BlackNotBlack.com

That Obama Glow

My goodness, Barack Obama’s golden glow is beginning to make him look like a life-sized Oscar. In my daily jogs around the trusty interweb, I continually encounter articles which label his speechmaking as “soaring rhetoric.” It is symptomatic of America’s sunken ideals that a presidential candidate is beatified for expressing himself about as well as the average sociology professor. On the other hand, perhaps it isn’t such a surprise people are impressed by his intelligence, considering the fact that the current president’s staffers spell out world leaders’ names phonetically in his speech notes. Imagine how hard Bush works to keep from giggling every time POO-tin appears in front of him. If recent history is any guide, Obama’s eloquence may hurt him if he wins the Democratic nomination and finds himself pitted in debate against a quipping and unctuous John McCain. Swing voters, as we know, will look for any excuse to back a dumbass.

Barack Obama writes quite a bit about strategic thinking in his books. As I keep tabs on his campaign I can certainly see these ideas at work. Strategic thinking, as defined in the political realm, simply means working toward a single stated goal that will effect multiple changes which were unstated. It’s a magic trick which Republican politicians perfected over the last thirty years, in large part because they realized Americans were too liberal across the spectrum to want most of the things their corporate bosses were demanding. For instance, the vast majority of Americans, whether New Yorkers or Alabamans, are too liberal to believe that leaving the elderly to fend for themselves is a good idea. Thus dismantling social security became “social security reform” in the Republican playbook. But in reality the reform was just another attempt at a destructive privatization designed to benefit a wealthy few.

Many Americans hear the word privatization and immediately think it’s good. The reaction is a testament to the effectiveness of corporate brainwashing, particularly when you consider that one of the first resources to be privatized in the United States was its political system. Only recently are people finally starting to suspect that selling the government to the highest bidders is why the nation is at such a dangerous crossroads today. Of course, some of those across the aisle claim this is a crucial election for different reasons. And I suppose it is. For the millionaires, Bush’s tax cuts could become permanent and push the U.S. that much closer to a society in which they pay no taxes. For the fundamentalists, teaching children that the world is only several thousand years old could become a law, if not a constitutional amendment. For the chickenhawks, the U.S. could kill countless more human beings in another Middle Eastern nation, as behemoth war profiteers continue to bleed the U.S. treasury, this time past the point of recovery.

Amidst all that is at stake, Obama claims to be the candidate of change. The real change he represents is that of a black president in the White House, something I'd love to see occur. But politically Obama is of the same stripe as other right-of-center Democrats. He supports border fencing and the death penalty, and also backed a law that makes it more difficult for consumers to sue corporations. This from a former civil rights attorney. He voted against an interest cap to rein in predatory credit card companies, and flatly stated that an impeachment of George W. Bush was not an option, a move that certainly doesn't signal a strong craving for change. It seems that when Obama says "change”, he’s simply trying to tap into voter discontent with being shut out of the government. This is a clever move. After decades of deregulation and unchecked corporate rule, most Americans are finally realizing that the price of all this has been utter marginalization. Yes, it appears that—and I’m stunned to say this, stunned I tell you—that ceding governance to the moneyed elite has resulted in the elite taking even more money for themselves. Trickle down? Nigga please. The only thing that has trickled down is corporate poison into the community wellwater. How did these mega-millionaires manage such a flim-flam? They managed it by telling gullible Americans that it was Mexicans ruining things for them, or the French, or frivolous lawsuits, or black welfare recipients. The list is really endless, though strangely, never seems to include corporate crooks or billionaire tax cheats, who do more fiscal damage than all the former combined. Despite the omissions, it’s finally clear to all but the most rockheaded observers that the problem all along was the very people who were pointing fingers.

