. Best case, the hero might leave behind some good advice. Shane told young Joey (played by Brandon DeWilde) to "grow up strong." The implication was: be like your father, one who fights steadily, modestly for the rights of homesteaders against the cattle barons. We, too, should grow up strong. Watching President Obama with a child’s hope in your eyes is indeed childish. The only thing Obama is giving us is a bit of opening to be ourselves, remembering that imagined heroes often turn their back on "the little people," that they do not even look back and wave. They are an episode. We are the full story.
Any socialist, any good leftist, voted for Obama because his story and what we might guess were his private inclinations gave encouragement to our own efforts toward social justice. Certainly he was a lesser evil; but more than that there was his social justice inclination expressed alongside his ambition. Now he is giving us the opportunity to make our own movements in the direction of that inclination. He himself will ride away. Heroes are men of exotic personal skills and great personal ambition. They use studied flairs of anger and determination but very often they maintain themselves with compromise and vast indifference.
At least that is my take on Shane and all the cowboy heroes.
Here are Paul Street’s reflections on Obama thus far. You might well have skipped Street’s new book Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics and can hardly be faulted for that. "Obama" is like the word "Cooking"’ in book title land these days. Street is also the author of Empire and Equality (2004). He is not cocky and leaves a trail of good names behind him, which are his reading. He is a habitual teacher. I clip here from his website (http://www.zmag.org.znet/viewArticle/20932) where Street describes the Obama violin model of politics, ‘you hold power with the left hand and you play the music with the right.’ "You campaign and gain office with populace-pleasing progressive-sounding rhetoric but you make policy in standard service to existing dominant corporate and military institutions."
Obama’s violin performance is being expertly marketed by dominant media. We are told by the Times that Obama is making "a radical departure from the past" even as he proposes to increase the so-called defense budget, even as he makes it clear that he will be leaving 50,000 so-called "residual" troops in Iraq well past August of 2010, even as he increases the level of violence in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and even as he cannot pay elementary honest attention to the legitimate grievances and claims of the Palestinian people.
Obama is a "radically progressive departure from the past," we are told from on high even as he says he will cut the federal deficit in half but cannot bring himself to embrace the elementary bank nationalizations that are obviously required in the current economic crisis. Even as he refuses to advance the obvious cost-cutting social democratic health care solution: single payer national health insurance. Even he can only set up a middle class task force but not a poverty and inequality task force. Even as he promises to spend untold billions and trillions on further bankers’ bailouts executed with zero citizen oversight and direction.
Obama is a radical progressive break, we are told, even as he does not utter one word about the overdue labor law reform he campaigned on, the Employee Free Choice Act. Even as he fails to advance such basic elementarily progressive measures as a moratorium on foreclosures, a capping of credit card interest rates and finance charges, and the rollback of capital income tax rates to 1981 levels, Even as his tepid and inadequate stimulus plan is over-loaded with business-friendly tax cuts and woefully short on labor-intensive projects that will put people to work right away. And even as he asks for twice the amount of money to sustain the criminal invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan as he proposes to set aside per year as part of a reserve fund that might pay for just more than half the amount required to give the uninsured health coverage… in 10 years. [Even as he pays a presidential visit to Caterpillar, the company that sells occupation and apartheid bulldozers to Israel and the first major U.S. manufacturer in decades to break a major strike with scabs.]
Looking back, Street sees Obama an the ideal establishment candidate for a ruling class at peril: he is Black, from African parentage, with a Muslim name, a "community organizing" resume, a solid family, and a degree from Harvard Law. These are hardly the normal establishment credentials but enormously useful for a corporate/military spokesman right at the present moment. Thus Obama passed the corporate vetting. It gained him 37.5 million in campaign funds, 75% of it from donations over $200, and $900,000 from Goldman Sachs whose gold watches adorn so many wrists in the Obama Administration. It gains him an outstanding corporate media approval that was probably even more costly (from the same sources).
And Obama does not lack the familiar Clintonian corporate-friendly moderation. Today Larry Summers is fronting for another give-away (hedge fund moguls will buy toxic assets, he suggests). Timothy Geithner, a deregulator, announces a vast new program of regulation that he will administer. And the hundreds in DC who specialize in promising bogus "defense" against bogus "threats" for their armament manufacturing and oil interests, go to work each day with enthuasism and smiles. Nobody is actually worried. Flexible capitalism (which by essence and definition cares nothing for equality or justice) is at stake. Now it has a leader, Obama, thought by many to be a hero. All the essential ruling class interests are intact. A few cripples may fall from atop the carriage but the basic mode of transportation with the masses pulling rolls on. Well more than 70% of Congress are stake-holders in the corporate cause. They are still riding in comfort.
We "little people" would not have given Hillary Clinton or Joe Bidden an inch but will give Obama a mile. And when he delivers only reassurance, smiles, and that fleeting sense of pride we will have lost a great opportunity if we have not used this Obama Moment for social action. That action no way depends on him; nor should. Clearly, he is another centrist. If we do not use the opportunity, then in 2012 every thing goes back to the fascists and their backers. Who can we blame for the missed opportunity. Not Shane.
I think, reading these times, all of you should join some costly cause, take the risk, put your back to the wheel of change. Why not? This is the time. There will be no "Great Depression." That much is clear. Going forward the main interest of the powers-that-be is harvesting the government’s new money, our money. In their last throes, if it gets to that, they will turn the fire hose of inflation on us; but that is not yet. Presently it is just harvesting the give-aways. As Shane advised, "grow up strong."
Jim