So into the breach comes Barack Obama, with his strategic thinking and his deliberately vague policy sketches. Hillary Clinton and others have suggested he is vague because he doesn’t know what he intends to do. They say he offers words to make people feel good, but no solutions when push comes to shove. Newsflash to Hillary—there are no solutions. Obama said himself that anyone who thinks Congress is just going to pass a health care bill while insurance companies stand by and do nothing is dreaming. With this mostly unremarked-upon aside, he told Americans to forget about having an efficient, functional system like in the E.U. It ain’t gonna happen because the insurance companies and their mostly Republican shills aren’t going to allow it. But in a democracy, surely the will of the people will win out, won’t it? A few corporations can’t resist the will of tens of millions of people, can they? Ladies and gentlemen, please take note of exhibit A: more than 70% percent of Americans want stricter handgun control laws, but for the power of only one corporation—the NRA—these killing machines remain epidemic. Ergo, according to my personal law of extrapolation, tens of millions of people, however passionate, are helpless against the insurance cartel.


The main obstacle to change is that in order for these changes to occur, the wealthy have to be divested of a portion of their resources. I don’t mean they have to be guillotined like in the French Revolution. I just mean that within the American economic engine universal health care, for example, would require insurance companies to forgo some profits. As Obama noted, that’ll happen when strawberry Yoo-Hoo shoots out of all our nipples (though he didn't use that exact phrase). It's a sad reality, because, if memory serves, the type of restructuring I'm talking about actually did happen in American history—from the middle 30s through the late 1960s. What occasioned this downward shift of riches? Well, a grinding depression necessitated policies designed to alleviate mass suffering. Those policies—called the New Deal—shifted money to the poor by putting them to work, and created a social safety net. Pretty soon a war came along and gearing up for that effort created more jobs and dragged America the rest of the way out the economic morass. New Deal programs, maintained through the 50s and 60s, effectively created the American middle class. During the late 1960s the downward shift of resources continued via the civil rights movement.

You may wonder, what were the greedy rich doing during this time? How were they neutralized? Well, there were quite a few angry citizens marching and rioting. During most of the 30s and again during most of the 60s, it looked as if a well-ordered society was disintegrating. The elite establishment realized chaos would eventually visit them even in their private country clubs. But they didn't give up right away—they're tougher than that. After thirty years of seeing American society become more equal at their expense they were ready to draw the line. So they shot some students, firehosed some civil rights marchers, and sent vicious attack dogs after unarmed protesters. But none of this silenced the cries for equality, and the elites saw clearly that nationwide chaos loomed. That would be bad for business, and this threat to their bottom line created a political opening that made change possible. Am I suggesting that riots are needed to effect change now? All I'm saying is that when people stand together—and I mean physically rather than in some e-mail deluge of a congressional office—the elite start to quake in their boots.

A while back I saw Sicko and was struck by a scene in which Michael Moore went to France and interviewed a group of American expatriates. The purpose was to ask people who had lived in both the U.S. and Europe to comment upon some common American beliefs about European health care. After the somewhat comical debunking session, one interviewee said the difference between the U.S. and France was that in France the government are afraid of the people, whereas in the U.S. it’s the other way around. In other words, a government in fear takes into account the wishes of its people, and that's why the French are always marching. I've never seen a march in France, but I've seen them in other countries and seen how seriously they are taken. Save for two brief periods, the reaction of the American establishment to citizen dissent has been sneering dismissal. They ain't worried folks, no matter how many e-mail petitions clog up congressional inboxes.

So when a guy like Obama—who is seeking to lead the smug clique of corporate puppets atop Capitol Hill—talks about change, can people take him seriously? Does he intend to engage a populace who are afraid of their government, when that fear is a crucial part of what makes government work such a sweet deal? In this privatized Washington, D.C., where the power players don’t want the insurance game or the empire game or the disaster capitalism game to end, will Obama really reject all that these conglomerates will offer him and instead help people who can’t offer him anything except gratitude? The possibility, though tempting to believe, sounds too good to be true. Does that make me a cynic? After all the corruption we have seen in Washington, is it cynical to think that for Obama to be different from the other Potomac slugs would be akin to a miracle? I don't think so. I mean, the guy would have to be Neo in the Matrix. He'd have to be Luke Skywalker. Shit he'd have to be another golden figure—not Oscar, but Buddha. Interestingly, Buddha and Obama have the same ears. And I fear another thing they have in common is that they're both fairytales.

Labels: barack obama, privatization

posted by Egan Ehlers @ 6:51 PM